THE JUST CITY

 

The Just City, Jo Walton, Tor Books, 2015, 280 pp

What a wonderful surprise this was! The goddess Pallas Athene creates an experiment to build a planned community where Plato's Republic will be brought to life. She gathers adult teachers from all eras of history and various countries. 10,000 children, bought from slavers, will be raised and taught Plato's principles and allowed to become their best selves.

Apollo joins in, having arranged to become a human child. Socrates shows up to question everything and keep Athene on her toes.

It is a brilliant story with plenty of fault lines built in, leaving the reader in suspense as to the success of the experiment. Since I have read Plato, the Illiad and the Odyssey, I was just knowledgeable enough about Greek mythology and philosophy to hang on to the tale by my mental fingertips.

I have only read two of Jo Walton's books previously: Among Others and My Real Children. Each time I am delighted, so I must read more.

Are any of you fans of Jo Walton? If yes, which of her books have you read?

DEACON KING KONG

 

Deacon King Kong, James McBride, Riverhead Books, 2020, 365 pp

I read this for the reading group I call Carol's Group. I was excited because my husband loved it and it got great reviews. Well, I had a hard time getting going with it. Lots of characters and and time shifts.

Deacon King Kong is a deacon in a predominately Black neighborhood church located near the projects in 1960s south Brooklyn. He is also a drunk who stays mildly intoxicated all day long on a concoction his best friend brews up and calls King Kong.

The entire neighborhood scene is humorously chaotic with some sad overtones. Many of the characters have nicknames. The Deacon's is Sportcoat. Mixed in are Latinos and Italian mobsters. Plus there are drug dealers, a murder or two, cops, love affairs and at least two mysteries.

That was a lot to keep track of but once I got past the feeling that the story was just spinning its wheels, I came to enjoy it and wanted to find out how it would end.

James McBride does not simplify what life is like among these people for the reader. I approve of that. Life in any community is messy. His characters are not stereotypes, but rich and complicated. Nothing is black and white for anyone and that is not a pun. However, Black lives are unique in their own way and the novel makes both of these truths quite clear.

I am glad I read it. I feel I understand some things I did not have clear before. 

THE BOOK THIEF

 

 

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak, Alfred A Knopf, 2005, 550 pp

I may be the only person who never read this book before. One of my reading groups will discuss the author's next book, Bridge of Clay, this month. Since I had The Book Thief on my shelf I decided to read it first. 

When I started The Book Thief once before, I just got creeped out at the idea of Death as a narrator. Somehow it now makes sense to me and I found it a good, if quirky, device.

The setting is Germany, 1939. Hitler has full power over the people with his Nazis. We all know that story. Liesel Meminger is being taken by her mother to a foster home in Berlin, the mother being too poor to take care of her two children. On the way, Liesel's brother dies. She finds a book in the snowy graveyard where he is buried, The Gravediggers's Handbook. She cannot read yet but wants it as a talisman.

Liesel's foster family is kindly enough, though her foster mother is gruff and borderline abusive. When the girl has nightmares, her foster father sits with her through the rest of the night and eventually teaches her to read. He and her book are her best companions, along with a neighbor boy, so she begins to steal more books. These people are almost as poor as Liesel's mother, whom she never sees again.

It is an awfully sad story interspersed with bittersweet moments. I guess because there are so many kids in the book, the publishers decided to market it as a teen read. What? I would have kept a ten foot pole between myself and this book as a teen. Heck, I did so for the past 15 years.

I will say though that Zusak does a wonderful job of portraying what war, anti-semitism and poverty is like for kids growing up. His style is unusual but his characters are people you come to know and care about. The depth of oppression in Nazi Germany is palpable and he shows the different effects it has on both children and adults.

 

 

 

THE THRALL'S TALE

 

The Thrall's Tale, Judith Lindbergh, Viking, 2006, 446 pp

This well-researched and meticulously written novel is historical fiction set in Greenland at the end of the 10th century AD. Erik the Red it was who led 25 ships and 400 settlers of Vikings from Iceland to the new land of Greenland.

A thrall was the name for a slave in the Viking world. Thrall originally meant someone bound to a landowner. It has come to mean any way a person can be under the control of someone or something. I like to say I have been enthralled by a book but never knew the word originally meant enslaved!

I have had The Thrall's Tale in my possession for many years but when I first attempted to read it, I could not make any headway. Recently I read a collection of Norse Tales.

The Norse Myths, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Pantheon Books, 1980, 236 pp

From it I learned the cosmology of the Norse people, came to know all the gods, goddesses, giants, dwarves and monsters. The tales, in the collection retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland, cover the entire breadth of Norse mythology from its creation tale to Ragnarok, its destruction tale and vision of the future. 

Thus I felt ready to try The Thrall's Tale again and it all suddenly made sense, especially enhanced by the maps provided in the front of the book. If that sounds like a lot of work and study, it was. It was also so worth it.

Katla is a thrall who traveled to Greenland on one of those 25 ships I mentioned above. She had lost her mother, who was her master's lover and also an early Christian. Once her master and his family were settled, Katla was brutally raped by the master's son. Being completely traumatized, her master sent Katla to Thorbjorg, a prophetess of the Norse god Odin. Thorbjorg had been brought to Greenland to serve as a link to the gods, a healer and a seer who could determine the future of the settlers. She does heal Katla and keeps her as one of her own thralls.

In a sense this is a pioneer tale. The wild and unpredictable weather in Iceland, the encroaching inroads of Christianity, and Katla's inability to accept the daughter she bore from the rape, make this a story filled with extreme hardship and brutality.

Thorbjorg truly had powers to heal, divine the future and protect the people. Once Christianity began winning converts from both the lords and the common people though, her powers diminished.

So many conflicts of love and faith, so much violence, even a plague. Through it all was the influence of Odin, of the Norse myths, and of forces for good and evil. Katla's daughter walks the razor's edge between those forces.

It was not an easy book to read but it was "enthralling." I looked forward to reading it everyday, taking my time to understand such a foreign culture. Judith Lindbergh goes beyond the grand themes of the Vikings and into the details of ordinary life behind the sagas, the battles and the feuds. She provides a thrilling tale of adventure giving equal attention to women and men.

IN THE COUNTRY OF WOMEN

 

 

 In the Country of Women, Susan Straight, Catapult, 2019, 358 pp

 Susan Straight is another one of my favorite authors. I have read all of her seven novels. This book is a memoir that almost reads like a novel.

She is a petite blonde whose novels feature an extended Black family in Rio Seco, CA (her fictional name for Riverside.) Many years ago when I read her first novel, I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, I along with others wondered what gave her the right to explore so deeply the life of a Black single mother.

Soon we learned that Susan Straight married into a Black family. In the Country of Women tells how she met and fell in love with her husband, how she grew up relatively poor with a Swiss immigrant mother, how she learned to read at the age of three, and how she became a writer shortly after she learned to read.

When she met Dwayne Sims, she found a huge extended family who accepted her unconditionally (after making sure she could cook.) Dwayne's mother provided the warmth that Susan's own mother was too embittered by life to give to her daughter.

I have a special affinity for girls who grow up reading every book they can get their hands on and then go on to write their own. Though Susan Straight is a decade younger than I, as kids we read all the same books!

Once she became an in-law to the Sims family and once she took a writing class with James Baldwin at Amherst College, she determined to research the history of both her family and the Sims. She also had three daughters with Dwayne and wanted to give them particularly the stories of all the strong women who came from Europe and the American south to California. Women who overcame incredible hardships and did whatever was needed to provide for and protect their children.

Hence the title: In the Country of Women. It is a beautiful, deeply emotional yet somehow lighthearted memoir. It is a gift to the world in which she proclaims the triumphs for which most women are left unthanked and unrecognized.

Most of all, it is a tribute to family, to taking care of your own as well as welcoming in those who are uncared for. It is full of hope. 

NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. THE STARS

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco, 2019, 787 pp

 

Note: This is one of the longest reviews I have written in a while. It is a plea for the benefits of reading outside one's comfort zone. I hope you understand.

 

I think it is safe to say that readers are divided into devoted fans of Joyce Carol Oates and those who would not read her, ever! Here is how I became fan.

I first read her one hot month in 1988 when I was stranded in Los Angeles due to a snafu in a training program I was attending. My accommodations were located across the street from a used bookstore with racks out on the sidewalk where battered paperbacks sold for a quarter.

I picked up Marya, A Life, only two years after its publication and already a 25 cent paperback. I lay on my bed in a sweltering room and read about Marya's terrible, gritty life having really no idea what I was reading. It was the most disturbing thing I had ever read. Not surprising because in those days I usually read trashy bestsellers.

By 1992, I was living permanently in LA and had embarked on an effort to branch out in my reading. I read Joyce Carol Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall. It was pretty gritty too. Her characters were fairly unrecognizable to me. Generally lower class whites, not mainstream in any way, violent and sometimes outright crazy. My mother told me she had tried reading Oates but found her books "weird."

I persevered, still eager in those days to rebel against my mother. I have read her first nine novels and some early short stories, then dropped her for several years. In 2013, I started again, reading whatever was her latest book. She is still weird in her own unique way, so I can only conclude that I have changed as a reader. I now count myself among her dedicated fans.

 

I have not read the recent bestsellers, How To Be An Antiracist or White Fragility, but I would say that Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars is JCO's answer to such conundrums from a literary viewpoint. 

 

The title is the last line of a Walt Whitman poem, "A Clear Midnight."

 

The novel is an intimate family tale concerning a white family in upstate New York. The father, a much-loved and well-to-do man in his community, pulls off the road one evening to intervene in what appears to be a scene of police harassment against a Black man. In the ensuing debacle, John Earle McClaren is beaten, tasered, and left by the police on the side of the road where he suffers a massive stroke. The dark skinned man being harassed is taken into custody.

McClaren dies in the hospital from a staph infection a couple weeks later. By that time in the story, his wife and five grown offspring have been introduced. It is clear they are not exactly the close and happy family they are perceived to be by the community.

The novel is long but I read it quickly, not wanting to look away. The family majorly fractures after the patriarch's death but she shows us the hairline fractures present from the beginning, though they had been held in stasis, in almost a hostage situation, by John Earle McClaren. His control was not ever physically brutal but it was absolute. Not his wife nor any one of his children were allowed to be who they really were nor to think for themselves.

JCO has always appeared to be prescient in her novels. She wrote this one a year before the more recent explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. Listening to an interview with her about writing this novel, I realized again how attuned she is to the evils and upheavals of American culture. At this point in her life she is a privileged white woman but she came up in near poverty in the midst of small town violence. A favorite childhood book of hers was Alice In Wonderland.

 

She has written at least 56 novels! I feel her writing has become somewhat more accessible over the years but has never lost that bite, penetrating the human heart with all of its strengths and weaknesses, its fears and joys. In her novels I have found everyone I've ever known, the ones I was afraid to know, and myself.

 

I most loved Jessalyn McClaren, the widow of John and the mother of those five children. Her grief and her emergence from it, her tentative forays into life as her true self, are all so meticulously shown. Somehow we white people get to know ourselves through the book: our ridiculous assumptions about others, our reluctance to move outside our perceived safety zones, our ill-informed prejudices about people and our inherent fragility as the most powerful race on earth, no matter what our political stances are.

All of that is in Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. Read it at your own risk.

SEPTEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

My reading groups are on a roll. Lately every book is one I either already wanted to read or one I am happy to read. Still on Zoom though it may be possible to hope we can meet in person again someday soon.

Carol's Group:

 

One Book At A Time:

 

Bookie Babes:

 

Tiny Book Club:

 

 

How are your reading groups going? Have you had any good discussions lately? Have you read or discussed any of the above?

STARLING DAYS

Starling Days, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, The Overlook Press, 2020, 289 pp

 

This novel was the April selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club. I hesitated to post my review since it was the least favorite of the books I read in August. It features a main character who suffers from depression and was hard for me to read at times but I decided to share what I got out of it because it was important to me.

 

Mina and Oscar have been a couple for many years and finally marry. Mina is a highly educated young woman who teaches and is working on a PhD in literature, specializing in Greek myths. Oscar works as a salesman for his Japanese father's liquor business.

On their wedding night, Mina attempts to end her life with pills. This we learn in the first chapter when Oscar is called by police to pick up Mina, whom they found at midnight leaning over the edge of the George Washington Bridge, known as a location for suicides.

Oscar decides to move them to London while he does some work there on his father's property, thinking a change of scene will be good for Mina. It does not help much, her depression has it in its grip, her meds are not working, and though Oscar tries to protect her he is becoming overwhelmed.

As the story goes on, it reveals the many early traumas of both. I liked the ways the author described each one's coping mechanisms but the choices both were making made me wonder if they would make it. I grew a little weary of being inside their heads and could not guess whether the ending would be happy or tragic.

I am not sorry I read Starling Days because it helped me understand a few things. I have always had an aversion to the subject of mental illness. It frightens me. After I finished the book I realized that I was raised to repress my own moods and occasional bouts of depression, to pretend I was fine, to keep up with life and family and work duties no matter how I felt. 

I guess I am fortunate to also have a strong, even sometimes happy side and to have never succumbed. Currently I have a friend who suffers from depression and have had to figure out how to relate to her when she is overcome. Buchanan's novel gave me insight into and more empathy for my friend.

THE VANISHING HALF

The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett, Riverhead Books, 2020, 460 pp

 

Two of my reading groups picked this novel for discussion in August, but what a difference in reaction between the two groups. One was unanimous in loving it, the other was a mixture of opinions. Personally I found it brilliant.

 

The story centers around a set of female twins, not necessarily identical but born on the same day from the same mother. Their family lived in a small Louisiana town where everyone is Black though extremely light skinned. The townspeople are careful never to marry a darker skinned person even though all the surrounding towns know they are of the Negro race.

The twins, Desiree and Stella, witness the brutal murder of their father, by a white man, at a young age. At sixteen, they run away together and manage to survive by depending on each other.

One day, Stella vanishes. From that point on the story is split into two, following Stella and Desiree separately. Stella has passed as white and married a successful white man. Desiree married and then left an abusive Black man whom she flees with her very dark skinned daughter and returns home.

The novel is an almost Shakespearean tale about identity, both racial and gender. It is not, as far as I am concerned, about whether or not the characters are likeable, but about what happens to individual identities as they live and grow in a world that disdains difference.

As these sisters and daughters and mothers long for each other through several decades, a majority of the characters do grow and change giving a hopeful aspect. Some do not, due to being either oblivious, hopelessly prejudiced or just plain evil. 

I was captivated on every page. Brit Bennett, I think, believes in love and family but is showing us how those aspects of life are also full of pain, separation and loss along with just enough redemption to keep life going.

BOOKS READ IN AUGUST

 

 

August was just fine for me, despite all the upsetting stuff that is going on. I celebrated my birthday, for a week, as always. We had a mix of heat waves and lovely days in the 80s with some clouds. As has been my way during the pandemic I escaped into books and was rewarded with all kinds of stories that reminded me there have always been troubles mixed with joys.

Stats: 11 books read. 8 fiction. 8 written by women. 2 science fiction. 1 mythology. 1 nonfiction. 1 memoir. 2 historical novels.

Place I went: United States, England, Greenland, Germany.

Authors new to me: Steph Cha, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Judith Lindbergh, Markus Zusak.

Favorites: Night Sleep Death the Stars, In the Country of Women

Least favorite: Starling Days

How did your August reading go? Favorites? Have you read any of these books?

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY

 

Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha, Ecco, 2019, 244 pp

 

I read this for my One Book At A Time reading group. It was my suggestion and we all found it amazing.

The story concerns racial tension in Los Angeles and is told from the viewpoints of two families, one African American, one Korean American.

In 1991, at the time of the Rodney King beating, a Korean American woman shot and killed Ava Matthews, an African American teenager who she thought was shoplifting in her pharmacy. The woman was charged with manslaughter but got off with no jail time.

Almost three decades later, the relatives of the Black victim and a daughter of the Korean family come into conflict again.

Grace Park was in the womb when her mother shot Ava Matthews. She grew up never knowing what her mother did. Now, thanks to her older sister, she does.

Shawn Matthews, brother of Ava, has served time in prison, as has his cousin Ray. Now they are both trying to live right but it's a struggle everyday.

When another shocking murder rocks Los Angeles, the families collide.

Steph Cha based her Ava Matthews on a real character and a real case from 1991. In fictionalizing the story she sought to show the tensions as well as the possibility for reconciliation between the two families.

Because the members of our reading group have all lived in the Los Angeles area for many years, we know of all these incidents, especially the Rodney King case, the resulting riots, and the tensions in South Central. For us, the novel brought a much deeper understanding of what life is like for such families, the trauma they carry, the resentments between them, the faulty working of law enforcement and the courts.

Perhaps for non-Angelenos, the impact would not hit so close to home but it would still give readers an accurate look behind the scenes of racial tension in any of our cities.

Steph Cha is Korean American, born in Korea Town, Los Angeles, in 1986. She has written a crime series featuring Juniper Song, a Korean American private investigator. Your House Will Pay is her fourth novel. 

IMAGO

 

 

Imago, Octavia E Butler, Warner Books, 1989, 225 pp

 

After finishing Adulthood Rites, I went right on to the final book in Butler's Lilith's Brood series because there was nothing else I wanted to read right then. I had to know how the story ended.

Lilith increases her brood with Jodahs, the first construct ooloi. The alien Oankali comprise three sexes: male, female and ooloi (non-sexed or combined or androgynous, referred to as "it.") How ahead of her time Butler was, though in fact she was preceded by Ursula LeGuin in some ways.

A construct ooloi then is non-sexed Oankali plus part human. The ooloi are genetic manipulators. They can cure genetic diseases, the kind that are passed on hereditarily, with just a touch of a tentacle.

Jodahs is looked upon as a dangerous new sort by both Oankali and humans. It has equal ability to cure and deform or even create plagues. What will it do when reaching maturity?

In Dawn, the first book, Lilith became the first construct female. Adulthood Rites featured a construct male. Now in Imago, the first construct ooloi emerges. Though all three books contain much emotion, Imago is the most emotional yet. Written in first person, the reader gets to feel the androgynous point of view which can be strange for a male or female individual. Yet not so strange after all once one has read the book.

I was deeply moved by this one. Jodahs's quest is to create a new state of affairs on Earth by merging and modifying both Oankali and human. It felt hopeful to me. Not that I would necessarily want to become part alien but that by weaving and blending sexual orientation, race, genetics and customs, a "construct" society might be able to live in some kind of peace.

I have been coming to the idea, for some time now, that human beings are all on a spectrum, sexually, emotionally, mentally and racially. We could create a better sort of life by recognizing that in each other instead of violently rejecting differences.

More Octavia Butler, please.

ADULTHOOD RITES

 

 

Adulthood Rites, Octavia E Butler, Warner Books, 1988, 268 pp

 

This is the second book in Butler's Lilith's Brood series, aka The Xenogenesis series. It follows Dawn. The story opens with the birth of Akin, born of Lilith. He is a "construct" male, meaning he is part human, part Oankali, who are the aliens who captured humans in the first book. 

Lilith and her family are back on Earth, living in an uneasy peace with humans who refused to be subject to the Oankali and call themselves resistors. The neutral gender Oankali, called Ooloi, rendered all humans infertile unless they have children with Ooloi genetic "help." The resistors sometimes steal a human-looking construct child in their desperation to have one of their own.

 Akin was stolen when he was only an infant, though he has advanced abilities. Adulthood Rites follows Akin's growth to young manhood. After he escapes the resistor village, he struggles to reconcile his dual nature and to understand humans. He becomes a mediator between the two species and brings about a compromise so that the resistors can reproduce.

 Akin pays dearly for his efforts and much of that is tough to read about. Octavia Butler is exploring what she calls a "self-destructive contradiction" in humans between high intelligence and a hierarchical nature. The Oankali believe this contradiction dooms humans to war and other catastrophes that threaten to wipe out the human race.

She makes you think about Africans brought to America and other colonized countries resulting in their subsequent struggles to integrate into White society. She makes you ponder the outcomes of colonization around the world. These subjects become real in the context of her characters who are caught in such struggles. That is the brilliance of the books in this series. In her own way, she is as eloquent as James Baldwin was.

 

 

OLIGARCHY

Oligarchy, Scarlett Thomas, Counterpoint Press, 2020, 230 pp

 

I have been a fan of British author Scarlett Thomas for many years. She is a bit of an acquired taste for some readers but I took to her right away. Her latest is the story of a young girl, illegitimate daughter of a Russian mother. 

 

Her birth father has just discovered her existence and has sent her off to private school in England. The father is the oligarch. She has never met him but suddenly she is catapulted out of her impoverished existence with her mother. He has showered her with money, gifts and a seemingly unlimited credit card.

 

So that is one oddball theme in itself. The real story at boarding school is how all these teenage girls develop eating disorders as they each try to be the thinnest one. Amid all that is a mystery about certain girls who disappear or die with a certain teacher being suspiciously involved. The plot catapults along while Natasha, the Russian heroine, gets advice from her father's sister on how to deal with it all.

Like most of the stories by Scarlett Thomas that I have read, the novel is equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious. The social commentary and the adventure of one female dealing with personal demons left me wondering how she would get through.

I loved it. Natasha survives and gets a clue, as in she starts eating again. I know, that might be a spoiler but how she escapes disaster is what matters. I could imagine that she would go on to have a good life, as do those of us who survive young adulthood.

THE STARLESS SEA

The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern,  Doubleday, 2019, 494 pp

 

This is not so much a review as it is a prose poem about what this book was to me. As maddening as it sometimes was, this is my kind of book and I loved it. A huge sprawling story about stories, it includes a land beneath the earth on the shores of a starless sea. A labyrinth filled with stories. Three young adult characters, just beyond their teenage years, searching for their destinies and longing for connection.

 

Doors, which may be anywhere, lead into this land. As she did in The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern, who seems to be made out of stories herself, created The Starless Sea out of her own longings. She certainly tapped into mine.

As I sat at my desk for hours trying to figure out how to write about this book and taking notes, I wrote: Stories, stories everywhere. The stories that are the life I've lived, the stories that run in my thoughts, the stories I've read, the stories I have dreamed but not yet lived.

If it took Erin Morgenstern years to arrange this magical novel into 494 pages, I think the best thing I can do is to encourage readers who long for books like this to just go ahead and read The Starless Sea. You will be whisked away from the horrors of today where you will meet characters dealing with their own troubles, finding their own pathways to their hearts' desires and braving their own inner demons.

These are timeless matters and now is a time to step back or step away for contemplation, to take a voyage on the Starless Sea. The news will still be bad when you return but you might be refreshed, ready to have another go at your own story.

JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

James Baldwin: A Biography, David Leeming, Alfred A Knopf, 1994, 388 pp

 

This is one of the best author biographies I have ever read. If I love or admire an author, and there is a biography available, I like to read it. Often I follow the author's life as I read their works. I did that with John Steinbeck and discovered that I enjoyed learning what was going on in his life as he wrote each novel.

 

I was going to follow that plan with James Baldwin but I got so involved with his personal story that I could not stop. David Leeming's way of revealing Baldwin is respectful and sensitive. He traces the man's development from an impoverished Harlem kid, son of a preacher, through the lucky breaks that gave him chances to build on his natural intelligence and improve his writing skills as well as figure out his sexual orientation and his place in the world. From all of that experience he became one of the leading Black writers of the 20th century.

 

Authors are not always "nice" people leading steady, secure lives. They are often driven by certain demons and James Baldwin was no exception. He suffered emotionally, he blazed with righteousness in many public situations, and I feel he created one of the most profound understandings of race relations in America ever.

 

I have read four of Baldwin's novels so far: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Reading the biography was like taking a class from a really great professor. It deepened my understanding of those novels, both as to how he came to write them and some of the literary aspects I had either missed or not fully grasped.

 

David Leeming is a professor of literature. He was also a close friend of Baldwin's from 1961 until the author's death in 1988. Baldwin authorized Leeming to write his biography and left all his papers to him.

 

Now I look forward to reading the rest of James Baldwin's novels, stories and essay collections while having this book as a resource. I especially liked learning about Baldwin's relationships with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many other civil rights leaders, through which I got an excellent overview of the Black race's ongoing fight for freedom. That was James Baldwin's fight, his life and his obsession.

AUGUST READING GROUP UPDATE

Four of my six reading groups are still meeting on Zoom. I have not heard from the other two but four Zoom meetings a month is just about plenty for me. Everyone has worked out their glitches and we are all old pros by now.

Two groups chose the same book again this month. All of the books deal with diversity of one kind or another and that is appropriate for the times. None are about pandemics though. Good!!

One Book At A Time:

 

I finished reading this yesterday and it is amazing! 

Just came out in paperback last month.

Carol's Group and Bookie Babes:

 

No review I have read prepared me for all that goes on in this novel.

I am reading it now and whoa!!

 

Tiny Book Club:

This is a memoir by one of my favorite authors.

Can't wait to read it.

It comes out in paperback this month.

 

 

Have you read/discussed any of these books?

Are you meeting with a reading group this month? If yes, what will you discuss?

BARN 8

Barn 8, Deb Olin Unferth, Graywolf Press, 2020, 282 pp

 

 

My goodness, this crazy novel was so good. Janey, a teenager from Brooklyn, runs away to find the father she has just found out she has. She ends up in Ohio where she falls in with some eco terrorist folks.

They plot the heist of a million chickens, which are from just one agribusiness farm of egg laying chickens. What you learn about how these chickens are treated is almost enough to turn you vegan if your are not already. The author IS vegan. She must have gone through some trauma herself in doing the research. 

Of course the heist goes very wrong but you will have to read the book to find out how it all turns out. Deb Olin Unferth is a fearless writer with a seriously whacked sense of humor and a lot of heart. The characters jump off the page and Janey won my admiration as she came to terms with who she is and what life means. Even the chickens became characters.

I am an omnivore and will remain so, but I am looking more deeply into where my supposedly "cage free" eggs actually come from. 

I received the book as the March selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, a subscription that continues to introduce me to great books and authors who deserve more attention. I listened to the talk with Deb Olin Unferth on the Otherppl podcast and got more insight into the vegetarian lifestyle and views.

FLIGHTS

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk, Riverhead Books, 2018, 403 pp (originally published in Poland, 2007, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft)

 

I read this for my Tiny Book Club. It is an experimental novel made up of fragments, written by Tokarczuk as she traveled around Europe in the first decade of the 21st century. It was a challenging read for me because though there are a few story lines, even those are broken up throughout the book. If you read mainly for story, this might not be the book for you, though it has its own particular pleasures.

 

After I finished the book, I listened to a talk given by Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft, presented on YouTube by Politics and Prose Books. That was good because it answered questions I had. She actually wrote the book 13 years ago. It was not published in English until 2018, after Jennifer Croft translated it and then fought hard to find a publisher. Once it was published in English, it became a finalist for and then won the Man Booker International Prize, after which Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the talk she explained that she intentionally wrote in fragments. She called it a "constellation" novel, comparing the way we look at the stars in a vast sky and group them into constellations in an effort to impose some order. Thus the book is a kind of fiction because it contains stories of other people intermingled with the author's reactions to the places she traveled, to what she saw, to certain areas of knowledge she was pursuing and what she learned. She wanted readers to read all of her fragments and involve ourselves in making our own order out of it.

If that sounds like it requires effort by the reader, I can tell you that it does. The pleasures for me were mostly due to being able to read about such continual and free travel during this time of restricted travel due to COVID. And I was reminded how much one can travel within one's own mind, in fact how much we all do that all the time!

A few years ago I read an earlier novel by this author, House of Day, House of Night. It was also a bit challenging but a more enjoyable read for me. I plan to read her most recently translated novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, soon.

Have you read Flights or any of her other books? If you have reviewed any of them leave a link in the comments or just a comment if you prefer.

BOOKS READ IN JULY

Happy first of August! I chose this image because it it about 100 degrees in my town today and that ocean looked nice and cool.

I had a great reading month in July. Somehow I finished 12 books. My solution to being behind on reviews is only to post reviews of the books I loved the most or found the most interesting. If you see one on the list here that you wish I would review, please let me know in the comments.

Stats: 12 books read. 11 fiction. 6 written by women. 1 sci fi. 1 thriller. 4 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 2 translated. 1 fantasy. 1 biography.

Authors new to me: Octavia Butler, Mark Guerin, Deb Olin Unferth, David Leeming.

 

Favorites: Dawn, Barn 8, The Starless Sea, James Baldwin biography, Oligarchy

Least favorite: The Man With the Golden Gun

Places I went: New Orleans, Boston, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Poland, France, Great Britain, Vietnam, Cuba, Caribbean, Off World.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you read any of these books? How did you enjoy your reading in July?