RidgewayGirl Reads in 2020, Part Three

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RidgewayGirl Reads in 2020, Part Three

1RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: okt 4, 2020, 1:45 pm

Starting the second quarter of the year with a new thread, full of uncertainty in this new world of social distancing. I am feeling quite smug about my own prescience in amassing a sizable collection of books to read during this time.

Kelly Reemtsen is an LA-based artist who is best known for her paintings of women wearing vintage dresses and toting tools and garden implements. It's a feminist take that can appear empowering or ominous, depending on the viewer.



https://artmazemag.com/kelly-reemtsen/

http://www.kellyreemtsen.com

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Acquired in 2020

3RidgewayGirl
jul 2, 2020, 9:13 am

Second Quarter Reading



April

1. Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez
2. Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates
3. Precious You by Helen Monks Takhar
4. Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal
5. Weather by Jenny Offill
6. The Whispering Wall by Patricia Carlon
7. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
8. Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown
9. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy
10. You Again by Debra Jo Immergut
11. All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang
12. Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
13. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Sims
14. Long Bright River by Liz Moore
15. My Mother's House by Francesca Momplaisir

May

1. Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland, translated by Kari Dickson
2. Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
3. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
4. Apartment by Teddy Wayne
5. You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
6. Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime by Val McDermid
7. Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
8. The Narcissism of Small Differences by Michael Zadoorian
9. Herkunft by Saša Stanišic
10. True Love by Sarah Gerard
11. A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh
12. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

June

1. The City We Became by N. K. Jemison
2. This Wicked World by Richard Lange
3. Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
4. The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine
5. In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
6. The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson
7. Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
8. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
9. Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

8RidgewayGirl
jul 2, 2020, 9:23 am

My new thread is now open for business. Come on in.

9RidgewayGirl
jul 2, 2020, 12:54 pm



Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four begins with the fourteen year old cold case kidnapping and murder of a seven year old girl, but that's just the scaffolding. Really this is a novel about the internal politics of a Japanese police prefecture and the machinations between departments and officers jockeying for position.

Mikami is a detective reassigned to the press office, a forgotten corner of administration where he leads a group of three working out of a too-small office. As the novel begins, they are stuck between the administration department and an increasingly angry press as they seek to keep the name of a driver who hit a pedestrian secret. At the same time, Mikami is asked to set up the press for a visit from the top police commissioner from Tokyo and things rapidly fall apart as he is torn between what he is being asked to do and what he feels is right, between the responsibilities of his current job and his allegiance to the career he had as a detective and in finding out what exactly went so wrong fourteen years ago. Miakami and his wife are also searching for their runaway daughter.

I can't tell you why a novel focused on the internal struggles of a police department should be so fascinating, but I enjoyed every single page. Mikami was just such a great character to spend time with as he methodically works to figure out what exactly is going on and gains some understanding of himself, his wife and his career.

10dchaikin
jul 2, 2020, 1:26 pm

>8 RidgewayGirl: um... (note to self, be polite)

No, but really, I’m reading through your last several, telling myself, “but I haven’t got time to read this too.” Sharks sounded terrific, particularly the Hawaiian aspect. I don’t think I knew what Nickel Boys is about (or I forgot), and it has more appeal now. As for Six Four - several years ago i read a kind of mystery that was really about Japanese police politics shortly after WWII, during US occupation. It was terrible, but the concept was good, certainly rich ground (and certainly it’s been written about extensively outside my awareness). Anyway, noting your enthusiasm and an interesting topic. And, of course, welcome to 2020 second half, may, and I say this with trepidation, it be the better half.

11BLBera
jul 2, 2020, 3:31 pm

Welcome to your second half of the year of reading, Kay! Your girls in the dresses with the axes still kind of creep me out.

>9 RidgewayGirl: This sounds interesting.

12AnnieMod
jul 2, 2020, 3:35 pm

>9 RidgewayGirl:

I have this one on my shelves but every time I reach for it, I decide I am not in the mood for a long novel just now... and start on something else (sometimes longer). It was one of my impulsive buys - I was grabbing some books from Amazon and somehow got to that one and decided I want to read it. Sounds like I need to pull it out and actually read it. :)

13stretch
jul 2, 2020, 4:33 pm

>10 dchaikin: Dan its a corded chainshaw. She won't get far.

I kind of want prints of these!

>9 RidgewayGirl: I've been fascinated with Japanese policing ever since I saw documentary about Sumo Wrestling fixing, and how that problem relates to the Japanese lack of enthuism for solving crimes. So a novel about the theme sounds interesting. I'll have to check it out sometime.

14RidgewayGirl
jul 2, 2020, 4:35 pm

>10 dchaikin: Sharks is fantastic and would probably be good as an audible book, as would The Nickel Boys. With Six Four, I really enjoyed getting a look at Japanese culture, even if my previous knowledge (minimal) wasn't enough to allow me to fully understand the undercurrents.

I know, I know, not everyone finds chain saws welcoming.

>11 BLBera: Reemtsen, I think, aims for that uncomfortable place between "aren't those dresses pretty?" and "I don't feel like anything good is happening here."

>12 AnnieMod: Annie, it does take a certain mindset - some of the reviews were disappointed that it's not set up like a thriller, although there are many tense moments and the central conflict is not necessarily whodunnit.

15RidgewayGirl
jul 2, 2020, 4:37 pm

>13 stretch: Stretch, if you're already interested in Japanese policing, I highly recommend this one.

16AnnieMod
jul 2, 2020, 4:55 pm

>14 RidgewayGirl:

Whodunits are a dime a dozen (I like them but I do not need my crime novels to be of that type all the time); I think I picked it up exactly because it sounded different. :)

19RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: sep 28, 2020, 9:53 am

USA
Zaina Arafat (You Exist Too Much)
Emily Beyda (The Body Double)
Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory)
Taylor Brown (Gods of Howl Mountain)
Steph Cha (Your House Will Pay)
Lan Samantha Chang (All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost)
Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer)
Caleb Crain (Overthrow)
Angie Cruz (Dominicana)
Jaquira Diáz (Ordinary Girls)
Jasmon Drain (Stateway's Garden)
Louise Erdrich (The Night Watchman)
Cristina García (Here in Berlin) (country of residence)
Sarah Gerard (True Love: A Novel)
Myla Goldberg (Feast Your Eyes)
Jake Hinkson (Dry County)
Debra Jo Immergut (You Again)
N. K. Jemison (The City We Became)
Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians)
Rachel Kadish (The Weight of Ink)
Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes)
Lily King (Writers and Lovers)
Catherine Lacey (Certain American States)
Richard Lange (This Wicked World)
Raven Leilani (Luster)
Megha Majumdar (A Burning) (country of residence)
Kyle McCarthy (Everyone Knows How Much I Love You)
Lydia Millet (A Children's Bible)
Francesca Momplaisir (My Mother's House)
Liz Moore (Long Bright River)
Joyce Carol Oates (Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers)
Jenny Offill (Weather)
Olaf Olafsson (Restoration) (country of residence)
Dexter Palmer (Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen)
Daniela Petrova (Her Daughter's Mother) (country of residence)
Kate Reed Petty (True Story)
Ivy Pochoda (Visitation Street)
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age)
Maurice Carlos Ruffin (We Cast a Shadow)
Riley Sager (Final Girls)
Alexis Schaitkin (Saint X)
Laura Sims (Looker)
Scott Spencer (River Under the Road)
Lynn Steger Strong (Want)
Pitchaya Sudbanthad (Bangkok Wakes to Rain) (country of residence)
Shruti Swamy (A House is a Body: Stories)
Brandon Taylor (Real Life)
Elisabeth Thomas (Catherine House)
Luis Alberto Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter)
Kent Wascom (The Blood of Heaven)
Kawai Strong Washburn (Sharks in the Time of Saviors)
Larry Watson (The Lives of Edie Pritchard)
Teddy Wayne (Apartment, Loner)
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
Elvia Wilk (Oval)
Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here)
De'Shawn Charles Winslow (In West Mills)
Michael Zadoorian (The Narcissism of Small Differences)

20RidgewayGirl
jul 10, 2020, 4:20 pm



Casey is having a hard time. She's saddled with student debt, living in a garage and working as a waitress as she tries to write. She's been working on her novel for six years and it's going badly. She's estranged from her father for very good reasons. Also, her mother died suddenly and then the guy she fell in love with at a writers' colony dumped her. She doesn't see things improving and she's dealing with a lot of anxiety.

So this sounds dreary, doesn't it? Except that Casey also has some good, supportive friends and her own resilience and humor to guide her along as she deals with mourning her mother and negotiating her way through her life. Lily King writes so gorgeously and with such immediacy in Writers and Lovers that I quickly forgot that I don't generally like novels about novelists -- it feels like an exercise in navel-gazing and how many novels about writers are there now? Except King's take is fresh and visceral and fun, while also being heartbreaking and fully committed to showing the precariousness of Casey's makeshift life.

I loved this novel. I loved how King had me inhabiting Casey's life and while that was rarely a comfortable place to be, it was intense. I loved the mocking/loving look at the writing life and at writers and the various ways they can be ridiculous.

21RidgewayGirl
jul 14, 2020, 12:10 pm



The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, who came to an isolated and poverty-stricken community in 1776. He's alone with his father, his mother having died, and his father is a fire and brimstone preacher who disciplines his son by making him swallow live coals. Things only become more bleak and bloody from there, as Angel runs away from home, forming a partnership with two brothers, and taking their name as his own as they seek first to survive, through preaching and robbery, then to create a new country, called West Florida, with the help, they hope, of the American leader, Aaron Burr.

Kent Wascom has created a violent world, where the only way to survive is to embrace cruelty and to strike without mercy. This isn't a comfortable story with a happy ending, but it is riveting and blood-soaked, if that's what you're in the mood for.

22dchaikin
jul 14, 2020, 1:35 pm

I’ve always wondered what Burr was doing out there and if he was just crazy. But this leaves me a little afraid I’ll end up comparing to Cormac McCarthy - who is quite an elegant word smith and hard to match up. Noting though.

23RidgewayGirl
jul 14, 2020, 3:19 pm

>22 dchaikin: A few reviews said this was akin to Cormac McCarthy. I own all of his books (my brother was a huge fan) and have yet to read one.

24lisapeet
jul 14, 2020, 3:43 pm

>23 RidgewayGirl: Well I'll put in a plug for Suttree—not everyone's cuppa tea, and not an easy read (or always a pleasant one), but I found it to be amazing and immersive, a real fever dream of a book (even the parts that aren't a fever dream, because there is one in there). I think it's something you might have to be in the right mood for. One of my all-time favorites, though.

25BLBera
jul 14, 2020, 4:59 pm

Isn't Writers & Lovers wonderful?! I might have to buy a copy; it's one I might reread.

The Blood of Heaven sounds too bloody for me. The only Cormac McCarthy I've read is The Road, which is bleak but beautifully written.

26dchaikin
jul 14, 2020, 5:17 pm

>23 RidgewayGirl: I’m asking myself what you would think. Don’t know!

>24 lisapeet: Suttree is definitely not for everyone, but it is quirky and memorable and an experience. I’m a fan. (But I liked all his novels, except Child of God, which has its fans)

>25 BLBera: I read The Road 1st, then later went back and read everything else.

27RidgewayGirl
jul 15, 2020, 3:47 pm

>24 lisapeet: Noted. But I will mention that I have spent a good few decades working myself up to reading McCarthy and have still not managed it. I did read The Road, but I'm pretty sure I didn't think about the author when I picked it up.

>25 BLBera: I will definitely buy a copy of Writers and Lovers. It was perfect.

>26 dchaikin: I don't know either! But I did get caught up in The Blood of Heaven, which was unrelentingly violent and grimy.

28RidgewayGirl
jul 16, 2020, 3:39 pm



Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is an account of the time Valeria Luiselli spent serving as a translator for unaccompanied child asylum seekers in 2016. Moving between the history of why children are forced into taking a dangerous journey alone, one that, at best, ends with an uncertain welcome at the end of it, the facts about the migration and with the stories of the children Luiselli interviewed, this very short book is powerful and effective. Highly recommended. I'll be thinking about this one for some time.

When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seem to be that the origins are circumscribed to "sending" countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States--not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.

29Simone2
jul 18, 2020, 1:22 am

>20 RidgewayGirl: I am super excited to read this one, even more after reading your review.

30RidgewayGirl
jul 18, 2020, 11:26 am

>29 Simone2: It's my favorite book of the year so far. I'm a sucker for the kind of writing that makes me feel as though I'm existing in the protagonist's skin.

31RidgewayGirl
jul 18, 2020, 11:27 am



Quincey is one of three Final Girls, women who were sole survivors of mass murders. She has a baking blog and a husband who is a public defender and a quiet life where no one references her past. That is, until one of the other final girls shows up at her apartment and the third final girl winds up dead. Is someone stalking the final girls?

Thrillers get a pass on many elements of the novel. It's fine if the writing is merely serviceable. If the characters conform to stereo-types or all the secondary characters feel like paper cut-outs, a pass is given as long as the thriller delivers on the necessities of the genre, that is, it thrills, the pages turn quickly, tension rises through the novel until there is a thrilling, and hopefully surprising, climax. When that doesn't happen, like here in Riley Sager's novel, when the wheels spin and, instead of a rising sense of dread, there's a steady hum of boredom, the other flaws begin to show. The long middle portion of Final Girls just sat there. The main character, a well-off, attractive white lady was often upset, but no hints of danger arose until late in the book. And by then, I just didn't care.

32BLBera
jul 18, 2020, 12:30 pm

>31 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for taking one for the team, Kay.

And hooray for promoting Writers & Lovers - it is so wonderful.

33RidgewayGirl
jul 18, 2020, 12:33 pm

>32 BLBera: Beth, it's annoying to find the book you picked up as a good escapist read is merely a slog. And without the elements that would make a book worthy of making an effort for.

I'm going to pick up a copy of Writers and Lovers for my shelves.

34RidgewayGirl
jul 20, 2020, 12:57 pm



In 1953, Thomas Wazhashk is working as the night watchman in the Turtle Mountain Reservation's sole industry, a small jewel-bearing plant, when he finds out about a bill before Congress to terminate the tribe's right to the land and to the nominal support they receive. Patrice "Pixie" Parenteau is a young woman working in the plant, thankful for the work as she is supporting her mother and brother. Her father is an alcoholic and the family dreads his returns home. Her sister has disappeared into Minneapolis and Patrice decides to go to the city and find her. Wood Mountain is a promising young boxer being coached by the white English teacher. All he wants is a fair fight, to work with horses and a chance with Patrice.

Louise Erdrich knows how to tell a story and with The Night Watchman, she demonstrates her mastery of the novel. It's perfectly paced, even as she takes the time to make each character come alive. Patrice and her uncle Thomas a good foils for each other, Thomas proceeding in a methodical way and full of appreciation for his life, Patrice barreling into dangerous situations as she fights to find her sister and keep her family afloat. It's just so very well done.

35RidgewayGirl
jul 28, 2020, 5:13 pm



Micah lives a quiet, ordered life in a basement apartment of the building he manages. He also has a small business fixing people's computer issues as the Tech Hermit and a girlfriend he sees on a regular schedule. Then, on an evening he brings dinner over, she tells him that she's worried she's going to be asked to leave her apartment because of her cat. Micah makes a joke about her living in her car and can't figure out why she seems so unhappy with him. Then he gets an unexpected visitor, the son of an ex-girlfriend shows up thinking Micah is his real Dad. Suddenly, his carefully constructed life is going off-kilter and he's forced to confront his own future, one that looks unbearable.

Anne Tyler is a skilled writer and Redhead by the Side of the Road is just beautiful; perfectly plotted, with wonderfully flawed and human characters and not a single extraneous word. That said, this is one of her slighter novels, with far less substance than in some of her others. It was the perfect novel for me, reading in an unsettled time and I'm so happy that she wrote this, but its difficulty setting is so low; she's been writing about this character, this setting and this conflict for decades. And maybe this is Tyler realizing that she can just play with variations of this same book for the rest of her writing life. I know that I'd read a dozen more just like it.

36RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: jul 29, 2020, 2:53 pm



David Federman went unnoticed in high school. Even his high grades were overlooked by all but his teachers. His friend group was, he felt, composed of the detritus of high school society and he longed to be noticed by the popular kids.

We were studious but not collectively brilliant enough to be nerds, nor sufficiently specialized to be geeks. We might have formed, in aggregate, one thin mustache and a downy archipelago of facial hair. We joked about sex with the vulgar fixation of virgins. We rarely associated outside of school and sheepishly nodded when passing in the halls, aware that each of us somehow reduced the standing of the other--that as a whole we were lesser than the sum of our parts.

Still, he gets into Harvard and arrives ready to start an entirely different life where he is finally appreciated and admired, only to find himself in the same social group as before. But on that first day he sees Veronica, a beautiful, wealthy girl from the privileged background of private New York schools and effortless social fluency. He is immediately smitten.

What follows is an upending of all the usual tropes of the literary college novel. We've all read plenty of books in which the awkward but good-natured guy faces a few hurdles, but eventually finds out who he really is and along the way wins the heart of the girl. Loner is not one of those books. We've all read the WMFuN,* in which the guy makes mistakes, but finds redemption, after an appropriate penance, with the more down-to-earth girl (and often gets to sleep with the object of his affection). Loner is certainly not one of those novels. Instead, Teddy Wayne takes us into the mind of someone we think we've all met before, whose intentions are familiar to us and shows us that we are very much mistaken.

Loner is fantastic. Wayne manages to create a brilliant and uncomfortable character study in the form of the college novel that is so immersive and insightful and off-putting. He's an excellent writer who is an even better observer of people's behavior and I look forward to reading more by him.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel.

37AlisonY
jul 29, 2020, 3:03 pm

>36 RidgewayGirl: I've got Loner on my wish list - I think maybe from your previous thread when you read Apartment and introduced Wayne as I'd not heard of him before. Sounds great!

38janemarieprice
jul 29, 2020, 8:32 pm

>36 RidgewayGirl: Sounds quite interesting. I've seen a few mentions of this that seem intriguing.

39rachbxl
jul 30, 2020, 4:56 am

>35 RidgewayGirl: I'm a big fan of Anne Tyler, and I read this one recently. You're exactly right, 'maybe this is Tyler realizing that she can just play with variations of this same book for the rest of her writing life' - but unfortunately I'd read two of her earlier variations not long before, so by the time I read this one I was getting a bit tired of it. I do actually enjoy seeing her revisit her material and play around with it, but I'm going to wait longer this time before reading another in case it's more of the same!

40avaland
jul 30, 2020, 6:16 am

>20 RidgewayGirl: Good to know about King. I read her first two books and enjoyed them (pre-LT). My problem, if it be one, is that there are too many books and authors out there :-)

41RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: jul 30, 2020, 11:14 am

>37 AlisonY: Teddy Wayne is my favorite new author discovery of the year so far. Apartment was recommended on a podcast I like (Book Fight) and so I am now in the process of finding his earlier novels. So far, I've been impressed. I follow what's being published pretty closely so it's always a surprise that there are established authors with solid reputations that I've simply never heard of.

>38 janemarieprice: Wayne is a very good writer, Jane. In Loner, the narrator gives examples of his "brilliant" essays and they are just such great examples of turgid over-writing hiding a lack of substance. I was delighted.

>39 rachbxl: I usually wait at least a year between books by the same author. Read too closely together and a reused turn of phrase or a way of describing a character will jump out at me and reduce my enjoyment. Of course, as soon as I read a book I like I'm all set to grab another by the author right away, but luckily the ever larger tbr means that impulse is buried under a stack of other books.

>40 avaland: Lois, I completely understand. I wonder if German has a word for that growing sense that one will not be able to read all the books one wants to.

42rachbxl
jul 30, 2020, 12:09 pm

>41 RidgewayGirl: Yes, normally I'd wait at least a year, not on purpose but because I get distracted by other books, but this year I made a loose New Year's resolution to read more by writers whose work I've enjoyed in the past (and Anne Tyler was near the top of my list). Sometimes it pays off better than others!

43BLBera
jul 31, 2020, 9:43 am

Hi Kay - I felt similarly about Redhead by the Side of the Road. I thought it was more a character study than anything else, and I wanted more. I think you liked it more than I did.

I love Louise Erdrich and I thought the fact that Thomas is based on her grandfather was interesting, but this isn't one that will stick with me like some of her others: Tracks, Love Medicine.

Still I'm happy I read both of them.

Loner goes on my list.

44lisapeet
jul 31, 2020, 10:19 am

You've sparked my interest in Loner too. I have a love/hate relationship with a certain kind of misery porn in modern fiction (hi, Eileen), but this sounds like it goes beyond that.

45RidgewayGirl
jul 31, 2020, 4:22 pm

>42 rachbxl: That's a good resolution. There are several authors who I would like to read more of and somehow never manage to.

>43 BLBera: Beth, I've been feeling ground down by the obvious things and so a novel that I could just fall into, that was well-written, with characters I cared about and who also felt familiar was just what I needed. In ordinary times, I would have liked this book less.

>44 lisapeet: Loner was just great. The main character's situation is enviable, so very much not misery porn. Which is an interesting concept -- I just finished a novel that felt exploitative and I'm still ironing out why.

46wandering_star
aug 1, 2020, 8:21 am

>13 stretch: The documentary about sumo fixing sounds very interesting. Can you remember what it was called? I have tried googling but am not coming up with anything.

47RidgewayGirl
aug 1, 2020, 4:33 pm



Parties were held in kitchens. Euchre was a sport. And fiddles made the only sound worth dancing to. Any other music was just background noise for storytelling and beer drinking and flirting. Or for providing the cadence for fight choreography when you just had to beat the shit out of your cousin.

Joan has been looking for her husband for almost a year when she finds him preaching in a giant tent in a Walmart parking lot. He looks different, and clearly doesn't know her, but she's sure it's him. Victor and Joan had met in Quebec and she brought him back to her small Métis community of Arcand on Georgian Bay in Ontario, where her family was less than welcoming. Arcand is close-knit and Joan grew up with tales of survival and encounters with the rougarou, a werewolf-type of creature that keeps children from wandering or girls from walking home alone at night. So Joan sets out to bring her husband home, armed with the knowledge passed to her from her grandmother and great-aunts, and with the help of her twelve-year-old nephew.

Empire of Wild is a fantastic book, full of warmth and love for the Métis community, imaginative and well-written. Cherie Dimaline is an author to pay attention to. In the world of Empire of Wild the supernatural exists alongside the natural one and it's up to Joan to figure out how to rescue her husband. Joan was a great character to spend time with, she's determined and more than a little reckless and utterly sure that Victor wouldn't leave her. The secondary characters have depth and their own histories. Zeus, Joan's nephew, was so very much a twelve-year-old boy, with all the bravery and vulnerability of that age. Even the bad guys were so understandable and multi-dimensional. Yes, I really liked this one.

48BLBera
aug 2, 2020, 10:05 am

Empire of Wild sounds great, Kay. Onto the list it goes.

49lisapeet
aug 2, 2020, 10:28 am

Yep, another wishlist hit! You're on a roll, Kay (at least with my wannabe shelf).

50wandering_star
aug 2, 2020, 11:07 am

Ditto!

51BLBera
aug 2, 2020, 7:25 pm

I'm # 2 on my library reserve list!

52RidgewayGirl
aug 2, 2020, 8:39 pm

Yay! I hope you all like it at least half as much as I did.

53RidgewayGirl
aug 5, 2020, 12:06 pm



When Adunni is fourteen, her father sells her into marriage to an older man. She'll be his third wife. When her mother was still alive, she'd managed to pay for a few years of schooling for Adunni, but with her marriage, the hope of returning is gone. Her new circumstances are difficult, and as the book progresses, Adunni deals with or witnesses a laundry list of hardships, always dreaming of a better life if only she could go to school, dreaming of having a "louding voice," a voice that people will listen to.

The Girl with the Louding Voice is set in Nigeria, first in a small village, later in Lagos. The novel is narrated by Adunni and author Abi Daré allows Adunni's voice to be an uncertain English, guessing at the words she doesn't know, and very much that of a naïve teenager. And as Adunni improves her English and learns more about the world, her language changes. Choosing to put the novel entirely into Adunni's voice is a courageous choice for a debut novelist and one that pays off. Adunni comes across as likable and resilient.

In the end, though, I was uncomfortable with this novel. Adunni faces an endless stream of abuse and injustice and all she can do is endure. That the solution lies in the largesse of a wealthy woman raised in Britain, while the abuse all came from Nigerians was unsettling. This is also the second novel in which a western woman's fertility worries are given out-sized space in a novel about greater issues affecting Africans that I have read recently and I'm not a fan. The Girl with the Louding Voice would provide book clubs with plenty to discuss, but I hope that the discussions at least touch on the problematic aspects of this book.

54RidgewayGirl
aug 6, 2020, 2:46 pm



Utopia Avenue is the band name chosen by a group of four musicians in London in 1967. They're a motley crew, but the music they make together is greater than the sum of their parts. As they fight to break onto the Billboard charts, traveling around Britain in a dubious van and giving interviews, they become close and write some great songs. But as they begin to break through, and to rub shoulders with the great musicians of their time, they also deal with hurdles and heartbreak, from mental illness to a stint in an Italian jail.

David Mitchell's newest novel is pure wish fulfillment. Mitchell has a great deal of fun chronicling the adventures of Elf, Griff, Jasper, Dean and their determined and cheerful manager Levon, as they give a disastrously hilarious interview on Dutch TV, run into everyone from David Bowie to Janis Joplin and enjoy the taste of fame. And because this is Mitchell, there's a touch of the fantastic that shows up abruptly three-quarters through the novel involving the guitarist, Jasper de Zoet. This novel is a lot of fun, but slighter than Mitchell's other novels. There's a lot more detail about the writing of each song the band releases, and who wrote what and why, than I wanted but this may be of more interest to the musically-inclined.

55RidgewayGirl
aug 9, 2020, 1:17 pm

56rachbxl
aug 10, 2020, 8:45 am

>55 RidgewayGirl: I like this a lot.

>54 RidgewayGirl: Hmm, I have this on hold at the library, and my hold has come up a couple of times now and I've rescheduled it. If it were not by someone whose books I've really enjoyed in the past, I probably wouldn't read it (you're not making me any keener with your mention of the detail about the band's songs!) I may give it a chance one of these days.

57RidgewayGirl
aug 10, 2020, 9:47 am

Rachel, I'm not a poetry person, but I read this one several times.

As for Utopia Avenue, it's well-written, because it's David Mitchell, but I'm not a musician and my music is later than this, so the nostalgia factor wasn't there for me (a few Bowie mentions, but perfunctory ones). It's sort of like Daisy Jones and the Six only in London and where the band all gets along really well.

58lisapeet
aug 10, 2020, 12:17 pm

>55 RidgewayGirl: I love Jack Gilbert. I bought my husband a collection of his years ago, can't remember which one though. I'll have to dig it out.

>54 RidgewayGirl: I'm looking forward to this one, though a friend of mine suggested that it's best if you've read his previous work because it features cameos and mentions from all of them. I can see where The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet might come in just from your review, and she also mentioned Slade House, The Bone Clocks, and Cloud Atlas—that last one being the only other of his I've read. I'm probably not going to read three other books just to prep for this one, and I am a bit of a music geek anyway, so I'm looking forward to it.

59RidgewayGirl
aug 10, 2020, 12:32 pm

>58 lisapeet: There are plenty of references to the Mitchell-verse, and it all goes very Bone Clocks for awhile. I'm still thinking about whether that was a better direction than staying with the portrayal of a musician with schizophrenia.

60avaland
aug 10, 2020, 3:40 pm

>55 RidgewayGirl: Interesting poem. Not sure how I feel about it. Hmm.

61auntmarge64
aug 10, 2020, 6:01 pm

Just checking in, Kay. :)

62BLBera
aug 10, 2020, 6:24 pm

I like the poem, Kay.

I've read The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas and look forward to this new one. I think I'll like the music stuff.

63RidgewayGirl
aug 11, 2020, 11:16 am

Lois, I'm not a poetry person, but this one grabbed me and I've read it several times. Not sure why it grabs me. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Hi, Margaret!

Beth, I'm a huge Mitchell fan - my favorite is Black Swan Green. I'm not musical at all and enjoyed Utopia Avenue. Elf is a wonderful character.

64sallypursell
aug 11, 2020, 12:40 pm

Just catching up here. I also enjoyed that poem, and you have expanded my TBR. It's always worth checking out your reading and your comments.

65RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: aug 18, 2020, 1:33 pm



River Under the Road by Scott Spencer begins an uncomfortable brunch and, in the course of several parties over the following decades, tells the story of a relationship. Grace and Thaddeus meet in Chicago one summer, she's an aspiring artist with an alcoholic mother, he's an aspiring author with parents who love, but don't particularly like him. They both dream of joining a vibrant artistic community, but it doesn't take them long to discover that New York in the seventies is less urbane and cultured than they expected. Grace's careful pencil drawings are not the performance art of the zeitgeist, and Thaddeus begins to worry that maybe he's not capable of writing the literary masterpiece he dreams of writing.

Scott Spencer is such a solid writer. He knows what he's doing, how to build a story, how to write characters who are nuanced and breathe. He writes a little like John Cheever, with his ability to write so that the words never become more visible than the story and with his portrayals of people stuck in moments of ambiguity or quiet discomfort. This was a novel with an old-fashioned feel and while I never warmed to either Grace or Thaddeus, with their innate conservatism, I was always happy to get back to this one and stayed up late more than once with it.

66sallypursell
aug 16, 2020, 6:35 am

>41 RidgewayGirl: What you said to Lois was something I referred to in someone's thread just tonight.

67sallypursell
aug 16, 2020, 6:38 am

>50 wandering_star: It went on my mountain of a list, too, Kay.

68sallypursell
aug 16, 2020, 6:41 am

>59 RidgewayGirl: This post was so interestingly phrased that you have enticed me.

69AlisonY
aug 16, 2020, 6:43 am

Looking forward to hearing what you think of Ducks.

70RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: aug 16, 2020, 2:08 pm

>66 sallypursell: There really must be a word for that, it's such a common plight. David Mitchell is a superb writer, I hope you'll enjoy reading what he writes. And, regarding your comment in my last thread, I was lucky enough to have lived for stretches in Germany. The trip to Naples was one of the last trips we made and I loved it - it's chaotic and grimy and there's so much history and life to it. And the food was great, which always makes a new place more attractive. And just watching the traffic was entertaining.

>69 AlisonY: I'm liking it so far, although it's such a different kind of reading experience and it's asking a lot of me.

71RidgewayGirl
aug 18, 2020, 4:10 pm



Margot's mother has died and she's left her partner because, having become pregnant, she's not sure he's someone to raise a child with. In the middle of that upheaval, she meets her birth mother's sister. Her birth family is very different from Margot. She's a GP with a quiet middle-class life and her aunt and mother were both drug-addicted prostitutes with unstable childhoods and while her aunt is now clean, she's still part of Glasgow's underclass. Margot wanted to find out about her mother's health history but what she gets instead is a plea to help bring her mother's murderer to justice. Margot is torn between a fascination with her mother's life and murder and a wariness about her rediscovered family. And her best friend is having trouble leaving her abusive husband, she's getting threatening letters slipped under her door and someone may be following her.

Denise Mina writes with heart and compassion about Glasgow's underclass, and in The Less Dead that skill is well-deployed. Here, the bad guys are both very bad and very human, the protagonist is flawed, yet brave and the many characters, from Margot herself to those we encounter for only a sentence or two are complex and real. There's a terrifying scene with a drunk mugger in which the mugger is both menacing and pitiful. This is Mina at her best, a well-plotted noir set in the back streets and hidden closes of Glasgow.

72lsh63
Bewerkt: aug 18, 2020, 4:26 pm

Hi Kay,
You know I want the Denise Mina. I will wait patiently for my turn at the library.

73RidgewayGirl
aug 18, 2020, 4:47 pm

>72 lsh63: It's worth waiting for! I read it far too quickly, and enjoyed every page.

74RidgewayGirl
aug 21, 2020, 2:49 pm



What to say about this gorgeous, gorgeous novel? Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad takes the form of tightly inter-linked stories about two people who meet and have a child, but also backwards in time to colonial Siam, forwards into the future, connecting with their families histories and futures. Nee is a young woman, a university student who marches in the protests in the mid-seventies and survives the violent response. She later meets a photographer and tentatively forms a connection with him, carefully not speaking about what she can't bear to talk about. Her sister has moved to Japan where she owns and runs a Thai restaurant popular with Thai students and expats, but the shadow of the violence reaches her in Tokyo. A missionary from New England despairs of doing anything worthwhile in Siam and writes asking to be reassigned, even as he begins exploring the city he's stranded in. Three children ferry a woman through the now-flooded streets of Bangkok. She wants to see the place her family once lived, back when Bangkok had not been covered by the ocean.

The novel begins with what first look like unrelated short stories, but that eventually resolve themselves into a coherent narrative. It's a wonderful format when it's well-deployed as it is here, Sudbanthad builds the novel in layers of history; of his characters, but also of Bangkok itself. It's such a pleasurable thing to read a well-crafted and superbly written novel where every chapter is carefully placed into the greater whole and yet can stand on its own.

75Cariola
aug 21, 2020, 6:05 pm

>55 RidgewayGirl: Love the Jack Gilbert poem and will have to look for more by him. It reminds me of some of the best of Billy Collins--who doesn't always hit it with me, but there are a few that are extraordinary, like this one I used to have my students analyze.


A Sense of Place

If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place–

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York's Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing a chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape–
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird–
little courier with someplace to go–

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

76Cariola
Bewerkt: aug 21, 2020, 6:08 pm

My daughter gave me a copy of Writers and Lovers for Mother's Day, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Might be my next read. My reading has been slow lately, probably due to expending too much time on politics. I finished Hamnet two weeks ago, and it has jumped to the top of my Best of 2020 list.

77BLBera
aug 21, 2020, 7:01 pm

>74 RidgewayGirl: This sounds lovely, Kay. I will definitely put it on my TBR list.

78RidgewayGirl
aug 22, 2020, 5:24 pm



I'm a little in love with Berlin. It's this modern, bustling, multi-cultural city, festooned with building cranes that is also haunted by history in a way no other city is. It's full of art and grime and people getting on with their days. You can grab a döner, see an exhibition of pretty much any kind of art you like, encounter a gathering of Stolpersteine in front of a building you've passed a dozen times unaware, browse in an English-language bookshop and catch a train going anywhere in Europe all in the same afternoon. And so it happens that I will buy pretty much any book with Berlin in the title.

In Here in Berlin by Cristina García, a middle-aged Cuban woman goes to Berlin. She's looking for a new beginning, but finds herself lonely and without focus in this city she's unfamiliar with. But as she becomes more fluent in German, she begins talking to people, usually older people, usually living in nursing homes, about their pasts. And in short chapters, they tell their stories. So there are former Nazis and former Stasi agents justifying their pasts, women remembering their fear of the Russians, Cubans who fought for the Nazis on behalf of General Franco and who stayed behind after the war, circus performers and musicians, Stalinists and lesbians. It's an interesting format that is hampered only by its reliance on the voices of the elderly so that the novel feels more like an elegy for a disappeared city than a reflection of Berlin today.

79RidgewayGirl
aug 22, 2020, 5:26 pm

Cariola, I like Billy Collins poems a lot. He tends to be accessible but not twee or sentimental. Every time I encounter one of his poems it makes me want to read more poetry.

Beth, it's such a finely crafted novel. I wish it had gotten more attention when it was first published.

80wandering_star
aug 22, 2020, 5:52 pm

>78 RidgewayGirl: I arrived in Berlin a couple of hours ago! I am visiting my sister who has been living here for the last two years. I can see why she, and you, love the city so much. I think Here in Berlin will be perfect for one of her Christmas presents.

81RidgewayGirl
aug 22, 2020, 7:22 pm

>80 wandering_star: My favorite Berlin book is A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones. Of course, I read it on a train going to and from Berlin, so that was certainly an influence!

82rachbxl
aug 23, 2020, 3:27 am

>74 RidgewayGirl: I've had my eye on this one for a while. Thanks for giving me a nudge towards it!

83wandering_star
aug 23, 2020, 5:27 am

>81 RidgewayGirl: Thank you - that will make a great set!

84RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: aug 28, 2020, 4:53 pm



Bakari Sellers grew up in Denmark, a small town outside of Orangeburg, South Carolina. His father is Cleveland Sellers, a contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who was targeted by the authorities during and after the Orangeburg Massacre and who struggled to find employment because of the record he had as a result, until he received a full pardon 25 years later. Bakari Sellers grew up around Civil Rights leaders but also around people who were struggling to get by in Denmark. My Vanishing Country is his memoir in which he describes how Denmark has slowly lost it's vibrancy as the local hospital is closed and the infrastructure crumbles.

My Vanishing Country is very much a memoir written by a politician with an eye to winning elections. There's more than a hint of hagiography in Sellers's account of his own life and experiences. But when his focus turns from himself, the memoir comes to life, and the best chapter by far is his account of the Orangeburg Massacre and his father's story. This is also a deep dive into politics specific to South Carolina and to Black culture in The Palmetto State, which may be of limited interest to people less interested in local politics or the history of South Carolina.

85RidgewayGirl
aug 28, 2020, 4:51 pm



"You're kind of aloof," he says, and all the kids underneath my trench coat rejoice. Aloof is a casual lean, a choice. It is not a girl in Bushwick, licking clean a can of tuna.

"I'm an open book," I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I'll just revise.

In Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, Edie is living in a shared roach-infested apartment, subsisting on ramen, when she begins an on-line flirtation with a married man that quickly becomes serious. Their actual first encounter is less intense. He's quite a bit older than her and tells her that his wife will have to approve their relationship. Edie also works at a publishing company, earning far too little money, dealing with routine racism from her nearly entirely white co-workers and engaging in risky behavior at work. When a series of events leaves Edie without a job or a home, she is taken in by her lover's wife, an awkward situation that no one seems willing to talk openly about.

This novel hits a lot of issues very directly. Edie is a disaster, but so is every single person she interacts with, often leaving her scrambling to be the adult in a situation. She's reckless but also compassionate and just trying to figure out where she belongs. At the heart of this over-packed novel is the story of a tentative friendship between women, one destined to be difficult and stilted by who Rebecca and Edie are, another between Edie and Rebecca's adopted daughter Akila, a girl often more self-assured than Edie, but still uncomfortable in her own life.

There's so much going on in this short novel that it's hard to find something to focus on. Events are recounted, but as more events pile on, the earlier ones become hidden. It had the effect of diluting the power of the story that Leilani is telling. There are some great sentences in Luster, but more often the writing gets in the way of the story. That said, this is a fine debut to what should be a notable body of work.

86RidgewayGirl
aug 30, 2020, 1:59 pm



Jackson Brodie is back! In Big Sky, Kate Atkinson's private detective is living on the Yorkshire coast, mainly following errant husbands and seeing his teenage son on weekends. And then a few things pull him out of his complacency; he sees a girl get into a strange man's car and he is hired by a woman to find out who is following her.

The thing that makes this series such a delight is Atkinson's talent at throwing out so many plot threads, tangling them together so that nothing makes sense or is connected, and then flipping the mess over to display a perfect tapestry of a novel. This one's a little less tangled from the beginning, involving a small group of golf friends who are involved in sex trafficking, their victims, and their oblivious (or not so oblivious) spouses. Throw in a pair of intelligent and dogged detective constables, a drag queen and a few teenage boys and there's not a page of this novel that wasn't wonderful. Atkinson has a fondness for shiny, surgically enhanced women who are, frankly, a little terrifying and she includes a few characters from earlier books.

This was definitely the case of the right book at the right time. I wanted a book that I couldn't put down and that's what I got. It made me want to start right back at the beginning and read Case Histories again.

87wandering_star
aug 30, 2020, 4:14 pm

>85 RidgewayGirl: Really interesting review. She sounds like a writer with a lot of promise.

88RidgewayGirl
aug 30, 2020, 9:01 pm

>87 wandering_star: Yes, definitely someone to watch.

89avaland
sep 1, 2020, 7:38 am

>75 Cariola: Love the Collins poem. I used to follow his work fairly closely but moved away from it at some point (I think it didn't seem as fresh to me anymore). Anyone reading his newer stuff, wondering what he's into now.

Some great reading here, Kay, too bad my TBR piles teeter precariously around me. Somehow the pandemic makes me feel book insecure, LOL.

90RidgewayGirl
sep 1, 2020, 9:38 am

>89 avaland: ...Somehow the pandemic makes me feel book insecure...

Between that and the upcoming election, I'm running by my local bookstore or "just checking" if bookshop.org has that one book far more often than I should given that I have yet to leave empty-handed.

91RidgewayGirl
sep 2, 2020, 2:49 pm



Restoration by Olaf Olafsson is set in the waning days of the Second World War, as the Germans retreated through Italy and is largely set on a fattoria where Alice, estranged from her husband after the tragic death of her son, works to keep everything going and the tenants, workers and the children evacuated from cities further south fed and safe. There are partisans in the woods, who periodically take shelter with the more outlying tenant farms and she's been coerced into hiding a painting for the Germans. Kristin arrives at the fattoria after being injured in an explosion on the train she was in and remains even after her wounds are healing. She's left behind an unhappy love affair and a secret that could destroy the man she once loved.

Restoration is a novel with an old-fashioned feel to it. There isn't a modern story bracketing the one set in the 1940s and it's told in a clear straight-forward manner. This was an enjoyable and engrossing read and while I don't think it will stay with me very long, I'd be happy enough to read something else by Olafsson.

92RidgewayGirl
sep 3, 2020, 12:24 pm



Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams is a novel that showed up in pretty much every book list in 2019, which meant it ended up on my own list of books-to-look-for, but somehow I never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally took the time to read it. Queenie is a young Jamaican-British woman who works for a national newspaper where she is under-valued and has stopped putting her heart into her job. She's also reeling from her partner telling her that he wants a break and that she has to move out. She finds a flat-share in a moldy apartment and throws herself into finding validation from men, a terrible idea in the best of circumstances, but the worst men have a talent for finding her and relentlessly harassing her until she gives in and then behaving badly. And then there's the low-key racism (with occasional blatant outbursts) that she deals with on a daily basis.

This might be a grim novel to read, but Queenie has a solid group of friends (some better than others) who support her, and Queenie herself is a determined and remarkably resilient woman, with a good sense of humor. Her family may often frustrate her, but they all are pulling for her. She may be down but she's willing to fight her way forward. Carty-Williams's writing reflected Queenie's voice, sometimes scrappy, sometimes funny, fully rooted in the present. I was won over by this novel, it's one that forced me to feel so much, from rage, to exasperation to hope.

93BLBera
sep 4, 2020, 10:55 am

>92 RidgewayGirl: I also liked Queenie, which I found unexpected. I thought it was going to be chick lit, but it ended up being much more than that.

Jackson Brodie - I hope there are going to be more...although I'll read anything by Atkinson.

94RidgewayGirl
sep 4, 2020, 12:12 pm

>93 BLBera: I initially thought it was going to be Very Serious, given its inclusion in so many prize lists, so hearing it compared to Bridget Jones made it more attractive -- I'm having a hard time with novels right now that linger on misery, not that they aren't good and often necessary.

Yes, Atkinson is on my very short list of authors whose books I pre-order.

95RidgewayGirl
sep 7, 2020, 2:10 pm



Rose is a bright young woman, although less young than she used to be. She went to Harvard, based on good grades and a brilliant one-act play she wrote during her junior year of high school. She got her MFA and even an agent who expressed excitement about her novel-in-progress, but now she's thirty and she still hasn't managed to get her novel published. She's decided to move to NYC, like all the bright young things before her, but she's finding it hard to find work, eventually settling for a job with a tutoring company, and harder to find a place to live. Then she runs into her childhood best friend and, although their friendship ended badly, she manages to get Lacie to let her move into her spare bedroom. Their friendship at first in tentative and careful not to touch the reasons that they hadn't spoken in over a decade, but slowly Rose and Lacie relax into enjoying each other's company. But Rose isn't telling Lacie everything, like what her novel is about or what she does when they aren't together.

This is a fun mash up of a familiar kind of debut literary novel written by people with MFAs who are now living in Brooklyn, and the kind of psychological suspense novel that is based in the often fraught territory of women's friendships. I'm not entirely sure the combination worked, but it was good to read a thriller that was well-written and where the actions of the characters came from who they were rather from the necessities of the plot, even if that came at the expense of much of the suspense.

What you think of Everyone Knows How Much I Love You by Kyle McCarthy will be largely determined by your love of unlikeable main characters behaving badly, not in a fun, isn't-she-reckless kind of way, but intended to cause discomfort. What I'm saying is that Rose, for all her initial presentation as a young woman whose early promise failed to translate into success and who is just trying to get by and build a life for herself despite her insecurities, is a terrible person whose ability to justify her own behavior is both impressive and more than a little scary. If that sounds like a fun afternoon, then this book is for you. If you want to like the characters you read about, there are other books out there.

96RidgewayGirl
sep 8, 2020, 2:14 pm



Emma puts her head on Wallace's shoulder, but she won't say anything either, can't bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it.

When Wallace begins his graduate studies in chemistry at a university in the midwest, it feels like a chance to begin again, without baggage. But a few years in and Wallace is still himself and he's still a Black man in an almost entirely white environment. Real Life by Brandon Taylor recounts a few days in Wallace's life, as he negotiates his way through a difficult and hostile lab environment, his friend group where he feels like an outsider, always, and his own loneliness, based both on his father's recent death and his lack of romantic attachments. Into that comes Miller, another chemistry post-graduate, with whom he has always felt a certain hostility.

This was a difficult novel to read, not because of the writing, which is very, very good, but because the novel is so centered on Wallace and Wallace is seriously depressed. Wallace has lost any resiliency he might once have had and the casual micro-aggressions (and overt hostilities) leave him drained and deeply unhappy. He's damped down his own anger so deeply that he comes across to his friends and co-workers as affectless and unemotional, but that careful veneer is one that is eating away at him and this moment, when the end of the summer weather is beautiful and he can almost see the finishing lines of his PhD, is when he can no longer sustain the effort, even when there's the possibility of love.

I read Real Life in close proximity to two other novels about Black people living in predominantly white environments (Queenie and Luster) in the present day and the cumulative effect of those three novels have really driven home the enormous stress laid upon Black people and the resiliency needed as the minimum requirement to function out in the world. I'm going to think about my discomfort with that and work on pushing my reading more in that direction.

97RidgewayGirl
sep 9, 2020, 11:49 am



Whether or not you'll like Naoise Dolan's debut novel Exciting Times depends largely on what you think of Sally Rooney's novels. It's not that they are both young Irish women, but that they are writing about self-contained young women who have trouble looking outside of themselves or viewing people as independent creatures and they think primarily about their sexual and romantic relationships. I liked one of Rooney's novels and not the other. I found Exciting Times to be ok.

Ava is Irish and working as an English-language (TEFL) teacher in Hong Kong, teaching grammar to schoolchildren. She meets an English banker and while their relationship is decidedly not romantic, he invites her to move into his spare bedroom. He's detached and unemotional and busy, so a relationship based on convenience works for him. It works for Ava since housing in Hong Kong is expensive and Julian is an easy roommate, although she thinks endlessly about their relationship and its parameters. She's not in love, but she wouldn't mind if Julian were, as long as he still gave her her space. And she misses him when he's on business trips. It's while he's on a long business trip that she meets Edith and falls for her. What follows is a simple love story complicated by Ava's endless analysis of her feelings, Edith's feelings and endless deconstructions of their every interaction.

The parts of this novel where Ava emerges from self-reflection to ponder the differences between British and Irish English or when she notices that the kids she's teaching are individuals and interesting are wonderful. The endless navel gazing got old for me, but not so old that I wanted to stop reading. I would have loved to have seen what happens were Ava to stop watching herself and began participating in her own life, but that's not the book Dolan wrote.

98SassyLassy
sep 10, 2020, 10:18 am

Been gone too long from your thread.

>1 RidgewayGirl: Love this image, perhaps because the tool in question is one of my preferred implements.

>21 RidgewayGirl: New author to try. I'm one of those McCarthy fans, so open to bleakness and despair.

>35 RidgewayGirl: You've convinced me to read Anne Tyler's novel again - any one I haven't read as yet! I've actually reread some, while ignoring shelves of them elsewhere.

>41 RidgewayGirl: I wonder if German has a word for that growing sense that one will not be able to read all the books one wants to. Sounds like a much needed word.

There used to be episodes of "Wanted Words" on CBC radio, words needed to describe things we all know but don't have a word for, what you could call 'word gaps'.

How about powernoia used to describe ""an irrational fear of authority, of "getting caught", when you have done absolutely nothing wrong", something I feel each time I cross certain international borders

99BLBera
sep 11, 2020, 10:16 pm

Everyone Knows how Much I Love You sounds interesting, even though I'm not much of a thriller reader. I'll have to think about that. Great comments.

Real Life sounds like one I might like, as does the Dolan novel; I loved the novel by Sally Rooney that I read.

100RidgewayGirl
sep 14, 2020, 1:35 pm

>98 SassyLassy: Isn't everyone behind on keeping up with various threads? I know I am. Good to see you here!

>99 BLBera: Real Life is a novel I've been thinking a lot about since finishing it. Here's a sample of Taylor's writing -- a piece on having anxiety issues during a pandemic.

https://lithub.com/going-quiet-as-the-world-goes-loud-on-private-anxiety-in-a-ve...

101lilisin
sep 15, 2020, 3:53 am

>100 RidgewayGirl:

I'm able to keep up with everyone's threads but inevitably ignore my own!

102RidgewayGirl
sep 15, 2020, 5:22 pm

>101 lilisin: I certainly prefer to read about what everyone else is reading than writing my own reviews.

103RidgewayGirl
sep 15, 2020, 5:22 pm



A House is a Body is a collection of short stories by Shruti Swamy. The stories in this collection often take a small, decisive moment in a woman's life and use it to shed light on who she is. There's a quirky kind of off-beat flavor to these stories, but it's subtle, as are the stories themselves. Even the oddest ones prefer to remain understated. This collection orders the stories from the weakest to the strongest, something I've never seen done before. Or is it that as I got accustomed to how Swamy wrote, my enchantment grew?

So in these stories, an alcoholic artist meets Krishna, a woman with a baby watches a forest fire approach her home, and a young woman remembers her sitar instructor. Each story focusses on a moment of discomfort and is revealing in a way that unwraps itself slowly. I started out being a little disappointed with these stories and finished the book wishing it had contained a few more.

104RidgewayGirl
sep 17, 2020, 3:21 pm



I wrote it my own way. I made it a thriller, a horror, a memoir, a noir. I used my college essays, emails and other found documents to ground the story in truth--they're the closest thing I have to "evidence," proof that my memories, however few, are real.

What does it mean when the worst happens and you can't remember it? A drunk teen-age girl is given a lift home by two members of the lacrosse team. She only found out what happened in the car because the boys bragged about it. A man goes to an isolated mountain cabin for a final bender before he gives up drinking, for real this time. He doesn't know how the accident happened, but he'll carry the evidence of it with him for the rest of his life. A wealthy entrepreneur hires a woman to ghost write his motivational self-help book.

In True Story, Kate Reed Petty uses the tropes of different genres and a variety of characters to explore memory and how an event can shape a life even if the person doesn't remember what happened. I enjoy novels that use the conventions of genre to dig more deeply than genre usually permits, and this one was so well done. There's a central story that emerges and as the different seemingly disparate threads come together, the novel twists into different things as it goes. There are screenplays written by middle-schoolers, emails, and sections that fall into different genres, that combine to form a cohesive, and very interesting whole. I'll be thinking about this one for some time to come.

105kidzdoc
sep 17, 2020, 4:01 pm

Bangkok Wakes to Rain and Queenie sound particularly interesting, so I'll add them to my wish list.

I skimmed your review of Real Life, as I'll read it sometime next month.

106RidgewayGirl
sep 19, 2020, 7:36 pm

>105 kidzdoc: I'd be very interested to find out what you think of Bangkok Wakes to Rain. I think this book deserves a wider readership.

107mabith
sep 21, 2020, 2:32 pm

Trying to catch up with threads. Glad to have another reminder that I keep meaning to read Queenie.

108RidgewayGirl
sep 22, 2020, 7:21 pm



Earthlings is by Sakaya Murata, who wrote the oddly charming Convenience Store Woman. While both novels share a certain off-beat quirkiness and both feature a protagonist who has difficulty conforming to what modern Japanese society requires of them, Earthlings is a far darker novel.

Natsuki loves her family's annual visit to her grandparents' house in the mountains. She gets to spend time with her cousins, especially Yuu, and it's where her parents' clear preference for her sister is less obvious. After buying a small stuffed hedgehog toy, Natsuki decides that he's an alien and he can teach her how to be a witch. This is necessary, since not only is her home a hostile place, her teacher is sexually abusing her. It's only her relationship with Yuu that keeps her going. When that is taken away, Natsuki must find ways to survive in a world that asks that she conform and submit.

Despite Natsuki having an imaginative and whimsical approach to the world, this is a dark story that gets darker as the story progresses, heading into Grand Guignol. There's meaty stuff here in how this novel looks at the demands of society and how it pushes people to marry and settle into a marriage within specific parameters that include procreation. Murata is revisiting the themes of Convenience Store Woman, but from a different angle and with more force. Expect to be made uncomfortable.

109RidgewayGirl
sep 26, 2020, 12:39 pm



The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is a literary novel that uses the framework of horror, or maybe it's a horror novel that is just very well-written and features well-developed characters and a vivid setting. In any case, Jones is an excellent author whose books I will now seek out.

There are four teenage boys who go hunting one day, trespassing into the part of the reservation where only elder Blackfeet are allowed to hunt. What transpires sticks with them to varying degrees, but it's some years later, when they are all adults, that the consequences manifest themselves.

This isn't the kind of horror novel where there's a central character that you know will make it out alive. Jones opts instead to make each of his characters fully realized, which increases the impact of the things that happen. I'd like to go into what Jones is doing here, but this is a book best entered into without any idea of what happens. It's worth reading, though. I'd go into how Jones has written a novel about what it is to live as a Blackfeet living both on a reservation and outside among non-Native Americans and it's fascinating for that alone, but there's also a fast-paced plot and some scary stuff, too, with a strong ending, but I don't want to give anything away.

110BLBera
sep 26, 2020, 3:51 pm

Both Earthlings and The Only Good Indians sound great, Kay. I'm waiting for Earthlings to become available at my library. Like you, I also enjoyed Convenience Store Woman, so I want to see what else Murata can do.

111RidgewayGirl
sep 26, 2020, 4:36 pm

>110 BLBera: I'm interested in finding out what you think of Earthlings, Beth.

112auntmarge64
sep 26, 2020, 5:28 pm

>78 RidgewayGirl:. Wow, Here in Berlin sounds great!, and my library has an ebook. As usual, reading your thread ads to the TBR list.

I've never been familiar with Berlin, but the last couple of years I've become a devotee of the Berlin Philharmonic, so I've paid more attention. I've watched so many of their concerts now that I've become familiar with most of the faces. It's delightful to watch them change over the years. Once you're accepted in the Philharmonic and passed the probationary year or two, you are in for life, so it's not uncommon to see, say, a French horn player or oboist who has been there for decades. I love that whole concept of orchestra as family. In this orchestra, the players choose the new musicians and the new conductors, so it really is a very close knit-group.

113RidgewayGirl
sep 27, 2020, 12:11 pm

>112 auntmarge64: For years, a friend from high school played viola in the DSO (German Symphony Orchestra) in Berlin, but she's back in Canada now.

I will pick up any book with Berlin in the title. It's just such a wonderful city.

114RidgewayGirl
sep 28, 2020, 10:34 am



When her parents die, Ester and her brother are taken in by an elderly rabbi who was blinded during the Portuguese inquisition. Settling in London, where the Restoration has made it safer to live openly as a Jew, the rabbi uses Ester as his scribe, when no one else can be found to do the job. Freed from the relentless women's work, Ester is given a world of ideas and a freedom to think. But a plague menaces London.

Helen is just weeks away from retirement when a former student finds a cache of papers in the 17th century home he and his wife are renovating. With the aid of an American graduate student, she begins the task of finding out what the papers reveal, racing against a team of rival scholars and her own diminishing health.

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish is one of the few historical novels using the framework of someone from the present day researching a past event that worked for me. Usually, one of the timelines, usually the one set in the present day, is an annoying distraction, but this novel managed to make both timelines equally compelling, despite the earlier one involving itself with much more dramatic stakes. The only criticism I have of this novel is that the plots are wrapped up very quickly and much too tidily, with unlikely happy endings bestowed with abandon. There's also a final twist that was ridiculous, but given how well-written and well-researched the rest of the novel is, these are minor quibbles.

115lisapeet
sep 28, 2020, 11:47 am

>114 RidgewayGirl: Agree about the too-tidy wrap-up, but it was a great ride getting there. I thought the whole plague and Inquisition era London setting was terrific.

116Julie_in_the_Library
sep 28, 2020, 12:04 pm

>114 RidgewayGirl: Have you read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks? It's another book that uses that conceit really well. It's been years since I read it, but I remember that I absolutely loved it.

117RidgewayGirl
sep 28, 2020, 12:46 pm

>115 lisapeet: Lisa, it was fantastic. I learned so much about Jewish history and culture of that time.

>116 Julie_in_the_Library: Yes, I've read People of the Book and liked it quite a bit. The Weight of Ink went into much greater detail about one specific time and place, rather than jumping around in time and setting.

118RidgewayGirl
sep 28, 2020, 12:48 pm



After a snake-assisted accident leaves Tété-Michel Kpomassie with some time to rest, he finds a book about the Inuit of Greenland on a shelf in a small bookstore run by missionaries. He's immediately smitten and decides that he wants to go to Greenland, quite an unusual goal for a teenage boy living outside of Lomé, Togo in the 1950s. And so Kpomassie sets out, working his way first in Africa and then in Europe. It takes him eight years to reach Greenland, but he makes friends along the way. And he makes friends in Greenland, where he stands out among the Inuit and the Danes. He's remarkably game to live as the Greenlanders do, from eating raw seal intestines and whale blubber, to living under conditions markedly different from what he grew up with. It's refreshing to see a "stranger in a strange land" story where the Western world is omitted entirely and Kpomassie's comparisons of Togolese and Greenlander culture are fascinating. There are certainly fewer snakes in Greenland! An African in Greenland is a fascinating and unusual travel memoir.

119Julie_in_the_Library
sep 28, 2020, 12:51 pm

>117 RidgewayGirl: The Weight of Ink is a good deal longer, as well. I do intend to get to it at some point, since I really liked Rachel Kaddish's talk at Limmud a few years back, but it's intimidatingly long for my current state of mind/attention level. One of these days....

120RidgewayGirl
sep 28, 2020, 12:57 pm

>199 I found The Weight of Ink to be such an enjoyable read that the length was a point in its favor. It was a book I was able to disappear into and so I found it a perfect antidote to these days of distraction. It's long, but not weighty.

121Julie_in_the_Library
sep 28, 2020, 2:48 pm

>120 RidgewayGirl: That's good to hear. It makes it much less intimidating. : )

122avaland
sep 28, 2020, 2:53 pm

Always interesting books to read about here, Kay. And I like the length of your reviews--it's "just" right.

123RidgewayGirl
sep 28, 2020, 4:36 pm

>122 avaland: Thanks, Lois. I always come up with much longer reviews in my head, but when I sit down to write them, they condense. And half the stuff I planned to say gets cut because I hate getting spoilers in reviews for books I might read, so I have to avoid them myself, just to be fair.

I'm reading an ARC of a new collection of JCO's short stories and it's fantastic so far. She really knows exactly when to end a story.

124RidgewayGirl
sep 29, 2020, 12:04 pm



An adjunct professor who also teaches at a high school to make ends meet and who, with her husband, is in the process of filing for bankruptcy. She goes about her life, sneaking out of work early, taking care of her two daughters, becoming involved in the issues her students bring to her and thinking about her best friend, with whom she is no longer in contact.

Want by Lynn Steger Strong is involving and very readable, while not having much in the way of a plot. The reader is set in the middle of Elizabeth's life for a short time and then the book ends, making it feel more like a long short story than a novel. Despite that, it's impossible not to be caught up in Elizabeth's fraught relationship with her problematic parents, to worry about money alongside her, to feel how much she loves her daughters and misses her best friend. I very much enjoyed reading this book; the writing is very good, but in the end I don't expect it to sit with me for very long.

125avaland
Bewerkt: sep 30, 2020, 5:32 pm

>123 RidgewayGirl: Agree re not wanting to give away too much of the plot. Also, meant to fist-bump (er, elbow-bump) another INFJ. Somehow I not surprised about you. You know Sybil (rebeccanyc) was one?

126stretch
sep 30, 2020, 7:10 pm

>108 RidgewayGirl: I don't know which to read first Convenience Store Woman or Earthlings. They both sound great, but leaning towards the darker side of things.

>109 RidgewayGirl: Stephen Graham Jones is such a great Horror author! He would never emit to be literary but he is. Everything he writes has depth. Not something that the so many knock off King and Knootz chasing authors.

127RidgewayGirl
okt 1, 2020, 3:08 pm

>125 avaland: INFJs represent! I didn't know that about Sybil, but it does make me feel as though I'm in great company. Are we disproportionately represented here on Club Read given that we're supposed to be less that 4% of the population?

>126 stretch: I'm glad to hear that about Stephen Graham Jones. I hadn't encountered him before The Only Good Indians, so I'm happy to hear his other books are both dark and good. There is certainly a lot of bad horror out there as it's one of the hardest genres to do well.

128Nickelini
okt 2, 2020, 2:50 am

>127 RidgewayGirl: INFJs represent! I didn't know that about Sybil, but it does make me feel as though I'm in great company. Are we disproportionately represented here on Club Read given that we're supposed to be less that 4% of the population?

Nice. I too have tested as INFJ, although normally I identify as INTJ. Myers Briggs results depend on the day you take the test. We are also apparently similarly rare (me, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and a few others). There's lots of science and psychology debunking Myers Briggs as nonsense, but it's still better than horoscopes or numerology in my opinion. At least you get a say in Myers Briggs.

I once took a similar test that said I was in 4% of the population (don't remember which one it was) and named other people in this rare category to include Gandhi. Right, because he's up at 2 AM taking internet quizzes. Seemed pretty credible.

129lisapeet
Bewerkt: okt 2, 2020, 10:47 am

I'll keep my thoughts on Meyers-Briggs off the table (has anyone here read Merve Emre's The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing?). But I have The Only Good Indians on the pile for a spooky October read, after I get done with my short story judging. Also Convenience Store Woman and Want, so I'm happy to hear such good things about them.

And I've had An African in Greenland on my wish list forever—it sounds really fascinating.

130RidgewayGirl
okt 2, 2020, 12:58 pm

>128 Nickelini: I'm skeptical of all personality quizzes, but that doesn't stop me from happily taking the silliest quizzes Buzzfeed can make up. Or from simultaneously believing that INFJs are rare and perfect and also that the Meyers-Briggs test was made up by people without the required professional background to design a "Which Disney Princess Are You?" quiz.

>129 lisapeet: Lisa, An African in Greenland is just great. It's also an NYRB book, which means it looks good on the shelf, too. Kpomassie is the best kind of adventure traveler - up for anything and so good-natured that he brings out the best in the people he meets.

131RidgewayGirl
okt 3, 2020, 5:51 pm



The Glass Hotel is a getaway for the wealthy, accessible only by boat. It's where Vincent works briefly as a bartender, having grown up in the nearby village. It's where her brother also works as a janitor, until he is asked to leave by the night manager. The hotel is frequented by Leon, a shipping executive, and owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, who visits the hotel a few times a year, in part to recruit new investors. Emily St. John Mandel has written a novel, not about a pandemic or apocalypse, but about a Bernie Madoff-type character and all the people affected when his fragile and fraudulent empire collapses.

This novel involves a large cast of characters, with some getting a careful look into what their pasts were like before they met Alkaitis, others we meet mid-plot as they scramble to make sense of what happened. Throughout, the central character isn't Alkaitis, but his companion, Vincent, a woman willing to live an artificial life of opulence without looking too closely at what was bringing in all that money. Mandel has created a seamlessly woven plot and several gorgeous character studies in this novel. It lacks the imaginative world-building of Station Eleven, but with The Glass Hotel, Mandel shows that she is a master of her craft.

132Nickelini
okt 3, 2020, 8:59 pm

>131 RidgewayGirl:
I was just thinking of giving Station Eleven another chance (didn't get very far, it wasn't bad but just didn't seem like my thing), but now I think I might want to just skip to The Glass Hotel. The premise sounds great.

133Simone2
okt 4, 2020, 4:45 am

Now I want to read Earthling, Bangkok wakes to rain and True Story!

134avaland
okt 4, 2020, 9:42 am

>129 lisapeet: I officially identify as a left-handed, INFJ, middle child ;-) And the Myers-Briggs people haven't made a dime off me (nor has Carl Jung). But, if anyone knows of a book about the development or genetics of personality, I might be interested.

>130 RidgewayGirl: I'm fairly certain I'm not a Disney Princess....

135RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: okt 4, 2020, 4:41 pm



A Burning by Megha Majumdar follows the story of two young women who transgress on societal norms in India, with vastly different outcomes. Jivan is Muslim and trying to build a better life than she's had. She's living with her parents in a crowded slum, but she has a solid job. Bored one evening, she makes some careless comments on Facebook and ends up arrested. Lovely lives her life openly as a woman, regardless of the abuse she receives for doing so. She's taking acting classes and she knows she's good and just needs an opportunity.

There was a lot to like in this novel. Lovely is a wonderful character, determined to be optimistic regardless. And Majumdar allows the characters to be more than just good or bad; Jivan is living through injustice and has had a hard life and yet she is, at heart, a frivolous person. A former teacher of Jivan's is led into some morally questionable actions, yet he isn't a bad man. And the setting and Majumdar's descriptions of life in India are well done. But the novel remains simplistic when nuance and complexity are called for. The writing feels like it is aimed at YA or middle grades readers, while the contents are very adult and often difficult to read. I was sometimes frustrated with how the writing didn't quite seem up to what the contents demanded. Every character's understanding of the world was shallow. Still, the story and the setting were interesting and I'm interested in seeing what the author does next.

136RidgewayGirl
okt 4, 2020, 11:04 pm

I'm moving to a new thread for the final few months of this year. See you over there!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/325045#