Elaine's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:08:30 -0700 60 Elaine's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Elaine 4 2025, audio
Back in the early �90s while spending a year at the University of Edinburgh, I saw (more than once) the revival of the seminal Scottish play, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, which was my introduction to the devastating Highland Clearance. During that time also fell hard for barely-populated but so gorgeous Western Highlands and the Hebrides; i would spend as much as time as I could exploring (I think I had a greater tolerance for cold and damp back then, but I digress). So, the clearances, and the language and culture lost with them, have long been of deep interest to me (that my own ancestral culture and language was nearly eradicated pre-inclined me to be moved and haunted by the Highlanders' story).

So I could picture Davies� imagined remote island, between Norway and Scotland, and those crumbling stone huts, those stark cliffs, and those bitter cold seas, and I was ready to fall in love with this novella, even while I expected it to break my heart. And fall in love I did, even as the ease with which Ivur and John begin to communicate with one another requires the extreme suspension of disbelief.

But then � I can’t say too much without spoilers, but the ending felt like a bridge too far. Perhaps true to Mary’s independent character, but not to John’s, or for that matter Ivur’s. Both are late-middle-aged men and both seem to walk away from that which has mattered most to them up to that point in life (one, his island, and one, his Presbyterian religious tenets) with nary a backward glance, or racking pang of guilt. And that’s when the book lost something for me.

But still so engrossing and well-written!]]> 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Clear, which is a novella rather an novel, I would say, starts really brilliantly. I read Davies� The Mission House last year, and when starting Clear, was once again struck by Davies� economical way of immersing you � and her fish out of water protagonists � in entirely credible “exotic� atmospheres. For the first 80 percent or so, I loved Clear unreservedly. I loved the details, the characters, and how much backstory was pressed into such a short space.

Back in the early �90s while spending a year at the University of Edinburgh, I saw (more than once) the revival of the seminal Scottish play, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, which was my introduction to the devastating Highland Clearance. During that time also fell hard for barely-populated but so gorgeous Western Highlands and the Hebrides; i would spend as much as time as I could exploring (I think I had a greater tolerance for cold and damp back then, but I digress). So, the clearances, and the language and culture lost with them, have long been of deep interest to me (that my own ancestral culture and language was nearly eradicated pre-inclined me to be moved and haunted by the Highlanders' story).

So I could picture Davies� imagined remote island, between Norway and Scotland, and those crumbling stone huts, those stark cliffs, and those bitter cold seas, and I was ready to fall in love with this novella, even while I expected it to break my heart. And fall in love I did, even as the ease with which Ivur and John begin to communicate with one another requires the extreme suspension of disbelief.

But then � I can’t say too much without spoilers, but the ending felt like a bridge too far. Perhaps true to Mary’s independent character, but not to John’s, or for that matter Ivur’s. Both are late-middle-aged men and both seem to walk away from that which has mattered most to them up to that point in life (one, his island, and one, his Presbyterian religious tenets) with nary a backward glance, or racking pang of guilt. And that’s when the book lost something for me.

But still so engrossing and well-written!
]]> Amma 202955293
This event becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithara, and her granddaughter Annie.

The effects cascade through generations as Annie sets out across the world to discover what happened to fracture her family.

Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Amma is a novel about how the past lives with us forever, and wherever we are.

Written in sensuous, vivid prose, Amma is a story of the rich history and unknown future of the Sri Lankan diaspora - and of one family desperately trying to find peace.]]> 280 Saraid de Silva 1739260147 Elaine 5 2025
A plus for me: A lot of food, lovingly described!

A lot of promise and I look forward to reading more from de Silva.
]]> 4.30 2024 Amma
author: Saraid de Silva
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: 2025
review:
4.25 or so with a debut novel bump-up. An atmospheric family saga, covering three generations of a Eurasian family as they move from Singapore to Sri Lanka to New Zealand (and to Australia and London), dealing with traumas, secrets, alienations and reconciliations along the way. The first sections are rich with promise, and perhaps the scenes in Singapore and Sri Lanka are the most emotionally involving. The book in some ways hits a lull in the middle New Zealand chapter (if Singapore and Sri Lanka are portrayed as bursting with life (even amidst some horrifying scenes, New Zealand is cold and gray (and white!)), and once or twice there are threads that don’t seem to be picked up on. However, as with all satisfying family sagas, the end is cathartic and emotional.

A plus for me: A lot of food, lovingly described!

A lot of promise and I look forward to reading more from de Silva.

]]> Glorious Exploits 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Elaine 0 4.15 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading, 2024, audio
review:

]]> Alma 203949706 A Trieste Alma ritrova una mappa dimenticata della sua vita. Ritrova la bella casa nel viale dei platani, dove ha trascorso l’infanzia grazie ai nonni materni, custodi della tradizione mitteleuropea, dei caffè colti e mondani, distante anni luce dal disordine chiassoso di casa sua, “dove le persone entravano e se ne andavano, e pareva che i vestiti non fossero mai stati tolti dalle valigie�. Ritrova la casa sul Carso, dove si sono trasferiti all’improvviso e dove è arrivato Vili, figlio di due intellettuali di Belgrado amici di suo padre. Vili che da un giorno all’altro è entrato nella sua vita cancellando definitivamente l’Austriaungheria. Adesso è proprio dalle mani di Vili, che è stato “un fratello, un amico, un antagonista�, che Alma deve ricevere l’eredità del padre. Ma Vili è l’ultima persona che vorrebbe rivedere.
I tre giorni culminanti con la Pasqua ortodossa diventano così lo spartiacque tra ciò che è stato e non potrà più tornare � l’infanzia, la libertà, la Jugoslavia del padre, l’aria seducente respirata all’ombra del confine � e quello che sarà.
Federica Manzon scrive un romanzo dove l’identità, la memoria e la Storia � personale, familiare, dei Paesi � si cercano e si sfuggono continuamente, facendo di Trieste un punto di vista da cui guardare i nostri difficili tentativi di capire chi siamo e dov’� la nostra casa.


Lei non saprebbe dire dove sta la sua appartenenza, neanche la sua città lo si è pensata sempre parte di una nazione che non era la sua, immaginava l’Austria, sognava il regno degli slavi, e perfino la nazione garibaldina, ma poi è rimasta estranea a tutto e soprattutto a se stessa.]]> 272 Federica Manzon 8858859790 Elaine 0 3.73 Alma
author: Federica Manzon
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.73
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading, 2025, italian
review:

]]> The Heart in Winter 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Elaine 4 2025, audio
As other reviewers have commented, there's a seeming incongruency between the flourishes of the language, on the one hand, and the bleak setting and lowly characters, on the other. But I think the language underscores Barry's theme, that even a mail-order bride with a sordid past and a broke dope addict can have a transformative, and tragic, love story.

If I had a quibble, it's that the plot seemed almost rushed to me - it's a compact story in the end - which I guess is another way of saying that I could have kept listening for longer! ]]> 3.80 2024 The Heart in Winter
author: Kevin Barry
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Barry's prose is luscious. Even more so when read by Barry himself in a rich but somber Irish accent that would not seem amiss proclaiming an elegy graveside.

As other reviewers have commented, there's a seeming incongruency between the flourishes of the language, on the one hand, and the bleak setting and lowly characters, on the other. But I think the language underscores Barry's theme, that even a mail-order bride with a sordid past and a broke dope addict can have a transformative, and tragic, love story.

If I had a quibble, it's that the plot seemed almost rushed to me - it's a compact story in the end - which I guess is another way of saying that I could have kept listening for longer!
]]> A Little Trickerie 200189179
Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. But her mother has taught her that if you're not too bound by the Big Man's rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. Now her mother is dead in a trick gone wrong and young Tibb is orphaned and alone.

As she wends her way across England's fields and forests, Tibb will discover there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything.

And so, when the opportunity presents itself to escape the shackles society has placed on them, Tibb and her new friends conjure an audacious plan: her greatest trickerie yet. But before they know it, their hoax takes on a life of its own, drawing crowds - and vengeful enemies - to their door...

A Little Trickerie is blazingly original, disarmingly funny and deeply moving. Portraying a side of Tudor England rarely seen, it's a tale of belief and superstition, kinship and courage, with a ragtag cast of characters and an unforgettable and distinctly unangelic heroine.]]> 371 Rosanna Pike 0241646065 Elaine 2 2025
I suppose I am an old stick in the mud, but I hate historical fiction which is not historical in the least but just some 21st century projection back in time by an author too lazy to use Google. Although A Little Trickerie has as its seed the historical episode of the Maid of Leominster, it is riddled with factual anachronisms and errors (a lot of reference to trade with the Spice Islands or enjoying cocoa or a fad for Black trumpeters, all of which seem to fail to understand that 1500 to 1505, when the novel was set, was really early in the age of exploration and none of these were in England yet (well Black trumpeters? on a time machine from the jazz age?)), as well as the (to me) very annoying trait of character and atmospheric anachronism, where characters march around espousing world views that are straight from a 21st century Pride parade (among many other such things, one character, briefly a priest, expresses the idea that God is compassionate and kind and, despite the Church, would embrace the idea of same-sex love -all in 1505 England!) The theme of the triumph of the marginalized in the book (with a heaping amount of solidarity with gay people (all of whom want to marry) and even gratuitously a perhaps proto-trans cross dresser) finds its counterpoint in the portrayal of Henry VII's England as a brutally violent homophobic place obsessed with rooting out sodomy and punishing it violently (as well as with punishing religious fraud violently). This too is ahistorical, with homosexual acts not being officially criminalized until 1533 and prosecutions for the crime in the late Medieval period being relatively rare. Indeed, the tone of the violent vilified churchmen throughout seems more Puritan than late-Medieval Catholic. I could go on and on.

I am always disappointed when authors project on to their characters starkly 21st attitudes. It would be much more complex, and to my mind more interesting, to write about a love between two men in an era where being gay wasn't really a fixed identity as it is now, but much more fluid and related to acts themselves, and where the separation of the sexes in many spheres meant homosocial friendship was prized above all, even as physical acts had to be kept hidden.

Anyway, that clearly wasn't Pike's project. She wanted to write a fable about an early 16th Century girl-boss and her gay BFF and she did. She seeks to entertain and history is only a decoration, not a substance. Lots of people want novels to reflect themselves and their own attitudes and value a novel on whether it matches those values they see as correct. Clearly, this is true for a wide audience of readers, and so I should stop wanting history in my historical novels (not everyone can be Hilary Mantel!).

But even holding that aside, the writing substitutes hyphenated quirks for style (God is the "big-man" to give but one example used on nearly every page), as well as lots of profanity to tide over any lack of narrative art (and here again, clunky anachronism - did Medieval Britons curse, to be sure - and even used the F word, but did they say "I do not give a F?" as our characters do repeatedly, no they did not; same with F off (a 20th Century locution but a fave in this book) and "give two shits")).

I should stop already- it was a lame book - but a quick read and a kind of amusing plot if you suspend every form and fashion of disbelief!]]> 4.16 2024 A Little Trickerie
author: Rosanna Pike
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: 2025
review:
This book was very mindless, and I ended up skimming some of it. It was saved from a dismal 1 star by a fast-moving, if entirely silly, plot.

I suppose I am an old stick in the mud, but I hate historical fiction which is not historical in the least but just some 21st century projection back in time by an author too lazy to use Google. Although A Little Trickerie has as its seed the historical episode of the Maid of Leominster, it is riddled with factual anachronisms and errors (a lot of reference to trade with the Spice Islands or enjoying cocoa or a fad for Black trumpeters, all of which seem to fail to understand that 1500 to 1505, when the novel was set, was really early in the age of exploration and none of these were in England yet (well Black trumpeters? on a time machine from the jazz age?)), as well as the (to me) very annoying trait of character and atmospheric anachronism, where characters march around espousing world views that are straight from a 21st century Pride parade (among many other such things, one character, briefly a priest, expresses the idea that God is compassionate and kind and, despite the Church, would embrace the idea of same-sex love -all in 1505 England!) The theme of the triumph of the marginalized in the book (with a heaping amount of solidarity with gay people (all of whom want to marry) and even gratuitously a perhaps proto-trans cross dresser) finds its counterpoint in the portrayal of Henry VII's England as a brutally violent homophobic place obsessed with rooting out sodomy and punishing it violently (as well as with punishing religious fraud violently). This too is ahistorical, with homosexual acts not being officially criminalized until 1533 and prosecutions for the crime in the late Medieval period being relatively rare. Indeed, the tone of the violent vilified churchmen throughout seems more Puritan than late-Medieval Catholic. I could go on and on.

I am always disappointed when authors project on to their characters starkly 21st attitudes. It would be much more complex, and to my mind more interesting, to write about a love between two men in an era where being gay wasn't really a fixed identity as it is now, but much more fluid and related to acts themselves, and where the separation of the sexes in many spheres meant homosocial friendship was prized above all, even as physical acts had to be kept hidden.

Anyway, that clearly wasn't Pike's project. She wanted to write a fable about an early 16th Century girl-boss and her gay BFF and she did. She seeks to entertain and history is only a decoration, not a substance. Lots of people want novels to reflect themselves and their own attitudes and value a novel on whether it matches those values they see as correct. Clearly, this is true for a wide audience of readers, and so I should stop wanting history in my historical novels (not everyone can be Hilary Mantel!).

But even holding that aside, the writing substitutes hyphenated quirks for style (God is the "big-man" to give but one example used on nearly every page), as well as lots of profanity to tide over any lack of narrative art (and here again, clunky anachronism - did Medieval Britons curse, to be sure - and even used the F word, but did they say "I do not give a F?" as our characters do repeatedly, no they did not; same with F off (a 20th Century locution but a fave in this book) and "give two shits")).

I should stop already- it was a lame book - but a quick read and a kind of amusing plot if you suspend every form and fashion of disbelief!
]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Elaine 4 2025, audio
One beef: Strout's writing is full of repetition, both as a stylistic tic within the book and as a way of (continuously) recapping what happened in prior books. I suppose it's always a danger when writing a long series of interconnected novels over a period of many years when not all can be expected to remember all. But having listened to two Strouts back to back, I found myself tuning out from the audio from time to time, and not losing much because of it. This suggests to me that the books could be tighter.

Still, an enjoyable listen, even if it does all feel a bit familiar by now (how much adultery can there be in one small universe of people - don't answer that question!).]]> 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Elizabeth Strout gets back on track with this one, which brings all her main characters together for a brief murder mystery and a meditation on late-middle-aged love. I enjoyed this after finding Lucy by the Sea pretty weak. I just love Olive Kitteredge and the Burgess boys are good characters too, though I find the likely somewhat autofiction Lucy in late-middle-age very annoying (it's a bit mysterious why everyone is always falling for her).

One beef: Strout's writing is full of repetition, both as a stylistic tic within the book and as a way of (continuously) recapping what happened in prior books. I suppose it's always a danger when writing a long series of interconnected novels over a period of many years when not all can be expected to remember all. But having listened to two Strouts back to back, I found myself tuning out from the audio from time to time, and not losing much because of it. This suggests to me that the books could be tighter.

Still, an enjoyable listen, even if it does all feel a bit familiar by now (how much adultery can there be in one small universe of people - don't answer that question!).
]]> Birding 178632549 In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.]]> 271 Rose Ruane 1472157982 Elaine 3 2025
Well, all that promise isn't quite realized. Lydia spins through a self-help book's worth of supposedly feminist cliches about agency, forgiveness, self-actualization, internalization and externalization of harm, all of them a bit tired, and many of them contradictory. The word "rape" is rather histrionically kept off stage, and we never learn, exactly, what happened in Lydia's worst relationship, why she remained involved with the guy for years, and why she seems determined to let him off scot-free, when the back drop to the book is the dominance of MeToo and the outing of abusers.

As for Joyce, she's more interesting, but at the end of the day, her story feels unfinished (the implausibility didn't bother me). There's no real encounter between the two women, and the supposedly seminal moment between them doesn't matter much, in the end.

So the whole ended up being less than the sum of the parts. And I shouldn't have read the acknowledgements, where the author castigates herself for a host of privileges, while managing to sound thoroughly whiny about the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and the authorial intrusion actually made me like the book less than I had.]]> 3.76 2024 Birding
author: Rose Ruane
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: 2025
review:
I was very conflicted about this book, which is at least a 3.5. First, the writing was gorgeous. It's lush and rather overdone feeling, and that usually annoys me, but then you realize that Ruane is actually layering her words into a great sense of place and atmosphere, with little punches of meaning. It's not just curlicues. Second, it's propulsive. Not much happens, but its rather unputdownable. I couldn't wait to get back to it each evening, staying up too late to finish it last night. Third, both the main characters, stuck in their mid 40s without the lives they might have wanted, are intriguing - Lydia is an ex member of a very briefly famous girl band, struggling with the residue of a lifetime's worth of MeToo moments with men in her professional and personal life, and Joyce is a gothic character from a Bette Davis movie, trapped in a terrifyingly twee tiny apartment with her all controlling mother who dresses them alike in the fashions of yesteryear. Where is this going? The blurb copy promises a fateful encounter between these two women in the vividly depicted crumbling seaside resort that is the book's setting.

Well, all that promise isn't quite realized. Lydia spins through a self-help book's worth of supposedly feminist cliches about agency, forgiveness, self-actualization, internalization and externalization of harm, all of them a bit tired, and many of them contradictory. The word "rape" is rather histrionically kept off stage, and we never learn, exactly, what happened in Lydia's worst relationship, why she remained involved with the guy for years, and why she seems determined to let him off scot-free, when the back drop to the book is the dominance of MeToo and the outing of abusers.

As for Joyce, she's more interesting, but at the end of the day, her story feels unfinished (the implausibility didn't bother me). There's no real encounter between the two women, and the supposedly seminal moment between them doesn't matter much, in the end.

So the whole ended up being less than the sum of the parts. And I shouldn't have read the acknowledgements, where the author castigates herself for a host of privileges, while managing to sound thoroughly whiny about the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and the authorial intrusion actually made me like the book less than I had.
]]> Fundamentally 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Elaine 3 2025
Younis's plot is less successful. The story of Sara, and Nadia's gullibility (and willing to blow her entire career on her), felt sort of glued together, and the psychological backstory that supposedly explains it all is clunky. But I did enjoy Sara's attitude, and unwillingness to conform to Nadia's, or the reader's, pre-conceived notions about "redemption." You may also find yourself wincing at some of Younis's prose - she's not a natural craftswoman, to be sure.

That said, if Younis hadn't stepped out of her usual role as an (apparently) well-respected and well-credentialed policy and development wonk to write a novel, it is certain that non-fiction-avoidant me would never have learned anything about this corner of the world, or ISIS brides post-Isis, or any of it. So I thoroughly respect her for trying fiction and this book is not at all a waste of time.]]> 3.81 2025 Fundamentally
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: 2025
review:
I liked this book much more than a 3 star rating may imply - it's really at least a 3.5. I enjoyed Fundamentally when the author was satirizing the customs and foibles of international development work, of NGO's, the UN and diplomacy. The glimpses of an Iraq that most Americans stopped thinking about during the 2nd George W. Bush administration are fascinating. Younis is funny, too, and her skewering of the international aid worker types that our narrator, Nadia, finds herself working with is delightful, if broad, and deliciously unconstrained by the constraints of PC or wokeness or whatever we can call adherence to a certain repressive coding of speech and attitude (it's hard to critique that way of writing without sounding MAGA - anyway, Younis doesn't do it, whatever it is called).

Younis's plot is less successful. The story of Sara, and Nadia's gullibility (and willing to blow her entire career on her), felt sort of glued together, and the psychological backstory that supposedly explains it all is clunky. But I did enjoy Sara's attitude, and unwillingness to conform to Nadia's, or the reader's, pre-conceived notions about "redemption." You may also find yourself wincing at some of Younis's prose - she's not a natural craftswoman, to be sure.

That said, if Younis hadn't stepped out of her usual role as an (apparently) well-respected and well-credentialed policy and development wonk to write a novel, it is certain that non-fiction-avoidant me would never have learned anything about this corner of the world, or ISIS brides post-Isis, or any of it. So I thoroughly respect her for trying fiction and this book is not at all a waste of time.
]]> <![CDATA[Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance]]> 58672976
Set over the course of fifteen years, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is narrated by Sally as she addresses Kathy before, during, and after her death. We watch as Kathy’s absence creates a gaping hole that only Billy—now firmly off-limits to Sally—understands and might possibly begin to fill. Charting years of their shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is both a breathtaking love story between two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other, and a wry, sharply observant coming-of-age story that looks at the ways the people we love the most continue to shape our lives long after they’re gone.]]> 352 Alison Espach 1250823145 Elaine 2 2022, audio 3.75 2022 Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
author: Alison Espach
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/23
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: 2022, audio
review:
Sluggishly slow and it didn’t help that I got tired of our narrator long before she got tired of herself. If the point is that tragedy freezes us in time, the book plays that out with excruciating reality. I don’t want to spoil, but the ending also left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
]]> Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4) 60657583
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.]]> 291 Elizabeth Strout 0593446062 Elaine 3 2025, audio
Also - and I'm going to try to capture the nuance of what I feel here - it took me back, perhaps too vividly, to the worst moments of the pandemic and the worst attitudes those moments brought out. I am not a Covid denialist: I was as careful as anyone in the early months, and I was hyper-vigilant about protecting my elderly parents, and making sure they were being as safe as possible, throughout. Unlike Lucy in this book, I stayed in New York for the first months and the reality in our city was horrific, to say the least. But I never liked the judgments - for not wearing a mask (I did), for socializing, for not washing your groceries (I never did). And Lucy and William have those judgments in force. Not only do they have those judgments, but given the handy all-controlling eye of fiction, if someone fails to follow their dicta, they promptly end up in the hospital, or die. Lucy's smug voice on these subjects (and on her trying to be empathetic but actually totally othering) view of the people who voted for our then and current President left a bad taste in mouth. Where we are right now is so terrible, I feel, that some of that sanctimony - which is clearly not Lucy's but Strout's - could have been put to better use.

Anyway, I'm going on to the next book, but I hope it is less ripped from the headlines and more quiet story telling, which is what Strout does best.]]> 3.80 2022 Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
I usually love Elizabeth Strout but this one didn't hit for me. It felt like filler between books of more substance, and a lot of recapping of characters we know from other books.

Also - and I'm going to try to capture the nuance of what I feel here - it took me back, perhaps too vividly, to the worst moments of the pandemic and the worst attitudes those moments brought out. I am not a Covid denialist: I was as careful as anyone in the early months, and I was hyper-vigilant about protecting my elderly parents, and making sure they were being as safe as possible, throughout. Unlike Lucy in this book, I stayed in New York for the first months and the reality in our city was horrific, to say the least. But I never liked the judgments - for not wearing a mask (I did), for socializing, for not washing your groceries (I never did). And Lucy and William have those judgments in force. Not only do they have those judgments, but given the handy all-controlling eye of fiction, if someone fails to follow their dicta, they promptly end up in the hospital, or die. Lucy's smug voice on these subjects (and on her trying to be empathetic but actually totally othering) view of the people who voted for our then and current President left a bad taste in mouth. Where we are right now is so terrible, I feel, that some of that sanctimony - which is clearly not Lucy's but Strout's - could have been put to better use.

Anyway, I'm going on to the next book, but I hope it is less ripped from the headlines and more quiet story telling, which is what Strout does best.
]]> The Book Censor's Library 175791196
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 254 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063352 Elaine 4 2025 3.99 2019 The Book Censor's Library
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: 2025
review:
A well constructed fable of authoritarianism, censorship and literature. An explicit homage to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but also more surprisingly to Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio. Gave this a bump up for being the first book I’ve ever read by a Kuwaiti author.
]]> Somewhere Else 217352361
Somewhere Else is an epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A novel which explores today’s most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement.]]> 360 Jenni Daiches 1910895954 Elaine 3 2025
But actually, this book doesn’t take place in the Edinburgh Jewish community at all and isn’t even very Jewish, apart from the opening scenes and a few passing references to Shabbat candles.

What it is is an incredibly sprawling family saga over 4 or 5 (to be honest I lost count) generations, tracing an extended family (the progeny of one Jewish woman and her Scottish lover, plus his brother and wife) as they march through 20th century history with some detours out of Scotland to Kenya, Israel, Canada and Bergen Belsen. It’s interesting base material but the family becomes so extensive with so many nieces and nephews and great nephews and great great grandchildren that at some point you can no longer really get invested in any of the characters. The emotions stay rather buttoned up and you don’t really feel like you get to know anyone that well.

There were also some editing glitches. Overall, a good effort but ended up reading a bit too much like a family tree and not emotionally gripping.]]> 3.74 2024 Somewhere Else
author: Jenni Daiches
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: 2025
review:
I had high hopes for this one which were unrealized. When I was a graduate student in Edinburgh, I got to know its Jewish community a bit, and met (and read the memoir of) the author’s father, David Daiches, a fascinating and wise man. I was hoping that this book would give me insight into that small close knit community that was at once both very Jewish and very Scottish.

But actually, this book doesn’t take place in the Edinburgh Jewish community at all and isn’t even very Jewish, apart from the opening scenes and a few passing references to Shabbat candles.

What it is is an incredibly sprawling family saga over 4 or 5 (to be honest I lost count) generations, tracing an extended family (the progeny of one Jewish woman and her Scottish lover, plus his brother and wife) as they march through 20th century history with some detours out of Scotland to Kenya, Israel, Canada and Bergen Belsen. It’s interesting base material but the family becomes so extensive with so many nieces and nephews and great nephews and great great grandchildren that at some point you can no longer really get invested in any of the characters. The emotions stay rather buttoned up and you don’t really feel like you get to know anyone that well.

There were also some editing glitches. Overall, a good effort but ended up reading a bit too much like a family tree and not emotionally gripping.
]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Elaine 5 2025 3.94 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 2025
review:
At first I was disappointed there wasn’t more plot, but Adichie just writes so well that these character studies of four different African born women, focusing on their interactions with men, and also, the United States, ended up sucking me in entirely. I loved all these characters, especially spiky morally complex Omelogor and Kadiatou, the only non-Nigerian and only working class woman. The send ups of American culture, particularly “liberal� academia, were also delicious. I hope we don’t have to wait 12 years for another novel!
]]> Nesting 214175077 An extraordinary and urgent debut by a prize-winning Irish writer, Nesting introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control � and what will be the cost?

Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.]]> 400 Roisín O’Donnell 1643755706 Elaine 4 2025, audio
This tale of marital abuse and economic precarity in Dublin earned my respect for the sharp air of unrelenting menace it creates and holds through most of the novel. We don’t really know the details of why Ryan is so scary, but he is, and the reader feels the claustrophobic terror of Ciara’s existence on every page. And also the routine humiliations of poverty and homelessness- that everything could go terribly wrong at any minute.

The book fell down a bit towards the end for me when Ciara’s learned helplessness vis a vis the legal system became quite exasperating. Despite having a competent free lawyer, and having little problem getting a maintenance order or a barring order, she continues to let Ryan violate court orders and invade her space. But I’ve never experienced abuse, and that may well be true to life. And Ryan and his family are a bit too cartoonish to be real.

Nonetheless, the chilling atmosphere of everyday awfulness was more gripping than any thriller I’ve read this year. Kudos to the author for that

]]> 4.28 2025 Nesting
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
3,5 with a debut bump up.

This tale of marital abuse and economic precarity in Dublin earned my respect for the sharp air of unrelenting menace it creates and holds through most of the novel. We don’t really know the details of why Ryan is so scary, but he is, and the reader feels the claustrophobic terror of Ciara’s existence on every page. And also the routine humiliations of poverty and homelessness- that everything could go terribly wrong at any minute.

The book fell down a bit towards the end for me when Ciara’s learned helplessness vis a vis the legal system became quite exasperating. Despite having a competent free lawyer, and having little problem getting a maintenance order or a barring order, she continues to let Ryan violate court orders and invade her space. But I’ve never experienced abuse, and that may well be true to life. And Ryan and his family are a bit too cartoonish to be real.

Nonetheless, the chilling atmosphere of everyday awfulness was more gripping than any thriller I’ve read this year. Kudos to the author for that


]]> Countrymen 18995469 416 Bo Lidegaard 0385350163 Elaine 0 not-finished, to-read 3.85 2013 Countrymen
author: Bo Lidegaard
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: not-finished, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Women Who Invented the Sixties: Ella Baker, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan]]> 62666223 Women Who Invented the Sixties tells the story of how four women helped define the 1960s and made a lasting impression for decades to follow.

In 1960, Ella Baker played the key role in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which became an essential organization for students during the civil rights movement and the model for the antiwar and women’s movements. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changing the shape of urban planning irrevocably. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, creating the modern environmental movement. And in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, which sparked second-wave feminism and created lasting changes for women. Their four separate interventions helped, together, to end the 1950s and invent the 1960s.

Women Who Invented the Sixties situates each of these four women in the 1950s—Baker’s early activism with the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jacobs’s work with Architectural Forum and her growing involvement in neighborhood protest, Carson’s conservation efforts and publications, and Friedan’s work as a labor journalist and the discrimination she faced—before exploring their contributions to the 1960s and the movements they each helped shape.]]> 286 Steve Golin 1496841476 Elaine 5 2022 4.55 Women Who Invented the Sixties: Ella Baker, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan
author: Steve Golin
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/31
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 2022
review:

]]> Murder in Constantinople 214680088 London, 1854. Twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure.
Then the discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman offer an escapade more dangerous than anything he'd imagined. Suddenly Ben is thrown into a mystery that takes him all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war.
His only clue is three 'The White Death'. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through kingmaking and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe - and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.]]> 328 A.E. Goldin 1782279202 Elaine 1 2024, not-finished 3.56 Murder in Constantinople
author: A.E. Goldin
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.56
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 2024, not-finished
review:
I gave up. The insane anachronisms (electric bulbs! discovery of novel viruses! a kerfuffle over an unlicensed gun!) in 1854 Constantinople almost killed me, but there were hosts of other clunkers, including Turkish street urchins quoting “the Bard� in English- the apparent lingua franca in Constantinople(eye roll). Then, beyond that, the leaden expository dialogue and improbable plotting drove me batty. Maybe if I read to the end I’d discover some time travel twist that explains this mess but it comes off as lazy sloppiness. Don’t!
]]> The Persians 228411794 Shortlisted for The Women’s Prize Named a most anticipated book by Electric Literature , Publishers Weekly , The BBC, Daily Mail (London), and more

A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.

First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York City trying to find deeper meaning by quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up in jail, the family’s upper-class veneer is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a quest to restore the family name to its former glory, but what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Can they bring their old inheritance into a new tomorrow?

By turns satirical and philosophical, spanning from 1940s Iran to a splintered 2000s, The Persians upends the listener's expectations while exploring questions about love, family, money, art, and how to find yourself and each other when your country is lost. Wry and witty, brazen and absurd, The Persians is a deeply moving reinvention of the American family saga.]]> Sanam Mahloudji Elaine 3 2025, audio
Where the novel slipped for me was pacing. The big reveal (not much of one) is a long time coming and then not much comes of it. A very little plot is an engine for a lot of book. The book's themes of bad and good motherhood and the relationship between wealth and purpose are worried at for a long time without much insight or resolution being provided.

Still a pleasant immersion and not too taxing chick lit that is a little smarter than most of that genre.]]> 3.25 2024 The Persians
author: Sanam Mahloudji
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
I like a good family saga - and this is that, with the added bonus for those of us who don't know much more than a handful of headlines of being steeped in Persian culture and 20th century Iranian history. I enjoyed meeting each of Mahloudji's Persian women - even the perpetually annoying Shirin (and the suite of audio narrators depicting each of them is excellent).

Where the novel slipped for me was pacing. The big reveal (not much of one) is a long time coming and then not much comes of it. A very little plot is an engine for a lot of book. The book's themes of bad and good motherhood and the relationship between wealth and purpose are worried at for a long time without much insight or resolution being provided.

Still a pleasant immersion and not too taxing chick lit that is a little smarter than most of that genre.
]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Elaine 3 2025
So far so good. Lalami sets up this world and ably crafts the details. But then the problem is that there is no plot. The various detainees have very lightly sketched characters (other than the narrator), and there are several episodes dropped in that seem like they will have a point (including, especially, the introduction of a 2nd narrator, but also the strange behavior of the lead most sadistic guard) but then don't. The novel moves at a snail's pace, and nothing really happens for most of it.

When the denouement comes, it doesn't really make sense given the logic of the novel or common sense, and it seems that after all that foot dragging, the novel just sort of ends with a clunk rather than wrapping up.

So good idea, but unrealized execution. ]]> 3.65 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2025
review:
Great premise - and a little too close for comfort - given the headlines. People, like our heroine, can be detained for things in their dreams and elsewhere that indicate that they will commit crimes, even if they haven't yet. Once detained, they are subject to byzantine and arbitrary rules in a grim for profit detention center where any effort to assert themselves can prolong their detention.

So far so good. Lalami sets up this world and ably crafts the details. But then the problem is that there is no plot. The various detainees have very lightly sketched characters (other than the narrator), and there are several episodes dropped in that seem like they will have a point (including, especially, the introduction of a 2nd narrator, but also the strange behavior of the lead most sadistic guard) but then don't. The novel moves at a snail's pace, and nothing really happens for most of it.

When the denouement comes, it doesn't really make sense given the logic of the novel or common sense, and it seems that after all that foot dragging, the novel just sort of ends with a clunk rather than wrapping up.

So good idea, but unrealized execution.
]]> Good Girl 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Elaine 5 2025, audio
I don’t really like books where taking a lot of drugs is a central theme, not a morality thing, just a feeling that it’s not fun to read about. But, in this context, the matter of fact presentation of Berlin’s club scene (almost a character in itself) was ok and not overdone.

The abuse scenes are hard to read and I wanted perhaps a different emotional resolution to them, but Aber’s book felt very very real, even when that is uncomfortable.]]> 3.72 2025 Good Girl
author: Aria Aber
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Aber is just an incredible writer- no surprise, I guess, she’s a poet, and the 5 stars are for that. The treatment of being an immigrant Afghan girl in Berlin - being betwixt and between everything- is just searing.

I don’t really like books where taking a lot of drugs is a central theme, not a morality thing, just a feeling that it’s not fun to read about. But, in this context, the matter of fact presentation of Berlin’s club scene (almost a character in itself) was ok and not overdone.

The abuse scenes are hard to read and I wanted perhaps a different emotional resolution to them, but Aber’s book felt very very real, even when that is uncomfortable.
]]> Crooked Seeds 191746392 A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt--from the Booker Prize-longlisted author of An Island.

Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer.

In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?

Deidre doesn't know the answers to the detectives' questions. All she knows is that she was denied - repeatedly - the life she felt she deserved. Overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. As alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family's disturbing past, Deidre must finally face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country.

In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.]]> 240 Karen Jennings 0593597125 Elaine 4 2025 3.55 2024 Crooked Seeds
author: Karen Jennings
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: 2025
review:
This is not an easy book to read because the protagonist is unredeemably dislikable and absolutely physically degraded as well, living in conditions of vividly described squalor. Nonetheless, it is very well done and its few pages fly by. There appear to be lots of metaphors for South Africa’s brutal past and precarious present at work but it would take someone with more than my facile understanding of recent events there to unpack them.
]]> <![CDATA[Believing the Lie (Inspector Lynley, #17)]]> 11737276
Deborah's investigation of the prime suspect-Bernard's prodigal son Nicholas, a recovering drug addict-leads her to Nicholas's wife, a woman with whom she feels a kinship, a woman as fiercely protective as she is beautiful. Lynley and Simon delve for information from the rest of the family, including the victim's bitter ex-wife and the man he left her for, and Bernard himself. As the investigation escalates, the Fairclough family's veneer cracks, with deception and self-delusion threatening to destroy everyone from the Fairclough patriarch to Tim, the troubled son Ian left behind.]]> 610 Elizabeth George 0525952586 Elaine 2 2025 3.76 2012 Believing the Lie (Inspector Lynley, #17)
author: Elizabeth George
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025
review:
I used to devour these books and decided to dip my toe back in. But they haven’t improved with age or I haven’t. Very flabby.
]]> They Were Sisters 2702376 464 Dorothy Whipple 1903155460 Elaine 5 2025, audio 4.45 1944 They Were Sisters
author: Dorothy Whipple
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1944
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: 2025, audio
review:

]]> The Wedding People 177328214 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach 1250899567 Elaine 3 2025 4.23 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> High Wages 7063048
As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton was king.’]]> 316 Dorothy Whipple 1903155754 Elaine 5 2025, audio
I have seen Whipple compared to Austen, and there are certainly call-outs to Austen, such as a ball scene that skews the Austenian perspective to tragicomic effect, but there were also call outs to Dickens and Bronte (naming a hardworking bookish orphan who catches the eye of an adulterous aristrocrat "Jane" is no accident). Whipple may not take a place at the table of those greats, but her book is an honorable part of the tradition.

If I had a quibble, it's that I could have read an entire novel about Jane's career in fashion retail from lowly shop assistant to prosperous boutique owner, dealing with sexual harassment, late paying customers, and all the like. The central romance plot was less interesting to me, and threatens to veer towards the overwrought, but I think Whipple pulled it off in the end. ]]> 4.28 1930 High Wages
author: Dorothy Whipple
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
I hadn't even heard of Dorothy Whipple until a friend recommended her to me a couple of weeks ago, but I found this first foray into her writing an entire delight. Writing in England in the 1930s, but depicting a milltown 20 years earlier, before, during and after WW1, Whipple has a keen eye for social caste and all its foibles and the pacing in this tale of an orphan shopgirl made good never lags.

I have seen Whipple compared to Austen, and there are certainly call-outs to Austen, such as a ball scene that skews the Austenian perspective to tragicomic effect, but there were also call outs to Dickens and Bronte (naming a hardworking bookish orphan who catches the eye of an adulterous aristrocrat "Jane" is no accident). Whipple may not take a place at the table of those greats, but her book is an honorable part of the tradition.

If I had a quibble, it's that I could have read an entire novel about Jane's career in fashion retail from lowly shop assistant to prosperous boutique owner, dealing with sexual harassment, late paying customers, and all the like. The central romance plot was less interesting to me, and threatens to veer towards the overwrought, but I think Whipple pulled it off in the end.
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Elaine 3 2025
But I got tired of our narrator and her vividly described sex life before she got tired of herself, or July tired of her. This was the 3rd a little too autobiographical novel I read in row (Martyr! and Liars being the other two) where the author was a little too enamored with their self-similar creation and went on a bit past the point of welcome.

Finally, NY Magazine and the like are trying to make me believe that some people are reading this book as advice or a manifesto - that they are taking its advice to blow up monogamy in middle age. People should do what they want to do, and I'm certainly not out here carrying a torch for sticking in a stultifying marriage, but do not take life advice from this intentionally uber-messy book where the narrator only remotely gets what she wants in a tacked-on coda and spends the entire book badly misreading people and falling apart. Our narrator is solipsistic, a fantasist, a mis-intrepreter - all by design - she's not anyone's guide to later life.]]> 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: 2025
review:
I think this is a 3.5 or 3.75. I enjoyed the wacky energy throughout - the first part, especially, with the drive across country that wasn’t and the motel redecoration, was off-the-wall enough to break through quirk and be truly interesting. I appreciated the author wrestling with perimenopause and menopause and the meaning of both of them. I lead nowhere near as interesting a life as July, or her narrator, but I remember that mid-40s storm before the calm well, and recognize it in many of my friends.

But I got tired of our narrator and her vividly described sex life before she got tired of herself, or July tired of her. This was the 3rd a little too autobiographical novel I read in row (Martyr! and Liars being the other two) where the author was a little too enamored with their self-similar creation and went on a bit past the point of welcome.

Finally, NY Magazine and the like are trying to make me believe that some people are reading this book as advice or a manifesto - that they are taking its advice to blow up monogamy in middle age. People should do what they want to do, and I'm certainly not out here carrying a torch for sticking in a stultifying marriage, but do not take life advice from this intentionally uber-messy book where the narrator only remotely gets what she wants in a tacked-on coda and spends the entire book badly misreading people and falling apart. Our narrator is solipsistic, a fantasist, a mis-intrepreter - all by design - she's not anyone's guide to later life.
]]> Liars 219481857
A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 7 Sarah Manguso 0593504712 Elaine 3 2025, audio
But I guess I got tired of her project long before she did. This is a loonnggg minute catalog of the sins of a really terrible thoughtless rude manipulative narcissistic boyfriend and then husband. The "Liars" in the project implies that there is more than one liar here, and that our saintly long-suffering loving horny domestic goddess/successful writer of a narrator is maybe not telling it like it is. However, the book doesn't contain any overt hints that that's the case. Rather, our narrator is downtrodden and put upon but still getting it all done, and if she has a flaw, it's staying with him long past the point of all reason, after a whole flag factory of red flags has been dumped on her head.

I'm not sure what, some 60 years after the Feminine Mystique, is insightful about the observation that women bear an unequal burden of domestic labor. Is anyone surprised by that? And by making the husband such a caricature Manguso blunts the impact of anything she might be trying to get us to take away from the novel. I suspect most readers breathe a sigh of relief thinking, well, my partner's not a monster like that.

Again, a tribute to the writing that I stuck with a subject matter i really didn't care for at all.]]> 3.69 2024 Liars
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Hey, Manguso can write. A style made up of telling details, close clipped, no flab anywhere. It's effective. That aspect of the book is very impressive.

But I guess I got tired of her project long before she did. This is a loonnggg minute catalog of the sins of a really terrible thoughtless rude manipulative narcissistic boyfriend and then husband. The "Liars" in the project implies that there is more than one liar here, and that our saintly long-suffering loving horny domestic goddess/successful writer of a narrator is maybe not telling it like it is. However, the book doesn't contain any overt hints that that's the case. Rather, our narrator is downtrodden and put upon but still getting it all done, and if she has a flaw, it's staying with him long past the point of all reason, after a whole flag factory of red flags has been dumped on her head.

I'm not sure what, some 60 years after the Feminine Mystique, is insightful about the observation that women bear an unequal burden of domestic labor. Is anyone surprised by that? And by making the husband such a caricature Manguso blunts the impact of anything she might be trying to get us to take away from the novel. I suspect most readers breathe a sigh of relief thinking, well, my partner's not a monster like that.

Again, a tribute to the writing that I stuck with a subject matter i really didn't care for at all.
]]> Someone Like Us 201102290
With Hannah and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.]]> 272 Dinaw Mengestu 0385350007 Elaine 3 2025, audio
The women characters too - the narrator's mother, his wife Hannah and Elsa - are such ciphers. To me that was a weakness at the center of the book - Hannah is a voice of care at the other end of the phone, safeguarding her husband, but it's almost impossible to tell why she fell for him, no less continues to love him.

I've gathered that Mangestu's other books are different and I might like them better. This was slow going in a thousand shades of gray.]]> 3.53 2024 Someone Like Us
author: Dinaw Mengestu
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Some really deep and painful writing about the immigrant experience, fathers and sons, and substance abuse (interesting to read it just after having read Martyr, which treats similar themes). But the material is doled out in a meandering thread which doubles and triples back without ever really advancing the ball. The somber bleakness is unrelenting.

The women characters too - the narrator's mother, his wife Hannah and Elsa - are such ciphers. To me that was a weakness at the center of the book - Hannah is a voice of care at the other end of the phone, safeguarding her husband, but it's almost impossible to tell why she fell for him, no less continues to love him.

I've gathered that Mangestu's other books are different and I might like them better. This was slow going in a thousand shades of gray.
]]> Martyr! 139401966 ęԲԾ! Kavego Akbara to opowieść o tym, jak niestrudzenie przez całe życie próbujemy odnaleźć sens � w wierze, sztuce, w nas samych i w innych ludziach. W tej historii osierocony syn irańskich imigrantów, od niedawna niepijący, wiedziony głosami artystów, poetów i władców, podejmuje poszukiwania, które prowadzą go do śmiertelnie chorej malarki, dożywającej swych dni w Muzeum Brooklyńskim.

Cyrus Shams jest młodym mężczyzną, zmagającym się z bagażem przemocy i straty: wskutek bezsensownego wypadku zestrzelono nad Teheranem samolot z jego matką na pokładzie; z kolei życie ojca w Ameryce określała praca na farmie drobiu na Środkowym Zachodzie. Cyrus jest alkoholikiem, narkomanem i poetą, którego obsesja na punkcie męczenników popycha go do zgłębienia tajemnic własnej przeszłości � kluczem do rodzinnego sekretu jest wujek, który przed laty galopował po irańskich polach bitwy, przebrany za Anioła Śmierci, by dodawać otuchy i nieść pocieszenie umierającym, oraz pewien obraz z brooklyńskiej galerii sztuki.

Ta elektryzująca, zabawna, całkowicie oryginalna i głęboka powieść zapowiada pojawienie się nowego głosu na literackiej scenie.]]> 352 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 Elaine 3 2025
Well, Akbar is undoubtedly very talented, and maybe his next book will be tighter. This felt like a meal that had just a few too many sauces and seasonings layered onto some really lovely main ingredients.]]> 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: 2025
review:
Really more like a 3.5. There was a lot in here that was brilliant, particularly the set pieces in Iran, the material about Cyrus's father, some of the material about Cyrus's and Zee's relationship, and some of the fragmentary poems scattered throughout. But there was also a sense that Akbar had been working on this for a long time, and ended up cramming everything into one novel, without a full vision of what was really necessary. The dream sequences added nothing but length, the addiction narratives of being a "super senior" in a college town did not feel fresh, and the "twist" did nothing for me (and didn't make any sense - I did wonder if the entire last chunk of the novel was just a fantasy). And while I enjoyed the coda and the character of Sang Linh, she did feel like a walk on from another novel, crammed into this book.

Well, Akbar is undoubtedly very talented, and maybe his next book will be tighter. This felt like a meal that had just a few too many sauces and seasonings layered onto some really lovely main ingredients.
]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Elaine 3 2025, audio 3.87 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Undeniably clever and occasionally thought provoking but too long to spend with such thoroughly unlikeable people. Each story went on, intentionally it seems, past the point of amusement and appreciation of satire to a place of discomfort and revulsion. I’d say it was generational- this lack of appreciation on my part for this extremely online novel - but I have liked others in the genre quite a lot (eg, several people are typing).
]]> The History of Sound: Stories 199683725
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 318 Ben Shattuck 0593490398 Elaine 5 2025 4.38 2024 The History of Sound: Stories
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: 2025
review:
Just beautiful, and for a book of paired short stories, incredibly compelling. The natural landscape of New England is vividly present in every story. But what Shattuck does so well in so few words is evoke suspense, dread, unease, the uncanny and sometimes, briefly, joy. I could’ve read so much more of this book.
]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Elaine 2 2025, audio 3.87 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Wow, reviews seem to be quite good but this one was absolutely not for me. Billed as funny, I didn't laugh once, although I found it suffering from that ailment of young female 21st century writers that is sometimes confused for humor - quirk. Praised for dealing with "tough" topics, single motherhood and sex work, I found its depiction of neither remotely realistic. The writing was utterly mundane. The tone and emotional register seemed more "young adult" than "adult" although I haven't seen it explictly billed as such. The plot is clunky, with characters being less realized characters and more devices to move Margo's story along. I longed for it to be over long before it reached its fantastical conclusion (which seemed like the "rousing" end of a feel-good after-school special). The silver lining - Elle Fanning's game and vivid narration, which at least made the time pass as I listened through a bout of flu.
]]> The Extinction of Irena Rey 172979818 From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets � and deceptions � of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.]]> 320 Jennifer Croft 1639731709 Elaine 3 2025 3.18 2024 The Extinction of Irena Rey
author: Jennifer Croft
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: 2025
review:
I can’t say I wasn’t warned - by Fionnuala and Gumble’s Yard, among others - and yet I was still struck by what an unwieldy mess this absurdist book was. It’s not a mystery and despite some very arty trappings about language, translation and fungi, it’s not really deep, either. At heart it’s a farce, and that’s why I’m giving it a three even though I was inclined towards a two. It was really weird and often quite funny, and if I could avoid taking any of it seriously, I kind of enjoyed my stay in this very warped Polish village.
]]> Great Expectations 139400711
I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States� first Black president.

Great Expectations is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.]]> 272 Vinson Cunningham 0593448235 Elaine 3 2025, audio 3.24 2024 Great Expectations
author: Vinson Cunningham
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Well written, but ultimately the attempt to marry the roman a clef about the 2008 Obama campaign to the Bildungsroman of a young Black man with deeply religious roots just didn’t quite work for me. There was potentially a powerful story about the many presences and absences of fatherhood in there but the many many digressions (art, music, basketball, etc etc) made it hard for me to stay engaged.
]]> The Book of George 203579186 From the author of the critically acclaimed Laura & Emma comes a The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. for our times: Kate Greathead's razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity, The Book of George.

If you haven’t had the misfortune of dating a George, you know someone who has. He’s a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend, Jenny; distant from but still reliant on his mother; funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Here, Kate Greathead paints one particular, unforgettable George in a series of droll and surprisingly poignant snapshots of his life over two decades.

And yet, it’s hard not to root for George at least a little. Beneath his cynicism is a reservoir of fondness for Jenny’s valiant willingness to put up with him. Each demonstration of his flaws is paired with a self-eviscerating comment. No one is more disappointed in him than himself (except maybe Jenny and his mother). As hilarious as it is astute and singular as it is universal, The Book of George is a deft, unexpectedly moving portrait of one man � but also countless others.]]> 288 Kate Greathead 1250351022 Elaine 4 2025, audio 3.43 2024 The Book of George
author: Kate Greathead
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Oh I dated a George or three back in the day. It’s hard to spend so much time in the company of such an irritating character but Greathead just writes this so well that you don’t mind that or that there really isn’t any plot to speak of. Helped for me that it takes place in a very specific Brooklyn milieu that’s co-existent with mine.
]]> Colored Television 220572119 An alternative cover edition can be found here

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 287 Danzy Senna Elaine 5 2025 3.75 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Elaine 3 2025, audio
But the second part of the book takes an unfortunate turn. Adina - a child of curiosity and talent who learns Italian overnight (her alien powers at work), shows promise as an actress, loves film, has great potential as a writer, and enormous empathy for animals - becomes a frozen stultified adult. Alienation becomes depression as Adina rejects romance and sex, has a deadend job, and seems disinterested in making any friends after the age of 20 or so. Eventually, loss gives an external reason for Adina's isolation, but the book has become boring long before then.

The turn back to the "sci-fi" plot at the end doesn't really save the book from the grey flatness of the 2nd half. The end [spoilers removed].

In the end, Bertino does raise interesting questions about belonging and not belonging, depression, and loneliness - and whether we're all "aliens" in modern New York City - but the promise and originality of the first half is unfulfilled.

PS. Carl Sagan's Cosmos aired in 1980, when I was in middle school, not 1990, as in the book. In general, the timeline seemed OK in the first half, but in the second half, the time from 9/11 to 2017 is very oddly depicted. A noticeable blooper though - it's a big deal that Adina lives on a street near a parking lot for "halal carts" (repeated many times), but then suddenly we're told these carts give off a smell of pork. I'm sorry when writers don't take care - of course it's a lot to keep track of, but this was glaring.]]> 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: 2025, audio
review:
Beautyland started out really strong - in 1977 Philadelphia, a teenage Sicilian-American mother gives birth to a little girl who may, or may not be, an alien sent to Earth to do reconnaissance on the local population, with her consciousness of her special role "activated" after a traumatic childhood head injury. For the first half of the book, this conceit doesn't get much in the way. Adina, her mother, her neighbors, and her childhood friends and nemeses are deftly sketched. If the lens is episodic and quirky (and you know I hate the quirk), there's an emotional weight to Adina's growing up, as who amongst us did not feel like an alien at some point during middle school or adolescence.

But the second part of the book takes an unfortunate turn. Adina - a child of curiosity and talent who learns Italian overnight (her alien powers at work), shows promise as an actress, loves film, has great potential as a writer, and enormous empathy for animals - becomes a frozen stultified adult. Alienation becomes depression as Adina rejects romance and sex, has a deadend job, and seems disinterested in making any friends after the age of 20 or so. Eventually, loss gives an external reason for Adina's isolation, but the book has become boring long before then.

The turn back to the "sci-fi" plot at the end doesn't really save the book from the grey flatness of the 2nd half. The end [spoilers removed].

In the end, Bertino does raise interesting questions about belonging and not belonging, depression, and loneliness - and whether we're all "aliens" in modern New York City - but the promise and originality of the first half is unfulfilled.

PS. Carl Sagan's Cosmos aired in 1980, when I was in middle school, not 1990, as in the book. In general, the timeline seemed OK in the first half, but in the second half, the time from 9/11 to 2017 is very oddly depicted. A noticeable blooper though - it's a big deal that Adina lives on a street near a parking lot for "halal carts" (repeated many times), but then suddenly we're told these carts give off a smell of pork. I'm sorry when writers don't take care - of course it's a lot to keep track of, but this was glaring.
]]> Fire Exit 213938704 Does she remember this day? Does she remember it at all? Does she know this history―this story―her body holds secret from her?

From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on and care for what he can: his home and property, his alcoholic, quick-tempered and big-hearted friend Bobby, and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever-deeper into dementia―he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident―a death that he and Louise cannot agree where to lay the blame―Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is it his secret to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth?

From award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.]]> 6 Morgan Talty Elaine 3 2024, audio, 2025 3.65 2024 Fire Exit
author: Morgan Talty
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: 2024, audio, 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art]]> 220335486 DECEPTION IS A FINE ART.

When Orlando Whitfield first meets Inigo Philbrick, they are students dreaming of dealing art for a living. Their friendship lasts for fifteen years until one day, Inigo - by then the most successful dealer of his generation - disappears, accused of a fraud so gigantic and audacious it rocks the art world to its core.

A sparklingly sharp memoir of greed, ambition and madness, All That Glitters will take you to the heart of the contemporary art world, a place wilder and wealthier than you could ever imagine.]]> Orlando Whitfield Elaine 4 audio, 2025 4.00 2024 All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art
author: Orlando Whitfield
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: audio, 2025
review:
In the end, the story of Inigo Philbrick's skullduggery and fraud is only lightly sketched - it's almost a coda to the book. But what makes Whitfield's surprisingly well-written book quite engrossing and worthwhile is the story it tells about a friendship between a high-flyer and a more introspective troubled sort as well as the insight it gives into how the contemporary art business functions. Whitfield ably conveys time and place, and if we are sometimes left with a lot of unanswered questions, I was never bored listening to it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy, #2)]]> 18990 In this classic masterwork, le Carré expands upon his extraordinary vision of a secret world as George Smiley goes on the attack.

In the wake of a demoralizing infiltration by a Soviet double agent, Smiley has been made ringmaster of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service). Determined to restore the organization's health and reputation, and bent on revenge, Smiley thrusts his own handpicked operative into action. Jerry Westerby, "The Honourable Schoolboy," is dispatched to the Far East. A burial ground of French, British, and American colonial cultures, the region is a fabled testing ground of patriotic allegiances?and a new showdown is about to begin.

]]> 589 John Le Carré 0743457919 Elaine 4 2024, 2025 3.98 1977 The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy, #2)
author: John Le Carré
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: 2024, 2025
review:
So much good writing and so many admirable pieces but, honestly, I find it all a bit involved, with motivations perhaps needlessly obscure. Still flashes of absolute brilliance and a rather heart pounding ending.
]]> <![CDATA[Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind]]> 212755924 From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.�

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.]]> 464 Yuval Noah Harari 006342200X Elaine 0 to-read 4.12 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Stamboul Train 145039
Weaving a web of subterfuge, murder and politics along the way, the novel focuses upon the disturbing relationship between Myatt, the pragmatic Jew, and naive chorus girl Coral Musker as they engage in a desperate, angst-ridden pas-de-deux before a chilling turn of events spells an end to the unlikely interlude. Exploring the many shades of despair and hope, innocence and duplicity, Stamboul Train offers a poignant testimony to Greene's extraordinary powers of insight into the human condition.]]> 216 Graham Greene 0140185321 Elaine 3 2024, audio
Greene’s writing never doesn’t have energy and he never doesn’t bring his characters to life. It’s just that it’s all a bit slight except for the caricatures and as noted, those are more edifying as artifact than they are fun to read.]]> 3.43 1932 Stamboul Train
author: Graham Greene
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A very minor Greene. Rife with the stereotypes of the time (published in 1932), particularly as respects the Jewish protagonist, Myatt, and a butch lesbian, Mabel Watson. As regards the Jew, I think Greene thinks he’s being sympathetic but he can’t get away from very heavy-handed tropes that will make any Jewish reader’s skin crawl (probably most others as well). And yet at the same time I wouldn’t do away with such books (I know there is a trend towards retroactively correcting the bigotry of history) - both Green’s wry sketching of his Jewish protagonist’s foibles and his chilling depiction of the casual and vicious bigotry that Myatt confronts throughout his journey are a part of the cultural record I’d rather be aware of (there’s one scary scene set in a Serbian forest, in which Myatt notes that the “old� attitudes of Jew hatred have not died out in the backwaters of Europe, ringing a tragic note of foreshadowing (again 1932)).

Greene’s writing never doesn’t have energy and he never doesn’t bring his characters to life. It’s just that it’s all a bit slight except for the caricatures and as noted, those are more edifying as artifact than they are fun to read.
]]> <![CDATA[Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley, #5; Karla Trilogy, #1)]]> 10073506 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley's chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet counterpart.

It is now beyond a doubt that a mole, implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre, has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind. But which one? George Smiley is assigned to identify him. And once identified, the traitor must be destroyed.]]> 381 John Le Carré Elaine 3 2024 4.07 1974 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley, #5; Karla Trilogy, #1)
author: John Le Carré
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Elaine 5 2024, audio 3.93 2024 Our Evenings
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A lovely quiet chronicle of a biracial gay actor growing up through the 2nd half of the 20 Century and into our own. Along the way, Hollinghurst conveys, as he often does so well, the changing political and social landscape of England from the post-war years to the present morning. The book is episodic but its emotional intensity is accretive, and as always Hollinghurst's prose is exquisite.
]]> The Bostonians 194546
This satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?]]> 460 Henry James 0812969960 Elaine 3 2024, audio
The rest is satirizing on Bostonian do-gooders and idealists, especially feminists, and the retrograde secessionist who swans about being smugly superior and priding himself on the fact that, although he is to all outwards appearances a failure, he's still got one up on Olive because he has a d*** (you can practically hear Ransome thinking aloud that "a lesbian is just a woman who hasn't met the right man yet"). James' satire is a little too misanthropic (and misogynist) here to be much fun.

There's a certain macabre joke here in that the tiresome political types of the late 19th century seem snatched from today's (tiresome) headlines. Olive's insistence on ideological purity (and no fun) finds its match in the current moment's more doctrinaire woke liberals and as for Basil, well, I don't think he'd be so uncouth as to wear a MAGA hat or tweet "your body, my choice" (after all, Southern chivalry), he's certainly thought those things while watching Joe Rogan and "doing his own research."]]> 3.59 1886 The Bostonians
author: Henry James
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1886
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
This is a tough James to love - none of the main characters are likeable, and while one (Verena) is only a cipher, the other two, Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom, are pretty actively dislikeable. James is never terse, so this is quite a lot of time to spend in a static love triangle where sour Olive and smarmy conceited Basil battle for the beautiful but susceptible Verena. Some of the minor characters are far more engaging (I'm looking at you, Dr. Prance), and if Henry has a favorite in this book I'd guess it's this independent minded but non-doctrinaire woman.

The rest is satirizing on Bostonian do-gooders and idealists, especially feminists, and the retrograde secessionist who swans about being smugly superior and priding himself on the fact that, although he is to all outwards appearances a failure, he's still got one up on Olive because he has a d*** (you can practically hear Ransome thinking aloud that "a lesbian is just a woman who hasn't met the right man yet"). James' satire is a little too misanthropic (and misogynist) here to be much fun.

There's a certain macabre joke here in that the tiresome political types of the late 19th century seem snatched from today's (tiresome) headlines. Olive's insistence on ideological purity (and no fun) finds its match in the current moment's more doctrinaire woke liberals and as for Basil, well, I don't think he'd be so uncouth as to wear a MAGA hat or tweet "your body, my choice" (after all, Southern chivalry), he's certainly thought those things while watching Joe Rogan and "doing his own research."
]]> My Roman Year 216165554 The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood.In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment (eventually revealed to be a recently vacated brothel) on Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman burrowed into his bedroom. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City.Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of "the poetry of the place" (John Domini, The Boston Globe), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.]]> 354 André Aciman 0571385184 Elaine 3 2024
While there is still great writing here, and the depictions of Aciman's family in diaspora are fantastic as are his Italian neighbors - so many characters sketched so well in just a few lines, we spend too much time with Aciman himself, who during his Roman year, is a somewhat self-obsessed teenage boy. Thus, in the way of brainy insecure teenagers everywhere, Aciman holds himself at a disdainful remove from his surroundings, both personal and physical, only opening to Rome and his neighbors when he's on the verge of departure. This feeling of being locked in Aciman's brain during a solipsistic stage of life makes the book seem longer than it is. ]]> 3.82 2024 My Roman Year
author: André Aciman
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: 2024
review:
I loved Out of Egypt so much when I read it, and of course, Call me By Your Name, and Rome is one of my absolute favorite places on Earth, so I had high hopes for My Roman Year.

While there is still great writing here, and the depictions of Aciman's family in diaspora are fantastic as are his Italian neighbors - so many characters sketched so well in just a few lines, we spend too much time with Aciman himself, who during his Roman year, is a somewhat self-obsessed teenage boy. Thus, in the way of brainy insecure teenagers everywhere, Aciman holds himself at a disdainful remove from his surroundings, both personal and physical, only opening to Rome and his neighbors when he's on the verge of departure. This feeling of being locked in Aciman's brain during a solipsistic stage of life makes the book seem longer than it is.
]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Elaine 5 2022, audio 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/22
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: 2022, audio
review:

]]> Orbital 123314421 A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours


"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times

A slender novel of epic power, ٲdeftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. 

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.]]> 212 Samantha Harvey 0802161553 Elaine 4 2024
Harvey imagines vividly what it is like to see earth from this vantage point, and her prose is gorgeous. She touches on the mysteries of space and the vastness of time and space, and at the book's core, there's the tragedy of human destructiveness. The environmental disaster that is Earth is present but not dwelled on, which somehow makes it all the more devastating.

Well, I usually don't like books that don't have characters or plot or that are episodic and repetitive, but Harvey does this so well, that I ended up giving myself over entirely to this book.
Harvey gets so neatly at the heartbreak of the current moment but maintains a gentle optimism that comes from taking the very very very long view.]]> 3.89 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: 2024
review:
Booker Book 8 of 13: 8/10. I love it when a book that is not something I would normally like at all ends up seducing me. Such is the case with Orbital. This is not a novel, and it is barely fiction. The six astronauts on the space station have lightly sketched characters, although for some the sketching is so light that the morning after I have trouble linking backstory to character. The real main character - the only main character - is planet Earth, lovely damaged magisterial Earth, seen over and over again from lightly shifting angles as the Space Station completes its 16 orbits a day.

Harvey imagines vividly what it is like to see earth from this vantage point, and her prose is gorgeous. She touches on the mysteries of space and the vastness of time and space, and at the book's core, there's the tragedy of human destructiveness. The environmental disaster that is Earth is present but not dwelled on, which somehow makes it all the more devastating.

Well, I usually don't like books that don't have characters or plot or that are episodic and repetitive, but Harvey does this so well, that I ended up giving myself over entirely to this book.
Harvey gets so neatly at the heartbreak of the current moment but maintains a gentle optimism that comes from taking the very very very long view.
]]> The End of Drum-Time 60741781 FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

An epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle

In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders—of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides—as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.

Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.]]> 368 Hanna Pylväinen 1250822904 Elaine 5 2024 3.88 2023 The End of Drum-Time
author: Hanna Pylväinen
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: 2024
review:
Incredible sense of place and time. Pylvainen takes us above the Arctic Circle into the midst of the 19th century, when the Sami people were still in the process of losing their lands and their way of life. Unlike much of what passes for historical fiction these days, The End of Drum-Time feels wholly persuasive. And while everything is incredibly well-researched, Pylvanien lets the book tell its own story. While that story may start slow, tension builds and it eventually becomes heartbreakingly unputdownable. A host of well-drawn characters. Really unique and beautiful.
]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Elaine 4 2024, audio 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A winding mystery with a host of characters, spanning generations. It could have definitely used some tightening - I wouldn't say that you'll be turning pages to find out whodunit but the writing is nice and unobtrusive, and it was a perfect escape from the headlines.
]]> The Magician's Elephant 33000838 In a highly awaited new novel, Kate DiCamillo conjures a haunting fable about trusting the unexpected � and making the extraordinary come true.

What if? Why not? Could it be?

When a fortuneteller's tent appears in the market square of the city of Baltese, orphan Peter Augustus Duchene knows the questions that he needs to ask: Does his sister still live? And if so, how can he find her? The fortuneteller's mysterious answer (an elephant! An elephant will lead him there!) sets off a chain of events so remarkable, so impossible, that you will hardly dare to believe it’s true. With atmospheric illustrations by fine artist Yoko Tanaka, here is a dreamlike and captivating tale that could only be narrated by Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo. In this timeless fable, she evokes the largest of themes � hope and belonging, desire and compassion � with the lightness of a magician’s touch.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 3 Kate DiCamillo Elaine 5 2024, audio 3.90 2009 The Magician's Elephant
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A lovely little fable, for adults and children alike, beautifully read by the incomparable Juliet Stevenson.
]]> Ex-Wife 2142191
It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.� Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand�: an era very much like our own.]]> 224 Ursula Parrott 0452262240 Elaine 5 2024, audio 4.16 1929 Ex-Wife
author: Ursula Parrott
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
I'd never heard of Ursula Parrott before last week, but this book blew me away. A sad, funny, perceptive, occasionally searing slice of life in New York City of the 1920s. A thoroughly original and thoroughly believable female voice. I found this book revelatory - the 1920s was long ago (WW1 is a pervasive backdrop, prohibition reigns, you can still take a horse-drawn carriage around the city if you want to) and yet the modernity of it all was striking (abortion, date rape, working women, gender dynamics). From a pleasure perspective, ah New York of yesterday- Parrott is very detailed and concrete in her place setting, and to those of us who love such things, drinks, clothes, meals, bars, restaurants, apartments - it's almost cinema verite. Her voice is original and memorable. If Fitzgerald's women were idealized or tormented, this is the Jazz Age protofeminist answer to all of that. Just read this, it won't take long, and you'll thank me, I promise.
]]> The Heart's Invisible Furies 33253215 real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from � and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.]]> 582 John Boyne Elaine 0 to-read 4.51 2017 The Heart's Invisible Furies
author: John Boyne
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Frozen River 112975658 A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546874 Elaine 0 to-read 4.37 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away 9414177 Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away is the witty and beautifully written story of one family’s attempt to survive a new life they could never have imagined, struggling to find a deeper sense of identity along the way.

When their mother catches their father with another woman, twelve year-old Blessing and her fourteen-year-old brother, Ezikiel, are forced to leave their comfortable home in Lagos for a village in the Niger Delta, to live with their mother's family.

Without running water or electricity, Warri is at first a nightmare for Blessing. Her mother is gone all day and works suspiciously late into the night to pay the children's school fees. Her brother, once a promising student, seems to be falling increasingly under the influence of the local group of violent teenage boys calling themselves Freedom Fighters. Her grandfather, a kind if misguided man, is trying on Islam as his new religion of choice, and is even considering the possibility of bringing in a second wife.

But Blessing's grandmother, wise and practical, soon becomes a beloved mentor, teaching Blessing the ways of the midwife in rural Nigeria. Blessing is exposed to the horrors of genital mutilation and the devastation wrought on the environment by British and American oil companies. As Warri comes to feel like home, Blessing becomes increasingly aware of the threats to its safety, both from its unshakable but dangerous traditions and the relentless carelessness of the modern world.]]> 438 Christie Watson 1590514661 Elaine 3 2012 4.08 2011 Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
author: Christie Watson
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/05
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: 2012
review:
I really wanted to like this book, which started very promisingly, more than I did. A fascinating setting, for sure, and some great characters as well. But the pacing is way off, the book creeps along, only to speed up, and then slow down again, with Blessing's too picturesque view point and studied naivete -- body parts growing bigger and smaller with characters' moods constantly is one overused metaphor -- a narrative mode that grows tired. The quirkiness and interest of the setting and certain characters (Mama, Celestine, Alhaji) can't make up for the inconsistency in others -- the abruptness and totality of the change in Ezikiel doesn't fit with what happens -- one minute he's a promising future doctor, eagerly trailing doctors at the hospital, and the next he's ...well, no spoilers, but it's a little abrupt. Similarly abrupt is Blessing's "revelation" about Father- nice narrative device -- but children growing up in a violent and scary household don't "forget" their father's violence, forgive, maybe, but black out forget no. Finally, too much of the book reads like a political tract -- for good causes, of course, anti-female genital mutilation and anti-oil/Nigerian government corruption, violence and exploitation, but still it was disconcerting to read entire passages from the Wikipedia entry on FGM repeated nearly verbatim in the book. Watson does her best to get this information into the mouth and mind of 12 year old Blessing, but still, when illiterate Grandma starts quoting statistics on FGM,it's a little much. Still...some very real moving moments, even more than the big political drama, the mother and daughter arc is touching, painful and real -- at the end Watson notes that not everyone is gifted at being a mother, and that message is perhaps the most powerful that this ostensibly "message" novel has to convey.
]]> Our London Lives 208558724 'Huge of heart and soaring of soul' CLAIRE KILROY
'A profound love story...Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment' COLUM McCANN

1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.

Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another's sight, always on one another's mind, yet rarely together.

Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she's ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives.

Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.]]> 493 Christine Dwyer Hickey 1805461346 Elaine 4 2024, audio 4.09 2024 Our London Lives
author: Christine Dwyer Hickey
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A gentle sad book about two Irish immigrants in London from 1979 to 1917. For different reasons both lead lives that don’t go anywhere although there are moments of connection and redemption. Some lovely writing and great audiobook narration.
]]> Dead Lions (Slough House, #2) 61677576
Now the slow horses have a chance at redemption. An old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford, far from his usual haunts. The despicable, irascible Jackson Lamb is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?

]]> 347 Mick Herron 1616953675 Elaine 4 2024 4.08 2013 Dead Lions (Slough House, #2)
author: Mick Herron
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: 2024
review:
Once again great fun and a bit more polished than the first one. Like potato chips I could keep going back for more, but I’m going to take a break.
]]> The Life Impossible 198281740
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…�

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.]]> 324 Matt Haig 0593489276 Elaine 2 2024, audio
The Life Impossible often felt like something Chat GPT would have come up with the cue "write a novel about a 73 old woman, aliens and property developers on Ibiza, and give it heavy handed environmental themes (without having anything fresh to say on that topic) and make it 300 pages long." Or "Take Richard Powers' work and distill the message into simple sentences with magic thrown in for people who would rather be clubbing on Ibiza."

No need to go on about the plodding prose, or about the fact that the author does not do a very good job of imagining what it feels like to be a woman (or 73, I would guess - the book's heroine begins every sentence with "I'm 73, I'm too old for that" before doing whatever that is), or about the way Ibiza is both idealized and stripped of any salient characteristics other than goats and hippies.

I did not read the Midnight Library and I am quite sure now that I would not enjoy it. Joanna Lumley's audio narration here, however, is quite game.]]> 3.45 2024 The Life Impossible
author: Matt Haig
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
Sometimes I see the category "literary fiction" and wonder what that really means - isn't all fiction literature and therefore literary? I suppose it distinguishes genre fiction - some of which I quite enjoy (spy thrillers, mysteries, and horror, among other things). But it also, I think, distinguishes good books from whatever this bad and overlong book is (fantasy, I guess)- because while this is certainly fiction, there is nothing literary about it.

The Life Impossible often felt like something Chat GPT would have come up with the cue "write a novel about a 73 old woman, aliens and property developers on Ibiza, and give it heavy handed environmental themes (without having anything fresh to say on that topic) and make it 300 pages long." Or "Take Richard Powers' work and distill the message into simple sentences with magic thrown in for people who would rather be clubbing on Ibiza."

No need to go on about the plodding prose, or about the fact that the author does not do a very good job of imagining what it feels like to be a woman (or 73, I would guess - the book's heroine begins every sentence with "I'm 73, I'm too old for that" before doing whatever that is), or about the way Ibiza is both idealized and stripped of any salient characteristics other than goats and hippies.

I did not read the Midnight Library and I am quite sure now that I would not enjoy it. Joanna Lumley's audio narration here, however, is quite game.
]]> <![CDATA[Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)]]> 59336841
London, England: Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

River Cartwright, one such “slow horse,� is bitter about his failure and about his tedious assignment transcribing cell phone conversations. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers� connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone has his own agenda.]]> 336 Mick Herron Elaine 4 2024 4.29 2010 Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)
author: Mick Herron
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: 2024
review:
Huge fan of the series and all of Jackson lamb’s lines were being said in Gary Oldman’s voice as I read this. A wonderful handful of hours for those who love the show. Good old fashioned pacy taut spy business. Not 100% convinced I would’ve entirely followed the plot � there are a lot of quick cuts- if I hadn’t seen this one on TV first.
]]> Interpretations of Love 197239524 240 Jane Campbell 0802162886 Elaine 3 2024, audio 3.29 Interpretations of Love
author: Jane Campbell
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.29
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
3.5 Very beautifully written. And I am just overjoyed to read about a debut novelist over 80 - I just love that idea so much! Some very interesting character studies too, and I particularly enjoyed that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Campbell has no trouble bringing to life the lives and loves of those in the 2nd half of life. I just found it a bit repetitive and slight such that it dragged.even though it was quite short.
]]> <![CDATA[Sabbia nera (Vanina Guarrasi #1)]]> 40232039 392 Cristina Cassar Scalia 8806236679 Elaine 3 2024, italian 3.93 2018 Sabbia nera (Vanina Guarrasi #1)
author: Cristina Cassar Scalia
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: 2024, italian
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Elaine 3 2024, audio 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> Il cognome delle donne 168849326 A breve distanza nascono il bel Fernando, Donato, che andrà in seminario, e infine Selma, dalle mani delicate come i ricami di cui sarà maestra. Semplice e mite, Selma si fa incantare da Santi Maraviglia, detto Santidivetro per la pelle diafana, sposandolo contro il parere materno. È quando lui diventa legalmente il capofamiglia che cominciano i guai, e un’eredità che era stata coltivata con cura viene sottratta.
A farne le spese saranno le figlie di Selma e Santi: Patrizia, delle tre sorelle la più battagliera, Lavinia, attraente come Virna Lisi, e Marinella, la preferita dal padre, che si fa ragazza negli anni ottanta e sogna di studiare all’estero. Su tutte loro veglia lo spirito di Sebastiano Quaranta, che torna a visitarle nei momenti più duri.
Con la freschezza dei 35 anni, Aurora Tamigio scrive al suo esordio un romanzo familiare dal respiro ampio e dal passo veloce, che trascina il lettore come un fiume: epica popolare, saggezza antica e leggerezza immaginifica, riso e pianto, e poi personaggi impossibili da dimenticare. Lo scrive come se fosse semplice, e non lo è. Semplice è leggerlo, non ci si ferma più fino all’ultima parola.
“Lo sapete, vero, che il cognome delle donne è una cosa che non esiste. Portiamo sempre quello di un altro maschio.�
“Comincia tu a tenerti il tuo, e poi si vede.�
Cosa resta dell’eredità delle nonne, delle madri, di tutte le donne venute prima di noi?]]> 416 Aurora Tamigio 8858858441 Elaine 4 2024, italian 4.29 Il cognome delle donne
author: Aurora Tamigio
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: 2024, italian
review:

]]> Greene on Capri: A Memoir 10798502 170 Shirley Hazzard Elaine 4 2013
Again, a peculiar and obscure book - but delightful for what it is, and the eccentric tastes to which it speaks.]]> 3.88 2000 Greene on Capri: A Memoir
author: Shirley Hazzard
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2013/06/07
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: 2013
review:
I was torn on this one. It's an Elaine 4, and probably an anyone else 3. I have a passion for Southern Italian islands and tales of expat life in a golden age that whenever it was was before my time. More importantly, Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene are two of a very small pantheon of literary gods that I absolutely worship. So, it's as if this odd little rambling and nostalgic book was a cocktail mixed just for me. As always, Hazzard's turns of phrase and trenchant observations enchant - so much so that I now have a reading list of now quasi-forgotten early-mid 20th century writers who washed up on Capri at one point or another, simply because Hazzard's allusions to them make them seem enticing. And she captures an intimate, loving if quite brutally honest, portrait of Greene. Capri itself (in a relatively unspoiled rustic state when there were still verdant farms and good simple trattorias) is so lovingly depicted that you can see, smell and taste it, and wish that you had not only a plane ticket but a time machine, so you could immediately go eat at pre-buffet-table Gemma's, and see a donkey stroll by... But the book is also a bit of a jumble - loosely connected anecdotes involving Italian and English intellectuals who Hazzard or Greene either knew on Capri, or knew of on Capri (clearly a wide scope).

Again, a peculiar and obscure book - but delightful for what it is, and the eccentric tastes to which it speaks.
]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Elaine 3 2024, audio 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> The Testament of Mary 23786243 The Testament of Mary tells the story of a cataclysmic event which led to an overpowering grief. For Mary, her son has been lost to the world, and now, living in exile and in fear, she tries to piece together the memories of the events that led to her son's brutal death. To her he was a vulnerable figure, surrounded by men who could not be trusted, living in a time of turmoil and change.

As her life and her suffering begin to acquire the resonance of myth, Mary struggles to break the silence surrounding what she knows to have happened. In her effort to tell the truth in all its gnarled complexity, she slowly emerges as a figure of immense moral stature as well as a woman from history rendered now as fully human.]]> 114 Colm Tóibín 0241962994 Elaine 3 2013
I think one of the things that is supposed to be interesting about this book, for an ex-Catholic like Toibin, is that the figure of maternity that has been worshipped for 2000 years as the all loving, all suffering uber-Mother isn't, at the moment of truth, that maternal. She saves her own skin. Her shoes hurt. She utterly fails to connect with her son and he with her, at any point where that could make a difference. Shocking? Thought provoking? Radical? It's not my tradition, so maybe not my place to say.

More an anecdote, than a novel. But well written, and with some very vivid moments.]]> 3.56 2012 The Testament of Mary
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/08/17
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: 2013
review:
This is a book that is very much in dialogue with the biblical narrative of Mary, and because I'm really not familiar with the details of her story or of the Gospels, I think that some of this book's power was lost on me. Like all of Toibin's work, it's very well written, at a sentence level, but by choosing to focus on only the last days of Jesus's life, it lacks the richness and emotional depth of some of his other books. We don't really see Mary as a mother raising Jesus, except in the briefest of flashbacks, nor do we see Jesus's transformation into a leader (a Messiah?) - by the time the "action" of the book starts, Jesus's life is coming to a close, and Mary is no longer even really in contact with him.

I think one of the things that is supposed to be interesting about this book, for an ex-Catholic like Toibin, is that the figure of maternity that has been worshipped for 2000 years as the all loving, all suffering uber-Mother isn't, at the moment of truth, that maternal. She saves her own skin. Her shoes hurt. She utterly fails to connect with her son and he with her, at any point where that could make a difference. Shocking? Thought provoking? Radical? It's not my tradition, so maybe not my place to say.

More an anecdote, than a novel. But well written, and with some very vivid moments.
]]> Before the Fall 26245850
Was it by chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something more sinister at work? A storm of media attention brings Scott fame that quickly morphs into notoriety and accusations, and he scrambles to salvage truth from the wreckage. Amid trauma and chaos, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy grows and glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, morality, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.]]> 391 Noah Hawley 1455561789 Elaine 4 2016
Long intro - way too long - much longer than the rest of this review will be. But all that by way of telling you that I could not really breathe while reading the opening chapters of this book. (Add in recurring nightmares about deep water, and you'll understand why I needed to switch books to fall asleep that night).

I read this book on a beach weekend, and it was the perfect beach read. A juicy thriller with well drawn characters, some lifestyle porn, a likable hero, unobtrusive writing, pretty tight pacing, and a quite satisfying plot, as such things go.

If I had a complaint, it's that there's a little too much fetishization of the uber-rich (but hey, we're all prurient about them), and a few too many incantations of how those who have billions are very different than you and me (true, but we get it!). But lifestyle porn is the salt on the margarita of a great beach read, so I'm not fussing too hard about the loving descriptions of townhouses and triplexes! ]]> 3.69 2016 Before the Fall
author: Noah Hawley
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2016/09/05
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: 2016
review:
So, I've been on a private plane exactly once in my life, in the year 2000. I was a young lawyer, and the junior member of a team headed to a meeting at a client located far from any major airports. On my own that trip would have meant a change of commercial planes followed by a reasonably long drive to the town where my client's offices were. Accompanied as I was (really, I was accompanying them) by some of the seniormost members of my firm, we instead headed out to Teterboro to get a "rent a jet" to the client. About 1/2 an hour into the flight, the cabin temperature began to climb until we were all sweating profusely and removing layers of lawyer clothing. They told us an electrical malfunction had occurred. Shortly thereafter, a smell of burning plastic filled the cabin, and a few coils of smoke escaped the malfunctioning a/c vents. The pilot said we'd be proceeding to the nearest airport - but assured us it wasn't serious. Nonetheless, he flew back at the lowest possible altitude, barely skimming (it seemed to me) the tops of buildings, presumably to increase our ability to survive an emergency landing/ditching the plane. Anyway, we made it. But it was one of the scariest 1/2 hours of my life. I wouldn't say the private plane option has insistently presented itself since then, but neither have I sought it out. I am happier on the big birds that make me forget just how irrational - and fragile - plane flight really is.

Long intro - way too long - much longer than the rest of this review will be. But all that by way of telling you that I could not really breathe while reading the opening chapters of this book. (Add in recurring nightmares about deep water, and you'll understand why I needed to switch books to fall asleep that night).

I read this book on a beach weekend, and it was the perfect beach read. A juicy thriller with well drawn characters, some lifestyle porn, a likable hero, unobtrusive writing, pretty tight pacing, and a quite satisfying plot, as such things go.

If I had a complaint, it's that there's a little too much fetishization of the uber-rich (but hey, we're all prurient about them), and a few too many incantations of how those who have billions are very different than you and me (true, but we get it!). But lifestyle porn is the salt on the margarita of a great beach read, so I'm not fussing too hard about the loving descriptions of townhouses and triplexes!
]]> <![CDATA[Eleven Days (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 17182207
Now she knows nothing more about Jason’s fate than the crowds of well-wishers and media camped out in the driveway in front of her small farmhouse in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, waiting to hear news. In a series of flashbacks we learn about Jason’s dashing absentee father, a man who said he was a writer but whose career seemed to involve being in faraway places. And through letters Jason writes home from his training and early missions, we get a picture of a strong, compassionate leader who is wise beyond his years and modest about his abilities. Those exceptional abilities will give Jason the chance to participate in a wholly different level of assignment, the most important and dangerous of his career. At the end Sara will find herself on an unexpected journey full of surprise.]]> 290 Lea Carpenter 0307960714 Elaine 0 to-read 3.69 2013 Eleven Days (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Lea Carpenter
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Need New Names 19420267
Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.

But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her--from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee--while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.]]> 305 NoViolet Bulawayo 0316230839 Elaine 3 2013 3.80 2013 We Need New Names
author: NoViolet Bulawayo
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2013/08/21
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: 2013
review:
Probably a 3.5. Pretty uneven. As it is really a collection of linked short stories, some have real power and some fall flat. Bulawayo can certainly write, and her use of English to capture different voices with entirely different linguistic backgrounds is really quite beautiful. But I felt that there were an awful lot of clichés jammed into one book - everyone acts like you expect them to act. That said I like the young female take on the immigrant experience, and also that it's Midwestern - so many of the immigrant stories you read are New York focused.
]]> Before the Fall 40670008 On a foggy summer night, eleven people--ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter--depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable the plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are Scott Burroughs-the painter-and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul's family.
With chapters weaving between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members--including a Wall Street titan and his wife, a Texan-born party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot--the mystery surrounding the tragedy heightens. As the passengers' intrigues unravel, odd coincidences point to a conspiracy. Was it merely by dumb chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something far more sinister at work? Events soon threaten to spiral out of control in an escalating storm of media outrage and accusations. And while Scott struggles to cope with fame that borders on notoriety, the authorities scramble to salvage the truth from the wreckage.
Amid pulse-quickening suspense, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, human nature, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.
]]> 401 Noah Hawley 1455561800 Elaine 4
Long intro - way too long - much longer than the rest of this review will be. But all that by way of telling you that I could not really breathe while reading the opening chapters of this book. (Add in recurring nightmares about deep water, and you'll understand why I needed to switch books to fall asleep that night).

I read this book on a beach weekend, and it was the perfect beach read. A juicy thriller with well drawn characters, some lifestyle porn, a likable hero, unobtrusive writing, pretty tight pacing, and a quite satisfying plot, as such things go.

If I had a complaint, it's that there's a little too much fetishization of the uber-rich (but hey, we're all prurient about them), and a few too many incantations of how those who have billions are very different than you and me (true, but we get it!). But lifestyle porn is the salt on the margarita of a great beach read, so I'm not fussing too hard about the loving descriptions of townhouses and triplexes! ]]> 3.69 2016 Before the Fall
author: Noah Hawley
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves:
review:
So, I've been on a private plane exactly once in my life, in the year 2000. I was a young lawyer, and the junior member of a team headed to a meeting at a client located far from any major airports. On my own that trip would have meant a change of commercial planes followed by a reasonably long drive to the town where my client's offices were. Accompanied as I was (really, I was accompanying them) by some of the seniormost members of my firm, we instead headed out to Teterboro to get a "rent a jet" to the client. About 1/2 an hour into the flight, the cabin temperature began to climb until we were all sweating profusely and removing layers of lawyer clothing. They told us an electrical malfunction had occurred. Shortly thereafter, a smell of burning plastic filled the cabin, and a few coils of smoke escaped the malfunctioning a/c vents. The pilot said we'd be proceeding to the nearest airport - but assured us it wasn't serious. Nonetheless, he flew back at the lowest possible altitude, barely skimming (it seemed to me) the tops of buildings, presumably to increase our ability to survive an emergency landing/ditching the plane. Anyway, we made it. But it was one of the scariest 1/2 hours of my life. I wouldn't say the private plane option has insistently presented itself since then, but neither have I sought it out. I am happier on the big birds that make me forget just how irrational - and fragile - plane flight really is.

Long intro - way too long - much longer than the rest of this review will be. But all that by way of telling you that I could not really breathe while reading the opening chapters of this book. (Add in recurring nightmares about deep water, and you'll understand why I needed to switch books to fall asleep that night).

I read this book on a beach weekend, and it was the perfect beach read. A juicy thriller with well drawn characters, some lifestyle porn, a likable hero, unobtrusive writing, pretty tight pacing, and a quite satisfying plot, as such things go.

If I had a complaint, it's that there's a little too much fetishization of the uber-rich (but hey, we're all prurient about them), and a few too many incantations of how those who have billions are very different than you and me (true, but we get it!). But lifestyle porn is the salt on the margarita of a great beach read, so I'm not fussing too hard about the loving descriptions of townhouses and triplexes!
]]> <![CDATA[Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie, #6)]]> 203164357 The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognize � a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick - except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the ‘sidekick� is DC Reggie Chase.

The crumbling house - Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton - suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it.

Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another The Woman with a Weasel, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow’s carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does The Woman with a Weasel hold? The puzzle is Jackson’s to solve. And let’s not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace.

All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house.

A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers.]]> 320 Kate Atkinson 0385547994 Elaine 4 2024 3.69 2024 Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie, #6)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Elaine 4 2024, audio
Unfortunately, the deliciously menacing and twisted character study melts away fairly quickly into a much more conventional story.

Nonetheless, I thought the writing was very strong, especially for a debut, and I was always eager to read on.]]> 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
Booker Book 9 of 13: 7/10. This book started wonderfully with a tone of psychological menace that deserved the comparisons I’ve seen in blurbs to Patricia Highsmith. That I guessed the twist from minute one is not really the book’s fault. I have family in the Netherlands and so I have my priors.

Unfortunately, the deliciously menacing and twisted character study melts away fairly quickly into a much more conventional story.

Nonetheless, I thought the writing was very strong, especially for a debut, and I was always eager to read on.
]]> Headshot 174156218 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors� pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 224 Rita Bullwinkel 0593654102 Elaine 2 2024 3.49 2024 Headshot
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Enlightenment 196774352 The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.

Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.

A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date. ]]> 384 Sarah Perry 0063352613 Elaine 3 2024, audio
The book loses steam, somewhat, in the 2nd half. The quest for the mysterious unhappy Romanian woman who lived in the local manor house in the 19th century and ties to the book's themes of astronomy and unrequited love never quite becomes a driving narrative force. It's always there, but the reveals are not very exciting and we don't get caught up in the thrill of the chase. At the end, her story is still very thin.

The struggles with faith that are central for many of the characters are not a theme that normally compels me, and Perry only intermittently made me care about them here. And the themes of astronomy and the way the characters' movements mirror those of stars and comets was admirably done, but didn't compensate for the feeling that the book was petering out rather than urging the reader to a conclusion.]]> 3.54 2024 Enlightenment
author: Sarah Perry
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
Booker Book 7/13: 6 or 7 out of 10. I loved the first part of this book. Although it starts slowly, it picks up steam, becoming a surprising and engaging portrait of a strictly religious family (father and aunt), their rebellious daughter, our "hero", a gay man bonded to the girl and with one foot in and out of the religious community, an eccentric Romanian drunk, and the "normal" men both the gay man and the girl love. These interesting characters hold our attention, and develop in ways that surprise us. (Oh yes, there's a delightfully smarmy villainess as well).

The book loses steam, somewhat, in the 2nd half. The quest for the mysterious unhappy Romanian woman who lived in the local manor house in the 19th century and ties to the book's themes of astronomy and unrequited love never quite becomes a driving narrative force. It's always there, but the reveals are not very exciting and we don't get caught up in the thrill of the chase. At the end, her story is still very thin.

The struggles with faith that are central for many of the characters are not a theme that normally compels me, and Perry only intermittently made me care about them here. And the themes of astronomy and the way the characters' movements mirror those of stars and comets was admirably done, but didn't compensate for the feeling that the book was petering out rather than urging the reader to a conclusion.
]]> Held 200241802
1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts whose messages he cannot understand .

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation.

Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From the WW1 battlefield where the novel begins, and its opening lines, Held is alive with "We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”]]> 240 Anne Michaels 0771005458 Elaine 5 2024 3.50 2023 Held
author: Anne Michaels
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves: 2024
review:
Booker Book 6 of 13: 9/10. A beautiful difficult book that bears reading and re-reading. Michaels makes you do the work to connect the fragmentary chapters which trace related - by blood or by friendship- people through the 20th century and beyond. The book touches on many big thenes: the border between life and death/love and memory, scientific discovery and the traumas of war, and how all these themes inform each other. I know I missed much of it - there are many historical breadcrumbs (Marie Curie makes an appearance but others are more subtle) to be followed- and I look forward to reading again and savoring all this. Michaels� prose is gorgeous, spare and epigrammatic but piercing and evocative. I could give this book the Booker.
]]> Wild Houses 128714412 A darkly funny and deeply moving debut novel about crimes of desperation, dreams abandoned, and small-town secrets that won’t stay buried

As Ballina in the west of Ireland prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer Cillian English and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night, he finds Doll—Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother—in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog, and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling that something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night, and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.]]> 272 Colin Barrett 0802160948 Elaine 3 2024 3.68 2024 Wild Houses
author: Colin Barrett
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: 2024
review:
Booker Book 4 of 13: 6/10. A fast ably put together read, although the terrain of Irish rural petty criminality feels perhaps too familiar. I never felt a deeper there when reading this book - it felt like a lesser included episode in a Paul Murray novel. That said, the writing was skilled and there was a bit of pleasant narrative tension.
]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Elaine 4 2024, audio 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
Booker Book 5 of 13: 8/10. This was my first Orange and his talent hits you hard, putting the complexity and heartbreak of the Native experience in the spotlight and not giving any easy answers. I really wish I read there there first, although the book does stand on its own. I loved the first part of the novel - taking us back five generations in the Redfeather family - I wished that each of the historical chapters were three times as long and that we could have spent much more time with the family ancestors. The modern day sections, which take place in the aftermath of There There, are perhaps more familiar in their tales of addiction and recovery but Orange’s ability to give us a multitude of believable voices keeps it fresh. Oh well, will have to read the prequel now!
]]> Cahokia Jazz 75584918 Golden Hill.

In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.

It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on—a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city's secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.]]> 496 Francis Spufford 0571336876 Elaine 4 2024 3.91 2023 Cahokia Jazz
author: Francis Spufford
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: 2024
review:
4.5 I just loved this book. A wonderful imagining of a United States whose native population was not exterminated but thrived into the 20th Century as an independent culture, modernizing as all cultures do, but maintaining a political and cultural state in the middle of these United States (and elsewhere - but the book takes place where St. Louis otherwise would have been). A fully realized alternative history and a thoroughly satisfying hardboiled detective story. Great characters and fantastic scene setting. Spufford is just so creative - and so thorough - you get lost in this very compelling, and tantalizingly heartbreaking because it didn't happen, other world. I'd happily read a sequel, though I suspect Spufford will go on to something else.
]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood Elaine 0 currently-reading, 2024 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: currently-reading, 2024
review:

]]> The Road to the Country 198563650 A sweeping, heart-racing, mystical novel about a university student in Lagos trying to save his brother, and himself, amid the chaos of Nigeria’s civil war—a story of love, friendship, and personal triumph by the two-time Booker Prize finalist and “the heir to Chinua Achebe� (New York Times)

“A wondrous novel.”—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All Stars, finalist for the National Book Award

“Chigozie Obioma is that rare thing: an original. His world is a mix of the real and the folkloric, and his writing sounds like no one else’s.”�The Wall Street Journal

The first images of the vision are grainy—like something seen through wet glass. But slowly it clears, and there appears the figure of a man.

Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer, he who marks Kunle as an abami eda—one who will die and return to life.

The story of a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire, Chigozie Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history of Africa. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is the masterpiece of Chigozie Obioma, a writer Salman Rushdie calls “a major voice� in literature.]]> 384 Chigozie Obioma 0593596978 Elaine 3 2024, audio 3.79 2024 The Road to the Country
author: Chigozie Obioma
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
A very well written and grueling novel of the Nigerian Civil War. Perhaps my favorite part were the mystical interludes, including the time in the land of the dead. The rest of the time Kunle’s odyssey is made up of the deprivations and brutalities of a losing war, and his impotence to help the people he loves even as he becomes- almost against his will - a brave and decorated soldier. I can say I appreciated this novel without ever really enjoying it. For a far more emotionally involving, and dare I say more politically illuminating, novel about the same period I cannot recommend highly enough Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is one of the best books of the 21st century.
]]> <![CDATA[The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth, #2)]]> 6570431 Old Filth has been acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, a book where life and art merge. And now that beautiful, haunting novel has been joined by a companion that also bursts with humor and wisdom: The Man in the Wooden Hat.

Old Filth was Eddie's story. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.

They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.

As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, the novel is a triumph. The Man in the Wooden Hat is fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power. It will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and so thoroughly satisfying.]]> 233 Jane Gardam 1933372893 Elaine 3 2010 4.04 The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth, #2)
author: Jane Gardam
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2010/03/04
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: 2010
review:
Charming and very well written, but there is a very English opacity to the characters and their feelings that keeps you from caring too much.
]]> My Friends 128657325
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

'I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice' Elif Shafak]]> 457 Hisham Matar 0241409489 Elaine 5 2024, audio
The book starts slow and the plot such as it is reveals itself in fits and starts. But the writing is gorgeous and what emerges is a quiet and heart wrenching portrait of a life lived in exile, of friendship and its comforts, but also of the loss when our friends grow and change.

All this against the backdrop of the tragedies and brief hopes of recent Libyan history.

An impressive and important talent]]> 4.35 2024 My Friends
author: Hisham Matar
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
I guess I’ll call this Booker Book 1/11 (read Strange Eventful History and James a bit far in the past to count): 9/10.

The book starts slow and the plot such as it is reveals itself in fits and starts. But the writing is gorgeous and what emerges is a quiet and heart wrenching portrait of a life lived in exile, of friendship and its comforts, but also of the loss when our friends grow and change.

All this against the backdrop of the tragedies and brief hopes of recent Libyan history.

An impressive and important talent
]]> One Perfect Couple 199798953 Harkening to Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, this high-tension and ingenious thriller follows five couples trapped on a storm-swept island as a killer stalks among them.

Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she’s pretty sure they won’t extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren’t going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, The Perfect Couple, she decides to try out with him. A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla find herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples—Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana—in order to win a cash prize.

But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real—and the stakes are life or death.

A fast-paced, spellbinding thriller rife with intrigue and characters that feel so true to life, this novel proves yet again that Ruth Ware is the queen of psychological suspense.]]> 385 Ruth Ware 1668025590 Elaine 4 2024 3.60 2024 One Perfect Couple
author: Ruth Ware
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: 2024
review:
Fun pacy light nonsensical. Perfect beach read. I’m indulging myself before my Booker sprint begins next week and this was great fun
]]> Westport 199408564 351 James B. Comey 1613165242 Elaine 3 3.79 2024 Westport
author: James B. Comey
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
Read these back to back. Fun light procedurals. The characterizations are quite broad and the plot twist such as they are or signal way in advance, but pleasant summer reading. Good parodic evocation of hedge fund culture
]]> Central Park West 62699619 The gripping crime fiction debut from former FBI director James Comey takes readers deep inside the world of lawyers and investigators working to solve a murder while navigating the treacherous currents of modern politics and the mob. When a years-long case against a powerful mobster finally cracks and an unimpeachable witness takes the stand, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton is looking forward to putting the defendant away for good. The mobster, though, has other plans. As the witness’s testimony concludes, a note is passed to the prosecution offering up information into the assassination of a disgraced former New York governor, murdered in his penthouse apartment just days before. It’s enough to blow the case wide open, and to send Nora into a high-stakes investigation of conspiracy, corruption, and danger. Drawing from the author’s decades in federal law enforcement, including his years in Manhattan as a mob prosecutor and later the chief federal prosecutor, Central Park West is a fast-paced legal thriller with an intriguing plot enriched by real-life details and experiences. That unique perspective gives the novel much of its allure, but it’s the unforgettable characters, shocking twists, and courtroom scenes as authentic as they are dramatic that will leave readers looking forward to more from this bold new talent in the genre.]]> 330 James B. Comey 1613164033 Elaine 3 2024 3.72 2023 Central Park West
author: James B. Comey
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Caledonian Road 199126293 A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising―and declining―fortunes.

Campbell Flynn, art historian and biographer of Vermeer, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public―yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. Entangled with a brilliant student, he begins to see trouble brewing for his family and friends. All his worlds collide―the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet―as dangerous forces enter his life and Caledonian Road gives up its secrets.
Andrew O’Hagan has written a social novel in the Victorian style, drawing a whole cast of characters into company with each other and revealing the inner energies of the way we live now.

“Not only a peerless chronicler of our times, O’Hagan has generosity, humour and tenderness, which make this novel an utter joy to read.”―Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage and Brick Lane]]> 614 Andrew O'Hagan 1324074876 Elaine 3 2024
O’Hagan wants us to dislike many of these people. The corrupt plutocrats from Russia, their craven vile upper crust British helpmeets, and the petty criminals who keep the wheels turning. And fine, we do dislike them. But I think we are supposed to have more mixed feelings about our “hero� Campbell Flynn, a middle class striver prone to (contradictory and often nonsensical) oracular pronouncements about the current moment, who is portrayed as some kind of truth teller and shatterer of shibboleths but never says anything that wasn’t hackneyed when I was a student in the ye old 80s. And we are certainly supposed to admire Campbell’s young genius mixed race foil, Milo, who is here to (literally) dismantle the old guard and usher us into a brand new day. But Campbell’s middle aged flailings never impressed me, and Milo is impossibly smug and holier than thou, so neither provides any relief from the general panoply of unlikeableness.

O’Hagen’s women fare better - Campbell’s wife Elizabeth has no discernible traits, other than to be loving and long suffering, but she is certainly not unlikable, and his sister Moira, a feisty Scottish MP, is one of the book’s most down-to-earth characters and most engaging. But this is really a male book and we spend very little time in the company of the female characters. In that sense, it reminded me of the “masterpieces� of the mid-20th century, which likewise dwell on the white male midlife crisis, and which really have never done much for me.

So, after all of that, why am I giving it three stars and not one or two? partly in recognition of the effort that went into creating this huge rambling book. Partly because the audiobook narrator hit it out of the park. And partly because I do enjoy books bring different social settings to life even if I longed for a tighter hand. ]]> 3.73 2024 Caledonian Road
author: Andrew O'Hagan
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/09
shelves: 2024
review:
Too long and everyone is so unlikeable. A lot of fun detail bringing different British milieus to life but boy does it go on. The name dropping - of brands, of artists, of writers - never stops, and with the enormous cast of characters you may be forgiven for scratching your head and asking who? as you read on.

O’Hagan wants us to dislike many of these people. The corrupt plutocrats from Russia, their craven vile upper crust British helpmeets, and the petty criminals who keep the wheels turning. And fine, we do dislike them. But I think we are supposed to have more mixed feelings about our “hero� Campbell Flynn, a middle class striver prone to (contradictory and often nonsensical) oracular pronouncements about the current moment, who is portrayed as some kind of truth teller and shatterer of shibboleths but never says anything that wasn’t hackneyed when I was a student in the ye old 80s. And we are certainly supposed to admire Campbell’s young genius mixed race foil, Milo, who is here to (literally) dismantle the old guard and usher us into a brand new day. But Campbell’s middle aged flailings never impressed me, and Milo is impossibly smug and holier than thou, so neither provides any relief from the general panoply of unlikeableness.

O’Hagen’s women fare better - Campbell’s wife Elizabeth has no discernible traits, other than to be loving and long suffering, but she is certainly not unlikable, and his sister Moira, a feisty Scottish MP, is one of the book’s most down-to-earth characters and most engaging. But this is really a male book and we spend very little time in the company of the female characters. In that sense, it reminded me of the “masterpieces� of the mid-20th century, which likewise dwell on the white male midlife crisis, and which really have never done much for me.

So, after all of that, why am I giving it three stars and not one or two? partly in recognition of the effort that went into creating this huge rambling book. Partly because the audiobook narrator hit it out of the park. And partly because I do enjoy books bring different social settings to life even if I longed for a tighter hand.
]]> Godwin 198563648
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the UK, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, the novel is both a tale of family and migration and an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.]]> 288 Joseph O'Neill 0593701321 Elaine 5 2024 3.54 2024 Godwin
author: Joseph O'Neill
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The House of Mirth 17728
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by ‘old money� and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something � fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a ‘suitable� match.]]> 351 Edith Wharton 1844082938 Elaine 5 2024, audio 3.97 1905 The House of Mirth
author: Edith Wharton
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1905
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> Long Island 199798893
Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 10 Colm Tóibín 1797174649 Elaine 4 2024, audio
Me and this book didn't get along as well as we might have because of the title. Brooklyn was imbued with a strong sense of place that resonated with me as a Brooklyn resident - Eilis lived near where I do, and worked in Downtown Brooklyn, and there were many details throughout the novel that made it special for me. My father's family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island at the beginning of the 50s, as do Eilis and all of Tony's family, and as so many families did, and I was excited for Toibin's take on this very specific American moment and landscape. Well, I guess I can forgive Toibin for not having the same interest in immersing himself in Lindenhurst as he did in Brooklyn, but the only Long Island in this book is in the title. The American chapters could be anywhere - there is no specific sense of place - and it's really an Enniscorthy book through and through. So that was a disappointment but an idiosyncratic one.

Back in Enniscorthy, we have a reconfigured love triangle to parallel the one in Brooklyn, and Toibin is quite masterful (of course) in showing the conflicting pulls of passion, duty, and community. But perhaps the best part of the book is the deftly sketched supporting cast - especially Mrs. Lacey, a rather comic delight.

The book can be leisurely but has its gentle rewards. I also love the way Toibin has been building a world all along - Nora Webster makes an appearance in this book, and while I couldn't figure out at first why I knew Nancy's backstory, after finishing the book, I realized she features in Mothers and Sons (and don't ask me why I can remember a book I read in 2006, but can't remember what I did last weekend :))]]> 3.94 2024 Long Island
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/14
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
3.5

Me and this book didn't get along as well as we might have because of the title. Brooklyn was imbued with a strong sense of place that resonated with me as a Brooklyn resident - Eilis lived near where I do, and worked in Downtown Brooklyn, and there were many details throughout the novel that made it special for me. My father's family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island at the beginning of the 50s, as do Eilis and all of Tony's family, and as so many families did, and I was excited for Toibin's take on this very specific American moment and landscape. Well, I guess I can forgive Toibin for not having the same interest in immersing himself in Lindenhurst as he did in Brooklyn, but the only Long Island in this book is in the title. The American chapters could be anywhere - there is no specific sense of place - and it's really an Enniscorthy book through and through. So that was a disappointment but an idiosyncratic one.

Back in Enniscorthy, we have a reconfigured love triangle to parallel the one in Brooklyn, and Toibin is quite masterful (of course) in showing the conflicting pulls of passion, duty, and community. But perhaps the best part of the book is the deftly sketched supporting cast - especially Mrs. Lacey, a rather comic delight.

The book can be leisurely but has its gentle rewards. I also love the way Toibin has been building a world all along - Nora Webster makes an appearance in this book, and while I couldn't figure out at first why I knew Nancy's backstory, after finishing the book, I realized she features in Mothers and Sons (and don't ask me why I can remember a book I read in 2006, but can't remember what I did last weekend :))
]]> This Strange Eventful History 201187765
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters� rich interior lives amid the social an]]> 448 Claire Messud 039363504X Elaine 4 2024 3.50 This Strange Eventful History
author: Claire Messud
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves: 2024
review:
This book snuck up on me. Like its surprising ending! At first, I thought it was too disjointed and unsatisfying for that reason - we start with one family member and then leap a decade into the future and find ourselves in the life of someone else. But the layers actually all add up to create very rich characterizations and a weighty and fascinating story. At the end, it becomes a story about the end of life and love at the end of life for two different generations. As the child of elderly parents who are devoted to one another, there was so much that resonated for me in these chapters. by the end, I was very emotionally involved and also wowed by Messud’s craft.
]]> Either/Or 58890783 From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 368 Elif Batuman 0525557598 Elaine 4 2024, audio
Less sex more travel in junior year, please!]]> 4.00 2022 Either/Or
author: Elif Batuman
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves: 2024, audio
review:
Noticeably weaker than the first book, although still quite enjoyable. Selin’s sexual experiences were almost photorealistic and certainly reminded us of some unpleasant truths of college and travel sex back in the day (and probably still now), but while the unpleasantness was part of the point, it quickly began to feel repetitive and nothing had the narrative compulsion of Ivan. Her observations on life and literature continue to be brilliantly on the nose of a certain kind of school at a certain time but the whole thing felt a little flabby this go round.

Less sex more travel in junior year, please!
]]> Symposium 69511
Symposium was applauded by Time magazine for the "sinister elegance" of Muriel Spark's "medium of light but lethal comedy." Mixed in are a Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent-a-butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman (a classic sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror) who has married rich Hilda's son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod's. There is also spiritual conversation and the Bordeaux is superb. "The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives. No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly." (The Independent on Sunday).]]> 192 Muriel Spark 0811216594 Elaine 5 2024 3.69 1990 Symposium
author: Muriel Spark
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/05/29
shelves: 2024
review:
What a beautifully done little mouthful of a book. Keenly observed and more than faintly menacing as is usually the case with Muriel Spark. And funny too. I could’ve read 200 more pages although it was perfect it ended when it did.
]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Elaine 4 2024, audio 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> The Island 922991
Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga - Greece's former leper colony. Then she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip...]]> 473 Victoria Hislop 0755309510 Elaine 2 2024 4.08 2005 The Island
author: Victoria Hislop
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves: 2024
review:
Kind of an interesting story - with the potential to have been even more interesting with some real character development. But so leadenly ploddingly written- it dragged on and on with the most clumsy prose and cardboard characters. I was visiting Spinalonga and Plaka - why I decided to read it - but that thread of interest was not enough to improve this book.
]]> Choice 150778991
Together, these connected narratives raise the How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.]]> 304 Neel Mukherjee 1324075015 Elaine 4 2024, audio 3.33 Choice
author: Neel Mukherjee
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> A Trace of Sun 196230296 ‘Don’t go Mammy please.� Stuttered words filled her ears, sent frissons of guilt through her as she bent over him; held him to her thumping chest. Tears sliding from her face to his.Raef is left behind in Grenada when his mother, Cilla, follows her husband to England in search of a better life. When they are finally reunited seven years later, they are strangers � and the emotional impact of the separation leads to events that rip their family apart. As they try to move forward with their lives, his mother’s secret will make Raef question all he’s ever known of who he is.

A Trace of Sun is, in part, inspired by the author’s own family experiences.]]> 389 Pam Williams 1915643368 Elaine 3 2024 3.75 2024 A Trace of Sun
author: Pam Williams
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The Sleepwalkers 176442759 From “one of the UK’s most interesting authors� (Kirkus Reviews), Patricia Highsmith meets White Lotus in this surprising and suspenseful modern gothic story following a couple running from both secretive pasts and very present dangers while honeymooning on a Greek island.

Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on a tiny Greek island for their honeymoon. It’s the end of the season and a storm is imminent. Determined to make the best of it, they check into the sun-soaked doors of the Villa Rosa. Already feeling insecure after seeing the “beautiful people,� the seemingly endless number of young models and musicians lounging along the Mediterranean, Evelyn is wary of the hotel’s owner, Isabella, who seems to only have eyes for Richard.

Isabella ostensibly disapproves of every request Evelyn makes, seemingly annoyed at the fact that they are there at all. Isabella is also preoccupied with her chance to enthrall the only other guests—an American producer named Marcus and his partner Debbie—with the story of “the sleepwalkers,� a couple who had stayed at the hotel recently and drowned.

Everyone seems to want to talk about the sleepwalkers, save for Hamza, a young Turkish man Evelyn had seen with some “beautiful people,� as well as the “dapper little man”—the strange yet fashionable owner of the island’s lone antiques and gift shop she sees everywhere.

But what at first seemed eccentric, decorative, or simply ridiculous, becomes a living nightmare. Evelyn and Richard are separated the night of the storm and forced to face dark truths, but it’s their confessions around the origins of their relationship and the years leading up to their marriage that might save them.

Exhilarating, suspenseful, and also very funny, The Sleepwalkers asks urgent questions about relationships, sexuality, and the darkest elements of contemporary society—where our most terrible secrets are hidden in plain sight.]]> 304 Scarlett Thomas 1668032988 Elaine 3 2024, audio 3.09 2024 The Sleepwalkers
author: Scarlett Thomas
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: 2024, audio
review:

]]> The Maiden 63106877
"In the end, it did not matter what I said at my trial. No one believed me."

Edinburgh, October 1679. Lady Christian Nimmo is arrested and charged with the murder of her lover, James Forrester. News of her imprisonment and subsequent trial is splashed across the broadsides, with headlines that leave little room for doubt: Adulteress. Whore. Murderess.

Only a year before, Christian was leading a life of privilege and respectability. So, what led her to risk everything for an affair? And does that make her guilty of murder? She wasn't the only woman in Forrester's life, and certainly not the only one who might have had cause to wish him dead . . .]]> 384 Kate Foster Elaine 2 2024
I also found the plot/writing level like what I would expect of a mass market bodice ripper (albeit a murderous one), not a prize list nominee.

It’s a fast fast read although once the central mystery is revealed you just wish the book would wrap up. ]]> 3.99 2023 The Maiden
author: Kate Foster
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves: 2024
review:
Not my thing: “historical novels� set in the late 17th century where characters say “you’ve always had a thing for him� and other cliches of 21st century chick lit speak. The sensibilities and motivations of the characters, as well as the dialog, are largely modern - only the settings, clothes and food are of the period.

I also found the plot/writing level like what I would expect of a mass market bodice ripper (albeit a murderous one), not a prize list nominee.

It’s a fast fast read although once the central mystery is revealed you just wish the book would wrap up.
]]> The Gentleman From Peru 55203986
Per vincere la diffidenza dei giovani, spiazzati dalle sue scomode verità, decanta loro le meraviglie della zona: una zona che frequenta d’estate fin da quando era bambino, piena di risonanze legate al mondo della mitologia, come i Lugentes Campi, i campi del pianto, dove gli amanti infelici errano ricordando le loro pene d’amore. L’unica del gruppo che non sembra lasciarsi ammaliare dal suo fascino e dalla sua retorica è Margot, che Raúl inizialmente aveva chiamato con quello che secondo lui doveva essere il suo vero nome di battesimo, Maria.

Ma con il passare delle ore e dei giorni, dopo un pranzo condiviso e lunghe camminate sulla spiaggia, Margot comincia a fidarsi di lui, ad aprirsi� E Raúl la condurrà in un viaggio indietro nel tempo, verso un passato che li lega molto da vicino. Prenderà corpo una storia d’amore e di mistero, nel segno di quella delicata profondità nel raccontare i sentimenti che è un marchio inconfondibile di André Aciman.]]> 3 André Aciman Elaine 3 2024 3.54 2020 The Gentleman From Peru
author: André Aciman
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: 2024
review:
Super slight. I’m an Aciman fan and he conjures up Italy - and young passion- as wonderfully here as elsewhere. But this short novella or long short story feels like a concept that never fully hatched.
]]>