Murderland (2025) by Caroline Fraser

 Audiobook Review

Murderland (2025)

by Caroline Fraser

  Murderland has an interesting and persuasive thesis: That the spike in serial killing in the 60's and 70's was directly related to industrial activity poisoning children with lead and other toxic substances.  Fraser combines this narrative with capsule biographies of famous American serial killers- Ted Bundy gets most of the ink in Murderland. Fraser also intertwines her own memories of a girlhood in the Tacoma era- the epicenter for factory pollution and serial killers.  The business part of the story is familiar- Mid 20th century capitalism pursues profit at the expense of the environment.  I presume those who are interested in serial killers will know much of that stuff to- I'm not, and I don't know much about Bundy, so I found that bit interesting- Bundy was an audacious killer- he kind of embodies every stereotype that parents fear and his targets were anything but women on the margin of society.   Fraser's memoir material didn't do much for me. 

Seascaper (2025) by Benjamin Wood

 Audiobook Review

Seascraper (2025)

 by Benjamin Wood

  I'm sure I only heard about Seascraper, by English novelist Benjamin Wood, because it was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.  It was a good pick for an Audiobook because it is set in seaside village in the English countryside, so you get some good regional accents.  There is also a strong musical element in the plot, and in the Audiobook you actually get to hear the song that the protagonist writes in a moment of inspiration.  The setting is literally atmospheric- with dense, wet fog playing a key role in the development of the plot.  And, winningly, Seascaper is brief enough to be considered a novella, thought personally I would go with short novel.

Run Away Home (1997) by Patricia C. McKissack

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Run Away Home (1997)

by Patricia C. McKissack

Mount Vernon, Alabama

Alabama: 20/20

   Run Away Home is an actual children's book, not a YA Novel, which is refreshing in the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.   The line between children's and adult fiction is actually thinner than the line between YA fiction and adult fiction.  Literature is filled with children's books that have reached canonical status in the adult lit world, whereas YA fiction has provided many films and television shows with material for adaptation.  Run Away Home is about an Apache boy who escapes from a train taking his people from Arizona to Florida, where they were held for several years in the late 19th century.

   The young African American girl who finds him becomes attached, and the story, about the girl's father struggling to maintain his piece of land in the face of white resistance, is a familiar one. 

A Hall of Mirrors (1967) by Robert Stone

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Hall of Mirrors (1967)

by Robert Stone

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 8/28

  I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out.  A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974.  Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway.  I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly.  Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy. 

  No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s.  Cool.

Miami Blues (1984) by Charles Willeford

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Miami Blues (1984)

by Charles Willeford

Miami, Florida

Florida 1/23

    Charles Willeford is a genre writer of crime-fiction who was elevated after he died to canonical status. His publication history spans decades with hits from the 1950;s, Pick-Up(1955), Cockfighter from the 1970's and his hobo-memoir I Was Looking for a Street, published in 1968.   Miami Blues also got a successful movie version, starring Alec Baldwin as the villain.  Blues was the first book in his late career series Sergeant Hoke Moseley of the Miami Police Department.  I guess you could call Miami Blues his sell-out book, since Willeford's reputation is/was as a writer of crime-fiction, not police procedurals.  Miami Blues still represents a half-way point between a true expression of the police procedural genre since Moseley splits his protagonist duties with Freddy Frenger, the casual California psychopath who has relocated to Miami after being released from a California prison.

  Also memorable is Susie Waggoner, who was equally memorable in the movie as depicted by Jenifer Jason Leigh. Like all Willeford books, the casual brutality and it's equally brutal consequences- fake teeth, fingers chopped off, eyes gouged out, retains the capacity to shock after decades. If Miami Blues was published today it would still impress.

Forrest Gump (1986) by Winston Groom

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

\Forrest Gump (1986)

by Winston Groom

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 19/20

  It was back in August of 2025 that I tackled my first title in the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Now, here we are.  Most of the work was done in November- what stands out is that this was the first state where I decided to eschew Audiobooks on the theory that it would be insufferable having to listen to most of these titles.  I don't regret the decision, which means that I'm running three states ahead in Audiobook titles right now (Florida) while physical books are stuck back in Mississippi and Louisiana.   My Audiobook consumption is dropping precipitously- a trend which started last year but is really apparent this year.

   Forrest Gump is, of course, the source material for the Tom Hanks film.  I was surprised that the book Forres Gump is described more like John Cena, to use a contemporary example, than Tom Hanks.  He is depicted as six foot six and heavily muscled, which, we all know Tom Hanks is not.  Wouldn't call myself a fan of the film (who is?) but of course I saw it like everyone else.  As is to be expected, the book is sharper on the edges than the Ron Howard directed film.  Gump is no racist, but the amount of n words thrown around was disturbing in a book published in the 80's that had little or nothing to say about racism. 

  There's also little of Mobile Alabama in the book- as the movie depicts, Gump appears Zelig-like at many of the most important events of the late 20th century. 

Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004) by Roy Hoffman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004)

by Roy Hoffman

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 18/20

   This is the first book wholly centered on the "Jewish experience" in this Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I myself have family who settled in Atlanta and later in Florida, so I have some idea about Southern Jews (I'm Jewish), but Chicken Dreaming Corn is a fairly conventional first-generation immigration novel about a family of Romanian Jews living in Mobile Alabama immediately before and during the Great Depression.

  Other than physical location there isn't much to distinguish the events here from similar titles from the New York chapter. Historically, Jews were prevented from owning land in much of Europe, and often physically restricted to urban environments, meaning that few Jewish emigrants became farmers in the United States.  In rural areas, they were travelling salesman and shop keepers.  The frontier nature of the Deep South/Cotton Belt in the early 19th century meant that successful Jews did become plantation owners, and the vice president of the Confederacy was Jewish.  Additionally, Jewish merchants and bankers played a key role in financing crops like cotton and getting them to domestic and foreign markets.

  This book though is just a narrowly depicted family history with none of that complexity of the Jewish experience in the South. 

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) by Antonio Munoz Molina

 Audiobook Review

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) 

by Antonio Munoz Molina 

  I really enjoyed To Walk Alone in the Crowd (2021), the English translation of Munoz' 2018 book- not quite a novel, not quite non-fiction, about the pleasures of walking a city i.e. ode to the flaneur.  Personally, I love strolling through a city, even if my chosen city, Los Angeles is not on anyone's list of top cities to perform this activity.  By contrast, Your Steps on the Stairs, is clearly a novel, even as it shares the same digressive DNA as Crowd.  It's about a late-middle aged Spainard, who, at the beginning of the book, has been "forcibly retired" from his corporate job in New York City, and is engaged in preparing a Lisbon apartment for the arrival of his partner, a female scientist.   From page one, any reader is likely to suspect what I suspected- something is amiss.

   As the plot slowly winds, Munoz treats the reader to all sorts of observations about Libson, New York City and contemporary relationships.  There are some surreal moments, such as when the narrator attends a terrible party given by a pop star who has recently purchased one of the mansions on the edge of Lisbon and realizes that most of the attendees are hired for the night- by his own handyman.  It makes for great Audiobook listening- ideal really, I highly recommend anything you can find by Munoz in translation.

Train Whistle Guitar(1974) by Albert Murray

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

Train Whistle Guitar (1974)

by Albert Murray

Gasoline Point, Alabama

Alabama: 17/20

    I know I've been saying this since I reached the halfway point, but I will be glad to see the end of Alabama.   Train Whistle Guitar, by noted African American critic and novelist Albert Murray, was a real discovery.  I'm not a jazz guy, so I haven't read any of his criticism, but I was vaguely aware of his influence on multiple generations of subsequent critics and scholars, and the fact that he lived long enough to see himself canonized.  Among his works of criticism, Train Whistle Guitar was the first in a series of novels following the childhood and adulthood of a Murray-like character named Scooter, who Wikipedia describes as an "alter-ego."

  Train Whistle Guitar is the rare 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that shows any kind of interest in modernist technique, specifically, there is no third person narrator voice giving the reader explanatory paragraphs- you are just in the world with Murray.  Reading this book in Court and at jail, it was clear I should have taken more time with it, so that I could focus on the technique, but alas. 

Slavery's Capitalism (2016) edited by Sven Rickert

 Audiobook Review

Slavery's Capitalism (2016)

edited by Sven Rickert

   One of the interesting by-products of the state-by-state, geographical approach of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, is that it really awakens an interest in the underlying history itself.  Since I've been reading about the south now for almost a year, naturally I've become interested in the history of the region, and specifically the economics of slavery.  The economics of slavery were a central to concern to both pro and anti-slavery forces until the matter was settled during the Civil War, and then after that both sides continued to make use of their propaganda-type arguments, which further obscured rational discussion and investigation of these issues.

  Both sides played their part.  Obviously, proponents of the Southern side do not want to dwell on the real economics of slavery- the whole idea is to drape the past with a gauze that softens the edges.  However, the North also did it's part, in that generations of Northern scholars have ignored or hidden the dramatic links between slavery in the American south and Northern capitalism.   I can attest to that based on my own trips to the Northeast, where I've visited a variety of history museums and read a handful of economic history books looking for scholars who make what seem like obvious connections. 

  Mostly what this book does is say these obvious things in print.  The format is uneven- it reads like a graduate level seminar where each participant submitted one chapter- many of the individual essays read almost like school projects, so mostly the value here is seeing the broad themes outlined in economic terms.  Specifically, you've got the economic ties between the slave holding south and northern (and European capitalism), they dynamic inside the south, namely the shift that occurred when the FOREIGN slave trade was abolished in 1808.  This book reveals the black line marking one era from the next.  Most Americans- and I'm talking the educated ones here, not the idiots, think only of this first part- the slavery of transatlantic importation of slaves.  Crucially though it is the second part- where slaves moved out of the older societies of Maryland and Virginia southward, culminating in the Cotton Boom of the early 19th century in present day Alabama and Mississippi.

 This is the distinctly American slavery this is more important to most African Americans, novelists and scholars. Both of modes of slavery where insanely cruel, but it was the trade within the United States that has really been highlighted for me both by this book and by the books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.