Last Post of the Year!

 Last Post of the Year!

  I'm proud of the way this blog has endured (for close to two decades at this point!)  The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project has been a huge boost for this blog.  I started in June of 2023 and 18 months later I've finished Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachussets, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Washington DC with Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina partially complete. I figure I'm something like 25 percent of the way through.  There have been many many many coming-of-age type books written from the perspective of adolescent girls and not enough older books but I've found it a valuable exercise.  Certainly, the domestic fiction is a good change from the fiction in translation and more esoteric titles I tend to prefer if left to my own devices. 

   2025 promises more of the same!  I will certainly wrap up the Virginia/North Carolina/South Carolina chapter in early 2025, then I will be moving on to both Pennsylvania and Georgia- two chapters at once for 2025.  Beyond that a recent career update means less driving and therefore fewer Audiobooks so enjoy the Audiobook heavy content of next year before it goes the way of my local music coverage.

   See everyone next year!!! Hope all my readers had a great one!  Thanks for reading.

Mobility (2023) by Lydia Kiesling

 Audiobook Review

Mobility (2023)

by Lydia Kiesling

  I checked the Audiobook of Mobility, the 2023 novel by American author Lydia Kieling after seeing it described as "the perfect novel for the Baku climate summit" in the New York Times last month.  I was intrigued at the idea that an American author, a woman, no less, had written a novel that was at least partially set in Baku- which sounded far more interesting than the usual:  books written about women struggling to live in America, either dealing with abusive fathers, husbands or partners, struggling with issues surrounding family, career and child-birth.   That is, in my experience, an accurate description of 90% of literary fiction written by American women.  My literary travels through the United States via the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project have left me with a profound lack of interest in the issues surrounding raising children in the USA.   Both in books in my experiences in real life it seems simply insane how OBSESSED "normal" parents are with every aspect of their child and its development, this despite the fact that basically every child is exactly the same (don't tell this to a parent!)

   Mobility, on the other hand is picaresque with a young woman, Elizabeth (or "Bunny" as she is known as an adolescent).  When we meet her she is a shy teen, the daughter of an American diplomat posted to Baku close to the end of the Soviet era.  Mobility follows her life as a young and then middle aged adult, where she works her way up the ladder of a privately owned "Energy Services" company while trying to navigate adult relationships and her Mom, who kind of falls apart after a divorce from her diplomat father.   It's not heavy lifting but it is nice to read about a female protagonist who has her act together.

1,001 Novels Chapter Five: Blues & Bayous, Deltas and Coasts

 1,001 Novels Chapter Five: 

Blues & Bayous, Deltas and Coasts

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida

   I'm running so far ahead on Audiobooks vs. Physical books that I thought it made sense to open up the next two chapters at the same time to take that into account.  Chapter five is distinctly the Southeast.  I'm surprised that Chapters Four and Five aren't reversed, since it makes sense to finish off the Atlantic United States before moving inland, which is what editor Susan Straight did.  I think that there is a strong argument for an alternative arrangements which would have gone from Chapter 2, New York/New Jersey to Chapter 3, Pennsylvania/Delaware/Maryland/DC instead of doing Delaware/Maryland/DC/Virginia /North Carolina/South Carolina.

  Besides stops at the Miami airport, brief trips to the Atlanta area to see family as a child and a post-graduation college road trip that saw a stop in New Orleans (where I got food poisoning and spent all night throwing up), I have no experiences with any of these states.  During visits to Nashville I've pondered a drive to northern Alabama, home of Muscle Shoals and NASA, but that is a tough sell.  Similarly I've thought about driving south from Nashville to Mississippi and non-New Orleans Louisiana but it doesn't seem likely to happen in my current lifetime. 

   Maybe this chapter will change my mind!

1,001 Novels Chapter Four: Mountain Home & Hollows, Smokies & Ozarks

 1,001 Novels Chapter Four:

 Mountain Home & Hollows, Smokies & Ozarks:

Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas

   I have finished all the available Audiobooks for 1,001 Novels Chapter Three (Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina).  Now I'm opening up the next chapter, which covers Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas.  It's the first chapter in the 1,001 Novels: A Library in America project that doesn't feel organic.  Chapter one was New England, chapter two was New York/NJ and chapter three handles the Southern Atlantic up to Georgia.   Chapter four, on the other hand, blends the Northeast Urban center of Philadelphia with the heavy Appalachian vibes of West Virginia and Kentucky and then appends Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas.  On the map, it makes sense, I guess but culturally it seems far from distinct.  Looking ahead I do see the very first repeat author- Tobias Wolff, who represented New Jersey with The Final Club and remerges in Pennsylvania with Old School.  It is hard to figure how Wolff would be the first and not Colson Whitehead or Philip Roth, but here we are.     

  I don't have very strong connections to any of these locations.  Both my parents come from St. Louis, Missouri, so I travelled back there a decent amount as a young child but only twice since college.  I've been to Nashville escorting my partner, who had a client there for close to a decade.  As part of that experience we've rented a car and driven around the area, up to and over the Kentucky border.  I went to Philadelphia as part of my junior high trip to the Washington DC area, then we drove through Amish country on the way to DC, but that is the extent of my experience in PA.   I have never been to Arkansas.  I have a plan that involves a trip to Arkansas and Oklahoma via flying into Dallas, but I'm not sure I'll ever make it.

  It looks like the Audiobooks are going to be running months ahead of the physical books, so it makes sense to expand in two directions at once.

My Name is Barbra (2023) by Barbra Streisand

 Audiobook Review

My Name is Barbra (2023)

by Barbra Streisand 

  It is hard to do justice to the 48 hour long Audiobook of Barbra Streisand's autobiography. It is important for a prospective listener to know that the narrator is none other than Barbra Streisand herself AND that many of her recordings are used when they are mentioned in the reading.  The listener learns many, many things about Streisand and I'm sure that is the case whether you are an ardent fan or someone who only knows her as a pop-culture reference point (me).   Begin with her troubled relationship with her only surviving parent (her Dad died when she was a young child), her Mom.   Streisand and her Mom do not have a great relationship which is a frequent theme early in the book and continues to be a surprisingly robust sense of ire all the way through to the end.  Streisand delves heavily into her emotional relationship with Virginia Clinton, Bill Clinton's Mom, in the same chapter she is lambasting her own Mother for skipping her big Las Vegas anniversary show, Streisand is in her late 50's in this chapter.

   Next is her status as an actress, not a singer and later as an actress/director/producer, not a singer.  It's hard to overstate Streisand's lack of interest in her singing career despite it being her voice that leads her to nearly immediate fame as a teenager.  Streisand is not a song writer, nor an arranger of music, so most of the stuff about her singing are details about her relationships with different writers, arrangers and producers. As a result, those looking for some insight about music career might leave disappointed.  On the other hand, those interested in hearing about every damn details about every film she has ever made- get excited!

House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Danielewski

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Danielewski

Rappahannock, Virginia

Virginia 11/17

  Hard pass on the idea of re-reading this 800 pager.  It's the first cross-over book in this chapter between the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list. 

Published 5/1/18

House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Danielewski

   Like Donnie Darko or Infinite Jest, House of Leaves is a love it or hate it proposition, an 800+ page book containing a half dozen different narrative voices, typefaces, page layouts and the most footnotes in a novel I've ever seen outside of the aforementioned Infinite Jest, which, now that I think about it, used end-notes, not footnotes.   The two major narratives in House of Leaves are about a purported documentary film about a house that contains infinite space inside of it AND a story, told in the footnotes, of a late 20th century LA hipster type who discovers the manuscript about the documentary film in the bedsit of a Bukoswski like deceased hobo.

  I was astonished- astonished- to learn for the first time of this book via the 1001 Books project. Not because I particularly liked it or anything like that, but just that it very much seems like something someone I know would have read or told me about.  It may be simply that it was published at a time- I was in law school in 2001- when I wasn't really tracking on new books.   The copy I read- a 2nd edition, is the cleaned up, big budget version that includes not only the novel but a companion piece, called The Whalestoe Letters, which are letters written by the institutionalized mother of the LA hipster type who authors one of the two major narratives in the book.

  At times, the "infinite house" at the center of House of Leaves, and the explorations within, seem to comment on the eccentricities of post-modern criticism: People wandering around in an infinite darkness, unable to derive any specific meaning from their experience.   Such postmodern fuckery was hardly novel in 2000, when House of Leaves was published, but Danielewski brings a certain counter-cultural swagger that obviously appealed to the readers who made it such a cult hit. 

The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020) by Grady Hendrix

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020)

 by Grady Hendrix 

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 7/14

  I hadn't heard of author Grady Hendrix before I read his book so I didn't know until after that Hendrix is a writer of what you might call horror-comedy.   Based on the title and the opening chapter I had assumed this was going to be some kind of cozy mystery/comic novel cross-over but as it turns out the horror is taken quite seriously and as I progressed to the business end of the vampire hunting there were several truly horrific scenes:  An old woman eaten alive by rats,  a book club member raped by the suspected vampire and a method of vampire feeding that involve suckling on to the inner thigh of the victim.   These Charlestonians aren't part of the planter aristocracy or the South of Broad professional set, rather they are a bunch of housewives in the traditional sense of that word- five women who do  not work outside of the home and have dedicated their lives to raiding children and taking care of their thankless husbands.

 The issue is, of course, that no one takes their warnings seriously forcing them into a DIY vampire hunt.   The South Carolina stuff is pretty muted- it's clear from the accents of the characters that this book takes place somewhere in the suburban south, but it could have been anywhere.  

The Looming Tower (2006) by Richard Wright

 New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century(#55)

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)

by Richard Wright

   The Looming Tower is a non-fiction account of the "road to 9-11."  It landed at #55  on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list and unsurprisingly it isn't a very popular Audiobook.  I did find the story interesting, specifically the way Al-Qaeda arose from a bunch of stuff that had literally nothing to do with the United States- the Egyptian repression of Islamists that led to the further radicalization of the incarcerated, the history of Saudi Arabia and the role of Bin Laden's dad in developing the infrastructure of that country and of course the fervent US support of the very same Jihadis who became our worst enemies after 9/11 but were our friends during the war in Afghanistan.

  Another theme that emerges is just how kooky Bin Laden and his obsession with hitting the United States were in the context of the global movement for jihad.  Many of Bin Laden's own people thought he was out to lunch and other US targets:  The Taliban and Saddam Hussein to name two, were only peripherally involved and on-board with Bin Laden's dramatic plans.   The other side of the coin is Wright's investigation of the failure of United States intelligence to disrupt and prevent 9/11.  Here, I was reading as a criminal defense attorney who knows a lot about law enforcement and I finished The Looming Tower with the conviction that, yes, more could have been done particularly in the area of collaboration between the FBI and CIA which was prevented for some reason I still don't understand.  On the other hand, it's hard to prevent an attack that no one had even conceptualized before it happened.   Wright is able to point to scattered foreshadowing but there really was very little to hone on before the attacks occurred.

  

The Invention of Wings (2014) by Sue Monk Kidd

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Invention of Wings (2014)

by Sue Monk Kidd

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 6/14

  I've finished all the audiobooks from the Delaware to South Carolina chapter of the 1,001 Books project, so I'll be moving on to Pennsylvania in one direction and Georgia in the other- fewer than half of the books on this list have Audiobook editions so I suspect I'll be done with all the Audiobooks from this list months and years before I finished reading the rest.   The Invention of Wings is a based-on-a-true-story about the abolitionist daughter of a South Carolina slave-owning plantation family and her relationship with her slave-maid, Handful.  Both characters assume narrating duties, meaning The Invention of Wings takes 14 hours to tell a seven hour story.   The abolitionist daughter, Sarah Grimke is based on a real person with the same biography.

   It's a pretty boring story, to be honest- with no sex (Grimke lives and dies a virgin) and little violence for a book that theoretically chronicles the slave holding society of South Carolina.  The plot even includes a slave revolt, and the resultant violence is limited to one oblique hanging.  I'm pretty sure that is not how that went down. 

   

Citizen (2014) by Claudia Rankine

New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (#34)

Citizen (2014)

by Claudia Rankine

    This is another non-fiction title from the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.  I also think it is the ONLY book that is classified as poetry that made the list- which tells you all you need to know about the status of poetry in the literary world in the 21st century.   I listened to the Audiobook and it sounded more like a series of experiences in prose than poetry but maybe the poetry is clearer in print.  The Audiobook was under four hours making it one of the shortest books on the entire list.   My take away from this book was a better understanding of the concept of "microaggressions"- which as a cis white male working as an attorney in a rapidly diversifying legal system- I feel like I need to be aware of in order to be a good professional citizen.  As Rankine makes clear, the line between thoughtlessness and out-and-out racism can be hard to judge, and putting the hearer in that position makes their life difficult.  Citizen is a good example of a book that is useful to read so you don't have to work out your understanding of race based microaggressions with African Americans you know.

  A theme that has come up again and again in the non-fiction portion of the 100 Best 21st Century Books list is that even people who despise racism and consider themselves liberal and or "friends" of the African American people can be just as bad, if not worse than out and out racists.   Another theme from Citizen is that it can be exhausting to be a high-achieving African American who is deputized by the whites around them to be THE African American in all things concerning race.  People don't want to do that- it's exhausting and sucks the life force out of people.   A final theme that stood out is the daily compromises that high achieving minorities have to make simply to exist in certain environments while white people- particularly white men like myself can simply exist.  

  One example I was thinking about both in this book and in Heavy- where the author makes his way in academia, is the idea of the brilliant, disheveled defense attorney- something I've tried to embody in my professional life.  It is literally unthinkable that a latino or African American defense attorney could dress the way I do (carelessly) with little attention to grooming, and have it pass as normal and acceptable behavior.  Similarly for women of all races- the pressure that non white men have to maintain their appearance is ridiculous and terrible. 

The Hunt Club (1998) by Brett Lott

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hunt Club (1998)

by Brett Lott

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 5/14

   The Hunt Club is what you call an interesting failure- half of a conventional thriller about greed and life in South Carolina as seen through the eyes of the 15 year old protagonist and half a work of literary fiction about said 15 year old and his family.   It doesn't really land either punch, but it is short enough and there are enough interesting moments to make it a worthwhile read- certainly within the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American it is a good representative of South Carolina, with plenty of tromping about in the marshy landscape of the area north of Charleston.   One of the things I've learned from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project is that there are geographical similarities between the low lands of South Carolina and the swampy wetlands of southern New England- at times I feel like the descriptions- here of lowland South Carolina could equally apply to summertime New Hampshire.

  The Hunt Club has several of the worst tropes in thriller/crime fiction including multiple scenes of various villains loudly explaining what they are doing to people they intend to murder in cold blood.  I've never understood it since seeing James Bond villains do it as a child.  So much talking but at least The Hunt Club was short.

Heavy (2018) by Kayise Laymon

 New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century #60

Heavy (2018)

by Kiese Layman

   One thing I love about reading is that it allows you to engage in serious subjects in a thoughtful fashion without having to TALK to anyone else about it.   If someone has an opinion or experience that is important to them they should write it down, preferably as a book, find someone who thinks its worth publishing and then publish it.  The further the experience is from my own, the more value I derive from the reading or listening experience.  I remember when Heavy- a memoir about the life of the author growing up as the precociously intellectual, overweight African American son of an equally intelligent single African-American academic mother in Mississippi and I ignored it because back in 2018 I wasn't particularly interested in what it was like to grow up obese and African-American in Mississippi. 

  In 2024 I found the Audiobook, read by the author, enthralling and the idea that Heavy is simply about being overweight is the descriptive equivalent of saying that Ulysses is about a guy taking a walk in Dublin.  One of the things I've already learned from the non-fiction section of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century is the impact that racism and poverty and overall oppression has on the physical bodies of African-American.   This author, who was the child of an extremely well-educated single Mother was not exempted from trauma but in his position as a teacher and author he is able to articulate his experience in a revelatory way.

   One of the points that I've seen again and again both in fiction and non-fiction about the African-American experience is that living in a society that continues to embrace the idea of white supremacy contributes to a deep stoicism in African Americans of all types- that these ideas are internalized and they cause disruptions in the process of developing a coherent self-identity which often leads high-achieving African-Americans into patterns of self-destructive behavior.  

   I thought Heavy was excellent and I'm glad it made this list so I finally compelled to read it.

Ellen Foster (1987) by Kaye Gibbons

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Ellen Foster (1987)

by Kaye Gibbons

Rocky Mount, North Carolina

North Carolina: 11/20

   The caption that 1,001 Novels: A Library of America editor Susan Straight wrote for Ellen Foster says, "In a voice like no other, a young girl tells the story of the dissolution of her family..."  I have to take issue with that statement, since the voice of a young girl in difficult circumstances is the single most prevalent voice in the entire 1,001 Novels project.  Every state has at least one book that could be accurately described the same way, and many of the large states have multiple books that could be described this way.   It's only a mild spoiler to reveal that the name of the book comes from the fact that Ellen, the narrator and protagonist, proudly takes the name of the foster family who takes her in, because she thinks "Foster" is their name, and a generic description.   Ellen describes a childhood that is utterly familiar to me as a result of all the similar books in the 1,001 Novels project:   One dead parent, one absent parent, an immediate family that isn't inclined to help.   Just about the only thing that doesn't happen in this book that a reader might reasonably expect is that the protagonist isn't sexually abused by a relative or friend of the family.    To be fair, she does have a distinctive voice, and it's a good Audiobook because it's just her recounting her history to the reader for the entire book.

Pulphead (2011) by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Audiobook Review

100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times 2024)

Pulphead (2011)

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Pulphead by journalist/essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan placed 81st on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.  It's a good example of how the lack of guidelines that governed the balloting process (the list was picked by a bunch of folks who were just asked to list their 10 best books published between 2000 and the present without specifying what "best" meant).    The first quality of the list that the aseembly process produced is that there are BOTH books of fiction and non-fiction and within both broad categories there are examples of multiple genres- so for fiction there are short story collections, novels and a couple novellas and then for non-fiction there is biography, memoir and books of essays.  Pulphead is a collection of long-form magazine articles that were published in places like the New Yorker and Esquire.  Sullivan is an obviously capable writer who reflects the teachings of "new journalism" (frequent asides about the relationship with the editors paying for his articles and his own presence as a protagonist) as well as the wave of identify based writing that has been in vogue in recent decades.

   Sullivan is a representative of what you might call the upper South- references to Kentucky and North Carolina as "home" and subjects like the Native American caves of the Appalachians and an article about a huge Church-rock fest that discusses his high school flirtation with Evangelical Christianity.    I enjoyed much of Pulphead- his music writing, in particular grabbed me to the point where I again caught myself wondering how I had never heard of Pulphead before the 100 Best Books list.  At the same time it was interesting that this book of magazine articles placed, at all, on this list.  

 If you look at the ballots section of the project very few of the voters placed more than a couple of books on the final list. Some voters didn't pick any of the final 100- James Patterson and Elin Hilderbrand, for example.  At the other end of the spectrum you have Harvard Lit Professor Anette Gordon-Reed, who placed 7 of her 10 picks and had three of the top 10 books.  Author Daniel Alcaron placed 9/10.  Of course, there is a bias towards recency but there seems to be some people who pick only "serious" books and others who defiantly stuck to what is popular.  Overall the serious people did much better than the popular people which suggests that the group definition of "best" has something to do with a traditional definition of literary merit- a challenging book which makes the reader work for a pay-off. 

Even as We Breathe (2020) by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Even as We Breathe (2020)

by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

227 Drama Road, Cherokee, North Carolina

North Carolina: 10/20

   Even as We Breathe is a pretty low-stakes work of historical fiction set at a World War II detainee camp for enemy diplomats (a luxury hunting lodge/spa situation outside Asheville). The narrator is orphaned high school graduate Cowney Sequoyah (Pronounced "County"), an Eastern Cherokee descended from the Cherokee's who hid rather than take the "Trail of Tears" march to the Indian territory of Oklahoma.  I was thrilled to encounter a book written from this viewpoint, which, despite an active interest in Native American themes I'd hardly knew existed- like I know they have a Casino on Eastern Cherokee land but that's it.  Wikipedia says that between 800 to 1000 tribal members remained behind- vs, the 15k odd that got moved out, so it is a rare POV.   

    The location of this title on the map marks it as the Eastern most point of the entire chapter from Maryland to South Carolina.  Only a half dozen books in the entire chapter are set "in the mountains," which strikes me as being an undercount, but it's likely subsidized by the states like Kentucky and West Virginia where EVERY book is a mountain book. 

    Aside from the POV- which is very interesting- the rest of the work is rote historical fiction with some family drama thrown in.   It made for a great Audiobook since it is narrated by the protagonist and he has an American Indian voice/accent that I don't typically encounter.

   

Harrow (2021) by Joy Williams

 Audiobook Review

Harrow (2021)

by Joy Williams

    I take some flack in my book group for reading prize winners but I stick with the approach because ANY literary prize is handed out by a bunch of people who take literary fiction seriously and are trying to make a point by awarding a specific prize to a specific book.  Any work of literary fiction that can win a major or minor prize is worth taking note of, because the over-under on "number of people who think a random work of literary fiction is great" is roughly zero.   I had checked out this very same Audiobook back in 2021 only to abandon it a couple hours through the eight hour listening length.   I revisited it after coming across the information that it had won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction back when it was published.  The prize itself only dates back to 2014 but it's done a decent job of picking relevant titles. James by Percival Everett is their pick this year, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was last year.  By those standards Harrow- a dystopian eco-thriller{?} and first novel by the well-known writer of short stories is a real left field pick. 

  What I remember from my first go-round in 2021 is that I had little idea what was going on- my number one indicator for gauging whether a book is "serious" literary fiction or not- lack of narrative guard-rails for the reader is the signal accomplishment of literary modernism.  But 2024 me would think that the combination of literary fiction and dystopian sci fi would have been appealing to 2021 me, so I wanted to unravel the mystery.   Second time through I had just as hard a time figuring out what was going on.  Like, sitting here right now I can't describe the third part of the book in relation to the first two parts.  Williams and her approach very much reminded me of the approach taken by George Saunders in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo- also a literary prize winner.  There, Saunders animated the graveyard with a polyphony of voices.  Here, Williams similarly throws voices like a short-story writer getting paid by the idea.  Her protagonist, Kristin, is a high-school/college age girl who is dismissed from her confusing boarding school situation after some kind of "final" collapse of civilization.

   She wanders in search of her Mother, who was last seen on the shore of a lake in what feels like Upstate New York at some kind of wellness conference.  When she arrives at her destination she doesn't find her mother but rather a run-down motel inhabited by a collection of elderly people who are each trying to commit a final act of terrorism against what is left of the world before they die, a quiet suicide now being somewhat de rigeur for Americans of a certain age.  There is also a 10 year old boy named Jeffery who constantly recites legal doctrines as a coping mechanism ("Before this he needed an inhaler") and his alcoholic mother. 

   But so far as anything happening in the book, there isn't a lot, just this girl Kristin talking to different people and those people relating their own stories before the focus goes back to Kristin.  There were passages where I could hear the greatness but getting that wrapped up in the listening experience would cause me to lose my grasp of the over-arching narrative- which is a very rare event in my reading life.  It really says something about the complexity of Harrow. 

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) by Alan Gurganus

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989)

by Alan Gurganus

Fells, North Carolina

North Carolina: 9/20

    This book is 700 pages long.  It isn't JUST 700 pages long- it is also a big ole physical 700 page book with smallish type and small margins.  Of course, I'd heard about this book before- Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All  was a monster hit when it was first published- especially for a 700 page work of more or less serious literary fiction.  It spawned a 1994 television mini-series which was also a hit, winning four Emmy's, and a musical version in 2003 (starring Ellen Burstyn) which flopped on Broadway and closed after one show(!).  Its length precludes a ready transition to the internet era, but I'd wager most active readers over the age of forty have at least heard of it.  

   For those unfamiliar, Oldest Living Confederate Widor Tells All is both the title of the book and an accurate description of the plot- a ninety nine year old Lucy Marsden, married to a 50-something confederate veteran at the age of fifteen, lives in a rest home and she is being interviewed by someone- there are frequent in-book references to the tape recording process of the interview.   Over the course of these 700 pages you not only get to hear Lucy's story- child bride, mother-of-eight and put-upon wife- but also the stories of her husband, her mother, her husbands mother, her husband's ex-slave and possibly the narrator's only friend and maybe more that I'm leaving out.  The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints and the use of a spoken idiom both conspire to lengthen Confederate Widow.  

  Lucy is a plucky, humorous narrator, and one aspect I couldn't get over is that her aw shucks, almost exaggerated southern dialect (which, mind you, constitutes almost the only distinct narrative voice for 700 pages) is something that young Lucy adopts to annoy her Mother, who raises her to be better.  Lucy has other plans, those other plans being married off to a fifty year old man before she turns 16.  

   The over-all vibe for me resembled that of John Irving- quirky, eccentric small-town types who experience both humor and great sadness- but in a humorous way.  In fact, if I had to make a one-line pitch for this book pre-publication it would be "John Irving but set in North Carolina"- Irving was at the height of his powers in 1989- that was the year A Prayer for Owen Meany came out. Also, in 1989, Alice Walker published The Temple of My Familiar and Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow) came out so Guraganus was right there and you could argue that this book would be a better representative in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list than is A Prayer for Owen Meany- one of several Irving novels on that list,

  There is no doubt it's one of the top books from North Carolina and a top 5 title for the sub-chapter (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) and top 10 for the full chapter.  Still, it is hard to imagine many people taking the time to actually sit down and read this 700 page book in 2024.  The late 1980s were different in that regard- you could publish a 470 page novel like London Fields by Martin Amis and EVERYONE read it.

  

South of Broad (2009) by Pat Conroy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

South of Broad (2009)

by Pat Conroy

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 4/14

   I will say that Charleston, South Carolina seems like the only globally interesting culture in this part of the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina).  The whole idea of the southern aristocrat comes alive in Charleston, which is also a genuinely interesting city which I'd someday like to visit.  Pat Conroy, of course, is one of the most well-known authors in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He achieved huge popular and limited critical acclaim for this novels, most (all?) of which were set in this part of the world.  Several of his books were adapted into big-budget Hollywood pictures that further cemented his place in the literary imagination of America.  

  South of Broad tracks the experiences of a group of friends from their time in high school in the late 60's to the present day- the book ends after Hurricane Hugo.  The narrator is Leo King, an obvious stand-in for the author.  The book traces back in forth in time from Leo's troubled childhood, marred by the suicide of hid older brother (this is the fourth or fifth older brother to commit suicide in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project) and his own mistake of being caught holding the cocaine of a popular athlete at a high school party.  Leo's Mother is a lapsed nun turned high school principal.  She is also a scholar of James Joyce, a fact that King/Conroy bandies about without it ever impacting the writing style or plot of his book.

  

 South of Broad is a great pick within the parameters of the 1,001 Novels project because Conroy's narrator is a newspaper writer who is himself obssessed with the beauty of Charleston.  He also does a good job explaining the different cultural dynamics of this place, though he seems a bit treacly in his sentiments.  At 20 hours, the Audiobook was no walk in the park, particularly in the early going, but as the plot cranks into gear I found myself enjoying the dramatic third act.

Absolution (2024) by Jeff Vandermeer

 Audiobook Review

Absolution (2024)

by Jeff Vandermeer

   Reading the latest Southern Reach book from Jeff Vandermeer is an exercise in self-inflicted pain.  For those who aren't keep track, Annihilation and it's follow-ups were always referred to as the Southern Reach Trilogy up until this, the fourth book in the series, was published. The reach of Vandermeer's enterprise was expanded by the movie version by Alex Garland, which polarized audiences when it was released but has gone to enjoy a succesful life in the stream-o-verse- I think I've watched parts of it on three or four different streaming platforms at this point.

 So three books in what do we know about The Southern Reach- we know something is going on in there, that the something changes and transforms DNA- turning peaceful bunny rabbits into crab eating monsters and possessing the capacity to create human-like doppelgangers.  We know that the investigation is being run by a shadowy government agency, or maybe even a shadowy government agency secretly ensconced within another, larger, shadowy government agency.

   Beyond that I don't really know, and frankly, I'm kind of done caring after this, the latest episode which mostly tells the story of "Old Jim" a washed-up, alcoholic CIA agent obsessed with his missing daughter who is posted to Area X prior to the time period covered in Annihilation.   There is also a portion told from the perspective of two different members of the all-male expedition that preceded the all female expedition of Annihilation.   Like all the other books in the series, Vandermeer never makes anything explicit, leaving the reader to ponder what to make of it all.   To be fair there were some heart stopping set pieces, like the aforementioned crab eating rabbits and a late scene where the Area tricks one of the male expedition members into eating the flesh of a dead comrade- which is, contrary to the rest of the series, described in such intimate detail that I had to turn the Audiobook off a couple times to keep myself from potentially throwing up in my vehicle. 

The Children of Men (1992) by P.D. James

 Audiobook Review

The Children of Men (1992)

by PD James

  I love the movie version of this book- I've watched it several times over the years, and I finally got around to listening to the Audiobook of the original book by PD James.  James made her name as a writer of detective fiction and it's one of three non-detective fiction books she published before her death in 2014.   I believe there are multiple versions of the Audiobook- I would imagine one before the film and one after to capitalize on the revitalized interest.  Whichever version I heard I didn't like the narrator, who had a stuffy, pedantic English accent (as befits the character in the book).  

  As one might expect, the book tells a related but different story than the film, which was obviously diversified in the hands of director Alfonso Cuaron.  In the book, the harsh treatment of would-be immigrants is mentioned as a concern  but not something encountered by the characters.  In the film, the immigrants and their treatment are at the center of the plot.  I found myself wondering about James and her motivation- my thought is that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood and A Handmaid's Tale, which was published in 1985, so it very well could have been in her mind when she first imagined The Children of Men.  I don't see anything in her detective fiction that would have triggered this dark, dystopian tale of a childless future (and neither did the New York Times, both before and after the movie was released.)

Black Mountain Breakdown (1980) by Lee Smith

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Black Mountain Breakdown (1980)

by Lee Smith

Black Mountain, Virginia

Virginia: 10/17

  Geographically speaking, Black Mountain Breakdown is just down the road from the last book, Big Stone Gap, and the two books combined are the only representatives from far western Virginia.   Unlike the last book, Black Mountain Breakdown is another book which epitomizes the preferred POV of editor Susan Straight:  Adolescent girl protagonist character, can't get her act together for reasons which are hard to understand, spends her life between periods of normalcy where a man takes care of her and longer periods where she is neither barely functional or actually institutionalized.  Crystal Spengler is the lady in question and maybe the best thing I have to say about this book is that the writing style was sophisticated/modernist enough to give me trouble in actually comprehending the book.   Only the last portion, where Crystal becomes the wife of a rising Virginia politician, really stuck in my memory.  Published in 1980, Black Mountain Breakdown still belongs to the gauzy/hazy era of mental health where people were afflicted with nameless maladies and institutionalized for reasons that had more to do with the judgments of the people around them than any desire to help the sufferer get better. 

Big Stone Gap (2001) by Adriana Trigiani

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Big Stone Gap (2001)

by Adriana Trigiani

Big Stone Gap, Virginia

Virginia: 9/17

  Finally, a book from this part of the country that wasn't narrated by a sad, abused white girl or her African-American counterpart.  My overwhelming impression of the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that of the perspective of an adolescent or pre-adolescent woman living on the margins of American society.  Which is fine, but it's hard to distinguish the perspectives from each other since every protagonist has almost the exact same background: limited/poor education, extremely limited geographical horizons and challenging family.

   Big Stone Gap, on the other hand, has an interesting and relatively sophisticated narrator- Ave Maria, the 30 something "town spinster" of Big Stone Gap, which guards the entrance to the Appalachians.  She runs the town pharmacy, which she inherited from her Dad and she has recently buried her Mother, who died after a long illness.  Her mother, an Italian immigrant, throws Ave's well ordered world into chaos when she reveals, after her death, that the man Ave thought was her biological father is not, and that instead her mom emigrated to the US from Italy after getting knocked up by a married man in her Italian village.

   This startling revelation sets off a chain of activity and provides most of the plot.  Generally speaking, Big Stone Gap is Hallmark movie/rom-com territory but I actually enjoyed listening to Audiobook Ave Maria and hearing about her life.  Some of Ave's tropes made me roll my eyes- like her insistence that she was the town spinster in her mid 30's, and her refusal to see the love that has eluded her has, in fact, been in front of her the whole time, but those are the rules of the rom-com/Hallmark movie.  I also enjoyed listening to her country accent- the Audiobook was narrated by the Author, so that was a treat. I wouldn't recommend this book but I didn't mind listening to it as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

Frederick Douglass (2018) by David W. Blight

 Audiobook Review

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

by David W. Blight

   Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight is another pick from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Time (#86).  I'm also looking for non-fiction titles to round out my fiction heavy reading list, and the Times list has plenty of non fiction titles.  Even within the non fiction world, "great man" biographies aren't my favorite, but Frederick Douglass strikes me as a worthy candidate, since he is the first African-American, chronologically speaking, who would merit this treatment under any "great man" type theory of history. This is as compared to the "ordinary man"/annales school of history which focuses on normal folks, in which case there are many possible candidates for the honor.

   I knew nothing about Douglass beyond the bare biographical details of his life: Born a slave in Western Maryland, he learned to read and write at a young age and then fled slavery to the north as a young man, where he became known as a strong and urgent voice for the end of slavery. As the book reveals, he spent most of his life on lecture tours although in the post Civil War era he assumed several government positions, including being the US Marshall for Washington DC and as an envoy to Haiti- the only sinecure for African-American diplomats in the world at the time.  The Audiobook runs 36 hours, and it is easy to imagine the exact same story as a work of fiction- any individual who charts a career path as an "orator" as Douglass did- in an era before amplification of the human voice- is bound to have a flair for the dramatic in his personal and professional life.  

  For most of his life- and certainly the early pre-Civil War part, Douglass worked closely with white abolitionists, who were both his sponsors and his audience. These relationships were often fraught with issues of financial dependency, and it's hard to not to see Douglass' desire to emancipate both African-American slaves AND himself from white partners as a double theme of the book through the end of the civil war.  Beyond his work as an advocate, Douglass was one of the first (the first?) African-Americans to travel the world (American and Europe anyway) and his biography also does justice to those impressions.  For example, there are at least a dozen descriptions of Douglass encountering racial segregation on trains and boats- including the detail that when he was appointed as the American envoy to Haiti he had to find a new ship to take because the captain of the first ship refused to transport blacks and whites together. 

   After the Civil War, Douglass' legacy is a mixed bag: He was there when the Freedman's Bank- a post Civil War financial institution designed to help newly freed slaves obtain financial independence- collapsed, taking the savings of many of its (black) patrons.  He also advocated for the annexation of Haiti and other Caribbean and Central American polities and generally served as an apologist/advocate for American colonization. Finally, after his long suffering wife died, Douglass married a white lady. which, again, was close to being a unique circumstance at the time.

  His family doesn't come off particularly well. Douglass felt a strong obligation to support his children and their children, but none them amounted to anything, and a few were out and out failures.   

The Kitchen House (2010) by Katherine Grissom

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Kitchen House (2010)

by Katherine Grissom

Tidewater, Virginia

Virginia: 8/17

   The Kitchen House by Katherine Grissom resides squarely in the "white lady book club" category.  It has a cover quote from Alice Walker(!) comparing it to The Help and my paperback copy had one of those complicated, multi-flap covers that only come with "Recommended by Jenna" stickers added or the like. Grissom blends the stories of a white child who is brought to a Virginia plantation with the story of her African-American counter-part, Belle, slightly older and way wiser in the troubling ways of pre-emancipation Virginia.  To whit, the ability of any white man to force himself on any black woman with legal impunity, and indeed, the ability to sell his own child should the mood or need arise.

  This dynamic is at the heart of Grissom's tale, and perhaps it is why an author like Alice Walker would agree to blurb the book jacket of a white author telling a story involving narrators of both races.  Here, the dramatic tension is maintained by the white Irish servant girl's very naivete about such matters.   Compared to other characters in the same circumstances, her ignorance often seemed comical but I suppose that is book-club land for you. 

The Last Days of New Paris (1998) by China Miéville

 Audiobook Review

The Last Days of New Paris (1998)

by China Miéville

  I'm a big fan of science-fiction, less so of fantasy.  Sure, when I was a lad I played by fair share of Dungeons and Dragons and read all the fantasy classics.  As an adult I enjoyed the Game of Thrones television series, but beyond that, regular fantasy just seems so tedious with its magical creatures that recreate the cultural preoccupations of whichever author is behind the keyboard.  I am, however, intrigued by the writers of the "New Weird" movement a genre that lands somewhere in between fantasy, science fiction and literary fiction.

  Chief among these is English author China Miéville.  The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate-history/fantasy novella about a group of surrealists resistance fighters battling Nazi's and otherworldly demons conjured up by a detonation of an "S-Bomb."  The thin plot, which involves running around a ruined Paris and fighting Nazi's who are seeking to capture control of the free-ranging apparitions wandering around post-war Paris with the help of Demons they've conjured from hell, is also an opportunity for Miéville to write about the history of the surrealist movement and animate some of those characters.

  I found it all pretty incoherent as an Audiobook, and I couldn't even make it through the Appendix, where Miéville pedantically explains all the surrealist references among his characters and his monsters- which often take their shape from the psyche of their surroundings(!?!).   The thing about fantasy is that you always know where it's going to end up- there is going to be some kind of a quest and the protagonist either does the thing or fails heroically.  It's like, people never sit down for a meal and a chat in fantasy novels.  

The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones

 Book Review

The Known World (2003)

by Edward P. Jones

  Pulitzer Prize winner The Known World by Edward P. Jones was the highest ranked novel on the the recent Best Books of the 21st century book that I hadn't read(#4).  I can't believe that editor Susan Straight didn't include it in her Virginia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, perhaps because she picked one of Jones' other titles for the Washington DC chapter.   Having now read The Known World, I found the exclusion baffling and I can't explain it except as an example of the firm one author/one book rule that seems to be operative within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Similarly, editor Straight left off Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which is set in South Carolina and also seems to be a victim of the one author/one title.

  Surely the one novel in American literature that covers the experience of African American slave OWNERS in the upper south is worth including in a project that shows the different experiences of Americans?  Looking into Edward P. Jones and his legacy, I understand how I missed it the first time around- Jones has the lowest of low literary profiles and never wrote a second novel.  Having read The Known World, I can understand why.  If you totally nail such a huge subject and everyone agrees that you nailed it and it is the best book on the subject, why bother trying to top it?

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) by Jacqueline Woodson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

by Jacqueline Woodson

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina: 3/13

   South Carolina is a geographically distinct state- the southern equivalent of Rhode Island on a bigger scale.  If you look at the map you can see that unlike Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, South Carolina is cut off to the point where it basically looks like a city-state surrounding Charleston.  It's not hard to imagine some alternative history where South Carolina extends across what became Northern Georgia, but the Spanish and French presence in the South precluded expansionism early on, and then Georgia took that part of the US for itself. 

   Brown Girl Dreaming is one of only four South Carolina titles that takes place outside of the Charleston/low country area- Greenville is located in the northwest corner of the state and I had to look up its Wikipedia page to find out that it has a population of 1.5 million.   Brown Girl Dreaming was another easy target- a four hour long Audiobook which is "written in verse"- not poetry, exactly, but not prose- really a succession of very short chapters telling the story of the eponymous protagonist/narrator, the daughter of a single mom from Greenville, who is herself the child of Jehovah's Witnesses. Mom doesn't observe the faith, but the kids do, particularly after Mom decamps for New York City.  Her children eventually follow her up there, and this is another example of a 1,001 Novels title that could be placed on more than one location on the map.  Here, I thought the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness was interesting and I believe the first book which touched on that particular experience but this book didn't add much to my understanding of South Carolina or Greenville- basically all the narrator does in Greenville is hang out with her grandparents and go door to door with her fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. 

   Like many novels written from the perspective of pre-adolescent children, there is, simply put, a limit to how interesting a child under the age of ten can be in the pages of a book- and it's an even sharper limit if the author adheres to anything close to realism.

Jim the Boy (2000) by Tony Earley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jim the Boy (2000)

by Tony Earley

Rutherfordton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 8/20

   Jim the Boy  was an easy mark- under 200 pages, written from the perspective of a prepubescent boy growing up in the 1930's.  Earley was named one of Granta's Top 30 Writers Under 30 at one point but the only novels he ever published was this book and a sequel published in 2008.  As with all of the authors I hadn't heard of before the 1001 Novels project, I checked out his New York Times coverage and found a really detailed review for this book and a somewhat less detailed review for the sequel and then a review for his most recent collection of short stories, published in 2014.  I guess it's not exactly a disappearing act but you'd hardly call him a household name.

  The most distinct aspect of Jim the Boy is the author's rejection of complexity that is inherent in choosing a 9/10 year old boy as the narrator and protagonist.  Like many of the protagonists and a few of the narrators, Jim isn't a complicated fellow.  This isn't a trauma narrative, but the opposite, a non-trauma narrative where the emotional peak is a back-alley confrontation in a small North Carolina town where Jim and a buddy are threatened by local streets toughs, and rescued by a friendly African-American.   In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another book within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that is so gosh darned wholesome. 

  The New York Times critic made a big deal out of the style back in 2000, which makes this book sound like a purposeful rebuttal to the frenzied Y2k era, but a quarter century later we have gotten no less frenzied.

Indigo Girl(2017) by Natasha Boyd

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Indigo Girl (2017)

by Natasha Boyd

West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 2/13

   I'm running two or three states ahead of reading physical books, so I'm listening to Audiobooks set in South Carolina and reading books set in Virginia.  That figures to be the major dynamic going forward since I'm almost positive I will close out all the Audiobooks from this chapter months before I finish reading the rest.   I liked Indigo Girl because it is set in the Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary period- when I started the 1,001 Novels project it was clear in New England that the editor favored contemporary stories over historical stories, and I accept that, but all things being equal, say a plot that is a bildungsroman about a young woman in a rural area of America, I'd rather read about the past than the present. 

  The protagonist of Indigo Girl is the oldest daughter of a British Naval Officer who is sent to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Daughter endeavors to save the family plantation by growing indigo, which has never been tried before in the Carolinas.  This character is a historical person- she ended up marrying Charles Pickney who was the father of one of the signers of Declaration of Independence.  The author added an afterword where she noted how she used historical artifacts- letters by the real version of her character- to give voice to her story. 

Indigo Girl was also interesting to me because it was set in the period before the slave rebellion's in Haiti solidified white opinion against a more genteel form of slavery.  One of the plot points in this book revolves around the fact that in the timeline of the story, South Carolina has recently made it a crime to teach slaves to write, though they did not make it a crime to teach a slave how to read, a fine point picked up on by the heroine and her husband to be, lawyer Charles Pickney. 

  It's not literary fiction, but as historical fiction goes it is well suited for its depiction of early Colonial Charleston.

The Book of Numbers (1969) by Robert Deane Pharr

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Book of Numbers (1969)

by Robert Deane Pharr

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 7/17

   I've got 10 titles to go for Virginia and I'm out of Audiobooks.  I actually had to buy a copy of The Book of Numbers, a lost classic by African-American author Robert Deane Pharr.  Like many of the lesser-known classics of post World War II African American literature, The Book of Numbers has some shocking language and behavior as judged by the standards of bourgeois white America.  Pharr writes about a fictional city based on Richmond Virginia and about the denizens of "the block," the only African American urban area in Virginia.  Once again, it's worth observing that in 1806 Virginia passed a law that required freed slaves to leave Virginia within 48 hours, and that undoubtably had an impact in reducing the native population of free African Americans until after the Civil War.  

  The main focus of The Book of Numbers is an African American racketeer named Dave and his mentor-sidekick Blueboy.  They blow into town with a bankroll funded by the insurance money Dave received from the deaths of his parents and proceed to start Richmond's first numbers racket.   I didn't know much about numbers before I started 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, but The Book of Numbers isn't the first or second book to use the numbers racket in its plot.  Pharr is very detailed about the ins and outs of the racket- one memorable chapter involves Blueboy and Dave trying to locate a printer who will print the triplicate pads required to run a numbers game.  This was also the first mention of how the numbers were generated- Dave would use the first three winners of horse races at various tracks around the country. 

  The language is very earth- tons of N-words and frank discussions of sexuality that still seem pretty racy.   There's also a cool blaxploitation era movie that you can watch on youtube.  The Book of Numbers was a real stand-out for me in this chapter  of the 1,001 Novels project.

   

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024) by Mariana Enriquez

 Audiobook Review

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

by Mariana  Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night. 

   

William (2024) by Mason Coile

 Audiobook Review

William (2024)

by Mason Coile

    William is an AI centered horror novel and I checked out the Audiobook after the New York Times gave it a great review last month.  The mere fact that the Times gave that many column inches to a work of genre fiction that was published under a pseudonym, no less (Mason Coile is the "open pseudonym" of award-winning Canadian author Andrew Pyper.)  The set up is that a pregnant tech billionaire and her agoraphobic husband are living in their state of the art "smart home" in the Seattle area.  Henry, the protagonist, is an engineer who spends his days working on "William" a spooky ai powered android that has no legs and a fearsome hatred of Henry and all of humanity.  The reader knows things are not going to go well and indeed they do not, with events starting to pile up after Lily, his wife, invites to work friends over for a rare dinner. 

  Although William clocked in at under four hours, Coile manages to intersperse the gory horror scenes with philosophical musings and a very big twist at the end.  It's worth a listen for the Halloween season!

Father of Lies (1998) by Brian Evenson

 Book Review

Father of Lies (1998)

by Brian Evenson

   The first Brian Evenson book I read was Immobility, his 2013 novel about a human-less post-apocalyptic scenario.   That was back in 2021.  Since then I've kept track of him- he's one of the few horror/sci-fi genre writers who commonly attracts attention from the literary fiction mainstream, which is enough for me.  Recently(2016 anyway), many books from his backlist were put back into print by Coffee House press, and Father of Lies (along with everything else he ever published) popped up on the Libby library app.  

  Father of Lies is an early work, a relatively straight-forward work of religio-horror about a psychopathic leader of a Mormon-like church (Evenson is from Utah and was raised Mormon).  In 2024, it sounds like a particularly sadistic retelling of the Catholic Priests vs. Young Boys saga of the past decades.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mormons are still in full on refuse to acknowledge/cover-up mode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the church which is depicted is only Mormon-like. 

  The horror is nothing you wouldn't read about in a newspaper story about Catholic priests abusing young boys- although he does murder one young parishioner after she confesses to being pregnant by her older brother.   This murder triggers a cascade of events which include a physical manifestation of Satan and lots of back and forth between him and his ever-supportive Church elders.  Events spiral when the mothers of three young church-members all come forward claiming that their young male children are victims of the protagonists vile abuse, and much of the horror comes from the support he continues to claim from the Church hierarchy who really stand by him all the way through the book.

Bewilderness (2021) by Karen Tucker

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bewilderness (2021)

by Karen Tucker

523 N. Main St. Troy, North Carolina

North Carolina: 7/20

   Due to my job as a criminal defense lawyer working in Federal Court, I have ample time to contemplate the vagaries of life as a drug addict, since that epithet describes many of my clients.  Thus, this novel, about two young, female opiate addicts living in the middle-of-nowhere North Carolina was always going to be a challenge for me.  I started by checking out the Audiobook but had to give up about a third of the way in because I simply couldn't stand the narrator/protagonist.   I am totally ok with drug addicts and their issues, but you have to be a pretty interesting drug addict to keep my attention, and this one was not.  It's interesting in that this is one of the first depictions of rural opiate addiction, which is a huge issue- even at the highest levels of national politics, but that doesn't make this a fun book. 

Sweetwater Creek (2005) by Anne River Siddons

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sweetwater Creek (2005)

by Anne River Siddons

Hunting Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 1/13

   Anne River Siddons was (d. 2019) a well-known writer of popular fiction of and about the South.  She never won any major literary prizes but she had some hits, and signed a 10 million dollar book deal at a time when that was still a lot of money.  Sweetwater Creek is the first book from South Carolina.  South Carolina has a pretty distinctive role in the history of the South by being a primary market for the slave trade.  At the same time, there is some of the social flexibility that is more typically associated with New Orleans- the idea of an urban class of free blacks and mixed-race people that is absent in other parts of the South. In Virginia, for example, freed slaves were forced to leave Virginia almost immediately upon pain of death, which meant that the population of free blacks was very limited. 

   Charleston also developed an intellectual culture that drew upon the outsiders who came and went for trading purposes- more outward looking than comparable locations in North Carolina and Virginia.  Which all goes to say that the area around Charleston is the most interesting place in this chapter.  Sweetwater Creek doesn't take place in Charleston but it operates in the orbit of Charleston, since the plot is a bildungsroman about a young girl who crosses paths with an alcoholic college age southern debutante who is in full flight from her life as a well-to-do young Charleston lady.   I listened to the Audiobook since it looks like I'm going to run out of available Audiobooks from titles in this chapter long before I finish reading the non-Audiobook titles.

  As Audiobooks go, it was one of the excruciating ones- with a third person narrator telling the story entirely from the perspective of this adolescent girl who has never left her Dad's spaniel raising operation in the South Carolina low country.  I lost track of the number of times the protagonist broke down in tears and ran crying to her room to be comforted by her dog.   I did think the depiction of the low country was really memorable and that was really the only thing that kept me slogging through the story to the end.

   

Roxanna Slade (1998) by Reynolds Price

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Roxanna Slade (1998)

by Reynolds Price

Macon, North Carolina

North Carolina: 6/20

    I'd never heard of Reynolds Price, a North Carolina-based author of some reputation. He was active for decades both as a writer and a professor- Roxanna Slade is one of his last books, and I imagine him writing a book from the perspective of a woman was a late career stretch for him.  Roxanna is a poor, uneducated white woman who narrates the book looking back at her ninety year long life, from her beginnings as a 18 year old bride, the birth of her two children, her struggles with depression during a time when there weren't many treatment options, a suicide attempt and then life as a single, older mother after her husband passes away in his 50's. 

  This is the rare book from this part of the country where race is a relatively minor issue.  Roxanna Slade's people aren't wealthy enough to have servants nor poor enough to be in economic competition with their African American neighbors.  Late in the book, Slade recalls her husband punching his long-time African American employee in the eye (and causing him to lose said eye) after the employee had been drinking and demanded back pay from her husband.  

   I recognized women from my Grandmother's generation in this book- women who were pushed into a domestic role in the home without a second thought or option and ended up living long enough to see what they missed. 

The Empusium (2024) by Olga Tokarczuk

 Audiobook Review

The Empusium (2024)

by Olga Tokarczuk

   Like many English readers, I hadn't heard of Polish author and Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk until the release of Flights in 2018- a translation from the original Polish which was published in 2007.  Since then I've kept up with her new English language releases- like many I found the similarities between Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, published in 2019(in English and 2008 in Polish), and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (published in 2020). No one ever got to the bottom of it! I also read The Books of Jacob- which I thought was really great but had zero and I mean zero, commercial appeal.

  The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story arrived late last month and I quickly got the Audiobook(!) version out of the library of the Libby app.  At 11 hours it was much shorter than The Books of Jacob and more in line with the standard length of a newly published novel.   Like every book I've read of hers except for Flights, The Empusium is going to appeal to a limited audience, fans of cheeky, feminist historical fiction with genre elements, provided here by the promise of a "horror story" in the title.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the horror is ever lurking and rarely front in center.  Instead, the reader/listener is treated to lengthy dialogues between the residents of a turn of the 20th century sanitarium which I believe is located in the Czech alps- or what would be a mountainous region of the Czech Republic today or maybe Austria.   

    I've actually learned a fair amount about sanitariums over the years from history and literary fiction- they played a prominent role in the settling of southern California vis a vis the dry client being ideal for sufferers of tuberculosis.  There's also the more contemporary understanding of the sanitarium as a predecessor/forerunner of the modern mental hospital/place to stash well-off people who are incapable of maintaining themselves in society- LGBT people, for example.   This sanitarium in this book makes use both of the tuberculosis model and the developing "science" of psychiatry- which- you don't have to be a Scientologist to point out issues with psychiatry. 

    So personally, I quite enjoyed it but it's another work of literary fiction which will have little, if any appeal to people who aren't already interested in fiction about turn of the century European sanitarium culture. Those showing up for the horror story will be left wanting.

Mattaponi Queen (2010) by Belle Boggs

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mattaponi Queen (2010)

by Belle Boggs

Mattaponi Reservation, Virginia

Virginia:  6/16

I love the Native American books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the different types of tribes out there but this was the first representation of the first peoples of Virginia, AKA the "Pocahontas" tribe that interacted with Captain John Smith.  They were and are a tribe of Algonquin speaking people who were members of the Powahatan chiefdom.  They have a rich and complex history but Mattaponi Queen doesn't really get into it, except to the occasional reference to a character who is absent because she left to act in Hollywood because she looked "just like" Pocahontas or another character musing about what a disappointment the real Pocahontas would have been to her family when she left for England in colonial times.

 The stories aren't all about Native American characters- both African American and White residents are represented, and this had the first story I can remember where I wasn't sure what race a character was until I really thought about it.  It's a rural milieu, so the stories in this volume resemble the stories from other run down, economically morose parts of the United States:  Health issues, poverty, a desire to escape coupled with an inability to do so- they all get ample space.  The dwarf river boat of the title doesn't appear till the end as part of a story about the owner and his desire to sell the boat and restore it at the same time.   

Annihilation (2024) by Michel Houellebecq

 Book Review

Annihilation (2024)

by Michel Houellebecq

  It's hard to be a fan of Michel Houellebecq in the United States- he's despised by the literary establishment, and the type of Americans who would be his fans typically aren't big fans of translated French literary fiction.  Thus, to read about Houellebecq in English language periodicals is to be subject to an endless stream of disdain with occasional concessions to his wit or powers of anticipation.  I wasn't surprised that the New York Times review for Annihilation, which is reportedly Houellebecq's last novel book?) struck this exact tone- using the cover of an opening about how an average American reader of literary fiction might become increasingly sympathetic to Houellebecq as additional drinks are consumed over the course of the evening. 

    Regrettably I agree with Dwight Garner's assessment, that this is far from Houellebecq's best work and it, in fact, frequently grim and nearly impossible to read.  The major theme here is end of life care and the issues surrounding euthanasia, interspersed with a strange and half abandoned techno-thriller angle and Houellbecq's typically fraught musings about relations between the sexes.   The inclusion of the techno thriller stuff gave me hope for at least some kind of mass market ambition, and it is impossible to know what to make of the fact that the plot line is abandoned two thirds of the way through the book.  Houellebecq's characters are, as always, hugely unlikable, that is nothing new, but there is a real lack of both wit and fun, which if you are going to put up with the rest of it, are what makes Houellebecq such a good read.

Jacob I Have Loved (1980) by Katherine Paterson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jacob I Have Loved (1980)
by Katherine Paterson

Ross Island, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

 Maryland: 10/10

  I thought this 1980 YA novel about living on an island was part of the Virginia chapter, but apparently it is not.  I didn't even know people lived on islands in Chesapeake Bay!   The book is about a young girl growing up on this island during World War II, more or less.  A mysterious stranger moves into town, there is a big storm, people go off to war, come back.  Narrator does nothing, goes nowhere.  The reader does get a very real sense of what living on one of these islands was like back in the day, so it makes sense that Straight included it in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project but other than that it's standard bildungsroman stuff here.

Playground (2024) by Richard Powers

 Book Review

Playground (2024)

by Richard Powers

   I like Richard Powers but I don't love him.  In many ways he's one of the last old white men if American fiction- he's managed to avoid irrelevance by winning major literary prizes and writing fiction that is broadly appealing to the biggest possible audience for literary fiction while changing things up enough to avoid charges that he is repeating himself or running out of new ideas.  One hallmark of Powers' fiction is his repeated ability to introduce non-fiction subjects into his prose:  Ecology, AI or, in Playground, the wonders of the oceans.  The weaving together of science and literary fiction is the essence of Powers and his appeal.  For me, his books are hit and miss.  Yes, I enjoyed The Overstory, but only read it after it won the Pulitzer Prize because "Richard Powers writes about trees" didn't sound interesting.  Afterward, I didn't regret reading it but I never think about it, talk about it or recommend it to anyone.

  Similarly,  I wasn't annoyed or uncomfortable reading Playground but nor was I ever compelled or emotionally triggered by the characters or the story.  Playground isn't a book I'll revisit and I really do doubt it's going to win a major literary award.  It got weeded out at the shortlist stage by the Booker Prize this year, which makes sense to me.  

A Stolen Life (1999) by Jane Louise Curry

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Stolen Life (1999)

by Jane Louise Curry

Shirley Plantation, Virginia

Virginia: 5/17

    The Shirley Plantation where A Stolen Life- which is a Newberry Prize winning Children's book, is set at the southern edge of an arc of territory that encompasses all of the books from Delaware, Maryland and Washington DC, and all but six of the titles from Virginia.  There's a clear dividing line between this territory, which is basically the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, and the rest of the area of Chapter 4:  western Virginia and all of North and South Carolina.  The defining characteristics of these books is their proximity to water and status as "old" parts of the United States, with a history that reaches back to the colonial era.  

    That brings us to A Stolen Life, about a young girl who is kidnapped (or "spirited" in the quasi-whimsical language of the time) away from her home in coastal Scotland and sold as an indentured servant in still-wild colonial Virginia.   If I have my history correct, the father of the protagonist is a rebellious Jacobite, and the reason for her kidnapping is tied up in her families decision to have her dress as a boy to avoid the wrath of the English king (for complicated reasons).  Thus, the spiriters take her for a boy when they grab her off the Scottish coast.

    A Stolen Life is a children's book, so her adventures in the new world, which include being kidnapped by Cherokees are decidedly PG but I enjoyed the rare depiction of life in colonial era Virginia.  

Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (1983) by Louise Shivers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (1983)

by Louise Shivers

Tarborough, North Carolina

North Carolina: 5/20

   Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail is another win for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: A regional work of fiction by a little-known author who I would have never read but for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  There's not much online about her- a stub-like Wikipedia page that mentions this book was named best first novel of the year by USA Today in 1983(!) and was made into  a movie in 1987, Summer Heat.   Her New York Times obituary noted the surprise success of this book- which was published when she was 53.

  Reviewers at the time compared her writing style to Flannery O'Connor, and author Mary Gordon had a role to play as well- selecting the manuscript out of a prize competition where she was the judge and sending it to her publisher.   The plot can be described in one line: Rural wife of a farmer has an affair with a hired hand with violent and predictable results, but like many books set in the rural south, it is all about the atmosphere.  The hot days, the sultry nights and the desperate need to escape- if not to another place then to another person, both themes that are active in this book. 

In West Mills (2019) by De'Shawn Charles Winslow

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

In West Mills (2019)

 by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
711 Main Street, South Mills, North Carolina

North Carolina: 4/20

  In West Mills was the debut novel by author De'Shawn Charles Winslow, about a fictional African-American community in the northeastern tip of North Carolina.  I really enjoyed this book, centered around Azalea "Knot" Centre, an unconventional woman who is a dedicated reader and equally dedicated alcoholic.   Set between the 1940's and the 1980's, In West Mills nearly takes place out of time- the characters are blessedly unaware of the societal upheaval that never reaches their little piece of heaven. 

  Most of the book concerns Knot and her decision to have two children and surrender them to her childless neighbors.  She is present as they grow up, and the plot expands to encompass her children and their lives as Winslow moves through the decades.  Knot also has her friends- Otis Lee, and Valley, the local representative of the LGBT community in West Mills.  She also has her enemies- one of her neighbors betrays her secret pregnancy and subsequent surrender of her children to her parents, and they refuse to talk to her for the rest of the book. In West Mills is unusual for the books from the south in that it is, basically, a book only about African Americans with little or no white presence.  Most of the books from the south contain both black and white characters, and the plots are often about their interrelationships.  Contrast this to the north, and New York City in particular, where single ethnicity books are the rule, rather than the exception. 

  Also this was a very good Audiobook.