All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006) by Edward P. Jones

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006)

by Edward P. Jones

Washington, DC

Washington DC: 4/12

    Edward P. Jones was the highest (#3\4) listed author on the New York Times Best 1001 Books of the 21st Century who I had never read (or heard of! Sad!).  His novel, The Known World was a Pulitzer Prize winner and general all-around banger.  It was preceded by one book of short stories and followed by a second book of short stories (this book).  Jones has the most iconic artistic biography I've ever seen- something approaching perfection in terms of the concerns of this blog.

   Jones left school in 1981 after he got his MFA.  His first collection of short stories was published in 1992, and I'd imagine he was working towards that since before he graduated from school, a decade long process of getting his short-stories published wherever and then convincing a publisher to take a chance on the collection.  That's a very standard first step for almost all the writers of literary fiction in the modern era.  Were one to pursue a path towards being a published author you would have to say, "OK, I'm going to spend at least five years actually writing short stories that possess some awareness of the market for short stories, I'm going to have to write more than one story, send them out to more than one publication, accept that people are going to be uninterested, keep going AND have some idea that this is going to work out and at the end of that I'm going to have to produce a novel."

    So Jones publishes Lost in the City in 1992 and it gets good marks. Enough to get his publisher, which gets purchased by HarperCollins in 1999- to put out his debut novel, The Known World, which is published in 2003, meaning that he completed it in 2002- a decade after the Lost in the City comes out, which, I think is the absolute limit for a reasonable length of time to elapse between publications.  There is no question that there is an ideal length between publication dates in all areas where market capitalism and artistic production intersect- a year between albums, two or three years between books, 3 to 5 years between films for a director, etc. 

   The Known World was a big bet- taking a decade to write and publish.  However, it was a hit.  He wins the Pulitzer Prize.  He starts teaching at George Washington University and then in 2010 he gets a full professorship.   In 2006, he published this book, another collection of short-stories connected to his first collection.  And that, my friends, is all he wrote.

  After The Known World placed number four on the best books of the 21st century list the Times sent A.O. Scott out to track him down and let him know.   It's just about a perfect interview- that of an artist who has said what he had to say and doesn't feel a need- either financial or psychological to continue to attract attention to himself.  Perfect!  That is the perfect artistic career.

Manywhere (2022) by Morgan Thomas

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Manywhere (2022)

by Morgan Thomas

Jamestown, Virginia

Virginia: 2/17

   Manywhere is a collection of short stories, many featuring "genderqueer" protagonists, set all over the rural and semi-rural south.  Many, many diversity points scored between the different stories and their locations and their characters: Rural, socio-economic, LGBTQ etc.   One story is historical fiction about an immigrant who lived as a man for decades before revealing themselves as a biological woman.  Another is about a transman who buys a pregnancy bump from Amazon and wears it to work, where her co-workers aren't aware of her background.  Not all the stories are about "genderqueer" characters- one story involves a young woman living in rural Oklahoma who becomes a surrogate for another couple after having a child of her own.

  The language is haunting and poetic, it was a good Audiobook to pick because of the lyricism of the language.

Headshot (2024) by Rita Bullwinkel

 Book Review

Headshot (2024)

by Rita Bullwinkel

   Headshot, by American author Rita Bullwinkle was the most surprising Booker Longlist title this year.  It was also our last book club pick- a decision that was made before the Booker announcement so...kudos to my book club.  Headshot takes place over a single weekend at a boxing gym in Reno, location of the women's under-18 national tournament.  Each chapter is a different bout- four fights in the first round, then the semi-finals and the final.  Each bout is told from the perspective of each fighter with Bullwinkle moving forward and backwards in time to tell us where the individual boxers have come from and where they are going.

  It's audacious technique and even more impressive because Headshot is only 224 pages long.  Author Bulwinkel has history with McSweeney's, and the combination of subject matter and technique reminded me of other offerings from McSweeney's affiliated writers.  

The Yellow Birds (2012) by Kevin Powers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Yellow Birds (2012)

by Kevin Powers

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 1/17

    Virginia is the most significant state hit I've tackled since I finished off New York and it's 100 books of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  This chapter has Delaware (3), Maryland (9), Washington DC (12) and North (20) and South Carolina (13).   Delaware and Maryland are both "minor" states and the rest are mid-range.  I have little personal experience in Virginia outside of the garden suburbs of Washington DC- which are just as likely to come up in the DC books as they are here.  As for the rest of Virginia... I drove through the state on my post-college drive back to the west coast, but didn't stop.  I've never been to Richmond, the location of The Yellow Birds, an Iraq war and its aftermath novel by Kevin Powers, and I've certainly never been to the rest of Virginia, so in that sense, I'm looking forward to learning some more about the state beyond what I know of its super racist history and purple state present. 

   

   The New York Times gave it a rave review in 2012.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award.  A movie version was released in 2017 with a cast that included Jenifer Aniston, Toni Collette and Jason Patric.  The movie version cost twelve million and made fifty thousand in theaters, which I think means that it essentially went unreleased.  It has a 44/37 split on Rotten Tomatoes.   The Amazon product page has 2000 reviews which is good but not great. 

 

 Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Times, called it "brilliantly observed and deeply affecting" and compared it to Tim O'Brien, specifically to his 1990 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried.  Thankfully, The Yellow Birds is not a collection of short stories.  It does track backwards and forwards in time in an attempt to find out what happened to Murph, a naive young soldier who Bartle, the protagonist and frequent narrator, swears to protect before they go off to fight in the first Iraq War.

   Powers intersperses the present- which is Bartle back in Richmond, living under a bridge by the river and bemoaning his PTSD with florid glimpses of the gritty, bloody scenes of the first Iraq War.  I'm a huge fan of reading about the horrors of war- the inevitable scene of field medics or the soldier himself trying to stuff his intestines back into his body after falling victim to an explosive is one of my personal favorites and of course it happens in this book.

     The secret at the center of The Yellow Birds left me a bit overwhelmed. In fact, I'm hard pressed to explain what Kakutani found so enchanting about the prose- maybe it was good timing on the part of Powers, publishing at the exact time when readers were looking for this particular perspective. In 2024 it's like, throw it on the horrors of the forever war pile.

Held (2023) by Anne Michaels

 Book Review

Held (2023)

by Anne Michaels

  Held by Canadian poetess/novelist Anne Michaels is the fifth of the six Booker shortlisted novels I've read this year.  The last, Stone Yard Devotional, is not out in the USA yet. I listened the live announcement of the shortlist this year on YouTube and one of the things the presenting Judge said is that REREADABILITY is an important characteristic of the Booker Prize since all of the Judges read all of the longlisted and shortlisted titles more than once in the course of the Judging period.  They start out with something over 100 books, which I have to believe they divide up, but after that the rereading begins.  I thought that was interesting because I almost NEVER reread books, and indeed, those books I've read more than once are basically books I'm OBSESSED with. 

 There are different ways to consider re-reading.  The first, is the passion for the book angle.  The second would be that the book is too complicated to be understood the first time, which also is congruent with the modernist-influenced prose favored by people "in the business" (i.e. English professors, graduate students) of literature.   So when I tell you that I would need to read this book again, like, immediately, to really get what was going on- take it as a compliment. I can tell you it takes place in several time periods, that the characters are related, that most of it takes place in England in the early 20th century, though several chapters take place in France during World War I. 

  Maybe that means Held is the winner- because it is the most difficult and therefore the most obviously re-readable book?   We will find out!

The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears (2007)

 by Dinaw Mengestu

Logan Circle, Washington DC

Washington DC: 3/12

  I certainly remember Logan Circle from my time in Washington DC, the more run down and decrepit cousin of Dupont Circle (home of the DC LGBT community) but always on the brink of revitalization and gentrification.  The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears is two things:  An immigrant living-in-America story, Ethiopian diaspora version and a gentrification novel.   The Ethiopian immigrant story-line I found compelling, the gentrification angle, less so, but overall this book fits within the 1,001 Novels project because it is so focused on the location of Logan Circle.

   The Ethiopian diaspora is the opposite from what many Americans, raised on images of starving Ethiopian children, might expect.  Ethiopia is/was an indigenous African empire, with its own elites- two of them- actually, and a host of what you might call "tribal peoples"- groups not really in charge of their own destiny under the Ethiopian Empire or the governments which followed.  The Emperor was deposed in 1974 by a group of Marxist revolutionaries who were largely led by the Omoro.  The Emperor was Amharic.  Thus, most of the Ethiopian immigrants fled in the aftermath of that change in power, and most of them were Amharic ethnicity people who were high-status Ethiopians under Selassie:  Wealthy, educated business men, soldiers, scholars and government officials.   

  They were all people who got to the United States of their own accord, using their own resources, and most if not all of them spoke English when they arrived courtesy of their educational background in Ethiopia.  In other words, the Ethiopian immigrants to America had as much to do with the starving Ethiopians of our television sets as the Pilgrims had to do with the Native Americans they destroyed.  

    Which all goes to say that the children of the Ethiopian diaspora were the children of educated people, and were themselves educated, even if the status of their immigrant parents didn't match their status in pre-Revolutionary Ethiopia.  It's a different immigration story than the proverbial tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free.   The literature of the Ethiopian diaspora reflects that background.  

   That difference has already been identified in the 1,001 Novels project courtesy of The Parking Lot Attendant (2018) by Nafkote Tamirat.  Both books feature shadowy elders with a hidden past and mysterious present and narrators who are younger, well educated, but with a feeling that they are neither Americans nor Ethiopians, and that they are in some sense only here in America temporarily.  Of course, that didn't really happen, even after the fall of the Marxists in 1991.  According to a report from 2018 there are more than 3 million members of the Ethiopian diaspora and over a half a million in North America.

    The center of the diaspora in North America is Washington DC and the surrounding suburbs- something that was very clear to me during college.  This book talks about entire apartment buildings in the Maryland suburbs filled entirely with Ethiopians and DC is chock a block with Ethiopian restaurants.   So, again, The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears, with its Logan Circle location, is very classically Ethiopian diaspora.   The gentrification angle- about a white lady with a young daughter who buys and renovates a decrepit old mansion, with sad and predictable results, was less compelling for me. 

Outlive (2023) by Peter Attia

 Audiobook

Outlive (2023)

by Peter Attia

    I'm not a big self-help guy but I'm always on the hunt for non-fiction Audiobooks and someone on my rec-league soccer team mentioned she was listening to this book.  I'm not a crazy bio-hacker nor obsessed with living forever but I do think it's useful to keep up on new developments in the world of health, exercise and nutrition, which is what this book is all about.  Attia IS very much one of these maniac bio hackers/ people who is obsesses with living forever.  He makes a living doing it- talking often about his practice where he advises healthy people how to stay that way.  There were frequent times in Outlive where Attia sounds literally insane, including the penultimate chapter on Mental Health where he recounts his pandemic era menty b that wound up with him having to do rehab for his feelings (that is not a joke.)   He is very much the kind of guy who spends twenty pages talking about how he is past forty when he realized getting enough sleep was important. 

   There is some irony in the increased importance of sleep to mental and physical health considering it is the medical profession itself that sets the professional standard for maniac sleep deprivation. You can't talk to a doctor for five minutes without them referencing it even if they are decades past that part of their professional life. 

   My take-aways from this book mostly reinforced what I've already learned in recent years.  First and most important lesson is that you need to do different kind of exercises- cardio, strength training and balance/stability work- it's this last category that was new to me.  It involves lots of supervised gym training- which seems like kinda bad advice, "Don't do this unless you can afford a personal trainer to closely instruct you" doesn't seem particularly actionable.  The idea is that it isn't enough to just build up your muscles, you also need to maintain and improve flexibility, balance and stability, since part of growing older involves losing these attributes.

  His nutritional advice also fell into the category of largely familiar but well developed arguments and explanations.  Sugar, of course, is public enemy number one these days and specifically the kind of "free sugar" or added sugar you find in soft drinks.  Heavily processed foods have largely replaced fat/cholesterol as enemy number two.  Attia goes to great lengths to defend dietary fat and cholesterol and gives frequent shout-outs to the meat-heavy keto approach based on his personal history.  He links together diet and exercise by arguing that the important thing about consuming carbs and sugar is that you exercise to use that energy up.  If you don't exercise, you can't eat those things, basically.   

   He develops a diet-agnostic approach to nutrition- it's not what specifically you eat but how much of it you eat of it, and what you do with the energy you take in.  That's one reason weight training is so important for long-term health- it's an easier sink for those calories than going for an hour and a half run every time you have a steak dinner.   Attia, for example, says he works out four times a week- just strength training.  He recommends "rucking"- which is walking with a full backpack on, over running for cardio. 

   I can see why this book was a hit.

Long Distance Life (1995) by Marita Golden

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Long Distance Life (1989)

by Marita Golden

Washington DC (Northeast)

Washington DC: 2/12

      Long Distance Life is another good example of the benefits of doing this kind of list-based reading.  It's a really good novel about the African-American experience in Washington DC, and almost certainly a book I would never have read or even heard about were it not for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project.   Long Distance Life is plot type 2, family saga.  It starts out with the matriarch of the family, Naomi Reeves, who leaves behind her sharecropper husband in North Carolina for a shot at something else in 1920's Washington DC.  She quickly manages to parlay work as a housecleaner into a small empire of rental properties.   She falls in love with a Marcus Garvey loving school teacher and they have a daughter, Esther.  

   Esther, of course, makes a series of what look like obviously terrible life choices:  Dropping out of Howard University in favor of having a child with a married man.  Most of the book involves mother-Naomi picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Esther's bad choice, and the impact that choice has on her two children, Logan, her first child and Nathaniel, the child she has with the same man after she works through her issues by volunteering as a Civil Rights worker in the deep south. 

  Golden's portrayal of African American life over the decades in Washington DC is lucid and clear.  She doesn't advocate or criticize her character's choices, preferring to let the narrative speak for itself.  Long Distance Life is a small gem of a book.