The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukehjee

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

The Emperor of Maladies (2010)

by Siddhartha Mukehjee

#84

   I'm wrapping up the non-fiction portion of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times) list.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do the fiction portion, since most of the books I haven't read from that part of the list are books I already know about and don't want to read.   I'm busy enough with my day job these days that I don't feel compelled to read as much during my leisure time.  I listened to the Audiobook version over a period of months.  It's a 22 hour listen, and frankly, 22 hours of listening to the history of the treatment of cancer proved to be a bit of a slog. 

   The take-away is that curing cancer is incredibly complicated because cancer itself is incredibly complicated.  Really, the history of cancer is the history of medicine itself.  No disease has attracted more attention from scientists seeking a cure, and The Emperor of Maladies was written at the cusp of the modern period, where a decline in the cost of genetic sequencing of individuals has made "curing cancer" a realistic prospect for a small but growing cohort of sufferers.   The major issue, as it turns out, is that each cancer is genetically different, and a cure requires sequencing the genetics of the cancer cells for a particular person.  

   Mukehjee does have lots to say about the causes of cancer, which can either be incredibly reassuring or the equivalent of a death sentence with no execution date.  Genetics plays a huge role in who does or doesn't get cancer, as do environmental factors and personal choices, but it really isn't only one thing or the other.  One fact I did take away is that family history is super important- if cancer runs in your family you are susceptible to it no matter how hard you try to stay away from risk factors, conversely, if no one in your immediate family has had cancer, you are more likely to get away with risky personal choices and environmental exposure. 

The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) by Honore Jeffers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) 

by Honore Jeffers 

Eatonton, Georgia

Georgia 10/26

  I love a writer with some ambition, even if I don't love the book.  That's the case here with The Love Songs of WEB Dubois, a debut novel with some gusto written by author/professor Honore Jeffers.  It would be fair to call this book "over-stuffed" in that it covers multiple generations (and multiple characters within each generation) of a mixed-race but basically African-American family that has done well in 19th and 20th century Georgia without getting into any trouble.   The main protagonist is Ailey Pearl Garfield, one of three sisters and the daughter of a medical doctor and his wife.   She is pretty clearly a stand-in for the author herself, as her experiences and physical description mirror that of the author. 

 

  At 816 pages, the plot resembles something like a 19th century Russian novel written by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but the subject matter is distinctly modern, with a strong current of child-sexual abuse and its consequences running through the family from start to finish.  I thought The Love Songs of WEB Dubois wasn't perfect, but it was interesting, and it will certainly be a top 5 book from Georgia and top 10 for the Chapter (Georgia/Florida/Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi). 

Kira-Kira (2004) by Cynthia Kadohata

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Kira-Kira (2004)

by Cynthia Kadohata

Chesterfield, Georgia

Georgia: 9/26

   Kira-Kira is a YA book about the experiences of a Japanese-immigrant family living and working in rural Georgia.  In some ways Kira-Kira is different than the vast amount of immigrant struggle narratives in the 1,001 Books project, in that the family here works hard and doesn't spend the entire book complaining about how hard it is to be an immigrant in America, which, if you take the books in this project as the sample-set, constitutes about 90% of the immigrant experience.   It is similar in that, like other books told from the perspective of a young child, the protagonist doesn't go anywhere or do anything for the most part, just sits around and thinks about her family circumstances.    The benefit of that approach in the context of this particular project is that the narrator in these situations has plenty of time to slowly meander through whatever American setting is involved.  Here, it's rural Georgia, which is on no one's list of top places to visit.   At least the racism and discrimination experienced by this Japanese immigrant family is leavened by their unfamiliarity to locals.  

The Director (2025) by Daniel Kehlmann

 Audiobook Review

The Director (2025)

by Daniel Kehlmann

  I think Daniel Kehlmann is my favorite German-language author.  I enjoyed both Measuring the World- which is a 1001 Books to Read Before You Die pick, and Tyll, his medieval jester novel.  I like his take on historical fiction, dark, but also funny.  The problem with historical fiction is that it typically treats the past like we view the present i.e. a perfectible world with characters who possess a positive attitude about the capabilities of humanity to solve its own problems.  Of course, no one thought like this until well into the mid/late 20th century, and yet in work after work of historical fiction the protagonists evince an eagerness to investigate and solve problems that, IMO simply didn't exist in the past.  People just accepted shit, back in the day.

  The Director is about German auteur G.W. Pabst who inauspiciously left Hollywood right before the beginning of World War II to return to the embrace of the Reich, which chose to overlook his past indiscretions (he was own as "Red Pabst" because of his Communist sympathies) and co-opt his talents. After a slow start, The Director really picks up in the second act, when Pabst begins working for the regime.  After that point, it's a wild ride.

Eviction (2016) by Matthew Desmond

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

Eviction (2016)

by Matthew Desmond

#16

  The overriding theme of the non-fiction portion of the 100 Best Books of the 21s Century by the New York Times is "getting to know the underclass."  It is poverty, more than race or gender, which interests the voters for this project.  Like Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Eisenreich,  Eviction is a laser-focused sociology-inspired work of reportage from the front lines of the housing crisis as represented by Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Desmond moved into a particular trailer-park for some of his time researching this book, and the trailer park really takes center stage.

  My abiding conclusion after listening to Eviction is the same thing James Baldwin said, "Poverty is expensive."  In other words, if you can't exist on a day-to-day basis you end up paying MORE for things like food and shelter.  The best example from these pages is the practice of landlords having tenants' possessions removed to a storage unit facility, where they are then charged for keeping their possessions even after they are rendered homeless.  

Purple Cane Road (2000) by James Lee Burke

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Purple Cane Road (2000)

by James Lee Burke

New Iberia Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 3/28

    Purple Cane Road is one of 24 volumes in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series- about a Louisiana sheriff's deputy who isn't afraid to use investigatory techniques that should probably get him fired.  This being Louisiana, he does, not, apparently get fired in this or any other book.  He is also obsessed with the solving the mystery of who murdered his Mom (aren't we all?)  This book weaves what can only be described as a familiar mix of police procedural and criminal deviousness, with a well-mannered hit man and a loose-cannon sidekick filling in the cast.  I listened to the Audiobook- which- like some other parts of the country, I like because the narrators do accents that I could not do in my head.

Orleans (2013) by Sherri L. Smith

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Orleans (2013)

by Sherri L. Smith

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 2/28

   This is a YA post-apocalyptic title, set in a New Orleans which has been disenfranchised from the rest of the country after a series of horrific hurricanes and the consequent emergence of a fever which infected all the remaining residents.  I could not believe that this book- which is almost entirely about tribes divided by blood types and the raids that go back and forth as people try to steal blood from one another.  The narration is split between a local teen and an outsider, Daniel a scientist with the military who is researching a cure for the fever.

   Again, I was startled that a book marketed to teens would contain so many scenes of cringe-inducing blood theft and minors being raped as a matter of course, but what do I know.

The Long-Legged Fly(1992) by James Sallis

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Long-Legged Fly (1992)

by James Sallis

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana 1/28

   I have adjusted my approach to completing the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to reflect the fact that I am now driving less than I have been over the past decade.  I have less time to listen to Audiobooks in the car, and that makes me more selective about the titles I choose.  No more YA fiction or struggle narratives in Audiobook format, it's quicker and easier to just glide through the print copy since that category of book rarely takes more than an hour to read, but multiple hours to listen.  SO, while I read at one end of this chapter, Georgia, I'm listening at the other end: Louisiana.  And by Louisiana I'm mostly talking about New Orleans, which boasts 13 of the 28 titles in this subchapter.  Also I'd be willing to wager that many of the other Louisiana books set somewhere else on the map have significant action inside New Orleans.

   New Orleans is not a first-tier American literary city but it is certainly in the group after the first tier- I'd put in the same group as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.  It's an interesting place, and it has historically drawn writing talent attracted to the anarchy of New Orleans.  The Long-Legged Fly, by underrated author James Sallis, is a great way to kick off the festivities.  Sallis is best known today as the author of Drive-which was made into the Ryan Gosling movie.  The Long-Legged Fly was his first novel, about African-American detective Lew Griffin.  Fly is anything but a conventional detective novel, taking place across the decades to give a fuller portrait of the detective.  This is a great example of how good the 1,001 Novels project can get- because I'd never heard of Sallis before reading this book, and now I think I'll go on and check out his other books. 

The Cherokee Rose (2015) by Tiya Miles

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts(2015)

by Tiya Miles

Diamon Hill, Georgia

Georgia: 8/26

  The subtitle, A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, made it hard to take The Cherokee Rose seriously, and there is no mistake that is a work of fiction written by a historian, but I can see why editor Susan Straight would pick it because it talks about a little mentioned group: people with mixed African American and Native American lineage.  As recounted by this book (and something I knew independently before reading this book, but presumably something the "average" reader would be learning for the first time by reading this book), the Cherokee tribe had gone a long way to assimilation before they were forced off their developed lands in the southeast and forced west at gun point.

  The conventional whoa-is-me narrative surrounding the trail of tears does a particular disservice to the Cherokee nation by focusing on the least fortunate among them.  Wealthy landowners, often of mixed Cherokee/white heritage (but identifying as Cherokee) were able to relocate with their possessions, including slaves, intact.    After the removal, some African American slaves with mixed parentage were left behind for various reasons, and then the convention became to identify as wholly African American.  Finally, in the 20th century, there was a double reckoning, first among the remaining Cherokee people in Oklahoma, who had taken affirmative steps to disenfranchise those of mixed African America/Cherokee blood AND by African Americans in the Southeast who "rediscovered" their native roots in the 20th and 21st century.

  Miles awkwardly accommodates all these experiences in the context of a novel about a wealthy but frivilous African American woman from Atlanta with "mixed roots" who buys the plantation of a famous Cherokee landowner who left as part of the removal process.  There, she reconnects with a childhood friend with her own racial identity issues and a Cherokee journalist who mixed racial identity.  There is also, yes, a ghost, and an appropriately menacing white local.  Besides the very real and interesting historical perspectives, The Cherokee Rose is basically an LGBT friendly Hallmark movie plot.

Hunchback (2025) by Saou Ichikawa

 Audiobook Review

Hunchback (2025)

by Saou Ichikawa

Translation by Polly Barton

  It's been a slow year for literary fiction- compared to last year- by this point in 2024 I'd read 14 books published in the current year.  This year the comparable number of books is four, and none of them were particularly memorable.  Thus, Hunchback arrived as a minor revelation, a book which boldly does what fiction ought to do- generate empathy and understanding for a point of view which has been previously neglected or ignored.  Ichikawa, who suffers from congenital myopathy, has written a book which redefine the way most readers think about the severely disabled.  It's not a rah-rah look at me I'm amazing situation, nor is it inordinately bleak.  Ichikawa's protagonist and narrator is wry, self-aware and very horny- a situation which is exacerbated by her side hustle of writing porn for the internet. 

  The plot is slight, as one would imagine in a book written from the POV of a person who is basically stuck in her room all day. Basically, the narrator wants to have sex and then there are consequences. I think it's likely to be a memorable read for most readers.  The Audiobook was great.