Nickel and Dimed (2001) by Barbara Ehrenreich

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: New York Times

Nickel and Dimed (2001)

by Barbara Ehrenreich

#57

   I actually remember the release of this book- I was surprised to find out it happened in the 21st century.  For me, one of the consequences of the rise of Trump has been a corresponding decline in the empathy in the real people depicted by Ehrenreich in this book: white, minimum-wage, poorly educated, with a myriad of health and housing issues.  These are, of course, Trump voters and it's hard for me to muster any kind of enthusiasm for their plight.   Ehrenreich spends each chapter in a different chapter: She starts in Florida, working in a restaurant and briefly, in a motel.  Then she moves to Maine- where she cleans houses in and around Portland.  She ends up in Minneapolis working in Walmart where she reveals that it was essentially impossible for her to get by on a minimum wage salary.

  In 2025, it is hard to imagine that anyone would feel bad for these future Trump supporters.  Ehrenreich is careful to keep her depictions positive- you don't hear any racist slurs or witness any of the kind of disgusting (spitting in customers food) type behavior that makes me reluctant to even eat at many sit down chain restaurants. 

  It's also worth noting that 25 years on and after eight years of Obama and four of Biden, no one has done anything to help these folks except by raising the minimum wage. It occurs to me that the best solution might be to hand the kitchen work and house cleaning over to robots and pay folks who can't hack it some kind of minimum amount of money to provide for food and housing.  The cost of shitty housing is one facet of Ehrenreich's poor people cos-play that stood out to me- because 25 years later it is still true.  Poor people often end up spending as much as a mortgage payment to stay by the day and week at SRO type motels and other temporary living arrangements which become permanent. 

  Surely, the need to provide more affordable housing options (or workforce housing, as they call it in some parts of the country) is a solution that all can agree upon.

Oromay (1983) by Baalu Girma

 Book Review

Oromay (1983)

by Baalu Girma

   Oromay is an Amharic language novel written by a member of the Ethiopian Communist elite circa 1980.  It proved, let us say, controversial in his native Ethiopia, where the Communist Derg were not known for their sense of humor, and where Girma was allegedly murdered by said Communist government of which he was a member.  Easy come, easy go! Oromay is about the lengthy, unsuccessful and ultimately pointless war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Historically, Eritrea was a province of the Ethiopian empire, and independence was tied to the Italian colonization of the area (the title of the novel is an Ethiopianisation of an Italian expression), but it was basically a decades long civil war that Ethiopia eventually lost.

   In this particular book, Girma covers one unsuccessful campaign among what had to be dozens, and adds an interesting entry to the shelf of books set in 20th century Communist dictatorships.  Honestly, the Ethiopian Communists don't sound half bad, so far as books like this one go. 

The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson

100 Best Books of the 21st Century- New York Times

The Argonauts (2015)

by Maggie Nelson

#45

  The Non-fiction portion of the New York Times 1001 Best Books of the 21st Century list should be subtitled, "How the Left Lost the Culture War," because all of these titles celebrate and draw attention to diversity, and different types of diversity, and it is exactly what the right is targeting when the eliminate "DEI" initiatives.   I've written on this blog about the importance I place on diversity and different viewpoints, and while I personally adhere to that view, it's also hard not to see things from the other side, particularly since the other side is in power and is doing whatever they want in that department.

   And of course, Maggie Nelson, is no doubt appalled beyond belief by Trump and Trumpism, although there are elements of her reference points which might suggest a post-modern-like joy at the bare face of evil power as it relates to issues like transgenderism and queerness generally.  At the same time, Nelson: a queer, sex positive lesbian in a relationship with a f2m/genderfluid artist (Harry Dodge), writing a book about motherhood and sexuality, is like, exhibit "A" in what the right has SUCCESFULLY critiqued about the left. 

  I imagine a member of the MAGA movement would read three pages of The Argonauts and as dismiss it as deviant trash, and it is the book that the New York Times represents as the 45th best book of this century.  Good for Nelson, Good for the Times, bad for the left and bad for the electoral potential of the Democrats in the middle of the 21st century.

Victorian Psycho (2025) by Virginia Feito

 Book Review

Victorian Psycho (2025)

by Virginia Feito

  I swear the E-book edition I checked out from the library managed to inform me that this book was already set to become "a major motion picture featuring Margaret Qualley" which seems almost impossible considering it just got released in the UK and hasn't yet been published over here, but such is the way of publishing rights- they can be sold before the book is even written- a la the Godfather by Mario Puzo which was under contract for a movie before Puzo ever set pen to paper.  Victorian Psycho is pretty much what the title promises, a Victorian-era riff on American Psycho with the nepo baby Investment Banker replaced by a Victorian governess.  What Victorian Psycho sadly lacks is any sort of narrative ambition, we learn, yes, that the Governess has had a difficult upbringing (who didn't, back then?)  The violent bits aren't particularly memorable.   The supporting cast, aka the wealthy family who hires this lady to work with them, are little more than collections of narrative conventions about the Victorians. In short, I was underwhelmed.  I will be interested to see the film.

The Unworthy(2025) by Agustina Bazterrica

 Book Review

The Unworthy (2025)

by Agustina Bazterrica

    I was excited for his novel by Bazterrica, author of the excellent Tender is the Flesh and a slightly less excellent but still very good collection of short stories.  The description had me drooling- promising a tale that combined dystopic lit and religious obsession.  To be fair, Bazterrica does indeed deliver on the promise, but in extremely minimal fashion, at 192 pages The Unworthy is in line with other recent works of literary fiction- short is in, unless it's an extremely long book, but I really wanted more.  The whole deal here is that this one of those books where the protagonist is keeping a journal a la Anne Frank- which, honestly, came to mind more than once while I was reading The Unworthy,  it's a technique that goes hand-in-hand with the development of the novel as an art form- Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, one of the first novels was an epistolary novel.  In that sense, it works that this book is so short, it's hard to imagine this protagonist getting deep into details when she is writing with ink she makes out of mashed up bugs.  Mashed up bugs, in fact, feature prominently, with the girls in the novel subsisting largely on a diet of crickets.  Not ground up cricket protein powder but actual crickets.   Ultimately, I thought The Unworthy was good but it didn't live up to my perhaps unrealistic expectations. 

The Watermark (2025) by Sam Mills

 Book Review

The Watermark (2025)

by Sam Mills

    I read about this book in the Guardian and it looked interesting so I checked out the E-edition from the library.  Sad to find out at the end that the print version has a "graphic novel" section that is simply translated into prose in the E-book.   Ultimately though I found the mechanics of the plot more interesting than the book itself, about two modern-day star-crossed lovers (a low achieving, well educated hipster and his morose artist girlfriend/soulmate) who are entrapped by a writer of literary fiction by use of a tea to become characters in his, and others, books.   While I won't be thinking about the characters or what happened in the book, the idea of these people being trapped as characters in a series of different novels, written by different authors, was really interesting and I can't remember reading anything along these lines that took it through so many levels- for a literary Inception type impact on the reader.   I wish the characters themselves were more interesting but five stars for the idea.

The Lost Steps (1953) by Alejo Carpentier

 Audiobook Review

The Lost Steps (1953)

by Alejo Carpentier

   I read about The Lost Steps in Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank- a book about the life of the 20th century novel.  The Lost Steps struck me as interesting- a pre/proto-magical realism work of Latin American fiction, about a guy living in an American city (New York?) who is dispatched by a museum to the wilds of Brazil to locate the "oldest instruments" in the western hemisphere.  Fortunately, Penguin just published a new translation (2023) done by Adrian Nathan West, who also translated the excellent book by Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World.  AND Penguin also did an Audiobook version, which is what I checked out from the library.

   I thought there were many memorable passages in The Lost Steps, and I enjoyed this book start to finish.  The protagonist is a frustrated composer working in advertising and he has a very existentialist vibe.  His adventures in Brazil are fun and the author and the protagonist stay away from racist proclamations about the indigenous Brazilians they encounter, which is welcome for a book from 1953.  Particularly memorable were his rhapsodic, Proustian passages about his relationship with music- again, unusual for fiction published in the early 1950's.  The Lost Steps maintained a modern feeling from start to finish and fans of Latin American lit from the first Golden Age should give this book a chance.

Plum Bun (1925) by Jesi Redmon Fauset

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1925)

by Jesi Redmon Fauset

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 6/27

   I've dramatically slowed down on the pace of 1,001 Novels: A Library of American because of less job-related driving (Audiobooks) and more job-related work (reading and writing and generally running around more).   Still, I was excited to listen to Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral which is a forgotten classic from a key (but largely forgotten) member of the Harlem Renaissance, Jesi Redmon Fauset.  Plum Bun is a novel about the experience of "passing" where (in this context) an African-American, usually a woman, abandons her racial identity in favor of living among white people.   It's a phenomenon that is best demonstrated in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing and the introduction makes a point of asking why the canon only includes one such tale.  From my perspective, it's understandable.  Larsen's book is centered around a woman who marries a white man who believes her to be white, and the resulting action is memorable and tragic.  

  In Plum Bun, on the on the hand, protagonist Angela Murray carefully avoids such a situation and generally speaking lives more like an existentialist hero- avoiding close attachments while yearning for them at the same time- than a heroine in a novel published in the 1920's in the US.  Plum Bun is also a book that seems somewhat randomly assigned to Philadelphia because Angela Murray grew up there.  Almost the entire book is set in New York City, and New York City is really the only place that the Author puts across to the reader- I didn't get much of a sense of Philadelphia at all beyond her childhood memories of "passing" with her mother, who was also light-skinned. 

Out in the Open (2017) by Jesus Carrasco

 Book Review

Out in the Open (2017)

by Jesus Carrasco

Translated by Margaret Jill Costa

   I found this book via the Libby library app via the "other books like this one" feature, which is especially useful if you are reading a type of book and want to read other books like it but don't know much about that area.  Here, I was reading another book translated from Spanish and Out in the Open popped up.  The story is about a child fleeing an abusive situation in an isolated environment. I had in mind the desert southwest or northern Mexico, though there are no place names or even personal names to help pin down the location or specific environment.  It's bleak, to be sure, but to call it "dystopian" as does the libby editorial copy seems a bit much.  Not every child wandering around in a featureless desert is living in a dystopia. 

The Ways of Wolf(2017) by James Carlos Blake

 Audiobook Review

The Ways of the Wolf (2017)

by James Carlos Blake

   The New York Times obituary for noir/crime writer James Carlos Blake caught by attention by not only comparing him to Cormac McCarthy but also by using this sub-header: "His savage fiction, set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, demonstrated his belief that “violence is the most elemental truth of life."   The fact that I'd never heard of him despite being a huge fan or McCarthy and decently well-versed in the world of crime fiction through friends & acquaintances is yet another example of how useful the New York Times obituary section can be for picking up new books to read.   Since he was a genre writer I thought I'd look for an Audiobook  but the only library available audiobook was the fifth volume in his Wolf family saga, about an Anglo-Texas cross-border family immersed in "the shade trade"- mostly selling guns to cartels as far as I can tell.

    Anyway, since I heard about Blake from a New York Times obituary, I'm not going to act like I'm on to anything here. I'm surprised there aren't Audiobooks available for all his titles.  I'm def going to look for his actual books when I am bookstores going forward.