Perspective (2025) by Laurent Binet

 Book Review

Perspective (2025)

by Laurent Binet

   This is pretty clearly a Laurent Binet riff on Umberto Eco or, more recently, Alvaro Enrique- i.e. a medieval who-dun-it with real life characters.  The plot involves a risque portrait of a duchess (or somebody like that) and the efforts her scheming father will go through to retrieve the portrait and her honor.   I was disappointed and barely paid attention, a sad miss for Binet, from my perspective, or at least not the kind of inventiveness I'd expected from his other books. 

Brother Brontë (2025) by Fernando Flores

 Audiobook Review

Brother Brontë (2025) 

by Fernando Flores

 I checked out the Audiobook of Brother Brontë from the library based on the capsule review in the New York Times book review promising Latin American themed/dystopian/literary fiction, and it was that, though perhaps it suffers from the narrow viewpoint common to many protagonists in post-apocalyptic fiction.  If you don't know anything different, what is there even to say about the situation.  Here, Flores hedges his bets by making one of the young-ish characters a "last bookworm" sort of heroine.   Various elements flash into view and then disappear, rendering the proceedings closer to literary fiction, but less exciting than genre.  Only the setting, which I imagined to be something like Brownsville, on the Mexican/Texas border, really stirred by imagination.    My issue with Brother Brontë is similar to my issue with the YA and child narrators from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list:  They don't go anywhere, they don't do anything, and they aren't particularly interesting people, being under 13 and poorly educated.   The sameness of the inner experience of the lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder across genre and geography is something that is never commented upon by literary critics, but I think it is worth noting. 

Random Family (2003) by Adrian LeBlanc

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

Random Family (2003)

by Adrian LeBlanc

#25

       This might be THE most representative book from the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, a 432 page in depth exploration of the life and times of a loosely related group of New Yorkers who are knee deep in the crack epidemic.  You've got Coco Rodriguez, the main character, a woman who manages to have four children by three different men in between the ages of 17 and 24.  You've got Jessica Martinez, the consort of a notorious crack kingpin who is sentenced to life in Federal Prison during the book, and who herself serves a ten year federal prison sentence over the course of Random Family.  You've got Coco and Jessica's respective families, who are equally filled with child sexual abuse, drug usage, child neglect and early/frequent exposure to domestic violence.

   As someone who deals with individuals who are enmeshed with the Federal Criminal Justice system because of their participation in drug trafficking, I am well familiar with the social milieus that produce the characters in this book, and everything that they say or do was familiar to me- listening to the Audiobook of Random Family was like listening to a 20 hour federal probation report, where probation officers try to get to the heart of the same questions that LeBlanc frames in 15 pages instead of 400.

   A common theme, both in Random Family and my own professional experience, is disordered living.  A one parent household headed by Mom, or a serial household with Mom and a succession of partner's, is common.  It's been my own observation, borne out at length in Random Family, is that people who get into organized criminal activity do it because a) they never think it will end up with them serving decade long prison sentences b) they literally do not have a single other idea about what do besides crime. The men in this book, most of whom spend the entirety of the book in Federal or State Prison make these decisions when they are very young and even as they spend their ten, twenty year or life in prison sentences, the level of self-reflection is minimal because there were never any other choices to be made.

  The women on the other hand, again, based both on the experiences depicted in Random Family and my own professional experiences, is that women often believe that the only thing they have to offer is their body and that a child is their best chance of forging a lasting relationship with a providing male. When this inevitably fails to happen, the man disappears, and the woman is left with the child.  Coco, at the center of this book, is incapable of making a reasoned decision or really even looking after her own interesting, rather she is buffeted by the day-to-day chaos of the consequences of her decision to have four children with three different men.

  Coco is, in a sense, amazing in that she manages to keep her tattered family together through the entire book.  Jessica, on the other hand, manages to get impregnated by a guard while in prison and foists the children off on her long-suffering mother, also caring for some of her other children which she left behind to serve her decade long prison sentence.   The men are equally despicable and pathetic, the tattered flotsam of late-stage capitalism, going nowhere and doing nothing.  What, one wonders, is the end game for anyone in Random Family, except as a burden to the state and incubator of intergenerational trauma.   Those looking for answers will find none here and the author doesn't bother to try- it's not that type of book.

  

     

Gold Diggers (2020) by Sanjena Sathian

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Gold Diggers (2020)
by Sanjena Sathian

1400 Dunwoody Village Pkwy SUITE #1406

 Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia 11/26

    You'd think there would be more novels written by the sons and daughters of the Indian diaspora in America but one gets the sense that writing fiction is secondary to becoming a doctor, scientist or venture capitalist. The post World War II South Asian immigrants to the United States mostly arrived as graduate students in hard-science/technical subjects- they had top degrees from elite Indian universities.  There's a much smaller subset of small-business owning immigrants who were fleeing turmoil- your NYC cabbies and gas station owners, but mostly the South Asian experience in the US has been small families: Dad, Mom and one or two kids.  Dad works as a scientist or doctor or in computers, Mom stays at home or has some kind of home business.  Kids are under intense pressure to do well.  

   In that regard, what must be mildly embarrassing for Sathian's own parents (she went to Yale for undergraduate and then went to, sigh, the Iowa Writer's Workshop), is great for readers.  Sathian's magical realist/coming of age drama is a rare depiction of the inner lives of two families of reasonably well off Indian American immigrants living in suburban Atlanta.  Sathian's protagonist is feckless male high school student who moons over his more successful neighbor-girl, also Indian American.  One night he stumbles over her neighbor's secret:  Her mom is creating a drink out of stolen gold as a way to harness the ambitions of others.   Sathian goes light on the lore- I sense the hand of the market at work, but that doesn't detract from a lively tale. 

  I could actually identify somewhat with these characters- some of the action takes place in the Bay Area and some of Sathian's high school portraits reminds me of Indian American girls who went to my own, highly selective high school in Oakland.   I was glad to get this window into a world that had always seemed opaque to me as a high school/college/law school student.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones

 Audiobook Review

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Stephen Graham Jones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet nation in Montana.  He is also a prolific author of genre fiction, with a bibliography that dates back to 2000, and usually with one publication a year, or two publications in one year and none in the next.  I'd never heard of him until he published The Only Good Indians, which was picked up by Simon & Schuster and represented a step up in authorial profile and out of the limitations of genre fiction (his previous publisher was Tor- a science fiction/fantasy/horror genre specialist.)

  I actually didn't like The Only Good Indian and didn't finish the Audiobook I checked out from the library, but that could have had something to do with the pandemic era publication date.  I also didn't know about the author's tribal affiliation, which makes a big difference in distinguishing genre horror from speculative but literary fiction.  The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, to me, is like, a riff on Interview with a Vampire but with the intent to actually say something about its historical era, instead of using the historical elements as scenery for the soap-opera plot.  It is also very much a horror novel with a very...um. visceral and uniquely Mountain West take on the familiar tropes of vampire lit.

  The format. a mysterious, black-clad Native American with an acute sensitivity to sunlight shows up one day in a late 19th century Montana frontier church whose minister has his own connections to the events that have touched the life of the stranger.  He insists on unburdening himself to the preacher over a series of evenings, and then the preacher recounts the events to his journal.

  Jones uses a somewhat awkward but historically accurate/appropriate framing device for this sort of 19th century yard, a present-day graduate student in western history who is the last descendant of the frontier preacher and who comes into possession of his narrative.  Considering his lengthy publication history, it's hard not to suspect that Jones is writing with editorial guidance about maximizing the potential for what I would imagine would be an FX miniseries adaptation.   More power to him- I think it would be a great tv show/movie, but you'd have to get the violence right, which would be tough. 

  The Audiobook is also good for this book because you get the Native American narrator voice, which I wouldn't have wanted to do in my head, reading a paper/e copy at home.

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.