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shiny things in messy little piles

The Books of August

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Heavy on the audio books this month. A lot of lis­ten­ing while knit­ting or other domes­tic activ­i­ties happening.

Books Read:

Lucy and Edgar — Victor Lodato (2017)

I fin­ished this out of a dogged sense of loy­alty to the old woman who dies at the begin­ning of the book. The char­ac­ters are stereo­types with­out any sort of depth to make them any­one you care about. In fact other than Edgar, the child at the cen­ter of the book, I could have done with­out any of the oth­ers and their pre­dictable behaviors.
But… like I said dogged loy­alty — which is in part what this book is about. There comes a point at about 75% of the way through the book where there looks to be only two pos­si­ble out­comes, and nei­ther one of them is sat­is­fy­ing. I guess I also held on to see if the writer could pull off some­thing mov­ing that wasn’t easy or manip­u­la­tive. And I think he did — mostly. It’s one of the obvi­ous pos­si­bil­i­ties from the mid­dle of the book but it’s done in a way that keeps you from want­ing to the throw the author off of the train. (And I can’t be any more spe­cific about it than that or I’d spoil the book for you.)
Still, I don’t under­stand the huge amount of praise that has been lav­ished on the book by crit­ics and review­ers. It’s just not that inter­est­ing or original.

* one more lousy mother and dam­aged son *

Geek Love — Katherine Dunn (2002)

Weird, but I think that was the point. The Binewski tribe is tragic in all kinds of ways and a per­fect object les­son about the dan­gers of fam­ily. While the char­ac­ters here are freaks on the out­side they point out to us the fact that we are, most of us any­way, freaks on the inside and our world is warped around that freak­ish­ness. I don’t like to think of peo­ple being unself­con­sciously mali­cious; though I see the evi­dence of just that sort of behav­ior every day. In this book the havoc wreaked by one self­ish ego-​maniac (Arturo) is stun­ningly wide and entirely believ­able. In fact one of the things that I liked most about this book was how believ­able the most out­ra­geous char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions were.
The writ­ing is lovely enough to keep you involved in the book when the plot and char­ac­ters get beyond your com­fort zone.

* human­ity with all its gross, ick­i­ness on the outside *

The Sleep Walker Guide to Dancing — Mira Jacob (2014)

I didn’t get very far in this, I think because it seemed too famil­iar and I was look­ing for novelty.
* I might pick it up again later. *

Books Listened to:

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender — Leslye Walton (2014)

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

I read this one a cou­ple of years ago. It’s a lovely story with amus­ing and intrigu­ing char­ac­ters. The story begins with Ava’s grandmother’s tragic, ghost-​filled fam­ily his­tory and con­tin­ues on to describe a line of women with what might be char­i­ta­bly con­sid­ered to have ter­ri­ble luck in love, lead­ing up the birth of the twins Ava and Henry. Ava is born with wings and Henry with what we might assume is autism but by the end of the book seems more like a prophetic gift of mute­ness. As Ava grows her wings come to define and cir­cum­scribe her place in the world. The tragic end­ing you expect is averted, but only nar­rowly, and only after a good deal of dam­age is done. But hope is a thing with wings. And so is Ava.
The writ­ing is clear and glis­tens with the sub­tle rain washed hues of the Seattle climate.
The nar­ra­tion is quite good. Worth a lis­ten if you haven’t read the book already.

* loved it again *

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. — Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (2017)

Narration: Cast of dozens :)

The new Stephenson. The title char­ac­ter — one Melisande Stokes an under­paid under appre­ci­ated lec­turer in lin­guis­tics — finds her­self involved with a mys­te­ri­ous gov­ern­ment agency and the pos­si­bil­ity of magic in the mun­dane world. There fol­lows the usual byzan­tine plot and riotous com­pli­ca­tion of details that I love in a Stephenson book.
One of the few writ­ers that I auto­mat­i­cally lis­ten to rather than read. I think that his in-​depth asides work best if you are forced to give them equal weight with the nar­ra­tive and that is most eas­ily done when the woods are read to you.
DODO is good clean — slightly fan­tas­tic fun. A change from Stephenson’s most recent work SevenEves which was any­thing but light-​hearted. The col­lab­o­ra­tion is seam­less, with no jumps from one writer to the other.
Narration is good, though the accents are a bit over done.
(Oddly there is a paint­ing called Melisande by a woman named Mariane Stokes — this can­not be a coin­ci­dence, not in a Stephenson book.)

* there are cat’s Schrodinger and otherwise *

Middlesex — Jeffery Eugenides (2002)

Narration: Kristoffer Tabori

Briefly reviewed in September 2015.  I found the book just as enjoy­able the sec­ond time around. Perhaps more so because I have become more aware of the con­ver­sa­tions sur­round­ing sex, gen­der, and iden­tity and appre­ci­ated the light touch that the author uses in insist­ing that we look more closely at our assumptions.
Narration is good, and the voice used is just ambigu­ous enough to make the fluid gen­der of Cal(liope) audible.

* the sins of the old coun­try come home to roost in mid­dle class Detroit *

The Books of July

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Prose

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir — Sherman Alexie (2017)

A com­pli­cated book on a com­pli­cated sub­ject. Many slight chap­ters made up of short essays, sto­ries, and poems.
This is a reflec­tion on life with a com­plex woman and the haz­ards of moth­er­ing and being moth­ered. Alexie’s mother Lillian … she what? Had demons? Don’t we all. Her demons inter­fered with her abil­ity to mother. And Alexi’s demons, so very close to those of his mother made it hard for him to be moth­ered. It’s a two-​way prob­lem between moth­ers and chil­dren: shar­ing the alco­hol a bipo­lar demons. And then there’s crush­ing poverty — the finan­cial and spir­i­tual and cul­tural of reser­va­tion life. In some ways it’s a tough book to fig­ure out. There is the par­tic­u­lar to the Alexie’s expe­ri­ence (and his mother’s.) More broadly, it is also about the haz­ards to fam­i­lies of liv­ing as a reser­va­tion Indian. And even more gen­er­ally to the expe­ri­ence of being Indian. But at both its heart and its outer lim­its it is about the prob­lem of being a dys­func­tional child of a dys­func­tional par­ent. We live and learn, some times late in life, and then we mourn the things that were and the things will never have been.
* grief can be a clear lens *

Vinegar Girl — Ann Tyler (2016)

I used to like Tyler’s work but some­how the voice in this is too? Common and pedes­trian. This retelling of Taming of the Shrew didn’t win me over because I didn’t like Kate. Really didn’t like Tyler’s Kate. She is a bum­bling, aim­less, preschool assis­tant with­out a per­son­al­ity. She’s so bland that I can­not begin to care about her. On top of that the voice and the story (which I nor­mally love) didn’t pull me in at all.
* some­times the orig­i­nal is best left alone *

 

 

The Art of Racing in the Rain — Garth Stein (2008)

Ayrton Senna name check aside I had a bad feel­ing about this book when I read the Kindle pre­view. But the dog as nar­ra­tor thing might be inter­est­ing and there is rac­ing… so I started it. At 15% of the way through there’s already a nice lady with brain tumor thing going on. Leading inevitably to a trag­i­cally moth­er­less lit­tle girl and all of that. Not to men­tion it turns out that the dog is an aging beast with a mar­tyr com­plex. So I stopped to check the reviews, so much praise, until I hit on a cou­ple of poor reviews with spoil­ers. (Yeah I some­times read the spoil­ers.) Rape alle­ga­tions? Child taken by CPS? ON top of the already quite melo­dra­matic sit­u­a­tion. Really? This is look­ing more than iffy. I just can’t.
* I don’t read to be manip­u­lated by amateurs *

 

Adventures of John Blake — Philip Pullman and Fred Fordham (2017)

Graphic novel about a boy trapped on a haunted ship that is shut­tled back and forth through time seek­ing the knowl­edge and a cer­tain item that will allow them to con­trol their path. The crew is made up of sailors col­lected along the way. From an ancient roman to the John Blake, a mid-​20th cen­tury son of a sci­en­tist who may have invented the device that allows time travel and that set the haunted Mary Alice on its course. It’s an enter­tain­ing, quick read. Don’t expect Pullman’s mar­velous prose to show up. It’s a graphic novel and the con­ven­tions are dif­fer­ent. The illus­tra­tions are nice but not ter­ri­bly imag­i­na­tive. Which, I think, is a good thing. I’m tired of Extraordinary Illustrations that make fol­low­ing the story difficult.
The plot goes along. There’s a mod­ern tech­nol­ogy vil­lain and the end result is a nice vic­tory for John and his mod­ern com­pan­ion Serena.
I can see this as the script for an action-​adventure with teenagers. I might actu­ally go to see it.
I’m look­ing for­ward to Pullman return­ing to prose with his next book sup­pos­edly set back in the world of Oxford and Lyra.
* cross­ing gen­res to good effect *

Outlander — Diana Gabaldon (2005)

Historical Romance with Time Travel. Yes I cap­i­tal­ized all of those words. Set in 18th Century Scotland and other parts of Europe as the saga goes on. It does help a lit­tle to know what’s going on but you can get along even if your grasp of English his­tory is weak. (You can read all about the pol­i­tics of the time in wikipedia is you want to.)
So (Girl) Claire falls through a hole in time (in a henge) and ends up stum­bling into an English Patrol where bad things are threat­ened. She is then res­cued by a Scottish raid­ing party. Bad things, but not quite so bad, are threat­ened. She doc­tors one of the mem­bers of the party and we meet (Boy) Jamie Frazer going under the name McKenzie. An out­lawed man. The story goes on in sweetly pre­dictable ways — Claire is threat­ened. Jamie res­cues her. They are forced to marry, but later fall in love. Jamie goes off to try to find some­one to help him get out from under his death sen­tence. Claire is threat­ened Jamie res­cues her (a few more times) until in the last huge set piece of the book Claire must res­cue Jamie from an English prison. Then all decamp for France. This should be a spoiler but you can tell from the begin­ning that the two pro­tag­o­nists are going to sur­vive and that the pat­tern of dan­ger, res­cue, dan­ger, res­cue, sex, dan­ger, sex, res­cue, sex is going to go on for a long time.
The sex scenes are fre­quent, pretty well writ­ten, and occa­sion­ally very dis­turb­ing. If you have a prob­lem with rape cul­ture (and 18th cen­tury Scotland/​England is a pretty damned rapey place) — then you might want to skip this.
There are another dozen or so books in the world. Eight directly in the series and a hand­ful that revolve around other points.
So… will I run out and read them all now? No, the books aren’t that good and are a bit pre­dictable. I’d get bored if I read another one right away. But later? The next time I need some­thing to shore up a long week­end at the beach or a deadly dull air­line flight? Yeah, I prob­a­bly will reach out for the next book in the series.
* at least at the end it’s the hero­ine doing the rescuing *

The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel

- Hiromi Kawakami, A.M. Powell, trans (2017)
Weird lit­tle novel about a thrift shop in Japan and the owner, his sis­ter, and the two peo­ple who work there. A small, inmate book. I kept want­ing some­thing amaz­ing to hap­pen but it didn’t. In a way it was an all day toy train wreck. I can’t not love it though. The way in which the pro­tag­o­nist (Hitomi) stum­bles through her aim­less twen­ties. Not quite reach­ing the unreach­able boy she works with. And the par­al­lels between her unsuc­cess­ful run to love and her boss’s dal­liance with the high-​powered antique dealer and his sister’s dal­liance with the soon to be deceased. Really they are all in love with some­one they ought not to be and it just doesn’t quite work out for anyone.
* var­i­ous states of mis-​shapen love *

The Moth: 50 True Stories — Catherine Burns, ed. (2013)

50 short mono­logues from var­i­ous Moth events and broad­casts. Just what Moth is well explained the three intro­duc­tions. (Yes, three.) True sto­ries of one sort and other. I’d esti­mate that most of them ran 5 — 10 min­utes live/​on air. Some really effec­tive story telling. If you’re a fan of essays you’ll rec­og­nize a cou­ple of the sto­ry­tellers but most are aver­age peo­ple recount­ing some not so aver­age event in their lives.
* good short mono­logues — refresh­ing story telling *

Poetry:

No Planets Strike — Josh Bell (2004)

 

 

 

 

and

Alamo Theory — Josh Bell (2016)

A cou­ple of mind expand­ing col­lec­tions. The first, No Planets Strike<?em>, is raw and unnerv­ing, what with Ramona, and the gen­tle handed holy father, and zom­bies. The sec­ond, Alamo Theory, is more accom­plished and pol­ished but… it lacks the mar­velous ner­vous­ness that the first one had. Both con­tain work that is some­times ran­dom in a care­fully plot­ted way designed to throw the reader off the scent. Both of these col­lec­tions are very sonic; It’s good to read them out loud but I would say essen­tial for Alamo Theory. Also note that Alamo Theory was pub­lished by Copper Canyon and is a square book — a for­mat that allows Bell’s ling line lengths enough room to breathe on the page and a decent type size. No Planets Strike suf­fers from a lot of crowd­ing and very small font. 

* I like bad boy poets, though they are a bit less thrilling as they grow up *

Books of June

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This month in nonfiction:

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior — Catherine Johnson and Temple Grandin (2006)

Ms. Grandin has a unique per­spec­tive on ani­mal behav­ior that is informed by her own autism. She is very opin­ion­ated but you have to trust the opin­ion of a woman who has spent so many years care­fully watch­ing ani­mals. It is inter­est­ing to see some of the folk­lore  of ani­mal train­ers and man­agers (such as the loca­tion of hair whorls on the faces of horses and cat­tle cor­re­lat­ing with flight­i­ness) backed up by expe­ri­ence and exper­i­ment. The ref­er­ences are some­what dated but the book is full of insights that are now being proven in sci­en­tific exper­i­ments. I will be very inter­ested to see how she expand on these ideas in her later book “Animals Make Us Human.”
* shift your per­spec­tive for a while *

 

 

Train the Dog in Front of You — Denise Fenzi (2016)

The best piece of dog train­ing advice I’ve got­ten this year. Maybe ever. Train the dog you have. In order to do that you have to pay atten­tion to your dog’s par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity and learn­ing styles. Fenzi offers a hand­ful of modes/​aspects/​facets that you can use to begin to orga­nize your thoughts as you observe your dog. Well worth the rather steep price.
* there is no point in wait­ing for the per­fect dog *

This month in essays:

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life — Samantha Irby (2017)

Ah, this one caused me a good deal of grief as I tried to for­mu­late an opin­ion. Angry POC women are a com­mon essay bucket at the book store these days. It’s about time that they got a chance for their voices to be heard and yet. And yet. POC, queer, and dis­abled is no guar­an­tee of interesting.

A lot of peo­ple loved this book. I just didn’t find it that funny; funny requires orig­i­nal and a glimpse of human­ity that is truly dar­ing. There is a guard­ed­ness about her rev­e­la­tions — a sense that she is dar­ing me to not find the sit­u­a­tions funny that –under­cuts these essays. Her overeat­ing, poverty dri­ven money fetishiz­ing, trash tele­vi­sion lov­ing life doesn’t speaks to me of larger human con­cerns in a new way.
* TMI isn’t the same as imi­tate — it just isn’t *

This month in fiction:

The Shipping News — Annie Proulx (1993)

Yeah, late to the party. I’d never read it. The Shipping News is much more darkly comic than I was led to believe. I enjoyed it, even the weird writ­ing style. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of all those frag­ments with the long lists of things. I was also impressed by how much she knew or learned about Newfoundland, fish­ing, and boats — espe­cially build­ing boats. The excerpts from the knot book at the begin­ning of the chap­ters were inter­est­ing on their own and added nicely the story. All in all I found this rather to my taste even though I hated Brokeback Mountain. So, do I dare to read another of her books?
* Weird, eerie, and darkly comic *

 

 

Camino Island — John Grisham (2017)

Great engag­ing plot. A caper involv­ing the theft of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s man­u­scripts and a blocker writer recruited very much against her will to entrap the man who may have bought the man­u­scripts from the thieves. Grisham’s prose is dry and thin. Lakes are pretty. Girls are tall. Buildings are old. Some peo­ple claim that it’s taut; I think it’s just unimag­i­na­tive. The char­ac­ters aren’t all that well-​rounded either. The woman from the insur­ance group who recruits the pro­tag­o­nist is such a stick fig­ure that I can have torn her out of a fash­ion mag­a­zine. Widely reviled by the Grisham faith­ful. But as a non-​Grisham read­ing fan of both the capers and that genre of mys­tery known as the cozy it worked well enough for me.
* a beach book for the fan of both capers and cozies *

 

Gwendy’s Button Box — Steven King and Richard Chizmar (2017)

This novella about of a girl given a gift by a mys­te­ri­ous man in a bowler hat cir­cles the rim of out­right hor­ror but never quite dips into the whirlpool. The man in the bowler hat gives Gwendy a box that will deliver two gifts (choco­lates and sil­ver dol­lars) when­ever she asks. But there other but­tons on the top whose use is left unex­plained. As time goes on Gwendy begins to develop a the­ory about their pur­pose. Only once does she use one of the but­tons on the box and at the same time an enemy is van­quished in a prop­erly hor­ri­fy­ing man­ner. Did Gwendy cause this or was it coin­ci­dence? She never quite sure but becomes con­vinced that the box is dan­ger­ous and its actions fraught with unin­tended con­se­quences. How should Gwendy deal with the box and it’s pow­ers? Can she stay on the right side of good and evil?
* what if some­one gave you Pandora’s box with­out an instruc­tion manual? *

 

The Book of Polly — Kathy Hepinstall (2017)

Another child nar­ra­tor — as the book begins the 10 year-​old Willow is pre­oc­cu­pied with the idea that her mother Polly will die. As well as telling out­ra­geous lies about her mother, she is obsessed with a secret that her mother is keep­ing. The rela­tion­ship between moth­ers and daugh­ters is explored in the con­text of an older mother, well estab­lished in her sar­cas­tic know every­thing per­son­al­ity, and her equally uncon­ven­tional late-​in-​life child. As Willow turns 16, Polly is indeed dying. With the help of her miss­ing brother’s odd ball friend , Willow sets out to get a mir­a­cle for her mother and in the process to dis­cover her secrets. I am par­tic­u­larly impres­sive is Hepinstall’s cre­ation of a unique voice for the teenage Willow.
* south­ern gothic with a heap­ing side of humor *

The Books of May

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This month in prose:

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories — Mehvesh Murad & Jared Shurin(eds) (2017)

A col­lec­tion of  new and tra­di­tional tales of the Djinn. Several of these are excel­lent. One is a com­monly reprinted bit of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where the Djinn is a taxi dri­ver. Other sto­ries range from the tra­di­tional, to poetry, to ones set in mod­ern Islam. There are also a cou­ple of pretty ter­rific future world/​Sci-​Fi sto­ries. The range of sto­ries and ver­sions of the djinn in Islamic folk­lore is amaz­ing. Happily this book is far from a bunch of white folks riff­ing on some­one else’s cul­ture. Also it has one of the high­est rations of good sto­ries to meh sto­ries in any mul­ti­ple author col­lec­tion that I have read in the last three years.
* eclec­tic can be a fab­u­lous thing. *

 

The Thirteenth Tale — Diane Setterfield (2006)

Another twins story. The writer Vida Winter has told a thou­sand and two sto­ries about her ori­gins, all untrue and most fan­tas­tic. But now at the end of her life she decides that she will tell one biog­ra­pher the truth. Her cho­sen biog­ra­pher is Margaret Lea, a ret­i­cent book­worm who lives above her father’s anti­quar­ian book shop. At the end of their ini­tial inter­view Ms. Lea announces her only con­di­tion for the work: that Ms. Winter only the truth. The truth in this case is at least as fan­tas­tic as any of the sto­ries that the author has told to pre­vi­ous interviewers.
There are secrets on top of secrets and mis­di­rec­tions and … in spite of it all you feel for both the talker and the lis­tener while this eerie and tragic tale unfolds. With a wholly sat­is­fac­tory, though not quite inevitable, twist at the end. Well writ­ten enough to make the story paramount.
* good, though I think I might be done with tragic twins for a while *

Rabbit Cake — Annie Hartnett (2017)

“A new novel about the griev­ing process” is absolutely not a tag line that would make me pick up a book. But once in a while Amazon gets the “If you liked A you might like B” thing right and throws a book that you would oth­er­wise not con­sider into your pile.  So I read the sam­ple. And then I read the book. Because… what if you were an almost 12-​year-​old, and what is your name was Elvis, (and what of it if you’re a girl with a boy’s name,) and what if you have a weirdly fact filled head, and what if your mother drown while sleep­walk­ing (actu­ally sleep-​swiming), and what if you know that you should be griev­ing but you aren’t sure you’ve doing it right? That’s a lot of “what-​ifs” to find in the first 10% — the Amazon sam­ple length — of a book. Enough what-​ifs to make me want to spend time in the head of this won­der­fully odd-​ball 12-year-old.
* what-​if you ignored the blurbs and just read the book *

Sharks in the Rivers — Ada Limon (2010)

Yes, there are sharks here. Free swim­ming, clearly, and decid­edly out-​of-​place. Things in places where they don’t quite belong are the sub­jects of these poems. And often the thing that doesn’t quite belong is the writer herself.
* things that are out-​of-​place are more inter­est­ing that things that are where they belong *

 

This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse — Ada Limon (2006)

Stories in verse are some­thing that I would usu­ally run away from.  They tend to be too much about the story and not enough about the poems them­selves. These are dif­fer­ent. Each poem stands on it’s own and advances the nar­ra­tive at the same time. Prodigious work. Our pro­tag­o­nist — the man in the grey suit, the unrec­i­p­ro­cat­ing object of his affec­tions — the hard­ware store lady, his rather inco­her­ent friend Lewis and the object of Lewis’s epis­to­lary obses­sion, Ronald Reagan wan­der through the their days and inter­act — each with each other and their own desires and obsessions.
* let­ters to RR maybe the odd­est thing I’ve seen in a poem recently *

The Books of April

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Cutting for Stone — Abraham Verghese (2009)

The book is very long. I started it in March and it took me most of April to fin­ish it.
The twins (Marion and Shiva Stone) at the cen­ter of Cutting for Stone come into the world in a messy and pecu­liar way. Their mother, a shy Indian nun, dies giv­ing birth to them and their father, and American doc­tor, runs off in a panic. So the boys are left to be raised by the doc­tors and matron of the Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. The two boys act and think as if they were a sin­gle entity for much of their child­hoods. It is as if they were born (con­joined at the head) and then agreed to split up the world and their reac­tions to the world. Marion tak­ing on the out­go­ing, pleas­ant, social per­son­al­ity and Shiva tak­ing on all of the dark, moody, and anti-​social bits.
I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed with how it ends, I mean it had to go some­where — I get that. and… it seemed inevitable that the twins were not going to have a happy res­o­lu­tion. That some­how there hav­ing been two of them, sep­a­rated but still act­ing as one — that in the end there couldn’t be two of them in the world. And is that their indi­vid­ual faults or the fault of being born twins? I liked the book, but I’m not sure that I am encour­aged to read oth­ers by the same author. It’s a kind of funny thing when it comes to read­ing such “other” expe­ri­ences — I rarely want to expe­ri­ence them a sec­ond or third time from the same point of view. I, mag­pie like, want to go on to col­lect another point of view. That is in cases where the writ­ing doesn’t make me swoon. And here the writ­ing does not make me swoon. It is com­pe­tent and in places quite pleas­ant but its noth­ing special.

Rules of Civility — Amor Towles (2011)

Not as nifty as The Gentleman of Moscow. But the his­toric back­ground doesn’t play nearly as big a part. Here we have a young woman in NYC on New Year’s Eve 1937 sit­ting with her pal in a second-​rate club wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen. That some­thing is Tinker Grey. Katey Kontent (hate the last name it tripped me up every sin­gle time I read it) is an okay nar­ra­tor. She’s a bit bland around the edges but I think that’s part of the point, she’s Every Girl mak­ing her way in the big city. The peo­ple who sur­round her for the year of the story are the inter­est­ing points and in fact the writer via Katey as much as admits that it’s the case that some­times we find our­selves sur­rounded by peo­ple and events that will catch us up in their swirl with­out actu­ally hav­ing much effect on our­selves. They whirl around us and then leave us to go on in another direc­tion with other peo­ple. (It’s some­thing that I’ve thought about a bunch myself — how we seem to be so inti­mately con­nected with peo­ple as we are in a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion but so eas­ily lose them when the cir­cum­stances change and we are no longer thrown together by some­thing larger than our­selves.) The whole thing is a bit like Fitzgerald — who I don’t actu­ally like. I find him dry and his char­ac­ters off-​puttingly shal­low. This book comes close to being that shallow.
The title is taken from the young George Washington’s list of Rules for him­self. And the rules are included at the end of the book. Young GW was a prissy lit­tle shit.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk — Kathleen Rooney (2017)

Lillian Boxfish is 85, it’s New Year’s Eve and she’s decided to take a walk across Manhattan. First to Delmonico’s and then to a party hosted by a young pho­tog­ra­pher that she met in the park. It’s a long walk and we are treated to not only Lillian’s ver­sion of Manhattan in 1985 but along the way to her life story. And it’s a pretty cracker jack story. Running from her first days in Manhattan to her reign as the high­est paid adver­tis­ing woman in America (writ­ing copy for Macy’s in its glory days) through a mar­riage a birth, a break­down, a divorce, a free­lance career, and now as a woman of a cer­tain age liv­ing on her own in a city that she dearly loves but that has changed in unpleas­ant ways. Lillian and the book are both witty, wise, and a bit wicked.

 

Everybody’s Fool — Richard Russo (2016)

Sully is back and with a mild bit of good for­tune in his wake and a not so hot report from the car­di­ol­o­gist at the VA mar­ring his future he’s not sure how the world is sup­posed to work this week. And then there’s Police Chief Raymer whose grief at the loss of his wife is tem­pered by the sus­pi­cion that she was intend­ing to leave him the day she fell down the stairs and the stray garage door remote that he found in her car. The rest of the crowd is here too. There are some snakes (both the hiss­ing kind and the human kind) and whole lot of peo­ple try­ing to make sense of their lives and cir­cum­stances. Russo writes with humor and deep insight into the ways in which we all flit­ter and flus­ter our ways through life. (Read Nobody’s Fool first.)