It’s been a while since I updated all of you on what I’ve been reading and there has been no clamor for me to tell you more. But I am not one to bend to the will of the masses, so I’m going to tell you anyway. Here are a few recent books that I’ve liked.
There’s been a lot written about Joan of Arc and I’m sure this is not the last. This Joan is not some saint with mystic abilities and holy aspirations to restore the Dauphin to the throne of France. This is Joan – Action Hero. This is not the story of some holy virgin with visions. This is a human Joan – an illiterate teenager abused by her father who is angry. The Joan we meet here is not a saint. She’s a savant, and her genius is for violence.
Earlier attempts to portray Joan have, in my opinion at least, failed because they don’t seem to add up. Part of it is the uniqueness of her life – there’s been nothing like her before or after. But part of it, surely, is the way history paternalistically portrays Joan, focusing on a question that befuddled popes, poets and playwrights: How did an illiterate peasant girl — emphasis on the word girl — come from nowhere to inspire and lead the French in victorious battle against the English, turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War?
Chen’s solution is elegant and timely. Her Joan is just plain tougher than all those knights and noblemen, a born fighter who, as a child, recreates Agincourt with rocks, gets a bull’s-eye with her very first attempt at a longbow and is a preternatural genius at military planning. As Chen’s Dauphin (the embattled heir to the French crown) puts it, “You are neither a scholar nor a philosopher nor an ambassador. … So, I ask again, what is it that you can do for us?”
Joan’s answer could come from an action movie: “‘Majesty,’ Joan says quietly, ‘I can fight.’”
Joan’s motivation is not prophetic but personal: a violent father and the brutal rape of her sister by raiding English soldiers. “I have thought to myself,” Joan tells the Dauphin, “What choices does a woman have for vengeance, for justice. … So when I spoke to God that morning, I decided, if I am to scream, let it be in battle.”
Eventually captured by the English and awaiting her death by fire she reflects on her career at the ripe age of 19: “I have become more than just myself. … I am the battle cry, the roar of spears, pikes and poleaxes rattling. I am the sound of a hundred horses thundering down a hill and the wind that ripples through banners, the swing of a catapult, the deafening blast and explosion of cannonry. … Before each battle, the foot soldiers, artillerymen and sappers will bend their heads and call my name.”
If every generation gets the Joan it deserves, ours could do worse than an ass-kicking, avenging angel fighting simply for the right to fight.
Read this book, you will enjoy it; I did.
Saying that this is Ondaatje’s best work since ‘The English Patient’ is a good introduction, but actually I think this one is better. It reads more to me like a John le Carré novel – moody and mysterious with suspicious figures lurking around.
It’s set in post-war London with bombed out buildings all around. This book’s resonant first sentence puts the situation this way: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.”
Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, try to puzzle out what’s going on and who these people are who are trying to ‘protect’ them. One of these two men is Walter, whom the kids nickname “The Moth” because he is said to be “moth-like in his shy movements.” He has a large nose, keeps curious hours and knows disreputable characters.
The other man, Norman, is nicknamed the Pimlico Darter. He uses a mussel boat to smuggle greyhounds at night into London for racing, and Nathaniel becomes a willing accomplice. These men’s friends begin appearing in the house as well, all of them eccentric and accomplished in unpredictable ways.
Left to their own devices, it’s not long before Nathaniel and Rachel forge their independence. Unhappy at a boarding school where Nathaniel is nearly expelled for urinating in a sink, they engineer a “midweek day escape” and negotiate a deal with The Moth to be day students. This leaves them free to explore the shadowy streets of London hunting for clues to their circumstances.
When the teenagers find that Rose, their mother, has left her steamer trunk behind — she had ostentatiously packed it in front of them — they become suspicious about her whereabouts.
It slowly leaks out that she’s not in Singapore but apparently doing dangerous postwar intelligence work. The men in the house are men she trusts, having worked beside them during the war.
While Nathaniel is living a life of lesser expectations, he navigates “hidden locations along the Thames” in a mussel boat, helping The Moth and The Darter smuggle greyhounds for illegal dog racing. As a dishwasher in a hotel, he encounters 46-year-old “fabulist” Harry Nkoma, “a remarkable man who had a scar on his cheek,” who plays the piano, and, during lunch breaks, regales him with stories of youthful sex.
In that “borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood,” Nathaniel meets an enigmatic, pseudonymously named 17-year-old, Agnes Street. She seduces him and they cavort naked, on “worn carpet[s]” in various abandoned houses in London, “invisible to each other in the dark.”
The teenagers’ lives may be in danger. There’s a kidnapping scene. People will try to kill Rose as well. Later in life, Nathaniel will work in intelligence himself, in part to try to tease out Rose’s many wartime secrets, what he calls “the obscure rigging of our mother’s life.”
The second part picks up 14 years later, when Nathaniel is 28. It zigzags back and forth, filling in the gaps of his mother’s past. Nathaniel is working for an intelligence agency himself and exploring connections that lead him finally to the mystery of his mother and her relationship to all these people.
I like the way new clues gradually surface to make us see what we have already read in a different light. Ondaatje relishes a turn of phrase and some of the writing feels a bit over the top but it’s a great read. Give it a shot!
I thought I’d bring you up to date on the books I’ve recently read.
Juhea Kim’s debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land, covers a lot of Korean history but also leaves out a lot. It starts in 1917 when a hunter, Nam KyungSoo stalks a leopard in the far north, hoping to feed his family. It turns out to be a tigerling, though, whose mother becomes a mortal threat. Starving and freezing, he is discovered by Japanese occupiers and he is able both to guide them to safety and protect them from the tiger. In return, the invaders allow him to live and the leader of the Japanese gives him a silver cigarette case.
At about the same time, another family, living near Pyongyang, decides they have too many mouths to feed and sell their 10-year old daughter, Jade, to a brothel in Pyongyang. She befriends the two daughters of the brothel’s owner and shortly the three of them move south to Seoul to begin training as courtesans.
Another new resident of Seoul is Nam JungHo, living on the street and carrying his father’s cigarette case. He meets Jade on the street and the two of them form a deep friendship and JungHo becomes involved in the revolutionary battle while Jade becomes a sought-after performer.
There are plenty of other characters as the fight between the communists, the nationalists and the occupying Japanese proceeds and lots of adventure. Mysteriously missing is the whole Korean war period which, I suspect, will come in a second novel.
It’s an often fun read but a bit too soapy for my tastes. I am looking forward to see what comes next from Kim, though.
I’m not normally a fan of mystery novels or thrillers, but thought I’d give this one a try after hearing good things about it.
A former FBI agent, settling down with her hunky judge husband, smells a rat at her weekly lunch group. When she met widowed hunk Josh, a top lawyer–turned–federal judge, and his now-14-year-old daughter, Eliza, Corie Geller thought she knew what she wanted. Instead of flying around the world interrogating terrorists for the government, she would marry Josh, become a wife and mother, and use her language skills to vet books in Arabic for U.S. publishers. That’s how she landed at La Cuisine Délicieuse in Shorehaven, Long Island, lunching every Wednesday with the suburban self-employed. A landscaper, an eBay reseller, a low-end speechwriter, a photo retoucher, an internet data expert…but there’s one guy in the group who sets off her internal alarms. Pete Delaney sits in the same chair every week, won’t take his eyes off his car, keeps changing phones—it’s just weird.
Corie intuitively feels that Pete is hiding something—and as someone accustomed to keeping her FBI past from her new neighbors, she should know. But does Pete really have a shady alternate life, or is Corie just imagining things, desperate to add some spark to her humdrum suburban existence? The only way to find out is to dust off her FBI toolkit and take a deep dive into Pete Delaney’s affairs . . .
It goes pretty much the way you would expect it to – Corie gets in deeper and deeper and then gets caught and captured by Pete Delaney and is saved at the last minute. There are some fun wisecracks and clever dialogue, but the characters are pretty much sketched in and the premise is contrived. I will pass on any more by Susan Isaacs.
It took me two tries to get into this book, but when I did, I loved it. The Promise is the story of the Swart family, descendants of Voortrekker settlers, clinging to their farm amid tumultuous social and political change — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes, “holding on, holding out.” Their farm is just like every farm around it. The tone of the book is strange, sometimes doleful, other times mirthful. Beginning in 1986, the novel moves toward the present, following Ma, Pa and the alliterative trio of Swart children: Anton, a military deserter and failed novelist; Astrid, a narcissistic housewife; and Amor, an introspective loner who eventually becomes a nurse. By the end of the book, Amor will be the only one left alive.
Starting with the accession of Nelson Mandela, the novel registers seismic rumbles of a changing South Africa. Yet white characters remain casually dismissive of Black people and their “unknowable lives”; everyone, Astrid muses, “just went on like before, except it was nicer because there was forgiveness and no more boycotts.”
Everything is written in the present tense and the narrator constantly changes viewpoints; scenes meld into one another without notice. Sometimes the characters reach out and correct the narrator, other times the narrator addresses the reader directly (“if Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked”). The narrator sometimes tells us what everyone in the room is thinking and it isn’t pretty.
Each of The Promise’s four sections centers around the death of a different Swart. They’re also set in defining eras of South African politics, from the State of Emergency to Mandela’s presidency, Mbeki’s inauguration and Jacob Zuma’s eventual resignation. The romp through South Africa’s sordid past is a bizarre one, populated by impossible coincidences and brutal violence, with a chorus of odd supporting characters: a case of snakes, an incestuous priest, a yoga teacher called Mowgli, an evil reptile park salesman.
The book is filled with satire and Galgut does a great job of leading us through the collapse of the old South Africa without guessing what will arise from the ashes. The novel was a well-deserved Booker Prize winner and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. You should read it.
I’ve been remiss in reporting on my reading. Here are some of my recent reads.
Colson Whitehead is a great writer. He’s published three novels in the last five years and two of them have won the Pulitzer Prize. He also won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016. The man has skills.
This book is a little lighter in tone and a bit more fun than his previous works. I liked it a lot. This book is set (naturally) in Harlem and begins in 1959. The protagonist is an enjoyable character named Ray Carney who is a husband, father and the owner of Carney’s Furniture on 125th street. Carney is a decent man and a striving furniture retailer but with a sideline in fencing. For a small fee he will take your stolen TV or radio or brooch to a retailer downtown.
He doesn’t consider himself a crook, though. From his perspective he is just “facilitating the churn” of stolen objects, transforming them into legit merchandise. Through his cousin Freddy, though, he does get involved in a real crime. Freddie and his ne’er do well friends enlist him as a fence for their stickup of the Hotel Theresa, “Headquarters of the Negro world”. Whitehead’s description of the heist is fun. “Robbing the Hotel Theresa,” Whitehead writes, was like “slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.” The ramifications of this theft and Carney’s reluctant involvement trigger a series of events, near-misses, murders, tragedies, and thrills that drive the novel’s action.
Ray Carney is a man of wit and a street corner philosopher. He’s also a dedicated family man who loves his wife and child. On the other hand, his in-laws can’t stand him – for one thing, he’s darker than their light-skinned daughter, and he isn’t part of the “Talented Tenth” they’d preferred she marry.
“… Says she wants herself a college man, and I said, I went to college — “
“UCLA,” Carney helped out.
“That’s right — University of the Corner of Lenox Avenue!” The old joke.
This is Ray’s community and neighborhood. We take in the people, sights, and sounds of Harlem from his point of view, from chapter to chapter, from year to year. Whitehead has created a character who exemplifies the classic heist anti-hero while also giving the reader a penetrating look into a Black man’s life in Harlem in the 1960s and the circumstances he might not be able to avoid. No matter how much trouble he finds, we can’t help but root for Ray Carney every step of the way.
I really enjoyed this book and I strongly recommend it. You will enjoy it!
Let me say at the outset that the title of this book is a bit of irony. There is nothing brief about this book – the hardback version is about 700 pages. I haven’t counted but I think there might be seven killings in the first fifty pages.
It’s a busy book. Characters include the would-be assassins, various gang bosses, journalists and CIA officers. There’s the ghost of a politician, and an even more ghostly Bob Marley, referred to throughout the book simply as “The Singer.” Basically it’s one life after another impacted by violence, music and politics. All of them stuffed, and I do mean stuffed, into a novel of 700 or so pages, told from over a dozen viewpoints, over the course of 30-odd years.
The first part of the book revolves around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. The second part of the book is based in part on the real-life story of the Shower Posse, who began their rise in early-’60s Kingston and spread to America, where, by the 1980s, they controlled much of the crack trade in New York and Miami — in the book, they form an alliance with Griselda Blanco of the Medellín cartel.
The beginning of the book goes back to when Edward Seaga and the Jamaican Labor Party used the gangs as enforcers in the slums of Tivoli Garden and the rival party, the People’s National Party led my Michael Manley.
This turf war led to spiraling poverty and savage violence. It was the kind of trauma described and transmuted into song by the great Bob Marley (referred to in the novel as the Singer), who in 1976, amid unprecedented bloodshed, announced a free concert to promote peace in Kingston. (Marley was himself caught between the J.L.P. and P.N.P., along with their criminal gangs.) At the same time, outside forces including the C.I.A., anti-Castro Cubans and the Colombian drug cartels were converging on Jamaica with money and guns. All of these characters appear in the book.
It’s a tricky book to read. Each chapter is narrated by a different character. There is a lot of violence and savagery, we are talking about slums here and people encouraged by outside forces to be violent to each other. Not all of the characters are likeable. But it’s a story of people on the wrong side of history and maybe doing the best they can. It’s a long book, but a good one and a dark look at some of the effects of colonialism.
Give it a try. I should mention that it won the Man Booker Prize – not too shabby.
I’m sure it seems from my book reviews that I very much like every book I read. That is decidedly not the case. I start many more books than I finish. Here are a few that recently failed to complete for one reason or another.
I really wanted to like this book by C Pam Zhang. It was a ‘notable book of the year’ for the NYT, WaPo, NPR and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It started off fine with a story about orphaned children of 19th century Chinese immigrants trying to survive but then swerved into giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints that made no sense to me in the context of the book. I moved on.
This is the first ‘adult’ book by Tochi Aneybuchi and I think it shows. It won high accolades and a large number of awards, but I just couldn’t get into it. It seems to me that it relies far too much on the ‘superhero’ trope and I just don’t enjoy that.
Apparently some people liked this book by Kim Stanley Robinson. I found it incoherent and virtually unreadable. It starts off promisingly enough with a massive heat wave that engulfs a part of India and kills thousands. This doesn’t seem far out of the realm of possibility to me. Then Robinson begins rapidly changing the POV, timeline, location, principals so quickly and in ways that seemed to me to be unrelated that I was unable to follow the book.
I liked this book but eventually it seemed interminable. Spencer follows the course of the English monarchy and its Norman cousins from the Norman invasion through decades of conflict with a huge cast of characters and battles. I generally love good histories, but the level of detail Spencer offers us in eventually excruciating. I might try this again if I’m trapped alone for several years with nothing else to read.
This is another book that I very much wanted to like. Here’s a blurb from the publisher:
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.
These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.
The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.
It looks really interesting and it may be that I was too busy with other things at the time I read it, but it seemed to take forever to get started and it was hard for me to keep the names straight for some reason. I’ve put it back in my queue, but my queue has over 100 entries, so it may be a while.
I know that all of you are anxious to see my list of The Best Books I’ve Read in 2021. Some of you have been unable to sleep and, of course, all the publishers have been after me to know which of their books can carry my coveted ‘BEST’ seal on the cover. So, in no particular order (drum roll), here they are!!
I LOVED this book. All of you should read it.
This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have waited long enough for their turn . . .
This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .
In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.
From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war.
A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told.
This an amazing and wonderfully told story; magical is a good word for Edugyan. Read it!
Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.
This was a fun book to read; life is not all about car chases and spies; sometimes people surprise us.
We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. Renée, the building’s concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.
Then there’s Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor. Talented, precocious, and startlingly lucid, she has come to terms with life’s seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
Ha! Queenie was amazing and fun.
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
This book wasn’t what I expected when I first opened it, but I became entranced and was sorry but satisfied when I came to the end. It won the Man Booker prize so I guess I’m not alone.
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
This is not my usual fare; it’s a snarky and funny rom-com, but I enjoyed it.
Melody Joo is thrilled to land her dream job as a video game producer, but her new position comes with challenges: an insufferable CEO; sexist male coworkers; and an infuriating—yet distractingly handsome—intern, Nolan MacKenzie, aka “the guy who got hired because his uncle is the boss.”
Just when Melody thinks she’s made the worst career move of her life, her luck changes. While joking with a friend, she creates a mobile game that has male strippers fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Suddenly Melody’s “joke” is her studio’s most high-profile project—and Melody’s running the show.
When Nolan is assigned to Melody’s team, she’s sure he’ll be useless. But as they grow closer, she realizes he’s smart and sexy, which makes Melody want to forget he’s her intern. As their attraction deepens, she knows it’s time to pump the brakes, even with her Korean parents breathing down her neck to hurry up and find a man.
With her project about to launch, Melody suddenly faces a slew of complications, including a devastating trolling scandal. Could the man she’s falling hard for help her play the game to win—in work and in love?
This book is so well-written and so easy to read that I fell in love with it.
In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
McBride is a marvelous writer and this story shows him at the height of his craft. Loaded with funny and amazing characters and some great tales, this is a book I really enjoyed.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.
The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
This is just a great story and well written.
Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that. Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.
1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. Award-winning author Kim Barnes weaves a mesmerizing, richly imagined tale of Americans out of their depth in Saudi Arabia, a marriage in peril, and one woman’s quest for the truth, no matter what it might cost her.
I really loved The Sympathizer (if you haven’t read it, stop what you’re doing and read it now), so I thought I’d read this follow-up and I enjoyed it. Nguyen writes from a different perspective that’s worth understanding.
The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.
This was a great read that really takes the reader around the world. I liked it a lot and there is a bit of a surprise at the ending. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so I can’t be the only one who liked it.
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
That’s it! There were many others but I think I liked these the best. So tell me what did you read this year and what did you like? I really want to know.
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