Month: March 2024

Golden Hill:  A Novel of Old New York

By Francis Spufford

Published 2016

Read Feb 2024

Like many books with which this reader engages as a result of her book clubs, this is one this reader never would have known about, considered, read, or had the delight to read.  That’s a reason for book clubs!  To read things that we wouldn’t otherwise and to discuss with a group of people interested in delving into the whats, whys and wherefores of a book and its author.  

Francis Spufford’s first foray into fiction is an interesting one. BBC Radio’s blurb includes this statement:  “The best eighteenth-century novel since the eighteenth century.”  Fortunately we’re spared the spelling approach used in 1746 except for a letter by the protagonist to his father.  But what we are treated with is a rollicking novel with adventure, mystery, romance, a duel, and a little sex.  There is a wonderful twist at the end regarding the source of the story but certainly don’t read it early.    

Richard Smith arrives in New York City in November 1746, a full three decades before the Revolution.  New York City is an unimaginably small town at that time, population about 7000, with chickens and cows grazing in the countryside which is remarkably close to the downtown section.  Richard Smith is a young man who immediately upon his arrival presents to the counting house a bill for a thousand pounds from one Barnaby Banyard of London.  Smith requests cash for the bill which the counting house cannot provide—-it seems that much cash is not to be found anywhere in New York City.  Smith is willing to wait 60 days for the money so that another ship’s letter can confirm the bill’s validity.  Smith’s adventures start the very next morning when his purse, containing the cash he did obtain from the county house and the bill, is stolen and he now must figure out ways to feed and house himself for the next sixty days. 

The story takes place between November 1, 1746, and Dec 25, 1746 and it’s packed with the many adventures of Smith and his various encounters with the people of the town—the counting house owners and his daughters, lawyers, the Governor and his Secretary, persons celebrating Pope’s day in the streets, and many more.  Since New York is so small, everyone in town is aware of his presence and his activities and all are interested in his business and source of funds, but no one learns them until the very end of the book.

This is the type of historical fiction this reader enjoys:  1) fictional characters and their story with the backdrop of a real place and time that are drawn with wonderful accuracy. 2) A story that interacts with real people of the time doing realistic but fictional things. 3) A story that doesn’t imagine the feelings of real figures of the time.  In this historical fiction novel, we learn much about the city itself, the type of people that populate it, and its culture.  We learn about the competing churches and their members, “Pope Day”, the celebration of His Majesty’s Birthday, Sinterklaasavond (St Nicholas’ Eve), how Christmas Day was and wasn’t celebrated by various (all Christian) churches, and more.  We learn that the slave trade is a well-established and significant component of the economy of the time—nearly thirty years after 1619, and that most of the upper class have one or more house slaves, and how they treat them.  While the author keeps us nicely focused on the many events happening to Richard Smith through a mere sixty days, we can’t help getting a sense of the racism and sexism that was well engrained in the culture and a chance to wonder at how much or little progress we’ve made in the intervening 270 years between the story’s setting in 1746 and the book’s publication in 2016.

While this reader had to work a bit at getting started with this book, once fully engaged she was quite gripped by the story, the characters, and the picture of Old New York the book provides.  The final chapter—don’t read it until the end!—was a marvelous ending for the book.  It both provides some small sense of “what happened next” and a somewhere jarring but welcome call to the rest of what the author might have hoped we would learn about the real history of our country. 

There is a interesting YouTube video at :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhPXz5eHmIM called Golden Hill:  Francis Spufford shows us 18^th Century New York that’s well worth its 2min 8 second run. 

The painting in the image shows the town in 1653.  The painter and its source:  By Johannes Vingboons – Geheugen van Nederland (Memory of The Netherlands), Selections from the Map Collections http://international.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?intldl/awkbbib:@field(DOCID+@lit(awkb012367)), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=238390

Amy and Isabelle

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 1998

Read Feb 2024

This reader has now read all of Elizabeth Strout’s published
books, the order being Olive Kitteridge  first following by Abide with Me
(before this website was started) then the Lucy Barton books, My
Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible.  Next this reader
read Burgess Brothers while waiting for more new Strout books which were read when available:  Olive Again! ,  Oh William, and Lucy by the Sea (post coming soon).  That left Amy and Isabelle on which this reader now reports.

Amy and Isabelle was Strout’s first novel, published in 1998.  The story is set in Shirley Falls, Maine, to where Isabelle moved with her young daughter,  with a wedding ring on her finger and a sad story that she had lost her husband and her parents were also dead.   Isabelle has remained a single mother, an
unusual situation in this town in the 1960’s. She doesn’t seem to have any friends and she and Amy live at the edge of the town in a rented house.  She is
secretary to Avery Clark at the town’s mill and remains separate from the other
women in the office. 

When the reader enters the story, 16-year-old Amy is working in a summer job her mother arranged for her.  Amy is temporarily replacing one of the women in the office who has recently has a hysterectomy and is recuperating at home.  It seems that woman was who usually listens to the stories of another office worker (Fat Bev) and now Amy is replacing that role as well.  Amy seems to like hearing the chatter of the office women but she clearly is not happy spending so much time in the same room as her mother.  Something has happened that causes Amy not to look in mirrors and the women to wonder why she has cut her hair so short.  We learn shortly that Isabelle’s daily prayers include asking for a better daughter.  So by the end of the first chapter, we expect to learn more about an untoward relationship between Amy and Mr. Robertson, a teacher at her school who the opening lines indicated left town that summer. 

Amy is quiet and shy, in high school, and seems alone save her friend, Stacy, with whom she shares cigarettes under the bleachers.  Stacy has broken up with her older boyfriend who likes going to bed with her.  It seems Stacy is bored with this preoccupation and we also learn at the end of chapter 1 that Stacy is pregnant. 

The story alternates between the present as Amy listens to Fat Bev, her mother pines for Avery Clark, and the search for a missing girl in the area continues, and a progression of events of the past school year as Amy’s relationship with school and her best friend Stacy evolve.  Amy has detention with her math teacher, Mr. Roberston, and then seeks reasons to continue to speak with him alone after school.

During these hot spring and summer months, the usual strain parents of high schoolers experience is underway.  Amy’s descriptions to her of her afterschool activities are quite different from actuality.  Both mother and daughter are quite disturbed by the apparent abduction of the local girl who hasn’t yet been found.  Amy pokes fun at Isabelle’s pronunciation of Yeats which leads Isabelle to try to educate herself with literature.  She first tries “Hamlet” which she can’t understand and then she reads “Madame Bovary” which she can understand but leaves her somewhat confused and agitated.   But the strain has skyrocketed even before it really began when Avery Clark discovers Amy and Mr. Roberston pursuing intimate acts in Mr. Roberston’s car.  This precipitates a fault line in Isabelle’s relationship with her daughter, with Mr. Avery, with the other women in the office, and with her past.

This book differs from many of Strout’s later novels that tend to describe scenes in the lives of other members of the community.  In this book, the focus is firmly on Amy and Isabelle.  Both become more isolated from others and now very isolated from each other after the incident.  Strout handles all of this in a seemingly calm fashion that at the same time enables the reader to feel everyone’s pain, frustration, and loneliness.

While this novel can well be described as nuanced, it also has many more descriptions than her later novels of the events and thoughts of the characters, and especially regarding the physical landscape of the area.  This gives this novel a richer, or perhaps, somewhat bulkier feel than her later novels.  In addition, this novel is not narrated by a character but rather we have an omniscient narrator that reveals both Amy and Isabelle’s feelings to us. 

This reader is glad to have finally read this first novel by Strout and to have met these characters.  Isabelle appears again in Olive Again!. This reader may revisit that book with new understanding of Isabelle.  Such an interesting web of books Strout has provided us and a new one coming in the summer of 2024!  This reader looks forward to more from this author.

The Anne Hillerman Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito Series

Spider Woman’s Daughter            Published 2013 Read Sept 2023

Rock with Wings                              Published 2015 Read Sept 2023

Song of the Lion                              Published 2017 Read Sept 2023

Cave of Bones                                  Published 2018 Read Oct 2023

The Tale Teller                                  Published 2019  Read Oct 2023

Stargazer                                           Published 2021 Read Oct 2023

The Sacred Bridge                           Published 2022 Read Oct 2023

As discussed in Books-How They Mattered to Me This Year  this author read extensively during some really difficult times.  After completing the Tony Hillerman Canon of novels about the Navajo Nation starring Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, this reader turned to the Anne Hillerman novels.  Daughter of Tony Hillerman, she continued the series.

This reader appreciates the approach Anne Hillerman took with this series.  In the first installation of her series, Joe Leaphorn plays a small role as he is shot in an early scene and spends most of the rest of the book in a coma and later beginning to recuperate.  This provides Anne Hillerman a chance to expand attention on Bernadette Manuelito who witnessed the shooting and is very conflicted about it as she feels she should have done more to prevent it (which wasn’t possible).  Thus begins the series which give more focus on Bernadette Manuelito, a character introduced in the later Tony Hillerman series where she slowly evolved from an officer in Jim Chee’s station, to someone who is attractive to Jim Chee (and vice versa), to Chee’s girlfriend, and eventually to Chee’s wife. 

During the first Anne Hillerman book, this reader wondered if Joe Leaphorn was going to be permanently written out of the series but was pleased that he does remain a character who is now consultant to the Navajo Nation police while retired.   Bernadette Manuelito’s challenges with her mother who needs some in-home care and her sister who provides it and her ambitions to be a detective and the potential conflict that job will have with family life involving children become part of the over-arching flow of the characters’ stories.   

Since the readers of this series were not George Guidall and varied across books, this reader reverted to reading with her eyes instead.  The new readers tended to read flatly—no differentiation in “voicing” for the different characters which this reader missed greatly after George Guidall’s approach.  But clearly this reader enjoyed the series as she read all that were available in the fall of 2023.

While preparing this post, this reader learned that another book in the series was published in 2023 so there is another book to read—hooray!

The photo shows Shiprock, the geological monument in the Navajo Nation for which the nearby town Shiprock is named.

The Rest of the Tony Hillerman Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Series

Dance Hall of the Dead:                Published 1973 Read Nov 2021

The Dark Wind:                               Published 1982 Read May 2022

People of Darkness:                       Published 1980 Read May 2022, Oct 2022

Listening Woman                             Published 1978 Read Oct 2022

Talking God                                       Published 1989 Read Oct 2022

The First Eagle                                  Published 1998 Read Dec 2022

The Fallen Man                                Published 1996 Read Dec 2022

Sacred Clows                                    Published 1993 Read Dec 2022

The Wailing Wind                            Published 2002 Read Jan 2023; sometime before 2016

The Sinister Pig                                Published 2003 Read Jan 2023

Hunting Badger                                Published 1999 Read Jan 2023

Skinwalkers                                       Published 1987 Read Feb 2023

Skeleton Man                                   Published 1986 Read Feb 2023

Shape Shifter                                    Published 2006 Read Feb 2023

As discussed in Books-How They Mattered to Me This Year  this author read extensively during some really difficult times.  The Tony Hillerman books were a great comfort as they gave me a great mystery, a set of characters whose stories evolve a bit in each book and over the course of the series, and especially as they gave me insight into the Navajo Nation and the Navajo culture and the land on which much of it resides.  The list noted above was read mainly through audiobooks with the same reader—George Guidall.  His interpretation of the text and the life he gives the characters through his voice are great. 

This reader has touched on Tony Hillerman books in previous blogs as this reader has frequented the author’s book occasionally for quite some time.  You will note that this reader read these particular books in rapid succession, although not in chronological order of their publication.  Having the same reader for the audiobook throughout the series enabled consistency which this reader greatly appreciated. 

A lovey aspect of this series is that it’s not necessary to read them in order of publication, although the slowly evolving overarching story of the characters does progress with the order of publication.  The reader can settle into the story rapidly whether it’s the first story with these characters or the tenth.  A primary focus is the particular mystery, the secondary focus is on the land, people, and culture of the Navajo Nation, and the third is on the particular state of the story of the characters. 

Tony Hillerman has authored other fiction books and a number of non-fiction books which this reader has not read—yet.   

Unfortunately, the world lost Tony Hillerman in 2008.  His daughter, Anne Hillerman, extended the Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito series which this reader has also read and will comment on separately.

The photo shows Shiprock, an important geological monument in the Navajo Nation and for which Shiprock, the town in which the stories are set, is named

Martin Walker—Bruno Chief of Police Books

The Dark  Vineyard                         Published 2009  Read Jun 2022

The Resistance Man                       Published 2013 Read July 2022

The Crowded Grave                        Published 2011 Read July 2022, Sept 2022

Black Diamond                                 Published 2010 Read July 2022

The Templar’s Last Secret             Published 2017  Read Aug 2022

The Patriarch                                    Published 2016 Read Aug 2022

The Children Return                        Published 2014 Read Aug 2022

Fatal Pursuit                                      Published 2016 Read Aug 2022

The Coldest Cave                            Published 2021 Read Sept 2022

Shooting at Chateau Rock             Published 2020 Read Sept 2022

Caves of Perigold                             Published 2022  Read Sept 2022

Body in the Caste Well                   Published 2019  Read Sept 2022

A Taste for Vengeance                    Published 2019  Read Sept 2022

This reader began reading this series previously but in June of 2022 binge reading of this series started.  This reader was progressing through the series when the matter discussed in Books-How They Mattered to Me This Year  occurred.  This series was one of several that enabled me to deal productively with the events. 

This series of books is about Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges, a former soldier and current police chief (and only police officer) of a small village in the Perigold region of France. The book series follows Bruno as he deals with mysteries that regularly involve international matters and thus the national police force for which his former (and sometimes current) ambitious lover works.  Bruno owns a small house with a garden and chicken coop which provide him items he supplements with purchases from the village to make scrumptious meals he often shares with his friends.  (A friend of this reader has termed the series a sort of food porn due to the details of the ingredients and food preparation).  The reader is also always treated to some sort of history lesson of France or the local region.  As with other series, there is a slow arc across the books regarding the story of Bruno, his loves, and his friends. This series delighted this reader by using the same reader for all the audiobooks to which she listened—Robert Ian MacKenzie. This reader was delighted to learn that more Bruno books have been published. Hooray! 

Evil Eye

By Etaf Rum

Published 2023

Read Feb 2024

Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, by parents who immigrated from refugee camps in Palestine where they were raised.  Rum’s grandparents lived in refugee camps most of their lives. Rum has now brought the world two books with stories that describe how at least some Palestinian immigrant families like hers work to maintain their culture after they come to this country.  The critical elements of the culture she describes:  1) a woman’s role and responsibilities are to marry, birth sons, raise children, obey her husband and her husband’s parents; 2) a man’s role and responsibilities are to marry a pure woman, produce sons, provide for his family, and keep his wife and daughters safe, pure, and obedient by any means necessary; 3) the oldest sons has an additional role:   to support his father in providing for the family while supporting his own family, produce sons, and to obey his parents.

Etaf Rum’s first book A Woman is No Man was a New York Times Best Seller and a post about it can be found on this website.  This reader wished to share the book with one of her book groups but it was considered “too dark”.  This reader acknowledges that it was quite “dark” but feels that the story highlights important enables readers to confront desires of immigrants coming to this county to retain their home community’s culture and not assimilate into the general culture of the county they are joining. 

Etaf Rum’s new book, Evil Eye, gives a new story that shares this theme and some of the “darkness” of her first book.  It’s likely this book is more autobiographical than her first book as the protagonist shares many aspects of Rum’s actual life.  This reader anticipates writing this book was somewhat cathartic for the author.  The author’s own experience enables Rum’s descriptions of the protagonist’s struggles with her marriage believable.  At times these frustrations and the character’s reactions/actions seem repetitive but that too is believable. This story is absolutely not as dark as the story in her first book but also sometime not as engaging.  This reader will leave the plot for future readers to discover.

Rum doesn’t preach the best way for immigrants to settle in this country—assimilate rapidly or retain your culture at all costs- for the immigrants themselves and their children.  She acknowledges the challenges both the immigrants and their children face and provides her readers with some insight into these struggles.    

Rum’s book allows us to consider the expectations of people in the receiving country of immigrants.  While we like to think of the United States as a “melting pot” of cultures of all the different immigrants that came to this land and that all will naturally assimilate into the culture while retaining “nice” aspects of their culture (such as food, dress, and holiday practices).  However, the challenges of immigrants and their families are not all the same, especially those whose religion is not Judeo-Christian, the predominant culture in the US.  However, some of the concerns are universal.  Purity of one’s daughter until marriage has historically been an important goal regardless of place of origin or religion.  The advent of The Pill in the sixties and fairly ready access to birth control lowered the consequences of pre-marital sex and astronomically changed the cultural norms of courtship and marriage in many—but not all—countries, although at different rates.  Acceptance of women in the workplace and in politics, specifically assuming roles outside child-rearing and home-making, similarly has changed norms but again far from identically in different countries and cultures.  Is the world “going to hell in a hand basket” as a result? Should immigrants—and current residents—who don’t want to allow women to have a role in society beyond marriage and childcare be forced to accept these “newfangled” notions and support their daughters in pursing options they didn’t consider themselves?  Many things drive people to migrate so these questions will continue to be faced by society in general as strong differences in opinion regarding “the right way to be” continue to exist.   Rum’s books add interesting fuel for such discussions and this reader will continue to suggest others read her work. 

French Braid

By Anne Tyler

Published 2022

Read July 2022

As usual Anne Tyler gives us an interesting story of family relationships, this time a family saga spanning from 1959 to late summer2020.  Yes, it does include the impact of COVID -19 on these family relationships.  Each of seven sections focuses on a different family member and their perspectives of what’s happening in the particular time frame of the section.  The sections generally move forward in time although there is some overall.  It may seem at times a little disjointed since there is sometimes substantial time between sections but this reader took this in stride and just enjoyed Tyler’s wonderful gift for looking inside people and how they influence the relationships they are in. 

This reader hopes Anne Tyler keeps writing!

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

By Kate Atkinson

Published 1995

Read July 2023; November 2023

Our book club is going to discuss this book soon so this reader decided to become refreshed on the details. (Our book club meets for 2.5 hours and the discussions are quite extensive so it’s good to be prepared.) 

This reader’s first reading left the impression of a story of women generally until The Pill became available—your lot was either spinsterhood with the hope of living with a family member or going into service, or teaching, or an unhappy life being married with too many children and a household to manage.  Several of the books this reader has happened upon lately show this same story in a variety of ways.

This reader’s second reading was informed by the first.  But fortunately, there was much more to the book.  Some topics covered:  The difficulties of the brothers of those sisters when faced with being a solider and dying in the war or surviving it but….  The hopes of the various women for an exciting life or at least a life they like living. How mean young children can be and the consequences of their abrupt actions.  And more and more. 

The narrator, Ruby Lennox, provides us vivid scenes from many parts of her life from the moment of conception through to the end of her mother’s life.   She is convinced at birth that her mother isn’t really her mother and she retains that feeling through most of her life.  But perhaps it’s a feeling enabled by her mother’s surprise at living a life she didn’t intend, having a husband who isn’t who she thought he was, and having children that she didn’t plan to have but did have as a consequence of the marital bed. 

In between thirteen chapters narrated by Rudy are “footnotes” that tell the story of Ruby’s mother Bunty, Bunty’s mother Nell, and Nell’s mother Alice:  their pre-marriage situation, how they became a married woman, and how they dealt with that situation.   There are also “footnotes” about the Nell’s brothers including scenes from their pre-war days and while in the war (The Great War). 

Alice is the only one of these women who escapes her married life—by running off with the travelling photographer—but eventually has regrets about this.  Nell’s sister Lillian has a child out-of-wedlock and leaves the country — an extreme way of leaving town.  She does eventually marry but clearly has a different grip on life than her sister, mother, or niece.  Although Ruby gives us a lot of detail about her early years and her sisters Patricia and Gillian during these years, she gives us little detail about her married life although she does indicate she and her friend Kathleen eventually divorce their respective husbands. 

In summary this book gives an interesting look at womanhood in working-class England through a number of generations showing the similarities of their challenges and the variety of ways these women face them. 

This reader definitely began to savor the book on second reading and was glad the second reading was undertaken.  The richness of the writing approach and the characters was much more evident the second time through for this reader.  I now look forward to the discussion and am now glad the book was on the season’s schedule. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

Published 2022

Read Aug 2023

Like many readers of this book, this is the first Gabrielle Zevin book this reader has read.  Apparently, she has had some big hits as well as some books that haven’t achieved commercial success even if the critics liked them. Based on this book, this reader looks forward to reading more of her work.

This reader is not a gamer but that doesn’t matter because the book is really about people, their relationships, and product development. 

Product development leverages current technologies and creates new ones as necessary to create a design that will be appealing to its customers.  Fast product development is universally desired by owners of companies so that revenues can be generated as fast as possible.  In small start-ups like the one described here—owned by two college dropouts who are the product designers/developers and their friend who is “producing” it—everyone pitches in to do all the stuff needed beside the actual product development.  The descriptions of the intensity of the work to get it to market is pretty believable given the need to generate revenue—they are starving otherwise—and the intensity of the market they are in.  The book also nicely describes the evolution of companies as they move into second generation products—how the relationships between various starting members can and perhaps must change.

Reading about the games that the characters play and develop was actually quite interesting to this reader.  As a non-gamer it was a rare glimpse into this world.  Two aspects of particular interest:  1) The complexity of the computer programming required to create the video games of our times—players moving around in complex landscapes, interacting with various “artificial” characters in the game and interacting with various other players that are on-line and in the game at the same time.  2) The male dominance of video game production.  This was accented in the book by the female protagonist who deals with the condescending way non-company members treat her but not her colleagues with whom she has equal importance in the organization as a primary programmer. 

This glimpse of gaming has been useful as this reader has read other books recently (particularly The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith and The Three Body Problem by Cixin Li) that involve gaming in one way or another. This reader anticipates this will be increasingly common in current modern fiction.   Video games, although not a part of this reader’s life, is a huge component of society so having some understanding of the culture is as useful to non-gamers as having an understanding of recorded music would have been to the generation who was raised before its popularity.

The characters are great—each has attributes that make them deserving of a reader’s interest and empathy while also having flaws or attributes that make them real and believable.  This reader’s opinion of and warmth towards each of the main characters varied substantially at different parts of the story—something this reader greatly appreciates. 

This reader may be reading more of this author.  Certainly, this reader would really enjoy discussing this book with others—also something this reader greatly appreciates.