A Great Reckoning

 A Great Reckoning

By Louise Penny

In my reading world, the arrival of December means an annual reunion with Armand Gamache and his

loyal cast of characters in Three Pines.

This edition finds the Gamaches living in Three Pines as Armand prepares to begin a new chapter of his career as Commander of the Sûretè Academy. I'm a little unclear about where this book falls chronologically in the Gamache bio, but I did read about how he took down the head of the police force, Franceour, who had been corrupt and filled its ranks with like-minded individuals. Gamache saw the academy as the training ground and ultimate source of this corruption, and his goal in taking it over was to right the ship, and restore order to the Quebec police force for years to come.

In what might be described as an act of arrogance, though, Gamache kept one of the most corrupt of the academy's faculty, Serge Leduc, on staff, and hired one of Franceour's right-hand men to join them. His reasoning was that the two might cancel each other out, and serve as living examples of the pitfalls of corruption. It didn't quite work out that way.

Shortly into Gamache's tenure, Leduc is murdered on campus. Gamache brings on his accomplice in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to serve as an independent witness to the investigation. Not surprisingly, he tries to peg the murder on Gamache. But just as he is about to make the arrest, Gamache, newly aware of just how twisted Leduc had been -- he made cadets play Russian roulette! -- proves his corruption and finds the real killer -- Franceour's former ally. Just in the nick of time, as per the usual.

So wonderful to be back in Penny's world again. She sure knows how to twist a tale. I found myself reading until well past my bedtime, which is just what I need this time of year. And after four -- five? -- of these books under my belt, the characters feel like old friends. Till next year...

North

 North

By Brad Kessler

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

At this point, I think I might have read as many McBride books as Murakami stories. He's an author who's work I know I will love, whatever the subject matter, and this was no different.

The book is set in 1930s Pottstown, PA, in the community of Chicken Hill. The area was first settled by Jewish immigrants, who in recent decades had been moving out as they tried to align their lives with the town's white residents and, in doing so, made room for increasing numbers of black people to move in. Moshe, a theater owner, and his wife Chona, though, are holdouts, largely because of the latter's insistence. Chona refuses to live her life by the "white" majority's rules, does not see moving closer to their environs as a step up -- and cannot understand Pottstown's division of people into classes and races. She grew up in Chicken Hill -- her father was its first rabbi -- and would stay there.

Part of the draw is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which, thanks to good business, Moshe is able to buy. The couple live above it, and it becomes something of the child that Chona herself cannot have. Monetarily, it is a losing proposition; but as a community center it is gold. It is not only a gathering place, but a social services network as well. And so, when a young Chicken Hill black boy, rendered deaf by a stove explosion that killed his mother, catches the attention of the state, who wants to put him in an institution where he will receive an "education", Chona and Moshe hide him. 

But then he is discovered. By Doc, an affable small-town doctor to local whites -- and a predator to the black and Jewish communities. When, in the middle of a seizure, to which Chona is prone, Doc begins to assault Chona, Dodo, the hidden boy, reveals himself and defends his adopted mother, an act that seals his fate to the institution. The community then must work together to get him back.

This, of course, is just one plot thread in the book. As a colleague remarked, McBride is a master of building these apparently different lines for hundreds of pages, and then bringing them all together at the end. Plot aside, though, this is a meditation on white power and privilege and the sickness it creates. It was a wonderful read. McBride's dialogue was particularly spot on and helped bring life and laughter to the characters.

I Must Betray You

 I Must Betray You

By Ruta Sepetys

Set in Romania during the final days of the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, this book examines the toll that a society of spies takes on one another. The book opens with the main character, Cristian Florescu, "recruited" by the Romanian secret police. The quotation marks because he really has no choice. His recruiter, dubbed paddle hands because of the size of his digits, claims to have caught Cristian in the act of trading items (stamps) with a foreigner (a diplomat's son) in exchange for currency (a dollar). The first two are true, but harmless; it is the last item that could get Cristian, and his whole family, in trouble. Moreover, he is enticed by the promise of medicine for his beloved, ailing grandfather. And so Cristian, feeling he has no choice, becomes the thing he hates most in the world: an informer.

He is not alone. It's a society full of informers, and Cristian is left wondering who it was who informed on him. He settles on his once-best-friend, Luca. Meanwhile, his grandfather, sick though he may be, continuously reminds Cristian of the evils of a regime that relies on fear to subdue an entire population, much to the chagrin of his mother and father, who has become a silent shadow of himself.

There is light even in this grim world, though. Cristian kindles a relationship with a girl, Lilliana. But even this isn't safe. It turns out someone is watching them, and when word of specific details of their rendezvous get back to Lilliana, she assumes it is Cristian who revealed them. Is Cristian an informer? Yes. But not of this kind! And so once again, he is left enraged, searching for who might have given him up. He settles on his sister, but, it turns out, he is wrong. 

And then it all comes crashing down. All across Eastern Europe, communist dictatorships fall, and Ceausescu is the last. But it only comes after an uprising that is met with cruel violence, which brings Cristian and Lilliana back together -- but which takes the life of Christian's sister. It is only long afterward that he learns the truth: It was his own mother who spied on him.

I found this an interesting read, particularly when tension builds toward the end. It is a pretty chilling reminder of how lucky we are to live in a democracy, even if it is far less than perfect. 

Vacationland

 Vacationland

By John Hodgman

Some light-hearted reading for our road trip. This is a series of connected essays that basically tells the

story of John Hodgman's second homes. Strange. The first was a place in northwestern Mass inherited from his mother. The second is in Maine, a state with which Hodgman's has a strange love affair -- and which gives the book its title. 

I am writing this more than a month after finishing it, just as many of Kes' friends are heading to Maine on vacation, a destination that I find very strange. What appeal does Maine have for Vermonters? Their mountains have nothing on ours. And if it is coast you are seeking -- why not head to waters that are actually comfortable to swim in? Or go north to Canada, where you can actually get away from people and feel like your in Europe, what with all the French and whatnot?

Anyway, Hodgman is charmingly funny and just self-aware enough about his privilege to make this book readable. I can't say that much about it stuck with me, other than it was hard to believe that Hodgman was managing to make money off a story that is essentially about him having enough money to buy more than one house. Well done there. This is why I keep telling Erin to write a best-selling novel. 

As the Crow Flies

 As the Crow Flies

By Craig Johnson

I picked up this Walt Longmire mystery somewhere in our travels out west this summer.  Maybe Iowa?

Figured it'd be a good read while in that country, and I was certainly right. This Longmire adventure takes place on the reservation just across the Montana/Wyoming border -- out of Walt's jurisdiction, but within sight of the Big Horn Mountains.

This might be only my second Longmire book, but already there are tropes to recognize. His daughter always plays a role, making Walt feel guilty about being hyper-focused on his work but ultimately validating his commitment to justice. In this case, Walt is inexplicably charged with finding a wedding venue for his pregnant daughter, who is traveling from her new home in Philadelphia to marry the brother of his deputy. Given that his daughter is from the area, it is unclear to me why Walt is given this job, but what do I know? 

Then there is Henry Standing Bear, Walt's best friend, who has some pretty stereotypical superpowers, mainly being able to sneak up unseen on anyone at any time. He always comes to the rescue, and does several times here.

In this particular version of events, a young woman falls from some cliffs near a potential wedding venue. Is it suicide or murder? Since it happens in the first chapter of the book -- definitely murder. Though Walt is technically unable to work the case, he becomes embroiled when it becomes clear that neither the newly-minted tribal chief, who is suffering mentally from her time in Iraq, nor the FBI are up to the job. He mentors the young tribal officer, gets the FBI off her back, and, of course, solves the case. 

A great summer read. Perhaps the beginning of a tradition? 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

For the first one hundred pages or so of this novel, all I could think of was Kavalier and Clay, Michael

Chabon's novel about a partnership in the golden age of comic books. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is also about a creative partnership during a "golden age" of sorts 50 or so years later, when it was possible for two unkowns in their early 20s to develop a blockbuster video game. Despite its widespread acclaim, I didn't care much for Kavalier and Clay, and abandoned it after 150 pages or so. For a while, I thought I'd do the same with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

But there was something different about Zevin's novel. Perhaps it was just the circumstances in which I picked it up -- at the beginning of summer vacation when it feels like work will never come again and there is oodles of time to read. But I was pretty quickly immersed in the story, which focuses on the relationship between Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who became friends in an LA hospital (Sadie there because her sister had cancer; same recovering from a car wreck that killed his mother) when they bonded over games. It is a tumultuous friendship from the beginning. Someone suggests to Sadie, who is going for her bot mitzvah, log her hours with Sam as "community service", and she does. While she goes far beyond her required hours, totaling something like 600, when Sam finds out he feels betrayed and doesn't speak to Sadie for 6 years after.

That changes at a Boston train terminal, where Sam, now a Harvard student, spots Sadie, who is attending MIT, and rekindles a connection. Sadie is enrolled in a game-making class, and hands Sam some of her work. He is enthralled and becomes convinced that they can make a great game together. And they do. It makes them rich, helps them launch a company, and leads to more and more games. It also leads to more and more conflict. Sam and Sadie engage in on-again, off-again feuds that ends, many years and a significant tragedy later, in a kind of frenemy detente.

The novel explores many themes: The way(s) games mimic reality, and vice versa; the nature of grief, loss, and trauma; adulthood; and cultural appropriation. But most of all, it's an exploration of different types of love. There is love of games and art and pop culture, to be sure; at the center of the book, though, is love between people -- especially the love between Sadie and Sam, a love that is consummated through game play rather than romance or sex. 

It sounds boring. But it was really, really good.

A few complaints. I felt like the love between Sadie and Sam was never established well enough. There was lots of TELLING the reader that the two loved each other, but not enough showing it. For most of the novel, the two were at each other's throats about something, and the reader was just expected to take the love between them for granted. In addition, the characters were Seinfeldian in their unlikability. You become so intimate with each character's inner life that you root for them, but their inability to communicate effectively and kindly was maddening. Finally, I wish the author had done more with the gaming theme. The book is organized around the games the characters make. This felt like an opportunity to play with the narration a bit so that it somehow mimicked the games. The author did this a bit, but there could have been more.

The Poisonwood Bible

 The Poisonwood Bible

By Barbara Kingsolver

I came across this book in the little free library at the Plymouth Schoolhouse; it was one of the few texts

there that seemed worth reading, so I thought I'd pick it up.

The book tells the story of an American family who, at the insistence of the father, fly to the Belgian Congo to do missionary work. It is a doomed mission. The father, a preacher before World War II, emerged from the conflict a zealot, convinced that he needed to make up for his fortuitous injury that helped him miss the Bataan Death March in which nearly all of his fellow soldiers died. 

The rest of the family, a woman and four girls, are less dedicated. They all react to the relocation in different ways, and take turns narrating chapters. My favorites were Rachel, a vapid teacher whose writing was filled with humorous malapropisms, and Ada, a selective mute with a disability, who copes with her place in the world with word play and Emily Dickinson. 

The patriarch is stereotypically dismissive of the culture he finds in his new home. He, for instance, doesn't bother to learn that the native language is tonal -- the meaning of words changes based on how they are said. Which is how the book gets its name. The father, thinking he is trying to say something else, inadvertently calls his holy book "poisonwood", which is symbolic of the challenges he faces in converting the Congolese people.

Things take a turn for the worse for the family when an independence movement, led by Patrice Lumumba, successfully frees the Congo from Belgian rule. Though other local missionaries plead for the family to leave, the father, haunted by his wartime past, refuses. The family is cut off from their meager stipend, which still made them the richest people in their village, and, as the father takes long walks working on sermons few people will hear and fewer will understand, the women of the family are more or less left to figure out how to survive on their own. Eventually, they flee. Or three of them do. Leah falls in love with a local teacher, whose participation in the independence movement becomes problematic when a US-backed coup leads to the murder of Lumumba and the rise of a despot bent on enriching himself and silencing his rivals.

Overall, the book was interesting -- but far too long.    

I Have Some Questions for You

 I Have Some Questions for You

By Rebecca Makkai

This was an immersive, couldn't-put-it-down read that explores the intersection of all sorts of 

contemporary issues: #metoo, predatory prep school teachers, podcasts, true crime obsession, racism, and cancel culture. It's a lot.

The way the book reads is reminiscent of Serial, which examined the case of Adnan Syed and ultimately resulted in his release. Its narrator is Bode Kane, a professional podcaster who normally dedicates her airtime to the abuse of Hollywood starlets of the past but who becomes obsessed with the murder of Thalia Kieth, her onetime roommate at an exclusive prep school in the woods of New Hampshire called Granby. Kane returns to Granby during a two-week break in regular classes to teach a course on podcasting and helps steer one of her students to Thalia's murder. This amateur first attempt spawns a full-blown podcast that results in a new hearing for Omar, a black athletic trainer on whom the murder was, it seems, unjustly pinned. 

At the same time as she is mentoring her students, though, Kane herself becomes embroiled in controversy when her former husband, Jerome, is accused of abusing an art-world neophyte just as his career was starting to take off. Though her life's work is exposing the abuse of women actors and her current project is finding justice for a murdered young woman, Bode defends Jerome -- because even the accused admits that everything in the relationship had been consensual. So what, Bode questions publicly, is the actual abuse? 

Meanwhile, Bode begins to suspect, strongly, that her one-time choral teacher was sexually involved with Thalia, and might be responsible for her murder. But these encounters were also "consensual". So where is the line? Who deserves to be cancelled? Obviously, a teacher-predator -- and Bode quite deliberately sics a devoted online following on the former teacher in the hopes that he will, in fact, be cancelled. 

Is the author suggesting that the line between bad relationships and abuse is actually very clear if only we opened our eyes and looked for it? Or is she saying that these things are more complicated than they seem? Is she implying that #metoo and cancel culture have gone too far? Or that a little collateral damage is okay if it keeps our society bending toward justice?

Interesting questions, all, and they are wrapped up in an addictive plot. Great book. 

Galapagos

 Galapagos

By Kurt Vonnegut

Was in the mood for some wry absurdism, so I picked up a Vonnegut book I'd never read before. It's a

meditation of sorts on evolution. We often think, of course, that we humans are the most highly evolved species, what with our big brains and whatnot. But in Galapagos, Vonnegut, writing as a wandering spirit 1 million years in the future, these big brains are actually the evolutionary mutation that brings about our downfall. It is the cause of a financial crisis, unnecessarily made by big brains, that wipes out all of humanity -- except for a small colony of humans that accidentally ends up shipwrecked on a deserted Galapagos island. There they evolve away from these big brains and back into animals whose sole focus is on survival. It is a simpler way of life -- though, as the narrator points out, no human in a million years would have the capacity to reflect on that.

It was good to revisit Vonnegut, like seeing an old friend after some time. It didn't quite pack the humorous punch as some of his other books, but a good read nonetheless.

Signal Fires

 Signal Fires

By Dani Shapiro

This was the second of my father's annual Valentine's Day book gift. Perhaps I'm projecting here, but it

seems like a major theme of the book is finding peace during middle age. The main characters of this novel have a harder time than most. In the opening scene, two of the main characters, brother-and-sister duo Theo and Sarah, are in a car that crashes and kills a friend. Inexplicably, the family decides to never speak of the incident again, leaving the trauma to fester for decades. It manifests itself in unproductive ways. Sarah turns to alcohol, Theo up and leaves the country without telling anyone, and Mimi, the mom, develops early-onset Alzheimers. They are all eventually saved, if that is the right word for it, when their story intertwines with new neighbors across the street, the youngest of which, Waldo, is a precocious 10-year-old with a genius level IQ and an obsession with stars, the "signal fires" of the title. 

Waldo's ruminations on stars and the atoms that make them up point toward another theme: the connection between all things. We are, after all, as CSNY pointed out, star dust. Waldo continually reminds us that everything is connected, and, at times, is even able to see the past, present, and future all mixed up at once. This is what happens when he, by chance, is with Mimi when she passes away. It's an idea emphasized by the organization of the novel, which jumps back and forth in time, and includes heavy doses of foreshadowing in the sections on the past.

In this sense, the author seems to be making a claim -- or maybe grasping at? -- of immortality, that we never really die. While I found the story engaging and very well written, it is the heavy-handed way in which the author presents this idea that will make this book forgettable. It seems more like an attempt to comfort herself than an actual story; judging by the book jacket, Dani Shapiro is also in middle age and, one would suspect, grappling with questions of mortality. In her book, everything ends happily -- even death! -- and all loose ends are tied up. I wish the book had sought to raise questions more than provide answers.

Trust

 Trust

By Hernan Diaz

The title of this novel is a play on the two themes explored throughout. On the one hand, it is a reference

to money, apt considering the book revolves around the rise of a financier who predicts the stock market plunge of 1929 and winds up unimaginably wealthy. Perhaps more interestingly, though, it refers to the ways in which reality often conforms to the person who owns its narrative. As the financier in question, Andrew Bevel, tells his secretary-cum-ghost-writer: "My job is about being right. Always. If I'm ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake." And as the father of ghost-writer Ida Perenza claims, "History itself is just a fiction -- a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously."

As if to prove this point, Diaz starts the novel with a novel-within-a-novel called Bonds, which tells the story of a Bevel-like financier, his rise to enormous wealth, and the mental decline that ultimately results in the death of his wife. I was fully prepared for the next section of the book to pick up where the last left off. Instead the reader is given My Life by Andrew Bevel, which is confusing, not only because it is unfinished, but also because much of it seems to echo Bonds. The two are connected in the third portion of the book, in which Ida looks back at her time working for Bevel. Turns out, Bevel's autobiography is a response to Bonds, which he found inaccurate and appalling. And it is at this point that I caught on to what the author was doing -- 193 pages in. I felt a little foolish until I read this review on NPR, the author of which felt similarly. Then there is the final section of the book, transcribed diaries of Bevel's wife that call into question who was responsible for the Bevel fortune. The diaries seem to claim it was she who developed the investing strategy that led to the wealth. Then again, she writes them in the days before succumbing to cancer, when she is regularly on morphine.

So, who to "trust"? I don't know, but I do know this was an engrossing read. After reading part one of the novel, I was beginning to wonder why the book had been long listed for the Booker Prize. But the narrative shifts made it clear. It is the rare book that keeps you engaged in the plot while also raising thought-provoking questions along the way.

Shutter

 Shutter

By Ramona Emerson

This is one of the first books I've purchased in a while. I did so after hearing an interview with the author

on Fresh Air. It sounded like nothing I'd read in a long time. After I bought it, I sat on it for a long time. It's a thin novel, and I guess I was enjoying the anticipation of the story. When I did crack the pages, I wasn't disappointed.

The book is the story of Rita Todacheene, who works as a forensic photographer in Albuquerque, NM. She's had a fascination with cameras and photography since she was young. Dead people, too. It turns out she was able to see them when others couldn't. It is/was at once a gift and an affliction; it allowed her to connect with her dead grandfather; but other spirits had come to her demanding justice. That was the case when Rita showed up to document a particularly grisly death that involved a woman falling from an overpass before being smashed to bits by unsuspecting cars below. It was ruled a suicide, but the woman in question shows up in Rita's life and is quite insistent that it was murder. She won't let Rita rest until the truth is unraveled.

This book had it all. It was funny in parts, suspenseful in others. It kept me rapt and it was done all too soon -- just as I suspected.

Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World

 Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

By Haruki Murakami

January means Murakami! I'm to the point where I need to dig a little bit to find books of his that I haven't

read. 

This novel takes place in what appears at first to be two different locations. The first is a futuristic Japan in which two groups, the System and the Semiotics, are in a kind of battle over information. Our main character is a "calcutec" who works for the government-backed system. His expertise is "shuffling" data, which I think is meant to be a form of encryption designed to keep it safe from the thieving Semiotics. One day this Murakami man -- kind of ho hum, divorced, aimless -- is summoned to do some shuffling for a mad-scientist type who lives and works in an underground layer. His work there captures the attention of the Semiotics, who bust into his apartment and knife him in the stomach, which sets off a trip back to the underground to rescue the mad scientist -- and figure out what the hell is going on.

This story alternates with another tale, this one set in a vague, mystical Town described as "the end of the world." Here "beasts" (unicorns) roam in and out of the town's walls, everyone is assigned a job by a gruff gatekeeper, and everything is a facsimile of the "real" world. Our Murikami man is newly arrived in this town. He is assigned the job of "dreamreader"; every evening, he goes to a library stocked with the skulls of the beasts, which glow with memories if he concentrates hard enough. Things are peaceful and calm, but, of course, there is a catch: Murikami man was separated from his shadow upon entry to his town and, with the onset of winter, the shadow isn't doing well. If it dies, the man will lose his "mind" -- that is, his ability to think for himself and of himself as an individual. The shadow devises an escape plan, which the man seeks to execute in the novel's final pages.

The two stories converge when we learn that this "end of the world" is really a figment of the real-world Murikami man's subconscious, in which he is doomed to be stuck because of the operation that allowed him to "shuffle", a task that requires the disassociation of the left and right brains. He learns from the scientist that he has about 25 hours left before he is stuck inside this mental creation for eternity. The escape from the Town that takes place in the alternating chapters suggests that there is hope he can avoid this fate. But, at the last moment, the man decides to save his shadow but nevertheless remain in the Town. He thinks he can both retain his "mind" and stay in his made-up world. 

It all seems like a meditation on the nature of consciousness. To what extent can we, and do we, live in a world of our own mental making? How do our subconscious thoughts and make up express themselves in our everyday life? Who really controls us -- are we hardwired from the beginning or do we have real choices? Does consciousness die when we do? 

These are all questions that Murakami explores in his other novels as well. I just read that this book is supposedly one of Murakami's favorites, though I wouldn't put it in that place. I guess the science fiction components felt less mystical than his other books and more scientific. There is one chapter in which the scientist explains "shuffling" that really lost me. Still, the action picks up toward the end, and I really appreciated, though am a bit haunted by, the twist at the end. Till next January, Haruki!