My initial reaction before I began reading this was concern about reading a book about writing a book, especially one that bills itself as a black comedy. Some of the cheap shots did make me uncomfortable. Ultimately it’s much more complicated than that, taking comedic aim at the publishing world, academia, the television industry, while exploring aspects of dealing with racial identity...
I truly loved There There and admire this one at least as much. I’ve now read my favorite book for the year. It begins with the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, a surprise attack by the US army on a peaceable Native American encampment in southeastern Colorado. Orange brings this and subsequent policies and events to life with characters, beginning with Jude Star, a child who barely escaped...
After I read James Woods’ review, I knew I wanted to read this book. Then in Wikipedia I learned that Muammar Quaddafi had overturned the government of Libya in 1969 and was both an authoritarian dictator and responsible for improving the status of women there significantly. It’s useful to read James Woods’ New Yorker review to learn about the author. The narrator Khaled is the...
I was happy to see Ron Charles’ enthusiasm for Louise Erdrich’s latest book and it turns out that I share it. This one begins in 2008 in North Dakota’s Red River Valley where the economy centers on sugar beets and gives brief updates to the present time. The last book I read of hers, The Beet Queen, written in 1986, begins in 1932, and has a character Wallace who introduces...
As usual I will begin by noting how hard I find it to write about a collection of short stories. How do I write about the whole of a disparate mix? Not comprehensively, I fear. “The Bootlegger” tells about a complicated marriage with the backdrop of classical music. The narrator describes her smart and successful husband, a person who was moved to hear classical music at Carnegie Hall...
Besides being an award-winning author, Alice McDermott has been active in teaching creative writing in many settings. This book is subtitled “Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction.” Though I don’t aspire to write, as a reader, I have appreciated authors’ reflections on what makes fiction work. I loved George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a 400-page...
This is the second in the Australian series “Writers on Writers” that I have read. The first was about Tim Winton; this one is about Kim Scott, another favorite of mine. I did not recognize the name Tony Birch, though it turns out I read an essay of his in Anita Heiss’s collection Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. In 2018 Kim Scott’s book That Deadman Dance was one of my...
If you love nice long sentences, this is a good book for you. It was published in 1908, the year my father was born, and is set in Waterford, Ireland. The Irish author was successful, having been the first author to have two top-ten best selling books on The New York Times list in one year (1905). She died when she was only 36. It tells the struggle of one family to become middle class in...
I am a fan of this author and have read four of his books that I find very clever and quite fun. My favorite was the first one I read, The President’s Hat, that tells a tale of François Mitterrand’s hat changing the lives of the people who happened to have it for a time. I read this one because I discovered it is in the public library. The Portrait is narrated by a man who works as an...
It was the review in Reading Matters that took me to this book and the author’s focus on the importance of precise language that kept me reading. The main character is a translator at “the Court” in the Hague, an unnamed international court that brings charges against those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes. She had left New York after her father died...