Having read The Buddha in the Attic I was familiar with Otsuka’s unusual and surprisingly successful method of storytelling. This one introduces a community of swimmers who are regulars at an underground pool. We get to know them by the accretion of factual characteristics: “Some of us come here because we are injured and need to heal. We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches...
This is my third Amor Towles book; The Rules of Civility was a treat from beginning to end and while A Gentleman in Moscow wallowed in the perfection of that gentleman, it too was irresistible. And once again, I find that when you are in the clutches of an Amor Towles book, it’s hard to resist. Set in 1954, the story unfolds in chapters told by or focusing on each character that end just as...
Imani Perry has an impressive academic background: Yale undergraduate, Harvard Ph.D, LLM degree from Georgetown, and she now teaches at Princeton. Her ramble through the South is an informed and wide-ranging trek, with both familiar and new bits of information to digest. The approach to talking to people about Washington, DC used the question, “Is Washington a Southern city?” While...
When I read about the recent action by the Montpelier Foundation board to undo their decision to share authority with descendants of the enslaved, I recalled I had purchased a book by Bettye Kearse, one of the descendants and a member of the Foundation Board. Here’s a link to the Washington Post story about it. The subtitle of her book is The Lost History of a President’s Black Family...
Dorothy recommended (and loaned me) this book and I thank her for it. It begins with the author explaining that Nesje, the haymaker, was his great-grandfather, born in 1838, and that though he heard many stories about Nesje and had some documents relating to his life, he would have to “invent him out of air and nothingness.” This he did, using “the light over Molde and...
China Dream by Ma Jian A Cat, A Man and Two Women by Junichiro Tanizaki, author of the makioki sisters The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka The Body Surfers by Robert Drewe Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (Iowa Writers Project grad). Audiobook fm library Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan The Personal Librarian by...
Before I began to read this book set in Cyprus, I read the part of the Wikipedia entry for that country about the long struggles between the Greeks and Turks, especially the events of 1974 and found that background very helpful. Many elements make this a pleasing book. First, the familiar story of teenagers from opposite sides of a conflict in love; Romeo and Juliet leap to mind. Kostas, Greek...
Though I used to follow closely the Canadian Giller Fiction Prize, I didn’t know What Strange Paradise was the 2021 winner until after I finished it. The moment I finished it, I headed straight for the Internet for an explanation of the mystifying ending. More about that later. In alternating chapters the story unfolds in two parts. The first centers on refugees leaving North Africa for an...
Having admired his book about Steve Jobs, I knew I would appreciate Isaacson’s book about Jennifer Doudna. He does a good job of explaining the how scientists learned about RNA and CRISPR, but it’s still a big mystery to me. I now recognize a lot more words on the topic, but wow, it remains an alien world to me. First, CRISPR: it is a relatively quick and easy way to edit the DNA in...
This account of a fictitious popular interracial music duo begins in the 1970s and ends with their revival in 2016 and is a tour de force. Opal and Nev are an unlikely twosome; when they met, Opal was an amateur with barely any experience and Nev had recently arrived from Britain with more expectations than promise in his musical ambitions. The story is told from the vantage point a year or so...