Idaho

I went into Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich, with my eyes wide open. I read enough reviews without getting spoilers to know that this was one of those books you either love or loathe, but I didn't quite know why.

Reading it is akin to watching a train wreck, a beautiful, dazzling disaster of a novel. Let me start with the writing. It is gorgeous. Ruskovich has the pen of a poet--she can weave sentences that are strong and poignant and colorful. Her words sing.

The problem is that the story doesn't hold together and the characters are unbelievable. I'm pretty comfortable with ambiguity in novels, but I don't think that Ruskovich wanted her readers to feel uncertain about what her characters did. The ambiguity is unintentional, so despite the glorious turns of phrase, the novel is weak.

If you haven't read it or don't mind spoilers, here goes - Jenny and Wade are married, have two young daughters, June and May, live on a mountain in Idaho near a small town. Wade meets Ann, a music teacher and English expat, and asks her to teach him to play the piano so that he won't develop early dementia, as his father did. She does--he practices at home. One hot summer afternoon, May is singing a song Wade learned from Ann, so Jenny kills her with a hatchet. June runs away from the scene and is never found. Jenny goes to prison, Wade and Ann get married, Wade gets dementia, Ann becomes obsessed with Jenny.

So, why did Jenny kill May? Because she hummed a song? Really--no other reason? Why did Ann and Wade fall in love? There seemed zero chemistry between them. Why was Ann English--what on earth did that have to do with anything? She didn't even seek solace in a cuppa tea, ever! The most non-English character I've ever met. Why did Ann visit the weird Deliverance-esqe family at one point in the story? It had absolutely no bearing on the plot or our understanding of Ann. What did Eliot and his accident have to do with anything--okay, plot device to get Wade to the school to meet Ann, but then why did he surface again later in the story for one short section? How did that have anything to do with the story arc or help explain anything at all about what went down that summer afternoon?

All that said, I actually found the prison scenes interesting, although they did nothing to help me get a handle on who Jenny really was, why she did the awful thing she did, etc.

Idaho was one of the most dissatisfying books I've read in a long time. It should've been great--Ruskovich has a way with words, but based on Idaho, I don't think she's a very good storyteller.

This is a Tournament of Books finalist. I have feeling it will do well. The crowd at GoodReads on the Tournament of Books group seemed to love it.

Manhattan Beach

Until I read Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan, I gave absolutely no thought to how ships, especially those engaged in WWII, were repaired. I suppose this is due to my living my entire life in landlocked Colorado and spending zero time with any proximity to a naval shipyard, but I found the subject utterly fascinating as recounted in Manhattan Beach.

Manhattan Beach not only provides an interesting look at how a young woman, Anna Kerrigan becomes a diver involved in ship repair in New York during WWII, but it also includes a creditable mystery that involves the disappearance of Anna's father, gangsters, politics, nightclubs, Ziegfield Follies show girls, and the rough and tumble life of the naval shipyard workers and its neighborhood.

However, the soul of the story is really that of the relationship between Anna and her severely disabled sister, a lovely girl named Lydia, who cannot speak or move, but who is cared for by both Anna and her mother with tenderness and a devotion that is heart-breaking. In a way, Lydia almost becomes for Anna what an imaginary friend is to some children--a confidant who doesn't pass judgement but who provides a focus and purpose whenever necessary.

I absolutely loved how Anna reinvented herself, which I think the vast disruption of the war made possible for so many people.

I also loved Anna's relationship to the ocean--her physical need to dive and immerse herself in another world, where she was lighter and stronger but completely vulnerable to the literal ties that bound her to the other world. In writing that, it occurs to me that her experience in diving metaphorically maps how she interacts with the other worlds she enters--the world of the gangsters and nightclubs and money laundering, the world of the mistress, the world of San Francisco where she starts over, but still tied to her family, however tenuous.

Manhattan Beach is on the Tournament of Books 2018 shortlist and one that I hope goes far. I'll be rooting for it.

Tournament of Books - 2018 short list

Here are the 18 books that made it to the short list this year, and here's the link to the official article at the Morning Post.

I would like to read the six I've noted, but will definitely read at least two...by March Madness!

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker - plan to read
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch
Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid - a likely winner, so I plan to read

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich- definitely will read
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - a likely winner, so I will try again to read
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Eganm - definitely will read
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee - would like to read
Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward -would like to read
So Much Blue by Percival Everett
Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash
White Tears by Hari Kunzru

This is such a great way to help me choose current titles to read. I'm rarely at a loss as to what to read when it comes to classics, but there is just so much contemporary fiction that I appreciate the help in navigating my way to the best books.

The Leavers

The Leavers by Lisa Ko is one of the few books I read this year that was released this year, and it's on the Tournament of Books 2018 long list and I'm sure it will make to the short list.

I enjoyed it immensely. For starters, it is quite different from just about everything else I've read this year, and that in itself is refreshing.

Here is the Amazon blurb:

One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. 

Told from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another. 

Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. 

I found the story fascinating and feel that I have a much better understanding of the stresses that immigrants face. Even those who enter the U.S. legally face enormous emotional, cultural, and physical hurdles that are difficult for me to comprehend and appreciate.

I liked Deming/Daniel so much, even when he was making bad choices, doubting himself and his talents, and looking for trouble. Surviving as he did is a testament to his strength of character despite his own misgivings.  Interestingly, I didn't like Polly, his mother, much until we got to the part of the book where she was allowed her own voice. Again, there is a lot about Polly that is unlikable, but at her core she is truly admirable--strong and fierce. A true survivor.

The only part that didn't quite work for me was the portrayals of Daniel's adoptive parents. They were just too cliched white yuppies who were clueless about the enormity of the role they assumed. I felt that Ko neither understood nor wanted to understand them and so left them as distinctly two-dimensional and bland characters in what was otherwise a rich and savory story.

I also absolutely love the synesthesia part of Daniel--he sees color as he hears sounds, especially music, and this helps him develop as a musician. I am fascinated by the concept of synesthesia and don't encounter it much in literature.

Finally, it ends well. There is resolution to the main stories of Deming/Daniel and Polly, but not finality. It is a realistic ending, and doesn't veer off the cliff as sometimes happens in novels. As a debut novel, The Leavers is remarkable in the tightness of structure, authenticity of voice, and cohesion of themes.

Excellent book that I highly recommend.

Tournament of Books 2018 - long Long List

I had fun last year reading some of the books in the 2017 Tournament of Books, and have been eagerly anticipating this year's tournament.

The Morning News has published the 72 books that constitute the long list, from which the final contenders from the Tournament will be drawn.  That's a long list to whittle down to 18 finalists!

Here is the long list--I've noted the few that I'm familiar with. Open to recommendations! A lot seem dystopian, which I don't care for, and a few sound very tough to read based on subject matter.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
American War by Omar El Akkad
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Augustown by Kei Miller
Autumn by Ali Smith
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch
Celine by Peter Heller - read and reviewed, one of the few books I really didn't care for
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall
Chemistry by Weike Wang
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt
Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
Eat Only When You’re Hungry by Lindsay Hunter
The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
Huck Out West by Robert Coover - I'm intrigued, will add to TBR
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich- on library wait list, mixed review but I like the premise
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Isadora by Amelia Gray
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera
The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin
The Leavers by Lisa Ko - currently listening too--really good!
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - tried it and loathed it
The Locals by Jonathan Dee
The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Eganm - on library wait list, sounds great
Marlena by Julie Buntin
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
A Natural by Ross Raisin
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Not Constantinople by Nicholas Bredie
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
The One-Eyed Man by Ron Currie
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein
Refuge by Dina Nayeri
Release by Patrick Ness
Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac
The Secret Books by Marcel Theroux
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet
Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward - it's going on the TBR
Six Degrees of Freedom by Nicolas Dickner
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
Smile by Roddy Doyle
So Much Blue by Percival Everett
Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake by Chiara Barzini
Ties by Domenico Starnone
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Void Star by Zachary Mason
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso

Homegoing and Vinegar Girl

These two books don't have much in common except that they are part of a set.  Homegoing was one of the Tournament of Books selections this year, and Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which modern popular authors tackle retelling some of Shakespeare's plays.

I knew I wanted to read Homegoing from the moment I heard about it and saw its wonderful, vibrant, promising cover. I've made a conscious effort to read more slave stories as a way of trying to balance the >50 years in which I read none, but apart from that I loved the premise.  Basically, two half sisters in 18th century Africa who have never met are the genesis for two narratives--one girl remains in Africa as do her descendants, while the other is sold into slavery and her descendants are part of the American experience.

This was a fascinating way to travel both lines through history, and I really enjoyed hearing about both sets of stories and people equally.  The writing was excellent--powerful, straightforward, and flexible, meaning that I was impressed that the author, Yaa Gyasi, was able to give each character a unique voice that made him/her memorable as an individual.

Homegoing rates as one of the best books I've read so far this year.  Interestingly, in the Tournament of Books, Underground Railroad was named the champion, and Homegoing came in second.  It's all opinion, but while both are 5-star books, I preferred Homegoing.  Maybe it's the span of time, the richness and variety of characters and stories, some that intersect and some that don't.  I found Homegoing the more satisfying novel, though both were equally thought-provoking and powerful.

Compared to Homegoing, Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler was pretty fluffy.  Here's what I wrote for my GoodReads review:

Wish that I could give this weird book another half star [I gave it 3]. It's a weird book because the basic storyline is pretty hard to work with as anyone who has seen Taming of the Shrew will tell you. Tyler does an okay job with modernizing the premise of a "Vinegar Girl" (i.e., a sharp-tongued, no nonsense woman) needing to get married, which is not an easy task--really, no one "needs" to get married these days, but Tyler came up with a reasonable reason. My main problem with the book is that Tyler's setting is contemporary Baltimore but the total feel of the setting is "Leave it to Beaver" land. The setting is so anachronistic that it's unsettling.

For example, there are no 2017 parents who would send their children to the preschool where Kate works as Tyler describes it--the parents sound modern, but the teachers and aides are completely unrealistic. Makes me wonder if Tyler has been in a 21st century preschool. And the notion that "everyone" started treating Kate differently when she announced her engagement because she was no longer doomed to be a single woman is preposterous.

But, and here's what saves the book for me, Tyler dealt in a wonderful way with that awful speech that Kate and her husband make at the end of Taming of the Shrew...it was so fitting and fun to read that I forgave Tyler for the weirdness of her anachronistic world.

Since I compared Homegoing to Underground Railroad, it's only fair that I compare Vinegar Girl with the other Shakespeare Project book that I've read so far, Hag-Seed.  They are light years apart. Hag-Seed was an interpretation of The Tempest and it made me look at the original, its themes and characters and plot, in a new way.  Vinegar Girl was a modernization with nothing really interesting or new to say about Taming of the Shrew. It was a fun read but not really memorable.

Tournament of Books - personal update

I decided late to jump on the Tournament of Books bandwagon and so only read a couple of the contenders.

I started with We Love You, Charlie Freeman, and also read My Name is Lucy Barton.  I'm currently reading Hag-Seed (modern retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, by Margaret Atwood, which was on the long list but didn't make the cut for the short list brackets), and am still planning on reading The Underground Railroad, Homegoing, and possibly The Mothers and Grief is a Thing with Feathers.

So looking at a head-to-head competition between the two I've finished, I definitely preferred Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton over Kaitlyn Greenidge's Charlie Freeman.

Charlie Freeman is a debut novel and it shows--Greenidge has a powerful story with difficult themes and challenging characters, and it seems that she is never quite able to manage all of those elements cohesively.  After I finished the book, I read a couple of reviews that talked about the book being messy, and I agree with that.  There were significant parts that I just didn't get--in particular, the characters of the mother and the younger sister baffled me. I could never make sense of either one.  Likewise, the institution where the family went to live was something I never believed in.  I liked the premise of the story, and I liked the complexity of the characters, but the story-telling was clumsy.

Not so with Lucy Barton.  I loved the structure of the novel--the way Lucy tells the story of her life through her conversations with her mother.  I found the mother borderline believable, primarily because I cannot imagine any mother acting the way she did towards her child, but that could be my own narrow view of the world.  But the writing was great, the dialogue realistic, and the story-telling superb.  It was all flashback with little action, and yet the story was taut with tension.

On to Hag-Seed--in a word, it is great.  I usually don't care for modern retellings, though I have done this myself with some Austen works, but this is spot on, thoughtful, with superb characters and dialogue and it reflects a profound and sensitive reading of The Tempest.  I'm half-way done, so I can't say for sure how I'll feel, but for sheer reading enjoyment, I pick The Hag-Seed.  After reading Atwood's The Blind Assassin and disliking it, I jumped to the conclusion that I didn't like Atwood. Now, I considering reading some of her other works.

It'll be interesting how I rate all the books in this year's Tournament.  I'll keep you posted!  Anyone else reading along these lines?