Ocean Vuong | Fiction 2019

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a 20-something to his mother who cannot read.   This book is emotionally difficult to consume ... it tells a painful story of being Vietnamese immigrants in this country, of family violence, and of mental illness unrecognized and untreated.  Little Dog, the son, uncovers and shows us much about his mom and grandmother coming to America, with him in tow.  It tells a personal story of a family, and not so much about the American culture or the society in which they struggled.

Vuong’s writing is like a big open flower. He uses beautiful words.  You get the sense each and every word is chosen carefully.  It is obvious this author is a poet.  Here is a random example:  “Being sorry ... is worth every self-deprecating feeling the mouth allows.”  I loved reading his words.  He engages us deeply and powerfully in a bruised story.

The one fault I find in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is the author’s digression into OxyContin.  This  large section (about 20% of the book) reads like a book within a book.  It was as though Vuong went on an OxyContin rage.  If he meant to connect it to the Vietnamese-in-America theme, I believe he failed.  His victim to the opioid epidemic was not Vietnamese.

I took the liberty of reading some of Vuong’s poetry.  His writing is stunning, and I look forward with anticipation to Vuong’s next novel.

Selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The Washington Post and by Book Riot.

Erin Morgenstern| Fiction 2019

I really enjoyed this book, the second book by the author of the highly successful The Night Circus.

There is a story line, a plot of sorts, though it is loose.  Zachary Ezra Rawlins walks through a door and down into an entire world beneath the surface of the earth, having no idea that a new story has begun.  This inner-earth world is mostly about stories.  Everything and everyone is a story.  There are stories that are people, and stories that are books, and stories that are folded pieces of paper.  While we follow Zachary through his journey in this land of the Starless Sea, we also read many stories.  There are threads that tie these stories together, and there are symbols that appear in all of them.  Swords, keys, and bees are constant friends and mysteries in the stories, but also cats, rabbits, and owls.  And ribbons and lanterns.  And, above all, there are doors.  Doors that open.  Doors that are locked.  Doors that simply appear.  Doors that disappear.  Doors that are drawn.  Doors that are built. This world-beneath-our-world is Alice-in-Wonderland-esque.

To engage with The Starless Sea, you must be prepared to disengage with reality.  I don’t know quite what to call the essence of this book.  Fantasy?  Magic?  Imagination?  And I wonder how she wrote the book and kept it all together ... I imagine she has created a big map of this land that Zachary is exploring, with rooms, and hallways, and caverns, a sea, stairs, characters, and doors.

I haven’t a clue who among you will enjoy this adventure, and who will find it too much of a suspension of reality.  All I can say is I sincerely loved it and am delighted to have read it.

Novel of the week by The Week.

Anna Wiener | Nonfiction 2020

What a phenomenon!  This book was published on January 14 and immediately the author was interviewed on NPR; Uncanny Valley was named book of the week by The Week; the SF Chronicle did an article on her; the book was reviewed by the NY Times, the New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.  And today is only Jan 22!

Uncanny Valley is written by the niece of a colleague, so right from the start, I was a little nervous.  I knew I would be completely honest in my blog posting, and I could only hope I wouldn’t find myself dissing this book or being brutal.

Never fear.

In the first chapter (or is it the second?  I must admit to some level of irritation with books that have no chapter numbers or names), Ms. Wiener was incredibly naive, and I became scared.  She never heard of eating snacks at work, of “ask forgiveness, not permission,” or of designing your own job.  “Oh no,” I thought, “some millennial writing about corporate America who has spent all of five days in it.”  Ahh, but that rapidly dissipated.  She proceeds to communicate a smart, bright, funny, refreshing, and illuminating view of Silicon Valley and her first jobs in very small startups filled with young men in hoodies and company-logo t-shirts, traveling around the office on One Wheels.

One reviewer remarked positively about her short sentences.  I, on the other hand, found myself actively watching for her long, complex, verbally staccato sentences, like this one,  “In the other direction was Valencia Street, a living diorama of late-stage gentrification:  third-wave-coffee shops selling paleo lattes, juice bars hawking turmeric shits, waifish Australians clutching branded paper bags from spartan boutiques.” (P 90). I adored these sentences!

In the second half, the section called “Scale” I thought her writing lost speed.  It was like hiking partway up a mountain and losing momentum.  The wondrous enjoyable hike becomes a bit of a slog.  What she writes about when she joins a new high tech company in “Scale” is more serious (the company was trying to recover from a gender discrimination lawsuit), but it also feels like the author became jaded and less enamored by the crazy creativity and weirdness she is writing about. She writes more seriously about misogyny, racism, and meritocracy.  It feels as though she is looking to solve a problem ... is Silicon Valley a problem?  ... but with no real definition of the problem or vision or parameters for a solution.

“Scale” pushed my rating from four hearts to three, I am sorry to say.  She will be speaking in Bend in a few days, and I will be interested to hear what she has to say about her energized colorful writing, and her duller, more frustrated(?) writing.  I am sure she doesn’t think of it that way, but I will be curious nonetheless to hear what she has to say about the second half.

Virginia Kantra | Fiction 2020

I did some research and found the largest bookstore in the Miami airport, Books & Books.  They didn’t have either of two upcoming book club reads, so I had to punt.  I settled on this fun read, Meg & Jo.  Yes, it is a modern-day version of two of the Little Women.  It was fun to read, and Kantra provides more depth of characters than I was expecting.  This is about sisters Meg and Jo, in their late 20’s, navigating careers, relationships, and, of course, family.

I was glad I saw the movie Little Women over the holidays, or I would have missed ALL of the call-backs to the original book by Louisa May Alcott.  For example, here’s one I caught.  In Kundra’s version, instead of Amy burning Jo’s manuscript, she deletes a letter Jo is working on.  Modern twists and turns imbue this novel with a sense of realism and relevance.

The further I read, the more I appreciated how the author developed real characters for Meg and Jo.  Depth, intimacy, personality, sadness, introspection, and a lot of humor.  While it is not the East of Eden of 2020, I recommend Meg & Jo if you want a read that will entertain you, while you gaze outside at the snowy streets.  And I will keep my eyes open for her next novel, Beth & Amy (the other two sisters).

Mary Pipher  |  Nonfiction 2019

Washington Post “100 Books for the Ages” Age 76 (and various friends)

It just didn’t interest me very much to read about the challenges of women growing older, even when the author threw in a few ideas for solutions.  I don’t really want or need a self-help book at this juncture.  I look forward to hearing perspectives from those of you who love this book!!

Ann Patchett | Fiction 2019

The Dutch House is about siblings Danny and Maeve, as told by the younger Danny, over five decades of their relationship.  And it is about the quirky Pennsylvania mansion that defines their family relationships and, to some extent, their demise.

Maeve and Danny are close, loving, interwoven, and highly connected.  It is truly a beautiful partnership to behold.  With resilience, they maneuver their way through all the Dutch House throws at them:  parents, step-mom and step-sisters, death, love, careers, expectations, disappointments, successes...

I found this book to be interesting, but not astounding.  I give it three hearts ... it might tickle your fancy, but I make no promises.

John Steinbeck | Fiction 1952

East of Eden is the definition of a “classic.”  Timeless.  A story with depth, meaning, interest and intrigue.  Excellently written.  Worth every moment of its 800 pages.  A book to re-read.

Melissa Albert | Fiction 2018

Alice Crewe Proserpine is seventeen and lives with her mother Ella as nomads, moving from place to place around the country for all her life.  She never understood why there was constant upheaval, and why she lived in studio apartments, or converted barns, or someone’s couch, or other unsavory places until one day, suddenly, her mom would move them on.

And then Alice’s grandmother Althea dies, who has lived in an old beat up mansion called Hazel Wood.  Alice learns that Althea has a cult of fans who latched on to the one book Althea wrote.  But the book, Tales from the Hinterland, is impossible to find.  It is as though it is destroying itself. Alice has been searching for it for most of her young life.

One day Ella disappears, and Alice takes off to find Hazel Wood, the one place her mother told her never to go.  The adventure begins, as Alice enters Hinterland, the dark fairy tale land.

I found Hazel Wood on a list from Book Riot.  The list was “ten books you might enjoy if you loved The Night Circus.”  Well, I loved The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) and I picked one that sounded like an enjoyable mix of reality and fantasy.  I enjoyed Hazel Wood, though I didn’t fall in love with it.  I particularly liked the first half, where the real world and the fantasy world were interspersed, and we traveled from one to the other.  Around page 200, just over halfway in, Alice bridges the gap to the fairy tale world and we are there for most of the rest of the book, until the resolution at the end.  I didn’t care for the Hinterland story quite as much as the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality as told in the first half.

You might like this, if occasional magic is your thing.  Albert is a good writer.  Her pace is quick and sharp.  She has a predilection for metaphors that sometimes don’t make sense to me, but that is a small complaint.

Melissa Albert  |  Fiction 2019

Time liked it and so did the Washington Post.  I will have to take a pass on this one.  I made it to page 80, but couldn’t bear another moment.  To me, I read a compilation of words from a profession presented as ridiculously ego-maniacal .... psychiatry and analysis; psychiatrists, psychologists, and analysands. Characters were defined not by their qualities or values or even behaviors, but by what they said in analysis and how they described their dreams and their emotional outbursts.  There is still no plot at 30% in.  I am moving on.

Did you read this and enjoy it?  I’d love to hear!

Min Jin Lee | Fiction 2017

Pachinko follows one Korean family through two World Wars, and their life in Japan as it evolves, away from their beloved homeland.  It is not a story of a particularly tragic family, or a wealthy or powerful family.  It is just a family.  A poor family who lost their home in Korea during WW2 and made a life for themselves. You will follow this family through four generations and 80 years, and they will touch your heart, as well as teach you something about our world history.  They endure catastrophe, tragedy, poverty, discrimination, and they manifest wisdom, joy, passion, laughter, and a powerful sense of self.

The word is difficult to find … but we will settle on “saga.”  Pachinko is a 500-page tale of this small family and is an eminently readable saga.  You will come to love the characters and cheer for their triumphs.  I quite like this quote by award-winning author Darin Strauss, “Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a great book, a passionate story, a novel of magisterial sweep.”

I do recommend this book.  It is simply a good story.  Yes, it is long; I read it over the first half of the Christmas break.  A nice time to read such a tale, while it is cold outside.