Timothy Egan | Fiction 2019

367 pages

I am an atheist with an unhealthy aversion to history.  So, how is it I could like Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity at a three-hearts level?  Because it is superbly written!  And if you like history, you’ll give it four hearts.  If you have a particular passion for the history of Catholicism, well, you will be in seventh heaven (yes, pun intended).  I gave the other Timothy Egan I attempted, The Big Burn, a single heart, so this is real progress.

Timothy Egan takes off on the 1200 mile Via Francigena, from Canterbury to Rome, in search of his own spiritual beliefs.  This is a trail of sorts, like the Camino de Santiago, only much less well-known. Egan walks most of the route, stays often at monasteries, and sees an inordinate number of statues, churches, Cathedrals, relics (yes, those are bones of saints), plaques, stones, arches, bridges, cadavers, and assorted other items that tell various tales of Catholicism and Christianity.  You will read about battles and beheadings, popes and princes, intellect and instability.

And what kept me enthralled is how he mixes his experience of this ancient pathway with his current life.  He connects his learning with our modern-day struggles and tells tales from his youth.  Even more intriguing to me, he talks about the food he encounters along the Via Francigena, and the difficulties and joys his body experiences in (mostly) walking 1200 miles.  So, it is a sort of long-hike travel journal, and we witness blisters and turning back when the weather becomes extreme and the joy of a stunning view. We read about pastries and cappuccinos and, of course, wines, as he travels England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. To give you a flavor, on page 138 he describes the items on a menu on Langres, France, which includes “frogs ... not frog legs, but the whole slain amphibian … and duck terrine with ‘trumpets of death’ “  All this and, too, we bear witness to Egan's search for his spiritual and religious beliefs.  What does he believe?  And why?

An essential message appears on page 64 and again at the end.  It comes from Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, “There is no way.  The way is made by walking.”

Thank you to Ralph from water aerobics class for this interesting recommendation.

Ottessa Moshfegh |  Fiction 2018

Some found it amusing, some bemusing.  Let’s face it, this is a dark book about a privileged woman who is severely clinically depressed and designs her life so she can spend a year sleeping and popping an extraordinary number of pills prescribed by an irritating and unethical psychiatrist, who is devoid of values.  The narrator’s sometimes boyfriend and best friend are nearly as dysfunctional as the psychiatrist.

I came back from yoga class this evening and couldn’t even pick it up.  It was simply too depressing, and also too unrealistic.  I was hoping the psychiatrist would be the real thing, and we would watch her attempt to help our narrator.  Instead, the psychiatrist is a caricature, and the narrator takes advantage of this.

Someone recommended this to me, but I can’t for the life of me remember who, which is probably good.

Elizabeth Strout | Fiction 2019

Crosby, Maine is a small bucolic town right on the ocean.  Olive, Again tells the story of many of the people who live there.  If you read Olive Kitteridge, you will recognize the style.  Olive, Again is actually the sequel.

As in the earlier book, there is no plot as such, but there are 13 stories of people in Crosby.  Olive Kitteridge is the thread that ties these stories together.  She is central in some chapters, an important character in others, and makes only a fleeting cameo appearance in some.

Caustic, witty, sad, kind, insightful, mean, opinionated, gleeful, loving, discounting, sometimes a deep listener, sometimes she doesn’t listen at all; we follow Olive as she ages from 73 to 86 in this book.  Her edges have softened from the original Olive Kitteridge.

Strout’s tales are fascinating.  The characters who live in Crosby Maine are not all that quirky or original, and yet they are each totally fascinating.  We have Andrea, a former Poet Laureate of the US; a Somalian woman, Hamila, who works as a home health worker; Kayley, a teenager who cleans houses and allows an old man to see her breasts; a couple who have lived together for 42 years, but for the last 35 have used yellow duct tape on the floor to divide her space from his space and who talk with each other by making comments to their dog; a guest at a baby shower who goes into labor herself during the shower and has her baby in Olive’s car before the ambulance arrives.  And of course we have Olive’s second husband Jack who gets a speeding ticket for driving his sorts car too fast and cannot understand why his daughter is lesbian.   There is also a dominatrix and a few people who have gone “dopey-dope.”

As Olive and her connections in Crosby have aged, there are also quite a few widows and widowers, including Olive herself.  Their stories left me feeling hopeful.  They live normal, if lonely, lives.

This is a wonderful book.  Sprout is a gifted and brilliant writer who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge and has written five other well-regarded novels.  Yes, definitely read Olive, Again.

Louise Penny | Fiction 2006

No one in Three Pines liked CC DePoitiers.  But someone hated her enough to electrocute her in the middle of the Boxing Day curling match out on the lake.  Armand Gamache is called upon to solve his second murder in the enchanting Canadian town of Three Pines.  CC is an arrogant self-appointed guru who believes enlightenment comes from burying all emotions.  No wonder she left enemies everywhere she went.

Once again, I found Penny’s writing fun and delightful.  I read the entire novel as I was traveling from Bellingham Washington to home, a 14-hour trip, on Amtrak and a bus.  Her writing is light.  Maybe too light, given the plethora of books waiting to be read.  This is the second novel in the series. I think I will read one more.

Unfortunately, I thought it was clear from the beginning who the murderer was, even though the reveal doesn’t come until the last couple of pages.  Penny’s hints were too obvious to me.  Of course, that doesn’t hurt the charm of the characters in Three Pines or the wittiness of the victim and why she was murdered.  But the suspense was dampened.

Your choice!

Allen Eskens | Fiction 2015

The Lexus jumped the median In Minneapolis and crashed headlong into a Porsche.  That’s what happens when you are busily having sex and driving at the same time.  When the Highway Patrol arrived at the scene, they found the two occupants of the Lexus half-naked but still alive.  The poor guy in the Porsche, James Erkel Putnam, was driving in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was dead.  Only, it turns out, he was not actually James Putnam.  Who was he?  That’s when the mystery begins.

Detective Alexander Rupert was recently demoted to the Fraud unit, due to his suspected theft of cash from his dealings with dealers in Narcotics.  But this juicy case lands in his lap, as he tries to figure out who was masquerading as James Putnam.  And why Putnam was so rich.

The story is good; Esken’s writing again engaging.  I read the whole book while Amtraking up to Bellingham, Washington.  I marked it three hearts instead of four because the bad guy killed people gratuitously.  There was just more murder than necessary.  For example, he needed to get Putnam’s girlfriend out of their house for a day, so he killed her mother.  To me, it felt like Eskens was simply being lazy.  He could have had the assassin break Mom’s hip or some such.

All In all, a good story with a diabolical plot.

Blake Crouch | Fiction 2019

I learned a new phrase in reading about Recursion, “speculative fiction”.

The book opens on November 2, 2018, when Detective Barry Sutton arrives to the 41st floor of a New York City skyscraper and attempts to stop the suicide of a woman whose legs are dangling over the edge.  Ann Voss Peters has FMS, False Memory Syndrome, and she can no long cope with the life in her false memory.

And then we meet Dr. Helena Smith, in October of 2007.  She is a brilliant scientist whose mom has Alzheimer’s, and Helena is trying to build a machine that will allow Alzheimer’s patients to revisit and retain memories.  Eventually, she builds such a machine, but it does more than expected.  It allows patients to visit the memories and change them, with, of course, disastrous unintended consequences.  And so we enter the world of speculative fiction.  To enjoy this tale, you’ll need to be able to suspend your current reality and believe this alternative reality.

Over time, as we vacillate between current days and ten years ago, we discover that someone can change the past, but then, on the day they do so, they suddenly recall all the various paths they have created in their memories.  Very disorienting.

So, though it was hard work sometimes to keep track of what year, and what memory path, we were in of our primary characters, Barry and Helena, I liked this book.  It is smartly written, and it made me think, both because of the structure of the novel, but also because of the issues it raises about technology, values, consequences. It has suspense, terror, fear, love, and triumph amidst its fast-turning pages.

Recursion will soon be a Netflix movie and tv series but read the book first.  If you can be intrigued by speculative fiction, pick this one up.  It is a winner.

A "Top Pick of 2019" by AARP Magazine.

Amor Towles  |  Fiction 2016

I really want to like this book, but I keep falling asleep or getting distracted, or picking up my iPad to see if anyone emailed me in the last ten minutes.  I am 100 pages in, which represents a significant commitment, and I think I must close the book and return it to the library.

I keep thinking that I "should" like it, and if only I were a more mature reader who could revel in the rather heavy-handed writing style, I would be a better person.  There IS humor and some fascinating visual descriptions, but the theme .... a Count who is under house arrest in a hotel in Moscow in 1922 ... is boring.  The inner flap tells me he will meet some interesting people, but he hasn’t yet.

An interesting review was written by Bill Gates.  He said you do not have to be a Russophile to like this book.  I think maybe you do.

I am surprised, because my dental hygienist Julie and I consistently agree about books we like and don’t like. I hope she remains gentle with my mouth when she discovers I abandoned this recommendation from her.

Camron Wright | Fiction 2012

This is a GREAT book.  I am moved and hopeful.

Sang Ly, her husband Ki Lim, and their ill young son, Nisay, live in a shack at the edge of Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in Cambodia.  They make their living sorting through the trash the trucks bring every day, finding valuable scraps to sell to sometimes unscrupulous buyers.  Yes, The Rent Collector reminds me of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  The Rent Collector, however, is above all, a book of hope.

While this is a novel of life and death at the dump, the story line is about Sang Ly and her discovery of literacy and literature.  It is as much a tale of the role of literature in our world as it is a tale of hardship, friendship, and love in the dump.

Here is a sample of the intelligent and visual writing by Camron Wright.  “I always tell Ki that it’s a dangerous thing sending me to work at the dump, not because I’ll get run over by a truck, burn my legs and feet, or fall into a pool of toxic sludge—though all these are possibilities.  It’s dangerous because my thoughts get away from themselves.  Mixed with emotion, they pile up like the garbage that surrounds me.  They stack layer upon layer, deeper and deeper, month after month—crushing, festering, smoldering.  One day something is certain to combust.”  (pg 25)

Mary—my good friend from high school—recommended this book to me.  Once again, Mary, you are spot on.  I will recommend The Rent Collector to my book club for 2021 because it is not only an excellent and enlightening read, but also because of what we can learn about literature.

Yes, blog readers, you might want to read this book.  I recommend it without hesitation.

Allen Eskens | Fiction 2014

Joe Talbert is a college student with an English class assignment to interview a person and write their biography.  With no living relatives other than his dysfunctional mother and a younger brother who has autism, Joe goes looking for someone interesting to interview.  He finds Carl, a Vietnam-era war hero and an accused rapist and murderer who, after 30 years in prison, has been released to a care facility to die from cancer.  Soon Joe is embroiled in Carl’s story and, believing Carl to be innocent of the rape and murder, he embarks upon a search to find the actual perpetrator and clear Carl's record and reputation before he dies.

This novel is fast-paced and an interesting twist on a suspense novel.  Allen Eskers is a criminal defense attorney with an MFA in creative writing and writes excellent suspense.  My friend Charlene recommended Eskers to me.  She said he is one of her current favorite authors, and I can see why.  I have already put another Esker’s book on my library list.  Charlene recommended The Life We Bury to me, and I in turn recommend it to you.

Jane Bryant Quinn| Nonfiction 2015

Fortuitously, this book crossed my radar on the same day I took my very first payout from my retirement funds.  Yikes!  So, I decided to read it.  And I am grateful that I did.  I know Jane Bryant Quinn is the financial-advice-in-print wizard.  Somehow, this book felt right at this time.

The book is well-designed.  Quinn and her publisher provide excellent bold titles to every section, so you can pick and choose what to read.  I skipped the section on when to take your Social Security, because that decision I have already made.  I passed over the “implications if you are married” parts, because they are now irrelevant.

Yes, she does address preretirement planning, but she also writes a lot about post-retirement and how to plan your withdrawals and RMDs and re-balancing to ensure the greatest benefit.  Two strategies I am quite intrigued by now are immediate-pay annuities and taking a reverse mortgage as a credit line very early in retirement, but not tapping it for a few years.

You will find something of value in here, if you peruse based on your own age, circumstances, and needs. I recommend a pause to reflect on your finances, with How to Make Your Money Last.