Brit Bennett

Fiction 2020 | 352 pages

“Brilliant, stunning, eloquent, gorgeous, thought-provoking, intricate, moving.”  These are just some of the words reviewers have written, and for good reason.  The Vanishing Half is a novel about identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, born in 1952, in a minuscule Louisiana town that prides itself on breeding light-skinned Black people, some of whom are light enough to pass for White.  And Stella does, separating herself from her twin and her family for 25 years.  They each have a daughter ... Jude, who is so black they call her “blue black” and Kennedy, a blond violet-eyed beauty.  The daughters’ lives eventually intersect and, of course, all their lives are irrevocably altered.

The story is exceptional and difficult to put down. I was often reading pages this last week at 3:30 in the morning.  The writing is simply superb. Brit Bennett was listed by Time magazine on March 8 as one of the next “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

There is no hesitation on my part.  Read this four-heart book as soon as you can get your hands on it ... there is already a long wait for it at your library!

March 2021

Jaqueline Woodson

Nonfiction autobiography,  2014

325 pages

I am disappointed in this book.  It is the story of author Jaqueline Woodson’s life, told in poetic form.  It feels to me forced and artificial.  “Now, for interest, this time I am going to write my autobiography in poetry.”  It is contrived.  What we lose is a coherent emotional story.  What we lose is artful writing with images and compelling turns of phrase .... which I would expect from true poetry.  A waste of effort on both the author’s and the reader’s part.

March, 2021

Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele

Nonfiction memoir 2018 | 257 pages

At first, I wasn’t all that thrilled about reading When They Call You a Terrorist.  I am not sure what I expected.  Some sanitized ... or perhaps glorified ... biography of the woman who first posted #BlackLivesMatter ... that is what I thought I was about to read. But it is not. It is her personal memoir.  It is the story of Kahn-Cullors' childhood and her youth, growing up poor and Black in LA County, with her two brothers and one sister, raised by a mother who works three jobs, and still does not rise about the poverty level.  It is the story of her two fathers.  It is the story of unjust prison sentences and unrecognized and untreated mental illness.  It is the story of immeasurable discrimination, violence, assumptions, injustice, and more.  It is the tale of lives gone awry, with no possible redemption.  Her narrative is personal; her writing is easy to read; but the content of her story is profoundly disturbing.  Reading this memoir left me with a single question .... how could she NOT start the Black Lives Matter movement?  With her intelligence, wisdom, compassion, passion, and history, it is inexorable.

Yes, read this book and learn about a woman whose name we should all know, but don’t.  Which, in itself, is part of her story.

March 2021

Sophia Segovia

Fiction, 2020 | 461 pages

The Murmur of Bees is a gorgeous story.  When you are ready to lose yourself in a novel that is artistically written, with deep and complex characters, find yourself a copy of The Murmur of Bees.

Set in the small town of Linares in Mexico, south of Monterey, the story begins when Nana Reja discovers an infant, abandoned under a bridge, disfigured (harelip?) and covered with bees who do not harm him.  He is named Simonopio.  He goes to live with the Morales family, landowners who take him in and raise him as their own. We follow the Morales family though many decades, deaths, and, in the first half, the great plague of 1917/1918.

The tale is narrated by Simonopio’s younger brother, Francisco, who is born when Simonopio is 12.  The bind between these two brothers is intense and unbreakable during their early years, though Simonopio cannot speak except in his own self-formed language.  And there is magic.  Magic that is imbued with wisdom, wanderlust, safety, communication, adventure, prediction of the future.  Simonopio is intimately linked with bees, in their mutually beneficial relationship.  It is with the bees, following the bees, learning from the bees, being protected by the bees, that he develops into a man.

The first of Segovia’s novels to be translated from Spanish into English, it is well worth your time, sitting on the couch with a cup of tea.  I recommend it highly.  Thank you, Carolyn, for this luscious read.

March 2021

Talia Lavin

Nonfiction, 2020 | 273 pages

This is the most profound, most devastating book I have read.  The author, a Jewish female journalist,  uses various guises, disguises, names, personalities, and personas, to enter the “dark web of white supremacy.”

I cannot begin to truly understand all I read.  First, I thought anti-Semitism was only a part of the white supremacist agenda.  It is not.  It is at the center, the core. The first few chapters explain much more, but in a few words, “What underpins this fixation — the intellectual foundation of the white-supremacist movement — is a stalwart belief in the omnipresence of the cunning, world-controlling, whiteness-diluting Jew ... the Jew is most dangerous because of his adjacency to whiteness, and a desire to destroy it, with crafty malice, from within.”  (pg 24/25).

You will read about race violence and race war, and about a dating site designed only for white supremacist men and women.  You will learn about an eleven-year-old imbued with racial hatred; about the role and agenda for intentional violence in our country; and about mind-numbing conspiracy theories.

The chapter on incels completely alarmed me.  “Incels” are men who are “involuntarily celibate.”  The misogyny, hatred, self- and other-loathing is shocking.  Incels on Incels.co and braincel actively encourage a suicidal poster (pg 115) to complete his agenda.  The author, who was not allowed to post as a woman, created a young 21-year-old angry white male, Tommy O’Hara, in order to dialogue with incels.  This chapter especially, and the entire book, are not for the faint of heart.

Lavin’s writing is inconsistent.  Some chapters are engaging and move the reader deeper into the material.  Other chapters seem to rely on context to such a great extent, that the point of the chapter, and subsequent learning, is lost.  The difference is when she writes of events where she is an intimate and involved player, and when she writes about topics from an intellectual distance.  The former is quite engaging.  The latter is important, though more difficult to absorb.

I must recommend this disturbing book.  It is important, distressing, terrifying.  Truthfully, I believe we all need to know of that which Lavin writes.

02/21

Kurt Vonnegut

Fiction, 1959 | 326 pages

Many argue that The Sirens of Titan is Vonnegut's greatest work.  It is dark and funny; classic and counter-culture; warm and cold; satirical; melancholic; bizarrely imagined; philosophical.   I loved it!  But that must be taken with a grain of salt.  I am a huge Vonnegut fan.  I first read this book in 1971, when I took an English course on Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Michigan.  Yes, that was 50 years ago!

The plot?  Hmmm.  The main character is Malachi Constant, the richest man in America, who has his memory wiped when he is recruited into the Army of Mars that is planning an invasion of Earth. Tying the story together is Winston Niles Rumfoord, who, in his private spaceship with his dog, Kazak, accidentally flies into an uncharted chronosynclastic infundibulum, which scatters his particles through space and time, giving him the ability to see the future, and to appear at set intervals on various planets.  We follow Constant’s life through meaningless wealth in America, his time on Mars and Mercury, and finally on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.  We also meet a Tralfamadorian, invented here in The Sirens of Titan, and which reappears in Slaughterhouse Five.  Tralfamadore is the planet where all beings live in all times simultaneously.

Vonnegut makes me wonder what I am missing, what he infers, what the hidden meanings and suggestions are, what is truth, what is satire.  I never know the answers to these philosophical questions, but thank goodness his writing is so damn engaging!  How can you fault The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent?  Or a world with UWTB .... the Universal Will to Become, i.e., that which makes universes out of nothingness at both macro levels and mundane day-to-day levels.

Along with his 14 novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction books, Vonnegut was revered, studied, interviewed, loved, and always prolific.  He penned much about writing, including his brilliant “8 Basics of Creative Writing.”  My favorite is number 4: “Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.”

This is our February read in my Casting Crew Book Club.  I am fascinated to hear what less biased Vonnegut fans have to say about The Sirens of Titan.  Yes, I absolutely recommend it, along with anything else by this writing genius.

02/21

Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, editors

Fiction, 2015 | 296 pages

The two editors of Octavia’s Brood invited social justice activists who had never written before, many of whom are marginalized, to write a science fiction short story; to dream and imagine a different vision, a different way of being.  The stories do not necessarily present a better scenario, but an altered reality. A few of the 22 authors are journalists and have writing experience, though not in speculative/visionary fiction.  At the end of the last century, speculative fiction by black authors enjoyed a surge of interest.  (Check out Dark Matter).  But this work goes further, inviting writing from many walks of life, circumstances, and cultures.  (Yes, the book is dedicated to and inspired by the writing of Octavia Butler, especially Lilith’s Brood.)

I am not much of a short story enthusiast.  Some of the stories in Octavia’s Brood are badly written, some are well written.  Some are interesting, others a little more boring.  Some are profoundly clear, several are more cloudy and even confusing.  However, this anthology does not read like a collection of short stories.  It seems congruent to me, a unified yet diverse voice of marginalized peoples.  The stories don’t overlap in any way, and yet together they feel like a “whole.”  They present a rainbow of experiences, perspectives, pain, pretend, magic, possibilities, imagination.

In my Decolonization book club, we discussed the stories and then took 15 minutes to write one of our own.  That was a fantastic creative experience, to write and then read each member’s tales. (Our prompt was to write a story as though one institution we know today is gone).

I found this book fascinating.  I highly recommend it for immersing yourself into a new reading experience.

(I have a copy of the book, by the way, if you want it.)

02/21

Jane Smiley  |  Fiction

1995, 414 pages

204 pages in, and I just must quit.  I really tried.  The characters in this novel about a fictional Midwest University are universally forgettable.  I mean, I forget who is who in-between chapters.  I keep looking for a list of characters and their roles, and there is not one.  There are too many to keep straight, and there is NO plot of any interest at all.  Of course, it goes without saying that I have not laughed at this ”humorous” novel once. Some of the relationships are interesting for a chapter or two, especially when there is a sexual connection.  I really tried.  My apologies, Teresa.  Too many days and my entire weekend slogging through this book have left me vacuous.  I must find something engaging to read. Now!

Posted 2/21

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Christy Lefteri | Fiction,  2019

313 pages

Nuri and his cousin Mustafa are beekeepers in Aleppo, Syria, along with Nuri’s wife Afra, who is an artist.  All is idyllic and calm, until war arrives, the hives are destroyed, and they must flee for their safety and to begin a new life in a new land.

Lefteri’s writing is captivating. A somewhat random example, “Afra’s soul was as wide as the fields and deserts and sky and sea and river that she painted, and as mysterious.  There was always more to know, to understand, and, as much as I knew, it wasn’t enough, I wanted more.”  (Pg 21)

What I liked is how deeply we become familiar with Nuri’s heart and soul.  What astonished me is how the realities we make up can be so clearly intertwined with the realities that are in the world we inhabit.  What confused me is how Lefteri intersperses Nuri’s and Afra’s challenging journey to England with their arrival in England.  The time frame shifts were not smooth for me; they were jarring.  I wish she had made the shifts clearer with chapter titles or some such.

This is politically insensitive of me, but I am simply tired of stories about people facing incredibly difficult challenges to move themselves from one place to another, whether as refugees or slaves.  I need new plots; I have become somewhat bored by their stories.

A Chinese concept I learned, that resonates, and that will stay with me from this book is that of (pg 303) “Yuanfen, the mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths ...”

01/21

Ta-Nehisi Coates| Fiction, 2019

416 pages

The writing is eloquent; the story of the Underground and of Conduction and The Task is fascinating.  You will know the main character deeply, Hiram Walker, when you finish The Water Dancer.  Based on a true tale of slavery and the urge for freedom, I wonder how much is fiction and how much is true.  The dramatic story is infused with magic; I am so curious about the author’s intention!

Just over half-way in, I think Coates loses his footing.  The book becomes more about the institution of the Underground Railway.  Even though we see everything through Hiram’s eyes, I feel less connected to him for a significant number of chapters. Plus, I find the growing cast of characters a bit confusing.   Ultimately, we wind up back in Walker’s character with strength and power to wrap up the conclusion.

Tough decision .... three hearts or four?  I decided on four because of the writing, the story, and the character development (not only Walker, but some other characters as well). Perhaps my getting lost was just me .... I choose to give Coates the benefit of the doubt.  This is Coates first novel, though he has written non-fiction. Have you read anything by him?