First published in 1937, They Came LIKE Swallows was William Maxwell's second novel. It tells …
Review of 'They Came Like Swallows' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
How nice to read a POV child narrator that actually sounds like a child might, and this author pulls it off for two different children at two different ages. It is also interesting to see a full range of responses to the Spanish Flu depicted, including cavalier ones, but none of the entitled rage that marked the COVID response.
He really has a talent for explanation and for finding characters, but this one suffers from the defect of any COVID book; none of us know how it ends, so there's no way to wrap it up
The Brothers K is a 1992 novel by David James Duncan, an author, fisherman, and …
Review of 'The Brothers K' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I very much wanted to like this book more, given my familiarity with this particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, my love of baseball, and the passing resemblance between the titular brothers of this tale and some relatives by marriage who grew up around the same time in the same place. But I really struggled with the epistolary conceit of the book, which meant that every word was supposed to be someone's written words to another person, and frequently it was someone's recital of yet another person's words to another person (they call that triple hearsay in my job). Somehow the author took this as license to let his (ahem, his characters') worst undergraduate writing impulses loose for long stretches of the book, which might have been fine if those passages still plausibly sounded like something an actual human being would have written to another human being, but reader, they …
I very much wanted to like this book more, given my familiarity with this particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, my love of baseball, and the passing resemblance between the titular brothers of this tale and some relatives by marriage who grew up around the same time in the same place. But I really struggled with the epistolary conceit of the book, which meant that every word was supposed to be someone's written words to another person, and frequently it was someone's recital of yet another person's words to another person (they call that triple hearsay in my job). Somehow the author took this as license to let his (ahem, his characters') worst undergraduate writing impulses loose for long stretches of the book, which might have been fine if those passages still plausibly sounded like something an actual human being would have written to another human being, but reader, they did not.
I quickly came to love and care about the fates of the characters (most of them, anyway), but for much of the latter part of the book it felt like I had to fight through this bad writing to reach the resolution of their stories (the ending felt unsatisfying, tbh, but I was too exhausted by then to care). I will also confess that I was on the verge of adding this to my "dropped" list when I got bogged down in the excruciating depictions of the locals during one character's deeply implausible trip to India. One last complaint: I could not discern any parallels to the Brothers Karamazov, other than that each of those four brothers fairly neatly lined up with one of the titular brothers, but if that was intentional, it is beyond me why the ending focused on the Smerdyakov (sp) of this book. OK, one more complaint: the author does not sound like an actual baseball fan, or at best one of those lapsed ones who stopped watching when they put in stadium lights or the DH or something.
Reading this book, it is easy to get caught up in the chilling parallels between the late 70's and the present, but as a historical narrative, you can pair this with the Tim Alberta book on the GOP decline into Trumpism and you have a pretty good explanation of the rise of the far right in the aftermath of Watergate and how we ended up where we are today.
I was not prepared for this book to be less of a sequel to the first (though it does pick up immediately after the end of the first book) than to be an exploration of a "Cros-mere" of stories in and around Crosby, ME, including characters from other books by the author, and Olive making on-brand appearances in each other person's story like Nick Fury. But there were enough chapters about her to be a nice farewell for the character.
FAR BENEATH the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there …
Review of 'The Starless Sea' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I simply could not get over the impression that the fantastical realm the characters spent most of their time in seemed very much like a boutique hotel, at least at first, and that led to a preoccupation about whether or how the (concededly human) characters went to the bathroom - was there one attended by similar invisible house servants (or magical self-cleaning toilets), or did they just magically not excrete despite all the food and drink they consumed over a long period of time down there? Also, the titular sea being made of honey was just gross.
I wanted to like this book more than I did, but the short timeframe and murder mystery (sort of) driving the plot were not doing it for me. I should be more impressed that untranslated Tamil can appear in big book releases, but instead I was left puzzled as to what in the world the author was consulting with Kamal Hassan about for the book.
Much more readable than Tolstoy, although I did get tired of the histrionic, pages-long tirades of certain of the characters, and the drawn-out soap-opera/streaming-drama pacing, but I did dig the whole trial at the end. How very tragic and unsatisfying that he died before he could write the next book!
In a series of letters to her sister, the author describes her travels West.
Review of "A lady's life in the Rocky Mountains" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
The lady is quite the extreme risk taker and ace rider, and she writes a mean description of Divide beauty. It is too bad about the racism, but I really enjoyed this short book, perhaps nonfiction is the exception to my general dislike of epistolary narratives
Review of 'The book of the new Sun' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This is a collection of the first two books of a four-part series that is very well written and has a super-compelling setting (a far future Earth civilization that is in a dark ages after an era of galactic exploration), and yet: at the end of the first book (e.g. halfway through), the first-person narrator/epic Hero says, "Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I cannot blame you. It is no easy road." I listened to the man and GTFO, and you probably will too. Perhaps the recurring involvement of busty, partially-clothed, and sexually-subservient female characters would have been enough to hold the interest of my 12 year-old self, but at this point, I can just acknowledge he's a boob man (and something of a misogynist), and move on.
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. …
Review of 'Red Plenty' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Alternate histories are cool but I wish I knew more about the actual history to appreciate it, and I couldn't keep track of the characters, we didn't see any but one of them often enough for that
