Tag: read

Baker Street Irregular: A Novel by Craig W. Fisher

JLLeave a comment
Baker Street Irregular: A Novel
by Craig W. Fisher

Readers who love a good spy novel, immersive writing with fleshy details, and large casts of characters will find a gem in Baker Street Irregular.

The novel follows a WWII British spy, Bill Hoffman, as he navigates Nazi occupied Europe, attending to the missions he has been tasked with. His primary task is to track a Nazi official in Vichy France, but events lead him to a deeper mystery.

I have mixed thoughts about Baker Street Irregular. On the positive side, Fisher is adept at storytelling, weaving the historical fabric of WWII through an intricate interaction of historical details and dark, noir-ish mood-setting scenes. The story is compelling. And Fisher is a good writer, possessing a unique voice and style. Fisher’s characters too are clearly visible. The novel reads like literary fiction: deeply reflective and full of wartime shadows.

But, some of these same aspects of the novel lost me as a reader. The pace of the novel is slow; long and numerous pages flow without progressing the arc of the story, even as they contribute to making the grey landscape of war tangible for the reader. Pages and pages would pass without a clear direction of where things are headed. At 328 pages — not including Historical Notes and a Glossary of terms at the end — the meanderings within the novel induced torpor, rather than interest. There are also numerous characters; Fisher’s attention to detail suggests each one is one to remember, leading this reader to forget many of them for lack of memory to track them all.

All in all, Baker Street Irregular delivers on its promise. Readers who enjoy historical fiction set in WWII or languid, noir novels are very likely to find it gripping and satisfying.

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

JLLeave a comment
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

I had feelings reading Unshrinking. Lots and lots of feelings, feelings which made me reflect and assess, then reassess again.

Some part of my reaction is due to the particular place I am at in my life where I am actively trying to lose weight and return to a body shape and size that I used to be, and the fact that I, like Manne, am a woman in higher education, in the humanities to boot. This book hit on many levels for me. YMMV, of course, but I think most readers, regardless of their gender, occupation, and size will find that some part or whole of this book mirrors an experience they have had themselves, witnessed, or been party to.

Manne’s Unshrinking focuses on fatness and the fear and loathing around that subject as an oppressive force; an unrecognized and often invisible loci on the intersectional matrix dominated by Race, Class, and Gender. Fat, says Manne, ought to figure up there, alongside the big three — or at the very least, Fatness ought to be taken into account as one of the newer cohort of (though no less inferior) factors like Disability/Ability, Age, Education, etc.

Some chapters address what readers might expect in a conversation about fatness and size: the FDA approved Food Pyramid, the faulty application of Body Mass Index (BMI) to any and all, the near global obsession with “dieting,” and what constitutes — in many societies — the Ideal Body Figure for men, women, everyone. But Manne also devotes pages to the philosophical and ideological fallout of Fatphobic culture, and the effects of fatphobia and prejudice in academia and professional settings. What it comes down to, according to Manne, is the moral leverage thinness, paired with the moral condemnation of fatness, has to shape not only individual experiences, but society on a larger scale.

Unshrinking also offers the reader — and readers like me — a certain, if narrow, avenue of hope and empowerment. I felt seen, even though my fatness is not especially fat and more a reflection of my own fatphobia and internalization of what size I ought to be. Manne suggests that fatphobia can be acknowledged, addressed, and the situation ameliorated. We can and should change the way we see fatness; it shouldn’t be a moral yardstick, it isn’t a signal of health, and it isn’t up for public policing. Instead, fatness is another facet of our human diversity, a thing worth embracing and including.

Still, today I counted my calories.

A Woman of Pleasure: A Novel by Kiyoko Murata

JLLeave a comment
A Woman of Pleasure: A Novel by Kiyoko Murata

 Woman of Pleasure is a slim novel whose size belies its powerful contents. For readers who enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, a novel by Arthur Golden (1997), Murata’s novel is the more historically accurate complement. Like Golden’s popular (but flawed and orientalist) work, this is a novel about Japanese geishas and their Floating World; however, unlike Golden, Murata draws on real events from Meiji-era Japan, weaving a story which is both fiction and history at their best. In Murata’s novel, geishas are not isolated from the rest of Japanese society, but integral to the larger whole.

The view of the floating world Murata offers us is raw and real, not romanticized; here we see women as they were, as actors with agency and power. We are given a glimpse into the real operations of a hanamachi and geisha houses of varying ranks and size, and the concerns of its most visible denizens. This is a powerful novel, one which removes geishas from the stereotypical niche they are often penned into, and places them in historical and economic context; Murata’s geishas are not dolls, but fleshy, flawed, and powerful individuals. This isn’t a romance, but an honest portrayal of what people do when they are denied their basic needs.

I am considering assigning A Woman of Pleasure in one of my history courses, as it emphasizes the change an individual and collective can invoke.

The Tragedy of Medusa: A Novel by H.M. Roberts

JLLeave a comment
The Tragedy of Medusa: A Novel by H.M. Roberts

At under 200 pages, The Tragedy of Medusa is deceptively thin. H.M. Roberts delivers a powerful and emotional alternate narrative to the myth of this complicated woman through a swiftly moving story and with a succinct use of words.

Readers should know that the novel spans the length of a lifetime, and will immerse them thoroughly in its magical timeline. I emerged from the novel feeling a kind of grief; as if I had lived alongside the woman, Medusa, herself. Having a familiarity with the original myth of Medusa is not required here; Roberts uses the mythology as a guide, but deviates from its rules to develop a compelling, deeply human tale. Through Roberts’ prose and storytelling I lived the tragedy of Medusa myself.

Readers who enjoy historical fiction, fantasy, and mythology will appreciate Roberts’ equal attention to research and reality on one hand, magic and lore on the other. As a historian and as a pleasure-reader, I appreciated how well-researched it was without being pedantic. Small details about dress and life brought a tangibility to the interactions between characters, put the story in historical context. But the novel remained focused on its story and characters, and this is ultimately what made it so compelling: Medusa, her sisters, and family were nuanced, imperfect and human, for all their divine origin, the mortal characters transcended time, feeling all too familiar despite the historical difference. Fans of literary fiction will find the deep reflection and well-crafted characters of this novel as appealing as story. Roberts’ The Tragedy of Medusa cuts across the boundaries of genre.

I thoroughly enjoyed this indie read, and would not hesitate to recommend this to other readers.

The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

JLLeave a comment
The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

As a reader, we all yearn for those novels that truly take us to another moment in time and hold us there until we feel like our own world is strange. We are lost when we return to our reality, feeling a little fuzzy in the head. I felt that way with this novel.

The River We Remember is a historical murder mystery, a story that is almost a cliché: the cowboy-like detective of a small, rural town, embroiled in the politics and corruption that all small towns seem to have and own proudly, must cut through all that to discover the truth. Along the way he has to confront his own loyalties, his own foibles, his own prejudices. He’s a flawed human being. Indeed, that’s part of Krueger’s skill here as a story-teller. His characters are fleshy, flawed beings, each with their own set of ambitions and darkness.

The River We Remember documents the seediness of life in a small town that looks perfect and serene on the exterior. That’s the kind of atmosphere Krueger builds here. Exposure of what lies in the shade. The crime rips away the comfort of that darkness, makes everything come into the glaring light.

The brilliance of the story aside, Krueger’s prose and dialogue, both the internal reflection of its protagonist and what is voiced, creates a lively world. Readers can almost hear the breath of the characters as they brush past the invisible reader in their midst.

The Library Book, Non-Fiction by Susan Orlean

JLLeave a comment
The Library Book by Susan Orlean

I read this for an Adult Book Club I’m part of at my local library. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but once I started reading, I was hooked.

The Library Book is about the Los Angeles Central Library, which I have walked past when I visited downtown LA last year, though it is not about that library, but the one which was very nearly destroyed by a fire on April 29th, 1986. Indeed, this is a book-lover’s dream book; it is about the history of the LA County Central library, the politics of the region and the immediate downtown area, the experiences of its staff, librarians, and patrons. Wrapped up into the book are issues that we face every day: sexism, homelessness, the politics of wealth and poverty.

Orleans opens with the arsonist and the investigation into the fire, which is fascinating in itself, but the book quickly branches out to discuss the rebuilding of the library, the meaning of the library to its patrons, staff, and to the community at large.

The history of the library is not the only appeal of the book. It is brilliantly written and deeply researched. Orlean writes with a keen sense of details, using them to bring what might seem to be a rather boring subject to life. Through her prose we can smell the charred incense of the library, feel the anguish of the staff, tense at the fury of the politics around the library’s governance.

The Dyatlov Pass Mystery: A Graphic History by Cédric Mayen

JLLeave a comment
The Dyatlov Pass Mystery: A Graphic History by Cédric Mayen and illustrated by Jandro González

I don’t often read graphic histories, but I was intrigued by this one, not knowing much about the mystery of the Soviet team who were lost while passing through these mountains in the 1950s. On February 1st, 1959 a group of young Soviet students who were hiking through the mountains disappeared without a trace. It has never been fully understood or revealed what happened to them.

The graphic novel tracks along two timelines: the team as it traversed the snowy mountain trails and the investigation afterwards. In the former timeline, the reader is given a fictionalized glimpse into the relationships and conversations between the teammates, their hopes and dreams, and an understanding of who they were as individuals. The latter time line offers the reader an understanding of the politics surrounding the mystery and its investigation, an event potentially embarrassing to the then-regime.

It was an entertaining read, if thin on history.

Speech Team: A Novel by Timothy Murphy

JLLeave a comment
Speech Team: A Novel
by Timothy Murphy

I picked up this book by chance, walking past it in my local public library. I know we’re not “supposed” to judge books by their covers, but I do. When I turned the inner flap to read the synopsis, I knew immediately I had to read it.

The premise is that a member of a high school debate team commits suicide later in life, and a former team mate and friend sees this on social media. In the suicide post left behind, is an accusation against the teacher who ran the debate team, that he had said some awful things. What follows is a series of enlightening conversations between the surviving friends, revealing that all the team mates experienced some kind of denigrating treatment at the hands of the debate teacher.

As an educator, I know that the words I say have an incredible impact on my students, for the better and for the worse, though I hope for the former. Sometimes I say things I wish I had said differently, or not at all. The semester before I read Speech Team I had a student breakdown in my office during a private meeting. They were debilitatingly afraid of submitting their assignments to me, for fear that I’d be disappointed. They told me that in middle school, they overheard a teacher telling someone else how disappointed the teacher was in them, thinking that the subject wouldn’t hear. The teacher had expected more of my student and was complaining to another person. It cut deep and my student never forgot it, and it ruined their experience of school forever.

The story is supported by Murphy’s excellent prose. Like most literary fiction, it is deeply introspective and thoughtful in its content and approach. Murphy excavates what has become a quotidian trauma — the rod-wielding nun, the grouchy math teacher, the demanding and unyielding debate team teacher — drawing out complex feelings, leading to even more complex and perplexing actions/reactions. Readers will find a piece of themselves in these characters, perhaps more than one.

This is an extraordinary tale of an ordinary epiphany: what happens when we discover there is more than one authentic version of our past, sometimes hidden from ourselves by ourselves, and that the view of it looks different from other angles and through other eyes. That sometimes it takes time to understand our traumas.

Speech Team struck a nerve. I couldn’t put it down. I had to know what happened. If you’re a teacher of any kind, read this, and re-read it.

The Bandit Queens: A Novel by Parini Shroff

JLLeave a comment
The Bandit Queens: A Novel
by Parini Shroff

I absolutely loved reading this book. Every twist, every shift of the story was both unpredictable and comfortably familiar. It was gratifying. I won’t give it away, but I found myself saying, “I knew it!” and “Oh, noooooo!” equally as frequently.

The story unfolds in a small rural Indian village (a fact about it I love; too often the novels I’ve read of India focus on the urban experience) and revolves around a woman whose husband has vanished under mysterious circumstances. The villagers suspect nefarious reasons and the woman is ostracized as a witch, though nominally included in a number of village activities, including a micro-financing program run by one of several foreign NGOs.

As the women become empowered through their new wealth and skills, they find themselves unwilling to bow to the patriarchal norms of Indian culture and so they seek out the witch in their midst to help rid themselves of their problems in the way they imagine she did.

Mayhem and hilarity ensue. Vengeance too. And redemption. Really, this novel has it all.

Shroff’s prose is another worthy reason to pick up this novel. Her voice is clear, bell-like and unique; her voice as an author, like the the women she writes is individual. The prose is confident and bold, clear and evocative. In several parts, Shroff touches too close to the reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society. I twinged when I read those words, both out of appreciation at being seen and discomfort, being confronted with the fact that women are universally abused.

I especially appreciated Shroff’s portrayal of rural Indian women. The characters here are fleshy women who disrupt the stereotype of the unworldly, uneducated, unintelligent village woman. This is a work of decolonization, unravelling the orientalist stereotype too many Indian women have — and are — burdened with.

I cannot wait for Shroff’s next book.

A Cowardly Woman No More: A Novel by Ellen Cooney

JLLeave a comment
A Cowardly Woman No More:
A Novel by Ellen Cooney

I utterly love, love, love this book. I never knew about or read any of Ellen Cooney’s fiction before, but I am a fan now. And to think, I only found this novel by mere chance. I happened to visit a branch of my local library system that I used to go to quite a bit, but hadn’t for awhile, and I happened to walk past the new arrivals shelf. The title, so striking, so challenging immediately appealed to me. I picked it up, felt its heft in my hand (slim novel as it is) and decided it was coming home with me.

I read it in a day and half. I couldn’t tear myself away. I felt so connected to this woman, felt her latent simmering dissatisfaction so keenly, I had to keep reading.

The novel revolves around a woman who leads an ordinary life, as most of us do: she works for a local company, a office job, and she’s married with kids. She’s hitting her middle years. She’s good at what she does professionally. She is encouraged to and does apply for a promotion. She doesn’t get it, which would be devastating enough — but the kick in the head is that the job goes to a man who is clearly under-qualified for it. It all comes to a head at the company’s annual banquet, held at a famous, local restaurant.

The woman walks in one way, walks out another.

That’s all I’ll say. You have to read this book.

Cooney’s words are knives and silk ribbons. Perhaps they are silk ribbons with edges as sharp as knives; they slice and soothe all at the same time. Women of this age — or, really, of any age once they’ve had a taste of the patriarchal world in which we all must live — will find this novel tragically relatable. It is so nice to hear a chorus of voices bounce back to us, to know what sounds like an echo is not merely our own voice, but the sound of many others screaming same complaints, announcing the same snubs and hurts and disrespects that have been inflicted on ourselves. The isolation Trisha Donahue, the novel’s protagonist, lives is a dark we all know. Cooney shows us that though we may not see each other, she does.