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This blog will include Greensboro Public Library staff reviews on books you can borrow from the collection or from our digital library. (includes link to Libby) We will cover a wide variety of titles including bestsellers, hidden gems, and fascinating non-fiction.
Happy reading!
The Way of the Hermit by Ken Smith with Will Millard
What is your idea of a hermit? Do you envision a crusty old man who lives out in the middle of nowhere, avoids other people, and distains any aspects of modernity?
In this book, Ken Smith upends the hermit stereotypes. For sure, he does live in a remote location in the Scottish Highlands, and if you didn’t know his cabin existed, you’d probably never stumble across it. But, as we progress through this book that chronicles his early life and his time since 1987 as a resident of the area, we find that Smith is many things other than reclusive.
Even though he prefers his own company, he comes across as personable and more than willing to elaborate on his endeavors to make a home in an environment that is often inhospitable. Smith also enjoys the occasional company of others, as he is a regular visitor to the local town, where he gets his mail and provisions, things that he can’t otherwise hunt or fish for, or grow.
Smith thrived in outdoor settings, and early on in his adult life decided he wanted to be free from the trappings of debt and 9 to 5 employment. A near death situation in his late twenties was the deciding point for him, and from then on, Smith spent most of his time hiking and roughing it, first in northwestern Canada and Alaska, and then back to his native Great Britain. He eventually settled down in Scotland, as he had worked there as a younger man and had liked the countryside of the Highlands.
The first thing Smith had to do was to get permission to build a cabin on the spot he wanted, as the land was part of a vast estate. The go-ahead nod took some time, but not only was he allowed to do so, he was also hired as a hunting and fishing guide for visitors to the estate.
Smith survives extreme weather, fires, health scares, and yes, an occasional haunting (not at his cabin, thankfully!) to relate to the reader his full and busy life, and his sheer love of his environment. The book is highly readable, and Smith is a likeable character.
Bloody January by Alan Parks
It’s early 1973, and snow and bodies are piling up in Glasgow.
Detective Harry McCoy gets a tip from a prison inmate about a planned hit job. The following morning, a young lady is shot at a location across the street from the bus station. Her killer is a teenage boy who then turns the gun on himself.
As McCoy and his new partner Wattie dig further into the background of Tommy Malone, the now-dead young man, they find that he was a former ward of a Catholic boys home and that he worked for the Dunlop family, known for their wealth and influence about town.
A former co-worker of McCoy’s, Jimmy Gibbs, now works for the Dunlops. Once a friend, he is now an adversary, having stolen McCoy’s wife from him. Regardless of his feelings toward Gibbs, McCoy loathes the Dunlop family, specifically the father and adult son, who enjoy immunity from any type of public scrutiny by virtue of their social status.
McCoy and Wattie, with their boss hot on their case (and adamant that McCoy avoid the Dunlops at all costs), comb Glasgow’s seediest, most desperate locales for leads. McCoy also has to play along with some of the city’s most notorious crime lords, peculiarly one who was a childhood protector and now expects favors in return for information.
Blood will flow, and some it will be McCoy’s.
Bloody January was the author’s first inroad into Scottish crime fiction AKA Tartan Noir. Parks writes a tense in-your-face yarn about a city and its gritty undertow.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
A stretch of woods somewhere in western Massachusetts is host to generations of inhabitants, some human, some of the natural world, and some who have gone but never left.
The enchantment, as it were, of this particular piece of land begins when a young couple flees from some unnamed Puritan settlement, their only shame the young lady’s cuckolded fiancé. After eluding the authorities, something about this particular land feels right. So they stay.
Successive owners/inhabitants of the property leave their mark. Perhaps the most lasting impressions are the additions of a substantial house and apple orchard by Charles Osgood, a veteran of the French and Indian Wars whose instincts led him from soldiering to fruit cultivation. His farm then passes on to his twin daughters, who remain unmarried until the more gregarious one does something unforgiveable to the other.
Others either own the property or pass through – we meet a ruthless slave hunter, a rich businessman with a troubled wife, a nature painter with a forbidden love, a true crime writer, an amateur historian, and others. All add to the mix.
The author combines poetry, straight-up narrative, and epistolary chapters into a sprawling epic of one piece of rural land and how it effects each being that has the fortune to live in it. For some, it is good fortune, for others, a curse, and the land itself is a character, a captivating entity that changes everyone who encounters it.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
Being dumped by your boyfriend is bad enough. Having to work with him and his new fiancé is totally unbearable.
Twenty-five and unmoored, Takako quits her job and sleeps. It’s the only action (or nonaction) she can handle in that it doesn’t require emotional involvement or any motivation.
After a few weeks of drifting, Takako gets a phone call from her Uncle Satoru, who offers her a place to live in exchange for filling in at his bookshop, a tiny and cramped business located in Jimbocho, a district in Tokyo renowned for its proliferation of bookstores. And Takako, aimless and without a future, accepts his offer, exchanging her pricey apartment for a tiny room above the bookshop. Needless to say, she has to do some shifting of contents (think monster stacks of books) to carve out space in which to live.
Takako at first doesn’t care a thing about the world of books, and yet, she will have to learn, and fast. Her first encounter with Sabu, one of the bookshop’s most loyal customers, is a wakeup call. Sabu, not a man of subtlety, berates Takako on her first day on the job over her complete lack of knowledge about books and their content, and what he perceives as the blasé attitudes of the young towards the written word.
Takako, at first lacking a passion for books, slowly changes her outlook for her work and the milieu that she inhabits. So many bookshops! And, their neighborhood opens up to her as well, specifically a local coffee shop, where Takako begins to make friends and interacts with the bookshop’s clientele away from the bookshop itself. She is also able to see a fuller picture of her uncle, a man she used to think was childlike and undisciplined in his demeanor. However, Satoru has a thorough knowledge of his shop’s contents and apparently has enough bravado to stand up to Takako’s ex-boyfriend. Satoru is also a damaged soul, as his wife left him abruptly five years ago.
As she negotiates the blossoming of a new life, Takako finds herself as book lover, matchmaker, friend, and potential love interest to another coffee shop regular. She also discovers the complexity of her Aunt Momoko, when she returns to Satoru after her five year absence.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop definitely falls into the “sweet little book” category. Read it if you love bookshops and kooky characters.
The library has this one in ebook format.
No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Disgraced former cop Eugène Tarpon barely scrapes by as a private investigator in Paris. Whatever job prospects he has are usually those of a security guard nature, and he has no interest in these.
So, when we meet our disgruntled hero, he’s down to close to zero in money, drinking to oblivion, and close to vacating his cramped apartment when he gets a fated knock on the door. His life gets dicier from then on, as he wrangles with potential clients, policemen, elderly journalists with insane driving habits, and other unsavory types. This is all in an effort to solve the case of a murdered young woman, a roommate of a self-imposed client of his named Memphis Charles.
For lovers of hardboiled crime novels with a French twist, enter the gritty world of Paris in the 1970s, when you could clout somebody on the head with a telephone and do real damage. No Room at the Morgue is a brutal, no nonsense, and occasionally funny sendup of the detective procedural.
746books.com, a blog that focuses on Irish literature, sometimes covers other areas and genres. No Room at the Morgue was a recommendation from this blog.
Inland by Téa Obreht
Nora is living in the Arizona Territory in 1893 and trying to run a homestead with her husband Emmett, who owns the local newspaper. During an extended drought, Emmett journeys for water and after several days is presumed lost or killed. An intense argument with her older sons leads to both of them disappearing as well, and Nora is left to tend their wreck of a farm with her youngest son Toby and Josie, the hired help, a young lady who purports to commune with the dead, an ability that has brought her some local notoriety. Nora scoffs at Josie’s abilities, but has her own dialogue with her daughter Evelyn, who died as an infant.
After a horseback accident that leaves him blind in one eye, Toby lends himself to an overactive imagination – he insists on the existence of a strange beast that haunts the area around their farm. Nora, with her hands full and attempting sanity in the face of ruin, humors him only to a point.
In a day’s time, we learn of shifting loyalties, hidden romance, animosities between the different ethnic groups living there, and the dire circumstances that settlers endure to either raise cattle or mine or simply live.
Intertwined with Nora’s story is that of Lurie, an immigrant as a child who soon enters into the world of thievery. He and his cohorts rob stagecoaches and individuals alike, and after disposing of the outlaw life, Lurie is hard pressed to shake off one dogged pursuer, a man that he meets time and again and manages to elude. He is also a haunted man who sees ghosts, usually unwillingly.
Inland is a sprawl of a book, and its two storylines initially have nothing to do with each other. But keep reading. Obreht’s writing makes the book completely worthwhile, and the comradery between Lurie and his closest companion, at first farfetched, turns into one of the most heartbreaking parts of the book.
Playground by Richard Powers
Life on the French Polynesian island of Makatea is idyllic – as idyllic as it can be on an island recovering from the over-mining of its phosphate reserves some years ago. Plant and animal life on the island are reclaiming the land, but the population is only about eighty people, a huge drop from the nearly three thousand of its mining heyday.
The islanders are largely content. They have solar power and Internet connections, but the French government lets them make their own decisions, until an opportunity comes around in the form of a multi-billion dollar American company that wants Makatea to be the base for constructing a proposed set of floating cities.
This would mean the potential for modernizing things, for having better housing and medical facilities. The influx of another major industry could also turn Makatea once again back to a wasteland.
Makatea sets the tone for the book, just one storyline of many that string through Playground. We meet Ina at the beginning, the mother of two and an artist who is disturbed at the amount of found plastic items on the beaches of Makatea. We follow her husband Rafi’s backstory - that of a reading genius from Chicago’s projects who forms a close friendship with Todd, a rich kid with a penchant for computer software development. We also encounter Evie Beaulieu, a shy French-Canadian who becomes a renowned sea scientist and advocate for the teeming life forms of the world’s oceans.
With the different storylines, Playground is occasionally confusing, but keep reading, as the writing is worth it – everything eventually converges. As is the case with his previous book, The Overstory, the author pitches the environment, but he certainly gets the reader to consider what we don’t know about our own earth, most of it covered by water.
The floating cities concept is a reality, and here’s a site to find out more about them - https://www.seasteading.org/. Also, Makatea is a real island. This website gives a brief history of the phosphate mining that went on there.
The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
Bob Comet has a carefully defined life.
Bob is a retired librarian who fills his empty days reading and wandering through his neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. It is on one of his regular walks, on one of those rainy days Portland is famous for, that Bob encounters a confused and catatonic older woman in a convenience store, and he manages to get her back to the assisted care facility where she lives. After meeting a few other patients there, Bob is intrigued enough to volunteer at the center, doing things that Maria, the facility’s head nurse, warns him might be thankless. However, Bob, weary of his life of routine, now is game for the challenge.
His first approach is book readings, but they bomb with his audience, most of whom have dementia or otherwise limited attention spans. Bob soon learns that steady interactions with the residents is really what builds the relationships, so after the first few weeks, he finds his place as a volunteer.
The confused lady, known by staff and residents as Chip, disappears again on a snowy night. They do find her – actually, Bob does, in the same convenience store that she was previously. Upon their return to the facility, Chip’s son is there and expresses his ire to Maria. As the son leaves, Bob notices his uncanny resemblance to someone in his past – and then the memories come flooding back.
The narrative goes back in time at this point, with Bob reliving his first love, brief marriage, and a massive betrayal that sets him on course as an avowed bachelor. There’s also a long section afterward, in which we meet an even younger Bob, an eleven year old at this time, as he runs away from home, finding his way to a seaside hotel on the Oregon coast in the company of traveling entertainers, two women and their dogs.
The book ends with Bob back in his present day, and starting to face some hard truths about his life – namely, that his idyllic lifestyle of books and day sauntering may be coming to an end. A peculiar fixture to his house fails in a spectacular manner and Bob realizes that a compromise of sorts is in order – a time to slow down and rid himself of some things.
The Librarianist is a quiet and humorous study of one introverted Everyman as he changes course in his golden years. Bob is a bookish soul, much at home with his own company, but somehow manages just fine with others.
The structure of the narrative is odd – not strictly linear, with the flashbacks to his previous ages taking up a big chunk of the book. Still – much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, and the book is a quick read.
The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy
Louise Kennedy set the Irish literary world ablaze with her novel Trespasses a couple of years ago. This follow up collection of short stories, although not on the same caliber as the previous book, still packs a wallop in terms of poetically capturing the everyday trials of its characters.
They inhabit a mundane, largely rural or small town Ireland, places ruled by past social mores and occasionally tinged by violence. The author does not write about happy or mentally settled people. Rather, her characters span all ages, are usually women, and are conflicted as to the indignities that come with having children, bad relationships, and the drudgery of being penned-in to a particular role.
The closest you’ll find to a “normal” marriage in these stories is found in “Garland Sunday,” the last one of the collection, in which a forty-something wife bakes a cake and otherwise puts on a brave face during a local festival, even though she and her husband can barely speak to each other. But within thirty pages, there is so much repressed emotion - the guilt of committing a societal taboo, the resentment of a strongly male-oriented culture, and even, as a twist, having her father-in-law as her closest confidant, he withholding judgment as he spins a tale of his own guilty past.
We relive Northern Ireland’s violent past in “In Silhouette,” a dream-like memory in which a young lady relives a death in the family, an interrogation, and other horrors of the time. In “Wolf Point,” a father entertains his young daughter as they sidestep around the mother’s unnamed illness. In “Belladonna,” a teenage girl struggles with bullying in school as she works part time for the intriguing couple across the street, only to discover that they have their own dark secrets. And in “Powder,” Eithne, a young Irish woman, travels with her would-have-been American mother-in-law as they tour Ireland with her fiance’s ashes, ultimately on a rendezvous with the Northern Lights.
There’s lots more here.
As I mentioned before, Kennedy doesn’t write about happy people, and the subject matter here in these stories may not be to everyone’s liking. The scenarios Kennedy creates are visceral and uncompromising. You also have to know or be willing to grasp aspects of Irish culture and dialect in order to make sense of what’s going on, but if Irish Lit is your thing, give this one a read.
The Cloisters by Katy Hays
Ann Stilwell is flush with excitement when she gets an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It’s a far cry from her home town of Walla Walla, Washington, and miles away from the emotional landmine that is home. Her mom still can’t cope after the death of Ann’s father from a hit and run the previous year, and is reluctant for Ann to travel across the country. But Ann, who is grieving in her own fashion, needs the distance.
Upon arrival, Ann soon finds out that she is without a position at the Met, but an unexpected savior comes in the form of Patrick Roland, who offers her an on-the-spot position for the summer. He is a curator at The Cloisters, a division of the Met devoted to medieval and early Renaissance art, and there Ann is able to immerse herself in a world away from the never ending hum of Manhattan. She works directly with Rachel Mondray, Patrick’s assistant, a charismatic young lady with a gift for research.
Together, the two sift through archival materials to find support for an upcoming presentation about the occult in the Renaissance, specifically the use of Tarot cards and their use as a tool for divination. It is when they unearth the remaining few cards to complete a fifteenth century Tarot deck from Italy that things get stranger. The two, along with Roland, begin readings with this deck.
It is one such setting that begins as a casual reading and ends tragically, although I won’t divulge the details.
The author sets the ambiance for the book well. The Cloisters as a place functions as a world away from the present day, with its medieval styled ramparts and medicinal gardens a throwback to a different era, that of the early Italian Renaissance, where court intrigue was a way of life and people took stock in a variety of methods for predicting the future.
The Cloisters works well as a page turner, with the supernatural elements implied but not used in a heavy-handed manner. Read this one if you liked Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or even Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers and enjoy reading about the worlds of museums and arcane subject matters.
By the way, The Cloisters really does exist – check out the website here.
The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Rural Michigan in the transition between traditional ways and modernity is the setting for this novel.
Hermine Zook AKA Herself is a local legend, a skilled herbalist known for her cures for a variety of ailments. As her small community changes with the times, there are many in the vicinity of Whiteheart who still seek out her salves and tonics. There are others who eye her with suspicion.
Hermine has three grown daughters – the first two are sturdy souls who left their island home years ago. Molly became a nurse, Prim a lawyer. It is the third daughter, beautiful and languorous Rose Thorn, who captures the hearts of many, but makes her escape from town early on, only to return with a baby in tow.
Rose Thorn does not stay. Herself raises Rose’s daughter Dorothy, known in the family as Donkey, who grows up both wise and naïve – wise to the natural world of their island home, and naïve to what Herself refers to as Nowhere, the menacing outside world of men and their vicissitudes.
Rose Thorn does return approximately yearly, to check on her daughter and to rekindle her romance with Titus Clay Jr., a man thought highly of in the community. There is great passion between the two of them, but Rose can’t bear the idea of being a farmer’s wife.
All three of Herself’s children are gifted in their own way – Prim as a defender of the defenseless, Molly in her capacity as nurse a healer, and Rose Thorn and her uncanny ability to bring life and insight out of others.
The Waters weaves together herbal lore and myth to tell the story of an unusual family and how they survive amidst the onslaught of modern society and its many woes – pollution, eroded family values, toxic masculinity, etc.
Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South by Diane Flynt
When you buy apples in the grocery store, your choices are usually limited to five or six varieties, if you’re lucky. The varieties we see are the ones that look desirable and keep well, not necessarily what taste the best.
Before Big Business regimented the apple industry, farmers of all types grew hundreds of apple varieties, particularly in the American South, which largely had a climate conducive to apple tree cultivation.
Who were these apple farmers? They varied from small land holders who tended their own orchards to plantation owners who generally used enslaved labor to do the hands on work, and then claimed nomenclature on the varieties that they developed on their land.
The author has an immersive attachment to her subject matter. For years, Flynt ran her own orchard and cidery, Foggy Ridge Cider, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and avidly cultivated older varieties of apples that still existed. In this book, she has written an informative history of apple horticulture that rescues from obscurity farming practices that date from colonial times.
John Prine: In Spite of Himself by Eddie Huffman
During his long career, John Prine proved himself to be one of the best singer-songwriters in conveying the human condition. His songs were relatable, often humorous, dry and spare, but didn’t refrain from covering difficult situations.
Prine started songwriting in the 1960s during a stint in the U.S. Army in Germany, and then as a mailman, where he listened to conversations from people along his mail route; these animated his early songs about aging, failed relationships, drug-addicted veterans, and long distance romances.
Prine’s discovery was the stuff of legend. In the very early 1970s, Roger Ebert, then a fledgling film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, occasionally reviewed local musicians, and gave Prine a boost and nod with a review. Steve Goodman, another musician and close friend of Prine, also relentlessly plugged his buddy’s work, and then Kris Kristofferson came calling, and the rest is history.
Despite his increasing renown for songwriting, Prine’s career largely was that of word-of-mouth fans, and his long career was a series of struggles with record companies who were at a loss to categorize him. Folk or country, rock-n-roll? Prine dabbled with all three genres, with varying degrees of success. Despite Prine’s many collaborations, it seemed, though, that his steadiest formula was just him, a guitar, his gravelly voice, and his songs.
The author retells Prine’s long story, from his boyhood in Maywood, IL, to his clutch of early albums that solidified his reputation, and then his explorations into further decades, including the establishment of Oh Boy Records, his own record label, in the early 1980s.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Turning forty. Raising a young son. Dealing with your husband’s appendectomy during a vacation. Having health issues of your own. All of these were impetuses to a period of down time for the author, a time of retreat, what she calls wintering.
In her interpretation, wintering is a period of reflection that coincides with actual cold weather. In her wintering time, May steps away from a stressful job situation and experiences the wonders of the cold and how it can rejuvenate. Wintering does not have to be depressing. Instead, she travels to even colder places (Norway and Iceland, from her native England) to find inspiration, takes cues from friends from even colder places (Finland and Denmark), and even passes on the amazement of winter weather to her son, when he sees his first snow of significance.
So the cold season and some rough bumps in life don’t have to mean turmoil and depression. Instead, read this book, if you like good writing and British things, and maybe reassess wintering. It’s only a cup of tea (and a few months) away.
A Fire in the Night by Christopher Swann
Nick Anthony is largely done with the world. A widower of about one year, Nick is a retired college professor, and his place of retirement is a remote cabin in the North Carolina Mountains. Actually, he and his wife Ellie chose this idyllic home site together, but Ellie is gone now, and Nick prefers absolute solitude; his only contact with the locals is his occasional grocery run.
The local sheriff’s deputy stops by, with news that Nick’s long-estranged brother and wife have died in a house fire in Florida. He soon has another visitor, his brother’s teenage daughter, of whom Nick did not know existed.
Annalise has been on the run, with items in her possession that are of great interest to the men who she believes killed her parents and burned down their house. When she arrives at her uncle’s, feverish and in shock from grief, Annalise is largely incoherent, and Nick, jarred from his self-imposed exile, finds himself caretaker to a teenager.
Nick and his niece don’t trust each other at first. He didn’t expect to take on any new responsibilities in his retirement, and is somewhat clueless as to the needs of a teenage girl. To her credit, though, Annalise didn’t expect to be an abrupt orphan, and she develops a resourcefulness beyond her years. The two manage to hash out a working relationship, once they realize that they both have limited options.
Annalise is not paranoid about having pursuers. As the story switches back and forth, we find our perpetrators to be brutally relentless in locating her and Nick. We also learn the back story of their leader, and find that he has a personal connection with the job at hand.
A Fire in the Night winds up the suspense nicely toward the end, with a significant body count. The book is a riveting page-turner, and with a setting largely in western North Carolina, how can you go wrong?
Back to Japan: The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter Kunihiko Moriguchi by Marc Petitjean
Back to Japan chronicles the life of a master kimono painter as he produces innovative designs while still adhering to a tradition going back hundreds of years.
As a young man, Kunikiko had the opportunity to study art in Paris during the 1960s, and showed great promise as a graphic artist. However, he chose to return to his native Japan to learn the work of his father, a renowned kimono painter who had created garments for the Japanese imperial family, among others.
Even though his father blazed a high mark in his field, Kunihiko forged his own style of kimono painting while working within long-established traditions. As you read the book, it’s very obvious that Kunihiko held his dad’s work in high regard, but he certainly had his own ideas about kimono painting, and his geometrical designs broke with tradition while still maintaining a sense of craftsmanship.
Back to Japan highlights a long-standing practitioner of a Japanese art form who learned to be true to himself, even within the rigidities of his chosen method of expression.
I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
A near-future bass-playing Orpheus sets out on an epic sailing journey to connect with his departed beloved wife.
Rainy is a bear of a man, a good, capable and almost childlike soul. He and his wife Lark live in Icebridge, a backwards coastal town on Lake Superior. They manage to have a life, Rainy as a handyman and Lark as a bookshop owner, in a world where getting by is a struggle, assuming you’re not one of the few invisible super rich folks who own everything, yet let infrastructure crumble and the average person fend for themselves.
Rainy and Lark fend away with scrappy good cheer, him with his odd jobs and occasional bass gigs at a local tavern, and Lark with her passion for locating inventory for her shop, at odds with the prevailing society where literacy is not valued.
Their good fortune ends after they take in a boarder, a young man who is running from a mysterious adversary. Kellan, as he is known, is likeable enough to Rainy, who sees him as a misguided kid who has gotten in with the wrong sort, who apparently want something from him.
Kellan disappears during a birthday party for Lark, and later she is murdered, presumably by the dark forces that are chasing Kellan, and this shatters Rainy’s sense of home, of settlement, and he undertakes a sailing trip across Superior to the Slate Islands, a place of magical memory for him. Along the way, Rainy struggles with vicious storms, all kinds of post-apocalyptic weirdos, and yes, even some even-keeled people who help him, and takes on a nine-year-old girl, a refugee from an abusive situation.
I Cheerfully Refuse is a far-flung and sweet-natured journey through a world torn asunder by greed and neglect, leaving behind a scattered population who either rises to do better or caves in with ignorance. Rainy is an amiable protagonist, an Everyman of bearlike proportions who cheerfully refuses to give in to the shortcomings of his blighted world.
That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry
Wastrel boyfriends. Old geezers obsessed with community deaths. A pursuer of an elusive sean-nós song. All of these characters and more inhabit That Old Country Music, Kevin Barry’s short story collection from 2020.
All of these stories take place in Ireland, largely within County Sligo, a mountainous area in the west of the country. The wildness and remoteness of the county are depicted as both liberating and confining, the liberation from the sheer unfettered natural setting of Sligo, with the Ox Mountains portrayed almost as a character themselves, and the confinement coming from the claustrophobic feel of small town/country life, in which it seems that everybody knows everyone else’s business. There is an escape into the natural world, best displayed in the story “Roma Kid,” in which a young girl, an outsider in many different ways, finds her freedom deep in the woods with a hermit, a trailer-dwelling older man who teaches her the ways of trees and books.
Other stories include “Ox Mountain Death Song,” chronicling an older policeman’s pursuit of a ne’er do well lady’s man as he wreaks havoc and breaks hearts, “Toronto and the State of Grace,” in which a hapless bartender humors an elderly lady and her son as they proceed to drink their way through his liquor collection, “Old Stock,” in which a man inherits his uncle’s house, a place uncanny in its ability for seduction, and “Saint Catherine of the Fields,” where a musicologist digs hard for an obscure sean-nós song, its last singer a nonagenarian in a nursing home.
The stories range from introspective to bawdy, with lots of Irishisms, so it helps to really appreciate Irish literature, dialects, and to love the culture itself.
Spook Street by Mick Herron
The bombing of a popular indoor shopping center in London has the Secret Service on high alert, and this includes the Slow Horses, AKA MI5’s screw-ups. As one of their own, River Cartwright has his own side project of concern. His beloved grandfather, once a higher up in the Service, is now losing his mind to dementia.
River, of course, checks in on his grandfather on a regular basis. It’s on one of these visits that he realizes that his grandfather still has a gun in the house, and doesn’t exactly recognize River.
River’s fate is in question after a body is found at his grandfather’s house that bears some resemblance to River. His assumed demise adds to the precarious state of things at Slough House, their decrepit warren of offices, along with the retirement (we think) of office manager Catherine Standish and her replacement, who is not a good fit, assuming such a thing is possible. Also, Jackson Lamb, their curmudgeonly leader, has been in absentia for some time. So our heroes are down a few people, until the enigmatic Lamb makes an appearance, stirs his charges into action, and as always, knows more than he’ll let on.
Add a new First Desk in MI5 who is largely clueless, a shadowy group who may or may not have connections to the Service and the bombing, and a relentless rain that complicates chases and good cheer, and you have the setting for Spook Street, the fourth in the Slow Horses series. Get ready for the usual hijinks from author Herron, who doesn’t disappoint. This one did go a bit slower for me than the previous three, as there’s several storylines going at once, but the tension is real.
The library has this book in print and ebook format.
Lark Ascending by Silas House
In a near future, fire consumes most of the United States, and what is left is ruled by extremists. Anyone who is still alive wants to leave, but very few places are taking refugees; Ireland is rumored to be one of them.
Lark and his parents manage to find places on a boat headed to Ireland, but his father dies on the voyage over, the victim of blood poisoning from a leg wound.
Ireland proves to be anything but a refuge, and Lark soon finds himself alone and avoiding human contact as best as he can; he doesn’t know who is trustworthy. As he traverses across the country, Lark sees the ravages of infighting between factions that he can’t fathom, and much of southern Ireland is deserted.
Help and companionship come in the form of Seamus, a beagle, and the first dog that Lark has seen in years. Seamus is obviously hungry, but apparently cared for recently. He quickly takes a liking to Lark, and the two soon discover the necessity of traveling together through the uncertainties of the countryside.
An intense woman named Helen also joins them eventually. Her knowledge of foraging and potential dangers is vital to them surviving, and eventually making it to Glendalough, an almost mythical valley that Lark’s parents thought would be a safe haven.
I try to avoid apocalyptic/end time books because the scenarios are mostly chaotic and depressing. Lark Ascending has been on my reading list for months just because I read another of the author’s books (Southernmost) years ago and liked it very much. This one doesn’t disappoint. As it is written (largely) as a twenty-year-old man’s point of view, the book could almost pass for young adult fiction, but House does not sugarcoat his future world – it is one of violence and desolation, but still, hope.
And yes, there’s a good dog story here.
The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
Life for thirty-year-old Lynette is a whirlwind of work and caretaking. She holds down three jobs and does some other dubious work to make a living for her, her mother, and her developmentally challenged older brother. Her mother also pulls some part-time hours at a local jewelers.
Lynette and her family live in a crumbling older house in Portland, a city notorious for outpricing longtime residents out of their homes in the name of gentrification. The town that Lynette has lived in her entire life is barely recognizable, with condominiums going up everywhere and the worst of bungalows selling for outrageous prices.
Their landlord is interested in selling their house, and is cutting them a deal on it. Lynette is counting on her mom to chip in on the down payment, but then her mom decides that a new car is what she really wants and backs out.
Lynette has get really resourceful, really fast, because their landlord can’t wait forever.
Join Lynette on one of her typical workdays, where she works the early shift at a bakery and then tends bar. But the day doesn’t end after this, and Lynette’s quest for cash has her traveling to some of the seedier places in Portland to settle certain favors and/or debts owed to her, but none of them come easily, and at least a few situations have Lynette fighting for her life and what’s left of her sanity.
In The Night Always Comes, we discover a flawed main character who is trying her best to hold her home together while coming to terms with her troubled past. Lynette is a well-meaning person, but can be difficult to deal with, as we find out from her mother and some of her associates. She is also not afraid to resort to extremes to get what she needs.
This is my first introduction to Willy Vlautin’s work. If you like novels about hard-edged working class people and aren’t adverse to some violence, then his writing might be to your liking. There’s definitely a noir feel to this – kind of Breaking Bad mixed with After Hours in book form, with the main character a female. This one was a quick read.
Days without End by Sebastian Barry
Thomas McNulty is one among many exiles from famine-wracked Ireland of the 1850s. As a teenager, he arrives in the United States wearing literally nothing but rags, and soon finds a kindred soul in John Cole. Together, the two find employment dressing as women in a bar to the delight of the rough-edged miners of Daggsville, a frontier town.
Their stint as dancing “ladies” ends as they grow too lanky to pass as women, and the two join the army, touring the West during the grisly conflicts between the Union Army and Native Americans. Thomas and John witness and participate in some of the worst atrocities of this time.
Their tenure in the army extends into the Civil War, and the two are also in the thick of some horrendous battles, until they are captured and sent to Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison, where they are pretty much left to waste away. They survive after a prisoner exchange enables them passage to Union-controlled territory.
After the war, Thomas and John, along with Winona, a young Sioux girl that they have adopted, make their way to Tennessee, where a former fellow soldier has a farm and a dire need for help to run it. There, they hope to find some peace, but the detritus of the war has a bad way of catching up to them.
Days without End is also a love story of sorts between Thomas and John, although this is largely downplayed.
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
It begins with the movie Psycho in super slow motion, as an art installation in a museum. An unnamed narrator observes two men in the room briefly as the film airs, its original running time stretched out over a twenty-four hour period. Who are they?
Flash forward to an undetermined southwestern desert, where Jim Finley, the younger of these two, is visiting the older man, Richard Elster. Elster is a professor who has self-exiled himself after a stint as a consultant for the military. Finley, a filmmaker of sorts, wants to make a documentary of Elster in his own element.
Elster never entirely agrees to make a film with Finley, but the two provide each other company in the isolation of Elster’s desert house. Finley pitches his ideas about his proposed film and Elster waxes philosophically on time and the natural world.
The dynamic changes abruptly when Elster’s daughter comes to visit. Jessie is in her twenties, a kind of odd duck who still adds some welcome variety to the long days of desert watching, and the long evenings of Scotch drinking. She is obviously an object of affection for her father. The question hangs as to why she came to visit at all - and then the dynamic changes again, even more abruptly.
At less than 120 pages, Point Omega is a quick read. The art installation of the slowed-down film frames the story at the beginning and ending, although you have to finish reading the book to find out its ultimate relationship to the main plotline, other than Finley and Elster being the two men observed by our first narrator.
24 Hour Psycho was a real art installation that was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2006.
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Retired Dublin police detective Tom Kettle ruminates over his past life, losses, loves, and mistakes.
Tom is enjoying the routines of retirement, especially the lack of involvement with other people. He is aware of his other neighbors in their seaside castle converted to apartments, but observes them with detachment. Tom is a widower, so being solitary is something he is used to, but he still has an intense longing for his wife.
An interruption to Tom’s idyll comes in the form of two younger detectives, both known by Tom when he still worked. They bring news of an old case newly opened that they need Tom’s help with, as he worked on the case. Some new confessions and allegations are at hand, both of which hit dangerously close to Tom and his past.
Tom, still loyal to police procedure, offers up his best memories of the case and its particulars, even though doing so dredges up intense pain for Tom, flashbacks of things that happened to both him and his wife June when they were children.
Throughout the narrative, it’s apparent that June has died some time ago, but it’s late in the book that we discover her fate. The same goes for Tom’s two adult children, who live away from him but seem to exist in the present day of the book. As the author chips away at Tom’s daily musings, we have a darker reality.
Old God’s Time is a beautifully written novel, a difficult book at times because of Tom being an unreliable narrator. Is it his age, or his grief, or both, that render his version of life incoherent at times? Still, read on. The author slowly teases out Tom’s foibles and fears, his vain attempts to be the nonchalant retiree, when in reality; it only takes a visit to knock his world apart.
The Island by Adrian McKinty
The Baxter family are on vacation, sort of. Tom, the husband who is a renowned surgeon, is attending a medical conference in Australia, and his two teenagers and new wife are along for the trip.
His kids can barely stand Heather, who is considerably younger than their dad. Their collective resentments exist largely because their father remarried so soon after their mother died.
Their vacation takes them, mistakenly, to the barren confines of Dutch Island, said to be a haven for hard-to-find Australian wildlife, and home to the O’Neill family, who allow very few on the island.
A split-second of driving negligence makes Tom guilty of a horrific accident, and the O’Neills prove themselves capable of monumental wrath. They inflict a deadly injury on Tom, and take Hans, the husband of another couple who visited the island, hostage.
Heather and the kids, along with Petra, Hans’ wife, are now on the run, and have to learn a collective resourcefulness, hiding out in the unforgiving landscape of the island. There are deadly hot days, vegetation that tears flesh, and some of the wildlife are best left alone.
Owen and Olivia soon learn to trust their stepmother, as she unveils survival skills that she had learned from her own father years ago. The two kids also develop a quick adaptation to the harshness of the place. The three gradually make peace with each other, and then make war on the flinty O’Neills.
The Island starts out as a run-of-the-mill bickering family drama, which ratchets up quickly into a tense and satisfying thriller. The O’Neills are relentless in their pursuit of Heather and the kids, but once you learn a little about their background, particularly the family matriarch, it’s not easy to say which side is right. The Baxters are the hunted, but they are also interlopers of a sort, as they have created their own grievance with the O’Neills.
Caveat – definitely violent, but some people like their thrillers that way.
The Last Ranger by Peter Heller
Ren Hopper is a thirty-something ranger at Yellowstone National Park who is good at what he does, but harbors an intense frustration with park visitors and the crazy/stupid things that they do in regards to wildlife. Hundreds descend, cameras and phones in hand, to gawk at the wolves, grizzlies, and other animals, most of them highly dangerous if approached too closely. His run ins with some park visitors often includes stern and quick lessons on what not to do when interacting with the park’s natural inhabitants.
Ren realizes that their patronage of Yellowstone supports his livelihood, so he does his job, although his feelings slant way more for the wildlife itself than for the hordes of tourists that populate the park year after year.
Ren is partial to the wolf packs that inhabit the park. His friend Hilly, a wildlife biologist, is especially keen on the local wolves. She has studied them down to a fine art, and knows how to observe them as unobtrusively as possible. There are other entities, though, whose interests in the wolves have nothing to do with their wellbeing, and not all of the locals are fans of the national park and what it stands for – the restrictions on hunting and firearms, and its influence on the region’s economy.
Ren tenuously walks the fine line between the law and the lawless, and somehow keeps his temper and sanity in check. It takes an almost deadly attack on Hilly that spurs Ren on to face, head on, the dangerous factions that threaten him and the wildlife that he is charged with defending.
The Last Ranger is a dizzying rural noir tale of Montana, a place of uncanny natural beauty, but also a place where anyone (wolf or elk or human) can be a target – of poaching or purely malicious intent. Read it if you like a good mystery yarn, some great nature writing, and love the wide-open spaces of the American West.
The Black Snow by Paul Lynch
A horrific barn fire takes the life of a kindly older farm hand and over forty heads of cattle, and Barnabas Kane, the owner of the barn and herd, is a broken man physically and emotionally, his lungs damaged by barn smoke and his marriage soon to be tested by the aftermath. The inhabitants of their small Irish community soon turn on Barnabas and his family.
Maybe it was a prideful thing, Barnabas thinking he could return to the village of his childhood, and think that a farming livelihood would sustain him, his wife and son. It did for several years, until the barn fire took away their property and income.
To his discredit, Barnabas is a stubborn and unyielding soul, and his manner increasingly alienates his neighbors. They gradually begin to shun him, especially when he refuses to take the help that some offer. Rather, Barnabas is suspicious of anyone’s motives, considering the offers to buy portions of his land to be intrusive and conniving. He is also drawing his own conclusions as to the cause of the fire.
His erratic behavior affects his family aversely. His wife Eskra withdraws into her own routines when Barnabas is overbearing, and tries to reason with him when she thinks she can, although Eskra is also prey to her own suspicions. Their son Billy, in his early teens and beginning his own inner rebellions, sets off his father at the worst times.
There is new hope for the family’s fortunes when Barnabas finds a source of building material for the new barn, but his raiding of a couple of deserted cottages for stones draws the ire of the community, as they consider his act a desecration on the past.
The Black Snow is a gritty, beautifully written but sad book about rural Donegal during the last year of World War II, in which the war takes a second place to the daily struggles against the elements to make a scanty living. The narrative is rich with Irish dialect, which might be an impediment for some readers, but the book is ultimately worth the read, although the ending did leave me hanging.
The author won the Booker Prize last year for his most recent book Prophet Song.
Sin Eaters by Caleb Tankersley
What do swamp monsters, kids with crushes, and pot-smoking preachers have in common? For starters, they (except for the swamp monster – it’s more of a fervently imagined thing) are all characters in Sin Eaters, a collection of short stories that manages to infuse weirdness into the mundane, with a nice mix of humor and shock value.
Tankersley’s stories take place mainly in the American Midwest, in Kansas and other places where the most confining aspects are cultural mores and the never-ending cornfields, planted, as he puts it, right up to the front doors. Small town religion plays a major role in these stories – two feature preachers, both dedicated to their calling but at odds with the expectations of their parishioners.
In “Candy Cigarettes,” one of the best stories in the collection, Tankersley perfectly captures the angst of a young girl, grieving over her grandfather’s death, who struggles to piece together the life lessons learned from him with the strangeness that is first love, or what she thinks is that. In “Apparitions,” the appearance of a Jesus image formed of rust renews the religious fervor of one man in a relationship and infuriates the other, with dire outcomes. “The Feed Corn Sea” brings us Jerry, back in his hometown, preaching up a storm in his childhood church and grooving on the devil’s lettuce, who finds his baked goods of particular interest to an ailing former churchgoer. And in “In the Clouds,” an older man ponders the Second Coming and wonders why no one else cares.
The characters in these are usually in hopeless situations. Depression, incurable diseases, dead end jobs, and age all figure in Tankersley’s stories, sometimes all at the same time. However, our characters (mostly) can laugh at themselves, even in the direst of circumstances.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
A successful dentist comes to question his sense of identity when someone begins to impersonate him on the Internet.
Paul O’Rourke doesn’t have it all, but he has enough – a successful dental practice in Manhattan and a sort of half-life in which he purports to be a Red Sox fan, ruminates on past loves or attempts at love, and questions the existence of God. He accepts his mundane life and the time he puts into his business. All is well in the world of Paul, or is it?
Fate comes knocking in the form of a website that claims to be from Paul’s office, highlighting Paul and his staff to an uncanny degree, at first benignly, but soon expanding into Facebook and Twitter territory. The unknown Paul then starts making posts about an obscure religious group in the Middle East, something the real Paul would never consider doing, and our quiet but successful dentist finds notoriety when he least wants it.
Despite his early resolve not to engage with his fake counterpart, Paul banters online with him and finds an entity that is not necessarily bad. In fact, this interaction helps Paul embark on his own journey of self-discovery via the Internet world.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour shares with us the inner musings of a well-meaning but curmudgeonly dentist as he navigates relationships and spirituality.
True North by Andrew J. Graff
Sam Brecht has followed pipe dreams all of his adult life. Sam is an art teacher, and a good one at that, but he has always envisioned harebrained schemes to make a living, such as selling ceramics from a van or starting a blueberry farm. His wife Swami, steady as a rock, has put up with Sam’s ideas throughout their marriage and raising three young children, but she is tired of humoring him.
Sam proposes buying his uncle’s struggling whitewater outfit in northern Wisconsin…and Swami reluctantly agrees, hoping that this opportunity will save their foundering relationship. After all, they met years ago when the two were guides on the New River in West Virginia. Whitewater rafting is something they both know and are good at.
So, Sam trucks his family up there from Chicago in a brand new Winnebago camper, nearly wrecks it hitting a deer just a few miles from his uncle’s operation, and situations get progressively stranger from then on. See, there’s a few things wrong with the Woodchuck Rafting Company. The place could use some…organization. Chip, Sam’s uncle, is a lovable pot-smoking bear of a man, well-meaning but lacking in keeping the books straight. Woodchuck is now facing competition from X-treme, a new rafting company that has everything Woodchuck doesn’t – financing, finesse, new equipment, and even a zipline. And a multi-billion dollar mining company has eyes on the property surrounding their beloved river.
X-treme syphons off most of their business and then a relentless flood swells the river into something unnavigable. As a viable entity, Woodchuck Rafting will probably not last through the end of the year.
True North is a big-hearted novel about family dynamics and whitewater culture, small town life and the encroachment of big business. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about the river itself, and how river guides interpret a seething current.
The novel is set in 1993, a year noted for the tremendous flooding in the Midwest.
Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin
Imagine – a Tales of the City novel that doesn’t take place at 28 Barbary Lane.
Instead, Mona Ramsey, now Lady Roughton, is now a widow and owner of a grand English country house. Easley House, as it is known, is a beautiful old heap, and Mona is house rich but money poor, which means she now takes in paying guests to cover the electrical problems, the leaky roof, and a host of other issues that beset aging manors.
Mona’s guests at the book’s beginning are Rhonda and Ernie, a middle-aged couple from North Carolina. Rhonda is fascinated by the grandeur of Easley House; Ernie, in his grumbly way, is only along for the ride. There’s something not quite right with these two, especially Ernie, and Rhonda, at times, sure uses a lot of makeup.
Mona and Wilfred, her adopted son and butler-in-training, have to engineer a disappearance for Rhonda after she decides to leave Ernie. He departs, presumably further on with their planned European vacation, and Rhonda stays on at the manor, a sort of extended working holiday, as she helps with cooking and cleaning, and finds her own logical family with Mona and Wilfred, even though their lifestyle and sexuality are at odds with Rhonda’s small town belief systems. Living with these two certainly broadens her horizons.
Other characters from Tales of the City make their appearances – our favorite matriarch Anna Madrigal, and Michael Tolliver, both long time Barbary Lane denizens. They both decide to visit Easley House during Mona’s infamous Midsummer celebrations.
Mona of the Manor is a quick read, an all-too-brief dip back into the Maupin’s world. The chronology might be confusing, as this one backtracks to the 1990s. Also – it helps to have read the previous books of the series, or at least to have some knowledge of who the characters are.
You Only Call When You’re in Trouble by Stephen McCauley
Middle-aged siblings Tom and Dorothy are reasonably close, but couldn’t be more different. Tom is dependable, a respected architect who’s on track for retirement, a father figure to Dorothy’s daughter Cecily, and the rock of the family. Dorothy is erratic, a well-meaning but scattered soul who has spent her adulthood in a series of business ventures, most of them money pits.
After a childhood of Dorothy’s slapdash parenting and Tom’s guidance, Cecily turned out okay – in her early thirties, she holds down a teaching position at a small private college in Chicago, has a boyfriend who she adores, and for all outward appearances, is successful, until a small indiscretion with one of her students lands her in a Title IX investigation.
Both Tom and Dorothy are in precarious positions as well – his project of a lifetime is put on hold after he disagrees with his client on the design, much to the ire of his boss, who is now ready to let Tom go. And Dorothy has started yet another of her “businesses” – this time, a retreat center in Woodstock, New York, with God knows what for financial backing. It’s at the opening gala of the center where Tom, Cecily, and Dorothy ultimately reunite, and Dorothy has some other revealing news once they get there.
These three are the focus, but there’s other memorable characters. There’s Fiona, Dorothy’s cohort with her new venture, who promises that her recent self-help bestseller will give some street cred to their retreat center. Outgoing and pushy to a point, Fiona has a real flair for solving other people’s problems, but can barely make a dent on her own.
We also have Charlotte and Oliver, a couple known to both Tom and Dorothy for years. They’re well off, to put it lightly. Oliver is the quiet one of the two, an astute business man who stays out of town largely. One suspects that this has made their marriage work. Charlotte is opinionated and hard-headed. She can be charming, but is also infuriating at times, and she is Tom’s client who is giving him the headache over the design of a guesthouse on their property.
Add a few estranged boyfriends and the counterculture charm of upstate New York, and you get You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, a witty book and a quick read.
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
In the last few years, Claire Keegan has gotten a fair amount of buzz in the literary world, largely because of two novellas – Small Things Like These and Foster, both of which have gotten the attention of the film world. But she’s been writing for years, and this collection of three short stories represents her work from as far back as the late 1990s.
It’s the third of the batch (Antarctica) that dates back this far, and is probably is the most startling of the three. In it, our heroine, who is purported to be a happily married woman, goes off on a solitary trip to an unnamed town to Christmas shop for her family, but she really wants a quick, extramarital affair, something she can slip into a shopping weekend and then just as quickly forget, pretend that it never happened. The act itself, the affair, will not let her go so easily, and the story leaves us hanging.
This is the prerogative of the writer, whenever they choose. They are not required to present us with a tidy story, one with a pat ending, and Keegan most certainly doesn’t give us one here. What she gives us is a slow-moving train wreck that begins with delight from the mundane and ends (or does it end?) with shock.
So Late in the Day, the titular story, begins the three, and is the ruminations of a man, obviously middle class and of means. He ponders the early promise of a relationship, one that had so much going for it, only to be destroyed by a moment of negligence.
The middle story, The Long and Painful Death, has as its main character a writer in residence who is staying at Heinrich Böll’s cottage on Achill Island in western Ireland. She is looking forward to two weeks of unfettered writing and reflecting, but is thwarted by an unwanted visitor, an irascible German professor who breaks her train of thought, or does he?
Read So Late in the Day if you like Irish literature and are not ready to tackle a novel, not quite yet. This trio of stories can easily be knocked back in an afternoon.
The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs by George Singleton
I read short stories, but it has been some time since I have read any. This title came by chance, mentioned by Jill McCorkle in the “By the Book” column of the New York Times, and I figured that if a writer of McCorkle’s stature recommends a book, it’s probably worth reading.
Singleton populates his stories with all manner of miscreants and clueless do-gooders. He is a Southern writer, albeit one whose corner of the South teems with all sorts of off-kilter situations. Is it stranger than fiction, or does Singleton have a keenness for observing daily absurdities in real life?
His characters include a henpecked EMT who will drive across a state in an overheating truck to get a load of sand for a hypochondriac brother-in-law, a young handyman who has to haggle with a McMansion owner and her smart aleck teenager, a social worker who struggles to bond with his nephew and his slovenly sister, and a recovering alcoholic who must adjust his life to a surreal mountain community and a mysterious tractor parked in his driveway.
Singleton’s characters range from well-meaning to delusional, and sometimes both at the same time. He gleefully recreates the unreliable narrator, and most of the time, writes his story in the first person, so the reader is front and center with the protagonists’ observations of the insanity that unfolds in their lives.
Singleton also manages to squeeze in commentary about the South and its foibles, the politics and racial issues that still haunt the region, and he pokes fun at all aspects – the stodginess of established mores going against the weirdness of development.
I liked the collection, and yes, laughed at much of it, and am still trying to compare Singleton to similar writers. Should we bother? Just read and enjoy.
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
Dr. Sacks popularized his observations of mental and neurological disorders into a series of bestselling books, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In On the Move, which came out shortly before his death in 2015, his own life is the subject.
Sacks was a 1930s baby, the youngest of four sons of a well-respected Jewish family in London. Both of his parents were physicians, his mother a surgeon at a time when there were few women in that profession.
He followed their example, getting his initial medical training in England. By his late twenties, Sacks had made his way to the United States, settling at first in California, and eventually in New York City, working as a neurologist with a variety of patients of differing conditions, and living to some extremes with his own life during young adulthood. At various times, Sacks lived the depths and heights of addiction, and managed to see the other, and better, end of this dark time of his life, when he refocused his time on the study of his patients, and began to write about his findings.
Sacks found some recognition within the scientific/medical community through publication of papers, but he hit his real stride when he found a mainstream audience for the books he wrote about his encounters in the medical field.
Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
The author reinterprets the life and writings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and revisits some of his homes and haunts in Switzerland. He also examines how Nietzsche's works influenced his own impressionable years, including an earlier journey made when the Kaag was nineteen.
Originally from what became Germany, Nietzsche came to Switzerland at first for academic purposes – he got a professorship at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of twenty-four. He lasted about ten years there, until the confines of university life and his poor health, along with heated reception of his first few books, led Nietzsche to the solace of the small town of Sils Maria in eastern Switzerland, where he summered most of the next ten years of his life, formulating his personal philosophy and walking a great deal through the mountain trails of the area.
Through a time of emotional extremes, friends made and lost, and the eventual losing of his mental faculties in the late 1880s, Nietzsche feverishly produced some of his more well-known works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. As he gravitated toward his own solitary ramblings, Nietzsche alienated most of his closest associates, and eventually went under the care of his mother and sister for the last several years of his life, unable to write anything.
The author visits Sils-Maria himself, first as a green college student who first discovers Nietzsche's writings, and as teenagers do, hikes some ill-fated treks in the area to follow the philosopher's steps and figure out why Nietzsche thought the way he did. He later revisits Sils-Maria as an adult with his wife and daughter in tow, wanting to recreate his journey. Some aspects of his recent visit are more enlightening than his first, although Kaag still displays a certain rashness when walking day hikes.
Hiking with Nietzsche is a worthwhile introduction to a philosopher who has often been misunderstood.
Panther Gap by John A. McLaughlin
The Girard family has lived in its hidden corner of the southwestern Colorado Mountains for three generations. Martin, the grandfather of the family, made his massive fortune, and then did his best to retreat from the ills of society.
Summer and Bowman are the children of Leo Girard, Martin’s son, and the last of the family. After the death of their mother, Leo has raised them largely separate from the mainstream, homeschooling the two and teaching them the deep lessons of their huge stretch of mountainous land.
Their father’s paranoid insistence in their family’s privacy has dampened their otherwise idyllic upbringing. His unconventional methods of teaching have both heightened their senses to natural surroundings and instilled into the two siblings a strong aversion to the outside world.
When the two reach adulthood, their paths diverge – for years, Bowman disappears into the wilds of Mexico and Central America, and Summer stays with the land and tries to keep the property up by cattle ranching with her uncles. Money is getting scarcer to pay off the taxes on the land, until the promise of a huge landfall, an inheritance from their grandfather, has Summer anxious to reconnect with her brother, as both are needed to sign for the money.
Unfortunately, other unseen forces connected with Grandfather Martin’s questionable dealings have interests in this inheritance.
Panther Gap is a sprawling, violent, convoluted, yet satisfying noir tale of a family loyalty and the lengths to which certain individuals will go to maintain an impression of independence to outside influences, even though some unsavory dealings are necessary.
The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny
The Quebec village of Three Pines is thrown in turmoil once again when Myrna Landers, the bookshop owner, finds a dead body in the beloved bistro owned by the couple Olivier and Gabri.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team are on the investigation, and they soon find that there is no evidence that the murder happened in the bistro – rather, someone brought the body there from another location.
It seems that nearly anyone is a suspect, but most of the evidence points to Olivier, and unfortunately, he is not telling the entire truth about his past, and about his relationship to the deceased.
There are other subplots as well – there’s the artistic rivalry, understated but very real, between Clara and Peter Morrow. There is the genuine affection between Ruth Zardo, poet in residence and the bane of everyone’s existence, and her pet duck Rosa. There’s also now a new source of hostelry (or is it hostility?) in the area, when the Gilberts, a husband and wife and his mother, buy and renovate the old Hadley house into a boutique hotel and spa, giving Gabri and Olivier some competition for their bed and breakfast.
Throw in a young furniture craftsman, a family of Czech émigrés, a related series of exquisite wood carvings, and the harsh reality of the art world, and you get The Brutal Telling, another winning mystery from Louise Penny.
This is the fifth book in the Chief Inspector Gamache series, and as always, the author examines the village of Three Pines with a critical eye, exposing the very human nature, good and bad, of its townspeople. Even the most idyllic of places has its flip side.