I can’t wait until September’s books. (2021)

[ozziegiraffe]

Here is the thread for September, as I finished one last night.
August is here. figjamnation.proboards.com/thread/8963/august-harvest-books-2021

[ozziegiraffe]

55. Knitted and Knifed, Tracey Drew. A cozy mystery with knitting and cats, set in a small New Zealand seaside town.

[Queen]

LaRose
Louise Erdich

Just wonderful.

Packed with emotions, from a range of characters each with a story. As usual she brings out the themes around loss and hope in a way that will hit you, sometimes hard. This one got me harder because of all the news about the bodies of Native American children's bodies being found in mass graves and being returned to their tribes.

[scrubb]

Thanks, OzzieG!

Q-pee - I really loved that book too. I think that Erdich has developed over the years and become a really good writer.

I just finished "Still Here" by Lara Vapnyar, about 4 Russian people who emmigrated to the US (NYC). Sergey and Vica and Regina and Vadik. It's about them finding their way, or not, mostly, but mixed in with their attitudes to social media and the loss of parents. Sergey has an idea for an ap that allows people to maintain a presence on social media after their death which is sort of the form on which the book hangs.

It was very readable. At first I thought that I wasn't going to like any of the characters, which makes it tougher for me to enjoy a book, but the author made them very human - imperfect and flawed - so I did start caring what happened to them. Overall, worth reading but nothing particularly earthshattering.

[Liiisa]

I'm about halfway through that Japanese book from a couple years ago, "Convenience Store Woman," which I think is about to become very creepy. But I think it's pretty great despite. It's short, I'll be back with a final comments soon, I think...

[Liiisa]

Actually, never mind, I was farther along than I'd thought....

30. Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

This is a strange little novel that never did get as creepy as I thought it was going to, thankfully. It's about a rather strange woman who really is best suited to working in a convenience store. Just as good as all the reviews I'd seen of it last year made it out to be.

[Queen]

scrubb I have loved everything I’ve read by Erdrich, but this felt more fluid… and the stories twisted together really cohesively, which I didn’t always feel in previous books.

And it’s not that all the loose ends are tied up neatly, nothing so obvious.

Loved convenience store woman! It is creepy but more creepy in her own mind… rather than her being in harm’s way… if that makes sense.

[Oweena]

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

Recommended by someone here (scrubb?). I like learning about surgery/medical procedures and am interested in how people deal with death so I gave it a try.
It was eye opening to how messed up the NHS system is. Brought home my extreme privilege of always having either top notch employer provided health insurance or having the money to buy the same.
The discussion of the crowded wards and no privacy was eye opening. I recognize the US system is also screwed up for some of the same yet different issues.
Dr. Marsh admits he's an arsehole, and is from the old school of medical professionals who came up when they were treated as gods. I struggled not with his brusqueness or superior attitude, but from the times he chose not to be entirely honest with patients or their families about their prognosis.
It reminded me of my experiences with oncologists and how they will always try some other chemo or drug when in reality they should be honest and allow the patient to enjoy what little time they have left.
Interesting book, and certainly if you needed brain surgery you'd want someone as experienced as Marsh to do it.

[scrubb]

Oweena, I agree with you about the hardest part being when he wasn't completely honest about prognosis- and I felt like that was actually one of his his main points in writing the book. He was questioning that very instinct to always try one more thing, to keep trying even if it was going to make the last bit of the patient's life worse. He was recognizing in the later part of his career that it "does harm" which is what doctors have vowed not to do.

[Liiisa]

Yes Q. I was thinking creepy like that guy Shihara might do something horrible,

SPOILER: Click to show

but he didn't.

[Liiisa]

Ha! I forgot there was a "spoiler alert" feature on here

[Queen]

He's almost good for her in the most weird way - It was like she finally had someone to care for... even if that was VVVVEEEEERRRRYYYY dysfunctional

[Liiisa]

I dunno Q... I hoped at the end of the book that she'd start working at the new store and kick him out. He gave me incel vibes.

[Liiisa]

31, Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I've been thinking of reading this again for quite a while because all I remembered about it was there was a kid in a cabin in the woods, and he listened to Radiohead's "Kid A" all the time. So since I've been in that musical space lately too, I thought I'd pick it up again, and I basically spent much of yesterday and today reading it.

Amusingly the only place "Kid A" is mentioned at all is an offhand mention on one page; otherwise I remembered it completely wrong, though I was right about the kid and the cabin in the woods. But anyway it's one of his better novels, I think - not so long as the later ones, and minus the weird stuff about breasts. I enjoyed reading it again.

[scrubb]

You Suck (A Love Story) by Christopher Moore. Typical Moore treatment of vampires - i.e., funny, poking at traditional stereotypes. Amusing.

Only thing is, it kept talking about stuff that happened before the book started, so I realized it's a sequel. But now that I know everything that happened in the first book I can't be bothered to read it.

[Oweena]

IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS Volume One: War, War, War By Leila Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor

Tells the story of Mathilde, an Alsatian woman who falls in love with a Moroccan soldier fighting for France during WWII. After the war they move to the husband's ancestral farm in Morocco. It's not a happy marriage, nor are any of the characters particularly interesting or sympathetic. The novel is loosely based on Slimani's grandparents story as well as the Moroccan struggle for independence in the 1950s and it's the first in a trilogy she's writing on their lives.
I found myself wondering why I was supposed to care about any of the characters and wishing the story would move more quickly.
Don't think I'll be on the lookout for the 2 follow ups.

[ozziegiraffe]

56. The Rules of Backyard Cricket, Jack Serong. An Audible freebie. Not quite what I was expecting, a seamy insight into the nastier side of competitive cricket. A suspense novel, but I’d twigged to who was responsible much earlier than the end.

[lillielangtry]

Oh yes, Convenience Store Woman, that one was interesting.

#55 María Cecilia Barbetta, Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros
Oh. I picked this up on the free bookshelf partly because I saw that it's set in Buenos Aires and partly because the book itself is absolutely beautiful - at the end of each chapter there's some sort of picture or graphic, the pages were really thick and the typeface was different at different points.
Shame about the content! It's nominally about two young women in Buenos Aires; one of them is a seamstress and the other is a customer who comes in to get her mother's wedding dress altered so she can wear it at her own wedding. But it leads you to think it's going to be a fairly traditional novel with a plot, and it's not. It meanders about describing random things about the women's lives and then towards the end sort of loses realism altogether. A piece of experimental fiction that was not for me!

[lillielangtry]

And I finished an audiobook.

#56 Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher
This memoir, originally published in 1976, has just been reissued with a new introduction by Bernardine Evaristo. Gilroy was born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana) and moved to England in 1952, eventually becoming one of the first black head teachers in Britain. Initially she couldn't get a teaching job at all, despite her qualifications and experience from her home country, because no one wanted to employ a black woman. She faced continual, open discrimination and ignorance that she recounts here (including all the racial slurs). But eventually, she finds her place at a growing, multiracial school. A really fascinating book, I'm glad it's been brought back into print.

[sophie]

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell. Someone on here read it I think, and wasn’t impressed. I loved it. Again characters from other novels of his show up but this time in a big way, especially The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It follows 4 musicians who become a rock band for a couple of years in the 60’s. Great book.

[lillielangtry]

It's not my favourite Mitchell, but I still liked it. I just get on with his writing in general. Liisa was a fan I think.

[scrubb]

Language Arts, by Stephanie Kallos

This book is about a man whose son has autism, who lives in a centre where he has enrichment activities and a caring staff. It moves through time, showing the reader what shaped Charlie Marlow (the father), from his formative grade 4 class, to his career as a bartender where he meets his future wife, to his second career as a teacher of language arts at a private school, to his daughter, to his divorce. It's a sort of gentle book with no major plot or story; I really liked it. A bookbub special worth reading.

[mei]

that might have been me writing about David Mitchell before. I liked it, but it's definitely not his best work in my opinion.

I finished #14 - Het Paulus Labyrinth (The labyrinth of Paul) by Jeroen Windemeijer. It's called the Dutch Da Vinci Code, apparently. The lead character has to follow a set of religious clues which lead to a secret cult and will rescue the woman he loves. I was looking for something lighter to read, so it was fine for that - but not really my kind of book.

[Liiisa]

Yes, I think it was mei who was oK with it and me who liked it. Well I don't think I listed it among the best of the year, but I really enjoyed it, particularly all the name-checking of bands I like.

[Oweena]

Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Novel set in the UK from 2010 to the present against the backdrop of what lead up to Brexit and then the vote and the fallout from that. The characters are former school friends and their families along with a politician's communications officer, a guy who's a clown at children's parties, and other assorted flawed humans.
Lots of the book is political, talks about classism in the UK, and other things that probably would have made more sense to a UKer.
It was depressing to read the background of political machinations around Brexit, and how the orange menace came to prominence based on some of the same ignorance and misinformation.
Overall take: interesting from my outsider status. I felt like the author was trying hard to have every current hot button topic be included somewhere in the narrative, and that came at the expense of better character development.

[Oweena]

And now I finished the book I was reading each night before bed:
We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption by Justin Fenton
A plainclothes unit of the Baltimore Police Department tasked with taking guns off the street is committing crimes of their own. They rip drugs from the supposed bad guys they stop and have a friend sell them, they plant guns, they harass innocent people, they charge for overtime they never worked, etc.
The author was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun during the time of their reign up to when the cops were arrested and charged federally for all their crimes.
It's well-written, moves fast, and told from multiple points of view including the citizens who were wrongly convicted and the defense attorneys who tried for years to get someone to pay attention to the corruption of these cops.
He writes like a reporter, lots of facts and sources without fuss or editorializing.
Frustrating to read how they got away with it for years, but sadly not surprising it was happening.

[Liiisa]

32) César Aira, The Divorce

I've read quite a few of Aira's strange little Argentinian novellas, and this one and "Ghosts" are my favorites so far.

A man goes to Buenos Aires to give himself a break in the middle of a divorce, and odd stories spiral outward from that point.

[mei]

#15 About a Boy, Nick Hornby

Found this in the local little free library and was an easy read perfect for the past few days. I may have seen the movie, although I don't think so, but at least I read this while visualizing Hugh Grant for the Will character obviously. Which was partly annoying, partly entertaining.

[scrubb]

Finally finished "The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt and his Adventures in the Wilderness" by Darrin Lunde.

It got off to a bad start, with an annoying attempt by the author to put "naturalist hunters" (those who collect animals for scientific study) on a pedestal as the only people who can possibly really understand nature. You can't understand the heart of an animal unless you kill it, you see. Coincidentally, the author is a "naturalist hunter".

There was also early mention of how Roosevelt's father believed in "Christian masculinity", which was the theory that men were becoming too feminized, and needed to get back to manly pursuits. 🙄

That really soured me right off the bat, but most of the rest of the book was interesting. It focused on Roosevelt's commitment to naturalism and fit the rest of his life around that narrative. Not as much discussion of his conservation initiatives while he was president as I'd have liked.

The final chapters about his safari on Africa were conflicting. He was collecting animals for the Smithsonian - but he was a poor shot, needing a lot more bullets to bring an animal down than a good shot would, and most often wounding animals so they had to be chased for hours before being put out of their misery. Unless his youthful sickliness and social awkwardness was overplayed by the author it seems obvious that he felt he had to prove his manliness, constantly. And felt that firing wildly at every animal he saw was the way to do it. Which left me admiring him less when I finished the book than I had before I read it.

[ozziegiraffe]

57. Knit One, Murder Two, Reagan Davis
58. Splintered Bones, Carolyn Haines

Both read for Goodreads Cozy Mystery challenges.