Goodbye summer, hello autumn...

It’s the last day of summer, and it’s certainly still felt like summer these past few weeks, with only the cooler mornings and the changing leaves hinting at the season to come.  I’ve got three books to tell you about, but I also want to get outside and enjoy the day, as we’ve got a couple of days of rain coming, so these entries will be brief. 

The first book is The Believers by Zoe Heller.  I read What Was She Thinking:  notes on a scandal a number of years ago and really enjoyed it, so when I happened to see it on my bookshelf, I thought that surely she’s written other books, too.  The Believers was written after Scandal, but was just as intriguing.  It follows the Litvinoff family, wife Audrey, husband Joel and their three children, daughters Rosa and Karla and adopted son Lenny, after Joel has a heart attack and is in critical condition in a hospital in New York.  Audrey is a reluctant mother at best, and she is critical of everything her daughters do and believe in, but willingly indulges drug-addict Lenny and continues to sing his praises.  Joel and Audrey married after a brief acquaintance when he visited London to speak at a Socialist rally in the 1960s, and after being uprooted to New York, she’s been a devoted supporter of Joel's for 40 years.  So when a woman appears claiming to be his mistress, Audrey is in shock.  How can she not have known this about her husband?  And how can she go on, with the knowledge she now has?  This book was incredibly engaging, and while I didn’t really like any of the characters or condone their actions or attitudes, I felt compelled to get to the end and find out how things got resolved.  I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys books dealing with family secrets, especially those told with a side of satire. 

Then I read a book for my Volunteer Book Club, Anthony Horowitz’ Magpie Murders.  I watched the PBS series and really enjoyed it, and I had the book on the shelf but had surprisingly never read it, so I was delighted to pick it up and dive in.  This book tells the story of Susan Ryeland, an editor who is reading the latest in a mystery series featuring fictional detective Atticus Pünd (think Poirot but Greek-German instead of Belgian), but she reaches the end of the manuscript to find that the final chapter is missing.  When she tries to find this missing chapter, she discovers that the author, Alan Conway, has died in much the same way as the main character in the manuscript, also called Magpie Murders.  As Susan tries to discover the truth behind Conway’s death, she begins to spot parallels between fiction and reality, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery until she must back away or risk her own safety.  Oh, and Conway’s entire book is presented within the book, making this one of the cleverest novels I’ve ever read, a true example of meta-fiction.  It was a great hit with the book club members, and would be an excellent choice for any book club. 

And I just finished the book for tomorrow night’s Friends Book Club meeting, Harriet Tubman:  live in concert by Bob the Drag Queen.  This novel tells the unlikely story of Harriet Tubman and her band, the Freemans, and their efforts to record a rap album and go on tour in order to reach young people and tell their story.  A phenomenon called The Return makes it possible for historical figures to return and live among us in the present day, and Harriet reaches out to Darnell, a music producer, to help with this project.  Darnell thinks of Harriet as a Black superhero, and is thrilled and more than a little nervous to take on this project, as he’s been writing advertising jingles for the past 15 years due to some personal crisis years earlier.  This may be the thing that puts him back on the music map, but will he overcome the obstacles he’s facing in order to complete this momentous project?  Can Harriet help to lead him to his own freedom?  You’ll have to read this strange, interesting novel to find out.  It was certainly not something I’d pick up on my own, but was definitely worth reading. 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the sunny day! 

Bye for now... Julie

First post for September…

It’s September 1st and Labour Day Monday, and the new school year is upon us.  It’s early evening and I have to be at work tomorrow morning, but I wanted to take this opportunity to write a very, very brief post about the last two books I read.  I’m sad that I don’t have more time to talk about them because they were both awesome, but if I don’t do this now, there will be no other time for a while and by then I’ll have forgotten what the books were about!!

The first book I reread was A Sudden Light by Garth Stein.  Here’s what I said about it when I read it the first time in February, 2018:  

“I just finished the book, A Sudden Light by Garth Stein (you may be familiar with this author’s name associated with his most popular novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, told from the point of view of a dog).  I’m not quite sure why I had A Sudden Light on my shelf, but I picked it out along with a pile of other books I know nothing about.  I decided that I needed to weed out some books, so I read the first few pages of each and either kept it or brought it to the Little Free Library that is at the end of my street.  This one I stuck with, and finished reading last night.  It is told from the point of view of Trevor, an adult looking back on the summer he was fourteen, when his father took him to his Grandpa Samuel’s estate just outside of Seattle, an estate that seemed to be suspended in time, having never moved beyond the night Samuel’s wife, Isobel, passed away, leaving their son Jones and daughter Serena motherless and in the care of Samuel.  But sixteen-year-old Jones is sent away to school shortly thereafter, leaving eleven-year-old Serena to care for drunken Samuel, causing her to feel trapped and embittered.  Nearly twenty-five years later, she wants to sell the North Estate, a crumbling mansion surrounded by 200 acres of pristine forest, and develop it into 20 lots of 10 acres each for the newly-rich to build their McMansions on, making her rich and allowing her to travel the world.  But Jones’ ancestors, in particular his great-grand-uncle Ben, had other ideas:  they wanted to return the estate to its natural state and preserve it, a repayment for the rape and pillage of so much land, as well as the exploitation of the men they employed, that made the family rich in the timber industry in the early 1900s.  Grandpa Samuel is suffering dementia, and Serena needs him to sign over power of attorney, which is where Jones comes in.  Jones and his wife Rachel are experiencing marital problems after their personal bankruptcy, and are in the midst of a trial separation, and all Trevor wants is for them to get back together and be happy again.  He believes that money is the solution, but can money truly buy happiness?  Through letters and diary entries, Trevor pieces together the intentions of his ancestors, and must struggle to reconcile his desire to stay true to his dead family's wishes and his need to try to bring his living family back together.  This sprawling, multigenerational story exploring the consequences of wealth and greed and the search for redemption, with a supernatural twist, is totally not my type of book, but it had me hooked!  Stein’s exploration into the motivations of Trevor, Serena, and to some extent Jones, was riveting, and this book reminded me in some ways of The Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche, also about a wealthy, powerful American family with dark secrets, although Marche’s book was more literary, more of a “Lee Valley” book, than Stein’s “Canadian Tire” bestseller.  Still, it was an enjoyable read, and while I felt it dragged a bit, I still wanted to find opportunities to read and get to the end to find out how things are resolved.  There were also times, particularly in the first half of the book, when it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, probably because both books involved a father and son on a quest to discover the true meaning of value and integrity.  I would definitely recommend this book to just about anyone, as it defies categorization:  it’s part historical fiction, part ghost story, part domestic fiction, part psychological fiction, and so much more.” 

I pretty much agree with everything I said above, and it was exactly the type of book I needed as we’re facing Doug Ford’s Bill 5 here in Ontario.  I think I enjoyed it even more this second time around, although I’d forgotten about the ghost story parts. 

And the second book I read was also amazing.  Sandwich by Catherine Newman tells the story of a single week spent at a cottage in Cape Cod.  Rocky and her husband Nick have brought their children, Willa and Jamie, to this cottage every summer for the past two decades.  Now the children are adults and living their own lives, Rocky is experiencing the emotional and biological changes associated with menopause, and Rocky’s parents are getting to that age when everything causes her to worry.  Divided into days of the week, with flashbacks interspersed throughout, this book focuses on Rocky’s experiences as she deals with her empty nest and her emotionally wrought responses to everything that is happening around her, from her adult children’s life journeys to her husband’s seeming lack of biological changes with aging, while also coming to terms with her own regrets from her past.  I wish I had more time to tell you about this amazing book, sandwiched between FIC NEV and FIC NEX on the library shelves (I couldn’t resist!!), because it really, really spoke to me in a way that I could totally understand and empathize with.  I look forward to the sequel, Wreck, coming out in late-October.  I would highly recommend this to any woman who is approaching mid-life or is in the middle of this tumultuous time.  Newman nailed it, managing to pack a whole lot of insight into a very small, compact novel.  PS Even the elderly cat, Chicken, got a "speaking" part in the book, which was a delightful addition!! Every time my Riley sits on my lap, I am reminded of Chicken asking if his neck smells like cheese!!

That’s all for tonight.  Happy September, everyone!  Bring Fall on!!

Bye for now...

Julie