Review: Caste

From Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson:

I'd been writing about a stigmatized people, six million of them, who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the South, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste, I would soon discover, follows Indians in their own global diaspora."
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Americans think they know what caste is. It's the social stratification of society in India. Isabel Wilkerson compares and contrasts with its American cousin (slavery, Jim Crow, racism) and German Nazism. This work offers a new way of seeing an old evil.

Review: The New Wilderness

From The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook:

Glen was the one who knew about the study, putting people in the Wilderness State. When things worsened in the City and Agnes’s health cratered, like so many children’s had, Glen was the one who offered his help to the researchers in exchange for three spots—for him, Bea, and Agnes."
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When the City becomes unlivable, people seek permission to live nomadic lives in the wilderness. It's a hard life, but return to the City is unthinkable. A coming-of-age adventure for a girl who struggles with her mother, budding love, and survival.

Review: Deacon King Kong

From Deacon King Kong, by James McBride:

The morning after the shooting, the daily gathering of retired city workers, flophouse bums, bored housewives, and ex-convicts who congregated in the middle of the projects at the park bench near the flagpole to sip free coffee and salute Old Glory as it was raised to the sky had all kinds of theories about why old Sportcoat did it."
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That "Old Sportcoat," aka Deacon King Kong, did it is clear from the first paragraphs. But why he did it takes a whole book, not just for the reader, but for Sportcoat himself. Great characters and story from a diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Review: The Glass Hotel

From The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel:

Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain—"
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A novel like shattered glass reassembled at random. Read it all the way to the end and you eventually get the full story of rootless characters whose lives seem repeatedly shattered and reassembled. Does anyone find peace in the end? Maybe a little.

Review: Piranesi

From Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke:

I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South."
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This is a wonderfully imagined world consisting of a mansion with endless halls filled with marble statues, populated solely by Piranesi and the mysterious "Other." Is it real? Fantasy? Magical realism? It'll keep you guessing all the way to the end.

Review: A Burning

From A Burning, by Megha Majumdar:

The night before, I had been at the railway station, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from my house. I ought to have seen the men who stole up to the open windows and threw flaming torches into the halted train. But all I saw were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot."
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A Burning is a debut novel by an Indian woman, born in Kolkata and now living in the United States. Its three featured characters are all from the poorer classes, and all seek to rise to middle class. Their prospects intersect and cross.

Review: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

From The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha:

On the day that Waxworth arrived in New York to write for the Interviewer, a man named Herman Nash stood on the rim of the fountain in Washington Square and announced that the world was about to end."
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The index of self-destructive acts is a baseball statistic developed by Bill James that counts up all the mistakes a pitcher makes that are entirely in his control: balks, wild pitches, errors, etc. There's not much baseball in this novel by Christopher Beha, but there are a lot of self-destructive acts.

Review: The Mirror & the Light

From The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel:

Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner."
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The Mirror & the Light is the third volume of Hilary Mantel's life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII. It covers the four years from the execution of Anne Boleyn to his own downfall, with all the court intrigues in between. It's a masterfully written view of England in mid-1500s. B+

Review: Trust Exercise

From Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi:

All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous energy running between them."
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Trust Exercise: A coming-of-age tale of a volatile relationship, made more electric by a charismatic drama teacher. Then a shift in time and narrator throws everything into question. A brilliantly constructed story of the weaknesses of memory. B+

Review: The Nickel Boys

From The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead:

The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue."

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The story of one of the victims of a 1960s Jim Crow reform school for boys. Fiction based on a real school in Florida. Story arc is depressingly predictable but offers some surprises. A timely contribution to today's Black Lives Matter movement.

Book Review: Brief Answers to the Big Questions

From Brief Answers to the Big Questions, by Stephen Hawking:

The obvious next step would be to combine general relativity—the theory of the very large—with quantum theory—the theory of the very small. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black hole."
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Don't have time to learn quantum mechanics? Read this instead. It's short. Accessible. Still deep. Stephen Hawking talks about the beginning and end of the universe, life, artificial intelligence, time travel, space colonization, and more. A-

Book Review: Disappearing Earth

From Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips:

Zavoyko was kilometers past all that, making it the last district of their city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the last bit of land before sea. “It was at the edge of the cliff where the ocean meets the bay.””
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A whodunnit about the disappearance of two girls in Kamchatka. But more a collection of vignettes of women of Kamchatka. Each character is fully fleshed out and not just someone to advance the plot. It's also the story of a place previously foreign to me.

Review: The Need

From The Need, by Helen Phillips:

Her desperation for her children’s silence manifested as a suffocating force, the desire for a pillow, a pair of thick socks, anything she could shove into them to perfect their muteness and save their lives."
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Molly, young mother of two, hears an intruder's footsteps. Molly, paleobotanist, discovers very odd objects in a dig. Is it a sci-fi novel about parallel universes? Is it a psychological thriller about the anxieties of motherhood? Mostly the latter.

Review: This Tender Land

From This Tender Land, by William Kent Krueger:

The tale I'm going to tell is of a summer long ago. Of killing and kidnapping and children pursued by demons of a thousand names. There will be courage in this story and cowardice. There will be love and betrayal. And, of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn't that what every good story is about?"
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"This Tender Land" is the 2020 selection for "Richardson Reads One Book."

Review: Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

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From Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai


he could hardly even remember that he had a daughter at all, who, as people tended to put it, was 'from the wrong side of the blanket,' he'd forgotten about her, or, to put it more precisely, he'd learned not to think about her, at least when he was able to do so, there were periods — even if transitory — when he was left in peace, sometimes even for years, just as now, he’d been left unperturbed "from that direction," he'd washed his hands of the entire matter, as in general he did with his entire past, he'd washed it away, and as for a good few years now nobody had been pestering him, he'd already reached the conclusion that he was free of all this, free, that is, until yesterday afternoon when out of the blue, unexpectedly, this daughter had just suddenly shown up here, and grabbing a megaphone, yelled out to him 'I'm your daughter, you basest of skunks,'"

This Hungarian novel by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, won the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Review: Year of the Monkey

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From Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith:


Coffee denied, I sat on the outside bench going over the edges of the night before. It was the last of three nights in a row performing at the Fillmore and I was pulling the strings off my Stratocaster when some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots. The last gasp of 2015, a spray of vomit ushering in the New Year. A good or bad sign?"

Serendipity brought this memoir by Patti Smith to me. Patti Smith is an accomplished poet, author, artist and punk rocker who, to my embarrassment, has escaped my knowledge up to now. My loss.

Review: Men Without Women: Stories

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From Men Without Women: Stories, by Haruki Murakami:


The call came in after one a.m. and woke me up. Phones ringing in the middle of the night always sound harsh and grating, like some savage metal tool out to destroy the world."

So begins the title story of Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories. Murakami is one of my favorite authors, whether writing epic tales or short stories. These stories are about men and women, men with women, and especially in a deeper way, the impact on men being without women.

Review: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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From The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane:


The literature of wayfaring is long, existing as poems, songs, stories, treatises and route guides, maps, novels and essays. The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature—a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells."

It's a nature book. And a book of geology, history, archaeology, literature, and poetry. It's a journal of walks in Britain, Palestine, Spain, and China. And a vocabulary builder to boot. B-

Review: The Sixth Extinction

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From The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert:


Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one."

In a calm, reasoned, tone, Kolbert lays out the case that we are living through a mass extinction on Earth. We should be tearing out hair out, but we are not. Despite the intelligence of our species, humans are such obtuse creatures.

Review: A Wild Sheep Chase

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From A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami:

It was my partner. "Could you come here right away?" he said. There was an edge to his voice. "I have a terribly urgent matter to discuss with you." "Just how urgent is it?" "Come in and you'll find out," said he. "Heaven knows it's got to be about sheep," I said, letting go a trial balloon. It was something I shouldn't have said. The receiver grew cold as ice. "How did you know?" my partner asked. The wild sheep chase had begun."

If that sounds to you like the start of a surreal, absurdist mystery novel, congratulations. You're right.