2022 Reading Challenge

Book 4: Kent State by Deborah Wiles

Yet another book from my YA lit class. This one wasn't required reading, but my professor brings in books every week and allows us to check them out and write a couple paragraphs for extra credit. As a native Ohioan and someone who has always been interested in the grusome history of America, I had to grab this from her. It's a short book, about a hundred pages. It's written in free verse poetry, intended to sound like an oral history of the massacre. It has about six different voices, and it's like all of these people are sitting and remembering the event. No one can completely agree about what happened that weekend, but none of them are completely wrong in what they remember. It's really thought provoking and utterly devastating. The author ends the book by naming so many senseless tragedies that have happened sense then - Virginia Tech, Parkland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, so many others. Part of me feels like we never learn, but I think that's why books like this as so necessarily. Even though we as a society have become numb to all of these shootings and pain... We can still find empathy. And we can teach teen readers to be empathetic, and maybe they can be the change.
 
Book 1: Testimony by Robbie Robertson

My first book of this year, had wanted to read this for a while being a large fan of both the Band and Bob Dylan. Excellent storytelling and pretty entertaining throughout, though clearly slanted towards Robertson's side of things as to the subject of the disputes that occurred later in life, particularly with Levon Helm. Almost 500 pages, it took a little longer to get through than I expected.
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Book 4:

Jazz From Detroit by Mark Stryker (University of Michigan Press, 2019)

This was a Christmas present and really is fantastic. The book provides a detailed analysis of the impact and contributions that Detroit has provided to the jazz scene over the years. Stryker does this by providing historical and cultural information, with the majority of the book consisting of short biographies/interviews/studies of key musicians that were born and raised in the city. I was unfamiliar with a few of these musicians but, as is the case with jazz, they all played with other "big" musicians that helped shape their development. The biographies are arranged in chronological order of sorts, with the early players being at the beginning and the contemporary musicians being at the end. Well worth a read and I thoroughly recommend it.

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Hhabelt said:
I'll be catching up on some James Rollins to begin the year. In the works are The Seventh Plague, The Demon Crown, Crucible and The Last Odyssey. Nothing too heavy.

For anyone looking for an app to organize their reading and keep track of stuff, I like Reading List. It's super basic and for your eyes only - no pressure to rate, review or follow.
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Wrapped up The Demon Crown this morning. I went from a plague in book one to murder wasps in book two. I think this guy knows something we don't 🤔

Anyway, did you know there's a salt mine in Poland, the Wieliczka Salt Mines, that reaches a depth of over 300 meters and expands horizontally for over 250 meters? There are lakes and chapels. Horses were used in the mining process - some spent 20+ years without seeing the light of day.

Now, a lot of this book took place in Hawaii and the surrounding waters. It reminded me that we should take a moment to really consider if our dream Hawaiian vacation is absolutely necessary. Native Hawaiians are facing issues of overcrowding, environmental damage and a higher cost of living. Oh, and there's a pandemic - I can't imagine tourism is alleviating any of that pressure.

Crucible is up next. Looks like it's gonna be witches and artificial intelligence. Spooky.

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Book 5: The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

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Another good one. Considering this was a first novel, the writing is confident, intelligent and full of wit and detail.
The main character is somewhat dated now in his life outlook and I can definitely see that modern readers might find very little sympathy for a white straight cis male from an upper class American southern family who is struggling to find himself amongst his frequent trips to the movies and adding notches to his bedpost with his secretaries. That being said, I kinda liked him and felt that his time and hinted at lack of success as a soldier in the Korean War along with losing his father and siblings led to a lot of his failings and his recurring ‘malaise’.
The writing is the real winner here though and Percy fills his pages with philosophical ponderings that really get their hooks in.
Good stuff.
 
Book 5:

Music Inside by Ian Carr (Northway Productions, 2020 Revised Edition)

This is a book that has been on my wantlist for ages and I knew I would rinse through it once I started. It's an incredibly charming look at the contemporary jazz scene around the 1970's and earlier. There are very few books written about the UK jazz scene, especially during its formative years, and this one is definitely a really great insight. It helps that it was written by a musician and the closing chapter (excluding the postscript) focuses on his group Nucleus, which had released their first albums by this point. It adds another great element to Carr's story as this wasn't really included in his biography. Fantastic stuff.

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Book 3: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

This one's been floating around my kindle for a bit since buying it on a sale (90% of my kindle books are things I bought on sale and only read by random whim after finishing my previous book half-asleep at bedtime, as is the case here). This is one I've seen mentioned online pretty frequently, and while I like this one, I'm learning the hyperbole of a reddit book recommendation is a guarantee for a letdown.

The premise is that a Jesuit expedition embarks to make contact a far-off planet after hearing music broadcast to the Arecibo SETI antenna (RIP). Something terrible happens there, and the only survivor of the contact returns ruined, as a figure of controversy. The book then jumps between 2019 (25 years or so in the future at time of publishing) when the contact is made and 2060, after Father Sandoz returns from his failed mission shaken in his faith.

This structure is probably the toughest part of the book for me, in the sense that the 2060 passages slowly unfurl what happened a lot more quickly than the 2016 sections, which takes some of the wind out of the sails, narrative-wise; the reveals in 2060 are vague and incomplete, but paint enough of a picture that you feel less urgency to reveal the truth. Rather, the story focuses on Sandoz's internal life, emotionally and spiritually. This manifests itself mainly in a lot of ambivalence over celibacy, as a lot of time is spent on his emotional yearning for a colleague (who also happens to be an object of lust for nearly every other male character, and a lot of time is spent in the heads of characters who want her, and less in her own head).

I'm not sure the philosophical bent of the novel did the trick for me; I'd be curious to speak with anyone who's read The Sparrow and got more depth out of it, but it felt like the Big Questions being asked were "how do you keep faith in the face of tragedy?", "how can a loving god allow suffering?", and "how do priests manage celibacy?", which are all questions we didn't need to leave Earth to ask. I'm not even sure much thought went into "if there's other life in the universe, how does that change our understanding of God?", or really examining how one's faith/ego might be shaken or reinforced by the discovery of life on other planets. Heck, there are undercurrents of the story mirroring the Jesuit exploration/indoctrination of native cultures in the Americas, but instead of dealing in the moral grays of that history, the author makes the expedition's members uniformly goodhearted in a way that makes the events on the planet feel more like "some bad shit that went down" than any sort of complicated reverberation of ill-acted-or-received good intent.

Certainly not a bad book, but one that left me feeling frustrated and grumpy at my inability to connect with it.
 
Book #3

Third book of 2022 completed. Going a lot faster than anticipated so far.

Jussi Adler-Older "The Keeper Of Lost Causes" (2011 Dutton, 2016 paperback edition)

Impressions: I devoured this one and yet I'm not sure what to think overall. I'm a bit ambivalent with Nordic noirs in general. My first Nordic noir reads were Jo Nesbø and those were disappointing, mainly because too many coincidences were driving the narrative. But then I read two superb examples of the genre in "Cruel Is The Night" by Karo Hämäläinen and "Faceless Killers" by Henning Mankell. The first is a darkly humorous subversion of the dinner party murder mystery and the second is a tight and realistic detective procedural set in Sweden with middle eastern immigration into the country as an underlying theme.

"The Keeper Of Lost Causes" falls short of these but remains well above those first few Nordic noirs I read. I suppose part of the issue with Nordic novels is I read the translated version and the writing can feel a little awkward at times, but it flows nicely here. The story revolves around a cold case being reviewed by a newly created department. The investigation in the novel is tight and the twists are earned. The main characters, particularly the mysterious assistant Assad, are engaging. However, the villain's plan has the feel of a convoluted Bond villain revenge plot, and it's not really clear to me why the villain was so angry that he had to concoct his plan. I guess I could rate this "entertaining and fun". Definitely a page turner.

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Turning to one of the best modern noir writers for my next read: George Pelecanos.

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Indymisanthrope said:
You guys are a bunch of literary big brains who are apparently able to concentrate on actual ideas.

Me, I've just finished Book 7 of a paperback fantasy series about a king's private force of magical bodyguards. Dave Duncan was a middling but prolific author who wrote a series of books about the "King's Blades." The gist is that juvenile delinquent boys show up at this academy/fraternity that trains them to be the best swordsmen in the world. At the end of their education, the king visits, the boys swear an oath to him, and they perform a magic ritual that involves him taking their sword and running it through their heart (it heals immediately). This ritual turns them into enchanted guards who are attuned to their wards with enhanced instincts and abilities (for example, they don't need to sleep anymore), and will go to superhuman lengths to protect the person they're bound to. The king can also 'gift' Blades to private individuals.

There's a trilogy (sort of, it's hard to explain), followed by a YA trilogy that was collected in a single volume (and also is heavily dependent on the reader being familiar with the previous volumes, so I'm not sure why he went the YA route with them at all), then five standalone novels set in this world. After the 'rules' for how all of this works are established in the first book, all of the subsequent installments are about exceptions to the rules that put a twist on the reader's expectations. Lots of swashbuckling and traveling to distant lands for various reasons.

Anyway, it's paperback garbage and it's fun. I read the first book after stumbling across it in the library almost 25 years ago (remember what it was like to just go to the library and randomly pull books off the shelf to figure out what you wanted to read?? WILD), and am just now finishing the whole series for the first time, up to the last novel that was published posthumously in 2020. The first book, The Gilded Chain, can be read as a self-contained story, and it's by far the best one. After that there's a lot of strange left turns and narrative dead ends. They're loaded with interesting ideas, but again, Duncan was not the most sophisticated writer, so he often introduces an idea and then fails to explore it, or gets bogged down in flashbacks that are not completely relevant to the story. There is lots and lots of worldbuilding, sometimes at the expense of just moving the damn plot along. It feels like the kind of thing that could have been a successful anthology series for other writers to come in and spin off concepts or characters that Duncan introduced in the main series. This last stretch of books feels like it suffered from inferior editing as well (use of modern phrases like "you can't fight City Hall" that don't belong in this medieval setting, or introducing a stand-in for Tenochtitlan and literally calling it El Dorado).

Overall, it's by turns fun and frustrating. It's fascinating to think about how much time and effort he put into designing this entire world across 9 (or 11, depending on how you're counting) books and four different decades, only for a lot of it to go unexplored and just sort of evaporate into the ether.

It's, um. It's not Murakami.
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Just finished the final book in the series, which starts with a foreword explaining that, due to Duncan’s passing, they were never able to start the editing process. So instead the publisher chose to release it as essentially a raw manuscript.

I have never paid much attention or given much thought to what editors do and how revision refines the books we read. But having read the 8 novels in the series back to back before this one, it immediately becomes clear: everything I said about the inferior editing of book 7 is magnified in book 9.

I have to wonder if the author’s age with each successive book doesn’t have something to do with it, also. If he was around 60 when he wrote the first one and 85 when he wrote the last one, does that explain some deterioration of the “sharpness” of the narrative? His treatment of female characters devolved steadily throughout the series as well, to the point where in the last several installments they are little more than plot devices that exist solely to seduce the protagonist of each book. And yeah, it’s a medieval setting and tropes of marrying young women are to be expected, but his casual references to sexy 14 year olds get a bit alarming by the time you’re reading material published in 2020. Read the room, Dave.

I don’t know. In the foreword, the publisher frames this as “pure, unadulterated Duncan,” and it seems half gift to the readers and half apology for what they’ll have to read. I don’t know if this further diminishes my opinion of him as a writer, or if it gives me new appreciation for the hidden contributions of editors in everything else I read.
 
I haven't read all week...not that 100 Years isn't compelling, just the opposite actually. I want to make sure I give it the attention it needs. I have a cold winter weekend with no plans on tap here, so I plan to dive in deep.

And, that book and Cholera were in a Jeopardy clue last night!
 
Book 6:

Jack Reacher: Better Off Dead by Lee & Andrew Child (Bantam Press, 2021)

I like to disperse Jack Reacher books into my yearly reading. They are incredibly fun and pretty light reading as well. I have all the books (read almost all of them) and have never paid more than £3 for them from local charity shops. This is the latest in the series and sees Lee writing in collaboration with his younger brother, Andrew. Lee was close to killing off Reacher so that he could retire but a chance conversation in the car led to the idea that Andrew could take over. An interview at the end of the book states that they aim to write 4-5 books together before Lee will back away and retire for good.

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Indymisanthrope said:
Oh yeah, I’ve got no qualms about it personally, I’ve just been impressed by some of the very challenging books people are bringing to the table in here.

I had an elementary school librarian as a kid who would call my parents occasionally to tell them that I was checking out too many books about dragons and other imaginary stuff from the school library each week, and she was concerned about me because I never read any “normal” boy stuff about football or whatever (again, I’m between the ages of, say, 7-10).

I had the good fortune of being in the next room when my mom received one of those calls after school one day and heard her side of the conversation, which went something like, “So he likes reading? Uh-huh. And he does it a lot? Right. And what he’s reading are books that you put in the school for him to pick from? Interesting. And he returns them on time? THEN WHY DON’T YOU MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS,” and then she hung up on her.

Any reading is good reading IMO. Moby Dick and Jude the Obscure will still be on my shelf waiting for my headspace and attention span to get on their wavelength again someday. For now I’m here, and that’s fine.

In re: Kilgore Trout, I’m probably being a bit unfair to Dave Duncan. He’s not a fantasy superstar on the level of George Martin or Robert Jordan, but he had some moderately well-known successes earlier in his career that I plan to read someday. I think the Blades concept is one of his lesser works, it just so happens that it served as my introduction to him and is the series that I started as a teen and had never finished until now.
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Wow, I like your mom's take. Doubt I could bring myself to be quite so eloquent though.

Fair, I guess I didn't take the time to consider that that might not've been the nicest thing to say about an author. They do sound like fun books.

Ericj32 said:
Have you read it before?

I tried to read Bleak House when it was assigned during my last semester in college, but just ran out of time and didn’t finish. I tried again a few years later and hit a wall about 40% of the way through. There were so many characters to keep track of that I kept a running list of the page numbers where each character was introduced (and the chapters where they were described in detail) and folded it up and used it as my bookmark (a trick I picked up when reading Crime and Punishment in high school). But, the problem was, I filled up the page, and also filled up the backside of the page. And I think the dilemma of trying to figure out what to do at that point became a roadblock. The issue with this novel is that a lot of the characters seem so minor that they’re not worth keeping track of, but then they’ll resurface ten or twenty chapters later and you’ll have completely forgotten who they are and what you’re supposed to remember about them, lol.

My copy of the book has been sitting on top of a pile of papers on my desk at home basically as a paperweight, with my cheat sheet folded up and tucked inside at the end of Chapter 27. But maybe I can finally cross it off my list this year. I really loved everything I read and would enjoy seeing how it’s all tied together and resolved.

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Heh, nah, I only read my first Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities - sometime last year. I liked it, but I don't know if that was enough to make me really want to read more ASAP. Then I somehow came across the Jarndyce v Jarndyce plot device and was immediately intrigued, enough to give it a go.

Huh, I guess I have a habit of just powering through when I can't remember who's who exactly but that's an interesting technique, may have to try it myself. Also, when Twin Peaks: The Return was airing we would get fun out of trying to remember who was doing what when a situation was re-introduced weeks and sometimes months later. Not saying that this is I'm excited to be lost, but I'm just going to see how it goes.
 
Book 5: Apple Skin to the Core by Eric Gansworth

Yet another book for class. I think this is a book that many of you would really enjoy. It's a free verse autobiography about a Native American man who grew up on a reservation near Buffalo. His grandparents were survivors of the Indian boarding schools, and his mother's side is enrolled in a different tribe than his father's side. He lives on the reservation of his father's tribe, and the novel explores this identity struggle. Music is a huge theme, too. There's an entire chapter that uses Beatles songs as poem titles. It was really cool and pretty eye opening.
 
WhiteDahlias said:
I haven't had much time to read the last few days, it doesn't help that I've started 3 different books at once. Hopefully I'll get through one of them this week!

My favorite of the three so far is Swing Time by Zadie Smith. This is my first of her books so if I like it I will probably pick up White Teeth at some point too.
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White Teeth was really fun! She narrates with confidence and a hilariously dry sense of humor, and the characters were really engaging. That was actually also assigned in the same college course in which Bleak House was assigned reading, and I also didn't quite finish that one until years later, either, haha. It jumps around a little bit in time, so it was easy to kind of forget where I was or how I got there (while I was in college and reading too many different things simultaneously), but it's not like a "challenging" read.

I actually have a paperback copy of Swing Time that I bought a few years ago and still need to read, so thanks for the reminder!
 
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