Reading Recommendations from the Northwoods

Remarkably Bright Creatures---Shelby Van Pelt

 

Might I be able to convince you that you will like this book----in which one narrator is an octopus in an aquarium, Marcellus---and that the octupus' main friend is Tova, the older woman who is the night-time cleaner?  

A long-time mystery gets solved. You learn a lot about the life and abilities of an octopus.   Like reality, the plot includes happiness and sadness, and a fair amout of laughter.

In this case, I think the positive quotes below may do a better job than I could to convince you give Remarkably Bright Creatures a try.   I don't think you will be disappointed.      (Thanks for the recommendation, Mary.)

 

An Amazon Best Book of May 2022:   Remarkably Bright Creatures will have readers falling hard for an acerbic invertebrate whose intervention in his new friend’s life sets her up for healing lessons in love, loss, and family. 

 

“As Van Pelt’s zippy, fun-to-follow prose engages at every turn, readers will find themselves rooting for the many characters, hoping that they’ll find whatever it is they seek.  .......What makes Van Pelt’s novel most charming and joyful is the tender friendship between species, and the ways Tova and Marcellus make each other ever more remarkable and bright.” — BookPage

For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

Remarkably Bright Creatures [is] an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut. . . . Memorable and tender. — Washington Post 

 

The Island of Missing Trees---Elif Shafak

 I loved The Island of Missing Trees, readable and well-written historical fiction set in a time and place I knew nothing about.  

In 1974, Turkey invaded the beautiful Greek island of Cyprus, leading to death, destruction and severed relationships.   In this book, two main characters are secret teenage lovers---Greek Kostas and Cypriot Defne---and become separated by war and politics.    Years later, Kostas returns to the island as a botanist studying native species, and finds Defne working there with archaeolgists  to return missing persons to their families.

After all the intervening years, the two do not magically rekindle their lost love, but they do connect and find loving perspective on their accomplished lives.   Ada, their daughter back in England, is the character who finds meaning in her parents' lives, and in the divided loyalties of her history.

The characters are lovely and believable;  the large themes about love, war, and family are apparent and would be interesting to think about and discuss.

But I am leaving till last one of the most charming and important things about the book.  Although the sections Kostas, Defne, and Ada narrate are clearly separated and labeled, a fourth narrator is a fig tree which grew in the taverna where the two lovers met secretly, and which Kostas has managed to bring back to England with him.    The fig tree gives an ecological bent to the novel, but also unifies the whole story in ways you will not anticipate.   

I thought this was a terrific book which I hope you may like and appreciate also.    It has been chosen by Jenna's book club and well-reviewed in many places.   I am grateful to Barb for recommending it to me.

 

 

The Guncle---Steven Rowley

 

Patrick has just finished playing a long major role in a well-known TV sitcom.  (I kept picturing something like Friends.)    But now he has escaped to live a private life, surrounded by sunshine and swimming pools in Palm Springs.  

His life becomes totally changed when his sister-in-law, also a good friend, dies.  Patrick's brother, going into rehab, asks him to take care of nine-year-old Maisie and six-year-old Grant for the summer.   Suddenly Patrick's lifestyle must totally change.   (The kids call Patrick their Guncle, their abbreviation for "gay uncle"  thus explaining the title)    

However, his sense of humor and zest for life do not change, and it was fun to read about his efforts to understand and to comfort these two very sad children.    

But the book has much more than cute children, witty dialogue, and a warm sunny setting.   The adult relationships mostly seemed true, as they also dealt with grief and responsibility.   The family love, on many levels, was meaningful, and by the end, both the kids, their dad, and their uncle, have made satisfying adjustments to the loss of a loved one.

I thought this book was very amusing and easy to read, but was also touching and thought-provoking.  

“Patrick, the hero of Steven Rowley’s effervescent, utterly charming, and affecting novel, is the dearest friend you haven’t met yet. You’ll root for his two adorable charges as they navigate a terrible loss, and for Patrick’s own heart to make a long-overdue comeback. A cleverly subversive story about what makes a family.”

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow---Gabrielle Zevin

 I have never played a video game in my life, and admit to a prejudice that video gaming is a violent waste of time.    But, I enjoyed Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow very much, and became acquainted and more respectful about a whole new world to me.  

This book is well-reviewed and on many of the "Best of 2022" lists.  Plus, I remember years ago liking The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Zevin.   Her new book here has a more complicated plot and characters, but it is just as readable as her earlier book.

Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital when both are teenagers and find comfort playing Donkey Kong in the early 90s.   Their friendship ties the book together, taking them through successes and failures, ups and downs.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about long love of friends, about creativity and satisfying accomplishments, about both fantasy and reality and how those can connect. 

I would think this is a great winter book, one long enough to get you totally engrossed and unique from others on your to-read list.   And I learned a lot about the creativity of video games and about the business surrounding them.     See what you think!

“The story of three brilliant kids who found a videogame company, this book is about so much more—friendship, love, loyalty, violence in America and the magic of invented worlds. Gorgeous.”
—Kim Hubbard, People

"You don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate the pulsing heart of this best-seller: In a story spanning three decades and references from Oregon Trail to Macbeth, Gabrielle Zevlin has written a modern, definitive story about work, love, and friends for whom you’d do and risk everything."
—Keely Weiss, Harper’s Bazaar

 

The Measure---Nikki Erlick

 

I read The Measure some months ago, but remember it vividly.   The concept is dramatic---every American over the age of 21 receives a small box on their doorsteps.  Each box contains a string of varied lengths:  the length of your string tells how long your life will be.   

Would you want to open your box?  How would your behavior change?   What, besides its length, makes a life worth living ?   These are all questions the main characters face, and that readers will also think about.    You gradually discover as you read, though, that meaning comes in different ways for different characters.  

Where the boxes come from and why they arrive is never addressed, so don't expect this fantasy to explain some great unknown.    What the fantasy does try to explore is the reality of anticipating our own deaths while trying to make the most of each day we are given.

The book is not preachy.   The book is not depressing.   It may raise more questions than answers.  I appreciated that it takes on big issues it a very readable style.   The Measure is thought-provoking and begs to be discussed.  

So many questions: To open the box, or to remain in blissful ignorance? Should the state become involved in the decision making process and, if so, to what extent? How will each person and society as a whole react to truth contained within the boxes and how will individuals be treated as they are found to be short-, medium-, or long-stringers?  

 

Demon Copperhead--Barbara Kingsolver

I have really enjoyed some new books I have read this fall, and will write about some of them in the coming weeks.    Thanks to all of you who have kept checking in here, as I have taken a longer hiatus than I anticipated.

You may know that Barbara Kingsolver lives in rural Appalachia.   In Demon Copperhead, the newest of her books, she demonstrates her love for this often maligned region.   But she also takes on some of the biggest problems the area faces, including poverty and opiod addiction.

Kingsolver admittedly patterns the book after David Copperfield, Dicken's novel treating poverty and abused children in Victorian England, and you will recognize the similarities of the two titles, and yes, the content of the book.    That comparison helped me keep reading during the early pages of the book, as title character Damon is left orphaned and abused by the child welfare system.   I was glad to know that Damon (nicknamed Demon) would turn out OK in the end, in spite of the hardships he endured.

The book was easily readable for me, even though it is thick, and the plot is full of action, sometimes graphically unpleasant.   Obviously a skilled writer, Kingsolver has an attractive turn of phrase, which made her sentences and descriptions charming and even humorous.  

I'll paste this description from amazon, to help you see if you will want to add Demon Copperhead to your reading list.   

An Amazon Best Book of October 2022: Kingsolver takes a literary classic and makes it her own, peering into the dark corners not of Dickensian England, but of present day in the neglected hollers of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains. Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead, came into the world already behind the eight ball of life, and before long he’s in foster care placements that resemble work camps more than loving homes. Throughout this coming-of-age novel, the rug is constantly pulled out from under him but Demon has reserves of Olympian endurance that somehow, like the man in the arena, enables him to get back up again and again. His knees get dusty—he faces hunger, cruelty, loss, and is swept up in the tidal wave of OxyContin that overtakes his tiny county—but he never loses his love for the place that claims him as its own. Kingsolver’s writing is arresting and illuminating; in baring Demon’s soul on the page she gives voice and visibility to a place and its people where beauty and desperation live side by side.

 

 

Thursday Murder Club---Richard Osman

 

The four members of the "Thursday Murder Club" are residents at a high-class retirement village.   These senior citizens have had interesting pasts----a labor organizer, a  CIA-sort of spy, a psychiatrist, and Joyce, a widow who seems naive and sweet.    In their beautiful surroundings, a developer is making plans to dig up a cemetery that has been attached to a convent, and the mysteries---yes, there is more than one---center around that destruction.

Our group discussed this witty and entertaining novel this past week.   We appreciated the author's respect for the abilities of old folks, as they frequently outsmarted the cops, as well as the bad guys.    Nearly all of us enjoyed the novel, even though there were lots of characters, and lots of action taking place.    Some of us took notes to keep track of characters, and some of us just read for the pleasure of the language, the amusing characters, and many plot elements.   

Osman has a second book in the Thursday Murder Club series (The Man Who Died Twice) and has a third book coming out this fall.    It seems all three books in the series are attracting a wide group of fans.   I'm among them.

 

Buddha in the Attic--Julie Otsuka

 

Buddha in the Attic is an amazing book, different from any other historical fiction I have read.    The reviewer below does a better job than I could, telling about the historical period and the author's writing style.   

The fact that the book is so short makes the emotions that it carries even more powerful.   I was able to empathize with the immigrant experience, with the life of young wives and mothers, with the prejudice toward a group of people considered to be different.   And, finally, with the historical face on the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

This very short novel is one of the most powerful and poignant books I have ever read. It is the story of the Japanese "picture brides" who were sent to the United States in the early 20th century to marry Japanese men, who mostly needed another set of hands to do farm work and someone to warm their beds at night.

What makes this book so unusual is that it is told in the first person plural using the pronouns "we," "us," and "our" (instead of "I," as is typically done in the first person) by an unnamed narrator without named characters to populate the story. The first few sentences set the linguistic style for the rest of the novel: "On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves." The brilliance of this literary ploy is that author Julie Otsuka can better tell the sweeping, tragic story of the whole, rather than focusing on only one story that is not representative of the entire experience.

And tragic it is. Beginning with the trip on the boat from Japan to San Francisco, the story continues with the young women's first night with their new husbands, their hardworking lives doing backbreaking, exhausting labor, their birth experiences, their children, and their deportation to Japanese internment camps during World War II.

This is the heartbreaking and remarkable story of resilient young women who immigrated to a strange land without family or friends and how they gradually relinquished their native identities of self and country to become Americans—even though they were shunned and persecuted and never fully accepted.

 

I just read Otsuka's new book, also short, called The Swimmers, labeled as a masterpiece by reviewers.    The style of The Swimmers is the same---a group narrator but giving details about lives of individuals.    The first half tells about swimmers who exercise at an indoor university pool, and the effects of a crack that appears in the bottom of the pool.    The second half tells about a mother's descent into dementia, as her daughter manages as best she can.     It is sad and descriptive, but not sensationalized.     I will love to discuss it with other readers---a beautiful book.  

 

The Violin Conspiracy--Brendan Slocumb

 

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK! • Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise—undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world—when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.

Amazon's summary of The Violin Conspiracy above, does a good job of hitting the major themes of this new novel.   

I liked what I learned about the violin and about the life of a professional musician.

The author describes the prejudice a Black person faces in the world of classical music.  This book is fiction, but the author is both black and an accomplished violinist.

Reviews are terrific, so I'm not the only one who enjoyed the suspense here.  In fact, some times I almost wanted to quit reading as I experienced Ray's struggles.

The book is a well-developed mystery with lots of possible suspicious characters.   I did not anticipate the conclusion.   

 

Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post--Allison Pataki

 

This recent historical fiction about the interesting life of heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriwether Post kept me awake evenings when I would ordinarily have been nodding over my book.   Marjorie lived a fascinating life, and Allison Pataki's careful writing does justice to both women.  

Marjorie was the daughter of CW Post, who changed breakfast habits in America with his discovery of Post Toasties, Grape Nuts, and Postum breakfast drink.   The reader learns of Mr. Post's life-threatening illness, and then his gradual moves to fame and fortune.    Marjorie always remembers her early days, as she also lives this long life in the public eye.    

She marries early  (the first of her four husbands) and lives through the Roaring Twenties and then the Depression, as the cereal/food business goes through successes and failures.    She was an amazing philanthropist, with her personal hands-on in food kitchens, hospitals, and other huge projects for the less-privileged.  

Marjorie's enormous wealth allowed her to build Mar-a-Lago in Florida, along with other famous homes.    She was a friend of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, and many other historical figures whom you will recognize.   With her husband, she was an ambassador in Russia, Belgium and Luxembourg in the years leading up to the war.    The author does an excellent job of showing history through the eyes of this woman who had many more privileges and opportunities than less-wealthy.

Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post gave me a look at history of the 1900's in a very readable way.    I was wowed by Marjorie's wealth and connections, and I admired that her wealth did not make her into a selfish and self-serving person.   And, both this life and this book were different from things I have read recently, and I enjoyed the variety.    Thanks, Nancy, for the recommendation.