The Boys in the Boat -- Daniel James Brown

I don't read a great deal of non-fiction. I don't say that to imply that it's a good thing, and it tends to happen that when I do read a work of such it works out that I end up really enjoying whatever it was I chose. Maybe that's simply a function of how discriminating I am when I do venture into the room at the store where the true stuff lives.

I'm happy to report that, although I was late to this particular party, I'm no less enthusiastic about The Boys in the Boat than I would have been if I'd been the one to discover it straight away. One of the dirty little secrets of bookselling is that we read a whole lot about books, and sometimes that is the only basis we have for recommending them to our customers. We can't read everything, sad to say. I knew this one had all the right stuff, just based on early reviews and a few paragraphs here and there that I scanned during quiet times at the shop. More than one person to whom I recommended it highly made a point of tracking me down (at the grocery, at church, etc.) to tell me how very right I had gotten it.

I decided to make it my first read of 2015. I started it a few days before the turn of the calendar, but don't let how long it took me to finish it dissuade you. There was more than one reason that everything slowed down for me as December turned to January, and it took some doing to stay interested in anything. I credit Brown and the remarkable story of achievement in the face of tremendous odds against success for pulling me back to this tale every day.

The Boys in the Boat tells the story of an improbable group of working class young men who rowed for the University of Washington, and who set about to become part of the US Rowing Team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In order to do so, they had to knock off East Coast teams that were considered to have a lock on the sport by dint of tradition. The uphill battle that was paled in comparison to what would face them in Germany. The stakes could not have been much higher, but this group of American sports heroes seemed to thrive on the idea of impossibility.

There is much to learn here about the Nazi propaganda machine, and the role the Olympics played in advancing Hitler's plans. Brown does a wonderful job of juxtaposing the hard work the men of Washington were putting in to their dreams with the devastatingly remarkable job the Nazis were doing of making the world see only what they wanted the world to see.

I'm sorry it took me so long to read this book, but you know what I always say: every book you've not yet read is a new book.

Visitation Street -- Amy Pochoda

I'm just going to squeeze in ONE more micro-review here, for a book that my boss has been raving about for months. I've had it on my list, but as we have a small staff it behooves us not to read the same things all the time. Sometimes this means that one of the other of us never does get around to reading some really solid books, unfortunately.

I made room and time for this one, here at the tail end of the year, and I'm awfully glad I did.

Two young girls take a raft out on the river one night, and only one comes back. While not a traditional mystery (there's no crime being investigated), there are questions about what happened out there on the water that float over the surface of the deeper stories that arise from the denizens of Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood.

Cree is a young man haunted by the murder of his father. He finds a champion in a mysterious tag artist, Ren, who protects and encourages him. Fadi is the owner of a neighborhood bodega who tries to unite the neighborhood in the aftermath of the tragedy. Jonathan is a washed-up musician living on the fumes of past fame, now a teacher and rescuer of Val, the girl who came back from that ill-fated night on the raft, a role that leaves him feeling responsible for her well-being well after that night.

Although I've never been to Red Hook, there are neighborhoods much like this all over the country, place that leave even those who pass through casually with a sense of resignation and hopelessness. Even so, Pochoda's characters are so well-drawn that even those who are less than likable kept me interested in where their own story would wind up.

Strongly recommended.

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Click here for my premiere audiovisual review if you are too lazy to read, bless your heart.

I have held back on writing a review of this one for weeks and weeks, both because I was beginning to get holiday busy at work and because I couldn't figure out how to review it and not spoil the stew out of it in any way, shape, or form. I hate it when that happens. I will never do that to you, I promise.


There is a creeper Girl on the Train who makes it a habit to follow the lives of people she sees from her vantage point on her daily commute, all of whom are just minding their own business in their own homes which are unfortunately situated within viewing distance from the train tracks. Over time, she has become all wrapped up in the stories she has created for them in her increasingly muddled psyche.


She reminded me very much of myself. Well, absent the train, and a bit shy of her level of creepy.  I don't really spy on people, but I love people-watching and I do frequently pass time by writing short stories in my head about why the people I see are where they are when I see them, especially if they are doing something untoward, like the man I saw hanging out of his car at Publix a couple weeks ago. He was obviously very unwell, and his companion/wife/whatever had left him in the car with the door open. I was in the store for about a half hour, and when I returned to my car he was still there and now I was pretty sure he wasn't breathing anymore and his companion/wife/whatever wasn't yet back to the car so I'm certain she must have put arsenic in his food and was slowly, slowly, slowly making her way through the aisles of the grocery to give it time to do its thing so she could feign horror and deep grief and take to carryin' on in public when she got back to the parking lot and discovered him there, lifeless. Ambulances and law enforcement would be called, and the whole thing would cast Publix as an undeserving backdrop for a tawdry, ill-fated romance's deadly conclusion.

Or maybe he was just really sick and she was hung up at the pharmacy window filling a prescription, and they wound up getting home just fine and he felt all better, and the rest of the evening was spent watching reruns of some sub-tier TV series that everybody else watched 6 years ago but which they've just now figured out how to stream.

But I digress.

The Girl on the Train won't be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize or anything, but great googly-moogly, it was as malevolently addictive as Gone Girl.


Publication Date:  January 13, 2015

The Book of Strange New Things -- Michel Faber

I've just recently read a book I can't believe I even picked up. I've been trying to write a review that would capture how very moved and challenged I was by it, but have come to discover how pathetically inadequate I am to do it justice. I am haunted by it, though, and despite being halfway through another really good book I find my mind and heart wandering back to The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber so often that I can scarce pay attention to its replacement in my hand.

I've given up trying to be coherent about this genre-defying story so I'm taking the easy way out. I hope that you will get some sense of how much I want you to read this from the scattershot words that follow. 

Here's the very least you need to know, which I have lifted straight from the publisher's description of it.

It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC.   His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling.  Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter.

As I have been handselling this one, I have made note of the words I'm using in that setting, the questions that people naturally have of me regarding it, and the thoughts about it that keep running through my head and I'm sharing those sentiments with you. 

1.  "Oh, I never read science fiction."  Neither do I, and it doesn't matter. Once you accept the premise--that intergalactic space travel and colonization on a distant planet is the norm--that's really all you have to "get over."

2.  Why set this on another planet?  Maybe because in our day and age it's impossible to find a place on Earth where a person, separated from his wife to take a job, would be utterly unable to communicate in real time with her, to undertake independent plans to return home to her in a crisis, or to have any idea what might be going on in a world left behind outside the context of Peter's one-to-one, sporadic communiques with Bea. 

3.  More than once I thought about times in my own marriage when my husband and I seemed to be doing little more than orbiting each other, and there was something about how Bea and Peter experienced this same thing--a hundredfold, and more literally--that spoke to those emotional memories like few books ever have.

4.  There are some things that remain unexplained, some things that the end of the book left hanging. Since Faber says he will not be writing another book at all, we can be quite certain there will be no sequel providing any answers. The whole book is a journey into the unknown and unknowable for Peter. For that reason, the journey we find ourselves on with him at the book's conclusion is an authentic experience for the invested reader.

5.  No, this is not a book where a person of faith turns out to be the bad guy. (Seriously, this happens so often in fiction that even I tend to shy away from books with ministers of the Gospel as main characters.)

6.  No, it is not a "Christian" book. That said, Faber is respectful of Peter's faith and plies it with credible opportunities for challenge, and growth, and reflection.

7. No, I haven't seen Intergalactic. I have no idea if there are shades of this story in that one, but surely there must be some Big Questions they have in common.

8.  Yes, I think this would make an outstanding book club read. 

There are far more thorough reviews of this book you can find easily, some of which reference other novels as having broken this same ground.  I don't doubt that's true, but you know what?  I haven't read those books, so that doesn't matter to me. (After all, there really are only about six stories in our universe, all of which are rewritten over and over.) The telling thing is that even when the occasional reviewer is finding fault with it for that reason, there is still deep admiration for the elegance and subtlety of Faber's writing. 

The Book of Strange New Things is, in short, a frightfully good read. Please make room for it on your bookshelf.  

The Burning by Jane Casey

I've been in yet another dreadful slump with reading, and once again, have put down more books after reading 100 pages or so than should be lawful.  I always know I've thrown in the towel on further attempts when I pick up a crossword puzzle book, and I was quite near doing that this time around.

Add to that sense of blechyblechyblah a growing realization that I am not a disciplined blogger, and I have been at the precipice of throwing in the Surly towel, too.  It dawns on me, however, that as long as I remember that I didn't invite Surly back with the intention of becoming a mover-shaker type of book blogger, I can forget sticking to a formula for pasting this thing up every time I've read a book.

Because let's face it:  not every book really warrants the time it takes to write about it thoughtfully.

As long as I'm being faithful to what I hoped this blog would be -- my personal reading journal and a sometimes helpful guide to those Faithful Few who occasionally are inspired to pick up something about which I've written here -- then I can let go of worrying about following even my own lackadaisical guidelines for each entry.

My new rules for myself, then, are these.  Backlist is as much fun to review as new books are. Reading books months before publication date is, too, so I'll continue to review them well in advance of their publication date, and trust that if they interest you, you'll make a note to yourself.  I will never adhere to a regular schedule of posting. It'll hit when it hits.

So.  Are we okay with that?   Yes, we are. Now, let's be on with it, shall we?

I decided to give Jane Casey a try for a couple reasons. My boss has mentioned liking some of her more recent books a whole lot, and we had this one, the first in the series, on the sale porch. I can afford to take a risk when it's only $7.99.

Maeve Kerrigan is a detective constable looking to make a name for herself in an ongoing investigation to find a serial killer whose handle is "The Burning Man." The things that make others on the task force question her abilities (her gender and her youth) are the things that enable her to make some inroads into the investigation of the latest of his crimes. She connects with the victim's best friend Louise, and the first person narrative voice Casey gives this friend provides the novel with the sense of impending dread and unease it would otherwise have lacked.

Ultimately, the story played out in a way that didn't surprise me too much (which always irritates me a little in a mystery, because I'm really not usually smart enough to figure things out well in advance), but I was taken enough with Maeve and her off-the-case personal life to want to read more in the series.

I give this one ***.

The Soul of Discretion - Susan Hill

Some booksellers, including this one, have a love-hate relationship with character series.

On one hand, if a writer hits one out of the park on their first at-bat, gets great reviews and word of mouth and otherwise has the feel of a sure thing, our job selling subsequent books isn't so hard. 

But on the other hand, once a writer has a long backlist of titles in their series, it can be hard to start someone on what seems the daunting task of reading every book, in order before they can get to the latest one.

I tend to be a purist: series should be read in order; and the notable exception to this are the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child.  Reacher travels light, and each book has a different setting as well as a whole new cast of characters. It's a bit of brilliance on the part of Mr. Child, and I can't help but wonder if the concept wasn't influenced by this short-lived but memorable TV series:

Of course, it's entirely possible that I am the only person who remembers it. I had the world's biggest crush on Michael Parks when I was 11 (the year this show aired). I should thank my lucky stars every evening that by the time it came time to pick a life partner for myself that I'd gotten over the crush. 

ANYway. 

The truth of it is that most series books don't require that you read all of them; they often reference things in the past, but typically in a way that doesn't make you feel you've really missed anything. It's sort of like meeting a person at a cocktail party that you find quite interesting, even without knowing their life story.

The one series, however, that I insist be read in order is Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler mysteries. I insist upon it so stringently that if a customer comes in and picks up a later one I always ask if they've read the preceding ones. If the answer is no, then something like this happens:

If you haven't already discovered this series, you have plenty of time to get started right now with The Various Haunts of Men before The Soul of Discretion hits bookstore shelves in January. 

For those who have heeded my advice, or that of their own amazing indie bookseller, here's what you need to know about this one. 

Simon goes deep undercover in an operation designed to bring down the most reprehensible criminals to whom the town of Lafferton has ever played host. It means leaving his family and the woman with whom he has just begun to have a serious relationship in the dark. While Simon is away, a member of his own family becomes the focus of a criminal investigation, one that threatens to rock Lafferton to its roots. 

Simon's sister, Cat, continues to find her way through the twin minefields of widowhood and life as a single parent, and faces a big decision about the direction her life will take. 

Hill doesn't disappoint in any of these plot lines. She routinely puts her main characters in harm's way, and some of them end up the way you don't expect. Neither does she feel any need to sew up either the mystery or a relationship crossroads by the end a novel. Hill knocks down the rules for mysteries and for series novels in ways that set her far apart from others in the genre. 

Far apart, and shoulders above. 

The Soul of Discretion gets ***** from me. 

Publication Date: January 2, 2015

Published by: The Overlook Press

                       Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

                      

Neverhome by Laird Hunt

She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband and donned the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a traitor, a madwoman, and a legend.   - From the dustjacket

It's a fact that many women disguised themselves to take active roles on both sides of the Civil War.This slim volume--fewer than 250 pages long--tells the story of one such woman over two years' time. Ash narrates the story in the vernacular of time and place, a device that doesn't always serve the flow of the novel well. I found that it sometimes became difficult to follow unless I read it aloud to myself. 

First person narratives generally make me feel like I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with the person speaking, but I never developed that connection with Ash (nee Constance). I just couldn't quite get a grip on who she was in any of her contexts: wife, daughter, soldier.  It's never fully explained why her husband Bartholomew didn't serve, although of the two, she was the one most equipped for such. There certainly is no suggestion that she did so out of any fervor for the Union stance; it's more that the idea of such an adventure was irresistible to her. The author suggests some tension between her and Bartholomew that predated her decision to fight, but we are never made privy to that. 

Her tale is told over the course of two years, and they are full ones, indeed. She sees battle, escapes capture by mercenaries, imprisonment as a traitor, and the long walk home to Bartholomew when her fighting days are over. Ash/Constance is not a person to whom life happens: she takes charge of each situation with grit and sheer will. I wish I'd liked her more. 

*** of *****