Out and About

Greetings. I want to wish everyone in the U.S. a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday ahead. It’s hard to believe it’s already upon us. Last week I was away visiting my parents in Southern California (see the photos attached) so I’ve  been off the blog for awhile and since then a lot in book news has happened. Particularly you probably heard that author Susan Choi won the National Book Award for fiction for her novel “Trust Exercise,” which I read back in April and found ambitious and a bit challenging.

Now I’m curious about Sarah M. Broom’s memoir “The Yellow House,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. It’s said to be about her New Orleans home and how her family scattered after Hurricane Katrina. It sounds good and I’m looking to get my hands on it. Also I was a bit surprised to see that Ian Williams beat out various authors including Michael Crummey to win Canada’s Giller Prize for his debut novel “Reproduction.” Set over three decades, it’s about a family living in an economically mixed and diverse Toronto neighborhood. I don’t know much more about it than that, but I plan to check it out in the future. 

Meanwhile a few publications I follow have already put out their 10 Best Books of 2019 lists, which are pretty interesting. Here they are below: 

The New York Times
The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Amazon Books

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap among their fiction picks, but two of these publications share the pick of “The Topeka School,” two others share “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” and two share “The Nickel Boys,” so there you have it. Did you get to any of these? I was impressed with “The Nickel Boys,” which I read in August, but I likely won’t put my list of favorite books of 2019 out until early January. There’s still plenty of reading left to do. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a few reviews of what I finished lately. 

I liked the setting of Leigh Bardugo’s first adult novel “Ninth House,” which has to do with Yale’s secret societies and their hidden rituals and elite members in the city of New Haven. And the protagonist, too, Alex Stern is quite cool. She’s gone from a druggy teenage past that left her the sole survivor at a multiple homicide scene in L.A. to being offered a full ride at Yale U from a benefactor who knows of her ability to see ghosts and wants her to monitor the activities of Yale’s secret societies. So when a town girl involved with the societies is killed, Alex becomes determined to find her killer, even if it means dodging attempts on her life and making bargains with spirits. 

So far, so good. I was able to hang with it — even though I’m not typically a reader of fantasy novels. As with many such books, there’s a lot of setup and explanation to get the plot to where it’s going and fill you in on what the heck is going on amid its societies and rituals. It can be a bit involved — all the explanation and setup — but the beginning also kept me interested. I  liked Stern’s secret society mentor Darlington who seems to be a neat character but he mysteriously disappears … which is a bit too bad for the story. Towards the end, all becomes sort of crazy and I had to roll my eyes a few times throughout. Certainly, “Ninth House,” which is the first in a series, will keep you on your toes with its various twists and secret magic to get to the bottom of its murder mystery — check it out if you’re up for a gritty, lively fantasy. (There is some violence & a bit of strong language involved.)

“My Twenty-Five Years in Provence: Reflections on Then and Now” is a charming slim travelogue-kind-of book — the final volume by Englishman Peter Mayle who died in Jan. 2018 — of his recollections and anecdotes about his life in Provence, France, where he moved to upon retirement in the late 1980s. In it, he writes about how he came to live there (so much more sun!); the wines and food; the seasons, weather and tourists; how he learned the language; what the locals are like; how fast they drive; buying real estate there; the melons and asparagus; dogs; his time on the set with director Ridley Scott while making his book “A Good Year” into a film; and his receiving France’s Legion of Honor. 

I found Mayle to be a pretty endearing guide throughout and listening to it as an audiobook read by John Lee was enjoyable. It reminded me of the time I briefly spent in Provence on my honeymoon visiting the area (hooray). I don’t think I ever read Mayle’s 1989 bestseller “A Year in Provence” (my husband did), but I’d like to someday in the future. Apparently Mayle never liked the TV series that was based on his book — he thought the actor who played him always seemed to be in a bad mood whereas he said he was delighted by his new life in France.

It is quite sad Peter Mayle has now passed away. My only qualm with his last book was that it seemed a bit redundant in places, such as about the seasons and weather, and it skips around quite a bit, but certainly it is a celebration of the Luberon area of France, which made me want to jump on a plane and just go. 

I can now check John Knowles’s 1959 classic “A Separate Peace” off my list. I know it has often been required reading for students in junior high or high school, but somehow I missed it and was always curious. It’s set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II and is said to be a “parable of the dark side of adolescence.” The two prep school boys Gene (the studious one) and Phineas (the athlete) become close friends, though Gene feels jealous and competitive with Finny, which in time leads to a misfortunate accident, or is it? 

The atmosphere of the New Hampshire prep school during the summer of 1942 with the war going on interested me. It wasn’t the heroic tale you often hear about of the Greatest Generation with boys going off to fight valiantly in WWII, but it is more grim and felt like impending doom. Themes of male bonding and coming of age permeate the story, and the accident with Finny leaves Gene, who narrates it, with feelings of guilt and sorrow. It’s hard to totally like Gene because of his early behavior, but it seems he comes around and learns a painful lesson in the end.

That’s all for now.  What about you — have you read any of these books, and if so, what did you think?