The Islanders is a great summer read, even in October. The narrative structure follows three unconnected characters – Joy, Anthony, and Lu – who are all on Block Island prior to a major storm that we learn in the prologue has left two people dead. Gradually these characters’ lives come together. It is a narrative structure that I always enjoy, even if it is predictable.

Food and writing, and writing about food, are major players in this book. As an amateur blogger and foodie, I couldn’t help but enjoy the narrative of Lu, the food blogger who is constantly thinking of new recipes and food themes for her blog.

All three characters struggle with parenting; one as a single mom, one as a dad separating from his wife, and one as a stay at home mom who wants out of the home. The struggles of the women characters are classic; the feminist subtext is a little heavy handed (Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own figures prominently Lu’s transformation). But I can’t really complain about a book being too feminist.

The book has some quirky characters. The highlight for me was 13 year old Maggie, who has a collection of T-shirts with corny sayings (one has a periodic table and says “I wear this shirt periodically” another “cute but psycho”).

But when it comes right down to it the book is just a fun read with a good narrative arc and a happy ending. And we all need a little pleasure in the text sometimes. Even when it’s no longer summer.

Song of Solomon dwells in the less discussed crannies of African American history – middle class black experience in the 1930s-50’s in the Midwest. Against this backdrop we are witness to a coming of age story in which the central character, Milkman, journeys to the south to seek the history of his family and his name, Macon Dead.

As we discussed in my book group, naming (and being able to accept, reject, know the history of, or pass on one’s name) is a central theme in the novel. Milkman’s grandfather, Macon Dead, was given his name by a drunk Yankee soldier. His grandfather picked his daughter’s name from the Bible, copying the letters “PILATE” although he couldn’t read on a piece of paper. Pilate has her naming paper made into an earring which she carries around with her the rest of her life. The poetry of biblical names, nick names, names imposed by others and names chosen for one’s self, form a central poem throughout the book.

Milkman, in the first half of the book, is presented as self-centered and un-self-examined. He does not identify as “other”, gets bored when his friends attend talking about the murder of Emmet Till, surprised the police would stop him when he was not speeding or otherwise breaking the law. He is insensitive to race and class difference.

But as he learns more about the story behind his own name, he gradually awakes to the stories of his family and friends, and sets off to the south in search of gold, and in the absense of gold, truth.

Toni Morrison is a brilliant storyteller and I feel inadequate at describing the narrative rhythms through which children’s songs, flying men, ghosts, and bags of bones come to life and gain meaning through her prose. It is a book both instructive and pleasurable, which must be read.

I read this book in 24 hours and couldn’t put it down. I have a full time job so this feat involved a few long escapes to the bathroom when I couldn’t put it down.

Alice hits her head and wakes up on the floor of the gym thinking it’s 1998 instead of 2008. All her memories of the past 10 years are gone- last she remembers she is pregnant with her first child, Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was in the news, and she is happily married to Nick. So it is a shock to learn she now is the mother of 3 and she and Nick are in the process of separating.

She has no recollection of her other children being born, doesn’t recognize her new circle of friends, her problems with Nick, or her new boyfriend.

Alice’s temporary amnesia takes her outside of her “busy busy busy” life and relaxes the social expectations of those around her, allowing her to see things in a new way and change her behavior. It is perhaps this extreme ability to step outside her life that makes the story so appealing. As the book proceeds we cheer on the old Alice of 1998, not wanting 2008 tiger mom Alice to return.

I’m not going to spoil the ending but will say it is a gratifyingly happy one. A fitting end to a very pleasurable read.

I have never felt so inside the head of a writer as I did while reading this book. In fact I was so confused by the blurring of autobiography and fiction, (a confusion I found somewhat pleasurable, I might add) that I wanted to write this entry before reading any of the reviews about the author or book so I could preserve the immediacy of my impressions. Even seeing the author’s picture at the end of the novel was somehow a distraction.

Nunez deliberately lays out this path of blurred boundaries with clues along the way. In Part Eleven, an extra-diagetic chapter where she describes her fantasy ending to the novel, and gives us another version of the “true story”, she comments: “She tells the man about a new course she’s teaching. Life and Story. Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction.” This course is the novel. The novel is the course.

The book does have a plot. The narrator, a writer, has learned that her good friend and mentor has committed suicide. His wife has asked if she will take in his Great Dane. The dog is also grieving the death of his owner, and makes terrible sobbing sounds when left alone. The narrator lives in a rent-controlled small apartment where dogs are not allowed. But she cannot say no, and takes the dog in. He soon takes over her bed and her heart and her life. The only character in the novel with a name is the dog, Apollo.

The narrator-writer sees literary references in all her thoughts and experiences, and beautifully interweaves these references in the story in a way that seems utterly relevant and not heavy handed. From Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’ Words often quoted, or paraphrased, including recently in an epigraph to the film White God: Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”

I am not a writer and it is not my sole passion to make sense of my experiences by committing them to words. The act of writing this blog is the closest I come to that struggle, which gives you some idea of how far away I really am. But Nunez brings the reader along in her struggle. Every moment is a literary moment; expansive, considered, connected through language to other stories. What is the truth and what is fiction becomes irrelevant to the larger project of observing and writing and trying to find meaning in life and art.

Sorry for the lag in my book reviews but I went on a binge, reading all 8 books of the Expanse series. (Unfortunately I have to wait another year for the final book 9.)

The Expanse is set in the future, in a time when speculative new technologies, combined with our continued environmental degradation of Earth, have lead mankind to explore habitation on Mars and the outer planet moons and asteroid belt. Corey explores the biological and social implications of the cultures which would emerge from low gravity living. Tensions between the residents of the outer planets “the Belters” and the inner planets sparks the initial conflict of the book. The Canterbury, an Ice freighter which harvests ice from asteroids and brings it to the Belt to use for water, is blown up by ships which appear to be Martian military vessels. Four crew members survive and broadcast their suspicions of Mars’ involvement to the universe, just before they are picked up by a Mars military vessel. The crew members – James Holden, Naomi Nagada, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton – form the central cast around which the series is based.

Like any epic fiction, the narrative is pretty complex, exponentially more so in this series due to the imagined technologies, life forms from other planets, and the changing laws of physics. Like many speculative fictional novels, new technologies influence not only how we relate to people on other planets, but also how we relate to each other. New reproductive technologies radically alter the concept and function of family. For example Holden grew up with 8 parents (all somehow biologically involved); families are mixes of gender and genetics, families are constructed, not predetermined. In many ways the future is dark and frightening, but the social fabric is progressive and liberating.

Syfy channel made a series based on the books that is dark and gritty and moves at the same slow mysterious pace as the novels. I’ve only watched a few episodes but they are intriguing. The complex imagined worlds are kept visually minimal – like the novels you don’t fully understand what you are looking at and the world gradually reveals itself to you as the story evolves.

But the books are really what I could not put down, and look forward to the final chapter due to come out next year

Blackfish City is a speculative fiction novel set well into our global warming future. The seas have risen, coastal cities flooded, and the world awash with millions of refugees escaping their failed governments.

An industrious group of “shareholders” have created a new city on the sea, Qaanaaq, using oil rigging technology for the foundation, and a geothermal ocean vent for heat and power. In creating this completely new future world, Miller is tasked with not only telling us a story, but also making us understand and believe in this world with all it’s strange architecture, new technology, and political history. At times the primary narrative gets lost in the weeds of context.

The narrative is told through successive chapters, each devoted to the story of a different character and told from their first person point of view. The characters reappear in the 9 sections and by the end of the book we understand how their lives are connected.

Blackfish City is a meditation on family and connections of blood and memory. The future families of Qaanaaq have a much greater variety of gender and species, the result of scientific experimentation connecting people and animals through nanotechnology. This is interesting in concept but Miller devotes so much time to explaining these relational complexities that we get a little short-changed in the character development. At one point in the book, for example, two characters learn they are parent and child. Until that moment I had thought these characters were the same age.

All these stumbling blocks make it difficult to become fully engrossed in Miller’s vision, one which is both a dystopic warning against continued environmental plunder and a utopian future which redefined family, gender and species. The complex questions posed by this vision are never given chance to flourish. At the end of the novel, Masaaraq, one of the mother figures quips, “Home is where we make it. Where we’re together.” After a novel full of explicating the particular challenges of this particular future, this generic ending is a disappointment.

Reading this book is like having a dream which fills you with a growing sense of dread. At first it is the unexplained toxic event which we are made to understand as the reason this family has isolated themselves in a remote waterfront compound. Then the three sisters start describing the strange “treatments” and cures designed to keep them healthy and rid of the toxins. Drinking glasses of salt water until you vomit. Being sewn into burlap sacs and put in the sauna until you pass out. The “drowning game” where you are held under water in the pool. As the tale evolves, the home which first seemed a refuge from a dying world, becomes a sinister prison from which three girls are unable to escape. Truth in this book is a fleeting notion, with multiple narrators redefining who is I and who is you and what screwy things we do to each other in the name of love.

After reading Homegoing and Don Quixote I was ready for a quick fix, and these two thrillers by Will Adams fit the bill. Both novels are archaeological mysteries of the looking-for-treasure-in-a-hidden-tomb variety, with lots of bad guys with guns in exotic settings. The main character, Daniel Knox, is an American ex-pat archaeologist who has settled in Egypt to pursue his career while making a little side money as a diving instructor. In
Alexander Cipher he gets hopelessly embroiled with gangsters, Macedonian Extremists, and corrupt Egyptian bureaucracy. In Exodus Quest he is accused of murder by the third chapter, while his girlfriend, fellow archaeologist Gaille Bonnard, is kidnapped a few chapters later.

As it happens, the archaeological mysteries in these books are not fiction, and Adams goes in to quite a bit of detail about the different theories of where Alexander the Great is buried with all his treasures and the history of the Essenes and the Jews in Egypt. So if you are an amateur Egyptologist and like a good mystery, these books are for you. Actually my only complaint is that it seems the rest of the series is not yet available in Kindle version, otherwise I would surely be whipping my way through Book 3: The Lost Labyrinth.