Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Hallmarked Man, by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

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The disclaimer to this review is that I am a big fan of the Cormoran Strike series and couldn’t put this book down once I started.

A body is found in the vault of a silver shop which specializes in Masonic Silver. The body has been horribly disfigured and there is a question about the identity of the body. Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency were hired by Decima Mullins who is convinced that Rupert Fleetwood, the father of her newborn son, is the body in the vault and wants Cormoran and Robin to prove it.

It turns out that Rupert is just one of four possible victims in the vault – one of four men who roughly fit the description of the victim who have been missing since the time of the murder. The detectives must investigate four sets of scenarios and character groups related to each victim, on top of their investigation of the employees of the silver shop, the people who delivered the silver, and their circles of acquaintances.

I was about halfway through the book when I started to feel like I should have been taking notes, because it was hard to keep track of all the characters and subplots, especially when they started to cross and overlap. Perhaps I just need to re-read the book when I’m not so busy but several times I had to go back and check who was who.

In spite of my confusion, I was still sneaking off to the bathroom at work to read it – basically had a hard time putting it down until I was done. But I think I might need to read it one more time to make sure I got all the intricacies of the plot. I give this one a 4👍🏼 out of 5👍🏼.

Do You Remember Being Born, by Sean Michaels

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Do you remember being born follows the life of 75 year old poet Marian Ffarmer who is invited to write a poem in collaboration with an AI Poetry Bot named Charlotte. Marian takes up the challenge and the $80,000 honorarium which would allow her to help her son Courney buy a house.

The oddity of the collaboration and Charlotte’s instantaneous expansive ability to generate “poetic” language makes Marian begin to doubt the project and her ability to produce a long poem in the requisite short period of time. This doubt seeps into her memories of motherhood and the impossibility she faced of being a poet and a mother at the same time.

Marian’s logistics are managed by her driver Rhoda, who remains unflappable despite the changing whims of her client. Rhoda drives her to a late night poetry event, joins her at a day at the zoo, brings her a blueberry smoothy to help with her hangover, and picks up an illicit collaborator Morell to help with the poem. In some undefined way Rhoda helps Marian progress and keep moving. “Proceed” is the button pushed to submit texts to Charlotte. Rhoda allowed Marian to Proceed.

Before I started the book I was skeptical that the voice of a 75 year old woman could be (adequately accurately aspirationally?) written by a male author. But after the first page this question slipped my mind. The challenges of a man passing as a woman was perhaps not unlike from the challenges of a machine passing as a human.

Although not a famous poet and not 75, I do feel out of synch with the cultural interest in AI, and uncomfortable by its potential intrusion in our lives. I do not share the curiosity of my coworkers who are looking to see how AI could make their work more efficient; how they can potentially offload their monotonous tasks to a hive mind.

I like the monotonous tasks, and the way they give my mind pause to consider other more complex projects.

This train of thought is a little far afield from the narrative, but also in keeping with Marian’s wandering memories and reappraisal of her life. A long way of saying that the book gives you a lot to think about. I give this book 4.5👍🏼 out of 5.

Birnam Wood, Eleanore Catton

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“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him”.

Birnam Wood is both a reference to Macbeth and the appropriated name of an activist gardening collective in New Zealand, the brainchild of Mira Bunting. On paper Birnam Wood plants food crops on unused land, or in gardens where owners give permission in exchange for the portions of the produce. The rest is distributed to those in need or sold to cover their expenses. Birnam Wood also has some Guerilla activites off the books where they maintain crops on median strips, abandon lots, and other hidden parcels which they struggle to maintain.

The group epitomizes a politically correct horizontal organization. Rotating directors lead caucuses at the quarterly “hui’s” (Maori word for “gathering”) where everyone votes on all management issues related to the group, and all financial records are kept on shared documents with total transparency. In spite of this Mira is the unspoken leader and her decisions shape the direction of the group. The novel begins with Mira reading about an abandon property which was taken off the market when a landslide cut off the main access to it and the remote town of Thorndike at the foothills of the Korowai ranges. Mira, Seong opportunity to upscale the organization, journeys 5 hours to Thorndike, treks through the woods around the landslide, and sneaks onto the property. But her reconnaissance is interrupted by a man in an expensive track suit, the billionaire Robert Lemoine.

Mira learns that Lemoine had been in negotiation with the property owner Owen Darvish prior to the landslide. After an initial intimidating encounter, he offers her $10,000 to help Birnam Wood set up operations in Thorndike. He tells her he is a prepper and is buying the property to embed a doomsday bunker in the land. Although he does not yet own the property, Darvish has invited him to use the house and use its airfield for his private plane. He convinces Mira that he will be ultimately purchasing the property and that they both might trespass together.

Meanwhile Tony Gallo, one of the founding members of Birnam Wood and a former (somewhat fraught) fling of Mira’s shows up at Mira’s house unannounced. Mira is on her way to her fact-finding mission in Thorndike, so Tony instead talks with Mira’s roommate and Birnam Wood co-director Shelley. We learn that Shelley is disaffected with the organization and trying to figure out her exit strategy. She thinks a one-night stand with Tony might give her the out she needs so the two of them head out for drinks. But the evening ends badly when Shelley realizes Tony is still interested in Mira.

So it is that Tony arrives at the next Birnam hui, hackles raised. First he gets into a loud debate with Amber, the owner of the cafe who hosts the hui, and who feeds the group using (of course) vegetables grown by Birnam Wood. The discussion, which seems to be a parody of me-too one-up-manship ends in Tony arguing that “Polyamory is so fucking capitalistic. Yet again. you’re proving my point. You literally couldn’t have picked a more individualistic example.” Amber looked confused. “What?” “It’s Consumerism 101!” Tony burst out. “It’s like going to a department store! The idea that this partner gives you a little bit of this and this partner gives you a little bit of that, and you don’t want to risk missing out, so you buy them both – it’s a hedge!“

The “caucus” has turned against Tony when Mira suddenly walks in late, excited about her news of Thorndike, and is confronted by the appearance of Tony who she hasn’t seen in years, and the hostile vibe in the room. Mira pushes forward her presentation of the project, not telling the group that Lemoine doesn’t actually own the property. Tony immediately objects, saying that Lemoine and his Autonomo surveillance technology company represents the opposite of their values. A heated debate ensues and Tony ends up being asked to leave. The rest of the group vote in favor of Thorndike and begin to mobilize the move.

Catton constantly shifts perspective in her narrative style and the reader is thrust from one first person narrative to the next with little warning. The first half of the book which I have summarized above took me some time to engage with, as we are introduced to so many characters with their extreme value systems. But as Birnam moves to Thorndike, and we learn more and more about Lemoine’s sinister maneuvering, we can see the conflict taking shape long before it happens, and wonder why none of the other characters can.

So it is that we learn Lemoine has hacked Mira’s cell phone and can now track, interrupt, and modify all her calls texts and emails. Her moves are further tracked by the Automono Surveillance drones which monitor the property. Lemoine, as the reader may have expected, is a billionaire on a mission, which has nothing to do with doomsday. His discovery of rare earth metals used for computer chips and cell phones in the Korowai ranges has prompted an extreme and secretive plan for extracting them. He has no intention of living in his doomsday bunker, but instead of filling it up with the extracted minerals he is illegally mining from the adjacent national park, and then secreting the product out of the country in the bunker. It is unclear to the reader, and perhaps even to Lemoine, how his support of Birnam Wood will play into his plans, which seem very fluid and have layers and layers of redundancy.

But when the Birnam Wood collective sets up camp in Thorndike, Tony starts to research the activities of Lemoine. Up to this point, Tony has seemed just an intellectual with few social skills, but he now demonstrates his extreme survival skills and ability to avoid the surveillance state. Sneaking behind the Darvish farm up in the hills of the Korowai range, he stays off the main path, keeps his phone in an aluminum pouch, and soon discovers Lemoine’s secret extraction site. The hapless Tony is able to avoid the guards, the surveillance drones, and Lemoine’s increasingly aggressive efforts to capture him.

But it is Mira’s failure to heed his warnings that ironically leads to his downfall. Not knowing (or believing) that her phone has already been compromised, she comes out at night to find Tony, immediately leading Lemoine to his hiding place.

If the lesson of Macbeth is the destruction wrought by unconstrained ambition, it seems none of these characters will escape their fate. Tony is blinded by his visions of fame and glory for revealing the sinister plot to harvest precious metals from National parkland. Mira’s vision of a vital Birnam Wood collective blinds her to Lemoine’s manipulations. Lemoine is the classic victim of wealth and power. Thus the ending – which seemed so abrupt – should have been foreseen, and in fact Catton makes no effort to hide the details. Nonetheless my first reaction was to look on line for a potential sequel – apparently I too willfully ignored all the clues.

I give this book 4.9đź‘Ť out of 5đź‘Ť.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

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Trust is a book within a book- actually three books within a book- that tell the same story three different ways.

The novel starts out with Bonds: A Novel by Harold Vanner. Bonds tells the story of financial tycoon Benjamin Rask, who we later learn is thinly disguised as the tycoon Andrew Bevel. Rask comes from a long line of successful financiers. “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross.”

In Bonds the reclusive Rask falls in love with the brilliant Helen Brevoort. Helen’s amazing performances of her photographic memory (rereading text verbatim, backwards, or two texts interspersed after one reading) was trotted out in front of high society soirées as a way to maintain the Brevoorts’ status. As Mrs. Rask, Helen becomes an important philanthropist, supporting the arts, and contemporary musicians specifically. She and Benjamin, neither of whom liked to socialize, enjoyed having chamber music concerts in their home. Rask even starts a Charitable Investment Fund to coordinate Helen’s activities and giving.

Helen develops an undefined mania and slowly withdraws from reality, writing obsessively in her journals. She asks to be taken to Zurich to convalesce, and Rask soon takes over her care with medical specialists from one of his German investment concerns. The doctors giver Helen a series of shots that cause extreme convulsions, sort of a pre-cursor to Electric Shock Therapy. Rask is not allowed in the room while Helen received the “treatment” but during one session he sees a nurse leave the room visibly upset, and she stares at Rask with hatred. The third treatment proves too much for Helen and her heart fails her, but not before suffering extreme pain and convulsions so strong her collar bone is broken.

Infuriated by this gruesome account of his life with his wife, Andrew Bevel writes the second novel of the book, My Life. This saccharine tale recounts his family’s successful history, his own genius in the stock market, how his financial acumen also served the public good, and the “true” story of his wife Mildred’s life and illness. “My actions safeguarded American industry and business. I protected our economy from unethical operators and destroyers of confidence. I also shielded free enterprise from the dictatorial presence of the Federal Government.”

In My Life, Andrew Brevel’s wife Mildred is a gentle warm companion. Like Helen she supports the arts through her philanthropic activities, but supports a more classic repertoire. Flower arranging is another hobby. When she becomes ill, the problem is cancer, not mental illness. She dies peacefully in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

It is only through A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza that the true story of Andrew and Mildred are revealed. We meet Ida in her 70s, returning to the Brevel mansion which has now become a museum. Ida hasn’t been back since her 20s when she worked with Brevel assisting him in writing his biography. Although Mildred has been long gone by the time Ida starts the job, she feels a strange kinship with her, and questions why Brevel seems to want to water down her intellect and business acumen, calling her philanthropy chaotic and haphazard.

After digging through boxes of Mildred’s papers, which primarily consist of her date books, and thank you letters for her philanthropic activities, Ida discovers a thin journal hidden in one of Mildred’s large appointment books. (Spoiler alert). The journal reveals the breadth and depth of Mildred’s intellect and success in the market. It was first discovered by Andrew when he noticed her charitable fund was performing better than his commercial funds and she begins to guide him on his investment strategies. It is Mildred who brings him his outsized financial success, who sees the upcoming crash in the 30s, and advises him to short the market. Brevel hide’s his wife’s contribution until the bitter end.

I know this book has received numerous prestigious awards, and conceptually I liked the Rashomon framework of a story being retold through multiple voices. The political message – behind every great man is an even greater woman – is elegantly explicated here. But I have to confess I did not particularly enjoy reading the book, even though the aspects I didn’t enjoy were likely intended by the author. Bonds was horrible but salacious. My Life was saccharine and had long tedious texts about the market. By the time I got to A Memoir, Remembered I was totally confused and it took me several chapters to reengage with the narrative. Against the backdrop of the legal proceedings against Trump, Trust is a timely novel, but the relevance of the story did not help my enjoyment level. I give this book 3.5đź‘Ť out of 5đź‘Ť.

T

House on Endless Waters, by Emuna Elon

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Israeli writer Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He and his wife Bat-Ami have travelled the world over promoting them. But when his publisher arranges a series of events in Amsterdam, Yoel refuses. The dying wish of his mother, Sonia, had been that he never set foot in Holland.

Yoel’s publisher prevails, and with Bat-Ami’s prodding they are soon enjoying a fancy (not Kosher) hotel in central Amsterdam. When his lectures and events are over he and Bat-Ami visit the Jewish History Museum which preserved remnants of the vibrant Jewish life in Amsterdam pre-Nazi occupation. Of the approximately one hundred and forty thousand Jews of Holland, only about thirty-eight thousand survived the war years. Yoel sees Bat-Ami captivated by an old black and white film of a Jewish wedding. Yoel sits with his wife and suddenly his mother Sonia looks up at the camera with his sister Nettie to one side, and a baby in her arms. But Yoel can clearly see that the blond baby in her arms is not himself.

When Yoel and Bat-Ami return to Israel he calls Nettie and she reluctantly tells him (but not the reader) the story. He is compelled to return to Amsterdam, literally to rewrite his history. With Nettie’s help he finds the neighborhood in Amsterdam where Sonia and Eddy lived, along with Eddy’s friend Martin and his wife Anouk, their son Sebastian, and Anouk’s parents, the wealthy Jewish bankers, the Rosso’s.

Martin had a small shop selling art which is now a real estate office. Eddy worked at the nearby Jewish hospital where Sonia had once been a nurse which is still a medical facility. Yoel finds a small hotel with a room overlooking the back yards of all the neighboring houses. The large unshuttered windows allow Yoel to look in on his neighbors’ lives, a bit of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but here the crime happened decades before the story begins.

Yoel both imagines those lives he sees from his hotel balcony, and the life of Sonia and Eddy, as the persecution of the Jews unfolds. First Jews are not allowed in non-Jewish shops. They lose their jobs in non-Jewish establishments. They are not allowed to go to school, given food rations, made to wear yellow stars. Raids begin and large groups of Jews are taken away by trains to work camps, some to Poland and Germany where they never return.

The narrative between past and present become increasingly fluid. In one paragraph Yoel is observing a mother and her children return home to a basement apartment he imagined Sonia had lived. In the next paragraph Sonia has a visit from a member of the underground, having made the difficult decision to save her children by sending them to be hidden with a Christian family.

We understand that it is only a matter of time before Sonia too will be taken away. The house where her daughter Nettie has been hidden is raided and Nettie is taken to the children’s dormitory with all the other Jewish children about to be sent to the camps. The underground manage to free her from this place and return her to Sonia. The two of them are hiding in their old house, now stripped of furniture and all belongings, not even wanting to turn on a light for fear of discovery. It is excruciating reading and our narrator seems to dissolve as we reach the origin of his story.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, and frankly by the time you get to the end of the story you have a pretty good idea of what has happened. But the process of getting there is worth the read so I won’t spoil it here. I give this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.

The Lost Metal, by Brandon Sanderson

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I’m a sucker for Brandon Sanderson. The Mistborn series (this is book 6) has his signature elaborate world building, and it also tells a story across time- three sets of trilogies in the same world, but set in three different eras.

The premise is that people are given magical powers through metals which connect them with gods. A Coinshot can rapidly push or pull metals other than aluminum. Other characters can make speed bubbles to slow or speed time. There is an elaborate belief system which is explained in the first (oldest in time) trilogy, but I had totally forgotten this by the time Book 6 came out.

At first I almost went back to reread the earlier books but realized I didn’t really need to. Other than some disorientation in the beginning I quickly was able to follow what was happening and soon became engrossed in the book.

The Lost Metal is a story of good guys and bad guys, in a sort of magical cowboy setting. The good guys are for justice and equality. The bad guys want all the power and try to develop a weapon that will both kill all their enemies and curry favor with their gods.

The highlight for me was Wayne, a wise-cracking constable who likes to make mischief and is clever with manipulating time. He is the sidekick you can’t help rooting for. In this book the hero of the previous two in the series, Wax, takes second fiddle, allowing other characters to emerge.

Steris, Wax’s wife, is another unexpected hero. A compulsive neurotic, Steris spends her free time making disaster preparedness plans for her home town of Elendel. When the imminent explosion of a massive bomb requires the sudden evacuation of the city to save thousands of lives, her obsession brings her to center stage.

The magical powers in this book are so unusual this it does help to have read the earlier books in the series. Nonetheless the plot is riveting and the characters quirky. I give this book 4đź‘Ť out of 5đź‘Ť.

The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon

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I’m a big fan of fantasy fiction so I was excited to dive into this new world created by Samantha Shannon. Like any literary world building project there is a lot of geography to master. The complexity of this world and the various geopolitical relations were so hard for me to follow at the beginning that I almost gave up.

The story centers around several main female characters. Tane, a dragon rider from Seiiki, an Eastern Kingdom. Ead who is a lady in Queen Sabran’s court in the western kingdom of Inys. Loth, Ead and Sabran’s male friend, is sent away by the Inys spymaster to serve as “ambassador” to the mysterious Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin. The last Inyist ambassador to Yscalin never returned and Loth is supposed to find out why.

This is a land of dragons. There are good dragons (who like water and breath wind), and bad dragons (who breath fire). The biggest baddest dragon is the Nameless One who was captured beneath the Abyss Sea 1000 years ago. Everyone agrees the Nameless One is bad but not everyone agrees how he was captured and who did it. Whole religious are built up around this origin myth and the tensions between the virtuous and the infidels stems from disagreements about this herstory.

Signs appear that the Nameless One may be emerging from his containment and individuals try to move nations to come together to fight him. Miraculously they succeed and ancient enemies come together for the big battle against the big bad dragon in the end.

The somewhat simplistic good versus evil narrative is not unusual for the genre. What is unusual is that Shannon packs into one book what could easily be more thoughtfully developed in 5 (or 12, as in The Wheel of Time). This information density makes the book sometimes hard to follow and other times hard to believe. Conflicts are resolved too easily. Secret hidden magical objects appear the first place they are looked for.

The feminization of this narrative is the more interesting and atypical aspect. All the protagonists are women except for Loth, the token sensitive guy. The women get all the action – they fall in love (with each other), have mad passionate sex, they ride dragons, they discover magical jewels that only they can control, they eat magical fruit which gives them special powers, and they work together to change the world.

In spite of this breezy review I was still sucked into the story. But I would have preferred a little longer journey, with the loose ends not quite so neatly wrapped up. I give this book 3.5đź‘Ť out of 5đź‘Ť.

Sleepwalk, by Dan Chaon

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Billy Bayer goes by many names but seems to have little invested in any of them. After killing his mother at 17 and doing a brief stint in a mental institution he emerges as Barely Blur. What caused his hospitalization and how he escaped is a mystery.

When we first meet Billy Barely Blur he is delivering a man in shackles from one state to another in his camper with his dog Flip. We don’t know what the prisoner has done, or who Billy is working for. Billy seems strangely uninterested in the details, and treats the prisoner with hospitality that makes the relationship even more unclear.

We see the world through Billy’s eyes, and the first person narrative does not provide much context for what is happening in the world. We have a vague sense that this is some future time- strange anthropomorphic drones appear, shaped like penguins or cartoon characters, with camera eyes that can seek and record. The surveillance apparatus is hard to escape, and Billy takes great pains to stay off the grid.

But one day several of his burner phones start to ring, and against his better judgement he picks one up. The caller, Cammie, says that she is his daughter. She clarifies their relation is a result of his sperm donations 20 years ago. Billy is not convinced and Cammie soon hangs up. Troubled by what he perceives to be breach of his defenses, he reaches out to his childhood friend Esperanza convinces Billy to be alert, and to record their phone calls if Cammie should find him again.

Cammie calls back and Billy tries to get more information from her. Cammie is elusive, and not wanting the call to be traced she hangs up after 15 minutes. She ends the call with a laugh that is exactly like his mother’s. Billy starts to think perhaps this may be his daughter, and slowly wraps his head around the possibility of being a father.

Billy and Esperanza work for Value Standard Enterprises. This innocuously named company has offices in equally innocuous locations – above laundromats and casinos – and their front man is Tim Ribbons. Value Standard Enterprises, we learn, is an underworld services company, providing assassinations, arson, kidnapping, illegal transport, and other related services. Billy seems to have a pretty loose job description, but his greatest skill is his ability to compartmentalize his feelings about his work. While picking up a young baby and transporting it to another state, he imagines that the baby will find a happy home with parents that love him.

Against this backdrop, Billy attempts the emotional gymnastics of being a father, and he begins to reveal memories of his past. These memories are deeply buried and unwelcome. Billy’s mantra is the wish to wake up on an island with amnesia.

To the reader however the memories start to fill in the gaps of Billy’s life. Tim Ribbons, we learn, came to Billy while he was in the mental institution and had some relation to his escape. Tim is now the one given the recordings of his calls with Cammie to analyze, and he’s soon given an address and a mission to “take care of the problem.” Tim tells Billy that the calls are not from his daughter but from a group of highly skilled hackers who need to be shut down.

Billy seeks out Cammie, with no intention of killing her, but Cammie is one step ahead. He arrives to an empty room with destroyed computers and a beeping phone in a refrigerator. Billy takes the phone and Cammie soon calls, warning him of the forces out to kill them both. Billy slowly is emerging from his lethargic denial and Cammie provides a new sense of purpose.

This lengthy description just scratches the surface of this slippery narrative, which you only really begin to understand at the end. It’s one of those books you want to re-read once you reach the end to see if you can pick out the clues in the beginning. But nothing is ever really spelled out and there is a lot of room for imagination. I give this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

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The Fifth Season takes place in a future world where environmental catastrophic events (seasons) have forced society to a constant state of preparedness. People live in communities (comms), work to amass a community stash of food and other necessities (cache), and follow ancient laws preserved by oral historians (lorists) in order to survive.

Interspersed among the people are oregenes- people with special powers of connection to the earth and the ability to effect temperature, weather, and plate tectonics. But these special powers are feared and hated rather than revered. Seen as violent and dangerous, Oregenes are identified as young as possible and shipped off to live in the Fulcrum where they are controlled by Guardians and taught to control their powers. The Orogenes have no rights as citizens- they are even forced by the Guardians to breed to optimize their powerful lineage.

All of this is backdrop to the main story of Nessun, who comes home from work to find that her husband has killed her son after discovering his Oregenic powers, and run away with their older child. While grieving over the body of her son, Nessun senses an earth-shattering event and knows a new Season has begun. She uses her powers to protect her Comm from the quake, but this act also reveals her powers. Nessun is expelled, and treks off after her husband and daughter.

The Fifth Season is a reconfiguration of otherness and race. In the land of The Stillness, nappy hair and dark skin are positive traits for durability and protection in the extreme weather conditions of the Seasons. Otherness comes from the powers within rather than the appearance without.

I’ve read this book a few times, but never during a pandemic. The collective trauma of living through disaster and trying to navigate the rapidly changing and unpredictable world of natural disasters is not unlike the experience of navigating the new normal of COVID-19. The struggle to survive leads to shifting priorities and new affinity groups with unexpected alignments.

Jemisin has created a dense vision of a new world and trying to summarize does not do it justice. I give The Fifth Season 4.5 đź‘Ť out of 5 đź‘Ť.