The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney was my book club’s selection for May. It’s a fascinating account of the internal workings of the most important newspaper in the world. I’m not sure I needed to know all this about the in-fighting, rivalries, poor personnel management, etc., but it was interesting. Also, I never gave much thought to how a newspaper is actually run, especially one that is as widely read as the Times. I’ve been a digital subscriber for many years now, but I was never a subscriber to the print edition (not counting the years I got the International Herald Tribune when I lived in Singapore). Still, I don’t take full advantage of the paper, and I should. For me, the book was slow to start, but as we got closer to the present in the book’s chronology, it got more interesting and relevant.
What I Know About July by Kat Hausler is a novel set in Berlin, by an American writer who lives there. It centers on Simon, a German singer/songwriter whose band has become popular in the local indie-rock scene. But Simon has a problem: a young woman has been stalking him and he’s uncertain of her intentions. In the meantime, he sleeps with other fans, has a poor track record with girlfriends, and is generally neurotic. The band goes on tour in several German cities and elsewhere, including Amsterdam, where the stalker goes missing. Simon is relieved, but also worried, so he reports this to the police in Berlin. He’s a suspect, of course. She doesn’t go missing until about halfway through the book, though, so it’s a long build-up, and the rest of the story is the search for her and the revelation of what happened. I think I would have structured this book differently, but I still enjoyed the read because of the clever writing and dialogue, plus the Berlin setting, which was familiar to me.
Simply Lies by David Baldacci is the first novel in his new series about a former cop named Mickey Gibson. Gibson is a divorced single mother of two young kids and she’s now working mostly online for a private investigative firm. Out of the blue, she gets a call from a woman who claims she works for the same firm and gives Gibson an assignment to check out a mansion. That’s unusual because she works mostly on the internet, and when she gets to the mansion, she discovers the body of a man who has been murdered. The man himself is a mystery because no one knows who he is, and the woman who set Gibson off on this investigation keeps pushing her to do more. Almost no one is who they say they are—lots of false identities—which is kind of fun, but a bit too manipulative for my taste. The novel is entertaining, but it lacks plausibility.
The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn is a novel translated from German by Melody Shaw. The title of the book in German is Der Buch Spazierer meaning, literally, “the book walker,” which I think would have made a much better title in English. It’s a sweet story about Carl, an older man whose job in a local bookstore in a German city is to hand deliver books to customers. He goes on daily walks to make his deliveries, and he revels in his chats with his customers as well as observing what’s happening in his city. One day he is joined by a nine-year-old girl who is full of questions, and while he tries to get rid of her at first, he gradually grows quite fond of her. His customers also succumb to her charms. The girl’s father, however, is not pleased with the arrangement and steps in to stop it, leading to one of the book’s major conflicts, although there are others. It’s a sweet story and an enjoyable read.
Coyote Weather by Amanda Cockrell is described as a novel of the 1960s, which it certainly is. The book is about Ellen and Jerry from Ayala (a fictionalized Ojai) California, who meet and fall in love one summer. Ellen is in college back east (at a fictionalized version of Hollins University, where the author went to school and also taught) and Jerry is just getting by. He doesn’t dig school, but he’s also worried about the draft. Eventually, they split apart and lead separate lives, coping with the horrors of the Vietnam war, which is claiming the lives of their friends from Ayala. Ellen eventually marries someone else, but she’s frustrated by society’s limitations on women, and she also pines for Jerry. The book is a very well-written account of the period as a backdrop to a moving story.
The Long March Home by Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee is a familiar World War II story. Three friends growing up in Mobile, Alabama join the army as war nears. They ship out to the Philippines, where they are just settling in at a supply base when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and then immediately overruns the Philippines, resulting in the Bataan Death March of POWs. Despite their courage, many prisoners die during the war, and the reader wonders if all of the friends will make it back to Mobile. The grim story of their experience in the camps is interspersed with stories about their lives before the war, which mostly revolve around a girl—sister to one of the friends and the love interest for the other two. I can’t deny that the book is affecting, although it seems like a story we’ve all heard before.
The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann by Virginia Pye. This novel set in late 19th Century Boston is a departure for Pye, whose previous work touched on China. (There’s a little China, here, too, as a brothel/opium den is populated with Chinese immigrants.) For the most part, the landscape of Cambridge and Boston isn’t significant (although the main character does have a house on Brattle Street, which was familiar to me, and eventually visits the famous Longfellow House to meet with Alice Longfellow), but the literary environment of publishing houses and important writers is the real reason for the setting. The story centers on Victoria Swann, a writer of cheap diversions for women, who fights back against her publisher when she discovers she’s being cheated by them. She has other problems, too, including a bit of scandal in her background and an opium-addicted husband she doesn’t love. It’s an enjoyable read that touches on an interesting historical development.
Parade by Rachel Cusk is a novel I was asked to review for the Washington Independent Review of Books. (My review will appear online in June.) It’s a challenging book that I struggled to understand because it mostly doesn’t have a plot. It is made up of four sections and in each there is an artist at the center, referred to as G. But these are different people, so it’s never clear to me why they’re all called G. They all have their own challenging relationships and situations, but the point, if there is one, seems to be what motivates them in creating art. I’m not sure I got out of the book what the author intended.
Flip by Steve Stinson surprised me. It’s a novel about an artist who, at 19, seems headed nowhere. He’s a mess, his girlfriend is pregnant, and her family hates him. With her encouragement, he gets out of town. On the road, he meets a stranger who asks him where he’s headed. Good question. He flips a coin by way of choosing. Flash forward and he’s now an editorial cartoonist for an Atlanta newspaper, about to hit the big time by way of syndication. But he meets a stranger again, flips a coin, and finds himself in the life he didn’t have, married to the girlfriend he’d left earlier. But he’s happy with his life in Atlanta! He flips back and forth, and how he lands is an interesting spiritual debate he has with the man who may or may not have saved his life years before. Another enjoyable read.
The Hint of Light by Kristin Kisska is, for the most part, a charming novel, although it has a twist. It’s about a young man who dies at the beginning of the book after struggling for many years with alcoholism. Before he died, he revealed to his father that he apparently had fathered a child with a woman he’d had a brief relationship many years earlier, and the father only tells the family this after his son’s death. At the heart of the story, then, is the effort to understand the son’s relationship with his child and to see what connection, if any, the child will have with her father’s family.
