2014 reading highlights

Best of reading lists are not my strength; I always forget something even with reading journals both physical and online. But here are some highlights from 2014:

Middle Grade Fiction

The Fourtheenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm

Holm pays tribute to her science forebear in a funny, wise and non-preachy book about parents and children, grown and not grown-up, when the new kid in Ellie's class turns out to be her grandfather. His experiment worked and he's now a 6th grader.

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee

Ophelia does not believe in magic in this novel inspired by The Snow Queen. But when her sword historian father takes on a job in a museum in a city where it never stops snowing, and she meets a boy in a locked room who has been waiting for her to rescue him, Ophelia has some rethinking to do.

YA Fiction

Don't Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley

The teen daughter of a mommy blogger does not appreciate having her whole life bantered about on the internet. And now her teacher wants everyone in class to blog. An entertaining coming-of-age story when those moments with your family are now things everyone online knows.

Nonfiction

Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow (memoir)

The New York Times columnist's memoir recounts his childhood in rural poverty, his mother's incredible hard work, his confusion over his sexual identity and his college years. I loved reading his gentle words about hardships, and his honesty with grace toward others.

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

Mead relates the importance of various aspects of George Eliot's wonderful novel to various aspects of her own life in a book that is part literary criticism, part biography of Eliot, part memoir and wholly entertaining.

Literary Fiction

Benediction by Kent Haruf

Haruf's Plainsong introduced me to quiet, heartfelt midland fiction. Haruf, who died this year but finished one more novel, wrote here about the end of life of a good man who didn't always do the right thing.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

One of two books by Americans on this year's Man Booker list for the first time, Ferris's novel about a self-absorbed dentist is wild, wide-ranging and was a complete blast to read. Especially after I wondered if I was the right reader for it. A terrific book.

 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

The other Booker nominee is about Rosemary's family, including her very special sister Fern. What I thought at first was a gimmick is instead a marvelous way to talk about how families relate to each other, how people relate to each other and how people and animals relate to each other.

 

History of the Rain by Niall Williams

A dreary story of a dreary Irish family where the rain makes everything look dreary. Except that it is not dreary. Bedridden Ruthie Swain tries to find her father through stories and it is transporting. Another Booker nominee.

 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Another reason for me to love Murakami and his translators. A young man traces what went wrong as a teenager with the friends who formed a tight circle, and what happened when they grew up. His work is wistful.

Most Grateful to Have Read:

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Pete Snow is a social worker in western Montana in the 1970s. He tries to help the son of a survivalist, Jeremiah Pearl, who sees the era as the start of the End Times and has hidden his family in the woods. At the same time, Pete's family has fallen apart -- his wife has left, taking their daughter. When the teenager runs away, Pete experiences the helplessness on he saw in the families he tries to help. Henderson knows the people, he knows the land and he has written a complex, thoughtful and devastatingly honest work.

Biggest Regret:
A long list of books not yet read and other online reviews and critiques not read or properly lauded.

Sunday Sentence: Lily King's 'Euphoria'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

"Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our 'progress,' so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? ... I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world."

-- Lily King, Euphoria

Sunday Sentence: Richard Flanagan

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further commentary or context:

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

-- Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Review: 'The Murder of Harriet Krohn'

The Murder of Harriet Krohn
By Karin Fossum
Crime fiction (Scandinavian)
November 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0544273399

A father writes a heartfelt letter to his estranged daughter. She is clearly the most important thing in his life, the reason, really, that he lives. Why won't she have anything to do with him?

Karin Fossum answers that question and more in The Murder of Harriet Krohn, an absorbing character study and crime novel. The father, Charlo, has had a serious gambling problem. His wife dying of cancer didn't help. He even gambled away the money they had put aside to buy a horse for his darling daughter.

Now that there is the chance his gambling creditors will come after him, Charlo has finally hit bottom. He's got to do something. So he does. He buys flowers and takes the bouquet one late, snowy night to the home of an elderly woman, Harriet Krohn, who lives alone.

Fossum, who often experiments with crime fiction tropes in her novels, next switches the focus to Harriet Krohn. She is small-minded, tightly wound, regimented, a skinflint. She is crippled with arthritis, but she is not a figure of sympathy. When the murder occurs, it's easy to see how the killer, over time, begins to blame the victim. If only she hadn't done this or done that, if only she had just let him take the silver and the cash, and leave.

This is just the beginning of the story. The major portion of the novel deals with what Charlo does after the fact. Will he get away with it? Will he feel guilty? Will he be reconciled with his daughter? And what of the police? Fossum's best character is Inspector Sejer. Is he going to show up?

Without incorporating spoilers, let's just say the rest of the book flies by as suspense grows over these questions. Charlo is a fascinating, flawed character who makes his own problems and is a victim of his choices and what matters to him. This is not a novel in which the author asks the reader to feel pity or empathy for the main character. Rather, it is an examination of what might lead a man to think murder is the only way to solve his problems, and how does someone go on after that happens? For an author who has done unusual things in her novels before, Fossum does not disappoint here. She shows how to let character dictate story. The Murder of Harriet Krohn is a remarkable book by an author who can explore ideas while entertaining.


©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Us'

Us
By David Nicholls
Literary fiction
October 2014
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062365583

Us by David Nicholls chronicles, with extensive flashbacks, a family that may or may not be about to fall apart. After decades of marriage, the artistic wife of biochemist Douglas Peterson tells him one morning that she isn't sure she wants to be married any longer. He adores Connie and, in flashbacks from the evening they meet at his sister's flat and beyond, it's easy to see why. She loves life, she is interested in things, in experiences. Connie isn't so much a free spirit, except in contrast to the earnest, clueless soul that Dougie presents himself as, as she is vibrant.

When Connie has announced her decision, they have already planned an old-fashioned Grand Tour of the continent, taking their son as the last family hurrah before he goes to university.

It is, of course, no fun at all. The three are tetchy around each other, the madcap escapades get more out of hand.

Doug, the novel's narrator, goes on and on about things but as Connie tells him, "Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point."

He loves her perspective even while knowing it's not how he sees the world: "I didn't hate art, not by any means, but I did hate knowing nothing about it." This extends beyond paintings, of course, as in this exchange between the couple:

"I've got nothing against dreams as long as they're attainable."
"But if they're attainable then they're not dreams!"
"And that's why it's a waste of time!"

Unlike the above exchange, however, Connie doesn't always take the opposite stance from Doug. Sometimes she's one of the grown-ups in the room now too. There are moments when Connie has become more like Doug than he has become like her. Their son Albie is early on picked up by an older woman who is busking her way through Europe, playing the accordion to earn money when not scarfing down huge amounts of food at hotel buffets. Connie is as offended as Doug is when this woman, Cat, puts food in her pockets after coming down to breakfast with them. She backs up Doug when he tells Cat the Moocher to put back some of the little jars she's swiping.

So, does this mean married couples grow more alike? Or people become more conservative and not as much fun as they grow older? Or does this mean nothing of the kind and rude is rude, after all? Us is the kind of novel that lets a reader wonder about these things even as the story proceeds.

Douglas is not always easy to understand, even if he understands himself. In one flashback, he relates how his parents were even worse than Doug is about being no fun at all. And when he took Connie home to meet them, there was a political disagreement. Doug stood with Connie. But now, when this hapless, apologetic family man is in the middle of a restaurant row involving his smart remark-making son, the busker accordionist who has picked him up, his wife and some wealthy arms dealers with glossy brochures spread across the breakfast table, Doug does the worst thing possible. He apologizes for his son.

As Connie tells him: "...in a fight you side with the people you love".

Immediately afterward, Doug reminisces:

I'm aware that it sounds perverse, but what I hoped for at that time was some accident, some near disaster, so that I could be as heroic as the occasion demanded, and show the strength of my devotion.

Yes that is perverse because real life demands as much heroism and devotion and steadfastness as we can give, and then some. We don't need near disasters. We need to pay attention to the here and now. Douglas, was Connie ever right.

The turning point in the novel shows that Doug may have realized he has his opportunity to pull off some heroic deed. Or at least, what passes as one for someone like him who plans holidays by museum itineraries and is always at the airport a good two hours early. There is a chance that Douglas may redeem himself whether or not he and his son, and he and his wife, reconcile. He realizes:

... perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

Indeed, Douglas, indeed. This character has just demonstrated that you never know when you are going to have a new realization about something you think you know very well indeed -- yourself.

The second half of the novel chronicles Doug's mission, with its ups and downs. It also continues his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever he says something wrong, which he still does. And the novel continues with the ability of this middle-aged man who has been alienating himself from his wife and son to become involved in outrageously ridiculous scenarios as he treks through Europe.

And yet, and yet, whenever the plot reaches a point that is OTT and a reader would not be faulted for giving up on it, go ahead and read another page. Keep going as the flashbacks shed light on how our narrator got himself into this pickle and how he remains someone who has not given up on himself, his wife, his son or on hope itself.

That there also is an unexpected development just when things are at their lowest point and Doug not only turns a former antagonist into an ally, because of honesty, changed one of the tropes of the novel. Before, whenever another party became involved with the Petersons, the outside catalyst became something that broke the pattern of the triangle of the three characters. The outside character didn't add another layer, that character instead caused a fracture.

This original structure and the changes made to it play a significant role in the way the plot plays itself out.

In between the flashbacks and the current story, Nicholls also gives Doug the opportunity for a passionate speech about modern technology, capitalism and the resulting widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Plus all the other things that have been going wrong in the world.

Nicholls also has insightful commentary about how children become like their parents in some ways and how children strive to become their own people, whether it's Douglas and his son or Douglas and his father.

Although the novel continues on long after the story itself is finished -- including an odd section where the plot is retold from the vantage of Connie being the protagonist and Albie being the protagonist -- Us is one of those novels about a journey in which the journey of reading it was worthwhile.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: More Marilynne Robinson

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further commentary or context:

"... If there is no Lord, then things are just the way they look to us. Which is really much harder to accept. I mean, it doesn't feel right. There has to be more to it all, I believe."

"Well, but that's what you want to believe, ain't it."

"That doesn't mean it isn't true."

-- Marilynne Robinson, Lila

Sunday Sentence: Marilynne Robinson

Inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further commentary or context:

You best keep to yourself, except you never can.

-- Marilynne Robinson, Lila