Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Wednesday, June 28, 2023--San Antonio 

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu won the National Book Award for fiction in 2020.  It is the story of a young man who lives in Chinatown in Los Angeles with his father and mother.  All are working actors in films and TV series, but have had little success because of the limitations they face in casting due to being of Asian descent.  At times, the thoughts of the protagonist are hilarious.  But the purpose of the book does not seem to be to "entertain" as much as it is to show how racism and racist laws have held Asians back for most of the history of the USA.  The story is often told in TV or film "script" form which is interesting.  But it is told during the performance of the script in which actors often verbally address each other quietly off-script; it can be a bit confusing in terms of understanding what is happening.  And the end of the book seems to turn to magical realism where it is written like a script that is being performed with the characters becoming real people in a court case against the protagonist.  It's all very unique which is probably why it won the award.  But for me it was a bit too confusing (without enough hilarity) to rate it higher than 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Better Than People by Roan Parrish

Friday, June 23, 2023--San Antonio 

Better Than People by Roan Parrish is not the kind of book I normally read.  It hasn't gotten great reviews from "respected" sources, plus it is acknowledged as being a romance novel.  But the last 2-3 "good" books I have read were boring for me--to the point that it took a week to 10 days to finish a 350-page tome.  This book was on my list of books that were available from Libby (where I check out all of my books from the local library), the the readers (most of whom probably chose it particularly for the fact it is a romance novel) had rated it fairly well (4+).  Well, I won't rate it that high, but it was so enjoyable to read it; I found myself laughing aloud over and over again. It's the story of two gay men who find themselves living isolated lives in a small Wyoming town.  When one breaks a leg, someone tells him about an app he could use to try to find a volunteer to assist by walking his dogs and one of his cats twice each day since he was not going to handle the leashes and his crutches at the same time himself.  (He broke his leg during a regular walk with the pets by going after the spooked cat and falling down a ravine.)  The other main character answers the app request.  It seems to be lust at first sight on both parts, but there are problems.  The young man who answers the app and comes to walk the pets has severe anxiety problems when it comes to communicating verbally.  The one who has broken his leg is rather boisterous (to the point of scaring the anxious one) and was already depressed before the accident because of having felt that his long-time friend and business partner had betrayed him a few months earlier.  But a relationship slowly begins to develop after quite a few hits and misses.  It's the non-spoken coherent thoughts of the shy one that provide most of the laughs.  If he could only communicate verbally the words that flash into his mind, everyone would find him charming and funny.  As the book progresses, they both help each other (the pet owners suggests that the walker might be more comfortable texting what he wants to say) as well as falling in love with each other.  Pet lovers will especially like the book, since there are 4 dogs and 3 cats in the home which all become part of the story, too.  I became frustrated several times with things that just didn't seem plausible as part of the story.  One of the main ones:  The character with the broken leg, although gay, is quite manly.  Yet he uses "Darling" regularly as his term of endearment for the other character.  It just seems out of character.  But also there were points where something happened and I thought, "That doesn't seem right considering what was said earlier in the story."  (For instance, the walker can't hug his grandmother when he returns home because she is so allergic to pet dander, yet she can come to dinner later at the pet owner's home and they plan on having her over regularly as the novel wraps up.) Anyway, I gave the book 3 stars out of 5 (and considered 2 1/2 out of 5) because I enjoyed the story in general and I enjoyed laughing so much.  But don't read it expecting quality literature; it's just not that well written. 

White on White by Aysegul Savas

Tuesday, June 20, 2023--San Antonio

White on White by Aysegul Savas is a short novel, yet it moves at a slow pace revealing what is happening in the lives of two artists--one a middle-aged painter whose husband is a well-known art scholar and the other a graduate student researching how nudity was viewed in Gothic sculpture during the time it was made.  The student has rented an apartment in an unnamed city to conduct her research; the apartment is owned by the artist and her husband and it is understood through the rental agreement that the artist will be there part of the time working in her studio upstairs--the only part of the apartment that is off-limits to the student.  When the artist does eventually arrive, she lingers longer and longer.  The two develop a relationship that is based primarily on the artist's over-sharing of her past and her difficulties in deciding what direction she should go in creating new paintings.  As the reader progresses through the book, questions arise:  Why is the artist over-sharing?  Why is the researcher continuing to listen?  Is there an unknown hidden relationship to be revealed between these two?  Is the artist hoping to develop an intimate relationship with the researcher?  It's a mystery with the potential for a dramatic turn--either a horrific consequence or maybe just a simple reveal.  The author is allowing the researcher to question this, too.  The story, however, is more subtle than that with the ending raising questions rather than coming to a climax.  It is very well written, but do not expect action.  It's more like watching a European film where you, after 90 minutes of little happening, it ends leaving you with thoughts and questions.  I gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 4.

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

Sunday, June 18, 2023

 The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is a mess of a book.  I've read his previous books, one a novel and the other a collection of short stories, and they were so good that I decided to give this one a chance as soon as I read it was being released.  I had to wait about 6 weeks with it on hold at my local library for reading on my Kindle.  It was not worth either the wait nor the amount of time to read it, but I did stay through the end of it.  This one is a hybrid--called a novel but really a collection of short stories in which some characters reappear (only occasionally) in other stories.  What are the problems:  1)  The first story, as well as a later one, both dwell on the critiques women are making of poems that have been submitted in a poetry class.  Their critiques are pretentious and the women seem to be poseurs trying to impress while also trying to tear down the writers.  Boring to read.  2)  In that first story and throughout the book the writer stays with situations way too long; so boring passages become a common element of the whole book.  3)  Throughout the book the author seems to be trying to impress us with his choice of vocabulary, similes, metaphors, etc.  It's distracting and boring when a reader notices something like this, because the reader's mind is pulled away from the story instead of staying in it.  4) There are too many characters with very deep backstories to keep in mind throughout the whole book as they come and go in the stories; that's sign that the author probably wrote all of these as short stories and was convinced to put them together and call it a novel.  5)  There are interesting characters who aren't covered enough and boring characters who are covered too much.  6)  To state it again within this list of points, whoever was the editor didn't do his/her job, so the book is a total mess!  I'm being generous when I give it 3 stars out of 5.   

The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Saturday, June 10, 2023--San Antonio

I stopped reading The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras 5 days ago after reading 46% of the book.  I have had trouble enjoying memoirs before.  I was making slow progress on this one.  There were too many details of South American mythical beliefs and treatments by curandero healers with only minimal progress in telling the story.  It might be a very good book for someone interested enough in this topic to want to continue, but that wasn't me.  The story covers 3 generations of a family--a man, his daughter, and her daughter who live in northeastern Colombia (near the border with Venezuela).  Maybe if the pace of the story went faster with fewer details (and not so many repeated details), I might have finished the book.  Instead, I stopped reading and will rate it at best 2 1/2 stars out of 5. 

A Play for the End of the World by Jai Chakrabarti

Saturday, June 10, 2023--San Antonio

After enjoying his book of short stories recently, I decided to read A Play for the End of the World, the only novel written so far by Jai Chakrabarti.  An award winner and a book frequently recommended on reading lists, the protagonist is a young Polish Jewish man who lived in an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.  The director of the orphanage, knowing that he and the children would soon be taken to Treblinka by the German SS for extermination, had the children stage an Indian play, The Post Office by Tagore, as a way to prepare them for accepting their coming death.  Years later (in the 1970s), the boy who played the lead in the play and who escaped death on the way to Treblinka through a quirk of fate is living in New York where he has met the older orphan who befriended him in Warsaw and who also escaped death only because of being on a work errand at the time the SS arrived and escorted the others to the train for Treblinka.  Furthermore, he is dating a young woman he has met--the first time he has had a relationship with a female his age.  At the same time in eastern India refugees from the Pakistani civil war that resulted in the establishment of Bangladesh have encamped and established a village within woods where the Indian government does not want them to live.  A professor who knows the story of the production of the play in Warsaw and wants to fight the government's plans to expel (or maybe even kill) the refugees has decided that a production in the of the same play with the refugee children playing the roles might provide just enough publicity and international uproar to stop the government's plans.  He enlists the two survivors of the Warsaw orphanage to come to India and guide the production of the play.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.