Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Wednesday, May 28, 2025--San Antonio

Blood Test by Charles Baxter is supposed to be a comedy.  I did chuckle a few times during the first quarter of the book.  But I had to push myself to continue reading from there and found nothing laughable about the rest of the book.  I know by having read the reviews that this book is supposed to be a critique of modern American society--a farce.  And it is obvious that it is not meant to be read as serious at all.  But for me, the premise, that a successful, intelligent and religious man follows through in taking a blood test which is marketed as being capable of providing results to forecast the individual's future, was too far beyond potential belief.  Scams in America today tend to SOUND believable even though they are planned to do nothing but take advantage of those falling for them.  That this was obviously a scam just led me to lose interest in continuing the novel at the pace I had been reading up to that point.  I had no interest in a character who was so gullible.  I spent at least 3-4 days longer to read this short novel than I should have, but I stayed with it because it has been so popular.  (I had to be on a wait-list for about 12 weeks before getting my copy from the ebook library.)  I'm now glad that I have finished it and can put it behind me.  The most I can rate this book is 3 1/2 stars out of 5. 

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Wednesday, May 21, 2025--San Antonio

There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a best book of the year by Time, NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, and others.  It is a fascinating book.  I consider it to be essentially a philosophy book built around the story of the life of a Black man who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Colombus, OH, playing pickup basketball with his friends at the local poorly maintained park while following the history of both the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team and the city of Cleveland during many years of mostly disappointment and depression for both the team and the city.  If you read about the life of the author, it's obvious that this book is essentially his autobiography with greater intentions than just to tell his life story.  It is one of the most interesting books I have ever read and one of the better written ones, too.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicincio

Saturday, May 3, 2025--San Antonio

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicincio was longisted for the National Book Award this past year and was named a best book of the year by TIME, NPR, etc..  It's the story of a young woman who is sent to the US to live with her grandparents.  Her parents died in an accident when she was too young to have memories of her life with them, and she had been raised by an aunt and an uncle until she was flown to the US entering only with a tourist visa to see her grandparents which, eventually when she did not leave, an illegal immigrant living with two other undocumented, illegal immigrants.  The book is the story of her life in the US.  It describes the way she was taught to keep their secret from everyone.  It tells how she was intelligent and learned everything she knew from reading.  Somehow, however, she did not make progress in learning social skills and is quite unlikable.  She made it into Harvard, but she uses her knowledge of situations in the books she had read to try to reason and analyze what is happening as she interacts with others.  And often she just doesn't care to do so leading to disastrous effects.  I really liked the novel at the beginning, but I became frustrated with her bad decisions toward the end.  Throughout her life, she had managed to come through situations with miracle-like results, but that was all coming to an end during her last semester at Harvard.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.