Long Island by Colm Toibin

Friday, Mar. 14, 2025--San Antonio

Long Island by Colm Toibin was named a best book of 2024 by many top publications.  It is a follow-up to his novel Brooklyn.   Toibin is a good writer.  His style is easy to read and clear and precise.  In this book, the character Eilis has returned to Ireland for the first time in 20 years (from the setting of the first book) to visit her mother supposedly to celebrate the mother's 80th birthday, but really to get away from a problem that has popped up in Brooklyn where her life has been somewhat suffocating from living on a cul de sac that has four houses filled with Italian in-laws.  She is at a point where she must make some major decisions about her life that will affect others--her husband, her children, and her family and friends still living in the small Irish village where she grew up. The book is so well written, that each step of the way the reader can foresee problems that don't have good solutions and the book ends with the reader left in this quandary.  What decisions did every one make?  If this was decided, this would be a problem.  If another decision was made, there would be this a different problem.  All the characters have their faults, so there are reasons for the reader to want the story to go in different ways.  I really enjoyed the book and rated it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor

Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2025--San Antonio

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is set on a small island 5 miles off the coast of Wales where fewer than 40 people live and half of the homes are abandoned due to the hard life on the island and the desire of young persons to leave for the mainland.  One young girl is a star pupil who knows not only Welsh, but also speaks and writes English.  The timing is the 1930's with rumors of war coming, but the news is always delayed by a couple of weeks or more before arriving on the island.  Two researchers from Oxford arrive on the island to study the people and their culture--their music, their stories, their life daily lives, etc.  They hire the young girl to be their assistant for interacting with the locals and for writing what is said and translating it into English for the book the researchers will publish.  The book gives a great picture of what the harsh life is like on the islands.  It also shows that the "researchers" are misinterpreting what they are seeing and hearing and will be presenting a story that is not really true to the life there but to how the researchers have romanticized it to themselves.  (Reading the book brought back memories of the criticisms that Margaret Mead and other anthropologists from that time period eventually received for their work in remote civilizations being misrepresentations.)  The researchers eventually disappoint not only the young girl but also the reader in an emotional ways.  But that was apparently a typical problem for anthropologists of that period in time.  It took a while to really get interested at the beginning of the book, but I soon found myself really enjoying the "real story" of life on the island.  I gave it 4 stars out of 5.

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada

Saturday, Mar. 8, 2025--San Antonio 

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada is, I believe, the first book that I have ever read within 24 hours.  But after about 7 books in a row that didn't excite me much (even though some were well written), it was such a joy to be reading a book that kept me wanting to stay with it page-after-page that I even changed my daily routine to keep going until the end.  It was identified as one of the top novels for young adults from last year (although it likely will be banned from many school libraries because of its subject matter).  It's a coming-of-age novel about the lives of various misfits in their senior year of high school--the tough guys who are considered delinquents, the school nerds, those becoming aware of sexuality issues, etc.  The central character is one of the tough guys in a group of three who call themselves The Triads.  He has been rebelling because of events in his earlier life.  His father was an alcoholic and an abuser until he and his mother finally decided to try to escape.   But a tragic event occurred and they have been afraid of being found by the father for 9 years.  They live a lower-class life in a small apartment above a business.  He works at a local pizza place owned by the father of one of his friends in the Triads to help his mother with the expenses.  He cuts classes, gets into trouble often, and is in danger of failing and having to repeat his senior year.   He is also discovering that he is apparently gay and is afraid to come out to his friends or his mother.  But he has seen and met a ballet dancer who is the best friend of the daughter of his mother's boyfriend's boss when the "family" (mother, son, mother's boyfriend, and boyfriend's daughter) make their annual trip to the local theater during the Christmas season to see a performance of The Nutcracker.  That sets the stage for the coming-of-age events within the lives of multiple people during the final semester of their senior year.  Bad behaviors are analyzed and changed,  enemies come to understand they have more in common than they realized, and adolescents begin to mature and to make amends for the past.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Liars by Sarah Manguso

Friday, Mar. 7, 2025--San Antonio

Liars by Sarah Manguso is a book that took me some time to become invested in it.  It begins with tales of how horrible a marriage is.  The central character is the wife who is being mentally abused by her husband--a man who does nothing to help around the house or with their child, who is a frustrated because of being unsuccessful both as an artist and as a failed (3 times) tech entrepreneur, who is envious of his wife's successful writing career, who constantly manipulates her to feel like she is a failure (in all possible ways), and who regularly implies to friends that she is crazy by emphasizing that she received psychological treatment years before they were married and exaggerating the story as if she had been confined to a mental hospital.  At the same time, the woman keeps downplaying/overlooking/excusing the severity of the abuse while it continues to happen regularly.  I wanted to yell at her.  By the last third of the book, I realized that I had needed to go through all the first 2/3 to understand the situation better and to observe the slow evolution that was occurring in their relationship. I didn't want to put the book down during that last third of it.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky

Monday, Mar. 3, 2025--San Antonio

Poor Dear by Claire Oshetsky has lots of good reviews.  I read it because of one on NPR.  But it was slow reading for me, especially in the beginning.  I spent the whole time I was reading the book trying to figure out exactly what was happening.  Margaret seems to be autistic with indications of high intelligence.  She teaches herself to read by looking at the books as someone reads to her.  She creates her own form of script to write the stories that appear in her mind.   She has a vocabulary that is far above what is expected of a child her age.  But at age 4, a tragedy occurs.  Her best friend is a bit of a wild child--always seeking adventure in dangerous ways.  While playing a game in an unused shed, the friend suggests a game and hides in an old ice chest that locks automatically when she closes the lid.  Margaret can hear her friend panicking and trying to get out of the chest, but Margaret cannot figure out how to operate the latch to free her.  She spends her whole life feeling guilt from that day with the entire town believing that the death of her friend was her fault.  Margaret's conscience seems to take the form of an imaginary animal called Poor Dear which is almost always around needling her about what happened and what she needs to do to atone for the death of her friend.  As the story progresses, there are good and bad experiences in Margaret's life, but the mental illness she is developing keeps interfering.  It's an open-ended book where the reader must decide what Margaret eventually does.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa

Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025--San Antonio

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa was listed as a top book of 2024 by NPR and others.  It is a part of the "Remix" series where classic novels are reinterpreted by authors from marginalized backgrounds.  In this case, the original novel was Pride and Prejudice, and the character Elizabeth is written to be frustrated because "he" (who associates himself with the chosen name of Oliver) has always felt that he is a boy and hates being in dresses, does not ever want to get married, and, thanks to his older sister and two friends who know how he feels, is able to sneak out into society dressing and passing as a man.  (I assume the author is a transgender man and used his experience to reinterpret the character.)  Furthermore, the "awkward with women" character Darcy is reinterpreted as being attracted only to boys.  The story essentially follows the story of book that is being reinterpreted.  The aggressive mother is worried that her 5 daughters must find suitable men to marry because the family home/estate will be inherited by a distance male cousin as the closest male heir.  The father is still rather meek yet understanding (and in this version is coming to realize that his second daughter is more like a son than a daughter even though he does not completely understand the situation yet).  The character Wickham is still conniving to solve his money woes by marrying in a way that will solve those problems.  Etc.  It's an interesting concept.  To make the story work, the author has to overlook the general circumstances of the time for LGBTQ persons, but there is an addendum where he explains that there is historical evidence to support what he has written--evidence of the "male" member of a married couple being discovered as having female genitals upon death, for instance--and pointing out that there were no birth certificates at the time of the novel's setting so that a person could live as the opposite sex with no official records indicating that that he/she wasn't.  It is an easy read and is well written.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.  I probably will not read any others in this remix series, however.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025--San Antonio

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is on the "best list" of multiple publications for 2025.  I found the first half of it to be fantastic.  It was well written, gripping, and seemed very authentic for the experiences and thoughts of a young minority scholarship student attending an elite school.  I was ready to recommend it to everybody.  But the 3rd quarter of the book became a bland telling of event after event with gaps of time between them.  Maybe this was on purpose because one learns that the protagonist wrote much of the novel, then his husband wrote the rest from journal entries.  The final quarter of the book was a bit better, but the excitement for reading it never returned to that I enjoyed with the first half.  If the whole book was like the first half, I would have given it 5 stars.  However, my overall opinion now is that it should be rated 3 1/2 stars out of 5.