Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 232
March 16, 2024
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BOOK REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.
Porch Poems by Cheryl Denise, Susanna Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly
The Late Show by Michael Connelly
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Trilby by George du Maurier
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
Fever Season by Barbara Hambly
The Kelsey Outrage by Alison Louise Hubbard
Safe by Imogen Keeper
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson reviewed by Diane Simmons
Rearranged by Kathleen Watt Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell
Educated: a Memoir by Tara Westover Reviewed by Christine Willis
Love Palace by Meredith Sue Willis reviewed by Hilton Obenzinger
This issue has reviews by several friends of mine, including one of an older book of my own by Hilton Obenzinger. I don't usually run reviews of my own books, but this review is fun to read, and it is about a book (Love Palace) that didn't get a lot of notice when it first came out, so I especially appreciate Hilton's review.
We are in a time when books need readers and reviewers badly: there are wonderful books coming out from Knopf and Random House and the other biggies, but a lot of great stuff is overlooked by the conglomerates. Reach further when you can--look at small presses like Dos Madres and University Presses like Ohio University Press and WVU Press.
And once you've read something-- particularly something from a smaller press that you like--make time to write a review. If you have somewhere to place it, great, but also (or only) post the review on Amazon. Whatever you think about Amazon, its short reviews matter, and you can help writers by them.
I continue to make some of my reading choices via the short novel guide Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly by Kenneth C. Davis.This issue I comment on Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Natalia Ginzburg's The Dry Heart, and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. These short books have been especially useful for me as a way to read something by writers I've been hearing about for years and never quite getting to. I went ahead and read another Ginzburg book, Family Lexicon, and expect to read more Lispector soon.
I also reread a couple of Michael Connelly's books instead of watching Netflix or HBO. Connelly is a very dependable writer with a clean style, serious and entertaining, and when I'm too tired to challenge myself, I often turn to Harry Bosch or the Lincoln Lawyer.
Again, please share your reviews: I'm happy to have submissions here, including ones you're publishing on Amazon).
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick
Perhaps more than the spoons, I love the birds in this book. They, along with a multitude of images brought to mind by the uses of and phrases using spoons, light up Minick’s collection of poems with what Doug Van Gundy calls “a near-boundless affection for the overlooked and quotidian.”
The poems are suffused with delight and love even as they look grimly at the loss and future loss of lifestyles and species. “Diminished,” for example (p.23), is about the passing ofovenbirds. This poem, like several others, is addressed to a specific poet, in this case Robert Frost. Mick speaks directly to climate change again in “When You Realize the Future” (p. 84).
But I kept anticipating the birds: the lost ones, but also the living ones. They give the book its cohesion (along with the spoons!), and sometimes, like “Spoon Bill,” you get both. “Why Birds” (53), celebrates love of birds and love of a woman. “Blink” (p. 79) is about a hands-on close encounter with a stunned cardinal, but there are also jays and sparrows and many others: the precise color of their feathers, the vicissitudes of their precarious small, striving lives, and Minick’s swell of gratitude to be in the world with them.Birds fly me away
from me, but also back– (53)
There are other animals too: in “Coyote Grace” (3) where the coyote puppies have a yodeling school and get the "nightly hairy news.” “Earth Diving” (66) is the fanciful title for a dog’s funny hobby of rolling with “odoriferous joy” in whatever is rotten. There are also several excellent narrative poems, especially the stunning voice piece “Tim Slack the Fix it Man” (57) with its calmly mentioned double murder. This one is too compact, humorous, and shocking to quote in part–just get a copy and read it!
And finally, there are the spoons. The book begins and ends with spoon poems: the opening “To Spoon” (1) explores the metaphors and the actual metal cutlery.
To spoon is not to fork--
that’s what we do to steaks
and roads and manure.
And the final poem, the “Intimacy of Spoons” (81) takes us to a lovely ending, in bed with a lover--spouse--partner: “knees cupped,/thighs touching."
Spooning.
Porch Poems by Cheryl Denise, Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Porch Poems, a chapbook anthology of 24 poems by four authors, offers new work in keeping with some of the most characteristic themes of Appalachian poetry—connectedness to family and community; connectedness to place and nature; and respect for work and the everyday. Cheryl Denise, Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal, all well-known and highly respected in Appalachia and beyond, formed a kind of writing collaborative that resulted in the collection. The foreword to the chapbook notes that the four friends began meeting in May, 2016, in Pocahontas County, “one of the most beautiful and peaceful spots in West Virginia.” That spring and at least one week-end a year for the next few years, they stayed at
an old house built for a section foreman of the Greenbrier Railroad in the early 1900s. During their stays at what they deemed “Poet Camp,” they wrote, critiqued each other’s work, and exchanged ideas. In keeping with the spirit of the book, I refrain from identifying the author of any of quoted passages below, as the collection refrains from doing so until the end of the book. Readers familiar with the poets might guess who wrote what.
“Audience Blessing,” the first poem in the collection, addresses an imagined community of readers directly. It lists things the narrator hopes those who read the book will take away from it:
:
Blessings to each of you.
May you find something familiar
in the words we share.
May you find kindness.
May you find solace.
May you remember
one moment you had forgotten.
May you find a gentle way
to listen to the morning
gossip of crows.
Even when expressing awe at the mystery of nature the diction and rhythms of these poems are natural-sounding. The tone is conversational, as in “Almost Hidden,” in which the narrator talks to someone dear, describing a trek the two made together on a narrow trail along the Mississippi River in winter. The poem ends with these lines, which honor both the beloved and what the couple sought:
I saw your eyes
and knew why
we had come
here
now
to see the cranes
standing
thousands
still and patient
breathing
quiet
almost hidden
in the morning snow
“DNA” uses a scientific acronym as the title to a kind of tall tale about origins, crediting family with passing traits to a descendant. Written in the third-person, the poet opens with— “His father was firewood./His mother an ax./ He knows how to burn,” and goes on to claim, “His father was a moon./ His mother a hawk./ He hunts at night.” Other family members lend traits, too: “His grandfather was a trail./ His grandmother a boot./ He travels light and fast./ His uncle is a hemlock./ Another a spade./ He is green and planted.” The author uses exaggeration to make a serious point.
Several poems assume the serio-comic manner that runs through Appalachian poetry and prose. “Rules for the Open Mic Poetry Reading” offers friendly advice for the community that populates open mic readings. The advice for the poet includes the following: “Don’t explain the whole poem before you begin./ Don’t stumble or slouch,/ or pick the scab at your elbow.” Advice for the listener includes “Gaze out the window of your mind/ and change what you see according to what you hear./Allow yourself to be surprised.”
Missing home and family is the theme of “Borders,” a poem that surprised me because the place the narrator misses is far away from Appalachia. The narrator, writing in the second person, describes crossing the Canadian border into this country and a new life then tells how it feels years later:
But even though you unfurled and became bold,
reading poems on the radio,
still some days, roaming these hills,
you wish for a family crisis,
an unexpected surgery,
anything to pull you north for a month,
maybe two,
pretending you could stay.
References to labor appear often in the collection. “Reprieve” follows a woman living in the country as she goes out to gather eggs. Ready to kill one of her hens for what I imagine to be Sunday dinner, she notices the hen is on the nest: “So you’re laying again, old girl.”/ ‘The clouds move on./ This will be a good day,’ she says.” The poet takes away the sense of complacency, however, with the next lines of this last stanza of the poem: “Sunlight gleams/ on the sharp edge of the blade/ hanging just inside the henhouse door.”
“Blue Watering Can” connects work and life with the presence of death, too, in the things the narrator holds up for us to see—a peach tree heavy with fruit, tomatoes growing, a blue watering can:
When the watering is done she sits
in a wooden rocker on the porch
built on to the trailer,
finishes her smoke with long, slow drags,
making it last,
making it last.
. . . .
Over the hill
coonhounds shift sadly on long chains.
One jumps to the roof of his doghouse,
as if to better see the road, the trailer,
the man inside who wheezes
with the steady beat of the oxygen tank,
watches hunting shows on TV,
as if maybe one night he will unchain the dogs,
grab his gun, walk the midnight hills again.
The porch, in “Blue Watering Can: serves, among other things, as a metaphor for a borderland between life and death. In “Fermata” (a music symbol that looks like an eyebrow over an eye and signifies lengthening of a note), it signifies the time between day and night:
Night approaches.
Hermit Thrush rushes into song.
Doe and fawn rise in meadows.
Snakes slide home.
Dusk pulls near.
Patient on the porch
I wait alone for that succinct moment
My body relaxes,
skin marries the air.
Here the porch acknowledges the border, but—in this last poem of the collection—emphasizes the sense of connection that runs through the book.
The motif of a borderland, both connecting and separating, is an especially poignant motif for the people of the Appalachian Mountains, as. Appalachia itself has long been regarded as a borderland—between east and west in the settling of this nation during the 18th and early 19th centuries; between the north and south in the Civil War years; and between poverty and wealth in the mid-to late 20th century. This collection, published in 2023 by Sheila-Na-Gig, bodes well for the region’s place as a borderland between past and future, connecting the past, “what brung us,” with a sense of the importance of a communal future with the natural world.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
This was my first work by Lispector, of whom I've been hearing for a long time in places like (I think) The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. There was always a sense that she was highly experimental, maybe something of a literary show-off, but if this small novel is a good example, she is on the contrary extremely easy to read and pretty powerful.
Brazilian, although born a Ukrainan Jew, Lispector published this book
in 1977, not long before her death.She fascinated the Brazilian public, and her books sold well. The Hour or the Star has a complex story within a story and is told by a male writer character who spends a lot of time sharing his travails with writing before getting to his story, which is a simple life and death of a very poor young woman. It has some of the tone of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, but with more devastating poverty and no parrot.
The striking thing to me is that the remarkable, small novel does not feel like an experiment, but how she had to write it.
Educated: a Memoir by Tara Westover Reviewed by Christine Willis
Tara Westover, Dr. Westover, entered my life via her memoir Educated, too late. Had I read her resistant-to-being-put-down book before I retired from high school teaching, I would have made the book required reading for my students in an
Expository Reading and Writing course.
Not a few of my many students disdained education and would have opted out had the option been open to them. Dr. Westover, however, was denied an education by her fundamentalist (my description) Mormon parents. Her father, driven to a degree by the Ruby Ridge events, took the extreme route of keeping some of his children from attending any school but home school. (The education she received at home had extremely little to do with academics; learning how to work with “scrap” was her alternate learning environment filled with sexism, violence, and hard labor.) She reveals how she agonizingly gained an education (initially by hiding who she was and where she had come from), and how she was able to finally fashion a family.
Family relationships are described in painful detail, and Westover admits to memory differences among people involved in important family events. It would have been frightening to have lived the life she lived as a child of her parents. The world view she was given was unique to her family, and it appears to have influenced her choices and actions well into her adulthood.
Trilby by George du Maurier
This 1894 novel by George du Maurier, the Franco-American caricaturist and writer (and grandfather of Daphne du Maurier), came to me first as a Classics Illustrated comic when I was about seven. At the time, I was was thrilled by the melodrama, the mystery of hypnotism, the hints of sexuality, and the the evil of Svengali, the impresario who trains Trilby to become a great singer.
What I didn’t remember (and probably wasn’t in the comic book version) was the gross anti-Semitism toward the clownish but villainous Svengali, who is hook-nosed, averse to bathing but brilliantly musical. Those passages are offensive reading now. Even so, the novel is entertaining. It spends most of its time on the story of three young British artists living and painting and carousing in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Apparently the details of that life and the great friendship of the artists and their working class friend Trilby are based on Du Maurier’s own life and observations.
This part is lots of fun, with drinking parties, Svengali on the scene--the anti-Semitism off-handed and cultural at this point. Then things get serious when Little Billee’s mother and sister show up to take him back to England and stop his marriage to Trilby. There’s lots of nervous prostration, and Trilby runs away so she won’t ruin Billee’s life, and he almost dies, and loses his ability to love even his great friends Taffy and the Laird.
You can deprecate the story for coincidences and melodrama and sections that go off on the wonders of the Latin Quarter, but the story moves forward. Little Billee is presented as a real artist, unlike his friends who like the life style more than the art. He has an interesting crisis in which he pretends to be affectionate with friends and family, but his heart is closed. His frozen emotions aren’t released until he hears the famous mysterious La Svengali, a singer who comes from apparently nowhere but has a voice that breaks and heals hearts and has never been heard before or since. Can she be the young men’s Trilby who had a magnificent speaking voice, but couldn’t carry a tune? In the final section, the mystery is solved, Svengali’s hold over his ward is broken, there is much satisfactory sorrow with plenty of time for memories and long farewells.
Whether you would want to read this would depend, I think, on your tolerance for some over-long passages of nineteenth century tangents and melodrama--and anti-Semitism that turns a figure of unpleasant fun into a devilish villain.
Love Palace by Meredith Sue Willis reviewed by Hilton Obenzinger
In Martha, Meredith Sue Willis has created a great hard-boiled narrator. She’s been hurt and pissed off, mainly by her two “rotters,” her father and her ex-husband, and the world that’s dealt her a tough hand, and she finds relief through sex and constant instability, confiding in her therapist, when she can afford her. She’s ready for change, and stumbles into the Love Palace, a church, a social center, and an
organizing HQ for its elusive charismatic spiritual leader, and by happenstance she becomes its administrator. The Love Palace is among the last low-income housing buildings in the riverside New Jersey neighborhood being overrun by gentrification, and it becomes the focal point for a fight to save what’s left. The Love Palace is a catalyst, pulling together multiple lives and stories into a pulsating community. Martha ends up cajoled to marry a much younger man, scion of the rich couple who owns the Love Palace as a project of their church – or at least we think they own it. The Love Palace community fights eviction and demolition, and knowing who owns the building is crucial – and knowing the truth about the spiritual leader as well. The novel is filled with surprises and revelations as the mysteries peel away, and Martha grows increasingly capable of handling the madness of seduction, deceit, and betrayal. Love Palace, the novel, is a delight to read, and Martha is a tough character worth meeting again and again."
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Offill’s second novel (and she does not produce many) of 2014 was highly praised. Many people seem to like its brief sections in block format, not paragraphs, with some space between them. It’s the story of a writer who has, she thinks, a wonderful marriage, focuses on her work and her neuroses in a very New York City milieu. Then she has a baby, falls in love with it, suffers for it, fears all the possible evils that might befall the child. She seems to think her child and her experience of motherhood are unique-- and trouble ensues in the marriage. The writing is witty and beautifully accomplished, although I could use just a little more self-awareness of how the narrator’s life is at once ordinary and at the same time, not the kind of life most people are privileged to lead.
I recommend balancing this rather tepid praise with Roxane Gay’s review of it in the The New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html
The Kelsey Outrage by Alison Louise Hubbard
Alison Hubbard's novel The Kelsey Outrage takes place shortly after the Civil War in a fishing and farming village on Long Island where a disappearance turns into a murder, and Cathleen Kelsey turns herself into a successful sleuth as she tries to find out what happened to her brother. She knows he has been tarred and feathered after an accusation of rape, but Cathleen is sure he’s innocent, and that the alleged victim’s wealthy fiancé and his powerful local friends are responsible.
One of the things being explored here is the conflict between the affluent original inhabitants of the town and the immigrant Irish, as well as the age-old propensity of the wealthy to get away with murder. What powers the novel is Hubbard’s excellent. layered storytelling. It’s a crime novel, but also the portrait of Cathleen as she faces off against far more powerful people who see themselves as the masters of their little universe.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson reviewed by Diane Simmons
Somewhere in the Far West, the town of Fingerbone perches on the bank of a lake that is cold and deep, and haunted by those who have died in its waters. The deaths are legendary—the town’s own version of the Titanic—as one night, passengers enjoying a train journey in warm, bright coaches, plunge off a trestle bridge, the lights and the lives, instantly extinguished in the black depths.
Afterward, the lake is still here, as is the little mountain town. But Fingerbone is built upon land reclaimed from the lake, and the smell of the water that comes through the tap is that of dank, freezing death, the ferocity of the wilderness invading through the house.
One family raised in the odd, little town struggles to locate “normal” life. One of the sisters, Helen, who went off for a time to Seattle, brings her two daughters — Ruthie and Lucille— home to Fingerbone to stay with their grandmother. Then Helen gives her handbag to a boy and drives her car into the lake. Helen’s death prompts another of the sisters, Sylvie, to leave off her life as a hobo and come home. The grandmother has died, and someone must keep house for the two pre-teen girls.
For Sylvie, though, the idea of living a settled life has become alien, and she continues some of her drifter habits. But for the sake of the girls, she tries to do the things that proper housekeeping seems to require. Houses need to be furnished, for example, so Sylvie dutifully goes about collecting furnishings. She does not, however, acquire the things usual to houses, but rather the materials she knows from her life on the road, especially newspapers and tin cans. She piles and bundles the paper neatly, washes and stacks the cans.
Sylvie is cheerful and kind, and the girls, Lucille and Ruthie, are all right. They go to school most of the time. Sometimes, though, they take off to ramble through the forests and along the lake. On one such adventure, they become disoriented and don’t make it home until the next day; a crumbling old cabin suggests the fate of lost children.
After this adventure, Lucille— recognizing both the charm and the gentle insanity of the wandering life—makes a sudden, irrevocable decision to go straight. She learns to sew herself proper clothes, and studies fashionable hair styles in magazines. She gets herself adopted by a teacher and is eventually accepted by normal girls.
But Ruthie remains with Sylvie, and—as if they were only trying for Lucille’s sake—they now wordlessly agree to drop their efforts to observe expected conventions. Ruthie gives up school and Sylvie stops trying to puzzle out what a proper home might be. Now they are free, too free for Fingerbone.
Later, as the lake is searched in vain for their bodies—Can they really have crossed the mile-long railroad trestle in the dark? Can they live forever as drifters? —we see that the story isn’t about houses at all, but the beauty, immensity, and sometimes fatal allure of the still untamed West.
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
I read The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg in more or less in one sitting. It’s a gripping little book that spins out from a crime and turns out to be about a bad marriage, entered into for bad reasons that don’t stop any of the parties from obsessing and suffering. There is also a sad portrait of mothering. Just about all of it is sad and grim and gray–and I couldn’t put it down.
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg deserves her fame, but I don’t find this particular work as sympathetic (to me) as I'd hoped. It is about a large, eccentric family in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. They have a vast acquaintance of equally eccentric and brilliant friends–many of them important in the arts and politics, especially in the anti-Mussolini world. Mixed with discussions are actual partisan activities. Many of the people in this book, in fact, end up jailed or killed under Mussolini or later under the Nazis, but the book--called a novel but using real events and real people and striving for a true account. It is told from the matter-of-face perspective of the youngest child in the family, first as a child and then as a young woman.
I loved a lot of the individual people. They change realistically over time without a lot of back story on how and why. It has a brilliant, moving ending in the form of several pages of faintly nostalgic dialogue between the parents of the family.
I also value its firm focus on what the Second World War and Mussolini’s fascism meant on the ground in Italy to a family of the professorial class with a bombastic Jewish father and a cheerful self-described lazy Catholic mother. As a group, the people are realistic about the horrors being experienced and their own losses (Ginzburg’s young husband is one). The translation is smooth and easy, but the conceit of the work is the Levi family’s idiosyncratic slang-words, and they are translated into English equivalents that don’t have the resonance I expect they do in Italian. It took me a while to get into this world, it’s an important world, well worth the visit.
Rearranged by Kathleen Watt Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell
Kathleen Watt’s memoir Rearranged is riveting. With the marvelous ear of the opera singer she once was turned now into nearly pitch-perfect prose, she recounts her harrowing ten-year odyssey of dealing with facial cancer and innumerable reconstructive surgeries. On the way, she informs the reader of the intricate architecture of the face and the equally delicate medical procedures required to restore that architecture. Sustaining infections, dislodged protheses, medical psychosis, and the emotional roller coaster of triumphs beset with setback after setback, she records the journey she and her partner traverse with authenticity, wit, and sobering bravery. The reader is left with awe over the heroism required to sustain optimism. When hers finally fails, she refuses to gloss over despair. When restored, it feels earned by the sheer grit of enduring that darkness. This is an inspiring, wise, astonishing book.
I attended the launch reading of Rearranged. Kathleen Watt looks terrific. She read with humor and drama, even singing. Like the performer she once was and still is.
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Here's another book I've been hearing of for fifty years, but never read. It was recommended to me by a children's writer (I’m working on a novel with a child narrator).
This starts fairly slowly with a clever eleven
The beginning didn’t seem especially special to me, but one needs to keep in mind that Harriet (published in 1964) was a game changer in how the characters, including Harriet herself and her friends, are not just cutely mischievous but occasionally nearly vicious. It's an affluent world of nannies and cooks and enormous freedom for a kid like Harriet who runs pretty free after days at her loosey-goosey-artsy private school. For example, Harriet has to choreograph a dance for herself as an onion.
The books gets better and better as it goes along, and a little over halfway in, there is a crisis when the wrong people find and read Harriet’s notebook and she gets involved in a pretty terrible battle with the other students that includes pouring ink over people and tripping them and isolating them and a lot of things terrible to children.
The getting better as it goes is always one of my major criterion for success.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
My favorite part of the novel are the scenes centering on a deaf boy who gets sent to the asylum. I'm a sucker for people-in-institutions-stories, and McBride does it really, really well. This part of the novel deserves all the accolades the book has been getting, in my opinion.
For me, though, the legendary story-telling quality of much of the rest is not as
much to my taste. I confess, then, that both what I love and what I don't love so much is about taste. I have a lot of respect for McBride and what he’s trying to do, but my whole life has been about trying to figure out what’s really real, and while I certainly enjoy tales and fantasy, I tend to like best even in those genres the characters more than the pyrotechnics. And I do like the characters here, but the half-humorous tall tale quality always sounds better to me told in person than on the page. Legends and myths make me wary.
There are some chapters and scenes in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store that are as good as anything contemporary I’ve ever read: the deaf boy Dodo communicating with his friend who has cerebral palsy, for example, and some terrific dialogues with precise dialect on all kinds of topics. On the other hand, I don't like the POV section of the evil racist doctor who is, compared to all the other characters, quite clichéd.
For a solid recommendation of the book, read what Maureen Corrigan has to say on NPR.
SHORT TAKES
Safe by Imogen Keeper
I just finished Safe, the fourth of five Imogen Keeper novels in the After the Plague series. She does the details of post apocalyptic life well, keeping it all pretty quotidian. In her world, it was a pandemic that killed half the population, and every survivor has lost a couple of loved ones. There's lots of predatory violence and some dictatorships and armies forming up, but the novel is, in fact, a romance (so is post-apocalyptic romance a thing?)
Keeper makes her love story a teaser, Frankie and Yorke are four (very short) books in, and have done just about everything sexual except intercourse. And doing just-about-everything-sexual very vividly, too. But Yorke, a big powerful warrior-type, is saving the final intimacy for when Frankie is finally ready--namely ready to let go of her dead husband. It's really pretty funny, how close they come and then, Oh wait, let's not. I assume Keeper knows it's funny. And old-fashioned, to have that particular sex act given such importance.
On the other hand, I'm quite engaged in their story, especially how she creates group dynamics. It's not a loner story. It's about their group, that has taken over a big resort based on the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. They garden, they search out gas for their vehicles, and they have a difficult relationship with a big group in the nearest town who are not exactly evil but rather bullies. They force our survivors to give them half their seedlings and share one guy who's an engineer.
Keeper also quietly has all the groups, including the big bad ones in D.C. let by women. I wonder if Keeper would have preferred to write more post-apocalypse and less romance, or if this Big Tease plot line is what she really likes.Easy to keep reading. Good on dogs, children, friendship.
Fever Season by Barbara Hambly
Another Benjamin January historical mystery set in 1830's New Orleans with terrific background of class and race distinctions and the devastation of Yellow Fever and cholera. January is working in a hospital where most medicine is by today’s standards malpractice. He also teaches piano to the daughters of a high class creole lady of interesting contradictions.
The characters alone would carry the story: there’s January’s extremely cool (in several senses) mother and his sisters, as well as his opium addicted white violinist friend. I particularly enjoyed a “Kaintuck” policeman with a penchant for missing the spittoon with his tobacco spit.
Murder, torture, surprises, and the constant danger of bad actors kidnaping free blacks and selling them into (or in some cases back into) slavery. I like almost everything about this novel, except that it probably needed one final run-through of tightening. As Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare when told that the Bard always wrote straight ahead without blotting (i.e. correcting) a line,"Would he had blotted a thousand."
More Connelly
I’m reading Connelly again. I started reading his books seven years ago when we were simultaneously selling and buying a house. It was hot and we didn't have a.c., and I always seemed to be stuck in one of the houses waiting anxiously for a call about money or repairs. I couldn't concentrate on anything intellectually challenging. I fell hard for Michael Connelly's Bosch, that perfectly serious and sincere urban cowboy loner with big gaps in his psychological make-up, whose true and only love is tracking murderers. He has a daughter eventually, but she mostly just distracts him from his calling.He's a native of Los Angeles, the child of a murdered prostitute, survivor of various institutions, and a veteran of the Vietnam War. His personality and Connelly's scrupulously believable police procedures (his plots are somewhat less believable, but I don't care so much about plot) work together extremely well. It's fast moving stories set on a bedrock of the inner suffering and narrow vision of a warrior. There are also a lot of fun minor characters and great L.A. scenery. None of Connelly's other protagonists come close. Mickey Haller the Lincoln Lawyer (and Bosch's half brother) is fun, but he's a first person narrator, a trickster, whose brash, optimistic voice carries the entertainment fact.
Harry's the man, though. I reread these instead of watching t.v.
The Late Show by Michael Connelly
Nice to be back in his meticulous police procedures, but Renée Ballard isn’t Harry Bosch. I think the problem is that MC just doesn’t feel her the way he feels Bosch. He tries hard, and he’s so good at what he does that I was totally into it, but she’s a skeleton crew going through the story–a damaged person, but without the historical/generational reverberations of Bosch. In her case, her dad died more or less in front of her in a surfing accident. She is semi-homeless, has a nice grandmother, a dog, a surf board. Basically lives out of a van.
The detection was fun: at least three cases underway, lots of personal betrayal in Ballard’s life, so she has ended up on the “Late Show,” the overnight shift. There's a nasty evil murderer; a semi-sympathetic portrayal of an ex porn star who now directs porn; bondage; life-threatening danger at 60% of the way through–typical of Connelly–with most of the violence and ugliness off-stage or in a crime scene till then. There's a daring escape, some sleazy cops and dedicated cops. Satisfying fast read.
Desert Star (2022) by Michael Connelly
This one is Bosch and Ballard together, and Bosch is sick at the end. He gets called “old man” a few too many times. I read this one in a used hard copy instead of as an e-book, and I kept feeling how many pages were left between my fingers, hoping it would last a long time. It didn’t, even though it was between 350 and 400 pages long. Two serial killers, a reset of the Cold Cases group, Renee running it now, Bosch back as a volunteer. Lots of taking the 101 to 405 then the 10 to Santa Monica. I go to L.A. a couple of times a year now, so I love that. Ballard is still just okay–she just doesn’t have the depth that Connelly feels for Bosch. Daughter Madison is in and out of this one toward the end–written after the t.v. series got going.
Two Kinds Of Truth (2017)
This is the one with the stone cold Russian killers and the plane rides over the Salton Sea. It is also the one with a sneering serial killer Bosch put behind bars who is suddenly about to be freed by new evidence that Bosch is sure has somehow been planted. The two plots, the dead pharmacists/drug plot and the serial killer seem like totally separate stories, but Connelly seems to do that a lot, at least in his later books, and my rereads blend it all into one long epic. Not complaining.
For a fuller review, check out Kirkus.
The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly
The big question here is whether the person Mickey Haller is defending is the real perp or not, and of course Haller is determined NOT to answer the question, only to defend the person.I enjoy his energetic generally optimistic voice– Connelly’s male characters have a nice tendency toward faithfulness, wanting to get back to the One They Love even after divorce etc. In Mickey Haller’s case, that’s part of his charming optimism. There’s also a good informal series of exchanges on guilt and innocence and how a Defense lawyer is better off not knowing about the client’s status. And all the turns of the case and the courtroom antics are a lot of fun.
LISTS
Phyllis Moore recommends Wiley Cash’s best books of 2023:
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch
Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash
Yellow Face by R.F, Kuang
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
To Anyone Who Ever Asks:The Life Times and Music of Connie Converse by Howard Fishman
After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher
American Caliph by Shahan Mufti
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More
Danny Williams' March Adventures in Editing
Peggy Backman writes: "Years ago I wrote a column for a small town newspaper on classic cars. I had heard that the newspaper was really bad in terms of delaying payment, so I refused to write anything until I was paid As it turned out, at some point they changed editors. I had written three articles (that I had been paid for upfront), but the new editor decided to discontinue the column—and I even had a little following! So at least I had my money, but I felt so bad for the people I had interviewed for the articles, as they were looking forward to reading about themselves and their cars. Congrats to those who got this new law passed."
https://authorsguild.org/news/
agcelebrates-passage-of-new-yo rk-state-freelance-isnt-free- act/
See Ben Shepherd's suggestions for online marketing. He sells services, but has lots of free ideas too.
Jane Friedman's "Hot Sheet" of new agents & presses from 2023 Free lectures from Authors Publish
A free publication from AuthorsPublish about how to publish in literary journals.
Check out WriterBeware.com, which keeps us up-to-date on scams and bad publishing options: it comes from a genre organization, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, but has information that is useful for all writers.
A list of literary journals and 'zines that accept previously published work.
GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Two pieces from Scott Oglesby's memoir online at Red Dirt Press. Red Dirt Press is a publication focused on "New South" writers, and the two pieces from Telling Dixie Good-bye are "Waiting For Mama" and "Rednecks and Sofabeds."
Rachel King interviews Austin Ross and recommends his novel Gloria Patri.
Check out Malarkey Books (thanks to Rachel King).
Joe Chuman's latest substack entry on his recent trip to Israel: always stimulating and worthwhile.
Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read!
An interesting New Yorker story by Sheila Heti that she wrote by interrogating and manipulating a chatbot and then cutting out her own lines. "According to Alice" starts out charming, then gets pretty weird and a little tedious. Definitely the best thing I've read with Chatbot collaboration, though: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/according-to-alice-fiction-sheila-heti
Daniela Gioseffi "It Might as Well Be Spring" youtube singing and art!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Just published--New Poetry by Jane Hicks!
The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.
Marc Kaminsky's latest translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan Review (vol.21. No. 1). The issue is available as hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan Review .
The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother," "Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit."
New Poetry book by Ernie Brill: Journeys of Voices and Choices
Leslie Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become those journeys to another way of seeing every place and time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when the going gets kind of rough. Unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine any time. Don’t miss this ride.”
James Crews says of Barbara Crooker's new collection Slow Wreckage, “Opening a book of poetry by Barbara Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need: the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.”
Coming April 16, 2024 Deborah Clearman's The Angels of Sinkhole County
Founded in 2016, Review Tales informs, inspires, and provides knowledge of the craft of writing and supports indie authors by providing a platform to demonstrate their well-deserved work. The quarterly magazine is dedicated to readers, writers, self-publishers and includes literature discussions. It is an essential collection of author confessions, exclusive interviews, words of wisdom, book reviews, and literary works. Founder & Editor in Chief: S. Jeyran Main.
Look for Laura Tillman's new nonfiction book, The Migrant Chef: the Life and Times of Lala Garcia.
Rachel Kin's Bratwurst Haven won a 2023 Colorado Book Award.
Published in Persian!
My novel for children Billie of Fish House Lane. See announcement here. The Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) has just announced that "Juvenile fiction book Billie of Fish House Lane by American author Meredith Sue Willis has been published in Persian and is available to Iranian Children."
BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.
If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book.
You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left. Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184, as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.
Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores.
Paperback Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical books with other readers.
Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."
If you use an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927). Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned books from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere--easier to read and more attractive.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
LICENSE
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
Meredith Sue Willis Home
Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.
BACK ISSUES:
#232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill. Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis.
#231 Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk. Review by Dreama Frisk.
#230 Henry Adams, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis.
#229 John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons.
#228 Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.
#227 Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and more.
#226 Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker, Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more.
#225 Demon Copperhead, Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more.
#224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more.
#223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White.
#222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more.
#221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly
#220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury
#219 Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams.
#218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman.
#217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover.
#216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more
#214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, and more.
#213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers.
#198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN! Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99 Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98 Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97 Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96 Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95 Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94 Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93 Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92 Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91 Richard Powers discussion
#90 William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89 William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88 Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87 Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86 Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85 Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84 Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83 3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82 The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81 Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80 Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79 Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78 The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77 On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76 Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75 The Makioka Sisters
#74 In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73 Joyce Dyer
#72 Bill Robinson WWII story
#71 Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70 On Reading
#69 Nella Larsen, Romola
#68 P.D. James
#67 The Medici
#66 Curious Incident,Temple Grandin
#65 Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64 Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63 The Namesame
#62 Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61 Lauren's Line
#60 Prince of Providence
#59 The Mutual Friend, Red Water
#58 AkÉ, Season of Delight
#57 Screaming with Cannibals
#56 Benita Eisler's Byron
#55 Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54 Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53 Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52 Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51 Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50 Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49 Caucasia
#48 Richard Price, Phillip Pullman
#47 Mid- East Islamic World Reader
#46 Invitation to a Beheading
#45 The Princess of Cleves
#44 Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43 Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42 John Sanford
#41 Isabelle Allende
#40 Ed Myers on John Williams
#39 Faulkner
#38 Steven Bloom No New Jokes
#37 James Webb's Fields of Fire
#36 Middlemarch
#35 Conrad, Furbee, Silas House
#34 Emshwiller
#33 Pullman, Daughter of the Elm
#32 More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31 Lesbian fiction
#30 Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29 More William Styron
#28 William Styron
#27 Daniel Gioseffi
#26 Phyllis Moore
#25 On Libraries....
#24 Tales of the City
#23 Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22 More on Why This Newsletter
#21 Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin
#20 Jane Lazarre
#19 Artemisia Gentileschi
#18 Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey
#17 Arthur Kinoy
#16 Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15 George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14 Small Presses
#13 Gap Creek, Crum
#12 Reading after 9-11
#11 Political Novels
#10 Summer Reading ideas
#9 Shelley Ettinger picks
#8 Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7 About this newsletter
#6 Maria Edgeworth
#5 Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4 Homer Hickam and The Chosen
#3 J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2 Chick Lit
#1 About this newsletter
