Books Read in 2022 - Part 3

Books: the final installment!

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Oreo (Fran Ross)

Christine Clark – “Oreo” to her family, though originally it was supposed to be “Oriole” – is a teenager in 1970s Philadelphia (when the book was originally published) and she is on a mission. She has only ever known her mother’s side of the family – African Americans who moved up to Philadelphia from the South not long before she was born – but would very much like to find her father, a white Jewish man. Oreo embodies both sides of her heritage – her speech is full of both Southern rhythms and Yiddish exclamations and terms – and she is both self-assured and intelligent enough to figure out what needs to happen. This is a ridiculous book – smart, funny, deeply odd, playful in its episodic structures and characters, and wonderfully memorable, and if I were perhaps more of a classicist I’d have picked up on the fact that it’s basically a retelling of the Greek myth of Theseus as Oreo heads from Philadelphia to New York City and faces off against a host of opponents before finally finding her father in perhaps the most unexpected way possible. But mostly I just enjoyed the story and the various locales and experiences that I remember from growing up in a largely Jewish area just outside of Philadelphia in the 1970s. This is a book that Lauren had to read for her African American Literature class and she thought I’d enjoy it. She was absolutely right about that. As you’d expect from a book assigned in a university class, the novel is bracketed by two short scholarly essays, the first of which was interesting and the second of which reminded me why I don’t read scholarly essays on literature, but the novel itself rises above them and remains a joy to read.

Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

I read this book because a friend really loves Berger’s ideas, and it was an interesting experience. Berger writes about art and how it is seen and what that seeing means in a larger cultural context, but he wrote this in the early 1970s and it is very much a product of its time itself, a way that the 1970s saw things. There are seven chapters – three simply images, one after another, arranged to tell a story that Berger wanted to tell though without any particular guidance for the reader, and four fairly detailed examinations of how things are seen. The chapter on publicity (what today would probably be called advertising) was probably the most grounded, while the one on oil paintings was the most theoretical. It’s an interesting look at a time and place and how one can see art. It’s also an interesting object in itself – the book is short (166pp) and slightly larger than a standard paperback, but it is printed on heavy stock glossy paper that gives it a literal weight that one suspects Berger would have approved of. It’s also printed in a bold-face sans-serif font and studded liberally with small black and white reproductions of artwork (the concept of reproducing art being the main subject of one of the essays), most of which really should have been larger and in color to get his points across but that would have been prohibitively expensive in the early 1970s. So in an odd sort of way it works on two levels. 

The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, a Surreal Memoir (Tom Garvey)

If you are a Philadelphia sports fan of a certain age this is a book you must read. Tom Garvey was a Vietnam vet at loose ends in the 1970s – he’d served in combat, came back and graduated from college, and then the wheels fell off his life. He bounced around to a few different things and then got a job with Nilon Brothers, who handled all of the food and parking at the Philadelphia sports complex (Veterans Stadium, JFK Stadium, and the Spectrum) in its various incarnations from the 1950s through the early 1980s. The Nilons were his uncles. Through what could charitably be described as a series of improbable events, Garvey a) becomes the head of the parking division, a job he had no interest in taking but which when presented became something of an inevitability, and b) carves an apartment out of an unused concession stand on the 200-level of Veterans Stadium, way out in left field. He lived in that apartment for two years – 1979-1981 – and met pretty much everyone who was anyone who came to the stadium. This is him telling that story, and the names and places were a marvelous walk down memory lane for me. I was in high school when the Phillies won the Series in the fall of 1980 and the Eagles lost the Super Bowl a couple of months later, and I had a grand time with this book. It helps that Garvey is an engaging storyteller with a gift for getting himself into just the damndest places and situations. There is a certain melancholy to it, a report from a vanished age in many ways, but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

Where’s Me Plaid? A Scottish Roots Odyssey (Scott Crawford)

Sometime in the early 21st century, Scott Crawford made two discoveries. First, that the next vacation he and his wife Katrina would take from their home in the British Virgin Islands would be to Scotland, and second, that Crawford was a Scottish name and therefore he could visit ancestral sites while he was there. Out of such realizations came this book, which is a jaunty and well told story of two tourists – Crawford is originally from Ohio – on the prowl in Scotland, alternately being vaguely disappointed to discover their ancestors didn’t get the credit for things that Crawford felt they should, and being absolutely enthralled by the breathtaking beauty and blood curdling history of the place. They visit all sorts of places, meet interesting and occasionally incomprehensible people, and generally have a grand time careening around Scotland from site to site. I’ve spent the last few years focusing on the Italian side of my heritage in my genealogical researches, but perhaps it is time to get back to the Scottish side.

The Brief History of the Dead (Kevin Brockmeier)

The city of the dead is not set in stone. It awaits all of humanity after their deaths, and it expands and contracts to suit the need. How you get there varies, as everyone’s path is different after they die, but eventually the last person who remembers you will die and then you will move on, though nobody knows where. It’s a pleasant existence, with nice apartments and restaurants and leafy parks. It is, in fact, a much more pleasant existence than the one Laura Byrd is having back in the land of the living. She works for Coca Cola in a world where a few corporations essentially run everything, where the megafauna have largely died out but there is still ice in the Antarctic. She was in fact chosen to go the Antarctic as a researcher for some corporate project – pure PR, she knows, but she had too much seniority to go unnoticed and not enough to refuse, so off she went. But there is a plague in the world – a virulent, deadly disease colloquially known as The Blinks since it starts as a headache that causes people to blink rapidly before killing them hours later. By midway through the novel she is alone in the Antarctic, unable to reach anyone back in warmer climes and abandoned by her companions who left to find help and never returned, so she sets out for the base near the ocean to see if she can find help. Meanwhile the city of the dead is contracting, and everyone there eventually realizes that they all have one person in common: Laura Byrd. How many people does one person remember? What happens when they die too? This is a melancholy, at times lyrical, and generally thoughtful book about the communities that people create and the ripples those communities have. Written long before the COVID-19 pandemic, it resonates with the present in insightful ways.

Escape from Yokai Land (Charles Stross)

The Laundry Files continue to chug along and we’re all better off for it. You forget, after a while, just how good Charles Stross is at the simple act of putting sentences together. This slim novella fits into the timeline somewhere shortly after Bob Howard became the Eater of Souls, earlier in the series, and it describes a mission he undertook in Japan. Like all shorter stories it alludes to more than it covers – this is apparently the latest in a sequence of such missions, though the first since Bob took over from Angleton who used to do these and who left a rather poor impression on his Japanese hosts that Bob has to overcome. He flies to Japan. He meets his hosts – notably Dr. Suzuki, who is not quite human – and he spends the first part of the story proving himself with little jobs before being given the main task, which goes sideways quickly and messily as you would expect. You’ll never quite look at Hello Kitty the same way again.

Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross)

Continuing my theme of “oh, there’s a sequel, I’d better read the previous one,” this is the first of a subseries within the Laundry Files – one that takes place in the same world at about the same time, but which does not actually involve any of the Laundry characters (at least so far). Jeremy Starkey – Imp, to his misfit friends Del, Game Boy, and Doc – is a wannabe filmmaker who funds his efforts by using his gang’s transhuman powers to commit crimes. His sister Eve is the personal assistant of Rupert de Montfort Bigge, a power player in the England of the occult rule of the New Management, a time of dark arts and blood. Their worlds will collide when Rupert orders Eve to retrieve a book – a cursed object that was destroyed in WWII but which still exists in an alternate dreamworld version of Whitehall in 1888 and can be accessed through a door in the long-abandoned Starkey family home that Imp and his friends are currently squatting in. Throw in a family curse, a number of heavily armed professional men on various sides (not always different ones, though often at cross-purposes), a rent-a-cop named Wendy with powers of her own, and Stross’ ability to string sentences together like jewels and you have yourself a story. There are more than a few twists and turns and eventually you reach, if not a conclusion, then at least a stopping point, and then it is off to the next installment.

Quantum of Nightmares (Charles Stross)

Things are getting grim for Imp and his crew, though as the story progresses they get relegated further and further into the background and Imp’s sister Eve becomes more and more of a main character – “a combat sorceress in full this end toward the enemy mode” as Stross memorably describes her at one point in this book. There are three stories here that eventually converge at the end and provide a springboard into the next book. In the first, Eve – now Baroness of Skaro, an island off the coast of England which is both an independent sovereignty and a place that hasn’t revised its legal code since the medieval period, as well as a nod by Stross toward the home planet of the Daleks – is working her way through cleansing both Skaro and the Bigge Organization of their infestation by the followers of the Cult of the Mute Poet, a bloodthirsty eldritch horror that Rupert, Eve’s former boss, served as bishop. In the second, there are evil doings down at the FlavrSmart supermarket in the Chickentown neighborhood of London (an homage to an old punk song, according to Stross’ note afterward) where neither the meat products nor the employees are what they seem and it is no coincidence that the HR person in charge of that is a devotee of the Mute Poet nor is it a coincidence that the Bigge Organization is in the process of a corporate takeover of the FlavrSmart chain. And in the third, a criminal named Mary McCandless is economically blackmailed into kidnapping the children of two transhumans (the superheroes of this world) and keeping them occupied and out of the way while her superiors work out larger plots – a task immeasurably complicated when it turns out that all four children have powers of their own. Stross keeps all of these balls in the air nicely and then drops the story off at a good place to move onto the next volume.

Base Notes (Lara Elena Donnelly)

This is a book about horrible people doing horrible things to people who are (mostly) even more horrible than they are, and while it is well written it is therefore something of a chore. I picked this up because I loved Donnelly’s Amberlough series and her talents as a writer continue to shine here but it was a seriously depressing book to read. Vic Fowler – whom Donnelly painstakingly never genders throughout the book – is a perfumer with an exceedingly particular skill. Vic can create perfumes that make the wearer relive old memories – not just remember them, but actually relive them. The down side to this is that they require the distilled essence of someone else who was there, and in the pursuit of this art Vic has already become a serial murderer even before the story opens. Vic is being blackmailed by Eisner, a client who wants Vic to develop a scent that can recreate a memory that Eisner wasn’t present for, a task that will require at least three other murders. To do this, Vic ropes Jane, Beau, and Giovanni into the project as assistants, and this will eventually unravel in the only way it ever could. There’s a McGuffin of a private investigator and a few other side characters weaving in and out, but mostly this is an exploration of how violence once started is very difficult to stop, and it is very much in the noir tradition that way. Told entirely from Vic’s first person viewpoint, it is well done but not something you’d recommend to most people.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman)

Anne Fadiman reads books. It’s what she does and what she has always done. It’s what her family taught her to love doing when she was growing up and what her husband does with her now. In this collection of essays you can follow along with her as she explores a life spent with books – books as objects, books as information, books as part of a relationship. She talks about the big step of merging her book collection with that of her husband, something she didn’t do until they’d been married for several years and already had a child together (and, to be honest, something Kim and I haven't done either). She goes over her family’s habit of proofreading menus and engaging in competitive wordplay. She describes the thrill of reading about a place in the place described. And so on – there are a bunch of short essays here, all of which started out as magazine columns and all of which are worth reading if you are a book lover.

It’s a Slippery Slope (Spaulding Gray)

Spaulding Gray was a professional narcissist, a man who made a living performing confessional monologues about his own life, and while he was a very entertaining sort of narcissist, it is the nature of such people to be destructive to themselves and others. This monologue starts with him learning to ski – a painful process because of his neuroses rather than any physical injuries – and then slides through his admittedly shabby treatment of his girlfriend before returning to skiing. I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to think about him after reading this, but it was an interesting ride.


Books Read: 43
Pages Read: 12,627
Pages per day: 34.6

Happy Reading!