Books Read in 2023, Part 3

And so the year in reading concludes.

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The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

One morning Gregor Samsa awakens to discover he has become a large cockroach. A traveling salesman trying to support his aging parents and younger sister, he at first tries to communicate his predicament with his family and his boss but eventually he is forced to retreat to his room where he scuttles about while his family’s fortunes decay, until eventually so does he. Somehow I had managed to avoid this novella through all the years of my education, but before we went to Prague this summer it became an assignment. It is a grim and cheerless story and I was glad to see the end of it. Prague, on the other hand, was lovely.

52 Things to See and Do in Basilicata (Valerie Fortney)

This is pretty much exactly what it says it is – a travel guide to the Basilicata region of Italy, which I read in preparation for our trip there this summer. Fortney, like me, is an American whose ancestors came from the Basilicata region, though she has since moved back there and devoted herself to promoting tourism in the province. It’s a fairly thorough guide that covers a wide range of attractions and places, even if the writing is a bit cute at times and it would have benefited from more photographs than the small black and white illustrations that open each chapter. It is apparently the only guide specifically for Basilicata written in English. She gives some of the history of the province and its two sub-provinces (Potenza, where my family is from, and Matera), some restaurant and lodging recommendations (for which she says she receives no commission), and – the bulk of the book – 52 short chapters on sights and events that this overlooked and relatively lightly populated region. Basilicata was a poor and neglected place in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is why my great-grandparents left, but it seems to be doing well now and in the end we had a lovely time there.

Puglia Travel Guide (Francesco Giampetruzzi)

Petrù, as he is apparently known to his friends, is a farmer in Puglia who took it on himself to broadcast the wonders of his home region to the world. This is a slim book, correspondingly short on details, but enthusiastic and liberally illustrated in color. It also contains a wealth of QR codes for further information online. He spends a great deal of time on beaches – admittedly one of the attractions of Puglia – and gives a bit of a short shrift to the cities that I would be most interested in, but there you go. It’s not the definitive guide to this region of Italy, but as an introduction and for suggestions for further research it’s a good place to start.

How Did You Get This Number? (Sloane Crosley)

For our trip this summer I decided that a) I would borrow e-books from our local library system rather than cart physical books across the Atlantic, which worked out pretty well I suppose, and b) I would focus on travel memoirs, which is a genre that I particularly enjoy and which seemed relevant. So this and the next three books come from that decision, and I finished the last of them about an hour before we landed in Chicago on the way home. This is a jumbled collection of essays, most of which are about travel (the opening essay has her alone and mostly lost in Lisbon) though some, like the final essay which focuses on getting things that “fell off the back of a truck” from A Guy, are more about life and learning, and all of which are well written and thoughtful – more so than might be expected in a book billed as a comedy.

All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, & Petty Theft (Geraldine DeRuiter)

What happens when you get laid off from a job you love, you have zero sense of direction, and your husband has the sort of career that takes him all over the world? You become a travel blogger, that’s what. Or at least that was DeRuiter’s response. This book apparently started as her Everywherist blog and it retains the short, punchy style that such things have. Her key realization was that she didn’t have to write about the things travelers should or should not do. Instead, she could write about her experiences, good and bad – and this it turned out was far more entertaining. She describes her misadventures trying to see the original clock that won the 18th century prize for determining longitude – an effort born out of an attempt to understand her father and brother. She writes of visiting her mother’s Italian village and meeting a horde of relatives – something that spoke to me on our vacation this year, as I likely did the same thing. She tells a number of stories, and takes you along for the ride. It was an entertaining book, and well written.

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches (John Hodgman)

For a man who became famous for portraying a PC in an Apple commercial and later for peddling fake news until he decided in 2016 that too many people were crowded onto that ship and none of them understood the joke, Hodgman is a fairly perceptive and empathetic writer. This is too spotty to be a memoir and too thoughtful to be a comic routine, which makes it an ideal book to read in short chunks while traveling. He discusses his family and their various homes and his friendship with the singer Jonathan Coulton and his family and the strange places that friendship often leads, and there is a fair bit about what it is like to live in and visit Maine (hint: people live there because they don’t want to talk to other people), as well as a few anecdotes about his life as a performer. He is, as he says, a privileged white man getting by in the world, and it’s a surprisingly thoughtful book for all that.

Mastering the Art of French Eating: From Paris Bistros to Farmhouse Kitchens, Lessons in Food and Love (Ann Mah)

Ann Mah always wanted to live in Paris. When her diplomat husband Calvin gets a sent there for his next assignment she sees it as a chance to make that dream come true, envisioning three years of exploring the city and enjoying all it has to offer with the love of her life. But when Calvin gets reassigned to Iraq for a year – an offer he quite literally cannot refuse – she is left to create her dream by herself. This, it turns out, is a difficult task since the joy of a place is in sharing it. But she makes friends and learns to travel to see the various foods she wants, and in the end when Calvin comes back she has in some sense made the place her own. She divides the book into chapters based on a dish or region and includes at least one recipe per chapter, but mostly this is about her getting out of her funk and into the kitchens and restaurants of a place where food is an end in itself. There are times when it is hard to feel much sympathy for an affluent and privileged person adrift in her own personal paradise, but she is an engaging writer and knows how to make the stories work for the reader.

Just Go Down to the Road: A Memoir of Trouble and Travel (James Campbell)

How James Campbell ended up as a professional editor and writer is just one of those stories. An indifferent bordering on hostile student in Scotland in the early 1960s, more interested in teenage hooliganism (though he was too straightlaced to do it well and a friend bailed him out of his only real attempt at it) than his studies, he eventually dropped out of school to take up a trade but got lured away by the temptations of music and the Swinging 60s. He spent time in London. He more or less hitchhiked his way to a Greek island where he spent months teaching rich Greek girls to ride horses – a skill he did not possess when he got there. He lived on an Israeli kibbutz in the early 1970s. He became a friend of the American novelist James Baldwin, even going to his house. He began a reading program with prisoners. Campbell is an engaging writer with an interesting story, one that lacks very dramatic highs or lows but holds your attention throughout.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer (Eric Hansen)

This is a story of a traveler, someone who has been all over the world and met all sorts of people, and the stories that come out of that. Eric Hansen is one of those people who go places, in large part because he seems open to the idea of getting lost and being present in wherever he happens to be, and he has a knack for meeting interesting people and getting to know them. Each chapter is a story of someone he’s met, and they’re all fascinating. Two involved elderly women – one a former dancer living in Paris, the other a Russian émigré living in New York City – who let him into their lives and tell their stories. Madame Zoya, for example, lived in what was then a drug-ridden crime-infested New York neighborhood where she taught Hansen how to make blini. The local criminals looked after her. Other stories involve working at a hotel on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, a job he left a prawn trawler to take; sharing kava with the men on Tanna, one of the islands of Vanuatu; “night fishing” in the Maldives; exploring the wreckage of a plane crash in Borneo with the widower of one of the victims; and working as a volunteer for Mother Theresa in Calcutta learning lessons as he tending to the dying. The title story involves an ornithologist who has befriended a group of strippers at a club and the genuine affection they seem to have for each other. Hansen has a journalist’s eye for detail and a graceful writing style that pulls you in and hints at other adventures – he casually mentions, as a minor detail in the Borneo story, having lived there for months a while prior, which is apparently described in another book he wrote. But mostly this is a story of the fascinating things that happen in everyday life that sound exotic until you realize that this is how some people live all the time. It’s a lovely book.

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams (Kevin Jon Davies, ed.)

This is a book for hardcore fans of Douglas Adams. Adams is perhaps best known for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, though he wrote several other books, some Doctor Who scripts, and a wealth of bits and bobs for various radio, theater, and television productions – some of which got produced and some of which didn’t. When he died fairly young, in 2001, he left behind a massive trove of papers and this tome – seriously, it's 8”x12” and weighs four pounds – is not so much a biography as it is an annotated scrapbook of some of those papers. Kevin Jon Davies was an Adams fan of long standing and he got permission to go through Adams literary estate in search of treasures to share. There is everything here from Adams’ grade school papers to his college years to the Hitchhiker and Doctor Who years and on to everything else – a treasury of documents, some of which are transcribed and some of which aren’t. Most are introduced with a small paragraph at the bottom of whatever page they’re on, unfortunately often in black ink on a blue page which makes reading a bit of a chore. There are also letters from people Adams knew, most of them along the lines of how much they miss him and how much he meant to them. I found out about this book when it was still a Kickstarter project – my name is there among the sponsors – and now it is a real thing, out there in the world.

The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi)

Jamie Gray is a midlevel executive of sorts at a meal-delivery company in New York City called “füdmüd” in early 2020 but his life is about to change dramatically. First, his boss – a gold-plated asshole named Rob – will fire him and then, when the pandemic hits he will rehire him as a delivery boy. Second, one of his customers will find him a new job as “the guy who lifts things” at a base on a parallel version of Earth, one where giant creatures referred to as “kaiju” live and are studied by a semi-secret international NGO funded by both governments and random billionaires. There is a way to get from one version of Earth to another, and scientific crews have been rotating in and out for decades. Jamie spends a fair amount of time getting used to things, and then – as inevitably he must – he gets caught up in a Problem which then must be solved. Scalzi is a fun writer of light science fiction – he’s not there to bend your brain or make you consider Eternal Truths, but instead to tell you a story and keep you entertained while doing so. I appreciate this, at a point in my life where I have very few spoons to spare. It’s a fun book where all the loose ends get tied up fairly neatly, and that was exactly what I was hoping it would be. He was gracious enough to sign it for me on a recent book tour, and that just makes it even better.

Starter Villain (John Scalzi)

This is the other book that John Scalzi was gracious enough to sign for me on his book tour and it’s of a piece with the first one, which is not surprising since even he says it’s part of a trilogy of “present day weird shit” books that are otherwise unrelated. The third one comes out in 2025, apparently. Charlie is at what can charitably be described as a low point in his life – divorced, broke, barely working as a substitute teacher after his journalism career tanked, and living with his cats Hera and Persephone in his deceased father’s house while his stepsiblings hound him to sell the place so they can get their share of it. But when his mysterious Uncle Jake – estranged from the family since Charlie was five – dies and leaves his business holdings to Charlie, things get hot. Jake was a villain, complete with an island volcano lair and a squad of trained if rather unpleasant dolphins, and now the other villains with whom he sparred want to take their shares – stepsiblings on a grander scale. Fortunately Charlie has Til, his uncle’s chief of staff, to guide him. Comedy, as they say, ensues. It’s a fun book, one where everyone is perfectly transparent about their motivations and willing to explain them at length in a “sorry about this, it’s nothing personal” sort of way. The intricate plot unfolds neatly if not always happily for the participants and in the end there is Charlie and his cats, who are of course far more than they first appear to be.

The Prophet and the Idiot (Jonas Jonasson)

Is there such a thing as a Dickensian farce? Because if there is, this would be a great example of it – a sprawling story that widens as it goes, pulling in new characters, world leaders, and a tasty but unassuming cheese in the process, most of whom (not the cheese) knew each other under some other guise years ago. It starts small, with Johan (the “Idiot” of the title) and his asshole brother, the Swedish diplomat Fredrik. Fredrick has sold their multi-million kronor apartment, given Johan a pittance and an RV, and taken the rest of the money with him to Rome where he plans to advance his diplomatic career. Johan – one of the world’s innocents, a terrible driver, and an astonishingly good chef, soon meets Petra who has calculated the end of the world to the minute, an event arriving in precisely twelve days. They embark on a quest to right several of the wrongs in their lives in the time they have left – small wrongs, but satisfying to correct – and along the way they draw in purple-haired Agnes, who at 75 years old has stumbled into a second career as a fake travel influencer on Instagram. Meanwhile, a man named Aleksandr grows up in the Soviet Union, a friend of Mikhail Gorbachev, an advisor to Boris Yeltsin, a man hunted by the Russian Mafia, and eventually – under the name Aleko – the leader of the most joyfully corrupt member of the African Union, the island nation of the Condors. From this point the book starts to get weird (or, rather, weirder) as all of these characters collide in unexpectedly comic ways and real life figures get drawn into the story. Barack Obama is a fairly important character, for example, as are Ban-Ki-moon and other diplomats and world leaders. Eventually the whole thing degenerates into as slapstick a series of crosses and double-crosses, fake identities, family coincidences, reunions, romances, and Västerbotten cheese as could ever be contained within the covers of a book. Jonasson also wrote The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, and this has much the same tone and feel as his earlier work. Kim picked this up at the Prague airport for the flight home, and it was definitely worth the crowns.

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (H.G. Parry)

What would your world be like if your younger brother, a literary prodigy who started reading novels as a toddler, could summon fictional characters to life at will? Whatever your answer is, Rob Sutherland, a lawyer in Wellington NZ, is living it. Charley Sutherland started doing this at age four, with problematic though never quite catastrophic results. Eventually his parents shipped him off to Oxford as a young teen and Rob’s life calmed down long enough for him to finish law school and find a girlfriend – Lydia – but when Charley gets a position at the university in Wellington it all starts up again. But this time it appears that someone is trying to harm Charley, which Rob – for all he finds Charley exasperating at times – will not allow. From this immersive start the novel spreads out at a breakneck pace. There is a street hidden in Wellington that only fictional characters and their guests can access, whose fractious inhabitants are carefully protected by a grown-up fictional child adventurer named Millie. There are Sutherland family secrets ready to be revealed, one by one, as they become relevant. And there is another summoner in Wellington who plans to use Charley to replace the nonfictional world with a world of their own making. It’s a clever book full of ideas, and if there are far too many places where you want to tell Rob to get over himself and stop being such a jerk, well, that happens sometimes in the real world. Parry clearly loves 19th-century British literature and the novel is full of Victorian characters brought into this reality – sometimes multiple times (the Darcys, 1 through 5, are a running joke of sorts), though each iteration is different depending on the interpretation of the reader who summoned it. There are a few loose ends – Lydia never really becomes more than an exasperated foil for Rob’s idiocy, for example – but for those of us who enjoyed Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series this novel is a treat.

Total books: 38
Total pages: 11,160
Pages/day: 30.6

Happy reading!