Books Read in 2024, Part 2

Part 2 and Last, unfortunately - it was that sort of year.

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The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers, and Life (Richard Russo)

I bought this book by accident, in a used book shop in Hoboken NJ, thinking it was a novel rather than a collection of essays. Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. His novels tend to be warm-hearted and centered on people who aren’t going to be counted among life’s winners no matter how hard they work because that’s now how life is, and they’re well written. This, however, is – as it really does say on the cover for anyone paying attention (i.e. not me) to see – a collection of essays, some of which I enjoyed and some of which I did not. On the plus side, there are a number of essays on the craft of writing and the role of the storyteller that stood out as worthwhile, particularly the title essay on Russo’s own awakening as a writer of fiction rather than as a scholar of literature, and one entitled “What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience,” on the virtues of the omniscient author voice. On the down side there are essays such as “The Gravestone and the Commode,” which uses a rather odd metaphor to justify being rude to people in the name of free speech, and “Imagining Jenny,” an extended treatment of a conservative man trying and ultimately failing to come to grips with the fact that his friend is trans and has taken medical steps to act on that, an essay that displays a startling lack of imagination and empathy for someone whose job is mostly about imagination and empathy. Russo is not anti-trans in the performatively cruel and immoral way that the modern American right revels in these days. He just seems to be at a loss about how to make the shift he needs to make and to recognize that it is in fact he who needs to make that shift and not his friend. I will continue to read his novels because he is a phenomenal writer, but I will admit I came out of this collection a bit disappointed in the man himself.

Midnight in Sicily (Peter Robb)

The more I read about Sicily, the more I understand why my ancestors left back in 1907 or so. For most the last two centuries it has been a poor, arid, rigidly conservative, and grievously oppressed place held in bondage by the Mafia – an organization which did not officially exist in Italy until the 1980s, in law or language. Peter Robb loves southern Italy and lived in Sicily for years, and in this book – originally published in 1996, with postscripts added in 2003 and 2007 – he goes into painful detail about how the Mafia and its mainland cousins in Naples and Calabria exerted control over both Sicilian and Italian life in the second half of the twentieth century. It is a story of murder and violence, of political corruption on a scale that beggars the mind, and the glacially slow efforts of Sicilians and Italians – two different groups of people, after all – to deal with it. He visits hostile towns and aging countesses, artists and writers, and if there is the occasional Australian term thrown into the narrative that reflects Robb’s origins but confuses the rest of us reading the book it does not detract from the clarity of his story. There is a grim sort of fatalism to it all, and a history of lost opportunities and powerful forces willing to kill with impunity to make sure they stay lost. It’s a thoughtful and informative book, but not a cheerful one.

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Gabrielle Hamilton)

Sometimes I think I like travel memoirs and sometimes I think I just like memoirs. People are interesting. Gabrielle Hunter is the owner and chef of Prune, a small restaurant in New York City, and this basically is the story of how that happened and what it cost. She grew up in the northern exurbs of Philadelphia around the same time I was growing up in the western suburbs, so a lot of the places in the early part of her story are familiar to me, but her life was very different. She grew up in a large, boisterous, and fairly poor family, with a French mother and an artist father who divorced when she was 13 and then basically abandoned her and her siblings. She spent some time running wild before discovering a talent for kitchen work in restaurants. She tried to go to college and eventually succeeded. She somehow managed to get an MFA in creative writing. She went from a committed lesbian relationship to an Italian husband and, eventually, two sons. And she opened Prune. She makes no secret of her need for control, her many and fascinating screwups, and her burgeoning love for Italy and her husband’s family, even though both make her crazy. It’s a fun read, if often a bracing one.

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese (Michael Paterniti)

This is a story about a cheese called Páramo de Guzmán, perhaps the greatest cheese in the world and certainly the most expensive one sold at the little store where Michael Paterniti worked in his youth. It’s the story of the cheesemaker, a larger-than-life contrarian and storyteller named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, who lives in the tiny village of Guzmán in the forbidding region of Castile in Spain and who mourns the old ways. It’s the story of a betrayal, how Ambrosio (always referred to by his first name) brought the cheese into the world and had it taken away from him, and perhaps how that betrayal wasn’t quite what Ambrosio said it was. It’s the story of Michael Paterniti, who tracks Ambrosio down and becomes part of Ambrosio’s world, even bringing his wife and two young children to live in Guzmán for nearly a year. But mostly it’s a story about stories, about how Paterniti struggles to make sense of the story of Ambrosio and his cheese, how to reconcile the different versions that he hears from different people, and how to understand the ways in which Ambrosio’s story envelops him and makes him simply another character. The “telling room” is a Guzmán tradition where you go to one of the bodegas – not a corner market, as it is in New York City, but a cave where wine and cheese can be stored – and sit at the table to drink and swap tales. Paterniti’s tale spirals out and circles back just as he insists all Castilian tales do, covering Spanish history, legal maneuvering, friendships broken and brokered, and ultimately a sense of the impossibility of fully entering the story of another no matter how hard one tries.

Look Alive Out There: Essays (Sloane Crosley)

I downloaded this book for our trip last summer because I enjoyed the other collection of her essays that I read on our previous summer trip, and while this wasn’t quite up to that standard it was still an enjoyable book to read. Crosley is an essayist with a knack for finding herself in odd situations that she faces with a fairly bleak sense of humor. There’s an essay about how much she hates the privileged teenager next door to her New York City apartment because of his endless noise and partying. There’s one on her neighbor Don, whom she gets to know in that distant NYC sort of way. She visits her Uncle Johnny, a long-retired porn star, and gets her eggs frozen when she realizes she does eventually want children but not with anyone in her life now. She tries to climb a mountain in Ecuador despite having no training or equipment for doing so, with predictable results. She arranges a meeting with the man who bought her domain name when she inadvertently let it expire and then charged her two months’ rent to get it back. She’s an engaging and revealing writer, and if many of these essays slide easily into and then back out of your mind without leaving too much of a mark, well, that’s enough.

Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed, and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth (Dave Seminara)

This book had the potential to be a lot better than it was. It probably would have helped if it could decide exactly what it wanted to be first, though. On one level, it is the story of competitive traveling, a niche activity enjoyed by some of the least introspective people on the planet. They collect countries visited and regions seen the way other people collect coins or Star Wars memorabilia, and while the first hundred and fifty or so countries are fairly simple to get to, the last few – uninhabited remote islands, restricted military areas, war zones, and so on – are not. On another level it is the story of William Baekeland, who passed himself off as one of these travelers and, more importantly, one of the people who could arrange trips for these travelers, but who turned out to be a fraud. There’s also a fair bit of research into the concept of wanderlust and the psychology behind novelty, curiosity, vagabondage, and similar things – much of it painfully outdated and explicitly drawn from the early 20th-century eugenics movement. Now and then there also seems to be some personal soul searching from Seminara himself, who hints at being one of the competitive travelers he discusses and analyzes, but it never really comes together and after a while the disparate parts of the book start to drift further and further apart without any real sense that they will ever wrap up into a coherent story or that it would be worth finding out if they do. There is a definite sense of missed opportunity about this book and I gave up on it a hundred pages in.

The Last Chairlift (John Irving)

At some point in a sufficiently celebrated author’s career they decide that they don’t need editors anymore, and John Irving has reached this point. This is a 900pp book that could easily have been a much better 300pp book, but Irving is in his eighties now with a list of literary achievements as long as your arm and he’s going to do what he’s going to do. One suspects as well that this is his swan song and he wanted to stuff in everything in that he could before signing off. Nobody is going to say no to John Irving at this point in his career. Pretty much everything you would expect to see in a John Irving novel is here – wrestling, Vienna, Iowa, New England, Exeter Academy, writing as a profession, a persistent obsession with the size of women’s breasts, a cavalcade of well-crafted sentences and complex characters, and a muted sense of both absurdity and anger directed at the Vietnam War, the Catholic Church, and the American right wing in general – plus a few things that are new, such as ghosts (friendly or otherwise), skiing, two different 100pp movie scripts, and a fair bit about the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado. It is, for the most part, a long shaggy dog story about the sexual awakening and history of Adam Brewster, who is presented as the main character of the book though later reflection does lead to questioning regarding that idea. When the novel opens he is a child living in Exeter with his free-spirited mother, Little Ray, and his grandparents. When it ends he is a successful author (also in his 80s). In between are a raft of odd-duck girlfriends, two unexpected dads, a long-running pantomime comedy act in New York City, and a whole lot of skiing. Really, quite a lot of skiing. Irving also has a tendency to refer to characters in this book by description rather than name – “the ski instructor,” “the little English teacher,” “the trail groomer,” “the snowshoer,” and so on – which gets odd after a while. Other than Adam’s grandmother, the aforementioned English teacher Mr. Elliott, and his cousin’s partner Em, there are vanishingly few likeable characters in this book. Adam himself is a boor – shallow, endlessly self-centered, prone to sexual misconduct of many and varied kinds – and done no favors by his mother. John Irving has long been one of my favorite authors. I have read every book he has ever published and even middling Irving is better than most of what’s out there, but this is not one of his best.

6 Billion Others: Portraits of Humanity from Around the World (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Sibylle d’Orgeval, Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire)

People are interesting. They have lives and stories and, very often, things to say. Even the people you least suspect will surprise you that way. For this book, interviewers fanned out across the globe, to all of the inhabited continents and often far away from the centers of power and wealth, to ask questions of the people they found there. What were your dreams as a child? What does family mean to you? In your experience, what is war? What does nature represent to you? What do you think happens after death? The book is organized by question, with maybe a dozen or two dozen answers per question presented. Each of the interviewees on a page (4 to 8, depending on how long their answer was) has their photograph on a facing page along with much smaller photographs of others who presumably were also asked the question. It’s not a light book, either literally (it’s 320pp of tightly bound, heavyweight glossy paper) or figuratively (there is almost no humor, a startling lapse if you think about it) but it is an interesting one.

Tress of the Emerald Seas (Brandon Sanderson)

There is a world of difference between reading a book and listening to a book. With an audiobook you get different voices and cadences. With a paper book you can move at your own pace and in your own voices. Kim was listening to this book when we drove up to northern Wisconsin in October and I heard roughly the middle half of it. We do this – I’m happy to listen to bits and pieces of novels that way and generally don’t feel any need to follow up on them. But after we got back she checked it out of the library and handed it to me so I could finish it, and it was a lovely little book. It’s a YA novel and, as is pretty much the definition of the genre, it’s mostly about the coming of age of the protagonist – a young woman nicknamed Tress. At the beginning of the novel she is a window washer carrying on an illicit but extremely chaste affair with the son of the duke who rules her island. When Charles is – eventually – kidnapped by the Sorceress who lives on her own island in the Midnight Sea, she sets out to rescue him and after some machinations finds herself on a pirate ship named The Crow’s Song. The crew slowly accepts her as she makes herself useful, though the captain does not, and from there the story spins out. Tress’s world is a different place than ours, with a dozen moons all dumping their own variety of spores into separate oceans – spores that react strongly, often violently, to any contact with water. The oceans themselves are made of spores, not water, which requires a different kind of sailing. Tress is a clever, resourceful, and kind character and she finds herself long before she finds the Sorceress. Sanderson also has a sly sense of humor that peeks in from time to time to lighten things up.

Zimmer Land (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyan)

This is actually a fairly short story, part of a larger book called Friday Black, but Lauren read it in a class she was taking in the fall and thought I’d appreciate it. This was a good call. It’s a powerful, quiet story about what happens when racial violence gets commodified and sold to the public as entertainment. Isaiah works in Zimmer Land, a theme park of retributive justice that is named for George Zimmerman, who murdered a black man in cold blood in 2012 but got away with under Florida’s “stand your ground” laws and thus became a hero to the white supremacist mob that is the American right wing these days. Isaiah’s role is to be the black man walking through the white neighborhood, and people pay money to play one of the homeowners so they can confront him and “kill” him, though his armor protects him from coming to much actual harm from the gunshots. He does this multiple times a day. Eventually the owners decide to open a new wing of the park that caters to children. It’s an angry story, as it should be, and a thought-provoking one.

Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)

Jay Fitger teaches English at Payne University, the sort of liberal arts four-year institution of higher learning that so troubles American right-wingers by its very existence these days. He is by any estimation a crank. He shares the campus with his ex-wife and several ex-girlfriends, all of whom dislike him to one degree or another as do most of his colleagues. To his credit Fitger is well aware of all of this and blames no one but himself for any of it. He finds himself inundated by requests for letters of recommendation from students, colleagues, former classmates, and fellow travelers alike, and this short epistolary novel tracks a year in Fitger’s life through those letters. Letters to employers for students looking for jobs. Letters to other campuses for colleagues looking for jobs. Letters to the campus administration theoretically about job seekers but mostly complaints about the defunding of his department and the liberal arts in general, the indignities of the ongoing construction project in his building that has led to the pampered princes of the Economics Department being safely evacuated while their department space is renovated while the paupers in the English Department remain behind to fend for themselves, and his own personal travails. Letters to Writing Workshops on behalf of a wide range of people. And, as a recurring theme, letters to some or all of the above regarding a particular student working on a novel. Fitger is an entertaining if sometimes bilious companion, and the letters get more frantic and more serious as the story goes on. This is the third time I’ve read this, in part because it really is that good and in part because I recently discovered that Schumacher had written two sequels and I wanted to refresh my memory before moving on to them.

The Shakespeare Requirement (Julie Schumacher)

After the events of the previous book, Jay Fitger has become a man besieged. As the newly appointed chair of the English Department at Payne University he must contend with a host of forces both personal and academic, all of which want to bring him down. His colleagues are a fractious and quarrelsome bunch, unable and unwilling to recognize the threat posed to them by both the university administration and, more pressingly, the Economics Department that is slowly and intentionally claiming most of the English Department’s space as lebensraum and looking to force them out of their building entirely. Some of this centers on an elderly Shakespeare scholar who insists that the English degree require a full semester of Shakespeare, something his more modern lit-crit scholars deride though it all does end up as something of a cause célèbres. Additionally, Fitger has a new admin assistant (Fran) who doesn’t particularly respect him and has her own agenda, and he’s trying to work out a friendly relationship with his ex-wife Janet, now over at the law school, all while looking after his students – particularly Angela, a conservative small-town girl adrift at a large secular university. It’s a fairly straightforward academic satire rather than an epistolary novel like the first book, and if it’s less humorous it is far more recognizable to anyone who has ever served in a liberal arts department in these mercenary times where training is valued over education by people who can’t tell the difference between the two. Schumacher makes the supporting characters fully human, with interests, flaws, and virtues of their own, as people are. Fitger will tilt at his windmills, flailing all the while, and in the end he finds himself in what is perhaps a better spot, though whether this counts as victory is kind of an open question. He is a fascinating character – generally good-hearted, often exasperating, and perhaps not the guy you’d want to hang out with on a quiet Saturday afternoon, but not a bad soul for that.

The English Experience (Julie Schumacher)

The last person anyone at Payne University wants to lead the annual three-week study abroad class in the UK is Jay Fitger – an assessment Fitger wholeheartedly agrees with – but when the designated professor can’t do it and literally nobody else can, it falls to him anyway. There’s a motley collection of students – smartly introduced through their application essays, each with their own conflicts, agendas, and expectations – and over the following weeks in England nothing much will go right but they will get through it somehow and perhaps learn a few things along the way even if they’re not necessarily the things Fitger wants them to learn. Schumacher returns to a more episodic and epistolary form in this third model – she builds the student characters by letting us read their homework essays, for example, and there are any number of small throwaway moments that don’t necessarily move the plot forward but do fill out who these people are – and it’s funnier than the middle installment of this series. The students emerge as fully individual people, and even Fitger finds some grace in the end. Schumacher also puts in a sort of “where are they now” postscript in the form of a late assignment from one of the students, and I have always loved that sort of thing.

The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley)

It’s somewhere in the indeterminate near future – close enough the present to be familiar, far enough away to see the crises of climate change starting to have real geopolitical impact – and the British government has discovered time travel. Through the “time door” they are able to retrieve a handful of people (carefully vetted to be people facing imminent death so their disappearance affects nothing from their own time) and bring them into the present where they are assigned a handler (a “bridge”) to get them acclimated. Among these are a WWI veteran, two people from various points in the 17th century who don’t like each other much, and someone parachuted out of the French Revolution. Some adapt better than others. One of the bridges – the narrator of the book and the unnamed daughter of a Cambodian mother and a white father, a heritage that receives considerable attention in the story – is assigned to Graham Gore, a Royal Navy officer on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition through the Arctic in 1847. Engaging, disciplined, and intelligent, Gore and his bridge bump heads and explore the present together while crises at the Ministry of Time slowly close in on them and the other time expats and their bridges. Nothing is quite as it seems and the expats are not the only fish out of water in this story. Part science fiction, part spy novel, part romance, it’s an interesting look at the sort of nuts and bolts of what bringing people out of their own time and place might look like – which is where the parallels with unnamed bridge’s heritage comes in – and as such is something of a cautionary tale. Bradley keeps it all moving along fairly smoothly until the end, which gets a bit muddled in the way time travel stories tend to do, but it’s a fun book.


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Books read: 29
Total pages: 9552
Pages per day: 26.1

Happy reading!