My Michael, Amos Oz

When I was compiling my list of countries and authors and books, I immediately put down Amos Oz for Israel. He'd been in the back of my mind as someone I should read for a long time, so he was the obvious choice for me. A few months later, I found a copy of My Michael for $1 at a thrift store and so my Israeli book was selected. I hesitated a little when I read the back cover blurb, which described the book as chronicling a woman falling out of love with her husband. An intimate book about a couple's relationship wasn't quite what I had in mind for my representative book for Israel. However — and in retrospect this seems obvious — My Michael was about much more than a couple's relationship.* The book takes place mostly in Jerusalem between 1950 and 1960: Israeli independence is new; Israel is being populated with Jews from across the diaspora; the Suez crisis happens. The book is intimate, but the outside world is everywhere in it.

* Similarly, the book I read from Japan was a very intimate book made up of letters between an ex husband and wife, and yet it also felt very much about Japan and life there in the 1980s.

Home, Marilynne Robinson

For the first hundred pages or so, as I was reading Home, I wished I had read it sooner after finishing Gilead, which I read a couple years ago. I found myself struggling to remember the characters and histories from the first book. I remembered some details, but not others. But as I read on, my memory and lack thereof started to feel right. It was at the moment that I realized the two books covered the same time period (which probably happened for me later in the book than it should have) that everything started to click. I knew one big secret, and knowing that made it feel like I was in on something. But other facts I had forgotten - or that simply weren't in Gilead - kept cropping up. The book covered familiar ground, but I learned new things and got a deeper understanding from it.

Marilynne Robinson seems to tell stories by first withholding information and then letting out little pieces bit by bit, and it's really lovely. In the case of Home, this method of storytelling seems particularly true to the characters and the reserve they have with each other. The secrecy and tender duplicity practiced by the characters in Home struck me as very Protestant and very familiar. This story felt like it could have taken place in some offshoot of my own family tree. One thing I loved about this book - and probably part of made it feel like my family - was the food. Every food Glory prepared in Home sounded like something my great aunt Gladys might have cooked up for a family meal.

Now I need to decide if I should read Lila right away or wait a couple years.

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller

It has been a long, long time since a book -- or anything really -- produce as strong an emotional response in me as The Dog Stars did. It hit me hard. I cried on the subway, I cried at work, I cried on the subway some more, I cried in bed, and I cried and cried on the couch with my therapist talking about loss and a future alone and going on despite everything. Either because of or despite the 36 hours of emotional anguish this book caused, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it. It's hard to say that this was quite my favorite thing about the book, but I think the strongest thing about the book was that I really identified with the narrator. The book is set in a post pandemic future with few survivors, and yet I found the narrator's condition and response to be imaginable. Probably my favorite thing about the book was the dog (and the narrator's relationship to it). And (I don't think this is exactly a spoiler - you know it has to happen) that's why it broke my heart. Another thing I loved happens very late in the book when two lambs are relocated via small plane. The lambs freak out then calm down and narrator says something to the effect of, "for all they knew this was the next step in the normal life of a sheep" and I just loved that.

Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

One day last week, I unexpectedly finished the book I was reading on my lunch break and I can't handle a bookless commute, so I went to the Goodwill to find something to read on my ride home. I should really plan better; I do this rather often.* I was definitely swayed by the quote on the cover claiming it was "one of the greatest mysteries of all time," but it's not really a mystery novel. I was not at all familiar with the history of Richard III and the two princes in the tower, so I wasn't even aware of the mystery at the center of the novel, which is presumably what is being referred to as among the greatest mysteries. I didn't love this book, but I do enjoy anything that includes a complicated family tree that I have to refer to again and again in the frontispiece.**


* I say this, but I'm not sure I mean it. I sort of love the randomness that comes with having to choose a book from an uncurated collection. I've ended up reading some very good books I might never have sought out specifically.

** I don't know which I like better: frontispiece family trees or frontispiece maps

The Jackson Brodie novels, Kate Atkinson

I'll still be a book behind, but I decided to kill 4 books with one post (or something) by writing about Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels all at once. I've read all four of them (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; and Started Early, Took My Dog) in the last 6 months and the last two in January of this year.

I started watching detective TV shows maybe 4 years ago and gradually they became the only TV shoes I could tolerate. I often half joke that I have terrible taste in television, but it's true that what I look for in TV is very different from what I look for in other entertainments. TV satisfies a certain mindless, escapist need for me. I don't like my TV to be too dark or too serious or too drawn out. I avoid programs that don't resolve in a single episode. Much of what is praised as the best television is just not for me. I like exactly the kind of detective programs that Kate Atkinson subtly derides here and there in her books: cozies set in English villages, especially if they're also period dramas. Not much gives me as much pure pleasure as a 90-minute murder-detection-resolution cycle. After a couple years of watching detective programs, I thought maybe I should give detective novels a try. I'm glad I did.

I have a much higher tolerance for dark and unresolved stories in books than I do in TV. It's a good thing because the Jackson Brodie books are, while not utterly grim, not the TV cozies I love either. (There is a BBC adaptation of the novels and I wonder if I would enjoy it; I suspect I might not -- the books are spread across several episodes apiece.) In my very limited reading within the genre, I've noticed there is a type of detective that shows up here and there who, unlike the masterful detectives of my preferred TV shows, does not have a particularly brilliant mind, but who does the grunt work of being a detective and kind of just happens to be in the right place at the right time to solve the crime. (If indeed he solves the crime at all.) Jackson Brodie is one of these. He seems to stumble into and out of most of his cases despite himself. It's not that he's a bad detective and it's not bumbling comic relief (though sometimes the absurd situations he finds himself in are laugh-inducing); if anything, this seems more realistic than the highly perceptive genius model of detective. While Brodie himself is reasonably sympathetic, it's the other characters that populate the books that I've found particularly compelling. I really enjoyed all four books, but without question my favorite was When Will There Be Good News?, which features two central characters who really drew me in: a smart, independent teenage girl who just needs a little stability in her life; and a woman with a seriously troubled childhood who has gotten her life totally together as an adult. These two - and especially their relationship with each other - kept me reading late into the night. But all the books feature compelling characters who have complicated, tender relationships among each other. When I finished the fourth book, I was very disappointed to discover there is not (yet, I hope!) another.

In a funny aside, I took a lunch break partway through writing this and after eating I went to a thrift store near my office where I sometimes go to browse during lunch. There was another woman looking at books there and she picked up a copy of One Good Turn. Of course I interjected and recommended it.