Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Book Reviews April 2019

How To Live With Kids: A Room-By-Room Guide by Gabrielle Stanley Blair.  This book had been on my nightstand for a while.  It’s the kind of book that is fun to dip into now and then and get inspiration.  However, I was tired of it taking up space in my “to read” pile, so finished it to move it along.  It is basically a book about home décor, the best part of it being the pictures of various options.  What she does well is a sort of “Marie Kondo” approach of making sure that you consider how each space in your home can best work for you with the least amount of clutter.

The Nix by Nathan Hill.  This was the longest-residing book on my kindle, and as I was in an orderly mode, its time was up.  It is a very long read, and while reading the first half of it I was a little grumpy; however, the second half won me over.  The first half was primarily the narrator’s childhood reminiscences, and I find I’m a little resistant to so much of that.  I think the book would have been better had those parts been edited out.  But I do see why the book made it to so many top ten lists of 2017.  The narrator is Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an English professor who is not very motivated by his job or life.  He spends most of his off hours playing a video game, until one day when his mother, who left Sam and his father when he was 11-ish, is in the news for throwing a rock at a Trump-like politician.  Samuel has a publisher – for a novel that has long been in the works – and this guy gets him to go visit his mother to try to write a book about her actions.  As mentioned above, the book goes into too much detail about Samuel’s childhood; it also goes into his mother’s considerably more interesting past, and why she abandoned Samuel.  There’s also a very funny and well-written storyline that involves the star player of the video game he plays, who goes by the moniker Pwnage, and is addicted to gaming.  The writing is often very funny, and when everything starts coming together in the second half, I really liked it.  

99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown.  Ugh.  I HATED this.  It is a biography, more or less, about Princess Margaret, but it becomes more about how impossible a biography is, especially a biography of a royal figure, who is so much façade to begin with.  I could easily get on board with such a metanarrative – and with 99 sections both very short and long; however, I just found Brown tiresome and annoying.  He does gimmicks where he pretends Margaret married Picasso, and there is a section or two where this topic is treated as fact.  Sometimes he did do interesting studies, such as presenting all the different viewpoints/opinions of an event.  But I found the majority of his ideas puerile and it was all I could do to make myself finish reading the book.  Don’t so torture yourselves.

Savage News by Jessica Yellin.  I follow Jessica Yellin on Instagram, and really like her stories, in which she presents the news of the day.  Her thing is to do “news not noise,” filtering out all the stories of the day in Washington that are really just noise.  I recommend her.  Anyway, Savage News is her first fiction, and it is a fun, light read.  She wanted to write a news novel that was a comedy and I’d say her book is a success.  The narrator, Natalie Savage, is a broadcaster trying to make it as a serious journalist in the world of television news.  She wants to report the facts, and her bosses want her to get her hair straightened, and report on the gossip and rumors rather than what might really be going on behind all the bluster.  She tries to please her bosses enough to not get fired, while following a real story about a disappearance of the first lady and all its political implications.  It’s a quick and fun read.

Hold Sway by Sally Ball.  I read one of my best – and oldest! -- friend’s new book of poetry this month and it was a treat.  Hold Sway is Sally’s third poetry book and it is a rich collection.  There’s so much in it to stop and think about, and when I finished it I found myself immediately returning to the first poem to start all over again.  It did not come as a surprise to me that Sally’s poetry is smart and reflective, but there was so much humor, both wry and otherwise in the book!  There are a pair of dog poems, both called “Can You Hear My Dog?” which – having a new young reader in my household, reminded me of the do you like my hat sequences from Go Dog Go.  There’s also a line about a hiking trip, in which the food carried is “lentils, lentils, lentils, quinoa!, lentils” which cracked me up.  And a poem about a Shakespeare sonnet we had to memorize in 10th grade that ends with the BeeGees!  It is all done, too, in a thought-provoking, original, and lyrical manner.  I think my favorite is a poem called “Breaker,” in which the narrator shuts down, emotionally, like a circuit breaker powering off, switch by clicking switch.  Her topics range from being in Paris during a terrorist attack, to seeing a heron fly up and away, and listening to her daughter sing jubilantly in the car.  There’s also the wonderful poem, “Hold”, about the disturbing state of our planet and its changes in climate.  Hold Sway is an impressive book of poems that will stay with you long past your initial reading of them.

The Hollow of the Hand by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy.  PJ Harvey is my favorite musician of all time, and I was pleased to receive her first book of poetry as a gift.  The book is half poems, half pictures taken by the photographer, Seamus Murphy, when they were traveling in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC.  Each location has its own section in the book of poetry followed by photography.  Her poetry reads a lot like her song lyrics, which is not to denigrate either.  As I read though, I could hear her singing the words (and some of the phrases from the Washington DC section in particular appear in her album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.)  As you can imagine from the locales to which they travel, the subject matter is bleak.  Harvey is good at painting a scene in few words and closing with an image that is poignant and food for thought. 

Good Riddance by Elinor Lipman.  I adore Elinor Lipman’s books and this one does not disappoint.  Her books tend to stay on the surface, in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get manner, but she is really funny and she has a knack for setting up humorous situations.  Here, Daphne is a young woman whose marriage has ended and mother recently died.  She found out that her husband had only married her to get his trust fund money, so she is bitter about that.  Then when her mother dies, she bequeaths to Daphne a yearbook filled with notes about what all the graduates went on to be and do.  Daphne decides she doesn’t want this and puts it in the recycling bin in her Manhattan apartment building.  However, a woman down the hall finds it and decides to make a podcast out of the information.  In trying to stop her from doing so, Daphne discovers a secret her mother had been keeping.  Meanwhile too, her widowed father has moved from NH to Manhattan and is enjoying his retired life as a professional dog walker.  Daphne also starts dating an actor who lives next door.  She frequently travels to NH regarding the information from the yearbook, and it is all an amusing farce.