The recent long holiday weekend was cold and rainy, so I treated myself to a long overdue reading binge. It was a wonderful time to finish current reading and dig into my TO BE READ STACK. Here’s what I discovered:
Trust: A Novel by Hernan Diaz
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
This is the book I started reading before the weekend, but happily finished reading. Hernan Diaz has created four narratives in one book, all telling the story of Benjamin Rusk. The first part is the novel Bonds, which Rusk is not pleased with, so he starts to outline his own version of his life in part two. Part three is a memoir of the person he hired to write his story and part four are discovered entries from his wife’s journals. All form an immersive story and a literary puzzle. Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay by Merilyn Simonds
Merilyn Simonds, has written a remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman — a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds.
Referred to as a Canadian Rachel Carson, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence lived and worked in an isolated log cabin near North Bay. Born in Sweden to a privileged life, she became a nurse, married a Russisan, who was murdered by Bolsheviks. After his death she moved to Canada where she worked for the Canadian Red Cross visiting her northern Ontario patients by dogsled. When Elzire Dionne gave birth to five babies, Louise became nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets. Repulsed by the media circus, she retreated to her wilderness cabin, where she devoted herself to studying the birds that nested in her forest. Author of six books and scores of magazine stories, de Kiriline Lawrence and her “loghouse nest” became a Mecca for international ornithologists.
Lawrence was an old woman when the author moved into the woods not far away. Their paths crossed, sparking Simonds’s lifelong interest. A dedicated birder, Simonds brings her own songbird experiences from Canadian nesting grounds and Mexican wintering grounds to this deeply researched, engaging portrait of a uniquely fascinating woman. Louise asked Simonds to tell her story, giving her full access to her journals, research, drawings and photographs. I was drawn in immediately and ever so glad to learn about this remarkable woman.
Lucky Turtle: A Novel by Bill Roorbach
When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends.
But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together—and circumstances shaped by skin color—will keep them apart for decades. Cindra gets trapped in a relationship, where she is controlled by a man who claims to be her rescuer. But for Cindra, there will never be another Lucky, and she dreams of one day finding him, the only man she’s ever fully trusted, her soulmate.
This book was on top of my TO BE READ stack due to the Montana setting. It was not what I expected…it was better. The relationship of Lucky Turtle and Cindra as they meet, run away and live off the land builds the backbone of the later quest to reunite.
The Bad Muslim Discount: A Novel by Syed M. Masood
Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is a comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.
It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalism takes root within the social order and the zealots next door attempt to make Islam great again, his family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar's deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can't find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim.
At the same time, thousands of miles away, Safwa, a young girl living in war-torn Baghdad with her grief-stricken, conservative father will find a very different and far more dangerous path to America. When Anvar’s and Safwa’s worlds collide as two remarkable, strong-willed adults, their contradictory, intertwined fates will rock their community, and families, to their core.
I was surveying first chapters before deciding what to read next, this book won because it made me laugh. A friend had lent me the book months ago, now I am glad I can return it! There is humor but many serious topics are discussed including reactions to 9/11 and Trump’s Muslim ban. One reviewer said Masood had an irreverent sense of humor but he also has insight as he examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging.
Grown Ups by Marie Aubert, translated by Rosie Hedger
Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic. She's navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs, terrified that time has passed her by, silently, without her ever realizing it, which feels even more poignant and common in our COVID era.
All she sees are other people's children, everywhere.
Now stuck in the idyllic Norwegian countryside for a gathering to mark her mother's sixty-fifth birthday, Ida is regressing. She's fighting with her younger sister, Marthe, and flirting with her sister's husband. But when some supposedly wonderful news from Marthe heightens tensions further, Ida is forced to mark out new milestones of her own.
This book was in my stack of June releases. It also had the shortest number of pages! I am a fan of Scandinavian authors and Aubert is referred to as one of Norway's rising stars. Modern motherhood, sibling rivalry and family gatherings present much to divide and conquer.
Every day, Albert Entwistle makes his way through the streets of his small English town, delivering letters and parcels and returning greetings with a quick wave and a “how do?” Everyone on his route knows Albert, or thinks they do—a man of quiet routines, content to live alone with his cat, Gracie.
Three months before his sixty-fifth birthday, Albert receives a letter from the Royal Mail thanking him for decades of service and stating that he has now reached mandatory retirement age. At once, Albert’s simple life unravels. Without the work that fills his days, what will he do? He has no friends, family, or hobbies—just a past he never speaks of, and a lost love that fills him with regret. And so, rather than continue his lonely existence, Albert forms a brave plan to start truly living, to be honest about who he is . . . and to find George, the man with whom he spent one perfect spring and summer long ago.
A Note from Matt Cain, the author of The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle:
“One of the things that inspired me to write this novel was all the joy I felt at seeing gay men like myself being embraced by British society. I think you'd be hard-pushed to find any other minority community in the UK that was as hated, feared and vilified as gay men were fifty years ago and is now as widely celebrated and loved. Acceptance of gay men has become a touchstone of British values within less than a decade, something that even the most optimistic commentators couldn’t have predicted. I wanted to write a book that would celebrate this. And I sincerely hope The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle makes its readers feel good about themselves and the part they’ve played in bringing about this extraordinary social shift.” —Matt Cain
OK, I stretched the long weekend into a week and just finished this book last night. It is a paperback original, which means book groups can and should pick this up immediately! Happy PRIDE month.
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