Book Log 2022 #6: Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan

As a newly minted member of the IRA, a 16 year-old Brendan Behan set off on an unauthorized mission to bomb the Liverpool docks. As you might expect, he was caught before ever coming close to the docks, and was sentenced to a term in a borstal, the UK version of juvie. This book recounts the three years he spent inside, from 1939 to 1941.

Two things struck me about his account:

1.Behan's time in borstal did not seem particularly harrowing compared to what you might expect from a prison narrative. There are episodes of mistreatment and violence, but nothing particularly extreme. I don't know if Behan played down this aspect of his time, or if it just reflects a different time or approach to confining minors.

2. It becomes clear pretty quickly that the Irish Catholic Behan and the largely English Protestant body of inmates have more in common than they first expect, due to having a shared working class background. 

I liked it, but wonder how different the story would have been had he written it closer to his actual sentence.

 Book Log 2022: Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones

This is one of several recent memoirs by former members of the Children of God (also known as The Family or The Family International), a religious movement/cult which combined fundamentalist Christianity with communal living and an emphasis on sex as a way to show God's love. What sets this one apart is that Jones is the granddaughter of the group's founder, and thus has a unique insight into both the day to day life and broader practices of the group.

As the title implies, sex played a significant role, and females (including children) were expected to have sex with any male member of the group. The trauma this caused was significant, especially when added to the emotional and physical abuse common among such groups. Making sex a critical part of faith added another layer, adding the fear of eternal damnation on top of everything else.

Jones left th group as an adult, and the latter part of the book documents how she gained an education and developed her own sense of the wider world, experiences she was blocked from having while growing up. I found this part of the book a little uneven, as her critiques of education and other social structures don't always ring true to me (though I admittedly am coming at them from a very different place).

The book shows a great deal of restraint with regards to sex (moreso than you might expect from the title), talking about it plainly but without lurid detail. The recounting of life within the group is fascinating and well worth reading.

 Book Log 2022: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

This novel reimagines the events of the Iliad from the point of view of Briseis, a local queen who is taken captive by Achilles after the Greeks ransack her city.  We see the war through her eyes, from the various conflicts that Achilles has with other Greeks to her relationships with the other women in camp, many of whom were her subjects. As the title suggests, there's actually not that much dialogue from Briseis, as much of her story is told in flashback or internally.

The book is very direct in how it portrays the horrors of war, and the specific trauma it inflicts upon women. Seeing this in the context of the Trojan War underscores how little this has changed in history, and how rare it is to get a female perspective on war and its aftermath. 

I did read a few reviews of the book, and many complained about the use of modern slang, saying it pulls the reader out of the ancient setting. I can't say it bothered me, but I can see the argument. Some also said it lacked the lyrical or magical qualities of Circe, but I would expect a book about war to be more direct than one about a demigoddess who lives on an island.

Overall, I liked this book very much and look forward to the sequel.

 Book Log 2022 #3: Inspector Saito's Small Satori by Janwillem van de Wetering

I've wandered in and out of van de Wetering's series featuring Amsterdam detectives Grijpstra and de Gier, liking them well enough but not so motivated as to actually finish the series. The author has a background in both Zen Buddhism and police work, and combining the two results in an unusual take on the genre.

With this book, van de Wetering shifts more towards the Zen side of the equation. Inspector Saito is young and relatively new at his job, and relies on his Zen training and logical mind to both solve cases and manage his position within the department. They're good stories, and I think the combination of detective fiction and Buddhist philosophy may work better in this format (though that could say more about me and my relative inexperience with the subject than anything).

As far as I can this is the only book of Inspector Saito stories, which is too bad. I think I'd have read more of them... eventually.

 Book Log 2022 #2: The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nguyen continues to examine memory, identity, and the feeling of living between worlds in this short story collection. The stories have a kinship with his novels in terms of location and character histories, but are not (as far as I could tell) directly related to them. 

Each of the stories depicts a conflict where the main character must come to terms with a change in circumstances that puts their world view in question, from the newly-arrived Vietnamese refugee who discovers his sponsors are a gay couple to the American father who has to overcome his war experiences when visting his daughter, who now lives in Vietnam. There's also one story that seems autobiographical, about a boy whose parents own a Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose.

I really enjoyed the collection, and found each variaton on the common themes gave me something new to consider. As someone who has lived in more or less the same place surrounded by more or less the same people, the book helped me develop at least a slightly deeper understanding of what it means to live with such a permanent change in ones circumstances.

 Book Log 2022 #1: Heat Wave by Richard Castle

I started off the new year by reading the first book in the Nikki Heat series "written" by Richard Castle, who is played by Nathan Fillion on the ABC show Castle. In real life, this book was written by Tom Straw, a real-life mystery novelist and TV writer/producer who would go on to write several books in the series.

Nikki Heat is a New York cop who has to solve a murder while babysitting a journalist, Jameson Rook, who is researching an article. The two become de facto partners in the investigation while maybe also becoming partners in the bedroom. The name Heat works on several levels, you see.

The book was perfectly servicable as a TV-tie in, and didn't require any familiarity with the show that I could tell. But it also wasn't particularly memorable, and I don't see myself continuing on with the series.