Book Log 2022 #41: The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin

This is a short story collection by the author of The Three Body Problem and is named for its first story, in which mankind works to move the Earth out of the way of the sun when it goes supernova. Not all of the stories are hard sci-fi, and some have a fairly light or humorous tone. I thought they were all well-written and inventive, though there were a couple I liked less than the others, which I expect is pretty common given the mixed nature of the collection.

 Book Log 2022 #40: The Stranger in my Genes by Bill Griffeth

As part of his interest in genealogy, financial journalist Griffeth took a DNA test to get more information to help fill out his family tree. The results gave him not just a new branch to consider, but possibly an entirely new tree. This memoir documents his work to uncover the truth about his past and the pasts of his parents, biological and otherwise.

This book came out in 2016, when DNA testing was just becoming popular and surprise results were often (at least locally) newsworthy. Reading the book in 2022, when these sorts of results have become more commonplace, does threaten to lessen the impact of the story. But Griffeth uses his journalistic skills to tell a story in an engaging way without being overly dramatic. 

 Book Log 2022 #39: The Confessor by Daniel Silva

So I didn't intend to dip back into the Gabriel Allon series quite so quickly, but I needed a book and figured I could stand to catch up a bit on the series. In this outing, a Holocaust scholar is murdered in his Munich home, and Allon is tasked to find out who did it. In the course of his investigation he learns about a secret society within the Catholic church that acts to defend its reputation and power - both of which were under threat from the scholar's work. When that group sees the current pope as a threat, Allon must act to not only avenge the death of the scholar, but to prevent an assassination that could have worldwide ramifications.

Like the previous book, Silva selects an historical basis for the plot that is worthy of greater public examination. It's fair to say that the Vatican did not cover itself in glory in its response to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. On the other hand, a secret society within the Vatican is a pretty tired trope. Still liked the book, just hope it doesn't indicate the series heading off in a Dan Brown-type direction.

 Book Log 2022 #38: We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole

A combination memoir and social history, O'Toole uses the coincidence of his birth and the passing of legislation to open up the Irish economy being in the same year to use his life experiences as a lens to examine the changes in Irish society. His journey from being a kid in working class Dublin to going to university to becoming a journalist and critic echo Ireland's change from being insular and church-dominated to being one of the most open societies in Europe.

In some instances the book is quite touching, especially as O'Toole shares memories of his parents and growing up in the 1960s. In others, he is searingly critical of the power structures that allowed violence and abuse to run free, from the overt violence of the Troubles to the personal violence of abusive parents, teachers, and priests that went undiscussed and unchecked. 

The book takes its title from an Irish saying, "Sure, we don't know ourselves," which typically refers to things improving to a point where you don't recognize who you are now based on where you were. What O'Toole successfully demonstrates is that there was (and probably still is, in some fashion) a cognitive dissonance in Irish society between the things that are publicly known and things that are collectively privately known but allowed to fester. This book take a fascinating and highly readable step towards synthesis.

 Book Log 2022 #37: You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero

So another genre I don't normally read that I've had to dip into for reading challenges is self-help. I wound up picking this for the most recent challenge as the title was amusing. I found the book less so. Some of it is motivational, but then there's a lot about manifesting things and becoming a life coach. I suppose there are people for whom this is the right book to get their life jump started. I'm not one of them.

I don't know if my reaction is specific to this book or to the genre as a whole. I suppose I might find out the next time I'm forced to read a self-help book.

 Book Log 2022 #36: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

When oil was discovered in Oklahoma, it turned out that quite a lot of it was sitting under land owned by the Osage nation. The Osage quickly became rich, and looked to be headed towards long-term security.

Except that the Osage started to die. Some mysteriously, others more obviously murdered. The killings often targeted families, with the inheritances eventually winding up with a sole survivor. This sole survivor was, more often than not, a white man who married into the family.

Officials took up investigations into the killings. Many of the investigators were themselves killed.  The nascent FBI took up the cases, struggling until J. Edgar Hoover assigned a former Texas Ranger, Tom White, to lead things. This book largely tells the story of White and how he was able to unravel the conspiracy against the Osage.

While the book does an excellent job of detailing the crimes and their eventual solution, what stood out to me was how it set the crimes into a larger context of American history and colonization. These were not isolated events, but part of a greater conflict over race and class. Recommended.

 Book Log 2022 #35: The English Assassin by Daniel Silva

Art restorer and Israeli spy Gabriel Allon is in Switzerland for his former job, only to find that the owner of the Raphael he's restoring has been killed - and left at the foot of the painting. An investigation uncovers that the owner also held a collection of looted Impressionist paintings, which are now gone. Allon is tasked by his service to track down the killer (who appears to be someone Allon trained) and recover the art so it can be returned to its rightful owners.

This book has all the hallmarks of the spy thriller - twisty plot, gunplay, clandestine meetings, etc. - while throwing some light on how Switzerland became a repository for treasure stolen by Nazi Germany. I enjoyed the book quite a bit and will likely stick with this series.

 Book Log 2022 #34: The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand

One of the challenges of doing a reading challenge is when you get a category that falls into a topic or genre you don't really like. This kind of happened to me with this book, which I read to satisfy a requirement for a "beach read." And while the person running the challenges was very flexible about the category, I felt like I had to respect the spirit of the thing and go with a summery romance-type novel.

The set up here is that a writer is blocked, and with bills looming is desperate for inspiration. She finds it when her best friend decides to revamp her garden, and hires a "ruggedly handsome" landscape architect to get the work done. While the friend seems attracted to the architect, the writer works this into the sort of "woman hires gardener to trim her hedges, if you know what I mean" story you'd expect, and both have to work to counter a rumor mill that already has the friend and her lawn guy laying sod together. If you know what I mean.

Without any real background in the genre it's hard for me to say if this is a good representation. Objectively, it's not a book I would recommend. Ever. One thing it did do for me was confirm my prejudices against Nantucket, which were developed early on thanks to an unlikely football rivalry. So if you're looking to find something to justify thinking that people from Nantucket are jerks, this may fit the bill.

 Book Log 2022 #33: The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars 

The 99% Invisible podcast focuses on the aspects of architecture and design that typically go unnoticed. This book combines topics from the pod with additional information and helpful illustrations to explain details in the built environment that we often see but usually don't understand (for example, what the symbols and colors spraypainted on pavement before digging mean).

While I found much of this book fascinating, the one drawback is that if you are a regular listener to the pod you may find that you're familiar with a lot of what's covered. This is probably a common hazard for books based on other media - I had a similar issue with For the Love of Europe by Rick Steves - but in this case there was enough new material to keep me going.

 Book Log 2022 #32: Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan

Gaffigan reflects on being a parent in this collection of essays and stories, mostly centered around the challenges of having younger kids (his musings on diaper changes and organizing family trips to the park will feel familiar if you've had kids) and the problems of being outnumbered (he and his wife have five kids). 

As someone who can safely look at parenting young kids in the rear view, I did recognize a lot of what Gaffigan writes about, and appreciated how he applied his particular brand of humor. Not all of the stories worked for me, but I expect that the success of the stories are more dependent on the experiences of the reader than usual. 

 Book Log 2022 #31: Atonement by Ian McEwan

The combination of an interest in writing and an active imagination is typically a good thing - how would we get books otherwise? - but in the personage of Briony Tallis, they prove damaging on a generational scale.  Her interpretation of things seen and read during a particular day in 1935 cause her act in a way that cause permanent injury to family and friends.  We see how she came to act the way she did, and how her actions played out in the future, over the course of the novel.

As much as I appreciated the writing and the nuanced way history played out over the course of the book, I had a hard time not thinking about what drove Briony to make the decisions she made. She was young (13 in 1935) and not particularly experienced, and the way her interior life seemed to influence her behavior made me wonder if she had an undiagnosed ASD (to the extent one could diagnose such a thing at the time). But it could just be that she's kind of a monster.

And just to put a cherry on top, the book also has a bit of a twist at the end that may change how you view everything that happened before it. 

 Book Log 2022 #30: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

While several authors used the Covid-19 outbreak as the inspiration for writing a pandemic novel, Mandel is among the few who used it to write a second pandemic novel. The difference between her first, 2014's Station Eleven, and the second, is personal experience.

A number of people have noted the similarities between Mandel and Olive Llewellyn, the main character who is also an author whose breakthrough novel involves a pandemic. Olive is on a lengthy book tour, and misses her family on the moon (there being two moon colonies in the 23rd century where Olive lives). Olive is on Earth at a time when an actual pandemic seems to be brewing, and isn't quite sure if it's enough of  threat to cut the tour short. Outside of actually living on the moon, it's pretty easy to see how Mandel's pandemic experience informed Olive.

But this is just one timeline in the book, which follows characters from the 20th to the 25th century. These timelines have a number of callbacks to other books (most notably The Glass Hotel), and are tied together by a real-life anomaly that Olive worked into her book. That anomaly later becomes a focus of time researchers, who provide its ultimate solution.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but I've liked all of her books. It will help if you've read Station Eleven and The Glass House prior to reading this one, as there are some spoilers. There are significantly more sci-fi elements to this book than the others (you did notice I mentioned time travel and living on the moon?), so price that in if you're not typically into sci-fi (though I think people who aren't into sci-fi can still enjoy this).

 Book Log 2022 #29: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria by Winston Churchill

This book is the first of two Churchill wrote on his experiences in the Boer Wars. He went to South Africa as a reporter, and his letters and dispatches form the book's source material. While there's ample coverage of the military engagements (which Churchill would later participate in when he rejoined the military), I found the sections dealing with his capture by the Boers and subsequent escape to be the most interesting part of the book. 

Unfortunately I found most of the book not that interesting, probably a combination of a somewhat archaic writing style and a lack of knowledge about British military history and the Boer Wars in general. I wouldn't say it's a bad book, just one with a fairly narrow appeal.

 Book Log 2022 #28: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

An Asante woman named Maame has two daughters, half-sisters who live in separate villages in what is today Ghana. One winds up marrying the British governor of a local slave forts and remains in Africa, while the other sister is captured in a raid and enslaved, sent through the fort her sister lives in to North America, where she winds up at a plantation in the US south. The book follows their stories and those of some of their descendants, up to the present day.

Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the US, wrote this book after her first trip back to Ghana, where she was struck by the difference in the upper levels of the slave fort and the dungeons, and how the people living upstairs were unaware of what the people in the dungeons were going through. 

I don't know that I would have picked this book up on its own, and I'm very thankful to the reading challenge that led me to it.  It's wonderfully written, both story lines are engaging and the characters fully realized. It's also impressive that this is Gyasi's debut novel. Recommended.

 Book Log 2022 #27: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

When I was a kid one of the magazines we got at the house was Reader's Digest. I'm pretty sure we got a gift subscription every year, as I don't recall ever seeing my parents sending in the renewal.  And say what you will about America's favorite source of abridged stories, but it was the publication that introduced me to Ray Bradbury.

There may have been others, but I remember two chapters of his novels that I first read in the magazine. One was "The Sound of Summer Running" from Dandelion Wine, the other was "There Will Come Soft Rains" from this book. 

This was a re-read rather than my first time through, and this time through I found the similarities between 21st century Mars and 1950s America a bit distracting. I know this was more or less done intentionally as a way to depict how current thinking and values can have significant impacts in the future, but I don't think it's aged all that well. Still worth reading if you like Bradbury, though.

 Book Log 2022 #26: Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

A part-time jazz drummer dies during a gig, and when London constable Peter Grant arrives to investigate he senses the tune of a jazz standard coming from the body, a sign that the death is not just unnatural, but likely supernatural.

Grant soon discovers this is just the latest unexpected death of someone in London's jazz scene. The broader scope of the investigation leads him to involve both his boss, the wizard Inspector Nightingale, and a music journalist with an understanding of the London jazz scene. The case quickly becomes personal for Grant, given that his dad is a jazz musician and that the relationship with the journalist starts heading in a romantic direction. 

This description probably doesn't do the book justice, as it's a highly imaginative (and often funny) mix of mystery and fantasy. I've come to like this series quite a bit over the first two novels, and am looking forward to continuing on.

 Book Log 2022 #25: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

A novel of the Shakespeare family rather than of the Bard himself, this book is named for William Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who (spoiler alert) died at the age of 11. O'Farrell uses his death to tell two different but related stories, one on how his illness and death affected Shakespeare's work and relationship with his wife, and the other going back to when the pair met and fell in love 15 years before Hamnet's death.

For all the talk of William and Hamnet, the main character of the book is Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife and Hamnet's mother. We know very little about her in real life, possibly not even her first name (at least one surviving document refers to her as Agnes). O'Farrell uses this largely blank canvas to depict Anne as an eccentric, with an interest in healing and falconry. We see how her marriage to Shakespeare leads to conflicts between her original self and her as a wife and mother, and how the loss of Hamnet causes grief, but also an opening through which to reclaim part of herself.

Most commercial reviews of the book were highly positive, while reader reviews seemed more split (a number of people complained about the pacing, as well as finding the characters flat). I did not find either of those to be issues, though as a parent (and as someone who lost a sibling at a relatively early age) I may have connected more with the issues of grief and loss and not noticed other shortcomings. 

 Book 2022 #24: Oh, Florida! by Craig Pittman

Pittman, a native Floridian (so a Florida man, but not Florida Man), brings his personal and journalistic experiences together in this book whose subtitle, "How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country," fits both the state's general vibe and its cultural weight. 

More than just a compendium of stories involving men, alligators, and liquor stores, this book is an honest (and funny) attempt to explain why Florida is the way it is. Not surprisingly, Florida was kind of weird from the get go, and has only become weirder as time gave us more ways to be weird and more ways for that weirdness to be noticed outside of the state.

Pittman does a great job of balancing humor, history, and a kind of pride about living in Florida. He's also a good interview, as he's been on Rick Steves's radio show a number of times to talk about the state (this show has an interview about this book, but he's appeared on other episodes, too). 

 Book Log 2022 #22: Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet by Michael Meyer

Before Benjamin Franklin died, he added a bequest in his will to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, leaving both 1000 pounds. But it wasn't a simple gift, as he also put specific conditions on the use of the money. For the first 100 years after his death, the funds would only be available to help fund apprenticeships, similar to the one that got him started in the printing business. Any money not loaned out would be invested to collect interest.

After than 100 years, 75 percent of the principal could be used for a public works project, with the remaining money staying invested and available for apprenticeship loans. After another 100 years, whatever money was left could be used as seen fit with no restrictions.

This book tells the story of how the money was spent over time, and the issues that came up along the way. Not surprisingly, there are stories of bad investments and politicians using the money for themselves. But there were also questions of how to manage a bequest as times changed. For example, as apprenticeships became less popular, what options do you have to loan money that would still meet the letter of the gift?

I did like the book, but I felt like there was probably more Franklin backstory than was strictly necessary.

 Book Log 2022 #23: Runnin' With the Devil by Noel Monk

Monk, who served as tour manager and then personal manager for Van Halen, tells the story of his time with the bank in this book, which roughly covers the band's beginnings to the departure of David Lee Roth. 

Most of the behind the scenes stuff is what you'd expect - they trashed a number of hotel rooms and had a fondness for cocaine - but there were some more revelatory aspects to the story as well.  Alex and Eddie Van Halen's home life when they were growing is presented as deeply dysfunctional, making it easy to draw a line to issues in their adulthood (Eddie is depicted as emotionally needy, while Alex is shown as having more issues with being part Indonesian). The Van Halens and Roth were also depicted as not treating bassist Michael Anthony as an equal member of the band, and he does kind of come off as being a bit apart from the others (though Monk always describes him positively).

I also hadn't really known what an overnight success the band was, probably as they became popular right when I first started noticing bands and listening to the radio. They're one of those bands that, to my mind, has always been there.

I did enjoy the book quite a bit, it's not the most penetrating analysis of the band but the stories are good and it fills in a lot of history for those of us who might not be aware. One suggestion I came across online was to read this and Van Halen Rising, as that book covers the period up to their signing with Warner, with this book adding on the history up to Roth's leaving. Seems like a good suggestion.