Once There Were Wolves, by Charlotte McConaghy: Immensely well done. I have not read Migrations (yet) and didn’t know anything, really, about either the author or the novel before beginning it. The past and present are woven together expertly and everywhere you look there’s something else that the story is about – wolves, conservation, twins, mirror-touch synesthesia, place, domestic violence. I was impressed by the author’s writing and storytelling both, and the novel never stopped surprising me.
Lost in Summerland, by Barrett Swanson: Someone is writing personal narrative about experiencing existential depression in South Florida? I feel threatened! Okay, that was primarily the first essay. I wasn’t totally sold on the premise of this collection – “looking for the real America” – seemed like a pretty thin rod on which to hang a bunch of stories that happened to, in some cases, take place in different parts of the country – but I may just have been extremely grumpy while reading this. Things kept needling at me – the way the author is so consciously self-effacing, the overdone flourishes in the prose (in particular when they were reused – how did an editor let two instances of “pumicing away” and two instances of “a whole nomenclature of ______” and three instances of “the vade mecum of _____” make it into the same book?). I might have appreciated them more one at a time, over years, rather than over a week during which I wasn’t having the best of times and may not have been as receptive as I otherwise might be. But these are many conditionals. I will say that as I read on, I did really admire the title essay and another late essay, “Disaster City,” although when Swanson began to recount his experiences with OCD I again started to feel like, hey, this guy is taking my beat here…so perhaps I should consider that the things nettling me in the collection are those that reflect my self.
Home, Land, Security, by Carla Power: The title, albeit clever and ultimately fitting, doesn’t completely capture the focus of Power’s book, which centers on deradicalization and the different methods countries around the world (in particular the UK, Indonesia, Belgium, Pakistan, and the US) have enacted (or failed to enact) in reintegrating former terrorists (neo-Nazis, members of ISIS) into society. There are a wide range of approaches and an equally wide range of participants being deradicalized – from those who have committed atrocities to those who have only planned on traveling to Syria to join the Islamic state or whose “participation” in terrorism was strictly providing support (eg food, lodging) to terrorists. Powers does a great job of questioning herself at every turn – how her allegiances and motives may cloud her judgment, how she can better examine her own prejudices and beliefs, how even the act of doing so may still leave her with lacunae in her understanding. The experience of reading her well-reasoned, empathetic, and compelling narratives, then reading on as she deftly questions herself, made me edgy (in a necessary way) in trying to interrogate my own biases and even my response to the book itself. Incredibly compelling and crucial.
Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner: The first thing I did after someone recommended this memoir was go to my Spotify “liked songs” (all of which come from my Discover Weekly playlists – ie all of the songs are recent discoveries and representative of only a tiny part of my actual “liked” music) to see if I had liked any by Japanese Breakfast, Zauner’s band. Yes! “Diving Woman” from their 2017 album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. (This was just to satisfy my curiosity – I realize that could sound as if I might decide whether to read the book based on whether I liked the music). Initially, it pained me to imagine that Zauner probably had an easier time publishing this due to relative fame – because it’s SO good that the idea of it not existing (if Zauner were unknown to the world) was painful. But then I discovered that actually, Zauner’s writing success and her musical success happened almost simultaneously, and she likely sold Crying in H Mart on the strength of the excerpts she had already published as essays (including one that won Glamour Magazine’s writing contest). I loved this book – but it’s also, for anyone with a mother, or anyone close to their mother – extremely sad and difficult to read.
Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner: Okay, as much as “spy stuff” is one of my top two most problematic favorite things (the other is the summer olympics), I didn’t harbor any illusions that the CIA has been a force of good in the world (or even a force of neutrality…or mild evil…) – but good lord was I not expecting just how incompetent it’s been! Sure, I knew about some of the missteps and the more recent flat-out failures, but at some level I went into this history of the CIA expecting underhanded, unethical intelligence…and found sheer bumbling destructive incapability. The book, though, is fascinating. It can be tricky to keep track of all of the players in the CIA’s history, but the 1000-page tome is structured around the tenure of each president, which helps. Unfortunately, because this is a 2007 book, there isn’t anything on more recent years, though I think the past ten years would still be classified. For comparison’s sake (and there is significant attention paid to how “advanced” (I need a punctuation mark there that looks less sarcastic than quotation marks but more ambiguous than no punctuation) the British intelligence service and the Soviet intelligence apparatus are while America had almost nothing), I’d love to read a history of the primary intelligence agencies from other nations. It was fascinating to see the transition from a time without electronic records, surveillance, or data – how much easier it was to lie (as the early directors of the CIA did, copiously) to the president and congress and continue to fail in the same exact ways repeatedly.
