Keep Reading

Hi all. It appears we’re in the dog days of summer now and I know many in the Midwest and East have been living with a lot of wildfire smoke. I hope it leaves soon and you get clear skies again. We have a little smoke here but nothing like it’s been there. I took this photo last Wednesday when it was more clear coming home from golf. I hope you like the yellow serenity. 

Meanwhile I’m headed out of town for a few days to officiate the provincial tennis tournament. I’ll be back later in the week.

In book news, some might have caught wind of an upcoming article in the August issue of the Atlantic titled The End of Reading Is Here by Rose Horowitch … which I haven’t read since it’s behind a paywall but is talked about elsewhere. It notes the dismal percentage of those reading among the next generation. Apparently fewer than half of all U.S. adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. So what — the article posits — does that mean for society? Nothing good I think, but I know us bookworms will keep the torch burning bright for reading.  

In response I made a chart of all the people waiting for a slew of popular books at the two libraries that I’m a member of.  I haven’t figured out how to post my chart yet, but I can tell you the demand is very high for such books as Whistler by Ann Patchett, London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, The Stranger by Belle Burden, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson … and of course Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, which had the most holds of all. Did you know that 6,508 people are on hold waiting for an e-book copy of Yesteryear at the Los Angeles Public Library, which owns 979 e-book copies? I wonder how long that would take to get. You can do the math … it’ll be a while. So I like to think that a lot of us are still reading for pleasure out there.

And now I’ll leave you with reviews of what I finished lately.  

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens / Farrar, Straus / 240 pages / 2025

3.7 stars. Whoa this was a bit darker tale than I expected going in. It’s set in a town called Dominion, Mississippi, about an affluent Southern Black family — the Winfreys — whose father is the reverend at the big Baptist Church in town and has five sons with his wife Priscilla. One of the sons Emanuel is known around as Wonderboy, and is a star high school quarterback, a really fast runner, and a great singer who seems to be going places. 

Meanwhile his father is caught up in his sermons and philanderings, taking Priscilla for granted. Then Wonderboy catches the eye of a struggling girl named Diamond who falls for him. They begin dating but later an encounter Wonder has at the track with a stranger … changes everything … and sets their world in a troubled direction. After that, Wonder asks Diamond if she’d set out on the run with him. 

Told mostly by Priscilla, Wonder’s mother, and Diamond, the orphaned girlfriend — with a bit of Wonder’s narration too — you soon come to see how the two women are in predicaments, one with the father and the other with the son. Their narrations are lively and compelling, and I wasn’t sure if they’d come out of it all right. It turns sort of violent.  

This debut novel received considerable attention last year and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I thought it was a promising debut though the ending and some parts of the characters and story kept me from loving it much more.

Under Water by Tara Menon / Riverhead / 224 pages / 2026

3.7 stars. This is another promising debut, which I read with Tina at the blog Turn the Page, about two close friends Marissa and Arielle who grow up in Thailand. Marissa, who narrates, lost her mother when she was young and relishes being with Arielle and diving together off a nearby island helping the research that her father, a marine biologist, does involving the habits of manta rays. 

Alternately, years later in 2012, Marissa, age 24, is living in NYC and working at a magazine. As Hurricane Sandy approaches, she is flooded with memories of her friend Arielle and the 2004 Indian Tsunami that changed their lives years earlier. (This is not giving anything away as it’s mentioned near the beginning.)

The narrative jumps between the timelines of present and past and between Thailand and New York. It gets a bit scrambled at times but what is apparent that the two grew up close friends and shared a love of the natural world and diving in Thailand. Some of the descriptions are quite beautiful, especially involving the water and the manta rays. But in the present, Marissa has a lot of PTSD over what happened to Arielle, which you don’t find out about till the very end. 

Tina and I both seemed to like some of the writing and descriptions in this novel, though I don’t think we felt we fully knew the characters. The jumpy structure between the timelines made it feel at times like scenes perhaps rather than a deeper story with fuller character development. Still the friendship and loss come through pretty viscerally and reminded me of those awful days in 2004 after the world heard about the tsunami and its aftermath. Some 230,000 lives were lost across various countries, which was beyond devastating. The particulars of the disasters — the tsunami and Hurricane Sandy — seemed well researched by the author. 

That’s all for now. What about you — do you know these books and if so, what did you think?