Hi all. I hope you are well. I had my first bike ride here of the season on Saturday and took this photo. It was great to be outside and about though my new replaced knee wasn’t fully ready yet for my road bike with clip-in pedals, so I used a mountain bike with regular pedals and raised the seat in order to be able to bend the knee in a circular motion. Apparently my recovery has been slow (now five months post-surgery) due to old scar tissue in the knee (Grrrrr), but I’m still working with a physio. It’s been quite frustrating, the first knee was so much easier. I don’t have time to waste with spring coming. I have hopes to get back to gardening, golf, and tennis pretty soon now. I sound like a geezer, lol. I’m part metal, part plastic, and part wishfully bionic lol.

The weather has been fluctuating wildly, we hit 60F degrees for two days this week and now it’s snowing again this morning. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, lol. But it’s nice to see spring and the azaleas at the Masters golf tournament we’ve been watching from Augusta, Ga. Today will be a nail biter on who will win. Rory McIlroy lost a 6-stroke lead yesterday at the end of Round 3. It was crazy. We will tune in again today.

Meanwhile in shows, we’ve been dipping into The Lincoln Lawyer lately. We’re only at the end of Season 1 … and currently they’re in production of Season 5. Yikes, we will last that long? Bosch was a great show based like this one on Michael Connelly’s crime books, but we’re still feeling our way a bit with this series. Any fans out there of this show?

And now in book news, let’s see what I finished in March. I got to two memoirs (Joyride and Fly, Wild Swans) and three novels (pictured below). I liked them all pretty well except for Tinkers, which lost me a few times. It’s hard to pick a favorite as they all had their moments. I liked the narration in Train Dreams and the memoirs — one serious and impactful (Fly, Wild Swans) and one lighter and a bit humorous (Joyride) were especially good. I’ve finished five nonfiction so far this year and I think I’ll surpass the 10 measly nonfiction books I read all of last year. We can only hope.

• Joyride by Susan Orlean (memoir, audiobook) – 2025
• Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild (debut novel, audiobook) – 2025
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (novel) – (novella, audiobook) 2011
• Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang (memoir, hardback) – 2025
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (novel, paperback & audio) – 2009

And now here’s a review of what I finished this past week.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan / Random House / 453 pages / 2025

4+ stars. This is a long yarn of a story, which I was happy to read at the same time with Tina at the blog Turn the Page. It was a good one to read and discuss together. If you like multigenerational family (period) dramas, then you’ll need to get to this one.

It covers 40 years in the lives of two American families — from near the end of WWII through the Vietnam War — who live in a small town in Ohio and become entwined through circumstances. It’s better to go into this novel blind without knowing too much about it if you can … as the characters’ wrongful turns and secrets play a big part of it. I won’t divulge those here but just give a general plot outlook.

At the beginning Cal Jenkins is preoccupied that he can’t enlist in the war since one of his legs is longer than the other. He’s married to a local girl Becky and works at his father-in-law’s hardware store. Then one day with the radio news of Germany’s surrender, he’s kissed impulsively by a stranger in the store named Margaret Anderson. She’s had a rough childhood as an orphan but is now married to Felix, a good looking man who’s an executive at the aluminum plant. Cal and Becky have a young infant son Skip, and two years later when Felix comes home from war in the Pacific, he and Margaret have Tom. The sons become friends and later they face the impending draft of the Vietnam War.

The novel with couples Cal & Becky and Felix & Margaret goes into their backstories and perspectives of their lives and times. Becky is a bit unique in that she can sometimes communicate with the dead. She starts inviting clients to their house where she holds seances to try to reach clients’ loved ones from beyond the grave. Cal is none too happy — nor is a firm believer in this, but he lets Becky conduct her business. Later you’ll see how it ties in with the rest of the book.

On the plus side, the novel was an immersive read as I got into the characters, each of whom is both sympathetic and also a bit maddening. They are a bit complex in that regard, which made it a better story. I also liked the historical and cultural aspects mentioned amid the decades along the way and how the themes of love and forgiveness tie together near the end. There’s not a ton of action (mostly Felix’s war experiences), but it’s mainly a character study of how they all relate and mix, sometimes consequentially. I only had a couple nitpicks about how Margaret’s character goes and whether some parts later on seemed fully realistic, mostly regarding attitudes towards Felix. Still this novel kept me readily turning the pages and I’ll be thinking about it for some time in retrospect. It’s a long yarn that has an impact.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read this one and what did you think? Or what are you reading now? Cheers.

Hi bookworms, how was your week? I got back from California on Tuesday evening and have been catching up on yard work and chores around the house ever since, lol. I will leave you with a photo of the beach where I had to say goodbye to the Pacific. I had some nice swims in the ocean, which felt cold but refreshing after being in the hot sun and I enjoyed some beach reading and walks. Now we are having some beautiful weather in southern Alberta, so I can’t complain. I’m squeezing in some golf, tennis, and bicycling each week and I’m loving it. But how did summer go by so quickly?

Currently I’m reading a PW novel and listening to Marjan Kamali’s novel The Lion Women of Tehran, which was on my summer reading list. I’m liking it and hopefully the ending will be good.

Also we are watching the TV series Say Nothing (on Hulu and Disney+) based on the nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe about a group of people involved with the Irish Republican Army and their actions over decades during the Troubles. It’s quite good and a nail-biter. I have not read the book, but the series is worth it. It brings the conflict to life and touches on the Disappeared and particularly the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972. Have you read or seen this? I know I’m a little late to the party, but it’s pretty potent and gives a glimpse into Northern Ireland during those violent scary days.

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

Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh / Little Brown / 288 pages / 2025

Synopsis: Set mostly in Shanghai, this novel is about a young woman Lindsey Litvak, 22, who goes over to China with her college boyfriend to teach English, but after a year he leaves and she starts supporting herself through dubious means. Then early on, she’s in an accident and winds up in a coma in the hospital and her divorced parents fly to sit by her side in a foreign city where they can’t speak the language, or manage very well.

Lindsey was a bit estranged to them but close to her younger adopted sister Grace, born in China, who’s in summer camp in the U.S. while this is going on. What happens to Lindsey and how she became estranged to her parents and how they’re impacted by her accident unfold as the book goes along. While a final section is narrated by her sister Grace and how she comes to grip with her Chinese identity and her sister’s accident.

My Thoughts:  4 stars. I fell into this story very quickly and worried about Lindsey’s wayward personal journey. She’s a naive flawed girl who learns a bit late some of life’s hard realities, despite being bright and knowing the language and being enthusiastic about Shanghai. I liked her parts best in the book (and kept rooting that she would change her ways), but then when her accident happens her parents arrive and it goes into the family’s backstory a bit, along with the younger sister Grace’s.

It’s a bit sad overall but seemed a pretty propulsive tale, which I listened to as an audiobook. I think the novel is my favorite of Jennifer Haigh’s novels so far … still I thought the ending could’ve been managed a bit better. The last section goes on a tangent into Grace’s narration and life, though I was still caught up on Lindsey whom I thought the book was mostly about. The Grace part, though worthy in itself, felt a bit separate and lopped onto it. Still I liked most of the book and will watch for what Haigh writes next. This was #11 on my summer reading list.

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa / translated by Polly Barton / Hogarth / 2025

Synopsis: This novella follows Shaka Izawa, a mid-40s woman confined in a group care home (during Covid) who suffers from a rare congenital muscle disorder that leaves her with a curved spine and using a wheelchair and a ventilator. She spends her days taking online university courses, tweeting incendiary thoughts, and writing pornographic stories for money, which she sends to charities. She’s wealthy and owns the group home due to an inheritance from her parents who are now gone. During this time she learns one of the caretakers has been following her tweets and she makes him a sexual proposition.  

My Thoughts:  3.5 stars. This is a bit of an odd novel and not for everyone, but for its originality and depiction of a feisty disabled woman (Shaka), I ended up admiring it and reading it twice since it’s only 90 pages. Some of the passages are powerful or biting and throw your assumptions aside about the severely disabled, other passages are a bit vulgar as the protagonist likes to tweet provocative things such as: “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute,” or “My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion just like a normal woman.” She wants to experience such things and yet sees herself as a “hunchback monster.”

Shaka breathes through a tracheostomy tube in order to breathe better so she’s often having to wipe away the mucus that gets in the way. Holding and reading a physical book hurts her spine and she writes that the able-bodied don’t know how good they have it. This novel speaks to the rights of the disabled. 

I won’t say what happens about the proposition Shaka makes to the caregiver, but it isn’t something you can forget anytime soon — and not in a good way. It’s a bit bleak and strange, but I’m glad to be introduced to Saou Ichikawa’s writing. She pulls no punches, and made me see things in new ways. Obviously most able-bodied people have no clue about serious disabled people or the steep hurdles they face each day. Though I’m still wondering about the book’s ambiguous ending … I could’ve used something a bit more concrete at that point but no. 

I first heard about this novel, which was published in Japan in 2023 and in North America in 2025, when it made the International Booker Prize longlist. The author Saou Ichikawa is like her protagonist in that she suffers from congenital myopathy, as does her older sister, according to Wikipedia. The New York Times did a profile of Ichikawa back in May, which you can read here. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have read these and what did you think?

Hi all. Happy Easter weekend. I hope you have some fun plans ahead. I think we are pretty much chilling at home and might just hit some golf balls, yay. Yesterday we weeded out the garden beds. And now it looks like maybe a rainy weekend is here, so we’ll see. We could really use the moisture. We went out to dinner last night as a treat and on the way home we saw this moose by the side of the road. He sort of blends into the landscape eh? It’s always fun to see a moose and lucky too I think, though he seemed a bit scraggly — not sure if he was old or just losing his winter coat, or a bit lonely. We wished him well. 

It must be the week of critters because a few days earlier we watched a red fox on our street for a while as he was carrying something in his mouth. We think it was part of a chicken, alas. Also a skunk was out last night and he sprayed something (luckily not our dogs), so it seems the critters are out and about as spring opens up here. And along the roadsides there are plenty of Richardson’s ground squirrels (often called prairie gophers) popping up that look a lot like prairie dogs but are a bit smaller. We do our best to weave and miss them when they run out on the roads, but they really like to flirt with danger. 

Here is some more library loot that I picked up this past week, combined with earlier loot. When will I get to Eowyn Ivey’s new one? I’ve read her two other novels: The Snow Child and To the Bright Edge of the World and hope to get to this one sometime too.

And then there’s also Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State, which is about three close friends and a wedding of one of them in Montana. Apparently 117 others at the library are waiting for a copy of it — thanks to Oprah picking it for her book club. But I’m not sure I will be able to get to it this time around with all my others going on — it’s a longer yarn too. But I see that Anne Tyler’s short novel Three Days in June is also about a wedding. What is it about wedding plots these days? There’s also the popular The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which I plan to get to on audio sometime. We’ll all become experts on wedding plots soon enough. 

And did you know that April 10 was the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, which came out April 10, 1925? Wow. I heard about it on a couple news programs recently and the New York Times did a pretty good podcast about the anniversary too. I’m a bit of a Fitzgerald fan and I last read Gatsby in May 2013 before the Baz Luhrmann movie with Leo DiCaprio came out of it. I’ve also read Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise and his last one Tender Is the Night. But Gatsby in 1925 was quite the literary landmark.

I think I will honor it by reading it again sometime later this year. And speaking of which, if you like literary anniversaries, 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth — she was born Dec. 16, 1775 in the village of Steventon in North Hampshire — so there are many festivities and readings to join in for her as well. 

Meanwhile, I thought I should say something about Season 3 of The White Lotus, which we finished a while back. It was a pretty crazy season, right? LoL. For those who don’t know: it’s about a group of rich guests and a couple employees at a luxury resort in Thailand over a week’s time.

The show was in the news quite a bit and popular. And the finale killed off one of the characters and you have to wait to see who it is and who did it, so that is the main gist … along with getting to know the crazy characters, their problems, and what they partake in. One episode’s particularly weird drug-induced orgy-like party with two brothers has been endless fodder for talk. But overall Season 3 certainly provided a decent escape from everything else going on. And since Season 1 was set in Maui and Season 2 was in Sicily, Italy, and this latest season is in Thailand … I’m thinking maybe they should set the next season at a snowy ski resort next time. Maybe in the Alps? What do you think?

Now we are onto watching the final Season 3 of Bosch Legacy, which I am suspecting will set up the new protagonist cop detective Renée Ballard and her spinoff series coming later in the year. Yay! Constance at the blog Staircase Wit gave me a heads up about that. (She’s one of our Michael Connelly experts.) Only thing is Bosch star Titus Welliver says he will not be in the spinoff show but that Maggie Q as Renée Ballard is great. So we will see. I’m just psyched the series continues in some way and somehow.

Now I will leave you with a couple book reviews of what I finished a while back ago. 

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad /Grove / 336 pages / 2024 

4+ stars. Whoa, by the end I was thoroughly impressed by all that went into this novel, which I listened to as an audiobook, and seems to include the author’s heart and soul along with it. It’s essentially about an actress in London — Sonia Nasir from a Palestinian family — who after ending an affair goes to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa, Israel, who teaches at the university in Tel Aviv. Once there, Sonia meets the dynamic director Miriam Mansour who’s putting on an all-Palestinian Arabic-language production of Hamlet and eventually convinces Sonia to play Gertrude. 

Much happens as Sonia begins to learn her lines and takes part in rehearsals for Hamlet with Miriam and the cast and as she begins crossing check points to spend time in the Palestinian city Ramallah. Things become politically charged and as opening night nears the theater troupe faces various hurdles to put on the production. Through it all, Sonia seems to undergo a period of self-discovery as she returns to her ancestral roots. 

I found it a good eye-opener into the geography there, which I was following on maps, and Israeli-Palestinian issues, dating before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. I was intrigued following Sonia’s journey and the production of Hamlet, and its meanings in light of everything were revealing. There were various layers to this novel that made it into a dynamo. I will be interested to see whatever Isabella Hammad writes next. 

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham / Hogarth / 272 pages / 2024

3 stars. There was some good writing throughout this novel … about David, a 24-year-old black man who comes to work on a senator’s race for the presidency, who is not named but seems like Barack Obama. Apparently before joining the campaign, David flunked out of a college after becoming a young father and involved with all that entails. 

Yet the novel at the same time also felt episodic or like an essay on a variety of topics that David comes across on the campaign, or through the people he meets, or the recollections of his upbringing in a Pentecostal church that it didn’t come together fully for me as a story. The loose plot withered for me and I struggled greatly to stay engaged with it. I usually love political novels, but this one seemed to be that only peripherally. It seemed more interested in the detours it takes talking about religion, race, film and many other topics. So just be forewarned. It’s not exactly a campaign novel.  

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these novels listed above, or seen the TV shows, and if so, what did you think?

Hi all. I hope everyone in the States has a very Happy Thanksgiving or wherever you may be. My relatives are gathering in Southern California for the holiday and it should be fun there. Though we are staying put for my knee surgery next week, so we will celebrate it here. Will you be getting a storm where you are or will it be nice and balmy for your turkey day feast?

Lately my husband has put up four bird feeders around the house, including the one in the photo, and we are watching to see which birds appear. I think the seasonal birds have flown south by now, so we are seeing many: Black-Capped Chickadees, House Sparrows, Magpies, Blue Jays, Northern Flickers, Mourning Doves, and Downy Woodpeckers.

And occasionally we see various other birds such as Pileated Woodpeckers, which are good-sized and have nice red-capped heads, and once this summer we saw a Great Horned Owl. The Northern Flickers (shown at left), which are also in the woodpecker family, have a colorful design to them so it’s nice seeing many of them here. But I have to practice taking pictures of the birds as they fly away at a second’s notice and I miss them. Our recent bird fixation jibes well with my nonfiction audiobook this month of Christian Cooper’s book Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World. I’m not that far yet, but I’m liking the author’s enthusiasm who narrates it for the audio. 

In other book news, I see that Justin Torres won this year’s National Book Award for fiction for his second novel Blackouts, which according to AP’s Hillel Italie is a “daring and illustrated narrative that blends history and imagination in its recounting of a censored study of gay sexuality.” Torres’s book imagines a conversation between a dying man and the young friend he educates about a real history in 1941 called “Sex Variants.”

Although I don’t think his novel will make my TBR list, it is worth noting that it beat out four other finalists, including Paul Harding’s novel This Other Eden, which I had picked to win, so I’m 0-2 on my literary award guesses so far. Next up, is the Booker Prize announcement on Nov. 26. 

Meanwhile we’ve been alternating watching episodes of Lessons in Chemistry starring Brie Larson as the quirky Elizabeth Zott — with the final season of The Crown starring Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana. We all know how that tragedy unfolded and I’m not finding it very easy to watch the tragedy again, though the performances seem pretty well done.

We also finished the four episodes of the miniseries All the Light We Cannot See – the first two episodes seemed pretty good, but the final two episodes seemed quite wobbly and a stretch to believe. Still the theme of a radio program connecting characters across enemy lines is a touching one. I liked the novel quite a bit more than the series. 

And now I’ll leave you with a review of the book I finished lately. 

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller / Knopf / 304 pages / 2023

3.7 stars. I liked the main character of this outdoorsy crime novel named Ren Hopper, who’s an enforcement ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Ren seems burnt out dealing with unruly tourists and those who get into trouble with wildlife. And he’s still grieving over the loss of his wife and his mother’s descent into alcoholism, but he finds refuge in the nature of the park, fishing, and his chats with his friend Hilly, a wolf biologist, who lives in a nearby cabin.

Then while going fishing one day he runs into a man with his dog whom he senses is poaching a bear in the park. The guy Les seems bad news and soon after his friend Hilly is nearly killed in an episode in the park. Meanwhile someone is leaving Ren threatening notes and signs. 

As Ren investigates, the storylines play out in a slow-burn kind of way with plenty of atmosphere of life in the park and info about wildlife, particularly wolves, which were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. I thought Heller intermingled these snippets fairly well without losing sight of the main thread. Towards the end, Ren gets involved in a relationship he doesn’t see coming, though perhaps the reader does. A flurry of action comes in the final stage, which I was waiting for. There’s not much of a surprise with it, but Ren and the perpetrators have their day. 

I sort of wonder if a sequel with Ren might be in the works. He’s a good character and Heller seems at home writing about national parks and life as a ranger, and Ren’s love life might just be going somewhere. I’d be happy to see a sequel. I have listened to four out of the six books written by Peter Heller, which were all outdoorsy/adventure male-propelled novels with a bit of suspense.

This wasn’t my #1 favorite (perhaps The Dog Stars still is), but it was engaging nonetheless. I listened to the audio narrated by Mark Deakins who’s done well reading some of his other titles. I expect another book perhaps next summer. And thanks to Sam over at the blog Book Chase, who also reviewed this novel, for reminding about it.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read this author or seen these shows — and if so, what did you think? Happy Thanksgiving. 

Hi. How is your week? Lately we’ve had many clear days with windy conditions. It was so windy a few days ago it sheared off some large branches from our poplar trees. We spent some of the weekend picking up the debris. We live near the prairies and the foothills here and it’s definitely the windiest place I’ve ever lived. In the summer there’s always a steady wind blowing. 

You might have caught the news that author Sarah Bernstein won Canada’s Giller Prize last night for her novel Study for Obedience. Wow! This surprised me since I sort of thought Eleanor Catton would win for her novel Birnam Wood, but No! Perhaps it’s a bit of an upset. Bernstein, who grew up in Montreal and now lives and teaches in the Scottish highlands, takes home $100K for the win. Congrats to her. The timing couldn’t have been better since I just finished reading Study for Obedience over the weekend (see review below). How apropos. The author’s novel is also on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. Will she win again? That would be quite a coup, but some are guessing Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting will win. Though we will have to wait and see on Nov. 26 when the prize will be announced. 

In other news, we’ve been watching and liking the TV series All the Light We Cannot See on Netflix and should finish it in a couple days. The two leads who play the blind French girl Marie-Laure and the German soldier boy Werner seem to be new actors and are pretty refreshing in their roles. With only four episodes in the series, the script seems to move at a brisk pace, faster than the novel it’s based on. Someone said the ending differs from the book, so I will prepare for that.

Also on Netflix we liked the movie Nyad  based on the true story of Diana Nyad’s long-distance attempts with her team to swim from Cuba to Florida in her 60s. It’s quite an interesting and unreal story … and I think Annette Bening spent a couple years training for the role. She’s a dedicated swimmer now. Jodie Foster is also good as her coach and long-time friend Bonnie Stoll, and the shots from the ocean are pretty compelling and put the miraculous feat into perspective.

Earlier we finished the final season (Season 3) of the British crime drama Happy Valley with Sarah Lancashire as Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood and Siobhan Finneran as her once-addicted sister. They’re both excellent in their roles, dealing with a demented bad guy who years ago hurt Catherine’s daughter. But man that small town in Yorkshire is riddled with dark crimes. It’s not exactly a ‘happy’ place. We followed that with Season 3 of the news drama The Morning Show, which was a pretty crazy season and sort of soap opera-esque. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but at least the large cast was entertaining enough. During the season, Jon Hamm plays an Elon Musk kind of character who tries to take over the network and much shenanigans ensues. I still think Season 1 was the best of that series. 

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of books I finished lately. 

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein / Knopf Canada / 208 pages / 2023

(3.5 to 4 stars) I think Shirley Jackson (and Lydia Millet) might have liked this strange little novel … which includes an off-kilter narrator who goes to her brother’s rural estate in a northern country to help him with things after his wife leaves with their children. The narrator is a solitary “inept” person who took care of her siblings growing up, left journalism and is a typist for a firm, and tries to maintain control over herself and adhere to obedience at all times.

When her brother suddenly leaves for a trip, she is left at the place alone with his small old dog and begins to take long walks into the woods and mountains, eventually having to go into town in the valley for supplies, which is a bit hard since she doesn’t know the country’s language. Then weird things begin to happen (on properties in town) and she feels the animosity and suspicion from the townspeople, which she tries to make right by volunteering at the farm co-op and leaving some woven stick dolls, but things don’t exactly go as planned and you wonder how it will end.

The plot seems simple enough to understand, but the off-kilter solitary narrator goes off on tangents that may or may not be too understandable. She’s mentally out there … and reflects a bit about how the townspeople might belong there but not her. Some stuff she talks about flew over my head. Still the writing is pretty smart and with its long, long sentences is quite lyrical and alluring. It’s a nice wonder that this little unsettling novel won the Giller Prize and made the Booker Prize shortlist. Whoa. Though I was hoping the ending would have had something a bit more happen. The townsfolk seem to hold her to account for several bad things that happen, but the ending perhaps wasn’t as big as I was looking for, though plenty of murky oddness abounds.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Canada for allowing me an advance copy to read and review.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim / 207 pages / 1898 

(3 stars) I’m learning about this author and her books a bit late in life. I listened to the audio read by British actress Lucy Scott of this semi-autobiographical 1898 classic tale, which reads like a memoir. In fact some people call it a memoir, others say it’s a novel, but I guess the publisher calls it a novel. 

I liked hearing about how a garden in the Prussian countryside made this woman — the protagonist Elizabeth — feel very happy and free from things that constrained her in her life. Her husband was an aristocrat, and life for women in her day was pretty confined, but it was made better when she moves to an old house in the countryside with a large garden. There she takes pleasure and refuge in outdoor life, planting, and nature, and with her writing and three babies — the oldest being 5 and the youngest 3, whom she refers to as “the April baby” and “the June baby.” Of course she has a governess for them and neither cooks nor sews but spends her time with books in the garden, and many see her as eccentric. 

Her husband — who thinks very little of women’s capabilities — she refers to as “The Man of Wrath.” And on Elizabeth describes in a diary-like style the seasons and the flowers in the yard, the servants, gardeners, and visitors who come by. It’s a pleasant enough tale as Elizabeth is in good spirits and making light fun of society and things of the day. Her memoir-like tale seems quite modern — as if she were talking about the refuge of gardening during the recent pandemic instead of what it offered her back in 1898. I’m not sure I knew women were talking about all she describes in the book — their rights, roles, and happiness — back then, so it has relevancy. 

I will have to read Von Armin’s most popular novel The Enchanted April sometime. Judging from her bio, she lived quite a well-traveled life, living in England, Switzerland, Prussia, France, and the U.S. and being born in Australia. So she was out and about and knew various languages and writers of her day, including EM Forster and HG Wells … and she fled WWI and WWII lands, spinning 21 tales and dying in South Carolina in 1941. Whoa I didn’t know much about her before I came upon this book, which was her debut and apparently a hit back in her day.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books, or seen these shows, and if so, what did you think? 

Hi. I hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been busy with various projects lately so I have been off the blog for a while. Now I’m back to check in and see what people are reading. I look forward to stopping by everyone’s blogs to see what’s up. Spring is trying to take hold here though we had some snow on Monday, which surprised my geraniums and petunias waiting patiently to be planted. Gardening should be better on the weekend when temps are forecasted to be in the mid-60s.

Meanwhile look at these two beauties at left: Willow and Stella, photographed by my husband on a walk a couple weeks ago. They are big loves and are particularly looking forward to swimming season to chase their balls in the river. 

In book news, I see that Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this past week. I am embarrassed to say I don’t know his novels so it seems like a surprise to me, but various fans of his works say he’s a brilliant author. As for what The Netanyahus is about The New York Times says it: “imagines Benzion Netanyahu, academic and father of the Israeli prime minister, arriving to interview for a job at a fictional New York college (modeled on Cornell) in the late 1950s.” Apparently it’s based on a true event that’s written as a satirical comedy, exploring Jewish identity and campus politics. I’m curious to try Cohen’s writing out. Have you read him?

Meanwhile on the TV lately, we watched the 6-part spy series Slow Horses on Apple TV+, which we liked quite a bit. It’s about a group of British intelligence agents who try to solve a case and includes a rough looking Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas among others. 

We’re also several episodes into the 10-part series The First Lady on Showtime that touches on the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt (played by Gillian Anderson), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Michelle Obama (Viola Davis). The show got pummeled with bad reviews in the press, but we’re sort of liking it regardless, though it seems to jump around too quickly between the three storylines and has some awkward transitions. Still we can’t turn away from it now. 

Lastly we’re almost done with Season 1 of Julia on HBO Max about the life of Julia Child and how she established her TV show The French Chief, which aired from 1963 to 1973. It’s enjoyable and light but also shows what a pioneer Julia was, persevering despite the sexism of her day. And Sarah Lancashire, the British actress who plays (American) Julia, does a wonderful job as the iconic chef. The series has just been renewed for a second season. 

And now I’ll leave you with reviews of a couple novels that I finished lately. 

Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding / HarperVia / 336 pages / 2021

What It’s About (courtesy Publishers Weekly):  Sonya, a single mother, and former London stage actress, finds her life in Dublin derailed by disappointment and alcoholism that puts her at risk of losing the 4-year-old son she adores.

My Thoughts: Whoa. This story about addiction is pretty intense and the main character Sonya is someone whose neck I sometimes wanted to ring … particularly at the beginning of the book when she blacks out after drinking too much and her 4-year-old son Tommy and their dog are nowhere to be found when she wakes up. Sonya also has severe temper problems with others and is capable of lashing out at any moment. Despite all that, there’s a sense that she’s not a total lost cause but has a long road ahead of her through rehab and recovery in order to show that she can care for her boy again. 

I ended up rating the novel 5 stars on Goodreads not because Sonya’s likable or even redeemable as it goes along, but more because it’s quite a tour de force and the writing is awesome and felt quite real. It simmers along compellingly, and the audiobook read by the author is quite a performance. Harding puts a lot into it (and at the beginning I thought the audio speed was on high but it was just Harding on a tear) and she seems to embody Sonya completely. Sonya, despite her flaws, is quite bright and witty and you come to learn how much she really loves her boy Tommy and their big black dog Herbie. I came to root for them all — especially Sonya along the darkened way. 

Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry / Penguin / 240 pages / 2016

What It’s About (courtesy Kirkus Reviews): After she discovers her sister brutally murdered, a woman’s search for answers becomes as much about understanding the sibling she’s lost as finding the killer. 

My Thoughts: I read Berry’s second novel Northern Spy last year so I wanted to go back to see about her first one, and it’s quite a weaved web and crime novel. Both novels are about sisters. And in this one a young woman named Nora finds her murdered sister Rachel and dog at her home in a grisly scene in the British countryside, and becomes obsessed with finding her killer. Along the way you get a good sense of how disheveled Nora is becoming as she analyzes her sister’s past and what might have happened to her. 

There’s a sense too that the sisters had a more complex relationship than at first you think. Nora loved her but there were also tensions between them. So what happened? And did Nora have anything to do with it? You’ll have to read till the very end to find out. The psychological tensions in this one are fairly good and perhaps I liked it a tad more than her second novel Northern Spy. But in both you can tell that author Flynn Berry is good at exploring sisterly bonds and the currents — both dark and good — underneath.

That’s all for now. What about you have you read these novels or seen these TV shows, and if so, what did you think?

Well it seems … sadly the news for May is not looking like it’ll be any better than April in terms of the pandemic and some say it will get worse (ugh, I won’t detail the grim projections from an internal report by a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist to the Trump administration that was reported in the New York Times recently, but American deaths per day listed by June 1 were considerably more than they are now). So it’s best to remain vigilant and stick to the rules whether on the job, or in public, and if possible to keep staying at home. 

Mentally we forge on … in distracted spare moments with books, screen time, family video chats, dog walks, and even a puzzle. The good news is spring has arrived here and the grass around town has just turned from brown to green in the past week. The leaves on the trees are about to burst open soon and the sun feels good. I’m taking pleasure in the little things that surround us … and keep us going.  

As for book news, you might have seen that it was announced on Monday that Colson Whitehead just won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “The Nickel Boys,” which I, like so many bloggers, had admired last year. His book beat out the other finalists:  Ann Patchett’s “The Dutch House” and Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” and apparently Whitehead is only the fourth writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, since he also won the prize in 2017 for his novel “The Underground Railroad.” He’s been on a roll as of late … with his past two books being about weighty topics … but he says: “The next book I’m working on has more jokes in it, and it does feel like those two books seem sort of remote now.”

As for TV series, over the past month we finished: Season 3 of “The Crown” in which Olivia Coleman did a good job as Queen Elizabeth in her first season with the show, and I thought Episode 3 about the Aberfan disaster in Wales in 1966 was the most powerful and sad episode they’ve ever made. Good grief, what an awful tragedy … which I hadn’t known about till I watched the episode; did you see it? 

Then we picked up and finished the final eighth season of “Homeland” … which has a doozy of an ending. If you were torn by the ending of “The Americans,” perhaps you will be with this one too. I can’t say anymore, but I will miss Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin who were great on the show.

Also the first season of the British mystery/crime show “The Capture” was pretty good and now we are onto Season 6 of “Bosch.” That’s Harry Bosch — the detective out of L.A. He’s one cool cucumber and the show has some terrifically shot scenes around Los Angeles … and one from Season 5 over the Salton Sea. Don’t miss it, if you like cop kinds of shows. And now, I’ll leave you with reviews of a few novels that I finished lately.

Long Bright River by Liz Moore / Riverhead Books / 482 pages / 2020

Synopsis:  Mickey is the narrator protagonist, a single mom and cop who patrols a rough Philadelphia neighborhood that’s rocked by the opioid crisis, where her sister Kacey lives on the streets in the grips of addiction. These sisters once inseparable are now not speaking … but Mickey still watches out for her until one day Kacey disappears … all the while a string of murders start to take place, leading Mickey on a search to find Kacey before it’s too late.

My Thoughts: I listened to the audiobook (read by Allyson Ryan) and loved it (giving it 5 stars) … mainly because I liked Mickey and wanted her to prevail. You really get a sense of what’s between these two different sisters and how they grew up at their grandmother’s since their parents were addicts (and their mother died young). 

Author Liz Moore delivers with this one … it’s powerful in an understated way and though it doesn’t have a ton of action, it slowly builds and you really get a lot on the characters, the area, and the police beat. It’s both a police procedural and a family drama and I was caught up in it pretty much from the get-go … though it is drawn out to good effect. I was rooting for Mickey to unravel her sister’s disappearance and the murders … and hopefully not to get killed in the process. I thought the couple twists that came towards the book’s end were cleverly done.

I enjoyed it more than Moore’s last novel “Unseen World,” but I plan to read her others like “Heft,” which others I know have really liked. She’s definitely an author to watch and I think “Long Bright River” will likely make my favorites list at the end of the year.

Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh / Ecco / 430 pages / 2016

Synopsis: It’s about the small, dying coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, that sees an awakening after fracking exploration comes to town. The story includes quite an array of townspeople who are affected in different ways by the fracking development.

There’s the Texas CEO and fracking crews who come to town; there’s those who eagerly sign leases for drilling on their lands, such as Shelby and Rich Devlin (with their sickly daughter who might be getting sick from contaminated water); there’s Pastor Jess who’s a widow and gets involved with a manager on the crew; there’s meth heads and addicts and Darren Devlin who’s trying to hang on to his sobriety; and there’s a lesbian couple who are organic dairy farmers — Rena and Mack — who don’t sign a lease and become anti-fracking activists. 

My Thoughts: The novel seemed well researched with various perspectives about such a town, and I learned a bit about fracking and energy in Pennsylvania and what happens to people when such an enterprise comes to town. I felt I came to know some of the characters, like Rena and Darren and that drew me in … though I also found the story a bit scattered as it meanders around between all the different people and side stories including a few chapters about the Three Mile Island disaster. Still it’s an interesting look at fracking and those who are for and against it and what happens to a town in the midst of such an upheaval change. 

This was my second read from author Jennifer Haigh whose 2011 novel “Faith” I liked as well.

You’re Not Aone by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen / St. Martin’s / 352 pages / 2020

Synopsis: When 31-year-old Shay sees a woman her age throw herself in front of a New York City subway train, she becomes anxiety-filled and fixated to learn more about her. She ingratiates herself into the dead woman’s inner circle of friends — lead by the glamorous Moore sisters — who befriend her … but then it turns out that not all is what it seems to be. 

My Thoughts: I guess I’m not really much of a psychological thriller kind of reader — though I keep trying — so I’m probably in the minority on this one. And it was my first by this popular writing duo that I listened to it as an audiobook, which was narrated by multiple readers for the characters. 

 I liked the lonely, insecure protagonist Shay (a market researcher) and her love of statistics … which she writes down and quotes from her data book — such as: “The average person will walk past 16 killers in the person’s lifetime” (hard to believe eh?) — and which ultimately help her figure things out. But the plot of the Moore sisters and their inner circle and how it plays out … had me sort of rolling my eyes. It didn’t do much for me and maybe a few of the villains felt a bit cardboard-ish. Still if you’re ever on an airplane again, this read will likely go down swiftly.

That’s all for now. What about you … have you seen or read any of these and if so, what did you think?

Meanwhile all is well here. I went to my first lecture and visit of Calgary’s new Central Public Library at left, which recently opened here.  It’s quite a state-of-the-art facility (inside and out) and who other than author Susan Orlean — whose new book “The Library Book” pays tribute to libraries — should be one of the first author speakers at the place. It was quite wonderful to attend and hear her speak about her book, which is partly about her love of libraries as well as the circumstances surrounding the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library that destroyed so many books there and shut the library down for seven years. I have not read it yet, but I surely plan to check it out — as well as more of our new library. 

Also I want to give a shoutout to Esi Edugyan who won Canada’s top literary award — the Giller Prize — last week for her novel “Washington Black.” Wow, this is her second time winning the Giller (her previous win was for her novel “Half-Blood Blues”) and she’s just 40 years old. I think only Alice Munro has ever won the prize twice since it started being awarded in 1994.  I have just started “Washington Black,” which follows the journey of an 11-year-old boy who escapes slavery at a Barbados sugar plantation, and so far I’m really digging its storytelling. I was stoked when the author came here in October and I met her and got a signed copy of her book. Very cool. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a couple of reviews of what I finished lately. 

Both the books this past week I was able to read the print versions of as well as listen to them as audiobooks read by the authors. It’s sort of neat to do both or a combination of both. You get to process the words in two different ways. I just so happened to get both versions from the library at the same time, go figure. The first one “Vi” by Vietnamese-born Canadian author Kim Thuy is a short novel that sort of reads like an autobiographical memoir, while the second book — Beck Dorey-Stein’s debut “From the Corner of the Oval” is a memoir that at times reads a bit like fiction. So I guess that’s the genre-bending ways of the book business these days.

First off, Kim Thuy’s novel “Vi” follows the story of a girl named Vi, the youngest of four kids, whose life along with that of her family’s is changed forever by the Vietnam War. She manages to escape with her mother and brothers as “boat people” to refugee camps before Saigon falls. Eventually the family makes its way to Canada to forge a new life. But while her mother and brothers set down roots, Vi proceeds on a different path despite her mother’s disapproval, following a boyfriend to Montreal where she studies for degrees in translation and law that leads to international aide work abroad — and to Vincent, the love of her life. 

It’s a story quite lyrically told in short episodes, which I found powerful as refugee lit along the way. I might not have understood exactly everything in it due to a cultural gap or the way she tells it, but still the novel left me with an impressionable picture of Vi’s journey — and how her mother never really approves of her despite Vi’s hard work to make something of herself and find her place in the world despite all the obstacles. Vi travels to Hanoi after the war doing aide work and other countries, which is interesting, and towards the end it becomes a bit of a love story between her and a man named Vincent, who is a naturalist. Unfortunately the ending felt a bit abrupt and left things sort of a mystery with me wanting to know more. Grrr.

This is the second novel I’ve read by Kim Thuy (the first being “Ru”) and each seems to be autobiographical in nature. She herself left Vietnam at the age of 10 with her family as boat people to Canada, settling in Quebec,  and she’s worked as an interpreter and lawyer among other things before becoming a writer.  So much of the novel seems to be her own story that it left me wondering which parts were fiction. Hmm. Will she be writing a memoir someday or is this her way of doing it?  Already she’s written three novels (“Ru,” “Man,” and “Vi”) that all seem to compliment the one before and tell of the refugee experience such as the one she has had. The impressions in them get me a bit each time — as I’m still fascinated by the Vietnam/boat people story and what happened to such people’s lives after they arrived in their new country. 

Next up, I finished Beck Dorey-Stein’s debut memoir “From the Corner of the Oval” about her five years as a White House stenographer during the Obama administration. Many bloggers have already written about this book so I was appropriately geared up for it and I was not disappointed. I flew through the thing and found it quite entertaining. It’s like cotton candy for the politically Young and the Restless. Okay maybe not exactly that but other people have likened it to “Bridget Jones goes to the White House” or “The West Wing” meets “The Devil Wears Prada” or even “C-Span meets “Sex and the City.” You get the picture …. it’s not too heavy.  It has enough twenty-something mojo in it to cut through a wonk’s briefing book in no time.

You probably already know — but the memoir tells about a lackey who comes to work as a stenographer for the president and travels with him on Air Force One domestically and internationally. I mean no disrespect. I liked Dorey-Stein, her vibrant youngness and openness. She seems bright, albeit naive, along with those she hangs with though she’s far from perfect. I couldn’t believe how she first applies for the stenographer job — through Craig’s List? Oh my. She thinks it’s for a law office so she skips the interview: but then she’s later told ‘you might want to come — the job will have you traveling with the president.’  The president? The president of what? Ohh you mean … that president. Holy smokes. You can’t make this stuff up. 

Much of it depicts the typical DC story about young politically minded staffers who work around the clock and don’t make much money but live the life working for big wigs. They work hard and party harder. Stories like these are often hard to resist. I once worked on Capitol Hill so it’s a bit relatable. And Dorey-Stein has a funny sense about her that moves the story along. I liked how the memoir combines the professional side of politics and current events with her personal life. It’s amazing too how she travels to 45 different countries with the president and shares her eye-opening experiences along the way. It’s neat just being a fly on the wall to her conversations and I liked what she had to say and reveal about President Obama. 

But man, are there boy troubles for her that dominate the book!  A fair warning to all:  the author falls for a senior staffer to the president who’s a total womanizer.  I just wish he went by the wayside much earlier in the book, but unfortunately he has a hold on her pretty much throughout it. Gosh the endlessness of this part and all her boy troubles gets a bit tiresome and crazy, but still I floored it to the end … to hear what happens when the Trump administration comes to town and she flies the coop along with her close group of work friends. It made for a quick and engaging read, whether she drives you a bit crazy or not.

Lastly we’ve been watching the new AMC TV series “The Little Drummer Girl” based on the John le Carre novel about a team of Israelis who seek to put an end to the increasing number of bombings thought out by an elusive Palestinian. The Israelis end up hiring a British actress as an agent to infiltrate the Palestinian network and so far that is where we are now with plenty of episodes left to watch.  Apparently the series first ran in Britain on BBC One.  The  one American actor recognizable in it is Michael Shannon, who as the head Israeli honcho, delivers a pretty good foreign accent for a guy born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. You might remember him as the bad guy in “The Shape of Water.”

That’s all for now.   What about you — have you seen this series or read either of these books and if so, what did you think?

Ahh yes, I’m one of those who finished Season 1 of the TV series of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and then went back and read Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of it. I was curious to see how closely the series tracked to the original, and I was pleasantly surprised that in many ways the storyline honored the book very well. Both follow a totalitarian theocracy — the Republic of Gilead — that has taken over the U.S. and strictly controls women, forcing them out of jobs and money and into various classes, including the reproductive “handmaids,” who are denied all rights and coerced to produce babies for the elite barren couples.

You know the story. It tracks the life of Offred, who comes to be a handmaid for a top Commander and his wife in Cambridge, Mass. Part of it follows the oppressive life Offred leads living in the house as a handmaid to the Commander and in the community where resisters are hung dead from a Wall near the river, and the other half flashes back to Offred’s life years before, when she was married and had a daughter, and had a job and money — before Gilead. Oh it’s eerie stuff! Poor Offred remembers the good old days with her family, which are contrasted to the horrors of her current life under the totalitarian regime.

Of course, it’s the Commander and his wife, beacons of this society, who break the rules at whim. The Commander starts a secret relationship with Offred, spending evenings with her and taking her out to an underground club, and his wife, who wants Offred’s offspring, asks her to secretly have sex with their car attendant, Nick, believing her husband is infertile. It’s threatening stuff, and you don’t know who among Offred’s contacts can be trusted. Is Nick someone she can trust? Or will her old friend Moira, or Ofglen, a handmaid who is secretly part of the resistance, come to her aid? You won’t find out till the very end.

Atwood effectively writes it so at the onset you’re thrown into Offred’s circumstances, but you don’t exactly know what’s going on. The mystery and horror of the times sort of unfold as you go along. Atwood creates an atmosphere and a world that seem so scarily realistic you can easily believe it is happening. In fact, as she has said in interviews, there isn’t anything in the book not based on something that has already happened in history or in another country. She has said she took the idea for Gilead from the early Puritans “who came to America to set up a theocracy (like Iran) ruled by religious leaders,” where dissent within is not tolerated.

It’s a book that has been selling like hotcakes again ever since the U.S. election and the TV series came out. The series with Elisabeth Moss as Offred is quite well done and follows the storyline (as I said) pretty closely, but there are some differences. For one, it takes place in today’s world and appears more modern than you get from the book. Also Gilead in the TV series includes various races and orientations of people especially among the major characters, while the book’s society has removed non-whites and gays to faraway lands. Also the sequence of events in the book and the series differ, and secondary characters are much more fleshed out in the TV series. Whereas in the book, what happens is solely from Offred’s point of view, the series involves her husband Luke’s viewpoint as well as others. The characters of Luke, Nick, Ofglen, and Moira all have bigger roles in the series and some of their fates differ from what happens in the book.

Remember Rory from the Gilmore Girls? Well apparently the actress Alexis Bledel will continue as Ofglen in the upcoming Season 2, even though she died in the book. I must say the cast is superb, and it has a lively and surprising soundtrack. Also Elisabeth Moss, who is excellent as Offred, is more headstrong in the series. I think Season 2 will depart from the book since it was almost at the end of the book in the finale of Season 1 and heading that way — off-script.

Still Atwood has been involved with the show, and her very brief surprise cameo (in the pilot of episode 1) was great to see. It’s a bleak and disturbing storyline for sure, but you get hooked into pulling for the resistance every step of the way. It’s a series that champions the resistance and is perhaps why many have taken to the story in light of the Trump administration coming to power. As the secret Latin text carved into Offred’s floor translates: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

If you doubt the oppression in Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” then you probably need to check out the second book I finished just yesterday. I listened for a week to Manal al-Sharif’s memoir “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening” as an audiobook and it made my blood boil among other things. The book, which came out in June, has made the rounds on the blogosphere and that’s where I heard about it. Of course, you might think you know about the restrictions and oppression happening to women in faraway places, but until you read a woman’s first-hand account there, you really don’t know up-close the magnitude of what’s going on.

Remember the news reports a few years back about a woman being arrested for having the gall to drive a car in Saudi Arabia? Well that was Manal al-Sharif. She became the unexpected leader of a movement to support women’s right to drive. It sounds a bit absurd right? She was thrown in prison for the transgression of “driving while female.”

While she starts her book with this episode of being taken in the middle of the night to prison, she thereafter goes back and tells her life story of growing up in Mecca a devout Muslim from a modest family. Her story of her Islamic fundamentalism and narrow-mindedness (her word) in the first half of the book are not always easy to listen to and I almost couldn’t wait to get to the second half of her memoir where her transformation takes place and she becomes more liberated and a female activist. Of course this all happens very gradually over time, certain things occur in her life that slowly change her perspective, including being forced by her parents to undergo a gruesome female circumcision when she was a teenager; going away to university, which opened her eyes; and watching the events of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold on TV.

Her ambition for a career and to help her parents financially were also factors in transforming her. Eventually she works her way up into getting a good job with Aramco, the state-owned oil company — yet like at every other stage in her life she ends running up against the Saudi rules of what women there are prohibited from doing. Just listening to all the minutia prohibiting women is staggering.

For instance, you always have to have a male guardian with you when you go outside, and you can’t drive yourself anywhere but need to use your paycheck to hire a taxi or driver to take you where you want to go, and you need to get permission to do things, like register for a class, or get an apartment, or have a male guardian sign for you on everything. Life there for women seems so much more complex, unjust, and time-consuming.

Manal’s account is both eye-opening and also uplifting in how she becomes transformed and persistent in her fight for women’s right to drive. As an activist, she eventually moves out of Saudi Arabia but still she is hopeful for a day when it will change there. I highly recommend her book, which reminded me of other powerful human rights memoirs such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Infidel” and Malala Yousafzai’s book “I Am Malala.”

Lastly this past week, my husband and I went to see the Kathryn Bigelow film “Detroit.” Oh my, I almost didn’t make it through. For those who don’t know the movie takes place during the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 when the National Guard was called in to patrol the streets, and three young African American men were murdered at the Algiers Motel.

Midway through there is a section of about 40 minutes or so of a scene of white police brutality that is quite difficult to watch. It felt torturous, especially for how long it goes on. Eventually this scene ends and it turns into a court case against the officers over what happened. It’s far from an easy movie — it’s rather disturbing, but the filmmaking is quite vivid and powerful. You feel like you’re right there and can feel the heat and the tension. At times it seems it’s shot from a hand-held camera that’s bouncing around from the chaos and violence on the streets. You get to know what happened to these real people who were caught up at the Algiers Motel that night. Gosh it would change their lives and the history of the city’s forever. Despite some of its difficult viewing, I’m glad I saw the movie and think it will be nominated for some awards by the end of the year.

What about you — have you read or seen any of these that I reviewed — and if so, what did you think?

It’s true I like an occasional sports novel. I’ve read Chad Harbach’s baseball novel “The Art of Fielding,” John Grisham’s football novel “Playing for Pizza,” and Chris Cleave’s bike racing novel “Gold” among others — so with the hockey playoffs going on, I was game for Fredrik Backman’s novel “Beartown,” which is about a small depressed community, set deep within a forest, whose junior ice hockey team means about everything to the people who live there. Molded by years of endless practice and coaching, the team has a real shot at the country’s championship — that is until a crime takes place involving its 17-year-old star player and the 15-year-old daughter of its general manager, which changes things in the community forever.

It’s an alluring premise and setting, and the novel skips around in snippets among a lively cast of quite a few characters that includes players, coaches, parents, the GM’s family, the town’s bar owner and others. Of these, I liked the young immigrant boy, Amat, who is small but very fast on skates and is trying to make the team. A lot rests on him and what he knows in the aftermath of the crime.

This was my first book by the Swedish author — who also wrote the bestseller “The Man Called Ove.” His novels seem to border on popular fiction, which is okay if it moves along accordingly. He definitely seems to know his hockey, which there is quite a bit of in this story. My only trouble was that the first half of the novel seemed rather repetitive about how important hockey and the team meant to the dying town — there’s quite a bit of backstory that takes awhile to get where it’s going — and while the novel’s second half moves better with the crime and aftermath, I found it was a bit heavy-handed and lacking in subtly. There’s an occasional voiceover narration — in addition to those of the characters’ — that seems to drum its message into you. I guess I didn’t care for that, or being molded about how to feel about the situation — let us decide for ourselves.

Still judging by all the raves on Goodreads, I’m in the minority on this one, giving it three stars, which to me means I liked it okay but didn’t overly love it.  Thanks to NetGalley for sending me an e-copy of the book to review.

Next up, I listened to the audiobook of J.D. Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which the author does a fine job of reading. It came out last June, and I feel like I might be one of the last bloggers to get to it. It’s been that popular! I had no idea, really, but the book’s sales sure took off amid the pre- and post-election hoopla, despite not being about politics or even mentioning Trump. Nor did I know the author was just 31 when it came out last year — it’s a memoir by a young person one could say.

As many know it’s about the author and his family’s life growing up poor in the Rust Belt — first in Kentucky’s Appalachia region then in Ohio, where his grandparents moved hoping to escape the poverty. J.D. chronicles how he was raised along with his sister mostly by his grandparents since his parents divorced — his dad moved away and his mother struggled with addiction problems and a trove of men and unsuccessful relationships.

To say his family life was chaotic would be putting it mildly. But luckily for him, his tough, gun-toting grandmother provided the stability and guidance he needed to get through high school. She is quite a character, who was not to be messed with. A couple years in the Marines also gave him discipline and structure and he went on to attend Ohio State University and thereafter Yale Law School and a high-paying job.

It’s quite a rise and the book chronicles his life’s changes in details that make for an interesting read. I admire how J.D. overcame so much (especially dealing with his mother) to get his education and job and make his life better. His genuineness in the book and the audio’s narration come through, and he tells it in a way that is straightforward and pretty humble. It’s mostly a memoir but also talks about the white working-class; he seems to love his hillbilly family and neighbors but is also critical of them.

Perhaps one of my takeaways of the book is that it takes a village or a support system to raise a child, especially when you don’t have reliable parents (surprisingly this sounds like Hillary). He credits his grandparents, sister, and mentors along the way for helping him. That seems key. I also like how he talks about taking personal responsibility and not always blaming others or the government for one’s place.

Apparently J.D.’s a conservative Republican who didn’t vote for Trump or Clinton, but someone else. But I’d be surprised from what I read in the book if he fully sees eye to eye with Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, are you kidding me? Does he? I didn’t find the book abundantly political — and I may not agree with everything in it — but I thought it was thought-provoking, and I’ll be curious to see where the author’s thoughts and life take him from here.

Lastly in fiction, I also listened to the audiobook of Nicola Yoon’s young-adult novel “The Sun Is Also a Star,” which is about a teenage girl (Natasha) in New York, who along with her family faces deportation to Jamaica in 12 hours, and a first generation Korean American boy (Daniel) who is being pushed by his parents to attend a college and career path he doesn’t want. Daniel and Natasha fatefully meet, and over the course of a long day, traipsing around the city trying to solve their problems, fall for one another, while their personal histories and those of their families unfold.

I thought there were a lot of excellent things about this story: the dialogue and details with which Yoon writes about teenage life and love seem pretty authentic and she knows a lot about the magic of love and how to write about it. The families and perspectives also seemed fairly realistic, though they came off a bit stereotypical. It’s a timely premise with today’s climate of increasing deportations, and the anxiety in it seemed palpable. I actually liked this book of Yoon’s better than her first bestselling novel “Everything, Everything,” which is coming out as a movie this month.

Though I might be too jaded to fully believe that two people can fall in love with one another in 12 hours. When I pick up a YA book, I often feel like I’m the wrong audience for the genre as the whole melodrama of the teenage experience isn’t often my cup of tea. So it’s usually me and not the book to blame. A few parts of this novel got a bit cheesy to me, and other parts I thought included an overabundance of cursing by the boy Daniel. Still I’m glad I finished it, and I think Yoon has a lot of talent writing YA fiction if she doesn’t go too overboard. I like her optimism and the spirit of love in her stories.

As for TV shows we’ve been watching, we finished Season 6 of “Homeland,” which ends with the president-elect pretty much going bonkers with retribution and cutting civil liberties. Hmm, is anyone paying attention? Now we’re into the TV series of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — based on the 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood in which a totalitarian and Christian fundamentalist government rules the former United States amidst an ongoing civil war — where society is organized with classes of women being brutally subjugated.

Oh my it’s grim, bleak stuff! After three episodes, my husband has declared it darker than Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Still it’s hard to turn away from and there is hope for the resistance. Filmed around Ontario, Canada, the series apparently has been renewed for a second season to premiere in 2018. Viva the resistance!

What about you have you seen these shows, or read any of these books, and if so, what did you think?