Hi all. We arrived home from our road trip after visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Idaho. It was great fun and very scenic. We enjoyed skiing together and going on walks with our Labrador dogs in the winter wonderland. They have good snow there. Much better than we do here in Alberta, where windstorms have turned things to icy conditions. On the way back, we drove through beautiful areas in Idaho and Montana and saw elk, big horn sheep, pronghorn antelope, and many bald eagles. It was cool. There’s also a moose and calf in my sister’s neighborhood so we were on guard not to get in the way. All in all, it was a great trip and fun visit and I stayed completely unplugged from my laptop, which is quite rare but was a nice break.
Now we’re home and I need to get back on the ball. I haven’t had time yet to post my February Preview so that will have to come next week. But I have done a few reviews below of what books I finished lately. I plan to visit others’ blogs this week to see what I missed and what you all are reading. I hope the new year is treating you kindly and that your reading is going well.
Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang / Random House / 224 pages / 2022
This tale, about a mid-30s ICU doctor in New York who seems to be going through a bit of a crisis, snuck up on me as it went along.
Joan is an American-Chinese workaholic who is so capable at her job that she eagerly assumes extra work shifts to fill up her time. But after the death of her father in China, her life goes a bit adrift … and she begins reflecting on the “gulfs within her family, the migrations they’ve made [her parents brought Joan and her brother to the U.S. as kids and went back to China after they were grown] and the cost of love.”
It’s true Joan is sort of an odd and lone duck. She has few friends, prefers to work all the time, has a sparsely furnished NY apartment, and has some problems seeing eye-to-eye with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law. But she studied hard at Harvard and became a successful doctor, though now her family has other wishes or expectations of her.
While the story is a bit scattered, I liked quite a few of Joan’s observations about her life, being a doctor, and their family … and also the pandemic as it comes into play towards the end of the book. You want to see how it will affect her and her relations, and by the end it seems Joan turns a bit of a corner. It’s a subtle character-kind of story — mostly of Joan’s inner thoughts without a lot of plot action — but still it comes off a bit meaningful.
Thanks to the publisher Random House for providing me with a copy of the e-book to review.
O Beautiful by Jung Yun / St. Martin’s Press / 320 pages / 2021
When I picked up the audiobook of this, the plot seemed enticing to me about a woman, who was a former model in NY and is returning to her home state of North Dakota to write a magazine article on the oil boom’s effects on a town. Her journalism prof, whom she had a relationship with, gave her the story, but while there some bad things start to happen her, including being abused on the plane, having to endure racist and misogynist language against her, and being kicked out of her hotel.
Much of the story deals with the evils of the oil fracking biz, the misogyny and racism of the people it employs and attracts, the pollution, and the violence that has risen during the boom. All of which seems valid to raise, even if it feels a bit heavy-handed at times.
My qualm was that I found the main character Elinor Hanson quite unappealing to spend hours with. I get that she has some substance issues and is grappling with her past and present and trying to write the story and get an angle on it, but she seems such a negative unhappy person toward everyone and everything (even with her sister who lives there) that I had a hard time with her. The story itself is very negative and on top of that she is too. It was just the combination of both endlessly that felt oppressive and made me lose some interest. I also wanted to know how her article goes … but at the end you don’t really find out, though you assume she’s well on her way with the material she’s able to gather.
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal / 384 pages /2014
We listened to the audiobook of this nonfiction book on our long road trip, and holy smokes it’s quite the true story of friendship and deception. I went into it pretty blind — not knowing too much about the events surrounding this British traitor — and was appalled by what MI6 officer Kim Philby did and got away with spying for the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1963.
Good grief the events detailed will turn your stomach inside out … not only because of what Philby did — blowing the cover of agents and handing over classified information and missions to the Soviets — but also because of the old-boys snobby network of the British MI6 that refused to believe that one of their own was involved in doing this. They let Philby off the hook after his colleagues defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, and he was able to continue on as a spy till 1963, when information finally came to light that the intelligence agencies could no longer refute.
The book follows Philby’s long close friendship mainly with fellow British MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott (but also to a lesser extent CIA operative James Angleton) as they go about various spy missions. Elliott particularly trusted Philby and shared with him his intelligence info for decades … without ever questioning this man who apparently charmed the socks off of the clan at MI6 and was a well-liked hard-core drinking buddy and a close family friend of Elliott’s. Later Elliott and Angleton stood up for Philby in the 1950s when he was being investigated for being a spy, helping him to become exonerated of the charges.
Good grief it’s an exasperating story. Philby’s now known as one of the worst (most effective) spy traitors in history, and the fact that he pretty much got away with it all then was able to disappear is cringe-worthy stuff. Philby certainly duped his intelligence friends and wives along the way, who come off looking foolish and negligent. It’s quite a tale — well told, suspensefully by Ben Macintyre, though he sometimes goes off on tangents that you wish he wouldn’t, so you could get back to the main story. Still he infuses the book with many fascinating details and leaves you with little confidence in the 1950s intelligence community … who come off looking like heavy drinkers, partiers, and incompetent nits who bore little accountability for the damage Philby left in its wake.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books or authors and if so, what did you think? And how’s life?
