Hi all. I hope everyone is well and enjoying their holiday break. We are getting close to 2024 now, so I hope you have chosen your first book to read in the new year. I plan to share my first book next week. Meanwhile we just got back from a little road trip a couple hours away where we took the dogs to go cross-country skiing.
Well, really my husband went to ski and I read because I’m not supposed to do sports yet due to my new knee. I need to wait till about three months post-surgery to commence activities. Right now I just passed my one-month mark, yay. But the snow in Western Canadian has not been good so far. It’s so minimal that people are rock skiing, I think. My husband took the dogs mostly hiking instead.
Over break we’ve seen two pretty good movies. We streamed the murder, courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, which is a French movie (mostly told in English) that’s a bit unsettling. The court case reveals the turbulence between a wife, who’s a writer, and her husband, and the thoughts of their blind son on what might have happened between them.
The movie goes on a bit long in the middle section but then has a pretty absorbing ending. German actress Sandra Hüller stars and is pretty convincing in the role. Critics seemed to like this crime drama and it wound up on various Best Of lists. We thought it was pretty compelling and gave it a thumbs up.
Next we watched the biographical movie Maestro about composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein on Netflix. Whoa Bradley Cooper stars, directed, and co-wrote the script for this film, which focuses on the relationship between Bernstein and his wife Felicia, played by British actress Carey Mulligan.
Much of the acting in this is terrific from both actors, and the music is alluring. Their marriage certainly had its tough challenges hidden from the world but also its very close connection. I know Cooper received a lot of flak for using a fake nose for the role, but it didn’t seem to distract me from the story. In many scenes, Cooper looked quite a bit like the Maestro himself … who it turns out was a complex man personally as well as a big chainsmoker. The movie, which explores this as well as his musical genius, was done to interesting effect.
And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of the last books I completed in 2023.
City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita / Berkley / 304 pages / 2023
3.7 stars. It’s not often I read a thriller type mystery/crime novel, but I enjoyed this debut and the pages flew by quickly. It has great atmosphere — set in a small wintry hamlet in Alaska where most of the residents live in a big apartment-like building.
Then the town gets cut off when a storm and avalanche closes the road out and Detective Cara Kennedy (from Anchorage) gets stuck there investigating a case of body parts found on a beach of a nearby cove. Cara has had her own family tragedies and has come to the town to see if there’s a link with the case. She partners with local cop JB and they make a good duo.
The story is told in alternating chapters by three women: Cara (the detective); Amy, a teenager who finds the bodies and lives in the big apartment building; and Lonnie, a woman with some mental disability who might know about some evidence. They are all pretty well-rendered, but the detective’s chapters seem the most compelling. I will likely follow Det. Kennedy who’s also in the author’s next novel coming in February 2024 called Village in the Dark, set once again in a chilly Alaska locale.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith / Atria /320 pgs /2023
This was my last book and last audio of the year, which is narrated by the author. Granted I didn’t know anything about this memoir when I picked it up. In a dumb way, I thought it was about the other Maggie Smith, the British actress, but no it’s about the American poet from Ohio, whom I didn’t know about before this. Now I do, and quite a bit! She lays her life out pretty open and bare for all to see.
Her whole book is a series of short snapshots about her life with her two young kids, and the divorce she went through with her husband of some 18 years. It’s a divorce memoir through and through! The author, who tried to save the marriage after finding out about her husband’s infidelity, is just crushed by the long torturous split and ordeal with her once soulmate. They were said to be the last couple who’d ever get a divorce. But after counseling the marriage couldn’t be saved and he moved away to another state much to the sorrows of their family.
Maggie powerfully and lyrically as a poet tells about their split as she agonizes and feels the intense pain of it, the dissolution happening during the pandemic. After I started, I wondered if I should even be listening to the book during Christmas break? It was sad and I felt for the author. But maybe the book had lessons: like don’t take your partner for granted? Watch for the signs? I think for those who are going through a divorce or have, this book might be very helpful and consoling and something appealing to grab onto like a life raft for survival.
I thought the parts about Maggie’s work life and how her life as a writer or freelancer were not treated equally or as respectfully with that of her husband’s work life – pretty revealing and I think it spoke to a lot of couples’ work lives. One person’s is often at the expense of the other’s. I hope Maggie is in a better place now, various years later after her divorce. She certainly was in a dark place going through this, yet she also yields some humor and essential truths in writing about the experience.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books or seen these movies — and if so, what did you think? Happy New Year.
