Reviews and Comments

This is a book of stories by an author of short fiction whose work has been featured in such places as McSweeney's Internet Tendency and The New Yorker. I consider its style to be in the genre of surrealistic tales that say something about the modern condition. If it's stories about recognizable characters that you might recognize from everyday life, this might not be the book for you. If you like reading unusual and off-kilter stories, then you might like this. These characters tend to give off pathetic vibes, though I don't remember any actual monsters or signs of cruelty or violence. I think he doesn't really aspire to have stories with clear-cut heroes and villains in them. Some of the stories commit to a certain kind of structure where they repeat a form over and over again. Others follow more of a straightforward narrative, though they may have bizarre situations and characters who interact with one another seemingly upon whims. Some of the characters repeat in other stories, though I wouldn't say that the whole collection constitutes a distinct universe of its own with laws that you can figure out. These stories, a few thousand words each, generally give the reader some light emotional payoff at the end, though a few of them suddenly come to a stop in the midst of action.

The title story at the end of the collection stands out as one in the fantasy or magical realism genre more than most of the others. For me, this was also one of the more demanding stories in this collection requiring me to read it through a couple of times to make sure that I understood what was happening. Some of the stories do play with genre techniques such as the one which adopts the form of a spy or heist story. You can tell while you're reading it that it doesn't really take it all seriously. There's another story which takes the point of view character from a member of a cult and you're not sure by reading it how much you're supposed to buy into the odd beliefs that that person has, or whether to hope that they are cured of their strange notions. I like the parts in this story where he is having to deal with parents who were operating under different assumptions about life.

I read this book as an advance reader's copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. This is the first time I've read this author's work, but I might be inclined to take a look at some of the others, such as the one that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize recently.

I picked up this book as part of my Lenten observance this year. This is a spiritual work by the well-known public author James Martin of the Society of Jesus which looks at spirituality through the history of that religious order, the Jesuits. He talks in some detail about how he came to his own calling as a young man and what he encountered at the significant steps on his journey. He refers to how he was inspired by the example of Thomas Merton the Cistercian monk, who was the author of The Seven Storey Mountain in awakening, a dormant faith that he had as a young man.

He also takes the reader back to the earliest days of the founding of the Society of Jesus in the 1500s. He gives an entertaining account of how a Spanish nobleman, whom we now know as Ignatius of Loyola, had a spiritual awakening which caused him to decide to found his new order. His writings include the constitution of that order and the Spiritual Exercises.

He describes in straightforward terms how the Society of Jesus was like the other religious orders of monks and how it differed. At one point, its theological stands led to its suppression for a while, but has been in the mainstream of the Catholic church for a long time now. This book was written before Pope Francis became the first Jesuit to become Pope.

A recurring theme that runs all through this book is the idea of contemplation in action. It refers to the inner relationship of the individual with God who brings this into their interactions with other people. Sometimes things go awry and the individual feels as though God was not present, a missing part of their life. The author makes a case for how spiritual experiences can come in ordinary ways that the prepared soul can recognize.

One of the key writings by Ignatius is The Spiritual Exercises. This book describes in simple terms what it's like to work through the practices described there. He returns again and again to one powerful prayer called the Examen, where the individual meditates on all the things that happened during the day and tries to understand what they mean for their life.

The goal of this book is not to indoctrinate the reader into becoming a Catholic or becoming a Jesuit themselves. He also talks frankly about what it's like to be a priest in the Catholic Church under the three vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. Again and again he cites the example of many Jesuits who lived out their vows in roles including those of government, science and literature. He talks about those who have been persecuted for their standing up to oppression. And yet he never tries to convice the reader that every Jesuit lives with a saintly demeanour.

I really did enjoy listening to this audiobook, not least of which for his descriptions of some of the places in Massachusetts where I am familiar with also. I think it accomplished part of its goal, which is not just to inform people who know little of the Jesuits, but also to stir up additional passion in those who might be able to engage in a deeper relationship using the techniques that Ignatius and others came up with.

This is one of the famous classics of English literature and part of the Western canon. Emily Brontë and her sisters lived at the beginning of the gothic story in the first part of the nineteenth century. So the moodiness, gloom, and melancholy atmosphere is of course abundant in this story, taking over the character development, plot, and setting depicted. The Yorkshire countryside takes on a role similar to the untamed frontier in early nineteenth century American literature. In at the center is a claustrophobic pair of landed families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, with a few servants and the one character who serves to propel the plot, that of Heathcliff. He is of some indeterminate though definitely lesser class origin according to everyone else. The book covers two generations, starting with the early life of Heathcliff and his great love Catherine Earnshaw, then jumping over eighteen years to focus mainly on the offspring of that generation. During this hiatus, Heathcliff goes off to become a self-made man of influence through unspecified means and returns with scores to settle.

Their emotions are portrayed as big and irresistible forces of nature. Heathcliff's unrequired love for the haughty Catherine is nearly too big to be contained, his ambition to own both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcroft Grange is calamitous to everyone else and too powerful to avoid. If Heathcliff didn't harbor these urges, there would be no story. You get the sense that if he were from a better pedigree, that would be the case; the characters see the darkness of Heathcliff as representin the bad blood in his veins. Twentieth-century adaptations of the novel reportedly focus closely on the love and the ambition working within Heathcliff, but things are more complicated than that in the novel. The other characters act according to their own unruly feelings, often contrary to their own best interest, to an extent that made me dislike them more or less. They have prejudices, an unwillingness to compromise, fallibilities, and infirmities galore.

Structurally the book has a frame story where the housekeeper Mrs. Dean is relating past events to the outsider tenant Mr. Lockwood. Really none of that matters, it's just bookkeeping to avoid having to invent an omniscient third-person point of view, which only came into vogue later. I had to consult a genealogical chart of the two families to keep track of the overlapping relationships and confusing names as I listened to the story in audiobook format. It's as though it would have been unthinkable in this book's universe to look for eligible matches just a few miles away from any other family. Nearly everything that occurs is reported as dialogue, aside from relatively small plot points such as unfastening a lock, going on a ride, hiding a letter. Everything is intimate, and everybody is miserable. By the end, the reader has seen everyone's flaws, and I'm thinking this was maybe a daring thing. I know so many other books with a spotless hero or heroine, but that was not the story the author wanted to tell. There is a slender hope at the very end that maybe with Heathcliff gone, the ones who remain can avoid the unhappiness.

I must admit that I didn't pay close attention to the first half of the book because things didn't capture my interest that much. The second part felt a little speedier even though it was playing out what was set up beforehand. In the end I felt as though Heathcliff successfully pulled off his scheme to own all the land, despite being an outside, yet he gained practically no satisfaction thereby. I never could be sure that any character was really capable of selfless love.

Reading about all these miserable people not the most fun experience for me, I have to admit. It wasn't like. It makes me think of Thomas Mann's book Buddenbrooks_ The Decline of a Family from a century later where things also come apart by the end, and yet that book had a little lift provided by Toni's character arc that led to self-awareness. There's just a tiny hint in this book that young Cathy might have learned to be less judgmental, but I'm not so sure this is realistic.

The audiobook format is what got me through this long story. If I were reading a hardcopy or electronic book I might well have set it aside by the first third. I'd say the narration by Billie Fulford-Brown gave it a little verve during the scenes with strong emotions, saving me the trouble of having to imagine them all myself.

I don't think I'll be revisiting this story soon, either the book or in adaptation. It's too bad the author didn't get the chance to take on other novels the way to see how her style might have changed.

This is a big scholarly work written in such a way that the reader can forget how much information is being transmitted. It was quite different from this author's other book, Caste_ The Origins of Our Discontents, which took a more impersonal approach to many of the same issues, more scholarly and less emotional in effect. The migration of millions of American Blacks over the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed both the Jim Crow states and the ones they moved to. It wasn't organized by any one person but came from the life choices of thousands of free Blacks facing lives often only a little better than under slavery when they heard about the opportunities available to them if only they could abandon the place of their birth. They took much of what they knew from the South to inform their new lives and those of their children. The racism of the North had rules they had to learn gradually because almost none of it was written down. They had to make new friends and avoid new enemies. And when they couldn't attain all they had dreamt about the disappointment could affect their personality the rest of their life. By learning about their struggles and the experience of many others, the reader gets to know them as well as any fictional character and feels what they felt over decades. By seeing how widely divergent their lives turned out to be one gets a sense of the variety in the millions of unique life journeys during the great migration.

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Robin Miles over twenty hours long. some of the passages about brutality were hard to hear and sounded as though they had come from centuries ago, not just decades. By the end I felt as though I gained a greater appreciation of my neighbors and their ancestors.

This was the third of the Melendy books, in the same country setting of the second one, during World War II. It is a period piece to us today, with the family doing their weekly chores by horse-drawn carriage and grocery purchases subject to rationing. The kids are 90% of the story with a new addition alluded to in the title. This wasn't a baby, which would have been difficult without a mother in the cast, but a local neighbor boy they take in when in one of the two episodes described he finds himself unhoused. The mood of gratitude the boy has for his new home reinforces the cozy, orderly feeling of the books. The rest of the world is far away, intruding only by radio broadcasts and rare long distance telephone calls to Father who spends most of the book away doing Pentagon work. For a week, the other adult supervisor, the housekeeper Cuffy, is away to tend to a family matter, so the children are able to live out fantasies of a summer on their own.

The edition I have has an introduction by the author written just after the war about how she came to write about the Melendys. She has a style that borders on sentimentality mixed with gentle humor. The characters spend a lot of time making cute conversation illustrating their various personalities. I wanted to read this book coming off of some harrowing adult fiction, as a light palate cleanser. It would have been easy to re-read it all in one sitting but I don't think it would be as pleasant, like taking too much wartime sugar ration all at once.

These fictional children would be the ones growing up to be the Silent Generation. Raised during trouble times and loyal to an ideal of ordered homogeneous society, accustomed to pinching pennies, I imagine them as being largely skeptical of the changes in the second half of the century. There are no Blacks or immigrants and while there are villains, these are easily identified by the children, and neutralized without much trouble.

This short book is having its moment with the dismantling of government institutions in the United States as a backdrop. The pattern of takeover by authoritarian forces happens like the way Mike Campbell describes how his ruin happened in The Sun Also Rises "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." There is first an erosion of norms, a bad actor gets a foothold in a place where they can exert influence, then there is a pivotal event like the fire at Germany's Reichstag and then the machinery of free government is taken away. The author organized this book in twenty chapters with titles that encapsulate the whole message. A person alarmed by the threat of state capture can read more context and a justification in the body of each chapter.

At the present time I think the United States hasn't yet blown through the entire process of takeover so I think the book might still be of good use. There are multiple countries where citizens' rights are also under attack so it could be a good resource there as well.