Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink: I’m not sure whether this crossed my radar because there’s a current TV series based on it or if I just saw it recommended somewhere – focused on the week of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this was published in 2013. I’m curious if there’s any sort of follow-up or update nine years later. Though – unavoidably, because of the number of people involved – it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all… Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Books of 2022, part 10
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk: I knew very little about this before reading, other than that it’s set in Poland and won the Pulitzer Prize. I think that was an ideal way to go into it; I had no preconceptions about the “sort” of story it would be, and for the first third of the book I felt totally content to follow the main character through her routines without really caring if anything… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 9
Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Ignorant of this novel’s publishing date, I was initially incensed that I had heard so little about it in the past…and then I realized it’s a very new addition to the world, published in April of this year. Set in the 1970s and 2016 (I assume so as not to…have to deal with Trump), it’s the story of medical ethics, good intentions gone wrong (and bad intentions gone worse), complicity, and control. There’s a… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 8
The Sentence, by Louise Erdich: The first half of this is absolute unfettered delight while simultaneously philosophical and profound. The characters – especially narrator Tookie – the descriptions, the language play, the voice – it’s hilarious. In its distinctiveness, its humor, and the sense of “here is a master at work” it was akin to James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. In the second half, COVID appears. At first I was disappointed, wanting to remain in Tookie’s individual timeline, but that… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 7
When the Stars Go Dark, by Paula McClain: An engaging mystery with depth and atmosphere – the descriptions of coastal northern California towns and redwood forests are captivating. There were three occasions, though, on which I thought “Surely X character would not do Y – oh, here goes X character doing Y” in a way that felt contrived for the plot. Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas: Fifty pages in, I thought, “Do I hate this? I might hate this.” I… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 6
The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka: Before I read the first page, this reminded me of Yannick Murphy’s This is the Water, which also takes place primarily in a local swimming pool, from an unusual perspective (second person for This is the Water, first person plural for The Swimmers), in which the pool is a metaphor or vessel for exploration of the rifts in the community. There’s a panoramic quality to both of them, a distance. In some ways that made… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 5
We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour: I could tell that this novel was going to break my heart from the first chapter, but I kept reading it anyway because of how atmospheric and cozy it is. Reading We Are Okay is like being in a snow globe full of glittering flakes but wrapped up in your warmest, softest blankets. Even the cover art, which when I look at it again is a girl standing on a bed in front of… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 4
The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold: The “five” are the five known victims of Jack the Ripper, with virtually no attention to their deaths themselves and a pure focus on their lives, which were bleak. I appreciate the author’s intentions to focus on the women as people rather than victims, but have to admit that I wouldn’t have minded a bit more information about the aftermath and investigations. There are other books for that, though. The Book of M, by Peng… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 3
The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore: Something I think about quite a bit is whether we have – as a world, as a society, as scientists – gotten better at determining when materials/elements/products are going to be toxic too us than we used to be, or if we just believe we are because we’ve discovered and ceased using lead, asbestos, radium, etc. It’s possible that we are actually better – that we aren’t simply relying on having ruled out some… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 2
The Kissing Bug, by Daisy Hernández: Apologies while I (perhaps undeservedly) go a bit hipster-epidemiologist and state that I’ve been afraid of Chagas disease as far back as at least 2011, when I added it to a saved email draft containing – among other detritus – a list of diseases to check if I ever have an unexplained illness. It hits the scare triggers for me – potentially deadly and largely undetectable until it’s too late (unless you proactively test… Read more »
