We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver was the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2005. 

Apparently I read this book in 2012? And I even wrote about it here. My original review is:

No, no we don't need to talk about Kevin.  While I thought the words crafted on the page of this book were beautiful, the pacing was horrible.  Long and long and long with relatively little payoff for the many unnecessary pages.  But it is a thought-provoking book.  Are some people just born assholes?  How much are we to blame when those around us go off the rails?  Do parents have a responsibility to their children forever and ever - should maternal and paternal love be unconditional? Is there a system in place to help those who seemingly don't want help?  I guess I'm not sold on this book, but I do think Shriver is amazing.

I think I stand by this review. This book is Very Long and can be Very Boring. But it's also an interesting perspective and a very topical subject matter.

So, what we have here is a series of letters from a wife to her missing husband about their son Kevin, who we soon learn was a school shooter. This grapples with what, if anything, this mother could have done to prevent her son's actions. It also grapples with the aftermath, when this woman and her son are household names.  

Huh.  Well, it's not a particularly memorable book in that I honestly didn't know I'd already read this book until I went to Goodreads to link it here!  But the writing is solid and it was a gutsy move to write sympathetically about people who do terrible things. I do think this would be a very good book club book if your book club is up for tough topics. 

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

...that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.(page 37)

A true lesson can be learned from this. Sometimes it's crazy to think about what was So. Popular. back in the day and now it's forgotten.

His whole geometry was based on the triangle and yours on the square...(page 114)

I just liked this image. I could clearly see what the author was going for here.

The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. (page 147)

When I was back in Michigan last month, one of my high school friends and I were chatting about how the true focus in high school should have been on the social scene because we spend so much of our working lives trying to uncover the secret to making co-workers and clients make sense. 

The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect. (page 148)

I sometimes joke that I wish there was an adulting manual and I think that's the thing we're really protecting kids from, isn't it? When you're an adult, no one tells you what to do. 

But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. (page 195)

Is this analogy fair? I mean, fake it until you make it has worked pretty well for me in social settings. If you go through the motions and do the things, maybe you ARE doing it right. 

...teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic, but even Jesus was probably paid better. (page 332)

Oh, teachers. So important. So undervalued. 

Words I looked up:

bagatelle (page 11) - a thing of little importance; an easy task

arrogate (page 44) - take or claim (something) without justification

argot (page 45) - the jargon or slang of a particular group or class

pentimento (page 134) - a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas

spoliation (page 247) - the act of ruining or destroying something - I guess I didn't realize the vowels would change position!

small-eared elephant shrew (page 279)

Not as cute as I might have thought. Source

logomachy (page 334) - an argument about words

Appearance of the word hat:

Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix.(page 48)

Property by Valerie Martin

 

Property by Valerie Martin won the Orange Prize (now Women's Prize for fiction) in 2003. In this book, we find Manon Gaudet in 1828 on a sugar plantation, unhappily married, bitter, childless, and jealous of an enslaved woman named Sarah who has borne Manon's husband's children. The book is told in three parts - the first details Manon's caustic personality, the second a slave revolt on her husband's plantation, and the last is the aftermath of that revolt.

The title of this book is crucial. This book shows the parallels between Manon's subjugated life as the marital property of her husband, unable to control her own money or land, and the life of Sarah who knows she can be bought and sold and abused, taken away from her family and children, and suffers not only sexual abuse from Manon's husband, but from Manon as well.

I thought this was a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the landed poor in the pre-Civil War American South. It's also a fascinating glimpse into how remorseless people who owned enslaved black people were in their thoughts about those enslaved people. It's to Martin's credit that while Manon is irredeemably nasty and was unable to see how her own subjugation was a lesser form of the subjugation of the slaves she ordered around, the reader is still compelled to keep turning pages to find out what will become of all the members of this household.

There are some criticisms of this book. Many people think this book should have been about Sarah instead of Manon. I think there is certainly a place for that book and I'd love to read it if Martin wanted to write it, but I also think this is an important book in terms of understanding exactly how white slaves owners felt and understood their roles in society. It's not pleasant and I don't think Martin glamorizes or excuses Manon's actions or thoughts, but I think it's a narrative worth telling and worth reading.

Another big criticism of the book is that it ends abruptly. I agree that it does end abruptly, but I think that's because it indicates nothing is going to change for Sarah or Manon. It's decades before the Civil War in Louisiana and while Martin could continue the story until the death of all the characters, I don't think it's necessary. We know what the rest of their lives will hold already and the ending comes when it does because there's nothing left for the readers to gain.  

An interesting book. It's dark and depressing, but it's also short (196 pages!) and impactful.

4.5/5 stars

Line of note:

If only I'd had an example of his epistolary style before I agreed to marry him. But he had been careful to send the briefest messages, apprising me only of his expected arrivals and departures in town. Stupidly I took his terseness as proof that he was a man of affairs, but now I know it is because he is so dull he can think of but few words to say. (page 73)

A good example of Manon's overall resentment of her station in life.

Thing I looked up:

orgeat water (page 79) - Orgeat syrup is a sweet syrup made from almonds, sugar, and rose water or orange flower water. It was originally made with a barley-almond blend. Today it is used to flavor many cocktails. 

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant was the 2000 winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction (then called the Orange Prize). Careful readers might remember that this was the book I could only get in large print and because I suffer guilt that I'm preventing someone who needs that accommodation from getting it, I read it as soon as I possibly could so I could return it promptly. I also think it would be impossible for you to find my lines of note in a regular print version because Goodreads says this book is 272 pages long and my copy is 400, so do with that what you will.

Right after World War II ends, Evelyn Sert finds herself living in Tel Aviv in a new country with divisive politics after having survived time in London during the Blitz. She builds a home and career and soon finds herself falling in love with a man who inadvertently involves her in spycraft. It's an interesting setting, with the newly forming/formed Israel as the backdrop of Evelyn's story. Evelyn herself is an interesting character, naive and world-weary at the same time. Her lack of basic curiosity about the environment she's living in, her own family's past, and who she's sleeping with sort of grated on me, but I can also see how someone who grew up in wartime might honestly just want to worry about new clothes and what's playing at the movie theater. 

I wanted to love this book. It is such an interesting transitional period and I loved how Evelyn's coming of age story paralleled that of Tel Aviv and Israel. But I didn't love it. It felt cold and unconvincing and emotionally detached. I'm really glad I read it, but I'm not sure if you have to.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

I wondered who he might be if I had access to him in his own language, if the idioms of the soldiers he had knocked about with for the past few years were gone and I could hear him speak in his original - his own - tongue. (page 124)

I know a couple who each speak a different language as their primary language and they communicate in English, which is a second language for each of them. I sometimes wonder if anything gets lost in their communication.

"You used me!"
"Darling, isn't it better to be used than to be of no use to anyone?" (page 241)

I don't know why, but this made me chuckle a little bit.

So we were all homesick in our own way, for each of us has a past and carries it inside us and you can never put it away. It always returns at moments when you least expect it...(page 284-285)

Isn't it crazy how something innocuous can just stop you in your tracks sometimes? 

I told her my Hebrew wasn't that good.
"Fine," she said. "I speak six languages. Pick one."
"English is all I know fluently."
"Then you're a fool." (page 312)

Ha ha ha. We should all know multiple languages, shouldn't we? I wish I were fluent in more than English.

But Palestine had taught me something, the hardest lesson: that there is no choice but to act, to take charge of your life. You can indulge your inertia only so far and then you have to snap out of it. In the end you must do something. (page 375-376)

Eh. Or you can just sit in the nothing, I guess.

As marriages go, mine turned out to be a successful one and only those who have never married themselves would ask if it were happy or unhappy. It was an accommodation, a partnership. It was a life not a love affair and there is a difference. Love affairs belong to the young or those who don't' have a life, or not a proper one, at any rate. Leo and I had a life. (page 389)

Harsh. I don't think I agree with this sentiment. 

Larry's Party by Carol Shields

 The 1998 winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction was Larry's Party by Carol Shields. 

Larry Weller is born in 1950, gets married in 1980 and it's on his honeymoon in England that he discovers his love for hedge mazes. The book follows his marriages and divorces, fatherhood, professional development, and his constant struggle to figure out what the current fads are in life and how he fits into society. Each chapter is a separate time period in Larry's life and Shields cuts forwards and backwards in time, focusing on a theme. This is a book about the mundane, the boring, the routine of life. It's not a book packed with action. 

The Good: It's sort of funny at times. I did laugh at some of the observations.

The Bad: Why did Shields write about the life of a sort of vanilla white man?  Why not tackle the story of one of Larry's wives or even his mother, who was the most fascinating of the characters in the book. 

I don't know. I'm glad I read this book, but I don't feel like I need to send people out to read it. 

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

There are a few words that are missing even from Larry's new under-the-counter dictionary. His sister, Midget, for instance, is divorced from her husband, but she's living with him again. What's the word for her status now? And for her husband? And for what passes between them?

What can he call the feeling he has for his son, Ryan? That mixture of guilt and longing, that ballooning ever-protective, multi-limbed force that's too big to cram into the category of love. (page 93-94)

I love it when authors talk about the limitations of language. There are some things that there just aren't words to describe and how do we go about still being able to talk about those things.

Their name is Halfhead, Wilford and Stacey Halfhead, and Larry's been wondering, ever since he signed the documents, what it's like to live with a name like Halfhead. Would you have to pump yourself up with fresh resolve every time you introduced yourself? (page 257)

I don't know why this made me laugh so much. Maybe because Wilford is such a terrible name, too?  (My apologies to anyone named Wilford or Halfhead.)

"Well," she said, shrugging, "thank heavens, I say, for small talk. Small talk's better than big talk. Big scary talk. Aestetics, societal values. And people stabbing you to death by mentioning authors you've never heard of. Quoting from Kierkegaard. I mean!" (page 290-291)

Right? I am always puzzled when people dismiss small talk. I mean, should we all jump into existential discussions as soon as we sit down for a work lunch?  

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2001.  In a small Australian town, two out-of-towners meet. They are just regular people, divorces and children behind them. They're plain people wearing clothes that are raggedy and eyeglasses that don't quite flatter them. They have jobs they love and that they're good at, but sometimes they're overlooked because they fly under the radar. 

I can see why this book won a major literary award. The writing was delicious in parts and Grenville's descriptions of people were shockingly honest. But I struggled to finish this book because I just didn't care what happened to these people. 

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

It was the dogs themselves. It was the way they adored you. That was the thing about dogs. Mice did not adore you, and nor did chickens. But dogs did.

    Husbands adored you, too, at least at first.

    Being adored was something she can come to mistrust.

    She felt adoration to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time. (page 39-40)

I don't usually brag about how much Hannah and I are bonded. I think it's probably clear if you read this blog that the dog and I are quite close. And I do mistrust it. I feel like I could hurt her in 0.2 seconds with a careless action or word and I think she could turn on me in a heartbeat. But it's worth it to see this look of absolute adoration and trust.

Those eyes! Those ears! How did we get so lucky to get her in our lives?

People usually thought museums wanted heirlooms, the cameo brooch, the engraved silver tea-pot, the lace christening robes that had come out from England with the great-great-great-grandparents.

    It was a safe bet that Karakarook was full of lace christening robes and silver tea-pots. They always survived because they were never used, just brought out now and then to be admired.

    The trouble was, the same things that had survived in Karakarook had survived everywhere else as well. No one was going to turn off the freeway to look at somebody else's great-grandmother's silver teapot. 

    What would put Karakarook on the map were the things that were so ordinary that no one had thought of keeping any of them. Ordinary dresses and baby's jumpers and men's work-shirts, and all the improvised things made for their houses by people who never had enough money to buy one from the shops. 

    Those things did not survive, because no one thought they were worth keeping. They were just used until they fell to pieces, or were thrown away as soon as you could afford something better. (page 143)

When I read How to Be a Victorian, one of the things the author talked about was how many artifacts from the time period were just lost, like cardboard that was used as a layer of clothing or cooking utensils that fell apart because they were made of flimsy materials. It's crazy to look around your home and think about what people might want to see in the future (hint: probably not the things in my curio cabinet). 

It was funny how you could live your whole life surrounded by something as ordinary as concrete, and never think of it as special, until you met someone who did. (page 267)

I dated a man once who worked as an engineer at a landfill. His job, as I understood it, was to make decisions about the layers of concrete, soil, and sand that they used to stabilize the landfill between layers of trash. I was utterly mystified by this job (and that it existed!), but I really loved to hear him talk about it because I love to hear people talk about things they have expertise in, even if those things are totally out of my comfort of knowledge zone. 

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

 

Fugitive Pieces award-winning 1996 novel of Canadian author Anne Michaels. The book is told from two perspectives. The first is Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and sister in the war was rescued by archaeologist Athos Roussos and taken to Greece. Athos and Jakob eventually move to Canada, but underneath all of it, Jakob must wrestle with what he saw the day his family was massacred. The second part of the book is told from Ben's perspective. He is the child of Holocaust survivors and he eventually goes to Greece to find Jakob's journals. 

Frankly, this is a tough read. The feelings of grief and the impact of trauma seep through every page and interaction that the characters have. The writing is powerful and intense, but as I was reading this right after Demon Copperhead, I think the deep depression hit me a little bit harder than it would have in another time. (I guess it won't surprise anyone to learn I followed this with a romance novel and a fantasy series to try and cheer things up a bit, will it?) I thought the first part of the book was more compelling than the second part, but I also really appreciated the way the author took the time to tell the story in a way that showed the long-term consequences of Jakob's trauma. 

Anyway. It's powerful and well-done. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend you go out there and read it this minute. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

All across Europe there's such buried treasure. A scrap of lace, a bowl. Ghetto diaries that have never been found. (page 40)

On the way home we passed walls scrawled with a huge V - Vinceremo, we shall overcome - in black paint. Or M - Mussolini Merda. Kostas explained why no one wanted to erase those symbols. During the occupation, graffiti required swiftness and courage. Graffitos who were caught were executed by the Germans on sight. A single letter was exhilarating, it was spit in the eye of the oppressors. A single letter was a matter of life and death. (page 78)

Sometimes a house waits for decades for a son to return. (page 84)

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. (page 109)

I know only fragments of what Athos's death contained: no less than all the elements and their powers, ten thousand names for things the humility of lichen. The instincts of migration: stars, magnetism, angles of light. The energy of time that alters mass. The elements that reminded him most of his country, salt: olives, cheese, vine leaves, sea foam, sweat...Two wars, which are both the rotten part of the fruit that can't be cut away and the fruit; that there's nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another. But who was the woman who first unbuttoned for him the two birds of her breasts in a night garden? (page 114)

Her mind is a palace. She moves through history with the fluency of a spirit, mourns the burning of the library at Alexandria as if it happened yesterday. She discusses the influence of trade routes on European architecture, while still noticing the pattern of light across a table... (page 176)

Things I looked up:

azimuth (page 33) - the direction of a celestial object from the observer, expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon (this definition lost me at "vertical circle")

siddur (page 39) - Jewish prayer book containing a set order of daily prayers

anabatic/katabatic winds (page 46) - thermally induced winds; anabatic wind is a warm wind that blows up a steep slope or mountain side (also known as upslope flow); katabatic wind is a drainage wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity (sometimes called fall winds)

Spectre of the Brocken (page 46) - Also called Brocken Specter, Brocken bow, mountain spectre is the magnified (apparently enormous) shadow of an observer cast in mid air upon any type of cloud opposite a strong light source - this phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside, cloud bank, or be seen from an aircraft, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Hars Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name

A Brocken spectre within glory rings - This picture was taken from the Golden Gate Bridge

demotic (page 78) - an ancient Egyptian script; of the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone

logomachy (page 78) - an argument about words

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver was our book club book for the month. Clocking it at over 500 pages, we gave ourselves seven weeks to read this one.

From the beginning, this book had a voice. Consider the first paragraph:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much; the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it. (page 1)

The perspective is of the eponymous Demon Copperhead, a boy born into poverty to a dead father and absentee mother in rural West Virginia. Soon he is orphaned and we follow his progress as he becomes a young man. This is Kingsolver's retelling of David Copperfield and it follows Dickens' book plot point for plot point, but does it in a magical way, really focusing in on the modern equivalents for poor children. 

There's a lot to admire about this book. The voice is lyrical and it's interesting to see how Demon's voice changes as he gets older. Like Babel and Cloud Cuckoo Land, this is another book in which the scope of the topics presented and the amount of research that must have gone into the writing is immense and somewhat overwhelming. From the realities of foster care, living in poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and rehab to even the slang and lexicon used, this book is sheer perfection. 

But it's heavy to read. Only about half the members of our book club read the whole thing because it's just not a great read if you want to escape the realities of a very hard world. I also found the first half of the book rather triggering, what with constant descriptions of rural poverty, child hunger, and checked out parents. 

(I also found the last fifty pages to be stretched out and interminable. But your mileage may vary on that.)

Should you read this? I don't know. It's not easy, but it's important. I felt like reading this in conjunction with Empire of Pain was really helpful to getting the full impact of Kingsolver's research. If I were in a book club that read serious books, I think reading these two books back to back would be a great idea. If you're up for a hard look at the structural issues that have brought rural America to its knees, I would recommend it. If you're looking for something a little less scary and sad, maybe just reread Love Lettering?

4/5 stars (I admired this A LOT and the writing was gorgeous, but I am not going to recommend this widely and the ending was pretty drawn out, so I think of this as a 4 star, but I can see why it's getting as much acclaim as it is.)

Lines of note:

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. (page 7)

Being a child really was terrible in so many ways. I would never go back to it again.

If you are one of the few that still hasn't been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped. (page 22)

We spent a lot of time talking about how so many young people we know who live in rural areas of Wisconsin have never been to Madison or Milwaukee. It's hard for them to see city life as real life in many ways.

Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending u the Batman signal. (page 138)

This was such an interesting way that Kingsolver wrote about the scales falling off Demon's eyes as he grew up and faced one disappointment after another. Really smart writing, but keeping it in a consistent tone and voice.

It was one of your April days where you can smell the plowed fields and see the mountains greening up, like it's the world saying, Hey everybody, I'm not dead yet! (page 161)

Spring will come!

But hard work? Let me tell you what that is: trying to get through every day without the gangling ugly menace of you being stared at, shamed by a teacher, laughed at by girls, or sucker punched. (page 167)

It's so hard to think about what kids are going through when we send them to school to learn. It's not always easy to focus on solving quadratic equations when a child is hungry, upset about abuse at home, suffering mental illness, worried about the health of a family member or friend, or any number of other important things that could impact their learning ability.

His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time. He said if I was ever in a library to look it up, but try not to look at the photos because the sight of an elephant hanging was not an easy thing to forget. It was a circus elephant that got fed up and finally ran off after its drunk trainer whipped and tormented it to the point of going on a rampage, which, I could relate.  (page 189)

A gray cat slunk out from under a big cabinet thing and gave me the evil eye before it oozed along the wall and ran out the door. (page 197)

What an evocative description of a cat. I know this cat, even though I've never met him.

It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you. (page 200)

One of the things that I liked the most about this book was how good Demon was, from the time he was a small child, at assessing people and their strengths and weaknesses and what his own place was in relation to them.

I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. (page 221)

The evocativeness of this sentence. It's just so well done.

Because the attack itself didn't seem quite real. To us, skyscrapers are just TV, so watching two of them fall down, over and over, looked like the same movie effects of any other we'd seen. (page 283)

Right? If you've never seen a building larger than your school, why would this seem like anything other than fiction to you? I know it seems crazy to think that children haven't seen tall buildings to many people, but I know many people who I graduated from high school with who have never left the state of Michigan. They've certainly never seen the likes of LA or NYC.

I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. (Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though). We're the dog of Ameria. (page 417)

We kept talking about "the dog of America" in our book club. It just kept coming up as a major theme of the book. 

In my first days of knowing Dori, I'd put in so much effort thinking of her around the clock, being amazed, planning how to get with her. I was high on wanting. Now I had her, and all the air hissed out. I was living life as a flat tire. (page 420)

I thought about this passage a lot as I was reading the book. Love as a simile for drug addiction.

"Whatever you love about her, you get to live with. And the other stuff, you live with that too." (page 422)

This is true for any relationship. You love what you love, but no one is perfect and you gotta live with those imperfections, too.

I always forgot that her last name, Amato, was different from his. They were crazy about each other though. (page 431)

Again, Demon just making these super smart observations and I am jealous that he could do that.

People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. (page 513)

I thought about this a lot, too. I guess if you have the resources to spend on buying and preparing fresh produce, you do have a degree of financial privilege and there's an easiness to that life. Is that joy? I don't know. 

That cat! It was definitely playtime for her.

Things I looked up:

Melungeon (page 4 and repeatedly throughout the book) - An ethnicity from the southeastern US who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. Historically associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia. 

Vandal Savage comic (page 15) - Supervillain appearing in DC Comics. He is said to be a Cro-Magnon warrior who gained immortality and advanced healing abilities after encountering a strange meteorite during prehistoric times. 

Battle of Blair Mountain (page 279) - In September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 law enforcement and strikebreakers during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired and the US Army intervened by presidential order. This was the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed conflict uprising since the American Civil War. Up to 100 people were killed and many more were arrested. 

sigoggling (page 307) - US, Appalachia, dated - Not built correctly; crooked, skewed, or out of balance

shelly beans (page 516) - Any large bunch bena that is removed from the shell and is good as a dried bean

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

 I listened to May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes because it was the Women's Prize for Fiction winner in 2012. 

You ever finish a book and wonder what exactly you read? This is a dark comedy? Family drama? Satire? Hm.

Harry Silver is a middle-aged history professor who specializes in Richard Nixon. His brother, a successful television executive, gets into a car accident and while he's recuperating, Harry sleeps with his wife and when his brother finds them in flagrante delicto, he shoots and kill her. Harry is in charge of his niece and nephew and all the dominoes of this family's life start to fall. Soon Harry is divorced, fired, and has a stroke. But don't worry because this family will take a trip to South Africa, adopt an elderly couple and the child who was left orphaned after the original car accident, and there will be a happy ending. Along the way there's random internet sex, a missing woman, newly discovered Nixon documents, and a teacher molesting a child.

WTF is this?

I don't know.

2.5/5 stars

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

 

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore was the inaugural recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction (then called the Orange Prize).  Cathy and Rob are orphaned and they live in an estate in England with their grandfather, but they are mostly cared for by a servant named Kate and a governess named Mrs. Gallagher. It's a moody, gothic piece for the first half, but then war comes, Rob leaves for Canada, and it becomes a book about survival in wartime. 

There are going to be spoilers from here on out because this book is almost thirty years old and I have to talk about this book. I HAVE to.

Did you all read Flowers in the Attic when you were a tween/teen? I mean, I assume everyone did, but I also assume everyone loves my dog and thinks butter pecan is the superior flavor of ice cream, so I am clearly NOT right about everything in life. ANYWAY.  This book is just Flowers in the Attic with some literary flair. There's a Cathy in both books! I'm talking incest, illegal abortions, and pseudo-murder. I was just lulled along into thinking this was some sort of bland historical fiction book and then page 104 happened and oh, boy, it was a wild ride. 

Anyway. I don't think I recommend this book? I mean, the incest is a turn off, right?  But the writing is good. But please read it anyway because I have SO MANY QUESTIONS and I want to talk to someone about this strange little book. 

Word I looked up:

spifflicate (page 120) - treat roughly or severely; destroy

Line of note:

Nothing told me he was dead. I can't look back on the ordinary day and make it extraordinary. It was a clear late summer day, that last day he was seen alive, the day on which I have to presume he died. He walked out of the world while I was picking apples. (page 287)

It was a lovely summer night when my MIL died. I remember thinking that terrible things like that should happen when it's raining or cloudy. But of course people die every day. We should take each day for the precious thing it is. 

3/5 stars

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

It is that time of year when many podcasts go on a hiatus to celebrate the holidays and while that's great for them, it is certainly not great for me. While I could download all of the podcasts Nick Quah has declared the best of 2022, searching for new podcasts is exhausting and full of decisions I don't want to make (start at the beginning? with the most recent episode? how many episodes before I give up? can you skip episodes?). So this means I've been listening to audiobooks and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is the latest.

I'm so confused about this book.

This story is very loosely based on a real event. In 1996, members of a guerilla group in Peru took hundreds of high-level diplomats, military and government officials, and business executives hostage at the Japanese ambassador's house during a party celebrating Emperor Akihito's birthday.  What happened over the next few months is frequently referred to as the Japanese embassy crisis, despite the fact that it took place at ambassador's residence. The book parallels many of the same touch points as the real event, so I won't write too many details about it, but definitely look it up if you haven't heard about it. 

So the story starts with a party at the vice-president's residence to celebrate the birthday of Mr. Hosokawa, in the hopes that Hosokawa will bring factories to this unnamed country. Part of the entertainment of the event is opera soprano Roxanne Coss singing several arias. Eventually, gun-wielding terrorists enter the residence and take everyone hostage. The rest of the book is about how the hostage event unfolds with people speaking multiple languages trying to communicate across culture and class. Terrorists befriend hostages, romance blooms, and how on earth can this end well?

Onto my confusion. The country is unnamed for the whole book, although it is referred to negatively always ("godforsaken," "backwards," etc.).  This just struck me as wrong and stereotyping of an entire swath of the Spanish-speaking world. I also found the noble savage trope to be rampant throughout the whole thing. Sure, that young guerilla is a budding opera singer and the other one is a savant when it comes to languages. Sure. Why not?

I was utterly befuddled by the book, to be honest. At first I thought it was going to be an exploration of Stockholm syndrome, but she never even goes there. Then I thought it was going to be an exploration of the impossibility of diplomatic relations with a non-recognized military actor when she introduced a Red Cross representative to do negotiations, but that quickly fell away. What is the book even about? It soon morphed into a soap opera and then the ending happened and I realized that I was seriously invested in the characters (somehow - it snuck up on me!). Maybe this was a book I liked? And then the epilogue happened and I realized that whatever goodwill Patchett had earned was sucked away.  

So, yeah. Confusing. 3.5/5 stars, but I don't think you need to read this unless you also want to be confused.

A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

 

I listened to the audiobook of A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne when all of my podcasts failed to release new material during Thanksgiving week. Hey, podcasters. I know you want to spend time with your families and all, but I still have to walk the dog EVERY DAY, even when you are putting out repeats in my feed or just taking a week off. Did you ever think about me and my needs? (Just kidding. Of course people should take time off.) This book won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 1999, so I was expecting really good things from it.

Marsha was 12 in the summer of 1978, living in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Crime was everywhere. The president was a crook. Her older brother was stealing cigarettes from a local store. Her father cheated on her mother. The new neighbor next door was a weirdo. And then the annoying kid from down the street was murdered in the woods just outside the mall.

I admire how seamlessly Berne weaves the history and the minutiae of daily life in the suburbs into this story. The strange new acceptance of divorce and what it was doing to the family structure. The suburban housewives who existed on gossip and innuendo. The poor single guy who is new in town and never accepted. The unsupervised children disemboweling insects and telling lies. The sprinklers, the bake sales, and the smoking.

And I think it's an interesting take on crime and what the crime in the neighborhood really is. I mean, the murder of the kid is the most obvious crime, but the real crime is that it's never solved and the family of the victim is forced to move town. And it's a crime that Marsha's father leaves the household that summer with no communication about when he's returning. It's a crime that the single guy next door becomes an outcast. It's a crime that Marsha's mom loses her support system in the divorce. What's the biggest crime? That's what Berne is examining.

But it's really not that interesting in many ways. Outside of the cool details about surburbia, it's a straightforward coming of age story. Marsha wants to be a detective and solve the murder, but she's an unreliable narrator. Marsha wants to be well-liked among her friends, but she's not the right age and she's a liar and her storytelling turns them off. 

I thought this book was fine and I enjoyed listening to it as Hannah and I hiked around endlessly trying to burn off her energy. But I'm not sure why it won this prize, to be perfectly honest.

3.5/5 stars

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie was the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. It is a story told in five parts with each part having a different perspective. Isma has been caring for her twin siblings since their mother died when they were twelve, but now they are adults and she heads off to the States to resume her education while they stay in London. 

I'm sort of torn on this book. It was really well done and I felt like I understood the motivations of each character and how and why they were acting the way they were. The writing was clear and powerful. While I'm not crazy about multiple POVs, I thought this was a nice balance because the reader was able to spend multiple chapters with each character before it switched.  I thought it was brave of the author to tackle issues of the Muslim experience in the modern UK and US. I thought the author did a fantastic job of showing how people become radicalized in every direction of the spectrum.

But it was so hard to read. I knew where the story was going because the book was sold as a modern retelling of Antigone and since I knew the ending of Antigone, I wasn't super excited about how this would end. If you haven't read Antigone, no worries, this book can absolutely be read as a standalone. However, while this book was good in so many ways - the writing, the characters, the plot - the topic was so scary and difficult and challenging that I didn't want to read it. 

It seems to me that this is the literature equivalent of vegetables. They can be delicious and wonderful, but it's not always as easy going down as a slice of pecan pie. It's definitely worth a read, but brace yourself because you'll have feelings and you won't know what to do with them.

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

We'll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But "touch" was the one thing modern technology didn't allow...(page 13)

I've honestly never thought about this idiom before and it is a silly thing to say, isn't it?

He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends' company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and become both focus and direction. (page 83)

Young love, right?

...enjoying her evident satisfaction at the clean workings of the cherry pitter she'd mocked not an hour earlier as an accessory of the rich who don't know what else to do with their money. It's a cherry pitter. It pits cherries. How is that some wild extravagance? In response she'd opened a kitchen drawer and held up one utensil after another: A cherry pitter to pit cherries, a garlic peeler to peel garlic, a potato masher to mask potatoes, a lemon zester to zest lemons, an apple corer to core apples. She'd grinned at him. All you need is basic cutlery and a little know-how. (page 95)

My husband has this same issue with single-use kitchen utensils and it gives me a huge charge every single time I use our strawberry huller. It's so delightful and convenient and single-use.

Person I looked up:

Ian Botham (page 101) - English cricket commentator, member of the House of Lords, and former cricketer who has been involved in a lot of controversies and is a tabloid favorite. 

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

 

How to Be Both by Ali Smith is a weird book. It's divided into two parts and when it was first published, some were printed with the CAMERA section first, then EYES, but others were published EYES, CAMERA. I had CAMERA, EYES and I guarantee you I would not have finished it if had been the other way around.

Basically, the CAMERA part tells the story of George, a young woman who is dealing with the loss of her mother with flashbacks to a trip they had taken to Italy to see frescoes in Ferrara. In the EYES part, we find ourselves in the role of the artist who had painted the frescos. 

The CAMERA section is a pretty standard meditation on grief. But the EYES section is incomprehensible at parts and is a bit of a struggle to get through. But when you figure out what's going on, it's relatively interesting. Weird, but interesting. 

Eh. This seems like experimental fiction that will resonate with some people, but will seem like a gimmick to others. I'm somewhere in the middle. I admire the attempt and ambition, but I'm not sure it hit the mark for me. I think the most interesting thing about this book is its structure and framing device, but I don't have a lot to say about its actual content or themes. 

Overall, it was fine, but I wish it had more to say to me. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

Is her other really dead? Is it an elaborate hoax? (All hoaxes, on TV and the radio and in the papers and online, are described as elaborate or not.) (page 66)

I like this observational humor. It's true, right? No one just does a hoax, it's always an elaborate hoax.

It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you'll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose had told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin. (page 228)

I wish I were a creative type. I really do. Doesn't this sound wonderful?

Word I looked up:

Her father was maundering on...(page 162) - talk in a rambling manner

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell was our book club book for the month. Generally speaking, this went over quite well with my book club members. I was much more on the fence.

This is an intergenerational tale of Shakespeare and his family. We watch him as he grows up, marries, and has children and then the pestilence hits and their family will never be the same. 

I thought this was quite overwritten at times. Someone in Goodreads talked about the "rule of threes" in this book and it was truly accurate. O'Farrell constantly uses descriptors in groupings of three and once this tic is pointed out to you, you'll never be able to read it the same way again. Consider the following paragraph randomly chosen by me:

She brings a honeycomb out of the skep and squats to examine it. Its surface is covered, teeming, with something that appears to be one moving entity: brown, banded with gold, wings shaped like tiny hearts. It is hundreds of bees, crowded together, clinging to their comb, their prize, their work. (page 16, emphasis mine)

I just don't enjoy this style of writing, although my book club members really enjoyed how immersive they found it, so my experience may not be your experience. 

I also found the whole book kind of chilly, like I was not really getting to know the characters. For example, one character has a kestrel that she's raised since it was a chick and when she moves into town, the kestrel is left behind and there's no sort of reaction from the character about losing a beloved pet. The kestrel never appears again. I thought that what Farrell most described was setting and physical movement and that was at the expense of getting to know characters.

Probably more than that, though, is that the depictions of domestic violence in this book were brutal and graphic. I was not expecting that and really struggled with the first third of the book. Those depictions were less overt as the book went on.  

There is a section in which O'Farrell writes a chapter about a flea that has the plague and how it is transported from one person/animal to another and that chapter is SO GOOD.  

Did I enjoy reading this book? Not really. Did other members of my book club? Yes. 

3/5 stars

Lines of notes:

He carried within him, always, the sensation of his father's calloused hand enclosing the soft skin of his upper arm, the inescapable grip that kept him there so his father could rain down blows with his other, stronger hand. The shock of a slap landing, sudden and sharp, from above; the flensing sting of a wooden instrument on the back of the legs. How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones. The doused, drenched feeling of a fury, of impotent humiliation, in the long minutes of a beating. (page 28)

I don't need this in my life. I really don't.

She learnt the advantages of invisibility, how to pass through a room without drawing notice. (page 45)

More domestic violence material that honestly sent me spiraling for a few days.

She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down is she is to be married. (page 49)

So much abuse.

She is nearly fourteen. Everything - the sight of the pots stacked on the table, the herbs and flowers tied to the rafters, her sister's corn doll on a cushion, the jug set by the hearth - provokes her in a profound and fathomless irritation. (page 52)

There are a few moments of levity in this book and this one made me chuckle out loud.

It is a damp, heavy, acrid scent, like food gone off or unaired linen. She has never smelt it before. If it had a colour, it would be greyish green. (page 153)

Interesting little description of synesthesia. 

He cuts feather after feather into quills, but not is quite right, he says. One is too long, another too short, a third too thin for his fingers. They split or scratch the page or blur and spot. Is it too much to ask for a man to have a working quill? (page 159)

This also made me laugh out loud. My husband recently bought a new pencil sharpener for our house because his travel sharpener didn't cut at the same angle as his school sharpener. There were a few days when the talk of pencil sharpeners in our house nearly drove me insane. 

Things I looked up:

fenland (page 26) - Marshy area found mostly in low-lying land in eastern England. I had in my mind that a fen was a dry place, but I was obviously wrong.

whittawer (page 26, among others) - A person who converts skins into white leather, a tawer.

factotum (page 30) - An employee who does all kinds of work.

odure (page 52) - Filth, dirt, rubbish, excrement. Sounds lovely.

fossick (page 106) - Rummage or search. This is a good word. I shall use it a lot.

millefiori (page 140, among others) - A type of glassware characterized by a flowerlike pattern. This was actually explained in the book, but I wanted to see photos.

You can buy vintage beads on Etsy!

skep (page 275) - A straw or wicker beehive.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is her long-awaited follow-up to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I spent most of the time reading this book wondering about Clarke's internal life and how exactly she comes up with these ideas. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a fictional academic work (complete with detailed footnotes!) about a magical world with fairies and political intrigue. Piranesi is about a man who lives in a magical house (castle?), nearly alone, with only statues, birds, and the coming and going of tides to keep him company. The edifice is slowly crumbling, but Piranesi can't (or won't) exit the building. He writes journals and is searching for The Knowledge.  

But there are hints that something else is going on. Piranesi overhears voices of people he doesn't know. He finds destroyed notes written by someone else (maybe written by him)?  He finds himself forgetting things and the one other person he occasionally sees in the house is telling him things that contradict his own knowledge. It's magical realism, combined with a mystery and an unreliable narrator and it's interesting, lyrical, imaginative, and just wonderful.

We picked this as our book club book this month and, as I'm writing this, we have not met to talk about this book, but I am going in assuming that everyone loves it as much as I do and will maybe pout a little bit if it turns out that no one loves it as much as I do. POUT, I say.

Update after book club: It was not universally beloved. It was interesting to see the breakdown of people who sort of understood the rigors and demands of academy ("no one would behave like that!" exclaimed one of our members as the other academic and I exchanged looks).  Someone else had an entirely different interpretation of the book that it was all a descent into madness and a slow awakening from it.  Interesting discussion, although we spent far too long discussing whether or not we'd like to live in the castle (1 yay, 3 nay, 1 "sure, if I could bring my dog" - ahem, I wonder who that was).  

Lines of note:

"I write down what I observe in my notebooks. I do this for two reasons. The first is that Writing inculcates habits of precision and carefulness. The second is to preserve whatever knowledge I possess for you, the Sixteenth Person." (page 12)

Piranesi only knows one other person and he think there have only ever been thirteen other people alive.  The book is written as his journal and his audience is someone else he thinks must exist.

"He is often like this: so intent on what he is doing that he forgets to say Hello or Goodbye or to ask me how I am. I do not mind. I admire his dedication to his scientific work." (page 21)

Academics, am I right? The stakes are so low, but the emotions are high.

"There is a thing that I know but always forget: Winter his hard. The cold goes on and on and it is only with difficulty and effort that a person keeps himself warm." (page 27)

It was at this point that I had a hard time taking the narrator seriously. How does one forget that winter is cold?  I don't know. I audibly chuckled. Sometimes, in August, winter seems so far away, but to quote another popular novelist, winter is coming.

"They were different from the Statues in other Halls; they were not isolated individuals, but the representation of a Crowd...I almost forgot to breathe. For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands." (page 59)

If I had read this in 2020, when I rarely saw anyone except my husband, this line might have made me cry.

"Two memories. Tow bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. There exists no third person to say which of us is correct." (page 71)

Every retelling is like this, isn't it. His side, her side, and the truth.

"'He is always second fiddle. And he knows it. It eats him up. He was one of my students, you know. Oh, yes. Complete charlatan, of course. For all the grand intellectual manner and the dark, penetrating stare, he hasn't an original thought in his head. All his ideas are second-hand.'" (page 87)

Academics.  It all reads real to me.

Hieraphant: A person, especially a priest in ancient Greece, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles (page 115)

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of the previously reviewed Purple Hibiscus) is the story of the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, that happened between 1967 and 1970.  We follow several characters from the antebellum period until immediately after.  We have Olanna, a spoiled daughter of a rich man who takes on a revolutionary professor as her lover; Ugwu, a village boy who has been recruited as a houseboy in the professor's household, a boy who is smart and kind, loves to read and learn, and does his best to do his duties as capably as he can; and Richard, an Englishman in love with both Olanna's sister and the art of the region.

I thought this book was much better than Purple Hibiscus. It was such an interesting look at all the divisions in Nigeria before the revolution - tribal, class, language, and family divisions.  We start with the middle-class revolutionaries, dreaming big dreams in the professor's study while his houseboy is just relieved to be able to eat regular meals every day.  We see Olanna visiting her aunt and uncle in a village, shamed by their poorly made home and the cockroach eggs in the seams of the kitchen table. We see people falling in love, simple jealousies, but there's a looming war.

When the war comes, each of them flees, but they're all touched by the fighting and violence that they witness. The novel does a masterful job of weaving in how the characters deal with the aftermath of the trauma while still keeping on.

I always struggle with reading books in which colonialization plays such a big role because they never seem to underscore the role of empire building, but I think it's because I'm used to American stories in which slavery is an underlying foundation of every story and I don't need that to be brought to my attention, but as an American, I can regularly forget about colonization in other countries. Anyway, it's my issue as a reader because I can see how Adichie would get accused of pandering or patronizing if she talked about it too much.  But the inter-tribal fighting and violence, in this particular case against the Igbo, would not be present without the encouragement of the original oppressors and seeing how the entire civil war's root cause was not within tribes themselves, but because of a power play in London years before, was stark.

The descriptions of violence in the book are fairly graphic and I admire that Adichie doesn't just allow those things to go by.  Characters has flashbacks and all you can do at the end of the book is hope that in their futures they learn some coping mechanisms because the tragedy they lived could never be undone.  I am struck by a particular scene in which one of the characters rapes a stranger and he suffers over and over again.  Of course, the woman he raped suffered, too.  How do we deal with this tension? Do we hope he "learns" from his "mistake"?  Was his situation so that he was coerced, too?  Do we "forgive"?  I found these questions to be vitally important and yet impossible to grapple with.  

This was a very good book.  I liked that I had some grounding in Nigerian culture and history with the author's earlier book and I'm excited to read Americanah, her most recent book, soon.

Things I Bookmarked:

1) "She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together." (page 33) 

It must be very hard to be an attractive woman. As a perfectly average-looking woman, this is not my lived experience.  It reminds me of a probably apocryphal story of Elizabeth Taylor saying something about how she couldn't wait until her looks go so that she would be taken more seriously.

2) "'And on top of it, her parents sent her to university. Why? Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that.  If gives a woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of wife will that be?'" (page 98)

This is a line of dialogue from an older woman. My parents always wanted me to do well in school, but they resented me whenever I would come back from college or grad school.  

3) boubou (page 100) - An article of clothing worn by women and men that consists of a single piece of fabric. I have seen boubous, but never knew the word for them.

4) "'Because of too much Book, you know longer know how to laugh.'" (page 130)

There is a definite anti-intellectual bias in the early parts of the book.  It's interesting to see how this was right before a civil war and thinking about the anti-education and anti-intellectual elements of American society today.

5) harmattan (page 140, among others) - A dry, dusty easterly or northeasterly wind on the west African coast, occurring between December and February.

6) kwashiorkor (page 338, among others) - A form of severe protein malnutrition characterized by edema and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. There is generally not a lack of calories, but a lack of protein. Marasmus is malnutrition because of nutrient deficiency (could be calories, carbs, or other necessary dietary ingredients). 

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is the tale of a young couple, Roy and Celestial, whose lives are marriage are shattered when Roy is arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. The book isn't about how terrible it is that black people just sort of accept injustice from the justice system. It isn't about how both people in the marriage are sort of terrible in their own ways. It's a book about a marriage - how to define a marriage and how to make it work (or not work). 

I wouldn't say that I loved this book. I thought the characters were abysmal and thoughtless and their definition of marriage is very different from what I expect my own marriage to be. On the other hand, it did force me to take on a perspective about marriage that is different from my old-fashioned, stodgy idea of monogamy and commitment. I certainly was judgmental about it as I read it, but on reflection, I wonder exactly what it is that I think makes my way so much better.  It might be better for me (and hopefully my husband), but why would I assume that would make people who are like our main characters happy? 

It was our July book club pick and it really did incite some interesting discussions.  We mostly discussed how interesting it was that, since it was told from the point of view of a black family, there was no angsty discussion about how to change the system, but rather an acceptance that the system failed and then how to move on from there. We also discussed whether or not the characters were terrible, how family dynamics are often cyclical, and our own hypocrisies about what we think the characters should have done (note: we were often victim blaming). 

But, while I can't say I loved this book, I loved, loved the observational writing of Jones.  Here are two passages that I marked and loved.

"But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable." (page 192)

"When I rolled into Atlanta, I entered the city up the I-75/85 to see the skyline before me like the Promised Land. I know it's not like seeing teh Empire State Building in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago. As far as I know, Atlanta doesn't have any famous buildings. You might even say that there are no skyscrapers. Sky reachers, maybe, not sky scrapers." (page 232)

The writing is spare and told from multiple POVs, which is a trend I'm disliking more and more, but it's so smart. Every bit of examination of the world is interesting, truly interesting.  I can't wait to read more from this author. I want to start incorporating more of these types of insights into my own daily life.