The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

My second big book of the year was The Big Sting by Paul Murray. I listened to an audiobook that J was kind enough to give to me via Audible. In this post, lots of people said that they liked this book, including Nance and Nicole, so I've spent the last month or so listening to it. 

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The Barnes family is going through a rough patch. They used to have money - Dickie, the father, owns a VW dealership - but the economy is not doing him any favors. Instead of finding another job or figuring out what to do to get his business back in the black, Dickie spends his time in the woods preparing for the end of the world. His wife, Imelda, is selling her fancy clothes, jewelry, and even the dining room table on eBay. Cass, the daughter, is about to graduate from high school. She used to be an excellent student, but now she's drinking, sleeping with rando gross guys, and isn't focused on studying. PJ is a twelve-year-old boy who's really struggling with a family that's falling apart and he has a very suspicious online friend. 

So, here's the deal. The first third of this book was a real slog. It goes back and forth in time, switching among the four family members with some regularity, and I just did not care. But did you see the list of the people above who like/love this book? I kept going. 

And by the end of it I was so eager to know what was going to happen to the Barnes family. Were they ever going to be able to make this work? Why so many secrets? Was everyone going to find out? OH HEAVENS, IS PJ GOING TO BE OKAY?

Section II Part 3 has a decent sports scene. Soccer even. I was invested in the outcome of that soccer game and I am never invested in sports scenes in books.

But, and this is a big but. This book is unrelentingly grim. Someone is always bringing up how terrible the state of the world is. There are graphic scenes of rape and domestic violence. At one point, I grumbled out loud (to the dog, who is my normal audience for these types of things on our daily walks) wondering why J thought I wanted to read a book about a woman reminiscing fondly about her abusive family. So, yes, I did eventually get invested in the inner workings of the Barnes family, but I do not think this is a book for everybody. It's also over 600 pages long and the audiobook is over 26 hours long, so be forewarned that if you do read this book, you're going to be in the bleakness for quite some time. 

4/5 stars - Slow start, but then I was all in. 

Lines of note:

"There's a hundred and one things could bring it down," Victor says. "Aging infrastructure, storms, solar flares, nuclear attack, unforeseen black swan event. Why would it stay it up? That's the question you should be asking." (Wolf's Lair: Part 1)

I think about the electrical grid and the water supply ALL THE TIME. It would be SO EASY to destroy the way the world works. 

You could hardly even call it a village Ballyroe: two pubs and a combine repair shop. (The Widow Bride II: Part 3)

As someone who grew up in a rural area, this resonated with me. 

"A drought, a flood, whatever it is, harvests fail and the next year they fail again. Suddenly what you're looking at in Europe is a famine. It might not be what they're calling it on the news, but that's what it is. It's worse in Ireland because we're a little island that imports half its food. Now you've been wise. You've stocked up enough to feed your family for a year. Please God, that'll get you out the other end of it. There you are, sitting at home, patting yourself on the back and thinking that things could be worse when the neighbors come knocking on your door. You want to help them. Of course you do. You're a good man, Dickie Barnes, everyone knows it. But food to feed your family for a year is only enough to feed two families for six months. That's just the beginning. Then the doorbells goes again. More neighbors, more friends, three families, four. You bring them in, too. You can feed everybody for four months, for three months. What happens the next time the bell rings? How many families live within five miles of here would you say? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? You see what I'm driving at? And when you decide you can't feed any more, what happens then? When you stop answering your door, what do you think they do? Starvin' people on your doorstep. You think they're just going to turn around and go home? You think just because they're your friends and neighbors that'll it all stay peaceful and respectful? You think Myanmar and South Sudan weren't all how you do and tidy towns before they started hacking each other to pieces?" (The Clearing VI) 

And this is why I'm going to take myself out in the event of a long-lasting catastrophe. (Looks at the news. Realizes that maybe I shouldn't be broadcasting my suicide plans in 2025.)

"Who, listening to that story," he said, "could maintain that progress had failed? Isn't it truer to say that progress needs failure? That progress is what humans do with failure? Failure, bad news, dark times, these are as fuel...progress takes failure and turns it into the future." (The Clearing VII)

I truly hope this is true. 

There are days that simply don't happen even when you're in them. The buildings are paper mache. The people are extras. You feel like you're trapped in a filler episode. Throw coffee in someone's face. Wave your tits at the lecturer. Jump in front of a car. By tomorrow it will be all forgotten. But in the moment it is endless like crawling through the desert. (Age of Loneliness I, first Cass chapter)

Doesn't everyone feel this way all the time? Like you're just an extra in a movie that's being made about the more interesting people in your life? 

Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn't know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm...He can still make out the tide marks from the flood, a once in a century event, that's what you are told. Then came the drought. And that was once in a century, too. Maybe that's how it will go. Instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of anomalies, each time lasting longer with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apart until one day it dawns on you that this is normal life now - the flooding, the empty shelves, the candlelight, the networks down, the impassable streets, the sewage in your living room, schools closed, work closed, cuz what use is work now? (Age of Loneliness I, first Dickie chapter)

So grim. 

You go to class and discuss famous poems. The poems are full of swans, gorse, blackberries, leopards, elderflowers, mountains, orchards, moonlight, wolves, nightingales, cherry blossoms, bog oak, lily pads, honeybees. Even the brand new ones are jampacked with nature. It's like the poets are not living in the same world as you. You put your hand up and say "isn't it weird that poets just keep going around noticing nature and not ever noticing that nature is shrinking? To read these poems, you would think that the world was as full of nature as it ever was even though in the last forty years so many animals and habitats have been wiped out? How come they don't notice that? How come they don't notice everything that's been annihilated if they're so into noticing things? I look around and all I see is a world being ruined. If poems were true they'd just be about walking through a giant graveyard or a garbage dump." (Age of Loneliness I, second Cass chapter)

Ha ha ha. Maybe she should read the orange poem. 

The fact is that people do terrible things every day and the world goes on. They commit atrocities and then resume their ordinary humdrum lives. In real terms, a death is practically non-existent. (Age of Loneliness III)

Bleak. 

Things I looked up:
Baffin Island (Wolf's Lair: Part 2) - in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, is the largest island in Canada, the second-largest island in the Americas (behind Greenland), and the fifth-largest island in the world

On the radio, Larry Gogan playing Boyzone on The Golden Hour like everything was normal. (The Widow Bride II: Part 1)

Lorcan "Larry" Gogan was an Irish broadcaster working for RTÉ.  His show was The Golden Hour, during which he played old favorites and classic songs from yesteryear. Boyzone was an Irish boy band created in 1993. 

The grey squirrel is not native to Ireland. The species was introduced to the country just over a century ago when a dozen arrived in a wicker hamper at Castle Forbes as a wedding present from the Duke of Buckingham. After the wedding breakfast, one of the daughters of the family opened the hamper on the lawn of the estate. the squirrels hopped out and scurried away into the woods. From there, like some fable of colonialism they have spread through almost the entire country. The native red squirrel...has almost vanished. The greys carry a virus, squirrel pox. They are immune to it, but the reds are not. It give them lesions around their mouths so they can't eat. After a week, it's killed them. (The Clearing IV)

This appears to be a true story. Genetic research has determined that all the grey squirrels in Ireland are related back the original 12 animals brought to the island in 1911.

Komorebi is the Japanese word for the kind of light you see in the forest. (The Clearing IV)

“Komorebi” is a Japanese word that means the play of sunlight through leaves. True facts in the book!

Hat mentions:

She spent her days excavating her walk in wardrobe laying out gloves, hats, scarves, blouses, dresses, jeans, skirts...(Sylvias II: Part 1)

He wore a woolly hat all year round. (The Widow Bride II: Part 2)

A baby? Well, that put the tin hat on it, didn't it? (The Widow Bride II: Part 5)

The old library is full of tourists wearing bucket hats carrying shopping bags that carry the college crest, the past for sale (The Clearing II)

brim of her hat (The Clearing V)

It is the weird tree with the witch's hat gouge in its side.  (The Clearing VIII)

"Ugh, that hat. Rapist. Klan. Serial killer. Another rapist." (Age of Loneliness I, first Cass chapter)

"That hat is insane. It's like a satellite dish." (Age of Loneliness I, first Cass chapter)

A group in wizard hats traipses noisily over the square.  (Age of Loneliness I, first Cass chapter)

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

 I read Real Americans by Rachel Khong because Lisa recommended it. 

What we have here is a multi-generational immigrant story. We start with Lily Chen who is interning in New York City at the turn of the century. She falls in love with a white man and they start a family together. Then in the second part of the novel, we speed ahead in time to pandemic era Seattle where we learn about Lily's son Nick. In the third part of the novel, we're traveling ahead in time to catch up with Lily's mother, Nick's grandmother, a woman originally from China who became as successful scientist in the United States, but maybe wasn't as successful in her personal life. 

I found this a difficult book to get into. Lily was sort of a non-character at first. But then, suddenly, I wanted to learn more. I wanted to learn about Lily's past and what she hoped for herself in the future. I wanted to know what her parenting philosophy would be and how it would be different from her own parents. I wanted to know things about Lily. And we sort of go there, but then it switched to talk about Nick, who was an interesting character in his own right, but I wanted Lily's story.

And that's what it comes down to for me. This was a good book, but it wasn't a great book. I wanted it to go deeper into Lily. I wanted her to talk about race and what it was like to be married to a white man and have a child who didn't look anything like her. I wanted to know her feelings about her estranged mother and ex-husband. I wanted to know if she ever thought about her relationship with her mother and what it demonstrated for own son. I wanted to know more about Lily. Why didn't she ask her own parents more questions? What were her ambitions in life? And that's all before we get to Lily's mother's story. 

I think this is the reason I prefer plot-driven stories, to be honest. This was a character-driven story and it was GOOD. But it would have to be five times as long as it was if it were to answer all the questions I still had about the characters after I closed the book cover. 

4/5 stars

Line of note:

There were things about Timothy I wished would rub off on my - most of all his ease in who he was. He never seemed to experience the uncertainty I felt. It was as though he'd emerged from the womb perfectly secure in who he would be and what he was capable of, like a giraffe that could stan an hour after being born. (page 171)

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

...I dodged tourists wearing backpacks and bucket hats, holding red bags from the discount designer store. (page 8)

As I walked to the stage to collect my diploma, my hat slid further down, looking silly, like I was poking fun at the ritual. (page 39)

She wore a sun hat with an enormous brim. (page 85)

...who tipped an imaginary hat. (page 169)

She stood in the doorway of my dorm, wearing a knitted hat and scarf of matching, multicolored yarn. (page 211)
...a shopping bag revealed to contain a hat, gloves, and a down comforter. (page 211)

A Woman of Substance (Emma Harte Saga #1) by Barbara Taylor Bradford

 

I have a theory. The website Goodreads was created in 2007.  If you look at the ratings for any book that published before Goodreads was founded on Goodreads, its star rating will be overly inflated because the only people who will rate and review a book from pre-Goodreads are people who like the book.  If you read a book in 1993 and were all "meh" about it, it's unlikely you'd go write it up, right? This is the only explanation I can find for the rating of 4.2 for A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. 

This book, published in 1979, is the tale of Emma Harte, a woman born into a loving family that is impoverished. She rises up into power and riches and we follow her whole saga, from her first marriage and business until the day she lets her family know how she's going to distribute her wealth when she dies. There are two world wars, two marriages, suicides, rapes, and countless business acquisitions. If you're thinking to yourself, hey, this is just a story about how hard work and smarts can make you successful, well, just read on.

First of all, there are a lot of things in this book that do not age well. There is the use of the r-word to describe a child, many fatphobic lines, including:

His brother Gerald had been dubbed ‘Skinny Ribs’, which made him laugh uproariously, since the obese Gerald was disgustingly fatter. (page 308) - Look, Gerald is a terrible person in this book, but the constant descriptions of fat=terrible person were absolutely nonstop.

...the uniforms certainly wouldn’t fit the bovine Annie (page 421) - Again, Annie is not especially hardworking in this book, but using descriptions of her weight as a surrogate for laziness was just lazy writing.

...was astounded at the man's hippopotamic body...(page 692) - Gerald again. Rude. 

Don't get me started on the characterization of the only gay man in this book.  I mean, sure it was the late 1970s, but it was just horrid and mean. 

Okay, well, let's just look beyond the things that we are reevaluating as the years go by. Let's look at the so-called woman of substance, shall we?

Things started out well enough. 

‘Being underestimated by men is one of the biggest crosses I’ve had to bear all of my life, and it was particularly irritating to me when I was your age. However, it was also an advantage and one I learned to make great use of, I can assure you of that. You know, Paula, when men believe they are dealing with a foolish or stupid woman they lower their guard, become negligent and sometimes even downright reckless. Unwittingly they often hand you the advantage on a plate.’ (page 8)

Okay, I get this. If people are going to underestimate you, maybe it's okay to take advantage of that.

But soon she manages to convince her husband to sell his property to her company in order to make a huge profit on it instead of actually, you know, helping her husband and their family?  

And then once WWI started, there was this.

...whenever she felt a prick of conscience about making a profit from war she dispelled her discomfiture with logical reasoning: Somebody had to produce the uniforms for the fighting men, and if she did not do it, others would. (page 547)

War profiteering. 

What a woman of substance. 

I'm not going to even talk about how she continued a decades-long affair with a married man. (She also birthed two illegitimate children, which I don't actually think is terrible, but the coverup she did for those births WAS and had terrible implications for those babies when they grew into adulthood.)

I think we're supposed to think of Emma as a woman with grit and perseverance, but instead I just think she was a person who took advantage of everyone and everything around her in order to create humongous wealth and get revenge for a family that mistreated her when she was young. I wanted her to do something with herself besides get revenge, but instead she's just vengeful toward her own family in the ending scenes. 

(Are any of you following that golf thing with Liv merging with the PGA? I am vaguely interested in this story because I watched that series about golf on Netflix. Basically, some rich people from Saudi Arabia have bought out professional golf. And Emma is like the rich Saudi. Just stepping all over anyone to get what she wants at the expense of morality and the common good. Capitalism, man.)

I will say that the historical research that must have gone into writing this book must have been a massive undertaking. Very impressive.

Ugh. I have very strong feelings about this book, but they do not align with the Goodreads folks who describe it as "a classic saga that stands the test of time," "one of the best novels in print," or "spellbinding." Did they read a different book entirely than I did? All NINE HUNDRED PAGES OF IT?

2/5 stars

Lines of note:

Daisy was like a dove that had been flung into a nest of vipers. (page 30)

I always note a good animal metaphor describing people.

At eleven sharp, for he was punctilious about time, Henry put on his black overcoat, picked up his bowler hat and umbrella, and left the office. (page 37)

I really can't stop myself from finding the word hat in books now. 

The boy was small-boned and delicate, yet for all that he was surprisingly wiry and tough, like a little terrier. (page 98)

Another animal metaphor.

Things I looked up:

bobbin ligger (page 90) - Person who removes empty bobbins from the spinning room area in the wool industry, especially in West Yorkshire 

parterre (page 345) - An ornamental garden with paths between the beds (from the photos, I would probably call this a garden maze)

cinereous (page 463) - especially of hair or feathers, ash-grey

cyclamen (page 510) - a perennial flower plant found in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin

Cyclamen

parvenu (page 546) - A person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity. In my defense, I had only ever heard this word and thought it was of French origin, so it would have an -eau ending. I was wrong.

dernier cri (page 547) - The very latest fashion.

deliquescent (page 598) - Becoming liquid or having a tendency to do so.

decree nisi (page 740) - A court order that will come into force at a future date as long as a particular condition is met. This apparently a step in getting a divorce in the UK (or at least England).

etiolated (page 757) - pale and drawn out due to lack of light

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is Min Jin Lee's 2017 epic historical fiction novel centered around a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. This book was a National Book Award finalist and has been rolling around in my TBR list for quite some time.

This book is unrelentingly sad. It starts in a small fishing village in Korea where a fisherman and his wife have a son with a cleft lip named Hoonie. When Hoonie is in his 20s, Japan annexes Korea and Hoonie's life is a lot more stable than many other Koreans, so he's able to marry a young woman named Yangjin. They have a daughter named Sunja and Hoonie dotes on the daughter he never thought he'd have, but when he dies of tuberculosis when Sunja is thirteen, she does when any teenager would do and seeks attention from another father figure. She gets pregnant by a wealthy Japanese businessman.

Sunja refuses to tell her mother who the father of her child is, but a Christian minister who is traveling through Korea on his way to Osaka marries her. Oh, I just realized that if I keep telling you about all the trials and tribulations of the succeeding generations of the family this post will be 15,000 words long. Eventually the family immigrates to Japan where they are treated quite poorly and struggle to make ends meet and remain in safe housing with enough to eat because Koreans were discriminated against a lot in Japan, particularly in the context of WWII. I was unaware of a lot of this cultural backstory and found it super interesting and sort of parallel to how people with Japanese ancestry were treated here in the US in that same time period.

This book has a lot to say about discrimination, power, and social mobility. I myself was absolutely fascinated by the super quick changes from one generation to another in terms of literacy, education, and language. It can be that a grandparent and grandchild cannot really communicate because they speak entirely different languages and have entirely different cultural viewpoints, from religion to to the role of women in the world to the propriety of certain jobs to the importance of higher education. The book is centered on a family and the family dynamics were fascinating to watch, especially since we did a deep dive into each generation and could see where they were coming from, even as one generation clashed with another.

It was quite good and I think of it as a winter read because of its unrelenting bleakness. Even as things are getting better economically for the family, they're still essentially stateless and at the mercy of the Japanese government. They can't go back to Korea and many of them don't even speak Korea. They aren't eligible for many jobs in Japan, even if they can culturally "pass." I would recommend this book, but it's 500 pages of sad, so maybe don't read it if you're already in the winter doldrums. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Her husband, the father of their six children, was as good as dead to her, though he was alive and living in her house several day a week in a drunk stupor. (page 142)

What a lot of information you can get from one sentence.

 Lately, Yangjin felt tired and impatient; small things bothered her. Aging was supposed to make you more patient, but in her case, she felt angrier. Sometimes, when a customer complained about the small size of the portions, she wanted to tell him off. Lately, what upset her most was her daughter's impossible silence. Yangjin wanted to shake her. (page 238)

It does seem like people who are aging go into anger or patience modes and there's no in between. 

Hansu never told him to  study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor. (page 275)

Hidden truths about pedagogy.

Before she'd left the house, she hadn't even bothered to look in the mirror. She wasn't hideous or shameful to look at, but she had prematurely reached the stage in a woman's life when no one noticed her entering or leaving a room. (page 352)

I feel like I entered this stage of life as soon as I left my twenties. 

Noa had noticed her beautiful handwriting on the files even before he noticed her.  It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two - her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph's strokes. (page 357)

I took two semesters of Japanese in college. I remember how freeing it was to write the numbers and this line really sparked a memory within me of rewriting the numbers over and over again.

Over lunch, for thirty minutes a day, he reread Dickens, Trollope, or Goethe, and he remembered who he was inside. (page 359)

Nerds be nerds across place and time.

Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all the same. Being a mother had taught her that this kind of emotional injustice was perhaps inevitable. (page 386)

Parenthood is one guilt trap after another from what I can tell.