Below is a list of the books I’ve read in the past year, followed by abridged reviews of seven fiction and seven nonfiction favorites consumed in 2018.
In the order read (linked to the full review)…
Commonwealth / Ann Patchett
Washington : A Life / Ron Chernow
The Geography Of Madness : Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, And The Search For The Meaning Of The World’s Strangest Syndrome / Frank Bures
Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis
Nostromo / Joseph Conrad
Hall Of Small Mammals / Thomas Pierce
One Of Ours / Willa Cather
I Want To Show Your More / Jamie Quartro
We Have Always Lived In The Castle / Shirley Jackson
The Girls/ Emma Cline
The History Of Tom Jones, A Foundling / Henry Fielding
All That Man Is / David Szalay
The Impossible Presidency : The Rise And Fall Of America’s Highest Office / Jeremi Siri
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared / Jonas Jonasson
A Gentleman In Moscow / Amor Towles
The Power And The Glory / Graham Greene
Howard’s End / E. M. Forster
How To Be Both / Ali Smith
In Case We Die / Danny Bland
Prague Winter : A Personal Story Of Remembrance And War, 1937-1948 / Madeleine Albright
Life And Fate / Vasily Grossman
My Name Is Lucy Barton / Elizabeth Strout
Perfect Child / Ashley Anderson
Talk Talk / T. C. Boyle
The Association Of Small Bombs / Karan Mahajan
Stalin’s Daughter : The Extraordinary And Tumultuous Life Of Svetlana Alliluyeva / Rosemary Sullivan
SPQR : A History Of Ancient Rome / Mary Beard
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark
The Loved One / Evelyn Waugh
Mansfield Park / Jane Austen
Janesville : An American Story / Amy Goldstein
Loitering With Intent / Muriel Spark
Enon / Paul Harding
Far From The Tree / Andrew Solomon
Killer Of The Flower Moon : The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI / David Grann
King Leopold’s Ghost : A Story Of Greed, Terror And Heroism In Colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild
Swing Time / Zadie Smith
Drown / Juan Diaz
How Democracies Die / Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
Hue 1968 : A Turning Point Of The American War In Vietnam / Mark Bowden
The Noonday Demon : An Atlas Of Depression / Andrew Solomon
The Accidental / Ali Smith
My Mother’s House, And Sido / Colette
That Old Cape Magic / Richard Russo
The Heart Of Things : A Midwestern Almanac / John Hildebrand
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Fiction
Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis
Lucky Jim, published in 1954, was Kingsley Amis’ first novel. It was hugely successful in Britain and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The protagonist is Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer in medieval history at a British provincial university. Hapless, he is the kind of person who seems to do all the wrong things for the right reason. Throughout the story, he is forced to contend with a surrounding cast of bores, crackpots, frauds, and an inept superior. Amis’ targets in this book are the regimented college life as well as the stuffy British upper class attitudes of the time. This novel deserves to be better known in this country. While set in a much different time period, its humor remains fresh, and the sorts of characters encountered along the way are still alive and well in academia today. This satire of irritants large and small will have readers cheering Jim Dixon on as he tilts against every windmill.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle / Shirley Jackson
In We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson’s final published work, she initially describes a slice of paradise. It features two sisters and an invalid uncle living on a family estate in Vermont. The house is large and located on extensive grounds, with a garden that produces a rich variety of flowers and vegetables. Located near a run-down town, the three members of the Blackwood family seem to be living harmonious lives. The snake in their Eden is a tragedy that occurred before the opening events in the book. As the story unfolds, readers learn that the rest of the Blackwood family members were murdered, poisoned by arsenic.
The narrator is Mary Katherine, called Merricat by her sister, who was twelve when her parents, aunt, and younger brother died by the poisoning. Constance, the older sister, now twenty-eight, was the suspect arrested for the murders, although she was later acquitted of the crimes. Since that time, she has not gone outside of the house other than to tend to the garden. Their uncle, Justin, survived the poisoning but has been confined to a wheelchair ever since, spending his time obsessively writing about the day of the murder. It is an Eden after its fall from grace.
In the novel’s final section, an unexpected guest’s arrival causes a rift between the two sisters and this leads to the destruction of their home by fire. However, the sisters’ paradise persists in even more constrained circumstances. The two continue to live in harmony, despite the fact that the truth about the poisoning of the Blackwood family members has been revealed. Agoraphobia is clearly one of the book’s themes. But in its final section, I realized that this mystery story is actually a fairytale, one presented from the perspective of those living inside a house considered haunted by their neighbors.
All That Man Is / David Szalay
The publishers of All That Man Is call the book a novel. However, there seems little that links the nine stories contained within. They deal with unrelated events taking place in different countries across Europe, with no overlapping characters. But after reading this marvelous book I can understand why the publishers make the claim. Each of its separate pieces presents a man dealing with a crisis, be it spiritual, moral, or physical. They are arranged by the ages of their male protagonists, beginning with a boy of 17, on the cusp of adulthood, and ending with a man of 73, facing his own mortality. Another nice touch is that they progress in order through the calendar year, giving the stories the unity of the four completed seasons.
While the nine men featured in these stories are at different stages of life, all are away from home, and each is forced to wrestle with the emotions of desire, failure, and accepting dreams gone awry. Szalay digs deep into the psyche of these men, and while their actions are not always commendable, they are so authentically real that the reader is instantly able to identify and sympathize with them. A gifted minimalist, the author’s focused prose makes these stories intensely readable. It is no wonder that Szalay was named one of Granta’s “Best of Young Novelists” in 2013.
A Gentleman In Moscow / Amor Towles
As this novel opens in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is appearing before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Russia’s new Soviet masters consider him a member of the aristocracy and thus a threat to the government. But because of earlier service to the pre-revolutionary cause, rather than being sent to prison or executed, he is sentenced to house arrest. However, there is a twist; he is sent to live out his days in one of Moscow’s most luxurious hotels, the Metropol.
When I began to read this book, I wondered if the premise of a man who spends decades living in one building, never stepping outdoors in all that time, could hold my interest. That was before I had gotten to know Count Rostov or to understood fully the wondrous world contained within the Metropol. The hotel is in fact a major character in this story, and like the lead character, what a fabulous tale it also has to tell.
The Count is representative of old-world aristocratic elegance, where the elite led highly mannered lives. And the tale of his life inside the hotel is filled to the brim with adventures, a love affair, and it is blessed with the presence of two delightful children. Just as engaging as the Count himself are the story’s supporting cast members. This novel highlights a man determined to live his life to the fullest, no matter how constrained it might be, and it is likely to captivate the reader from beginning to end.
How To Be Both / Ali Smith
Some novels are harder to explain than read. Such is the case with How To Be Both. From its opening page, Smith’s dazzling wordplay hits the reader like a tsunami. The author does not play by the usual rules here; there are no proper paragraphs, periods are used sparingly, and the plot resembles jumbled puzzle pieces, difficult to assemble. But what at first blush appears to be incomprehensible, proves to be a strength rather than a detriment. Smith makes the infinite scope of this work feel intimate and fascinating.
The novel is two stories woven into one, with themes seamlessly overlapping. Both deal with the power of art and how the dead continue to haunt the living, with the main characters in each dealing with sexual and gender ambiguities. And that only scratches the surface of a novel that effortlessly combines the Renaissance period of the 1400s with modern day life, blending both into a singular tale. In doing so, Smith shows that our emotional and creative needs have remained the same over time.
This is the second novel I’ve read by Smith, and in both she presents the business of life as a messy affair. Her characters grapple with needs, wants, and conflicting emotions. Smith’s stories are never one dimensional; rather, they brim with the joys, sorrows, and the mysterious glory of human existence. As I wrote, some novels are harder to explain than read. How To Be Both contains discrete meanings open to interpretation. Readers are left to form their own conclusions. But most will come away impressed with this ingenious work of art.
Life And Fate / Vasily Grossman
While Life and Fate is not a well known book in this country, it continues to receive critical acclaim and has been favorably compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Both novels are war epics that deal with pivotal periods of Russian history. Grossman was a Soviet Jewish journalist who covered the Battle of Stalingrad and later the liberation of the Treblinka extermination camp. He wrote a number of novels during his lifetime, but this one (his final work) draws directly upon his experiences as a journalist during World War II and his emotional response to the Holocaust. In heartbreaking fashion, he shows how both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia sought to answer the “Jewish” problem by stirring up antisemitism among their respective citizenry.
The story centers around the Battle of Stalingrad, where a determined city held the Germans at bay and turned the tide of war in the Allies’ favor. Thousands of its citizens were either killed in the fighting or starved to death during the long siege.
While fiction, the novel has the ring of truth from beginning to end as Grossman conveys what he witnessed during the siege. Sprinkled into the story are brief chapters that take the reader into the minds of Stalin, Hitler, and Friedrich Paulus, the German general who commanded the Nazi army surrounding Stalingrad. But it is the author’s ability to capture the thoughts and actions of the common citizenry that makes this such a riveting read. Its haunting prose depicts the plight and valor of a people caught in the vise of two totalitarian forms of government, fighting to preserve the soul of Mother Russia.
This novel is long, nearly 900 pages in length, and with its huge cast of characters (and all those Russian names!) it is a challenging read. Nonetheless, the story’s depth and emotional resonance is richly rewarding. It is a book that deserves to be assigned reading in universities across the globe. Celebrating the power of the individual against the intolerance of the State, its message remains as relevant today as the time it was written. It is indeed a novel worthy of Tolstoy himself.
My Mother’s House, And Sido / Colette
While classified as fiction, the two novels in this combined volume are clearly thinly veiled memoirs of Colette’s childhood and family, focusing especially on her mother, Sido. As these recollections highlight, Colette’s mother was a compelling force not only in her own family, but also as a person much admired in her community. Until age twelve, the author grew up in a rural French village during the late nineteenth century. As Colette describes it, the environment she grew up in was a slice of paradise on earth. After reading about her mother’s abundant garden, a house cluttered with books and all kinds of pets, as well as a loving relationship with her second husband, I was inclined to agree with Colette’s opinion.
Of course a child has little understanding of the difficulties their parents face in life. Sprinkled throughout these vignettes are hints of money troubles, family discord, and health issues. Wisely though, Colette concentrates mostly on the joys and wonderment the world presented to her in childhood. She lovingly captures the magic and innocence of a place that remained a touchstone throughout her life. Sido was a master gardener, and the plants she grew and the rhyme of the passing seasons play a large part in the stories Colette tells. So does her relationship with her siblings and father. A war veteran who lost a leg in battle, he represents the dreamer who infuses Colette with the desire to become a writer. But it was her mother’s energy and “can do” attitude that served as the inspiration to succeed in the craft. The author’s reminiscences capture not only the special qualities of her mother; they preserve forever a remembered paradise as seen through the eyes of an observant child.
Nonfiction
Prague Winter : A Personal Story Of Remembrance And War, 1937-1948 / Madeleine Albright
Prague Winter is both a family memoir and a history of a country. In its pages, Madeleine Albright writes about her family’s deep roots in Czechoslovakia, entwining their story with an account of that country’s quest for recognition as an independent state during the Twentieth Century. Particularly, she concentrates on the years from 1937 through 1948. It was a period in which the country went from an independent democracy to occupation by Nazi Germany and, following World War II, occupation by Russia.
The author’s early childhood was spent in Czechoslovakia. Her father, Josef Koreb, was a high ranking politician in the independent government. He fled the country with his family after Germany occupied it, and spent the war years in Britain as a member of Czechoslovakia’s shadow government in exile. They returned home following the war’s end, and for a few brief years her father served as the country’s ambassador to Yugoslavia and Albania. Once the Communists took over control of the government, he defected to the United States with his wife and children.
Albright, who served as America’s sixty-fourth Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, is well placed to tell this intimate history. Growing up, she was on familiar terms with the key political figures involved in Czechoslovakia’s struggle to remain independent. It is a gripping tale of a small country attempting to hold the Nazis at bay, and later to stay free of Russian control. Presenting the broader history of this time period, she paints a picture of the West’s betrayal of the country’s independence, first with the Munich Pact that allowed Germany to occupy Czechoslovakia, and later turning a blind eye to Stalin’s seizure of power.
SPQR : A History Of Ancient Rome / Mary Beard
SPQR takes its title from a popular Roman catchphrase, Senatus Populus Que Romanus, “The Senate and People of Rome.” In this tome, Mary Beard traces Rome’s history from its earliest days up the the third century CE. While the presentation is scholarly, she succeeds in putting flesh on the Empire’s bones in a highly readable format. It is a book that will appeal to both the historian and the interested layperson.
In piecing together the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus, as well as the key figures before actuate documentation, Beard shows that much of what we know about Ancient Rome is based more upon folklore than truth. She challenges many of today’s sketchy accounts. In disassembling myths, she meticulously presents the whys and hows of the city’s growth and recreates in great detail how the Romans viewed their culture and long dominance on the world stage. While the author does spend considerable time describing the autocracy that ruled Rome from its earliest days through its decline, Beard also brings to life how the other classes lived and endured through the centuries. Rather than focusing on the causes of its decline, the book concentrates on what made Ancient Rome successful for such a long period of time.
Janesville : An American Story / Amy Goldstein
Janesville is a medium sized city located in southern Wisconsin. Throughout the Twentieth Century, it prospered because of two major employers, the Parker Pen Company and General Motors. In its heyday, GM’s auto plant there employed over 4,000 people. These were well paying union jobs that ensured a solid middle class existence for most employees. Thanks to this strong economic base, many believed that the city would continue to prosper for generations to come. This was proved wrong when, at the start of the Great Recession in 2008, both industries closed their doors there, and soaring unemployment knocked many people from their middle class perch into needing government assistance to ward off hunger and homelessness. In a year’s time, the world was turned upside down in Janesville.
In this exposé of the events that followed in Janesville, Amy Goldstein focuses on a select number of families, showing the devastation that occurred on a personal level as the city grappled with how to respond to the double whammy of two major employers leaving town at the same time that the economy tanked universally during the Great Recession. Portraying both sides of the political divide, she chronicles a city’s attempt to rebrand itself in a world where the loss of high paid jobs were replaced by employment that came nowhere close to providing the wages that most were making before.
Following the arc of citizens in Janesville affected by the Great Recession through 2013, Goldstein paints a picture of why it was so difficult for these families to find firm footing despite the subsequent rebound of the stock market. Despite the efforts of a determined city intent on rebuilding its former middle class existence, there was no way to cushion such a devastating blow. It is a story that is, in part, a harbinger of Trump’s election in 2016. However, Janesville is not a tale that highlights a community’s failure. Rather, it sympathetically details a city’s determination to overcome the label of just another casualty in today’s economic environment. Even if not totally succeeding in the quest, Goldstein provides a picture of a Midwestern community’s refusal to become just another Rust Belt city.
Far From The Tree / Andrew Solomon
While most parents realize that their children will have a personality of their own, few expect or can imagine a child that does not match society’s prevailing norms. In this fascinating book, Andrew Solomon chronicles stories of families coping (and not always succeeding) when they learn that their child has an inherited or acquired trait foreign to their experience. Solomon brings his own unique perspective to the work. Being gay, he was raised at a time when such an orientation was considered a disease, something shameful that was frequently blamed on poor parenting.
In separate chapters, Solomon first writes about families dealing with inherited conditions: deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, and multiple severe disabilities. In the book’s second half, he focuses on acquired traits, such as children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, or who are transgendered. Throughout, he highlights the difficulty parents face in raising a child who has fallen far from the tree. Not only do they have to come to terms with their own shattered dreams, they must deal with a world in which their children do not easily fit. And yet in most cases, he documents the triumphs of love over prejudice.
Throughout the book, Solomon is never judgemental of the parents who fall short of their ideals when raising their children. He does not sugar coat the problem and provide a happily ever after ending. For these parents and children there is no magic wand that can be waved to make it all better. In his summary, Solomon writes, “Insofar as I have written a self-help book, it is a how-to manual for receptivity: a description of how to tolerate what cannot be cured, and an argument that cures are not always appropriate even when they are feasible.” Far From The Tree was an eye (and heart) opener for me.
King Leopold’s Ghost : A Story Of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild
When first discovered by Portuguese explorers in 1491, the Kingdom of the Kongo was roughly three hundred miles square. The Portuguese built churches and mission schools and actively engaged with local chiefs in what was to grow into a booming slave trade. However, these early explorers stuck close to the coastal areas. For centuries to come, central Africa remained a blank space on maps. This changed after the Civil War when Henry Morton Stanley, a Welshman, took note of the European scramble to acquire colonies in Africa. Up to that point, no expedition had managed to penetrate the interior of the Kongo. Seeking his fame and fortune, Stanley decided to be the first to do so in 1872. When he succeeded to tell the tale, he became a celebrity throughout the western world.
In Brussels, there was one person who took a keen interest in Stanley’s accomplishment. Leopold II, the King of the Belgians, had long dreamed of acquiring a colony in Africa and he saw in Stanley a man he could use to accomplish this goal. Hiring the explorer, Leopold began to send missionaries and a private army to lay claim to an area he renamed the Congo Free State. To win public support for his endeavor, he portrayed himself as a humanitarian seeking to put an end to the Arab slave trade. In newspaper articles widely distributed, he was lauded for his selfish efforts to bring enlightenment to the natives. Nonetheless, his intent from the first was to drain the area of its natural resources in order to fill his own bank account. This first involved the collection of ivory, and later the harvesting of rubber, using the natives as forced labor. During his reign from 1885 to 1908, as this book graphically documents, 10 million Congolese died due to harsh treatment (including mutilation), starvation, and disease.
King Leopold’s Ghost brings this sad piece of history to the light of day. When the Belgian government took over governance from the King, little was done to prepare the country for future independence. When it finally was granted in 1959, the entire territory had fewer than thirty African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers, agronomists, or physicians available to help steer the country during the transition. King Leopold’s Ghost features a riveting cast of heroes and villains. The evidence that the author unearths, while horrifying, keeps the reader engaged throughout. It goes a long way in explaining why the Congo is still a war torn region today. The book’s title is appropriate since King’s Leopold’s ghost remains a haunting figure still.
Hue 1968 : A Turning Point Of The American War In Vietnam / Mark Bowden
In late 1967, General William Westmoreland was making the rounds to media outlets in the United States. As the commanding general leading the American military effort in Vietnam, he was delivering an upbeat assessment of the war: thanks to the help of American troops, the war in Vietnam was close to being won. Unfortunately, his optimistic outlook was based more on wishful thinking than on solid evidence.
On January 31, 1968, the first day of the Lunar New Year, called Tet, the North Vietnamese government launched a major offensive that would prove that they were far from being a defeated force. The Tet Offensive featured attacks across South Vietnam on its major cities, including Saigon itself. Most of these attacks were easily repulsed, but not the one focused on the third largest city, Hue. There, the National Liberation Front’s army, composed of ten thousand soldiers, captured all of the city save for two small military outposts.
Hue 1968 is a detailed (and fascinating) account of the Front’s capture of the city, and the bloody twenty-four days that followed before American forces were able to recapture it in house-to-house fighting. In the process, close to eighty percent of the city was destroyed. Caught in the cross fire or executed by the invading army, more than 5,000 civilians were killed. The communist forces lost an estimated 2,400 to 8,000 killed, while Allied forces lost 668 dead and 3,707 wounded.
When North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, they believed the citizens in the South would rise up and join them, leading to a quick victory. This did not occur, and it soon became apparent that their forces would be driven from Hue. Nonetheless, the National Liberation Front was determined to make the Americans pay a dear price to dislodge them. And while the Marines were able to eventually wrest control back, they in no way emerged the victorious army. As Bowden shows, the Tet Offensive changed the American public’s outlook on the war. The Battle of Hue provided them with proof that the war was not winnable.
The Heart Of Things : A Midwestern Almanac / John Hildebrand
The Heart of Things is a collection of essays that Hildebrand first published in Wisconsin Trails magazine. The stories are arranged to follow the calendar year, from January through December. He focuses on the rhythm of life in small town America, capturing the small details in a sympathetic and often lighthearted manner. Each essay is short, running only from two to four pages. But in this case, boiled down to a rich essence, less is more. Whether observing the weather, nature, family or home, his descriptions of life in northwestern Wisconsin are sharply drawn.
Hildebrand is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Being an outdoor enthusiast, stories of hunting, fishing, and canoeing play a big part in the book. In these activities, he employs his keen eye to describe Wisconsin’s rural environment. Among the topics covered are church suppers, Friday night football, farming, and the natural world’s importance to local communities. Following the 2016 elections, there was much discussion about city dwellers being unfamiliar with the concerns of rural America. While The Heart of Things barely touches upon political issues, it certainly does provide a snapshot of daily life in smaller communities around the state of Wisconsin. These essays show that while there are certainly differences between rural and urban inhabitants, there are many more areas where we are more alike than not.
Robert Up At Dawn 