September Reading Recap

Another great month of reading, with some intense stories of different kinds:

→ THE LIONS OF WINTER: SURVIVAL AND SACRIFICE ON MOUNT WASHINGTON by Ty Gagne chronicles the true story of a 1982 search and rescue mission for lost climbers that resulted in a tragedy. Gagne begins by introducing Albert Dow III, a dedicated volunteer with New Hampshire's Mountain Rescue Service, and establishing that he will be killed in an avalanche while searching for two lost climbers. Then we meet the young but experienced climbers, Hugh Herr and Jeff Batzer, and follow them on their ice climbing expedition as Mount Washington's famously severe weather worsens and they lose their way. Over the course of their harrowing ordeal, it begins to seem increasingly impossible that Herr and Batzer will survive, except that we know Gagne interviewed them in the present. While their predicament grows more dire, a search is organized, and we also get hour-by-hour accounts of the teams of heroic rescuers who brave the extreme conditions. Among them is Dow, who we follow into the avalanche that claimed his life.

Gagne creates so much suspense in this story despite the known outcome, because the tension isn't over what will happen but how it will play out, and how it might have gone differently with other choices or circumstances. The account is full of careful detail about winter mountaineering, search and rescue, and other fields, and it's also full of emotion and compassion for everyone involved in the story. I read one of Gagne's earlier books, WHERE YOU'LL FIND ME, and found it gripping but sometimes overly technical. I think the pace and stakes of this book would appeal to a wider audience who enjoy reading about true life adventures and disasters.

→ THE TREES by Percival Everett: In the town of Money, Mississippi, during a family gathering in 2018, an elderly white woman remarks that she wishes she never told that lie about the Black boy all those years ago. (Only, she doesn't say "Black".) Soon, one of the men in her family is gruesomely murdered, and his body is found alongside another brutalized corpse belonging to an unknown Black man. Local law enforcement is puzzled, even more so when the Black body disappears from the morgue. The situation really starts getting out of control when a second relative is killed in a similar fashion, and the same dead Black man is found at the scene. (By the way, this novel is written as a comedy.) Two agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are called in, both Black men who find the largely white population of Money resistant to their presence. As they push through racism to conduct their investigation, they discover that the murders are connected to the history of lynching, in Money and throughout the United States. (Again, this is a comic novel.)

I am impressed by the way Everett has crafted a madcap comedy with a rollicking, page-turning plot that revolves around the deadly serious topic of racial violence. From that unexpected combination comes further surprises, and every time I started to figure out where the story was going, it veered off in a new direction. The book is over-the-top in many ways, but it goes light on the history lessons, which works for the story, but motivated me to do some outside research into referenced events. I recommend this, and I bet you haven't read anything else like it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang: Alice is a graduate student in Analytic Magick at Cambridge, and her advisor recently died in an experiment gone gruesomely wrong. With her professor dead, Alice has little hope of completing her dissertation and finding a good job in academia. She also feels responsible for his death, since she's the one who drew the pentagram. (He always made his grad students handle those tiresome details.) So Alice sets out on a rescue mission to Hell, armed with all the arcane knowledge she could uncover and a new box of chalk. But at the last moment, her co-advisee and former friend Peter insists on joining her, since he has just as much at stake. Together, they will have to face the unknown challenges of the Eight Courts of Hell in hopes they can return with their professor's soul, and their own lives.

This is a big novel with a lot of ideas, and while I liked all the pieces, I didn't find them as well put together as in Kuang's earlier (and even more ambitious) BABEL. I most appreciated the imaginative depictions of the different areas of Hell, the allies and foes that Alice and Peter encounter, and especially the wonderful magic system based around logical paradoxes. The portrait of academia is also very effective, both when it receives satirical treatment and when the toxic elements are seriously critiqued. Alice and Peter are compelling characters, but there's unevenness to how they're developed over the course of the story. In general, my major complaints are about pacing, and I wished the novel had been edited into a tighter story. I do still recommend this to interested readers who are willing to push through some slow sections and forgive some flaws.

→ THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald: In 1913, Frank's wife leaves him, taking their three children on the long train journey from Moscow back to her original home in England. The next morning, the children return, since Nellie changed her mind about bringing them with her. Frank's life is naturally thrown into disarray by all these events, and he's faced with the problem of how to ensure his children are looked after while he attends to his work running a printing business. Some early attempts at finding caretakers go comically wrong. At the same time, Frank is dealing with various problems connected to his company, including the concern that the Russian government might stop tolerating businesses run by foreigners.

I was inspired to pick this up after reading FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane, a novel which features author Penelope Fitzgerald as the main character. I wasn't sure what to expect from Fitzgerald's own work, but I wasn't surprised to find that it focuses closely on Frank's observations and interactions with the people around him. I enjoyed Frank's view of the world and the way he often takes amusement from the events of the story. I also enjoyed how Fitzgerald portrays the details of the place and time, including the operations of the printing company. Even as I continued through the book, I never really knew what to expect next, and that made for a fun ride.