July Reading Recap

I'm doing so much summer reading!

→ THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang: Ro has trained as a Linguist, and he's determined to prove himself by becoming the first in generations to make a jump. The empathic sense of his species, when combined with a deep understanding of languages, allows the rare individual to jump across the galaxy into the body of a Star Eater. That species, so alien in body and mind to Ro's, lives in the vacuum of space and has the unique ability to find and mine the meridian element. Meridian is crucial for every world in the conglomerate, but the Star Eaters and their skills are poorly understood, so the possibility of jumping provides a secret advantage for Ro's small moon against the galaxy's larger powers. Once, the Star Eaters were cruelly exploited, but now they are full members of the conglomerate who participate willingly in meridian mining. Or at least, that's the claim. Ro discovers that this idea, along with so much else he's been taught, may be lies.

This story introduces so many fascinating concepts and explores them all well in a surprisingly small number of pages (about 160). I was immediately drawn in by the focus on linguistics, and thrilled by the continuing language innovations in the story and how important a role these play in the plot. I was also delighted by the alienness of this story without humans, featuring characters who are physically nothing like humans. Huang's skillful writing made me feel immersed in the unfamiliar bodies and worlds. But it was still easy to connect with Ro as a character, because Huang wisely gives him recognizable personality traits and flaws. This is a wildly creative and clever novella, and I recommend it to science fiction fans, especially those interested in language.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams are teenage brothers growing increasingly curious about the world beyond their secluded island. They've been taught about the new nation of America and every scientific innovation of the 18th century, but they've never been permitted to see more of the world. Then one fateful day, the brothers find a mysterious device that shows far more of the world than they're prepared for, including the revelation that the year is 2026. While they make plans to confront their mother with this information, the Antediluvian Society meets to discuss when to introduce their family of clones to modern America and get the country back on the right track.

This entertaining novella establishes its tone immediately with an opening line about Benjamin Franklin discovering internet porn. From there, it's a wild and bawdy ride that speeds right along. Well-handled POV shifts offer the perspectives of the naive clones as well as the informed adults, with appropriate diction for each. I expected the story to play out over a longer period of time than it does, but what's here fun to read, and Elison clearly had fun developing the absurd premise of a new American experiment gone wrong.

→ SANDWICH by Catherine Newman: For twenty years, Rocky and her family have been renting the same house on Cape Cod for a week every summer. Her kids are now young adults living away from home, so spending this time together brings Rocky a special joy. It also brings on memories of every past vacation, all the laughter and tantrums and fights with her husband and love, and the painful memories of long-ago pregnancy loss. As the family visits their favorite spots on the Cape, Rocky deals with her memories, with menopause symptoms, with her children's adult drama, and with the health of her elderly parents.

I enjoyed the balance of breezy summer read and thoughtful family story in this novel. The humor worked for me, and I laughed often at the family conversations and Rocky's commentary. It was great to see writing about menopause that's both frank and funny. The dynamics between the characters, especially the conflicts, felt realistic and sometimes familiar. There's not much to the plot, and it took a little time for me to adjust my expectations to the slice-of-life style, but I was content to hang out with Rocky's family, and I may continue on to the sequel, WRECK.

→ HOW TO READ A BOOK by Monica Wood: Violet is nearing the end of a prison sentence for manslaughter, after her reckless choices caused the death of an older woman. Harriet is a retired teacher who volunteers at the prison, running a book club that provides a weekly bright spot to Violet's life inside. Frank is the widowed husband of Violet's victim, who is moving past his complicated grief with a job at a bookstore in Portland, Maine, where Harriet often shops. When Violet is released from prison, she finds her way to the bookstore as well. The first meeting between the three comes as a surprise to them all, and it doesn't go well. But with time, new connections form that change everyone's life for the better.

This is a gentle and heartwarming story, a bit too much for my taste. Violet encounters unwavering kindness from most of the other characters, except for the villains, who are relentlessly awful, and I wished for everyone to be more complicated. Still, the characters are portrayed with enough depth that I developed affection for them. The novel contains an unexpectedly large amount of detail about research into language and cognition in African grey parrots, and I found that fascinating, though it didn't entirely fit with the rest of the story.

→ FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY by Francine Prose: The nine children of Charles Dickens are worried their father doesn't love them anymore, and that he's also lost interest in their mother and in their country home. Into this time of family strain enters another burden, in the form of an awkward and demanding houseguest named Hans Christian Andersen. He's apparently a renowned author in Denmark, maybe even as famous as their father in England, but the children have never heard of him or his fairy tales. Though Andersen is a great admirer of Dickens and eager to be included in the household, nobody returns the enthusiasm as his visit drags on and on for weeks.

I was excited to see how Prose would fictionalize this true case of an intolerable houseguest. She mines a lot of humor from both real and imagined details of the situation, and that makes for some fun scenes. I was also intrigued by the potential of the POV shifts, with a section narrated by the children, then Dickens, and then finally Andersen, a structure I expected to keep revealing new surprises. But this aspect disappointed me, with too much rehashing of scenes and not enough that reframed the reader's understanding. I appreciated the portrayals of these writers and their lives, but I wanted more out of this story.

→ LAST NIGHT IN BROOKLYN by Xochitl Gonzalez: Alicia is proud to be not just living in Brooklyn but a Brooklyn native living in the borough in 2007, when newcomers and gentrification are changing the city around her. Among the new arrivals to the trendy neighborhoods are her rich cousin Devon and his wife. Soon after Alicia reconnects with them, she's invited to one of the notoriously glitzy parties thrown by her neighbor, the fashion designer La Garza. It turns out La Garza isn't only being neighborly: She wants Alicia's help getting back in touch with Devon, who she had a passionate relationship with in the past.

I found this story very slow to get started, with a long stretch at the beginning where Alicia mostly attends various bars and parties in a way that seemed aimless. Gonzalez's descriptions provide a portrait of the place and time, but I wasn't sure to what end until La Garza's request brought the plot into focus. It took me a still longer stretch to recognize that Gonzalez was riffing on THE GREAT GATSBY. I was sorry I hadn't known sooner to look for parallels in every character and plot event, which did make the novel more interesting for me. But only to a point, because I still thought this was a pretty slow book, and not that compelling. (I'm not a GATBSY fan, either.) I far preferred Gonzalez's previous novels, OLGA DIES DREAMING and ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Slate, Laura Miller interviews Jon Krakauer about the thirtieth anniversary of the Everest disaster he recounted in Into Thin Air: "I was convinced when I wrote the book that all my friends who were guides were going to hate me because I had certainly destroyed guiding on Everest forever. Nobody would now want to climb Everest with a guide. Well, of course, it had the opposite effect. It was the best advertising the guides ever had. That bothered me, and also, I added to all this crowding. This guilt just doesn't go away."