I heard good things about this book as a post-apocalyptic novel, but what I got was more of a horror tale with a syrupy dollop of romance at the core.

I haven’t really read many “horror” books, so maybe the choppy writing style is part of the genre. For me it was distracting and trying to lead to often artificial mini-cliffhangers that mimic the jump scares that you see in movies.

The story elements were a little schlocky – I was willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to some really out-there stuff (zombies? aliens?) but this book had stuff I just couldn’t bring myself to buy. Trapped in a nearly abandoned mansion with a hunky guy in a snowstorm and your priority is planting seeds for a future food crop in two weeks? Amnesia causing you to forget the first chapter of the book? These were tough to swallow.

But it was also a book with a unique story that I don’t run into very often, and I liked that there are lots of mysteries in here that aren’t necessarily solved. There is an inherent promise for more answers in the rest of the series, but I think those answers probably aren’t worth the reading time for me.

Next I am reading Bye, Bye Baby by Ace Atkins – his last book writing for the Spenser series.

I tend to like books about people in isolation, so naturally I wanted to read this non-fiction work about a fisherman from Mexico in 2012 getting stranded on his boat and drifting all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the Marshall Islands .

The story certainly draws your imagination – especially as it started with two fishermen and ended with one. The story is amazing, and the author had access to everyone involved on both ends of the journey.

The writer details all the information before, during and after the journey, and the bravado and machismo of the fisherman and the people he works with really shine through. If anything this was the greatest skill of the writer – to allow us to feel that and see how it influenced the final result – a living castaway after more than a year adrift.

For me the writing style was pretty flat – it was written in a documentary style and I understand that decision, but I felt like more effort could have been made to bring the story to life. Maybe because it was written in the 3rd person, I always felt a distance between myself and the story. Some writers like Jon Krakauer can really bring out the danger and make you feel like you’re there. Unfortunately this felt like a dry re-telling sometimes.

Next I am reading Voices in the Snow by Darcy Coates.

It was my first time reading this author, and I was pleased to find a pretty cerebral work that looked at tough problems (man’s mistreatment of the Earth and climate change) in a introspective and productive way.

The format of the book itself is unique. On one hand it tells a story instead of preaching about a problem, and lets the reader see the effects of unchecked climate change (which are fictional at the time but feel like they may not be far off) through the eyes of fictional voices from the future. Some of these voices are fully developed characters, while others are representative of a larger group. Sometimes this is hard to follow, but in the end I think the effect and the risk was worth taking in pushing along such a wide-reaching narrative.

I enjoyed the book and found a lot in here that I wasn’t expecting. How some characters knew the routine of hospice care, or the profile of the city of Zurich, and incidentally the Swiss people. It was an ambitious novel in unexpected ways – and while I would have cut some of the fat out it was in the end pretty satisfying to me.

Some readers may look at this as a book that proposes concrete solutions to our problems – solutions that run towards the violent or extremely radical at the very least. While I can’t comment on the technical feasibility of the scientific or economic solutions (I’m not smart enough to know if they are even realistic or not) I can say that it was good to read a story about people proposing solutions and finding the will to (sometimes) painfully implement them. Some of the solutions in this book are pretty unbelievable – not technically but socially – and if you can get by that I think you’ll enjoy the story.

This was another long book – I’ve had a run of long books lately. Next I am reading 438 Days by Jonathan Franklin.

This book had a lot of potential and got me pretty excited about the story in the beginning. Unfortunately it couldn’t follow through for me and it felt to me like it had turned into a romance/fantasy novel for teenagers.

A woman prays to a dark god and receives a gift and a curse. Part of this gift/curse is the stopping of her aging process, and she lives for 300+ years. The mechanics of this gift/curse are explained clearly, and I appreciated that the author gave us the rules of the game early on and was careful not to break them.

The author also hints at an enormous scale – the main character talks about all the time she spent in various (exotic) places, hanging out with Hemingway, etc. However these places and people are only name drops and I think a big opportunity was missed here. This was a long book but most of it was spent in just two eras, and the book feels like an empty shell because of it.

Another thing that bothered me was that the 300+ year old character didn’t really have much more wisdom than anyone else – all of the time and the ability to float invisibly through time but not much in the way of mental development.

So that together with a long romantic interlude involving someone else with a gift/curse made this book a disappointment for me.

Next I am reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I like reading about solo journeys, and this was technically solo although having some camels and a dog as traveling companions threaten that definition.

Traveling across half of Australia with some tamed wild camels, the author explains in detail how she ended up doing this trip, which was featured in a 1978 issue of National Geographic magazine. There are always a lot of questions on why she did the journey, and this book has some answers. It seemed to be written as a response to people who were curious after reading the magazine article.

She seems like a pretty live wire back in the 1970s and there is definitely an agenda in this book – to point out the poor treatment of the Aboriginal people, call out misogyny, and to shock the audience a bit with the differences between the National Geographic experience and the more personal one that she went through.

I liked the book, and although I wasn’t as curious or interested in the traveling with camels aspect, it was interesting to read about travel in a wide open and dangerous place. In the afterword the author says that it is probably impossible to do the trip these days – there are fences and checkpoints to get in the way of a true solo experience.

She has a great writing style – startling to think that she was in her 20s when she wrote it – and although there was a little woo-woo in there I was following along on the journey with a lot of anticipation.

If there was any downside to this book for me, it would be all the time spent before the trip which was important to the success of the adventure but wasn’t as interesting for me. There wasn’t really a solid plan to go – so the reader has to watch her put up with a lot of crap with the possibility of no eventual payoff. Of course from the cover of the book we know it was a successful journey, but the is a lot of aimlessness in the beginning.

I was able to read the National Geographic story after finishing the book, and especially the photos were well done. I wouldn’t recommend reading the book without first flipping through the photos to whet the appetite.

Next I am reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab.

Before reading this book I would have had no real mental picture when hearing the term “Dark Southern Gothic” but this book was an educational experience for me.

A collection of short stories published in the early ‘50s, it more than holds up today and shows some of the same racial and immigration tensions existed then as now. The style of writing also holds up – it doesn’t feel like something written 70 years ago. The stories are varied and powerful, and each one had me pondering the message. These were really good.

I guess the only bad news here is that there aren’t a lot of other works by this author as she passed away fairly early. I wonder how many authors she influenced, and where I can find more work like this. For me the southern setting wasn’t the key point, but the slow slide into darker areas that each character experienced.

Next I’m dipping back into non-fiction, reading Tracks by Robyn Davidson.

This book was recommended to me by ChatGPT based on my prompts for similar books in feeling/tone to A Gentleman in Moscow. While reading it I could see some similarities and I think it was a solid recommendation by the AI engine, but the bittersweet tone of this book put me off a little.

Books about libraries, book stores, booksellers, and bookworms have sort of a safety net built-in. People who are reading your book already like reading, many of them love reading. So they are a receptive audience to a story that exalts books and the act of reading. Some stories can rest on their laurels and come out OK, and some take risks and build on these positive foundations.

This book took some chances, and although I wasn’t really into the vibe of the story and the plot felt a bit too unbelievable, the book’s heart was in the right place and I enjoyed it. Within these pages are plenty of references to great books both old and new, and so at the very least I could add some books to my reading list.

Speaking of which, the next book is one recommended by the main character of the this book. I am reading A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.

Made up of three short novels: Empress of Salt and Fortune, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and Into the Riverlands, this series celebrates great storytelling with some pretty good storytelling of its own. Along for the ride is a fantasy setting akin to ancient China, with talking tigers, spooky ghosts and war mammoths.

This series has a comforting feel to it – the writer has somehow captured the feeling despite the characters being in dangerous places and situations. Part of it is a sense of journey and exploration, and we follow the cleric Chih on their mission to chronicle the stories of the land on behalf of their temple. Chih is always on the move, hearing the stories of others and occasionally telling their own. This clever device maximizes the stories we get, and avoids what might be at first glance a more dramatic choice if Chih was a martial arts expert or something.

Of the three novels I preferred the first, Empress of Salt and Fortune but they were all quite good. Chih is an observer and because the stories are short there isn’t much development in them, but rather a revealing of something else entirely. I wonder if this kind of story could work in a longer novel, and hopefully the author is experimenting with that for the future. I am looking forward to reading more!

Next I am reading The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.

Living outside of America does not relieve me of the curiosity of how things are going now and what life might have been like if I had stayed there.

Reading internet news is not as simple as just searching for “news” and digging in. Source reliability, bias, advertising money – all these must be considered. Bad news gets more attention than good, and outrage brings eyeballs (and advertising dollars).

But just about every news source I read says that things aren’t going well in America, and there are lots of problems that are getting worse rather than better.

This book focuses on a problem from a long time ago, poverty, which seems to be reaching a breaking point in some areas of the United States. There are plenty of books that look hard at poor people and try to figure out how they got that way, but this book instead focuses on how people who aren’t poor tend to benefit from the people that are, and how the current system is difficult to change because it is in affluent people’s best interests for this state of affairs to remain as it is.

There are a lot of statistics used in this book while examining the problem – maybe too many for my taste but I understand that the author needs to back up some of these contentions that will be hard for affluent people to hear.

The writing can be a little bit idealistic, but more importantly it is solution-oriented writing. It is easy to point out problems but much better to give some ideas on how to begin to solve them. The author is realistic as this kind of societal repair would mean a dramatic shift. But he remains positive and seems like someone who wants America to do better.

I liked this book and after reading so many articles decrying poverty and homelessness it is good to see someone handing out ideas. I guess the big question is: Is anyone in America listening?

Next I am reading a trio of novellas by Nghi Vo.

The dramatic true story of a group of Indian workers trafficked into the USA to work as welders for a major corporation – held against their will under the false promise of a green card, while their families back in India struggled under the debts of the huge loans they took out to finance the welders’ journey.

This book was extremely well-researched and told from the viewpoint of the (Indian-American) community organizer who stumbled on the situation and helped to get them out of it. It was a very unusual situation – not the usual thing you think about when talking about human trafficking. Even worse was that the US government (at least the ICE organization) was helping exploit these guys as well.

I’m not sure I liked the author so much, however. As a writer he tended towards building up situations (even minor ones) into as much drama as possible, and I felt like sometimes as a participant in this story he was kind of self-focused and humble-bragging a bit. The dialogue is reconstructed from notes, affidavits and testimony, and it felt artificial. Maybe because much of these conversations was translated from another language into the English that I was reading?

The best parts of the book for me were the scenes taking place in India, and of course all the food that the starving workers were dreaming about. I can’t wait to do some Indian cooking of my own to sate the appetite that this book raised. The author may want to look into food writing as well.

So good book, great story, and more than a little shocking. Come on, US government, you can do better than this.

Next, piling on the US government a little more, I am reading Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond.

I had heard good things about this book that takes a broad look at influential people over history, especially but not limited to women and their roles in overcoming a male-centered society.

This is a long book, and one of the things that made it worth reading was the writer’s beautiful writing, a sort of poetic prose that made every sentence worth considering and savoring.

She describes her work as a “project”, and I can understand given the huge amount of information and research that went into this. One of the key features of this book is the author’s ability to tie together people from across history, and see how they influenced each other’s thinking. For the most part I found these connections interesting, but some felt a little forced or vague or unsubstantiated – more like wishful theories than fact.

The scale of this project is huge, and for me sometimes it was a little overwhelming. Within some chapters points of view changed abruptly, and stories are completed in a non-linear way that had a discussion of Darwin’s feelings on hydrotherapy suddenly appearing in the middle of someone else’s history.

There are many key figures examined here, including Maria Mitchell, Johannes Kepler, Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson. But I found the section on Rachel Carson the most interesting, and I’m looking forward to reading some of her work in the future.

It was a long read – but overall I thought it was worth the time. If you are a big fan of more of the people I mentioned above, then I’d strongly recommend the book.

Next I am reading The Great Escape by Saket Soni.

This was a book with a pretty unusual perspective: the memoirs of a security guard who was paid to stand around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, killing time and protecting countless works of art for around ten years.

With all that time on his hands, the author had the opportunity to really appreciate the art that surrounded him, from the old masters, to the Egyptian gallery, and each chapter focuses on some area of the gigantic museum combined with some aspect of his life experiences – his relationship with his family, the loss of his brother to cancer, meeting his eventual wife, having kids.

While I really enjoyed the art analysis from a layman’s viewpoint, I didn’t get a cohesive feeling from the way the book was structured. I understand what the author was trying to do, but it felt a little awkward sometimes.

I also experienced a strange jarring feeling when hearing his thoughts on New Yorkers and their behavior – it has been a long time since I’ve been exposed to the sort of brusque NY attitude and it was interesting to see that he preferred that kind of interaction. Living in Japan so long I’ve gotten used to the careful, calculated and polite conversations that are necessary here.

In this book there are a few sketches of some of the art that he is describing, but the best way to read this book is with Google Images ready to go and to load up the artworks that he is talking about while reading each passage. This book made me take the time to really look deeply into the artwork, and also made me want to visit a museum to try it out in person. In this aspect at least the author hit the mark.

Next I am reading Figuring by Maria Popova.

I haven’t read much by Kurt Vonnegut, and most of what I have read was back in high school and university. I heard good things about this book so I picked it up at the library.

The story was an extremely clever and sharp look at humanity and the power of time and nature. Unfortunately it was not exactly a celebration of the human experience.

But the sharp satire here was pretty funny, and it holds up well even well past the publishing date of 1985. There is some outdated stuff (Japanese economics, acid rain) but for the most part it was very entertaining.

Although the tone was a little wearing on me I enjoyed the book, and I liked that the author took the chance to be completely ridiculous on purpose to make his points.

Next I am reading All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley.

My first work of fiction by this author, and it was a pretty good one. Set in the early stages of Vietnam conflict (before America got truly “involved”) the story is told from the viewpoint of a British news correspondent.

There is a lot in here that tells the future, for America and for colonialism in general. The way he writes the main character I could see how locals were treated, and why they would fight against foreigners living in their country. I don’t know much about what kinds of social issues were going on in the UK and the USA at the time this was written, but I suspect some of that background knowledge would make the book even more interesting.

The writing really makes you feel like you are there – Saigon, Hanoi, and the villages in between that were caught in the crossfire.

This book also jumps back and forth through time, which is common enough nowadays but struck me as a little unusual for an older story. It was done very well, and was instrumental in setting up the tense conclusion. I really enjoyed this book.

Next I am reading Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.

This was recommended to me by a friend, but other than the title and the author I had no info going into reading the book.

In that spirit I won’t reveal any of the details of the story here. The book tells a compelling story, it is educational (at least for me it was), and the pace keeps you turning the pages. There was a lot of action inside a courtroom which I enjoyed – I didn’t realize there would be a legal aspect to the story and that made it more interesting for me.

However, this book came off to me as a sort of mom-targeted. The details, hints and undercurrents of the story were blunt and oversimplified, and I felt like there was a lot more room to gracefully approach the topic rather than hit you over the head with it. So much time and energy is spent on the relationships between mother and son, mother and daughter, and mother and abusive husband.

Overall the book didn’t really work for me. Maybe part of the problem is that it was written by two authors. For me, the oversimplification of the issues was the biggest problem of this book.

Next I am reading The Quiet American by Graham Greene.