This book used a clever device to tell a history of the modern country of India – and thanks to the way the story is told the writer has free reign to criticize and comment on significant events. There is a lot of great writing here, rich in Indian culture and history.

We are introduced to a boy telling the story of several generations of his family, and all the trials they go through. Importantly the boy himself is born at the exact moment of the birth of independent India as a nation, and we here about the growing pains of both. The boy’s growing pains are illustrated in detail, both comic and tragic, while India’s (and Pakistan’s) rest more heavily on the tragic.

I don’t know much about Indian culture but I learned a great deal reading this book – a lot of new vocabulary as well. I thought that the storytelling style was a little annoying, however. It doesn’t go smoothly from tale to tale, but abruptly shifts and then goes back, with shocking revelations about a character’s future even before we get to know them. There was also a fair amount of magical realism which was interesting when done in the name of comedy but sometimes left me wondering about the true message (that apparently I wasn’t getting).

This is a long book with a fairly slow start, but getting through the first third sets you up nicely for the rest, and I liked how the structure of the tale feels random at first and then slowly comes to light.

Next I’m reading Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone.

About halfway through this book I realized that I was reading a sequel. I did a little research online that said that you didn’t necessarily need to read the first book to enjoy the second, but I beg to differ.

Candy House hooked me in the beginning with some great writing – the writer has an edgy modern style, giving me of a sort of tech-savvy Sex in the City vibe. The format of the book was part of what threw me off – a collection of stories of different people, most of whom share some kind of connection from the previous stories, or will illuminate a future character’s story. Here is where reading the previous book makes a difference, I’m guessing.

There is some humor here, some heartbreaking moments, some ridiculous characters and so many people popping in and out of the story that it was honestly a lot to keep in my head. There were also a few sections written in an alternative style – one written by someone from the future in an instruction manual style that just went on and on and was almost unreadable to me. Another was a collection of emails/messages between many different characters, and without knowing the characters very well it became work trying to sort it out. In another book I read recently – “The Appeal” – this was handled much more skillfully.

So, good writing, experimental styles, but without knowing the complete backstory I felt like I was spinning my wheels getting through this. Maybe I should do a little more research before picking my books!

Next I am reading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

I’ve read two other books by this author so I already knew that I’d enjoy his writing. The style is really beautiful – lyrical (almost poetic) prose that is still accessible to Neanderthals like me. This kind of writing lends itself especially well to descriptions of the world by a young blind woman – one of the main characters.

This book has a long epic scope – focused mainly on two kids who grow up and experience the Second World War in France and Germany. Their story is told with skill and knitted together so well that you have to keep going to see what will happen next.

Each section is fairly brief, but full of meaning and some surprising wisdom. The writer doesn’t hit you over the head with it, but gently lays it out like a blanket and lets you absorb the message. There is so much here – so much detail and history and kindness and love. I felt at first like this would be a safe and happy journey about war, but of course that wouldn’t be a fair way to tell it. We see the cruelty, lies, the guilt and the loss of innocence, as well. All of this was balanced perfectly for my taste.

Exactly my kind of book, I couldn’t find anything to criticize here. I’ll be waiting eagerly for any future work by this author.

Next I’m reading The Candy House by Jennifer Egan.

A book recommended by Bill Gates, this book outlines the current global challenges, and suggests where improvements need to be made to avert future disasters. It was written near the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, so lessons learned from that are also included, which was especially interesting to me.

There are a lot of statistics in here, complete with references, so these can help the reader understand the scope of the problems he is describing. However as the author states, it is nearly impossible to predict the future of something complex as “the world” and where it will be in even just a few years, let alone thirty.

With the statistics presented the author takes neither an optimistic or pessimistic view – he vows to remain realistic. In principle this means a more accurate view of the situation, but to me sometimes it felt like listening to a grouchy old man lecturing younger people.

The parts that were the most educational for me were the sections on energy costs for food, the downsides of globalization (and the possibility that the peak of this trend is already past), and the idea that as humans increase their life span they also increase their periods of vulnerability, and there are costs associated with that.

I did feel like this book spent a little too much time on historical reviews of how things became what they are now – but thankfully these were brief enough. My focus coming into the book is where we are now and where we’ll be going – but I guess without some background it is hard to communicate these complex issues.

Next I’m reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

I had heard that this book was about a woman’s investigation of the lives of oil rig workers as they worked in dangerous conditions in various locations around the world. What I read was something quite different, but I guess it was sort of entertaining in its own way.

The writer is clearly talented – I really liked her writing style and she had a great way of setting up scenes and making you feel like you were there. Her life in England is a completely different one from what I’m used to – a place where men and boys fight outside of bars, clubs and drugs and sex are what people aspire to, and people work hard in dangerous conditions just to blow the money on shoes. When I read I want to visit different worlds, and this one fit the bill.

In the end I wasn’t satisfied with the book – it is more memoir than informative on the subject of life on oil rigs. There is an inordinate amount of focus on the author’s sex life – I’m not sure why we need to hear about it. There is a lot of pop culture from England, which was inscrutable to me but I think probably nailed it for young British women. Finally I wasn’t sure about the ending of the book – what was resolved? What will happen in the future? Just a snapshot of a moment in time?

With her beautiful writing I guess I was expecting more, but it was a fairly educational book from a sociological perspective.

Next I’m reading How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil.

I enjoyed this fast moving book that showcased the effects of a drastic change of society, with some time travel and a possible paradox thrown in for good measure.

As usual I went into this book almost completely blind, so what starts as a historical novel quickly branches out into the modern and then into the future. Like Cloud Atlas it moves one direction in time to a center point, and then moves back outward from there, creating ripples along the way.

Maybe because I have been reading pretty long books lately I felt that this one wrapped up unnaturally quick – I would have liked to see some more detail here. Years pass in just a paragraph or two, but those years must leave some kind of trace on our characters – it is left for the reader to imagine. I thought it was a missed opportunity, but better a shorter good story than a bad one.

There is also some meta in here – if the writer of this book goes on a book tour to promote her work, then she will be a writer promoting a book in a pandemic that has a writer promoting a book in a pandemic that features a pandemic. If you enjoy parsing that last sentence then I think you’d enjoy the references to the real world in this book.

Next I’m reading Sea State by Tabitha Lasley.

I started reading this book and got through about a quarter of it before I had to give up. After reading so much good writing lately, this one hit me like a cow patty to the face.

There was so much wrong here – unnatural dialogue, unbelievable story, tropes and cliches, and a liberal sprinkling of contemporary cultural references to try to get your attention. Is it possible that this was a book written by an AI program? If this is the case AI still has a long way to go.

After reading enough to find that it wasn’t going to improve I had to give up on the premise that life is too short to waste time reading crap.

So definitely can’t recommend this one – I hope that someone else gets some pleasure out of it.

A short book on some ideas for why things in America are going the way they are in 2022. The author traces the problems of today back through time to around 1970, when he thinks America went the wrong direction.

Whether the writer’s ideas are correct or not is probably not important for me, but rather this book was an interesting look at how the USA never really moved past slavery, and how a sort of hyper-individualism is causing problems for everyone.

Now I live in a very collectivist society, and although there are plenty of weak points, the strong points of living in Japan are higher than average social cohesion and people willing to make personal sacrifices (in privacy, personal space, or even freedom) to help the greater good.

I appreciated the intelligent analysis of the problems facing Americans these days, and I think it should prompt some healthy discussion. Nothing is black and white but these are some starting points to look at where things might have gone wrong and a possible roadmap to improvement.

There are some broad ideas for recovery, but they felt pretty naive to me, and didn’t delve into details that might make these recommended steps feel more realistic.

There was also a lot of history – both personal and national. I could have done with less of the national history in this book, but the writer’s personal history is closely tied with some key events in the birth of the USA, so I suppose we have to go with it. Much more interesting was the memoir-esque portions that had a good blend of nostalgia and humor.

Next I’m reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

A while back I read Piranesi by this author, and thought since I enjoyed it so much it might be interesting to read some of her previous works. Little did I know that this book, written back in the 1990s, was such a huge book.

A book of this size allows for a great deal of flexibility and pacing, and certainly the story proceeds at a very slow pace. It was tough to get started, and there were parts in the middle where my attention was wandering, but in the end the book wrapped up with an excellent resolution.

Later I read that the book actually began as sort of serialized short stories, that gradually grew into the complete book. This made sense, as each section worked well within itself but sometimes jarred with the ones around it.

What I liked about reading this was that it felt so very British, containing characters that were warm, polite, sarcastic, and occasionally quite funny. The villains were written especially well.

I think in the end the ambitious scale tripped up the flow of the story for me, and so I would have liked to seen a more slimmed down version of this – I felt like I was reading the “director’s cut” and some judicious editing would have helped out.

There were some hints of Piranesi here – you could see where the idea of that story had occurred to the author – and for that glimpse of the future it was worth reading for me.

Next I’m reading The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben.

This is one of those books that convinces you utterly and beyond doubt that there is no way that you have writing talent. No talent like this, anyway. I read later on Wikipedia that Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write each of her books, and that at least made me feel a little better.

Richly detailed, with few shortcuts, this book tells the story of a boy who suffers a horrible tragedy at 13 years old, and follows him as he grows up and makes his own way in the world. Along the way the journey delves into the surprisingly dark and murky New York art and antique markets and the high society that vie for its treasures, drugs and alcohol, furniture restoration, the Ukrainian and Russian underworld, haunting empty houses on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and a full and extensive look at what it means to appreciate, love or simply recognize art.

This is a big book and I couldn’t possibly do it justice with a summary here. Thanks to the detail provided it really puts you there – into the head of this person as they go through the process of growing up (a process that isn’t easy in the first place). We’re so deep in his head that when he makes bad decisions we cringe, and through a lot of the book my nerves were jangling on his behalf.

The writing of the characters was especially well done – even minor characters felt like they had a backstory. A taxi driver taking someone to the bus station reveals that he is a part time magician and gives advice. A doorman does a favor for a kid in need and we find a charming story behind it. All these little details contribute to a long story that was very satisfying and a pleasure to read.

As a person who loves traveling by plane there was a beautifully written section on air travel:

“…I’ve been in a kind of bardo state, flying around in a gray roar, climbing with drop-spattered windows to laddered sunlight, descending to rainclouds and rain and escalators down and down to a tumble of faces in baggage claim, eerie kind of afterlife, the space between earth and not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous concourse glow, a mass identity I don’t want to be a part of and indeed am not a part of, except it’s almost as if I’ve died, I feel different, I am different, and there’s a certain benumbed pleasure in moving in and out of the group mind, napping in molded plastic chairs and wandering the gleaming aisles of Duty Free…”

On a surprising note the main character at the end spends time reviewing what he learned, what he (and the author) want to say to you, the reader, and provides a framework to analyze what you’ve read and what they want you to take away from it. This was written in a very natural way – and I appreciated it as I believe it helped me (and my thinking) land closer to where the author hoped I’d be after reading the book.

It was a long book, and I feel a little drained after reading it. Next I’m reading another long book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. After this one I’ll need a light pamphlet to balance things out…

I’m not sure what kinds of books qualify as a cozy reading experience for me, but this was one of them. Maybe it is because the characters are recovering from some kind of tragedy or trauma, without actually focusing on the trauma itself. Maybe cozy books show a group of warm and kind characters struggling to find happiness. There is a lot of kindness in this book.

On the face of it, a book with an octopus as one of the main characters feels a little gimmicky. But written well, the octopus and his point of view are pretty believable, and they are a key part of the events in this book.

The story was a little predictable, and I felt like the author was circling around the resolution, waiting for all the characters to make the necessary progress with themselves before the final act could actually happen. Sometimes I read situations that I thought were trying to be funny, but I never really laughed out loud. In the end I wasn’t sure it was supposed to be comedic or not, which is usually a bad sign.

This was a well-written book and I felt warm and happy finishing it. Sometimes we need to read books like that.

Next I’m reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.

Full of weaponized snark, this book was a sort of nerd-porn pick-me-up that entertained me for a couple of hours. What’s not to like?

My only problem with this book was sometimes it was a little too meta for me, but I understand that is the writer’s style and I have come to expect it. Since the story is quite short there isn’t much depth to the characters but just enough to serve the story.

The story was good – just enough explanation of the science to make it barely believable enough, but nobody in this book is taking things too seriously and it would be a shame if the reader did.

It is good to read stories like this now and then, as sort of an amuse-boche before your next book.

Next I’m reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.

I like books with time travel so I picked up this newer book from the library. It starts off by showing what the main character’s life is like – very modern, and apparently very boring (according to her, I guess). Once the background information is set, the time travel begins and for the most part I enjoyed the mechanism and the “rules” that must be followed.

The book worked well as a fun thought experiment, and a cautionary tale to remind you to be sure to enjoy the here and now – there is no guarantee it’ll be any better in the future (and from a health standpoint, it is almost guaranteed that it’ll be worse).

Where this book missed for me was the loads and loads of pinpoint nostalgia and cultural references, mainly for a teenage girl in the 90’s growing up in New York City. There is a certain amount you’d add to build the world, but this felt like it was a memory download from the author more than anything that helped move along the story.

The main character bugged me a little – she seems to take time travel as not a really big deal. Without knowing the rules she goes off to take an SAT prep course. A little introspection and curiosity would have been more normal, wouldn’t it?

The story was a little predictable, and I was hoping that the author would be a little more imaginative with the possibilities here – dream bigger!

So in conclusion, nice ideas, odd situations but no real risks or threats, and a sort of harmless predictable resolution. I was a little disappointed.

Next I’m reading something completely different – John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society.

There are some twists in this book so I don’t think I should say much about the story here – but I did like the initial premise and then started to like it less the further along the story went.

The writing here is quite good – sort of like getting into someone’s head and hearing their thinking process (not unlike The Martian by Andy Weir). There are some contemporary references, and even some American racial issues that didn’t seem to fit in to me. Finally I felt like the author was throwing things in and the ending sort of dragged for me.

But the initial thrill of the situation that the main character finds himself in was great – in the future I’ll be looking for books that follow a lead-in like that.

Next I’m reading This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub.

I like books about journeys, and I thought this one might be fun – a couple who just started dating sail together from Los Angeles, California with a goal of crossing the Pacific Ocean to at least Australia, and depending on how it works out, even further.

The author of this non-fiction book has a great sense of humor, and really does a good job of pointing out the funny and embarrassing moments of their adventure. She is very direct, which I found refreshing, and the book is full of great details and beautiful scenes.

One problem she has is that something she freely admits – she tends to worry a lot. She really goes over all the (fatal) possibilities, whereas her companion seems to be too far in the opposite direction, ignoring her worries and relying and his own positive vibes. There are a lot of problems in a journey of this length and duration, but unfortunately she often telegraphs the surprising troubles so that we can see them coming.

Although they had some troubles, they also had some great adventures, and I enjoyed reading about their freedom and the resolution of their trip. It was interesting to contrast this book with another I read a long time ago called Dove, also about a young sailor trying something exciting and adventurous early in their life. Dove was more about the journey, while this book was a little more focused on the relationship.

Next I’m reading City of Orange by David Yoon.