In the mid-1990s or so, on a tiny island in Scotland there is a dwindling number of families – young people are few and the older residents are staunch church-going folk who follow a very strict – the Free Presbyterian Church. Strict moral standards are prescribed and adhered to – with the few remaining residents watching each other to make sure nobody is breaking the rules or sinning against God.

So how many of the men on this island would you expect to be homosexual?

Turns out quite a lot. It was hard for me to believe the situation itself, so it made it hard to buy in to the themes that are being struggled with here.

Most of the characters were not very likable. They often did some pretty aggravating things, and it made me think that the author was trying to make us hate them. The female characters did not get much to do, and we are left with quite a lot of pages of men struggling with their own sexuality.

Luckily there were some good points – the setting sounded stark and beautiful, the industry of weaving and fishing, and the general lifestyle of the residents were all pretty fascinating. The author writes very well, but I think mostly the characters were just getting hung up on an issue that didn’t really resonate with me.

I understand the book has been shortlisted for the Booker prize, so it definitely resonated with someone.

Next I am getting back to Stephen King’s The Stand, which has been patiently waiting while I finished off these library books.

Wow, this was a great book! It includes some introspection on the life of an executive, as he deals with the idea of ending it on his terms. I tend to enjoy books that span lifetimes, and this one has plenty of flashbacks to describe his joys and failures.

The book is written in a dreamy style, for medical reasons, and we see things from the main character’s point of view. Unlike the main character, we can remember what happened a few minutes ago, so it was sometimes agonizing to read (in a good way). Time sometimes speeds up and sometimes characters just sort of disappear. Who can we trust? The main character? Maybe sometimes, but clearly not other times. The mysterious aide? The drunken woman in the bar? I liked the feeling of being cast off from stability and hoping for the best.

But it was tough to read because I could see how this might happen to anyone, and how it would affect the people around them. In this case the protagonist has plenty of money since he lived life for the most part as a high-powered executive. He has choices that many people do not – does that make his path easier? How would it be different for someone from a different economic class?

Lots of questions here, and it was part of the experience of reading the book and reflecting on it. That is certainly a sign of a well-written book.

Next I am reading John of John by Douglas Stuart.

I think I can mentally picture John Hodgman – he was/is a correspondent on The Daily Show, I think. I wasn’t aware he is also a writer, so I picked up this book to check out his work.

For the first few chapters I was a little confused as I wasn’t getting the jokes – or rather, the jokes were not landing as funny for me. But after reading more I started to understand his style and I enjoyed the writing from there on.

It was a little unclear what the purpose of the book was – funny stories from where he lives? Slices of his life history? Something to leave for his kids? But I got the sense that a lot of these stories show up in his stand-up comedy so maybe people who have seen his act would appreciate it even more.

The book was quite short, I got a few laughs, I returned the library book. Mission accomplished, I guess!

Next I am reading Switzy by Emma Cline.

When I first told my wife that I was reading a book by this author, she asked me if it was depressing yet. Now that I finished the book and read more about the background of the author I can see what she meant.

This book was pretty wild. It starts off simple enough, and then later I realized that the character that I was following along wasn’t the main character at all. The reading is fairly intense, and the author often shifted points of view and really got into each person’s thinking. I liked this aspect of the book – digging in deep into each person’s character.

The book is set in an interesting time for Japan, starting to gain its momentum in manufacturing and soon to move on to be a temporary economic powerhouse. It was interesting to see daily life in those days.

It is also pretty graphic – I was getting squeamish reading about how a kitten was treated, and it turned out that the author was pre-loading the feeling for a big scene later on.

Overall the book was well-written but the depressing themes and psychotic teen characters kind of put me off for future reads.

Next I am reading Vacationland by John Hodgman.

One of my current favorite authors continuing a great series – nice! This book continues the mystery style in a fantastic and dangerous world. The main characters and their interaction is entertaining as usual, and especially Ana’s language and communication style set up a lot of great scenes.

This new place they are investigating is quite different from the last two books, but it works well. Sort of Sherlock Holmes meets Romeo & Juliet meets the American beef cultivation industry. Weird but it works.

In the previous book in this series things sped up quite a bit and to me it felt like the author was setting up to finish the series as a trilogy. But in this book he steps back a little and slows things down which brings about a bad news/good news situation. The bad news is that this slower pace is less exciting and it seems like we’re still quite far from revealing some mysteries, but the good news is that it seems that the series will continue, and we can get more of these characters.

The really great stuff happens in a haunted forest, with a scene at the end that really creeps out the reader. I hope that future books go this direction more often. The author hints in the afterword that he was struggling with his editors and ended up starting this book over – I hope that the next one goes easier for him.

Next I am reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima.

I have read this author before, and maybe because of that I may have had higher expectations for this book. This book was extremely disappointing – and I could not finish it and gave up about 40% of the way through.

Perhaps the author was too focused on dropping technical vocab related to the future of AI, or the odd shifts in points of view, the Chinese-American challenges in living in a multiracial-reluctant America – all of these seem blunt and I know the author has the skill to weave these issues more subtly. Was it written too fast? There are lots of pages of info dumps on character’s backgrounds – why not take the time to show rather than tell?

Life is too short to waste reading time on something like this – and I am trying to be better about knowing when to cut bait and move on.

Next I am reading a book that I also have high expectations for – A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett.

This was an ambitious book that I’m glad I finally read. Set in Chile, it walks the line between biography, magic and fiction. I really like stories that span generations, especially towards the end where we can look back to where things started and make connections.

Any time you are reading a translation you need to keep that in mind while interpreting the writing, but this particular translation from Spanish to English is phenomenal. It comes across naturally and rarely felt awkward.

As for the writing style itself I often felt overwhelmed – the story is presented as a giant wall of text and breaks are rare. This is a long book, and sometimes it was hard to keep going after a long block of text. The writer also was fond of foreshadowing, which was used skillfully most of the time. After a while I started to dread the foreshadowing drops, it started to feel like a gimmick to me.

This was a long story and it took me a long time to finish it, but the conclusion was well worth it.

Next I am reading All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu.

OK, some of the contents of this book are a little far-fetched. I think that the author knew it, and early on in the book a couple call off their wedding several times within a few weeks – sending out invitations, cancellations, invitations again. Already we are in the territory of hard to believe. But finally I was happy to forgive some of this and just relax and enjoy the story – there was a lot I liked.

I am a sucker for themes involving someone moving away and starting a new life (because I did) and if the destination is a lonely Italian island off the coast of Napoli then even better. There is also a good stretch of the book where the main character finds himself being transferred to an office in the back of a lonely floor of a huge office building, left to his own devices. Later we find out why, but the dawning realization that he is on his own for the time being really hit me.

I have read another novel from this author, and while I enjoyed that one, it was a little futuristic and not as easy for me to identify with. The author’s writing is great here, reminding me a lot of Anthony Doerr, with that sort of dreamlike stream of poetic moments. It isn’t so esoteric that I got tired out, just really well written prose.

One of my favorite moments was a sort of heist of a one-eyed cat, delivered from a New York apartment to an island off Italy. I liked it better than Ocean’s Eleven.

The novel takes a turn for the spooky, especially near the end, and I really liked this sudden injection of the occult. It made a possible paradise turn into a possible prison. Well done.

Next I am reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.

I enjoyed this book, and how it takes a long hard look at dying. Any consideration of death should also include a fair examination of life – the balanced approach. This book nicely balanced both, and it was a pleasure to read.

There are a lot of kind people in this book. Maybe it has been my choices of books lately, but I am always expecting a villain. There are some grumpy people in this one but nobody we can point at and hiss. Well, unless you count the Grim Reaper.

The story is pieced together nicely in a structure that makes memories and events come to you as they do to the main character – in a kind of recollection. I kept expecting something horrible to happen but I was pleased that things turned out the way they did. The author’s writing style is surprisingly easy to read – I felt like I was flying through the pages.

There is one scene in particular that stuck with me, when the main character and her stepfather Eddie crash a wedding in New York City, and it was the kind of magical moment that you’d expect from Manhattan. A lot of the book takes place in this sort of storybook New York, and while people travel upstate to Westchester or casually drop into the Metropolitan Museum of Art we rarely see the grit of the city. We rarely see grit, to be honest. The story moves briskly from one positive development to the next, and I felt like we were just getting the cream, which bothered me a little.

Take Eddie, the long lost stepfather, who is so perfect in just about every way. The way he was written had me worried that we were setting him up to be some sort of monster later on. Nobody is that perfect – not even the Pope.

But I did enjoy the book and got lots of good quotes out of it. Not my usual style, but fun nonetheless.

Next I am reading The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel.

This was a cute Narnia-esque story – a sort of updated and non-religious version that might appeal more to younger people these days. It features a very clever pre-teen girl as the main character, and it is a lot of fun to see how she operates in the magical world of Wildwood.

The book has illustrations that are especially well-done, and together with the text they really tie together the whole package.

While I am probably not the target reader, I did manage to catch a few political allegories and I think younger readers should get the message as well. Kind of a timely book, really.

As in Narnia there is a big battle at the end between good and evil, but it felt very little like there was much risk. The battle itself was filled with an oddly large amount of brutality – something that hadn’t really been around until the very end of the book so it felt a little out of place. There was also a strange vibe between the girl and her parents in the midpoint of the story – but I guess things were patched up at the end.

Overall it was a cute read, but I do not think I will continue on with the series.

Next I am reading Whistler by Ann Patchet.

This book is based on the counter-intuitive idea that more freedom can be bad for you. The author is great at explaining this concept and what it can mean in various parts of your work and personal life.

We definitely live in a world that gives us a lot of choices, just deciding what to read next is a daunting prospect. Add in social media, or 200 TV channels, or surfing the web for information and you’ve got a lot of deciding to do.

The author makes the case for setting some limits and working within those rules to prevent stalling out and actually stimulating creativity to make something work within the limits you set out.

It sounds simple but the book delivered more than I expected on the idea. It is well researched, too. I felt like the first half of the book was the stronger argument and really did a good job of explaining the concept, but the second half to me felt a little less compelling.

The whole structure of the book was tied together by stories related to the development of the periodic table of elements. This felt to me a little too much – I minored in chemistry and I was getting sick of the examples. But I commend the writer for trying to make it work.

Next I am reading Wildwood by Colin Meloy.

This book is filled with characters who have serious problems. Watching them all work through their problems – flailing around waiting for something better to happen to them – was not a fun experience for me to read. Just about everyone needs a serious mental evaluation, but I guess normal characters make for boring reading.

Ostensibly about baseball this book has a lot more to offer, and I enjoyed a lot about the history of each character and how they ended up in the bind that they find themselves in. It helps if you know a little about baseball, but it is written in a way that makes it unnecessary to be an expert.

It felt like the book was written recently, with a contemporary vibe that seemed fresh and up to date. People are using smartphones, and the liberal college where things take place feels about the appropriate level of liberal for the United States five years ago.

But since everyone is broken it gets a little hard to get behind the characters as they make mistake after mistake. It is a long book, too – maybe it could have been trimmed down a bit. Possibly it was written with the potential of a TV drama deal in mind.

This one showed promise, but in the end wasn’t really for me. Next I am reading Inside the Box by David Epstein.

This book was fun to read – and the writing was impressive. I have read a book like this, simultaneously feeling amused and dread. I just couldn’t stop reading, despite the feeling that something awful was around the corner.

Part of why I liked it so much was the sense of humor of the author, and despite the bleak feeling of the environment I was laughing out loud.

The main character is struggling through some serious issues, especially with her family. I was vaguely horrified to see their interactions, hopefully there is no kernel of truth in here. It was absurdly dysfunctional – exaggerated to make a point – so sometimes it was hard to get through. The writing style is sort of stream-of-consciousness, and events sort of slide by in a dream-like way. Maybe that was on purpose due to the main character’s use of “cousin of methamphetamine” pills throughout.

This book stood out from other books that I have read, in a good way. I’m looking forward to reading more of the author’s work in the future.

Next I am reading The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

For some reason I don’t often read history books set in this time period – the first ten years of the 1900s. At first thought it seems like a great time to be alive. There were plenty of things still to discover on the face of the earth, plenty of mysteries to explore and it took a month to get from America to Brazil by ship. But then I think that antibiotics were still 10-20 years away and my mind changes quickly.

This book was all about Theodore Roosevelt’s trip down the River of Doubt – which was renamed to Roosevelt River. The book details how the idea got into the former president’s head, and includes the preparations, choosing companions, and of course the trip itself. Luckily it was well-documented at the time, and all the details were re-written to bring things to life. It is a great travel story along with a whole lot of historical background to put things into perspective.

The writer’s style was a little bothersome for me – they seemed to always be overemphasizing the hardship of the explorers on this trip. When things went well for them the author explains all the terrible things that might happened, and brings up all the terrible things that happened to previous explorers, bringing in horror stories from other expeditions. I get it – it was no picnic – but the author really wanted to get across that this was a harrowing journey.

Towards the end of the book they describe the exhausted Roosevelt riding in the boat down the river, and the book said that he had to sit on metal cans rather than a comfortable seat – but the author added in that the metal cans were hard-edged, to really make us feel bad for Roosevelt’s poor behind.

And the section on some of the parasites and where they might enter the human body – yikes!

But I learned a lot from the book and it was an enjoyable read. I’m glad I wasn’t born in that particular age of adventure.

Next I am reading Offseason by Avigayl Sharp.