August Reads
I’m just gonna say it. The Booker longlist is hella boring so far, y’all, and I’m 6/13 in. I mean, the books are ok and they’ve been fine to read, but I’m hoping the stunners are in the other half of the list I haven’t read yet.
1.Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Widower finds himself devastated and bereft, with three young daughters, after his wife dies. He pushes them through intense squash training to cope with grief and the pressures of their British Gujurati family and community to do right by them. The novel models the the structure of the game as it depicts how the family grapples with grief and growing up. Short and intense.
2. Pearl by Siân Hughes 🔥
“I have a pretty sensitive trip switch too, it can flip over from reality to invention in a heartbeat.” This sentence sums up how Marianne, the novel’s protagonist, deals with her mother’s disappearance when she was eight. In the spaces between uncertain memories and a troubled transition from childhood into adulthood, the book meditates on the proximity between mothering and self-destruction. This one is a favorite in the ones I’ve read so far .
3. In Ascension by Martin McInnes
It’s about the exploration of the unfathomable depths of the sea and the infiniteness expanse of space and how the human mind and body copes — or doesn’t because it’s impossible — with the sublimity of both. I think it’s fine at doing this. But I can’t get into it, because maybe I’m just not as deep as all that.
4. A Spell of Good Thing by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Among the pleasures of a story told from multiple perspectives are the moments when the various threads collide. The same is true of A Spell of Good Things. In its slow burn depiction of two Nigerian families — one wealthy, one far from it — the book creates multiple such moments of collision, where the reader flinches and gasps, when the violence lurking all along strikes.
5. Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
So far it is like the Fosse books everyone loved last year — you’re inside the head of an old dude who lives by himself and is hella lonely and cranky about it, as he putters around his present in deep reflection about a past that I hope will gradually be revealed. At the center of this novel is uncomfortable violence against the most vulnerable, and the loss and grief it leaves in its wake.
6. This Other Eden by Paul Hardin
This one is inspired by the real history of an island off the coast of Maine — as I learned when I said to my prize list reading partner something about this book being satire. I know. I know. This is what I get for not reading anything about the books before reading them. It isn’t satire. It really is using the racist omniscient narrative style that we know and hopefully don’t love from 19th and early 20th C fiction that is sometimes not so low key racist in their narration, to tell the story of a racially integrated community at the turn of the 20th C that the government violently displaces. I can understand the as a choice that reflects wanting to be contemporaneous with the period it depicts, but I wasn’t here for it.
7. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
East coast Jews and African Americans are always building places of worship together, among other things, in James McBride’s books, and I love to see it. There are some challenging things around sexual assault that I’m not here for, because they create a hierarchy in what should/can be punishable via denouement, in a way that seems to unproductively pit gender based sexual violence against race based discrimination and violence. But overall a worthwhile read.
