The Dog of the North

The Dog of the North by Elizabeth Mckenzie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Dog of the North had some fine reviews and a Women's Prize nomination, but I found the writing and dialog clunky, although the story buzzed right along and the humor and certainly the Santa Barbara setting reminded me of early Sue Grafton. At the mercy of every character in the book, the protagonist bounces back and forth in her efforts to help everyone and avoid her soon-to-be ex-husband, her cantankerous, creepy father and her erratic mentally challenged grandmother while trying to find her missing parents who disappeared years ago in Australia. Age is well represented in this story with Arlo, the 93-year-old grandpa game to scour the outback with her and avoid his first wife and his shrewish second wife. There is also a cardiac event and a sinkhole and a mysterious corpse and a piñata to keep you turning pages, pages which for me were a bit ho hum.

View all my reviews

The English Understand Wool

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The English Understand Wool's take on the writing/publishing game is easily one of my top books for this year for writing, topic, size (67pp), plot and wit "like a dry cork," as a blurb pointed out. Dewitt is at her best.

View all my reviews

My Phantoms

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not my favorite book this year due to the poisonous relationship between mother and daughter which made me want to look away, it was painful to be there for their infrequent meetings, but the writing is stellar. It is a slim, spare novel which moves right along.

View all my reviews

2022 Reading in Review

2022 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A satisfying year meeting my goal and reading a few extra volumes (69 total) mostly due to pandemic quarantining. My most generous reviews were of my husband's book Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front (about the Vietnam War), several poetry volumes (discovered Robert Wrigley and Larry Levis, revisited Octavio Paz), and fiction: Still Life, Fight Night, The All of It, The Fell, Recitatif,Burntcoat, Trust, The Lovers, Companion Piece, The Passenger, and Small Things Like These; and non-fiction include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Deborah Levy's memoir trilogy, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir, Suppose a Sentence (on favorite sentences), In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(on death with dignity), The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (on endings), Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, both memoir hybrids and Figure It Out (on art and life). A satisfactory collection but this year I would like to strive for more classics, read more books in translation and finish Ducks, Newburyport. Certainly, something can be found in my TBR pile of 1,093 titles the oldest and highest rated of which is The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I am already looking at a maxed out library holds list and an ample in-house collection.

View all my reviews

Vertigo & Ghosts: Poems

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of the book addresses Zeus and his rapist ways and it blew me away, captivated and chilled me. The second half deals with motherhood and nature and was less interesting, but her gifts of word choice made every poem worthwhile. Recommended by Andy Miller from Backlisted.fm where I hear about the best books.

View all my reviews

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice," and Bobby Western is a man in misery broken by the loss of his sister, several close friends, sought by government agents he knows not why, unemployed and unhoused much of the book allowing for extravagant descriptions of weather ("It had rained earlier and the moon lay in the wet street like platinum manhole cover.") nature, birds ("In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers."). The idea of the missing passenger from the downed plane is never clear, but I let it go as government chicanery. I meandered through the author's digressions on physics, math, war, atom bombs, guns, cars and Kennedys, what is a photon? I did not love the hallucinations and dream segments, but I would not, could not, stop reading because of the dialogue, rich descriptions and settings especially New Orleans and Ibiza. Is Bobby's future a "nameless burial in the hard caliche of a potter's field in a foreign land?" Reminded me of past reading treks with Robert Stone or Jim Harrison.

View all my reviews

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings may drive many readers crazy with the author's meanderings, but they're meant for me: it is the same way I read or wander the shelves or google hop from topic to topic. I skimmed much of the tennis stuff, but there's plenty more on Nietzsche, Beethoven, Larkin, Amis, Hitchens, Burning Man, indulgences, D. H. Lawrence, films, and myriad jazz performers, some of which I've never heard of. The Wonderboom Bluetooth speaker and Spotify are worth their weight. I play every song he mentions.

Here is how Geoff Dyer describes his aims in The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other EndingsLast Days of Roger Federer: "Not that this was ever intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally. It's about a congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artefacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life. Thought not my last, hopefully, this phase is marked by a daily increasing consciousness that the next may well be--so much so that I feel I'd better get this done now in case it comes round sooner than I think, or that the last phase, whenever it comes, might be distinguished by an inability on my part to identify or articulate it. But it does describe final compositions and letters and essays and poems of creative people who mostly did not know this would be their last or near to the last in various stages of creativity.
Ties in perfectly with another book I am reading Dancing with the Muse in Old Age written by Priscilla Long by Priscilla Long reminding us of myriad old creatives just like me. Highly recommended no matter your age.

View all my reviews