Last Ten Books Read — xxviii

Last 10 Books Read – xxviii
(In order of completion – and at three lines apiece.)

1. Donal Ryan. “The Queen of Dirt Island.” My cousin Elizabeth said if I liked Claire Keegan, I would like this. I had and I did. I told Adele the same thing and she liked it too. Lives and deaths flow through it in captivating two page chapters, their uniformity enhancing its variety.

2. Joseph Mitchell. “My Ears are Bent.” I thought I might have already read this, but Moe’s had marked it down to $5, and you can never have too much Mitchell in your life. (I had read it, it turned out, but, like. 30 years ago, so almost all of it seemed new.)

3. Angela Lam. “Red Eggs and Good Luck.” I swapped books with a romance novel/memoirist. I like memoirs more than romance novels, but I don’t like either much, and this one, while containing an interesting character or two, did not raise my estimation of the genre.

4. Percival Everett. “Trees.” Everett is successful and well-regarded, but this comic-grotesque about lynching struck me as of no interest to anyone not extremely mad at white people. The characters are shallow; the plot simplistic; the “humor” juvenile, the thought/complexity scanty.

5. Han Kang. “Human Acts.” If you want a novel about disproportionate brutality inflected upon innocent people, this is a better choice. You need know nothing about the actual historic events at its center of it to be cowed and awed. Inventively structured and immaculately composed

6. Muriel Spark. “A Far Cry from Kensington.” Thoroughly enjoyable. Fun characters. Engaging story. Smartly written. One is delighted to be in such an adept presence. This is the third Spark I have read and I will seek more.

7. Han Kang “The White Book.” The third of her five novels translated into English I have read in the last couple months. (Two to go.) The slimmest and, in a sense, most ephemeral but no less harrowing or gripping or engaged by the tragedies of life.

8. Nikhil Krishnan. “A Terribly Serious Adventure.” A history of philosophy at Oxford (1900 – 1960). The philosophers were a colorful bunch, but the philosophy was difficult to digest. And the question of why bother with what it bothered with remained elusive throughout.

9. Leila Slimani. “Lullaby.” Page one informs the reader that a nanny has killed the two children under her care. Things do not become much sunnier. It won the Prix Goncourt, but be warned if you decide to venture into it. And what is wrong with the French anyway?

10. Lawrence Wright. “The Looming Tower.” I am late getting to this since it won a Pulitzer in 2011, but it is the best journalistic history I have read in a while. A thoroughly researched look into the origins of Al-Queda and the turf wars in US national security that let 9/11 happen.