The Raging Storm
Ann Cleves

I recently listened to the third Matthew Venn mystery, The Raging Storm, on libro.fm.

For those of you who haven’t discovered this series yet, what are you waiting for????? The first books in the series are The Long Call and The Heron’s Cry.
I recommend reading them in order.

Note: The paperback is being released August 6.

Siberian Dilemma
Martin Cruz Smith

Speaking of mystery series…….I’m on Siberian Dilemma, #9 of the Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith (the first in the series was the well-known Gorky Park which means I’m almost to the end of the series, or at least caught up to the author.

In this installment, Renko’s sort-of-girlfriend, a journalist, has been on assignment in Siberia for what seems to be a little too long and so Renko follows to check on her. As usual for this series, Russian politics give a distinctive flavor to the book. It’s been fun over the course of the series to see Renko age and evolve. As always, there is a lot of vodka, especially for Renko’s sidekick Victor.

The Silence Factory
Bridget Collins

BRIDGET COLLINS HAS A NEW BOOK COMING OUT THIS MONTH! And it’s historical! And fascinating! And sometimes a little weird!

Collins’ past adult books include The Binding and The Betrayals.
 
The new one, The Silence Factory, is historical fiction, set in two time periods. In the first, in the 1820s, a wealthy British adventurer and his wife go to a remote Greek island in search of rare nature. The island does in fact have a very rare, special specimen…… a spider that spins a special silk with unusual properties (almost but not quite magical.) The locals are reluctant to share information with the wealthy outsider (and rightfully so.) Years later, we meet Henry Latimer, who works in his uncle’s shop which provides instruments to assist with hearing (this is pre-hearing aids.) Henry is sent to the home of a wealthy man with a deaf daughter. The man hopes his daughter’s deafness can be cured. As with Collins’ previous adult novels, the two threads come together, the characters are complex and fascinating (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), and there’s just a hint of quirkiness in all of it. Each book is a standalone, so you can read them in any order you like.

Lost & Found
Kathryn Schulz

I’ve been re-reading (a rarity for me!) Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz for book group and I’m reminded why I loved this book so much in the first reading (or listening, to be accurate, because I listened to the audiobook—it’s narrated by the author.) Lost & Found is a memoir. “Lost” refers to the death of the author’s father. “Found” refers to the author’s finding the love of her life, the woman who will become her wife. Schulz gives us her family history (a fascinating story in itself) and really delves into what loss is—from objects to feelings to people. There’s some overlap between the death of the author’s father and the meeting of “C,” her future wife. This creates a real-life tug and pull of emotions—the enormous loss of her father and the power of not just falling in love but falling in love and beginning a life with THE ONE. The book is incredibly well written, thoughtful, and in many ways feels like a meditation.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin

One of the perks of being a bookseller is receiving advance copies of upcoming books. The other side of the coin is having to wait months for the book to come out so you can talk to people about it! Even worse, when a book is a bestseller in hardcover, as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was, is waiting FOREVER for it to come out in paperback. (Two years is forever, right?)

The book’s main characters are a man and a woman, childhood friends, who are gamers. I’m totally not interested in gaming. The thing is, though, that the book isn’t about gaming, per se, but about the relationship between Sam and Sadie over a 30-year period. This relationship is passionate but not romantic, although they care deeply about one another. They develop a game which becomes famous and found their own company. The plot of the book is intricate, just like their games. It includes a number of characters, sub plots, and even includes references to Macbeth (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow)! Please read this wonderful book and let’s talk about it!

The Crane Husband
Kelly Barnhill

This slim novella is a quick read but is no less impactful than longer tomes. The narrative follows an unnamed teenage girl who cares for the house and her younger brother while her flighty artist mother is weaving the tapestries she makes to pay the bills. The equilibrium of the family is upended when the mother brings home a new fling—a large, humanoid crane that leaves bruises in his wake. Although elements of the plot sound fantastical, the tone of the story, while fairly dark, stays grounded in reality. Barnhill crafts a compelling tale of domestic abuse and generational trauma through this reimagining of the Japanese myth “The Crane Wife.”

Magic Pill
Johann Hari

A couple of months ago, I started seeing people online commenting about high-profile celebrities losing weight rapidly due to new medications coming out, specifically Ozempic. When my mother repeatedly mentioned this intriguing book which examined these drugs, I knew I wanted to read it. Journalist Johann Hari explores how the drugs work and the many moral and ethical dilemmas they may pose. He intersperses scientific discussions with those of his own experience taking Ozempic for his weight, which he has struggled with his whole life. I have a lot of thoughts after reading this book and for that reason alone, I highly recommend it as a jumping-off point for those wanting to learn more about the newest fad for weight loss. This treatise could lead to a super interesting discussion for the right book club.

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Jake Skeets

I read a few poems from this collection for a college class and was really moved by them. I finally got around to reading the rest of Skeets’ debut collection. This anthology is a perfect summer poetry read with the hot desert of New Mexico as its setting. Many of the poems are bleak and the people described within both commit and experience violence, but moments of queer intimacy and resilient flora stand out-all-the more on this backdrop.

The Light Pirate
Lily Brooks-Dalton

The threats of climate change become real in this book as one powerful hurricane after another lashes both coasts of Florida. Unrelenting storms erode the infrastructure of the state, causing an ever-increasing exodus and a society forever altered.

Main character Wanda Kirby and her family are integrally tied to the storms. Wanda’s father is a linesman who travels from one storm-ridden area to another, restoring power to battered, overheated communities. He meets Wanda’s mother in San Juan after a hurricane leaves her life tipped upside down. A move to Florida was the start of this dystopian saga.

This book left me with the same feeling that I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger did: I was reluctant to start another book because I didn’t want to leave these characters behind.

Shift
Dust
Hugh Howey

Last month I talked about Wool, the first book in the dystopian Silo series. I said that reading the books would be a way to avoid waiting to see what happens next as each episode of the streaming video series was released. But this, as it turns out, isn’t exactly true.

When I finished reading the books I watched Silo. This is a lesson in how filmed versions of books are their own entities, not necessarily just acting out the book but reinterpreting the material. In this case the plot differences are striking. The basic premise remains, and most of the characters are still there, although not always identical to their originals from the books. But the writers pick and choose which plot elements to keep, and they add new stories.

To me the most jarring difference is the change to the stairwell. In the books a great point is made that the steel steps are wearing down, losing paint and texture. The description of the staircase had me picturing a scary, claustrophobic, not very wide, not too bright space. In the video version the staircase is well-maintained cement, downright attractive, in a bright atrium. From the beginning you see that this is a different world, a variation on the theme.

 I recommend both versions. It’s fascinating to see the ways they are the same and the ways they are quite different.

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

This is classified as Sci-Fi, but while it does include time travel, (spoiler coming) I think it’s just a device to let us see a 1970s Black woman’s first-hand witness to 1815 life on a plantation. She is somehow transformed back every time the owner’s son is endangered. Over time she sees how difficult it is for anyone to retain humanity while “owning” human beings, and how difficult life was for enslaved men and women, how much they learned to endure.

Butler wrote several novels and received major Sci-Fi awards. Kindred is also available as a graphic novel: I need to check that out, to see how the characters and incidents are rendered.

Who Killed My Father
Edouard Louis

This very small, very powerful book is a monologue of a gay man speaking to his father. I was surprised by the way the story grew. It seemed like the author in these few pages brought himself, and the reader, through his whole life’s journey by saying things to his dying father that bring awareness to the impact of poverty and homophobia in lives full of anger and love.

A Volga Tale
Guzel Yakhina

A Volga Tale was published by Europa Editions, a publishing house which brings foreign works to the English reading public through translation. This gives those of us who only speak and read English an opportunity to experience what other people in the world are thinking and writing about. Guzel Yakhina is a Russian writer, winner of several awards, and represents a Russian perspective and voice difficult to access, due to political and cultural tensions at present. Just as Solzhenitsyn provided a window into the intellectual and cultural life of Russia during the Cold War, so does the work of Yakhina. In A Volga Tale she explores the history of the little-known German settlement communities along the Volga River. After 1917 they became known as the German Soviet Republic and prospered quite well until Stalin felt they needed to be ruthlessly eliminated. Jacob Bach, the story's main character, is a schoolteacher in a tiny village along a bend in the river. The novel is about his life... brutally real, while at the same time human and curiously surreal. Yakhina's style seemed to me very like Boris Pasternak's. Give this book a look; you won't be disappointed.

Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor
Donald J. Robertson

Dare I confess it? One of my guilty pleasures is reading the biographies of The Ancient Lives Series, published by The Yale University Press. A second is reading serious self-help books. Yes, there it is for all to see—stark, pale, and boldly exposed to the glare of the public's gaze, my shame—Self-Help Books! Imagine my delight to discover the two themes intertwined in Robertson's new biography of Marcus Annius Verus, known nowadays as Marcus Aurelius, author of Meditations. This is a book many of us were traumatically introduced to (with the best of intentions) at too early an age, and without the necessary groundwork and explanation that would have enabled us to process what we were reading. That being a system of Self-development, imagined by the followers of the philosophy called Stoicism. Robertson, through the retelling of Marcus' life, introduces his reader to Stoicism (Living in agreement with Nature), and why it was adopted so successfully. As he does, the notion that this self-development (self-becoming) is just as vibrant and necessary today, as it was 2000 plus years ago. We, as human beings on this planet, need this!