What I'm Reading Now

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

This is the best book I've read in a long while. Patchett is hit or miss for me -- I've really liked a couple of her books, while others bored me horrifically. I almost didn't check this one out when I saw it at the library. "Oh, Patchett again. Is she still writing?"

She is, and this book is a masterpiece. Patchett tells the story of a summer on a cherry farm in the early months of the pandemic, when the three daughters of the farm come home to stay with their parents and help them pick the sweet cherry crop. (All the details about cherry picking ring true, though I don't think Patchett lives on a cherry farm.) The daughters want the mother, Lara, to tell them the story of how she dated a guy who later became America's biggest actor. So she does, her story interweaving with the story of cherry-picking and their lives during the pandemic.

Lara met Peter Duke (the actor) when they were both in a summer theater production of Our Town, and the entire novel is filled with echoes of that play, as well as Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, while remaining a story about its own characters. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Lara's love first for Duke and then for her present husband, and how that came about; and about the oldest daughter, who is in love with the neighbor boy (just like in Our Town, yes) and what happens with that. The plot is fine, but the wonderful structure and writing of this book are just sublime. I kept stopping to read paragraphs over again, because they were so wonderful. Not showily written -- this is not a "lush" book -- but just perfect.

Read this one. It's amazing.

Thorton Wilder, Our Town

This is one of the first plays I ever saw performed, as an adolescent in New Orleans, and one I read several times during my teen years. I re-read it because of Patchett's novel, of course. I remembered almost nothing about it, while everything felt familiar. I do remember Mrs. Gibbs saying, "Once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English," a line that has stuck with me for all the intervening years. But I think I missed the part where Wilder tells us she never went to Paris -- she leaves the money to her Emily and George, who spend it on a concrete watering trough for their cattle. Which, yikes.

It's a good play. But don't watch the 1977 version on YouTube, that's my advice.

Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

This is a re-read, my favorite of Moriarty's books. Alice hits her head in the gym and forgets the last ten years of her life, the time during which she gave birth to three kids, stopped loving her husband, became an exercise fanatic, and lost her best friend, traumatically. She thinks she's still 29 year old Alice, a goofy, soft, whimsical woman, pregnant with her first child and madly in love with her husband, who in her memories is a wonderful guy. What happens when her memory returns? It's an engaging book, like most of Moriarty's novels, with great characters. I liked it just as much on the re-read as I did the first time I read it.

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries

I'm re-reading all these for an essay I plan to write. They're great. Murderbot is a "construct," which is to say a kind of half-human/half-robot Security Unit, SecUnit, as these constructs are often called. It's an entirely ungendered being (it finds sex boring) who underwent a traumatic event, which it mostly can't remember, and which caused it to "split" from its previous self, hacking its governor module and becoming, technically, a rogue unit. What Wells does in these texts is really interesting. Clearly I'll have more to say about this in the essay, but meanwhile you can also just read these for fun.