What I'm Reading Now

Stella Hayward, The Good Boy

On her 30th birthday, a woman is granted a wish by her magical grandmother. This is a family tradition -- every grandmother gives every granddaughter a wish on their 30 birthday. But Genie, a bit drunk and traumatized by life, accidentally wishes her beloved dog was human -- and voila! 

This is an adorable book. The best part is Rory, the dog turned human who still acts and thinks like a dog. He's a golden retriever with his own traumatized past, and he's just great. (The trauma is off the page and kept non-explicit.) There's a romance (not with Rory) and it's fine and charming as well, but Rory is the best part. If you're looking for a well-written, charming read with a happy ending, this is your book.

Elly Griffith, The Frozen People

This is sort of science fiction, so I suppose I could have included it in one of my review columns. But it's really SF-ish, so I decided not to. It's a good book, mind you, and kept me interested all the way through -- this division in the English civil service handles "cold" cases (so cold they're frozen, get it), by which they mean cases that can only be handled by sending witnesses back through time to observe the murder. That's the only science-fictional part about the novel, the time travel. Otherwise it's a straight-up murder mystery.

The main plot concerns a powerful minister in the government, bruited as a possible Prime Minister some day, who is writing a book about his family history and wants to clear up the rumor that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a serial killer. So our main character is sent back to 1850 to act as a witness, and gets stuck there. Meanwhile in the future/present, the minister is murdered. Are the two connected?

I love time travel novels anyway, but this one is also very well done. Good writing, great characters, and a couple of cranky cats. If you like a little SF in your murder mystery, this might be worth picking up.

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

Helen DeWitt wrote one of my favorite books, The Last Samurai. This is a bit different, and much shorter (really a novella) but every bit as good. An 18 year old, raised in Morocco and various cities (Paris, London) by fabulously wealthy parents, reared by those parents to be spectacularly well-bred (never doing anything mauvais ton), suddenly learns that (a) her parents are not her parents and (b) she has very little money left indeed. What she does about it is one of the surprises of the book. 

As with Samurai, DeWitt plays with form and structure here. She does it very well. This book is a delight, and it's short enough to read in a few hours. 10/10, no notes.

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

This one is also (sort of) science fiction/fantasy. A woman on the eve of her 40th birthday figures out how to return to her 16th birthday. There's a portal, sort of. But it will only ever take her back to that one day, her 16th birthday. She can, however, change things, which changes her life in the future. The one thing she keeps trying to change is the death of her father, who in the initial story is dying of lung cancer. The thematic arc is she has to learn to accept her father's death. 

It's not a bad book -- nice writing, and the characters are pretty well done. But it's the kind of SFF which people who don't read much SFF end up writing. (To her credit, Straub knows this and lampshades it in the book.) The science fiction convention that features heavily in the various timelines is really well done. Straub's father is Peter Straub, so that makes sense. 

The notion of 1996 being the ancient past kind sent me.

Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever

I read this one so you won't have to. Lee is famous for having written every high school teacher's favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird (I also loved this book as a kid) and then never publishing anything else. Because of this, it was a truism among the (male) writers in my MFA program that Truman Capote had "actually" written Mockingbird. 

Anyway, now that Lee is dead, her heirs are publishing her trunk novels and uncollected works, including Go Set a Watchman in 2015 and this collection of short stories and essays this year. It contains several short stories written when Lee first started writing, none of them terrible but none of them very good, and several pretty bad essays about nothing in particular. 

Only read this if you're a completist like me.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I read this as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, so this is a re-read.

It's a lovely book. Joyce writes like an angel. Sadly, this one is overshadowed by his (incoherent and frankly overrated) later novels. If you actually like to read and don't just want to look like a hipster, this one and his short stories are where you should spent your time.

Review: Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

tl;dr: Oh, Harper Lee, No.

As I started out reading this book, I had some hope. The writing is lovely, and the early chapters are nice enough: It's the mid-1950s, sometime just after Brown v. Board of Education was handed down, and Jean Louise is coming home from New York to visit her daddy in Maycomb.

There's a train ride.  There's some trenchant and interesting commentary on the South and Maycomb and the difference between New York and the South and on one's ageing relatives. Some nice details about Atticus and Aunt Alexandria. This fella Hank, a new character, is introduced -- he's not part of To Kill a Mockingbird, but in the new history, he was always there, living across the street from Scout and Jem, and he was Jem's BFF, and Scout has always, sorta been in love with him. Lee does a good job of making him interesting enough that we see why Jean Louise might actually be drawn to marry him.