What I'm Reading Now

I've been writing a lot and reading a lot of books to review for Asimov's and Interzone. But among the non-SF books I've been reading, here are my reviews for the good/not-terrible ones:

Alison Bechdel, Spent

Bechdel is probably most famous for her graphic novel Fun Home, which is about her relationship with her closeted gay father, who eventually is arrested for having sex with a 16 year old boy, and who adamantly opposed Bechdel's expressions of her own sexuality -- she's a butch lesbian, and he wanted her to be (or at least act like) a frilly girlish girl.

My favorite book by Bechdel is the one she wrote about her relationship with her mother, Are You My Mother? That one is heavy on psychology, but it also gives a picture of the fraught and yet deeply loving relationship between mother and daughter, as well as how they both dealt with Bechdel's father.

This book, Spent, is an AU-version of Bechdel's life. In this one, she has a sister instead of two brothers, and her father is a taxidermist, not a mortician, and he's arrested for trafficking in endangered butterflies, not molesting a teenager.  Bechdel is still a cartoonist, but her graphic novels are about entirely different things. This novel looks at our current world, with MAGA supporters and sky-rocketing food costs, as well as poking gentle fun at a certain type of leftist; the Bechdel in the book is writing a graphic non-fiction explanation of economics, or is sort of intending to. She spends most of the book reading about economics, from Marx onward.

I liked reading this one, but I'm still not sure how I feel about it, or what exactly Bechdel was trying to do. I suspect I need to read it a couple more times.

Anna Quindlen, One True Thing

I have a vague memory of having read Anna Quindlen's non-fiction, or maybe her columns in some newspaper? I'm not sure. Anyway, this is the first novel I've read by her, and it's a good one. The subject matter is a bit depressing, as it's about a young woman who leaves a successful career in New York to take care of her dying mother -- guilted into it by her emotionally barricaded father.

The whole dying-of-cancer thing isn't what makes this book good, though. The good part is the character of the mother, who has been a homemaker for thirty years, something her daughter has scorned her for. The novel makes us admire this woman, shows us the beauty of that kind of life. (Mind you, it's a life very few could have -- you need real wealth to afford a life like this one.) Making the home, raising the children, cooking elaborate meals, serving on town committees -- Quindlen shows us how this is a life worth living, even beautiful.

Good writing here too. Spoilers: the mother does die. And there's some ancillary filler about the daughter being accused of murdering her mother that honestly the book did not need. Nevertheless, a very good read.

Anna Quindlen, After Annie

Here, Quindlen gives us another dead mother. This one dies at the start of the book -- she's the Annie in the title -- and the book concerns how her husband and three children, the oldest being a 13 year old girl, deal with the loss of their parent and that parent's income stream. This is definitely a working class family.

Wonderful character development here, and despite the mother's death not depressing. There's grief about the mother, obviously, but the main story is the family learning to cope without Annie, who did most of the heavy lifting in the family.  Again, a very good read.

Kevin Wilson, Run for the Hills

I've liked Wilson's other books, so when I saw this in the new fiction at my library, I checked it out. It's not bad. Four siblings who share the same father but different mothers and very different lives (the father takes up with a different sort of woman each time) go on a road trip, determined to find and confront their father. 

The road trip is fun, and the siblings are well done. The conclusion here, once they find the father (who has taken up with yet another kind of woman (women) and slotted himself into their life, falls flat. The conclusion the oldest son makes, which is that the father is mentally ill, isn't wrong, precisely, but it doesn't really feel like an ending to this quest they've all been on. Though maybe that's the point. Why expect a parent to provide meaning for our lives? Maybe they should have been questing for something else entirely?

Very readable, though.

Stephen King, Never Flinch

This is a Holly novel, in which Holly deals with not one but two obsessed murderers. That's probably the biggest flaw in this novel. Having two bad guys means the novel lacks coherence. It was an okay read, but definitely not one of his best novels. If you like Holly and her plucky detective agency, you might want to check this one out of the library. I wouldn't buy it.