reading road trip...Iowa

January 18, 1988 was a bitterly cold Iowa day.  VICKI MYRON is not a morning person anyway and cold mornings are especially trying for her. As the new director of the Spencer Public Library, however, it’s her duty to open up.  She’s puttering around as the rest of her staff arrives and then her colleague JEAN goes to empty the book-drop box.  There she finds a tiny kitten so cold and filthy that Vicki can’t believe it’s still alive.  
And so begins the story of Dewey, the small town library cat. It's no secret that I am fond of cats, orange cats in particular, but I don't as a rule, read animal stories. I was paid to read this one, however, as possible fodder for a movie, and it absolutely charmed me. Spencer, Iowa was a town that had fallen on tough times and this story of how the town rallied around the cat, how the library became a "third space" for the community, and how a scroungy little orange kitten became a symbol of hope is worth reading. 
 
Another great book set in Iowa is Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, which is a retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. I'm fond of Shakespeare retellings--I'm currently reading Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, her version of Macbeth--and Lear has always seemed to me one of Shakespeare's most timeless plays. (It's kind of hard to relate to Timon of Athens these days.)

 An unnamed town in Iowa is the unlikely setting of Grasshopper Jungle, a dystopian YA novel of survival after an apocalypse. Written by Andrew Smith, the novel won a couple of awards when it came out in 2015, and it is a styish, emotional, sometimes hilarious chronicle of the end of the world and a coming-of-age story. Smith's first novel was the equally well-received Ghost Medicine, another story of adventure and friendship.

Reading road trip...Indiana

For some reason a ton of cozy mystery series take place in Indiana, where the state motto is "Crossroads of America." Probably the best-known are those by Ralph McInerny who also wrote as "Monica Quill." These include the Notre Dame mystery series and the Andrew Broom mystery series. McInerney is also the author of the 28 "Father Dowling" mysteries, which are set in Illinois. He was incredibly prolific, and in addition to his fiction, wrote poetry and books of philosophy and theology.

At the other end of the spectrum is Frank Bill's stunning debut collection of short stories, Crimes in Aouthern Indiana. His part of hte state is inhabited by desperate losers who commit acts of unspeakable violence for reasons they barely understand themselves. Dog-fighting, meth-making, survivalist characters make this "pulp-noir" book an instant classic.

For an earlier generation, though, Indiana was the setting for the gentle classic The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West. Based on the author's memories of growing up Quaker in a southern Indian far removed from Bill's, the novel was published in 1945 and made into a movie with Gary Cooper in 1956. (The screenplay of the movie was written by Michael Wilson, one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political beliefs.)

A book that's been on my TBR pile for a while now is She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indian, a fictionalized memoir by  Haven Kimmel, it chronicles the adventures of a woman increasingly dissatisfied by her life who decides to do something about it. This is shelved next to The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, another book about a woman with gumption. I come from a long line of women with gumption and i like reading about them.

North Korea, a reading list

North Korea is in the news right now and for most people, impressions of "the Hermit Kingdom" are mostly gleaned from news stories and old M*A*S*H reruns. There was a chilling collection of photographs smuggled out of the country a few years ago and the story those stark images told was dire--child laborers, malnourished people gathering grass to eat. Here's a list of books offering more perspective:

1.  The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story. the author, Hyeonseo Lee still lives in South Korea, where she's an activist. You can follow her on Instagram(@hyeonseolee) and Twitter (@HyeonseoLeeNK)

2.  Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman. As you might imagine, this is one tough read. The author was arrested on false charges, held and tortured for a year until she finally confessed and then served more than a decade in one of the most inhumane prison systems in the world. Soon OK Lee now lives in South Korea.

There are actually dozens of memoirs of defectors. Others include: In Order to Live. Dear Leader:  My Escape from North Korea, Stars Between the Sun and the Moon: One Woman's Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom, and A Thousand Miles to Freedom.

3.  A Corpse in the Koryo. This is the first of the Inspector O novels by James Church, mysteries set against the backdrop of North Korea's totalitarian regime. The books have been compared to Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir books about Nazi Germany and Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park and other Arkady Renko novels.

4.  The Orphan Master's Son. This epic novel about North Korea won Adam Johnson a Pulitzer Prize. It's the kind of story made for a miniseries, or a movie like The Last Emperor. It may remind readers of the work of writer Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Killers of the Flower Moon...a review

The true story of a federal investigator who broke a murderous conspiracy orchestrated by a white businessman who was murdering Osage Indians in order to acquire their oil lease money.

This is a story that has a little bit of everything—sex, murder, greed, money, racial politics. The author (who also wrote the terrific LOST CITY OF Z), takes pains to place us into time and place as the story begins, and there are hints of Osage ritual in Anna’s funeral that are both visual and moving. (Mollie’s family practices a blend of Catholicism and Osage tradition.)

He also takes his time setting up his characters, particularly the complex, charismatic William Hale, a white businessman known as “the King of the Osage Hills. The “plot’ has a lot of moving parts and there are wheels within wheels turning here.

The family relationships of both the whites and the Osage are complicated. And the people are equally complicated. Bill Smith, a white man, was a horse thief before marrying a wealthy Osage woman. He was known to “raise his hand to her” and to say to other white men that hitting his woman was the only way to handle a squaw. (Like the other white men married to Osage, Bill was called a “squaw man.”) But when the murders started happening and his mother-in-law died in the exact same way that his first wife, Bill genuinely wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Flesh Bone Water

This book is definitely one for the TBR pile. The cover caught my eye and the description makes it sound like a big, juicy, summer read:

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a seductive, dazzling, atmospheric story of family, class, and deception set against the mesmerizing backdrops of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon River, and London.

André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family’s luxurious penthouse apartment. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André’s mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belem, a jungle city on the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rainforest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André’s father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the family apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family’s maid.
Three decades later, and now a successful surgeon himself, André is a middle-aged father, living in London, and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.
In deeply affecting prose, debut novelist Luiza Sauma transports readers to a dramatic place where natural wonder and human desire collide. Cutting across race and class, time and place, from London to Rio to the dense humidity of the Amazon, Flesh and Bone and Water straddles two worlds with haunting meditations on race, sex, and power in a deftly plotted coming-of-age story about the nature of identity, the vicissitudes of memory, and how both can bend to protect us from the truth.

Thank you Patrick Farley

Artist Patrick Farley is making his awesome Science March posters available for free download. And if you're looking for more posters, click here.

Unicorn Books

Unicorns are suddenly everywhere, from Starbucks' color-changing drinks, to Coachella couture. I started thinking about unicorns and realized the only book about unicorns I could name was Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. (The unicorn ponies of My Little Pony don't count.)

 I knew there had to be more so I turned, as I often to, to Good Reads, which did not disappoint with a list of 68 unicorn books.

I'm probably the only fantasy geek on the planet who never read The Chronicles of Narnia, so I didn't know that the seventh book in the series, The Last Battle, has unicorns. They're also in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time series. (I never warmed to that series either.)

But as I browsed the list, I found one I'd read and forgotten, Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn. Terru Brooks also wrote a unicorn book as part of his "Magic Kingdom" series but I find combinations of fantasy and  humor a bit hard to take. I don't mind comic relief, but I tend to like my fantasy taken seriously.

Writer Fuyumi Ono has an epic series ("The Twelve Kingdoms") that features unicorns heavily, and Mary Stanton has a multi-part Middle Grade series ("The Unicorns of Balinor") that sounds interesting. Other than that, I really wasn't tempted by what I saw on offer. but I kept Googling around and eventually I ran into Kathleen Duey's "Unicorn's Secret" books. Duey is a friend of a friend, and somewhere along the way, I'd read the first in the series, Moonsilver.  I went back and read it again and then I read on.

This series is a classic fantasy and very satisfying. It's also listed as MG (ages 7-10) but like the best fairy tales, it's timeless.