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.

A personal reading list for Earth Day

If you Google "best books to read for Earth Day," the first hits that come up are for children's books (including The Lorax by Dr. Seuss). That's great, because environmental education needs to start early before the habits of careless consumerism become ingrained and careless disregard of Mother Earth becomes a way of life. t's the adults who are okay with the dismantling of the EPA, or are okay with rollbacks of protections on clean water, and clean air who honestly believe that "global warming" is a hoax invented by China. The people who dismissed Al Gore's thoughtful documentary An Inconvenient Truth are not going to pay attention to True Activist's list of "Worst Man-Made Disasters of 2016 You've Probably Never Heard Of."

The thing is, climate change deniers really aren't going to be persuaded by logic or argument. But there are subversive ways to send a message. And books are the best delivery system for this message. Here are the books I recommend recommending to anyone who's still not onboard with saving the planet. (See the Atlantic Monthly's article on "Climate Fiction," which asks the question, Can books save the planet?

1.  Zodiac by Neal Stephenson. This was his secondnovel and it's the story of a charismatic jerk of an environmental activist who discovers that something has gone terribly wrong in Boston Harbor. It's laugh-out loud funny (and also short, which most of his more recent books have not been), and there's a sobering message about meddling with Mother Nature underpinning the hijinks. (You can read a synopsis of it here.)

2. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. This steampunk/science fiction story takes place in an alternate, 19th century  Seattle where a massive industrial accident (think Bhopal) has poisoned the air in the city's center and turned people into zombies. The novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and won the Locus Award for best science fiction novel.

3.  Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler. This is actually a trilogy--Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. In the book, the environmental disaster is nuclear, the result of an all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The book was published 30 years ago and remains a frightening cautionary tale while also delivering a thrilling science fiction epic.

4.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  Two words:  Dust Bowl. Most people are introduced to Steinbeck via his novella, Of Mice and Men, but this book, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, is his masterpiece. My parents were born into the Depression and it shaped their lives. They collected scrap metal for the war effort in the 40s and even in the country's post-war boom, they lived frugally. (My maternal grandmother cross-stitched a sampler with her motto:  Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without.)

5. The World in Winter by John Christopher. In this "new ice age" of a book (think Day After Tomorrow), a winter no one predicted coming just never ends after a very long and harsh season. For those who have lived through increasingly savage winters of "Polar Express" weather and snowfalls that last well into spring, this story will be particularly frightening.

6.  The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Give this book to horror fans because that's exactly what it is--a brilliant examination of just how badly humans have messed up. They will WISH it was fiction when they're done. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and it should be on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about environmental issues. Donate a copy of this book to your library. Send it to your relatives. If nothing else, it might motivate a few donations to some environmental causes. And God knows, they can use all the private help they can get right now.

An Eccentric Easter Reading List

I've always wondered why Shakespeare didn't take a crack at writing a play about Jesus. Perhaps because it would have been seen as heretical. After all, D.H. Lawrence got plenty of criticism for his short work, The Man Who Died some three hundred years later. (If you've never read that, it's available from Project Gutenberg online.) Imagine the fallout there would have been had he kept the book's original title, The Escaped Cock.

 Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (1990).  I'm not a huge Terry Pratchett fan. I tend to think his whimsical humor is heavy-handed. I do like Neil Gaiman's work, though, and this novel--about two angels trying to prevent the apocalypse--is a romp through pop culture and religion and you name it.

Good Omens makes a good companion piece to Christopher Moore's Lamb. I loved, loved, loved christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping and also liked Coyote Blue quite a bit. I've read pretty much everything he's written and while Lamb is not my favorite, it's a lunatic piece of work detailing Jesus "lost years" as told by his friend Biff.

The Gospel, According to the Son by Norman Mailer (1997). One of my English professors, Reynolds Price, was a biblical scholar and he was pretty scathing in his review of Mailer's novel, which he didn't think was "inventive" 'enugh. (One of my other professors, Buford Jones, used to make fun of Price for his heavy-handed allegory in the novel A Long and Happy Life.)

King Jesus by Robert Graves (1946). Graves is  the man who gave us I, Claudius and Claudius the

God. He also wrote The White Goddess, a book on poetic mythmaking that was required reading, along with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces when I was just starting out as a writer. The book views its title character as a philosopher rather than a messiah.

The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain (1953). I read this book when I was in high school and liked it a lot. (I also loved the author picture, which depicted Costain and his very fluffy white cat.)
It's about a Greek artisan named Basil who crafts a silver chalice to house the Holy Grail. I don't remember it being a "prequel" to the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail, though, so I may re-read it.