Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 237
December 1, 2024
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Books that everyone else isn't reading
Books from Small and Independent Presses
Favorite and Rediscovered Books
Sue Horton on the 25 Harry Bosch novels
Some of my favorite books of 2024 at Shepherd.com -- a site
that offers reading ideas and the opportunity to share yours.FREE: Danny Williams is offering free samples of his editing services. See more here.
Issue No. 51, Fall 2024
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Poetry: James Daniels, Richard Lyons, Tim Suermondt, George Kalamaras, John S. Eustis, Sharon Whitehall, Ronald Moran, Rick Adang, J.R. Solonche, Susan Shea, Ryan J. Davidson, Greg McBride, Barry Seiler, Josh Mahler, Stephen Gibson, Tony Beyer, Mary Dean Lee, Claire Scott, Moriah Hampton, Stan Sanvel Rubin.
Prose: Mark Connelly, Cara Diaconoff,Sohana Manzoor, Eric Maroney, Carlos Ramet, Bob Rehm
For information about submissions, click here.
CONTENTS
Back Issues
Announcements
Book Reviews
Short Takes
Especially for Writers
Notes
I'm hardly the only person saying this, but in these dangerous times, most of us naturally pull in a little, seeking solace and support-- and how to support-- ourselves and each other.
For the upcoming holidays, please consider supporting your favorite writers by buying their books--especially as gifts for others-- and by giving at least brief ratings or reviews on Amazon.com.
For something different, also take a look at some of the increasingly numerous small and independent presses, and probably people you know who have written books. I particularly recommend some of my personal connections include the small and university presses like Hamilton Stone Editions and Irene Weinberger Books, Mountain State Press, WVU Press, Ohio University Press.
Take a look at Dreama Frisk's brand new new novel Before We Left the Land which is about a different view of the World War II years. Also, consider Kelly Watt's new book The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide.
Then there is Hilton Obenzinger's wonderful list of memoir, poetry and move ranging from his recent Witness: 2017-2020 and the blasphemous but delightful Treyf Pesach. Also, don't forget your faithful editor's books: I have novels for children like Billie of Fish House Lane and science fiction for young people and adults like Soledad in the Desert. If you are a beginning writer, take a look at my books about writing too like Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel.
I welcome your recommendations too. The ones I mentioned above just came to mind as I was typing. If you send me some soon (I'm featuring small press and independent books), I'll try to get out a list before the December holisdays.
Finally, as a gift to my readers, here is a section of Hilton Obenzinger's upcoming book Old Fool.
Beliefs
By Hilton Obenzinger
I always wonder why people think there’s an after-life. I sympathize with those who yearn for paradise but I can’t do it. One life is all I can handle, if at all, why ask for more?
I can’t imagine heaven or hell – except hell on earth in Gaza and Treblinka. There are some people I’d love to see in some imaginary hell, of course, but I’m pretty sure they’ll end up only sharing dust with me and everyone else.
I do find the notion of reincarnation appealing. Maybe we can get it right, coming back again and again. However, I don’t anticipate my soul flying off into another body. The miracle stops here.
I’m not too sure about the idea of a soul, either. Maybe there’s a ball of consciousness that is irreducible in the center of my gut. Or maybe it’s just my gut. It’s a shame that whatever it is can’t be passed on. It’s a waste, I know. Every life is a universe, according to Jewish lore, and multiple universes disappear each day.
I don’t know why people are afraid of ghosts. Just say hello and leave them alone. If there’s an angry ghost, ask them what the problem is and help out. Same thing you should do with the living. However, if they’re vicious and mean like the living, run like hell!
I do believe in Original Sin, just not the biblical kind. Just the fact that I’m a human means I’m capable of doing horrible things – and it’s a fight not to.
I do believe in Evil. Or maybe Evil believes in me.
When people want to kill and maim, even get pleasure from it, that’s Evil. When they are deluded into thinking that it’s fine, even necessary, to kill other people, that’s Evil. When you allow people to starve when you can feed them, that’s Evil.
It’s so hard to believe that so many Jews have become The Beasts (what my father called the Nazis). No people chosen to be priestly, just miserable oppressors with a grand excuse: We suffered, and now you will too,
I don’t believe in God. And God is perfectly happy with that.
I don’t believe there’s an End or Goal of history. There’s no inevitable classless society, no thousand years of blessings, no ultimate grand technological transformation, at least none assured. There’s an end, for certain, when we destroy ourselves, or when the planet gets sucked into our dying sun millions of years hence. And even that isn’t a goal, just something that will happen.
I don’t believe in AI, although that doesn’t matter, it will grab my brain no matter what. Maybe AI heralds the next stage of human evolution: the machines can gather all of our knowledge and experience and become a better us. And maybe we can continue on as machines that can survive the extreme heat and radiation and floods we have caused. Somehow, I think that's wishful thinking.
I believe in wishes.
I can’t believe so many of my friends are dead, and the list keeps growing. I dreamt last night that I was walking with Paul Auster along the railroad tracks behind my house. He had a small boy with him, who may have been my grandson Eli although I couldn’t see his face. “I can’t believe that you’re dying,” I said. “What am I going to do? What about that big project we’re working on together?” He said, “I’m at peace. You’ll figure it out.” I woke up saddened, again, over my friend’s death. But in the dream Paul may have stood in for me, and I was the one dying. I better finish this big project soon before it’s too late.
BOOK REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.
The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte reviewed by Christine Willis
The Firm by John Grisham
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Shut Outs by Gabrielle Korn
The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner
Mistaken Identity by Lisa Scottoline
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Also, here are some very short responses to various books from Christine Willlis, Danny Williams, and me.
Forest Whitaker in the 2024 TV series version of The Emperor of Ocean Park
The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter
This one has a lot of excellent qualities, including an interesting setting int the Gold Coast black upper class centered in D.C. with summers in Oak Bluff??? It has an interestingly tortured narrator who is frankly Christian and conservative, and it has family dynamics par excellence and a terrific central charactrer, dead, the narrator's father known as The Judge, who almost made the supreme court but for a scandal. There's action, mysteris, an insider look at a law school faculty--really so much good. What it osn't nr really as powherfully written as it was supposed to be. It was a first novel (??) and you feel a certain heavihandness: Narrator Talcott "Mishs" Gardner is one of those men who has more angst than h e knows how to put on the page. His committed monogamous life (which his wife doesn't share) isn't totally convincing, although it's very interesting. His search for his father's secrets pretty frequently telegraphs what's coming. It is turgid in places, in spite of other places with lively, sharp action and dialog. And the ending in particular is very slow coming. I just want to know the final set of answers, then set me free....
For a contemporary review, see The New York Times and The Guardian. The Guardian said, "Inevitably for a work of this length - and one that relies for its effects on the forensic flourishes of the genre - it is not without its extended water-jumps and patches of boggy ground. There is, perhaps, a sense in which Carter thinks rather than feels about his characters, or rather that he does their thinking for them. Alternatively, the sense of a writer who is playing all the parts himself, resisting that illusion of individual separateness, may just be a result of the first-person narration."
More recently, some notes when the book was turned into a video series.
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
That was a reread, and actually a return to the book from this summer after losing patience with it. I have to gear myself up for Hardy, where everyone interesting is always doomed! He has humor, but it's usually heavy-handed local color and rustis who are soemwhere between infinitely wise and clownish. This one is set on a great heath in England with little hamlets and villages and hills and ancient people's burying grounds in the form of barrows. The heath itself is wonderful in his telling: his insects and furze and snakes and butterflies and moths are all far better reading than any other nature enthusiast novelist I know. He doesn't set nature up as an artifact to be admired as in a gallery, but rather as causing sweat and snake bite and moths grabbed and thrown into candles as a signal. The people are also always walking, walking, on paths, across the open heath, meeting a cross roachs. They walk six miles just to pay a call, striding all over this place day and night. And the women walk too, even in the dark. Eustacia may be shallow and doomed from the start, but she wanders the heath in the night all alone. She has no outlet for her powers and romantic yearnings for travel and adventure, but she does walk. I love that about Hardy. His women tend to have bad outcomes (and so do the men, of course), but they take more exercise than any other nineteenth century novelist's women characters.
Snow Crash by Neal StephensonThis was nineties cyberpunk. Joel told me about it. It was an odd thing to be reading during Election day–it started out, said Stephenson, to be a computer generated graphic novel (?) And it's full of stuff that isn't quite what really happened, but amazingly close. The dystopia is about a completely privatized America: the Mafia is private, Fedland takes care of things like the mail that no one else wants or can make a profit on. Y.T., the skater/Kourier girl's mother has a kind of altruistic desire t serve and works for the Feds. Y.T. is lots of fun and energy, slapping a magnetic device on cars to pull her swiftly through L.A. traffic, and the main character, is Hiro Protagonist, and although he is a super hacker and supreme sword fighter, he spends way too much time researching ancient Sumer for a "virus" that is both actual and read and a killer and also a computer virus. The details of Sumerian mythology get super boring: Hiro is in his office in the Metaverse, in the person of his avatar (and he is such a super hacker he is one of the builders of the Metaverse), and he talks with a non-human called the Librarian who feeds him information, often giving the author as a narrated footnote. He, the Librarian is fun, as is a bitter Aleut contract killer known as Raven who mostly uses glass knives for his work and gets a hard on for Y.T.
There is tons of fun stuff, people who use commercial avatars for the metaverse look cheap black and white and static-y, where as the real hackers' avatars appear three dimensional and full color. Oh, and there's the Raft, a giant floating city made of the aircraft carrier Enterprise and lots of boat people's escape dinghies, and other large and small craft where an evil founder of a religion is trying to dump all this immigrants on the west coast of the U.S. and take over via them and his hacker-killing super virus from Sumer. Why Sumer? Don't really know.
Lots of action, fighting, wise cracks, a little hot sex (just one scen?)–and except for the info-dumps, I enjoyed it mostly. Can't say I took it too seriously, though, except for the uncanny working out of some thing that seem to be really happening. Now, as I write, on 11-6-24.
The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner
l liked The Strange Case of Rachel K well enough, but really, what it is, is three clever-to-brilliant brilliant short stories, and I don't quite get the uproar about it. Clever, amusing, with some interesting observations and imaginings about Cuba between the European conquest and the revolution, and entertaining sentence by sentence for sure.
But all the brilliance and large-projected historical context, it feels slight or perhaps more like showing off.
When I reviewed Kushner's The Flamethrowers a while back, I said this: https://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive196-200.html#flamethrowers . When I wrote that I can hear myself trying to be fair, to squash down my jealousy of all successful writers, especially those younger than I am, trying for some measure of objectivity. I'll read another of her books, probably, because my beef isn't that there's anything wrong with her writing or what she's trying to do, but just that its importance, her importance seems overblown.
Here is what Kirkus said about The Strange Case of Rachel K.
The Shut Outs by Gabrielle Korn
I'm not sure why I got on the ARC list for this post apocalyptic YA LBGQT novel, which is actually a sequel to a previous novel of hers. I decided to see if I liked it, and generally did–certainly enough to take the ride, i.e. read it. There are several sets of characters and a couple of time frames, and it all comes together at the end pretty nicely: it isn't so much tricks as just story telling.' The Apocalypse here is rapid climate change with floods and wildfires and plagues and heat bad enough that people have to keep moving north. The heat is done nicely, and there are several interesting ideas: one, hardly new, is that the wealthy save themselves and a chosen few by pretending to be climate friendly but actually encouraging climate change. They go to something called Inside, with a chosen few others. This is essentially underground behind walls, sealed off. As long as the rich-and-powerful want to keep you in. There's also, especially interesting, a group of climate activists who turn into a cult. They have a lot of earth saving technology that they keep from other groups, including at least one super-bean for life-preserving food. So it's an interesting world, these various survivalist groups, the good guys mostly led by Lesbian or otherwise gender fluid women and young people. What gives it life is various individual young people learning new cultures, as it were, and falling in love and lust. I'll keep an eye out for Korn's work.
SOME SHORT Responses, Mini-Reviews & Recommendations
(As usual, by MSW unless otherwise credited)
Christine Willis recommends: What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
I have just finished What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. The book is an impassioned sort of "return to your roots" cry for which Catte builds a solid case. She ran away from Appalachia, as I think many have. She didn't find a better life, but she did find her way back emboldened with understanding and motivation to work within her community. And she does do what Vance did not: she found worth in her home. I wonder if she had to flee to find that worth ... I think so.
[What I wrote-- Cut? This is small and solid with a definite and proud leftist, labor point of view. I bought copies for a couple of people, just to give them a chance to have a different angle on the region. This is one of the books that was written in reaction to J.D.'s Hillbilly Elegy, and its direct references to him, several years before he got political, afre veyr much in keeping with who he still is. ]
Danny Williams's Comments on a Few Books:
Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale was a chore to read, but in the end I thought it was worth it. A Soldier in the Great War took me about a year of reading it, giving up, and going back to it. Like A Winter's Tale, magical parts of it remain with me. I've had Memoir From Antproof Case for more than 20 years, I've read about 50 pages, and every year I consider giving it as a Christmas gift to someone who doesn't read, who will be impressed at its heft and thank me. Helprin creates small hideaway spaces for his protagonists, so precise and delicious I'm sad I can never go there. And he does masterful horses.
[If] you like Big Fat things, I recommend Charles Palliser, The Quincunx. ("Pronounce it carefully," my father-in-law liked to say.) A gimmicky format, like the guy you met on the way to St. Ives. Every book has five parts, and every part has five sections, and every section has five chapters . . . , and all the details escape me after these years, but a joy on a couple of levels. On the surface it extends Dickens into even deeper injustice, unfortunate circumstance, and hopeless poverty of material and spirit, with helpless good people tortured at every step by powerful bad people. Underneath, it was leading me unsuspecting toward a realization that black and white are not as polarized as they appear, and most people are mostly doing what they can with the circumstances life has handed them....A bonus, to my taste: so many characters there's a list and an identifying phrase for each, so you can refer to it and think, "Ah, yeah, the lady in the dress shop who a hundred pages ago tried to . . . " Now that I've reminded myself of this, I may dig it out of the attic and read it again. Do not expect to hear more from me for about a month and a half.
I leave a book in every hotel or motel room for someone to find. 50 or more years ago, this was my introduction to A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Mistaken Identity by Lisa Scottoline
After Grisham, I see that the thing with crime/mysteries/thrillers really is action, and while Scottoline likes her people, and makes them at least more colorful than Grisham's. This got better toward the end, pretty exciting in places, but I'm ready for some real writing now.
The Firm by John Grisham
Yes, it was entertaining, and I used it for my week-end relaxation reading, about on the level of good television, which isn't bad, but I never could get the various partners and associates of the Firm separated. The whole book, published in 1989 (??) Has a late fifties, early sixties feel, partly because of the insistence on a certain manicured lawn life style. And the women. Oh the women, while I'll admit he tried to give some agency, it comes in the form of helping more-and-more heroic and brilliant Mitch McDeere flummox the Firm, the Mafia, AND the FBI. Surely he could have made it a little more dangerous in there? And the women are always labeled in terms of their physical attributes (Abby's stunning legs, Tammy's spectacular boobs). I think that's enough Grisham for me. For a long time.
GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Cat Pleska has a creative nonfiction piece on the travails of Appalachia called "The Ineffability of Home" in the fall issue of Still: A Journal.
Diane Simmons talking about The Courtship of Eva Eldridge, now an audio book! See our review here.
The Latest Danny Williams Adventures in the Written Word, November 2024 .
Danny talks about fine- tuning Appalachian dialect in dialogue--and a lot more!
Issue No. 51, Fall 2024
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Poetry: James Daniels, Richard Lyons, Tim Suermondt, George Kalamaras, John S. Eustis, Sharon Whitehall, Ronald Moran, Rick Adang, J.R. Solonche, Susan Shea, Ryan J. Davidson, Greg McBride, Barry Seiler, Josh Mahler, Stephen Gibson, Tony Beyer, Mary Dean Lee, Claire Scott, Moriah Hampton, Stan Sanvel Rubin.
Prose: Mark Connelly, Cara Diaconoff,Sohana Manzoor, Eric Maroney, Carlos Ramet, Bob Rehm
For information about submissions, click here.
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Check out Estelle Erasmus's podcasts at Freelance Writing Direct: Conversations with Authors, Journalists, Agents, Novelists, Memoirists, Niche Writers, Agents, and More!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Dreama Frisk's wonderful novel about a farm family that is torn apart by the Second World War (yes, the one that was supposed to be so uplifting!). Published by Moonshine Cove, you can buy it at Amazon.
See more about the book and about Dreama on her web page at https://www.dreamafrisk.com/
Issue No. 51, Fall 2024
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Poetry: James Daniels, Richard Lyons, Tim Suermondt, George Kalamaras, John S. Eustis, Sharon Whitehall, Ronald Moran, Rick Adang, J.R. Solonche, Susan Shea, Ryan J. Davidson, Greg McBride, Barry Seiler, Josh Mahler, Stephen Gibson, Tony Beyer, Mary Dean Lee, Claire Scott, Moriah Hampton, Stan Sanvel Rubin.
Prose: Mark Connelly, Cara Diaconoff,Sohana Manzoor, Eric Maroney, Carlos Ramet, Bob Rehm
For information about submissions, click here.
