Author: whatmeread

Review 2652: Alligator & Other Stories

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Alligator & Other Stories is the last book I had to read to wrap up my James Tait Black project. It is a collection of nine stories by Syrian-American writer Dima Alzayat, all with a theme of dislocation.

I was nearly brought to tears by the first one, “Ghusl,” about a woman preparing the body of her younger brother for burial, against tradition. The woman’s name is Zaynab, and I believe she is the same woman we read about in later stories.

“Daughters of Manät” (does it mean “destiny”? all I could find was a definition of the word without the diacritical mark) also brings in Zaynab as the aunt of the narrator, but it begins with a woman stepping out of a window, presumably committing suicide. This act indicates a shift of point of view between telling the story of Zaynab and whatever else is going on, but that’s just it. The rest is beautifully written, but I found it a bit opaque.

“Disappearance” is the only story that doesn’t seem to contain characters of Middle East origin unless one is Etan, a boy who has disappeared. The story is written from the point of view of a young boy who is not allowed to leave his New York apartment building during the summer that Etan disappeared.

In “On Those Who Struggle Succeed,” a young college graduate makes compromises, including hiding her Lebanese ethnicity, to try to succeed at a company.

In “The Land of Kan’an” an Egyptian man living in Los Angeles tries to overcome his predilection for men as sexual partners.

“Alligator” is a long story that shows America’s history of racism through newspaper clippings, interviews, and testimony, reverting many times to the killing of a Syrian grocer and his wife in Florida by the police in 1929. Although it employs the technique, becoming more common, of using documents to tell its story, I think it is overly long and a bit redundant. I hadn’t realized until reading it, though, that there was a large emigration of Syrians in the early 20th century and that they were treated like my Irish ancestors were in the late 19th century.

“Summer of the Shark” is from the point of view of a young man of Jordanian descent working in a call center on 9/11.

In “Once We Were Syrians,” Zaynab makes another appearance as a grandmother tries to explain to her granddaughter what her Syrian heritage means.

In “A Girl in Three Acts,” a teenage girl in foster care reconnects with the Christian Syrian family that ostracized her branch of the family when her grandfather converted to marry a Muslim girl.

I found the first and last stories most affecting. The stories are beautifully written, but since short stories are not really my thing, I’d like to see a novel by Alzayat.

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Some Book Serendipity of My Own

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When Bookish Beck posts her lists of what she calls “Book Serendipity,” that is, coincidences she notices across books, I am always impressed by how many things she lists and the level of detail she notices. So, last summer, I noticed a few things and jotted them down, thinking I would create a book serendipity list of my own. Then I had to flip the page in my notebook for some reason and forgot all about it. So, this is the paltry number of things I wrote down, plus one that is more recent.

  • Frail older woman interferes with a much younger man’s life: The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym and Cecil by Elizabeth Eliot.
  • Women are married to much older men: Cecil by Elizabeth Eliot and The Musgraves by D. E. Stevenson.
  • Feudalism is a good thing: The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie and The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge.
  • Empire is a good thing: The Portuguese Escape and The Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge

Boy, Ann, you’re not doing too well here.

The other things I noticed were actually cross-media serendipities that happened almost exactly at the same time:

  • Reference to Burgess and Maclean in The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge while watching a TV series about Kim Philby, also with references to Burgess and Maclean (A Spy Among Friends, starring Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis)
  • References to or setting in Ancient Syracuse in Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny, on Jeopardy, and in Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

I guess maybe I’m not so much a details person as a big picture person, because I’m sure there have been more than these.

Review 2651: #NovNov25! The Buddha in the Attic

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This is an unusual little book, which I read for Novellas in November. It is based on the experiences of Japanese women brought to California as brides in the early 20th century. It doesn’t have any detailed characters but instead treats the women as a disparate group and is written in first person plural.

The girls and women have never met their husbands. They have apparently been married by proxy and have letters from and photos of their husbands. But when their ship arrives, they don’t recognize them. Their husbands are twenty years older than their photos, and they are common laborers, not the bankers and professional men the women are expecting. The women have been brought there not to improve themselves but to provide sex and hard labor.

The novel follows the women in their many paths until World War II and the internment of almost all the West Coast Japanese residents. Somehow, despite its lack of distinct characters and plot, it builds. It makes you sympathize with the hard lives of these characters. It’s powerful.

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Nonfiction November 2025! Week Four: Diverse Perspectives

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This week the host is Rebekah of She Seeks Nonfiction. The prompt is Diverse Perspectives. Nonfiction books are one of the best tools for seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. They allow us to get an idea of the experiences of people of all different ages, races, genders, abilities, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, or even just people with different opinions than ours. Is there a book you read this year from a diverse author, or a book that opened your eyes to a perspective that you hadn’t considered? How did it challenge you to think differently?

I think the book I read that most reflected a perspective that was different from my own was Life Among the Qallunaat by Mini Aodla Freeman, a memoir by an Inuit woman whose life, even in the 1950s, was so different from my own, growing up at the same time. In the memoir, she portrays herself as a very naïve young girl, but at the same time there is lurking in her writing a little bit of humor as she explains the differences between her people’s ways of thinking and behaving and our own.

Another book that reflected a different kind of “modern” life was Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village. What struck me about this book is that the lives of the people were so remote from those of everyday English people in the 1970s even though their village was located only about 30 miles from Cambridge. The fact that for years there was no easy transportation between the village and larger towns and even between the fen dwellers and the village made the villagers’ lives a lot more primitive than others’, and the situation, although it has improved with many people having cars, has only gotten worse for the poor with transportation issues such as the removal of bus routes.

I don’t feel as if this topic works that well for the books that I read this year, though.

Review 2650: The First Woman

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The First Woman is one of two books left in my James Tait Black Prize project, which I began winding up in 2023. I’ll come right out and say that although I’m sure many people will enjoy reading the book, it was not really for me at times. I had trouble getting through it, although I found the end more interesting.

First, I don’t really enjoy dreams in novels, and at the beginning there are plenty of them. Also, although I may read a volume of folk tales, I don’t always like them mixed in with my fiction. However, I understand that here, they are a strong part of the culture portrayed.

At the beginning of the novel, Kirabo is a thirteen-year-old Ugandan girl. She is just beginning to enter womanhood even though she and her best friend Giibwa are still playing with dolls. Perhaps it is the upcoming passage that has made her wonder about her mother. All she knows is that her father, Tom, brought her home to his parents when he was attending university, and they raised her. When she asks about her mother, no one tells her anything, so she decides to consult Nsuuta, the witch.

Nsuuta and Kirabo’s grandmother, Alikisa, don’t speak, so Kirabo is surprised to find out that once they were best friends. Nsuuta is reluctant to talk to Kirabo, but she is plainly lonely and blind, so she agrees to talk to her if she will come for lunch. But she mostly tells her folk tales with a feminist bent.

I have to say that at this part of the story I was a bit shocked by Kirabo’s immersion into sexual considerations. Not that she does anything sexual, but, for example, as soon as she has her first period, she is told how to stretch her labia so she’ll have more pleasure from sex—about a week after she had her baby doll out! I read more about labia in this section than I have in any book except one by Simon Mawer.

Kiribo is about to have a shock. Tom has been telling her he is going to take her to the city to live with him. One day shortly before she is to start school at a secondary boarding school, he tells her to pack and takes her away. But when they arrive at his house, she finds he is married with two children she never met before and her stepmother doesn’t want her in the house.

The novel follows Kirabo for several years in the 1970s and 80s while she tries to reconcile the demands of her patriarchal culture with her desire to be educated and have a career. It also covers the effects of the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, when, for example, Kirabo’s boyfriend Sio’s father is murdered because he has a Tanzanian wife.

After the almost purely sex- and marriage-related first half of the novel, I was more interested in the second half. However, about 75 pages go back in time to when Kirabo’s grandmother was a girl, to explain what happened between her and Nsuuta. I thought this material could have been covered more effectively in a story lasting a few pages.

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Review 2649: #NovNov25! Seascraper

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this novella, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize but did not make the shortlist. It’s an atmospheric, closely observed story set in the 1950s that seems as if it is from an earlier time. I read it for Novellas in November.

Thomas Flatt is carrying on the difficult work followed by his grandfather, scraping the sea bottom at low tide for shrimp. He is the only man left doing this grueling job the old-fashioned way, with a horse and wagon, and the pickings are getting slimmer. He didn’t choose this path but was made to quit school to help his grandfather before he died. He lives with his demanding mother, but he has a secret desire to perform music at a local folk club.

One evening he comes home to find a stranger with his mother, an American named Edgar Acheson. He claims to be a movie director and produces as proof a cover of a movie magazine with a photo of his younger self. He wants to make a movie using the dismal fall sea as the setting, and he wants to pay Thomas, as an expert on the beach, to help him find locations. And indeed, the beach at low tide can be treacherous. He gives Thomas a check for £100, an astonishing amount, and arranges for him to take him with his horse and wagon that night.

And that’s pretty much all I want to say about the plot except that it holds surprises. Events happen that allow Thomas to explore feelings about the father he never met and to consider a new path for himself.

This novella was moody and minutely observes the details of Thomas’s exhausting job. It is the novella’s later events that leave me not knowing what to think about it.

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Nonfiction November 2025! Week Three: Book Pairings

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This week, the host for Nonfiction November is Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home, and the prompt is book pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like!

This year, I thought of several pairings, some of which aren’t that original, but maybe some of them show a little more thought. My first pairing is really obvious. I’m pairing the nonfiction Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker with its fictional counterpoint, Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton. Both are about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. I read Margaret the First last year during Novellas in November!

Next, I’m bringing up the Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky again, and I’m pairing it with Island, a book of short stories by Alastair MacLeod. One is about the geography of islands, and the other is about living on one. (I also might have paired the Pocket Atlas with The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan, a memoir by one of the last inhabitants of the Blasket Islands in Ireland, but then both would be nonfiction.)

Next, we have the memoir Girl Interrupted by Susan Kaysen, about a young woman who is incarcerated in a mental hospital for very little reason, and A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, about a girl being subjected to other kinds of violence.

Finally, I thought of two books by Barbara Kingsolver that kind of complement each other. One is the nonfiction memoir/food book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life, and the other is Demon Copperhead, her acclaimed novel about the difficulties of a life of poverty in Appalachia, the same setting for her farm in the nonfiction book (but a lot more prosperous).

Review 2648: #ReadingAusten25! Persuasion

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Persuasion is a reread and re-review for me, and I see that my original post works just as well as it did before for a general review. So, I was trying to think of a topic I could discuss, and I decided to focus on its villains.

Maybe “villains” is too strong a word for this novel. The only outright villain in Austen that I can think of now is Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. But certainly Austen’s work features selfish people, people who wish ill to others, and even people who actively work against others. It strikes me that, although many of these characters are comic, they are less comic as she goes on. Is it my imagination, or are there also more of them?

First, there’s Anne Elliot’s entire family. Her father and sister Elizabeth are cold and snobbish and care only for appearances. Neither of them thinks Anne is of any account. And Sir Walter Elliot holds this high opinion of himself despite his having recklessly outspent his income, he and his daughter refusing to retrench where it might lessen their consequence. Above all, Sir Walter felt that Frederick Wentworth was beneath Anne when she fell in love with him seven years ago.

Anne’s sister, Mary Musgrove, is a little more bearable, but she is also self-consequential, as evidenced by her disdain of the Hayters, her husband’s cousins. However, she finds Mary useful (selfishly so, but Anne wants to be useful) and although she never considers Anne’s comfort, the contrast between Anne’s life in her father’s house and the one in Mary’s, with her nearby warm and welcoming in-laws and the visits with the neighbors, is striking. Of course, Anne has to bear Mary’s whining.

Then there is Mrs. Cox, Elizabeth’s friend, a poor widow and daughter to Sir Walter’s lawyer, so of inferior station. Pretty much everyone except Sir Walter and Elizabeth understands that Mrs. Cox means to marry Sir Walter if she can. However, she isn’t actively malevolent, and the only aspect we see of her is excessive agreeableness (sycophancy?). As she is living with two such people and probably endures many humiliations, I sort of feel sorry for her.

Now, if you don’t want spoilers, skip this part, because it’s about Mr. William Elliot, the young, handsome, well-mannered relative, Sir Walter’s heir, whom Anne encounters briefly in Lyme and meets later in Bath. Everyone thinks he and Anne will make a match (except Elizabeth and Sir Walter, who think he’s after Elizabeth), but Anne has one safeguard—she has been in love with Captain Wentworth since she was 19. Also, she instinctively feels that there is something about Elliot she doesn’t understand. He turns out to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Wickham, although he doesn’t do anything as dastardly. Still, his attentions to Anne get in the way for a while of her gaining an understanding with Frederick Wentworth.

These negative characters are maybe a bit more nuanced but also more seriously depicted than equivalent characters in her other books, where they are often comic. They’re not at all funny in this book, and notice how almost all of them are related to Anne.

Austen is certainly a master at showing us people’s foibles in a way that is absolutely believable.

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Review 2647: The Darlings of the Asylum

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Violet Pring is more interested in her art than marriage, and she meets an artist, Mr. Lilley, who thinks she shows great promise. But it’s 1886, and Violet’s parents are pushing her to marry her childhood friend, Felix Skipp-Berlase. Felix is wealthy, and Violet’s parents want her taken care of, as they are broke. Felix is willing to have Violet continue her art career, but that doesn’t seem to cut any ice with Violet.

Violet’s mother is perennially ill, and she has a doctor, Dr. Rastrick, who makes Violet nervous. Violet finally agrees to marry Felix, but on the eve of the engagement party, she commits an indiscretion with Mr. Lilley. A few days later, Violet wakes up in Dr. Rastrick’s asylum.

The novel seems to be about Violet’s unfair incarceration because her ambitions are ahead of her time. However, we find that Violet is not altogether a reliable narrator, because she has memory lapses.

The thrust of this novel is confusing. At first, it seems that the evil scientist with absurd ideas about treating mental patients is dominating a gothic novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but this idea shifts and shifts again. And Violet’s adventures turn toward absurdity by the end.

I think O’Reilly has written more of a 21st century heroine than a 19th century one, and not a terribly convincing one. He also doesn’t seem to know what his own book is about—a girl learning how to take control of her own destiny? a girl learning to understand her parents better? a girl coming to sympathize with the stresses on women in poverty? the difference between Dr. Restrick’s approach and that of the new field of psychiatry? It doesn’t seem like he knows.

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