Your Duck is Not My Duck

Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an art to the short story and I am not sure I fully appreciate it. Instead of a short novel, the short story seems to glory in vagueness and abrupt endings. I'm sure there is an art to reading them and a key to understanding, but it seems to elude me lately. So while I did enjoy some of the stories in this collection, there were others that I thought were frustratingly obtuse. I did enjoy her observations on language and especially the thoughts in "Merge" about the first words humans spoke and how our communication, the written word especially has allowed us to become who we are. And "The Third Tower" about how who we are develops from how we associate different and unique thoughts from the names of things. In fact, those stories hold enough ideas in them that I might give this collection another go after I've given it some time to marinate.

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to observe the moment when, at the heart of the conflagration, the trees that sustained it became phantoms, the fire's memory.

"Can you believe that all that turned out to be then? At the time I somehow thought that it was now.  Did it occur to you that it was going to be then?

The tool that doesn't work, Ernst called language.

Maybe these pictures are memories that somehow became detached from other people and stray through the universe, slipping through rips in the fabric and clinging to whatever living beings they can, faulty beings like her.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

 

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read. A man dies in Vera's tea shop and she takes it upon herself to solve the murder. She does this by befriending the suspects, making them special tea, feeding them food that sounds amazing, and giving out advice in her demanding, no-nonsense, Vera way.

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Why We Sleep

 

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sleep is more important than anyone would think. I do think we've come a ways since this book was published (maybe because of it?). Walker does a great job of recounting numerous experiments that show how important sleep is and all the ways we cheat ourselves of getting the whole benefits of sleep. I loved his ingenious and imaginative (and specific) ways we can educate and practice sleep hygiene. If there was one thing he didn't cover as in depth as I wished was why we vilify sleep as a culture--the person who wakes up early and works late in the evening is always more admirable than the one who wakes late or leaves early. But at least he makes an airtight case for those of us willing to buck the system and sleep a full eight hours!

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REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.

Reality and perceived reality were no longer the same in the "eyes" of the sleepless brain.

Never definitely on or off, the brain of a narcoleptic patient wobbles precariously around a middle point, teeter-tottering between sleep and wakefulness.

We, and not the rotating mechanics of planet Earth, would not decide when it was "night" and when it was "day".  we are the only species that has managed to light the night to such dramatic effect. 

Miracle Creek

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was impressed by the depth and breadth of this mystery/trial story. A hyperbaric chamber has been blown up with patients inside, resulting in death. The problem is nothing is at it seems. Kim does a credible job of convincing the reader of the guilt of one character only to reveal some new secret that changes points to a whole new suspect or discredits all the previous assumptions. But besides being a great crime drama, Kim also explores issues such as immigration, fertility, racism, and sexual exploitation. She tackles autism and other disabilities and the challenges of being a parent of a nontypical child--the exhaustion, the guilt, the frustration, the relentlessness of it. But she also captures the community that can spring up among those experiencing the same difficulties--the support and also some of the competition and envy. But she also ties in how hard it is to just be a parent, how you show love and how kids recognize it (or not).

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But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech, and like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself.  In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect.  In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept.

Good things and bad--every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness--resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential. 

Anxious People

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think I might be being generous. I felt like this cutesy telling of a bank-heist-hostage situation was all over the place. There were flashbacks, and witness statements, and more flashbacks and backstories and more flashbacks. Maybe it was me but it was hard to keep it all straight. Especially since there were also mistaken identities, flashback tie-ins, and missing persons. And new persons hiding in the bathroom. It ends nice, but the first part emphasizes everyone's problems and anxieties and made me a little depressed myself. Maybe another time in my life I would have enjoyed this but as it was, it was just a little too much--too twisty, too cutesy, too quirky-corny.

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Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What I have read about Manhattan Beach is how much research Egan put into this book. The good news is that it reads as though she researched to write instead of writing to show off her research. There is a lot of information, but it is organic to the story. The plot covers the story of Anna, the daughter of a former dancer and bagman with a disabled sister. WWII comes and her father disappears and Anna goes to work in the shipyard where she becomes obsessed with being a diver. The story itself is a bit disjointed and meandering but the story as a whole seems to focus on the body and the ways it holds up back and propels us forward. Moments when we leave our body behind and become something outside it. How different bodies can accomplish different things and how we are often captured by the way our bodies look. What our bodies can do through will and grit, and how the spirits of those we love can inspire us.

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The Personal Librarian

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I felt like this was one of the most fully-formed fictional historical novel about a real person. Benedict and Murray did a great job of imagining what it must have been like to feel like an imposter in a position that was both exhilarating (running in circles with some of the most powerful and rich men in America) and perilous (see above). I loved how they captured both the anxiety she must have felt, but also how confident and self-assured she must have been to make the deals she did and run in the circles she did. She was a woman who could think outside the box and that allowed her to do more than her circumstances would seem to allow. Thank you Marie and Victoria for introducing us to a lady who didn't let one aspect of herself define everything about her, but used her gifts and knowledge to soar as high as she did.

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Force of Nature

Force of Nature by Jane Harper
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Australian environment strikes again. This time a group of women go on a corporate outing into the wilderness and one goes missing. She happens to be an informant for Aaron Falk, financial detective, so he and his partner go to wait to see if she turns up. It was just ok. All of the women were awful, and Alice, the missing camper, was the worst. I didn't really care who killed her or why. Once again, the only redeeming factor was the Australian outback which seems equally fascinating and beautiful. Turns out finace is boring even when murder is involved.

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The Trespasser

 

The Trespasser by Tana French
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

French goes back to form with this installment of the Squad series. Interestingly, she filp flops the viewpoint of the same team that investigated The Secret Place. Now we get to understand why Detective Conway comes across so brassy and how Detective Moran is viewed by her and others. The murder investigation is okay but the exploration of how the stories we tell (to others and ourselves) and the stories we believe shape everything we perceive. (Need a new perception? Tell a new story). In fact that theme might have overshadowed the mystery itself, but its a good idea to think about. Not the best of the bunch, but a solid contribution to the collection.

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The Secret Place

 

The Secret Place by Tana French
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

French deviated quite a bit in this entry to the Dublin Murder Squad and while it was a fine detective novel, I felt frustrated that it didn't play by the rules. First of all we go back to two novels to Frank's world instead of the immediately preceding book. If we're going to jump back that far, might as well go back to Rob and Cassie, since they are who we all like anyway. Next, instead of staying inside our protagonist's head we alternate chapters with an omniscient narrator that covers a group of roommates/best friends. The chapters also alternate between present time and when the murder happened a year ago. It makes for an interesting read, but it varies vastly from the other installments. And then finally, the magic that has hovered in and through the other novels from a vague sort of beast in the first book and shows up as watchful shadows and invisible beasts in other installments but which plays a nebulous existence in the narrator's (or victim's) heads, shows up full-fledged in this one, unambiguous and disconcertingly real. Which, again, is ok, but doesn't play by the rules French laid down in her earlier novels. Such deviations were distracting, but the story, another focusing on the power of the magic of youthful friendships and the threat of its destruction by growing up and changing having a devastating result, does stay on French's overarching theme and is told in a relatable and heartbreaking way.

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Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won't lift away.

Broken Harbor

Broken Harbor by Tana French
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For me this was the most harrowing of the Dublin Murder Squad series. The small details that kept building sucked me in. I was like why is she including so much of these minor details, and then as I was trying to figure it out I was suddenly horrified and completely embroiled in the mystery. Which maybe helped me to believe such a convoluted murder resolution. The total feeling of isolation both in proximity to others and the emotional isolation that occurs with shame and grief was palpable. The affect of mental illness on family members was also well explored as well as the warning that we all need a community to help deal with catastrophe to protect our own well being. Definitely one of the more haunting in this series.

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The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets.  I don't trust that smell.  It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals.  When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised.  Now I know better.  That smell is bad medicine.  It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. 

Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin.  The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got a chance to happen. 

Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good exploration of what it is to be a parent, the legality of it, the biology, the real life ramifications. Mix these issues with prejudice--racial, sexual, class. But Ng does this well in the real moments of life--principles we say we believe in may change when confronted with exceptions for our friends, our children. There is also the question of what makes a good parent--which is more important, the temporal or emotional needs? No one escapes from this story without some blame and/or realization that they do not live their own beliefs all of the time. By allowing the focus to follow so many characters we can understand the justifications, the realities and the decisions, even if the other ignorant parties don't and we also realize there are no easy answers. Ng helps us to realize we have our own exceptions and prejudices. Do I completely understand the final scenes? No, because of all the characters, Izzy may be the least explored. But overall I thought the issues and questions raised were thought-provoking and proved there are no easy answers when it comes to the who and hows of parenting.

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