The Books of August

 The Books of August

For the first time in the season of the virus I have slowed down a bit with reading.  I did a re-read of a book I love, found a new author, and continued my diversity reading.  All great books--just not a lot of them.

My re-read was Driftless, by David Rhodes, which I loved ten years ago and reead again to see if it was as good as I remembered.  It is actually better this time around--a true Wisconsin rural book with quirky interesting characters, some parts that make me cry, some that made me laugh out loud even when I was re-reading, and truly wonderful male characters.  Rhodes' men are three-dimensional, make mistakes, but we always learn why, and they grow so much.  I haven't read a book that empathizes with its male characters so much in a long time.  David Rhodes has written a sequal, Jewelweed, which I have not read yet.  

For a long time I kept lists of books that were set in or had characters from the places I have lived.  I will digress for a minute and say that the other book that is quintessentially Wisconsin for me is Midnight Champagne, by A. Manette Ansay.  She writes a lot, and Oprah has picked up some of her books in the past.  They are excellent but tend to be rather dark.  This is, for lack of a better term, a ghost story set during a wedding at a venue that used to be a strip club or brothel along the stretch of I-94 between Kenosha and Chicago.  For those of you who have not visited this territory, it is a no-man's land of cheese, fire works, tatoos, truck stops, etc. This slim, simple story grabs you by the throat. The rather unexpected wedding of people who have known each other four months takes place at the same time that a ghostly woman, somewhat accidentally killed by her abusive husband in another part of the lodge, roams as a ghost, trying to figure out what has happened.  So, wedding, ghost, and murder--a fascinating mix on a snowy night.  The characters could be from nowhere but Wisconsin.

This month I discovered M. K. Jemison.  I read The City We Became, which needs to be put on the New York list mentioned above.  Jemison says it is her first book set in the real world, and she said it was so much harder to work with reality than to create a new world.  This book is a fantasy love letter to NYC.  I can't recommend it enough.  

I just finished Jemison's The Fifth Season,  This world is incredibly grim, but Jemison's strength is that she makes you believe in the otherness of it from the start.  It is the first of the Broken Earth Trilogy--she seems to write trilogies regularly, and The City We Became is also going to be a trilogy.  If you are just finding her, as I did, I would read The City first and then branch out to the other worlds.  

Finally, for my fiction reading this month, I finished Long Bright River, which I started in the spring when Lucy and I were walking a lot, and I finished it now that I have time in the car again.  I have heard a few people comment that this is a book without a lot of diversity.  I think this might be being a bit unfair, since it is a book that is VERY grounded in a particular place and community, and that is part of its message.  I think I have come to this book a bit late--like I am late to N.K. Jemison, so I won't go in to a lot of plot summary here. There are so many social issues included in this book, but what struck me the most was that the narrator has all the best intentions but ends up being so wrong about so many things and having to suffer guilt for those things as well as all the other burdens she carries.  She isn't exactly an unreliable narrator, but she has based her life on some beliefs and doesn't seem able to move beyond.  There is a hint of a happy ending, but so much has been lost here.

I read one book for my ongoing re-education on race matters.  This month it was White Negroes:  When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation. by Lauren Michelle Jackson, who is a wonderful cultural critic.  If you have puzzled with how to think about the Kardashians, Paula Dean, and Christina Aguilera through a racial lens, here is your chance to have a clear, cogent analysis of how they fit into the bigger framework of race in America.