Book Reviews
A summary of 4 published reviews and updates of recent reading
A summary of recent book reviews and bookish thoughts.
Yes, I will be contributing to the commentary about Alice Munro. Art/Life, Life/Art, the connections between the work, the legacy, the recent revelations of bad behaviour. Coming, just not quite yet.
Excerpts from four recent book reviews, plus additional thoughts below:
A Horse at the Window by Spencer Gordon (2024), review in Zoomer
Flame-throwing? Check the cover, which features a man in a brown suit whose head has turned into a hose of orange fire. Readers may experience something similar as they pace themselves through the collection’s shining, often shocking pieces, navigating the dense outrageous complaints and linguistic ramblings of Gordon’s assembled narrators.
James by Percival Everett (2024), review in Zoomer
Jim and Huck are separated more than once, but they keep finding each other. In fact, their lives are eternally bound together in ways readers are best left to discover on their own. The novel ends where it begins, in the hearth of family. How it gets there is a journey readers will admire. James both renews enthusiasm for Twain’s book and adds layers of insight that only a novelist of Everett’s power could provide.
Heydays at The June Motel (2024), cookbook review in Miramichi Review
If you think summer is the perfect time for cocktails and zesty snacks, you may be the target audience for the latest brand extension of The June Motel Empire. Perhaps best known from the 2021 six-episode Netflix series, Motel Makeover, The June Motel is a boutique hoteling experience blending 1970s nostalgia, Instagrammable design, and choice drinkies and snackies.
Killing Shakespeare by Koom Kankesan (2024), review in Miramichi Review
In this wild young adult (YA) novel, three Scarborough, Ontario-based 21st century teenagers give new meaning to “a midsummer night’s dream.” Off they jet through time to Elizabethan England with a mission to knockoff the legacy of the English language’s greatest hits writer. Why? To make Grade Eleven a little bit easier, but boy are they in for a surprise. Will isn’t the nasty they imagine, and the1590s are a lot more fun – and weird – than they thought.
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Other recent books read:
Buddha by Karen Armstong (2000)
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh (2018)
Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh (2024), review coming soon in Miramichi Review
NW by Zadie Smith (2012)
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021).
Now, I love Zadie Smith, but I didn’t feel great about the start of her 2012 novel, NW. I was listening to it as an audio book, as I had her 2023 novel, The Fraud, which I wrote about here, but NW lost me early, and I wasn’t sure I was going to find my way back. By the mid-point, I did, though, and by the end I was back to my regular Zadie lovefest. It’s definitely a novel of a period, kind of an end of a period, the last pre-social media period. It felt like a walk through a lost world, how we used to think of our fractured world, before it became even more mediated, even more fractured.
Claire Keegan’s novel won awards and has over 180,000 ratings on Goodreads, but it was too neat for me. Also, it’s more of a short story than a novel. More like Act 1 of a novel. Lots of set up and withholding of action, then a burst of revelation at the end. Beautiful prose, for sure. Deep empathy and heartbreaking scenes, yes. So much talent and could have pushed farther and harder? Too harsh? Meh, I wanted more.
I started the Smarsh essays, then realized I really needed to read her memoir first. Got an audio copy from the library, and it was an easy read. Having a grounding in Smarsh’s working class Kansas beginnings and a bearing on her extended family and their intergenerational traumas definitely helped me approach the essays, which are a continuation of the project. What’s the project? Promoting the key message that not everyone in Trump Country is a Trumpist. Also, it’s well past time that stereotypes about the working class were deeply examined and set aside and new voices about the working class experience were given prominence, especially in media coverage of so-called working class issues. The essays cover 2013-2024, so also serve as a history of the Trump Era, though they’re not framed that way. They’re grounded in the mid-west and downhome truth telling.
The Karen Armstrong book is billed as a biography of the Buddha — born Siddhama Gotama — 2,500 years ago. Of course, sorting fact from myth over that period of time is impossible, but Armstrong does an excellent job of contextualizing the sources, the cultures, the global spiritual shifts of the era, and the different schools of thought and practice. I knew things about Buddhism, but realized what I knew wasn’t coherent. This is an excellent primer. Armstrong has written other histories of spiritual movements and religions. I may well be checking them out soon, too.