Walking on the Moon

I really enjoyed Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, but I feel like that says some bad things about me. I quite enjoyed hanging out with her antihero protagonist while watching her do things I despise. And this wasn’t the transgressive joy of watching a villain revel in getting back at the system or flaunting convention. She’s just going with the flow.

There’s a lot to chew on there. Nothing about the flow, or going with it, felt unreasonable. It doesn’t say much good about the world we live in and the people we are. I find myself with a lot of questions about the guilty pleasure of rooting for someone I should oppose in the abstract.

It would be easy to blame Kushner’s writing. It’s charming, witty, insightful, and completely believable. It would be hard not to be on her side. But I still think I shouldn’t be.

Recommended.

Steven Brust has a way of building a solid SF genre scenario, drawing readers into it, and then making the world real in ways that raise the stakes in way that should break it. It always works for me, but I see how it is a tightrope walk that won’t work for everyone.

Good Guys give the game away in its title. We’re in a modern Fantasy setting of shadowy magical societies with a group of folks working for the ends of their society. As we go on, they all start to question if they’re on the right side. And then they begin to consider if there is a right side. Or maybe if there are sides at all?

This is easy to do wrong. Too much realism breaks it as does too little. Or even the wrong elements of realism. This works for me. The structure of the adventure stays intact as the stakes evolve for the characters.

Recommended.

This was a fun SF novella with exactly the right amount of depth and character to be interesting without overwhelming me. Breezy, but with stakes that could be more later. I see that it’s becoming an Amazon series, and I can see how this makes a great setup for that. It also works as a novella. Very diverting.

Recommended.

I do like me some Carl Hiaasen. This is a sequel to Bad Monkey and I don’t have much different to say about Razon Girl. And that’s not bad.

Recommended.

This is an early Vonnegut novel which brought him a Hugo nomination and more attention from the community. It is full of ideas that Vonnegut would return to in later works. I liked it, because Vonnegut will always be enjoyable to me, but Sirens felt a little too jam-packed with ideas that are better explored in later work.

I kind of wandered into this rather than seeking it out. I grabbed a thriller to chew on while one of my holds came in, so I didn’t have expectations. I found it a pretty good thriller/procedural with some strange tonal shifts.

The lead investigator on the case is significantly defined by his abuse as a child in the foster care system and the first victim is similarly defined by abuse. I found the initial chapters that abuse and the investigator’s reactions to what he sees of it affecting in difficult ways. I was thinking that this was going to be more of an emotional exploration of the effect of abuse on people.

But as the book goes on, the depth of that exploration shallows out. The abuse is still there and a central driver of the plot, but Karin Slaughter lives less in the heads of the sufferers. And other colorful members of the investigation team appear who provide other viewpoints. As the book goes on it becomes more of a traditional whodunnit.

It’s a good whodunnit. The team is interesting. The mystery is twisty and engaging. And the abuse remains there, but it becomes more of a Law & Order: SVU level of intensity.

It’s also part of a series of books, so the investigators all have backstories and histories that I didn’t know about. I usually don’t jump into the middle of a series, but it wasn’t an impediment. I probably won’t jump back in to check on them though.

I enjoyed it.

Not only did I recently realize that Shirley Jackson was important, I’ve been on something of a tear through her work. Castle is broadly the story of a haunted house from the perspective of the haunters. Who are still alive. At the very least it tells a story of how that creepy house you grew up afraid of might have become that creepy house without anything supernatural happening at all.

But then again, there might have been some witchery. But no more than knocking wood, but everything is heightened here. It’s another book by Jackson that transports you into a world that’s slightly off, but not in any way that you can put a finger on. That transportation is just a delight, both in experience and seeing aspects of the trick as it happens.

You can interpret it from different angles as well. Characters seem to stand in for aspects of the mind and watching them interact can be like hearing your own inner monologue. And the spooky stuff is all still going on, as is some class struggle and…

So, a rich text.

In addition to all those structural and thematic acrobatics, there are so many individual sentences that made me catch my breath. Just amazing.

A must.

Man, I don’t know how I was unaware of Shirley Jackson until recently, but it does mean I get to be blown away by a great author for the first time later in life.

“The Lottery” has a reputation as a great short story, of which I was unaware, and it’s well earned. It’s evocative, powerful, and deep. In a couple pages it can completely rattle your worldview. Even if someone else has canted your worldview the same direction, it’s still an amazing story.

“The Lottery” comes at the end of a collection of other great short stories that have set a high bar for perfectly crafted stories. The whole time I was reading the collection having been clued in to “The Lottery”‘s reputation and thinking I’d be disappointed because everything up to it was so good. Nope. All great stuff.

Strongly Recommended.

I found a lot to like in Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds, a historical fiction set in the Dust Bowl. It’s pretty much impossible to take that on without inviting comparisons to Steinbeck, of course.

Hannah’s book isn’t about the Dust Bowl, but about specific characters in the Dust Bowl. Her characters are interesting and believable, though I do find them a bit broadly drawn. I find them very easy to get to know and identify with, but not unforgettable.

The Dust Bowl takes them from Texas to California along paths that many at the time were forced down. I think Hannah balances making the era come alive for readers and making the events into a story that shapes her characters. I can see the outlines of the country’s plight, but she is committed to the view on the ground and the reactions of her characters.

I like the character-driven approach and was happy to see some closure in the story. These are hard times and for much of the book sympathetic characters are taking a lot of abuse from the world and their fellow people. These folks find a way to escape the worst of the times, but in a way that’s specific to them. I want there to be answers for everyone, but that’s not this book. And probably not the real world, either.

It’s an interesting, well-written historical fiction. The hard parts are pretty bleak.

Recommended.

Greg Melville has put together a survey of historical trends tied together by the theme of graveyards. It reminded me of Loewen’s Lies Across America which did a similar thing with historical markers.

Body runs well with the idea. Graveyards are full of people so the Melville is able to touch on issues of race and class in America. They’re also public lands, which lets him talk about how we treat such lands from their landscaping to who can use them. Military graveyards are a jumping off point for wars and how we talk about soldiers.

As with Lies, Melville is surveying, not doing a deep dive. Every topic he touches on has more comprehensive and insightful works on it, but he never pretends otherwise. The result is an interesting exploration of how history ties into everything. It’s a nice doorway into how everyday things can lead one into more of the world once you scratch the surface.

Recommended.