Sunday Caught My Interest

What a week! Two batches of mini muffins for Book Group, 94 cupcakes for the XC team on Wednesday, and a sheet cake for the team on Saturday. Plus a wonderful escape to Seattle for food, Trophy Cupcakes, Ballard Locks, Pikes Market, and a XC meet at the beautiful Salt Creek Park near Port Angeles. Great food, running, conversations, and friends! Plus two books read on the trip over and back thanks to a friend who was willing to do all the driving.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Eva from a Striped Armchair gives some thought this week to I the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters by Rabih Alameddine, auth0r of The Hawkawati the first novel I reviewed for this blog. I really enjoyed The Hawkawati and I the Deivine is an earlier novel by the author and also is about Beirut in the war-torn 1970’s. The novel has a different structure in that each chapter is the attempt of the protagonist, Sarah Nour El-Din, abortive attempts to write a memoir. Each attempt of a start reveals more and more of the character, and her life straddling two cultures – America and the Middle East.

The New York Times reviews a book I have been eagerly awaiting: There But For The by Ali Smith. This novel follows a similar format to A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge and has interlocking short stories with different voices with this one centered around Miles Garth, a guest a dinner party. In between dinner and dessert, he excuses himself, goes to the guest bedroom, and locks himself in and refuses to leave communicating with others only by notes slid under the door.  The novel is written in the voice of four characters so we get to know Garth through the memories and recollections of those voices. I have long wanted to read this book and now even more so after reading the review which ends:

This lively, moving narrative is filled with such details, with historical and musical lore and, above all, with puns. All the likable characters in “There but for the” enjoy a good verbal game, most happily with someone else. It is as though playing with language is what enables them to make their way through a complicated world. It’s a knack that might also be picked up, most enjoyably, by reading Ali Smith.

Having grown up in a house with lots of language play and puns this new novel by Smith sounds like it might be a pleasure to read.

The Times also reviews a second book that sounds interesting: The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen which is centered around the Ryrie family (Ricky and John, their children Biscuit and  Paul and Jess,  John’s daughter from a previous relationship). The family is disintegrating after the death of a third child fifty seven hours after it was born. The family struggles with grief and loss in different ways losing the connections with each other along the way. The review is scattered with sentences like, “With graceful jumps into the past that illuminate the present, moving from one unerringly rendered point of view to another, Cohen weaves a complex pattern of light and dark, happiness and grief, in a 21st-century version of the family chronicle.” While the first part of the book detailing the loss of the child is dark, the author also speaks of hope and redemption. This sounds like a great read.

Swapna of S. Krishna’s Books brings a new mystery writer to my attention, James Thompson author of The Inspector Vaara Novels set in Finland. The first in the series, Snow Angels, introduces Kari Vaara, the police chief of the Lapland town of Kittilä. A brutal murder takes place during the town’s two weeks of darkness in the Winter. The second in the series, Lucifer’s Tears came out last spring. The Inspector and his American wife have moved to Helsinki and the homicide detective is dealing with a torture/murder. Swapna calls this “a great procedural” and the series sounds like something to keep on hand as good travel books.

Happy Reading!

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