Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

December 22, 2023 · 4:08 pm

Home: Slow and beautiful

I have tried a couple of times to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead but each time gave up with boredom (despite it being routinely included on best-of-all-time lists). So what made me think I’d fine the second book set in the town of Gilead and focused on religion to be more captivating, I’m not sure. But I was! More captivated that is. Still not going to run away with any prizes for being enthralling or Utterly Engrossing, but definitely a winner here in the slow burn of character development and theme.

The book follows Jack and Glory, siblings returned home to care for their dying father – a retired minister. I guess Jack didn’t really come home to care for him, or Glory either, both sort of find their lives falling apart and return home, conveniently to care for the dying dad. For Jack it’s a return after a long exile/absence and for his father this is something of a chance to redeem Jack (who’s soul he has been Very Worried About).

Unfolding over many scenes of making tea, or standing in a garden, or rocking on a porch bench, Glory and Jack reconnect and cautiously share and build trust. It asks readers to figure out where the limit of familial bond might be, how we carry/negotiate/give up/fail/rebuild familial expectations, and when – if ever – we might be allowed to start our lives again when they Go Wrong.

If you are tired, sleepy, exhausted, even a bit likely to doze, I’d say make this a Morning Book as you will almost certainly fall asleep within a paragraph as the lyrical writing and slowwww pace are very… lulling. But if you’ve got your 8 hours and a cup of coffee, you could do much worse for a book to read and contemplate What It All Means.

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November 10, 2023 · 9:15 pm

One Last Thing Before I Go: Meh

Created with Dalle3: create an image to accompany a book review about the book One Last Thing Before I Go

Jonathan Tropper’s One Last Thing Before I Go has a nice conceit: protagonist Drew Silver is a washed up musician, divorce husband, absent father and disconnected son and brother. In the early chapters he has some kind of Heart Incident (that sounds entirely made up) that means if he doesn’t have surgery he can drop dead at any moment. And because he thinks his life isn’t worth living he declines the surgery, choosing instead some kind of protracted surprise suicide. For the remaining time he has he makes a list of what he will do that boils down to be a better father and man. It does, and doesn’t, go well.

But while this reader found the first few chapters a sort of delight in the creative descriptions of misery, these quickly wore and became grating and predictable. Likewise, the initial interest that the somewhat novel plot offers wanes as it becomes pretty clear that he’s not going to die and will get the surgery in the end and so any suspense or emotional investment just kind of… peters out.

That said there are some funnier moments and some gentle scenes of someone Trying To Be Better. But I’d file this one away under mostly forgettable, if somewhat heart warming (but not so heart warming as to cause a Heart Incident).

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August 18, 2023 · 7:13 pm

Promise Falls Trilogy: That’s where I’ve been for three months

For those of you keeping track, it’s been awhile since I posted. And that’s because I let myself read Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls trilogy (Broken Promise, Far From True, The Twenty-Three). Guys. None of them are that good. (If you were I. you’d launch into a thing about how great Tana French is and how she’s the only mystery writer you should read, but I like to give new mysteries a ride).

Why then, why did I persist? Inertia? Guilt because I’d taken all three from the ‘take a book leave a book’ shelf at the local coffee shop and the barrista had given me the side eye for taking three books and leaving none? Deep moral failing? I don’t know. But I did.

They’re just not all that captivating, the detective isn’t endearing, the mysteries themselves don’t feel like there’s too much at stake (even when the town’s water supply is poisoned you’re sort of like shrug).

So… skip, pass, move on. And deep apologies for wasting so much of my own time. Like it was so bad I just read My Name is Lucy Barton and only realized in the last twenty pages that I’d already read it. Like I needed some kind of palate cleanse… Anyway.

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May 17, 2023 · 1:54 am

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Forgettable Title, for a Memorable Book

It is an extremely good feeling when a person you love loves a book that you love. Orders of magnitude better feeling when a person you love who does not normally (ever) read books (1) reads a book and (2) loves a book and (3) that book turns out to be one you don’t mind/enjoy (I want so much to go so far as to say love, but… #integrity).

I get that this is what it means to share passions and that this is so much of what does underpin close relationships – I do. But so many of my recent friend additions have been ones where the first point of connection is being Adults With Small Dependents And Too Many Responsibilities, and not The! Joy! Of! Reading! (though to the credit of K. and K. this *is one of our shared connections, and I’m grateful for it).

Enter Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Our ill-named book club (famous for never picking, never-mind reading a book) decided we’d had enough mockery, and so we’d read a book. Problem: C. who refuses to read (anything? that can’t be true. But made up things where you might feel something). So we gave her the power to choose the book, and she did. And she loved it! (though, she – like me – couldn’t remember the name of it two weeks after reading it, so maybe something to take back to the focus group: get a better title).

I won’t tell you it’s the best book you’ve ever read, but it is a romp. The sort of thing you can immediately see being turned into a miniseries (oh wait, it has been already?) starring someone and someone and extra tall wine glasses. It follows Hannah and her step-daughter Bailey in the days after Hannah’s husband/Bailey’s father, Owen, goes missing – oh he leaves behind some notes, some cash, and is wanted in connection with a collapsing ponzi scheme (though maybe all ponzi schemes are collapsing? anyway).

While tripping along the thriller-suspense-can’t-put-it-down-just-one-more-chapter-I-swear lane, the book stumbles into some interesting thematic questions about what it means to be a parent – like literally in the sense of the limits of biology, but of course more in the sense of what responsibilities, what sacrifices, what ways of thinking-being are required. It makes a reasonably good case that ‘parent’ is to be – the verb, I mean – and has almost nothing to do with the noun.

And if you’re not into books with parenting themes there’s still lots of quasi-car chase scenes to keep you entertained, and modestly interesting other threads about identity and starting over. Perfect book for a beach or airplane.

But mostly? It’s a lot of fun. And so much more fun when your not-a-book-club people read it with you. Thanks, C.

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