Anima Rising by Christopher Moore

In July, my online book club reads historical fiction. This year, we selected this book. I tried to get it from my library, but both the ebook and the physical book had a long wait list. In the end, I broke down and bought myself a copy of the ebook from ebooks.com.

The cover of the book includes a short blurb about the plot. It reads, “Klimt, Freud, and Jung meet the bride of Frankenstein”. Very accurate but without much detail. Klimt finds the bride of Frankenstein, whom he calls Judith, naked and apparently dead on the banks of the river after crossing a bridge on his way home. Upon realizing that she is not dead, he enlists a young paper boy to help him get her to his studio. He hopes to paint her portrait. Klimt is portrayed as a lovable, caring artist who spends his time around young naked models, sleeping with many of them and having many children named Gustave. Judith remembers nothing of her past, not even her name. Klimt gets Freud to take her as a patient. This is how we start to learn about Judith’s past, and the story takes off from there.

If you have read Christopher Moore before, you will not be surprised that there is a lot of humor and downright absurdity in this book. I laughed out loud many times reading it. He has a way with words and with the way he views situations. He also includes a warning in the beginning of the book titled Author’s Note and Trigger Warning. This note warns about sex, nudity, and violence throughout the novel and ends, “Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, if you are listening to this book in audio format in the car, with a kid or your grandma, turn on something else. Now.” The story kept me guessing and turning pages. I love how the author approaches storytelling and thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

My rating: 4/5

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

For March my book club reads women’s fiction or a book written by a woman. We selected this book. It was published in 2018 and proceeded to win numerous awards including the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards for best novel. I finished it the night before our book club meeting this past Wednesday.

The book is an alternate history. In the spring 1952 with Dewey as president (not Truman), a meteor strikes and wipes out the entire east coast of the United States. The damage to the whole planet is so bad that the world immediately starts making plans to get off of it. Elma is the main character and narrator, a female computer (one who does math, not a machine) and former WASP pilot who dreams of becoming an astronaut.

The book starts with a bang, literally. You are dropped right into the action as the meteor hits in the first few pages. A number of the computers in the new space agency are former WASPs eager to get into space. The male leaders are eager to maintain the status quo while Elma’s husband is the image of support. In this way, it was a bit cliché for me. And certain aspects of the story seemed a bit drawn out. Overall I really enjoyed the novel. It always kept me wanting to find out what happened next. I will definitely be reading the next book in the series.

My rating: 4/5

The Green Door by O. Henry

For “Throwback Thursday” I have a less well known story by the short story master that they named the award after. This one is from his collection The Four Million, so called because it takes place in New York City, which had four million residents at that time. A young man is led by destiny to the door of a damsel in distress. It has his trademark twist at the end. Enjoy!

The Green Door by O. Henry (1906) – 2,679 words (about 11 minutes for the average reader)

James by Percival Everett

This book was up for a lot of awards last year. Inevitably, I heard a lot about it. It was a finalist for the Booker Award and the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. My book club reads Black history or fiction in February and selected this book to read.

The easiest way to describe this book is that it retells the tale of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim. In addition to the fact that he prefers to go by James, there is a lot of the story here that is not in Huckleberry Finn. Everett gives us a glimpse into what he imagines happened to James during the times he and Huck were separated.

I started to write that this book is a gut punch, but that is not quite right. It is more subtle, powerful, and longer lasting than that. The enslaved speak in slave dialect as a choice, in order to help disarm the slavers into thinking of them as stupid and helpless. And yet the hopelessness and fear of being enslaved is palpable. No matter what someone enslaved does, they are guilty. The story really brings home the powerlessness of their position. And yet, in the midst of such overwhelming adversity, James finds a way over and over to express his own agency. This is a stunning work.

My rating: 5/5

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

This book has yet to be released. I received a copy through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I was on the lookout for this book as i had read the other two in this trilogy. This one is due to be published on February 18. You can purchase a copy from the author here.

The trilogy has been a reverse chronology. This final book in the series is Marty Hench’s origin story. In it, we learn how he came to flunk out of MIT, start a company with his roommate, and move to Silicon Valley to start his career as a forensic accountant. Once there, he is hired by a trio of religious leaders (a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop) who are taking advantage of their customers by selling them computers and accessories only from them. The bulk of the story is how he and a group of women who used to work for the Reverend Sirs fight to free their customers from this lock in.

It doesn’t sound that interesting when I write it out. I mean, Marty is a forensic accountant for crying out loud. Can you get more boring than accounting? But somehow the author makes forensic accounting exciting, cool, and intriguing all at the same time. The book really does have the feel of the early computer revolution and the optimism that went with it. A thoroughly enjoyable ride and fitting conclusion to the saga of Marty Hench. I will miss him.

My rating: 4/5

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

This one has been on my list to read for almost a year. What put it there was an incredible review by Cory Doctorow. I finally pulled it from my pile when my book club selected it to read in November, our indigenous fiction month.

It is set in an alternate 1920s where much of the western US was never completely subsumed by the United States. The central action takes place in the state of Cahokia covering parts of modern day Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The capital is also called Cahokia. The protagonist is an orphan giant of a man whose heritage is part black, part indigenous. He is a murder detective for the Cahokia Police Department. As the book opens, he and his partner have been called to the scene of a grizzly murder at the top of a skyscraper. The body has been mutilated in the style of an Aztec sacrifice. In a racially divided city, this sets the city on edge and puts pressure on the mayor and the police to solve the crime fast.

This novel has everything—politics, history, racial tension and conflict, mystery, plot twists, romance. I kind of feel like the grandfather in The Princess Bride. Seriously, this is one of my favorite books I’ve read. I most appreciate books that explore deep issues of what it means to be human, and I found it in this book at every turn. It deals with but gives no easy answers for questions like these:

What do I do when there seem to be no good choices to make?
Where is the boundary friendship and doing the right thing?
Where do I belong? Who am I?
Is it okay to break the law in service to a higher sense of law?

To top it off, the writing is evocative. I felt immersed in the noir detective world of prohibition politics in a Midwestern state governed by natives who never gave up governing their own land. This book has it all. Truly a masterwork.

My rating: 5/5

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

When I reached out to the adult services librarian at my local public library recently, he invited me to join a book club that just had an opening for a new member. This club meets every other month. They each read a different book on a theme and then tell the group about the book at the next meeting. For the meeting I attended, they all read a book published the year they were born. Gretchen, the woman sitting next to me, read this book, originally published in 1935. She spoke so well of it that I immediately picked it up and read it.

The author‘s wife was a newspaper reporter in Munich in 1931 as Hitler was rising polically. She interviewed Hitler and saw him for what he was—a petty, dangerous tyrant. In 1934 after describing him in part as “the very prototype of the little man”, she found the Gestapo politely but insistingly inviting her to leave the Fatherland. Back in the USA, many people told the author and his wife that she was overreacting. At least such things could not happen here the US. The author did not agree and wrote this book as an illustration of that.

The book is the story of an inexperienced politician who rises to power through populist tactics. He gains the Democratic nomination for president in 1936 by promising to make everyone financially secure in the midst of the Great Depression. Naturally, he goes on to win. He immediately becomes a dictator and begins to target his enemies. The main character is a newspaper editor in Vermont who only very slowly comes to see the danger of the candidate and then new president and eventually starts speaking against him. You can guess at what follows.

The plot and the storytelling do not reflect the best of this author. But that isn’t the point. Instead the author seeks to show how easy it could be for Americans to fall for a petty tyrant who is wiling to give us what we think we want. And even the people who know better don’t believe it enough to do something until it is too late. In this he succeeds admirably. Some of the things he writes could be right out of today’s news in our politically divided country. That makes this book particularly haunting and perhaps particularly important to read right now, almost eighty-nine years after it was published.

My rating: 3.5/5

Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

I came across this gem on the Patreon member feed of the *What Should I Read Next?* podcast. It was their “One Great Book” segment. These are short episodes where one of their staff members gives a quick review of a book they liked. Based on Shannan’s review, I immediately added to my list of books to read.

This short novel (more of a novella or short story, really, at just over ten thousand words long) was originally published in 1938 in Story magazine. It is the story of two good friends who are partners in an art gallery. One of them returns to Germany while the other remains in San Francisco to mind the store. Max, the one who stays, is a Jew. Once he arrives in Germany, Martin writes back to Max about the wonders of a revitalizing Germany in the early 1930s. As their correspondence continues (this is an epistolary novel), their relationship deteriorates.

Wow! This one is a real gut punch. It shows how people who were once so close can be alienated from each other so quickly. It feels very contemporary in our divided times. The change is slow and realistic. The two main characters come alive in their different writing styles. And the slow change in Martin is haunting as he succumbs to Nazi propaganda. It shows how any one of us, liberal or conservative, can find ourselves alienated from those we love when we give up and let others think for us.

My rating: 5/5

Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness

I learned about this book from my partner. She had suggested I read the first three books in the series. Not long after, she told me that the author had written a fourth. We recently watched the entire TV series on Netflix, so I decided to finally read this book as it picks up where the series left off.

This is the story of Marcus and Phoebe. Phoebe becomes a vampire in order to mate with Marcus. We follow her experience as a fledgling and learn about the tribulations of the change. At the same time, we learn of Marcus’s past, including how he met Matthew and became a vampire himself. While I highly recommend reading the other books in the series first, the author does an excellent job of bringing to the reader’s mind the things that came before.

There wasn’t anything spectacular about this book. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed learning about the continuing lives of characters that I have come to care about in earlier books. But there isn’t any great conflict that drives this story. It just kind of sits there. I’m glad I read it and spent more time in this world. But it would not have been any great loss if I had skipped it either.

My rating: 3.5/5

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

I subscribe to Austin Kleon’s free Friday newsletter. In a recent edition, he mentioned that a “book about A.I., The MANIAC, is one of the best things I read this year.” With all the hype about artificial intelligence these days, this really got my attention.

This book is a semi-biographical novel about John von Neumann, widely considered to be one of the founding father’s of digital computing. Each chapter is in the first person from the point of view of someone who knew von Neumann well. It is an intriguing picture of an important historical figure. But what really grabbed me was the epilogue. There the author tells the true tale of how the computer program AlphaGo beat a top professional Go player. I play Go and followed that series of matches as it happened. Like most other Go players at the time, I didn’t think there was a chance that the computer would win. Spoiler alert, it did.

This novel is a great introduction to the human side of von Neumann and artificial intelligence. The excellent writing varies from voice to voice, showing Von Neumann to be a flawed and struggling human like the rest of us. When you finish this wonderful novel, I highly recommend reading the biography of the computer by Walter Isaacson called The Innovators.

My rating: 4.5/5