Fireside Reading

With most of the country confined to home by snow and ice, I thought you might appreciate some more book recommendations for your fireside reading. And I promise not to mention the weather here in southern California. Stay warm and enjoy!

Fiction

Wild Houses, Colin Barrett

The Irish landscape is cold and gray in this novel, and the villagers lead equally bleak lives just trying to scrape by. The action comes when a local drug gang kidnaps a teenage boy to put pressure on his brother to pay them for the drugs he was supposed to sell. The boy is deposited in the home of a reluctant host who owes the gang a favor. The heart and soul of the story is the boy’s 17 year-old girlfriend who first thinks he dumped her but then realizes that he is missing. Each character is unhappy with their lot in life, which they meet with a sad fatalism that they cannot control. But there is wry humor and a faint hint of hope that their lives will improve despite the reality that they won’t. This is an impressive debut novel that connects these small, narrow, very human lives to our empathy for their struggle.

Fonseca, Jessica Francis Kane

In 1952, the Irish novelist Penelope Fitzgerald visited an eccentric pair of sisters in Mexico, but never wrote about what happened on that trip. So Kane fills in her own story of that trip. Here, the sisters are looking for an heir to their fortune, and entice a young mother, pregnant with her third child, to visit them in Mexico with the promise of an inheritance. Leaving her husband and daughter at home, she arrives with her six-year old son, who soon charms everyone. There are multiple suitors for this inheritance, including a dashing American who, without proof, but with enough knowledge to have a plausible claim to be a relative. The trip is also an opportunity to evaluate her faltering marriage, abetted by the presence of the handsome American suitor and by her newly founded friendship with the artists Edward Hopper and his wife, Jo, who really were in Mexico at that time. Blurring fact and fiction, Kane paints a moving portrait of a woman searching for her place and meaning in the world.

Separation, Kate Kitamura

A young woman marries a handsome, charming and wealthy young man, everything, and more, that she could hope for in a husband. But soon they grow apart, as he engages in a series of affairs, and she decides it’s time to ask for a divorce. He knows it’s coming, but asks her to postpone legal proceedings until he returns from a photography trip to Greece.  When he doesn’t respond to his parents’ phone calls, she is persuaded to go to Greece to find him. She feels conflicted about pursuing a man she intends to divorce, and conflicted still when she realizes she will inherit a fortune if he is not found. Her ambiguity about both finding him and  a possible inheritance is the heart of this story. Kitamura draws us to her characters with intimate detail in this superbly crafted book.

Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange is one of our most astute observers about race, identity, cultural legacy and assimilation. Wandering Stars is both a prequel and sequel to his superb debut novel, There, There, with some of the same characters from the first novel. The book follows a family through 150 years and four generations, from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne to the present day where the latest generation, with its multiethnic genealogy, ponders what it means to be “Indian.” There are drugs, addiction and poverty, but also love and pride and hope. Another brilliant work by a gifted author.

The Antidote, Karen Russell

Nebraska in the Great Depression of the 1930s: a bleak landscape punctuated by a fantastical witch who keeps people’s secrets, secrets they may want to forget, or happy ones they want to preserve for posterity. A young girl aspires to become a witch, begging to be taught the mysteries of keeping, and retrieving, secrets. This is an extraordinary novel, exploring the secrets we keep and discard, and, amid the miseries of the Dust Bowl, our relationship and responsibilities to the land and the environment. An exceptional work of historical fiction.

Nonfiction

Peak Human, Johan Norberg

Norberg examines the common traits of seven great civilizations: ancient Athens and Rome, the Abbasids of Bagdad, the Song of China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic of the 17^th century and the Anglo (British-American) empire of the 19^th to 21^st centuries. What made these civilizations great was trade, not just in goods, which enabled these economies to steal, copy and adapt new technologies, but trade in people and ideas that brought fresh innovation and dynamism to each of these cultures. Likewise, the demise of these great civilizations occurred when their borders were closed to trade and their minds were closed to immigrants and new ideas. It’s hard to imagine a more timely and relevant history lesson.

The Great Transformation, Odd Arne-Westad and Jian Chen

This is a detailed history of the transformation of China from the economic disasters of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution to Deng Xiaoping’s openness to capitalism and the political battles fought within the Chinese Communist Party for supremacy during and after Mao’s reign. It stands on its own as a superb work of history. But it also serves as a reminder of the dangers of one-man rule, without checks and balances and the democratic consensus-building that is a requisite for sustainable progress. A timely lesson for today’s China, as well as every other country that bends to the will of a single man.

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