Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai

This is a story collection, but a more coherent one than most, with stories–shockingly–about music, and about war, and about the role of each in the other, Hungary being the focus. Maybe this is why at times it reminded me of The Tsar of Love and Techno, although I think this one was published first. The web was much tighter there, with shared characters. This one is primarily thematic.

There are some that stand out in memory–the child playing the violin with the old master who’d been a POW, the soldier being interviewed after being sent to assassinate a pianist during a concert, the professor whose career and life spiral out of control when she makes a mistake while hunting, and mistakes and ethnically Chinese but American-born student for a Korean immigrant–and of course the woman who inherits her fiancé’s ex-wife’s apartment. This is what a story collection should be!

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Always so very human. I’m fascinated by the way she takes on the really sad things that happen in life and in Indian lives in particular–and exist with the, in stories with children.

This one has a note of the epic in it, five generations of LaRoses, the current one the only boy, and maybe that sort of thing is what makes Erdrich who she is, and makes it more tied to the native aspect–but ultimately it distracted me from the gripping human drama of the two families, the shared son, the addict injured in childhood saving his friend and bitterly seeking revenge, the suicidal mother. That’s what I wanted to know about.

Also interesting use of a close-historical setting (2000-ish). Around the time of the beginning of the Iraq war, without being about it. Seems to solve the eternal question of how to tell timeless stories in a world changing incredibly fast.

Waking Up White by Debby Irving

This is an interesting blend of story of personal journey to awareness and attempt at creating awareness in a very specific audience. To the extent that it avoids sounding didactic, I think it’s primarily by making it personal to her — and never shying away from detailing the sometimes humiliating mistakes she has made herself. So many personal books I enjoy do this. Who’s the biggest asshole in the book? The author herself, and she always owns up.

It comes with a “question for you to consider” at the end of each chapter that I could’ve done without — a lot of them felt like they were only designed for one answer. I wonder how the book would be for someone whose background is very different from hers.

This Muslim American Life by Moustafa Bayoumi

This is primarily a collection of previously published essays and articles on War-on-Terror-era treatment of Muslims in America (legally, culturally, socially, artistically). Much of it was stuff I knew on some level, either from law or reading or experience dating a Muslim — but a lot of it I hadn’t thought of much or lately or in this context or perspective. I definitely feel like I learned something and gained awareness. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the two I enjoyed the most were the last two, not previously published, one about the CIA and the entertainment industry, the other about meeting oneself as a stereotyped character in a novel (the essay itself presented as a fictional narrative).

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, & John Tiffany

It’s hard not to enjoy reasonably authentic new adventures of beloved characters–especially when it casts a backward glance with different perspective on events we already know.

Also interesting to read it as a script. It actually ends up feeling more or less the same. Maybe that’s because dialogue was such a strong part of the novels.

I wouldn’t really call it the Eighth Harry Potter. But I enjoyed slipping comfortably back into that world.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith

Some memoirs feel mundane or self-indulgent. This is neither. Her voice is unique, her experiences fascinating. But mostly I can really tell that this was done out of love, out of promise to her great friend who died three decades ago. True humility.

Time moves a little unevenly. The early chapters cover time almost on the week-by-week level, and in the second half of the book time passes faster. Maybe that’s based on when she had the most day-to-day interaction with her dear friend.

I came away thinking about youth, and death, and art. Her voice is just so lovely. It’s so intimate. I can only imagine how painful it must have been to write.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

I thought as this started that it was going to be a novel focused on Dominican-ness for youth in New Jersey (a valuable trope, but not to my personal taste for fiction, no matter what -ness is the book is about) — but it became an epic multi-generational story about the Dominican Republic told through the story of a family ultimately focused on a single individual and his family’s history under a brutal dictator — with a third-party Gatsby-style narrator, Yunior, who apparently appears in Diaz’s stories, too. It drew me in much more than  I anticipated.

On Being Raped by Raymond O. Douglas

A tiny book, deeply personal, clearly painful to write, perfectly described, frank about the injury done to him but without self-pity. And it ends by explaining why it was written — without stories of men who have faced this, our society will never come to recognize that crime and its unique costs, to take care of those victims.

Dead Man Talking by Roddy Doyle

I didn’t really figure this one out — a novella, if that, about how a big mistake or betrayal you commit might stay with you for the rest of your life — the premise being that his friend Joe dies, he attends the wake with his wife Sarah, and Jose sits up and talks to him (only him) — we’re never sure if it’s the narrator or Joe who has died but either way he is forced to stop pretending to himself that he slept with Joe’s wife and Joe knew. The bottom line, I guess, is that he has to stop deluding himself. Because of death. Cheery Irish stuff.