Stepping in the Write Direction

The storyline in We Begin at the End  by Chris Whitaker sticks to you like the scent of orange blossoms unexpectedly hitting you late at night as you drive past a Florida grove with the windows down. It is powerful and unforgettable. A series of events are invoked by an accident that occurs at night when a young girl goes looking for her older sister thirty years earlier. It blooms from there like droplets of color ink on wet paper, it’s expanding tentacles affecting primarily one family, and many who are part of their extended community. A number of crimes are committed, including murder, which must be solved or an innocent person may get railroaded by the overzealous prosecution. There is quite a bit of strong language as the main character Duchess is a teen with a traumatic life and a lot of rage, fear, and sadness inside. She often seems like a student with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder.   By page seven readers are drawn in by an emergency situation as California’...

Snow by Orhan Pamuk is an invocation for life, love, art, beauty, family, friends and connections against a panoply of competing factions thirsting for power, imposing their rules and ambitions over traditions of the past, and the meat grinder such sociopolitical forces become, sucking lives into its vortex, hungry to neutralize all perceived as threats.  T he main character is Turkish poet, Ka, who after 12 years exiled in Germany, returns to Kars, Turkey, the town of his youth. He is now on a pilgrimage of sorts during tumultuous times (a local rebellion between radical Islam and western secular ideals). He has had writer’s block, unable to create poetry for some time, and arrives in Kars hoping to reignite a past unrequited love since learning this previous object of desire has recently divorced. He aches for love and to write poems again. The whole book transpires primarily during his three day visit to Kars, although in reading, it feels like a lifetime because so much happens...

I love the P. G. Wodehouse books. It amazes me that almost a century after they were penned, I’m literally laughing out loud at the wittiness of the plots, and the hysterical narrative. In my mind’s eye I shall forever visualize the incomparable actors Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster respectively, while I’m reading! That perfect pairing is tantamount to God’s gift to Wodehouse’s legacy via the Jeeves and Wooster series.   Wodehouse spent a lot of time in the US, continuously from 1946 until his death in 1975, purchasing a home in Remsenburg, part of the Southampton area of Long Island, 77 miles east of Manhattan, and became a citizen in 1955 (but remained a British subject, although never returned or visited). Between 1952-1975 he completed 20 novels. The most well known of his books are likely the Jeeves and Wooster series. During WWII he was interned in a hotel in Berlin, and was released shortly before his 60th birthday, but made five ill advised broadc...

Although I love literary fiction and nonfiction books, police procedurals, true crimes, and detective/investigation thrillers are my literary crack. There is nothing quite like the physical feeling of liftoff as a book soars airborne toward its climax, and you just can’t put it down. If such a book also has a more original story, is written well, and the last few paragraphs give an unexpected punch, it’s the cherries on top! If it takes place in Chicago, even better! The Fourth Monkey by J. D. Barker, book one in the book The Fourth Monkey Killer (4MK) thriller series, is just such a book. Before I’d even finished reading it, I’d already ordered books 2 and 3 in the series.  The elusive perpetrator of a number of recent deadly  kidnappings is interrupted making a crime related delivery, when a Chicago Transit Authority bus accidentally hits the killer mid stride. Although one detective later expressed a hope the bus reversed and backed over the killer again, one strike was mor...

I read The Rachel Incident by Carolyn O’Donoghue following two intense books, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women and Wellness. My sense of O’Donoghue’s book is of it feeling like the sorbet course sometimes served between the entree and main course to cleanse the palate. It was piquant, refreshing, lively, humorous, poignant, energetic, and very entertaining. The story starts out with a 20 year old, tall, zoftig Irish woman Rachel who needed “ to be in love and to be taken seriously.” She yearns to be independent from her family noting,  “It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged.” Rachel is on the verge of attending the university in Cork, just as the economy has taken a serious downturn affecting her parent’s dental office, making it impossible for them to cover her fees, and requiring her to work in order to support herself at school. She lands a job in a book store, and meets her new best friend (not romantic)...

In his book Wellness, the Chicago of author Nathan Hill’s imagination is a far more richly layered one than meets the eye, full of possibilities, both good and otherwise. The book is like a coming of age (middle age) for main characters Jack and Elizabeth long after they arrive in Chicago for college. Their pilgrimage through life together forces them to examine the authenticity of their lives and trust their own instincts, rather than continuing to make life altering decisions based on prevailing external forces and social media dictates.    This powerful book feels epic in scope. It begins on the sweeping prairie of Jack’s childhood, a backdrop of an endless sea of rippling tall grass, teeming with life, as vibrant to those who really look, as if it had a heartbeat of its own. Jack is taken by the images he sees around him every day of twisted and bent prairie trees, “growing up crooked, nudged that way by the prairie’s relentless bullying air.” It is a stark landscape, one ...

Welcome to the Fox News Follies, A Farce, or as Michael Wolff chose to title his book,  The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.  A farce is defined as “A light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect.” Follies is defined as “ Lack of good sense, understanding, or foresight. An act or instance of foolishness. A costly undertaking having an absurd or ruinous outcome.” (American Heritage Dictionary).  All of these elements come into play in the course of this true life yarn of clashing egos in media corporations and the family that owned one, with billions at stake, played out across boardrooms, studios, and upscale dining locations. It’s soap opera in the way only big business can produce it, and truth is always stranger than fiction.  I read the Kindle with Audible narration which was set to a speed of 1.4x. Holter Graham is the narrator who did a masterf...