September 2024 Reading Round Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the September 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
Oye - Melissa Mogollon
Fiction, 336 pages
Oye is structured as a one-sided phone conversation between Luciana, a senior in high school, and her older sister Mari, a sophomore in college. Over the course of the year Luciana calls Mari to vent, complain, and share updates about their grandmother, Abue, a fiercely stubborn woman who has recently been diagnosed with caner. After Abue’s diagnosis, she reluctantly moves into Luciana’s bedroom and regales her with long-lost family secrets from her life in Colombia, which Luciana dutifully relays to Mari despite frustration over Mari’s absence. Every conversation with Mari seems to begin with Luciana’s disdain that Mari has chosen to stay away rather than be near at the end of Abue’s life, and because the reader is never given Mari’s side of the conversation, the dramatic angst emanating from Luciana can become tiring. I appreciated that Mogollon was trying to be unique in the way she wrote the story, but the amount of spoken “OMGs” and “LOLs” verged on unbelievable. If you’re going to read this book, I recommend listening to the audio because the narrator puts on a performance.
Rating: 7/10
Henry Henry - Allen Bratton
Fiction, 350 pages
Advertised as a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad (which I didn’t know until reading the summary of the book just now), Henry Henry is the story of Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, the Duke of Lancaster. As the eldest of six, Hal is aware of his long ancestral history and the traditional expectations required for its continuation. This weighs heavily on Hal, who, as a young gay man in 2014, knows that adoption is not viewed as a proper means of succession. On top of this, Hal is grieving the death of his mother, struggles with nascent alcohol and drug addictions, and is experiencing continued abuse that began in childhood. If that wasn’t enough, he is also forging a romantic relationship with a fellow future Duke, also named Henry. The book is a weighty downer made worse by the fact that I was never really able to root for Hal, who is so guarded and cynical that his actions feel borderline absurd. I also made the mistake of reading the author’s blurb on the back flap and discovering that Bratton is American, which dampened my favorite parts of the story — the haughty descriptions of aristocratic British society.
Rating: 7/10
The Caretaker - Ron Rash
Fiction, 272 pages
Jacob Hampton’s parents never approved of their son’s relationship and elopement with Naomi Clarke, an uneducated, poor, sixteen-year-old. The two had bigger plans for their son, mainly to take over the Blowing Rock, North Carolina general store and marry someone of his social status. When Jacob is drafted to fight in the Korean War soon after Naomi finds out that she is pregnant, Jacob enlists his childhood friend Blackburn to look after Naomi, knowing full well that his parents won’t accept their daughter-in-law and future grandchild. After Jacob is injured fighting and the parents intercept the telegram bound for Naomi, the two concoct an absurd scheme to tell Naomi that Jacob has died and, upon Jacob’s return, that Naomi died from a miscarriage. Blackburn, who works as the cemetery caretaker and dug the grave for an empty coffin, wants to be there for his grieving friend while also harboring suspicions. I enjoyed this book at the sentence level and can appreciate the quality of Rash’s writing. However, I wasn’t blown away by the plot itself. Apologies if this is a spoiler, but it seemed fairly impossible that the parent’s scheme would never work, even in a world without modern communications technology. I couldn’t get over the obvious unravelling that I could spot from a mile away, and without this plot point, the book is fairly toothless.
Rating: 7/10
Cheap Land Colorado - Ted Conover
Non-Fiction, 260 pages
When I drove through the San Luis Valley in Colorado on a roadtrip between Denver and Albuquerque, it was hard not to notice the vast openness of the land and seeming emptiness. The amount of space felt, in some ways, claustrophobic. Everything was far away and extremely off-grid, emphasizing the underlying notion that you’re on your own out there.
Imagine my excitement and surprise, then, when I discovered Cheap Land Colorado while killing time browsing the McNally Jackson bookstore in Rockefeller Center. In 2017, journalist Ted Conover heard about people living off the grid on cheap plots of land in the San Luis Valley. Interested to learn more, Conover, a Denver native, moved to the Valley and bought a parcel of land with a small trailer to live in and began volunteering for a rural outreach organization and homeless shelter. Through his work with them, Conover began meeting the people that populate this vast and arid landscape: everyone from families in overcrowded trailers to former-felons, addicts, conspiracy theorists, and people looking for a fresh start. As the name of the book suggests, the land is cheap but the living is hard. Cell service is spotty to non-existent, the nearest town, Alamosa, is at least a thirty-minute drive, and its not uncommon to find people frozen to death after a particularly cold night. Yet, Conover, who has a knack for people and an eye for a unique story, kept coming back to try to understand why people choose to live here, resulting in a beautifully humane book about individual people within larger systems.
Rating: 8/10
Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar
Fiction, 331 pages
Cyrus Shams’ life has been marked by loss. His mother died when the plane she was on, Iran Air Flight 665, was shot down by the U.S.S. Vincennes in 1988. Infant Cyrus should have been on the plane, but at the last minute he was left home with his father, Ali, in Tehran. Filled with grief, Cyrus and Ali move to Indiana where Ali works at a poultry farm during the day and drinks himself to sleep every night. In Cyrus’ second year of college, Ali dies of a stroke, and Cyrus is orphaned and alone. Half a decade later, Cyrus is a recovering addict and a poet who rarely writes. Unable to contend with the way that death can strike so suddenly and randomly, Cyrus becomes obsessed with the concept of martyrdom; specifically an obsession with ensuring that his own death has meaning. His initial plan is to write a book of poetry chronicling the deaths of martyrs, and when he learns that an artist dying of cancer is living in the Brooklyn Museum for a final exhibition where she speaks with visitors about death, Cyrus sees an obvious source of inspiration for his book. His trip to New York will be revelatory, both personally and for his larger family story.
Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, made the National Book Awards long list and has earned a lot of buzz since its release in January of this year. Akbar had previously published two books of poetry, and the attention to detail for sentence structure required in poetry is clearly present in his fiction. However, despite the praise from literary heavyweights like Lauren Groff and Tommy Orange, I thought the book had some major flaws, including the reveal near the end that ruined the rest of the story for me. Akbar is dealing with heavy themes from a literary and intellectual perspective but the imposition of a clearly plot-driven twist was too forced for me to think he stuck the landing.
Rating: 8/10
The Hunter - Tana French
Fiction/Mystery, 467 pages
Full disclosure: I read the entirety of this book and didn’t realize it was a sequel until I was finished. This could say great things about the book or mediocre things about my powers of deduction. While I was left with a few questions at the end, I thought overall that the book stands alone. After I finished The Searcher, the first book in this series, I realized that these books should be read in order to fully appreciate the subtleties in character and setting that French beautifully imbues into her work. In that spirit, I recommend you read my review for The Searcher (below) first or you can just keep reading and experience these books in the same wonky way that I did.
The Hunter picks up two years after the end of The Searcher in the same small, remote village in the West of Ireland. The tepid connection that formed over the course of The Hunter between retired Chicago PD detective Cal Hooper and fifteen-year-old Trey has now developed into a beautiful quasi-parental relationship. Trey helps Cal with his carpentry work and Cal looks after Trey like she is his own daughter. When Trey’s absent father unexpectedly returns to the village after a four-year stint in London promising investment opportunities to make the whole town rich, Cal’s hackles are instantly raised. While her father is conning the village with his English businessman friend, Trey sees an opportunity to get revenge for her brother’s death (the premise of The Searcher), pushing Cal to figure out what’s going on so that he can stop it.
Like I said above, this book would have had so many more layers of nuance if I had read it after The Searcher. I would have understood Cal and Trey’s relationship better and understood how the town, and it’s sinister underbelly, operates. I was also slightly put off by how emotionally perceptive all of French’s characters seem to be; everyone is assessing everyone at all times and have very nuanced reads of their behavior that could sometimes seem unrealistic. Otherwise, I was drawn in from the start and thoroughly impressed by French’s capacity to so thoroughly create a sense of place that I felt like I was in Western Ireland amongst the peat and bogs and complicated town drama.
Rating: 8.5/10
The Searcher - Tana French
Fiction/Mystery, 450 pages
The Searcher is the first book in Tana French’s Cal Hooper series. The Searcher begins a few months after Cal moves to the rural Western Irish village of Ardnakelty looking for peace and quiet after his retirement from the Chicago PD. He’s fixing up his place and getting a feel for the town and its inhabitants when Trey, a local kid, starts showing up on his door hoping for help in finding out what happened to her older brother, Brendan. Cal is hesitant to get involved, but the shady reactions he observes after initial questions draws suspicions that the inner-detective in him can’t let go of. This is Cal’s first investigation that doesn’t have the backing of authority, so he must rely on his soft skills — people reading, conversation, basic deductions — to get answers. But the closer to the truth Cal gets, the more pushback he receives and the more evident it becomes that the people closest to him have serious reasons for wanting him to back off.
As much as this is a story about Cal and his investigation, it is also a beautiful portrait of the town and the surrounding countryside. French has an incredible gift for transporting the reader exactly where she wants them to be, slowly peeling away layer after layer until answers are laid bare. I won’t include any spoilers, but after finishing this book and then having the knowledge of how it ends when thinking about The Hunter, I’m fascinated by French’s untraditional depiction of the concept of justice and its interplay with a small town suspicious of outside intervention. These two books have convinced me that I need to read everything French has written; she’s too talented to do otherwise.
Rating: 9/10
Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck
Historical Fiction, 297 pages
Somehow, unintentionally, 2024 has become my year of Jenny Erpenbeck. In January, I picked up The End of Days and was immediately blown away by Erpenbeck’s writing. In May, I read Visitation and was once again floored by Erpenbeck’s capacity to tell larger stories of history and politics within small frameworks. This month, I finished Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Kairos, set in East Berlin in the immediate years leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. At face value, Kairos is about a relationship between Katharina, a young woman, and Hans, a middle-aged married author. Dig beneath the surface, however, and it becomes clear that Kairos is also a larger story about the collapse of the GDR and the tumults of German unification. The couple navigates the increasingly unhealthy contours of their romance in similar ways that the state navigates a poisonous relationship with its people. Hans, the older and married man, wants near complete control over Katharina, who, despite copious tears, remains deeply attached and desperately loyal. The meta elements of the book, which only really dawned on me at the end (at which point I had to reread the first chapter), solidifies Erpenbeck’s place in my mind as a master of the craft, fully deserving of a potential future Nobel Prize for Literature.
Rating: 9.5/10
Wellness - Nathan Hill
Fiction, 593 pages
As this doorstopper of a book opens, Jack and Elizabeth only know each other from what they’ve observed looking through their windows. They live in a gritty Chicago neighborhood in the early ‘90s — both having left dysfunctional home lives and hoping never to return — in apartments with windows that face each other. One night Elizabeth is dragged on an awkward date to a bar in the area to hear a band play and it is there that she sees Jack, who is photographing the event. The two recognize each other from their lives viewed through their windows, feel an instant connection, and leave together. Now, in the early 2010s, the two are married, have a wonderful and difficult ten-year-old son, and are looking to buy a condo in the suburbs that will be their “forever home.” But differences in their visions for the design of the home bring other challenges to the surface that have been brewing in their marriage, mainly the recognition that they have each evolved into different versions of the people they were when they met and fell in love two decades before.
I promise the book is not as depressing as it sounds. Rather, it’s filled with quirky characters, jaw-dropping scenes, and moments when I laughed out loud. Interestingly, I’m not sure if I would have had the same reaction to this book if I had read a physical copy instead of listening. The book is very long and there are frequent digressions (interesting ones, I would argue). The narration, however, was truly excellent and somehow made everything feel relevant and cohesive. I was so gripped by the story that I found myself looking for opportunities to keep listening, which says something because at its core this is the story of a dysfunctional marriage. Trust me, I can not recommend this book enough. It is funny, it is sad, it is earnest, hopeful, and all-around a beautiful portrait of a couple adapting to the inevitable passage of time.
Rating: 10/10
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Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here. You can also check out my most recent posts below.
You write the best book reviews, it makes me want to read EACH and every one!! I feel like I’ve seen the name Tana French everywhere recently and now I feel like I definitely need to read her work. The story on the fall of the Berlin Wall sounds absolutely riveting. Thank you for writing these!!