Review: The Great Alone

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a chilling, excellent book. The Nightingale, by the same author, has been recommended to me numerous times. While I haven't yet read that, I immediately appreciated Hannah's writing style and mastery of writing a complex book.

This story is about a girl whose father is a drifter. At loose ends after a traumatic experience in combat during the Vietman War, he moves their family of three every few years. This time, he learns that his best friend from the War has left him some land in rural Alaska, so the family moves there. At first, they struggle with basic survival, completely unprepared for how rugged and cold and remote their new home is.

Then the father falls in with a group of survivalists, and begins to alienate the family from the small number of townspeople in the village. While his wife and daughter retain a working relationship with certain members of the village (and the daughter enters adolescence, with all its complications), the father becomes increasingly erratic, violent, and separatist.

As the book reaches its climax, I could not stop reading. The characters were so well-written, the obstacles so seemingly immovable, and the resolution just heartbreaking. And at hundreds of pages, Hannah reserved an appropriate amount for a proper denouement, which not all authors do. Just lovely, all around.

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Review: The Heart's Invisible Furies

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a great, juicy, thick, fun read, chosen as the book of the year a few years back by the Book of the Month Club. The book begins with a young woman being expelled from her church and village upon her priest and family learning that she is pregnant out of wedlock. Through a little luck and a lot of perseverance, she makes her way to Dublin and finds both housing and work within a few weeks.

Next, we meet her son, who she has given up for adoption. He is adopted by a truly dysfunctional and loveless couple, who choose to adopt because they think they ought to, and who remind him ceaselessly that he is not "a real Avery." The book follows this boy as he grows into a young man and an adult, always curious about his origins, and (surprisingly) never bitter about his childhood.

At the same time that the book is a specific story about a specific man, it is also a meditation on Ireland, and all its prejudices and societal changes over several decades. I really enjoyed reading it, and it stuck with me for a long time.

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Review: The Immortalists

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw this book in the library, and the premise was intriguing: a set of siblings have their fortunes read, and each one learns the date of their death. With this information, they each make vastly different decisions about their lives, sometimes together, and sometimes in isolation. As the first few siblings die, the book raises some tricky questions about fate and free will, while remaining a compelling narrative with complex characters.

really liked the writing and the story, and appreciated that the storytelling itself let the questions about fate work themselves out.

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Review: I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering

I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering by Janelle Hanchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been following Hanchett's blog, Renegade Mothering, for several years. I have always liked her down-to-earth and honest depiction of motherhood. In her blog, she often mentions in passing of having struggled with addiction, so I was interested to read this memoir of that period of her life.

I was rather taken aback at her story - I guess as someone who started following her once she was in recovery, and seemingly a successful blogger, it was hard to relate that to the addict she is. In this book, she describes a life defined (for a time) by drugs. How to get them, who to get them from, scenes in crack houses, in trailers. She is consumed by when she is getting them next, and suffers from many, many relapses. Clearly, she displays an inability to parent her children, which culminates in her parents taking temporary custody of them.

The right combination of family support and professional help ultimately lead her to recovery, but not before several heartbreaking false starts. I am in awe of her strength over her illness, and her honesty in writing about truly shameful periods of her life, all in the hopes of being a better mother. Which, I believe, ultimately she is.

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Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was wild! I couldn't put it down. I hadn't seen the movie, although now I am curious to check it out.

The story is about an astronaut on a manned mission to Mars who is stranded there after a major equipment malfunction. The rest of the crew and Mission Control think him dead, but he survives, and begins to figure out if he has the supplies and the time to meet an upcoming mission to Mars and hope for a rescue. This has all the heart, drama, and ingenuity of Apollo 13!

The parts of the book that represent the astronaut's point of view through journal entries, depict a very likable, very smart, and very flawed guy. The rest of the book is told from the point of view of NASA, and their review of what went wrong and how to recover, both personally and politically, from the disaster.

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Review: Black Rabbit Hall

Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book while in line to pay for some other books at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. The reviews of this book compare the author's work to something written by Kate Morton or Sarah Waters, which is why I chose it. I like that comparison: this is a modern-day gothic-style mystery.

A woman searching for a wedding venue is uniquely attracted to Black Rabbit Hall, a dilapidated and crumbling once-beautiful estate. She tries to figure out why she is so fascinated by it, and whether she has a connection to it. Meanwhile, decades before, an otherwise happy family is devastated by an untimely death, and never really recovers. By the end of the book, these two storylines join together, but not in any way that I could have figured out. And the journey is full of beautiful writing and sympathetic characters.

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Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a really wonderful book - if you work in technology. If you don't, it's completely inaccessible. So take this 4-star review with that audience in mind.

This book reminded me most of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in that it was fiction, with composite and shallow characters, designed to explain a new business process. In this case, it is the relationship between developers (people who write code) and IT (people who manage computer systems). Notable venture capitalist Mark Andreessen wrote a piece several years ago in the Wall Street Journal called Why Software is Eating the World, and this book seeks to teach us how to adjust our organizations to accommodate this.

What I found most useful in this book was not the proposed solutions as much as it was the descriptions of the problem. The composite characterizations of everything that can be wrong between Development and IT: prioritization, speed of deployment, interdependences, individuals relied upon too much, and many, many more. It gave me a great view into my customers' daily lives.

There is a companion book to this, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, which takes it out of the fictional world of this novel and into a tangible set of recommendations. But for me, for now, this was a great introduction to the world of DevOps.

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Review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though not classically a time traveling story, this book falls into that category. The protagonist has a condition that ages him only a year or so every decade. So he appears to be in his 30's but is actually 400 years old. While the book delights in regaling the reader with his exploits in history - a part in one of Shakepeare's debuts, for example, and a voyage with Captain Cook - it is his current life that is most compelling. He struggles with falling in love, both drawn to a colleague at a school where he is a teacher (history, of course), and cautioned against such relationships by the leader of "The Albatross Society," who has assembled and protects people with this condition.

I found the historical chapters tedious, but enjoyed the narrative of the present day.

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Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It's a memoir, of sorts - to the extent Between the World and Me is, in that Vance tells his story of growing up in rural Kentucky, using the narrative as a jumping-off point to characterize Appalachia.

Vance grows up with domestic violence, drugs, poverty, and many other poor circumstances. And yet, he perseveres, ultimately attending Yale Law School. In describing his life story, and what differences he experienced that enabled him to break the cycles his family had settled into, he did a great job explaining the life choices and prejudices that exist in Appalachia today. Though published several months before Trump's victory, it goes a long way to describe a community that, illogically, will end up voting for Trump.

I'm glad I read this and will be interested to follow Vance's career, as he is only 33.

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Review: This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide by Geneen Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am supposed to love Geneen Roth. I just wonder if I started with the wrong book. She is well-known for her seven rules of eating that helped her find a healthy relationship with food; they include things like, "Eat when you are hungry," and "Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car." And Anne Lamott wrote the preface to this, so that was a must-by endorsement on its own.

But somehow I didn't click with much in this book. Like Lamott, Roth is honest, and funny, and broken, and optimistic, and a realist. But I found some of the chapters of the book just too short - I wanted more meat, I wanted to know more - and other chapters of the book lacking in a relatable point. The two things I related to most in the book were quotations from other people (Shunryu Suzuki: "All of you are perfect just as you are and you could use a little improvement," and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: "The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”) With so many references to her earlier books - about food, about losing all her money to Madoff, about her husband - I can't help but wonder if she wrote this one on a contract, not because she had something to say.

All that aside, I'd read something else by her - but only because Lamott (and, ok, Oprah) tells me to.

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Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This memoir was beautiful. It followed Wamariya as she and her sister flee civil war in Rwanda, survive several refugee camps throughout Africa, and eventually make their way to the United States.

What I most liked about this is that embarrassingly, the majority of my knowledge of the civil war in Rwanda was based on the movie Hotel Rwanda. This was a great education on what happened after - how did the people who escaped make their way, what kind of difficulties did they have, how did resettlement feel to people, what did it do to relationships among refugees?

Wamariya was generous in sharing a wide swath of her experience - from the pain and disappointment, to the people who helped her, to the complex relationship she had with her sister, and even the dark side of appearing on Oprah. Truly a lovely, honest, and wonderful memoir.

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Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yes yes yes. I adored this book. I had tried to read it years ago, and didn't get very far, but glad that I read Chabon's wife's recent book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, which prompted me to try this again. The story follows two cousins, Clay, raised in the United States, and Kavalier, a magician-in-training who flees Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. They become fast friends, and partners in creating a universe of comic book characters. The book follows decades of their lives, loves, and business together.

I loved everything about this book - but most of all the storyline. I really enjoyed the depiction of the comic book industry of the 1950's and '60s, Kavalier's magic and escapism, and the love story that runs through the book. I also appreciated the comic-book-like characters and situations sprinkled throughout the book.

Can't wait to read another book by Chabon.

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Review: The Fishermen

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book out when I was stranded in Toronto and sought refuge in a bookstore. :) It was ok. The story followed four brothers in Nigeria who are growing up. When they run into the town madman during a disallowed visit to go fishing, he prophesies the death of the eldest. This prophesy sets in motion a complex set of familial decisions and its own madness. The writing was good, and I appreciate how well the author painted the setting and surroundings. However, I found the story to move too slowly for my taste, and take some predictable turns. I almost loved it, but in fact did not.

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Review: Home Fire

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was definitely one of the best books I've ready lately. It was about Pakistani Muslim three siblings who (as adults) are separated for the first time. One arrives in the US for college, one remains in London, and the third, the only boy, is suddenly missing.

The story unfolds with the sister in the United States running into a former neighbor, and as they become close, she worries that their political differences will stand between them. He and his family become inextricably linked with her family over time, though not in the ways that present themselves initially. I thought the characters were great, the plot was wonderfully complex, and the writing was excellent.

As a side note, the plot follows that of Antigone - which I had no memory of from 10th grade English class. Still a great read.


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Review: Alternate Side

Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I usually love Quindlen's books - Object Lessons is one of my all-time favorites. But this just didn't hit the mark for me. It was about a tight-knit neighborhood on a dead end street in Manhattan. The neighborhood had the usual squabbles over parking, personalities, and annual parties. When there is an accident involving the neighborhood's friendly handyman, suddenly fractures in marriages, racial tensions, and complications in friendships arise. While the story was good, her writing - usually ethereal - wasn't as good as usual.

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