House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday

 

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday is a classic of Native American literature.

Started: February 24, 2024
Completed: February 26, 2024
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This is a complicated and multi-layered story.  It is rich in character development and intermixes traditional story telling with narrative.  The mix was mildly disorienting for me.  The fact that this was happening was not clear to me as I first started to read the book.  This is also a story of lived history so it borders on historical fiction as well.

Harold, Steven Wright

 

Harold by Steven Wright

Started: February 23, 2024
Completed: February 24, 2024
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: I saw Steven Wright talking about the book on a talk show

Review:

There are many, many reasons not to like this book.  I like it anyway.  It made me laugh once I gave up trying to figure out if there was really any plot.  Wright, as usual, has a habit of looking at the world in a way that I simply don't.  His description of how a boy might experience ADD was interesting, plausible, and a good reason to talk about birds.  The end of the book is just as I realized it would be about half way through and that was immensely satisfying.  If you do not like Wright's comedy, then stay away.

The Showman, Simon Shuster

 

The Showman:  Inside the invasion that shook the world and made a leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster

Started: February 18, 2024
Completed: February 22, 2024
Recommendation: Highly recommended
Recommended By: My Wife

Review:

What a great book.  I now have much better insight into the beginning of the war from Zelensky's point of view, how he operated, and a much better understanding of how he came to power.  This also gives good insight into early Russian aggression.

Ancient Illumination, Rod Van Blake

 

Ancient Illumination by Rod Van Blake is a book I picked up after meeting the author at a party hosted by my brother.

Started: August 6, 2023
Completed: February 18, 2024
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: The Author

Review:

This is the first book by a first-time author and it is self-published.  The book has a lot of flaws, from editing to a distinct lack of segues.  The author made the unfortunate assumption that a Palm Pilot would live well beyond its actual lifetime (I thought it would also).  Maybe, in the parallel world (?) created they did.  I have to admit that I found the book stuttering, but there were several ideas that I really liked.  The characters were very flat and had no development.  Van Blake's vision is grand and there is a tendency to describe what happened as opposed to describing it as it happens (I'm not sure how to put this into better words as I am not an author, but there were numerous times when an event was completed in a sentence without any sense of how it happened).  The explanation of light speed travel is great, but hyperdrive is left unexplained and simply assumed.  Then there are rips in reality that allow even faster travel--also unexplained.  Things tend to happen on impossible time scales and space ships stop at the edge of gravity wells.  All of these flaws are jarring and it is why it took me a long time to finish (I decided to just power through and that worked much better than trying to make sense of things that were throwing me off).  So, I can recommend this book for the ideas which are interesting.

Promise, Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Started: February 12, 2024
Completed: February 17, 2024
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

It should not matter, but Griffiths is the spouse of Salmon Rushdie.  I'm sure that this has an impact.  This is also her first novel (she has several books of poetry).  The turns of phrase and imagery in this book are often excellent.  The concepts described by the 14 year-old narrator, however, are so far beyond her years that they are jarring.  I have to say that this book is really, really sad.  I find books like this (that sort of wallow in sadness and look for every opportunity to indulge in the worst part of character analysis to be unrelatable.  While I absolutely accept that people have had to live through horror and have often done so with simply shocking character, this book felt like a traipse through generations highlighting horror at the expense of everything else.

Inseparable, Yunte Huang

 

Inseparable:  The original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history by Yunte Huang

Started: 2/7/2024
Completed: 2/12/2024
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I was hoping for a biography and what I really got was more or a sketch of the life and times.  I think that if you took the pages that actually talked about the the Siamese Twins and compared them to the book, the biographical material would be less than half.  I learned some things I hadn't known about Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and way too much about Mayberry (from The Andy Griffith Show).  I learned more about the twins, but it feels like I should have just read an Encyclopedia Britannica article and then read a little of their financial logs and my time would have been better spent.