Gilead, Marilynn Robinson

 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Started: December 6, 2024
Completed: December 8, 2024
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody that I can think of, but maybe I saw it on the Pulitzer Prize list and with Gilead becoming charged in my mind from The Handmaid's Tale, perhaps that drew me in.

Review:

This is a truly odd book.  An "old man's" letter to his young son is not a format I would have thought to write.  Certainly not a pastor.  Nope, not me.  All the same, this book came across as authentic to me and I enjoyed it.  It seemed a tad like As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) except it was much, much easier to understand and there was less of the ghoulishness of that book.

White Rage, Carol Anderson

 

White Rage:  The unspoken truth of our racial divide by Carol Anderson

Started: November 26, 2024
Completed: December 7, 2024
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: A reading list of books addressing white racial prejudice

Review:

The material in this book is well collected.  I have read it across many other sources, but this book collects together all of that material and methodically walks through it with a welcome set of end notes for virtually each passage.  As such, for me, where the references were sometimes books that I had already read, this did not bring particularly new information, but, rather brought many thoughts together as one compelling thought.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is the prequal to Bring Up the Bodies which I noticed on President Obama's reading list.  This book is extremely well respected as a winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Started: 3/6/2020
Completed: 3/10/2020
Recommendation: Not recommended
Recommended By: President Obama

Review:

The minutiae of Thomas Cromwell do not interest me.  I would say it is just Henry VIII trying to get his groove on, but I have read a couple of books that touch on this subject.  I even read The Life of Thomas More a couple of decades ago and made it all the way through that--a much more boring read from the view of content.  This book, however, I just could not take.  The novelization did not catch me and I found the characters (though big players on the stage of their time) to be uninteresting.  The dialog (maybe taken from letters?) did not grab me and I was constantly trying to figure out the time period of the book as it seems to jump back and forth in Cromwell's life with few clues that a transition had been made.  I just don't get it and gave up half way through.

Evicted, Matthew Desmond

Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in The American City by Matthew Desmond is a book that my wife saw and thought we should both understand how eviction is effecting America.

Started: 2/18/2020
Completed: 2/21/2020
Recommendation: Highly recommended
Recommended By: My wife

Review:

This is a hard book to read, pretty much nothing but sad.  Eviction is a horror.

These are individual stories.  This is a tiny fraction of the actual evictions that took place over the period the book covers.  Despite that, each story is characteristic of the broader issue and carries its own nuances.  These individual stories stand on their own, but as a spotlight illuminating a small subset, they give character to the whole problem.

Carrying the knowledge of what happens is hard.  It is our responsibility, however, as Americans.  Utah's Housing First seems like a good answer.  As important as healthcare, and maybe more important, housing issues need to be solved.  A cycle of evictions perpetuates a problem that could be stopped.