The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese

 

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is a book I picked up because I enjoyed Cutting for Stone

Started: 5/10/2023

Completed: 5/23/2023

Recommendation: Mild Recommendation

Recommended By: Nobody

Words for which I sought  help:

mendacious -- not telling the truth

Review:

I will never read this book again.  It is extremely well written and for that alone it deserves recommendation.  This tale of woe and sorrow occasionally highlights on brief moments of joy, but it is first and foremost a tale of loss.  In one sense, that is true of any multi-generational story because the loss of some of the characters is built into the very nature of the book.  I was prepared for that.  As I review this book in my mind, I cannot find a point where everything started to be better.  That is fine for people who want a "tear jerker" or some tale wrapped in everyday life revealing the simple sorrow that is intractable in most people's lives.  I am not that person.  I have come to realize that Verghese is much better at clarifying, amplifying, and immersing in grief than finding joy.  I do not anticipate picking up another novel by this gifted author.

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

 

Bewilderment by Richard Powers is another of Powers' books.

Started: 2/15/2022
Completed: 2/18/2022
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

"Fierce as death is love" Solomon 8:6 seems like an excellent summary of this book (it is quoted near the end).  The prose is lovely and made me laugh out loud more than once.  The premise, that brain patterns could be captured and then learned was wonderful.  The corollary to "Flowers for Algernon" was obvious from the start and reinforced in the book itself.

Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker

 

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the mind of an American family by Robert Kolker was recommended by my parents.  It is a story of a mental health problem that runs through a large family.

Started: 5/25/2021
Completed: 5/28/2021
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: My parents

Words for which I sought help:

aphasia -- loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage

funicular -- a cable railroad, especially one on a mountainside, in which ascending and descending cars are counterbalanced

obstreperous -- noisy and difficult to control

Review:

I really did not want to read this book.  Who wants to read about the horror of a bunch of schizophrenic children?  In general, I'm not thrilled about large families either.  My parents, however, insisted that this was an important book to read.  So, I read it.

Make sure that your prenatal vitamin has lots of choline.

All of the children in this family suffered.  They suffered because of mental illness and an inability to provide help (in part because the family was too large for a single income).  The healthy children suffered from physical abuse (both received and doled out) as well as the anxiety and other traumas that comes with living among the mentally ill.  The family was too large for the parents to provide the intense and personalized support that normal children need, forget the support that mentally ill children require.  It is clear that even with time and resources, these parents had some serious problems themselves that would have prevented them from providing the kind of loving environment the children needed.

It is amazing that science can study a family like this.  It is not amazing that such a family exists.  I just don't know what to say.  This book is absolutely worth a read.  It is worth suffering through the appropriately described trauma.

Caste, Isabel Wilkerson

 

Caste: The origins of our discontents by Isabel Wilkerson keeps getting reviewed as an excellent book offering insights into systemic racism.

Started: 2/12/2021
Completed: 2/15/2021 (did not finish)
Recommendation: Recommended if you have not read of the horrors of slavery
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

"Race is a social concept, not a scientific one," J. Craig Venter (geneticist who ran Celera Genomics).

Here's the deal, I just cannot stomach the reality again.  I have read several books about slavery forcing myself to pay attention to the graphic detail of the horrors of slavery.  I just cannot do it again.  As it is, my nightmares all too often go in this direction.  It is just more than I can take.  Yes, I realize that merely reading about something awful (likely perpetrated by my own relatives) is nothing even remotely like living through it.  I don't wish slavery on anyone ever.  I have a visceral reaction to its horrors.  I just cannot take any more and had to abandon this book half way through.

An American Marriage, Tayari Jones

 

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones was on my library list, I'm not sure why I picked it up.

Started: 1/6/2021
Completed: 1/7/2021
Recommendation: Not Recommended, Not finished
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This book is well written.  I just cannot take the sadness and the agonizingly slow dissolution of something valued.

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is a book I cannot remember why I selected, but it seemed to me at the time like the author was particularly good.  I think it had something to do with the National Book Award.

Started: 5/22/2020

Completed: 5/24/2020

Recommendation: Mild Recommendation

Recommended By: National Book Award?

Review:

This is a carefully crafted story with insights into how it might feel to suffer from dementia.  It is also about how people fool themselves and others.  It is rife with mistakes that people could make and rife with patterns of mistakes that people can fool themselves into making.  The story is told from multiple points of view that occasionally overlap.

It feels like this is a vignette in a much larger story that starts well before the book does and goes on well after.  That makes sense.  The anchor to the story line is an aging father and grandfather who starts on the edge of dementia (though flash backs show a fully lucid individual, as one would expect) and ends with his being in full dementia.  This is not, really, however a story about his dementia, but more a story about how everyone around him changes during his struggle with reality.

I was not moved by the story and, though it was well told, have some trouble recommending it.  I didn't gain any insight from it and tale is overall a little sad. 

House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III

House of Sand and Fog By Andre Dubus III is an Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection in 2000 and a National Book Award Finalist in 1999.  There are plenty of descriptions, reviews, and analysis from this time frame, so I'm not even going to try to provide a decent introduction here.

Started:  November 22, 2009

Completed:  November 24, 2009

Recommendation: Not recommended

Recommended By: Picked this up at a yard sale.  I had no real knowledge of it, but the back caught my attention.  I read the first few paragraphs and found the approach interesting.  There was a note about the National Book Award on the front, but I didn't know about Oprah until I started writing this review.

Review:  The book is well written and the change of perspectives are very well done.  That having been said...the plot just sucks.  The events that are described are awful.  Now, some people like that but I don't.  This book doesn't have a happy ending and there is no "message" being sent.  There is an argument to be made that this is a character study, but I don't see the characters being developed as the book progresses (the time frame is much too short to allow that).  At best, this strikes me as a modern tragedy (in the Greek sense).  Fundamental flaws in each character are exploited by the plot line and run, arguably, to their logical conclusion.  The result is a sad, sad book where everyone makes reasonable decisions within their own selfish point of view but no one is made better by the book.  There is a meager effort to look at what is "right" or even altruistic but the very mildness of the approach suggests that this is not a course to be pursued, but a character flaw in itself.  I found the book very dissatisfying.