Cinema love, by Jiaming Tang

 

I liked this book about a group of Chinese immigrants who struggle with life and love in New York's Chinatown. The story actually spans decades, starting in China where many of the characters cross paths in the Worker's Cinema, a run-down movie theater that's used by the town's gay men, most of them married, to meet up with each other. Over the next decade, many of these characters immigrate to New York where they live in extreme poverty. One of the things I was struck by is the overall unhappiness of all of the characters in the book. The women are in loveless marriages, and the men are struggling to survive while also secretly seeking out male companionship. No one communicates effectively with each other, and resentments and regrets linger for decades. One of the characters feels responsible for the closure of the cinema that resulted in her husband's death; it's only late in the book that she learns that the cinema would have closed anyway and she carried that guilt all her life for nothing. None of these characters are very likable, and they all make bad decisions, which would usually make me dislike the book, but I found this one to be very compelling.

The secret adversary, by Agatha Christie

 

I really enjoyed the second novel of Agatha Christie's. It's the first of five books starring the characters Tommy and Tuppence. In this one, Tommy and Tuppence meet after the war, and neither has had luck finding employment. They decide to team up as the "Young Adventurers" and take on jobs for hire. Tuppence is offered a job, but when her potential employer disappears, she and Tommy decide to track him down, and get embroiled in a much larger conspiracy that involves people at the highest level of government. It's a fun read that brings Tommy and Tuppence together not just as friends, but also romantically.

The Friday afternoon club: a family memoir, by Griffin Dunne

 

I enjoyed this celebrity memoir written by actor, director, and producer Griffin Dunne. It brought to life the crazy life of his parents and extended family in the 1960s and 1970s as they lived and worked in Hollywood. He tells his own life story without flinching from his father's closeted identity, his mother's illness, his brother's mental illness, his sister's murder, and disputes with his extended family, specifically John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Griffin Dunne grew up in a wealthy and entitled family, attended private schools (until he was expelled), then moved to New York City to try to make it as a stage actor. He had some success with acting and producing films, but discusses many of the missed opportunities that he had as well. He's not shy about sharing the names of many of the actors who attended parties as his parents' home, sharing seedy details about drunkenness along with heavy cocaine and LSD use. At one point he reports that Susan Sarandon gave him a sheet of acid from Timothy Leary's personal stash for his 28th birthday party. He also writes quite a bit about his life-long friendship with Carrie Fisher; they met at teenagers but stayed friends until her death in 2016. Most of the action in this book takes place in the 1960s through the 1980s, with a large portion covering his sister Dominique's 1983 murder trial.

Edmund: in search of England's lost king, by Francis Young

This is a good introduction to Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia until his death in 869. Edmund was killed by the Danes, reportedly tied to a tree, shot with many arrows, then beheaded. His head was separated from his body and thrown into the woods, where it was found later, by some accounts guarded by a wolf, reunited with his body to which it became re-attached. His body was said to be incorruptible (in that it did not decompose), one of the many miracles attributed to him. Over the following decades and centuries, his body was moved several times before being housed in a shrine in Bury St. Edmund. It was later lost, possibly during the dissolution of monasteries that Henry VIII set in progress. This was a well-written account that covers the historical period leading up to Edmund's death, the various reports of the death itself, and the growth of a cult around Edmund that led to a portrayal of him as the King of all England, even though he was actually only one of many kings that controlled smaller territories at that time.. The last chapter addresses the location of Edmund's body with the author putting forward a plausible theory that it is interred in the monk's cemetery next to the Abbey ruins at Bury St. Edmund, under what is now a tennis court.
 

Deep & wild: on mountains, opossums & finding your way in West Virginia, by Laura Jackson

 

I enjoyed this collection of personal essays about West Virginia. Author Laura Jackson is a West Virginia native and writes lovingly about her home state. She covers many topics, but primarily the flora, fauna, and geography of the state. Chapters address copperhead snakes, opossums, dogs, the red spruce, country roads, topography, and much more. With an easy prose, Jackson gives the reader a good understanding of what makes West Virginia special, but without denying or overstating its problems.

The enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I really enjoyed this 1922 novel about four women who travel to Italy, renting an old castle for a month. All of the women are unhappy for different reasons, but they find that their month away has given them the time and space to heal and face their respective concerns. The writing reminds me of E.M. Forster's classics Howards End, and A room with a view with their witty dialogue and comical situations, but also real-life sorrows and anxieties. This is a scholarly edition with a lengthy introduction, bibliography, chronology of von Arnim, and explanatory notes, which were very helpful.
 

Dear Evan Hansen, book by Steven Levenson; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul

 

Dear Evan Hansen is a musical that will be coming to Eisenhower Auditorium in April, so I thought I'd read the play before going to see it. I really enjoyed this sad, but heartwarming, play about a boy who gets drawn into a long-term web of deception following the death of a school mate. It shows how one lie leads to another, until it's almost impossible to extricate oneself without blowing everything up. I won't give away any of the plot lines here, but will just say that this is a worthwhile read.

Devil is fine, by John Vercher

 

Devil is fine tells the story of a biracial man who has just lost his teenage son. He inherits a plot of land that was meant for his son upon reaching age 18, but since his son died before then, he inherits it instead. Intending to sell the land and arranging routine inspections prior to the sale, he finds that the land is a former plantation and has the skeletons of enslaved people as well as the plantation owners on it. These developments wreak havoc with the narrator's mental stability, and an element of magical realism enters the story. The narrator has regular conversations with his dead son, he is transported into the past where he inhabits the persona of the plantation owner as he abuses his slaves, and other times he experiences hallucinations that he is turning into a jellyfish. In the meantime, he has a high level of difficulty getting along with everyone else in his life, including his son's mother, his co-worker, and new people he meets along the way. I found his conversations with others to be so filled with hostility that it was difficult to imagine anyone behaving that way, even someone grieving the way he is. Eventually, after what seems like a series of psychotic breaks, he has an epiphany that allows him to move forward.

An unfinished love story: a personal history of the 1960s, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

This is a wonderful look at not only the relationship between Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin, but also an in-depth memoir about both of their experiences working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. This was my Albany book club's December pick, but none of us finished in time, so it's carried over to January. I thought it would be mostly about their personal relationship, but there is a lot of substantive history here. It's fascinating to read about their experiences, bolstered by the artifacts and documents that they explore as they root through Dick Goodwin's hundreds of boxes of archives. It was also interesting to see how their opinions about John and Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson evolved as they reviewed the events of the 1960s from the vantage point of 50 years in the future. I loved the writing and couldn't put the book down.

The Brooklyn follies, by Paul Auster

I really enjoyed this novel by Paul Auster, one of my favorite authors. The Brooklyn follies tells the story of a recently retired, divorced man (Nathan) who relocates to Brooklyn from his former suburban home. His comfortable routine of writing, visiting a favority bookstore, eating in a local diner, is upended when he realizes that his nephew (Tom) is working in the bookstore that he regularly frequents. Both of their lives are further upended when Tom's niece (and Nathan's great-niece), Lucy, shows up on their doorstep. Adventures ensue as they try to find out what happened to Lucy's mother, get involved in a forgery scam, travel to Vermont for a getaway, and meet new friends that will change their lives forever. This is a well-written, heartwarming, and amusing story about making a new life with the people around us.
 

The Plantagenets: the kings that made Britain, by Derek Wilson

 

This is a good introduction to the Plantagenet dynasty in Britain. It devotes a chapter to almost all of the kings from Henry II through Henry V, one chapter on the War of the Roses, and then a final chapter on Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III. It includes helpful family trees of the ancestors of Henry II, the Plantagenet kings, and the Houses of Lancaster and York. My one beef is that the family trees include the individuals' lifespan dates, but I would also like to see their dates of rule. Most kings' portraits are included in their respective chapters, and there is one map of England and its territorial possessions under Henry II. The book covers more than a dozen reigns and 300+ years of history in fewer than 300 pages, so it is a cursory look at this period.

The mysterious affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

 

I read what I thought was a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a teenager, probably a few dozen, but that's only a fraction of her 66 novels and 14 short story collections published between 1921 and 1976, and I haven't read any of her non-fiction, poetry, or plays. I recently decided to delve back into her works, taking a chronological approach, so I began with this one, her first book and her first mystery featuring Poirot. My past reading of Christie was scattershot: basically as I came across her books in used or new book stores or the library. Reading them out of order didn't hamper me, but I thought it would be fun to read them as she created them this time. I thoroughly enjoyed this one as it introduced Poirot for the first time as a Belgian refugee from the Germans during and after WWI and his friend Hastings, a wounded veteran from the same conflict. I like the way Poirot roots around for the solution to every puzzle, sometimes being led astray but always finding his way back to the truth, often inspired by a stray comment from Hastings. And Hastings always takes the wrong lesson from every clue, but his goodness of heart makes him unable to be suspicious of a friend. Very enjoyable!