Bookwi.se

Summary: A significant biography of James Baldwin.

There have been several biographies of James Baldwin. David Leemings’ biography is well worth reading, but Leeming was close to Baldwin, working at times as his secretary, travel companion and corespondent. That type of closeness has a benefit to a biographer, but it also has some weaknesses. I tend to think that we get a lot from biographies written by people close to the subject, but we also need a good biography from someone that isn’t personally close to the subject.

Nicholas Boggs is fulfilling that role for Baldwin. Leeming’s biography came out in 1995, but since that time there has not been a full biography of James Baldwin. Boggs main focus is connecting Baldwin’s writing to his life and his life to his writing. And at the same time showing how the fiction informed the non-fiction and how the non-fiction informed the fiction. Lemming discussed the writing as well, you can’t be a biographer of an author like Baldwin without discussing the writing, but I think Boggs made the writing a more central feature of the biography.

It is at the end of the book, one of the main contributions of this biography is a long exploration of Baldwin’s relationship with Yoran Cazac, a french painter that he originally met in Baldwin’s early days in Paris, but with whom they reconnected in the last 1960s. Baldwin had a “type”. He seemed to be attracted to men who were primarily attracted to women but still related well to him. There was a pattern with Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, David Leeming and Yoran Cazac and others. These men may not have had sexual relationships with Baldwin, but they were relationally intimate. Boggs suggests that Yoran Cazac was the last significant relationship that Baldwin had. Cazac was likely originally introduced to Baldwin through Baldwin’s mentor Beauford Delaney. And it is also likely that it was through Delaney that they became reacquainted.

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Summary: Funny, sort of scifi novel, set during the covid pandemic.

I first read John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars and then read a number of his other books over a couple of years. Then I moved on and I didn’t pick up a Scalzi novel for about six years or so. Last year there was a 2 for 1 sale and I saw one book I wanted and Scalzi’s Starter Villain was essentially free. And a year later I actually picked up Starter Villain on a whim and remembered why I like Scalzi.

He is funny. He takes ideas that have been well done and then gives it a new spin that both stands alone as a story, but also is even better if you know the original. Redshirts was told from the perspective of the crew where the crew knew something was going on and if they went on an away mission they would probably die. Fuzzy Nation  is a spin on Henry Beam Piper’s 1962 Little Fuzzy. Old Man’s War is inspired by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. There are a number of other books that are original, but it is often the “inspired by” book that are the most funny. And while I like the more serious scifi, I tend to use Scalzi’s funny novels to help break me out of reading slumps.

Kaiju Preservation Society is a covid novel. Jamie Gray left his English PhD program to work in communications for a start up. He gets fired, unfairly, just before covid hits NYC and he spends months working as a food delivery person before being offered a job by someone he knew from his grad program. Jamie is desperate for a job, his friend Tom is desperate to get someone at the last minute because he is leaving on a project and one of his team members has covid.

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Summary: A two generation story of self discovery on the Camino. 

The Camino is something I will never do. I would love to do it, but it is highly unlikely that I will ever do it. That being said, several people that are in a book group that I am in have done it. A married couple that I knew from college managed a way station for almost two decades. The son of one of my best friends has done it. And I know there are tons of memoirs and other books about it.

I picked up Call of the Camino because I am in a data entry phase of my work and I like to put light fiction on in the background to make the data work more tolerable. The kindle book was on sale and the audiobook was part of the Audible free library for members. So it was a very low cost to entry.

As I started I wasn’t really impressed. The book it telling two stories, at two points in time, simultaneously. This is something that is not new. You find out very quickly that the two stories are of a daughter in the present getting the chance to write a travel story about the Camino. And then the second story is about the daughter’s mother, who died when the daughter was a toddler. The daughter knows her father (who also died when she was in elementary school) and mother met while doing the Camino. There is obviously a pull to the Camino for the daughter. I think the motivation for the mother’s story is a bit far fetched, but once you suspend disbelief about the reason for the mother’s trip the rest is good.

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Summary: A fictional story in response to the Muslim immigration/travel ban from the first Trump administration.

I picked this up on sale years ago, but like many books I pick up on sale, it can takes years get around to reading it. I read it today in part because I have been trying to decide whether to keep a Kindle Colorsoft that I purchased a few weeks ago.

I read it outside and that outside light offsets the fact that the Colorsoft is pretty dark generally. I won’t turn this into a review of the Colorsoft, but I do want to note that it was a digital ebook and it looked great in full color.

I am a fan of Nnedi Okorafor’s writing. LaGuardia is the 8th book/novella that I have read from her. She is writing scifi/fantasy from an African perspective. My favorite of her books is the Binti trilogy.

This is a near future story where Aliens (from space) were in both Nigeria and the United States. Contextually, it appears that the aliens came to Africa first. The main character, Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka, was born in the US to Nigerian parents who were doctors. Those doctors died in a terrorist bombing in the US that was protesting alien immigration to the US. After that bombing, Future, also a doctor, went back to Nigeria to start a medical clinic. As the story unfolds, the reader comes to figure out why the pregnant Future had returned to the US to have her baby.

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Summary: A novel about World War II where the war is just some of the reality of the world.

Francis Spufford is a novelist that I avoid all spoilers and descriptions and just buy the book as soon as I see it. Nonesuch was released last week and I started it as soon as I finished my last book. I never like to give away too much when writing about fiction books.

One of the things I really like about Spufford is that he writes very different novels from one another. This one feels like Charles Williams and Neil Gaiman were inspirations (treating the supernatural as very real, with a little bit of almost creepiness, but never really being creepy and enough sex for it not to be a young adult book but it not to feel gratuitous). There is also a hint of CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but only a hint.

I won’t give it away, but Spufford is also very much known for last minute twists to his books. This one is no different and I won’t give it away, but this time I didn’t love the twist. It makes sense, I understand why he did it. But while I think the twist in Golden Hill made the book, I think it was a net negative here. In some ways, I think it changed the book from a historical fiction book that had great characters and really felt like it was a book about the war and the problems of war, to being a book that “was about something.” I don’t want to be too negative, because I loved the novel. But I just don’t think the twist was quite right.

Iris Hawkins is driven young woman. She works in a brokerage house and she wants to succeed. She also is clearly trying to control the world around her and seems to be running from something. In the days leading up to World War II, she stumbles on the reality of the supernatural and gets drawn in to a bigger story than she really wanted to.

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Summary: A beautifully told story in letters. 

There is some irony that just a couple of days ago I wrote a post about not liking to read letter collections and how I always get bored before I finish them. And today I am going to strongly recommend a fiction book that is formatted as a collection of letters. I know not everyone is an audiobook fan, but if you do audiobooks, I would start with this on audio. The production and editing is top notch and the various voices reading the letters give context to the letters. It is going to vie for my favorite audiobook ever. (Colin Firth’s narration of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene has been at that place for a long time, but this is right there.)

This is a book that I have great appreciation for, in part because it is pushing back against speed and efficiency in a helpful way. The story is about Sybil, a divorced, retired woman who lives alone just outside of Washington DC. She was a lawyer in private practice with a long term friend. And when he was appointed to a judgeship, she took the pay cut and became his chief clerk. She retired when he retired after 28 years on the bench.

The story unfolds slowly as she writes letters to friends and family and various celebrities, especially authors. I don’t know if Virginia Evans got permission to write in the voice of various authors, but Sybil is a great reader and letter writer and when she reads a book she loves, she writes the author and tells them. And as she says throughout the book, a surprising number of people will write back if you write them. So in this book of fiction that takes place over about 10 years, there are multiple letters to Joan Didion, who she has developed a friendship with, but also a teen boy of a law clerk she mentored, and a friend who she has been writing for nearly 60 years.

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