James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett is an interesting novel that reimagines the Huck Finn story told through a first-person account by Jim, Huck's family slave. Everett wrote the book Erasure, the basis of the film American Fiction, and with this effort, he provides a very unique story construct.

Jim had to play a part, one expected based on the color of his skin, even with people like Huck that were kind to him, but still casually racist. There were expectations of slaves and their supposed mental shortcomings so Jim used incorrect grammar, and taught his kids to do the same. He would offer up ideas to white people, not as suggestions, but ones they would latch on to and say as if they their own. It was noted in the book about whites that they better they feel, the safer it is for black people. Jim also concealed that  he knew how to read, to the point of making a joke of what would he do with a book? 

Identity is a theme, with fairly early Jim writing with a stolen pencil "I am called Jim, I have yet to choose a name," and "with my pencil, I wrote myself into being." 

The book is funny at times and gutting at times. There's such a matter of fact telling of how an entire race was treated as less than people. It's a super creative idea and effort from Everett, and the ending of the book an excellent one, with the main character claiming his identity as James, not Jim the slave.

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby is an interesting work of nonfiction that compares Charles Dickens and Prince. It's a fascinating construct subtitled A Particular Kind of Genius and the book jacket notes how it examines the two artists' personal tragedies, social statuses, and boundless productivity.

About the working lives of Dickens and Prince, Hornby write that each incredibly prolific with the craft they produced. Prince was referenced as being addicted to the creative process, and it's interesting reading about the creative process of the two, how both often worked on several projects at once, something impossible for many people. 

They were each larger than life characters, full of creative energy, which led to much being produced, a lot of it great. 

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is lovely work of nonfiction about the bedridden author and a connection she felt with a snail that was put into a pot on her nightstand. It's a interesting book that includes the topics of kinship, resilience, and survival. 

Bailey fell ill at the age of thirty-four after picking up an illness while in Europe, and upon getting back to the United States, became largely unable to get out of bed due to the unknown pathogen. 

Her friend brought a snail to her and, first in a pot and then terrarium, Bailey provided for the snail and watched as it lived its small life. As Bailey wrote, the snail provided comfort and focus to her and buffered her feelings of uselessness. She learned what environment the snail liked and what it wanted to eat (portobello mushrooms), and provided it. Bailey appreciated how the snail would make it through the day, something that was all she could do as well. She notes that the energy of her human visitors, loved them as she did, wore her out, but the snail inspired her with its curiosity and grace in a peaceful and solitary world. 

Also noted is the concept of how time is finite, but morphs between one not having not enough of it, like all her friends, and having an abundance of time to fill, which she faced. She eventually improved some, and was first diagnosed with autoimmune dysautonomia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and then told she had acquired a mitochondrial disease, from either a virus or bacteria. It's excellent writing as well as a touching story and something that felt to come out of the book is that there's all kinds of lives, and they all matter.

True Grit by Charles Portis

True Grit by Charles Portis is an entertaining novel that was turned into an equally entertaining 2010 movie with Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin.

Portis tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross retaining U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track down and bring to justice the man, Tom Chaney, who murdered her father. Joined in the quest initiated by Mattie is a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf.

One thing that the movie did, which was actually a remake of a 1969 film starring John Wayne, was show just how amusing the scenes written by Portis were. It's a tremendously fun western story set in 1870s Arkansas and Indian Territory. 

The skill with which Portis sets scenes and provides dialogue is remarkable, with the writing a first-person account by Mattie Ross done decades after the fact. Among many great stories in the book is the saga of Mattie's horse Little Blackie, from when she acquires him from Col. G. Stonehill through to the conclusion of the book.

The Siege by Ben Macintyre

The Siege by Ben Macintyre is an interesting work of nonfiction book A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World. 

Macintyre details the 1980 hostage crisis at the Iranian embassy in London, with twenty-six hostages taken. The perpetrators were Iranian Arabs from the Khuzestan region of Iran, where the Arabistan people were persecuted by the government in Iran, and the effort was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein, with he an enemy of Iran.

This occurred six months into the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Iran, and six days prior to the hostage-taking in London, eight U.S. soldiers were killed during an effort to rescue hostages. The Iranian government said the CIA was behind the London embassy attack, and that Iranians there would be happy to die as martyrs. 

It's a fascinating account from Macintyre of the six-day event, which the attackers believed would be over a day, including the eventual raid on the embassy by British SAS forces acting on the go-ahead from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a solid follow up to his first book, The Tipping Point from 25 years ago, and the new effort subtitled Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

In part one, "Three Puzzles," Gladwell writes about bank robbers in L.A., Medicare fraud in Miami, vaccination rates, and the dangerous quest for achievement, as told through the story of the fictional town Poplar Grove and its wave of teen suicides.

Part two, "The Social Engineers" includes the decades-past integration of Lawrence Lane in Palo Alto, CA and the concept of the Magic Third, the point at which something becomes normalized or integrated. If about individuals, when you get to three, you have a team, not just a single person or a friendship between two people. 

Related to the concept of ratios, Gladwell, tells a fascinating story about Harvard University, and the varsity women’s rugby team. He notes that Harvard competes in more D1 varsity sports than any other university in the country, and that Harvard has a two-track admissions process, the first for people who simply compete based on merit, and second for ALDCs, or Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (children of rich people), and Children of faculty. The ALDCs leave admissions control to university discretion, and there is a corresponding impact on the makeup of the student body. Gladwell makes the point that varsity sports are a mechanism by which Harvard maintains control of admissions decisions, and whether nefarious or not, that that maintains group proportions within the student body.

Also included is the story of the Marriott outbreak, where a hotel in Boston became an early epicenter of the covid virus. It was interesting from the perspective of how specific individuals have the propensity to be superspreaders. Gladwell refers to it as the law of the very, very, very few, and we can somewhat tell who those people are based on the characteristics of that person. This raises the question of whether in the future people identified as potential superspreaders will be treated differently than others.

Part three, "The Overstory," includes the L.A. Survivors' Club about holocaust discussion and the impact of the 1978 tv miniseries Holocaust. For decades after the war, the Holocaust wasn’t spoken of much. Many people wanted to simply move past, to not get bogged down in thoughts and discussion of things horrible. The show airing then had a huge impact on people using the term and opening discussing the atrocities that happened.

Gladwell also writes about how the tv show Will & Grace had an impact on gay marriage becoming law, it normalized behavior, showing that homosexuality wasn’t a problem to be solved.

The conclusion to the book includes detail on the opioid crisis. Gladwell notes how select states forced doctors prescribing opioids to make triplicate carbon copies of the prescription (one for the doctor, one for the pharmacy, and one for the bureau of narcotic enforcement), and how those states have had way lower rates of addiction. There’s also an interesting point made about opioid superspreaders, doctors who prescribe way more opioids than others, similar to covid superspreaders, or pollution superspreaders.

The Bookshop by Evan Friss

The Bookshop by Evan Friss is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A History of the American Bookstore. 

Friss covers topics including a bookstore run by Benjamin Franklin, the New York City bookstores Three Lives & Company, Books Are Magic, and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (closed down in 2009). Also detailed are sidewalk booksellers in NYC and Parnassus Books in Nashville, run by the writer Ann Patchett.  

Barnes & Noble and Amazon Books (now closed down) is also detailed, along with mention of people who put on seminars about how to open and run a bookstore.

The book has interesting content, especially the stories of modern-day bookshops.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a remarkable memoir about she, her siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen, and parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Sometimes Rex or Rose would have jobs, but often they wouldn't, and they didn't believe in public assistance, so the kids would go hungry and the family bounce from city to city when bills would come due or trouble arose, doing what Rex called "the skedaddle" in the middle of the night. Among many other small towns in the Southwest, they lived in Battle Mountain, NV and Blythe, CA before moving Phoenix and then Welch, the West Virginia hollow town mining town where Rex grew up.

It's a wild story of abdication of parental responsibility, one where Rex and Rose wouldn't do adult things, because "why should they have to?" Rose had a teaching degree, but fancied herself an artist, not someone who would waste their days working. When Jeannette later had a great opportunity come her way, the response of Rose was to say it's not fair that Jeannette should have that instead of her. It comes out late in the book that as they lived this itinerant and poverty-stricken lifestyle, Rose from her family owed land in Texas worth roughly a million dollars, but wouldn't sell as she wanted it to keep it. 

Rex at times would have jobs, but focused more on his drinking and telling of his grand plans. He would talk about how he was going to come up with a new way to extract gold from the ground, and the ensuing fabulous wealth would be used to build the family a Glass Castle, a home he often shared the meticulously created designs for with his children. But when there would be money coming in, Rex would take the paycheck and buy booze. 

It's an amazing book, including the memorable scene were Jeannette was chastised by a college professor, asking her what she would know about hardships faced by the underclass.

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell is a short and  interesting book subtitled A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. Rundell in separate chapters covers animals including the seahorse, American wood frog, lemur, golden mole, wombat, narwhal, pangolin, and Greenland shark.

Rundell notes that in the last fifty years, the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. She makes a compelling argument that these animals, many which teeter on the brink of extinction, have a right to remain, and celebrates in the book just how interesting and different they are.

The American wood frog allows itself to freeze solid for winter, with it's heart stopping for the season. The Greenland shark can live to be over five hundred years old. The swift flies at least ten months a year, sleeping in the air, with one brain hemisphere shut off while the other remains alert. The golden mole is the only mammal with iridescence, and the Somali golden mole to our knowledge has never been seen alive. The book is written as a call to act, to not give up on vanishing animals and to do the climate change mitigation needed to keep many of these species in our world.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is a novel based on real-life events, as Hunter tells a story taken from the life of her grandfather and his family, starting in 1939 as they celebrate Passover in Radom, Poland. 

Hunter notes that of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than three hundred survived. The matriarch and patriarch of the Kurc family are Sol and Nechuma, and their five children (and their spouses) are Genek (Herta), Halina (Adam), Jakob (Bella), Hunter's grandfather Addy, and Mila (Selim), along with Mila and Selim's young daughter Felicia.

Addy was apart from his family during the war as it impossible for him to return from France where we was living to Poland, which fell early in the war and was split between German and Soviet control. Sol and Nechuma were forced out of their house and Genek and Herta sent to a labor camp in Siberia. In Poland, ghettos were created, and later liquidated, and there were many times various family members could have been killed, but survived due to both bravery and good fortune.

The story spans from Europe to Asia, briefly Africa, then Brazil, and ultimately America and the conclusion of the book is a powerful one, with the fate of various family members unknown during much of the war.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is an engrossing novel that features the characters of Tova Sullivan, Cameron Cassmore, and Marcellus the giant pacific octopus. It's an ingeniously put together book with first-person narration from Marcellus interspersed throughout and a really fun read.

Cameron is a young adult without much going on in his life who goes from California to the small town of Sowell Bay, Washington in search of his biological father.

Tova is the cleaning person at Sowell Bay Aquarium, by herself after the passing of her longtime husband a few years prior, and only son Erik decades before, and is contemplating a move to Bellingham, where she can "not be a burden on people." 

There's also the local grocery store owner, Ethan, who befriends Cameron, and likes Tova. The connections between the characters both develop and reveal themselves and it's an exceptionally nice story that Van Pelt provides in her debut novel.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work of nonfiction that's described as one where Coates "set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."

The book starts talking about language, and the sports stories that captivated Coates in his youth, and then gets into stories, and how stories of places not actually always what they are. 

There's three distinct parts, first on a trip by Coates to Dakar, Senegal, then on his time in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally Palestine. In South Carolina he's confronted by often racist mythology, and in Palestine, sees the repression of Palestinians by Israel.