West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge is a really good work of historical fiction that begins with 105-year-old Woodrow Wilson Nickel furiously writing down a story, one from his life in 1938.

Nickel is an Okie, a farmboy from the Dust Bowl, making the book reminiscent of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. He came to the east coast after the deaths of his baby sister and both parents, and made it through the Great Hurricane of 1938, which killed seven hundred, including the only family he had left, his cousin. Also surviving the storm were two giraffes who crossed the Atlantic, slated to go to the San Diego Zoo. 

The giraffes were to traverse the country in the care of Riley Jones, who Nickel would know as the Old Man, and Nickel after learning of their destination saw the giraffes as a way to get him to California. Nickel also came across Augusta Red, a young women he finds himself smitten with, who states she's taking pictures of the giraffes for Life Magazine. He in a stolen motorbike tailed the truck with the giraffes, then conned his way into driving they and the Old Man, and she tailed them in a green Packard. 

They embarked on the twelve-day road trip across the country to the San Diego Zoo, and zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley. The Old Man was a lover of animals, treating the hurricane giraffes that he referred to as the darlings with great care, and grew to see how well Nickel worked with the two, who he knew as Boy and Girl. Red continued following them, spending time with Nickel and telling him of her heart trouble. When passing through Texas, they wound up at Nickel's burned down home, and he told the Old Man what happened there with his father after his mother and baby sister died. A flash flood then hit them and Red saved the rig from falling over with the giraffes in it, ruining her car, camera, and the photos she hoped would be in Life. 

Boy then saved Nickel and Red when someone tried to steal the giraffes, the second person to do so, and the book is a compelling adventure tale. Also interesting is the newspaper headlines included that cover Europe and what the Nazis are doing. There's also so much poverty, with the cross-country trip coming across Hoovervilles, scores of people living in shanties. At the beginning, it wasn't entirely where the book going, but it winds up being a history lesson, travelogue, and story of love and animals and unexpected endings. It's told first-person by Nickel and at the start it notes that the story he writing in notepads was to someone, and it comes out at the end who it was. Lovely book.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is an excellent novel that's a work of suspense, family dynamics, and the consequences of AI, including moral and ethical responsibility around artificial intelligence.

Detailed is the Cassidy-Shaw family, with seventeen-year-old Charlie, fourteen-year-old Alice, eleven-year-old Izzy, father Noah, and mother Lorelai. The book starts with them on the road in their autonomous minivan, with Charlie behind the wheel and Noah in the passenger seat, as the adult responsible for Charlie's actions. There's an accident that leaves dead a retired couple from the other car involved.

Several weeks after, the family goes to a house on Chesapeake Bay and come across technology mogul Daniel Monet there with his teenage daughter, Eurydice, and people that work for him. While Charlie and the daughter develop a relationship, Alice and Izzy start exhibiting odd behavior, and it comes out that Lorelai and Monet know each other. She's a star in the field of AI and it's ramifications, with a dual doctorate in engineering and philosophy, and received a MacArthur Fellowship. 

Police wanted to interview the family about the accident, and it was interesting the way things progressed, with each person playing, and revealing their part in what happened. While he was behind the wheel of the minivan driving on autopilot, Charlie was texting with Izzy about Alice, and Alice screamed, causing him to jerk the wheel, taking control of the car away from the autonomous driving system. The question of fault in the car accident is very up in the air given the autonomous vehicle, and revealed is that Lorelai created the autonomous driving system, on behalf of Monet. Charlie and Eurydice go missing and the ending is unexpected, and circles back to autonomous systems and responsibility for their actions. It's a compelling read.

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer is a lovely debut novel about thirty-six-year-old Clover Brooks, who lives in New York and is a death doula, spending time with people at the end of their lives.

Clover's parents died when she was six, and lives with her dog and two cats in the apartment that she was raised in by her grandfather. He passed away in his office at work thirteen years ago and Clover kept many of his things, as if he still there. She had never been in a relationship and was a loner, with her best friend her eighty-seven-year-old neighbor Leo that she played mahjong with. 

Clover met her new neighbor and eventual friend Sylvie, and then Sebastian, who she met at a death cafe meeting. Sebastian's grandmother Claudia was terminally ill and he hired Clover to spend time with her. Claudia had been a photojournalist in the 1950s, and was to marry someone in the U.S. after returning from holiday in France. She met a local, Hugo Beaufort, and sailed to Corsica with him for ten days. She then still came back to the U.S. and got married, largely because she was expected to. 

Clover and her new friend Sylvie researched and found there a Hugo Beaufort born in France in 1931, listed as a resident of Maine. She went to try to find him, only to discover he had passed away a couple of months prior, but she met his grandson, Hugo. Upon hearing about Sebastian's grandmother, Hugo guessed that she Claudia, who his grandfather had talked about her right before he died, and said she was the reason he moved to America. He and Claudia each requested their ashes be scattered in Corsica, where they were together. 

Hugo found letters his grandfather had written to Claudia but not sent, the last one saying he had seen her with her husband and she looked happy, so he's going to leave her be. Clover gave to Claudia the letter, and others Hugo wrote which said Claudia the love of his life. She died content and her final words to Clover were "learn from my mistakes, my darling. Don't let the best parts of life pass you by because you're took scared of the unknown. Be cautiously reckless." Clover then came upon her neighbor Leo in the last moments of his life after a heart attack and he said to her "the secret to having a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Promise me, kid, that you'll let yourself live."

Clover received a package that Claudia had arranged to be sent, with a digital camera and several lenses. She embarked on a three-month trip traveling the world, documenting her time in a notebook from Hugo. The two then met in Corsica and scattered together in the sea Claudia's ashes and Hugo's grandfather's ashes. 

It's a nice read and Brammer closes with "you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough; if you want to believe that everything happens for a reason. But if we completely understood one another, if every even made sense, none of us would ever learn or grow. Our days might be pleasant, but prosaic. So maybe we just need to appreciate that many aspects of life - and the people we love - will always be a mystery. Because without mystery, there is no magic. And instead if constantly asking ourselves the question of why we're here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: we are here."

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe is an interesting memoir by the writer and director of movies including Say Anything, Singles, Jerry McGuire, and Almost Famous. Additionally, Crowe wrote the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then won an Oscar for the movie screenplay he adapted.

Crowe was born in 1957 and in The Uncool, writes about heavily about his teen years in San Diego in the 1970s. He had a supportive mother and father, older sister Cindy, and oldest sister Cathy who committed suicide. He began writing music reviews for an alternative weekly newspaper, The Door, at the age of fourteen and at fifteen both graduated high school and became Rolling Stone's youngest-ever contributor.

The movie Almost Famous is about his youth, and before long he was interviewing Ozzy Osbourne at a Black Sabbath show, the Eagles, Kris Kristofferson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Allman Brothers Band. Later there was Led Zeppelin, who he was flying with on their plane, and significant time with David Bowie, who told eighteen-year-old Crowe, "ask me anything, hold up a mirror and show me what you see." 

Bowie also told Crowe he "young enough to be honest," perhaps part of why other musicians spent time with Crowe. Later Crowe recounts the story of bringing from Jamaica back to the U.S. marijuana seeds he pulled out of Bob Marley's stash. At twenty-one, Crowe wrote about everyday high school kids, with his book Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Uncool closes around the time Almost Famous: The Musical came out in 2019, with the ending centered around Crowe's mom. It's a revealing and solid book.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a lovely novel that tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, done entirely through letters she writes and receives. The book begins with seventy-three year old Sybil in 2012 writing to her brother Felix, and goes up to letters from 2021. Sybil corresponds as well with people including: 

• Fiona, Sybil's at times estranged daughter
• Theodore Lubeck, her neighbor that cares for her
• Melissa Genet, a local college Dean who refuses her request to audit classes
• Harry Landy, the troubled high-achieving student son of a former colleague 
• Dezi Martinelli, the son of someone she played a role in sending to jail
• Basam Mansour, a customer service agent with a DNA testing company
• Henrietta Gleason, her recently learned of biological sister in Scotland 
• Gilbert, her son who died young and with whom she regularly writes missives to
• Authors like Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry that she writes with
• People that she wrote in the 1950s when her letter writing began

Evans writes an originally constructed book, spinning the story together letter by letter. They're lovely pictures of relationships progressing over time and the wrap up to the book is kind of great.

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe is a solid collection of a dozen The New Yorker pieces. The collection is subtitled True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, with those below ones that stood out:

The Jefferson Bottles (2007) - Noteworthy was how Bill Koch, whose father founded Koch Industries, collected wines, and sued people.

The Avenger (2015) - Details Ken Dornstein, whose brother died in the Pam Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Interesting from this piece is the level of obsession that it shows Dornstein had to find those responsible.

The Empire of Edge (2014) - About New York Mets owner Steven Cohen and his hedge fund SAC Capital. Covers his scant punishment for wrongdoings, especially in relation to how much he profited from them.

Journeyman (2017) On Anthony Bourdain and his CNN show No Reservations that would travel the world to authentic places. Bourdain then took his life in 2018.

The Worst of the Worst (2015) - Details defense attorney Judy Clarke, who has represented a number of extremely high-profile guilty people that she's attempted to keep off death row, seeking life imprisonment sentences instead. Plaintiffs she's represented include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui, Eric Rudolph, Susan Smith, Robert Bowers, and Jared Loughner.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Syrian Canadian Zoulfa Katouh is a lovely debut novel about eighteen-year-old pharmacy student Salama Kassab, who volunteers at a hospital in Homs, Syria, caring for those injured, including six-year-old Ahmad who died of internal bleeding, at the hands of the Syrian military.

Salama's father and her brother Hamza were imprisoned by the government the year before after going to a protest, and her mother killed a week later by a bomb. Salama hopes to escape the country with her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla, an artist. 

Salama has PTSD, which takes the form of an imagined companion, Khawf, who frequently tells her what she must do to survive, even if it's a painful, and potentially horrific, choice. She finds love with Kenan, who has two younger siblings, thirteen-year-old Yusuf and nine-year-old Lama. She secures passage, eventually for all of them, out of Syria, with it to be via boat across the Mediterranean to Italy, from Am, whose sister she treated in the hospital. Salama finds out her father died and brother still held in prison, counter to her hope that they both no longer being tortured.

The book takes a unexpected turn as it comes out that Layla being alive was imagined by Salama, just like Khawf a figment of her PTSD. Layla had been killed by a sniper five months before. Salama then is told in her head by Khawf that the hospital about to be bombed, rushes there and tells Dr. Ziad to evacuate, saving many. Salama, Kenan, Yusuf, and Lama take the boat and jump overboard, leading to the Kenan's siblings safely in Germany with family, and Salama and Kenan in Toronto. It's an excellent book, with many events taken from real atrocities suffered by Syrians and inflicted by the dictatorship.

Joyride by Susan Orlean

Joyride by Susan Orlean is a memoir on her life and career as a nonfiction writer, with books including The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, and her first, Saturday Night. 

Orlean starts with her path as a writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, then moved to Portland and worked at Willamette Week as her second writing job there. She went to Boston and worked at the Boston Globe, also as her second writing job there, and then New York City. She eventually wound up at The New Yorker, first doing freelance pieces before she became a staff writer there. 

There's fascinating anecdotes about journalism in years past, with large expense accounts, frequent travel to write stories, and often open-ended timeframes for time to complete them and how frequently staff writers had to publish. She also covers how access as a writer was different in the past, she wanted to write about working in missile silos, asked the military if she could visit, and did so with little difficulty.

Orlean describes her book Saturday Night as a wild experience of being passed to different editors, some of whom were interested in the book and others who were simply assigned to it. She twenty-five years ago wrote The Orchid Thief, expanded from a magazine article into her second book, which became the basis for the movie Adaptation, with the Charlie Kaufman-written screenplay about making the movie from the book. In researching Rin Tin Tin, she notes finding late in the research process a volume of material that expanded the scope of the book. When she wrote The Library Book, it coincided with her moving from a country home in Hudson Valley, New York to Los Angeles. 

The "writer on writing" content she provides is fantastic. On subjects, she writes:

• Writers fall into two categories, those who have something they want to say to the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them, with her in the second camp. 
• Two categories of story subjects she loves are "hiding in place sight" and "who knew?" 
• She likes to write about subjects that are passionate about something, especially if it likely wouldn't be covered by other writers.
• Every person has an unimaginably rich world inside of them. She loves the idea of describing a world, it may not be a celebrity world, but it's a world nonetheless. 
• When you pick a topic, you declare it matters. Writing is then learning about that topic and sharing it, including your thoughts on it, with others.
• Editors or bosses she worked with said that her stories being about obscure topics made them require great execution to be successful.
• Subjects at times would feel an attachment with her, she's asking in depth about their lives.

On her writing process, she notes that:

• She reads her work aloud, listening for the cadence of the words.
• A lesson taught to her about writing that it involves reporting, then thinking, then writing. 
• Her work is something that anyone could do, putting in the research and reading the archives to be able to describe something, but they don't. 
• It was her job to do the research, think about it, and then tell the story.
• Another lesson she was taught is stories don't need a huge conclusion, they should leave readers falling forward, finishing the tale in their heads.
• The engine of her stories is the drive from ignorance to knowledge. 
• To manage the volume of material from researching books, she put information on index cards and spread it all out, then grouped them together. It's assembling a coherent whole. 
• She doesn't use a tape recorder, rather takes notes. 
• Writing a book is about fulfilling a daily word quota. 

It's an informative and compelling book and Orlean also covers being a speech coach for the Democratic National Convention, including trying to convince Senate candidate Barack Obama to tweak a speech.

Frostlines by Neil Shea

Frostlines by Neil Shea is a work of nonfiction subtitled A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. Shea writes a series of chapters with each on his time in an area north of the Arctic Circle.

 The book starts with him watching narwhals talk with each other, or tusking, in Canada's Admiralty Inlet. In a a chapter about wolves on Canada's Ellesmere Island, he notes how the animals were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the mid-1990s. 

He writes of the Northwest Passage, and how forty-one ships made the voyage through the Passage in 2023 and thirty-eight in 2024. Covered in one chapter is the decline in caribou herds across the top of North America. In another, he shows a  classroom in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, where a freshly killed caribou is butchered for the students to see, and the parts all parceled out to the Nunamiut people. 

Shea as well covers Greenland and the Norse people who vanished from there in the mid-fifteenth century. The last chapter is on the border between Russia and Norway, stretching 120 miles, stopping at the Barents Sea. He writes about the Norwegian town of Kirkenes and how people used to cross the border in both directions, but now after the invasion of Crimea, then Covid-19, then the invasion of Ukraine, traffic has largely stopped.

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of John Lowry and Naomi May on the Oregon Trail. She's a young widower from a white family, he's half-Pawnee, raised by his white father, without his mother.

John was retained to travel the first part of the journey west by Naomi's travelling party, which included her immediate family of mother and father Winifred and William May and brothers Warren, Will, Webb, and Wyatt. Also part of the group was the Bingham family and Caldwell family, whose son Naomi had been married to. 

The group set out in 1853, and people that made the trip west were in search of a better life, and found many hardships along the way, and encounters with both Indian and illness sometimes fatal. John and headstrong Naomi, who draws and paints, fall in love and John and Naomi marry. At the start of the book, Naomi's mother, father, older brother Warren, and the Binghams are killed by Indians, and Naomi and her youngest brother Wolfe, who was born during the trip, are taken by the tribe. 

John comes across the massacre, sees that Naomi has likely been taken, and goes in pursuit of her. He comes across a group of Shoshoni, including his sister, Hanabi and the chief, Washakie. John learns about a different group of Shoshoni, led by Pocatello, with a reputation for killing white people. Washakie tells of a coming meetup of tribes and there Washakie and John state their case for the release of Naomi and Wolfe, but a vote of the various leaders results in Naomi being released and Wolfe kept, to be raised by a woman, Weda, in Pocatello's band who lost her own baby.

Naomi goes with John and Washakie and his people, but from the death of her parents and brother, and taking of Wolfe, she retreats into herself, lost in grief, hence the Where the Lost Wander book title. Wolfe is brought back to them by Weda as he's sick and she hopes they can heal him. Instead, Wolfe dies in Naomi's arms. He had been loved by many and Naomi and John left Washakie and his people and rejoined Webb, Will, and Wyatt and formed a life. It's a solid book and while still fiction, it's interesting how it based on real people.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a lovely novel that tells a story about Phoebe Stone, who arrives at a Newport, Rhode Island resort hotel with the intention to take her life.

Phoebe had been left by her husband, was going nowhere at work, and found her cat dead, leaving her in a broken state. Upon arrival at the hotel, she finds herself the only guest not part of a week-long wedding party, and becomes quickly intertwined with Lila and Gary, the respective bride and groom to be.

Lila is used to being the center of attention and Gary older, and has a daughter, Juice, from his wife who got cancer and died. Espach writes of how people have a part to play at the wedding, and that includes telling the bride how perfect everything is. Phoebe comes in and doesn't feel a compunction to lie given that she was going to take her own life. She forms relationships that matter with Lila, Gary, and Juice.

Events wind up having Phoebe be tapped as the maid of honor, and the toast she writes is lovely. She was going to say, "a wedding is a huge waste of money, but it's also true that this wedding will never be a waste. Because I came here to die. And now look at me. Lila, every day this week, you gave me a reason to get up in the morning, to put on a beautiful dress and be part of something, and for that I will always be grateful."

At the end, Espach writes this about Phoebe, to be alive, she must leave this hotel, despite the uncertainties of everything. Walk down the long hallway of that mansion come winter, not knowing what will become of her, which is a thing that does scare her. But she also feels a thrill imagining the candles she'll light at night. Frank, the nineteenth-century yellow dog, who will sleep on her bed as she writes. The snow dusting the ocean.

It's a lovely story of someone falling into a situation and then how the characters lives touch each other. The book is immensely entertaining, but most of all has heart.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrick Backman

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman is a novel that tells the story of seven-year-old Elsa, who is different than other kids and often picked on at school. 

Her best, and only, friend is her grandmother, seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. At night, Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms, and new friends from her grandmother's world, including Wolfheart. The story is an odd one, but finishes nicely, and is about being different, having family, friends, and protectors.

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy is an engrossing novel about a woman, Inti Flynn, trying to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands after hundreds of years of them not being there. Her belief is that wolves will help the entire ecosystem come back to life. 

There with her twin sister, Aggie, Inti has mirror-touch synesthesia, where she feels in her mind sensations, including pain, that she sees happen to others. Aggie is a shell of her former self, communicating only with Inti, and often just barely, afraid to leave the house after the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. 

The locals in Scotland are generally against Inti's efforts to introduce the wolves, believing them a threat to their sheep and way of life. One of them, Stuart Burns, who had been beating his wife, Lainey, is found dead by Inti and she buries his body to try to prevent retribution against the wolves. She had developed a relationship with the chief of police, Duncan, becomes pregnant, and goes from believing it was Duncan who killed Stuart to thinking a wolf did it after Duncan gets attacked. 

Inti goes to try to find and kill the wolf and gives birth in the forest, with she and the baby almost dying from exposure, but wolves curled around them for warmth. Her sister then finds them in the forest, and after Aggie takes the baby to get her help, one of Inti's adversary locals comes and saves her. She later learns it was Aggie who killed Stuart, and almost killed Duncan, in an effort to protect her. 

The book feels very unique, with it wild, raw, and visceral, containing a huge connection with the natural world. It's also about love and loss and finding your way through pain in your world, and contains lovely language, with Inti "halved and doubled at once" after the birth of her child.