The Names by Florence Knapp

The Names by Florence Knapp is a lovely novel that tells the story of Cora, the naming of her newborn son (whose father wants named after him), and its impact on the lives of Cora, her nine-year-old daughter, and son.

The book progresses in sections, with each having three chapters. The first section tells the story of their lives at the time that Cora registers her son's name, second their lives seven years in the future, and subsequent ones over a thirty-five year span.

The first chapter in each section tells the story of what occurring in their lives if Cora registered for her son the name Bear as Maia wanted, the second chapter about if Cora registered the name Julian that she thought of, and third if she registered the name Gordon after her abusive husband, a well-respected doctor in town.

It's an interesting construct that Knapp puts together and she in the novel shows the impact of the naming decision, creating alternate universes for Cora, Maia, the son, and even Cora's mother. There's so much that happens in the lives of the characters based on the name choice made by Cora. In one universe without a father, in another without a father and mother, in a third with them there in an abusive house of horrors. It's a powerful book, beautiful and heartwarming at times, devastatingly sad and painful at times. 

An interesting choice Knapp made was to not have the three different realities be all good in one and all bad in another. There's unexpected turns taken in the lives of the characters, particularly for the son and what happens with him if he named Bear. It seems as if just as the impact of a name is shown, detailed as well is the impact of both the choices people make and the vagaries of things that happen in their lives. In the first universe, Bear dies of a wasp sting, in the second, Julian gets his family back (with mention of him running past a wasp nest), and in the third, Gordon rescues his mom (with no wasps noted). The epilogue has an alternate timeline for the father, and closes with another for Cora's son, had a different name, Hugh, been chosen.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. Keefe details the story of Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who in 2019 jumped to his death from a balcony overlooking the River Thames in London. 

It's a deeply reported book that covers London, including it's wealth from both financial institutions in the city and foreigners, with the many empty luxury apartments owned largely as investments by those out of the country. Keefe delves into the influence of Russian oligarchs and their families on London, as well as the criminal underworld and how someone can get sucked into it all. 

Zac in his early teens become enamored with money and status, it comes out that he at nineteen presented himself to strangers as Zac Ismailov, son of a wealth Russian oligarch and heir to his fortune. Zac had a connection with a man, Mark Foley, tied to oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owned Chelsea Football Club, and became close with two older men, Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, known as Indian Dave. 

Shamji was a hustler and Verinder a gangster, someone who made a living collecting debts owed to underworld characters. Zac purported to be in business with Shamji, including foreign cars and mining, and told his parents that he was staying in an apartment of Sharma's that was empty. At least Sharma appears to have viewed Zac as a mark, someone who could enrich him with Zac's family money. 

Zac went missing and several days later his body was found in the Thames. It then came out that there was video footage from the Mi6 building of Zac alone on an apartment balcony, and then jumping. His hip clipped the embankment wall, nearly making it to the water from the fifth floor. Shamji and Sharma in between Zac going missing and his body being discovered expressed concern to Zac's parents about his well-being and purported to not know his whereabouts, but additional video revealed that as a lie. Cameras captured footage of Shamji leaving the apartment he was in with Zac and Sharma, Zac then jumping, Sharma returning to the apartment and leaving again, staring into the water below the balcony. From additional evidence, Sharma may have broken Zac's jaw before he jumped, and likely threatened his life. It appears that rather than a suicide, Zac jumped from the balcony hoping to land in the Thames and escape, but hit the embarkment on his way in. 

Police knew that Shamji had lied to them, with Sharma answering no comment to all questions, but couldn't prove that a murder had been committed, especially after Sharma died of a drug overdose. The video of Zac jumping along with the death of the principle suspect caused the police to stop investigating. The book is a fascinating portrait of an underworld, including with a Russian oligarch connection, and somebody sucking themselves into it, playing a game that wasn't a game to the other parties. Zac's mom Rachelle noted in the inquest to his death that he "wanted money and power, fast." Zac got tied up with a charlatan and a gangster, and died quite possibly attempting to escape violence. 

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Heart the Lover by Lily King is an interesting novel that tells the first-person story of a main character through decades of her life.

In the fall of her senior year of college, the narrator meets two other students, close friends Sam and Yash. They nickname her Jordan and she starts dating Sam, with a convoluted and often stormy relationship between the two.

She and Sam break up and she later starts a relationship with Yash. The two of them go to visit Yash's family in Tennessee and she goes to Paris for a job. He flies there for an extended visit, they have an amazing time together, and Yash receives a job offer in Paris. He decides to go back to America, and the two of them are to then live in New York City. All their plans are made, and then when she arrives in New York, she learns that he hasn't come, rather has gone to Atlanta to move in with Sam.

The book jumps forward in time to her as a married adult with two kids, one of whom suffers from seizures and debilitating pain and has made the choice to have a high-risk surgery to get better. She hears from Sam, who tells her Yash is dying, and she flies to see him along with Sam, his family, and Yash's family. She and Yash express how much they mean to each other and she tells Yash that she had his baby twenty-seven years ago and gave her up for adoption. Her contact information was left in case the daughter ever decides to get in touch, and then she could tell her daughter about Yash.

She leaves the hospital around the time Yash goes unconscious and goes for her son's surgery, landing and receiving a message from Sam that Yash died. It's kind of a lovely book about relationships over time.

My Kind of Place by Susan Orlean

My Kind of Place by Susan Orlean is a 2004 collection of her travel writing. There's just over thirty different pieces from her included, with these the ones that stood out...

All Mixed Up - about a neighborhood grocery store in Queens, NYC and the interesting cast of characters that work and pass through there.

Rough Diamonds - on baseball in Cuba, where they love the game dearly.

The Congo Sound - about an African music store in Paris.

The Place to Disappear - covers Bangkok's Khao San Road, known as a gathering spot for itinerant travelers.

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.