*** The Local by Joe Hartsone

The Local reminded me of early John Grisham books, with an ambitious plot of a small-town lawyer taking on the local authorities and having to untangle a murder mystery from the courtroom, in near real time. If I have a quibble, it’s the highly unlikely and totally unnecessary to the plot affair he starts during the trial, but the cast of characters is enjoyable and complex and the plot very twisty while still believable.

** Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Very Cold People is the story of a girl growing up with a controlling mother in a small town where her parents are on a very tight budget, and are ashamed of it. Her mother is also both depressed and repressed. She observes her family, friends, teachers, and police officers with both curiosity and suspicion and collects ammunition for what we know is her eventual flight from her oppressive life. It makes for a both engrossing and dispiriting tale of a girl in need of rescue.

* The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living provides a daily short lesson and meditation inspired by a citation from a Stoic philosopher. I did not consume it as intended, and I’m no aficionado or connaisseur of philosophy in general, or Stoic philosophy in particular. I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with many of the principles that seemed to be put forth in the book, in particular the quests for self-control and embodied virtue–but others seemed strange. For instance, what’s so wrong about anger? I find it to be a useful emotion. Perhaps the goal is not to act on it in destructive way? This may be linked to another odd aspect of the book: its ultra-masculine affect, perhaps because all the thinkers that are quoted are themselves men?

 

 

** Chinatown Pretty by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu

The authors of Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors photographed seniors in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles (mostly), as well as Chicago and New York, and put together a gallery of photos and commentary on how these seniors live and make sartorial choices. I found the glimpses into their (often harsh) life stories more interesting than the clothes, who are often remarkable only by the interesting mixing and layering choices their owners make. (A few hand-tailored ones are remarkable.)

 

*** How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is the hilarious but deep and layered portrait of an older Dominican woman who, having lost her job, is enrolled in a series of sessions with a job counselor to, she hopes find a job. Instead, she finds herself reliving her emigration from the Dominican Republic, her raising her son alone, and how she takes care of many of her neighbors. It’s never schmaltzy, full of subtle twists, and with an artful inclusion of Spanish words and phrases. A breath of levity that’s not just silliness. 

** Dinners With Ruth by Nina Totenberg

Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships talks about the author’s cross-generational friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and occasionally about her friendships with her NPR co-hosts. For me, the most interesting part of the book was to relive the very slow opening of the professional world to women, from Ginsburg’s inability to get a law firm job to her sitting on the Supreme Court, with a similar trajectory in journalism for Nina Totenberg.

I sometimes felt uneasy reading the book and seeing how very close journalists and political actors can be. How easy it is for reporting to become biased. (and, also, how surprisingly circumscribed a life all the characters seem to live, socializing with others in equally prosperous circumstances and within a few cities). 

*** Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Case Study is an intricately-constructed novel that blends straightforward story-telling with an exploration of mysterious notebook, a sister’s suicide with psychotherapy sessions, a dull young woman’s life and her spunky alter ego’s. It’s all quite shadowy and confusing and brilliantly executed, and left me wondering about the boundary between sanity and madness.

*** Democracy’s Data by Dan Bouk

The US, by law, conducts a census every 10 years and, also by law, the raw data collected during the event becomes available 72 years later to protect the respondents’ privacy (it works for those of us who don’t live extremely long lives, at least.)  Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them is an exploration of the 1940 census, which starts slowly and cautiously but soon blossoms into a fascinating book. Each chapter explores a different aspect, some of which I was not too interested in, for instance the one about census jobs being distributed through patronage. But other chapters, especially the ones that discuss what data was chosen to be collected, and how it was organized, are well-constructed and show how a seemingly neutral data collection and data cleaning exercise can surface racism, sexism, and other exclusionary practices. My favorite part of the books are the actual pages that the enumerators filled out, complete with the names of those they counted, their ages, relationships, incomes, and various comments, both from the enumerator and the individual who coded (and re-interpreted) the data. Highly recommended!

** Path Lit by Lightning by David Maraniss

 

Jim Thorpe was a remarkable athlete and led a life shaped by the atrocious treatment of Native Americans around the turn of the 20th century. His biography, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, painstakingly takes us through every game he ever played, it seems, and the abundance of details unfortunately manages to obscures both the major accomplishments of his life and the backdrop of the racist treatment of Native Americans. That’s too bad because the personal and historical stories are both outsized.

* Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

Three adult siblings and their families convene for their first Christmas without their formidable mother in Flight. They are determined to behave but it takes some effort as they squabble about what to do with their mother’s house, how to resolve cousins’ petty fights, and also how to find a lost local girl. There are lots of potentially interesting themes in the story, but I could not get attached to any of the characters.