Reads 2018

Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
I first saw the slim volume named for a Velvet Underground lyric on Mike Opperman’s bookshelf in early 1996. Twenty-some years later, I read these riveting short stories about a narrator named Fuckhead in barely a week. The narrator and his friends end up with a giant, violent mute men in their backseat. While stealing items from abandoned houses, two men admire a naked women parasailing above the river. An recovering addict develops an obsession with standing below a window while an unaware woman showers nightly.

The Great Halifax Explosion, John U. Bacon
Outside Canada, few know of the greatest explosion to strike a city prior to the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Bacon sprinkles in Canadian history and reveals that our ally to the north still feared American annexation into the 20th century. Only a catastrophe of this magnitude could reshape the views of the two nations. Bacon dives into stories of survivors, the heroes and the heels surrounding the explosion caused by two colliding ships and an unfortunate cargo of ordnance bound for Europe during WWI. Events leading up to the explosion are covered in exacting detail, and the seconds that wiped out a chunk of Halifax get equally tragic time. Bacon makes the reader feel like they know the location of everyone in Halifax was seconds before their world turned upside down. For all the death and the thousands more permanently wounded, the tales of heroism shine throughout.

Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Annie Proulx
 I re-read the second volume of Wyoming Stories, and the weakness touted by critics was more apparent in some stories. The Contest was weak, just a beard contest at a dive bar. The Old Badger Game is almost nonsensical. The story about hot tubs is immediately forgettable, and Dump Junk seems underdeveloped. But there’s enough here to like. In Hellhole, a game warden finds a geologic hotspot useful for dispatching the conniving poachers he cannot abide. In The Indian Wars Refought, a young woman of Indian heritage rediscovers her routes through a series of lost films from Buffalo Bill Cody, climaxing with a simple but firm statement about those old films. The Trickle-Down Effect combines a chain-smoking drunk with a 1,000-mile hay-hauling expedition, and fireworks ensure. "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" presents a man who has seen his wife and children shun him as he sees the sun set on the small Wyoming rancher.. Proulx takes a break from chronicling the natives in Man Crawling Out of Trees, where a New York couple move to Wyoming only for the wife to break Wyoming’s unspoken rules and the husband to embark on long drives on empty roads, all while the cracks in their relationship widen into canyons. The Wamsutter Wolf finds never-do-well Buddy Millar taking a job in the gas fields, renting a moldy trailer next door to high school bully Rase Wham, then gets drawn into a disastrous cookout with Rase’s family and his best friend Graig, a nomad who claims to hunt Wyoming wolves. Bad Dirt wraps up with Florida Rental, when the dive’s bartender faces cattle trampling her land, and retaliates by renting Florida predators unknown to Wyoming cows.

The Largess of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson
What better way to catch up on Johnson than to go immediately from his famous collection to this posthumous collection of five long tales? These five long short stories are a fitting epilogue. They concern Johnson staples – writers, small-time criminals and addicts struggling to quit. Doppelganger, Poltergeist is student-teacher friendship story woven with an Elvis conspiracy tale no one knew they needed to read – but when it’s done, you’ll be glad you did.

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, Annie Proulx
In late 2017, I got rolling with Annie Proulx’s short fiction and could not stop. Them Old Cowboy Songs portrays a young homesteading couple and turns true-to-life bleak, maybe bleaker. Despite its crude title, Tits Up in a Ditch chronicles the life of a young woman raised by her homesteader grandparents and her efforts to get a step ahead that always leave her three steps back. The ending will bowl you over.

Tetris: The Games People Play, Box Brown
While the subject matter is not always best-suited to the graphic novel form and Brown’s style can come off as simplistic, the strength of this true story is strong enough to overcome it. Three cultures came together to make Tetris the sensation it became.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, Jessica Bruder
The Great Recession expelled hundreds of thousands of people from the workforce, and Bruder finds many of them embracing a life on the road, living frugally in four-wheeled homes. They work as campsite hosts in national forests, harvest sugar beets on the Great Plains and staff Amazon fulfillment centers. It’s a story of survival and people building new lives off the grid as best they can. Bruder takes the lid off the life forced on many during the Great Recession, when living out of a van became a viable option. She doesn’t shy away from tough questions, such as why this crowd is almost 100 percent white and how they can slip through the cracks and dock their vans cost-free in hidden nooks around the country. Bruder grounds the book in the travels of Linda and her quest to find a spot of land for an earthship, a home built of recycled materials. Relationships with the people living this life made this book possible, as Bruder debarks with her own van to meet with many of them. Watching these older workers grunt through long shifts at thankless, low-wage jobs gives a glimpse into a potential frightening future as retirement threatens to evolve into something else for people once staunchly middle class.

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, Nate Blakeslee
The reintroduction of wolves to the northern Rockies has been successful and highly controversial as the wolves quickly expanded their reach beyond Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. The ranchers and rural people impacted by wolf kills get their say, even if sympathies generally fall with the wolves and their scientists. At times the book seems to simply catalog the actions of particular packs, although Blakeslee does interject with political matters than ultimately lead to the climactic deaths of well-observed wolves. The changes the wolves have made to the Yellowstone ecosystem have been documented heavily, but this book does well by exploring the humans who track the wolves and those who see them as a nuisance, not a restoration. Later chapters with a man who killed the best-known wolf are as incisive as the depiction of the pack’s reaction to the sudden death is depressing.

The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea
Taking place over two critical days in a dying Mexican-American patriarch’s life – his 100-year-old mother dies days before his backyard birthday bash and unofficial farewell party – Urrea weaves flashbacks and family history into the two events, bringing back distant and estranged family members. Urrea’s language sizzles on the page and despite frequent use of Spanish words, even non-speakers can follow easily. This is a novel of modern immigrant life in San Diego, so political overtones are inescapable, with issues of gang violence also looming heavily. Urrea does drill down to craft a full view of this family. Every character feels fully fleshed out, from Big Angel’s half-brother Little Angel to the family’s strong women to Ookie, the neighborhood boy who has been secretly working with Big Angel on a surprise. Even if we only spend two days with Big Angel and his clan, the reader knows them intimately. I got to meet the author at the Southern Festival of Books in October.

Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann
Grann documents a campaign of terror against the Osage, the Oklahoma tribe made wealthy by vast oil deposits under the reservation. Wealth was no protection from depredations of outsiders - Osage with mineral wealth had to have white guardians administer their money, and in most cases robbed the Indians blind. The killings are brutal, as is the quiet campaign to keep the law away. The nascent FBI agents, led by a former Texas Ranger, step in and turn the tide. While I am not normally a fan of reporters stepping into the story, Grann's research drastically widens the scope of the Osage killings. Nothing can be said for certain, but he pours over documents and interviews Osage descended from those who died under odd circumstances. It earned a spot in the Native American section on my bookshelves.

Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance
I’m very late to this party, but Vance’s book concerns the struggles of Appalachian people and the loss of prosperity due to drugs and their ingrained culture. Vance educated me about an Ohio I didn’t know - I expected Vance’s book to concern some tiny town in Ohio’s Appalachian southeastern counties, which were only a hop-skip away from where I grew up in Cleveland. Instead, he focuses on his life growing up in Middletown, a factory city on the Miami River between Cincinnati and Dayton. He chronicles a migration to factory towns that never left behind the origins or the hillbilly character of those places. Vance broke the chain and poverty and violence – he served in the Marines, graduated from Ohio State then Yale Law School – and he sounds grateful for all people and events that had to transpire for him to land in that position. But he acknowledges that government alone can’t solve this problems and could get out of the way in some cases (allowing extended families to rise a child instead of funneling them into foster care). If I don’t agree with everything he says, I see the book’s importance – communities and families have cratered in many places around this country, and people get stuck. Many do not realize that they could become unstuck, but certain facets of character and culture often become obstacles. Criticism of Vance’s book has grown but I would defend it as one family’s experience. We should not be so eager to use Hillbilly Elegy to paint broad generalizations that don’t serve anyone.

Ride With Me, Mariah Montana, Ivan Doig
Sue me, I like Ivan Doig. He’s a great antidote for those don’t live in the Last Best Place and long to return. In the final book of his Two Medicine Trilogy, Doig centers on Jick McCaskill coping with his wife’s death and joining his daughter and her ex-husband on a motorhome trip around the state to uncover its hidden corners and small-town highlights in advance of the state’s centennial. Thirty years after it writing, what Doig wrote about Montana still holds true. It might be one of the better introductions to his work since it is part travelogue (and Montana tourists can see almost every piece of this tour).

Property: Stories between 2 Novellas, Lionel Shriver
Every story in this collection orbits in some fashion around the concept of property. The Standing Chandelier and The Subletter bookend a number of shorter stories. Sometimes they do feel a little long and fluffed out, but it’s hard to dispute the power of both pieces. Chandelier concerns the long, doomed relationship between a man and woman, while Subletter involves two expatriates in Belfast in the last days of the Troubles, one entrenched in Belfast, the other a seeming self-entitled mooch. In The Chapstick, the dutiful son caring for his aging but arrogant father runs afoul of airport security at the wrong time. The Self-Seeding Sycamore brings together an odd couple of townhouse neighbors feuding over a tree and its saplings. The couple in Negative Equity divorce and stay under the same roof during the housing crisis. The raccoons of Vermin gradually wear away a couple on a quiet NYC street. Paradise to Perdition finds a fugitive embezzler gradually souring on the tropical resort where he fled.

How to Stop Time, Matt Haig
Despite some of the egregious name-dropping (Shakespeare, Captain Cook, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald), the saga of the 430-year-old man is an absolute page-turner and a deep dive into the sacrifices required of people who age at a fraction of the normal human rate. It's a novel about pain, the pain of losing everyone, the fear of being uncovered and the awful lengths to which the society that protects these long-lived people from possible threats. We see his sadness nearly overwhelm him until he finds people with the same condition in the late 19th century and discovers the grim consequences for normal humans who clue into their long-lived ilk. Some of the plot points move a little too fast, but Haig is covering 400 years in 300-some pages, so you won't mind too much.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures, Nick Pyenson
This is a tour de force about the ancestry of whales, the modern behemoths who ply the oceans, their future and how little we know about them. No one can take a sperm whale, humpback or blue whale into a zoo or aquarium to study a living specimen. So many extinct and even living whales are known from a single skull or fossil site. Pyenson explores scores of skeletons at the Cerro Ballena sites in Argentina, likely the spot of a massive kill-off millions of years ago. He discusses the whale’s amphibious, footed ancestor and their closest land-dwelling cousins (hippos, ungulates). The future is short for some, following the presumed extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin. The tiny vaquita that lives only in the Gulf of California and has been decimated through bycatch for other fish. Some might find the author’s actions unconscionable – his team studying whale anatomy joins a commercial whaling vessel from Iceland – their dissections lead to new discoveries, including a previously unknown sensory organ at the top of rorquals’ lower jaws. Whales face precarious futures as the oceans change, but the spirit of Pyenson’s book is infectious. We can marvel at giant creatures in the fossil records – dinosaurs, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers – but we are contemporaries of the largest creatures to ever live on this planet. This book could reinvigorate anyone’s love of whales and their many mysteries.

Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Chris Nashawaty
A surprisingly engrossing story about the rise of National Lampoon, the mercurial and self-destructive Doug Kenney and the edgy comedy that went mainstream in the 1970s. This book goes way deeper than the golf course comedy, tracing the movie's roots to the Harvard Lampoon, the National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. At the center is volatile writer Kenney, and in his orbit we meet the Murray brothers (Bill and Brian Doyle-Murray), Chevy Chase, Harold Ramis and many more. Well-researched and sourced, Nashawaty landed interviews with every key person from mercurial Bill Murray to prickly Chase and spoke extensively with Harold Ramis before his 2014 death. Even a casual fan of the movie will enjoy the way Nashawaty places the film in context of the 1970s and subversive comedy's ascent.

Florida, Lauren Groff
Another set of short tales from Groff, who bounces from Florida to the French Coast without ever losing the innate oddness of the Sunshine State.

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
I flamed out on this book when the E Street Band became rich and famous. While there are more stories to explore, once they stop having to fight for everything, the book lost something for me. However, Springsteen’s down-to-Earth tale unfurls the struggles of his early years – scrounging for toll change, siphoning gas, crashing where he could. Like his music or not, the man fought for what he earned and adhered to a strict vision for what he wanted his band to become.

The Ancient Minstrel, Jim Harrison
These three novellas spring from common Harrison inspirations, but chart drastically different paths. The Ancient Minstrel is virtually autobiography, with the his author narrator attempting to become a pig farmer and trying not to overdrink. Eggs follows a solitary women who farming a patch of Montana and harvesting eggs, then becomes pregnant from a brief affair with a wounded WWII soldier from Britain. It’s easily the best of the three. The Case of the Howling Buddhas is pretty sordid, delving into the life of a detective who has an eye for teenage girls. When the inevitable happens, he sheds all sympathy and escapes in the only way available. Yet somehow Harrison makes that last scene poignant and beautiful.

The Water Museum, Luis Alberto Urrea
Urrea spent a fair amount of time in San Diego and brings along familiar characters from House of Broken Angels (this collection precedes the novel). Mountains Without Numbers foretells the slow death of a town in the Mountain West. My favorite stories come later in the book – the final trio of The sous chefs of Iogua, Welcome to the Water Museum and Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses were among the best stories I touched all year. In three stories Urrea touches on immigrant cuisine in Iowa, a sci-fi future where rural children experience water in a museum (a Ray Bradbury homage that suddenly hits with how close this world is to our and how horrifically different it is) and a white man whose Native American wife dies, forcing him to confront his long history with her family.

There There, Tommy Orange
Twelve Native Americans converge on the Oakland Coliseum for a historic powwow. We learn their histories and heartbreak, from childhoods during the Alcatraz occupation to lost fathers to stealing cars just to drive cross town. Orange plays on both Gertrude Stein’s famous quote about Oakland (“There’s no ‘there’ there”) and Radiohead’s 2003 single There There, which plays one character’s iPod. I had the song in my head every time I picked up the book. In 300 pages, Orange builds a world around these characters, the weigh of their ancestry, the drug abuse that threatens all of them, heartbreaking ending that leaves us hanging on the fates of many characters. You’ll read the last 50-page section, when the characters arrive at the powwow, in about 30 minutes.

Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, Jeff Pearlman
A quick, entertaining read, Pearlman drops us back into the early 1980s, when the itch for a new spring football league that focused on fun and playing up regional roots very nearly took root. Spring football might have worked if the United States Football League stuck to its guns and grown incrementally. But the league’s wild-card owners grew too fast and went from 12 to 18 teams in a year, even as markets like Birmingham, Jacksonville and Memphis showed promise. Several owners were too interested in pushing for a merger with the NFL. The role of the 45th U.S. president in challenging the NFL and ultimately dooming the USFL figures heavily – in essence, he would kill the league by wanting to go against the NFL. But just as interesting are the stories of teams like the San Antonio Gunslingers, who became celebrities in their town while struggling to get paid and playing astroturf-covered concrete. There are laugh-out-loud moments, especially when the drunken L.A. Express owner gets in NFL Hall of Fame QB Steve Young’s face during contract negotiations.

Robin, Dave Itzkoff
I try to avoid celebrity biography, but much like his wit and comedic timing, Robin Williams is hard for me to ignore. As a kid, he was Mork, the goofy alien any kid wished would drop in; as a teen, he was John Keating, the teacher we all wanted; as an adult, he any number of damaged characters. After a while, I too tired of his shtick, catching him on late-night talk shows and little else. He became best in small doses, until his hanging in 2014 shocked anyone who had considered themselves a fan. His childhood was mostly lonely, with a distant father and two older half-brothers. In Williams, I saw a kindred spirit, a pleaser, a man with a manic, overwhelming mind who just wanted to do whatever it took to be loved and make people happy. The book grows more challenging after Williams’ peak years as his star power faded, he relapsed into alcoholism, lost his second marriage and struggled to regain critical acclaim. Worst yet might be the last year, when his return to weekly television masked a rapid decline in health leading up to his suicide.

Future of the Mind, Michio Kaku
 The author empties the cupboard in describing what we’ve learning about the brain in the past century, advancements in the last 20 years and where they might lead in the future. I cannot imagine downloading mine into a hard drive or cloud to achieve immortality, but the possibilities of what comes next for the mind seemed endless (especially on the audiobook’s 13 CDs).

Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
A tremendous little book with a voice unlike anything else in Johnson’s work, Train Dreams follows a man who lives in the Idaho Panhandle during his work as a railroad and lumberman. Strong flares of magical realism influence the narrative. Easily my favorite Denis Johnson read of the year, which says a lot.

Of Mice and Mine, John Steinbeck
A classic that I somehow never read, it’s still a poignant tale. The harsh language toward an African-American ranch hand draw some criticism, as does the subject matter, but I get why it deserves recognition as a classic. Should you read it, watch the original film adaptation with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr. It hews close to the book.

In the Garden of American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff
Back to another short story master.  The title story depicts a dramatic swivel from a women who finds she is a token candidate for a professorship and won't be considered seriously. Hunters in the Snow tackles the grievances between hunting buddies rising to the surface. Not every story hits, not everyone has to. The Liar, which closes the collection, is a solid end.

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy
The Wilco frontman brings his trademark sardonic honesty to a memoir/music travelogue that tackles every controversy (the end of Uncle Tupelo, the firings of Ken Coomer and Jay Bennett) and spell of adversity (his painkiller addiction, his wife’s bouts with cancer) with naked honesty. There’s quite a bit about the process of creation – you will know how Tweedy writes a song – and the influence of his family. One of the best rock memoirs I’ve read.

Cuba Diary, Isadora Tattlin
I read this (or a good chunk of it) for book club. An American women and European husband go on a long-term assignment in the partially opened Cuba of the 1990s. Everyday struggles and clashes of culture run deep, and the diary immerses the reader in a world where basic amenities are not available for most Cubans.

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
A college professor ends up in possession of her friend’s Great Dane. The dead friend is more of a character in the story than the giant dog. At times, it reads more like an essay and people, pets and grief than a story of a women and the dog she’s forced to take.