Disappearing Earth

Finished my last book of 2019 just under the wire. I expected I would be finishing as the clock approached midnight on NYE, but a bout of middle-of-the-night insomnia made for a good hour to wrap things up this morning. This was a good one to end with, but it left a little to be desired.

I didn't know much about Disappearing Earth, but it was on quite a few lists of the best books of the year. Reading the description, I wasn't sure it was for me. But, it was a well-told story with a complicated web of characters that you knew would somehow come together in the end.

It starts with the disappearance of two sisters on Russian's Kamachtaka Peninsula. Isolated from many and in the shadow of a volcano, the mystery begins on that very first page. We, the readers, know that the girls are taken. Many in the region believe they merely drowned in the bay. 

Each chapter is a different month of the year of their disappearance and each focuses on new characters. Slowly, they start to blend into each other's stories. When each chapter begins, it takes a few pages to engage with that story, but I found every one of them to be worthwhile on their own. Then, you see a pattern emerge about the way women are treated in this far-flung part of the world; each of their stories, much of their existence, is defined by the men in their lives. In each case, you realize that it's up to the women to find their own way.

I found this story riveting and, at times, breathtaking. There were a couple of moments where I literally put my hand over my heart at what was taking place. But, as it raced toward its conclusion, I found it wrapped up a little too easily. I also look back now realizing some of the characters that moved the book along didn't do much to advance the story itself. While much of it was grounded in realism, the ending felt a little too tidy. 

My 5 favorite books of 2019

By the time the clock strikes midnight and a new decade begins, I should have finished reading my 55th book of the year. 55! That's more than I expected, but a healthy pace for the third straight year.

As some of you know, this blog started with a New Year's resolution for 2017 to read a book every week. In 2017, I finished 56. Last year, I wasn't planning on keeping up that pace, but finished with 44 total. I fully plan to keep up the one book per week pace next year, but I also have a lot of TV shows I want to finish and a lot of podcasts to try, so I'm not going to make myself crazy. Still, I have absolutely loved getting back in the habit of reading more and there are a million on my list still to read.

So, breaking down 2019...

55 books is a lot of books. Looking back, though, that number is not entirely accurate. I started and didn't finish a book this year, but it keeps showing up on my total. It was truly awful, you guys. And, I don't feel bad about not finishing it. But, maybe 54 1/2 is a more accurate description for how many books I actually FINISHED this year. There's your factcheck.

I LIKED a lot of what I read this year. I didn't love quite as many as I have in the past few years. I read a good mix of new and older, fiction and non-fiction. I read a lot of books that dealt with poverty and a lot of books that examined the ways society puts women in boxes and expects them to stay there. That wasn't intentional, I really do try to mix it up. That's just the way the bibliography shook out.

This year, I became even more intimately familiar with my public library. Wait, intimately may not be the right word there... It was a strictly platonic relationship. But, I did check out quite a few more books this year, which means I bought fewer titles. I miss owning books. I'll be moving into a new house in a couple of months and have space set aside for bookshelves, so I look forward to transfering some of the shoe budget to the book budget (just kidding... books AND shoes are what make the world go 'round.)

So, sorry for the preamble there. I just like to look back on the year in books as whole. For those of you who have read this far, THANK YOU. Thanks for reading this, thanks for reading my reviews, thanks for suggesting new books to add to my list. I already have about 20 in the queue for 2020...

Without further adieu, my top 5 books of 2019... (out of 54 1/2). Links go back to my full reviews.

1. Daisy Jones & the Six. 

I couldn't possibly love this book more. One of my top five favorite books of all time. Daisy Jones & the Six are a band in the 70s who hit it big, then break up with no public explanation. This book is told as if in a series of interviews in a music magazine. It's about love, family, music, badass women, heartbreak. It's just perfect. It took my breath away at times, broke my heart in others. And, I read it on the beach in Costa Rica, so it will always feel like coconuts and sunshine to me. I rarely read a book more than once; I will absolutely read this one again.

2. City of Girls

Another one of my favorite books of the year (and of... ever) is about a strong, badass woman who lives her life in a way you don't expect. Our protagonist here lives unapologetically, but only after she's shamed and forced to rethink everything. City of Girls is pure magic. It's about a woman named Vivian who loves sex, loves men and lives out loud in a period of time where that wasn't exactly accepted. This book shows you the consequences of her actions and also how she defined herself beyond her youth. It's written as a letter to a woman whose identity we don't learn until nearly the end. It completely swept me away. Like Daisy Jones, I also read this book on vacation. A long weekend at the lake and this book was exactly what I needed.

3. Homegoing

Okay, I didn't read this book on vacation. And, it's not about misguided women living life on their own terms. Lest you think that's all I read this year. What Homegoing has in common with the first two books on this list is the unique narrative structure. With as many characters as this book laid out, the author had to be incredibly skilled to pull it off without confusing the reader. Yaa Gyasi did it magnifenctly. Homegoing tells the story of a two family bloodlines from a village in Africa, through slavery into the United States and into present day. Each chapter switches between families; each chapter advances the family another generation. It's incredibly written, remarkable in its structure. This book was published in 2016; my only regret is not reading it sooner.

4. The Testaments

I feel like I cheated a little bit on this one. I hadn't read Atwood's famous book The Handmaid's Tale until this year. To be honest, I didn't realize it was as famous a novel as it was. All I knew was that the world was obsessed with the Hulu series. I was fascinated by the subject matter, but didn't feel like I had the time to invest in the series. But, as soon as I saw all the hype about its sequel finally being released, I had to see what it was all about. I read Handmaid's Tale, then immediately jumped into The Testaments. I felt like I cheated because I didn't have to wait the 34 years like the readers of the original book had to do. Jumping into both back-to-back was a revelation. Handmaid's Tale is about the dystopian society where women lose all of their power and are relegated into categories designed only to perpetuate the species. So much mystery is left at the end. The Testaments answers all of it in a completely satisfying way. Again, badass women living outside of their boxes. I loved them both. You absolutely can't read one without the other.

5. Three Women

Okay, now that I've reached the final book of this list, I realize 2019 absolutely did have a feminist vibe. And, a tilt towards books not written in the most conventional way. Three Women is a strange book to describe and my feelings about it have changed a lot since I finished reading it three months ago. A work of non-fiction, the book is a profile of (you guessed it) three women with very different and complicated stories to tell. One is a young woman who had an affair with her high school teacher in a story that became national news. One is a woman trapped in a sexless marriage who reached out to her high school boyfriend and tries to recapture the sexual ache of her youth. The last is a powerful business woman whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other men. It's unflinching, intimate and, more often than not, extremely uncomfortable. It's the most in-depth, honest look at female desire that I've ever read. I've thought about it so much in the months since I read it. It makes you think about how women's sexuality is portrayed and how we all fit into advancing that complex narrative. And, it explores how men and women share that same desire, but it's the women most often punished for it.

So, that's my Top 5. Strong women, powerful narrative structure, covering centuries with diverse and unforgettable characters. 

There were others that I liked quite a bit that sit just outside this top 5. Here are some quick links, so you don't have to sift through all 55!

-Nickel Boys One of my favorites, it's about a school for "broken boys" in Florida and the racism that was finally exposed, decades later. 

-Becoming Michelle Obama's memoir was my first of 2019. A dense and powerful look at a woman who will stand in history in her own right.

-There's No Crying in Newsrooms - My most-read review on the blog this year, it's pretty specific to women in my industry. A powerful, important read for women in news.

-Immortalists Unique and powerful book about a group of siblings who are told by a fortune teller the day they will die. It follows them all through their lives as you wonder if the fortunes will come true. Such a great book! 

Hope you can find something here you like. As always, I'm happy to recommend books! Here's to a great year of reading in 2020. 

Fleishman Is In Trouble

Why books great 'til they gotta be great?

I'm exaggerating.

Kind of.

But, this book held so much promise for me. I liked so much of it. But, I feel like it fell apart in the final 30%. Like Peter Griffin on Family Guy once said about The Godfather, "It insists upon itself."

That's how this book ended for me. Like, it made its point (which was a good point, actually), then it just refused to end. That's what's left a bad taste in my mouth.

Let me back up.

This book took off like a rocket to me. Toby Fleishman is a soon-to-be-divorced fortysomething dad who is experiencing single life for the first time after a long and, to hear him tell it, tortured marriage. He's finding out through dating apps that there's a world of adult sexual experience to be explored and he's living his life to the absolute fullest in that regard. We also learn about his wife who is more obsessed with her career than she is with being a mom. One day, she drops the kids off early for their weekend with dad and vanishes. Drops off the face of the earth. No texts, no calls, no updates. In the weeks (and chapters) that follow, we wonder along with Toby how a mother could simply abandon her children. How could she be so selfish?

You see where this is going, right? It doesn't take a soothsayer to know that you're going to find out where Rachel really is and that maybe Toby's opinion isn't exactly spot on after all.

The book is narrated by Toby's college friend who is living her own version of a tortured marriage existence. Through her and every other central character in this book, the message of this book is crystal clear: in marriage, we're all wrong and we're all right and we rarely see it through other people's eyes. And, we're all longing for the past and future simultaneously without ever really appreciating the present.

See, there's a lot about this book that resonates. The idea that every day, we're getting older. We're constantly trying to hang onto something that's past. As parents and spouses, it's incredibly easy to forget who we are; when we try to remind ourselves, our motives are dismissed as selfish and immature.

The book did an incredible job capturing that feeling. It also did a great job exploring how we never really know anyone, even someone we've shared our bed with for more than a decade. And, it made the point about the expectations society has for women. We're either moms or sexual beings, but not both. We're either moms or ambitious about our career, but not both. The points are clear and relevant. But, at the end, it really belabored that point. It's also a theme that appears more and more in books I've read. The author here didn't do much to tell it in a different way. By the end, I felt like shouting "WE GOT IT!" and it still went on for 40 pages or so after that.

About 80% of the way through, there's a metaphor about watching a show that doesn't get good until the third season. It's about how we endure just because we're expecting some payoff and about the time we waste waiting for something to "get good." It was an apt metaphor given my thoughts on this book overall.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is, I almost loved this book. Maybe 70 fewer pages could have done the trick.

Moment of Lift

Let me start by saying Melinda Gates is a brilliant, remarkable woman. What she and her husband have done for the world is absolutely incredible and almost hard to fathom. What they're focusing on now - lifting up WOMEN - is the most remarkable approach of all. 

This book has been called one of the best of the year. I read it after watching her on the David Letterman Netflix show (which the title for is so long, I can't remember it and I'm too lazy to Google it right now.) Bottom line: I needed to read more about her mission and her message. 

What the Gates Foundation is doing is not simply empowering women in the "You Go, Girl" kind of way in which that phrase is often associated. They're literally lifting communities out of poverty by lifting up the women through education, access to contraception and other means.

For example... Access to contraception that most of us take for granted can change an entire society. The less control women have over when they'll have children and how many, the more likely women are to die in childbirth, have children they can't feed and have children who don't make it past the first year of life. This book points out that no country in the last 50 years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives. 

Think about that.

The kind of family planning we have the luxury of experiencing can literally lift a society out of poverty.

This book is filled with that kind of information and so much more about how simply given women some control in their families and communities is what will eventually change the world.

Gates does this not through preaching in this book, but through examples of the women she's met. The stories she tells are heartbreaking and inspiring. She talks about how cultural traditions often put women and children in danger and how breaking through those traditions takes not a billionaire's donation, but the "buying in" of those communities.

It's fascinating and awe-inspiring work. It's so big, it's hard to even comprehend. Gates takes it down to a personal level in this book and the change feels almost accessible to the rest of us.

All that said, I found myself bored by the end of the book. That's horrible to say, but I got more out of her interview with Letterman and shorter stories I've read of the work. Here, it felt repetitive after the first half or so and I found my mind wandering. That's not a comment on the work, please don't confuse the two. I just feel you can get the same feel for what's being done through interviews and articles without needing to invest your time in the entire book.

Lady in the Lake

Let me make this brief.

This one was not for me.

I saw this book on a lot of best seller lists and read a lot of accolades, but I just had a feeling from the jump that I wouldn't enjoy it. 

I probably should follow my gut.

This book will absolutely interest some people, I can appreciate that. But, it felt too much like a Dateline episode with some pretty pedestrian storytelling, some not-so-dramatic twists and turns and a big "revelation" at the end. The revelation was the most interesting part of the book, but it just took too damn long to get there.

The biggest problem with this book is that it actually tried to do too much. The main character is a woman who gets divorced in the 1960's and has to reinvent herself. She goes from, essentially, trophy wife to newspaper journalist by inserting herself into some high-profile criminal cases. The journalist in me was annoyed by it, the woman in me was annoyed by it, the reader in me was annoyed by it. 

The author tried to make it more interesting by switching points of view, which can only work if those points of view all eventually become relevant. Instead, it felt like a magic trick with no payoff. It was just... messy.

I just read a review of this book written by Stephen King. Clearly, I've missed the point. But, I like what I like - and this wasn't it. 

An American Marriage

In some stories, there are no heroes. There are no villains. No clear wrong or right. There are merely circumstances. Those stories are often the ones that stay with you the most.

One review described An American Marriage as "a genuinely suspenseful love story where nobody's wrong and everybody's wounded." 

Couldn't have said it better myself.

This is the story of Celestial and Roy... and, Andre. The first two are married and live a somewhat unremarkable life together. Andre is a mutual friend who grew up as the boy next door to Celestial. Then one day, Roy is arrested for and convicted of a crime he didn't commit. While he waits in prison for the justice that may never come, life on the outside goes on without him.

What happens through that time and after is told through alternating perspectives; one chapter is Roy, one is Andre, one is Celestial and on and on it goes. What it does is provides not a jolt of storytelling back and forth, but a realistic look at life. What happens to you doesn't only happen to you. What you see through your own eyes is not always reality. The truth - the right and wrong - usually lives in the gray area.

I loved this book. It was sweet and sad and somewhat hopeful. It wasn't easy, by any means. It felt entirely too real; and, perfectly just so. You find yourself not rooting for or against anyone, but simply resigning to yourself that fairy tale endings belong in fairy tales for a reason.

Such a good, clean read of a messy story. Beautifully written, too.  

American Predator

It's weird to say how much you enjoyed a book about such awful, evil things. But, this book was so riveting and fascinating, I finished it in two days.

I'm not generally someone who reads true crime. Maybe it's because I'm a journalist and I'm surrounded by this kind of thing all the time. Also, very few of them break the formula and truly bring something interesting to the table. Still, I wanted to read American Predator as soon I heard about it. The subject, serial killer Israel Keyes, may very likely have killed in my own backyard.

What most people know about Israel Keyes is the murder that ultimately led to his capture. He climbed inside a coffee stand in Anchorage, then abducted and murdered the teenage girl working inside. I remember hearing about that and also hearing about "kill kits" Keyes left all over the country. It piqued my interest even more when I learned Keyes used to live in the small town of Colville, Washington not far from where I live. Up there in the mountains outside of town, I have covered a number of crimes committed by people who wanted to live "off the grid" and away from government intrusion. Keyes was raised in a home like that. Two young girls were murdered around the time he lived here and those crimes have never been solved.

But, I didn't remember hearing much more about Keyes until I heard that he committed suicide in jail before he went to trial. His secrets appeared to have died with him.

Until a journalist fought to open them up.

Callahan fought for the release of investigative records, documents, videotaped confessions, etc. She spoke to some of the investigators tasked with finding out as much as they could about Keyes and other crimes he claims to have committed. What shakes out of that endeavor is a story about a serial killer with no predictable patterns, no clear M.O. That makes discovering exactly who he killed and when even more difficult. Her work reveals a man trained by the military, raised with white supremacist beliefs and able to leave for a cruise while a young woman's body lay hidden in a shed outside of his house.

Keyes gave his investigators information they never would have learned without his confessions; he also made them look like fools at nearly every turn. The randomness of his crimes and what he may have done to his own body to pull them off makes for some seriously disturbed sleep. Fortunately, I finished it quickly or it could have been a long week...

This book is chilling in its detail. It's complete in its critical examination of a largely botched investigation. And, at the very end, it leaves the door open to so many other possible secrets that the rest of the world will likely never know.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Oskar Schell wears heavy boots.

That's how the little boy at the heart of this moving story describes how he feels when his emotions are just too much. Heavy boots.

This book made me feel like my boots were heavier than I ever imagined.

This is Oskar's story about finding a connection to his dad, who was in the World Trade Center on 911. He's not handling those emotions well - who would, really? - and, reaches out for any way to find the connection he lost that day. He finds a key in his father's closet with a name written on the envelope. Black. Desperate to find someone who knew his dad and could tell him what that key would open, young Oskar decides he needs to meet everyone in the NYC phone book with the last name "Black."  His journey takes him down subways, through boroughs and into people's homes he never imagined.

He's a little boy with quirks, no well-liked or understood. He has a mind far beyond his years and emotions he's clearly not capable of expressing or understanding. He's a really grown-up tiny child. I wanted to swoop Oskar up in my arms or at least help carry him on this journey.

Along the way, we also learn about Oskar's grandmother who lives across the street and a desperate secret about family she's been hiding as well.

This book has been out for years and was made into a movie as well. I really hadn't considered reading it until I heard the author Jonathan Safran Foer on the Dax Shepard podcast "Armchair Expert." Halfway through the interview, I liked this guy so much, I went online and ordered his book! When I went back to the interview, I heard Foer say this was his least favorite book among those he's written! Crap! And, when I started it, I wasn't sure I would finish. It's heavy and meandered a bit and I wasn't sure it was going to end up anywhere that satisfied me.

I'm glad I stuck with it. The second half picked up and the last quarter was exquisite. You don't find joy in this story, but you do find satisfaction. Connection. And truth. And you are reminded about how much in our lives we don't say, even to the people who mean the most. We worry about being too vulnerable; we worry about bringing other people down. And what we don't say often drives us apart.

Warning, though: it will absolutely make you feel those heavy boots.