Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

 

Brooklyn is the magnificent tale of a woman coming into herself. It’s a journey of discovery, and I love that it begins in a small village with its landscape of familiarity. I hear it’s been made into a movie, but I can’t imagine how it could be possible to translate this novel to the screen. The entirety of the novel in the interior, personal reflections, hopes, and fears in the moment, and the people and events that happen seem removed, as though they are happening to our heroine, and that’s largely the point of the whole novel. 

This is the story of a woman coming into herself, a story of identity, and of how we shift with the landscape of possibilities, community, and our own affections and fears. I really liked this book.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

If you liked Project Hail Mary,  this is exactly what you should read next. If you ever felt like a human doing instead of a human being, you should read this next. If you ever found comfort in a cup of tea, you should read this. 

Chambers deftly handles themes such as burnout, imposter syndrome, and purposefulness without being sanctimonious or preachy. We love the main character as much for their vulnerabilities and flaws as we do for anything else. The journey is the message, and as I wandered the wild with them, I found myself hurt, and healing, and then, again, whole. 

I really loved this book.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Paul Harding takes on an exploration of the interior workings life in this short, brilliant novel. Overlaid on the workings of a clock, we see a landscape of gears that create, propel, shudder, chime, and escape. 

The language of Tinkers is brilliant; Harding has paragraph-long sentences that feel like a journey and at the end of the action, I felt as though I should have gotten a stamp for my passport. He deftly handles the musings and broken timelines, returning us to where we left off in just the right moment and with just the right tone. 

As I turned the last page, I felt as though I had been imprinted with mechanisms of George and the various springs that propelled his life.

The Keeper by Tana French

In her third and final installment in the Cal Hooper series, French unspools the ways of being that create community ties, identity threads, and the fabric of life in a place. The result is the antithesis of the oft-overused and too-hip idea of “placemaking;” French shows how the community bends us to it, and all the ways that bending around a community is what makes it real, and how we, in turn, are made real by the effort. This is a picture of co-constructed reality. It’s an anthem against fast-anything, corporate profit-grabbing, and the idea that a place can be for sale. 

I’ll miss Trey and Lena even more than I’ll miss Cal. 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you liked Tartt's The Secret History, you'll love this. It's just as immersive, and as Dickensian, as ever, and Tartt does a masterful job of weaving deatils and cognition into everything. It's a long book, with sentences built on reflections, and some sentences spanning a page or more. I didn't read this book so much as I inhabited it, or, more accurately, let it inhabit me. 

This is another round of David Copperfield, and while the original tale came from England, we in the States seem to eat it up mightily, perhaps becuase twenty-first cetury America is so neat a parallel to nineteenth century England. 

The power of found family, the power of the truth, and the power of being seen ring through with authenticity and brilliance. Ultimately the power of a life of substance holds the key to the whole novel, and Tartt couldn't have chosen a better painting on which to hang her tale.

James by Percival Everett

This retelling of Tom Saywer and Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who becomes James, is as satisfying as I could have wanted. Definitely recommended.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

The Premise of The Lost Apothecary is lovely. Penner doesn’t realize the potential of the parallels in any spectacular fashion, and the voice work—especially of the modern day narrator—is particularly thin. Nonetheless, it is a serviceable airplane book.