Small Rain by Garth Greenwell and Other April Reading!

I've been working long and hard this month, but I've managed to make time for my reading adventures. I've had to face it: It's essential for my mental health, the care of my brain, and my mood in these terrible times.

Earlier this month, Garth Greenwell won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Small Rain. I was lucky--I checked in with my fabulous library in Glens Falls--Crandall Library, and they had a copy. It has been a good read for me emotionally. 

Like the narrator, I am completely leery of doctors and their interventions. But when the narrator develops a life-threatening condition that leaves him hospitalized in the ICU for 2 weeks, he mentally scrambles to find a way to accomodate what's happening. He's only in his 40s, completely unprepared for such a venture, and feels an incapacity to handle what usually occurs only in people of poor health in their 60s and 70s. Yet he hustles, as we all do, to find ways to let his mind escape what's happening. Unwittingly he focuses on recent, past traumas, but also on the many wonderful relationships in his life. For me, as a hospital-phobe, due largely to a life-threatening condition that happened to me in 2012 and was not handled well, to say the least, I totally resonated with the narrator's experience and his all-too-real, understandable anxieties. A great novel! I know, it sounds too grim, but I highly recommend it for its veracity to human experience.

 

I am also nearing the end of The Distant Hours by the Australian author Kate Morton. It's 563 pages, and frankly, would have been improved by some tightening, to say the least. However, I have enjoyed it. Gosh--I only paid $1.99 for the ebook, so that's something. It's set in England, mostly during the early years of World War II, but also bounces forward in time so that the daughter of a very young evacuee can visit the "Castle" and the people who offered her mother shelter during the Blitz. A complex family saga, much more complex a story than I've described here. Although overly long, it is compelling. I recommend it!

 

Really Reading Now, As Much as I Can

Yes, another long time away from this blog. But these days I need to read and share with others, like I need to breathe. 

I've been immersed in the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy's recently published The Wild, Dark Shore. Without knowing what I was doing, I chose it as an Audible book. If I knew then what I know now, I think I would have chosen to read it as a book rather than an audiobook. The writing is beautiful, and because I am not a stellar listener, I feel I'm missing some of its beauty. 

 

I'm still wrapped up in it, nevertheless, and am near the end now. Powerful writing! The novel is set on Shearwater Island in the Antarctic. A friend asked if it's set in the future, and I would say yes, a bit in the future. Shearwater Island is about to become uninhabitable because the ocean is overtaking it, yet one family remains there, though only for a matter of weeks, at which time they plan/hope to be picked up by a ship and taken back to Australia. Wonderful nature writing, yet this novel is a nail-biter as well, and yes, a harbinger of climate disaster. 

I'm only 10 pages from finishing Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated and first published in English in 2008. I just came off being tremendously moved by Schlink's most recent novel, The Granddaughter, and decided, as a project, I would read all of his novels (many of them for the second time). I did read Homecoming back around 2009-2010. But this second reading has been nothing like the first; it has been much, much more startling. 

I reached the ending, and I saw what was coming, though I swear I don't remember. But some part of me remembers, because for a long time, I could not finish the last 30 pages. I did read much of it today, but all of it is so prescient, so unbelievably, incredibly timely that it is horrifying to me. No, nobody dies. No extreme tragedy ensues. But this ending is about our current status--now. A charismatic professor, a person at the helm, leading his students into danger for his own theories and purposes. And in the ADIRONDACKS, no less!! I kid you not!

 So, to rest the mind (!), I'm also reading a Kate Morton novel, The Distant Hours. Have you read that one? It's a very long one, set in England, during WWII to decades later, moving back and forth in time.

A Brief Check-In of Sorts!

 It has been so enormously long since I last posted. I've been happily consumed by satisfying work, and the research for an article I'm writing about the "Hard Winter," 1779-1780, during the Revolutionary War. I'm just barely grabbing moments for non-work reading these days.

A question for any reader out there: Did you ever read a novel set during the American Revolutionary War that you enjoyed, or that you remember reading? I can't recall a single one, other than The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which I really appreciated. 

I'm in the mood for Revolutionary-War era fiction, given my recent research. We're well into the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, and I hope fiction and non-fiction will be appearing, but thus far, given that I have heard nothing about any new historical fiction on this topic, I fear there will be nothing. 

Right now I'm reading the 2024 translation of the acclaimed German author Bernhard Schlink's The Granddaughter. It's so thought-provoking, so fascinating, I'm riveted, but then again, it's not easy reading, emotionally speaking. It's emotionally hard, as are all his novels. Very worthwhile, however. A young woman brought up in the GDR (East Germany) weds a young man from the FDR (West Germany). Lots going on. It all runs so deep. So deep.

I read The Sequel recently, the thriller-mystery novel by Jean Korelitz, and the sequel of her bestseller The Plot. This one was stupendously clever, I grant you, but the characters are colder than ice and worse than that. So if you need a novel to sustain you in harrowing times, this one is not it. 

I really enjoyed Nancy Thayer's audiobook, The Summer We Started Over. Family fiction, set on Nantucket, and I thought it extremely well done. I highly recommend it for these times. Very soul-satisfying. 

I'm sorry I have not provided links to any of these books. If I have time tomorrow or later, I will. I hope you will be able to find them if you are interested.