2020 books read

As I mentioned in my 6-word review, there were recipes at the end of chapters where the main character made a dish, which were mostly desserts, and most of them sounded very good. These are the names of them: Cocoa-Crunch Cookies, Honey Apple Crisp, Anytime Peach Pie, Melt-in-Your-Mouth Pork Roast, Ultimate Lemon Bundt Cake, Cool Whip Lemon Frosting, Bacon and Sausage Breakfast Burritos, Cashew Butter Blossom Cookies, Chocolate Hazelnut Bon-Bons (my “mémère” used this word a lot), Ultimate Butterscotch Bundt Cake, Cool Whip Butterscotch Frosting, Ultimate Christmas Bundt Cake, Cool Whip White Chocolate Frosting, and Minty Dream Cookies.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. ^{*From goodreads.com’s synopsis.}

But if Pa doesn’t have a job, he does have a trolley car. And what could be more sensible than living in a trolley ’til Pa gets another job. So off they go–Ma and Pa Parker, Sally, Bill, George and Little Peter—and of all people, cranky Mr. Jefferson too. Bouncing and bumping on the trolley tracks, they park their new home at the last stop. It’s the end of the line for the trolley car, but it’s a beginning of fun and adventure for the trolley car family. ^{*From goodreads.com’s synopsis.}

This is definite a “period piece”—set in a time when stereotypes abounded about women doing indoor/housework and men doing the outdoor/yardwork. It’s very “Little House on the Prairie” with the ma and pa references and the kids being pretty much the perfect kids—I mean they even stopped recreational activities like playing baseball to enthusiastically do all the things that needed to be done to keep their household running. Hardly anything bad happens to this family, and when it does, it all happens in one day, and it’s nothing catastrophic. It’s a very benign story, and reads easily. Can it be that it was so simple then, or has time re-written every line?

With all that said, I did think the origin of the book was great. From the author: “A few years ago, I started collecting vintage snapshots—the kind you can find in loose piles at most flea markets for 50 cents or a buck apiece. It was just a casual hobby, nothing serious, but I noticed that among the photos I found, the strangest and most intriguing ones were always of children. I began to wonder who some of these strange-looking children had been—what their stories were—but the photos were old and anonymous and there was no way to know. So I thought: If I can’t know their real stories, I’ll make them up.”

Although my 2-star rating includes: “Would not recommend,” I’ve heard from enough people that like sci-fi, fantasy, & horror who loved it that I would recommend it with that caveat.

Carr recommends 3 books in that podcast of which this is one. I rarely re-read books, but this is one that I’d like to re-read one day, and I know sooner would be better than later, but I also know that’s probably not going to happen. There are a lot of characters, and they appear in the book in different places in their lives, but not always in the chronological order of their lives. I do like when an author stops for a second and tells you something about a character that’s going to happen to them in their future, which happened with a few characters in this book. I’m not sure I would have picked up on the “deep meaning” of this book, or understand why it was a Pulitzer Prize winner, probably because it’s pretty much completely by metaphor, and I was expending a lot of energy on trying to remember all of the characters. That’s the reason I’d like to read it again. Also, distracting me throughout was the fact that I knew one of the chapters was presented as a PowerPoint slide presentation, and I kept anticipating it being next. FWIW (possible spoiler alert—if knowing when the PowerPoint slide is going to appear in a novel is a trigger for you), it’s not until chapter 12, so relax.

1. The way she shared the stories of the 4 patients she chose to highlight throughout the book.
2. How she changed the details of those patients’ stories so as to protect their identities in a way that didn’t at all detract from the telling about the issues they were facing and her assessment of them.
3. The way she wove in her personal issues and the therapy she decided to enter in the midst of a crisis in her own life, especially about the second guessing she was doing about her therapist at the beginning of their sessions.
4. How she sprinkled in psychological concepts and therapist nomenclature with both definitions and examples easily understood by lay-people.
5. Opening herself up to personal and professional scrutiny by potentially millions of readers.

This is definitely in my top 3, if not the top, books of the 43 I’ve read so far this year.

This is a book I downloaded for free from BookBub, and like several of the other books they’ve offered free, it turned out to be one book of a series. (Book 2 of 7, as it turns out.) I would never purposely start reading a book series without starting with the first book and without reading them in order, but this is now the third time I’ve done it, and it’s not bad. I do have interest in reading the first and third books in the series, but if history repeats itself, I won’t—especially if I can’t get the other books from the library. With all that said, as my 4-star review intimates, I’d highly recommend this book.

I didn’t like that the author used the r-word at least 4 times. I did like that Renée’s deceased husband’s name was Lucien, which was my paternal grandfather’s name. I enjoyed the parallel stories of the 54-year-old concierge and the 12-year-old child who were the two (alternating, for the most part) narrators. I particularly liked when it happened that you heard one side of a scene from one of them and the very next chapter revealed the same scene from the other one’s perspective. I also liked that the 12-year-old girl was planning to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. (Not a spoiler; it’s revealed early on in the book.) And finally, I liked the ending, and if you know me at all—with regards to the endings of books or movies—then you can guess what happens.

I didn’t find this book too tedious to read, as a couple of my friends seem to have—according to some Facebook comments about it. I did find it difficult to read because of the graphic descriptions (as they should be) of the horrific things we did to slaves in this country. I’d never heard of the “underground railroad” before reading this book. I had a white history teacher who was a memorize-these-events-and-dates kind of teacher, so I never found it interesting, and I’d be very surprised if he ever even mentioned the underground railroad. If I hadn’t read the Wikipedia entry about it, this book would have led me to believe the myth that it was an actual, physical railroad. (Yes, I know the book is a novel, so I shouldn’t have assumed that, but I did.) And finally, I’m glad this was a book club book, because I’m sure I wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and I’m very glad I did.