Books -

MR BOOKS READ 2020 – 2023

recommended in bold

Author	Title (s)	Comment
Ingrid Rojas Contreras	Fruit of the Drunken Tree	A gripping tale of growing up in Colombia amid violence and corruption and escaping, barely.
Ann Napolitano	Hello Beautiful	Straight, compelling storytelling. Ann Napolitano reaches a new level of accomplishment after Dear Edward (below).
Jacqueline Woodson	Another Brooklyn	I loved this book about growing up in poverty, in the projects, in Brooklyn during a time I remember so well.
Stephen Mitchell	Tao Te Ching	Stephen Mitchell’s ‘interpretation’ of this ancient text. Inspiring guidance for living in 2023 from around 400 BC.
Stephen Mitchell	Bhagavad Gita	Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of this classic ancient text is clear and inspiring.
Annie Ernaux	Do What They Say or Else	Annie growing up as a teenager. Stream of consciousness. What’s it like to be a girl in France. We get intimate with her mother and father. They are examined in other Annie Ernaux books so this book gives context and depth to the Annie Ernaux life in its various permutations. 112 pages.
Joan Didion	The Year of Magical Thinking	Hard truths, deep grief, drifting alone in a world with her partner gone I could see her in her New York apartment, sequestered in a room. “I’m only myself in front of a typewriter,” she has said. She pulls it together for this book to keep herself from unraveling, and we’re with her through every word. The Didion style is unmistakable but it goes deeper, naturally, than she has before.
Annie Ernaux	A Man’s Place	Annie’s father. Beautiful. 90 pages.
Elizabeth Strout	Lucy By the Sea	Again, an easy read that cuts deep and doesn’t spare the drama and the life altering circumstances of the real-life characters that inhabit the pages of an Elizabeth Strout novel. She is a treasure.
Annie Ernaux	Getting Lost	Sex. Desire. Obsession. More sex. More obsession. The object of her obsession is a married Soviet apparatchik. Intimate and focused, vulnerable and brave, she cuts herself open and lets us crawl inside. I never read anything like this. Annie Ernaux is winner of the Nobel Prize. 239 pages.
Jennifer Egan	A visit From the Goon Squad.	This novel won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Whatever. Didn’t do it for me.
Jane Smiley	1000 Acres	Pulitzer Prize winner. Drama on par with Shakespeare. Three daughters processing trauma and fighting for the affection of the abusive father reminded me of Lear at the outset but it’s a very American novel with a deep dive into the farming way of life in the Midwest with a lot of drama to go with it.
Haruki Murakami	IQ84	I got 550 pages into this 800-page book and abandoned it. He went off the edge, again, into some super-real magic realism or something. Why does there always have to be the obligatory chapter on animal abuse in his books?
Colson Whitehead	The Nickel Boys	Two Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Colson Whitehead pumps out highly readable novels about the Black experience. This one about an institution in Florida that abused Black boys was highly readable, disturbing, and educational. He’s a smooth storyteller.
Amy Bloom	In Love	Wonderful short book about helping your spouse die.
Honoree Fanone Jeffers	The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois	800 pages. Incredible, sweeping epic of Black life from the time of slavery to the present day. A life-altering experience.
Miriam Toews	Fight Night \| Women Talking	A treasure. A beautiful writer. No matter how tragic, she’s funny as hell. Canadian. I want to read everything she writes.
Elizabeth Strout	Oh William!	Long listed for 2022 Booker. Love Elizabeth Strout. Loved this short book.
Nastassja Martin	In the Eye of the Wild	Yes.
Nathan Harris	The Sweetness of Water	Black slave life. Beautiful book.
Peter Ho Davies	A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself	I agree with Sigrid Nunez when she says more books like this need to be written. Honest, true, funny auto-fiction about love, marriage, raising children, and writing. Short book. Gut punch.
Avni Doshi	Burnt Sugar	Terrific debut book. Very talented writer. Let’s see how she develops. This book was a little fractured.
Jason Mott	Hell of a Book	2021 National Book Award winner. Hell of a strange book.
Alexandra Chang		OK. Chinese woman disappointed with her boyfriend, her job, her life, ruminating on her place. It’s educational. The gradations of the culture and relation to whites, the place of a Chinese American. She’s young and I have a feeling she’s going on to more weighty books.
Sigrid Nunes	1.A Feather to the Breath of God 2. What Are You Going Through? 3. Sempre Susan	1 & 2. Beautiful voice, masterful story telling. Short books that effortlessly go deep and wide. Love her voice. 3, Sempre Susan – about Susan Sontag. I’ll read anything she writes.
Madeline Miller	Circe	Beautiful, fantastical exploits of a Greek goddess. A historical novel by some stretch. It’s like an action-adventure book that will teach you about the Greek gods. Awakens the adolescent adventurer.
Deborah Levy	The Cost of Living	An intimate, lyrical look at growing up at 50 with kids and a still raw divorce. One in a trilogy. A short book with short bursts punctuated with a longer killer sequence. I ordered earlier novels. Beautiful voice.
Alison Bechdel	The Secret to Superhuman Strength \| Fun Home \| Are You My Mother?	Incisive. Erudite. Brilliant graphic memoirs about coming of age, coming out, and discovering and analyzing deep family secrets. Rearranges what you believe a graphic novel could do. Goes deep into the history and practice of psychology.
Robert Jones	The Prophets	life-altering historic fiction about life for slaves on the plantation, revolving around the love of two male slaves. A powerful book that doesn’t leave me. I remember the situations and feelings of the book as if I read it yesterday. It should be a classic. Debut novel shortlisted for the National Book Award.
Raven Leilani	Luster	Love this book. Love her voice. Great debut novel. Could be an artist coming of age, or a lost soul scraping along. I was with her all the way, like I was under her skin.
Tara Westoff	Educated	Memoir. Wonderful.
Brit Bennett	The Vanishing Half \| Mothers	Extraordinary talent, really ambitious in sweep. So young. Great work to come. Loved both these novels.
Elif Batuman	The Idiot	Strange, long book. Subdued and close-up without being intimate. I stuck with it, although I imagine some wouldn’t.
Lily King	Writers & Lovers	Wonderful. A fun book that’s real. You thought you knew what it took to be a waitress? The tale of a struggling writer. Based on this book I tried to read two of Lily King’s earlier novels and found them too dense. The book has air and lift.
Carolyn See	The Handyman	Another fun look into the Southern California strangeness. I can’t believe they didn’t make this into a movie.
Ann Napolitano	Dear Edward	An OK book. I like Ann Napolitano and want to follow her. I remember the story. See above for ‘Hello Beautiful’
Sheila Heti	Motherhood \| How Should a Person Be? \| Ticknor \| Women in Clothes	She will appeal to a certain type; most, nah but she fascinates me for some strange reason. I read everything she writes. Ticknor was a misfire. She was trying to be something she’s not.
Sally Rooney	Normal People Beautiful World, Where Are You?	Normal People: I was really impressed with this book. I admired the writing. But I don’t remember it at all. Beautiful World … : Didn’t get it at all. Rejected.
Kiley Reid	Such a Fun Age	OK. A little too clever/MFA for me. Good buzz on this book. Let’s see what the next one looks like.
Maggie O’Farrell	Hamnet	“… a thing of shimmering wonder …” What more can you say? Incredible historic fiction. Adds so much to understanding Shakespeare and his time. A joy to read.
Suleika Jaouad	Between Two Kingdoms	Memoir. At turns highly readable and occasionally petulant and annoying. I love Suleika’s substack ‘Isolation Journals’
Yaa Gyasi	Transcendent Kingdom \| Homegoing	All the Jesus stuff can become annoying, but I loved these books. Homegoing has less Jesus. A really gifted writer and natural storyteller.