What I'm reading this week (7/15/19)

Last week I finished:

I love a good atmospheric novel, where the setting is a character, and where extreme weather helps drives the plot. Burial Rites is one of those novels. This is a book I saw all over the place when it came out, but I never even looked into it, because the cover made me think not for me. So if you've had a similar reaction to the cover, try to put that aside. This was a rather impressive historical novel, not to mention the only one I've read set in Iceland. Based on a true story (and soon to become a motion picture), this is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, accused with two others of murdering two men and then setting fire to the home in 1828 Iceland. A farm family is tasked with lodging Agnes until the date of her execution (by beheading). As grim as the plot is, this is also a story of empathy and the human condition. Bonds are formed, and complicated feelings come to light. I enjoyed this book very much. The writing is nuanced, the plot slow-paced, the characters believable. Give this one a try if you enjoyed Emma Donoghue's The Wonder or Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World. They have similar feelings, if not similar plots. My rating: 4 stars.

There are some books I kind of dread reviewing, and Eleanor and Hick is one of those. I had such a problem with the author's lack of objectivity that I could not trust her book. For many years there has been an assertion that Eleanor Roosevelt had a long-time lesbian relationship with Lorena Hickok ("Hick"). I have yet to see one convincing piece of evidence that confirms that assertion to me one way or the other. Although certain correspondence can certainly be read in such a way to give credence to the theory, there is certainly nothing blatant that hints at anything of a sexual nature. The letters that exist are intimate, they talk about love and missing each other when they're apart, but they do not confirm a lesbian affair. Now, this was close to one hundred years ago, and homosexual relationships were not as open as they have become. Also, Eleanor was a high-profile individual who would have known the importance of keeping such a relationship from the public. Certainly, it was possible, but I cannot say it was definite. Yet, many writers, such as the author of this book, do. I think this kind of reinterpretation of history and re-envisioning of past events is so damaging to the first lady's memory and reputation, and they do a disservice to scholars and young people who don't know how to separate possible from probable. As for the book, if you've read anything about Eleanor and President Roosevelt (I'd suggest Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time or Kathryn Smith's The Gatekeeper), there is nothing new here. The book is not so much about the relationship between the two women as a duo-biography of the women. I did not care for this one. I found it intellectually dishonest, written to capitalize on identity politics because LGBTQ issues are in the forefront of the national consciousness right now. It is not an objective look at the relationship. My rating: 3 stars.

Shortly after my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the late 1990s, I read Sharon Olds' The Father (from 1992), which is a sequence of poems about her father's death. I'm not sure if one thing led to the other or if it was coincidence, but this book will always be very personal to me as I used it to work through what I thought of at the time as my father's mortality. And yet, I have not read the book since, that I can remember. It's an excellent collection. Still, I wonder if I've kind of outgrown my fondness for Olds' poetry. So many of her poems--even poems about her father--are sexual in nature, and it just doesn't always make sense to me. I don't believe you could pay me enough to write about my dead father's penis, for instance. I find a lot of it gross and over the top (all of her recent Odes is like that). But, uncomfortable father-sex imagery aside, this is an excellent collection from beginning to end. The poems stand on their own, but reading them in chronological order adds up to a strong collection. My rating: 4 stars.  

Last week I abandoned:

I have to have likable characters, and there were too many in this one that just weren't. There was too much heaviness here, and I gave up.

This week I'm reading:

I'm anxious for this one--in both definitions of the word.

My evening reads:

I'm making steady progress on each of these. I hope to finish one or two of them this week.

And while processing this one at work, I decided I really wanted to re-read it, so I started it that night.

 

As for this re-read, no progress, so I'm switching to audio.

My current audiobook:

This is not really what I was expecting. I'll put up a review of it next week.