Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Exploring the use of language. How does one speak in the language of the oppressor? Most of us are never confronted with this issue. We may all feel oppressed at one time or another, or even all of the time, but for most of us, the language that is native to us is also the language of the oppressor.



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The House at Belle Fontaine by Lily Tuck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An American, Tuck's short stories remind me very much of what I'd expect from a British writer. An intellectual style with a rye, ironic sense of humor. The final story in the collection, "Sure and Gentle Words," saved the book for me.



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Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Friends in Wisconsin

The struggles of small town high school buddies now grown up. Sort of.

One grows rich and then goes broke. One becomes a rock star. One suffers a life altering injury. And one has what all the others want. Conflict ensues.

Money can't bring happiness. Fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, no matter which side of the fence you're on.

This a realistic novel, well told. I enjoyed it, although the conclusion seemed a bit forced. But then endings to novels often seem a bit manufactured, especially when composed in the mode of realism.



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The Dinner Party and Other Stories by Joshua Ferris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Eleven stories of young men who find themselves in trouble do to their inability to adequately employ self-examination. All of them attempt to do so and they miss the mark. Sometimes this ends up in fatally destroy a marriage, sometimes, as in the case of the last story, resulting in a death. We are all Oedipus (not the mother thing, but the acting out of ignorance part). Are men inevitably "bulls in a china shop," doomed to bring things crashing down around them despite the best of intentions?

The stories are very readable.



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United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is the first of Gore Vidal's works I've ever read, which is odd, considering that his career more or less spanned my life. Vidal's writings don't fit into any easy categories, and perhaps that's why he is generally ignored by English departments. And the fact that he was always highly disparaging of the criticism that came out of such places and the writers who inhabited them.

I first became aware of Vidal in 1968, when the TV network, ABC, which had poor ratings, hired him and William F. Buckley, Jr. to serve as high level talking head commentators on the Democratic and Republican conventions. I was familiar with Buckley from his PBS TV show, "Firing Line." I admired Buckley's linguistic gifts even when a rarely agreed with his perspective, but I never expected that I would feel sorry form. Gore Vidal did that. The Buckley v. Vidal events became must see TV, just as the police riots in the streets of Chicago were.

This collection of essays covers the years listed in the title. It was highly acclaimed after it came out, and now that I've made my way through it, I see why. Vidal's writing style is immensely entertaining in a way that I never found his conversational style in all the TV appearances he made over the years, during which his patrician/condescending mannerism were often off putting. On the page, he seems incredibly prescient. His criticism of academia and the lack of American literacy is as spot on today as it was at any time in the 40 years that the essays cover. I found his essay on Egypt, for instance, published in 1963, as current today as it must have been then. In fact all of the essays, and there are many of them within this 1273 page tome, all seem as though they could have been written today.

For those who are not familiar with Vidal, he not only wrote essays, but also short stories, novels, TV shows during its so called golden age, and film, including having worked on the continuously popular "Ben Her" with its hidden homosexual story line.



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The Best American Short Stories 2019 by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The tastes of individual readers may change but gradually over the years, but editorial tastes tend to move in occasional leaps. Or so it seems to me. The last three years of this annual anthology have illustrated this to me. The broadening of the editorial scope has opened the sorts of stories up to a wider range of writers, reflecting the diversity in the English speaking world. While I embrace the enlarged scope, I don't always enjoy it quite as much as I'd hoped. But then I'm old, and we tend to value most what we enjoyed most at an earlier period in our lives. It's still a joy to read well crafted short stories, which these invariably are.



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