Amor Towles has become one of my favorite contemporary authors, so I was delighted when Table for Two was selected for the Skagit Valley Book Club. Towles has assembled a collection of short fiction stories and a novella. Table for Two is fine work but not comparable to A Gentleman in Moscow or Lincoln Highway. That being said, Evelyn Ross, in the novella, is a character not to be forgotten.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles is a book title that has almost no relationship to the theme or plot. That is not true of Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance by the same author. As you can see from the cover, News of the World was made into a movie because it is a compelling story of hardship, creating character and integrity. Chenneville is about a Union soldier, John Chenneville, coming home to the senseless slaughter of his sister and her family and the struggles he goes through to find their killer. You will find yourself rooting for John to get revenge and justice for his family.
Lessons in Chemistry is more about challenging the status quo than how to combine chemicals safely. This NYT Book of the Year by Bonnie Garmus is about stupid white men trying to control an intelligent woman, Elizabeth Zott, who refuses to accept the 1960s convention. The book was made into an Apple TV+ series I watched before reading. Subsequently, it became a Book Club selection, and I worried that it might not match the quality of the television series. It was worse than I could have imagined.
Men are retarded brutes who live on prejudices and lower base instincts, and women are primarily virtuous and put up with men to save the family. There is the lying bishop at the boy’s home who thinks only of money, the pastor who does not believe in God, the TV station manager who has to be the worst boss ever created in literature and would make Archie Bunker blush, the UCLA dean who raped Elizabeth and got her expelled from school, and her father who is in prison for being an evangelical fraud and murderer and drove his son to suicide. Don’t forget the executive at the lab who is clueless and plagiarizes Elizabeth’s work. The author feeds on stereotypes and prejudice. Still, it was entertaining.
In response to a question about how to understand the conflict in Palestine, a friend recommended The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan. Certainly, there are many books on this topic, but Lemon Tree takes a refreshing approach by documenting the histories of two families in Palestine, one Arab and one Jew, centered on a home that belonged to the Arab family before the 1967 Six-Day War. Their story and struggles become a method of understanding the many decades of conflict in Israel. The dialogue between these families brings light to this challenging topic.
This book was written too early. Now that he is in the news more than ever, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk should be updated by the author to fully capture the personality of this controversial character. I read the book mainly because of the author’s work in Steve Jobs, another bestselling biography, and I was not disappointed in Musk. I can say I’m disappointed in Mr. Musk (full disclosure: I drive a Tesla) since he purchased Twitter in 2022. Nevertheless, this book deserves your attention if you want to understand Mr. Musk, and there is every reason you should since he refuses to leave the world stage.
