November Reading Recap

I was so busy reading books last month, I got behind on reviewing them until now!

→ CAHOKIA JAZZ by Francis Spufford: Detectives Barrow and Drummond of the Cahokia PD are called to the scene of a grisly murder. It's 1922, so most of their cases involve the illegal liquor trade, but this is something else. An eviscerated body has been left atop one of the city's highest buildings, with a message scrawled in Anopa, the local language that most Indigenous citizens speak along with English. Barrow isn't an Indigenous local, though he's often mistaken for one; he's a newcomer of uncertain heritage to this ancient kingdom on the Mississippi that's now part of the United States. Since Barrow is still learning Cahokia's customs and culture, he tends to let Drummond take the lead, even when his friend's policing strategies are corrupt. But this time, Barrow is compelled to look past the convenient suspects and figure out what's really happening with this case and its complicated repercussions.

I loved everything about this compelling detective story set in a brilliantly rendered alternate history. Cahokia was a real city that prospered centuries before European colonization, and Spufford has established a timeline in which it continued thriving. He puts enough of the worldbuilding details on the page that my curiosity was satisfied, but not so much that Barrow ever gets much chance to rest from the grueling pace of his investigations. Barrow is an excellent character, burdened by all the usual trappings of a noir detective and also grappling with who he wants to be in the world. This is a smart, complex, dark novel, and I highly recommend it.

→ THE TELLING by Ursula K. Le Guin: When Sutty was growing up, Earth was dominated by an oppressive religious regime. She couldn't wait to complete her training as an Ekumen Observer and leave for an assignment on another planet, where things would be different. But when she arrives on Aka, she finds it's another rigidly controlled society, this one stridently anti-religious. The Akan government, in pursuit of technological progress like that of Earth, has outlawed everything associated with the planet's once-widespread spiritual practices. Sutty wishes she could learn more about this situation, but she's granted little access to anything worth studying while she's confined to the city. Once permitted to leave, Sutty travels to a remote village and realizes the old ways are still a part of daily life, though kept hidden from government monitors. As she gains the trust of the villagers, she learns the traditions of the Telling and the history that brought Aka to this point.

As I continue to wander through Le Guin's extensive body of work, I'm particularly enjoying the stories that place characters in cultures they're unfamiliar with and delve into the anthropological details. I didn't know anything about THE TELLING when I started it, so I was pleased to discover it's firmly in this category. I was immediately drawn in to Sutty's story and happy to get to know her better as we learned together about Akan culture and history. This novel is so heavy on the anthropological details that I grew a bit impatient in the middle, but soon more plot developed, and I was enthralled again. It's interesting to read a story contrasting a society that demands religion with one that bans it, and Le Guin explores this with her usual nuance.

→ OREO by Fran Ross: Oreo begins before the birth of the title character, when her eventual parents, a Black woman and a Jewish man, announce their marriage. The news of the union is so upsetting to their own parents that one drops dead and another is rendered catatonic. The marriage doesn't last long, and soon Oreo's father is gone from her life, but he leaves behind a set of clues Oreo can find him with when she's older. Though Oreo and her younger brother are raised by the Black side of their family, they are exposed to a certain amount of Yiddish as a consequence of their (now immobilized) grandfather's extensive but spite-based knowledge of Judaism. After a childhood immersed in the various language eccentricities of her family members and tutors, the precocious Oreo sets off to New York City on a quest to find her father.

This novel was published in 1974 and largely ignored until decades later. I went in knowing only that it was a satire with a biracial protagonist, and the book was quite different from what I expected, and from anything else. While there is social commentary on race as well as gender, the most prominent feature is Ross's extensive, inventive use of wordplay. The puns and jokes and rhetorical devices draw on numerous languages and fields of reference. I was constantly amused, impressed, and looking things up. The broader humor of Oreo's adventures is, well, broad, and often too slapsticky or surreal for my taste, but the language jokes are magnificent. The quest's structure turns out to be based on a legend from Greek mythology, adding another unexpected, fascinating layer. I didn't always enjoy this as a story, but I appreciated its idiosyncrasies, and I'm glad I read it.

→ THE SEQUEL by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to THE PLOT. The plot of THE PLOT involves a writer who publishes a wildly successful novel based on a plot that originated with another writer, and consequently ends up in the middle of his own sinister plot. The plot of THE SEQUEL results from the events of THE PLOT, making it difficult to describe without revealing the plot turns of THE PLOT. Once again, THE SEQUEL involves a writer publishing a wildly successful novel, but the plot of that novel is less important to the plot than the plot of the novel from THE PLOT, which continues to have sinister consequences in the life of the new writer. You got all that?

This is a reasonably clever followup, but I found it far less fun than the original. What THE SEQUEL adds to the story is the new protagonist's perspective, which Korelitz brings to life with some complexity. However, the premise requires going back over much of the material from THE PLOT, so this novel lacks the freshness and surprise of the first one. The rehashing made my disbelief lose suspension, and some of the publishing insider stuff felt like unnecessary filler this time. I was also sorry that one of the plot twists hinges on sexual assault, a trope I'm very tired of. Read THE PLOT if you're looking for an entertaining, over-the-top thriller set in the literary world, but you may want to stop there.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ For Literary Hub, Jadie Stillwell and Nicole Blackwood attend a Nancy Drew convention and consider the mystery of the girl detective: "Even if Nancy can't be defined by her image, surely we can nail down a character logline. Sherlock Holmes is abrasive, Hercule Poirot is vain, Veronica Mars is prickly, and Nancy Drew is... the quintessential teen girl of her time, at all times. Yes, she was lovingly sculpted into being by Carolyn Keenes (Carolyns Keene?) and scores of illustrators, but she's also one publishing executive's idea of how an independent young woman might look and act, packaged for the masses and routed straight to a bookshelf near you—and your mom, and your mom's mom. It's true that most of Nancy's iterations share a few traits: cute blue roadster, loyal boyfriend, indulgent dad. But these are things she possesses, privileges she has; there's still frustratingly little to cement her as more than a concept."