“Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac” by Gabrielle Zevin

After reading and loving Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Sam and I both were interested in reading more Zevin. Sam went with AJ Fikry (which I then read later), but the title of this amnesiac book was the one that most piqued my interest. I knew ahead of time that it was YA, which isn't always my favorite genre (at least not since I was a YA myself), but I wanted to give it a try anyway. 

Well, here were my thoughts as of page 20: This book is silly. 

And yet within three days I’d already finished reading it, so it couldn't have been all that bad. It never did really grab me, but it was enjoyable enough. 

This story follows a teenage girl, Naomi Porter, as she tries to regain her memories after falling down the steps outside her high school and getting a nasty knock on the head. She's seventeen years old, but she has lost all her memories since the time she was in middle school. She's forgotten her parents' divorce, and she doesn't even recognize her own boyfriend. 

The first half of the book seemed a bit contrived, with the amnesia just a plot point that allows Naomi to learn about her life along with the reader. The second half of the book was somewhere between surprising and annoying as Naomi realizes how much the fall has changed her. I'm obviously no expert, but I find it difficult to believe that a few forgotten memories would so completely change who you are on the inside. Would you really make such completely different decisions the second time around just because you forgot what you'd chosen the first time around? To me, the mystique of amnesia lies with the potential when uncovering what's hidden. In this book, nothing is really hidden--there are no real surprises or twists--it just takes some time for Naomi to put all the pieces back together. 

Ultimately, I was a bit disappointed in this book but that was most likely due to unrealistic expectations. 

“The Girls” by Emma Cline

Well, Sam was right--The Guest was better than The Girls, and I was right too--I should have read The Girls first. I think I would have liked this one more if it wasn't suffering in comparison to its successor.

This is the story of Evie Boyd, a fictional hanger-on of the Manson Family. In fact, all of the characters were fictionalized, or at least given pseudonyms. I did briefly contemplate that decision (why bother? why not just give everyone their real names?) but I came to the conclusion that this allowed the writer greater creative freedom rather than requiring historical accuracy. 

I'm not eager to read about serial killers or senseless murder (though I guess I would say, for me, it's one step above reading about war, which is nothing if not officially-sanctioned senseless murder) but this book benefits from not really being *about* the Manson murders; they're more of a backdrop. What is really central to the story is fourteen-year-old Evie's obsession with Suzanne, the beautiful older girl whose gravitational attraction separates Evie from her mundane life and pulls her into the inner circle of a cult. Part of the story is told years later, and it's unsettling to see how Evie has spent her life just drifting off on an aimless trajectory after her release from orbit.  

Did I like the book? Meh. I mean, it definitely wasn't a chore to read. But ultimately it left me a little disappointed. 

“Dinner: Changing the Game” by Melissa Clark

What's this? Another cookbook blog post? 

I promise I am not trying to turn this into a cooking blog. It is, and always will be, a reading blog. However, technically I did read this entire cookbook. In fact, I did more than just read this entire cookbook: I cooked every single recipe in it. All 225 of them! Did it take years? Yes! Was it awesome? Also yes! I even took it on vacation with me, more than once. (Hi, Hot Springs and Santa Fe!) I cooked a recipe from it the first time my son brought his then-girlfriend, now-wife over for dinner. I cooked a meal for my best friend from high school. I was brave enough to invite our foodie friend (the might-as-well-be-a-chef type) over for a meal cooked from this book. If there were an award for Best Cookbook Ever, this one would win hands down (and forks up).

Every time I cooked a recipe, I took notes. (Right there in the cookbook! My mom would be horrified. Five-year-old me still vividly remembers the We Don’t Write In Books conversation.) My notes are a combination of helpful hints for next time (when did the heat need adjusting? what did I use as a substitute for broccoli rabe? when did I use feta because I couldn't find any ricotta salata?) and diary entries about the who, when, and where of each meal. 

Towards the end I even started sticking photographs of my finished meals on the pages that didn’t already have a picture. (I just wish I’d had that idea four years ago!) My photos, of course, are nowhere near as beautiful as the ones already in the book, but they add another dimension to what has become an intensely personalized keepsake. 

“Foe” by Iain Reid

Sam said I wouldn’t like this book. He said it was terrible and he didn't recommend it. But I decided to read it anyway. (Because it was the shortest book in my main TBR pile? Maybe.)

I'm not sure what Foe seemed like to Sam, but as I read I found it similar to Philip K Dick: mysterious, intriguing, strange. And I never got to the point where I didn't like it. In fact, on page 111 (almost halfway through) Sam asked what I thought so far. When I said I actually liked it, his response was, "I don't think you will all the way through. But we'll see." 

Too bad Sam can't remember specifically what he didn't like about this book. (Sometimes I feel like we're the old man and old lady from The Buried Giant . . . ) This is the story of Junior and Henrietta, a young married couple living on midwestern farmland (which, embarrassingly, in my mind's eye looks exactly like the Kent farm in Smallville; the embarrassment doesn't lie with the fact that I was reminded of the Kent farm, but with the admission that I've watched every episode of that show. Though I guess I didn't have to mention the "every episode" part). Junior and Hen live in a somewhat dystopian future. They own chickens (which is illegal, but who's to know out here in the middle of nowhere?) and, surrounded by corporate canola fields, Junior works at a feed mill rather than cultivating his own land. Life takes a bit of a turn when Terrance shows up with the news that Junior has been randomly selected to temporarily populate The Installment, ostensibly in outer space. Hen will remain behind, and during his absence Junior will be replaced by a not-completely-explained entity who will be an  indistinguishable (even to Hen) replacement. This news, understandably, puts a bit of a strain on their relationship as they each privately deal with the coming changes.

On one hand I don't want to say more about the plot because I want to avoid spoilers; on the other hand I want to talk about the ending, so I'm about to give a huge spoiler. It's unavoidable. I mean, if you want to avoid it, you can. Just stop reading now. But if you've already read the book, I really want to know what you thought of the end. I thought it was totally ambiguous . . . did you? Junior is happy, and Hen is even more so. Is Hen happy because Replacement Junior has come back? Or did the real Hen leave, and it's Replacement Hen who is happy??

“The Storied Life of AJ Fikry” by Gabrielle Zevin

For a long time I have harbored a fantasy of finding a baby in a box. (In my dreams it's a live one. Let's not talk about my nightmares.) Not that anyone finds a baby in a box in this book. But there's a similar sort of dynamic which spoke to that unrealized possibility.

Sam bought this book after reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, because who wouldn't want to read more books by the same author after reading that? (I myself, maybe unsurprisingly, was more attracted to the title Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac; I'll definitely be reading that someday.) Unfortunately Sam was less than impressed by Fikry; I'm willing to bet that's just because TaTaT was that good. How could it compare? But despite the lack of recommendation from Sam I figured I would give it a try. 

AJ Fikry is an old (ish! not really) and somewhat grumpy bookstore owner on Alice Island, off the northeast coast of the US (although, weirdly, the beach and the ocean hardly figure into this book; I think the [made-up] location was only chosen because it is a bit remote and difficult to get to). We first see AJ through the eyes of Amelia "Amy" Loman, a publishing rep from a small press hoping to get him to purchase a significant portion of their winter catalog. At first we don't realize it, but AJ has every right to be gruff since the demise of his beloved wife two years earlier. 

Sam may have been right in that this book isn't as good as TaTaT, but I enjoyed reading it. I mean, it had its flaws, mostly centering around Maya. For one, I could not grasp Maya's voice; she didn't sound like a real child or even a real person. What was supposed to make her sound unique (never using contractions) only served to make her sound like a weird robot. It's like Maya was written by someone who has never met a child, or maybe never even was one. For another, Maya's short story (supposedly nearly award-winning) was terrible. It had a striking final line, but that was the only good thing about it. On the other hand, I loved it on page 86 when Maya figured out that r-e-d spells red, because I remember that moment of realization in my own life (the letters make sounds, and the sounds make words! although I was sounding out "Away We Go" instead of "red"), and I remember the feeling of the world opening up to me. It's definitely a nice thing to be reminded of. And then there's the whole bookish background, with all of the literary references and love of reading. Island Books is the perfect setting for a bibliophile.

Overall, I found this book very satisfying, even if contrived (as when Fikry asked to keep the child, and when Maya reviewed the books in the store) and a bit sentimental. The nostalgic bent saved it for me.

“Romantic Comedy” by Curtis Sittenfeld

This is the kind of book I usually hate. I mean, if I hadn't already read a book of short stories by this author that I really liked, and if this novel hadn't been recommended by [insert entity here that a literary amnesiac can't remember but was probably Oh, Reader magazine], I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole, no matter how witty and intelligent the main character was. 

I actually bought this book for Sam for his birthday. (Six months ago.) It's not Sam's usual thing either, but he *did* like One Day and The Versions of Us, both of which I would lump into the same category as this one. Aaaaaand yes I was interested in reading it myself after that [unremembered] recommendation. Unfortunately, without the interesting hook of once-a-year updates, or the distinctive alternate universe idea, there must not have been anything in this book for Sam, because . . . he hated it. I don't think he made it more than fifty pages before he gave up. 

I won't say I was undaunted by Sam's reaction, but I still wanted to give it a try. And I'm glad I did, because it turns out I didn't hate it. It definitely wasn't my favorite book ever ever, and I wouldn't recommend it unreservedly, but I did enjoy reading it. So maybe the characters' lives were too different from the average Joe (or Josephine, or me) to seem realistic, but that was actually part of the (vicarious) fun. And somehow the characters, despite their charmed lives, did seem real (which I can only attribute to good writing). 

Oh, right--what's it about? Sally Milz is one of the longer-term writers for the TV comedy show The Night Owls (a super-obvious surrogate for Saturday Night Live). She meets Noah Brewster, who is maybe not the male equivalent for Taylor Swift because apparently she's currently bigger than any worldwide phenomenon has ever been? But Noah is maybe the next tier down, as a talented, beloved, hunky pop star who stereotypically should only be dating models, though actually (actually) he is interested in Sally. And then there's that attraction-repulsion-attraction cycle that keeps you hanging on for more, only it's interspersed with personal assistants and mansions in Topanga Canyon and private jets punctuated by a bit of pandemic caretaking in Kansas City or whatever location is a substitute for bland middle America, and the underlying question is: are they going to live happily ever after? 

The only other thing I can think to say about this book is that it is weirdly, weirdly specific about what life is like when you work for a famous weekly improv comedy show. 

“Snow” by John Banville

If you were cynical, and you were reading a book about a priest who was one of the people in charge of a school for wayward boys, would you guess what that priest did with those boys (or at least some of them)? Yes, yes you would. And you would be right, and you would be disgusted. 

And that right there was me reading Snow. And I just can't get past that aspect of it. 

It was a murder mystery, and I like murder mysteries. It was well written and suspenseful, and I enjoy well-written suspense. It was atmospheric, and really, Snow was the perfect name for it--the story really evoked the wintry and cold ambience. But also  . . . it was just . . . sordid. Agatha Christie would never have written about a pedophile who (albeit deservedly) had his junk removed in the throes of death.

This one is going back to Half Price Books.  

“Rules of Civility” by Amor Towles

Any time a book I read completely absorbs me, the book that follows is going to suffer in comparison. And there's no doubt that's what happened to Rules of Civility. 

But even if I hadn't read this immediately following The Guest, I'm not sure I would have known what to make of it. It's mainly the story of one year in the life of Katey Kontent, an independent young twenty-something in 1938 Manhattan who talks like a hard-boiled detective in film noir. I don’t know why, but I expected Katey to turn out to be a Russian spy. Thant unmet expectation threw me off for quite a ways through the book. 

I liked it but didn't love it. I enjoyed the reading experience but wasn't swept away by it. The characters were interesting enough but I didn't live their lives with them. And it took me nine days to finish this blog post . . . 

“The Guest” by Emma Cline

Is it almost a cliché to read an Emma Cline book at this point? I feel a little behind the times.

I let Sam pick my next read, and this was it. He'd already read both The Guest and The Girls, and he said this was the better of the two. I did have a brief momentary doubt--shouldn't I read the less good one first, saving the best for last? I can't help but want to read the other one, but I also kind of dread its not-as-goodness. 

Speaking of dread...

Reading The Guest was an intensely uncomfortable experience, from quite early on. When I mentioned this to Sam, he laughed and said, "Yeah, it's like that the whole way through. You just have to remember--she's not you. And then you can see the humor in it." And he was right--I had been living this book as if I were Alex. It felt dangerous, unhealthy, and a little bit dirty. But even after the reminder that this was not my life, I'm not sure what I was seeing (as I mentally cringed and snuck peeks through my fingers) could be called humor.

This is going to be a weird comparison, but this book reminded me of The Nanny Diaries, only dark and edgy. (And Alex is definitely not a nanny.) Alex is a vaguely beautiful 22-year-old who has most recently been living in New York City. She's some combination of escort and prostitute and leech, who has attached herself to the older and (much) wealthier Simon for a late summer month in the Hamptons. Just when Alex is thinking maybe everything in life has become exactly what it always should have been, it begins to devolve into exactly what it always has been. But Alex has an unsettling way of simultaneously settling for and denying the existence of reality. 

I was sucked into this story just as quickly as Alex was almost sucked out to sea (that is, within the first three pages). Yes, I read the whole book in two days. Yes, this is despite the fact that I have a full-time job. I enjoyed the reading experience (if in a slightly bewildered way) but my overwhelming feeling as I turned the last page was one of exceeding relief that it was over.

“The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett

This was Ann Patchett's very first novel. It was published while I was in college, though I wouldn't even become aware of it until years later. And it's the second to last book of hers that I've read. If I'd thought about it ahead of time, I would have read this first one last, but it’s too late for that neat symmetry now. 

This is the story of St Elizabeth's, formerly a grand old hotel but now a home where unwed girls hide unwanted pregnancies. The hotel was first built near the site of a miraculous spring reputed to have healing powers, but when the spring dried up, eventually the hotel's clientele did as well, and the hotel was gifted to the Catholic church. 

All of that information is laid out prior to the first chapter of the book, and at that point I wasn't sure if I was really going to enjoy reading it. (But it's by Ann Patchett! There's always hope when it's Ann Patchett.) And then Rose was introduced, and I was even less sure that I was going to enjoy reading.

I did not like Rose. She was cruel and alien. I didn’t understand her or identify with her. She also vaguely reminded me of Sabine from The Magicians Assistant, a character I could never really grasp. But I kept powering forward. And I can tell you exactly when I realized I was hooked: after Sister Evangeline met Angie, and Rose knew the truth but Angie did not. (Sorry, I know that sentence is meaningless to you if you haven't read the book, but it is meaningful to me.) From then on I was invested. And by the time I was about a third of the way through it, I was further rewarded when I found out that the entire book is not from Rose's point of view. 

Despite a somewhat rocky start, I ended up loving this story. Especially the ending--mostly the very last paragraph, right down to the last sentence--which I think is unusual. How often is the end of a book a slight letdown, a slight disappointment? It either tells too much or not enough, it's either to sweet or too banal, it's either too sudden (with a feeling like the author figured "this has got to end somewhere" and thus randomly decided to just cut off the narrative) or too drawn out, blathering on and on, wrapping things up and then wrapping up the wrapping ad nauseum. 

I want to make a statement, but first you have to promise me one thing: you will never just go read the last paragraph of this book without reading the rest of it first. I don't think it will work that way. But now that you've promised, here is my statement: This book may have the most perfect ending I've ever read. 

“The Berry Pickers” by Amanda Peters

Everybody is talking about this book. 

That's exactly what the emailed newsletter from Strand in NYC said, so how could I not buy this book? I wanted to know what everyone was talking about. Plus it was almost my birthday, so why not give myself a little present?

When the book arrived, I loved the beautiful cover (it's one of those really soft-feeling ones, somehow like slick velvet) but I must admit that the synopsis did not draw me in. I started reading anyway, because whaddayagonna do, but it did not grab me. And then Sam gave me all those Miss Marple books! So The Berry Pickers was laid aside and I did not touch it for a couple of months. 

Last weekend I decided it was finally time to finish what I'd started. I was surprised to see I'd only made it to page 8 the first time around! I went ahead and started over at the beginning, because you know me and my memory. I didn't want to forget something important from those first few pages. And this time I got into it. Maybe around page 11? If only I had persevered the first time around. 

This is a split story: an indigenous family from Nova Scotia whose 4-year-old daughter goes missing in 1962, a girl named Norma growing up an only child in Maine, a middle-aged man named Joe dying of lung cancer, and the links between them all. The synopsis doesn't come right out and say this, but it's pretty obvious throughout the entire book so I don't feel like it's a terrible spoiler to say this: Norma is the daughter who went missing, and Joe is her older brother. But there is so much more to the story than that, and the characters are very vivid and real-seeming. 

My only complaint (other than finding the beginning a bit meh when I first tried to read it) was the last long chapter. Somehow it seemed superfluous. It wasn't too happy; it was more bittersweet, and that was fine. It just seemed to say too much when it could have been more effective to leave some things unsaid.

“This Is Climate Change: A Visual Guide to the Facts” by David Nelles and Christian Serber

I had a really annoying conversation about climate change with my parents over Christmas, where I felt sure my parents were wrong but I didn't have enough information to prove it. My mom magnanimously agreed that the climate is "currently in a warming trend" but she simpered with condescension as she stated humans have no control over the climate. My dad went off on a tangent about dendroclimatology (reading the climate records in tree rings). Sam got so mad that he walked away. I felt helpless.

After stewing about it overnight, first thing next morning I decided it was time for me to arm myself with information. I searched online for books that I hoped would provide unbiased facts, and ended up ordering four. 

This is Climate Change (which, ugh, I can't help singing to the Nightmare Before Christmas theme!!) is the one I chose to read first, since it seemed it would give me a brief but broad overview and promised to be easy to understand--and it delivered. Best of all, it clearly refuted some of the "facts" that my parents had spouted. I hate that my memory is terrible and that the information in this book can't just reside in my head, but I've got the next best thing--the book itself. I'm definitely going to keep it to use as a reference. 

I think this book does a really good job of showing that the rise in greenhouse gases is unquestionably caused by human activity. It starts by explaining that greenhouse gases have always existed, and have always naturally varied, but several different charts make it clear that the sharp increase and current trajectory clearly started with industrialization. Let me stop for a second and mention, via principle of charity: maybe, as well as also believing that the climate is in a warming cycle, my mom also believes its rate of warming is influenced by human activity and she just doesn't believe there's anything we can do about it? (I was too irritated to clarify this during our conversation.) But the book also makes it clear which human activities contribute to this rise, and that a decrease in these activities will result in a decrease of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

My dad claims that attributing global warming to increase in atmospheric CO2 is "old science" and that recently the focus has been on methane. I said (even before reading this book!) I didn't think that was true, and that while methane was also important, it had less of an effect because it didn't hang around as long. My dad countered that methane and CO2 have a similar half-life, which I thought was completely wrong, but I wasn't sure, so I let it drop. Well, guess what? Atmospheric lifetime of CO2 is up to a million years; atmospheric lifetime of methane is 12.4 years. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know if this might have something to do with the amounts of each gas that are present. The concentration of CO2, measured in parts per million or ppm, is much higher than the concentration of methane, which is measured in parts per billion or ppb. Plus it's possible we were talking at cross-purposes and were both right: my "hanging around" time might not mean the same thing as "half-life." My knowledge doesn't run deep enough to answer these questions.)

My mom thinks that the recent rise in CO2 levels is "majorly impacted by the great increase in huge forest fires, and the solution is to plant more trees." The truth is that 85% of global CO2 emissions are from the burning of fossil fuels, 5% is from cement production, and 10% is from land use (slash-and-burn clearance of rain forests, and I would assume we can include forest fires in this category). Majorly impacted? Sure. The majority of impact? No. Plant more trees? Sure. This will solve everything? No. 

The jury is still out on dendroclimatology. My dad says that the visitor's center at Petrified Forest National Park has a chart showing spikes in greenhouse gases in past millennia to levels that are just as high as those we see today. This book does not address dendroclimatology, but it does cover ice core samples, which show this: Over the past 800,000 years, concentrations of CO2 have gone up and down, staying between 160ppm and 310ppm, until human activity became a factor. When this book was written in 2021, CO2 was up to 404ppm. I googled it just now, and the most up-to-date figure is 419.07ppm. Methane concentrations have varied from 330ppb to 750ppb in the past, but were up to 1,843ppb when this book was published, and were 1,902ppb in 2023. Nutshell version: atmospheric CO2 and methane concentrations are at the highest they've ever been, and getting higher. I wonder if the dendroclimatology chart at PFNP does not extend to modern measurements? If the chart is based solely on tree ring data from petrified wood, it would not be surprising if the chart does not include recent data. Anyway, maybe someday I'll be able to see it myself to find out.

My parents didn't say anything about this in our climate discussion, but I've definitely seen this sort of thing posted online: "Melting ice won't raise the sea level. Displacement! I can science!" What these people are missing is knowledge of the difference between sea ice and land ice. It is true that melting sea ice will not cause a rise in sea levels, but melting land ice (specifically the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica) definitely will--and already has. And just because melting sea ice doesn't contribute to rising sea levels doesn't mean it isn't a problem, because it does contribute to a feedback loop that accelerates global warming (see "ice-albedo feedback"). 

So that's all I have to say about that. This is a really helpful book and I highly recommend it. I would be super interested to hear how a climate-change-denier reacts to it, but *only* if they actually read the whole thing and take the time to understand it, and *only* if they're not allowed to arbitrarily decide that the facts that don't fit their worldview must not be true. (This book has tons of sources that can be reached through an online bibliography here.) Here's one more little interesting tidbit which I did not even realize until I reached the end of the book: it was originally written in German by two university students who wanted to "find a book that explained the nuts and bolts of climate change and presented the scientific evidence in a way that was concise and enjoyable to read" but they found that book didn't exist . . . so they wrote it themselves! It was great to have the opportunity to read this book without having to write it first.