When These Mountains Burn by David Joy

 

Grabbed this from the library when I saw it, because I'm basically in some kind of love with David Joy's writing, and oh my gawds this is a brutal and beautiful novel. It's at least a little more hopeful than Where All Light Tends to Go, the ending turns almost elegiac, just the last handful of paragraphs as one of the POV characters is pondering the differences between the mountain life he was born into and the mountain life he's going to be leaving behind. Joy writes with belief and empathy and his prose is sweet like blood, his characters make choices they know are bad and they still often aren't prepared for how bad things will get, how heavy the consequences will be for their actions; he never shies away from telling their truths, from showing their pain. His novels are strong stuff, but they're worth it.

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

This turned out to be a more complicated novel than James was, at least in some ways. Some of that might have been the explicit intellectualism of the narrator, some might have been the insertion of another (much shorter) novel inside it--one probably too short to play as a novel for real, but enough to serve the larger purposes. The story is ... more nuanced than the cover copy, or reviews of the movie made from it, might lead you to believe. The language is well handled, both in the narrator's own voice (so to speak) and in the thing he writes out of some combination of rage and self-sabotage and desperation and pain; the characters all seem very much themselves, with the exception of the character who's slipping into dementia. The novel has a lot to say about a lot of things, identity (both in the sense of racial and in the sense of self) is the primary one, though there's clearly some amount of poking at the literary establishment of the late-1990s, when this was almost certainly written (publishing date of 2001). It's a pretty strong novel, though I can't pretend to understand the vast majority of what the narrator was writing about when he wasn't, erm, narrating.

We Ate the Dark by Mallory Pearson

 

It became clear within the first fifty pages that this was a novel about a bunch of Appalachian witches dealing with a murder and the Powers behind it. I kept reading anyway, and I really regret that choice. It's murky and muddled and the characters are barely distinct from each other and at the end the putatively good characters seem to have sacrificed another world and all the people on it. I wish it hadn't taken over four hundred pages to get to that ending. The fact the author seems to have at least occasionally reached for heightened prose and basically ... failed to get there did not improve things.

Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi

 

Grabbed this little nonfiction book somewhere while we were on vacation a couple of months ago, it's a reasonably well-written book about what being a long-haul trucker is like, and what parts of their job and work environment play the largest parts in why some small number of them end up being murderers (and some smallish percentage of them end up being serial killers, as that term is defined in mainstream culture, which is different than its meaning in law enforcement) There are interspersed sections from the POV of former sex workers, and from law enforcement and social workers who are working to get those who are victims (most of them, as the author sees things, and I'm not inclined to argue) out of the life, as well as bits relating fragments of various investigations into murders committed by truckers. While the book is reasonably informative and well-written, it seems like 250-ish pages that could boil down to this: Serial killers have always been able to do more killing if they've been able to move around, and serial killers have always been able to get away with killing sex workers because in many places and many times they're women who won't be missed; given that trucking combines mobility with access to sex workers (at truck stops seems to be fading, but there's still a culture around the business) it's not at all surprising that long-haul trucker is a job that some serial killers would find attractive and appealing.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

 

I grabbed this because the idea of a novel about a protopunk band threatening a reunion seemed interesting to me. I wouldn't say there's nothing interesting in this, but I liked the novel a good deal less than I hoped. It's basically (mostly) the same story as any band that struggles and kinda makes it before the members come to kinda loathe each other. Also, the main story is the narrator (who's a fictional editor at a fictional music magazine working on a fictional book about the fictional band) working to forgive the Other Woman in her parents' marriage, and also probably her father, who died before she was born. It's plausible Ms. Walton knows this, but it's kinda buried under all the pseudo documentation. Because the text is mostly in the form of interviews (interspersed with the narrator's notes) the novel struggles of course to be kaleidoscopic rather than scrambled; it lands somewhere in the vast middle ground, there. The characters are reasonably clear, even if many of them are types someone with a knowledge of rock and pop history will recognize. The novel has things it wants to say about racism and sexism, both in culture overall and in the entertainment biz (at least the music division) and one of the reasons I was so disappointed was that I agree with those things, I just don't think the novel really did a good job of saying them--which probably connects to the fact I didn't think it did a great job of telling its story.

Grunt by Mary Roach

 

I grabbed this because I noticed it when I was walking through my local library's nonfiction section, and Ms. Roach is always interesting--and I was curious what sorts of science she'd found to write about. Turns out there was much in the way of medical science, both in the sense of treatment and in the sense of prevention, as well as digressions into intentional bad smells and the effect of sleep on cognition, not to mention things like how one armors a vehicle against IEDs and how much of one's situational awareness (at least in an actual combat or combat-adjacent context) is based on hearing. Ms. Roach writes with bucketloads of life and sparkle, and can apparently get almost anyone to talk with her, and the combination of their expertise and her viewpoint (sometimes playing up her ignorance, at least in the telling) and her prose makes for a powerfully readable book.

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

 

I grabbed this after enjoying the first two books Ms. Bear wrote in this setting, and this is nowhere near the romp especially Ancestral Night is, but it is a very good novel. It doesn't have as much sparkle as I remember the other two novels having, and it does drag some through the first half or so--things take a long time to get into place for inciting events, and some of that feels really slow and overly granular in detail to me. The prose is still really good, and the characters are mostly well-defined, and the setting has a lot of stuff going on in it, some of which feels ... not entirely good, to me: not just the pirates, but there seems to be some sense that human psychology (and that of other sentients) just has too many hard-wired flaws to make for the kind of long-term viability needed for interstellar civilization, so there's like consensual brainwashing of a sort. Ms. Bear makes her characters seem like people, even if they're people with more, or at least more direct, control over their endocrine systems; and the story, when it does get into motion, works really well. In the Acknowledgments, Ms. Bear describes it as (paraphrasing) space opera crossed with family drama, and that's not wrong.