Lake Efffect

Lake Effect by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, 288 pages

It's 1977 in a tight-knit neighborhood in Rochester, New York, and when a recently divorced woman gives all of the ladies in the neighborhood book group a copy of The Joy of Sex, it's like a bomb has gone off. Nina begins to realize that her long and emotionless marriage isn't making her happy anymore and that she should seek pleasure elsewhere. Meanwhile, Nina's oldest daughter, Clara, steals the book to woo the boy next door, her first love. But when Nina and her prominent neighbor run off for quickie divorces and a wedding, it upends everything, including Clara's relationship with her now-stepbrother. Just as we're getting used to the late 1970s, the book jumps forward 20 years, to check in on food stylist Clara and her estrangement from her family.

This was a quick, engaging read that took some odd and hilarious turns, and really examined family, betrayal, love, and somehow surviving it all. My problem with this book is that most of the development seems to happen in the 20-year gap between the 70s and 90s. Both sections are fantastic and well worth reading, but I kinda wish we'd had a chance to see exactly how everyone got to where they were in the 90s. Still, definitely worth the read!

Coffin Moon

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson, 320 pages

Vietnam vet Duane is back home after his tour of duty, and with the help of his in-laws, has managed to get sober (despite his job as a bartender), salvage his marriage, and become a foster parent to his niece, Julia. But one night at the bar, Duane runs afoul of local gang leader John Varley, and Varley decides the best way to get even is to massacre Duane's wife and in-laws in the goriest way possible. In their grief, Duane and Julia decide to get revenge on Varley, despite the fact that Varley is a vampire and nearly unkillable.

I loved this book, which felt like a throwback to the classic Stephen King novels of the 1970s, but without the coke-addled overlong books. This was tight, surprising, scary, and altogether fantastic. I highly recommend it for horror fans.

A selection of October graphic novels

 Monet: Itinerant of Light by Salva Rubio with art by Ricard Efa (2017) 112 pages

Captures the Impressionist style in the backgrounds of comic panels. Really explores the starving artist trials of Monet. He was often rebellious of authority, but with this graphic bio being so short, you are mostly struck by how often Monet and his family were struggling to make ends meet with his irregular income as a painter. I read it on an older Kindle from Libby, which isn't as great at being able to zoom in on small text boxes or bubbles.

Mary Shelly: Monster Hunter Vol. 1 by Adam Glass and Olivia Cuartero-Briggs with art by Hayden Sherman (2019) 120 pages

Fun! Interesting Frankenstein pastiche. It combines the night Mary and Byron and the others had their horror writing competition with Mary meeting a woman Dr. Frankenstein, who is trying to create a man who is a protector of women. The series starts off promisingly with the art conveying the Romantic and Gothic nature of the time period, and the writing making use of increased feminist themes. But the last issue does not end in a way that was satisfying to me.

The Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Vol. 1 by Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, et al. (2017) 507 pages

Comics of the '70s feel a bit too much like soap operas for my taste. The art is sometimes too busy and hastily finished. Still, the continuity and character development are strong as it moves forward. Blade is introduced in this series. Great twists and turns for the imagination. I like the black and white art and stories through time of the Dracula Lives! series in the second half better than the first half. That is with the exception of the story set in Hollywood, which is cynical in the worst way. 

Monstress, Book One by Marjorie M. Liu with art by Sana Takeda (2019) 521 pages

Epic! I'm glad I picked this edition that includes issues 1 through 18. No other ending point would have felt conclusive. The fantasy elements are stronger than the steampunk elements until it gets into the later issues. I love the world building. I love the matriarchal society. The writing and art are so well matched. Maika and Kippa are great characters. Kippa is like Jiminy Cricket, a conscience for  Maika who has a monster inside her. Ren, the cat, and later Zinn, an old god, are created with fantastic complexity too. This book is full of stunning visuals and sometimes gruesome, bloody horrors. Figuring out who are Maika's allies and who are her enemies is difficult. Many different factors are intertwined in the plot. Five stars!

The Stolen Queen

The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis, 352 pages

Charlotte Cross was an archaeology student in the 1930s when she helped discover a female pharaoh's tomb in Egypt. Fifty years later, she's helping curate the arrival of an exhibit of King Tut's riches at the Met when a necklace from the female pharaoh's tomb — a necklace previously thought lost in a horrific accident — reappears at the Met on loan from an anonymous source. Pair that with the theft of an important Egyptian artifact and Charlotte's own research (both stolen during the Met Gala, no less!), and Charlotte is forced to confront her own past in an attempt to salvage her career and find the missing artifacts.

I'm a sucker for both Egyptology and the Met Gala, and I read this book with high hopes that it would deliver on both fronts. Instead, it was kinda meh, and focused more on the relationships than on the historical elements. (Also, it drove me nuts that, just for fun, the author created a red carpet for the 1978 Met Gala, when it didn't have one at all — and then told us exactly that in the afterword.) There are better historical fiction titles out there.

Daisy Jones & The Six

 Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, 368 pages.

Daisy Jones was practically raised by the Sunset Strip in the 60s, and that upbringing guided her towards a meteoric career in music. The Six, and their sensational front man Billy Dunne, are pulled into her orbit as they work together on an album that will become one of the defining moments of the 70s before their equally spectacular separation. 

This fictional oral history worked very well as an audiobook. Funny enough, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed this book had I not been listening to it. Very little happened in the way of plot, and to hammer home the nature of unreliable narrators in an oral history much of it was covered repeatedly from different angles, which made the book move at a crawl at times. It is also guilty of something that's relatively common in books where the characters know the end at the beginning, wherein they allude to a big, bad event for the whole time that, on it's arrival, is ultimately pretty anticlimactic. All of that being said, I did still find myself invested in the characters and the book. I suspect people who enjoy celebrity stories and messy interpersonal drama as the driving force of their books would like this one, but for my tastes I'm afraid it was only fine. 

Velvet Was the Night

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 284 pages

Maite has a pretty boring life, working as a secretary and spending every moment she can reading Secret Romance comic books and listening to records at her apartment. But when her beautiful neighbor Leonora asks her to cat-sit and then disappears, Maite begins searching for her, becoming embroiled in a conflict between student protestors and the pseudo-military thugs that have been hired to spy on them and beat them down.

This book wonderfully captures life in 1970s Mexico City, and marries Maite's hum-drum life with the dangerous escapades of Leonora's world. Fascinating and revealing.

How to Order the Universe

How to Order the Universe by Maria Jose Ferrada, 175 pages

In 1970s Chile, M is a young girl who idolizes her salesman father, D, doing whatever she can to spend time with him on sales calls. As they grow closer, M starts skipping school to help out her dad, as he's found that a cute kid can really help move the product and she loves meeting the people he interacts with. One of those people, E, is a mysterious photographer, whose involvement in their lives threatens to upend a lifestyle that M has come to love.

What a quirky, haunting, and ultimately unsettling novella. With a tip of a hat to Paper Moon, Ferrada's sparse writing and characterization of M is pitch perfect. Well worth the short while it will take to read.

Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust On Chicago's South Side From the Seventies

Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust On Chicago's South Side From the Seventies poems by
Patricia Smith, photographs by Michael Abramson, 191 pages.
Michael Abramson a photographer whose work appeared in Time, Newsweek and other publications, started documenting the visitors, regulars, drinkers, dancers, and musicians at several Southside Chicago night clubs in 1974.
Patricia Smith, renowned poet from Chicago wrote the poems that accompany the photos in this book.
It's unclear to me whether the poems were written when Abramson was alive. The book jacket lists them separately and indicates that the photographer died five years before the book was published. A bio of Smith on the Poetry Foundation website indicates that the two "collaborated" on the project. The essays in the book don't really clear that up, but it's not that important. Both the photographs and the poems along side them bring the places and the people to life. Sometimes you look at the photo and the poem explains the man, the woman, or the mood in a straightforward but beautiful way.  Other times you think you see the photo and understand it, but the poem shifts your focus to a frown or a smile on the person behind the person, and your perception shifts. A wonderful book.
I picked up this book because it stood out; a large format, coffee-table book among the slim volumes in 811.6.

Tales of the City

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin  419 pp.

This was a re-read of the first book in a series I adore. It is the beginning of the tales of the residents of the apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco and their charming, quirky, and much loved landlady. The first three books in the series became a PBS series with Olympia Dukakis playing the indomitable pot growing Mrs. Madrigal. Taking place after the "Summer of Love" but before the AIDS crisis, the novel covers subjects like free sex, drugs, infidelity, race, and LGBT/Queer identity before the advent of the letter salad. I was fortunate to meet the author many years ago and he is as charming and gracious as his famous landlady character. This time around I listened to the audiobook read by Frances McDormand with an introduction by Rachel Maddow.

Death in Connecticut

Death in Connecticut by David Linzee (1977) 245 pages

I wanted to read an early book by this local author, but I did not find the main character in Death in Connecticut sympathetic. Arthur Jr. had been floating about the country, a hold-out from Vietnam protests/campus office takeovers. When his father did not rush in to save him from his own judgement, and when his girlfriend didn't drop what she was doing to validate him, he found himself in a downward spiral until we meet him on a bus three years later, with no food, no clean clothes, but near his father's law office.

His father gives Arthur Jr. access to his apartment, where Arthur finds his father's guns and decides to kill himself. By chance, out in the country where he was going to kill himself, he sees his ex-girlfriend's car parked and stops what appears to be a theft from the car. From here, the confusion grows as he thinks it's possible that drugs are in the package: His ex works for his father's firm; do they deal in drugs? He finds a new zest for life in trying to take his father down. Meanwhile, some shady characters are paying him ominous visits. The action ramps up from there!

Sweet Tooth / Ian McEwan, 304 pp.

I saw Atonement along with the rest of the world and always meant to read McEwan but never got around to it.  I thought the Atonement narrative was a little purple and throbbing, but was pleasantly surprised here.  Serena Frome is a beautiful young Cambridge grad at loose ends in 1972, when she's steered towards a job at MI5 and given an assignment to surreptitiously recruit an up-and-coming novelist whose work will champion the anti-Soviet cause.  She falls in love with her target, though, and things get complicated.  One of the best surprise twists of an ending I've read in a while, this is ultimately about narrative: how does it work, who gets to tell it, and what does it mean?

Bucky F*cking Dent

Bucky F*cking Dent by David Duchovny, 296 pages

Thirty-something self-described loser and Yankee Stadium peanut vendor Ted has always had a fraught relationship with his father, Marty, a retired womanizing advertising executive and a lifelong Red Sox fan. (Is that the reason Ted works for and supports the Yankees, despite having the middle name of Fenway? Probably doesn't hurt.) Father and son haven't talked for five years when Ted is summoned to the hospital, where he learns that Marty is in the final stages of lung cancer. Ted moves home and is determined to figure out where their relationship went wrong. The whole book is set against the 1978 American League fight for the playoffs between the Red Sox and Yankees (a LOT of Sox fans felt that that was their year, and in the book, Marty is convinced that he's immortal until October, "when the Sox win it all.").

Duchovny offers up a good exploration of both the father-son dynamic, as well as the role that baseball plays in the American psyche. A great book to read as the MLB season kicks off.

The Flame Throwers

The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner, 383 pages.
This book was shortlisted for the National Book Award, as was the author's previous book, Telex from Cuba. Set in primarily in 1970's Italy, NYC, and briefly, the Bonneville Salt Flats, the novel follows a woman nicknamed Reno through the New York City art scene, to Bonneville as she sets a short-lived land speed record as part of her photography / art installation, and then to Italy first to meet her boyfriend's family, and then to interact with the Red Brigades.
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The Little Friend / Donna Tartt 555 pp.

An entirely different story from Tartt's The Secret History, but no less engaging. Harriet Cleves Dufresnes is growing up in small town Mississippi in the 1970s in the long shadow of her older brother's unsolved murder when she was an infant. The murder has ruined her mother, who copes by taking pills and staying in bed, and left her older sister dreamy and fragile. Harriet, on the other hand, is precocious, tough, and determined to solve the case and exact vengeance. The cast of characters here includes a snake-charming preacher, an oily car salesman, a psychotic ex-con, and an ex-con who may or may not have a heart of gold.