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jdscott50's reviews
1530 reviews
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
emotional
funny
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird returns with a new book. Author James McBride's novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, focuses on the small town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Moche and his wife Chona run a small grocery store that serves the Jewish community, immigrants, and Black residents. He also runs a local integrated theatre that brings in popular music acts. We see the ups and downs of this small community and its dark secrets. They stick together despite constant troubles.
This was an immersive, emotional, educational, and, at times, thrilling read. McBride sets up the community and its characters from Moche and Chona, Malachi, Addie, Nate, Fatty, Dodo, and more. They deal with a racist town and fiendish government agendas who kidnap Dodo since he is deaf. A heist is panned. Water must be tapped, and an accidental murder happens. This is an engaging and educational read.
Favorite Passages:
“And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic. And that’s where the bones of that rotten scoundrel whose name is not worthy to be called by my lips is floating to this day. At the bottom of the ocean, with the fish picking his bones and the devil keeping score.”
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. His world, his wants, his needs were of little value to anyone but himself. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining-room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible. The truth was, the only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf, twelve-year-old boy who at the moment was either riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was a full-blown ghost wearing a schoolboy cap, old boots, and a ragged shirt and vest standing ten feet from him tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek before his eyes. Which one was it?
Nate was silent a moment. He peered up the slight embankment, toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world. So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.
These lost people spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.
This was an immersive, emotional, educational, and, at times, thrilling read. McBride sets up the community and its characters from Moche and Chona, Malachi, Addie, Nate, Fatty, Dodo, and more. They deal with a racist town and fiendish government agendas who kidnap Dodo since he is deaf. A heist is panned. Water must be tapped, and an accidental murder happens. This is an engaging and educational read.
Favorite Passages:
“And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic. And that’s where the bones of that rotten scoundrel whose name is not worthy to be called by my lips is floating to this day. At the bottom of the ocean, with the fish picking his bones and the devil keeping score.”
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. His world, his wants, his needs were of little value to anyone but himself. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining-room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible. The truth was, the only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf, twelve-year-old boy who at the moment was either riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was a full-blown ghost wearing a schoolboy cap, old boots, and a ragged shirt and vest standing ten feet from him tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek before his eyes. Which one was it?
Nate was silent a moment. He peered up the slight embankment, toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world. So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.
These lost people spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.
Zero Sum: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
challenging
dark
slow-paced
3.0
Joyce Carol Oates has been a literary force since the 1960s. Most recently, her book Blonde was the basis of the Oscar-nominated film. Her characters are out for revenge in the short story collection Zero Sum. There are two prominent expressions for the endeavor that revenge is a dish best-served cold, and when one sets out a path for revenge, one should dig two graves. In Zero Sum, we see both examples.
In the titular story, a young student attempts to one-up her professor by picking on his daughter with unexpected results. In Mr. Stickum, a group of high school girls seeks revenge on abusers, but things go further than they expected. Stories about writers with suicide ideation sound inspired by David Foster Wallace and other stories. No one getting ahead or falling behind the struggle is real.
These stories were a little uneven. Assembled on a theme with different results, it felt incoherent as a collection. Mr. Sticjum was my favorite, but most of them were not memorable.
In the titular story, a young student attempts to one-up her professor by picking on his daughter with unexpected results. In Mr. Stickum, a group of high school girls seeks revenge on abusers, but things go further than they expected. Stories about writers with suicide ideation sound inspired by David Foster Wallace and other stories. No one getting ahead or falling behind the struggle is real.
These stories were a little uneven. Assembled on a theme with different results, it felt incoherent as a collection. Mr. Sticjum was my favorite, but most of them were not memorable.
The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller
informative
tense
slow-paced
5.0
The Russo-Ukranian War has been raging since February 2022. As this war continues, Financial Times War Correspondent Christopher Miller has become an expert on the history and what may happen next. For those who want to know more about the leadup and implications of this war.
Christopher joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Donetsk, Ukraine. Past the beautiful parts of the country, he goes to a broken-down factory town. It's a sort of rust belt of Eastern Ukraine. However, it proves to be an extremely valuable placement when he returns as a reporter for Kyiv Post. When the Russian puppet president is ousted, Russia takes Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
As tensions mount in 2022, Russia invades again. Miller was there before and during the war to give context to what was happening. We see the start of the Euromaidan Revolution and how Ukraine was caught flat-footed immediately after the ousting of the president. As the war churns on, it ]seems there are no easy answers to the horrors of this war.
Christopher joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Donetsk, Ukraine. Past the beautiful parts of the country, he goes to a broken-down factory town. It's a sort of rust belt of Eastern Ukraine. However, it proves to be an extremely valuable placement when he returns as a reporter for Kyiv Post. When the Russian puppet president is ousted, Russia takes Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
As tensions mount in 2022, Russia invades again. Miller was there before and during the war to give context to what was happening. We see the start of the Euromaidan Revolution and how Ukraine was caught flat-footed immediately after the ousting of the president. As the war churns on, it ]seems there are no easy answers to the horrors of this war.
My Murder by Katie Williams
funny
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Lou wakes up from the operating table and returns to her husband and baby. She has been cloned back to life after being the victim of a serial killer. The replication commission chose her and each of Edward Early's victims. All viciously killed throughout the town. They all must now readjust to their new life despite the macabre fascination the public has regarding their plight.
Accosted at a shopping mall by a mother hoping for the resurrection of her child, a boyfriend follows one of the victims everywhere in the hopes of preventing another tragedy (but mostly is smothering), and even a VR game is created based on their murders. However, in this science fiction future, there are more practical twists that make for a clever read.
Lou works as a touch therapist. She dons a VR skin and provides hugs, holds people's hands, and comforts those who need it. She is assaulted and murdered in a park along with five other victims. Nothing is what it seems, however. Her husband is acting suspiciously, an amateur detective group thinks the cops are hiding something, and this VR game initially sets out dark Edward Clones only to be upended by revenging Vanessa. The twist at the end was fun and fair, the author telegraphed it, and it was very satisfying.
Accosted at a shopping mall by a mother hoping for the resurrection of her child, a boyfriend follows one of the victims everywhere in the hopes of preventing another tragedy (but mostly is smothering), and even a VR game is created based on their murders. However, in this science fiction future, there are more practical twists that make for a clever read.
Lou works as a touch therapist. She dons a VR skin and provides hugs, holds people's hands, and comforts those who need it. She is assaulted and murdered in a park along with five other victims. Nothing is what it seems, however. Her husband is acting suspiciously, an amateur detective group thinks the cops are hiding something, and this VR game initially sets out dark Edward Clones only to be upended by revenging Vanessa. The twist at the end was fun and fair, the author telegraphed it, and it was very satisfying.
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby
funny
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Samantha Irby returns with a new set of hilarious essays from when she tried to create a sitcom from her life to her rewriting Sex and the City Episodes. Quitely Hostile refers to her facade that can fail at any moment, leaving her a quivering mess. Relatable in its antisocial anxiety. She has excellent insight in Sex and the City and I am enjoying the Just Like That Reboot.
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
As I said earlier, consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art. I repeat: this occurs in every case.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
People used to use the word canceled jokingly. Meaning they are over, or some minor infraction resulted in cutting all tries with a person. Lately, people have been using the phrase cancel culture to refer to a person of prominence getting their access to resources revoked. Of course, those advocating for this rarely have the power to do so. Typically, when someone commits a wrong act, they must atone. Some people don't feel as if they need to do so. Furthermore, there are those whose behavior created a stain on their art. What should be done for those who create great art but are bad people?
Clarie Dederer decides to weigh in on the issue. Her main conflict that brings her to the topic is that of Polanski. She loves movies like Chinatown but worries she can no longer enjoy these films due to his criminal acts. She attempts to justify it, but she is conflicted. How can she deny herself something that she enjoys so much due to the artist's failure? She makes comparisons with Polanski, Picasso, J.K. Rowling, and others. Her general conclusion is the same as environmental action: you cannot individually hold artists accountable for their sins. If you enjoy their work, continue to enjoy it. There is no force that can change that.
I feel that if you like art that may insult your friends, you might want to reconsider your tastes. Some art doesn't hold up. Some artist crimes outweigh their greatness. Ultimately, it feels like an excuse to like Roman Polansky films. Go ahead and watch them, but I can expand my enjoyment to less problematic art. In fact, it forces one to expand one's horizons and to look forward instead of continually looking backward.
Favorite Passages:
Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.
But of course giving a group of white male fancy-pantses all the breaks for years is the ultimate social engineering. Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look different from them.
Our feelings seem—they feel—sovereign, but they’re tethered to our moment and our circumstance; and the moments and past circumstances that came before. I might well add: what response, what opinion, what criticism do you have that is not tied up with history? We are subject to the forces of history and the biography we ourselves are living out in the conditions of that history. We think of ourselves as ahistorical subjects, but that’s just not so.
All of which is to say, the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.
The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.
Clarie Dederer decides to weigh in on the issue. Her main conflict that brings her to the topic is that of Polanski. She loves movies like Chinatown but worries she can no longer enjoy these films due to his criminal acts. She attempts to justify it, but she is conflicted. How can she deny herself something that she enjoys so much due to the artist's failure? She makes comparisons with Polanski, Picasso, J.K. Rowling, and others. Her general conclusion is the same as environmental action: you cannot individually hold artists accountable for their sins. If you enjoy their work, continue to enjoy it. There is no force that can change that.
I feel that if you like art that may insult your friends, you might want to reconsider your tastes. Some art doesn't hold up. Some artist crimes outweigh their greatness. Ultimately, it feels like an excuse to like Roman Polansky films. Go ahead and watch them, but I can expand my enjoyment to less problematic art. In fact, it forces one to expand one's horizons and to look forward instead of continually looking backward.
Favorite Passages:
Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.
But of course giving a group of white male fancy-pantses all the breaks for years is the ultimate social engineering. Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look different from them.
Our feelings seem—they feel—sovereign, but they’re tethered to our moment and our circumstance; and the moments and past circumstances that came before. I might well add: what response, what opinion, what criticism do you have that is not tied up with history? We are subject to the forces of history and the biography we ourselves are living out in the conditions of that history. We think of ourselves as ahistorical subjects, but that’s just not so.
All of which is to say, the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.
The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.
Fisher’s book asks us to understand ourselves as isolated consumers, and from there it asks us to accept the amorality of our own consumption. In other words, we keep looking to consumption as the site of our ethical choices, but the answer doesn’t lie there. Our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle; more complicit in what Fisher calls the atmosphere of late capitalism.
Art does have a special status—the experience of walking through a museum is different from, say, buying a screwdriver—but when we seek to solve its ethical dilemmas, we approach the problem in our role as consumers. An inherently corrupt role—because under capitalism, monstrousness applies to everyone. Am I a monster? I asked. And yes, we all are. Yes, I am.
In other words: There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
As I said earlier, consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art. I repeat: this occurs in every case.