Vampires In the Lemon and Other Stories Grove by Karen Russell

Vampires In The Lemon Grove and Other Stories by Karen Russell

Read by Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, Mark Bramhall, Michael Bybee, Romy Rosemont, and Robbie Daymond

9 hours, 15 minutes

Published February 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf

Publisher's Summary: 

In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" - stories of children left to fend for themselves in dire predicaments - find Russell veering into more sinister territory, and ultimately crossing the line into full-scale horror. In "The New Veterans", a massage therapist working with a tattooed war veteran discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the images on his body. In all, these wondrous new pieces display a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.

My Thoughts: 

Book two for Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.). Yea, me; although, I must admit that this was a complete coincidence. This is one of those books that I've been wondering about for a long time (a decade, actually), but it was getting an advanced copy of Russell's latest work (The Antidote) and having a break in the audiobooks I'd requested from the library, that finally had me picking this one up. 

Maureen Corrigan (NPR) had this to say about the first story in this collection: "The title story kicks off this collection by doing the near impossible: making me care about vampires, a breed more overexposed these days than Labrador retrievers." I agree, despite my major skepticism when the story began. Poor Clyde is a vampire who can no longer transform into a bat and fly; instead he spends his days and nights sitting at a table at the back of a lemon grove, where no one except one young worker, seems to be aware of what he is. He lives for the arrival of his wife, who descends nightly from a cave on high, along with thousands of other bats. It was his wife who made him understand that they could survive without blood and the two of them discovered that lemons work as a kind of analgesic for their kind. But has their marriage reached its end? And will the reality of that cause Clyde to do the unthinkable? I liked this story much more and it set the bar high. 

Like all collections of short stories (at least in my experience), not all stories are equal. I must admit that I gave up on "The New Veterans," which felt to me like it was dragging. But both "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" impressed me with their originality and twists. In "Proving Up," Russell has set her story in Nebraska (something she has repeated in The Antidote), which always makes a story more interesting to me. Each of these stories is a work of fantasy, a genre that you know I often struggle with, but here the fantasy element almost never overwhelmed the story. I mean, even a vampire just felt like a sad old man to me! 

Perhaps my favorite thing about this collection was the fact that each of the stories was read by a different reader and each felt absolutely perfectly suited to the story they read. 

I more eager than ever to get back to The Antidote and Russell's Swamplandia, which I own...somewhere (is it in print? is it on my Nook?). 

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz

10 hours, 21 minutes

Read by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathon Davis, Mozhan Marno, Orlagh Cassidy

Published May 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

My Thoughts:

Here is my recommendation to you: read the summary; read reviews of this book; decide whether or not it interests you and, if it does, add it to your list of books to read. Then don't pick it up to read for several months, until you've forgotten that summary and those reviews and only pick it up because it's on your list so you know it interested you at that time. 

To be honest, it's what I do so much of the time and it almost always works in my favor. It worked for me here. I had no idea when the book began that I was reading a book within a book. I was fascinated by Benjamin and Helen and their relationship. And then utterly startled when suddenly I was reading (well, listening to) notes written by Andrew Bevel, the man upon whom Benjamin Rask was based by the writer Harold Vanner in his book. 

Next we jump to Ida Partenza, a woman living with her out there father who had to run from Italy because of his political beliefs, who is hired by Bevel to write that memoir we just read the notes for. Ida's task is made all the more difficult by Bevel's insistence on clearing his wife's name while also refusing to include any real details of her life, much to Partenza's amazement. Neither book will yield a true picture of the real Mildred Bevel, a woman Andrew didn't seem to know well himself. Ida grows more and more curious and, ultimately, finds Mildred's diaries. And that's where readers go next, into the pages of those diaries to get to know the real Mildred Bevel. At least that's what we believe. In the end, though, we're trusting her to know that truth. But at this point, one wonders if the truth is still out there to be found. 

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it's easy to see why. This is such an interesting and unique way to tell a story. Even more an interesting and unique way to remind readers that the truth is not easy to know. And within that unique structure is so much more. In Trust, Diaz has written: 

"...a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery..." - Oprah Daily

"A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction." - The Boston Globe

"A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself." - Vogue

If you're looking for a book that will challenge you, make you think, teach you something (lordy, did I learn a lot about the stock market, in particular in the early decades of the last century), that's exceedingly well written, I highly recommend Trust. Is it a book I loved? Not really. But it is one I greatly admire. 

Life: It Goes On - October 6

Happy Sunday! This week has reminded me of a Jane Austen quote: "Life is but a quick succession of busy nothings." My calendar looked pretty clear, but somehow I managed to be quite busy all this past week. 

I got Mini-him's dresser finished (at last!) and we got that delivered to them on Monday. I'm really pleased with how it turned out but completely forgot to take a picture of it before it left our house. One night we switched mattresses, trying to find one that would be better for my back; another night was spent cleaning up potted plants outside so that they will look good for a little longer. On paper, each of these things only takes up one line on the to-do list so I'm always surprised but how much of an evening they can take up. Busy nothings. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove, which I'll finish today. Next up is Helen Simonson's The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club. 

Watched: The usual football and volleyball and I started Season 2 of Bridgerton. I don't love it as much as I did the first season (I miss Rege Jean Page), but it suits for my mood of watching nothing too stressful. 

Read: Karen Russell's latest, The Antidote, and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, which I'm reading as part of a read along with Ti, of Book Chatter. 

Made:  We're enjoying the last of the tomatoes in BLTs and pasta, the Big Guy cooked up a pork tenderloin and baked potatoes one evening, and I made a pea and bacon pasta, which will be a repeat. Today I've made a peanut butter pie and will make up some pizza cups for dinner tonight with Mini-him and Miss C. 

Enjoyed: Dinner out with friends last night at a favorite place and ice cream after at a new-to-us place. A day running errands - the kind of day where you have some time to browse, but also tick a lot of things off of the to-do list. Pumpkins and mums are now on the porch, some Christmas gifts were purchased, and I have the paint for my next project.

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I've got a couple of chairs I want to get painted this week, which will eventually go to Mini-him and Miss C, but maybe not until after Thanksgiving, when I'll need every chair we own. 

Thinking About: I RSVP'd to attend my class reunion in a couple of weeks. I was peer pressured into it. How is it that, at my age, I'm still vulnerable to that? 

Feeling: Accomplished after a productive weekend but wishing I had another day to get more done while I'm in the groove. 

Looking forward to: Seeing family and friends next weekend. 

Question of the week: If you live somewhere where winter impacts what you get done, what's one project you're still hoping to get done before it's too cold to be outside?

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai 

Read by Julia Whelan, JD Jackson

14 hours, 4 minutes

Published February 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

My Thoughts: 

It's late and I'm way behind on reviews so I'm going to get straight to it. 

What I Liked: 

• I requested the audiobook version because I find I have far more time for those than physical or digital books (well, far fewer of them waiting for me to get to them, at least) and I'm so glad I did. Julia Whalen is, as alway, terrific. 
• This is a book, ostensibly, about the murder of a young woman years ago. It's actually about far more than that. It's about the way our justice system works (or doesn't); it's about the power of social media to do good and also to destroy lives; it's about the Me-Too movement and the ways men in positions of power can misuse that power; and it's about the ways society discounts and devalues women. Because of the way the book is written, none of it feels forced. 
• Throughout the book are interspersed different versions of what might have actually happened to Thalia Keith and every one of them felt believable. 
• The book is largely written as though Bodie were writing to a former teacher, her favorite, who she has come to realize may have been acting inappropriately, not just with her, but with other young women as well. It's a terrific red herring. 
• There is no happily-ever-after and you know how much I usually like that in a book. And I did...sort of. But it came in a way that made me so frustrated with our justice system, reminding me of the recent executions of men who were convicted but appear to have been innocent. 

What Didn't Work For Me:

• There is a little bit of that feeling that Makkai may have been trying to work in all of the talking points. It seems logical in the course of the story, but yet...maybe too much.
• Did all of that work that Bodie and her students do result in answers and new leads just a little too easily? Maybe. 
• I felt a little bit like Bodie's back story unnecessary. Not that we didn't need it in the book; it explained why she felt like an outcast. But it could have been something far more ordinary. 

All in all, I really liked this one and I'm looking forward to reading Makkai's The Great Believers...when I can find it. Is it on my shelves somewhere? On my Nook app? Thanks to whoever recommended this one to me.