relationships

Book 50 for 2025: “The Well of Loneliness”, Radclyffe Hall

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Published in the US in 1928, banned in England, this is the first, well known lesbian novel and without doubt one of the saddest books I have ever read. Hall was already an award winning and popular novelist when she decided to write this novel. The main character, Stephen Gordon, was born to upper class English parents. Her parents had hoped for a boy and chosen the name Stephen. When she was born a girl, they decided to call her Stephen anyway. From an early age, she was different and preferred to ride horses and do outside activities with her father who adored her rather than wear frilly dresses and do the activities common for English girls at the time. Her mother found all this off putting and never showed any love or nurturing toward her. Later in life, after an unpleasant incident with a young woman who uses Stephen as a distraction from her boring life, Stephen’s mother throws her out of the family home and she moves to London where she writes a highly successful novel.

During WWI, they are desperate for ambulance drivers and Stephen is assigned to an all female ambulance regiment in France. There she meets another young woman who becomes her lover.

An English friend, a successful playwright, convinces Stephen to move to Paris where there are no laws against homosexuality and where there is a large community of similar people, many of whom are highly successful in their careers. She and her lover live there for many years, and Stephen successfully continues her career as a writer. Then an old friend from her childhood shows up and everything changes.

Book 46 for 2025: “Norwegian Wood”, Haruki Murakami

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This is the novel that shocked him by selling over a million copies and made him famous. It is the story of Toru, a young college student, whose two best friends from childhood change his life. One, his best male friend, commits suicide unexpectedly. Afterwards, the other friend, Naoko, a beautiful and mentally fragile young woman, and Toru spend their weekends just walking together all over Tokyo. As her mental health deteriorates, he increasingly falls in love with her and tries to help. Meanwhile, as Naoko becomes mentally more unstable, he meets another young woman, Midori, who is adventuresome, outgoing, and mentally stable. He does not want to give up on Naoko but is also drawn to Midori with whom he attends college.

The novel is written from the viewpoint of Toru. He tells not just about these women but also his very eccentric roommate at a dormitory and his friend, Nagasawa, who is very smart and disciplined but also quite immoral by Toru’s standards. Although the novel takes place in a Japan of several decades ago, Toru’s narrative and life seem quite modern and realistic.

One thing a reader from the US might notice is that all the characters go everywhere using public transportation. No cars are ever mentioned. Since several of the characters commit suicide, I decided to research the suicide rate in Japan. For decades the suicide rate of young people in Japan has been quite high and continues to be a concern there.

Although I am many decades older than all the main characters, I could not stop reading. This is a meaningful, very well written novel which I highly recommend. It is my second Murakami novel recently and I will read more.

Note: The version I read has the author’s notes from 2023 which are very informative and interesting. He apparently has to leave his home in Japan and go elsewhere, e.g. Greece, to write.

Book 45 for 2025: “Atmosphere”, Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Joan, the main character, is an astronomer obsessed with the stars since childhood. She is content with her life as a physics professor until she sees an ad seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space program. While her initial attempt fails, she applies again and succeeds.

In the summer of 1980, she begins her astronaut training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, along with other trainees, including some from the military and others chosen because of their specialist expertise. She is one of those. Some of the top military pilots are nice and some like to make jokes at the expense of women. The women know they won’t all be chosen to go to space. As a consequence one woman in particular becomes excessively competitive. Others help each other and hang out together.

The novel details the rigor of astronaut training both mentally and physically, how trainees behave under stress, and how all the stress makes some people nicer and others increasingly rude. In the midst of all this Joan continues to care for her beloved niece and discovers a love she never dreamed of in her wildest dreams.

Book 33 for 2025: “Landscapes”, Christine Lai

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The novel fascinated me in so many ways, the style of writing, the subject matter, what I learned about some famous paintings and especially Turner. I will never see works by Turner in the same way as I previously did. Before mostly I noticed the colors, the translucence. I totally missed the details and the violence nearly hidden.

The novel takes place after an ecological collapse in England where first violent floods occurred followed by a devastating drought. Now it has not rained in three years and Penelope, the main character, spends most of her time working as an archivist for the notable collection at a soon to be demolished estate in the English countryside. She has lived here for two decades with her current partner, Aidan, who owns the estate. The disasters have nearly destroyed the once magnificent mansion. Now Penelope and Aidan allow refugees from the disasters to live there with them as they transition to new places and housing until the new buyers demolish the place.

Most of the novel is Penelope’s diary, what she writes about her life present and past. In the midst of this her archivist notes appear as well as descriptions of famous paintings, most of which show women being brutalized in one way or another, e.g. The Abduction of the Sabine Women, 1633-34, Nicholas Poussin. Later in the novel there are segments from the viewpoint of Aidan’s brother, Julian, who previously owned the estate and with whom Penelope experienced a violent and disastrous relationship.

This is a tale of survival, redemption, memory, and art as a means of renewal. I liked this novel so much that I spent time looking up the art the protagonist describes, researching Turner, writing down passages, etc.

Book 19 for 2025: “Tell Me Everything”, Elizabeth Strout

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This latest Strout novel takes the reader back to Crosby, Maine, the site of most of her other novels. The same cast of characters appear, Olive, the Burgess boys, Lucy, William, Margaret, and all the others. This one, however, has a new twist, a heinous murder occurs. The most obvious suspect is the victim’s reclusive son who lived with her. Bob Burgess is hired as his lawyer. Lucy starts visiting Olive and they tell each other stories about people they have known , what Lucy calls “unrecorded lives”. Meanwhile, Lucy keeps asking, “What does anyone’s life mean?” Lucy and Bob take walks every week, spending the time talking about all the things they feel they cannot talk about with anyone else. William becomes more obsessed with the parasites he is studying and never quits talking about them.

This, like all of Strout’s novels, focuses on relationships, the good and the bad, and how they sustain us, sometimes transform our lives, sometimes nearly ruin us. Although, readers do not have to read her novels in sequence and this one could be read alone, I think it would make more sense to the reader to at least read three others first: “Olive Kitteridge”, “The Burgess Boys”, and “Oh, William”.

Strout has a unique, easy to read style, that is both simple and profound. She talks about people as they are with empathy and concern. She talks about the many forms of love–“…it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”

Book Two for 2025: “Memory Wall Stories”, Anthony Doerr

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While wandering around in the library, I found this book. His two more recent novels, ” All the Light We Cannot See” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land” remain two of the most touching and fascinating novels I have ever read so decided to try what he started with, short stories. These stories do not disappoint.

The title of the book comes from the first of the stories. It is a combination of science fiction and paleontology. Via an operation to his head a young boy in South Africa possesses the memories of an old woman. Through her memories he learns of a her deceased husband’s interest in rocks and fossils. This allows him to make a discovery that changes lives. In the next story, due to the death of her parents, a young girl in Kansas has to move to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and makes a myth come true. The following story, “Village 113”, won the O. Henry Prize. It details what happens to one woman, a keeper of seeds for an entire village, when the Three Gorges Dam was built in China. Another story tells what happens to a couple in Wyoming when they desperately want a child but cannot conceive. The shortest of the stories, “The Demilitarized Zone”, is well about that–sort of. The final story, like several others, is about memory, in this case the memories of a Holocaust survivor, who like many who survive horrible events when others they know do not, wonders why her.

I liked these stories so much that I ordered his earlier collection of short stories, “The Shell Collector.” He has won the O. Henry Prize for short stories five times and the Pulitzer for “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in 2015. I keep wondering how he knows so much about so many places. His short stories and novels are set in countries all over the world. The research must never end.

Book 39 for 2024: “The Return”, Hisham Matar

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This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The subtitle, “Fathers, Sons, And The Land In Between” indicates a bit of the subject matter–how sons and fathers relate, but in this case it is a tale of horrible grief and suffering when Matar’s father is arrested and imprisoned in the notorious prison of Qaddafi in Libya. For decades Matar tried to find out what happened to his father. There is no record of his death and no one knows what happened to his body. The book details the lives of his family and their search for news of, hopes he might be alive, and what happened to Matar’s father. To this day no one knows. In 2012, 22 years after his father’s kidnapping when Matar was 19, he returned to Libya to try to learn more, met with uncles who had also been imprisoned, some for 20 years. This is the tale of his family’s suffering and hope. It also relates in detail the horrors of Qaddafi’s reign, what happened to many in his most notorious prison, and the resilience of so many who managed to survive, including close relatives of the author.

Note: After Qaddafi fell, there was hope for a new, unified government. However, as of the present, Libya is ruled by two rival administrations and is a divided country.

Book 35 for 2024: “Woman of Interest: A Memoir”, Tracy O’Neill

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In 2020, the author, Korean, adopted as a child, nearly 30, decides she needs to find her biological mother before her mother dies. Finding few leads, clues, she hires a private detective who disappears. Then she takes the task of investigating on her own. This book details her investigation, her long relationship with a Serbian furniture mover, life with the parents who adopted her, and her career as a writer, plus going to South Korea to meet her biological family.

Her writing style is a bit different and somewhat rambling. However, for those who have experienced the same sort of search, this book provides details on how to go about finding “the lost”.

Book 32 for 2024: “The Premonition”, Banana Yoshimoto

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Translated from Japanese, this short novel tells the story of a 19 year old young woman, Yayoi, who lives with a loving family–her mother, father, and brother. Yet she has a premonition that she has missed something from her childhood, forgotten something. She decides to move in with her aunt, Yukino, a gifted eccentric who sometimes awakens Yayoi in the middle of the night to eat and drink, who watches “Friday the 13th” over and over, who just throws unwanted stuff in the back yard and leaves it there among the weeds. While living in the midst of Yukino’s disordered life, Yayoi’s memories begin to resurface. When her aunt disappears, Yayoi and her brother go in search of her and learn mysteries of Yukino’s life. Later, while still searching for Yukino, Yayoi discovers the truth of her own life.

This novel was a best seller in Japan when it was first published there in 1988. It was not translated into English until 2023. Eleven other novels by this author were already available in English.

Book 31 for 2024: “Tender”, Sofia Samatar

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This book contains 20 fantastical and dystopian short stories. I found them fascinating with topics ranging from selkies to ogres to ghouls to jinns to witches (in this case positive ones). The settings range from US to Africa to a settlement in outer space (the story “Fallow”). Divided into two sections, Tender Bodies, Tender Landscapes, these stories address human frailty, anger, greed, extreme religions and how humans treat each other (both good and bad) and what might occur in the future if people do not behave better. “Fallow” is a sort of handmaid’s tale where instead of being on Earth–which has been basically destroyed–a group of extreme religious folks have made a place for themselves on another planet after escaping Earth. If anyone from Earth accidentally shows up, they are in big trouble unless they become just like the people already there. Otherwise, they do not kill them–that is wrong–but just sort of let them slowly die. These stories, both brutal and lovely, display an incredible imagination.