Desiderata (things desired): A monthly review of books recently read
January brought me a handful of critically-acclaimed and/or commercially successful 2019 books. This is what happens when you wait not just weeks, but months, for hot titles to wend their way through the library queue to land on the holds shelf, your name printed in bold font on a scrap of paper tucked inside.
January’s biggest news in publishing was the controversy surrounding the debut of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. I have not read the book (see: library request list), but I weighed in on the controversy all the same. The notion who has permission to tell which stories, the flinging around of the word censorship, the state of the publishing, and a myriad other issues moved me, as a writer and reader, deeply. My post on Goodreads led to some interesting discussion.
As always, clicking on the book cover will take you to my full Goodreads review…
The Dutch House
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Disappearing Earth
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
In Russia’s Far East, the Kamchatka Peninsula knifes between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. It is a 1250km-long blade serrated by volcanic mountains, honed razor-sharp by unrelenting cold, empty tundras, bears, wolves, and a history of violent encounters between Kamchatka’s indigenous people and mainland white Russians eager to plunder its vast natural resources.
Julia Phillips chooses this perilous landscape as the setting for her mesmerizing, fierce debut, Disappearing Earth. The story opens benignly enough, on a warm summer day at the edge of a bay in the territory’s only metropolis, Petropavlovsk. Sisters Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya, eleven and eight, are left alone to play while their mother writes feel-good propaganda for a post-Soviet state newspaper.
Then a man arrives in an improbably polished black sedan and the little girls are vanished.
What follows is a kaleidoscopic literary thriller that tracks the year following the Golosovskaya sisters’ disappearance, each chapter a shift of perspective of a Kamchatkan woman, reflecting the cultural complexities in this strange and treacherous place.
Girl
Girl by Edna O’Brien
Between Shades of Gray
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
This Is Happiness
American Dirt
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
I wrote this in response to another reader’s statement that the criticism of American Dirt amounts to censorship. I find this notion so appalling that I responded with the following, but realized I didn’t need to bomb her feed with my opinion. I could bomb my own 🙂
Oh, as an author, it makes me so sad to see anyone conflate accountability with censorship. This author received a seven-figure advance, a massive marketing campaign, (bolstered ironically by the controversy); this book will be, is, widely read; it’s currently topping a number of best-selling lists, including The New York Times’s. No publishing runs were cancelled, this book is featured prominently in bookstores across the country. Please, please reconsider your take on “censorship”…. Read more….