THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS by Ruth Ozeki

Fourteen-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, both have a problem with inanimate objects.  Since the death of Kenji, Benny’s father, Benny hears the voices of things like a table leg, which tells him the story of a toddler being tied to it.  Annabelle’s hoarding of useless stuff could result in their eviction and in Benny’s removal to foster care.  Benny’s issues lead him to do some really asinine things, and I felt for Annabelle as she struggles to keep her job and her sanity while Benny becomes increasingly more unmanageable.  At its heart, this book is an attack on the materialistic world in which we live. However, it also makes a statement on the inadequacy of our mental health system, although Benny’s problems would be a challenge for any doctor trying to diagnose and treat them.  I found this book to be a relatively fast read, despite its length, but I found some aspects of it to be unnecessary and confusing.  At times, the narrator is definitely a book or books, and sometimes Benny is the narrator.  It also contains snippets from a book called Tidy Magic, which Annabelle is reading, although her adherence to its advice is haphazard at best.  Whereas objects speak to Benny, Annabelle speaks to objects, as suggested in Tidy Magic, thanking them for their service before disposing of them.  Despite all this conversation with inanimate stuff, the only objects that actually come to life are the tidying-up book itself and a collection of words on refrigerator magnets that periodically rearrange themselves in a different order.  Then there’s the author of Tidy Magic, who lives in a Zen monastery.  She comes into the picture because Annabelle voices her frustrations to the author via email with no expectation of a reply, and I guess that’s why we need to know her situation.  The good news about this side plot is that the Zen author’s aide offhandedly offers a welcome explanation for Benny’s behavior.

DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters

Two trans women, Reese and Amy, fell in love, but then Reese cheated with married men, and Amy has detransitioned back to a man, because being a trans woman was just too difficult.  Now he muses that before he transitioned from a man to a woman, he felt like his body was a separate obedient entity, like a good dog.  Then he transitioned to Amy, and the dog disappeared.  That would seem to be a good thing, but then he implies that he detransitioned because he missed the comfort of the dog.  That’s all well and good, but the dog did not come back, and now he is going by Ames. Believing himself to be sterile due to hormone injections from his years as Amy, Ames has a sexual relationship with his boss, Katrina.  She becomes pregnant with Ames’s child, and Ames has to ‘fess up to his trans history.  Katrina reels from the shock of this revelation but then rebounds and pushes Ames to decide whether he wants to commit to being a father or not.  Ames, however, is still wrestling with his gender identity and has not ruled out the possibility of transitioning to a woman again.  He broaches the possibility that he, Reese, and Katrina all serve as the child’s parents.  What?  Well, OK, the family unit is evolving these days, and Katrina eventually warms up to the idea, adopting the attitude that queerness is cool.  This book was definitely an education for me, as I don’t know any trans men or women, at least none that I am aware of.  The three main characters are fully formed and in transition, in more ways than one. I have to say, though, that Katrina’s flexibility about how her child would be raised seemed radical to me.  Of course, fiction is fiction.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin

I struggled with this book and don’t understand why it has received so many accolades.  I had a long career as a software developer, so the technology aspect did not turn me off.  However, the two main characters, Sam and Sadie, did.  Yes, they experience a lot of trauma and grief, but Sam is very buttoned up emotionally, and Sadie just goes into hiding occasionally, waiting for someone to draw her out.  These two collaborators in video game design just got on my nerves.  I also found it odd that Sam does most of the speaking engagements whenever publicity for a newly launched product is required; he seems to relate better to strangers than to friends and co-workers.  My favorite character was Marx, Sam’s college roommate who joins Sam and Sadie’s company, Unfair Games, as a producer, but there’s just not enough of him spread across the pages.  I also loved Simon and Ant, who join the company much later, but they are basically NPCs (non-player characters, in video game jargon).  Every time I picked up this book I hoped to read about anyone but Sam or Sadie.  Near the end of the book, however, is a section that follows a player (or players) through a game called Pioneers.  Characters in this game interact in a more empathetic and heartfelt way than the human characters in the novel, although, of course, the players inhabiting the characters in Pioneers are human.  Plus, for non-gamers like myself, the game sequence gives more insight into how such games work and why they are popular.  This novel needed more stuff like this, although Pioneers did not really appear to be fun.  My takeaway is that video games provide an outlet for some people to shed their insecurities and interact with other people in an alternate universe.  I’m  not judging here but rather offering a not necessarily valid conclusion.

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood

This book might be perfect for readers with a short attention span, but the format turned me off.  The first half of the book is a series of social media witticisms, and, if that’s what I wanted to read, then I would read witticisms on social media.  Granted, the author’s witticisms are way funnier and thought-provoking than those I might find on the internet, but this book was just not cohesive enough for me.  The first-person unnamed narrator is a woman who posts pointed ruminations on “the portal” and travels the world for speaking engagements.  The subject of these speeches was a mystery to me, but I assumed that she was sharing with her audience more comic observations about social media and that people were willing to pay to hear this stuff.  The second half of the book deals with a real-life tragedy that starkly contrasts with the first half’s twitter posts, if that’s what they are.  I foolishly hoped that the format of the novel would become more traditional in the second half, but no such luck, and I felt like the format diluted the content.  I recognize that the author has an important message to deliver about what really matters versus the barrage of trivialities that we consume on the internet.  I just wish that she had stated her case without making me read it as a series of twitter-like snippets.

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD by Benjamin Labatut

This book makes me wish I had studied Physics.  If you’re a science nerd, don’t miss this blend of fact and fiction, but even if you’re not a science nerd, this book is spellbinding.  The only downside is that I will never remember which scientist made which discovery, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics, in which subatomic entities behave both as particles and as waves.  Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Niels Bohr are bit players here, while Schrodinger (of Schrodinger’s cat fame), Heisenberg, de Broglie, Schwarzschild, Mochizuki, and Grothendieck steal the limelight here.  Unfortunately, the only part of this book that I am likely to remember is the beginning when the author recounts the various drug addictions of Hitler, Goring, and other Nazi bigwigs.  He goes on to talk about cyanide and its original development as a pigment for paint.  Apple seeds contain cyanide (who knew?), and half a cup of them contains enough cyanide to kill a human.  This book is not exactly dripping with little-known facts like that, but fascinating stuff abounds.  One would assume that brilliant scientists would collaborate, but apparently they were just as likely to feud, each convinced that his (no women here) theory offered the truth about the behavior of matter.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

The author here is on a mission to prove that Ted Bundy and other serial killers are not genius masterminds.  In this novel, the Ted Bundy character is known simply as The Defendant, and we learn fairly early in the novel that he murdered two sorority sisters near the end of a killing spree that stretched from Washington State to Florida.  The focus here is on the victims and the two first-person narrators—Pamela and Ruth.  To further complicate matters a bit, Pamela narrates in two different timelines—the immediate aftermath of the murders of two of her FSU sorority sisters and several decades later.  Ruth is a victim whose body is never found.  Pamela also witnesses the escape of the murderer as he exits her sorority house, making her one of the few people who can identify him.  The writing here is good, and the plot is very suspenseful but confusing at times, and not just because of the dual narrators and three timelines.  A journalist named Carl apparently sees himself as the next Truman Capote, but I was unable to follow exactly how he fit into the picture.  Although I realize that the author does not want to give The Defendant too much airtime, I couldn’t follow his various arrests, extraditions, and prison escapes, and my morbid curiosity led me to wonder exactly how he slipped through so many fingers.  Finally, there’s Ruth’s friend and mentor, Tina, who has made it her personal mission to make sure that The Defendant is brought to justice, but various law enforcement officials warn Pamela that Tina is dangerous.  I was never sure if the author’s intent here was to introduce a red herring or simply to highlight the poor judgment and incompetence that allowed so many women to lose their lives even after The Defendant had been taken into custody—multiple times.

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT by Maggie O'Farrell

Historical fiction is not really my thing, and since I know that Maggie O’Farrell has a very fertile imagination, I would prefer that she stay away from semi-true stories.  I liked this much better than Hamnet, however, as this novel is very creepy--in a good way.  In this version of her life in the sixteenth century, Lucrezia de’Medici is married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, when she is only fifteen.  The ultimate insult that she receives from the Duke and his sister is that she is a mere child, but, ironically, her foremost duty is to bear a child, preferably male.  What makes this spooky, though, is that Lucrezia suspects that her husband will murder her in short order if she does not produce an heir, although rumor has it that the Duke is infertile.  I liked the suspense of this novel and especially its sinister Gothic mood, although the ending appeared to be a foregone conclusion.  O’Farrell kept me guessing as to whether she was going to be true to history or deviate. The Duke is handsome, and, at times, charming, but he has a dark side, particularly when it comes to challenges to his authority. Lucrezia is your typical spunky heroine who unwittingly incurs the dastardly Duke’s wrath at times and deserves a better fate.