Happy Spring!
Here’s what I’ve been reading and can recommend.
To Live, by Yu Hua
Why keep reading when the main character is despicable? That’s how I felt in the first few pages of this book, a classic work in China.
As a young man of wealth long before the Cultural Revolution, Fugui spends his days whoring and gambling. When his pregnant wife comes to town to beg him to stop, he beats her.
I was reading this slender novel for the Columbia University book club I cohost. I had to keep reading. I’m glad I did, because it’s now one of my all-time favorite reads.
Fugui loses the family home and its land. He’s conscripted into the Nationalist Army, where he somehow survives. Returning home, his wife Jiazhen and young daughter Fenxgxia accept him, and from there he builds a new, spare life. The couple has another child, a son named Youqing.
Will they survive what’s coming? The Cultural Revolution brings collectivism, famine, corruption.
My historian friend Chris says fiction does a better job illustrating historical fact than non-fiction. In this instance, he’s right. Wife Jiazhen becomes so weak from the famine that she must be carried. When she begs a bag of rice from her father, the neighbors storm their home because they see smoke and smell something cooking.
Most shocking is the death of young Youqing, who volunteers to give blood at school. His blood is a match for a party official’s wife. They drain Youquin to death.
It’s hard to believe that this ends happily, with Fugui, an ox, and a sweet grandchild.
A Killing in Cannabis, A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed, by Scott Eden
I picked up this hefty piece of non fiction after putting down a new work of fiction in which it was one party after another and I had no sympathy for its narrator. (I am always hopeful.)
This book by journalist Eden is a love story and murder mystery wrapped around the illegal and legal world of cannabis growing, curing, and selling in and around Santa Cruz, California. It is a dark story. Tushar Atre, a mercurial Silicon Valley tech bro, surfer, and cannabis entrepreneur falls hard for the young and beautiful Rachael Lynn, whose whole career has been devoted to growing and selling pot. As cannabis becomes legal, can the two create an integrated business together?
More than once I thought, “Run, Rachael, run!”
There’s so much to appreciate in this work. Eden is a gifted storyteller. He brings us way back to the likely origins of this flowering weed, in India, but never takes us too far from Santa Cruz, where the murder takes place.
Highly recommend.
No Way Home, by T. C. Boyle
I’m a fan. I’ll read anything by T. C. Boyle, especially his short fiction, which often runs in The New Yorker.
So much to love in this contemporary novel.
Terrence Tully, a third-year medical student in L.A., is in a small Nevada resort town because his mother has died. This event leaves him a house, a dog, and a Prius. Enter Bethany, a one-night stand who moves in to his mother’s house while he’s back in L.A., telling neighbors she is Terry’s fiancee.
Every time Terry tries to reason with her, sex wins. He just can’t help himself. Bethany is young, beautiful, sexy — and out of his league.
Not happy with this new “love” is Bethany’s most recent ex, Jesse, an eight-grade teacher with a mean streak.
Grievous injury follows.
Boyle is a master of getting inside his characters’ heads and showing us the country we live in. One of Terry’s patients lives in a dog pen. Before Bethany moved herself in, she was living in a storage unit. Her friend Lutie moves in, too, ‘cuz, why not? Food is fast and unsatisfying. Everyone drinks too much.
I loved this ride, and could have kept going. The ending kind of peters out…