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Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I am trying to work in more BIPOC and female authors onto this list. To that end I decided to go with a contemporary female author and one who is pretty well known by now: Marilynne Robinson and her 2004 Pulitzer winner Gilead.
This book was an outstanding read for many reasons (and was a delectable palate cleanser from The Bourne Identity), not least of which would be Robinson’s incredible and deft use of language and imagery to tell a quiet story about generations of a family. On the face of it this novel is epistolary, or told in the form of a long letter from a father to a son. The father John Ames has been a preacher in the town of Gilead for many years; however his own father decamped for warmer climates. John’s grandfather was an activist during the Civil War and moved out to Kansas to fight for abolition. He eventually came back after the war but left for Kansas again at the end of his life, leading to a moving passage in which John and his own father travel there to find his gravesite. I enjoyed this part of the novel especially. Later we see more scenes contemporary to the book’s time period (1956) and we learn about John’s friendship with a man and preacher named Boughton. Here John's faith is tested when Boughton's son returns to Gilead, and we learn the long backstory in which Boughton’s son (also named John, or Jack in the novel) has fathered a child out of wedlock early in his life and since abandoned it. We later learn the child dies. Some of the most riveting parts of the novel are the preacher John’s wrestling in his own faith and anger over this. He then learns that young Jack has a new family of his own in Tennessee and decides to give him his blessing as Jack decides to head back out to be with them. As stated, this was a remarkable book for many reasons and I can definitely see why it won one of the most prestigious awards in the world of letters. The imagery is quite compelling and astounding, whether that’s of a memory of a boy taking a charred biscuit from his father during a church demolition or a small town in Iowa and its trees and flowers. And I feel I must touch on this: while I consider myself a nonbeliever the prose, despite wrapping around Christian and Calvinist doctrine for most of the book, was so well written that I didn’t mind and actually enjoyed it. So there’s that. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone looking for a master class in how to tell a phenomenal story, made even more interesting for me knowing now some of the characters are based on real people. There are no chapter breaks but it is broken down by scene so there are plenty of places to take a break when you need it. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure.
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Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end, I decided to read an author I grabbed out of the mystery paperback section of the bookstore I used to work at that I thought (back then) would be a great genre read: Robert Ludlum and his 1980 spy thriller The Bourne Identity.
I won’t delve much into the plot of the novel as many of you have probably seen the 2002 epic film based on this novel. However suffice it to say it does begin with a man dumped overboard from a fishing boat who washes up on an island in the Mediterranean Sea with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The single clue to all of this resides in a strip of film that has been surgically implanted in him and leads to a bank in Zurich, Switzerland. It’s there when he tries to withdraw the money that people start trying to kill him. At this point in the book Bourne runs into the Canadian economist Marie St Jacques, who Bourne takes hostage but eventually treats as an equal in his escape plans (they of course become lovers during the tale). Then clues lead him to divert the money to Paris and to investigate that city as the home base of another killer, “Carlos” whom Bourne discovers is his rival. We also discover throughout the events that Bourne was a trained killer during the Vietnam War and was a man made to disappear. There is more uncovering of plot and motive that leads to a mass killing at the clandestine headquarters that was in control of Bourne up until the events of the novel, and then Bourne travels to New York for a final confrontation with Carlos. While all of that might seem like a thrilling caper and indeed the novel is full of action beats the entire thing fell flat for me as the writing was about as staid as could be in its description. While I wouldn’t say Ludlum’s writing is as bad as say, The Firm, I still found it to be middling and plodding at best even during the most gripping passages. While I was initially excited to pick up this work at the bookstore, that excitement turned to dread as I had to slog through this book’s over five hundred pages to get to the end. While I don't doubt Ludlum did his research and wanted to portray a major mystery taking place over broad swathes of the European continent leading back to the US, the final result is less than stellar and I’d be hard pressed to recommend this novel to anyone other than adventure seekers who are looking for their next whodunnit to solve. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure these last months as we pored over (most of) the remaining old white dudes on the bookshelves of my apartment. From here on out I plan on getting back into reading more contemporary female and BIPOC authors, especially important given all the machinations happening at the federal level right now. Thanks for your patience as this one took me a while to read, and I’ll be back soon with another exciting update of the Reading List! |
AuthorJohn Abraham is a published author and freelance journalist who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Mary and their cat. He is writing a speculative dystopian novel and is seeking representation and a publisher. Archives
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