TBR: Garnethill by Denise Mina & Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

Reading Garnethill by Denise Mina. I haven't felt much like reading lately, but I'm finding that I really am enjoying this book. I was quite surprised to discover that it's more than 20 years old - the clue was that the library copy I'm reading is quite well-loved.

What I love most about Garnethill is the "local color"; the thing I love second-best is the feminism at the heart of the story.

Also on the list:

The One-in-A Million Boy by Monica Wood

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

7/27/2020
Having finished Garnethill, I'm now reading Agnes Grey. This is the first time I've ever read Anne Bronte (her other novel is the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). What strikes me first is just how different her style seems from that in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson

I have several wonderful things to read, but right now I'm reading Dead Certainty. When I began it, I wasn't sure that I would continue reading. The exposition seemed to me to move slowly; quite a few paragraphs seemed to be devoted to spiritual healing, which seemed off-topic for a horse racing novel; and the protagonist shared that he wasn't too interested in genealogy. Something about it seemed inauthentic. But I find I'm still reading it.

I have a relative who has enjoyed Dick Francis, the horse racing mystery writer, in the past. I was curious if there were other authors writing horse racing mysteries, thinking that a really good horse racing mystery might make a good gift. I went to my library's website, clicked on the Novelist database, and typed "horse racing mysteries" in the search box. I was surprised by the long list of titles that came up - 203. And the very first on the list was Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson, so I put a hold on it and picked it up at my library's drive-through.(Another book on the list that looked interesting, and was owned by my library, was High Stakes: A Jack Doyle Mystery,

In a larger sense, I was looking for a horse racing mystery series writer, so I scrolled down the list to a title by Dick Francis called Wild Horses. Underneath the title, there was a link for "Title Read-alikes," that is, books very similar to Wild Horses. I clicked on another link, right beside the first one, "Author Read-alikes," because I wanted to find other authors writing horse race mysteries.

It was an interesting list: the very first author name on the list was Sam Llewellyn, who writes mysteries related to the sea, chosen because he also provides details about an intriguing milieu. The second author on the list was cited for mysteries set in the world of auto racing. The third author, Kit Ehrman, also writes about the world of horse racing. And, Glenis Wilson was on the list.

I notice that there are many reviews of Glenis Wilson's books on GoodReads, and that Dead Reckoning, the third in the Harry Radcliffe series, got a 4.44 rating, quite high for GoodReads where readers tend to be critical.

Now that I've finished Dead Certainty, I can't quite make up my mind about it. I wanted something light and suspenseful, and I think it was both. When I got to about page 75, it started to be much more suspenseful and I finished it in two days.

Harry Radcliffe is a jockey who takes a great spill, injuring his knee. Afterwards, he's not sure if he'll be able to race again, but certainly faces a long period of physical therapy rehabilitation. His boss suggests Harry, while he's recuperating, take on a special commission: ghost-writing the autobiography of a famously successful trainer who's now retiring. Harry writes a column for the local racing newspaper, but he think it's a stretch to take on penning a biography. Still, needs must - he needs the dosh.

Shortly after he begins work, a number of frightening things start happening: he's involved in a car crash with a horsebox, and an unknown person enters his kitchen in the middle of the night, splasing around petrol, and would have started a fire with Leo, Harry's formidable ginger tom.

Harry's scared and angry. He doesn't know who's out to get him. Does it have something to do with his accident? The book commission he's taken on?

Bodacious: The Shepherd Cat (A Charming Tale of an Extraordinary Cat) by Suzanna Crampton

This book is a memoir, told through the eyes of a farm cat, Bodacious. It's sweet, whimsical, and easy to read: you can pick it up long enough to read an anecdote in a few pages, put it down and easily pick it up again later. Author Suzanna Crampton is a farmer and animal lover in County Kilkenny, Ireland, where she raises Zwartbles sheep (a rare black breed with white patches on their faces, originally from The Netherlands).

Crampton is a social media sensation: she has accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Here she offers many entertaining anecdotes about the history of her animals (many of them rescued, as Bodacious was).

Crampton is also a beautiful writer, a natural storyteller, using adjectives to paint a scene and describe her animals. 

I can well imagine that there are many readers who might not immediately see the appeal of a farm memoir. But Crampton has so much to say, and so many really interesting stories to tell. Her life has been full of incident, and she's had many careers, all of which add up to a really interesting book.

The many fans of All Creatures Great and Small will love this book, too. But its appeal is really broader than that because it's really an adventure story. It's Bodacious' story about his adventures on the farm, but it's also the story of how Suzanna took over a very small farm and made it work. I think this book will appeal to many people, and is a perfect gift, especially for friends and relatives who are recovering from illness.

She tells the story of how she came to adopt Bodacious, who was a street cat and was then knocking about a novelty toilet seat shop (how many stories feature a novelty toilet seat shop?). And it's the story of the pony Marco Polo, an incredibly feisty sojourner who escaped the dog food factory, was rescued by a farmer, and adopted by Crampton.  I have many favorite stories from this book, but I find something special in Crampton's account of visiting with a hornbill. Crampton recounts her experience encountering exotic animals in Indonesia where she worked for a wildlife charity. Bodacious explains:

     "The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favorite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I'd like to mention that my egg-makers (chickens) originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rain-forests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have today.)  While the Shepherd was working for a wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity ..and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation center was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for these poor primates. 
     "Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd's companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill.. a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck ..
     "He would sit on the table while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes, and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time from her bowl until he'd had his fill. After he'd taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to the Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill's soft feathery head."

Certainly Crampton is an animal-lover, but, as this anecdote demonstrates, she has a very gentle spirit that is a huge part of her appeal.

Crampton organizes the book by chapters for each of the months of the year, and sprinkles it with farm lore and information about the value and practice of regenerative farming. Regenerative farming is, essentially, practices to preserve and enrich soil as a part of every-day farming practice. For Crampton, this includes spreading on her fields  a hay-and-dung mixture left when she cleans out the sheep sheds. It  also includes planting a variety of grasses and other plants to enrich the soil of her fields and to improve the diet of her sheep.


           

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I've just finished Anne of Green Gables, a childhood classic, which I nevertheless never heard of until I was an adult. It's a wonderful book. Anne is delightfully precocious, full of wonderful speeches and emotion. I read it as part of an online read-along.

Montgomery is a wonderful writer, given to beautiful descriptions of nature.

"It was October again when Anne was ready to go back to school -- a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings when the valleys were filled with delicate mists as if the spirit of autumn had poured them in for the sun to drain -- amethyst, pearl, silver, rose, and smoke-blue. The dews were so heavy that the field glistened like cloth of silver and there were such heaps of rustling leaves in the hollows of many-stemmed woods to run crisply through. The Birch Path was a canopy of yellow and the ferns were sear and brown all along it. There was tang in the very air that inspired the hearts of small maidens tripping, unlike snails, swiftly and willingly to school; and it was jolly to be back again at the little brown desk beside Diana, with Ruby Gillis nodding across the aisle and Carrie Sloane winding up notes and Julia Bell passing a "chew" of gum down from the back seat."

Another example which struck me:

"Anne came dancing home in the purple winter twilight across the snowy places. Afar in the south-west was the great shimmering, pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce. The tinkles of sleigh-bells among the snowy hills came like elfin chimes through the frosty air, but their music was not sweeter than the song in Anne's heart and on her lips."


There's so much humor in the book. As a girl, Anne frequently gets into scrapes -- like the time she offers her friend Diana raspberry cordial only to discover later that it's really currant wine, and the time the minister and his wife come for dinner, the beautiful cake Anne has prepared tastes very unappetizing because the vanilla she put in it is really liniment. One of my favorite bits of humor is when Marilla tells Anne that the teacher Miss Stacy is organizing a preparation class for students who plan to take the entrance exam to get into Queen's College, and asks Anne is she would like to join the class:

"Oh, Marilla!" Anne straightened to her knees and clasped her hands. "It's been the dream of my life -- that is, for the last six months, ever since Ruby and Jane began to talk of studying for the entrance (exam)."

The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers

This film seems not to have made much of an impact on awards season, but there are so many ways in which it's a tour-de-force.

The sound design, the photography, and of course, the writing and acting. It's a film full of beautiful dialogue, with references to sea lore - "Old" reprimands "Young" for killing a gull, telling him that it's bad luck to kill a sea bird.

It's a psychological thriller, and I found it difficult to watch. I found that surprising, in a way. I've never really been a fan of horror, whether it's novels or films. But I really liked Hereditary and Get Out and I thought I should have felt the same way about The Lighthouse. The sense of claustrophobia induced by the film made me feel squeezed.

But the acting was so wonderful. In one of the features, the director said that Robert Pattinson said to him that he really only wanted to do really strange stories, and on that basis, Eggers offered the role of "Young" to him. Willem Dafoe said that the theatre shaped him, and the skills he developed there he was able to use here. And there was a perfect seamlessness to their performances. They really committed; it all seemed very real. This felt experimental, in the sense that the dialogue, the cinematography all contribute to an unreal, dreamlike feeling.

Motherless Brooklyn by Edward Norton

I wanted to love Motherless Brooklyn, and it is certainly true that in the beginning of the movie, I thought: this is watercolor fantasy for urban planners. Norton bought the rights to Jonathan Lethem's novel, which I haven't read, but seems to have changed the story to make it about Robert Moses.

Robert Moses is famous, and perhaps notorious figure. He had a very long career, and having worked in New York State government, became the most powerful figure in New York City development between the 1930s and the 1960s. He built parks, expressways, and bridges, and destroyed many working-class neighborhoods in order to build those structures. Jane Jacobs, famous for her influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, opposed him and helped turn the tide of public opinion against him. Moses represents destroying neighborhoods for the sake of providing movement for cars, prioritizing cars over public transit, and for a model of urban renewal that called for large-scale demolition for the sake of new building.


The character in the movie based on Moses is called Moses Randall (or Randolph) and is played by Alec Baldwin. The movie has a wonderful cast: Willem Dafoe, Cherry Jones, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. 

As the movie progressed, I felt that the quality of the plot, the dialogue, and the acting suffered. When the heritage of the character played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw was revealed, I found myself feeling that this had been done before, and better, in Chinatown.

A year or so ago I heard an episode of Terry Gross's Fresh Air, from National Public Radio, in which Robert Caro talked about his award-winning biography of Moses, The Power Broker. Caro said that one source of his power was his ability to dig up dirt on his political opponents:

     'But all of a sudden, the key official, a lawyer for the council to Mayor [Robert] Wagner       changed  his mind, and wrote a letter saying Moses' route was good. So when I was talking to Moses I said, "What did you do to Henry Epstein?" And he said something like, "Oh we hit him with an ax." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said in their investigation they had found that he had a girlfriend. He was a married man but he had a longtime girlfriend. He said, "I said to Henry, you and this chum of yours. And Henry said, "She's not my chum." And Moses said, "Oh yes, Henry, she's your chum all right." So Moses said to me... "So Henry wrote his letter."'

Here's a link to that podcast: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/713413916/biographer-robert-caro-on-fame-power-and-working-to-uncover-the-truth

Absolutely Anything

Terry Jones passed away, and my library put up a very discreet display of Terry Jones items as they do when famous people die.

When I got there, all the materials were checked out except Absolutely Anything, a video that I'd never heard of .. with a front cover with a photo of Kate Beckinsale, Simon Pegg, and a dog wearing glasses.

None of this enticed me, but I reminded myself that everything at the library is free and one really ought to try new things, early and often.

I checked it out, and as I watched it I thought: "I know this story!" I thought it was Jesus and Satan in the desert, like in Paradise Lost, but now that I think about it, maybe it's the Book of Job. Anyway, I really loved it. The last 25% was a little bit weaker .. (endings are hard, or so I've heard), but just when I was getting quite worried the plot ended itself very happily. Later, I thought: is this an overlooked film, or is it the case that you are a sucker for a plot in which an affectionate, adorable dog saves mankind?

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

I wondered if I would like this book so soon after reading Will in the World. Well, I loved it, and I think I might enjoy reading it again. I read it last year.

It's an account of the plays of 1599, and what Shakespeare's world was like in 1599, with a great emphasis on the political events in London that year. In fact, this book is really "about" how political events affected Shakespeare's work and I found this account both entertaining and a great improvement to my understanding of the plays. Henry the V, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar were the plays Shakespeare wrote in 1599, and I enjoyed the discussion of Julius Caesar the most.

The book opens with a wonderful adventure story: Shakespeare and his fellow Globe shareholders take apart The Theatre, their playhouse just north of London's city limits, and carry it off to re-erect it as The Globe in Southwark. They'd lost their lease to the land on which The Theatre stood. They'd built the theatre, but anticipated trouble with the landlord over removing The Theatre building, so this was a covert operation.

Sadly, the book closes on a less festive note: with Essex's rebellion and execution. The queen was increasingly unpopular, in part because she would not name a successor, leaving everyone with a sense of uncertainty. Perhaps also because the very fact that she was so old meant that it was time for something new and the younger generation was impatient for something new to begin. Finally, there were exclusive licenses being given to favorites, and this caused resentment. The impression that I carried away was that Essex was all out of chances; without a court position he was broke. He'd lost favor when he was sent to Ireland and, in the eyes of many, bungled it. Shapiro's view is that Essex had a vision of service and gallantry that was outdated.

Shapiro discusses censorship in this period, and I found myself feeling surprised that Shakespeare never ran afoul of the censors. In fact, the character of Falstaff was first named for a censor; the name had to be changed and it was changed to Falstaff. In a sense, he did not get away with that - but I think Jonson was imprisoned more than once. How did that smart mouth Mr. Shakespeare get away with that? I guess he was just that popular.

Mr. Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar who has made quite a few public appearances and presented a television show on the historical Shakespeare. You can find these on YouTube.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I loved Normal People. It'd gotten a lot of publicity and praise, and made it onto the "best of" year-end book lists. It came in second in the general fiction category after Margaret Atwood's The Attachments (the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale) in the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2019.

"Don't tell Mam about this," he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn't matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. " (p. 68)
   
"Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense  of the most basic premises. .. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is not direct. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."

"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it's a foreign country, but one they consider themselves very knowledgeable about." (pp. 70-72) 

In the closing pages surprising but wonderful.

Normal People reminded me of Eleanor and Park, because in both novels the couples are seemingly misfits who have little in common with each other; the woman suffers emotional or physical abuse at home; and the relationship offers the woman emotional escape.


I looked up Normal People in Novelist because I wondered which other books would turn up on the Novelist "Read-Alikes" list for Normal People. (Novelist is a readers' advisory database subscribed to by many libraries for use by their staff and library users; it offers information about authors, lists of their work, book reviews, and finally "read-alike" lists: suggestions for new reading that fans of the book in question are likely to also like.) Eleanor and Park was not on the list much to my surprise.

(The books listed were Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi; One Day, by David Nicholls; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBridge; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; Purity by Jonathan Franzen; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud; Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh; and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.)

I like this excerpt from the review of Normal People that appeared in the Kirkus Reviews online:

"Rooney's  genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney  elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney  precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people  as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become. Absolutely enthralling. Read it."

Having done everything I can to avoid talking about what I think of the novel it is this: Like the Kirkus reviewer, I love the the psychological insight that permits Rooney to "articulate everything that's going on under the surface,"; I love that Marianne believes that Connell's love for her has "redeemed" her, giving the healing power of love a little shrine; I love that Rooney has captured the strange psychology of teenagers; I love that, to me, both Marianne and Connell are refreshingly surprising. Both Marianne and Connell are more, and very different from, what they seem. Asserting the healing power of love is in no way new; but Marianne and Connell's particularity and vulnerability means to me that Rooney has successfully reworked an old theme and made it fresh.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

As the title implies, this book is, among other things, a true crime story and a wonderfully written and entertaining one. Keefe said in one of his interviews that he worked hard on the structure. It permitted him to tell a story that was suspenseful, propulsive, sometimes amazing, but full of detail.  It provides context.

It begins with the story of Jean McConville, a Protestant woman who married a Catholic, and though a recent widow with ten children, was disappeared by the IRA. The story of what happened to her, after she was dragged from her apartment in front of her children, is the frame for the book.

It mostly focuses on four people: Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander, two women, Dolours and Marian Price, and the former leader of the Sinn Fein party and the leader of the IRA in Belfast, Gerry Adams.

It deals at length with all four of this figures. Hughes and the Price sisters made sacrifices as IRA soldiers that made the Good Friday Agreement a very bitter pill for them to swallow. Hughes specifically said that every death, civilian or paramilitary, was a worthless sacrifice.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

When I found out that my book club was reading this book, I was a little bit disappointed. I had really enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell's books in the past, but for me, the bloom was off the rose because I'd read an article online by two academics who criticized Gladwell's approach as incautious and misleading. The notion that I might have been misled had troubled me, and had dimmed my enthusiasm.

The book opens with Gladwell telling the story of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was arrested in a traffic stop in Texas, and unable to raise bail, hung herself in her cell about three days after she was arrested. Interestingly, Gladwell does not mention that Bland was unable to raise bail in this book. The fact that she was unable to raise bail has always troubled me, and I'm grateful that there's currently a trend to reduce bail for poor suspects in certain cases. Had Sandra Bland not been in jail for so many hours and days she might still be alive. That's not to take away from the analysis presented in the book; it's not directly relevant to Gladwell's thesis, which is about how often we rely on visual cues for assessing people we don't know and how often judgments based on visual cues are erroneous.


What I found as I continued to read was that this book, like Gladwell's others, is very entertaining. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, which really surprised me. And, Gladwell has modified his approach; this book has extensive footnotes.

Gladwell explains that an experiment in Kansas City indirectly led to setting the stage for Sandra Bland's arrest. Social scientists identified the blocks with the greatest number of criminal incidents. Patrol teams were assigned to these special blocks in one neighborhood, and asked to aggressively police, by which I mean that they were instructed to pull people over for small infractions of traffic laws and look for any evidence of other crimes. In these special areas, this strategy was successful. However, this practice of pulling people over for small infractions has been misapplied to neighborhoods that are not "hot spots" for crime and this is the context for Sandra Bland's arrest. The case of Sandra Bland is a complicated one, and Gladwell is not offering a policy prescription, but I infer from this case that police forces using this strategy in low-crime areas is inappropriate.

Two of the topics Gladwell discusses in presenting support for his theses are areas he's explored before: facial expressions (in Blink) and suicide (in The Tipping Point). In his discussion of facial expressions, Gladwell mentions Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, which collected research from others and asserted that expressions of aggression, sorrow, etc., are universal. I'd read The Expression of the Emotions in college and loved it, and so was disappointed to learn that research has recently been done to show that abilities to read facial expressions are not universal. The research is complicated; as presented, the different results in an attempted replication of experiments may result from different methodology.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote of the "contagious" quality of suicide: that the suicide of one influences others. I accepted this as true, because I knew of a such case in my high school.

Here, Gladwell writes about the context of suicide. When San Francisco's authorities proposed creating a net or a barrier to prevent suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge, members of the public opposed the move, believing that potential suicides will find another way. Interestingly, Gladwell cites a case that shows this is not necessarily true. And he frames it in an interesting way, telling the story of the suicides of the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

In the years in which the British used "town gas" in their stoves, which contained a large amount of deadly carbon monoxide, suicides like Sylvia Plath's, rates rose. After "town gas" was replaced with natural gas, which contained almost no carbon monoxide, suicide rates dropped. Gladwell found a second example of this phenomenon. Suicides like Anne Sexton's, where she closed the garage door and sat in her car while her garage filled with carbon monoxide, have dropped markedly since catalytic converters were introduced; catalytic converters emit a very small amount of carbon monoxide which is not lethal. Gladwell is saying that the ease with which a suicide can occur influences the individual. I find this fascinating; I wish I could easily learn whether scholars and researchers who study this topic agree with Gladwell's conclusion. (Here's an online article that does seem to agree with Gladwell's conclusion: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide). It certainly has policy implications; it suggests that it would not be a waste of time and money to create a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. I must note that Gladwell has been criticized for drawing false or misleading conclusions: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php

Sandra Bland's experience was an example of what Gladwell calls mismatch, the misreading of visual (or behavioral) cues. It's relevant to the Sandra Bland case because the officer who arrested her reported that she was agitated and that he feared for his safety; it appears that he misread her anxiety as guilt.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

I personally thought this book was a tour-de-force and I enjoyed it and would recommend it. I'm so glad this book was so heavily publicized; otherwise I might not have found it. This is a book for lovers of writing style. There's no chance Kevin Barry will run out of words and he uses them the way a jeweler uses gems.

"..She held things unsaid within--sly deposits--and it was her secrecies that enslaved him. They shared a telepathy..As they watched from their eyrie at St. Luke's, the winter crept in with greys and dense mists and the city fell to a drugged slumber. It was moving to watch the city lights burn through the riversmoke at dusk."

"She wanted to go to Maroc and live in one of the camps. She wanted a place that did not know the meaning of her grief.

"She wanted to travel to the far recesses of herself and see what she might find back there."

Two retired drug smugglers wait, and wait, and wait at the Port of Algeciras, waiting for the night boat from Tangier to land. To me, the story is kind of alchemy. (I thought: oh, this is Waiting for Godot .. not just the waiting but the metaphysical nature of Charlie and Moss's musings .. the way Charlie answers his own questions, the questions he poses to the informacionista in the ferry terminal). The patience of Charlie and Moss as they wait is a wearing combination of boredom and longing. By the end of the novel, Barry's "irradiated the dross of life," as my professor said, and granted Charlie and Moss a remarkable, unlikely resilience. I really like this book.

Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

I just finished Ayesha at Last a few days ago and I must say, I am a big fan. The conflict between an arranged marriage and a marriage made for love is explored, as is other aspects of the immigrant experience, giving the novel a needed ballast. On the one hand, I felt the book worked perfectly well as a novel of a young immigrant woman in the West, without the Austen connection; on the other hand, I must admit I was thrilled when the author set up situations that mirrored events in P & P and even included Austen dialogue verbatim (!!! thrilling !!!). Halfway through, I found I could not put it down -- I had to find out what happens! Even though I *knew* what happens!