Three Days in June

Three Days in June: A Novel by Anne Tyler

A woman, Gail Baines,  is stuck within her education career. A position opens up in her school that she thinks she would. be qualified for. However, the administration thinks otherwise and she ends up leaving the job. She is now jobless and her daughter is about to get married. Her ex-husband shows up in town. He has a cat with him. He had been planning on staying with his daughter. However, his ex-wife has him stay with her since their daughter's fiance is very allergic to cats. The novel proceeds with some complications. The fiance had a recent fling with somebody they know. However, he explains it as a misunderstanding. Gail doesn't believe it at all. However, her ex is fine with it. The wedding goes through and there are some stressful moments. We later learn in a flashback that Gail's marriage was harmed when she had an affair. Her husband eventually stuck with her. However, communication broke down and they eventually got divorced. Now, after their daughter's wedding, the two rekindle their friendship. It is light-hearted, interesting study in relationships. The struggle with trust and communication are difficult to overcome to restore a relationship.

Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes

Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes by Gordon B. Hinckley , forward by Mike Wallace

This book is a book of family values and principles written by a religious to a general audience. The principles are sound, bur the delivery fells dated. It feels obvious that the values of the world have drifted further towards individual wants and away from standing for something. A marriage where the spouses are devoted to each other will be the best for raising kids, but also feels so rare today. People are afraid to "stand for something" and thus follow the understood whims of society as seen in social media. Alas, this often does more to bring people down than to help society.

Tracker

Tracker by Gary Paulsen

A boy's parents died when he was young. He is being raised by his grandparents in rural Minnesota. His grandpa has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Now the boy is hunting on his own. In most of the novel he is out tracking and hunting deer by himself. He spends time contemplating death of loved ones and animals.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

The author works primarily as comedian. A lot of the work involves traveling around the country and interacting with the audience. The pandemic made this challenging. He was glad to finally be able to get back out on tour again. The book is primarily narrated, but there are a few "live" sections that include the audience response.

The comedy in the book primarily deals with personal experiences in his family life. There are also plenty of observations related to culture and society. The pandemic caused a shortage of low-wage labor, and left some poor quality service workers. The different values from different parts of the country also provide source of humorous insights about things such as masks and guns. The death of his nonagenarian father also provided a source of humorous insights.

The humor is relatively clean, though his partner would have some of the content removed. The delivery is fairly relaxed. He is not wild and crazy. Part of the humor is with the calm way he observes interesting events.

Counting by 7s

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

A girl in Bakersfield is crazy smart. She aces a test and gets accused of cheating and sent to see the counselor. The counselor tests her and realizes she is smart. She also meets a Vietnamese brother and sister who also visit the counselor. She also needs to travel in a taxi to see him at times. She gets to know the driver and encourages him to go to school as get a mole looked at.

Then her adoptive parents die in a car crash, leaving her orphaned without any relatives around. On impulse, the the Vietnamese girl declares her to be a family friend and get her mom to adopt temporarily custody. They go through a number of challenges to try to become a family. They end up taking over the counselor's apartment and putting on a good show for protective services. They also work to mike things better by creating a garden. Things don't quite go according to plan, but others help out. The book pulls at the heart strings with many characters that appear stereotypical, but have growth of their own.

Trust

Trust by Domenico Starnone

A teacher (Pietro) has a relationship with one of his students (Teresa). They agree to share something together they haven't shared with anyone else. Later they break up. The teacher goes on to get married. They student goes on to an esteemed career abroad.

The bulk of the story focuses on the teacher and his life. He has a good relationship with his wife. They are both academics. They have a kid. They have some struggles. Then an essay that he wrote starts to get some acclaim. He is asked to expand it for a book and later goes on speaking and lecture tours. His career is taking off. Meanwhile, his wife is struggling with her career. She is also spending more time with their kids. There is a struggle as neither seem to be adequately supporting each other. They have different needs. They reach some general truce.

The end of the story moves to the point of view of the teacher's daughter. She sees that he is not nominated for a teacher award. She users her connections to work to rectify this. She mentions all he did, and that he taught Teresa. This lat bit helps sway the committee, and they are willing to have him if she can talk. The daughter contacts her and she agrees immediately. The daughter tells this to her father and she is upset. We then learn of the love that Teresa still has for him and the challenges of the relationship.  

The end of the book has a discussion by the translator of how she translated and some of the challenges in translation. Translators play a key role in how we understand other works, and it is great to hear details from their perspective. The book has a nice, light view glimpse of the struggles that people have in balancing all aspects of their lives. The translation did a great job of keeping the story alive and interesting.

Go as a River

Go as a River by Shelley Read

Victoria Nash lives in the rural mountainous Iola, Colorado where her family has managed to produce peaches in the inhospitable climate. Her family is not without challenges. Her mother was killed in an accident. Her brother is an alcoholic with a temper. She lives a fairly isolated life on the farm. Then one day she meets a strange Native American who asks for directions. They sense an attraction, but don't act on it. Her brother (drunk) sees them and tries to "protect" his sister. The stranger ends up protecting her instead, this sewing the seeds of love. She ends up getting pregnant and the brother is involved in the death of her boyfriend. She is distraught and flees to the wilderness. She barely manages to live off the land and eventually gives birth on her own. She is on the brink of starvation. One day, she notices a young couple with picnicking with an infant. She secretly places her baby in the car. The couple end up adopting this baby as their own.

The novel then covers the travails as she returns to life. Her brother has been "cast out" of town due to her involvement with the murder. Her father is near the end of his life. She ends up with the orchard. The government plans on building a dam that will inundate Iola in the Blue Mesa reservoir. Victoria sells out (to the chagrin of her neighbors.) She also contacts a university to help relocating the peach trees. She eventually moves on to a new town with the trees and makes a friend. She has been reluctant to share her story with anyone. However, she does go to the place where she abandoned her child to place a rock there every year. One year she sees a "peach rock", and holds out hope of reuniting. Many years later, she sees a note there with a history of her son.

After much prodding and sharing by her friend, Victoria reaches out to the "adoptive" mother. They each had sad stories to share.  (There seem to be an abundance of anger-impulsive male characters in this female-driven story.) We learn the other side of the story, and have a number of tear-jerkers before a reunion is arranged, the results of which are up to our imagination. Victoria is perhaps too strong-willed. She is ready to take everything upon herself without sharing with others. However, by finally opening up, she can achieve more than she otherwise could on her own.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff with Your Family: Simple Ways to Keep Daily Responsibilities from Taking Over Your Life (Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Series)

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff with Your Family: Simple Ways to Keep Daily Responsibilities from Taking Over Your Life by Richard Carlson

This is a basic self-help book about family relationships. Often we take family members for granted. We need to willing to treat them as real people, like we treat our friend. We should tell them we love them, and respect their wants and needs. We should listen and be there for the members of our family. Don't focus too much on vacations. Focus on the daily life.

The Benefits of Being an Octopus: A Novel

The Benefits of Being an Octopus by Ann Braden

Zoey is smart, but she has trouble putting much focus in school. Her family life is less than optimal. She has to take care of her younger siblings while her mom works. They have what seems to be a fairly nice lower-class life. They live in their step-dad's trailer home. However, her step dad appears to be abusive and controlling. Meanwhile her friend is also in a home with domestic violence issues. In the process, a gun is fired. It was by the friend's abusive step dad, but people like to blame it on a family that likes to hunt. The kids in school feel that it is almost unfair to debate gun control. Guns are so obviously bad. Zoey has more nuanced view. She also views the debate tactics her step dad is using to control her mom. Eventually she helps to get everyone out of the abusive relationships and tries to be a middle school kid again. The story helps bring alive the many challenges that are faced behind the scenes in lives of poverty and challenging relationships.

Shelter

Shelter is a long exploration of the role that technology plays in our lives. The novel centers around Meredith in a near future San Francisco. She is the only child of the wealthy founder of Macro corp. As a girl, she barely saw her father as he was running the global business. She didn't lack for creature comforts, but she had a passion for animals. On a business trip, her father came down with a deadly virus. The entire family had to go into isolation. Due in part to their wealth, they had sufficient care for she and her mom to survive. Many others (including her father) did not. However, one of the nascent technologies of the company was the ability to "record" a mind so that the person could live on in technology. Thus her father was able to keep his presence in the family through TV and other internet devices. She actually saw her father more after his death than before.

Meredith is regularly hounded by the tabloids. She chooses to live at the Gaian temple in somewhat of an attempt to escape. She becomes friends with people there, especially a boy that likes to study AI. They date for a bit, then break up. Later he is kidnapped and dies a gruesome death. She slowly builds a relationship with another guy from school. They eventually get married and adopt a baby whose family died from the virus. He goes to preschool instructed by an AI and a woman. Her boy has issues. This leads to drama with the teacher going to prison, the AI being wiped and the boy being "brain wiped". Meredith doesn't take it well. She is divorced and goes on a hunt for the boy. After years, she comes together, but her husband dies in a storm. She finds peace with her other friends and computers.

Around that story, there is the underlying conflict between technophilia and technophobia. Bots have become pervasive and help with everyday activities. A.I.s have also taken on a life of their own. There is political debate over their "personhood". What rights do they have? If they are capable of independent thought, does that mean they are slaves? It was eventually found out that the brutal murder of Meredith's friend was orchestrated by A.I.s. The computer was able to hire people to do some of the things that it was not capable of doing. It knew how to manipulate them (and how to "dispose" of them in a plausible manner.) The A.I. that taught preschool did a great job, until it started to get a mind of its own. 

Humans are also moving closer to computers. Meredith's father is now in a computer. He is "alive" in the sense that his brain is around and capable of independent thought. However, he is only in a computer. He is able to still run the company, even though his body is dead. (This creates all sorts of legal issues. What happens to his wife? He provides for her financially, even as she has a baby with another man.) Brain-wiping is used as a means of criminal rehabilitation. Rather than punish the body, the brain is cleaned of the badness and given the chance to start over. The success rate is less than 100% with some people unable to return to normal. Is this more or less humane? Despite all of this technology, the human relationships still remain important.

Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships

Drama Free is geared towards dealing with the really bad family relationships. One point in the book encourage people not to enable the drug habits of family members. Avoiding abuse is also an important point. There is also advice on dealing with different beliefs and life-styles. It seems to have the contemporary approach of "live one's life independently", while pushing off the blame on others. It does acknowledge that therapy and being vulnerable is hard and that it is impossible to force other people to change. Setting boundaries is a point that re-occurs in the book.

There seemed to be some useful items in the book, together with a lot of modern spin that likely won't stand the test of time.

Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel

In a remote seaside location in Puget Sound, an old lady has a part time job of cleaning the local aquarium. She befriends an octopus that she finds stuck in a power cord. This animal has a habit of sneaking out of its tank to go exploring. (We also get to hear some thoughts from the Octopus's point of view.) She is currently living alone, and still has not got over the mysterious death of her son many years ago.

Meanwhile, in California, a young man that never knew his father (and barely knew his mother) stumbles across an old picture of his mom with another guy. She thinks this might be his father. He traces him to the small town in Washington state, and heads up there. The airline loses his luggage (it ends up traveling all over the world), and he ends up buying a camper from somebody he met and uses it to drive from Seattle up to the small town. In the small town, he befriends the old man that runs the grocery store, and is able to live in the camper on his lot.

Back in the town, the old lady sprains her ankle. The young man takes over her job cleaning the aquarium. The lady comes back in to see how the aquarium is doing (and see the octopus.) 

The characters in the book develop powerful relationships with each other. The octopus also has his personality and works to help the humans in their relationships - sometimes doing things that the humans are unable to do themselves. The octopus knows the answers that the humans are looking for before the humans do. They all are much better with each other than alone.

This Time Tomorrow: A Novel

A girl's father is dying on her 40th birthday. Her mother had abandoned her when she was young, leaving her to be permissively raised by her father. She has not had much to do with other people in her life (other than her best friend), and has even turned down a marriage proposal. Her father was a science fiction writer, known for his time travel book.

She is saddened by the passing of her father and finds herself revisiting her past. She inhabits her teenage self in this odd way of reliving life with some future experiences intact. She knows that she is a future self, but still has the feelings (such as being attracted to teenage boys) of her youth. The novel goes through a "groundhog day" cycle, with her reliving the same time period over and over, and seeing what changes it causes in her future life. She finds herself married with kids and her dad quits smoking, yet he still dies. 

Finally she accepts the past and goes on with her life. Time travel plays a key role in the store, yet it does not feel like a science fiction book.

The Family Chao

The Chou family are immigrants who run a Chinese restaurant in Haven, Wisconsin. They have conflicting dreams and goals. There is a mixture of Buddhism and Christianity religion, Chinese and American culture, and fitting in and remaining separate. There are challenges fitting in to a culture when you are not really Chinese or really American. The Chou family also has plenty of "standard" family conflicts, especially over money. It all culminates with the family patriarch ending up dead in the freezer. We never know for sure how he died, but one son ends up being convicted on circumstantial evidence. (He had motive for doing it - he even acknowledged the motive on the witness stand and called himself a wimp for not following through.) 

This book was not a "can't put down" nor a "totally awful" book. It was just there. The characters were almost, but not quite relatable. The situation seemed plausible but not likely. The book was ok, but not great. I have liked the Silicon Valley Chinese immigrant novels better. 

The Swimmers: A Novel

I had initially thought The Swimmers was an essay collection. It had the feel of a writer extolling the virtues of swimming together. Then it pivoted to the story of a woman losing her memory and moving into a home. Only afterwards did I notice the "A Novel" section of it.

The novel starts with the story of swimmers. These are a group of casual swimmers that go at their swimming time each day. They are not accomplished like the fast masters swimmers at another time. They have their unspoken rules and each have their own lap goals. One day a mysterious crack appears in the pool. This leads to fear and eventually a pool shutdown period.

The pivot is then to the life of an older women who is moved to a memory care home. She no longer has her freedom. The stipulations are called out in detail. The family makes sacrifices to put her there. She doesn't want to be there. It feels like a poor way to live out one's life.

Family Trust

Family Trust seemed so familiar, yet so different. Taiwanese families in Silicon Valley have their unique culture. This is very well portrayed and familiar in the book. The book does take things to a soap opera extreme. I guess that is needed to make a good story. 

A family is in a messy situation. Grandpa is nearing the end of his life. He has been divorced and married to a younger "gold digger" wife. The family thinks he has a few millions and want to make sure they get their share. Meanwhile, other marriages are breaking apart with affairs. Work is unfulfilling. Many of the family members have well paid jobs, but feel like they have not managed to come close to the fortune that they were expecting. 

The characters are well developed. Just when you are ready to toss out one as pure evil, you get their side of the story. Suddenly, you discover that they have good motives and are in fact protecting people from others. The portrayal of the South Bay is spot on. There is a lot of money sloshing around. It often ends up with those that are lucky (or corrupt) rather than those that most deserve it.

And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives

John Gottman had made extensive study of what makes marriages succeed and fail. This book focuses on one of the key "stress points" of a marriage - the birth of a child. Children throw a knot in even a well-calibrated marriage. They provide joy but also stress. (3 AM feedings and diaper changes are never easy.) They also alter mom's hormones and dynamics in a relationship. this book was appropriately written with his wife who is also a psychologist. (Perhaps they will have a follow up written with their child?)
One of the key points is that life will change with baby. It becomes more difficult to keep communication open, but that is a requirement. Parenting styles may be different. Sexual desires and needs from each couple will also be very different. There must be work done to ensure that it is balanced appropriately. Maintaining intimacy and romance after baby requires more effort, but is important. It is also important to create new family traditions by synthesizing the traditions of each family. Neither couple should assume that things will be the same as they experienced growing up. It is also important to realize that your memories are more colored by later childhood and adulthood. The "young child" traditions take some time to cultivate and develop.
The involvement of mother and father are also very different. The father role is typically more playful and chaotic. The mother role is typically more guided and attentive to needs. Baby needs some of both. A couple that loves and respects each other will often be more helpful for the growth of baby than one that attempts to provide every last little benefit fad for the child. Couples should respect the different styles of parenting to help baby to be loved and develop well.

Cheaper By the Dozen

This light read details the life of a family of 12 kids who lived in New Jersey around the time of World War I. The central character is the somewhat eccentric father, Frank Gilbreth, Sr. He was a proponent of using motion study to reduce wasted motion and increased efficiency. He would try out these methods of increased efficiency on his own family, resulting in unpredictable humorous outcomes.

The book spends a little time covering Frank Senior's early life and how he met his wife and had their first kids. However, most of the book details the misadventures of the father and the 12 young children. (Though some of these adventures clearly happened outside the time of 12 children, since he died when the youngest was still a toddler. However, knowing large families, things could have been so crazy during those years that they could fill a book.)

Aside from the family relationships, it is also an interesting account of changing culture and values in the World War I era and the "roaring twenties". Frank Sr. comes across as both very eccentric and very conservative. The book, even ending with his death, manages to stay light and cheery throughout.