Book Club: What are you reading?

[Ikoiko]

I listen to true crime.

[Virginia]

Ikoiko, TRUE CRIME before going to bed?

[Virginia]

I finished another Nicholas Sparks book. The name of this one was "Last Breath". I thought it was very good. It is one that has just stayed with me since finishing it yesterday.

[agate]

I often read true crime while dropping off to sleep. There's always the danger that I'll get so wrapped up in it that I won't go to sleep but that doesn't usually happen. On the other hand, some accounts of other horrors real people have been through can be too upsetting. I read some accounts by Holocaust survivors sometimes and find that they're definitely not to be read at bedtime.

[Virginia]

I read a book by Michael Connelly. This is Sunshine's favorite author and I have read quite a few also. The name of the book is Desert Star. It is a detective story and a really good book as most all of his are. Sunshine, if you are reading this it is a Harry Bosch/Renee Ballard book. I think you would like it. For the rest of you, these are two characters he has written about through the years, especially Harry Bosch.

[agate]

I've almost finished another true crime story--"Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University" by Richard White. It's an interesting story about someone who was very important but I knew nothing about her until I read this book.

She was the wife of the founder of Stanford University and she spent a lot of time and money memorializing her late husband and especially the son they lost. When she died in 1905, it was fairly clear that she'd been poisoned but it was apparently in everyone's best interests to pretend that she died naturally. The book goes into the details of the case and shows how some people probably maneuvered a coverup.

[Ikoiko]

I finished two novels recently:

Circle of Quilters, by Jennifer Chiaverini is a very relaxing read about the stories of 5 quilters applying for a position at a quilting camp in Pennsylvania. You might like it if you have ever sewn or quilted. It made me want to finish the quilt I started years ago.

We Were Never Here, by Andrea Bart’s is a real page turner of a thriller about two women who are best friends and take a vacation together every year to remote locations with disastrous results. I wondered if the author was a psychologist with all the analysis she did (she isn’t). Anyway, I couldn’t put it down.

[Virginia]

I just finished The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham. I hadn't read one of his books in a while. If he is now writing all of them like this one then I have been missing out. This was one that I didn't want to put down. The more I got into the characters the more I liked it.

[jingle]

Thanks, Virginia, you've inspired me to get a Grisham. For some reason? I haven't gotten any of his.
I just started Properties of Thirsty by Marianne Wiggins. I've never before heard of it or her but, so far, it's been very good. I'm going to look for other books by her.

[agate]

I'm almost finished reading (well, listening to) "The Tangled Web: A Cyberstalker, a Deadly Obsession, and the Twisting Path to Justice" by Leslie Rule (2020). It's a true crime story but so bizarre that it's almost unbelievable.

[jingle]

Thanks, Virginia, you've inspired me to get a Grisham. For some reason? I haven't gotten any of his.
I just started Properties of Thirsty by Marianne Wiggins. I've never before heard of it or her but, so far, it's been very good. I'm going to look for other books by her.

Oooops - that book is Properties of Thirst. And I enjoy it more every time I pick it up.

[agate]

I've heard of Marianne Wiggins but haven't read anything by her. She was in the news a while ago as she was married (for a number of years) to the author Salman Rushdie.

[Lazarus11]

Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...|Guerrilla Gardeners Meet Billionaire Doomsayer. Hurly-Burly Ensues.
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Guerrilla Gardeners Meet Billionaire Doomsayer. Hurly-Burly Ensues.


“Birnam Wood,” by the Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, is a fast-moving ecological novel and a generational cri de coeur.

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• Published March 13, 2023Updated March 31, 2023

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BIRNAM WOOD, by Eleanor Catton

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Eleanor Catton’s third novel, “Birnam Wood,” is a big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wrenching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humor. The result is thrilling. “Birnam Wood” nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles, like hair drawn through a pocket comb.

Catton, who was born in Canada, raised in New Zealand and now lives in Cambridge, England, is a prodigy. She was, at 28, the youngest-ever recipient of the Booker Prize. She won it for “Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...” (2013), a byzantine, dry-witted novel about irascible gold prospectors and unsolved crimes on New Zealand’s South Island in 1866. She is also the author of “Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...” (2008), a much slimmer novel, about a relationship between a male teacher and a student at an all-girls high school.

Catton has felt like the real thing out of the gate. One reason is her way with dialogue. Her characters are almost disastrously candid. They talk the way real people talk, but they’re freer, ruder, funnier. Alongside the wordplay and in-jokes, and the topping of those jokes, unexpected abrasions pile up. You sense the world being thrashed out in front of your eyes.

Another reason is her knowingness — her thinginess. Catton is at home in the physical world, and her details land. (In “Birnam Wood” her scrimping gardeners strew hair-salon clippings as slug repellent.) Her books move sure-footedly, as if on gravel paths, between microclimates.


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Finally, there is Catton’s generosity, to her characters and to her readers. She turns her men and women around and around in appraisal, allowing the available light to alternately flatter and roast them. Even the venal clods burst to complicated life. Catton resembles one of those teachers who can take a student’s simple-minded question and, without condescending, shape it into an ingenious one. She’s generous to her readers because, in the manner of Iris Murdoch or John Fowles (at his best), writers to whom she deserves to be compared, her philosophical predisposition doesn’t dim her relish for pure plot, for blood-warm suspense. The bullets really fly in “Birnam Wood.” The big explosion will probably go off. Greta Gerwig could film this novel, but so could Quentin Tarantino.

Catton’s title is from Shakespeare: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.” Here it’s the name of a guerrilla gardening collective that sometimes legally, and sometimes less so, cultivates wherever it can, “along verges and fence lines, beside motorway offramps, inside demolition sites and in junkyards filled with abandoned cars.”

“Why Are You on Facebook?” is the title of one of Van Morrison’s nutty recent songs. The question isn’t a bad one, though. The Birnam Wood collective makes sure its apolitical Facebook page is sunny and welcoming. It posts a daily gardening tip. This is part of its front for the fact that some members — a few are described as “crust punks” — do a bit more than trespass.

They took cuttings from suburban gardens, leaf litter out of public parks and manure from farmland. Mira had stolen scions from commercial apple orchards — budding whips of Braeburn and Royal Gala that she grafted to the stocks of sour crab-apple trees — and equipment out of unlocked garden sheds, though only, she insisted, in wealthy neighborhoods, and only those tools that did not seem to be in frequent use.

The idealistic members yearn for widespread, lasting social change. They want people to see how much fertile land goes to waste. It’s 2017 and the populists and privatizers, even in New Zealand, are sweeping into power. Birnam Wood has this cockeyed, D.I.Y. notion that people, and nations, could do vastly more to pool their resources.

We get to know three of Birnam Wood’s members well. The alpha is Mira, the group’s founder. She’s 29 and a horticulturist by training. Mira is broke and a bundle of nerves; she has feral qualities but longs for a rural authenticity she senses she lacks. She got into gardening for the same reason some of us got into reading: “It offered a respite from this habit of relentless interior critique.” She’s lost in a complicated, funny way, as if, morally, she’s trying to find her eyeglasses while she’s wearing them.

Then there’s Shelley, Mira’s best friend. Shelley is skeptical and sane and has a self-deprecating sense of humor. She’s the closest thing this book has to a reader’s representative and the only load-bearing wall, at least at the start, that doesn’t seem off plumb. Shelley is forbearance personified but she’s tired of being taken by Mira “for a dogsbody, a beta fish, a bridesmaid, a ride-along.” The sleeve of her good will has begun to fray. She’s aching to leave the collective, and she may not be as sensible as we think she is


Finally, there’s Tony, a mansplaining Bernie bro (his detractors say) with a master’s in “critiquing the anti-humanism of post-structuralist political thought.” He’s as cultivatedly shaggy, and as appalled by capitalism, as only a trust-fund kid can be. He probably works himself up with Temple of the Dog’s anthem “Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...” on loop in his earbuds.

Tony has returned to Birnam Wood after several years traveling and finding himself in activism. He and Mira almost had a little thing once. Now Tony wants to be a blogger, or a podcaster, or a journalist of some sort. “A scoop is better than sex,” the late blogger Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register... used to say. Before long, Tony has stumbled onto the scoop of a lifetime. Either that, or he’s got the journalistic equivalent of a nasty wad of gum in his hair.

The story involves an inscrutable American billionaire named Robert Lemoine who flies his own planes and wears designer tracksuits, a bit like Bobby Axelrod in “Billions.” He’s made his money in high-tech drones, a fact that feeds this book’s obsession with surveillance. “Birnam Wood” will make you want to attend, as Tony has done, a digital obfuscation workshop.
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Lemoine is a doomsteader. He is sinking an elaborate bunker into the ground on a big tract of rural land he’s purchasing. New Zealand is, as similar billionaires know, in the middle of nowhere — on the part of a world map where “reverse” is on a gear shift, as John Updike wrote in a Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...
The Birnam Wood collective and Lemoine meet with a jolt when he catches Mira on his new property scouting for land to cultivate. They end up liking each other; they’re both outlaws; they find each other spicy. Lemoine proposes investing in Birnam Wood, the first real money the collective has ever seen. For him it’s moral cover. For Birnam Wood, getting into bed with a rapacious billionaire drone maker is a crisis.

Tony is outraged. (Tony is always outraged.) The more he looks into Lemoine and his plans, and his gift for purging his foes, the stranger everything begins to seem. To give away more would be to ruin a story that sails as if on a magic carpet, or a fleet of quadcopter drones.

“Birnam Wood” is an ardent ecological novel, but it’s not a softheaded one. That’s another reason it’s a rarity. I sometimes feel that if I must read even one more wet novel that argues courageously, in the teeth of its audience’s predilections, in favor of trees and moss and sunshine, I will pluck out my eyes.

It has resonances with two recent novels that escape this fate — Nell Zink’s “Avalon,” in which characters employ criminal gardening tactics, and Allegra Hyde’s “Eleutheria,” about a utopian compound on a tropical island.

Catton’s novel takes place, as do all novels in 2023, under skies thrice poisoned — by greenhouse gasses, by crisscrossing drones and by a moon we’ve littered with golf balls. Lower to the ground, Tony will discover, is an excremental flow of chemicals, leading to a bigger

Writing a novel is not unlike tending a garden, and “Birnam Wood” becomes a kind of serpentine pastoral. Catton has a naturalist’s eye, and she traces her character’s streams of perception when their fingers are in the dirt, tinkering with the photosynthesizing world:

Even in her failures and mistakes — as when she learned that onion seeds don’t tend to keep, or that low soil temperatures result in carrots that are pale, or that fennel inhibits growth in other plants and should be propagated only on its own — she never felt chastised, for truth, in a garden, did not take the form of rectitude, and right was not the opposite of wrong. To learn even something as simple as to water the roots of a plant rather than its leaves was not to be dealt the harsh reality of a cold hard fact, but rather to be let into a secret. In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across generations were united in a kind of guild.

“Birnam Wood” is also very much of its moment: Like a refreshed “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s all laptops and cycle helmets. You will learn more here about thermal imaging, drone evasion, burner applications and the raiding of other people’s browser histories, to name but four things, than you thought possible. This is also an intimate novel about female friendship that dips into the things that keep one up at night, the national character of New Zealand, hangovers and dinner parties and microdosing.

At a few moments you sense the clanking of plot in “Birnam Wood.” Some late scenarios are implausible. But the pop novel that lurks inside this wise work already has you on the hook.

Catton gives Tony, the Bernie bro, his jeremiads, some of which are woozily inspiring. He can get pretty lathered up about a lot of things, including “the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilizing unreality of the internet as it encroached upon, and colonized, real life — ‘real life,’ Tony thought, with bitter air quotes.”

Reflexively, Catton takes the moral wind out of him at the same time. As the plot in “Birnam Wood” really kicks into gear, as everything begins to converge, Tony says to himself: “I am going to be so [expletive] famous.”

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BIRNAM WOOD | By Eleanor Catton | 424 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux |

[agate]

Entertaining commentary on this book! Now I'd like to read it. I didn't even know that there are many novels about gardening. I don't think I've ever read one--but occasional novels where gardening entered into the story now and then.

Linda, I hope you won't mind if I mention that the review is from the March 13 New York Times Book Review? Just in case anyone gets fussy about citing sources.

[agate]

A question for people here. Judy Blume, the author of popular books for children like Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret is getting a lot of media attention just now because ...Margaret has been made into a movie.

I'm wondering if I should read her books or at least one of them. I may have read one or two years ago, or at least dipped into them, because my daughter was quite a fan of her books.

Has anyone here read them? I'd welcome opinions.