hiphuman2020

[hiphuman2020]

Hate, like love, knows no boundaries of time and place.

[hiphuman2020]

Louise Erdrich is one of America's great novelists. If you haven't done so yet, discovering her will be an enriching treat.

[hiphuman2020]

Soul-baring discussions of our sex drive are too rare. J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace is as honest as it comes.

[hiphuman2020]

Novelist Arthur Hailey was famous for Airport, but Wheels just became my favorite.

When Arthur Hailey published Wheels in 1971, my father was in the midst of a 25-year stint on the assembly line at American Motors (AMC). Reading it fifty-four years later, I realized this was his story.   Hailey was famous for writing novels that do a deep dive into various industries – Hotel, the Moneychangers and his most famous, Airport. He invested at least a year of research into every…

[hiphuman2020]

It’s easy to see why Anne Tyler’s 1982 novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It’s one of her finest.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant opens with Pearl Tull on her deathbed proclaiming to her son, “You should have got . . . You should have got an extra mother.” As she begins to fill in the reasons why that is true, we come to understand that Pearl was not a nice mother. She was dependable but stern and verbally abusive, sometimes physically. Her husband might be partly to blame. Or her…

[hiphuman2020]

Some books arrive in your life at just the right time. For me, Intermezzo is just such a book.

[hiphuman2020]

Niall Williams is the best of modern Irish storytellers. His lilting prose pitches This Is Happiness into the stratum of music, a ballad with timeless lyrics.

As a boy Noe entered the seminary to pray for his dying mother. Now that she’s gone, he sees no point in religion. After dropping out, he has nowhere to go but to his grandparents’ rustic home in western Ireland.  Ganga and Doady live outside the little village of Faha. When Noe arrives, the entire community is about to embark on the biggest change in their lives. Little does he know that he too…

[hiphuman2020]

A Personal Tribute to the Late, Great Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins (1932-2025) was my literary father.

Tom Robbins (1932–2025) was my literary father, a maverick-of-a father who encouraged me to rebel. His works chronicle my life. His words have challenged, counseled and consoled me through all of it. Speaking to the impact he’s had on me seems the best way to honor him. His first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), came out just after I’d left the seminary and was struggling to redefine…

[hiphuman2020]

Writing her 18th Mary Russel novel, Laurie R. King opened my eyes to the Sherlockian game.

The Sherlockians - 138 different authors writing hundreds of novels and dozens of series.

The opening of The Lantern’s Dance finds Sherlock Holmes’ young wife Mary Russell laid up with a sprained ankle in the house where his son grew up. Holmes had only found out about Damian’s existence six years earlier, his former lover Irene Adler having hidden her pregnancy when she sent Holmes packing. Now he’s gone missing.  Russell has time to pore over the contents of a decades-old chest…

[hiphuman2020]

Four Letters of Love wrestles with the ever-present question of whether or not we deserve love. 

As for the question of love being random or part of God’s plan, I will leave that for you to arbitrate as you enjoy the timeless Four Letters of Love.

Niall Williams elevates the question to an arena where belief in God’s plan battles with cold-hearted randomness. The lives that he describes in his flowing Irish vernacular aren’t about pursuing love but simply believing in it.   Two parallel stories run through the first two thirds of the novel. One takes place in Dublin, the other on the opposite side of Ireland, on a small island off the…

[hiphuman2020]

The Passenger is the denouement of Cormac McCarthy’s literary life. He pulls together the strands and themes of all his previous writing.

Nothing warm and fuzzy about Cormac McCarthy, now was it ever his intent.

The Passenger is also his final work. It was published in 2022 as book one of the Passenger series. Book two, Stella Maris, was published the same year. Cormac McCarthy died in 2023 at age 89. Before the visceral scene of salvage diver Bobby Western encountering nine corpses in a plane recently crashed into the coastal waters of Biloxi, Cormac opens with this: “This then would be Chicago in the…

[hiphuman2020]

Have We Forgotten What We Began to Learn A Hundred and Fifty Years Ago, That Those Who Have Suffered War Need Kindness and Care?

The aftermath of all wars are the same, victims trying to stitch themselves back together.

In Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips describes the ramifications of war through the eyes of people enduring the long aftermath of the Civil War.  She captures their experiences by reimagining what they saw and how they felt about it, using their language and their sensibilities: “The three sat that night on the porch of the lower one-room cabin, looking into the dark beyond lantern glow, singing…

[hiphuman2020]

Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel prize for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The deadly serious title gives little room to believe that it is a simple murder mystery. 

A late-in-life reflection on the cruelty of the world, especially toward animals.

In the first paragraph Janina Duszejko lets us know she’s looking death in the eye. “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.” Winter days are cold and dark in the remote Polish village where Janina lives. Adapted to the vast empty plateau where the village is…

[hiphuman2020]

Good books have a way of resurfacing, their potent themes washing up again and again on the shores of current events. Davita’s Harp (1984) by Chaim Potok is just such a book.  

The timeless theme of a troubled world as seen through the anxious eyes of a young girl in 1930's NYC.

Growing up in 1930’s New York, Davita is only seven when her parents’ lives begin to shape her world view.  Her mother is Jewish, non-practicing ever since she fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Her father, raised in Maine, is a journalist and a non-practicing Christian. Both of Davita’s parents are communists, hell-bent on fighting the rise of fascism in Europe and in America. What’s…

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We did not become the dystopic Brave New World that Aldous Huxley described ninety-three years ago, but we’re still trying.

Have we become as complacent as the citizens of Brave New World?

Huxley had enough background in science that when he wrote Brave New World in 1932 he predicted technology’s great leap forward in the second half of the 20th Century. His story is populated with personal transport helicopters, television, contraceptive pills, a chemically-enhanced food supply and total sensory entertainment called ‘the feelies’.  But all of that is just the backdrop for the…

[hiphuman2020]

Bluesky, Books and the Answer to Trump

Bluesky, books and Heather Cox Richarson led to the first step in a reckoning with 77 million votes for Trump.

After the reality of November 5th bore down on me, I walked around for a while like a drunk in a Jack Kerouac narrative, upright but stunned.  I didn’t want to tune out what I was hearing, but I desperately needed a filter. Friends spoke of a broken Democratic Party that couldn’t deliver the right message to the middle class. Political pundits said Kamala became too centrist and spewed out a…

[hiphuman2020]

Us Against You is a curiously compelling novel. Bestselling author Fredrik Backman speaks directly to the reader, challenging you to understand why he’s breaking your heart.

'Us Against You' is the most uniquely written novel I've read in a long while.

Backman’s is the omniscient voice of Beartown, a forest village that lives and dies for hockey. He doesn’t ask you to like the game, merely to understand that it’s at the heart of the story, “Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did.” He tells us, “It is a story about hockey rinks and all the hearts that beat around them, about people and sports and how they sometimes take turns carrying each…