Olive Ketteridge - Elizabeth Strout

This is a rare pleasure too. Discovering an author seems rare now. I love this book for its acuity and precision and clarity.

The story is of a tough cantankerous horrible in some ways old lady, and her relationship with her maybe slightly wet husband. I feel like their lives are made unbearable by their misfortunate choice to stop at a hospital so that Olive can take a pee, this is the turning point of the book. Olive and her husbane end up held at gunpoint by two addicts breaking into the pharmacy. In this frightening moment, exposed and afraid of being killed the two vocalise the hateful thoughts they had about each other, and this leaves a dark stain on their old, both tough but fragile hearts.

The truth can only be glimpsed in this book and each chapter is almost a short story often only incidentally about Olive - a picture builds of a small Maine town too, and the families and generations around Olive. The throwaway lines in one chapter are shocking because of what else we know (like when the pharmacy that was the whole focus of the Husbands live in chapter one is mentioned in passing to be a chain now) so the book does give us privileged view of a town, but that seems almost the easy bit in this story, the part I love is the insight into Olive herself.

I'm reading more Strout because of this book.

Sapiens - Noah Harari

I love a book that makes me feel learned and this is undergraduatey and accessible and skims over the issues of evolution and the gap in our knowledge that comes from seeing the monkey evolve into a cyclist or whatever on T-shirts. There were more than just Homo Sapiens, there were many and what happened to the others, and how the Homo Sapien went from the hunter gatherer, who sounds quite relaxed into the pressure of growing numbers, growing need for food, so then farming and finally capitalism... well it is all a nice fast paced big picture story and I liked it.

What I learned... was how recent the arrival in New Zealand was, and why the familiarity with landscape is such a pleasure. That led to the Old Ways, a couple of blogs down the line.

Sylvia Leonard Michaels

this is devastating and wonderful.

i come back to this a year later. It is a book full of violence and a sad marriage. The arguing couple. I can't remember now who is guilty and who is mad and violent. There are stressed people living in claustrophobic poverty and all the pain feels real and the author is sympathetic not superior.