March reading
Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs, Willie Nelson (with David Ritz)
My local library's ebook selection is surprisingly robust on music books. This is one of them, and one of several books Nelson has written. It uses about 150 of his songs as inspirations for various topics, only some of which are the stories behind the songs. Some of his most popular songs aren't in here, probably because they have their own book (e.g., "Always On My Mind"). The book was a pleasant diversion and a reminder that no one's more surprised that Nelson is still alive than Nelson himself.
Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange
Orange's second novel somehow manages to be both a prequel and a sequel to his first book, There, There. The first half of the book follows some of the ancestors of the characters in his first novel, and the second half takes place in the aftermath of the Oakland powwow that ended the first novel. I really liked the first half, depressing though it was. I found the second half much more difficult. The story moves mostly through the inner voices of the characters, several of whom become addicted to substances. It felt like there were pages and pages about what it feels like to be high, and after a while I had enough. The overall message of the book seemed to be that people who are taken from their ancestors and their ancestral lands are doomed to spend their lives looking for the place they belong. Naturally, I wondered where that leaves me. Orange is incredibly talented, and I was happy to read that he's now a professor at a writing institute in Santa Fe.
Any Known Blood, Lawrence Hill
My introduction to Hill was his novel The Book of Negroes, which I bought in a Montreal bookshop and which is about enslaved Americans who earned a plot of land and a promise of freedom for fighting for the British in the Revolutionary War. Any Known Blood is a similarly expansive novel that follows a family from slavery to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The protagonist, Langston Cane, is the fifth with the name; he's considered an underachiever by his father, who is a physician and civil rights activist in Toronto. On the heels of a divorce, Cane (V) gets himself fired from his boring, safe government job and decides to research his family's history, including whether the first Langston Cane fought at Harper's Ferry with John Brown. Half of the book takes place in 1980s Baltimore, which sounded pretty grim. Cane is mugged after stopping to help a child who'd been hit during a drive-by shooting.
The Mars House, Natasha Pulley
I was surprised to read that Pulley's usual publisher passed on this novel, because it's very much like her previous ones. There is a gay, male protagonist who is tall, lanky, and awkward and who finds himself in an unusual situation despite being very careful and safe. For this book, the protagonist is a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in a future, mostly underwater London. When a torrential storm buries what remains of the city, his only choice is to go to a Mars colony. There is tension on the Mars colony between people born on Earth and those born on the Mars colony (some are six or seven generations from Earth ancestry); gravity on Mars is one-third that of Earth, and so Earthlings are short, stocky, and strong. Meanwhile, sex has been genetically engineered out of human embryos raised on Mars, so everyone uses "they" and "them" pronouns (it's considered primitive to have a sex or gender), and they are much taller and thinner because of the lower gravity.
Other than the setting and some rather fantastical technology, this is the same book that Pulley always writes, and you either like that story or not. [I do wonder whether she's friends with Kazuo Ishiguro, because this also felt very similar to books he's written, particularly Klara and the Sun.] I was surprised at the negative Goodreads reviews where people accused Pulley of sexism (there are almost no women in the book) and racism (I didn't understand why--something about Mars-born humans resembling Asians and being racist toward Earthlings?). I had to chew on it for a while before deciding that the absence of women isn't automatically sexist, but it is a limitation (compare, for example, every David Mamet play). Pulley is still one of my favorite living writers.