Category: Pop

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, 386 pages)

There are a lot of things to appreciate about this debut novel from Bonnie Garmus: The story is original, the writing is engaging and the cast of characters is mainly quirky and fun. Well, except for most of the men. And therein lies one of the problems with this book.

Lessons in Chemistry is fiercely devoted to the idea that women in 1960s California were treated entirely unfairly and had no opportunities for careers outside of the home, and that men were generally awful humans who had zero respect for women and were successful only because they were born male.

The book centers on chemist Elizabeth Zott, who works with an otherwise all-male team at Hastings Research Institute, where she doesn’t feel her work is respected. Prior to that job, Elizabeth was trying to get her Ph.D. but was sexually assaulted and kicked out of the program after defending herself with what must have been a pretty sharp pencil. So she has a particularly strong point of view about the male species and equality. Fair.

“Elizabeth Zott held grudges … mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things … and women stayed at home and raised children.”

But then she meets Calvin Evans, a renowned scientist who appreciates Elizabeth’s intelligence and passion for the sciences. His character is reminiscent of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper, with his academic genius far superior to his emotional intelligence and ability to understand human behavior and societal norms. But he is a champion of Elizabeth almost from the start, despite her oft-exaggerated views on life.

“‘You’re saying,’ he said slowly, ‘that more women actually want to be in science.’

She widened her eyes. ‘Of course we do. In science, in medicine, in business, in music, in math. Pick an area.’ And then she paused, because the truth was, she’d only known a handful of women who’d wanted to be in science or any other area for that matter. Most of the women she’d met in college claimed they were only there to get their MRS. It was disconcerting, as if they’d all drunk something that had rendered them temporarily insane.

‘But instead,’ she continued, ‘women are at home, making babies and cleaning rugs. It’s legalized slavery.’”

Not to be too dramatic or anything.

Elizabeth has self-righteous tendencies and can be annoying at times. There are some contradictions in the book too; Elizabeth spends so much time talking about how she deserves equality, yet she ends her cooking show, Supper at Six, with “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.” So fathers can’t be home cooking? If the point here is equality, shouldn’t it work both ways?

Still, Elizabeth as host of the show is one of the author’s more clever moves; Elizabeth takes the job begrudgingly when life seems to leave no other option, and she uses it as a forum to bolster the spirits and promote the intelligence of the housewives who are watching. She uses scientific formulas in her recipes and encourages women to do more and be more. The problem is, she isn’t likable (in my opinion — as of this writing, the book has a 4.4-star review on Goodreads, so I’m not necessarily in the majority here). I had a hard time believing that anyone would watch her show; she comes across as smart, yes, but not personable. She speaks like the scientist she is, and it’s not relatable dialogue. No one who is not a scientist — man or woman — would know what she’s talking about most of the time, and it’s not like Google existed back then to figure it out.

The book’s other “lesson in chemistry” — the chemistry between Elizabeth and Calvin — is short-lived. Their relationship was the highlight of the story to me, but it ends abruptly, and the plot disappointingly transitions to its heavy-hitting feminist focus. Calvin’s character becomes less about his impact on Elizabeth’s life and more about a convoluted subplot regarding his family history, an adoption mystery and the funding of scientists.

There are some fascinating characters, like Elizabeth and Calvin’s daughter Mad, and Mad’s babysitter Harriet, both of whom add depth and refreshingly different points of view to the book. And then there’s Six-Thirty, Elizabeth and Calvin’s dog, who learns to understand hundreds of words that Elizabeth teaches him. I appreciate the purpose of that message — anyone, and any dog, can do anything! — in the context of this book, and it’s mostly delivered well, through the eyes of other characters, like Elizabeth (who thinks it just makes sense that a dog could learn any words) or Harriet (who thinks Elizabeth is strange). But there are a few random, abrupt moments in the book where we’re seeing things from Six-Thirty’s point of view, and I found it a bit off-putting. His perspective didn’t seem to add anything to the story and, to me, it just slowed down the flow.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the first half of the book. The second half was missing, well, chemistry. Elizabeth is a better character alongside Calvin, which is likely the opposite of what Garmus was aiming for, her message seemingly being that women don’t need men. That message might have gone over better if Elizabeth were the least bit happy and hadn’t been described in the first few pages of the book as “permanently depressed” and “ashamed” of her job as a TV host — it’s hard to cheer for a bitter “hero.” C+ — Meghan Siegler

Book Notes

Nora Ephron’s most famous films were When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, but it was Heartburn, not insomnia, that made her famous.

A novel loosely based on her breakup with Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, Heartburn (Knopf, 179 pages) was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and began the transformation of Ephron from journalist to screenwriter and director, although she never stopped writing books. Her 2006 book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck (Knopf, 137 pages), was a droll reflection on aging.

Ephron would be pleased that her neck is concealed in the photo on the cover of the new book about her life. Nora Ephron, a Biography (Chicago Review Press, 304 pages) is by Kristin Marguerite Doidge, a journalist who combed through Ephron’s own writing and interviewed colleagues such as Tom Hanks and Martin Short.

Meanwhile, the ex who inadvertently launched Ephron’s Hollywood career published his own memoir this year: Chasing History, a Kid in the Newsroom (Henry Holt & Co., 384 pages). His work with Woodward at The Washington Post resulted in the 1974 book and subsequent film All The President’s Men, which was consequential in bringing down a president, Richard Nixon.

Incredibly, it’s the 50th anniversary of the Watergate scandal (although Nixon didn’t resign until 1974), which means that Woodward and Bernstein are making the rounds on news shows. There’s also a new history of Watergate called, quite redundantly, Watergate, a New History (Avid Reader Press, 832 pages) by Garrett Graff.

Did we need a new Watergate history? “The answer turns out to be yes,” writes Len Downie Jr., but he’s a former Washington Post editor, so take that with a grain of salt.

Meanwhile, if you’d rather not revisit the Nixon years, go back even further in time to The Monster’s Bones (W.W. Norton, 288 pages), promising nonfiction by David K. Randall. It’s about the discovery of the first T-rex skeleton in Hellcreek, Montana, in 1902, and how this fueled our fascination with dinosaurs — and natural history museums. —Jennifer Graham

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Book Events

Author events

• PAUL DOIRON Author presents Hatchet Island. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., June 29, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SARAH MCCRAW CROW Author presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., July 19, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email pembrokenhtownlibrary@gmail.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Two Nights in Lisbon, by Chris Pavone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pages)

As perhaps the only semi-literate person on the planet who hasn’t read or seen Gone Girl, I still know enough about Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel to know that her fans would like Two Nights in Lisbon. In fact, but for the pesky laws of copyright, Chris Pavone could have called his fifth novel “Gone Guy.”

The thriller is set in Portugal, where a bookstore owner named Ariel Pryce is on a business trip with her husband, John. On their third night there, she wakes up alone and when he doesn’t immediately respond to her texts she starts to panic. Everyone she consults, from the housekeeping and wait staff at their luxury hotel to the local police, assures her that it’s premature to worry, that John probably went on a long run or is meeting with one of his clients. That’s why they are here, after all — for business.

Even as the hours tick by (in Jack Bauer-ish 24 fashion), unconcerned detectives and embassy staff are more inclined to think that John is off with another woman, or maybe even left his older wife permanently; it’s far too early to worry that anything criminal has occurred, they say. (“Senhora, I hope you understand that it is not possible for the police to search for every man whose wife cannot find him in the morning. We would never do anything else.”)

Ariel, however, is insistent from the start that John, her husband for only a year, isn’t like that, especially since he insisted she accompany him on the trip. (What married man wants his wife to come along if his planned activities include a tryst?) Her fears grow as she starts to think someone is following her, and seem to be confirmed when a hotel maid finds a note under her bed that indicates John intended to be away for only a few minutes and planned to meet her for breakfast.

From the start, though, there are suggestions that Ariel may be an especially unreliable narrator, or at the least, a woman prone to unusually high levels of anxiety that could distort her view of what is happening.

The local police she repeatedly contacts are suspicious not only about John (they ask if he uses drugs, among other things) but also about Ariel herself, to the point that they have a detective follow her when she leaves the station. Meanwhile, we get hints of former identities for both Ariel and John, who seem to not know very much about each other. There are flashbacks to earlier times in Ariel’s life, when she went by another name and apparently lived a life much higher on the socioeconomic ladder.

Then there’s the question of her teenage son, George, an increasingly moody kid with whom she lives on a ramshackle farm a couple of hours from New York. It’s unclear who the boy’s father is, and why Ariel walked away from her former life for one that seemingly has a lot more troubles and goats.

Pavone boasts a roster of heavyweight endorsements from John Grisham — who says “I defy anyone to read the first twenty pages of this breakneck novel, then try to put it down for five minutes. It can’t be done.” — to Stephen King, who seems to be trolling Grisham when he says, “There’s no such thing as a book you can’t put down, but this one was close.”

This may be because, in addition to his own writing career, Pavone has worked for 33 years in publishing. In other words, he’s hardly a supernova who burst out of nowhere; he’s as establishment in the business of words as you can get. As such, he is a craftsman when it comes to the construction of a made-for-Hollywood thriller. The foreshadowing is a bit too heavy-handed in places — particularly with regard to news going on in the U.S. that is constantly on TV screens in Portugal.

But the twist that turns the story on its head at the end is deftly done. In fact, Two Nights in Lisbon may require two readings: the second to see how the story changes once you finally learn what was really going on.

To be sure, Pavone injects a generous amount of moralizing, which was interesting at first but grew a bit tiresome as the story developed. Here he is on college degrees: “oversold, overpriced, undervalued educational achievements that turn out to be almost meaningless on the job market,” and on the internet: “The magic of the internet. It’s easy to forget this, looking at the toxic effects of social media, at the economic devastation wrought by online retail and the tech-driven gig economy and the decline of Main Street, at the mis- and disinformation that threatens the integrity of democracy, in fact the integrity of everything.”

Cultural asides are useful when lobbying for prizes or stretching a thin story to novel length, but the frequent digressions seem so much overreach, similar to its bloated, self-important final paragraph that tries to give the novel more authority than it earned.

Two Nights in Lisbon is actually a misnomer, as the book spans six days (six days and three months, if you count the epilogue). It could have been satisfyingly shorter, and will be in a screenwriter’s hands.

Some Amazon reviewers have noted the resemblance of a pivotal character to a certain former president who has been unusually divisive. Meh. That’s surely the author’s intent, but the parallel is not heavy-handed enough to make this book political. More radical is the age-old question the novel offers about whether an end justifies a means. As cultural commentary Two Nights in Lisbon comes up short, but it’s an excellent beach read. B+

Book Notes

Even without a print magazine and daily talk show, Oprah Winfrey still wields power in the world of publishing. She still has a book club through her website, Oprahdaily.com, where she recently guaranteed the publishing success of Leila Mottley, the 19-year-old author of the new novel Nightcrawling (Knopf, 288 pages).

Mottley began writing the book when she was 16. It’s set in Oakland, California, where she lives, and it’s about a high-school dropout named Kiara who has to work to support her family and a neighbor child, but gets embroiled in a scandal involving the Oakland Police Department.

The last book Winfrey recommended before this was the memoir of actress Viola Davis, called Finding Me (HarperOne, 304 pages). Released in April, it has 3,800 ratings on Amazon, most of them five stars.

Can Bill Gates crown an author like Oprah can? He keeps trying. His summer recommendations for fiction are weirdly dated: last year’s The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking, 592 pages) and Naomi Alderman’s The Power, published in 2016 (Penguin paperback, 352 pages).

More current is actress Reese Witherspoon, whose Reese’s Book Club features only books with female protagonists. Her pick this month is Counterfeit (William Morrow, 288 pages) by Kirstin Chen. It’s about a Chinese American lawyer and mom who gets inadvertently sucked into a counterfeit purse scheme run by an old friend. And actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop book club is recommending Circa by Devi S. Laskar (Mariner, 192 pages), a coming-of-age story of an Indian American girl.

“Celebrity” book clubs may be pushing the bounds of celebrity when they include Jenna Bush Hager, who some people may not recall is the daughter of former President George W. Bush. But I like her recent pick, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco, 368 pages), a novel about a lonely janitor who makes friends with an octopus at the aquarium where she works.

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Book Events

Author events

• ANDREA PAQUETTE Author presents Loveable: How Women Can Heal Their Sensitive Hearts and Live and Love as Their True Selves. Sat., June 18, 6 p.m. Toadstool Bookstore, Somerset Plaza, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Visit toadbooks.com.

• PAUL DOIRON Author presents Hatchet Island. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., June 29, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SARAH MCCRAW CROW Author presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., July 19, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email pembrokenhtownlibrary@gmail.com.

Writer submissions

• UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed, by Stuart Isacoff (Deckle Edge, 320 pages)

In modern parlance, we’re most likely to use the word “revolution” to describe a political uprising. But in Musical Revolutions, pianist Stuart Isacoff uses it like Copernicus did when describing the movement of the planets. There is still “a disruptive shock of the new” in this sort of revolution, he says, but there is symmetry, growth and expansion.

Isacoff, the longtime editor of “Piano Today” and the author of three other books about music, explores the disruptive shocks of music history in his latest book, which will appeal most to readers with a comprehensive music education. He also offers a general audience an overlook of things they have probably not thought of before: how and why, for example, “do re mi fa so la ti do” became a thing long before The Sound of Music and how the first music notations emerged.

The book also provides a fascinating thread on how music has been used — one might say exploited — to harness emotions and manipulate listeners, and the reason that certain forms of music (including opera) have been denounced as demonic throughout their history.

Early Christian leaders, for example, realized that meditative chants, used broadly and uniformly, could be a way of unifying a far-flung church. But they had to be taught, which was no easy task without sheet music. Enter an Italian monk named Guido, a singing instructor who would develop a form of musical notation using a staff of four lines with color coding that showed the singer what to sing. Guido’s system is the basis of the music we read today, although the four lines became five and the colors were replaced with clefs.

The development of uniform notation, however, also led to increasing complexity in music, as singers began weaving disparate melodies in songs that were harmonious but complex. While archeologists have found instruments dating back to the most primitive cultures (in Germany, they found a rudimentary flute made from a vulture bone is thought to be 35,000 years old), early Christians struggled with music’s ability to both enhance and distract from morality. St. Augustine, for example, was beset by guilt when he allowed a soaring melody to distract him from sober contemplation. And the “busy textures” of the complex harmonies known as polyphony was denounced by Pope John XXII, who said in 1324 that these cutting-edge medieval composers were “ceaselessly intoxicating the ear without quieting it, and disturbing devotion instead of evoking it.”

Things got worse with the invention of opera in the late 1500s. The first opera has been lost to time, so the first surviving one, called Euridice, was commissioned for the wedding of King Henry IV of France. It was, Isacoff writes, “music for a select audience, more to be admired than felt,” but it became all the rage, and “New theaters became staging areas for the hedonists and rabble-rousers” of the time, with box seats becoming venues not only for the enjoyment of music, but for engaging in “notoriously indecent behavior.”

Isacoff turns his attention to Johann Sebastian Bach in a chapter called “Out of the Bachs,” in which he chronicles the rise of the Bach family as multigenerational “musical royalty.” Amusingly, Isacoff reveals that the composer who is a giant of Western music was all too human and once had a knife fight with another music student after calling him “a nanny goat bassoonist,” which is as good an insult as any that Shakespeare composed.

He moves on to French composer Claude Debussy and synthesizer developer Robert Moog, before taking on jazz, which arose in late 19th-century America with an appeal that was “instantaneous and widespread.”

“It moved feet all over the country,” Isacoff writes, before exploding in Europe in the 1920s, helping to enable the celebrity of Josephine Baker. But then came Prohibition, George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman and the advent of what was known as symphonic or orchestral jazz, and the swing era in the 1930s and ‘40s. Isacoff examines how the music and musicians (like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis) intersect with political and social events of the day.

He concludes by reflecting on how music and musicians are often targeted during cultural revolutions, as in China in the 1960s when musicians “began burying their instruments, destroying music books, and melting down their vinyl records” as artists and intellectuals lived under threat of imprisonment and death. Much has changed since then; New York’s renowned Juilliard School now has a campus in China.

Musical Revolutions ends somewhat abruptly, with Isacoff declining to take on the most prevalent popular forms of music in America today, rock and its derivative, rap. He addresses this omission early on, saying his expertise is the Western canon of music, and “If rock is to be written about, it deserves a more knowledgeable observer than myself.”

Rock’s story, of course, is ongoing; incredibly, the Rolling Stones are touring this summer, led by a 78-year-old Mick Jagger. A much-heralded Elvis movie is about to come out. Rock’s history and impact is everywhere these days; for everything preceding it, Musical Revolutions is a fine, if selective, primer. B+

Book Notes

This is a hot take, but I’ve never understood the appeal of murder mysteries. There are too many murders in real life, and murder as entertainment, as in the start of the new Mary Kay Andrews novel, The Homewreckers, feels sort of icky. And last month came the news that a self-published Portland author who wrote a treatise called “How To Murder Your Husband” was convicted of … murdering her husband. Let’s hope there’s no cause for authorities to start a post-mortem investigation of Agatha Christie.

All that said, I’m in the minority here. The reading public loves murder mysteries. Here are some recent ones you might want to consider:

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray (Vintage, 400 pages) takes a Jane Austen character and has him murdered in the midst of a house party at a country estate, leaving the guests to figure out who did it.

Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library(Poisoned Pen Press, 288 pages) offs a patron at the Boston Public Library and the suspects are four strangers sitting quietly around a table in the reading room.

A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons (Crooked Lane Books, 304 pages) is by Kate Khavari and involves a university research assistant’s search for the killer of a professor’s wife who dropped dead of apparent poisoning at a dinner party.

Then there’s Last Call at the Nightingale (Minotaur, 320 pages) by Katharine Schellman, which deposits a body outside a nightclub in New York during Prohibition, embroiling a young fun-seeking seamstress in a dangerous underworld of crime.

And coming at the end of the month is Hatchet Island (also Minotaur, also 320 pages) by Paul Doiron, a double-murder mystery set on an island off Maine that is a sanctuary for endangered seabirds.

If you like the book and also like fishing, there’s an added benefit: You can go fly fishing with the author, who is a registered Maine fly fishing guide who lives on a trout stream. Also, if you’re wondering, you pronounce his name “Dwarren,” according to Doiron’s website.

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Book Events

Author events

• ANDREA PAQUETTE Author presents Loveable: How Women Can Heal Their Sensitive Hearts and Live and Love as Their True Selves. Sat., June 18, 6 p.m. Toadstool Bookstore, Somerset Plaza, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Visit toadbooks.com.

• PAUL DOIRON Author presents Hatchet Island. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., June 29, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email pembrokenhtownlibrary@gmail.com.

Writer submissions

• UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

The Immortal King Rao, by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Co., 384 pages)

Commercially successful fiction usually doesn’t make the reader work too hard. The story typically flows in a fast-running river, propelled by familiarity and forum. No brows need furrowing, no paragraphs or sentences re-read.

Vauhini Vara could have gone that route with her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, for at its simplest, the plot has all the markers of prime Hollywood fare: A brilliant and eccentric tech titan creates technology to essentially offload one’s consciousness into another person, as a climate-ravaged planet transforms society into a socialist dystopia.

Instead, Vara added layers of complexity, making her titular character an immigrant who was born into the lowest caste in India and then moved to the United States to get a graduate degree. Naming a child born of rape “King” is an act of defiance and hope performed by the aunt who raises the child after his mother died in childbirth. Yet King Rao himself is dead as the novel begins. His effect on the world is largely told by his daughter, who is in jail, accused of killing her father.

As a father, King was “uncommonly old” and raised his daughter largely on his own, after he had been forced out, not only from Coconut, the massively influential tech company that he founded, but also from society in general. At the peak of his power, King was something like a combination of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with a sprinkling of Karl Marx. He just happened to be all this, and also a Dalit, an “untouchable” in India’s caste society.

In America, however, he rose to the potential of his name.

King Rao had, Vara writes, “rescued the planet from nation-state rule, which was bringing society to ruin, and engineered a calm and peaceful transition to Shareholder Government, under which the world’s citizens collectively owned its corporations.”

Worldwide, societies were run not by human leaders but by the “Master Algorithm” that Coconut developed. Rather than money, people traded in Social Capital, “based on the Algo’s prediction of the actual value they had produced.” The Master Algorithm also decided what schoolchildren would be taught (the curriculum was the same worldwide) and what punishment would be given to criminals.

This large-scale transformation had been enabled, in part, by the myriad breakdowns occurring on “Hothouse Earth.” But not surprisingly, not everyone signed on to this system, resulting in deadly rioting. Instead of punishing the objectors, the Master Algorithm ruled that they could live on islands that came to be known as “the Blanklands.” These people came to be known as “exes” and leaving society was called “exing.”

And King Rao and his daughter became exes, too, as a requirement of the algorithm’s judgment.

Living in almost total isolation on an island in Puget Sound, Athena has a largely blissful life as a child with her doting father. But when she turns 7, she starts to experience something akin to visions. When, for example, her father calls her “Puffin,” one of her nicknames, she suddenly can see images of the birds, “their potbellied stomachs thrust forward as if they were businessmen at a conference.”

She also suddenly has knowledge of puffins that she has not been taught — such as the fact that prior to their extinction, people in Iceland used to trap puffins for food in a net on a pole, and this was called “sky fishing.”

Athena’s brain, in effect, had absorbed the internet through a product her father’s company had invented called “The Harmonica.” It was to be King’s crowning achievement, yet the technology had failed — not because it was a moral problem, but because of an engineering fail that resulted in the deaths of test subjects.

But King had managed to have the genetic code implanted in a frozen embryo that would eventually be Athena. “His decision to leave the mainland, to take up residence on Blake Island instead of one of the established islands — all of it was meant to keep the world from discovering the project of my existence,” Athena says.

King experimented on himself, too, and Athena can experience his memories. So she is able to explore his early years, his relationship with her mother and how she came to be, in the comfort and safety of her own mind, even as her physical safety becomes increasingly uncertain.

Like King, the author — who has been a reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker — hails from a Dalit family. She has said it took 12 years to write the novel, and it shows. It is a finely layered story with a beginning that is difficult to get through, not only because of the subject matter (the sexual assault of a child and a marital rape occur in the first chapter), but also because it’s challenging to keep up with various Rao family backstories that seem not to matter. The novel quickly picks up speed, but even so, readers may find little to emotionally connect them with the characters. The ending is jarring, but elicits little more than a pained “oh.”

The Immortal King Rao is clearly a cautionary tale about something; it’s just not entirely clear what. Still, it manages to be inventive and often lyrical in the telling and was 12 years well spent. B

Book Notes

Little, Brown & Co. is billing James Patterson’s latest book as “the most anticipated memoir of 2022,” and the publisher is probably not wrong, given that its competition right now includes memoirs by political strategist Kellyanne Conway (Here’s the Deal, Threshold, 512 pages) and actress Melissa Gilbert (Back to the Prairie, Gallery, 282 pages).

Patterson has written or co-written more than 200 books, and The Washington Post has said of him, “In book publishing, there is James Patterson — and basically everyone else.”

Still, there’s something that smacks of hubris in the title of the book, which is James Patterson, The Stories of My Life. Which means the listings of the book say James Patterson by James Patterson. You can get away with that when you’re James Patterson. The memoir is 400 pages and comes out on Monday.

While we’re on the subject of writers writing about writers, we may as well move on to books about books and readers, which is suddenly a thing.

The Woman in the Library (Poisoned Pen Press, 288 pages), also out next week, is by Sulari Gentill and is billed as an “unexpectedly twisty literary adventure” set in the reading room of the Boston Public Library.

Emily Henry’s Book Lovers (Berkley, 384 pages) is a romance novel about a literary agent and a book editor who keep encountering each other while vacationing in North Carolina. (Definitely a beach read from an author whose previous titles include 2020’s Beach Read.)

And in August comes Bookish People (Harper Muse, 336 pages), a comedic novel by Susan Coll that is set in the world of an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., and will appeal to anyone who might name a cat Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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Book Events

Author events

• JAMIE RASKIN Author and congressman presents Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Fri., June 3, 11 a.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• AMOS J LANDON Author presents debut novel The Girl, The Pig, and the Accidental Demon. Sat., June 4, 2 p.m. Toadstool Bookstore, Somerset Plaza, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Visit toadbooks.com.

• ANDREA PAQUETTE Author presents Loveable: How Women Can Heal Their Sensitive Hearts and Live and Love as Their True Selves. Sat., June 18, 6 p.m. Toadstool Bookstore, Somerset Plaza, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Visit toadbooks.com.

• PAUL DOIRON Author presents Hatchet Island. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., June 29, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email pembrokenhtownlibrary@gmail.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Kingdom of Bones, by James Rollins (William Morrow, 435 pages)

Jim Czajkowski — you might know him by his pen name, James Rollins — writes about viruses with such authority you might think he has a secret medical degree. That’s almost right.

He was a veterinarian in California before his side gig as a novelist became so successful that he couldn’t do both anymore. He told a veterinary trade publication that at one point he was working 15 hours a day at his veterinary practice while writing a novel a year in between appointments.

Now he’s written 23 novels by himself and co-authored five others. His latest is Kingdom of Bones, the 16th in what is known as his “Sigma Force” series, named for the covert team of highly trained specialists — Rollins has called them “scientists with guns” — called in to save the world from various perils. (Think the Avengers, without the otherworldliness, and with a military war dog.)

The story involves a mysterious malady that emerges in Africa and threatens the human race, which Rollins is somewhat apologetic about, given the ongoing pandemic. He writes in an author’s note that he pitched the book before Covid-19 and had reservations about going forward with the project, saying “it felt insensitive to tackle such a subject at this moment, to seek to entertain with ‘plague fiction’ when the world was suffering.”

He worried needlessly; the book never once feels exploitative, and in fact is at its most interesting when Rollins expounds on topics with relevance to Covid, such as the fact that “Each hour, some thirty-three million viral particles cascade onto every square meter of this planet.” And the fact that some scientists believe that “ancient viral invasions” may comprise up to 80 percent of the human genome. (I could have done without this knowledge; it is far better to think we are made of stardust than viral mutations.)

This is the sort of information that Rollins scatters throughout the story, making Kingdom of Bones a thriller that is deeply intelligent.

It begins in the Congo, where a cadre of large, angry winged ants are floating in floodwater and making their way onto land, where they are attacking humans in a refugee camp with unusual ferocity. While some people who are bitten appear unaffected, others fall into a catatonic state. Before all of the people can be evacuated, the camp is also overrun by a band of aggressive baboons, creatures that had previously been shy around humans but suddenly seemed set on destroying them.

As if this isn’t chaos enough, a band of militants bursts onto the scene and abducts the handful of people that they don’t kill, including a mother and her now catatonic baby, who had been bitten by the ants. All this sets up the bat signal to flash for the Sigma Force and Commander Gray Pierce to step in and try to figure out why animals are suddenly becoming more bloodthirsty and cunning — even moths are turning deadly. As one young doctor says, “It’s as if all of Nature is about to turn against us.”

As the team tries to discover what is infecting the animals, they encounter killer bats, jackals, aardwolves (an animal that looks like a striped hyena and eats insects), and even hippopotamuses that seem to have been weaponized. This leads to snappy dialogue like “We’re about to play the worst game of Hungry Hungry Hippos,” but fortunately, that sort of banter is limited, as is the side story about a sinister mining executive who may or may not have a hand in what’s going on.

Rollins’ prose is generally sophisticated, certainly for the genre, although I confess there came a point where I started rolling my eyes every time a character’s eyes or face “shone.” But that’s more a problem of the editors, not the writer.

I should note that while many of the Sigma Force characters were featured in previous books, Kingdom of Bones works as a stand-alone novel; you don’t have to know the history of the force (I didn’t) although Rollins says the characters evolve throughout the series. I also suspect the book would be easier to digest knowing some backstories. Although the plot is easy enough to follow, the characters are many and complex.

Although the book is somewhat moralistic (ye climate deniers, stay away), and wanders slightly into The Overstory territory toward the end, it doesn’t feel preachy. It’s a solid summer read that raises interesting questions about whether the world at some point will rear back and retaliate for the damage we’ve done to it. (And here I’m not talking about climate but pesticides and exposed power lines.)

Also, it has an opening line that dares us not to read more: “The Reverend William Sheppard silently recited the Lord’s prayer as he waited for the cannibal to finish filing his teeth.” Five stars for that opener, four for the rest of the book. B

Book Notes

Endurance athlete Cameron Hanes is probably the opposite of what we think of when we hear the word “bookish.”

His passion is bowhunting in Alaska and to be prepared for it he runs ultramarathons (200-plus miles) in the mountains. According to his publisher, his goal is to become the “ultimate predator.” In the zombie apocalypse, you want to be on this guy’s team. Somehow, however, he found time to sit down and type things, resulting in a book, Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast and Keep Hammering (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages), that’s selling well this month.

If you like to be outside in ways that are a little less extreme, check out Outdoor Kids in an Inside World (Random House, 208 pages) by Steven Rinella.

That’s not to say that Rinella isn’t a man of extremes; he is also the author of 2020’s The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival (Random House, 464 pages) and host of a Netflix show called MeatEater. But his new book encourages families to get “radically engaged with nature.” I’m not a big fan of hunting, but the opening pages, wherein he describes butchering a deer his 10-year-old had shot, and then feeding the fat to the birds, was rather riveting.

Also out this month to help us channel our inner woodsman, there’s The Rugged Life: The Modern Guide to Self-Reliance (Rodale, 272 pages) by Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL who reminds us of another Emerson (Ralph Waldo) and his call for a “greater self-reliance.”

Got to confess, the title of The Rugged Life is not nearly as compelling as that of Emerson’s first book, 2015’s 100 Deadly Skills. But he promises to teach three essential skills: how to build, how to farm and how to hunt. Pretty good for 272 pages.

And if you’re not too tired after all that, check out The Workout Bucket List (Running Press, 400 pages), Greg Pesto’s compilation of more than 300 “life-changing races, epic challenges and incredible hikes, bikes, lifts and runs” to do before you die. And yes, some are in New Hampshire: he recommends various Pinkham Notch hikes and a climb up Mount Washington.

If you haven’t already figured this out yet, one of these titles might make an excellent Father’s Day gift. Not that women won’t enjoy them, too.

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Book Events

Author events

• TAMMY SOLLENBERGER Author presents The One Inside: 30 Days to Your Authentic Self. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Wed., June 1, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• JAMIE RASKIN Author and congressman presents Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Fri., June 3, 11 a.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL DOIRON Author presents Hatchet Island. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., June 29, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SARAH MCCRAW CROW Author presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., July 19, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly Email pembrokenhtownlibrary@gmail.com.

Writer submissions

• UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.