Back in April, the New York Times published an article about All God’s Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten, the 1974 National Book Award winner, an autobiography that seemed to have been all but forgotten. It’s the oral history of a former sharecropper who bucked against the system that kept him down.

Well, we picked up a used copy down at Heartwood Books in Charlottesville (coincidentally, the name penciled on the inside was Lauren F. Winner, a high-school acquaintance of mine who writes about faith and society and sexuality, among other things). And it’s every bit as important today as it was in 1974.

Nate Shaw is an old man as he narrates his life, and he meanders, but even those digressions – about the livestock he owned, the proper way to plow a field with a pair of mules, the family history of his neighbors and kin – are informative.

What struck me, again and again as I read the book, was the how difficult it was to be a poor farmer, regardless of being cheated by white people. The title of the book refers to the arrival of the boll weevil in Alabama: “All god’s dangers ain’t a white man.” No, the boll weevil is also out to get you. Lice and mosquitoes and your mule if you don’t look out will also hurt you. Doctoring won’t help much. The commodities market and the weather can ruin you.

And if you’re Nate Shaw, decades of incredibly hard work and prayer and good fortune will let you scrape together enough money to put down to buy some land of your own, and white folks will get together, put you up on some bogus charges, and send you to prison for 12 years, and take that land away and return your family to poverty.

If you want to understand Ta-Nehisi Coates’ case for reparations, remember this: Nate Shaw’s was not an atypical story, and he was not a distant historical figure. When his children left the countryside, they faced not only individual discrimination, but official federal policy that kept them in substandard and overpriced ghettoes while white people got cheap financing for new houses in white neighborhoods.

Shaw’s story is the story of American injustice, piled decade upon decade. Reading it won’t fix things, but it’s a start.

Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody should be a must-read for everyone this Summer. In the Catskills in 1982, a murder-suicide in room 712 off the grand old Bellweather Hotel is witnessed by a young bridesmaid who happens to be there for the wedding of her sister. Flash forward fifteen years to the annual Statewide music festival, where hundreds of high school musicians, including Rabbit Hatmaker and his twin Alice, have gathered to practice and perform. Another guest that same weekend is Minnie Graves, the young bridesmaid, now grown, who returns to find answers to what happened years ago. A snowstorm strands them all in the hotel and meanwhile Alice’s roommate, one of the stars of the orchestra, disappears. Is it a stunt or real?

The search for answers introduces a glorious cast of well-written characters. The plot unfolds in such a way that the slight twists and turns leave the reader unable to stop reading. This is a hard to classify book as it’s neither horror nor coming of age nor a mystery, rather it’s all of these things and more. Racculia has a sure-fire hit on her hands with her excellent debut.

Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, sums it up best, “Witty and smartly moving, Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody offers a heart-thumping mystery of music and murder, wherein the past repeats itself, and in doing so becomes malleable again: just as an orchestral score can be rearranged to new effect, so an unsolved crime sometimes returns to shock and surprise anew—and in both cases the outcomes are as unpredictable as they are suspenseful.” 

It’s been pretty quiet around here at bookdwarf.com. I’m not shutting down or anything. I got a new job, one that is exciting and that I have a lot to learn about, so most of my energy is going there these days. I’m off to Book Expo next Tuesday and I’m very excited to see all my old book world friends and perhaps score some new books.

This new job has not stopped me from reading of course. I’m loving Francine Prose’s Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, the story of several characters whose lives cross in pre-war Paris. The writing is stunning and makes me want to read more history of the 30s.

I also read and fell in love with Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique, coming from Riverhead Books in July. It’s one of those books that you become so absorbed in reading, that it feels like coming up from underwater when you have to close the book. It follows three generations of a U.S. Virgin Islands family from 1916 to the 1970s. Two sisters prospects are shattered after the death of their father, ship captain Owen Bradshaw, and unknown to them, their father left behind a half brother. Both are unusually beautiful, but and their brother has inherited the family good looks. The novel mixes magical realism with more realistic descriptions of how the island changes as American tourism–and American racism–upends the traditions they’ve held dear. This is Yanique’s debut novel and marks a fresh, new voice to look forward to reading.

I also greatly enjoyed reading Valerie Luiselli’s essay collection Sidewalks, out now from wonderful Coffee House Press. Luiselli gloriously investigates cities in a series of essays that use the small, undocumented moments in an urban area to explore larger ideas. How does one translate a supposedly untranslatable world, like the Portuguese word saudade, which is somewhere between homesickness and longing? She slowly walks you through her ideas, like someone exploring a neighborhood. Here’s the bodega that sells sodas cheap, here’s a relingos, or an urban abscence, a pocket of nothingness in an otherwise filled space. She writes elegantly, with precision, and with a deep intellect that hopefully will not go unnoticed much longer.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman seems at first to be a sort of picaresque, with the protagonist, a plucky woman named Tooley, recalling her eccentric international upbringing and how she settled as an adult in a bookshop in Wales. But as the novel progresses, reality begins to intrude. Tooley had imagined herself as the quirky protagonist with a life full of adventure and intrigue. But the adventure was largely imaginary, and the reality is far less charming. By the end of the novel, we realize that her emotionally helpless father surrendered her to a narcissistic mother, who used her as a pawn to gain the attentions of a sociopathic con artist. The only people who have truly loved her and stood by her have been the ones she took for granted and those manipulated for her own means.

I’ve casually enjoyed reading Charles Dickens over the years and realized that I hadn’t read Great Expectations, one of his purported best books. For some reason though, I feel like I can’t really write a review. With books of this caliber, it feels more like a book report or essay I might have written in high school, something wooden with ridiculous metaphors and large words to prove how smart I am. Instead, I thought I’d give you some of my observations, things that occurred to me when discussing this book with others. For a much better essay in Dickens, read this essay by one of my literary heroes and neighbors Jill Lepore from The New Yorker.

Pip comes off as somewhat of a dick for much of the book. Yes, Dickens often makes his characters behave in a way that seems off putting before they have some sort of comeuppance, but in this instance, Pip is an asshole through most of the book. His comeuppance makes him only slightly better in my opinion.

What the hell is up with Estella? I realize that Miss Havisham is completely batshit, but Estella seems like a cardboard cutout. And don’t get me started with Miss Havisham!

Poor Joe and Biddy. Pip treats them like crap. You can tell Pip cares about Joe, but only so much as it affects his fortune. Even after the big reveal and comeuppance, he thinks he “settle” by marrying Biddy. Hah! Too late Pip! That ship has sailed!

Most of the rest of the cast were okay. I liked the Pocket family especially. Even with all of my issues with characters, the book kept my attention. Maybe it’s time I read David Copperfield….

The atmospheric setting of Lawrence Osborne’s novel The Ballad of a Small Player threatens to overwhelm this small novel, but it also sets the tone for this ghostly tale. The baccarat tables of Macau, in an unspecified time period, are the backdrop to this tale of a corrupt English lawyer, who has fled here after embezzling money from an elderly English woman. Known only as Lord Doyle amongst the casinos in Macau, he plays the table wearing yellow gloves, and loses and gains money steadily with aplomb. After all, “everyone knows you’re not a real player until you secretly prefer losing,” according to Doyle. On the first night we meet him, he loses a few hands and then ends up back in a hotel room with a call girl named Dao-Ming. By morning she’s gone. In a moment of foreshadowing, Osborne writes “although the city is a reef where the confused fish never meet twice unless a goddess intervenes, intervene she does sometimes.”

There is an explanation of baccarat, which might help the reader understand the game, but it’s one of those things you only understand unless you try playing, I think. Because there is almost no skill involved–it’s all luck after all–and it tends to be high stakes, the game can get player’s adrenaline rushing. But playing with a cool head will increase your odds, especially if you pit yourself against Luck and not the other players, according to Doyle. When he loses badly to a woman the casino workers call Grandma, the wife of a wealthy property developer, he can’t afford to pay for his hotel and flees, contemplating ending it all by jumping off a boat. His apathy doesn’t even allow him to this choice. At a breakfast buffet that he has no money to pay for, Doyle is recused by the appearance of Dao-Ming, who pays for his meal and bring him home to recuperate. They fall into a pattern of eating and lovemaking until one day he wakes up and she’s gone. There’s a box of money however that he uses to return to the mainland.

From here, the story becomes even more dream-like and supernatural. Will Doyle’s addiction get the better of him? I found the book electrifying and ambiguous. The book finishes without answers exactly, perhaps mimicking what I imagine it’s like to play a baccarat game. This slim novel packs a wonderful jolt.

Until I read this book, when I thought of Indonesia, I thought of Homer Simpson given a free copy of a news magazine: “Look at me, I’m reading the Economist! Did you know that Indonesia’s at a crossroads? It is!” That, and maybe something about the East Timor conflict. That’s part of Indonesia, right? (Was part of Indonesia.)

That is to say, Elizabeth Pisani has picked a topic that a lot of Americans don’t really know much about. It’s a shame we don’t, but it’s great for her and it makes her new book Indonesia, Etc. fascinating at almost every page.

Indonesia consists of thousands of islands, dozens of cultures, dozens of languages… what holds it together? Pisani travels around the country speaking with imams and prostitutes, bus drivers and fishermen, farmers and hunter-gatherers, politicians and voters and non-voters alike. And while she knows that no book, no lifetime, could ever really capture everything that Indonesia is, she gives her readers a great introduction to a nation that she obviously loves dearly.

The book opens with a visit, in 1991, in Sumba. A child in a small village invites Elizabeth to tea with her auntie. It turns out that the auntie has recently died, and she’s being invited to a wake and traditional tribal funeral ceremony. 20 years later, she revisits the village. On her blog, there’s a slideshow of those visits, and… let’s just say you need to look at them, then buy the book, and then maybe visit Indonesia.

Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel An Unnecessary Woman is a book about nothing and about everything. By which I mean to say, there’s not much to the plot but there’s so very much to the narrator, 72-year-old Aaliya Saleh, who lives alone in her Beirut apartment surrounded by her books. She used to run a bookstore and now, on the first of each year, she begins a new translation of a novel into classical Arabic, which she then packs away for posterity. She has strict rules about what she will translate because of course she has very particular reading tastes. While the world goes on around her, she insulates herself in her apartment and fends off her ex-inlaws who think they deserve the apartment. She refers to the bad times in Beirut, which she spent reading Calvino by candlelight, and the AK she bought to help protect herself. The entire novel is Aaliyah’s ruminating on her past, the country’s past, and her tentative future.

She is the singular lead character that I can recall to capture my attention for so long with just her musings. Indeed, this awesome cranky heroine grabs your attention from the beginning. Wherever Aaliya wants to lead me, I’m willing to follow. This almost perfect novel delighted me from page one all the way through the end and will be a volume I cherish for years to come.

When I was younger, I fell in love with the original versions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. They were the opposite of the cloying and soporific Disney versions, with twisted darkness that appealed to me at the time. Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed reading Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, which reminded me of not just reading those tales, but that time of my life when I was young and trying to figure out my way in the world.

Set in the 1950s, the novel draws its title from the three main characters. The main narrator is Boy Novak, the daughter of an abusive father that we only know as the Ratcatcher. After he tries to feed her face to the rats he keeps in the basement, she flees to a small town in Massachusetts and tries on different jobs much as one might a change of clothes. Eventually she falls in love with a jeweler, Arturo Whitman, and his bewitching daughter Snow. But when Boy and Arturo have a daughter named  Bird, the Whitman family’s long-held secret is revealed: they are light-skinned African Americans who have been “passing” as white. To keep their secret, they’ve been marrying light-skinned or white people and sending away any offspring that might disprove the myth of whiteness, including Arturo’s sister Clara. The Whitman family expects Arturo and Boy to send Bird to be raised by Clara,  but instead she sends Snow.

Bird grows up mostly being ignored by her extended family. Her sister Snow was the beloved child, after all. Eventually Bird gets to know her sister through letters and learns that Snow’s life has had its own set of challenges. The entire novel echoes with myths and fairy tales. What is it like to think you’re white until someone tells you you’re not? Is Boy the wicked stepmother or someone trying to break the curse? Who is the fairest person looking in the mirror? This simple seeming story gets quite complicated as questions of identity arise and some appearances that you took for granted turn out not to be quite what they seem. As the charm spell wears off Boy, she begins to realize that spells only work if you believe in them and that is when she decides to change the ending of the fairy tale.