Joyland by Stephen King

Devin just went through a bad breakup, and to get away, he takes a summer job at a carnival named Joyland. It is located along the coastline of North Carolina and is run by a strange old man who embodies much of an old-style carnie era.

Devin shares a room with a veteran worker, in his late 50’s, that knows some of the secrets of the area, but even so he can’t explain why so many young women have turned up missing around Joyland.  One murder still lingers as the ghost of Linda Gray, who was thrown from a car on the tracks that ran through the tunnel of love.

Yes, the park is haunted, and Linda even shows up in photographs.  Devin finds the ghost mystery to be a good distraction from the girl he left behind, and really tries to get to the bottom of what happened with Linda Gray’s murder.

He learns the trade mojo from some carnie masters and eventually he finds a new relationship with a worldly older woman. He excels as he cheers up the kids posing as a huge fury dog.

The loss of the old-time carnie style is one focus that King weaves into this novel. The manipulation of wiling customers seems to be sincere and honest because of the old established rules of the game. The comparison to the Disney approach is obvious. King may have used the changes in this industry to be symbolic of the changes form old style pulp fiction approaches to writing?

 Eventually the villain is unmasked, and o yes there are evil clowns.

Quotes by Stephen King

"When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

"We stopped checking for monsters under the bed when we realized they were inside of us"

"Nobody likes a clown a midnight".

Joyland (Hard Case Crime)

By Stephen King

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Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen introduces his book, Hatchet, saying: “Hatchet came from the darkest part of my childhood. I don’t think I ever realized that before. But now, as we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s publication, it is what I see the most clearly. The three most important parts of my life are reading, the woods, and writing and they came together in Hatchet”.

Brian Robeson was a 13-year-old city boy when he spends two months alone in the Canadian wilderness. He was on the way to spend time with his father in a Cessna 406 as the only passenger. The pilot did show him how to steer but then had a heart attack and died.  Brian spends hours steering the plane and trying to determine what to do.  He eventually crashes, and the plane sinks into a lake in a remote forested area. His mother had given him a hatchet before he left, and he had attached it to his belt. It was the only thing he had other than the clothes on his back after the crash.

It is a survival story where he builds a shelter and learns, through trial and error, how to find food, build a fire, and much more. His way of looking at what is around him and how to face the challenges, by learning from his mistakes, are the big lessons that the story teaches. 

The plane had crashed through the forest and sunk into the lake but almost two months later, after a tornado hit it the lake, the plane surfaced with its tail sticking out of the water. He has mixed feelings when it happened.  He knew he needed to get into the plane and find a survival pack, but he also knew that somehow this would change who he had become. It would help, but that very help would reduce his reliance on what he had learned from the environment.  He recovers the survival kit from the plane and faces much more than he expected in the plane.  The survival kit contains a "Emergency Transmitter” which appears to not work but even, so it is switched on.  Even before he can prepare a meal from the freeze-dried banquet, a plane who has heard the transmitter lands on the lake to rescue him.

The experience taught him many lessons. Waiting, thinking and doing things right was a critical lesson as was knowing that feeling sorry for yourself doesn’t help.  

His rescue came 54 days after the plane had gone down.

Quotes about Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

“the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.” 

“Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.” 

“Not hope that he would be rescued--that was gone. But hope in his knowledge. Hope in the fact that he could learn and survive and take care of himself. Tough hope, he thought that night. I am full of though hope.” 

Hatchet

By Gary Paulsen

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Thinking in Pictures, My Life With Autism, by Temple Grandin

Dr. Temple Grandin is a well-known professor of animal behaviors at Colorado State University. She describes her autistic mind as one that does not think in words like most people. She says it is like a video library where memory is stored in pictures that she can retrieve as images, from her own memory, and even combine and reshape them

Rather than using social skills, she relies on logic and rules she has learned along the way to guide her behavior. Because human’s relationships have been challenging she has especially enjoyed, and made major findings by using her unique empathy, working with animals. She especially loves working with cows and originally this book was going to be titled “A Cow’s Eye View” instead of “Thinking in Pictures”.  Cows move from yard to yard and to truck by chutes. She found that a squeeze machine calmed the cows and then learned that it worked for her, so she made one that she uses daily to calm herself. This approach has revolutionized the livestock business, and today almost half of the cattle in North America are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed.

Grandin’s goal has been to improve animal welfare and “Thinking in Pictures” has been, for her, a key to doing just that. The information she shares about herself gives insight into the value of having the right teachers and thinking past school to a career that will be the “right career niche”.

In 2017, Grandin was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame

Quotes by Temple Grandin

“Children who are visual thinkers will often be good at drawing, other arts, and building things with building toys such as Legos.”

 “I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don’t know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.”

 “My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.

 “I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.” 

Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism

By Temple Grandin

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The Call of The Wild, by Jack London →

FIRST PARAGRAPH: “Buck did not read newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal”

Like most of Jack London’s writing, his own life was as dramatic as the fiction he wrote. The Call of The Wild was an instant sensation from the moment it was released in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush when strong sled doges were the way the work was done.

Buck is the novels main character and he is stolen from his comfortable home in Santa Clara Valley, California. His father was a huge St. Bernard, his mother was a Scotch Shepard dog and he weighed 140 lbs. He is eventually sold as a sled dog in Alaska. He learns fast and is much smarter than the other dogs and many of his handlers. As he learns to fight for survival and dominance he senses his own primeval influences that take him back maybe even the beginning of time. He seems to master the life as a sled dog but the feelings he has for the wild call him and he eventually emerges as a leader in the wild.

London’s story from Buck’s point of view is masterfully done.

The Call of the Wild Quotes

“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.” 

“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.” 

“The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.” 

The Lonely City, Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, by Olivia Laing

First Paragraph: “Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.”

Oliva Laing found herself lonely living in Manhattan as a young woman in her mid-thirties. Her own inability to connect were likely the source for many of her thoughts and they are the points found in the artists and stories she features to explain the isolation and pain of loneliness. She explores their lives and works.

Artists such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and others show the reality of being isolated in a big city. Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks is the focus of a chapter on this artist. Nighthawks is a stand-alone diner, with distinctive rounded corners sitting between tall buildings. Silence itself is a part of the painting and it is reflected inside and out of the dinner. No visible doors and thick glass on the rounded windows suggests that those inside are trapped. The people inside the diner are not talking or looking at each other.

Oliva Laing had ample reason to see in her own experiences as being confirmed by the artists whose stories she used. Maybe more of her own stories would have been useful. 

“Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.” 

"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.” 
―Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The Nighthawk Diner

"Nighthawks was inspired by Hemingway's short story 'The Killers,' which Hopper read in Scribner's magazine

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

By Olivia Laing

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The Autistic Brain, Thinking Across The Spectrum, Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin says of this book, “I will be your guide on a tour of the autistic brain. I am in the unique position to speak about both my experiences with autism and the insights”. “I was fortunate to have been born in 1947. If I had been born ten years later, my life as a person with autism would have been a lot different.”

Grandin was taken to a neurologist by her mother when she noticed the symptoms that we now label as autism. She describes the labels, given to those on the various spectrums, as clumsy system of behavioral profiling and she is critical of the “Autism Spectrum Disorder” conclusions.

She reviews the evolution of causes over the years from 1947 when it was thought that autism was possibly caused by “refrigerator moms” (lack of maternal warmth).  This has evolved and changed, of course, to current thoughts about, “observable neurological and genetic evidence”  and conclusions, including environmental factors, that may be responsible for particular symptoms.

Quotes by Dr. Temple Grandin

 “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality” 
 

“Neuroanatomy isn't destiny. Neither is genetics. They don't define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be.” 
 

The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed

By Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

This is Neil Gaiman’s first fantasy book for children, but adults will quickly be absorbed into the plot. The New York Times Book Review said that is was “One of the most frightening books ever written”. This seems like a pretty bold statement considering the body of scary books available but it is a testimony to Gaiman’s writing skills with this plot.

Coraline Jones and her family’s new home is an old house divided into flats. The space above and below has unusual tenants. The two ladies below them give her a cup of tea and a special piece of wood with a hole that will protect you when you look through the special hole in it. The man above them, Mr. Bobo, has some trained mice that warn Coraline to never go through the door.  She sets out to explore and finds the door. Her mother shows her the special key for the door and they open it, but it has a brick wall behind it.

Eventually she goes back to the door alone and opens it again, only to find a dark hall, which of course she just walks right into. What quickly looks like a very scary situation is met with a matter of fact unquestioning approach, but Coraline tells us that how she needs to act “to be brave”. 

The long hallway leads to a parallel world where she becomes trapped.  Gaiman excels in his descriptive writing of this other world. It is complete with “other parents” who have large button eyes. She learns that her real parents have been stolen and hidden and she finds what is left of three young children who were trapped there and had their souls stolen and hidden. Her cat somehow makes it to this place, but the cat can talk in this world and is a help.  After being locked in a dark closet with the three soulless children she decides to free her parents and to find the lost souls by challenging her not-mother to a contest.

The contest is a life and death struggle but she finally gets back and saves her parents, and the lost children, and they are able to leave on their own. Even safe back in the real world she learns that her other-mother has sent a severed hand to get the door key from her. She eventually overcomes that threat. Her parents seem to pay more attention to her, after all this has happened, but of course they don’t remember what happened to them.

Quotes by Neil Gaiman

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” 

“What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.” 

Coraline

By Neil Gaiman

Love Anthony, A Novel, by Lisa Genova

Anthony had autism from early in his short life and then suddenly died when he was 8 years old. The death and the grief surrounding it was just too much for Olivia and her husband David to deal with and they divorced.

Beth and Jimmy had three daughters and seemed to be a happy family but then Jimmy had an affair and moved out.  Beth withdraws into her own writing and is drawn to a memory of years ago when she was sitting on a beach. She had watched a little boy lining up his rocks up and then watching the tide come in and wash them.  She eventually walked over and placed a rock with his. “He jumps and squeals and flaps his hands, a happy dance.” As she walks away she waves and says with total conviction, “See you later”. The memory of this little boy becomes the basis of the story she writes. As she writes it, the autistic boy can voice his thoughts and feelings through her, and she believes that they are coming from outside of her.

Olivia on her own, after the divorce, turns to photography to earn an living and she hopes it will help her understand why Anthony’s time on earth was so short.

Beth and Olivia meet and Beth, after learning about Olivia’s loss of Anthony, shares the thoughts and feelings of the boy she feels is speaking to her about the story in her book. The boy seems to be allowing her to see his world and it seems like it may have been Anthony’s world. His exuberance for life and intelligence help Olivia and the words really do seem to be inspired by her own son.

Both Beth and Olivia are strengthened through the boys thoughts and they both gain understanding by this.

The plot is simply enough, but as Lisa Genova has done before in her other books, the characters are life like and you feel what they feel

Love Anthony

Lisa Genova Quotes

  

“The spectrum is long and wide, and we’re all on it. Once you believe this, it becomes easy to see how we’re all connected.” 

"We have pills for headaches. We have antidepressants for sadness. We had God for believers. We have nothing for autism.”

 “He said not to worry. But it's there. The worry. I can't help it. It's like telling me not to have brown eyes. I have brown eyes. I'm worried.” 

Love Anthony

By Lisa Genova

The Vegetarian A Novel, by Han Kang

Yeong-hye was several years older than her sister, Kim In-hye. Growing up with an abusive father was harder for Yeong -hye, because she received the brunt of the abuse, and the older sister was expected to keep order in the home.  

The first part of the book is called “The Vegetarian” but the decision about what Yeong-hye would eat came after her marriage. It was clear that her husband didn’t love her, and he said that he always had thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way and was just fine with that.

Yeong-hye had been haunted by dreams of torture and blood for years but after her marriage she believed she was being told to stop eating meat after a series of dreams involving images of animal slaughter. Her husband, sister and brother in law all fought to exert control over her. This abstention from meat lead those around her to extreme measures to change her decision but only resulted in her becoming even further distanced from her family and from society. Her choice and feelings didn’t matter to anyone.

The second part of the story, the “Mongolian Mark”, takes place after the marriage has dissolved and she has gone though nothing but horrible abuse over her Vegetarian choice. She is living alone when her brother in law learns of a special mark on her body that he wants to exploit in his art, and the process ignores her as a person. The effort leads to ending the brother in laws marriage.

In the last section, “The Flaming Trees”, In-hye has committed Yeong-hye to a psychiatric ward and she just refuses to eat. She thinks of herself as a tree and can’t understand why it isn’t ok to die.

The book is a masterpiece presenting a dark life story, that perhaps is allegorical of one women’s attempt to break from the violence she faces both within and without.

The Vegetarian

By Han Kang

Inside the O'Briens, A Novel, by Lisa Genova

First paragraph: “Huntington’s Disease is an inherited neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control and an increase in involuntary movements. Initial physical symptoms may include a loss of balance, reduced dexterity, falling chorea, slurred speech, and difficulty swallowing……..There is no treatment that affects progression and no cure.”

Lisa Genova is an author of several books dealing with debilitating diseases. Joe O’Brien is Irish and a third-generation tough cop who has a good marriage and 4 children. The disease is coming for him and another serious concern is which of the children will it come for and have the gene passed to?

We see the progression and challenges from Joe and his 21 year old daughter perspective. Joe and his wife worry all the children struggle. Their life changes. Relationships, the job, and finances change. Mood swings, suicidal thoughts, and exhaustion are not just part of a story. You feel it, and it is as if this is happening to you and your family.

Understanding of this disease is expanded by this book and the author skillfully brings the challenges of the events and feelings of all involved together to help accomplish that goal

Lisa Genova writes about debilitating diseases. The stories are heartbreaking. You may ask yourself why is the story of value? The value is clearly that you understand what it is like to suffer from these diseases.

Inside the O'Briens Quotes

As they lurch down the hallway and finally make it to the kitchen, it occurs to Joe that this is the best anyone can hope for in life. Someone you love to stagger through the hard times with.” 

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” 

“Fenway seats just over thirty-seven thousand, about the same number of people as have Huntington’s in the United States. Thirty-seven thousand. It’s a faceless number,” 

Inside the O'Briens: A Novel

By Lisa Genova

Time and Again, An illustrated novel, by Jack Finney

Stephen King wrote in the afterword section of his great book 11/22/63 that he had inspiration from Jake Finney, who he says was one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers, saying of “Time and Again”, that in his humble opinion it was THE greatest time travel story.

Simon Morley, a talented sketch artist, is approached in 1970 by U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien to participate in a secret government project to work on a time travel. He agrees and prepares to go back to the 1880’s and spends weeks preparing in the Dakota Apartments in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City.

In the apartment he dresses, eats, and reads newspapers in the style of the New York of 1882. He reaches a point where he just walks out the front door into 1882. He crosses the street into Central Park in a snowstorm where the streets and the park are filled with horse drawn carriages.

He has a mystery about a letter to solve but winds up meeting Julia and with her being very involved in the mystery and a serious fire.  The mystery letter suggests “the destruction by fire of he entire world” and they work to learn what that means.

He brings Julia back, but then he has to decide what to do next?

The Dakota Apartments, is a cooperative apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States.  It has looked just like it does today since back in the 1880's.

Click date linked to Review of Stephen Kings Book Review 11/22/63

FYI Jack Finney also wrote Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Time and Again

By Jack Finney

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

At the peak of her career, Alice Howland, a Harvard Professor and published author is developing early-onset Alzheimer’s a degenerative disease for which there is no cure. Very early in the progression she gets lost when she is out running and at that point still doesn’t know what is coming, but of course more challenges come.

She loses her job as a teacher, and her relationship as a wife and mother changes. At each step in the progression of this disease we feel it with her. We feel her hope and disappointment in the testing and attempts to help her. It is especially interesting to see her prepare for a talk with the Alzheimer’s Association Annual Dementia Care Conference not long before she really fades past being able to do that.

Lisa Genova, is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer’s Association and brings her own experience in dealing with the facts of the disease. The writing is done so well that you feel like you really know more, maybe too much, about the disease. 

Still Alice became a movie in 2014. Alice was played by Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin played her husband

About the Author

Lisa Genova  was born November 22, 1970.  She self-published "Still Alice" in 2007 and as the book became successful Simon & Schuster acquired it.  It was then published in 2009 by Gallary Books and today here are over 2.6+ million copies in print, and it has been translated into 37 languages.

Still Alice

By Lisa Genova

Human Acts A Novel, by Han Kang

First Line: “In early 1980, South Korea was a heap of dry tinder waiting for a spark”

Park Chung-hee had ruled since 1961 but he was assassinated by the director of his own security services. Another army general, Chun Doo-hawn, stepped in and brought martial law that closed universities, banned political activities and further curtailed the press. Riots and protests followed.

During the Gwangiu violent student uprising Dong-ho goes to search for a friend. He then volunteers, much to his family’s concern, to help a team that was entrusted to guard and care for the bodies of the demonstrators who were killed. His job is keeping a ledger, creating a number for each corpse, and helping the bodies be prepared for coffins.  

Dong-ho’s own ultimate death becomes the connection to the rest of the characters, and their stories make up 6 of the 7 chapters of the book.

These chapters cover from 1980 to 2013. The author, Han Kang, brings us a unique understanding the terrible torture, the survivors, the suffering of families broken, and even the feelings and thoughts of spirits who look back after their death. In one chapter we travel with a body to a holding area where it is laid on other bodies in a pile. Even as they are burned, the spirit of the body is telling us of thoughts and feelings, and it appears he is really alive.

Hans own story is told in the last chapter. She was nine years old at the time of the Gwangiu Uprising, but her writing captures it as if she was right there and she talks us there as well.

See Past Review Tab for a great book on North Korea, "Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick"

Human Acts: A Novel

By Han Kang

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Book Review: Beartown, Fredrik Backman

Author Fredrik Backman

FIRST PARAGRAPH: “It is Friday, in early March in Beartown, and nothing has happened yet. Everyone is waiting. Tomorrow, the Beartown Ice Hockey Club’s junior team is playing in the semifinal of the biggest youth tournament in the country. How important can something like this be? In most places, not so important, of course. But Beartown isn’t most places."

This small Sweedish town is located in a forest, near a lake, in the middle of nowhere, where the people are “tough as the forest and hard as the ice.” Everyone knows that it is a Hockey Town.  The boys grow up wanting to play, and the town lives for the games.

To understand what really happened when the coaches daughter is raped before a big game, you have to understand the characters of this story.

The coach, Peter, grew up in the town and was the most successful player they ever had, up to know. He went on to the NFL and came back to be the coach. Sune used to be Peter’s coach and, after 50 years, he is still working at the club. Peter’s wife Kari is not from Beartown and sees things very different than Peter and the locals.

Kevin is the best player the team has had in years, but for Kevin’s dad it is all about winning. For his mother she see’s things very differently, since the big game and the rape.

The book keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end, but the overall story does finally come to a conclusion. I especially appreciated, as part of the ending, learning where many of the characters wind up 10 years later.

I thought Backman’s book “A Man Called Ove” was one that presented deep insight into characters, but this book brings many characters together with even deeper insight for them individually and collectively.

A powerful book and far more than just a hockey sports story, for sure.

See Past Reviews Section for Review of "A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman"

Book Review: And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, a Novella by Fredrik Backman

Backman has brought a unique beauty and intensity of emotion to the words of this moving story. The expressions of feeling suggest poetry and indeed this short story moves in a magical way.

The story is framed around the conditions described so well in the very first paragraph: There is a hospital room at the end of a life where someone, right in the middle of the floor, has pitched a green tent. A person wakes up inside it, breathless and afraid, not knowing where he is. A young man sitting next to him whispers: “Don’t be scared.”

Grandpa’s memories of his grandson Noah are stronger and more detailed than his own son, Ted, but both have to say goodbye to him, even though he lives on in his mind and memories. Those memories take him to special places from his past life and he finds his wife who has passed on. They talk and remember, and she tells him that both he and Ted were given Noah as a bridge between them adding that by spoiling their grandchildren it is a way of apologizing to our children.

The story floats back and forth, from settings and dialog in Grandfathers mind, to those taking place.

Backman offers understanding in a letter to the reader at the beginning of the book. He tells us his greatest fear in growing old is that he would lose his imagination before his body gave up. The story seems to confirm that this isn’t the case.  He calls the book a love letter between a man and his grandson ,and a dad and his boy. He says he never meant for us to read it. I will take him at his word on that, as it is indeed a love letter of recognizable and familiar feelings for all of us.

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer: A Novella

By Fredrik Backman

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