AJ Dunn Reads

  Marilou is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith Cindy Stoat's mother has taken off and left her with her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton. Cindy, 14 years old, often feels abandoned and overlooked, and she longs for a life where she and her choices matter. When Virgil's ex-girlfriend, Jude Vanderjohn, disappears Cindy finds an opportunity for another life. Everyone in town has a theory about Jude and why she disappeared. Some say she ran away, some that she's dead, and others with wild variations in between. Cindy wishes she could disappear as well, into a new life. When she meets Bernadette, Jude's alcoholic mother who is suffering from a memory loss condition, she sees her chance. Inserting herself into Bernadette's life, Cindy takes on Jude's role, becoming her, and leaves home to live with Bernadette. But Cindy isn't doing this for Bernadette. She goes out of her way to make sure the woman stays drunk and confused in order to stay. She starts wearing...

  The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides The Silent Patient follows psychotherapist Theo Faber as he investigates the reasons behind the silence of his famous artist patient, Alicia Berenson, after the murder of her husband. But the story isn't as simple as it seems. Alicia refuses to speak and is being kept heavily sedated in a psychiatric unit. Theo thinks he can help her. He has an intense interest in her case. He conducts private sessions with her and eventually she appears to begin to open up to him, offering him her diary to read, where she details her life in the several weeks prior to her husbands death. She wrote that some man had been watching her house. Then he finds a way to get her her own space ot paint in the hopes she will communicate in that way. And she does, but the message in the resulting image was lost on me until the end. Meanwhile, Theo believes his wife, Kathy, is having an affair. He finds sexual emails between her and an unknown man. Theo decides to foll...

  Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen We all know the basic premise of any Jane Austen novel: the heroin in grand society (a lady, but not necessarily of comparable means to those she interacts with) meets a man and falls for him through a series of misadventures with him, his family, her own family and friends, and society at large. There is the inevitable backdrop of town versus country with a lot of commentary on social manners and settings. All very picturesque and full of Austen's biting wit. Northanger Abbey is no exception. This book, Austen's first real attempt at a novel even though it was last to be published, was originally called Susan. This makes sense when reading the book, in that the bits about the Abbey only appear toward the last third of the book. Mostly the story is about Catherine Morland meeting and falling in love with Henry Tilney when she is on holiday with friends in Bath. Catherine, newly beautiful and feminine, meets Henry and his sister while engaged w...

  The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw "The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions." The quote above is from the back cover of the book and nothing I can say in summary would describe it any better than that. This is a 5-star book, full of incredible voice after incredible voice. The prose is direct and honest, striking right into the minds and hearts of the characters in these stories. Each story in the collection is strong, unapologetic, and unrestrained. They are raw and real, full of sadness, strength, hope, and desire. A real pleasure to read and to immerse yourself in.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow I DNFed this book. I'm going to have to come back to it and try again later on. The writing style was difficult for me to engage with. Maybe it was too hip. The prose utilizes a lot of commas and a lot of hyphenated words that made me lose the thread of the sentence before I got to the end. I'll try again at some point.

  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates The decline of a marriage in post-war suburbia is the subject of Revolutionary Road . It is a story of marriage and selfhood, manhood and womanhood, parents and children, mental illness, conformity, class, and status. Frank and April Wheeler are in a marriage that is mostly surface level and unsatisfying for either partner. April wants to see Frank as an ideal man who is self-possessed and intellectually stimulating, but he falls short of her expectations. Frank wants to be admired by April, and he also wants to control her, which has disastrous results at the end of the book. Their lives are consumed with showing good taste and not giving into the banality they see as suburban life, where everyone is a cookie cutter image of their neighbors, living dull lives, locked into jobs they despise and never being able to be the person they would have been otherwise. Frank and April spend their time together talking about these things, disdaining them ...

  The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt The Last Samurai is a challenging book that plays with the form in a lot of interesting ways. I was not expecting it to take on such an interesting structure nor to be challenged so much with the incredible intelligence of the subject matter. Sybilla is a single mother. She is eccentric and highly intelligent, and this brings some very quirky habits into the story and the form of the book. She has a son (Ludo) after a one night stand with a travel writer. Ludo shows incredible aptitude and intelligence at a young age, and Sybilla tutors him at home on a wide variety of subjects to satiate his appetite for knowledge, including maths, languages, and science. She does this while working at home as a typist for various obscure magazines. As Ludo grows and matures the narration switches from Sybilla's pov to Luca's where we learn that Sybilla is not as forthcoming with information as he would like her to be, specifically when it comes to informati...

  Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett In Pond , an unnamed English woman lives alone in a small cottage in western Ireland where she muses through twenty short stories, which are more like snippets of her solitary life. She talks about bananas and oatcakes, Spanish oranges after sex, taking a bath, the missing knobs on her small oven. The woman focuses on the small things in her life, or simple things that happen to her that her mind takes on tangents, lifting the mundane into the extraordinary. It is not a novel that is easy to classify. The prose is meandering and beautiful, with a touch of the classic style where commas and asides are prevalent. At times it reads like a journal, at others like short story. It is a novel full of atmosphere. And atmosphere is what Bennett herself cites in a discussion with Philip Maughan from The Paris Review in an interview about the book. Bennett talks about solitude as lending itself to atmosphere because being alone is "nullifying, terrifying...

  Different Seasons by Stephen King This is my second time reading Different Seasons ; the first time was more than twenty years ago. A sufficient amount of time to have forgotten completely two of the stories. I only remembered the other two because they are two of the best movies ever made, in my opinion, one my all-time favorite. This short story (novella) collection opens with "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," the story of Andy Dufresne who has been sentenced to life at Shawshank Prison for the murder of his wife and her golf pro lover. The story is told by another inmate, Red, also in for murder. Andy didn't do the crime he was accused of, but Red did. Red and Andy become friendly throughout the course of the story. Red is a man who can get things, and he gets Andy several things, including a rock hammer and a poster of Rita Hayworth. Andy, an ex-banker, works his magic on the guards and wardens of Shawshank by offering his knowledge of taxes and the banking ...