AJ Dunn Reads

  Defending Jacob By William Landay   A fourteen-year-old boy is murdered in a park in a wealthy town and the main suspect is a school mate named Jacob Barber. In Defending Jacob , the narrative follows the cross examination of Jacob's father, Andy, an Assistant DA who assigned himself the initial investigation, unaware that his son would end up as the prime suspect. Andy narrates and tells the story of the murder and all that follows. Andy and his wife Laurie don't want to believe that their son could be capable of murder, but slowly it is revealed that Jacob has underlying social and personality disorders that place doubt in their minds. On top of that, Andy finds out that he and Jacob may both have a propensity for violence. Andy has spent his life denying his father's existence, a man who is in jail for a violent crime, as well as his family's history of abuse and violence. As the story unfolds through narrative and a court proceedings transcript where Andy is being...

  How We Fight for Our Lives By Saeed Jones This memoir traces Saeed Jones's journey from being a young closeted boy knowing he is gay and attracted to men to his coming out experience with his single mother and beyond her death. It is a riveting and unflinching portrait of what it is like to know who you are as a young queer black man having to hide those parts of yourself that make you who you are. This memoir explores what it means to be young and gay when you have nowhere to turn for answers to your questions, which leads you into sketchy, even dangerous, situations in the quest to connect to others like yourself in your search for touch, closeness, and love. It also explores the ways in which closeted queer youth make themselves numb to violence, and how they (we) turn ourselves into perpetrators of violence or danger out of self-preservation. I could relate to this book on a soul level. I've lived some of these experiences and could picture myself in the others, acting in...

  The Sea, the Sea By Iris Murdoch Charles Arrowby, a once-famous theater director has retired from London to a house by the sea, intending to work on a book about his past love and actress Clement. Once there he is beset by a cadre of past flings, one he scorned, most he strung along, and most he seems to have used to amuse himself.  And then he sees the love of his life, a woman he was in love with in his youth named Hartley, who is living in the same small town with her husband. Charles, believing his love for her never dwindled, intends to reunite with her and to be with her no matter what. He acts horribly and selfishly to keep Hartley with him against her will. She protests many times that she doesn't want to be with him. Several other theater friends make appearances, adding to the disarray. Titus, Hartley and her husband's adopted son, also shows up on Charles's doorstep, adding to his master plans of winning Hartley over to get her to leave her husband. Of course, ...

  Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories By Mariana Enriquez Things We Lost in the Fire is a collection of short stories set in post-dictatorship Argentina. Through social criticism, they explore the boundaries of a return to democracy, economic instability, poverty, drugs, violence against women, and criminal pollution through the horror lens. These stories takes place on the borders of the comfortable and the vulnerable. They are sinister and dark alongside the mundanity of everyday life. Argentine history and culture are explored in this horror mostly realistic, though sometimes with hints of the supernatural. Like most horror, the scariest parts are those perpetuated by humanity where the known becomes the unknown. This is a string collection and exposed me to a part of the world I never think about. The writing is confident with a palpable sense of anxiety on every page. The characters sometimes appear peripherally in other stories besides those they featured in, in unexpected a...

  Hotel Du Lac By Anita Brookner Edith Hope, a romance novelist, has been exiled temporarily by her friends to the Hotel du Lac after an affair with a married man which led to her leaving her own fiancé at the altar. At the hotel Edith is expected think about her life, her actions, and to work on her current novel. While their, instead of working on her novel, Edith spends her time moping, interrogating the other guests (mostly women), and composing letters that she will not send to David, the object of her infidelities. Slowly, she is drawn into acquaintance with these women who bluntly, sometimes cruelly it seems, tell her what kind of woman she appears to be, demeaning her looks and clothing, yet wanting her attention. In their company Edith seems to come around, to begin to liven up. Then one of the guests, a Mr. Neville whom all of the women seem to fancy in one way or another, makes Edith an absurd proposal of marriage out of the blue. He claims he can make her the kind of wo...

 The Sign of the Four By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Sign of the Four (1890) is the second Sherlock Holmes story in The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson continue to live together and at the beginning of this story we learn that Homes is addicted to cocaine, which he shoots into his veins. Watson also alludes to Holmes's use of morphine. Holmes claims that when he is not working on a case he uses these drugs to stimulate his mind. Watson is clearly upset by this fact. Then a woman named Mary Morston shows up asking for Holmes's help in figuring out the mystery of her missing father, who has been gone for ten years. She states that she was supposed to meet her father at a hotel but he never appeared after having gone out the previous night. Her father's friend (Sholto) claimed not to know he had returned. Then Mary starts receiving single pearls in the mail, the last accompanied by a letter telling her she had been wronged and requesting a meeting with...

  Native Son By Richard Wright Bigger Thomas lives in a one room tenement flat in 1930s Chicago with his mother, younger sister, and younger brother. The family has been removed from the social welfare program and will not have an income if Bigger does not take a job with the wealthy Dalton family that has been offered to him, his name given to Mr. Dalton from the welfare office. Bigger would much rather pal around with his friends Jack, G.H., and Gus, hanging out at theaters and pool halls or planning and perpetuating petty crimes. But he takes the job to keep his family from starving. Among the other black people in his segregated neighborhood, Bigger acts like a tough guy, often bullying his siblings and his friends. He is afraid of appearing weak and he takes his fear out on others. He believes that the whites do not care about black people committing crimes against other black people, but if he did the same things to whites he would find himself in a world of hurt. Once Bigger...

 The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three By Stephen King In this second installment of The Dark Tower series, Roland wakes on the beach just hours after the events in The Gunslinger . In search of the Tower, he has to draw three doors open, and "three" people to become gunslingers to aid him on his quest. Through the first door, marked The Prisoner, he find Eddie Dean, a junkie on an airplane moving cocaine into the US where he is supposed to deliver it to a crime boss. Roland enters Eddie's mind and is even able to control Eddie's body if he needs to. But Roland is sick and needs Eddie's help. When the two come to understand what is happening, they agree to help one another. Roland helps Eddie navigate the crime boss when Eddie fails to show up with the drugs because he was detained by Customs officials when he was acting suspiciously on the plane. In return, Eddie helps Roland with some medicine. When events do not go as smoothly as they would like, Eddie h...

The Mirror & the Light By Hilary Mantel In the final installment of the Wolf Hall/Thomas Cromwell trilogy, we follow Thomas Cromwell's final year. He attains his highest position as Earl of Essex, but his downfall is imminent as his enemies find new purchase and surround him. Anne Boleyn is dead and Cromwell carries on with his and Henry's agendas, which usually align, but not always. Cromwell has plans for England. He works hard to make religion accessible to everyone and to have justice and equality become the law of the land. He has his work cut out for him because now his enemies, who helped him free Henry from his marriage, want their rewards. Mary is reunited with Henry after Cromwell makes her swear obedience. Henry becomes sovereign over the church and requires all nobles in his family to have his blessing in their marriages. A rebellion rocks England, but is soon squelched, with all of its leaders executed. The Duke of Norfolk, Cromwell's great enemy, looks to ...

  Swimming Lessons By Claire Fuller In 1979, Ingrid meets and falls in love with her writing teacher, Gil. The two are driven from the school because of their affair; Gil is fired and Ingrid is told she can not finish her degree because she is pregnant. Ingrid moves in with Gil and their hippy life of partying is interrupted as Ingrid faces the reality of becoming a mother and Gil's lack of producing any writing that can support them. The couple slowly come apart after Nan is born and the two try unsuccessfully to have more babies. But they are both harboring secrets. Gil is having affairs in his writing room behind the house (called the Swimming Pavilion), while Ingrid secretly hides the fact that she doesn't feel any sort of love for her child, and doesn't believe she ever will. During one pregnancy, a boy is born and does not live, but he is the one child Ingrid feel a strong motherly bond with. Afterward, she never does again, despite the birth of Flora some time later....

  Ceremony By Leslie Marmon Silko Tayo is an Indigenous Laguna man. After he returns from being held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese in WWII, without his cousin with whom he enlisted, Tayo struggles with PTSD. He grew up with his aunt after his mother left him there as a child. Tayo is half-white and has always felt estranged from his family and community, but this feeling is heightened after the war. He feels an emptiness in the alcohol and violence the other Laguna war veterans take solace in. Tayo even spends some time in a psychiatric hospital because of his fear and delusions of being in the war. His is grandmother sets him up with a shaman to perform a ceremony to help him. The quote below sums up the story and its messages perfectly. It is quoted from a review by Yelisa Leiva at Foggy Pine Books. https://www.foggypinebooks.com/reviews/ceremony-book-review#/ "Tayo must return to his roots to recover from not only the war he had fought in, but the war within him...

  Apartment By Teddy Wayne In Apartment , an unnamed narrator who is in an MFA writing program at Columbia University paid for by his father, struggles to connect with his classmates who tear apart his stories. Billy, a young man in his class, is the only person who champions the narrator's work, speaking up for him. The narrator, grateful for the positive feedback, befriends Billy, hanging out with him at the bar he tends. The two find an easy friendship, and it becomes obvious that the narrator begins to idolize Billy. When the narrator finds that Billy, who is from the Midwest and does not have a lot of money living in New York City, is sleeping in a backroom at the bar he asks Billy to move in to his apartment with him. He is illegally subletting his great-aunt's apartment, with an opportunity to eventually become the lease holder of it. The two men create an agreement for Billy to cook and clean periodically in order to earn his keep, at Billy's suggestion. After Billy...

  Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston This is the story of Janie, who has returned to the town where she spent most of her adult life after leaving it to find herself and her own true freedom and happiness. Janie is telling her life story to her friend Pheoby, who she instructs to go and tell it to everyone she had passed on her way into town who asked her where she had been, thinking she was so high and mighty. Janie recounts how she was pushed into marriage by her grandmother who wanted Janie to have all of the freedoms she never did.  But Janie is told to marry a man she didn't, and couldn't, love until one day she meets a man she finds extremely handsome and charismatic. She leaves her husband and follows this man (Joe Stark) to a new place where he becomes an influential person, raising Janie's life up to great financial heights compared to the others in the community. However, her life with Joe proves unsatisfying because Joe wants to keep her apart fro...