AJ Dunn Reads

  Four Past Midnight By Stephen King   A collection of four long form stories. In "The Langoliers" a plane leaves California bound for Boston and experiences as time shift. Several sleeping passenegrs wake to find everyone else has disappeared, leaving behind bits and pieces of their belongings. Those who wake must figure out how to land the plane, and what they discover when they do is horrifying. They have to get back to their own time in one piece. In "Secret Window, Secret Garden" a divorced writer is menaced by a man claiming the writer plagiarized his story and he wants the writer to admit it. When Mort, the writer, goes about proving the story was his own, a series of calamities is visited on those he knows, with the visitor appearing to be hell bent on being right. Mort's mind starts reeling with who the visitor really is. In "The Library Policeman" Sam Peebles borrows a couple of books from the library to use in giving a speech. When he fails ...

  Young Mungo By Douglas Stuart   I loved this book! Young Mungo follows Mungo, a young boy from Glasgow whose alcoholic mother is often MIA, leaving him with his sister Jodie who acts like more of a mother to him. At the beginning we get the idea that Mungo has done something wrong, leading into what presaged that information. Mungo lives in a tough world full of tough men, where there isn't much to do or to look forward to. His older brother Hamish is somewhat of a gang leader and wants Mungo, who is much softer, to toughen up and be more like him: a MAN. Mungo meets James, a Catholic (whereas Mungo is a Protestant) who lives behind him and raises pigeons he shows for prizes and glory. With James Mungo explores his sexuality, which both of them have to hide for fear of the men in their lives. James, a year older than Mungo, wants to get away and is making a plan to do so. As the two become inseparable, navigating this sexual awakening in the awkward ways of youth, Mungo dec...

  The Widow By Fiona Barton   This was my first experience with Barton and it wasn't the greatest. The Widow follows a woman named Jean whose husband is accused of kidnapping and murdering a little girl. Jean, unable to have children herself, longs for a child and throughout the story we are teased into thinking maybe she had something to do with the girl's disappearance. But the story plays out exactly as you would expect, and that enticing tidbit is left off the table. Instead we follow the rote procedural of a detective obsessed with the case and a journalist who wants the inside scoop and talks her way into Jean's life in order to get it. There are other suspects, but the overall feeling of this book is predictability. We know who did it. There is no major twist. I found Jean to be a milksop and not at all the type of woman I expect in a book published in 2016. She was easily led, bullied by her husband, and I was sick of her after a couple of chapters. There were so m...

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit By Jeanette Winterson   This is a coming of age autofiction novel about a young, rebellious girl who is adopted into a religious family and has to reconcile her love for God and her northern England community with her budding sexuality as a lesbian. Winterson's prose is quick and witty, her characterizations vivid and alive. It was a book I wanted to keep reading, full of humor and a comedic angst that was compelling. An easy 4 stars.

  Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy   Blood Meridian loosely follows a fourteen year old nicknamed The Kid as he joins a gang on the hunt for Indian scalps in the 1850s on the Texas-Mexico border. This is a very graphic and depraved look at the morals this group of men lacked on their bloodthirsty quest to make money from the heads of those they deemed to be less than human. In so doing, their own lack of humanity is on full display with McCarthy's mastery of prose. It is a sick and twisted narrative elevated through amazing writing. The setting is bleak and nightmarish with despicable characters, some based on real people, who engage in the grossest displays of evil with no remorse. One of the most vivid and memorable of these characters is a man called the Judge, who seems like a devil creature who is the decider (the judge) of what is allowed to exist and what is not, as he spends his time between massacres drawing and cataloguing the things he sees. He is the ultimate dec...

  The Diary of a Young Girl By Anne Frank   This was my first time reading Anne Frank's diary. I don't know what I expected, but Anne was far more intelligent, witty, and observant than I ever would have expected a thirteen year old to be. Her observations and descriptions of herself, her surroundings, the war, and the people in the annex were incredibly astute, often gut-wrenching, and always honest. Her self-awareness and self-consciousness were amazing for someone her age. The Diary follows Anne from her birthday on June 12, 1942 when she received her diary as a birthday present from her father through to her time in the annex with her parents. her sister Margot, the Van Pels family, and Albert Dussel up until they were all discovered by the gestapo. Anne recounts the difficulties of living in secret for such a long period of time (2 years) with people in such close quarters. She also tells us about their helpers, heroic non-Jews who helped to keep them hidden and to provi...

  The Netanyahus By Joshua Cohen   After The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer this year I was keen to read it to find out if I thought it was worthy. Spoiler alert: I did! Ruben Blum is a history professor at Corbin College in western New York state, a recent transplant from New York City with his wife and daughter. Ruben is the only Jew in town that he knows of, and certainly the only Jew at Corbin. As such, it seems, he is asked to host a prospective employee arriving soon to be interviewed to teach another history course (like Ruben). The interviewee is another Jew, Ben Zion Netanyahu. Ruben delves into any information he can find on this interviewee and receives letters both for and against Netanyahu. Beforehand, we learn about Ruben's home life and his anxieties about his job. He is uneasy in both realms; his wife and daughter are adjusting to life outside of the city and visits from both Ruben's and his wife's parents comically bring everyone's feelings about it to li...

  Outline By Rachel Cusk Outline tells the story of Faye, a writer staying in a rented apartment in Athens while teaching a writing workshop. On the way she gets into a conevrsation with one of her seatmates, learning deep things about his failed marriages, and the two reconnect after landing. She goes on boat trips with him where he eventually professes attraction toward her, an attraction she does not reciprocate, thus ending, for her, their friendship. During her stay she hears stories told by her students, stories from friends in Athens, and stories from strangers. She hears all about their lives; their anxieties, fantasies, regrets, longings, and ideas. Through their stories we learn about what she thinks of the shape of her own life after a divorce of her own, now living as a single mother. We learn through these stories the great loss she has suffered and how she will define herself as a result, how she will learn to redraw herself in her new reality. She must rely on herse...

  The People in the Trees By Hanya Yanagihara   In 1950, a young doctor named Norton Perina goes on an expedition to a Micronesian island with two other scientists where they are brought deep into the jungle in search of a lost tribe who have members who have achieved a semblance of immortality. While there, Perina discovers the cause of the affliction which, though keeps the tribe members from aging, it also takes away their mental capacities. Perina brings back the anti-aging source and some of the afflicted tribe members, subjecting them to a lifetime of tests. When the scientific community learns of Perina's discovery they race to the island in conquest and competition, destroying the island and its inhabitants in the process. But alongside this story is Perina's imprisonment after the fact. After his first return trip to the island Norton began adopting island children, eventually over many years he is accused by one or two of sexual abuse. Perina recounts one of the accu...