Can this seed fall on good ground and bear fruit?

Now that I've read Octavia Butler's biography it was time to read one of her books and I chose Parable of the Sower.

I've been aware of Butler's name for years, which is why I read her biography. I have not been a science fiction fan since my twenties, however, which is why I'd never read one of her novels. The science fiction I once read tended to feature space and science: The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Martian Chronicles, The Andromeda Strain. Butler, based on this title, is up to something else.

The first person narrator, 15-year old Lauren Olamina, begins telling her story on July 20, 2024. (The book was published in 1993 and the entries are dated.) She lives in a walled community north of Los Angeles with her father, who is a minister and the community's leader, her step-mother, and brothers. Lauren is hyperempathetic; if someone nearby is injured she literally feels the pain.

Civil society is collapsing. A new drug has blighted the country. People who take it, "burners," shave their hair, paint themselves garish colors, and start fires. Fire for these addicts is better than sex. The police are indifferent or corrupt or, like the firemen, want to be paid before they'll help. Rival gangs war one each other and anyone foolish enough to cross them. Stores and businesses that can afford armed security guards survive; those that can't don't. America is becoming a country of all against all.

Halfway through the book as Lauren's life becomes grimmer and grimmer the compound's walls are breached and burners pour through burning and slaughtering indiscriminately followed by scavengers who steal whatever they can. Lauren and two neighbors escape. The second half of the novel is the story of their perilous trek north.

A number of things struck me about the book. Butler is black and Lauren is black; she has to be careful traveling with a white companion and in fact passes as a man. Butler wrote when crack cocaine was plaguing the country. Lauren does not like or trust the police (with good reason). Although society is collapsing, radio stations still broadcast and ammunition for weapons is still available (and a good thing).

Also, a major thread in the book is Lauren's thoughts about God and development of a religion. "God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God, There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for yo or take revenge for you."

I don't know what I expected when I opened the book. I was impressed by Butler's imagination and inventiveness and I'm delighted I finally read it.

Six hundred seventy pages of wonderful

The thing is 670 pages. Okay, it was a 2025 Man Booker Prize finalist, but do I want to spend three weeks of my reading time on two young people "whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years"? Do you? After all, the world is filled with shorter novels waiting to be read. Nevertheless, I gave it 50 pages to see how it goes.

Three weeks and 670 pages later I closed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai in awe of her talent and thankful I'd decided to read this, her third novel. (Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.)

It would be nice to offer a unique, penetrating, adequate comment but I cannot improve on the words of others. Author Andrew Sean Greer wrote, "[It] achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough,” 

And author Lauren Groff wrote, "Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to love in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world."

The novel needs all those pages to hold all the characters: Sonia's parents, Sunny's mother, their servants (including the cook the mothers compete for), relatives, eavesdroppers Sonia's lover, Sunny's lover, Sunny's best friend. Yet even with all the characters and the unfamiliar Indian names and Indian dishes, one should have no difficulty knowing who was who and the food is clearly food.

We watch daily life in upper class Indian life, Indian customs and cuisine, and more and more. The action takes takes us Vermont, New York City, Delhi, Allahabad, Goa (what do you know about life in Goa?), Venice, Mexico. 

And in addition to conjuring up a wealth (a plethora?) of characters, Desai puts them in a recognizable historical reality. The older characters remember Partition; we watch the contemporary ones experience anti-Muslim pogroms and 9/11.

Desai is also able to weave in interesting, apt observation, almost philosophical tidbits that illustrate a character or a situation. Here for example are Sonia's thoughts about death: "It was worth believing in an impossible story of God, so when death occurred and the impossible happened, you already believed that anything could be true, and if you believed in heaven, you would be much less sad. So many reason to be religious."

I hope that by writing about the length of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I have not discouraged potential readers. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's about Indians. Yes, it requires a commitment. And yes, it is an exceptional book.

It's not a book for claustrophobes

Nevada Barr was a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service when in the early 1990s she created Anna Pigeon, a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service who finds herself embroiled in crimes in America's national parks.The first Anna Pigeon mystery, The Track of the Cat, was published in 1993. The most recent, Boar Island, the 19th, was published in 2016.

She published her first book, Bittersweet, in 1983 when she was 31. She describes it as “a kind of ‘cowboy’ book because I'd grown up on westerns and loved those; it had a female hero and was a bit uneven," Unfortunately, “The publishing house really didn't know what to do with it. A neo-gothic lesbian western? I think it sold 1200 copies and then went out of print.” But after Bittersweet, Barr sold nothing for ten years. “I'd written a lot of stuff,  but it just wasn't selling.”

At the time she was living in Minneapolis, and says she actually made a pretty decent living there doing voice-overs. industrial training films, and an occasional play. She liked Minneapolis—“but it was just too cold!” Moreover, “I wasn't going to go any further. I was 37 years old, and you know men can kind of slide into the old silver fox thing, but women just start to lose work. I also was getting tired of it, and I became very interested in the environmental movement. The Park Service seemed like a really neat way to segue out of acting because I could do it during the summers and still make a living as an actor during the winters.” She quit acting entirely and entered the Park Service full time when she was 40. Anna Pigeon was a natural result.

Although Track of the Cat was a prize-winner and led to a contract for more books, I did not care for it, feeling that it has many flaws of a first book—although it was not one. 

On the other hand, I cannot recommend highly enough Blind Descent, the sixth book in the series by which time Barr was fully in control of the characters, the situation, and the environment, which is almost a character itself.

Anna is dispatched to Carlsbad Caverns National Park when her close friend and fellow ranger, Frieda Dierkz, is severely injured while exploring the treacherous, labyrinthine depths of Lechuguilla Cave (which is a real place). Battling her claustrophobia, Anna fights her terror and joins the rescue mission.The After hours of squeezing through narrow wormholes and crawling through inky blackness, Anna reaches her injured friend. In a fleeting moment of lucidity, Frieda whispers a warning: her fall was no accident.

Before the team can successfully extract her, however, a second incident results in Frieda's death and nearly kills Anna as well. She realizes a killer is underground with them, although why is just one mystery among several. Anna is, in effect, in a "closed-room" murder mystery deep beneath the earth. As the survivors return to the surface, Anna has to unravel a web of complicated relationships, shady business practices, and park politics to identify the murderer.

I think the book succeeds because Barr is able to evoke the absolute blackness, the absolute strangeness of a cave. She describes in detail the equipment cavers must use to descend 150 feet into the darkness—and climb back out. The motive for the murder makes sense to me as does the identity of the killer, which is not always the case. If Nevada Barr is a new name to you, and if you read mysteries, I recommend Blind Descent.