All in Contemporary Fiction

The Great Believers

The Great Believers

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores themes of trauma, lost generations, parenting, death, emotional inheritance, and the repetition of generational struggles as its weaves two stories throughout. One storyline begins with Yale Tishman in Boystown, Chicago circa the mid-1980s as AIDS lays waste to the gay community. The other takes Fiona (who was a very young woman affiliated with Yale’s world in the mid-‘80s) to Paris in search of her missing adult daughter, Claire, in the year 2015.

Go Set A Watchman

Go Set A Watchman

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, The Classics

Last week I listened to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman narrated by Reese Witherspoon (HarperAudio, 2015) as I finished a baby quilt.  As I stitched and cut and ironed, Witherspoon’s lovely reading brought Jean Louise Finch to life.  And some of Lee’s passages were so moving, I paused in quilting to listen to them over and over again, writing them out for use here. 

Once Upon A River: A Novel

Once Upon A River: A Novel

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style.  Appropriate for its nineteenth-century setting, Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles: good or evil, liminal or privileged, young or old.  Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to get into the flow of the story.  

Letters from Yellowstone

Letters from Yellowstone

Chris Mathers Jackson
Reading The West, Contemporary Fiction

Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999) is a delightful, compelling and educational story about a fictional botany expedition into the wilds of late-nineteenth-century Yellowstone National Park. Smith inserts historically accurate details about the early years of Yellowstone National Park including cavalrymen stationed at the park and a young Native American family living quietly in its back country.

Puritans & Whalers: Reading Coastal Massachusetts

Puritans & Whalers: Reading Coastal Massachusetts

Chris Mathers Jackson
Travel Reading, The Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Nonfiction

In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).