Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a well-written novel that's character, rather than plot, driven, and a nice read about love and relationships between people. 

In the spring of 2020, Lara is with her husband Joe and their twenty-something daughters, Maisie, Emily, and Nell, at their farm in northern Michigan during the pandemic. Lara tells of her early-twenties relationship with famous actor Peter Duke while the two of them working at a summer stock theater company, Tom Lake. 

Lara talks about her college experience with the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, her getting a staring movie role, filmed before she went to Tom Lake. She and Duke started a relationship, and Patchett writes about them, his brother Sebastian, and Lara's understudy Pallace. Also, recounted is how they all spent time at a farm (which Duke immediately and forever loved) with Lara's eventual husband Joe, and the Achilles injury that Lara suffered, changing the course of all their lives.

 Along with this, Patchett writes of the relationship between Lara and her daughters, including what they expect from their mother and what actually occurred in her life. There's a lot about how our lives not what our children think they were. The girls wanted more to the story, but it's what led to them being together. Patchett writes characters really well and provides a nice story about people and their lives.

Gringos by Charles Portis

Gringos by Charles Portis is a novel that tells the story of Jimmy Burns, an expatriate American in Mexico. The book recounts the bizarre things that occur in his life, leading up to interactions with a doomsday cult and it's wacky members.

James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett is an interesting novel that reimagines the Huck Finn story told through a first-person account by Jim, Huck's family slave. Everett wrote the book Erasure, the basis of the film American Fiction, and with this effort, he provides a very unique story construct.

Jim had to play a part, one expected based on the color of his skin, even with people like Huck that were kind to him, but still casually racist. There were expectations of slaves and their supposed mental shortcomings so Jim used incorrect grammar, and taught his kids to do the same. He would offer up ideas to white people, not as suggestions, but ones they would latch on to and say as if they their own. It was noted in the book about whites that they better they feel, the safer it is for black people. Jim also concealed that  he knew how to read, to the point of making a joke of what would he do with a book? 

Identity is a theme, with fairly early Jim writing with a stolen pencil "I am called Jim, I have yet to choose a name," and "with my pencil, I wrote myself into being." 

The book is funny at times and gutting at times. There's such a matter of fact telling of how an entire race was treated as less than people. It's a super creative idea and effort from Everett, and the ending of the book an excellent one, with the main character claiming his identity as James, not Jim the slave.

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby is an interesting work of nonfiction that compares Charles Dickens and Prince. It's a fascinating construct subtitled A Particular Kind of Genius and the book jacket notes how it examines the two artists' personal tragedies, social statuses, and boundless productivity.

About the working lives of Dickens and Prince, Hornby write that each incredibly prolific with the craft they produced. Prince was referenced as being addicted to the creative process, and it's interesting reading about the creative process of the two, how both often worked on several projects at once, something impossible for many people. 

They were each larger than life characters, full of creative energy, which led to much being produced, a lot of it great.