Book Report: The Question of Bruno

9. Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno (2000) (4/15/26)

This book is labeled "stories," and although I expect not all of the eight stories are completely autobiographical (the book is not labeled "memoir"), they all ring true to lived experience. Hemon was born in Sarajevo (then Yugoslavia) in 1964, and made his way to the U.S. in 1992, where he has lived since.

The Question of Bruno begins with "Islands," relating in short sections aspects of a childhood holiday on an island off the Bosnian coast—family interactions, family stories, that place and time. Some of the family stories are of atrocities under Stalin, but these are (almost) overwhelmed by swims in the sea and wonderful feasts, sweet interactions with loved ones. 

The next two stories are about an imagined forester, Alphonse Kauders, presented as a work of research, and a real spy, Richard Sorge, who informs the young Aleksandar's imaginings about his own father as a spy—though the truth proves sadder. 

"The Accordion" takes us to the moment when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914—and a relative of Hemon's happened to be in the throng, playing his accordion.

"Exchange of Pleasant Words" recounts a family reunion—a Hemoniad—following the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, with attendant family history stretching from Ukraine and Bosnia back to Brittany and even Greece.

"A Coin" consists of love letters that focus on survival: getting from point A to point B in Sarajevo without being dropped by a sniper, and all the life lived in between.

"Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" (the title is a reference to the narrator's youthful rock band in Sarajevo) is about a young man who comes to the U.S. and ends up staying, though he doesn't speak the language and he has no prospects. But he makes do, working all manner of odd jobs. (The book's title comes from this chapter, where a doddery old woman keeps asking, "Where's Bruno?")

And finally, there's "Imitation of Live," told from the perspective of a young boy in Tito's Sarajevo. The "imitation" concerns movies—all the stories we tell and are told, all the stories we want to believe. 

It took me a while to finish this book, though it's short. I liked it well enough at the start, but by the end I was a bit bored by all the "telling detail." Still, I'm glad I read it. 

96. Just poking around the universe

This afternoon the Artemis II successfully completed its mission with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Wonderful! Big applause for the dreaming, for the science, for the engineering, for getting some new glimpses of our fragile planet from space and for totally new views of the moon's backside! 

Meanwhile, I've been wondering how the ship slowed down from its 24,000 mph hurtle through deep space to a mere 17 mph as it approached the Earth's surface. I haven't found answers that satisfy me—those that I have found include aerobraking and eleven parachutes. (The best source of information I found was a thread on Reddit, but still—I'd really love a nifty video direct from NASA. NASA—do you hear me?) 

Anyway, as I wandered through the internet, I got to wondering about our atmosphere—which was ostensibly helping to put the brakes on the Artemis II. And once again, as so often, I realized (with some delight: there's so much to learn!) how ignorant I am. Check out this rather simplistic illustration:

So, what really slays me here is the Thermosphere, with temperatures from 930°F to 3600°F. This right after the Mesosphere, with a high temp of 5°F. What? And then, beyond the Thermosphere: absolute zero. How is that even possible? 

As a certain scientific type in this household explained, it doesn't mean the Thermosphere is hot. There are very, very few molecules out there. But what molecules there are (mainly atomic and molecular oxygen, molecular nitrogen, and atomic helium), they have a high temperature. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Why are they so high-temp? (The short answer is that they directly absorb intense, high-energy UV and X-ray radiation from the sun.) 

And now I'm resisting doing further research into the auroras—are they super high-temp too? But not hot? What is hot? What is cold? What exactly is an aurora? I'm so confused...

And then finally, I'm not even sure where this came from—it could be Mr. Science mentioned it—I learned that Elon Musk has launched over 10,000 LEO (low earth-orbit) Starlink satellites in the last seven years (since 2019). His plan is to have 1 million satellites as orbital data centers, "addressing the immense energy needs of AI on Earth." The 10,000 are already making earth-based astronomy harder to do. But 1 million? And for AfuckingI?I am beyond horrified.

Until last year, said satellites orbited at 550 km (340 miles), but they've now lowered the orbit to 480 km (298 miles) "to increase safety by reducing space debris and enabling faster re-entry of inactive satellites." Now I need to find out what "re-entry of inactive satellites" actually means.  

There's so much I don't know. But I have to say, it was a relief to venture imaginatively into space today, and avoid the earth-bound news, which never fails to be infuriating anymore. 

Book Report: Purgatory Ridge

8. William Kent Krueger, Purgatory Ridge (2001) (4/3/26)

Book #3 in the Cork O'Connor series (my reports on the first two are here and here), about an ex-sheriff in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. Cork is half Ojibwe, and the town is cheek by jowl with an Indian reservation, so some of the plot elements tie in with the cultural tensions following an explosion at a lumber mill in which a Native elder is killed. Accident? eco-terror? What about the nearby stand of white pines: who should have access, those who revere the Old Grandfathers, as the trees are known, as sacred, or the owner of the lumber mill, Karl Lindstrom, who after all provides employment to a good number of townsfolk? 

The book opens, however, with a twelve-year-old incident on Lake Superior when, in a violent storm, an ore carrier sinks and all but one aboard die. The one who survives, half-Native John LePere, has been a wreck ever since, mourning his lost younger brother and eking out a living as a janitor at the local Indian casino. And then Lindstrom builds a fancy house on the inlet across from John's cabin. His wife happens to be the heiress of the shipping line whose ore carrier sank. John's resentment, and pain over his brother's death, only grow. And then he meets a man who's (obviously) got things on his mind other than finding personal peace—like, shaking things up, and maybe getting his hands on vast amounts of money.

In the midst of all this, Cork is treading a tender line as he reunites, after mutual extramarital affairs, with his wife, Jo, a lawyer who represents, among others, the local Natives. She gets drawn into the lumber mill explosion, and Cork tags along. Cork bumps up against a few eco-warriors, and wonders what their involvement in the incident might be. He can't seem to keep his nose out of all the goings-on. And as he is the former sheriff, the various authorities—current sheriff, FBI, the state version of the FBI, etc.—let him keep nosing around.

Then Jo and their son, Stevie, are kidnapped, along with the heiress and her son. It's about here, halfway through, that the book becomes, as they say, unputdownable. And there is where I'll stop with the summary. Even my summary so far is sketchy at best—though I bet you can guess who might be behind the kidnapping. It's a pretty good book, and the dénouement did surprise me (not that I consider it convincing, but heck, it's genre fiction, not real life). 

I think now that I'll be giving Krueger a rest for a while. Then again, I do find it hard to resist a good thriller, and the three so far qualify. We'll see. The next one's called Blood Hollow, so if I continue on my alphabetical pattern at the present pace, it'll be up in, oh, five months. But maybe I'll find something more compelling for B. It'll probably depend on how demanding A was . . . 

And now, on to Q! Which I thought I'd skip, but then, scanning my shelves for an R book, what should jump up and wave its arms but a book of short stories, The Question of Bruno. My decision has been made. (I do love this method of choosing what to read next. And if whatever book lands in my hands just doesn't engage me, onto the discard pile it goes, and off I go in search of an alternative. If Bruno proves unsatisfying, I will be skipping Q. But here's hoping.)

Book Report: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

7. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) (3/29/26)

On October 25, 2023, the journalist and writer Omar El Akkad wrote on X: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

He was writing about Gaza—and about the West, about privilege, about power structures and power plays. He was writing about death and destruction, about lives turned topsy-turvy. And to what end? What does all the killing actually accomplish? Isn't it, simply, abhorrent?

This book is an extension of that tweet.

In it, he provides many anecdotes, which I found easy enough to grasp—anecdotes about love, about confusion, about power, about yearnings, about life's meaning, also about atrocities. He also interrogates this world order, and I found his polemics harder to get a handle on. He has plenty to criticize, but I ended up—as so often in these circumstances—unsure just what we are to do about it all.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, is now a US citizen. From early on, he experienced the capriciousness of the world order as his father, who worked in the hotel business (think: capitalism, think: third world), tried to follow a career. He brings all those identities to bear here, in what is essentially a critique of western liberalism. 

Lord knows, we are living in a bizarre time when nothing much makes sense. Not Gaza. Not Trump. Not Ukraine. Now, not Iran. I read the news daily, and feel ever more alienated from what I've always thought of as "my country," of "the world." 

Maybe I need to read this book again, slower. Maybe I just need to accept that it will never make sense. That there's so much hatred in the world, so much desperate scrabbling for power.

Although as El Akkad reminds us at the end of his book, while atrocity is rampant, maybe the opposite is indeed stronger: kindness and love, caring and humanity. The final paragraph is this:

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air. 

But: Evil is never necessary. We don't ride around in carriages. There is no cliff. We can't fly. I mean, I get the sentiments, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that there are too many of us, and we seem to be ever more at odds. And there is so much fear and hatred, cruelty and greed in the world. That, I don't get. But it's a fact. I would absolutely love it if, today, we could all agree that we've always been against... all the suffering, all the heartache, all the death, all the turmoil. But that doesn't seem to be the human condition. How strange, that we would choose such a state of being. How absolutely strange.

In the meantime, however, I vote, as I have done in every election for 52 years. It often feels meaningless: I live in California; my vote for president has 1/4 the weight of a vote in Wyoming thanks to the stinking electoral college. On Saturday I waved my flag with 10,000(!) others at our local No Kings protest. It feels so small. But it's something.

Sorry, I've not really covered much about this book. You have to read it yourself. Let me know what you think.

And now, after two O books in a row, it's on to P.

95. Essays, part II

The other day I shared a multi-part list of essays from Summer Brennan's Substack "A Writer's Notebook" and her weeklong "essay camp." Here are the rest of the essays she recommends.

Day 4

"Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn," by Summer Brennan, 764 words, 3-minute read
"A Woman's Work: Home Economics," by Carolita Johnson, 1,075 words, 5 minutes
"Natural Intelligence," by Maria Popova, 1,538 words, 6 minutes
"The Face That Replicates," by Katy Kelleher, 2,620 words, 10 minutes
"The Heaviest Pain in the World," by Rob Delaney, 4,240 words, 17 minutes
"Chicxulub," by T. Coraghessan Boyle (a short story), 4,374 words, 18 minutes
"Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations," by Leslie Jamison, 7,271 words, 29 minutes
"The Reenchanted World," by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 10,766 words, 43 minutes
"Ugly, Bitter, and True," by Suzanne Rivecca, about 16,000 words, 1 hour 10 minutes
"Bluets," by Maggie Nelson, about 28,000 words, 2 hours

Day 5

"A Word for Autumn," by A. A. Milne, 892 words, 4 minutes
"Living Like Weasels," by Annie Dillard, 1,585 words, 6 minutes
"On Self-Respect," by Joan Didion, 1,826 words, 7 minutes
"Uncanny the Winging That Comes from Certain Husks," by Joy Williams, 2,251 words, 9 minutes
"Scent Makes a Place," by Katy Kelleher, 2,700 words, 11 minutes
"Frog," by Anne Fadiman, 6,019 words, 24 minutes
"When I Met the Pope," by Patricia Lockwood, 6,604 words, 26 minutes
"Shipping Out, by David Foster Wallace, about 20,000 words, 1 hour 20 minutes

And that's it! Plenty of reading material, most of which I've never encountered. 

94. Louise Gluck, poet

Witchgrass

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before

you ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little.  And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure sea water.

93. Essays, part I

The other day an email appeared in my inbox heralding a weeklong event that I (sort of) participated in last year, and so I'm on the list for this year too, it seems. It's called "Essay Camp," and its on the Substack called "A Writer's Notebook" by Summer Brennan. The point being to write an essay over the next week. Simple, huh?

Yeah, sure.

Michel de Montaigne,
father of the essay

Summer writes this: "An essay is famously defined as 'an attempt.' That is the root of the word. It means to try—but try to do what? To understand, to clarify, to persuade, to compare, to connect, to remember, to preserve. An essay can be long or short, personal or impersonal. It can express a truth or explain a stance, introduce an idea or marry two seemingly unrelated ideas together. In that trying, the author’s thought process is often visible on the page. To write an essay is to reach for something, not so much to explain as to explore."

As so often, I take a look, and yes! these seem like wonderful exercises. And as so often, I then wander on to some other distraction, thinking maybe I'll just collect all six or however many days' worth and then—one day when my slate is as clean as can be—sit down and really apply myself. 

Seventy-plus years on this planet, and I still have no self-awareness!

Anyway, the reason I'm writing all this today is to catalog the "exemplary essays" that Summer mentions at the end of each day's assignment. Reading essays, she points out, is a critical exercise as we tiptoe into the murky waters that are our own lives and try to make sense of what we find.

This is part I, presenting the first three days of "Essay Camp." I'll tackle the second half in a future post. And apologies to Summer for stealing wholesale. If you're interested in her Substack, you can find it here.

On day 1, it was "some familiar classics that show variety in length, subject, and style." I've read many of these, but they are all worth a revisit:

"Tiny Beautiful Things," by Cheryl Strayed, 896 words, 4 minute read
"The Death of the Moth," by Virginia Woolf, 1,175 words, 5 minutes
"A Good Café on the Place St-Michel," from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, 1,639 words, 6 minutes
"Me Talk Pretty One Day," by David Sedaris, 1,847 words, 9 minutes
"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell, 3,283 words, 12 minutes
"Night Walks," by Charles Dickens, 3,788 words, 14 minutes
"Goodbye to All That," by Joan Didion, about 4,000 words, 18 minutes
"Total Eclipse," by Annie Dillard, 5,589 words, 22 minutes
"Notes on 'Camp,'" by Susan Sontag, about 6,000 wordes, 24 minutes
"Equal in Paris," by James Baldwin, 6,775 words, 28 minutes
"The Fourth State of Matter," by Jo Ann Beard, about 7,200 words, 30 minutes
"Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace, about 7,500 words, 32 minutes

Day 2

"Ghost Story," by Maggie Smith, 618 words, 2.5 minutes
"The Smoker," by Ottessa Moshfegh, 1,098 words, 4 minutes
"The Invitation," by Barry Lopez, 1,758 words, 7 minutes
"Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," from Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, 1,673 words, 7 minutes
"Kevin Brazil," by Kevin Brazil, 3,090 woreds, 12 minutes
"On Keeping a Notebook," by Joan Didion, 3,052 words, 12 minutes
"Joy," by Zadie Smith, 2,868 words, 12 minutes
"The Youth in Asia," by David Sedaris, 3,294 words, 13 minutes
"The Terror of Love," by Samantha Irby, 3,570 words, 13 minutes
"A Toast Story," by John Gravois, 3,838 words, 15 minutes
"Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life," by Yiyun Li, 3,948 words, 15 minutes
"The Curse," by Alexander Chee, 4,924 words, 20 minutes
"My Instagram," by Dayna Tortorici, 8,323 words, 33 minutes

Day 3

"Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful," by Gretchen Legler, 468 words, 2 minutes
"Love Songs: I'm Your Man," by Laurie Stone, 722 words, 3 minutes
"The Negreeting," in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, 722 words, 3 minutes
"Rape Joke," by Patricia Lockwood, 1,266 words, 5 minutes
"An Almanac of Birds," by Maria Popova, 2,141 words, 8 minutes
"Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over," by Sabrina Orah Mark, 1,627 words, 8 minutes
"Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk," by Katy Kelleher, 2,053 words, 8 minutes
"Quitting," by John Phipps, 2,226 words, 9 minutes
"What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib," by Toni Morrison, 3,878 words, 15 minutes
"One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail," by Joy Williams, 3,936 words, 16 minutes
"Welcome to Dog World," by Blair Braverman, 7, 485 words, 30 minutes

Even if I have to cattle-prod myself to sit down and write essays, it's theoretically quite possible to sit down and read them, and so get some inspiration. 

Part II will follow when Summer has finished presenting this iteration of "Essay Camp."