Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

This is a very unusual style of writing and I never would have picked it up at all if not for the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019. At that time my local library did not have a copy, but I often circle back later and at the end, I am happy I did. When you look at the reviews of this book, they are almost evenly divided between 5 star reviews and 1 star reviews--so you either love this book or you hate it, and I suspect a goodly number of the one star reviews are people who did not finish the book. Why do I think that? The book is a thousand pages long, and consists of about eight endless sentences, spooling out at a stream of conscious pace. Seriously, at the beginning I thought 'Well, I read Finnegan's Wake, I can read this" and then in reading a review of the book, I found out that the author is the daughter of the James Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, so she may understand better than most and certainly better than me what the underlying structure and message of this sort of book can be. Apparently she had trouble getting it published and I understand that entirely, but also feel some gratitude that it made it onto the printed page. At base, is the story of a middle-aged woman in Ohio. She was once a college teacher, but after recovering from cancer has retreated to her kitchen, where she bakes pies and mulls over her life, her children, her regrets. As i got through the first 100 pages, the first sentence really, I realized that while I couldn't read much written in this style, I agreed with about 80% of the ruminations, and all of the craziness of the past decade in the United States is being rehashed in this book, and it made me think, in a way maybe more so because it is so untethered to the usual narrative. If you only read a handful of books a year, I wouldn't add this to your reading list, but if you read 100 or more books a year, or you yourself are a middle aged woman, this is well worth a read.