It seems like everyone loves this book so Idk if it's just me and not the book. I had a hard time staying interested. It seems like a story that would be perfect for me. It's fiction but wrapped in a lot of fact. The narrator has a colorful family with lives that seem like each could be their own book. The grandfather is the center of everything but really it's about the whole family. It has spy stuff, war, mental illness, rockets, just a bit of everything. It sounds great in theory, but for me, there were times I had to force myself to keep reading.

Is it too early in the year to say that if you buy one book this year, it should be this one? Yes, I know Mantel’s conclusion is coming out next month, but you should really consider this one.

I first read about in the NYT Book Review. That day, I went out and brought it, mostly because of Marlon James and Victor LaValle (the reviewer really liked those essays). Then I pulled the book down from the shelf and so who else is it in. Jacqueline Woodson. Geraldine Brooks. Neil Gaiman. Salman Rushdie. George Saunders. Jesmyn Ward.

The book is a collection of essays celebrating the ACLU and famous cases. And there really isn’t a bad essay in the bunch. Each author takes a case and the essay is mediation on it. Perhaps the most touching is Woodson’s essay on the Scottsboro Boys. The cases go up to the present day, and the essays are, understandably political. The politics run from the border wall to free speech to the taking of Native American children.

The best essay in the collection is the one by Morgan Parker, which strangely was not mentioned in the NYT Review. I haven’t read Parker before. His essay is the one you want everyone to read. You want to make copies and hand them out on the street. Honesty, read it. It’s just so bloody powerful.

This is going to be one of those reviews in which the reviewer wishes the novel was about something other than what the author wrote.

Kavalier and Clay are cousins, one a refugee from Nazi occupied Prague, the other a kid from Brooklyn. Kavalier is a talented artist and Clay an inspiring writer and together they get in on the start of superhero comics with their character the Escapist, a Houdini inspired hero who mostly fights Nazis. I find the history of comic books and the writers and artists who created them to be a fascinating story and I hoped this novel would tell that story, but the early days of comics are just a background for the complicated relationships of the two main characters.

For a novel that touches on the plight of Jews in eastern Europe during the Third Reich and the plight of closeted gays in early 20th century America, Kavalier & Clay is a surprisingly fun novel. Kavalier has most of the adventures, and they are amazing. Clay mostly makes wisecracks on the sidelines. There are elements of a fiction trope I think of as "all happiness must die." Whenever the characters in a book or film are getting too close to happiness you know something is about to ruin everything, and that absolutely happens at about the 2/3rds point of the novel.

The book has a running theme of escape, both literal and metaphorical. Kavalier literally escapes from Czechoslovakia and then helps his cousin escape from his dreary suburban life. At various times both Kavalier and Clay attempt to escape from their whole lives by packing up and leaving or by pretending to be something other than what they really are. Comic books and genre fiction are often disdainfully dismissed as escapist. I have marveled at the level of literary snobbery that leads someone to dismiss anything that is not serious and/or depressing as escapist. If it means escaping from the wardens of the imagination, then I am all for the escape attempt.

This lengthy book felt like it lasted forever. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but then I'd put down the book and not miss it until the next time I had a chance to read. Yet when I was in it I was quite engrossed in the novel, set in the Golden Age of American superhero comics in the late 1930s-1940s. I'm not much of an American comics reader as I'm more partial to the Japanese manga, so many of the references to real-life comic book characters and creators might have been lost on me except for the most famous ones (Stan Lee makes an brief appearance later in the book). I liked the friendship between cousins and work partners Joe and Sammy and their complicated relationship with Rosa, which to my relief is not the usual cliched love triangle, although the ending is a bit too neat. While I did wish it was shorter, it's a funny, sad, adventurous novel, devastating at parts but filled with hope and passion.

Admittedly fairly obvious choices, but anyway:

1. Miss Marple -- who may or may not have cracked 70 at the beginning of the series (The Murder at the Vicarage, 1930) but is an elderly lady even then and must have been over 90 by the time the last book about her was published, some 46 years later (Sleeping Murder).

2. Allan Karlsson -- the eponymous protagonist of The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared.

3. Little Nell's Grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Honorary mention:

Sherlock Holmes -- who has retired and is keeping bees in the South Downs in The Final Solution, which is set in 1944.