Mandy

“Even when I'm far away, the convenience store and I are connected.”

Omg, this book was actually SO FUN, and yet so provocative at the same time. I will say, though, I felt like this book is probably best appreciated by readers who have spent some time in Japanese, or minimally an Asian community and culture, because there was a lot of satire about the social structures, prejudices, and biases that are still fairly rampant in society and culture here. I also got bonus points of appreciation because Japan is probably my most visited holiday destination and I have an extremely vivid memory and impression of their convenience stores, and the visceral experience it is shopping in them as well as the almost robotic-like standard of service their staff never fail to emulate.

Keiko Furukura has always had trouble pretending to be human. It's not that she's an alien or anything, this isn't a sci-fi or fantasy book, but she's always had trouble understanding the underlying social codes, etiquette, and behaviour. She might be written to be autism-coded, but it's not definitively labeled in this book. In any case, quite often her thought process sounded like an AI going through deep learning to behave more like a human being so that she could fit into society. Despite this though, her narrative voice was personable, often relatable, and overall genuine and sincere in her wish to feel like an accepted part of society, as well as not to hurt the people she at least appreciated for having been kind to her in the past, like her sister.

“When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don't have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.”

So, Keiko takes great joy in her job as a part-time convenience store worker, a job she has held for the past 18 years, since she herself was 18 years old. There is a very fixed set of rules guiding her behaviour, and she is valued for following those rules to a T. She enjoys how predictable everything is.

“It was fun to see all kinds of people... don the same uniform and transform into the homogenous being known as a convenience store worker.”

Despite finding joy and fulfillment in her job, she is still constantly being judged by her friends and family for “not being normal”, in that she is 36 years old and still in a “dead-end job” as a part-time convenience store worker. Without going into too much spoilery details, Keiko takes some steps to experience life as someone who is accepted into the fold of society.

There is definitely some satire and criticism here about the misogyny of society as well as the gender and sexuality stereotypes that is still deeply entrenched here. As someone who was born and raised in an Asian society, I think it hit pretty hard. It's easy to judge this book on more left-aligned values and find basically every other character in this book annoying except for Keiko, but I think it's a lot grayer than that over here. There's still a pressure to get into a relationship, to get a full-time job, to get married and have kids, even for me and even in this day and age. It might be a different experience from someone living in another country, especially if they were in USA or the EU, but differences in culture doesn't make any one culture less valid or more backward than the other. Anyway, being from a very similar culture to that of Japan, I could absolutely get the predicament Keiko was in and it hit much harder for me. There's also some commentary here about “normalcy” and how it feels like a performative act most of the time, just that for most of us it just comes more subconsciously than others (like Keiko, who has to make a much more conscious effort about it).

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.”

Overall, I enjoyed this a ton but I'm not sure whether I'd recommend it to just about everyone. To anyone who is far removed from Japanese and Asian societies, this book might be quite bewildering and illegible (I hope it isn't, but I can imagine that it would be). Nevertheless though, it was quirky and had a sense of humour that had me chortling out loud at some parts, with a relatable and endearing though eccentric protagonist too.

I knew this book was going to either make me drag my feet through it, or I'd have a good time overall. I'm glad that I fell into the latter category.

I derived enjoyment mainly because the book appealed to my existentialist side, exploring how meaningless life can be if we don't create our own meaning for it. Most of pop culture explores the explosive and dramatic importance of humans and humanity (which I don't have anything against), but I also find it refreshing to read something that's just so quietly and timidly insignificant, even though it's sad and a little horrifying to think about. Admittedly, I don't really read a lot of existentialist books so I can't say how this one stands in that subgenre but from where I am, at least, I did enjoy the whole ride and found myself going through this a lot quicker and with more engagement than I expected.

The writing had a weird effect on me. It was straightforward to the cusp of being boring, but, for some weird reason that I cannot quite name, it sucked me in and I found myself even rereading some passages so I don't miss out on what it's trying to say. That being said, I can absolutely understand people finding it boring and for that reason I wouldn't recommend this book to just about anyone.

Stoner is not a flawless character by any standard. He's pretty much just an average person who isn't deliberately malicious and doesn't aspire to much in life. He'll never be a villain, a hero, or even any other kind of sterotype, because he's so in the middle. There are, I'm sure, millions of Stoners out there in all of human history but because their lives are usually drab and unexciting (from a pop culture standpoint), it's usually never memorialized. I think this book is trying to do that.

Stoner makes good and bad decisions, he randomly experiences leaps of epiphany and seems to find a personality, only to later shrink back into himself and retreat from confrontation or making a stand. Most books might have their heroes as a Gordon Finch who enthusiastically signs up for war and achieves all these accolades in academia, so it's interesting to see things from a perspective like Stoner's, who consistently shrinks away from things. He's the sort of person no one seems to remember for very long after he's gone (like the depressing first few passages of the book), but I think what the book does is to show us the inner workings of all these nameless, faceless people who have faded into the backgrounds of society and time, and that they, like any hero or villain in life, are also trying to create some meaning for themselves if it isn't as flamboyantly or colourfully done.

This book was also just as much about Edith and Grace as it was about Stoner, because, going along with the customs of the times, as the head of the household Stoner would inevitably dictate the course of his wife's and daughter's lives, whether he wanted to or not. Edith sadly doesn't seem to have a happy childhood - the theory that her father sexually abused her is one I only read about after I was done with the book but I buy it, everything does click into place - and, in so doing, she sort of pays it forward and asphyxiates Grace's childhood. Stoner doesn't intervene. Sure, I was annoyed at him for not standing up for Grace more and it's not an excusable reason, but it's also pretty real.

In the end, this book is about an ordinary, flawed person trying to navigate an ordinary, flawed existence. He makes some good and some bad decisions along the way, accumulating some accolades but which is outweighed by a ton of regrets and missed opportunities. The beauty in it is that I think most of us are more like Stoner than we realise or than we admit to ourselves.

This was simultaneously a love letter to New York City, and how every little thing in life can trigger a cascade of events that changes how the cookie crumbles. I first discovered (and loved) Towles with A Gentleman In Moscow, so I was therefore naturally curious about this earlier work, published in 2011 and a full 8 years before Gentleman. The quiet and aloof detachment of the narrator and the narrative took a bit to get used to, but I couldn't help getting sucked in nevertheless into Katey's mildly cynical yet wildly intense assessment and dissection of life and its meaning. The only reason why I'd rate AGIM a little higher than this one is really only because I have a soft spot for AGIM's subject matter of found family.

“For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity into the ether of the finely superfluous?”

Katey Kontent and her colleague, roommate, and partner in crime Evelyn Ross go out for a night on the town on New Year's Eve, 1937, where they bump into a smartly dressed young man, Tinker Grey. This unexpected and fateful meeting starts a chain of events that irrevocably changes all three lives for good.

“Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke up in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.”

We mostly follow Katey in the story. As previously mentioned, her detached manner of narration gives a sense of distance from the events of the story. Similarly, Towles makes a pretty big choice of formatting all the dialogue in this book without quotation marks, and simply demarcating them as speech by an em dash at the start of what ought to be dialogue. The mixing of narrative and dialogue deepens that sense of distance between us readers and the action, and it helps permeate that haziness of memory throughout the story, which essentially it would be since this would be a future and older Katey looking back at the events of 1938.

I had mixed feelings for Katey. On one hand, she was pretty relatable and occasionally sympathetic, with her obsession with books and her being caught in between a child-like state of wanting to believe the best of the people around her and wanting to do right by them, and being jaded about life and society after having had to make her own way and living in New York City since she was orphaned at 19. For the first half of the book, she was so detached that I could barely really feel much for her except as the vehicle through which we are experiencing the events of the story, but I did feel more sympathy for her as the second half unfolded. We found out more about her, and she also began getting more personally involved in the events rather than acting the observer.

Tinker Grey gave me some Jay Gatsby vibes, although with marked differences. The entire denouement of the story revolves around him, and I guess he comes close to being the male equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl to Katey. We see and hear a lot about him but ultimately I found it difficult to be very much attached to him, although this might be more because of me than of the narrative.

Perhaps my favourite character in this whole story was Wallace. He was a cinnamon roll that's too precious for this world.

“In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revision–we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

Overall, this book is wistful, mildly sad, but also a gentle affectionate reminder to us about how much our life paths are just as much made by chance as by intention.

I... I don't know what to say. This was a horrible book - not in that it was badly written, but because everything and everyone in it were just horrible. It wasn't depressing though, probably because it didn't touch very deeply on the human condition or society at large. It was just like a competition of how mean can people be to each other. Heathcliff probably now dwells amongst one of my most disliked characters in all literature. Still though, I'm giving this around 2.5 to 3 stars because despite the utter awfulness of everything going on in here, it was still fairly engaging to read. I'd have enjoyed it a bit more if there was actually just a single character worth rooting for but there isn't, and maybe that's a deliberate decision on Bronte's part.The story revolves around two families: the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights, and the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. One fateful night, Daddy Earnshaw takes in an apparently orphaned boy of unknown origins who doesn't seem to speak a lick of English. Eventually the boy comes to be known as Heathcliff as both his Christian and his last name, and though Daddy Earnshaw himself is partial to Heathcliff, almost everyone else treats him like dirt, especially the Earnshaw son, Hindley, and their neighbour, Edgar Linton. Heathcliff soon strikes up a strong alliance with the daughter of the Earnshaw family, Catherine, who is also surprisingly nasty.The first time I read this book, I went in expecting some epic romance as pop culture has led me to believe (thanks for nothing, pop culture). No. Wrong. That is without doubt hands down the worst way to read this book ever. I would strongly advise against expecting warm fuzzies or even any kind of ships you would bother rooting for. So this time, I went in expecting a tragedy, which... is slightly better but also not really quite the right expectations to have either. I'd say go in expecting a complete shitshow, something like a crazy soap opera but without any likeable or sympathetic characters. Shit hits the fan pretty early in the book anyway, so you would know what you're in for before you're 30% through. It's a bit juicy like [b:The Count of Monte Cristo 7126 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611834134l/7126.SY75.jpg 391568], but the vibe is different in that at least in COMC you have plenty of people and relationships that you wanted to root for. Here you're really just waiting for everyone to fade to black.So first up, Heathcliff was probably the worst character I've read in a while, and I'm already inclined to be generous because he had a pretty rough childhood and upbringing, being ill-treated and abused as he was by Hindley Earnshaw. His entire motivation in life was basically just Catherine, and to bring down all others who even remotely stands in his way. He cared for nothing else, neither religious redemption, nor any kind of empathy for his fellow human beings. He wasn't just an indolent, brooding misanthrope either - he was actively malevolent towards his neighbours and everyone he viewed to have done him wrong in his life. He's the sort of spider that weaves a web for years and patiently waits and waits until the people he seeks vengeance towards falls into his trap. He doesn't hesitate to use brute force and violence against anything and everyone, whether man, woman, animal, child, adult, etc. I don't know if this is remotely a redeeming factor, but his malevolence doesn't have sexual tendencies (at least as far as we know, although I'm pretty sure he would've had to rape Isabella to get her pregnant since they were estranged very early on in their marriage). It still doesn't remotely excuse him in any way though.Catherine was not really much better but then again she considers Heathcliff and herself soulmates so that ought to give us an idea of her true nature. She doesn't resort to as much physical violence as Heathcliff does, but she's incredibly bitchy, unfeeling, and ungrateful to most of the people around her. She at least shows some capacity for love and some form of sympathy, though remaining incredibly self-centered throughout it all.There were some characters who may be slightly less annoying than the two main ones, namely Mrs Dean, Mr Lockwood, Hareton, and the younger Catherine, although all of them were also at least mildly annoying at some point or other (I especially wasn't a fan of Hareton physically striking Catherine nearer the end of the book. Yes, she was being pretty snobby, but considering what she's been through and the fact that Hareton is also physically bigger and older than she is, that really raised a lot of red flags for me.).Do I recommend this book? Maybe if you were in a particularly masochistic mood and wanted something where everybody's at least a bit of an asshole and sometimes wholly without redeeming factors.