Jeff
Made it through 600 pages this time, but it's turned into a slog. It's such clever writing, and the sardonic wit when they're all discussing Templar history is very funny, but it stops being funny at some point and I need just a little bit more plot movement, character development, something. Maybe I'll try reading it again before I die.
It's books like this that betray the BS of the “star” rating system.
I loved this book. Nolan's writes with the precision of a lawyer (which she is) and the heart of a poet (which imho, she also is)–it's a really great mix of styles, her writing, and I can't wait to read more. She also manages to navigate writing about the (deeply) personal while tying it in ways that aren't heavy-handed to systemic issues like racism and fatphobia. Also a fine line to walk, and she nails it.
That said, each essay mostly only whets my appetite for more–I want even more depth on the systemic stuff, and that's not the fault of the book or the author, just a preference. So how do I express a preference in a star rating...? I don't. I hope we get a lot more from her, but I also hope for something more long-form.
Found this one in a little trading library near my house. I think it's my favorite of deBeauvoir's fiction work. It can still be heavy-handed in the way that her fiction tends to be for me, but some of that may be in the translation, who knows? (Lots of “I exist and the world exists for me” stuff, like anybody but existentialists talks/thinks this way.)
That said, I loved the almost science-fiction-y take on what it might mean for a person to live forever, and I really enjoyed the history lesson as our protagonist moves through history, trying to do good, but failing, failing, failing.
This was my first Erdrich book, and it was an interesting read. I almost put it down fairly quickly, because the entire book follows from a violent attack on a woman, and almost all of the central characters are men/boys. However, I think this is an example of how fiction can expose some serious societal problems, without being pedantic about the problems.
It's also about how men and boys deal with violence against the women in their lives, which is something worth reading and thinking about.
The book is an odd mix of a thriller (of a sort) and a deep dive into the emotions that come from violence. I think it works, but I never forgot that I was reading a book, because of the jarring mix of thriller genre tropes and a serious look at violence.
Plusses:
+ First Nations main characters, written by a woman of Native descent.
+ Great relationship stuff between father and son, against a lot of traditional masculinity.
+ quite good as a thriller for the most part
+ Star Trek: The Next Generation references throughout (it works, don't worry!)
+ Some great is-it-real-or-a-ghost-or-a-dream sequences
Minuses:
- we don't get enough of the mom character, or any of the female characters. I am certain this is a conscious choice on Erdrich's part. It's just a choice I don't like.
- a couple of Very Amazing Coincidences to drive the plot forward. These can be fun, or they can be distracting. For me they were distracting.
- the violence is mostly left to the side, undescribed, which works well
Plusses:
Loved this one. It's a great dip into a stylized harlem of a particular historic moment.
Plusses:
+ Great noir-ish dialogue, plot and characters.
+ A complex (but not that complex) protagonist.
+ Steeped in race relations of the time, but informative of present-day racism.
+ That plot! So fun.
+ Really fun structure, too, which jumps ahead just a bit, several times.
+ the character Pepper.
Minuses:
- zero well-fleshed out female characters. Would have added to the novel to involve the protagonist's wife's life more, for instance.
- needed more Pepper.
- had the novel-as-a-pre-screenplay feel. This isn't always a negative, but it did drag this one down a little for me. (That said, I'd see this movie.)
This is not a novel.
It is, however, a pretty great book. I come at it from a place of not knowing much about Said, and nothing at all about Edd??. I still loved it–lots of intricate analyses of complex problems, summed up at times very nicely. And some windows into both Said and Edd??. My favorite stuff was about his ideas' relationship to those of Camus and Sartre (though if you're going to use them in this book, why not deBeauvoir, too?), but it was nice to see Vico represented some too. And I learned quite a bit about Joseph Conrad.
It's also a lovely slice of how a person grieves.
I nominate this one for the most ironic (/misleading?) cover of the decade.
Loved Murata's book Convenience Store Woman. This one explores some similar themes–alienation being the central one, but it's more intense, and comes at alienation from a different vantage point. There are lots of things to have trigger warnings about here, so please read up about it before reading it if you have triggers around child abuse in particular.
That said, it's a great book. The ending comes up quickly, and gets really fucked up at the very end, but it flows into that ending in an effortless way, kind of like riding some rapids and then hitting the falls.
Can't wait to read more from her.
This one was tough for me–I struggle mightily with stream-of-consciousness narratives, and this one is no exception. And yet, it did pull me in enough to just go with it, to take the ride. I didn't try to understand everything (um, I don't think I could have), and I'm certain there are levels here that I didn't “get”, but it was a fun experience. Not sure I'll reread over and over like some reviewers recommend, but I think I will check out Lefebvre again.
I don't quite know how she does it, but these short vignettes amount to much more than the sum of their parts. I still like Greg's book Accommodations better, but I get why folks love this one so very much. It's hard to put down, even though some of the subject matter is tough to read about. I'll definitely keep this and read it again...
Read this the first time a while back, and loved it, but it turns out I remembered only tiny bits and pieces of it, and many of those I remembered incorrectly, so it was fun to read again. I like the stuff with Pew the most, the stuff around Dark less so, but the beauty of the language and structure carried me along the whole way.
It does lose steam a bit toward the end, but still worth the read. I'm sure I'll read it again sometime.
I loved this book! The East Bay in the 70s, cops and Black Panthers and informants and a murder, what's not to like. Quite a complex take on race and class for what is really a murder-mystery, so it was right up my alley. I liked the complexity of the characters, the dialog was spot-on, and it had one of the things a good murder-mystery should have: I could have figured out who did it if I had been paying close enough attention. Sherrell does a great job of painting a portrait of a slice of time in Oakland, and the East Bay Area.
I suspect I will get more out of this after a second reading, but the narrative style made it a very difficult read for me. I kept feeling like I do when I try to read Ulysses...just kind of lost, and not in a good way (lost in a good way would be something like Dhalgren). I'll pick it up again someday and try once more, but most of it was lost on me I think.
The stuff that did resonate had to do with the build-up to large-scale conflict, that feeling of being unmoored, which Husain (and his translators) capture beautifully. The shift that you can feel happening, but can't do much about, even though you have to do something about it...it reminded me of the best parts of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.
I tried reading this one a while back and couldn't get into it, but something told me I should keep it around and try again. This time, before I read it, I read the acknowledgments in the back, and I'm glad I did, because the author thanks Samuel Delany for Dhalgren, and that turned out to be the key to enjoying the book this time around.
I had the same start-and-stop experience with Dhalgren, though I had to try more than once before I finished (and enjoyed!) it. This is kind of challenging fiction for me, the structure of it, and I guess that's why it was worth going back to. With Dhalgren, I had the knowledge that Delany was worth reading (from enjoying his shorter, older sci-fi stories); with this, I only had the faith that, hey, anybody who loves Dhalgren enough to attempt anything even within the fringes of that style is worth some effort to read.
And it was. I love the conceit of the book, that Ravicka is a place where communication is...complicated. And not just communication, but reality. I'm going to read the other Ravickian books, though perhaps not right away.
I'm going to need more translations of Vigdis Hrjorth's 50 books please. The tone is dark, but the overall story is kind of existentialist-ish positive. Making meaning making meaning making meaning. Loved it.
Plusses:
+ Somehow a story about a PR firm is deep and interesting.
+ human interactions that don't require a traditional love story. at all.
+ humor across the spectrum, from wry chuckles to belly laughs
Minuses:
+ really, seriously, none.
Another great book from The Dorothy Project (dorothyproject.com)
This was oddly charming, for a book that is basically a bunch of vignettes about mental illness, and being in a (relatively nice) institution from time to time. I loved that it was intimate without being particularly raw, that it dealt with some intense feelings and ideas without being overwhelming. Part of the not-overwhelming part was the good writing. Part of it is the shortness of the chapters, perhaps, though I read over just a few days. It's one I want to read again.
[This book deals with child sexual and physical abuse.]
I'm a little surprised at how much this book affected me, and how much I enjoyed it, given that some of the content is pretty hard to take. It's just so well-written, and I'm guessing well-translated, that I couldn't put it down. It's got me thinking about the nature of truth, of family, of meaning in life. I'm going to seek out more books by Hjorth and hold out that more will get translations.
I picked this up because it was referenced in Jenny Hval's book, Girls Against God, which I absolutely loved. It's definitely a book of its time, with lots of added forward-slashes in the tradition of 80s deconstructionism. The author photo on the back cover was worth the price I paid for the book, honestly. I think if I were Canadian, the book would have been more interesting, but I mostly only enjoyed the last third, where the connections to Anna Karenina are made explicit.
I picked this up during a Verso Books sale, and I was not disappointed. I can't even begin to describe the book, which has a point of view that is complex in its structure, as well as the meaning in that point of view being complex. Sometimes it feels like a memoir, sometimes like a movie treatment, and sometimes a wonderful modern deconstructionist story, which on the face of it I usually wouldn't love. But Hval pulls it all off wonderfully, and I want to go back and read it again at some point.
It's tough to write a character who is mad in some serious way, and Van der Vliet Oloomi really nails it with this one, and from a first-person perspective, even. The prose is kind of intoxicating, allowing the reader to sink into the madness for themselves, which is fun and even a little frightening. I can see where my brain could go wrong in some similar way. Echoes of Diary of a Madman and (sort of) Crime and Punishment.
