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Books for (Past) Mid-2019

What am I doing? Where is time going? Here are some books I’ve read over the last four months while I have not been updating this blog in no particular order. Cheers.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

Excellent excellent. Why does death matter? What would it truly be like to live forever? Horn is genius in her answers.

At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight

This is a beautifully crafted little story about life at a girls boarding school. Knight writes his female characters wonderfully, which I commend him for. Excellent excellent.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Excellent excellent. Wow wow wow, Machado is such a talented writer. These short stories are all so, so beautiful and strange and wonderful. “Inventory” made me cry on public transportation.

The Missing of Clairdelune by Christelle Dabos

YAS I cannot wait until the third book in the series comes out. The tension! The enemies to lovers trope! My heart can’t take it. Dabos has a such a fun imagination. Excellent excellent.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Damn. Finally got around to this one. Teared up on public transportation at this as well. I’m going to go ahead and assume that everyone knows about this one already. Excellent excellent.

Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

A fascinating look at what we do to recover after exercise. The takeaway? Sleep is your best answer to full recovery. Sleep and relaxation. The expected: there is no magic answer to recovery. 

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Ugh, excellent excellent. Exploring how difficult and downright crushing it is for immigrants to actually achieve the “American Dream.” So honest and real and touching, and Jende and Neni were rendered so perfectly. 

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Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal

As I’ve mentioned in several previous posts, I love Pride & Prejudice. So when I saw that there was another retelling of the story coming out, I knew I had to snatch it up right away.  Unmarriageable is set in Pakistan from 2000-2001, and it is another delightful spin on Jane Austen’s classic.  I will say that, as far as modern novel retellings go, I think I am still partial to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, but I thoroughly enjoyed Kamal’s interpretation.

In this re-imagining, Alys, Jena, Mari, Qitty, and Lady Binat live in Dilipabad, a somewhat backwater village in Pakistan where they are forced to live after Mr. Binat is betrayed by his brother and tricked out of his full inheritance.  Alys and Jena work as teachers at a local school, making wages but, to Mrs. Binat’s dismay, still unmarried in their thirties, tantamount to being old maids in this society.  Enter Darsee and Bungles, whom the girls meet at the NadirFiede wedding, the hottest social event of the year.  And, well, we all know the story from there.

That’s really the main reason I say I prefer Eligible: Sittenfeld introduced new twists and turns, and though it ended as expected, Lydia’s storyline in particular was much more satisfying to me. In Jane Austen’s original, Lydia is vapid and silly, but she is also punished for her sexuality; in Kamal’s story, Lady is also punished for her decision to run away with Wickaam and live “in sin” with him before getting married.  Lady even foreshadows her action, asking Alys as they travel together whether she thinks Lady is stupid enough to run off with someone, and then this is exactly what she does.  Yes, her punishment is a product of the society they live in, but I would have liked to have seen more sympathy for a character that always has the misfortune of getting screwed over.  To be fair, though, Lady’s behavior, especially her bullying of Qitty, who is depicted as somewhat overweight in this book, does make her less likeable.

I also thought the pacing of this version was somewhat off-kilter.  The first chapter, where Alys somewhat obviously points out her feminist views to her classroom (and thus to readers) went on a bit too long, whereas the entire end of the book felt incredibly rushed.  I did not feel like I really got to know Darsee or see him and Alys together as much as I would have liked.

The only other thing I will say about this book that is somewhat critical is the meta-ness of it all. From the beginning, Alys teaches her class Pride & Prejudice and she is a self-proclaimed Austen fan.  But it makes my head hurt a little to think that Alys could be such a smart character who muses on P&P without ever stopping to think, Wow, my life seems unusually like this Jane Austen novel.  I have five sisters, my last name sounds suspiciously like Bennet, and now I’m meeting a guy who goes by Darsee.  So weird! I know that’s a silly thing, but that kind of stuff does not leave my head while I’m reading.

Again, though, I will never not love a go at P&P, and Kamal’s setting works perfectly to align with the society of Austen’s England.  There are some excellent book recommendations within the story, and Kamal’s commentary on all aspects of Pakistani society (and on English-language literature) is extremely interesting.  Another great addition to my Austen-inspired collection.

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A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos

I was a little wary of this book given some reviews on Amazon I had read, but I honestly fell in love with the story not too far into it.  Something about the world that Dabos creates is so enchanting, and I whizzed through the nearly 500 pages.  The Gilded Age aesthetic combined with the magic plus the traces of those early, weird French court novels was just all irresistible to me. And for some reason the book also reminded me of those random 80’s kid’s books I would find and read at the library during summer breaks in elementary school, which I dug.  I will definitely be pre-ordering my copy of the second book in the series very soon.

In Dabos’s world, Earth as we know it has broken up into floating “arks,” and each ark has its own distinct culture and a god-like figure that is the head of the ark, from whom all the ark’s citizens are descended. Ophelia lives a quiet but content life on her ark, refusing marriage offers and happily curating her museum; as a “reader,” she can touch an object and read its past.  She can also travel between mirrors, which she often uses to sneak into the musty archives that her godfather owns.  However, her world is turned upside down when she is forced to accept the proposal of a mysterious Thorn or be banished from her ark forever. Thorn, from the almost uninhabitably icy Pole, turns out to be just as cold and forbidding as his homeland, and as Ophelia is whisked away to the Pole with only her godmother as company, she finds that the rest of his family is just as, if not more, treacherous.  The treachery only deepens as Ophelia navigates the court of the Pole, the Citaceleste, in disguise.  Yet Ophelia vows not to let her new home drag her down to its level, and her quiet strength proves her just as capable as the most devious figures at court.

Was there quite a bit of cliché nonsense going on?  Yes—Thorn is so predictably brusque, Ophelia so predictably mousy and quiet.  Was there an avalanche of repetition?  Yes—if you took a shot every time Ophelia thought Thorn was ridiculously large and tall or every time Ophelia whispered, you’d absolutely die of alcohol poisoning. But the arks sparked my imagination, and the hint of romance—well, I’ve never made my love of relationships like those of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy or Margaret and Mr. Thornton quiet.  Plus, Thorn as a name is so close to Mr. Thornton… Here’s hoping something similar will happen over the next three books.  I can’t wait to get hands on the next one, at any rate.

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Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg

I’ll admit that I have some bias here—with personal ties to South Bend, I’m already inclined to look upon Mayor Pete favorably.  But it’s hard not to like him even more after reading his memoir, and, if you happen to have lived in South Bend at any point, it’s also hard not to get swept up in the nostalgia Buttigieg creates in his vivid descriptions of the city he clearly loves so much.

With humor, warmth, and an openness refreshing to find in a political figure, Buttigieg invites readers into his world, recounting personal anecdotes and retelling the story of South Bend’s revival under his leadership.  From Harvard to Afghanistan, Buttigieg’s journey back to South Bend, culminating in his election as one of the youngest mayors in a town of comparable size in the country, is engaging and interesting.  Buttigieg embodies the smartness and honesty we all demand of political figures but never seem to receive.  And it’s impossible not to fall in love with him as he recounts falling in love with his now-husband, Chasten.  Somehow Buttigieg has rolled a bildungsroman, a triumphant coming-out story, and a political memoir all into one—and, oh yeah, he’s not even forty years old.

Mayor Pete is the real-life Leslie Knope.  It saddens me to think that he probably has very little chance at winning the presidential election in 2020, but I believe that everyone should at least give his memoir a read and see just how seriously he takes his role as a leader for the American people.

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Uprooted by Naomi Novik

In Naomi Novik’s Polish-inspired fantasy novel, 17-year-old protagonist Agnieszka lives in Dvernik, a small town in the country of Polnya that is situated close the magical Wood, a forest with a mind of its own, full of dark terrors.  Long-time wizard of the region, Sarkan, more commonly known as the Dragon, picks a girl from the village every ten years to live with him and help him in his tower as he combats the Wood’s powers.  Agnieszka, of course, was born in a year where she could be chosen to serve the Dragon, but there is little doubt in the village that her best friend, beautiful, kind, and smart Kasia, will be chosen.  Yet when the feast day comes, Kasia is not chosen—Agnieszka is.

At first enduring the verbal abuse and emotional neglect of the Dragon, Agnieszka soon finds out that she is a witch, and quite a powerful one at that when given the right magic, which eventually wins her Sarkan’s begrudging trust.  As her powers are flourishing, though, the Wood, too, is becoming more audacious in its assaults on the nearby villagers.  First saving her village from monstrous wolves and then Kasia from the Wood itself, Agnieszka makes a name for herself, with unintended consequences—the prince of Polnya himself comes to ask Sarkan and Agnieszka to free his mother, the Queen, from the grasp of the Wood, where she has been kept for two decades. Almost certainly a fool’s errand, Sarkan and Agnieszka agree, if only to keep Kasia from being put to death for having at one point been corrupted by the Wood.  

Finding success at great cost, Agnieszka and Kasia travel to the capitol with the queen and the prince, but they soon find that even miles from the Wood, its malevolent influence is inescapable, and it will take all of Agnieszka, Kasia, and Sarkan’s wits and bravery to find a way to defeat the Wood once and for all.

Uprooted was a fun read, fast-paced and entertaining; the element of Polish fairy tale was expertly put to use to craft a rich world. It is not a life-changing read, nor is it free from clichés—namely, Agnieszka being clumsy and “not like normal girls,” and the obvious romantic entanglement that she finds herself in with Sarkan—but it does an admirable job at the end reminding readers that the world is not black and white, good and evil, etc. etc.  On a more SPOILERY note, I did find the sex scene between Sarkan and Agnieszka a bit uncomfortable—first of all because, as he points out, he’s about nine decades older than her.  But also, if the roles were reversed and Sarkan had been the one approaching Agnieszka’s bed… well, that would be pretty rapey.  As cliché as their relationship might have been, though, I can’t lie—it was enjoyable to watch it come around as I expected, and that sort of nicely sums up my feelings on the book as a whole.

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The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

Set in the Stillness, a continent prone to devastating earthquakes—which, when destructive enough, cause an apocalyptic “season” to begin—The Fifth Season is the intriguing first book of the Broken Earth trilogy by sci-fi author NK Jemisin.  In this world, orogenes (those with the power to “sess” the earth and quell quakes) are taken from their families and raised at the Fulcrum, a place where they are taught control over their power to help keep cities safe.  But because of their awesome powers, they are feared, detested, legally less than human; the Fulcrum, while it teaches them to use their skills, is little more than an educational prison.

The narrative shifts between three perspectives: Essun, an orogene in hiding, who comes home one day to find her son murdered and her husband (the likely killer) and daughter gone; Damaya, a young orogene whose parents give her over to the Guardians that control the Fulcrum; and Syenite, an ambitious orogene at the Fulcrum who takes on a mission with the most powerful orogene in all the Stillness, Alabaster.  As their stories converge, secrets—of obelisks and stone eaters and islands—are revealed, but you won’t find any answers yet in this book. It’ll take two more Hugo Award-winning novels to finish these storylines.

I found The Fifth Season intriguing, original, and a refreshing break from clichés that often get used in sci fi.  You’ll find no enemies-to-lovers here; instead you’ll find gender queer characters and polyamorous relationships, a wide range of representation unfolding across the pages.  Jemisin writes with a strong, quirky narrative voice that is not afraid to talk about subjects many might squirm away from.  Jemisin, a female African American author in a genre that is predominated by white males, also brings a fresh perspective in the references she makes in the novel, both literary and real-world, from Toni Morrison to the Three Fifths Compromise.

I have so many books on my current to-read list that I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get around to reading the next two books in the series, but I am intrigued enough to hope that one day I’ll find the time. The way Jemisin converged the three narrators in the book was brilliant, and I wonder what sorts of clever twists lay in store in the next book.

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Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

I’m still not totally sure why I decided to read this book.  I kept hearing about it, and then it was on a buy 2 get the 3rd free display, so here I am.  It’s definitely not my typical choice, but I gave it a try.  And it was interesting.  Probably not something I would re-read.  But interesting.

JD Vance uses Hillbilly Elegy to both tell his story—one that is all too common among the “hillbillies” like him, white, poor people from the Appalachia region—and to delve deeper into why so many lower-class white people feel like the American dream has abandoned them.  He writes well, has an interesting story, and raises some uncomfortable truths about how and why some people get stuck in the cycle of poverty, addiction, and violence. I think he could have gone even deeper with the psychological analysis of this group, but that probably would have made the book a bit more academic and taken away from the personal reflection that drives the narrative.

It’s hard to put your own prejudices away when you’re reading.  I admit: the fact that Vance is a white, male Republican did not really endear him to me whenever he mentioned race in the book.  It made me very skeptical when he went from talking about how a ridiculous percentage of the people around him believed that Obama was a Muslim to saying that the general dislike of Obama by “hillbillies” had nothing to do with race.  I’m sure that many people, as Vance suggests, did not connect with Obama because he’s a highly-educated smooth-talking politician, but it seems silly to say that he would have received this same scrutiny and distrust if his skin color was closer to his mother’s.

Let me be clear here: any time that someone faces abuse or neglect is a reason for concern.  Vance describes a serious problem that needs to be addressed.  Everyone, regardless of race, gender, or class, deserves a loving and safe home.  But I also believe that some people are born with certain privileges that need to be acknowledged, the color of one’s skin being one of those things.  But perhaps this is an inappropriate place for that discussion.

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The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

I’ll admit it up front, I 100% bought this book for the cover.  The design, especially on the hardcover edition, is exquisite.  I kept reading the summary of the book and thinking, oh, that’s not quite what I was hoping, but eventually I just went ahead and got the damn thing because why not.

I again think that the summary on the back of this book was somewhat misleading—it claims that main character Cora’s “London past” will catch up to her after she moves to a country village in Essex called Aldwinter.  However, I don’t really think that’s an accurate portrayal of this plot, so I guess I’ll take a swing at it myself.

After the death of her cold and abusive husband, Cora Seaborne is free to live the life she wants and follow her own desires; talk of a frightful beast resurfacing in the small village of Aldwinter draws Cora out of London at once.  Along with her she brings her maid/friend Martha and young son Francis, a boy she has found difficult to connect to for many years.  Free to roam about the country, Cora feels able to be herself again, and it is here that she runs into the village parson William Ransome.  Through a tense first encounter, the two cannot help but be drawn to each other, despite the fact that Will is happily married to his childhood sweetheart Stella. As more strange occurrences in the village get blamed on the Serpent, both Will and Cora search for an answer to the mysteries around them.  Set in Victorian England, the occult beliefs of the villagers clash with the ideals of the Enlightenment, and Cora and Will must find their own ways to live with and love those they hold most dear.

Ok.  That’s not great either.  Whatever.

It took me a couple chapters in to remember that, according to the back of the book, this story is set in 1890s England.  The New Year’s Day scene at the beginning of the book gave me no indication that this was set in the past, and it wasn’t until the end of the funeral that I fully realized that this was set in the past, thanks to the fashion of the day. Perhaps that was just me being a bad reader, but I do think that Perry was constantly trying to challenge our modern sense of what living the Victorian era was actually like.

I also thought the book had a very interesting way of dealing with its themes.  In particular, I was struck by themes of duality and of logic vs. feeling.  Duality plays out in many ways: man or woman, religious or atheist, conservative or socialist, city or country.  Perry does an excellent job of fleshing out the ways that humans slide between absolutes, how we are never exactly one thing or another.  And I was very interested in the way she showed that every seemingly supernatural event that occurred in the book was easily explainable by science.  This did seem a bit repetitive by the end, but it helped to underscore the one thing that could not be explained away by logic or science: the workings of love and the desires of the heart.

If you don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading here: that last paragraph is a good enough end. But I would like to discuss the ending some, and to do so I will have to spoil the end of the book.  I loved the end of Luke’s storyline; I loved that his friendship with Spencer—a platonic, male relationship—is what saved him from suicide.  It’s not something you see a lot.  I didn’t like Luke for most of the book because of his ideas of “possessing” Cora, but I found this end to his plotline very touching and sweet.  

However, Cora’s end I am a little less comfortable with.  I am all for women not needing to live with men; I myself like to think that I am a very independent person, capable of spending much time alone happily working or reading.  Yet—and perhaps this is personal life getting in the way of my interpretation—I did not like that Cora ended up alone in a house that had once held such bad memories, claiming that “solitude suits [her].”  This past year was very difficult for me mentally, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I felt very isolated almost all the time.  Having friends nearby is important.  Physical touch is important.  During my college years, I spent a great deal of time alone in my room doing work, but I never felt lonely because I knew I could just pop my head out my door and talk to a friend or that my roommates would be home soon.

Humans are, of course, all different, but I don’t like the thought of Cora always being alone in a large house because it just feels too lonely, too easy to become isolated.  Are we to take Cora as a fool for thinking that she will be happy alone all the time?  Are we to not see this as a happy ending for her, but rather a punishment for her selfishness?  I don’t think Cora deserves to be punished, and I don’t think Perry wants that for her either.  And I’m not saying that every story has to have a happy ending, but it certainly felt like Perry was trying to give her characters a hopeful space in the end.  I hope that Cora at least has friends to call upon in London often, because in my experience, solitude is rarely a happy ending.

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Books for Getting Through That Last Stretch of 2018

One job hunt and a NaNoWriMo later, I am back.  Cheers to good books and a looong year.

Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine

This was the last of my books that I was supposed to read in college but never did.  What an interesting one.  First of all, I’m very intrigued by Antoine Vollodine as an author, because apparently he writes under a bunch of homonyms (like an adult version of Lemony Snicket), and I want to read other stuff by him to get a better sense of this world he has created.  But then the story itself.  Very strange. Lots of incest.  But so compelling.  The reader wanders through a dreamscape with the characters, and the beautiful prose is enough to keep you going along with strange events.  Lots of unexpected humor as well.  

I’m not sure if I can succinctly summarize the novel, but I’ll at least try to give a general sketch.  So after the world has begun to use more and more nuclear power, nuclear meltdowns begin to happen more and more, resulting in the destruction of most of the natural world.  In a devastating Russian landscape, teams are sent out to try to clean up the waste; most die, but a few genetic mutants—those whose genes are actually bolstered by the nuclear radiation—find that they are now essentially immortal, including the Gramma Udgul and Solovyeir, former lovers who find each other again at Solovyei’s commune, or kolkhoz. Meanwhile, three separatist insurgents have departed from their militant group and are now dying in the wastelands. One of them, Elli Kronauer, goes to look for help, and he stumbles upon Radiant Terminus.

There’s a lot going on here, everything from politics to feminism to literary critique.  I think you could probably go to grad school and write a thesis about his body of work.  I’m honestly kind of thinking about it myself because I’m just so intrigued to hear someone smarter than me analyze this book and how it fits into the larger oeuvre. Also, kudos to the English translator for putting the original French into such lyrical English.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

This books blew my mind. I was randomly lying in bed one night thinking about how we can know whether, say, dogs have their own language and communicate with each other like we do.  My thought at the time was doing brain scans to see if they had similar brain activity/lobes/whatever.  After reading this book, I can say three things: 1) Brain scans on live animals are very difficult because the claustrophobia and loud noises scare animals; 2) people have actually trained their dogs to lie still in these machines so that they can do brain scans, which is pretty darn cool; and 3) the idea of comparing our language to dog “language” is part of the problem.  We humans like to think we are the center of the universe, but really… we’re not.  

Frans de Waal probably changed the way I see the world through this book.  Humans are just animals, and we live and die like other animals.  While I knew this fact, it had been a while since someone had so baldly pointed it out to me  There are chimpanzees that have better memorization skills than humans do.  We are limited by our experiments, which always come from our limited human experience.  It was almost shocking to see on page our pride and arrogance called out; we do not want to learn that there are animal species that might have superior intelligence capabilities because that flies in the face of everything we teach ourselves, of how our technology or understanding of quantum physics makes us superior to every other living creature on the planet and is thus the reason that we can exploit them and the natural world.  I would highly recommend reading this if you’ve ever had any curiosity towards animal intelligence.

The Last Days of California by Mary Miller

I have honestly never related so much to a narrator in a book.  Jess is a fifteen-year-old girl from Alabama who is travelling across the country with her family so that they can experience an impending apocalypse in California—at least, there will be a day of reckoning according to the leader of the church they are a part of.  None of these things describe my life—I am not fifteen, I am not from Alabama, I am not on a road trip, I am not part of a religion that regularly predicts the end of the world—but Jess’s first-person narration is so spot-on to how I felt as a teen, to how I still often feel now, that I was mesmerized by her thoughts for the entire book.  I cannot recommend this book enough, and at about 200 pages in length, it’s a very quick read to get through.  Mary Miller has captured something genius, beautiful, and real about being a teenage girl, especially when you feel like you are the one that is always slightly out of place and off of center..

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is an epic, and I loved it.  It broke my heart, but I loved it.  I think I loved it so much because of the fact that Min Jin Lee took twenty years to write it and poured so much of her life into it—you can’t help but be inspired by her story of dedication to this one idea that lit a creative fire in her.  

The novel follows almost five generations of a family of Koreans who immigrate to Japan.  Most of the story revolves around Sunja—her parents, her accidental pregnancy, her children—and I thought Lee did a brilliant job of following the adage to create characters that feel real.  Sunja makes mistakes, loves a man she shouldn’t, desires things she shouldn’t, loves her children fiercely, doubts everything.  I think it would be too complicated to go into a more detailed summary, as it is simply a huge book and worth discovering on your own, so I’ll leave it at that.

I can’t say I was always a huge fan of Lee’s prose style; it felt a bit stilted at times to me, but that almost seems to fit with this grand, mythic thing she has created.  I was devastated by many of the events that happened near the end of the book, and I’m not sure I would really call it a hopeful ending, but it was a genuinely awe-inspiring experience to be able to read this book.  If nothing else, read it to learn about the experience of immigrants who, as the narrator states in the first sentence, have been forgotten by history.

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The Room on Rue Amélie by Kristin Harmel

I don’t like being negative in my book reviews, because I know that writing a novel is hard.  And every published author deserves respect for their accomplishment.  But there are just some books you don’t connect with, and The Room on Rue Amélie was one of those books pour moi.  This was especially disappointing to me because I’m one of those pretentious Americans who loves Paris and the French language and thinks I’m cultured for it.  Anyway.

The novel is set in Paris as World War II is kicking into gear.  Ruby, a newlywed American who has moved to France to be with her husband Marcel, is stuck in a Paris that has been taken over by the Germans.  As her marriage crumbles in distrust, she learns that Marcel has become part of an underground resistance line helping RAF pilots who have been shot down over France escape back to England.  To top it all off, her next door neighbors, the Dachers, are Jewish, and life is becoming increasingly difficult for them as the Nazis tighten their grip on Paris.  Young Charlotte Dacher is especially struggling to find her place growing up in a war-torn world.  Meanwhile, RAF pilot Thomas just wants to help the Allies defeat the Germans, but when his plane gets shot down over the French countryside, his plans for the future go awry.

I can’t really discuss this book without getting into major spoilers, so… WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.  

So here’s the thing: the writing style of this books just was not for me.  There was basically no urgency or suspense to any of the plot points, which is baffling considering the time period and the events of the story. Ruby’s husband Marcel is shot for helping the Resistance, yet his death is more convenient than anything else, as this makes space for Thomas without having Ruby be an adulteress.  Meanwhile, Thomas gets shot down and makes it into and out of Paris not once but twice with only one short run-in with a German officer.  At multiple points, Harmel describes things in slow, precise detail, which would lead me to believe that she was building up to something, only to have nothing happen at all.  Half-way through the story I would just skim through potentially perilous moments because I knew nothing was going to happen to the characters.

This is especially puzzling in the case of Charlotte Dacher.  From the beginning, all Charlotte thinks about is how everyone treats her like a child but how she feels she is not a child anymore.  The amount of times Charlotte thought this and then thought about how she should do something to prove she wasn’t a child anymore (even though she never did anything…) was somewhat grating, and I frankly couldn’t stand her character for the vast majority of the novel.  Her actions and thoughts portray her as so childlike, yet then there would be lines like, “But what Charlotte didn’t say was that sometimes, the dawn never came at all.”  This girl is supposed to be thirteen, and I’m sorry, but what thirteen-year-old just spontaneously thinks like that?  I feel like Harmel was probably drawing inspiration from Anne Frank’s diary, but there’s a world of difference between a real girl writing in a journal she specifically hoped would one day be published and the thoughts and words a fictional teenage girl would have in everyday life.  

Furthermore, the novel takes place over a two year span, and Ruby ends up essentially adopting Charlotte after Charlotte’s parents are rounded up by the police and deported. They move to a new apartment that’s not too far from their building on Rue Amélie—Ruby inexplicably reasons to herself that she can still walk by this building every day, even though her former neighbors might see her at any time—and by the time Charlotte is fifteen, it’s just fine and dandy for her to leave the apartment and walk around Paris with her beau Lucien.  What about Charlotte’s old schoolmates?  What if a former neighbor saw her out?  Two years wouldn’t be enough to render her unrecognizable, and it’s pretty hard to believe that no one from her old life ever saw her out in the city.

Switching gears, the main plot of the novel—the romance between Ruby and Thomas—just felt so contrived. I knew that once Thomas’s perspective was introduced, Marcel was going to be killed off.  More than once, Ruby reprimands herself for falling for Marcel so quickly: they meet and get married within six months, and then she moves to Paris to be with a man she has known less than a year.  Yet her romance with Thomas is just as fast a fall.  They get to know each other over the course of about a week, and then for TWO YEARS apparently neither one of them has relations with anyone else.  I’m sorry, but Thomas would have been visiting prostitutes with his RAF buddies, and Ruby, a beautiful young widow, would have been attracting the attention of single Parisian men, especially the German officers.  

And then the ending. So Ruby ends up going to a concentration camp in Germany because she is suspected of helping the Resistance, although how she got found out is never revealed.  (A small part of me was hoping there would be some interesting twist here, like a spy for the Germans would be revealed, but we’re just supposed to accept Ruby’s random imprisonment.)  At any rate, she is able to escape after becoming deathly ill, and she makes it to a farm (literally all the farmers in this book are the most angelic, brave people on the planet) where she can give birth to a baby girl, conceived when Thomas makes it to Paris after getting shot down and somehow not dying a second time. She dies from her fever after giving birth, and I could accept this death.  Her time at the concentration camp was brutal, and was actually the most well-written part of the novel is my opinion.  

But then Thomas. Harmel kills off Thomas, which I get: it’s romantic that both Thomas and Ruby die at around the same time, one can’t live without the other, yadda yadda.  But his death was so unearned.  He is flying back to France after liberation and his plane randomly malfunctions, won’t even let him eject, and he crashes into the sea and dies.  After somehow being hit by German fire TWICE and then parachuting to safety TWICE and making it into and out of Paris on foot TWICE, he randomly dies in a freak accident that is never explained.  Was his plane tampered with?  By whom?  It made no sense and felt too easy.

I could probably keep going about this book, but I think I’ve gone on long enough.  Let’s just say that I would recommend spending the money you could use to buy the hardcover edition of this book on some other book of historical fiction.  Like Atonement.  That’s a great read.

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Okay Fine Whatever by Courtenay Hameister

Courtenay Hameister may have anxiety, but she is not afraid to write about some of the most intimate details of her life and publish them in a book for the world to read.  And I have major respect for her for that. Actually, as someone who feels like I, too, have been somewhat behind the curve when it comes to life experience, I have major respect for Hameister for just deciding to stop letting her anxiety control her fate and start living her life.  MAJOR PROPS.

In a series of essays, Hameister details her struggle with Generalized Anxiety Disorder—how it stifled her ability to have mature, intimate relationships, how it ultimately led to her leaving her job as host of the public radio show Live Wire.  She then goes on to describe the “Okay Fine Whatever project,” an attempt to do things that would put her outside of her comfort zone without leading to full-on panic attacks.  Mostly this relates to her experiences in dating, as she had never really dated anyone throughout her twenties, and the one serious relationship she was in during her thirties ended in heartbreak.  It was really wonderful to witness Hameister’s journey to love unfold, and I liked that it broke the mold of this idea in our society that if you are not wed by the time you’re thirty, you will never be able to find love.

For anyone who struggles with anxiety, this book will hit home and make you nod sagely while thinking, yes, girl, I know exactly what you mean.  And hopefully this book will inspire others to move outside their comfort zone and take the necessary steps to feel like they are in control of their lives.  I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways of the book: anxiety may always be there, and going outside your comfort zone might not be a life-altering experience, but it’s something to be proud of, and only by challenging ourselves do we truly experience what life has to offer.

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White Noise by Don Delillo

Simply put, White Noise blew my mind, and it feels just as relevant now, if not more so, than it would have when it was first published in the 1980s.

Everything about the book—from dialogue to the characters that speak this dialogue—is slightly absurd, but that is what makes it all work so well.  Main character Jack lives with wife Babette and four children, though these children all from different marriages and do not include some of Jack’s children from other marriages.  One day, a “toxic event” takes place, forcing the family and their neighborhood to evacuate their homes and seek shelter at emergency stations.  However, Jack is briefly exposed to the giant toxic cloud, and he is given a prognosis that death, his worst fear, is impending. Meanwhile, he discovers that Babette has been secretly taking pills to help rid herself of her fear of death; this secret threatens to tear their marriage apart and leads to an inevitable but still astonishing conclusion.

My fear of death feels as all-consuming as Jack’s fear, so I related to the characters in this book on an entirely new level.  Delillo’s mastery of language and his philosophical musings about death and humanity and the consumer-driven world we live in make this novel absolutely incredible. As we stare down the barrel of an increasingly environmentally and politically unstable world, Delillo’s ruminations are haunting and powerful in their prescience.  It is disturbing and funny, ironic and heartfelt, and it will make you think more than you might want, as any great book will do.

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Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

I haven’t stayed up reading a book in bed, unable to put it down, for many years.  Probably since I was in high school.  But Eligible became the latest addition to this list of can’t-stop-reading-ers.  It was phenomenal.

Eligible is a modern-day adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, set in Cincinnati in 2013. Sittenfeld does an amazing job of transforming Austen’s world into ours; her prose is a spot-on imitation of Austen’s own style (while still being wonderfully unique), and elements of the plot are perfectly transferred to 21st century attitudes—for example, instead of Jane and Lizzy being just about being considered old maids at 24 and 26, Sittenfeld ages them to 38 and 40 (certainly above the age we consider “normal” for getting married these days), meaning that rather than being too late to find husbands, they are rather approaching an age where it is too late to have biological children, a much more modern approach.

Not only are Sittenfeld’s updates smart and timely, they are more than just a straight copy of Austen’s plot points.  Sittenfeld brings her own narrative to create a new story that will shock and delight those who believe they already know what’s to come.  Part of the fun is guessing how these modernized characters will act differently than their 19th century counterparts.  And not only does Sittenfeld update, she gently but purposefully brings the reader’s attention to the legitimate criticisms we can have of Austen and the culture her books were created in.  None of the Bennet sisters are shamed or punished for their independence or sexuality, and it’s very refreshing to see a feminist take on the Bennets, especially considering Lydia’s plotline.

As you may have guessed, I LOVE Pride & Prejudice.  The OG book, the BBC Colin Firth adaptation, the Keira Knightley adaptation, the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Bride & Prejudice.  So if you don’t share my love of Austen, you might not find yourself as drawn to Eligible as I was.  But it was so delicious to see how pivotal moments in the plot came about in this version of the story, and the last 50 pages or so were wholly satisfying for any fan of Austen or romance.

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Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

Yes, I finally finished Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy, and maybe now someday I will actually watch the movie. But honestly, I still have no idea what’s going on.  What should I have taken away from this series?  What was VanderMeer’s ultimate point in writing these books?  Again, the “doubling” and the “uncanny” of the era we live in, the Anhropocene, was hammered home—I noted every time a character had an uncanny feeling, felt like there was some kind of ghostly presence in some way, registered déjà vu, or described something as a double.  I know that asking what a book means is apparently a dumb question, but what does it mean?

In this final installment, all the characters of the first two books have their storylines woven together, and I enjoyed getting all these different perspectives at once—the first-person perspective returns with the biologist’s writing, second-person is introduced through the director’s story, and third-person narration is used for all other characters.  I was particularly drawn to a new character we get to meet who brings a lot of clarity to the plot.  Saul Evans is the lighthouse keeper right before Area X falls, and it his experiences around the lighthouse and his interactions with the future director of the Southern Reach and the mysterious Science & Séance Brigade are illuminating and incredibly interesting.  Saul’s perspective is very well-written, and when the events begin to occur that spiral into the creation of Area X, VanderMeer’s creepy and intense descriptions of what Saul sees and experiences are just plain fun to read.

Acceptance was trippy, chilling, and mind-bending, and though I can’t say I totally understood what was happening, I thought that it was a satisfying way to end the Southern Reach trilogy.  VanderMeer is an exceptional writer, and his lush descriptions of nature and richly imagined creatures and characters make for great literature.  Fans of horror and the grotesque, well-written sci-fi, or zany speculative fiction should definitely check out the series.

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The Philosopher’s Flight by Tom Miller

In which magic, history, flying sports, romance, science, heroism, and women’s rights combine in glorious fashion

The Philosopher’s Flight is a delightful, fantastical, and magical coming of age story.  In Miller’s version of the world, “empirical philosophy” is a practice dominated by women that is a mix between magic and science; these “philosophers,” or sigilrists, as they’re often called, use powders and drawn “sigils” to let them “hover” or fly, carve smoke, transport from place to place (like teleportation), freeze human motor functions to put people in “stasis,” and much more. Narrator Robert Weekes grew up the son of one of the best hoverers in Montana (and probably the country), and since he was a young boy, he had dreamed of following in his mother’s footsteps and becoming part of the U.S. Sigilry Corps’s Rescue and Evacuation team, where only the best and bravest philosophers have flown.  As a male, however, this is viewed as impossible; men just can’t perform empirical philosophy like women can.

But as in any patriarchal society, the philosophers are not without opposition.  The Trenchers, groups mainly of men who believe that empirical philosophy is against God’s word and should be made illegal—and that the woman’s place is in the home—are riled up and out for blood as our story begins, and it is because of a tragic event involving Trencher terrorists that Robert Weekes becomes a hometown hero and is given the chance to get a scholarship to Radcliffe, a women’s college and a premier school for sigilrists. Robert finds opposition everywhere he turns at Radcliffe, but he does not give up on his goal to become a part of Rescue and Evac.  To even earn the recognition that would get him an interview with R & E, though, he must find a way to compete in the inter-collegiate General’s Cup, an Olympics-style competition for philosophers.  And of course, what would a coming-of-age story be without a love interest?  Over the course of the school year, Robert falls for Danielle Hardin, war hero and transport sigilrist extraordinaire, but will their love survive the political turmoil surrounding Danielle and Robert’s impossible dreams?

I absolutely loved reading this books and learning about how history would be different if empirical philosophy were a real practice.  There are such great little details that you pick up—like women already having the vote in the 1800s, for example—that it’s impossible not to be absolutely floored by the insane amount of time and research it must have taken Miller to put this whole book together.  Robert is a darling narrator who is so easy to empathize with; I honestly don’t think the story would have worked half as well from any other character’s perspective or if it had been written in third person.  And the quotes from characters and excerpts from textbooks and articles created for the beginning of each chapter are ingenious.  Not only do they immerse you in Robert’s world, they let you see into what the future holds for Robert and empirical philosophy as a practice. Similarly, the inclusion of pages at the end f the novel taken from a “textbook” of sigils that Robert helps to write is incredibly fascinating, finally giving the reader visual representations of the symbols sigilrists use for their different tasks.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the novel was the thought put behind how gender dynamics would work in this alternate universe.  The dedication page is great—apparently one of Miller’s friends or colleagues had asked why his stories never feature women, and this novel, though told from a male perspective, is all about strong women and the struggles they face in early twentieth century society, which, despite the respect most people have for the philosophers, is still a world run by men, where women and their “witchcraft” are often feared.  Miller does an excellent job of thinking out the nuances of how a society where powerful women are given a chance to take charge would differ from our own.  It’s also a very interesting way to look at how, for most of Western history, women were seen as the inherently inferior sex; if you were a woman, you just couldn’t compete with men.  In Robert’s world, he is seen as naturally inferior because men just are naturally worse than women at empirical philosophy, and Miller hits the nail on the head of how, for example, women who fought and flew in the World Wars must have felt trying to break into these fields dominated by the opposite gender who saw them as naturally incapable.

However, Miller is also not blind to how these situations would obviously be different as well. Robert’s roommate, another male at Radcliffe, Unger, has a younger sister who wants to go to Harvard, and after he and Robert are targeted in the cafeteria on their first day at school, Unger shudders to think of the kind of treatment his sister would get being the first woman at male-dominated Harvard.  The threat of sexual violence and the way that people like the Trenchers use the Bible to remove women’s autonomy and classify them as the submissive sex are still very real for the women in the novel, and I appreciated Miller’s effort to show that while Robert can metaphorically stand in for the women who had to break into the public sphere in a patriarchal society, he enjoys privileges as a white male in a country that still holds the white male as the standard, making his transition into the female-dominated world of empirical philosophy much easier.  

The only thing about the novel that is left ambiguous that I wanted to explicitly see happen was Robert ending up with Essie, another first-year at Radcliffe who aspires to become a part of the Rescue and Evacuation corps as well.  She was obviously so into him the entire time. And they had the same interests! And there was definitely a spark near the end!  I guess I just identified more with Essie—she seems quiet and is easily embarrassed, but inside, she’s strong as hell.  Ugh. You know it’s a good story when you want the author to tell you exactly what happened after the novel ended.  All in all, I absolutely loved falling in love with these characters myself.

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Books for Mid-2018

I would just like to say that I’m trying my best here.  (Also… how is it July already??)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Yes, it did take me a month to read this one.  Honestly, it was so dense—every page just packed with words and plot—that I was proud of myself if I read 10 pages at a time.  And I don’t really know what to say that could possibly add to any serious literary discourse.  I think I would need to take an entire course about this book to begin to understand what Marquez is doing here.  Magical realism, the repetition of the past and the cyclical nature of time, blah blah blah.  Like what was up with all the incest?  There has to be something there—something about keeping things in the family, the Buendias representing some aspect of society or a country.  Lots of commentary on war and politics, for sure.  (Is this the most useless review of this book of all time?  Probably.)

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

Authority picks up where Annihilation left off, except this time we are no longer reading the journal of the biologist.  Instead, we view the action from a new character’s perspective: Control, newly appointed director of the Southern Reach, the organization that runs the expeditions into Area X.  At the Southern Reach facility, many revelations are made—what the first expedition into Area X was like, who is really running the Southern Reach, the psychologist’s true identity.  Familiar concepts continue: hypnosis, climate change, doubling, the sense of the uncanny. But what is Area X?  I, for one, still do not understand.  Hopefully the final installment will bring big revelations.

This one also took me a long time to get through, but that’s because I would only read it during my lunch breaks at work.  I found the shift in style—from the first person journal account to third person limited perspective—to be very interesting and a great way to let the reader be drawn further into the world.  It was like getting to see behind the curtain, although we later learn that perhaps this third person perspective is just as unreliable as the biologist’s first person account.  I enjoyed getting to know the new characters, and all the new information we get about characters we met in Annihilation makes old characters feel new as well.  I still haven’t seen the movie, but from what I’ve heard, I think it might actually have pulled quite a bit from this book.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

I read this book in 5 hours on a plane ride.  Short and sweet but packed with emotion and thought, it is a quick read that will stay with you a long time.  Hamid’s sparse writing style is exactly the kind of prose I tried to emulate as an undergrad, giving an almost fairy-tale-esque vibe to the story.  And indeed, the concept of the book is something like a fairy tale: two young people (Nadia and Saeed) fall in love, their lives are rent apart by war, and then they discover that doors are opening up all over the world that allow a person to step into a completely different place.  The ending is perhaps not the fairy tale conclusion we might hope for, but we as readers are ready for it as Hamid beautifully sets up the ways Nadia and Saeed change over the course of the novel, and it is probably for the best.  

(***Spoiler***: I was definitely thrown off by how quickly Saeed proposed to Nadia, and I think that already pointed to the trouble they would have in the future.)

I really loved how the doors were presented in the story—they were just accepted as true by the world, no need to find an explanation.  The short character sketches of the anonymous people that used these doors were also very well done.  I especially enjoyed the first one, where the doors are introduced, as Hamid does a great job of building up suspense and our expectations of what potentially terrible things could happen.  But the reality of the situation is that the man that uses the door is just a human being trying to escape to a better life, which is what every human wants on a basic level.  I thought Hamid’s straightforward approach to showing how prejudiced Western society is against immigrants (specifically, those immigrants from non-Western countries) was so relevant and so true.  It’s fascinating to think about what would happen if doors like this really did appear; I think Hamid is pretty optimistic in how the world would handle this crumbling of borders.  Throughout the novel, star imagery is used to evoke a greater sense of the universe (the doors themselves seem like tiny black holes), and this is incredibly appropriate as Hamid seeks to uncover the universalities of what makes us human.

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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Is a tree red?

All the Birds in the Sky is an absolutely delightful mix of sci-fi and romance, written with an incredible sense of humor and an eye for perfectly weird little details.  Charlie Jane Anders plays to the tune of all my favorites: childhood romance, magic, strong female characters, hilarious dialogue, straightforward and witty narration. I loved every minute of reading this book.

The story follows Patricia and Laurence, two total misfits who are lucky enough to find one another when they’re young.  Both have unhappy family lives, no friends at school, and incredible secret talents, though these talents at first appear opposing: Patricia finds out from speaking with a bird as a child that she is a witch, and Laurence is a tech whiz, creating an artificial intelligence system in his childhood bedroom closet.

The two meet as children at school, where they are shunned and bullied by everyone.  A guidance counselor/assassin, demon worship, and a military boot camp are just a few of the traumas that Patricia and Laurence have to suffer through in their school days until they are forced to part, with Patricia going off to learn how to be a witch and Laurence leaving to attend a school for tech and engineering geniuses.

We pick up with the protagonists years later in San Francisco.  Patricia has become a prodigious talent among witches, and Laurence has become a part of the most scientifically advanced tech group in the world.  They meet at a party, and eventually (finally!) realize that they’re in love with each other.  Which is coincidentally when the world begins to end and the tech geniuses and witches go to war.  Patricia and Laurence must find a way to come together and stop the fighting, or the world as they know it will end.

My only complaint with the book was that the ending felt a bit rushed, but perhaps it felt rushed to me because I knew I only had a few pages left and I wanted the story to keep going for many, many more pages.  Honestly, All the Birds in the Sky reminded me of why I love to read so much.  I kind of feel lucky to be alive at a time where this is a book that exists to be read.

Note: I have finally caught up on all my reading, so posts will be coming when I finish each book.  I am currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and Acceptance.  So whichever one I finish first will be reviewed next.