Books 116-117
Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I rarely read memoirs but it was a popsugar prompt and I needed something to read during my cancer surgery recovery. This shone across the library from me and you know the rest. Had to have it. I'm coming into this as a big Sir Pat fan from his stances on helping people out of domestic violence situations and helping rescue animals to his roles as Picard, Xavier, Scrooge and various Shakespearean characters. Obviously I was primed to love this but the truth of it is, Sir Pat writes as well as he acts.
One of the things I especially appreciated was this is not salacious or completely self aggrandizing. Yes, we learn his father was abusive and the vestiges of that are still there 80 years later. Yes he's been married three times (divorced twice) but he doesn't dwell on any of that. All I really know even know is Sheila, his first wife and mother of his children, was a stage performer too (Dance) and his choice to do Star Trek and live half of his time in LA put a strain on the marriage and broke it. He's honest about cheating but all of it is without details we don't really need. I know less about his second wife and more about his current wife, Sunny. His relationship with his children is strained too (especially the daughter) but again nothing it dwelt on or feels tawdry.
This memoir is about his acting life first and foremost, literally 95% of it is about that and the relationship/friendship stuff is the rest. And that's what I was there for. He starts in his earliest days and we do learn quite a bit about how poor he was growing up and how early he took to the stage. If there is one thing good to say about his father it was he didn't stand in the way of this career. Another thing Sir Pat is honest about are bouts of imposter syndrome and anxiety that I think a lot of creatives will relate to.
As Sir Pat is around my parents' age and I'm the same age as his son Daniel, I never would have had the chance to know his Royal Shakespeare Company days (and wished he'd done a little more for film of Shakespeare) but would have liked too. I know him, of course, first as Jean-Luc (still my favorite captain though it's a tight race to the top) and then Charles Xavier. Sir Pat brought some of my favorite characters to life and I'm thankful for it. This memoir showed me how close none of that came to happening (I feel a little sorry for him that Roddenbury never seemed to warm to him).
I was glad I read this during my recovery. It was like getting to spend the time with an old friend.
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Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Wow this is a hard one for me to rate because most of it was lucky it didn’t get two-starred. At one point I said I was bored with it but upon reflection it was more severe disappointment, so much so that it moved Stiefvater from auto-buy to maybe see you in the library. I maintain my opinion that this trilogy should have been a duology and trimmed way the hell down.
My disappointment is easy to pinpoint. Most fans reading this aren’t here for Jordan/Hennessy. They’re most likely not there for Farooq-Lane/Liliana. Heck they’re probably not even here for Declan & Matthew. They’re here for Ronan and it’s hard to be excited for Ronan’s role in this final book of the trilogy and indeed the entire series. He’s only active for what? The last thirty pages of the book? And the rest of the time without spoilers, let’s just say he’s utterly passive and barely even a reactive character let alone proactive.
Maybe if I had liked Jordan, Hennessy and Farooq-Lane this would have landed better but honestly I was meh on the lot of them. (I did very much like Liliana though). Maybe if what happens to Matthew mid-way in had been revisited more it would have helped (I think this was to set the reader up to wonder is Matthew going to make a very bad choice but we don’t know to the very end)
In many ways I’m reminded of the time Anne McCaffery tried to give scientific explanations for the dragons and for Thread and it fell so flat it all but destroyed the series. I do NOT need to know what makes Ronan (and the others) dreamers. I was already meh to learn there were plenty other dreamers beyond the Lynches and this did nothing to help that. For me it stole away what made the original series and Ronan and his family special.
But at the end of the day this was everyone BUT Ronan’s story, like he was an afterthought in his own series and I felt annoyed by this. And honestly if I heard the words I need a sweetmetal one more damn time in the first two thirds of the book I was ready to scream.
The only thing that saved this for me and got it up to that third star was the last quarter of the book. Again without spoilers, Ronan has a problem this whole book. How it was resolved was very clever and I loved that. The ending of the book and especially the epilogue was a good way to end everything. That said, I can’t stop wondering if the fans had been less toxic would this book have worked out the way it did. Fans were hounding her to write Adam/Ronan in highly sexualized terms for one and otherwise being insanely demanding of how their relationship should go (I liked how it ended) I will always wonder if Ronan was a guest star in his own damn book as a result of the toxicity and the author having had enough.
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