Fall into winter, part two: reading
@disgruntled-owl reprised last year's autumn reading challenge, much to our friend group's delight. This is where participants rack up points for pages read and for completing Bingo- and/or Yahtzee-style boards and then trade them in for small prizes at a pizza party because we miss the '80s. After reading almost nothing during this summer's chaos, I finished 24 books over the 11-week game. One short of a Bingo card blackout, but that's all right.
That's a lot of books (for you), you might say, especially since in the previous 11 weeks I'd read about four. And you would be correct. We are looking at the consequences of depression/moving recovery, obsessiveness and the motivation that arises from gamification. Also, a few of the books were for young readers.
Favorite read: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Runner up: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Least favorite: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (DNF)
Timely reads: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Took the most concentration: Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race by Rukmini Pande
Featured the most butts: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat: A Graphic Novel by Faye Perozich and Daerick Gross
Chewiest: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Consuming that much media in that short a time generated some interesting comparisons. Like between Life of Pi and the movie The Lighthouse: mirror souls/shadow selves, which story is "true," whether "the truth" matters. Or The Deep by Rivers Solomon and The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill: the problems that arise from loss of collective vs. individual memory.
Here are my thoughts on all the books, if you want them! Summaries are adapted from our communal reading spreadsheet.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
When a friend recommended this, I laughed because it sounded like the result of one of those "find out the title of your fantasy book!" memes. But it featured a sexy god of death, so I was happy.
Much more a romance than expected, with an interesting compromise of an ending. The last few chapters reminded me of last year's read, The Smoking Mirror, for its YA journey through the underworld, which proved apt because this author then thanked that author, David Bowles, in the acknowledgements. I liked the theme of forgiveness over cycles of revenge.
Recommended for: People who like Death as a character and/or romances involving reticent supernatural men and mortal women and/or contemporary takes on Mayan mythology.
Bunnicula: a rabbit-tale of mystery by Deborah and James Howe
Dog reports on cat who suspects rabbit is a vampire, sucking the juice out of vegetables! Oh no!
Howliday Inn by James Howe
Could the pair of dachshunds at the boarding house be... werewolves???? Also: a murder mystery. Also: not very charming, alas.
The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howe
The cat sets his sights on staking all the vegetables Bunnicula drained before they turn into minions. Joke has gotten old. Worth it only for the Telltale Heart reference at the end.
Mr. Burns: a post-electric play by Anne Washburn
I was expecting brilliance based on reviews; it was good, but not that good. Fun exploration of the dynamics of oral storytelling tradition and how pop culture items transform through generations, accelerating against a postapocalyptic near-future backdrop in this case. Ended up also being a commentary on how "high" culture and folk heroes can evolve from silly beginnings and/or from unknowing mashups of multiple origin sources.
Recommended for: People who like stories about transformative work and/or metanarratives and/or vague apocalypses (plague + power grid failure) and/or The Simpsons and/or Gilbert & Sullivan.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean ♥
Hugo/Newbery/Campbell award winner, and Halloween appropriate, being about a boy raised by ghosts in a cemetery. It's reminiscent of Lincoln in the Bardo in that way, only not as clever. Gaiman says he was inspired by The Jungle Book. Each chapter features An Adventure. My favorite character was Silas, who's basically half professor and half Grim Reaper. Much creativity, although it didn't speak to me personally for most of the book. Then it did get me, all adults-fighting-to-protect-the-child and child-grows-up-and-wants-to-live-life. <3 <3 :,)
Recommended for: Kids who like ghosts and adventures. Adults who like ghosts and Harry Potter-style "protection of the chosen one" stuff. People who have feelings about how good parenting means letting go.
How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 by Joy Harjo
Good excuse to get to know Harjo's poetry properly! Now that she is U.S. poet laureate and all. I learned that her work isn't my favorite, but I'm glad to have read the sampling. Favorites: I'm a sucker for prose poems that sound like sestinas, and "Grace" is no exception. Text at PoetryFoundation.org. Also particularly liked "Anchorage" and "Never."
Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat: A Graphic Novel by Faye Perozich & Daerick Gross
Oh, Lestat & co <3. Impressive distillation of the novel into comics-style narrative and dialogue, with most text taken from the source verbatim. Different art styles in different sections. The watercolors during the wolf hunt were my faves. Lestat looked like Rutger Hauer, as Armand said in The Queen of the Damned. Armand himself had a Trouser Problem similar to Jareth's in Labyrinth. As previously mentioned, there were a lot of butts.
Recommended if: you like muscly male butts and often inappropriate makeouts; millennia-old characters who never learn. Final butt count: 28 + 1 grab, and at least 3 full-frontals, also all men; not counting gratuitous crotch shots.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Because my crush Zahn McClarnon had a minor role in the then-forthcoming movie and because I'm on a Stephen King kick this year. A very readable ~600 pages, with two complaints: the beginning (too gross, even though the grossness was intended to make a point about the nadir of an alcoholic) and the climactic battle (villains too dumb).
Recommended for: Stephen King fans. People who have tried to overcome problems with fathers, alcohol, anger.
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
I should have known that reading the Vampire Lestat graphic novel would make me want more Vampire Chronicles. At least rereading the sequel filled the "Q" slot for our group challenge to complete the alphabet using the titles of books we read.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I would say that although this didn't live up to the hype, and although it featured tone whiplash that did not always work for me, overall it's a solid and memorable story, and the more I thought about it the more I saw how and why it works. Not least, despite being a first installment in a fantasy trilogy, it actually has a beginning, middle and END, and it's a good length. Too bad the initial responses to sequel Harrow the Ninth haven't been enthusiastic.
Recommended if you like: bones and necromancy, morbid jokes and sarcasm, unremarked-upon non-heterosexual and possibly non-monogamous characters, SF/F worldbuilding, genre mashups of horror and mystery and humor.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Hm. I expected this to be more profound. The 'ghost who comes back to watch over her town' conceit, which was all I really knew about it besides Aaron Copland's score, comprised only a portion of the third act. The rest was about mundane small-town life as microcosm of human experience, only maybe we've had so much literature like this in the 20th century that Our Town no longer hits home quite the same way. Also super normative. Can definitely imagine it as over-serious high school drama production, thanks to a lengthy note at the beginning about how to license performance rights. I guess my favorite part was some fourth-wall breaking in Act I, such as lines from "Belligerent Man In Back of Theater."
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng ♥
Loved this. It's like a round robin through the POVs of each family member, from paragraph to paragraph or chapter to chapter, revealing all the ordinary secrets everyone keeps from one another before and after the mysterious death of the middle child. Ribboned with the everyday racism experienced by members of a mixed-race family (Chinese American & white American) in the midwest in the '70s. I cried through the last several chapters, in a good way.
Recommended for: People who like writing fic about miscommunication should read this as a master class. Also good if you like the intricacies of family relationships, good and bad, and the ways parents try to fix their own lives through their children's.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
A boy and his dogs and a lot of hunted raccoons. Idealized rural life. It reads very much like "a classic." I'm glad to have read it in any case, and maybe now I'll stop confusing it with A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which I've also never read.
Trapped by the Wolf by Juno Blake
By the author who wrote my favorite story in last year's m/m/f dragon collection. Sorry to report that the dragon story was better.
Slow Heat by Leta Blake
A/B/O original fiction recced on Twitter a while back by a friend. Unfortunately, not only was it not my thing, it was sometimes the opposite of my thing. I guess I can thank it for helping me articulate those preferences. I found it alternately boring and gross. The most joy it brought me was that i got to explain A/B/O to my editor while i expressed my disappointment in the book.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
Started out as a simple, if dark, fairy tale and turned into quite the mystery, including institutional conspiracies and magically enforced amnesia. And oh no, it became about FEELINGS and how walling yourself off from sadness flattens everything.
Favorite line: "My love is not divided," she said. "It is multiplied."
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
Eh. Conceptually, culturally and linguistically it was cool, Afro-Caribbean mythology (?) in post-apocalyptic Toronto with much of the dialogue written in dialect, but it was hard to get into the main character's head, the story didn't grab me, and the pacing felt way off. Does this say more about the book, which won publication through a first novel/new author discovery contest, or about my own culturally shaped narrative expectations?
Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race by Rukmini Pande
Very much an adapted thesis concerned with which theoretical frameworks are most appropriate for considering the many ways in which race impacts fannishness and fandom studies. Many useful/illuminating arguments and case studies, but some stuff I wish had gone deeper, i.e. chapter on race and kink memes. Need to read this a second time and take notes, but had to return it to the library after maximum number of renewals, and new copies run $60+.
Recommended for: Acafans, and non-aca fans who want to deepen knowledge in this area, maybe especially white U.S. fans.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
Based on a song by clipping., a rap group that includes Daveed Diggs. Lyrics song.
Strange, experimental-seeming novella that's like 75% backstory and 25% plot/characterization. Autism-coded queer protagonist as in Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts. Interesting theme of what happens when you connect too much or too little to a painful collective history. Compare to The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which was about risk of ignoring individual memory/history.
Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 2 ed. Hope Nicholson*
Great read, worth taking time over. Some gorgeous art, too. Made me want to revisit vol. 1, which I don't remember having been super into. The last comic was well placed in the collection, with a space launch compared to a canoe journey. Look at this loveliness by comics industry illustrator Jeffrey Veregge!
Fascinating note in the afterword about the production team having consulted with various tribal elders to discuss which stories could be told in a public forum like this.
*Since revealed to be not a great person, sigh.
Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 3 ed. Elizabeth LaPensée and Michael Sheyahshe
Indigenous futurisms in comic form! Way cool. Fave line: "Her anger was a passing spark against the timeless things that lived in him."
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
A (white) family breaks apart when an abuse (of Native women) is revealed. Good read, clean prose, disappointing resolution, though the last lines were great. Smart afterword about demythologizing the cowboy/conquest of the West.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Man Booker Prize winner. I was put off and/or bored enough by the intro and first page that I didn't come back to this for two months, but then a single paragraph on page two made me laugh no less than five times, and things proceeded well from there. (It's the third long paragraph in this excerpt.) Then I hit the last section and went, oh. It's not just about animals and zoos and the shocking extremes to which the will to live takes people and how "God provides"/how faith can keep someone going in extreme circumstances; it's also a multilayered allegory about religion and (ir)rationality and aspects of human personality and the mind cracking when confronted with unspeakable trauma, and the essential sameness of animals and people, and "truth" and storytelling. As the meme goes on Twitter: *galaxy brain*
It did not, as the tag line promised, make me believe in God, but it did reinforce my appreciation of what faith can do for people-as well as what an author can do with a single narrative. When I finished, I actually went and read SparkNotes for greater insight, learning about Martel's color symbolism with Hinduism and hope as orange, that the ship name Tsimtsum comes from a kabbalistic term for the space God left in which the world could form, etc., and then flipped right back to the beginning of the novel and started again, a thing I could not tell you the last time I did. There was lots more to pick up on second read, down to individual word choices. Everything had been right there the whole time. Passages I had not spent much time on during the first go-round proved critical thematically even though they did not always advance the plot, like the choruses in ancient Greek plays. The "author's note" grated much less once I learned that it was meant to have come from the (semi-)fictional biographer within the story itself, as did the first words of the official story, "My suffering," considering that it reads like a Biblical tale of someone who in addition struggled to understand the suffering of Jesus. Is Pi (a) God, a Job, a Jonah, an Eve in Eden, a Noah, a Crusoe, an ordinary practitioner struggling to maintain his faith, all of the above? These sorts of themes and questions don't really grab me at my core, but as an intellectual reading experience, it's been memorable.
My sketchy notes are like:
Zoos/animals ~ religion
- "intense territoriality of animals" = interfaith "dialogue"
- Sparknotes: tiger viciousness ~ 'religious conflicts'
- habit and ritual
- family "bolts" from India like animals fleeing discomfort
Kumar and Kumar, dovetailing of science and spirituality
Ocean, baptism
He didn't mourn his loss in the ship-sinking chapter because the enormity of it broke him - told tale of animals instead
Zebra = black and white (thinking, morality). It goes first.
Animals in lifeboat ~ pain (zebra), fear/panic/gluttony (hyena), shock (orangutan), will/savagery (tiger)
Things in the way of salvation
Pi is an irrational number, Pi abhors slaves to logic
Richard Parker abandons him without ceremony because returning to civilization means hiding savagery
Recommended for: People who like animal facts but are OK with occasional animal harm. People who like literary fiction that flirts with the ridiculous. People interested in faith and fable and extreme survival measures and, to an extent, comparative religion.
DNFs:
Sweet by Uzuri Wilkerson
Bostonian vampires by a local author! Alas, it quickly proved the sort of book that reminds you that all you need to do to publish a book is write a book; it doesn't matter if it's any good. Boring/annoying/simplistic characters, mediocre writing, love triangle, etc.
Recommended: If you like sentences such as "He used his fingers to taste her wetness first." Or "'Inconvenience' was spelled incorrectly because Bobby hadn't notice." [sic]
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Guy wakes up in the body of a different English country house guest each morning and has to solve a murder before he runs out of hosts; otherwise his memory gets wiped and he has to start again. Cool concept, terrible execution. First person narration, and the protagonist had almost zero interest in figuring out who he was and how the mystery "game" worked. Unrelenting fatphobia in one section. Nobody was likeable. I skipped to the last section just to find out what happened, and not even that satisfied.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/393039.html, where there are
comments.
That's a lot of books (for you), you might say, especially since in the previous 11 weeks I'd read about four. And you would be correct. We are looking at the consequences of depression/moving recovery, obsessiveness and the motivation that arises from gamification. Also, a few of the books were for young readers.
Favorite read: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Runner up: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Least favorite: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (DNF)
Timely reads: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Took the most concentration: Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race by Rukmini Pande
Featured the most butts: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat: A Graphic Novel by Faye Perozich and Daerick Gross
Chewiest: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Consuming that much media in that short a time generated some interesting comparisons. Like between Life of Pi and the movie The Lighthouse: mirror souls/shadow selves, which story is "true," whether "the truth" matters. Or The Deep by Rivers Solomon and The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill: the problems that arise from loss of collective vs. individual memory.
Here are my thoughts on all the books, if you want them! Summaries are adapted from our communal reading spreadsheet.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
When a friend recommended this, I laughed because it sounded like the result of one of those "find out the title of your fantasy book!" memes. But it featured a sexy god of death, so I was happy.
Much more a romance than expected, with an interesting compromise of an ending. The last few chapters reminded me of last year's read, The Smoking Mirror, for its YA journey through the underworld, which proved apt because this author then thanked that author, David Bowles, in the acknowledgements. I liked the theme of forgiveness over cycles of revenge.
Recommended for: People who like Death as a character and/or romances involving reticent supernatural men and mortal women and/or contemporary takes on Mayan mythology.
Bunnicula: a rabbit-tale of mystery by Deborah and James Howe
Dog reports on cat who suspects rabbit is a vampire, sucking the juice out of vegetables! Oh no!
Howliday Inn by James Howe
Could the pair of dachshunds at the boarding house be... werewolves???? Also: a murder mystery. Also: not very charming, alas.
The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howe
The cat sets his sights on staking all the vegetables Bunnicula drained before they turn into minions. Joke has gotten old. Worth it only for the Telltale Heart reference at the end.
Mr. Burns: a post-electric play by Anne Washburn
I was expecting brilliance based on reviews; it was good, but not that good. Fun exploration of the dynamics of oral storytelling tradition and how pop culture items transform through generations, accelerating against a postapocalyptic near-future backdrop in this case. Ended up also being a commentary on how "high" culture and folk heroes can evolve from silly beginnings and/or from unknowing mashups of multiple origin sources.
Recommended for: People who like stories about transformative work and/or metanarratives and/or vague apocalypses (plague + power grid failure) and/or The Simpsons and/or Gilbert & Sullivan.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean ♥
Hugo/Newbery/Campbell award winner, and Halloween appropriate, being about a boy raised by ghosts in a cemetery. It's reminiscent of Lincoln in the Bardo in that way, only not as clever. Gaiman says he was inspired by The Jungle Book. Each chapter features An Adventure. My favorite character was Silas, who's basically half professor and half Grim Reaper. Much creativity, although it didn't speak to me personally for most of the book. Then it did get me, all adults-fighting-to-protect-the-child and child-grows-up-and-wants-to-live-life. <3 <3 :,)
Recommended for: Kids who like ghosts and adventures. Adults who like ghosts and Harry Potter-style "protection of the chosen one" stuff. People who have feelings about how good parenting means letting go.
How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 by Joy Harjo
Good excuse to get to know Harjo's poetry properly! Now that she is U.S. poet laureate and all. I learned that her work isn't my favorite, but I'm glad to have read the sampling. Favorites: I'm a sucker for prose poems that sound like sestinas, and "Grace" is no exception. Text at PoetryFoundation.org. Also particularly liked "Anchorage" and "Never."
Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat: A Graphic Novel by Faye Perozich & Daerick Gross
Oh, Lestat & co <3. Impressive distillation of the novel into comics-style narrative and dialogue, with most text taken from the source verbatim. Different art styles in different sections. The watercolors during the wolf hunt were my faves. Lestat looked like Rutger Hauer, as Armand said in The Queen of the Damned. Armand himself had a Trouser Problem similar to Jareth's in Labyrinth. As previously mentioned, there were a lot of butts.
Recommended if: you like muscly male butts and often inappropriate makeouts; millennia-old characters who never learn. Final butt count: 28 + 1 grab, and at least 3 full-frontals, also all men; not counting gratuitous crotch shots.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Because my crush Zahn McClarnon had a minor role in the then-forthcoming movie and because I'm on a Stephen King kick this year. A very readable ~600 pages, with two complaints: the beginning (too gross, even though the grossness was intended to make a point about the nadir of an alcoholic) and the climactic battle (villains too dumb).
Recommended for: Stephen King fans. People who have tried to overcome problems with fathers, alcohol, anger.
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
I should have known that reading the Vampire Lestat graphic novel would make me want more Vampire Chronicles. At least rereading the sequel filled the "Q" slot for our group challenge to complete the alphabet using the titles of books we read.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I would say that although this didn't live up to the hype, and although it featured tone whiplash that did not always work for me, overall it's a solid and memorable story, and the more I thought about it the more I saw how and why it works. Not least, despite being a first installment in a fantasy trilogy, it actually has a beginning, middle and END, and it's a good length. Too bad the initial responses to sequel Harrow the Ninth haven't been enthusiastic.
Recommended if you like: bones and necromancy, morbid jokes and sarcasm, unremarked-upon non-heterosexual and possibly non-monogamous characters, SF/F worldbuilding, genre mashups of horror and mystery and humor.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Hm. I expected this to be more profound. The 'ghost who comes back to watch over her town' conceit, which was all I really knew about it besides Aaron Copland's score, comprised only a portion of the third act. The rest was about mundane small-town life as microcosm of human experience, only maybe we've had so much literature like this in the 20th century that Our Town no longer hits home quite the same way. Also super normative. Can definitely imagine it as over-serious high school drama production, thanks to a lengthy note at the beginning about how to license performance rights. I guess my favorite part was some fourth-wall breaking in Act I, such as lines from "Belligerent Man In Back of Theater."
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng ♥
Loved this. It's like a round robin through the POVs of each family member, from paragraph to paragraph or chapter to chapter, revealing all the ordinary secrets everyone keeps from one another before and after the mysterious death of the middle child. Ribboned with the everyday racism experienced by members of a mixed-race family (Chinese American & white American) in the midwest in the '70s. I cried through the last several chapters, in a good way.
Recommended for: People who like writing fic about miscommunication should read this as a master class. Also good if you like the intricacies of family relationships, good and bad, and the ways parents try to fix their own lives through their children's.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
A boy and his dogs and a lot of hunted raccoons. Idealized rural life. It reads very much like "a classic." I'm glad to have read it in any case, and maybe now I'll stop confusing it with A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which I've also never read.
Trapped by the Wolf by Juno Blake
By the author who wrote my favorite story in last year's m/m/f dragon collection. Sorry to report that the dragon story was better.
Slow Heat by Leta Blake
A/B/O original fiction recced on Twitter a while back by a friend. Unfortunately, not only was it not my thing, it was sometimes the opposite of my thing. I guess I can thank it for helping me articulate those preferences. I found it alternately boring and gross. The most joy it brought me was that i got to explain A/B/O to my editor while i expressed my disappointment in the book.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
Started out as a simple, if dark, fairy tale and turned into quite the mystery, including institutional conspiracies and magically enforced amnesia. And oh no, it became about FEELINGS and how walling yourself off from sadness flattens everything.
Favorite line: "My love is not divided," she said. "It is multiplied."
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
Eh. Conceptually, culturally and linguistically it was cool, Afro-Caribbean mythology (?) in post-apocalyptic Toronto with much of the dialogue written in dialect, but it was hard to get into the main character's head, the story didn't grab me, and the pacing felt way off. Does this say more about the book, which won publication through a first novel/new author discovery contest, or about my own culturally shaped narrative expectations?
Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race by Rukmini Pande
Very much an adapted thesis concerned with which theoretical frameworks are most appropriate for considering the many ways in which race impacts fannishness and fandom studies. Many useful/illuminating arguments and case studies, but some stuff I wish had gone deeper, i.e. chapter on race and kink memes. Need to read this a second time and take notes, but had to return it to the library after maximum number of renewals, and new copies run $60+.
Recommended for: Acafans, and non-aca fans who want to deepen knowledge in this area, maybe especially white U.S. fans.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
Based on a song by clipping., a rap group that includes Daveed Diggs. Lyrics song.
Strange, experimental-seeming novella that's like 75% backstory and 25% plot/characterization. Autism-coded queer protagonist as in Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts. Interesting theme of what happens when you connect too much or too little to a painful collective history. Compare to The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which was about risk of ignoring individual memory/history.
Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 2 ed. Hope Nicholson*
Great read, worth taking time over. Some gorgeous art, too. Made me want to revisit vol. 1, which I don't remember having been super into. The last comic was well placed in the collection, with a space launch compared to a canoe journey. Look at this loveliness by comics industry illustrator Jeffrey Veregge!
Fascinating note in the afterword about the production team having consulted with various tribal elders to discuss which stories could be told in a public forum like this.
*Since revealed to be not a great person, sigh.
Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 3 ed. Elizabeth LaPensée and Michael Sheyahshe
Indigenous futurisms in comic form! Way cool. Fave line: "Her anger was a passing spark against the timeless things that lived in him."
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
A (white) family breaks apart when an abuse (of Native women) is revealed. Good read, clean prose, disappointing resolution, though the last lines were great. Smart afterword about demythologizing the cowboy/conquest of the West.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Man Booker Prize winner. I was put off and/or bored enough by the intro and first page that I didn't come back to this for two months, but then a single paragraph on page two made me laugh no less than five times, and things proceeded well from there. (It's the third long paragraph in this excerpt.) Then I hit the last section and went, oh. It's not just about animals and zoos and the shocking extremes to which the will to live takes people and how "God provides"/how faith can keep someone going in extreme circumstances; it's also a multilayered allegory about religion and (ir)rationality and aspects of human personality and the mind cracking when confronted with unspeakable trauma, and the essential sameness of animals and people, and "truth" and storytelling. As the meme goes on Twitter: *galaxy brain*
It did not, as the tag line promised, make me believe in God, but it did reinforce my appreciation of what faith can do for people-as well as what an author can do with a single narrative. When I finished, I actually went and read SparkNotes for greater insight, learning about Martel's color symbolism with Hinduism and hope as orange, that the ship name Tsimtsum comes from a kabbalistic term for the space God left in which the world could form, etc., and then flipped right back to the beginning of the novel and started again, a thing I could not tell you the last time I did. There was lots more to pick up on second read, down to individual word choices. Everything had been right there the whole time. Passages I had not spent much time on during the first go-round proved critical thematically even though they did not always advance the plot, like the choruses in ancient Greek plays. The "author's note" grated much less once I learned that it was meant to have come from the (semi-)fictional biographer within the story itself, as did the first words of the official story, "My suffering," considering that it reads like a Biblical tale of someone who in addition struggled to understand the suffering of Jesus. Is Pi (a) God, a Job, a Jonah, an Eve in Eden, a Noah, a Crusoe, an ordinary practitioner struggling to maintain his faith, all of the above? These sorts of themes and questions don't really grab me at my core, but as an intellectual reading experience, it's been memorable.
My sketchy notes are like:
Zoos/animals ~ religion
- "intense territoriality of animals" = interfaith "dialogue"
- Sparknotes: tiger viciousness ~ 'religious conflicts'
- habit and ritual
- family "bolts" from India like animals fleeing discomfort
Kumar and Kumar, dovetailing of science and spirituality
Ocean, baptism
He didn't mourn his loss in the ship-sinking chapter because the enormity of it broke him - told tale of animals instead
Zebra = black and white (thinking, morality). It goes first.
Animals in lifeboat ~ pain (zebra), fear/panic/gluttony (hyena), shock (orangutan), will/savagery (tiger)
Things in the way of salvation
Pi is an irrational number, Pi abhors slaves to logic
Richard Parker abandons him without ceremony because returning to civilization means hiding savagery
Recommended for: People who like animal facts but are OK with occasional animal harm. People who like literary fiction that flirts with the ridiculous. People interested in faith and fable and extreme survival measures and, to an extent, comparative religion.
DNFs:
Sweet by Uzuri Wilkerson
Bostonian vampires by a local author! Alas, it quickly proved the sort of book that reminds you that all you need to do to publish a book is write a book; it doesn't matter if it's any good. Boring/annoying/simplistic characters, mediocre writing, love triangle, etc.
Recommended: If you like sentences such as "He used his fingers to taste her wetness first." Or "'Inconvenience' was spelled incorrectly because Bobby hadn't notice." [sic]
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Guy wakes up in the body of a different English country house guest each morning and has to solve a murder before he runs out of hosts; otherwise his memory gets wiped and he has to start again. Cool concept, terrible execution. First person narration, and the protagonist had almost zero interest in figuring out who he was and how the mystery "game" worked. Unrelenting fatphobia in one section. Nobody was likeable. I skipped to the last section just to find out what happened, and not even that satisfied.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/393039.html, where there are
comments.