December book reviews
Hello hello. I feel like a robot whose little batteries abruptly fell out the week before Christmas, and I'm just now struggling to pop them back in the right slots. I had a nice, albeit low-key Christmas, and I am now temporarily awash in arbitrary-new-year feelings of hopefulness.
I spent some of my vacation o' sloth marathoning TV series. Notably, Parks & Rec (which I looooooved) and Fringe (which I found alternately fascinating and irritating). Tl;dr thoughts on those at some point, I'm sure, but for now, the last of the year's book reviews.
(One thing I totally failed to note about Restless Virgins: it had the highest blowjobs per page ratio of anything I've ever read. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.)
Pol Pot: The History Of A Nightmare - Philip Short (non-fiction, history) (****)
Every couple of years, I feel inspired to pick up a big, heavy tome of a history book. I think to myself: “YES. History! I love history! History helps us to understand ourselves. It’s so important to read history books.”
Then, almost invariably, I make it through 100 pages of said heavy tome and it just defeats me. This always makes me feel slightly worthless, but in my defence, most history books are (1) really badly written and (2) far too minutely detailed to interest a casual reader.
Pol Pot has a distinct advantage over a lot of history books: Philip Short is an excellent writer and, in fact, his analysis and conclusions throughout the book are the most engaging parts. However, like every other similar book, there’s also an air of “fuck off, I spent five years researching this and I am going to include every damn morsel of information I got from every damn interview I conducted”. Is this good news for a history student writing a paper on Pol Pot? Of course! Did it also make me, someone with poor eyesight and a limited attention span, want to weep? Of course!
Nonetheless, with some perseverance, I found Pol Pot a long but satisfying read. It includes fascinating insights into how the Khmer Rouge’s ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ came about; how it differed from Communist regimes in the USSR/China; and why it wasn’t a genocide so much as an indiscriminate annihilation. Scary, thought-provoking stuff.
I’d like to read Short’s biography of Mao soon, but I think I need a nice cup of Chai and few weeks of reading mildly-idiotic novels first.
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson (fiction) (****)
It’s easy to see why so many horror writers of the last 50 years cite The Haunting of Hill House as an influence. The premise may seem simplistic to readers now - an academic studying paranormal activity invites three strangers to stay at the allegedly-haunted Hill House, and they observe what goes on over a fraught weeklong period - but Shirley Jackson uses a light touch to make the novel feel continually engaging. It is, by turns, heartbreaking, hilarious and very scary indeed.
I finished Hill House a few days ago, but it has stayed with me, images and snippets of dialogue lurking at the back of my mind. It’s one of those books that makes me miss being a student, because I’d like to look out some criticism and shape my thoughts into an essay (mmm, nerdy).
Twisted - Laurie Halse Anderson (fiction, teen) (**)
Twisted, about a nerd boy reborn as a tough guy, tries for grittiness and zeitgeist and fails to fully achieve either. The novel suffers from a seriously schizophrenic mood. It begins as a sweet-yet-realistic romance, when the aforementioned nerd-boy/tough-guy finally garners the attention of the school’s most popular girl. However, then things become, well, “twisted”, as the protagonist Tyler finds out what it’s like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the novel starts to feel like a mediocre “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law & Order: SVU.
I’ve liked Laurie Halse Anderson’s teen novels before, but this one lacks the emotional resonance of Catalyst or Speak. There are flashes of good observation, but Anderson doesn’t quite seem to embody the anger and confusion of wronged, misunderstood Tyler. The plotting is also a bit on the laborious side, with more time spent on build-up than the actual climax and action. By the end, I just found myself speeding through the pages, not because I was gripped, just because I was tired of it.
Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School - Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley (non-fiction, teen) (***)
Restless Virgins is a soapy, compelling read about a number of prep school seniors. It’s basically the literary equivalent of MTV’s “Laguna Beach”, but it nonetheless captures something relevant about the high school experience in the 21st century.
Restless has been pitched quite obviously as the “real life” version of Curtis Sittenfeld’s best-selling Prep. The difference between the two books is immense, however. Sittenfeld conjures a narrative that cuts much deeper than the usual high school drama, revealing wider truths about life. Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, by contrast, stay firmly on the surface. It is, ultimately, just not about very much. Some days I would pick it up and think, “gee, there are wars going on, people are living in poverty, governments are taking away our civil liberties - why should I care about a bunch of spoiled rich kids in New England?”
But, the fact is, teen lit is something that does mean a lot to me. I read YA novels as a teenager and simply never stopped. I’ve found it exciting to watch a niche section of the market blow up over the last ten years, and I’m always interested in how authors portray teenagers. What’s more, the criticism I most often level against teen fiction is a failure to capture the claustrophobia of high school. Teen characters are invariably far more well-adjusted than I was at their age. Restless, more than any other teen book I can recall reading recently, evokes the everyday trauma of trying and failing to fit in at high school; the feeling of constantly being judged by your peers, until, finally, you internalize that judgement and the watching eyes follow you wherever you go.
Where Restless falls down is in its lack of analysis. As a text, it draws immediate comparisons with Guyland, Dude You’re A Fag, Women Without Class, etc. The difference is, those are academic works that draw sociological conclusions about teens’ behaviour. The narrative of Restless is content to be “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (sorry, gratuitous Isherwood reference). Ironically, if you were to remix the soapy action of this book with the rather dry sociological theory of, say, Deborah Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire, you might have a meaningful text.
Read Restless to remember that, in spite of the gloss of Gossip Girl, high school is still a wretched place, but don’t expect to find anything too revelatory within its pages.
Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience - Ziauddin Sardar (non-fiction) (**)
Judging by the number of pages of this book that I dog-eared, I know that parts of it are both interesting and thought-provoking. But it’s worth noting that it took me more than three months to actually finish the book and, as I attempt to review it, I’m left with a distinct feeling of meh.
With its brightly-coloured cover and jaunty title, I thought Balti Britain would be a breezy and none-too-serious read about British Asians. In fact, there’s quite a lot of gravity to be found within the book (no bad thing), but that gravity mixes strangely with the parts that are breezy, like Ziauddin Sardar’s search for the origins of the supposedly-Indian “balti” curry dish.
The book is part journalism (as Sardar investigates issues like British-grown terrorism), part history, and part memoir. But there’s no dividing line between the three narrative strands. Sardar’s unfortunate tendency to ramble and digress means that it becomes a hard book to digest. Oftentimes, I would find Sardar was writing about something I found interesting (such as how his children’s British-Asian identities began to differ from his own as they grew up), and then suddenly he’d dive into an only-tangentially-relevant historical account.
There’s nothing wrong with Sardar’s writing ability, and there’s plenty of worthwhile content within the book. In fact, the things wrong with Balti Britain are depressingly banal:
1. Sardar doesn’t seem to know what his book is about, so he makes it about anything that occurs to him as he’s writing.
2. Sardar rambles, leaving his reader behind as he delves into yet another thought process.
This turns what had the potential to be an interesting book into a slog to the finish.
Tamburlaine Must Die - Louise Welsh (historical fiction, LGBT) (****)
In Tamburlaine Must Die, Louise Welsh brings to life a noisy, dirty, chaotic Elizabethan London. In her reimagining of Christopher Marlowe’s last days, he becomes a noir-ish detective, forced to investigate who is setting him up to hang for heresy.
Welsh’s writing is beautiful without being distractingly poetic, and she evokes the language of day without making her text dense or unreadable. The central storyline is a little too conspiracy-theory-esque for my taste, but the characters are well-drawn and I loved immersing myself in their lives. The sense of danger within the novella is wonderfully sharp: the Plague hangs over the city like a cloud, and lurking shadows seem ready to smother Marlowe for his proclivities (atheism, bisexuality).
Some of Welsh’s dramatic irony is enjoyable. The people of London gripe about ‘strangers’ (Moors and Dutchmen) who are apparently making their country unrecognisable, just as folks do today. And there’s a lovely segment where Marlowe confesses he cannot imagine London existing for much longer. Haven’t we all found it unfathomable that a place will persist centuries after we have died?
However, sometimes Welsh’s knowing references are far too on-the-nose, such as when a character professes that Marlowe’s work will be known and performed 400 years from now! Grooooan.
As a card-carrying Kit Marlowe fan, I was predisposed to love this book. But, with its glorious scene-setting and engrossing characters, it stands on its own merits as a piece of gritty historical fiction that can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of Marlowe.
I spent some of my vacation o' sloth marathoning TV series. Notably, Parks & Rec (which I looooooved) and Fringe (which I found alternately fascinating and irritating). Tl;dr thoughts on those at some point, I'm sure, but for now, the last of the year's book reviews.
(One thing I totally failed to note about Restless Virgins: it had the highest blowjobs per page ratio of anything I've ever read. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.)
Pol Pot: The History Of A Nightmare - Philip Short (non-fiction, history) (****)
Every couple of years, I feel inspired to pick up a big, heavy tome of a history book. I think to myself: “YES. History! I love history! History helps us to understand ourselves. It’s so important to read history books.”
Then, almost invariably, I make it through 100 pages of said heavy tome and it just defeats me. This always makes me feel slightly worthless, but in my defence, most history books are (1) really badly written and (2) far too minutely detailed to interest a casual reader.
Pol Pot has a distinct advantage over a lot of history books: Philip Short is an excellent writer and, in fact, his analysis and conclusions throughout the book are the most engaging parts. However, like every other similar book, there’s also an air of “fuck off, I spent five years researching this and I am going to include every damn morsel of information I got from every damn interview I conducted”. Is this good news for a history student writing a paper on Pol Pot? Of course! Did it also make me, someone with poor eyesight and a limited attention span, want to weep? Of course!
Nonetheless, with some perseverance, I found Pol Pot a long but satisfying read. It includes fascinating insights into how the Khmer Rouge’s ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ came about; how it differed from Communist regimes in the USSR/China; and why it wasn’t a genocide so much as an indiscriminate annihilation. Scary, thought-provoking stuff.
I’d like to read Short’s biography of Mao soon, but I think I need a nice cup of Chai and few weeks of reading mildly-idiotic novels first.
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson (fiction) (****)
It’s easy to see why so many horror writers of the last 50 years cite The Haunting of Hill House as an influence. The premise may seem simplistic to readers now - an academic studying paranormal activity invites three strangers to stay at the allegedly-haunted Hill House, and they observe what goes on over a fraught weeklong period - but Shirley Jackson uses a light touch to make the novel feel continually engaging. It is, by turns, heartbreaking, hilarious and very scary indeed.
I finished Hill House a few days ago, but it has stayed with me, images and snippets of dialogue lurking at the back of my mind. It’s one of those books that makes me miss being a student, because I’d like to look out some criticism and shape my thoughts into an essay (mmm, nerdy).
Twisted - Laurie Halse Anderson (fiction, teen) (**)
Twisted, about a nerd boy reborn as a tough guy, tries for grittiness and zeitgeist and fails to fully achieve either. The novel suffers from a seriously schizophrenic mood. It begins as a sweet-yet-realistic romance, when the aforementioned nerd-boy/tough-guy finally garners the attention of the school’s most popular girl. However, then things become, well, “twisted”, as the protagonist Tyler finds out what it’s like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the novel starts to feel like a mediocre “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law & Order: SVU.
I’ve liked Laurie Halse Anderson’s teen novels before, but this one lacks the emotional resonance of Catalyst or Speak. There are flashes of good observation, but Anderson doesn’t quite seem to embody the anger and confusion of wronged, misunderstood Tyler. The plotting is also a bit on the laborious side, with more time spent on build-up than the actual climax and action. By the end, I just found myself speeding through the pages, not because I was gripped, just because I was tired of it.
Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School - Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley (non-fiction, teen) (***)
Restless Virgins is a soapy, compelling read about a number of prep school seniors. It’s basically the literary equivalent of MTV’s “Laguna Beach”, but it nonetheless captures something relevant about the high school experience in the 21st century.
Restless has been pitched quite obviously as the “real life” version of Curtis Sittenfeld’s best-selling Prep. The difference between the two books is immense, however. Sittenfeld conjures a narrative that cuts much deeper than the usual high school drama, revealing wider truths about life. Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, by contrast, stay firmly on the surface. It is, ultimately, just not about very much. Some days I would pick it up and think, “gee, there are wars going on, people are living in poverty, governments are taking away our civil liberties - why should I care about a bunch of spoiled rich kids in New England?”
But, the fact is, teen lit is something that does mean a lot to me. I read YA novels as a teenager and simply never stopped. I’ve found it exciting to watch a niche section of the market blow up over the last ten years, and I’m always interested in how authors portray teenagers. What’s more, the criticism I most often level against teen fiction is a failure to capture the claustrophobia of high school. Teen characters are invariably far more well-adjusted than I was at their age. Restless, more than any other teen book I can recall reading recently, evokes the everyday trauma of trying and failing to fit in at high school; the feeling of constantly being judged by your peers, until, finally, you internalize that judgement and the watching eyes follow you wherever you go.
Where Restless falls down is in its lack of analysis. As a text, it draws immediate comparisons with Guyland, Dude You’re A Fag, Women Without Class, etc. The difference is, those are academic works that draw sociological conclusions about teens’ behaviour. The narrative of Restless is content to be “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (sorry, gratuitous Isherwood reference). Ironically, if you were to remix the soapy action of this book with the rather dry sociological theory of, say, Deborah Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire, you might have a meaningful text.
Read Restless to remember that, in spite of the gloss of Gossip Girl, high school is still a wretched place, but don’t expect to find anything too revelatory within its pages.
Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience - Ziauddin Sardar (non-fiction) (**)
Judging by the number of pages of this book that I dog-eared, I know that parts of it are both interesting and thought-provoking. But it’s worth noting that it took me more than three months to actually finish the book and, as I attempt to review it, I’m left with a distinct feeling of meh.
With its brightly-coloured cover and jaunty title, I thought Balti Britain would be a breezy and none-too-serious read about British Asians. In fact, there’s quite a lot of gravity to be found within the book (no bad thing), but that gravity mixes strangely with the parts that are breezy, like Ziauddin Sardar’s search for the origins of the supposedly-Indian “balti” curry dish.
The book is part journalism (as Sardar investigates issues like British-grown terrorism), part history, and part memoir. But there’s no dividing line between the three narrative strands. Sardar’s unfortunate tendency to ramble and digress means that it becomes a hard book to digest. Oftentimes, I would find Sardar was writing about something I found interesting (such as how his children’s British-Asian identities began to differ from his own as they grew up), and then suddenly he’d dive into an only-tangentially-relevant historical account.
There’s nothing wrong with Sardar’s writing ability, and there’s plenty of worthwhile content within the book. In fact, the things wrong with Balti Britain are depressingly banal:
1. Sardar doesn’t seem to know what his book is about, so he makes it about anything that occurs to him as he’s writing.
2. Sardar rambles, leaving his reader behind as he delves into yet another thought process.
This turns what had the potential to be an interesting book into a slog to the finish.
Tamburlaine Must Die - Louise Welsh (historical fiction, LGBT) (****)
In Tamburlaine Must Die, Louise Welsh brings to life a noisy, dirty, chaotic Elizabethan London. In her reimagining of Christopher Marlowe’s last days, he becomes a noir-ish detective, forced to investigate who is setting him up to hang for heresy.
Welsh’s writing is beautiful without being distractingly poetic, and she evokes the language of day without making her text dense or unreadable. The central storyline is a little too conspiracy-theory-esque for my taste, but the characters are well-drawn and I loved immersing myself in their lives. The sense of danger within the novella is wonderfully sharp: the Plague hangs over the city like a cloud, and lurking shadows seem ready to smother Marlowe for his proclivities (atheism, bisexuality).
Some of Welsh’s dramatic irony is enjoyable. The people of London gripe about ‘strangers’ (Moors and Dutchmen) who are apparently making their country unrecognisable, just as folks do today. And there’s a lovely segment where Marlowe confesses he cannot imagine London existing for much longer. Haven’t we all found it unfathomable that a place will persist centuries after we have died?
However, sometimes Welsh’s knowing references are far too on-the-nose, such as when a character professes that Marlowe’s work will be known and performed 400 years from now! Grooooan.
As a card-carrying Kit Marlowe fan, I was predisposed to love this book. But, with its glorious scene-setting and engrossing characters, it stands on its own merits as a piece of gritty historical fiction that can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of Marlowe.