Tag: good book. read it, dude

Review: Circe

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Circe by Madeline Miller is an imagining of several mythological tales from the perceptive of one of the more notable witches in classics, focusing on Circe’s motivations, isolation on Aeaeae and interactions with various other figures from myth. Obviously, notably, with Odysseus himself.

I am a nerd.

I am a …I am a classics nerd.

I loved this portrayal and interpretation of Odysseus and his personality. I was surprised, given how much I liked this interpretation of Odysseus as a character that I then liked Telemachus more. The way each character is humanized and contended with–there is such a tender and careful amount of thought given to each character’s portrayal–a person in these circumstances, with these accomplishments, with these constraints and flaws–the portrayals feel very genuine and realistic and in a way definitive.

The stories and myths touched on and how they’re woven together is masterful and carefully unites many strands of myth which are usually presented as broken threads.

I found the story telling unpretentious, accessible, and masterful in creating the atmosphere that lends itself to its character’s logic and behavior. I think that’s something which people don’t appreciate enough in well written works; the audience not only following a character’s line of reasoning but being so embroiled in the created atmosphere that they agree with it.

I generally tend not to review books that I wouldn’t recommend, but this book is really special to me in its portrayal of femininity. Motherhood especially is shown as being unglamorous, difficult, and largely managed alone. Sexuality is often violent and not treated as something aspired to or an end goal but as another feature of life and of relationships–her relationships with various characters, though sexual, are built on respect and intellect. Her first relationship which ends poorly does so because it is built on attraction; moving forward she is more shrewd, more clever, and the relationships become more meaningful. Her competition with other females, particularly among her family or with Scylla, demonstrate the toxicity of strictly held feminine ideals. Each explore the different ways in which womanhood is weaponized and women are forced to compete with each other. Once she develops more confidence in herself and throws off a large portion of the role that she had as a demigoddess after banished to Aeaeae, she cultivates positive relationships with the nymphs and other scorned daughters sent to her. Aeaeae becomes a sanctuary for women who do not fit into a strict patriarchical ideal. And finally Aeaeae is both home and prison as the most important relationship which Circe develops is with herself. Being able to be contented in quietness, competent in self defense against the violence of men, in the labors of survival is one of the things which makes this character so compelling. She repeatedly does not back down from challenges, and she does not do so with feigned grace or the dignity of Victorian manufactured femininity but with the shit stained bluntness of: I will survive this because I must.

Review: Piranesi

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I have always had an intimate soft spot for mazes and labyrinths and I feel that they are so difficult to capture in story. Not just in terms the physical difficulty of describing a labyrinth, but the disorientation. That disorientation is key to Piranesi, the book and its character of the same name–named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a famous 1700s architect, artist, and Italian Classical archeologist famous for his etchings of ancient Rome as well as a series of 16 prints of fantastic, fictional prisons, Carceri d’invenzione.

Clarke does a superb job of creating a character who is finely tuned to living in and traversing her maze, and presenting his internal disorientation. To him, he makes perfectly sound sense, but the most difficult part of reading this book is the first few chapters, learning to parse his style of speech and logic, before the mystery begins that he must solve. This book was remarkably well written, fast paced, and one of the best representations of disassociation and trauma I’ve read—really cutting to the core of that disorientation that is represented by the labyrinth that the main character finds himself in.

I won’t speak much to the plot of the book because it is the sort of story that once unraveled becomes difficult to talk about without revealing the ending. I cannot speak highly enough of this book for the atmosphere is creates. The plot is a tightly wound spiral that is enchanting as it comes undone.

It is easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, it hits every checkmark.

Clarke is, as always, thorough, thoughtful, and intense in presentation of characters who feel not only sympathetic but like whole human beings.

Review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

I remember seeing the film in 1997 and it stuck with me, it was a book I always intended to go back and read at some point but kept falling through the cracks. It seems to me now that the film is a faithful adaptation of the novel, though it is limited in what could be presented in a visual medium. There are details of the book that I think might even have eluded Berendt himself—reported comments made by individuals about queer characters which seemed inoffensive to the author but which a different eye might know were barbs. I had some flinching moments, reading this book 28 years on, discussing a crime that occurred in the 1980s, particularly with how queer and POC characters were addressed. However, in equal measure, I learned a few things about representation of queer and POC characters that would never have been discussed in my scope of knowledge. There was a specific point at which the narrator is researching and unable to find an account of someone, and is caught up on segregation practices in newspapers—a detail which has stuck with me as one of many, many factoids which people nowadays deny or have never heard of. And I think that was the purpose of including. The whole book is about perspective and hypocrisy.

The book is classified as non-fiction, but not. It is a narrative of real events which the narrator/author was investigating, the actual slaying of Danny Hansford and the individuals involved in the case. Berendt provides a skewed first hand account of events as he ingratiated himself as an outsider into the culture and personalities of Savannah, Georgia.

While the book is classified as non fiction, there are elements altered from the true story for the purpose of storytelling, causing the book to be referred to as a non-fiction novel. Berendt included stories and characters that were interesting or which did take place, regardless of if they impacted the central focus of the murder trial, for the sake of story telling. Added elements didn’t impact the outcome or course of the trial and so are considered just an illustration of the culture contributing to the crime. Ultimately it’s a series of true-ish events told out of sync with reality. And it’s entertaining. It’s an interesting snapshot that centers Savannah itself as a character by way of showing off it’s varied personalities. Calling the characters quirky or eccentric feels overdone; this isn’t quirky, it’s nearer to an alien observing earthlings.

There is a reason that this story and the way it was told stuck with people.

Review: Carter Beats the Devil

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold

On a personal note: I received this book from a friend in 2019 who then died suddenly three days later. So a lot rode on this book for me, that I had to enjoy it, or it needed to strike the right chord for me, and part of me considered never reading it at all. In 2020, finding myself with suddenly considerably more free time at home, I made an effort to start going back and rereading all of the books, watching all of the shows that had been recommended to me by Eric that I never got around to. I saved this for last.

The good news is that I adore this book.

It is not only for me a very niche subject which I truly enjoy—I know a lot about stage magicians, shut up—but it’s presented in a very charming, intelligent way where you truly come to care for the characters and feel engaged with them. I like historical fiction, ad a rule, but I often feel very cringe with it—this book escapes that. At no point when mentioning historical figures do I find myself flinching at their presentation, instead there is a casual familiarity that becomes very genuine. I adored this book.

But I clearly also have a bias about this book and it means something different for me than it probably does anyone else, and it’s a kind reminder of Death of the Author having it’s merits—that something once it’s put out into the world truly can take on separate meanings of its own and different significances.

But regardless, I think you would like this book, too.

That casually genuine quality to Gold’s writing is spectacular, like being taken into confidences, and I can’t speak enough to how genuinely likeable the characters are. As you follow their progression through conflicts, there is almost a schizophrenic phenomenon of feeling compelled by the pacing and telling of the story and this nearly tongue-in-cheek quality of floating above it, knowing where it’s going by seeing the references to storytelling of the time. I felt it was very respectful to its influences. I adore it.

Review: Born to be Posthumous

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery

I am no biography reader. It’s not that I dislike biographies for any given reason, it’s that I can’t read them quickly and I tend to enjoy things I read that I can get sucked into. It would be unusual for me to want to talk about a biography except that this is about Edward Gorey.

It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I would want to talk about Edward Gorey, and that I would like to do it a lot, at length, alienating those around me. This book, Born to be Posthumous in particular, is considered a definitive biography on Gorey—delving into the innerworkings of Gorey’s career and personal life in magnificent detail and with a very sentimental and thoughtful approach that peels back to hint at several layers of a man who was purposely effuse.

I had always appreciated Gorey as a creator but now I can say definitively that there isn’t an aspect of this man’s career that I’m not envious of, but also there is a great deal of his life which I hold in common. Moreso, I can say that while I am deeply saddened I would never be able to meet the man, I can add proudly that he would have found me remarkably obnoxious.

I’m truly not a biography reader, but I could speak to Dery’s writing and tone which is respectful, familiar, and just a bit tongue and cheek, giving the reader the full impression. The research done, especially into literary styles and aesthetic is impeccable and appeals to a nerd like me.

I couldn’t say more about it without sounding like a fourth grade book report, so I would instead just encourage you: read this book.

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I loved this book. I had intended to read it a while ago and hadn’t. I can’t remember what the reason was. It seems odd and distant now. I saw a review calling this a sad book, and it isn’t. Or, I didn’t think it was.

I also saw a review that said this book has no moral but is instead about letting go of childhood and adulthood as solid, separate masses. I am no expert, but I do believe that’s called a moral.  But I think that’s not *the* moral.  The capital M Moral.

I don’t think, if the reviews are to be the measure, that a lot of people understand this fairly simple story. They’re too caught up in the Neil Gaiman of it all.

This is a book about back tracking, literally back tracking, starting as an adult and looking backwards.  He discovers that the house is gone, the evidence of his childhood is swept away, but maybe if I walk down the lane I can still find something.

I’m still the same person as I was then, just taller. So whatever it is about me that makes me different must be here.

There are a lot of moments like that, that aha, no, this is it, this is definitely why I’m like this. There’s this thing and it did this to me, I didn’t know how to respond because I was young, but it’s in me now and I can’t get rid of it. And there was this other thing about my dad. And there was this other thing about my sister. This happened, but no wait, then this happened. And though the events in Ocean are fictional, they each mean something significant.

Gaiman talks a lot in other works about honesty, but in Ocean he’s just out of reach. It’s like reading an inside joke. You know you’re being told something, the shape of something is given to you, it’s teased, but it’s not all there. You’re missing the same experience that made the joke into a joke. 

Instead it’s just a story.

This time, it’s this story.

In the end, the narrator forgets. He doesn’t remember the events of his childhood that made him this way, but he’s told, more or less, ‘you keep coming back here and looking for it’.  

The moral is that the evidence isn’t going to be somewhere else. He’s been carrying it in him the whole time.

Review: Wave

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Wave

Wave is a memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala about the loss of her sons, husband, best friend, and parents in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

I was compelled to read this almost by strange stroke of fate. I had gone down a rabbit hole looking things up online doing grief research and someone mentioned it off hand in a comments section, and about five hour later I had bought and read the whole thing. I am putting this under the book review area, but really it could just as easily belong under psychology if I wanted to really delve into this work as a piece about grief. But I think I’d rather do Sonali Deraniyagala the service of making this about her. There’s this terrible urge to be magnanimous when we talk about grief and not focus on the individual shapes that grief takes. There was a review I came across while hyperfixating on this story that called Wave an unsentimental account of…I’ll stop there. What the fuck does that mean? This book is dripping with sentiment, just not in the preconceived Victorian tinted melodrama of loud wailing for prescribed lengths of time, as though your loved ones will stop being dead in six months. This book is an absolutely beautifully written account about an unimaginable amount of suffering and this woman somehow is still alive. Surviving a cataclysmic event does not end with the event, and Wave illustrates that very honestly. 

One of the things Deraniyagala discusses that most stuck with me is this notion of….when do you tell someone? How do you explain to someone new, someone you haven’t seen in a long time who asks how you’ve been, ‘oh, uh, well actually’. Wave talks a lot to the isolation that comes with trauma and the uniqueness of individual experience, because it’s individuals that are being lost.

Review: The Halloween Moon

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

The Halloween Moon

The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink (Welcome to Nightvale, Alice Isn’t Dead) is a middle grade fiction tale about a single Halloween night that takes a very long time. It was reminiscent to me of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury in that same spirit of a spooky book for young readers that really does its best to celebrate being young. I actually went back and reread The Halloween Tree after reading The Halloween Moon because of it. The main plot concerns Esther Gold, a young Jewish girl in a gentile town who in many ways feels separate and has a ….gentle sprinkling of bullying and being ostracized, while delicately skirting over the heavy implications of references to her Judaism being an alienating force in the town. Esther finds solace and acceptance through her love of Halloween. She wins the school costume competitions every year, knows the best horror movies, and pins much of her personality on her love of Halloween, this community activity which she more or less brings her visibility to her classmates. Of course there is an actual Queen of Halloween who isn’t particularly pleasant and Esther’s parents have issued the challenge that she is now too old to go trick or treating. This is a very sweet, shorter novel for young adults about losing those elements of childhood that once defined you, as you instead learn to define yourself. I think, in a child-friendly way, without slapping you over the head, it gets to the root of why so many people gravitate toward horror and fantasy and science fiction under circumstances of feeling separate and ill defined within the ominously beige ‘larger society’, and frames how overcoming those demarcated lines is a part of growing up.

Review: Aristotle and Dante and the Waters of the World

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Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Aristotle and Dante and the Waters of the World

Oh boy.

I’ve made some edits to this review because I feel like I didn’t do it justice, but also because it’s a story that I keep coming back to mentally. I tend to get hooked by certain lines and passages in things, and I cannot underscore enough how beautifully written this book is.

As I have come to expect of Benjamin Alire Sáenz, it is beautifully written. His dialogue is almost foreign to me in how tender it is. His characters have a way of showing emotion so strongly through their prose that you almost forget that they struggle to communicate effectively with one another. It seems frustrating that Ari, who writes in his diary or pushes to understand others so empathetically and offer forgiveness and understanding, is someone who in his world is accused of being a delinquent. He is a fighter, that’s there, but that’s so tertiary to who he is and that is such a remnant of who he thought he had to be.

It says something so devastating about the treatment of Hispanic men and Hispanic people that this vibrant inner world means nothing on a surface level, unless Ari pushes against type and opens himself to others. And even then, there are racist characters, homophobic characters, who no matter the effort Ari makes or who he is, who the reader knows him to be, it doesn’t matter. This could easily be a story of discouragement that focuses on those interactions.

Ari’s efforts to meet his brother, to repair a meaningful relationship with his father, to confront his ideas of manhood and masculinity, is full of setbacks and tragedy and I found myself drawn to those storylines the most strongly. Yet, this is still a love story. This is the perspective of a boy in high school, who despite these very adult confrontations of masculinity and familial pain, is also navigating his first relationship.

I was a little dissatisfied with the ending. It seemed too romantic to me, less grounded in reality like much of the book is. Ari engages in this gesture to show his love for Dante, but I didn’t know that Dante had earned it. I had reservations about his behavior toward Ari, rooted in not having that same insight into his inner world as the reader has to Ari’s. Ari, however, is able to see through that. By the nature of his own experience and treatment, knowing who he is versus knowing who he is to other people, Ari continues to take the risk of reaching out.

How often does a queer story get to end romantically? How many examples are there, really, of a big, showy, romantic gesture in queer media? I think we worry that it’s cringe. That it’s too loud, that people will see us. The fact I was deeply invested in Ari’s relationship with his father and masculinity, with his brother and letting go, knowing when to let go of toxicity, more than I was Ari’s relationship with Dante, says something about me and the age that I am at—-it doesn’t say anything about the necessity of stories like this. How often are Hispanic men allowed a romantic ending with another man? I cannot imagine the pressure of writing this book. 

Review: The City We Became

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Making an effort to post a book review every Friday!

The City We Became

The City We Became by NK Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Inheritance Trilogy) is the first of her Great Cities series in progress and it’s been a long road between it and I. I loved this book, I did, but I struggled with this book, taking longer to read than usual, and it is my own fault. I got too attached to particular characters. I more or less proved its thesis.

The City We Became begins with Sao Paulo informing the avatar of New York City that he is soon to become the embodiment of New York City Itself, under threat by an interdimensional, existential, eldritch horror—and in order to evade said threat as the city is birthed, Sao Paulo is here to act as midwife. All cities, all great Cities, eventually develop this pulse, this living embodiment, that becomes a protective factor for all of its citizens. Naturally, under cosmic threat, the birthing is not without incident. New York City, a queer black homeless young man, is incapacitated by an attack. The five Burroughs, in an attempt to save their city, in turn birth their own avatars, in the hopes of coming together to save the primary and New York itself. These five unlikely characters, each representing the spirit and character of a particular place, are forced into fighting eldritch horrors and confronting their own cultural and personal biases, examining both how the cultural make up and flavor of New York works for and against itself. This story is beautiful. 

By the end I loved each character or at least understood their perspective.

Manny I got instantaneously. Staten Island, yeah, I got right away just the sort of person she is, for better or worse. The queen of Queens, Padmini Prakash, I felt like was a love letter. I have known people like Brooklyn Tomasin and I like them. I had to reread sections with Bronca Siwanoy, the Bronx, a few times. It wasn’t that she was dense, it was that her character was the most different. This story is detailed, and those details are important to the characterization of the city itself, and I found myself not wanting to misunderstand anything. Bronca ultimately stood out to me the most. A queer Lenape woman in her 60s, Bronca  I had the hardest time visualizing her in my head. I found myself backtracking and trying to understand her better.

I’ve worked in museums and art houses. That’s not a brag. If you’ve been done it, you know it’s not a brag. I know people, technically, similar to Bronca yet I had to really consider who she was to appreciate her better.

Despite taking my time with it, I was very excited about this book. I told people about this book. I told people I was wrestling this book. It makes so many bold decisions, the best of which are to know when to excise someone toxic and elevate others in your plot. By the ending, I was very much happy with the characters who came together and how they did so. And Manny, who I was too attached to for probably person reasons I should reflect on, actually had me cheering. I don’t…I’m not a person who does that, you understand.

The narrative is broken between large chapters of each character’s perspective and the story is very much about how these characters live, their personalities, their way of handling problems, and their coming together. It is a story that culminates not just in battle with eldritch horrors but primarily in understanding between the characters.

And I’ve skirted over one of my favorite elements of this book, but because the chapters are so divided amongst characters, the most consistent presence, who you spend the most time with as a reader, is the The Enemy; the Woman in White, Dr. White, various fungal appendages, x-wing spider monsters, or whatever form she takes—she’s funny. She’s charismatic. It’s not us, it’s her; she’s just doing her job here, man.