A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin
262 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 1 to November 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book was an emotionally draining read, but not for the reasons I expected. Going into it blind, without having read the jacket summary, I envisioned a brutal tearjerker about racism in America and the violence of the police state, assuming (in my white liberal ignorance) that every Black story in 2019 would be akin to The Hate U Give. Instead, while racism in America very much played a role in the tale, A Particular Kind of Black Man dealt with themes of family and identity, of mental illness and heredity, of coping with loss by editing the past—all things painfully personal and relatable for me.
It says something about my own internalized racism, absorbed from my upbringing and still visible even in my attempts to become a decent person, that I wasn't prepared to relate so strongly to a Nigerian American's fictional narrative. That's an embarrassing fact to have to admit to. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent; I was abandoned by my own mother at a young age; I've sabotaged relationships through my own insecurity. Turning each page was a challenge because of how deeply I cringed at Tunde's social self-destruction. I knew his story all too well; I didn't want to see it happen again, no matter how fictionalized.
I feel embarrassed for expecting a thunderous rebuke of state violence instead of a narrative with its own fully realized ends. I feel ashamed of how little Black fiction I've read. Owning up to it is one step forward, I hope: reading more is another.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Friday, October 11, 2019
2019 read #17: The Quick by Lauren Owen.
The Quick by Lauren Owen
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
2019 read #16: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
2019 read #15: Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.
Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.
Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.
Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.
Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.
Monday, September 23, 2019
2019 read #14: Circe by Madeline Miller.
Circe by Madeline Miller
394 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 21 to September 23
Rating: 4 out of 5
Women, throughout the history of the written word, have been relegated to roles as helpmeets, trophies, obstacles, cheerleaders, and convenient plot devices. The few famous literary characters who were women tended to appear as chapters in the narratives of men. The mythological figure of Circe exists almost entirely as an appendage to Odysseus: initially a powerful and dangerous foil for him to overcome, subsequently conquered by his supreme manhood and serving a domestic role for him and his crew. In texts where her existence doesn't revolve around Odysseus, Circe is depicted (more or less literally) as a maneater, a manifestation of female libido and power who transforms her male "victims" into swine.
It's satisfying to read a modern novel based on Circe's legends that, for a good chunk of its length, refuses to center Odysseus as the upright pillar of her story. Miller's treatment explores age-old topics like godhood and mortality and the capricious cruelty of the divine, centering Circe herself as a belittled outcast in a divine household where nymphs are treated merely as bargaining chips and as playthings. She is the focus of her own story—an obvious choice rendered significant by the overwhelming numbers of male storytellers (and readers) who would be baffled by it to this day.
I grew up with the safely sanitized versions of the classical Mediterranean myths we all absorbed. Odysseus was my favorite as a child. A hero who used his brains far more than his brawn sailed directly into my nerdy, shrimpy little heart. I put myself in his sandals when I read a bowdlerized and abridged version of The Odyssey, right up until the end, when I also identified with Telemachus and viewed Odysseus as the esteemable and good father figure I lacked. The chapters in Miller's novel when Odysseus arrives on Aiaia, the romance he shares with the wary and cynical witch Circe has become, felt nice, cozy, fulfilling. All of which made Miller's subsequent deconstruction of that little domestic interlude all the more powerful and eye-opening.
394 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 21 to September 23
Rating: 4 out of 5
Women, throughout the history of the written word, have been relegated to roles as helpmeets, trophies, obstacles, cheerleaders, and convenient plot devices. The few famous literary characters who were women tended to appear as chapters in the narratives of men. The mythological figure of Circe exists almost entirely as an appendage to Odysseus: initially a powerful and dangerous foil for him to overcome, subsequently conquered by his supreme manhood and serving a domestic role for him and his crew. In texts where her existence doesn't revolve around Odysseus, Circe is depicted (more or less literally) as a maneater, a manifestation of female libido and power who transforms her male "victims" into swine.
It's satisfying to read a modern novel based on Circe's legends that, for a good chunk of its length, refuses to center Odysseus as the upright pillar of her story. Miller's treatment explores age-old topics like godhood and mortality and the capricious cruelty of the divine, centering Circe herself as a belittled outcast in a divine household where nymphs are treated merely as bargaining chips and as playthings. She is the focus of her own story—an obvious choice rendered significant by the overwhelming numbers of male storytellers (and readers) who would be baffled by it to this day.
I grew up with the safely sanitized versions of the classical Mediterranean myths we all absorbed. Odysseus was my favorite as a child. A hero who used his brains far more than his brawn sailed directly into my nerdy, shrimpy little heart. I put myself in his sandals when I read a bowdlerized and abridged version of The Odyssey, right up until the end, when I also identified with Telemachus and viewed Odysseus as the esteemable and good father figure I lacked. The chapters in Miller's novel when Odysseus arrives on Aiaia, the romance he shares with the wary and cynical witch Circe has become, felt nice, cozy, fulfilling. All of which made Miller's subsequent deconstruction of that little domestic interlude all the more powerful and eye-opening.
Friday, September 20, 2019
2019 read #13: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
831 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 5 to September 20
Rating: 2 out of 5
This is one of those exceptionally rare occasions in which a standalone epic fantasy novel the size of a cat would have been improved had it been split into a trilogy and padded out with an extra hundred or two hundred pages of worldbuilding and introspection.
Some spoilers ahead.
The first half of this book is great. It has many of the flaws common to epic fantasy—too many coincidental meetings and overheard conversations driving the plot forward, too many feasts where every dish gets listed, too many repetitions of the word "trencher"—but big things start happening a hundred pages in, and for a while, the accelerating pace and the appealing characters are enough to grip your interest and keep you going. Around the halfway point, though, the book begins to feel a bit undercooked. A major climax occurs with the thwarting of a palace coup, and as the dust settles, the narrative sputters out, losing much of its momentum. It feels like a logical place to end the first book of a trilogy: falling action after a climax, wrapping up some loose ends, setting the scene for the next book. Coming as it does in the middle of a single volume, however, it just feels like sloppy pacing—a feeling compounded by how everything after that point feels rushed and only half-finished.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, a viewpoint character who has completed his first character arc is randomly given the responsibility of interviewing suspects among the nobility (presumably because he has nothing better to do), just so that there can be a couple dramatic prison cell monologues. As soon as those are wrapped up, the viewpoint character gets taken off the case and sent on to his next plot function, never really regaining agency as anything other than a plot device.
The book's strict reliance on the same four viewpoint characters forces similar detours and epic journeys upon each of them. All four crisscross the world in a period of just a few pages; the result feels more like the outline of the second novel in a series than an actual narrative. People we've followed from the very beginning just happen to meet at the ends of the earth, or just happen to be on hand at exactly the right time to witness tertiary characters duke it out, literally half a world away from where they started.
A semi-legendary character teased from the setting's ancient past appears, gains an intriguing layer of nuance in a memorable scene, and then does a ridiculous heel turn that never coheres into something that makes sense. Her "Everything you thought you knew was a lie!" gambit never pays off or affects the plot in any way, and then she dies like a chump.
Worst of all, almost every main character gets a fake-out death scene just to manipulate your emotions. Hell, some characters get two. It all feels like a mess of clumsy plotting, hurrying you along to the preordained set-piece battle between the forces of good and evil. With the rushed pacing, the repeated cliffhanger "death scenes" that get walked back in the next chapter, and the lack of space for the characters to breathe, each new setback the characters face becomes an annoyance for the reader rather than a source of dramatic tension. Like, we know so-and-so will get dramatically reunited with her dragon, and we know the magic MacGuffin sword will do what it's supposed to do in the end, so if you aren't going to bother giving us more than plot checkpoints for half the book, and you're giving us fake death scenes instead of character development, why bother slowing things down with extra steps? Just get to the end already.
So, contrary to all the laws of nature and book criticism, I have to say that stretching this tome into three would have fixed many of its issues. Build up the characters' setbacks organically. Let them experience doubt and growth beyond the plateau they all reach at the halfway mark. Maintain the excellent balance of character beats and plot movement from the first half of the story by giving the rest of it space to take root and spread its crown.
831 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 5 to September 20
Rating: 2 out of 5
This is one of those exceptionally rare occasions in which a standalone epic fantasy novel the size of a cat would have been improved had it been split into a trilogy and padded out with an extra hundred or two hundred pages of worldbuilding and introspection.
Some spoilers ahead.
The first half of this book is great. It has many of the flaws common to epic fantasy—too many coincidental meetings and overheard conversations driving the plot forward, too many feasts where every dish gets listed, too many repetitions of the word "trencher"—but big things start happening a hundred pages in, and for a while, the accelerating pace and the appealing characters are enough to grip your interest and keep you going. Around the halfway point, though, the book begins to feel a bit undercooked. A major climax occurs with the thwarting of a palace coup, and as the dust settles, the narrative sputters out, losing much of its momentum. It feels like a logical place to end the first book of a trilogy: falling action after a climax, wrapping up some loose ends, setting the scene for the next book. Coming as it does in the middle of a single volume, however, it just feels like sloppy pacing—a feeling compounded by how everything after that point feels rushed and only half-finished.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, a viewpoint character who has completed his first character arc is randomly given the responsibility of interviewing suspects among the nobility (presumably because he has nothing better to do), just so that there can be a couple dramatic prison cell monologues. As soon as those are wrapped up, the viewpoint character gets taken off the case and sent on to his next plot function, never really regaining agency as anything other than a plot device.
The book's strict reliance on the same four viewpoint characters forces similar detours and epic journeys upon each of them. All four crisscross the world in a period of just a few pages; the result feels more like the outline of the second novel in a series than an actual narrative. People we've followed from the very beginning just happen to meet at the ends of the earth, or just happen to be on hand at exactly the right time to witness tertiary characters duke it out, literally half a world away from where they started.
A semi-legendary character teased from the setting's ancient past appears, gains an intriguing layer of nuance in a memorable scene, and then does a ridiculous heel turn that never coheres into something that makes sense. Her "Everything you thought you knew was a lie!" gambit never pays off or affects the plot in any way, and then she dies like a chump.
Worst of all, almost every main character gets a fake-out death scene just to manipulate your emotions. Hell, some characters get two. It all feels like a mess of clumsy plotting, hurrying you along to the preordained set-piece battle between the forces of good and evil. With the rushed pacing, the repeated cliffhanger "death scenes" that get walked back in the next chapter, and the lack of space for the characters to breathe, each new setback the characters face becomes an annoyance for the reader rather than a source of dramatic tension. Like, we know so-and-so will get dramatically reunited with her dragon, and we know the magic MacGuffin sword will do what it's supposed to do in the end, so if you aren't going to bother giving us more than plot checkpoints for half the book, and you're giving us fake death scenes instead of character development, why bother slowing things down with extra steps? Just get to the end already.
So, contrary to all the laws of nature and book criticism, I have to say that stretching this tome into three would have fixed many of its issues. Build up the characters' setbacks organically. Let them experience doubt and growth beyond the plateau they all reach at the halfway mark. Maintain the excellent balance of character beats and plot movement from the first half of the story by giving the rest of it space to take root and spread its crown.
Friday, August 16, 2019
2019 read #12: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett.
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5
Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.
After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.
Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.
I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5
Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.
After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.
Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.
I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.
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