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Apr. 28th, 2019 02:06 pmRecent books -
Non-fiction:
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World - Highly ambitious account of several thousand years of world history through the lens of Europe-Asia interactions, particularly travel through Central Asia and the Middle East. There was a lot that was fascinating in this, but it was too broad and moved too quickly. Frankopan’s expertise seems to be in the Byzantine period, and those sections were strongest; I think I would have gotten more out of a more tightly-focused history of a particular period.
- Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays - collection of varied autobiographical essays, mostly about Chee’s development as an author. As often with such collections, some pieces were noticeably stronger than others (somehow, the essay about Chee’s relationship to tarot felt really rich and thoughtful; the essay about his experience with an MFA program, not so much).
The center of the collection is composed by a few trauma-narrative essays, which are not so much about Chee’s own history of childhood sexual abuse, as about his journey to transmute it into his first novel. I haven’t read Edinburgh, the novel in question (I have read Chee’s second novel, Queen of the Night), and the essays didn’t hold up all that well without that context, but I appreciated the reflection on what it means to turn one’s own life into a story, how that is both part of healing and not. I was especially moved about Chee’s description of the regret he feels at previously minimizing his abuse, and specifically voicing that minimization in a documentary interview, the feeling of betraying himself and viewers.
- Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh - Biography of a romantic-era female architect, particularly known for her creation of an eccentric church in her home town of Wreay. I don’t know if it was the writing, which was meandering or unfocused, or my own lack of familiarity with Losh’s work, but I had a lot of difficulty getting into this, despite the fact that Losh’s life and work were quite interesting.
- Emma Reyes, The Book of Emma Reyes (trans. Daniel Alarcón) - Emma Reyes was a Columbian painter, contemporary of Frida Kahlo; this memoir takes the form of a collection of letters she wrote to a close friend describing memories of her childhood, which she spent in abject poverty and experiencing repeated neglect and abandonment. It’s a beautiful and painful memoir, with a certain delicacy and attention to detail which powerfully conveys both her suffering in childhood and the compassion with which she looks back on it as an adult. Excellent trauma memoir.
- Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America - Sociological study of mass incarceration, now ten years out of date; as it’s very focused on statistics, it ages quickly. It’s also interesting to see how different the discourse was before The New Jim Crow; there a lot of rhetorical moves Western doesn’t make that I now would take for granted in this conversation. He talks a lot about racism, but there isn’t the same kind of broad, structural focus that’s now a part of our conversations about criminal justice.
- Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir - Memoir of Khakpour’s decades-long struggles with Lyme disease, including immense difficulty obtaining a diagnosis. I wanted very much to like this, but it was almost impossible to follow, and lacks the kind of self-insight and deliberate structural choices needed to make a memoir like this work. I noticed this particularly in the way Khakpour writes about her parents; she repeatedly alludes to ways in which they’ve failed or let her down through her illness, but the reticence about discussing this further seems to demonstrate an ambivalence about the purpose of the memoir, how much is supposed to share. I also felt very weird about the way she writes about her social circle (weird exorcizing description of a friend who she learned was doing sex work, for example?). Not recommended.
Fiction:
- Ivan Bunin, Sunstroke: Selected Stories (trans. Graham Hettlinger) - Bunin was a Russian emigre author writing in the early twentieth century. These stories are brief, lyrical, and crystalline. I would say that they’re somewhere between Chekhov and Maupassant, but the romance is a little softer than anything either of them would write. I savored them a great deal.
- Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors (trans. Alfred H. Marks) - This is like mid-century Japanese Dangerous Liaisons, except all about internalized homophobia. It is sharp and brilliant and really unpleasant to read. An aging libertine writer cultivates a young gay man as his protege and encourages him in these loveless manipulative affairs with women. Mishima is just like this, I am finding?
- Michéle Roberts, Ignorance - Two childhood friends from different social strata survive the Nazi occupation of France in different ways. I enjoyed parts of this, but I think it would have worked a lot better if it had been kept to a tighter and more contained narrative frame; it alternates between the perspectives of not only the two protagonists but also their daughters, which was too much. The representation of child sexual abuse was also deeply weird, and I wasn’t really okay with it.
- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities - I liked this a lot. I had read an been deeply impressed with Obioma’s first novel, The Fishermen, which had a rich and audacious mythic sweep; this one combines that same perspective and beautiful narrative voice with this very deep compassion for the characters. Loosely inspired by the Odyssey but very much rooted in Nigerian mythology, it is about a young chicken farmer who leaves Nigeria for the sake of the woman he loves, only to fall prey to a series of misfortunes. I still don’t know how I feel about the ending, but I was totally enthralled, and Obioma’s prose is astounding; I want to read everything he ever writes.
- Emma Glass, Peach - This was a slightly surreal, very much stream-of-consciousness novella about a teenage girl navigating the aftermath of a violent rape, which no one in her life seems to notice. I don’t know quite how I feel about it. A lot of readers seem to have found the horror and gore too much, and I didn’t quite feel that, but I also don’t think it really works as a trauma narrative. There were some details that made it weird to read from my particular perspective as a reader, like someone very inaccurately interpreting parts of my own life.
Non-fiction:
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World - Highly ambitious account of several thousand years of world history through the lens of Europe-Asia interactions, particularly travel through Central Asia and the Middle East. There was a lot that was fascinating in this, but it was too broad and moved too quickly. Frankopan’s expertise seems to be in the Byzantine period, and those sections were strongest; I think I would have gotten more out of a more tightly-focused history of a particular period.
- Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays - collection of varied autobiographical essays, mostly about Chee’s development as an author. As often with such collections, some pieces were noticeably stronger than others (somehow, the essay about Chee’s relationship to tarot felt really rich and thoughtful; the essay about his experience with an MFA program, not so much).
The center of the collection is composed by a few trauma-narrative essays, which are not so much about Chee’s own history of childhood sexual abuse, as about his journey to transmute it into his first novel. I haven’t read Edinburgh, the novel in question (I have read Chee’s second novel, Queen of the Night), and the essays didn’t hold up all that well without that context, but I appreciated the reflection on what it means to turn one’s own life into a story, how that is both part of healing and not. I was especially moved about Chee’s description of the regret he feels at previously minimizing his abuse, and specifically voicing that minimization in a documentary interview, the feeling of betraying himself and viewers.
- Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh - Biography of a romantic-era female architect, particularly known for her creation of an eccentric church in her home town of Wreay. I don’t know if it was the writing, which was meandering or unfocused, or my own lack of familiarity with Losh’s work, but I had a lot of difficulty getting into this, despite the fact that Losh’s life and work were quite interesting.
- Emma Reyes, The Book of Emma Reyes (trans. Daniel Alarcón) - Emma Reyes was a Columbian painter, contemporary of Frida Kahlo; this memoir takes the form of a collection of letters she wrote to a close friend describing memories of her childhood, which she spent in abject poverty and experiencing repeated neglect and abandonment. It’s a beautiful and painful memoir, with a certain delicacy and attention to detail which powerfully conveys both her suffering in childhood and the compassion with which she looks back on it as an adult. Excellent trauma memoir.
- Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America - Sociological study of mass incarceration, now ten years out of date; as it’s very focused on statistics, it ages quickly. It’s also interesting to see how different the discourse was before The New Jim Crow; there a lot of rhetorical moves Western doesn’t make that I now would take for granted in this conversation. He talks a lot about racism, but there isn’t the same kind of broad, structural focus that’s now a part of our conversations about criminal justice.
- Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir - Memoir of Khakpour’s decades-long struggles with Lyme disease, including immense difficulty obtaining a diagnosis. I wanted very much to like this, but it was almost impossible to follow, and lacks the kind of self-insight and deliberate structural choices needed to make a memoir like this work. I noticed this particularly in the way Khakpour writes about her parents; she repeatedly alludes to ways in which they’ve failed or let her down through her illness, but the reticence about discussing this further seems to demonstrate an ambivalence about the purpose of the memoir, how much is supposed to share. I also felt very weird about the way she writes about her social circle (weird exorcizing description of a friend who she learned was doing sex work, for example?). Not recommended.
Fiction:
- Ivan Bunin, Sunstroke: Selected Stories (trans. Graham Hettlinger) - Bunin was a Russian emigre author writing in the early twentieth century. These stories are brief, lyrical, and crystalline. I would say that they’re somewhere between Chekhov and Maupassant, but the romance is a little softer than anything either of them would write. I savored them a great deal.
- Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors (trans. Alfred H. Marks) - This is like mid-century Japanese Dangerous Liaisons, except all about internalized homophobia. It is sharp and brilliant and really unpleasant to read. An aging libertine writer cultivates a young gay man as his protege and encourages him in these loveless manipulative affairs with women. Mishima is just like this, I am finding?
- Michéle Roberts, Ignorance - Two childhood friends from different social strata survive the Nazi occupation of France in different ways. I enjoyed parts of this, but I think it would have worked a lot better if it had been kept to a tighter and more contained narrative frame; it alternates between the perspectives of not only the two protagonists but also their daughters, which was too much. The representation of child sexual abuse was also deeply weird, and I wasn’t really okay with it.
- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities - I liked this a lot. I had read an been deeply impressed with Obioma’s first novel, The Fishermen, which had a rich and audacious mythic sweep; this one combines that same perspective and beautiful narrative voice with this very deep compassion for the characters. Loosely inspired by the Odyssey but very much rooted in Nigerian mythology, it is about a young chicken farmer who leaves Nigeria for the sake of the woman he loves, only to fall prey to a series of misfortunes. I still don’t know how I feel about the ending, but I was totally enthralled, and Obioma’s prose is astounding; I want to read everything he ever writes.
- Emma Glass, Peach - This was a slightly surreal, very much stream-of-consciousness novella about a teenage girl navigating the aftermath of a violent rape, which no one in her life seems to notice. I don’t know quite how I feel about it. A lot of readers seem to have found the horror and gore too much, and I didn’t quite feel that, but I also don’t think it really works as a trauma narrative. There were some details that made it weird to read from my particular perspective as a reader, like someone very inaccurately interpreting parts of my own life.
