Kelly
“That's what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.”
This was good. I liked it. That's my review. Also, as a warning, some of the descriptions of prolonged childbirth in an understaffed hospital in 1918 during a pandemic were super graphic and made me a little woozy, and I don't typically get woozy. Bodies are nuts!
“We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers,' . . . Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals' and ‘evildoers' are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.
A RARE DNF. I love Toews' writing (All My Puny Sorrows was beautiful) but good Lord I could not get into this one. There is virtually no plot – which, fine, I can roll with that, I'm pretentious, I love intense, well-written character studies – but I can't deal with the complete absence of verisimilitude in this novel. (Who is this wacky carefree lady whose parents stay at the Four Seasons while she and her four children live on the dole?) Bummer. :(
“I'm compelled, she says, by your conflicted relationship with power. You want it, through the narrative, but you keep disavowing it. I'm just trying to acknowledge that there's an imbalance. This all feels very gendered to me, she says.”
In this book, Vanasco interviews a former friend who raped her in college. This is such a nuanced, powerful, timely, and important book, and I am so impressed with Vanasco's honesty and transparency, even when it doesn't paint her in the best light. Highly recommend.
“It is easy to feel discouraged and simply let go. There is no shame in that. We are, after all, engaged in a struggle that seems, if we look at it using a mainstream political framework and through a mass media prism, unwinnable. On the other hand, if we take a step back, look at things from a broader angle, reflecting on what is happening all over the world and the history of struggle, the history of solidarity movements, it becomes clear, sometimes even obvious, that seemingly indestructible forces can be, thanks to people's willpower, sacrifices, and actions, easily broken.”
A very readable collection of interviews and speeches from Angela Davis. There is some repetitiveness in this volume because the speeches were intended as standalones that then became consolidated, but it's not getting fewer than four stars because it's Angela Davis.
All young women should be full of themselves, to feel empowered to create the future they desire.
Really a 3.5.
I don't know why everyone in this book was like Kirk from Gilmore Girls cranked to 11. Very annoying on the whole with some good spots.
I think about all the things we could beif we were never told our bodies were not built for them.
A too-neat ending for me, but a perfect portrayal of adolescence on the whole.
“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
So directly in my wheelhouse: pretentious art kids + a fancy, remote college + murder. Entertaining.
One of the problems in writing about Scientology is that its credos are both highly complex and utterly meaningless. The religion was created by a not-so-bright guy who thought he was a genius (recipe for disaster), and not-so-bright people who think they're geniuses tend to believe that the more complicated and dense something is, the more brilliant. As a result, in learning about this religion, the reader has innumerable stupid jargon words to contend with (“out-ethics”, “enturbulated”), and has to learn about so many pointlessly complicated “training exercises” that make no sense but that last literally weeks. (Example: L Ron Hubbard, pedagogical revolutionary, believes that people learn best by stating every definition of every word they read as they go, and starting all over again from the beginning every time they make a mistake. Imagine reading this review, starting with the word “one”, providing every definition of that word, then moving on to do the same for “of” and “the” and so on. What a rich understanding of the text you'd have!)
The problem is that this author's writing and level of . . . I don't know, analysis? Reflection? are at about an 8th grade level, though it gets better as the book goes on. It frequently makes the tedium of Scientology tedious to read about. Under more capable hands, that tedium could be elevated to absurdity, irony, pathos, I don't know – anything else. I wish a better writer had taken this fascinating story on. Still worth a read.
So, so, so good. Instant “to reread” designation.
“There is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they're arguing with a stranger.”
“‘Look at me,' said Grandmother. Yes look at her. Spiny as a jujube tree, sweet as a julep, ju-jitsu-minded with a heart like a jubilee. Energy, work and heat in the joule-force of her. A wryneck jynx, sudden turn of the head. Woodpecker bird at the World Ash Tree.”
I'm hard-pressed to remember a time I read such distinctive prose. I didn't care much for the plot or the characters (which is generally, you know, quite an indictment of a novel) but the sheer oddness of the writing made it worthwhile.
I did not necessarily like this book but I respected it a lot. (I have a hard time with any book that is rugged or western in general – maybe because I am an liberal East Coast elite? – so my lack of emotional connection is perhaps not surprising. I do have an affinity for well-drawn and deeply unlikable characters, though, which this book delivered in spades.) Whatever your literary preferences, this is undeniably a very well-crafted and masterfully written book. I'm glad I read it even though my own shortcomings in taste made it less enjoyable than it could've been.
An interesting YA mystery novel (albeit with a weird ending but w/e, curious to see where the sequel picks up). Is anything better than murder mysteries at elite New England boarding schools????
Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.
In contemplating Slaughterhouse-Five, George Saunders wrote something that always sticks in my mind:
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. . .We are meant to exit the book altered.
When Saunders wrote about Slaughterhouse-Five, he was speaking specifically about fiction, and even more specifically about the “absurd, invented material” Vonnegut employed to evoke genuine, “nontrivial” change in the reader's life – but I found myself thinking about his words as I read an account that is all too real, and unflinching. The amount of empathy and insight the mother of Dylan Klebold displays in this book is staggering. It seems impossible that a person could read this book and not emerge altered, which, when you think about it, is one of the highest compliments you could ever give to art.
This is a tough one to rate. For instance, some characters are perfectly updated from Austen's era (e.g., Mr. Bennett, Lydia and Kitty, Chip Bingley), and the plot is good, of course, because it's Austen. But because it's Austen, Sittenfeld has the unenviable task of retaining the perfection of the characters of Darcy and Elizabeth and updating them for the modern era. She didn't succeed there, but she made a fairly good effort in transmuting them into their 21st century versions. (There's something to be said for an Elizabeth Bennett who can get drunk).
HUGE EXCEPTION TO THE RELATIVELY GOOD RATING: the modern twist of turning duplicitous, villainous cad Wickham into a male suitor who reveals himself to be transgender was . . . unfortunate. A gross and moreover poorly made attempt at a parallel.
Overall, it was worth a read – and it really is a compulsively readable book, even if it ultimately just made me want to re-read Pride and Prejudice for the real thing.
“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”