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brennanaphone's reviews
651 reviews
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
2.0
I'm really not sure how this won the Pulitzer Prize, except that Walker Percy took the manuscript under his wing and shepherded into acclaim. And, based on his intro, Percy and I don't look for the same stuff in books, since he liked "its ethnic whites--and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy." I think old Percy needed to read more Black authors.
Anyway, the book is okay. At its core it is farce that goes on way too long. I was really into the idea of a book where the bloviating, self-important white dude is the butt of the joke (although, reading other people's views, some folks actually identify with him, what??). His long-winded and painfully verbose rants are sometimes uncomfortably relatable and often hilarious, especially in his correspondence with Myrna, who is also painfully obtuse. But at some point you realize that everyone is the butt of the joke, that the author skewers everyone, often with boring stereotypes for lesbians, gay men, and Black people, and that a lot of what is supposed to make Ignatius a ridiculous and grotesque figure is his weight. Cool. So there's just no real warmth or empathy or growth or anything. And with farce that's usually fine, but it has to be a lot faster and a lot punchier for that to work, and this is 400 plodding pages long.
I have never been to New Orleans, so I will have to trust others when they say that the regional dialogue is note-perfect. It does have some legitimately funny writing, but it is also incredibly repetitive in its word choice, which undercuts a lot of the humor. You can really hear about Ignatius's pyloric valve, his belching, his "massive" tongue, his slurs, his mother's alcoholism, people screaming, Mrs. Levy's exercise board, Miss Trixie snarling, and Jones saying "Whoa!" only so many times before you just kind of glaze over. I can admire some of the writing choices, but I don't think I actually enjoyed more than a handful of pages of this book.
Anyway, the book is okay. At its core it is farce that goes on way too long. I was really into the idea of a book where the bloviating, self-important white dude is the butt of the joke (although, reading other people's views, some folks actually identify with him, what??). His long-winded and painfully verbose rants are sometimes uncomfortably relatable and often hilarious, especially in his correspondence with Myrna, who is also painfully obtuse. But at some point you realize that everyone is the butt of the joke, that the author skewers everyone, often with boring stereotypes for lesbians, gay men, and Black people, and that a lot of what is supposed to make Ignatius a ridiculous and grotesque figure is his weight. Cool. So there's just no real warmth or empathy or growth or anything. And with farce that's usually fine, but it has to be a lot faster and a lot punchier for that to work, and this is 400 plodding pages long.
I have never been to New Orleans, so I will have to trust others when they say that the regional dialogue is note-perfect. It does have some legitimately funny writing, but it is also incredibly repetitive in its word choice, which undercuts a lot of the humor. You can really hear about Ignatius's pyloric valve, his belching, his "massive" tongue, his slurs, his mother's alcoholism, people screaming, Mrs. Levy's exercise board, Miss Trixie snarling, and Jones saying "Whoa!" only so many times before you just kind of glaze over. I can admire some of the writing choices, but I don't think I actually enjoyed more than a handful of pages of this book.
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
3.0
I entered the Grishaverse books with Six of Crows, even though I knew the first book was Shadow and Bone. I am so glad I did. If I had started with this book, I doubt I would have read beyond the first chapter.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
3.0
Droll and quick-witted farce. Feels like an inspiration for the late, great Terry Pratchett, with characters who are meant to be somewhat shallow stereotypes and vehicles for madcap shenanigans and incredibly striking witticisms.
I've read absolutely no Wodehouse before, but this collection of humorous short stories struck me as a sort of prototype for what were likely beloved characters in later books. He plays around with a lot of the same phrases and schticks, and some of them absolutely land with a bang. Some of them feel repetitive. Overall very fun, light, and with quite a few genuinely hilarious lines and delightful turns.
I've read absolutely no Wodehouse before, but this collection of humorous short stories struck me as a sort of prototype for what were likely beloved characters in later books. He plays around with a lot of the same phrases and schticks, and some of them absolutely land with a bang. Some of them feel repetitive. Overall very fun, light, and with quite a few genuinely hilarious lines and delightful turns.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
4.0
Lushly written and absolutely devourable. I had some problems with the pacing, but I'll get to that later. For now I want to talk about the magic of feminist fantasy!
In my early twenties I had a male roommate call me a buzzkill because I complained about a sexist show he was watching; he said it was "escapism." Interesting how in male escapist fantasy women are sex objects who live only to serve the male narrative, while in feminist escapist fantasy, women are just... allowed to do other things? Jesus, what a low bar.
Anyhoo, what I loved, loved, loved about this book was that the entire world she built (all four points of the compass and every culture therein, babyyy) was egalitarian when it came to gender and sexual orientation. Married folks are "companions" to each other, no matter their gender. While I was expecting badass women assassins and captains and dragonriders, some subconscious part of me expected them only in spotlight roles (and probably "taught by their dad to love boxing" or whatever, lol). Instead, women populate every single background role you could have--sailors and castle guards and scholars and assassins and rulers and ambassadors and healers. They're just... there. It's not a big deal. It's amazing how huge that felt to me, how I would find myself automatically picturing male NPCs until it would be like, "The guard turned right and then continued on her patrol" or something. Here. For. It.
The romance in this is lovely. Honestly, I found Ead and Tanè too similar most of the time: they're both very serious and hardworking women with lofty professional ambitions who are sometimes kneecapped by personal issues. They think and speak the same way, to the point that I sometimes got them confused with each other. Ead's complicated and quite tender relationship with Sabran, though, really sets her apart in a way that felt sweet and authentic. Sabran herself is also probably the only truly complex character of the whole book; everyone else, while interesting, tends to be exactly what they seem: Loth is stalwart and honest, the Prioress is devious and conniving, Niclays is a self-serving coward, etc. (Don't expect the plot twists to surprise you, tbh.) Sabran, however, was the perfect combination of haughtily regal and curiously needy, and the growth she experienced over the course of the book was fantastic.
I'm surprised I'm saying this, but at 800 pages, the book felt too short. Or it felt like it should have been a series of books, maybe? I say this because the first half of the book was stunning. She unfolded the worldbuilding really elegantly, bouncing back and forth between the East and West, then extending it slowly to a whole different kingdom in the South. It felt adventurous and huge and populated by so many people and cultures, all at odds with each other over religion or disease or philosophy. There was enough violence and danger to make a lot of things feel unexpected, sometimes sickeningly so.
Then, sometime in the last half, the book got really streamlined. They came up with The Big Plan, and you kind of knew from that moment on that the point of the book was just to get us to the climactic battle as quickly as possible. Characters were suddenly traversing half the world in a day or two without issue, meeting up with each other in chance ways, and even world leaders were setting aside huge fundamental differences to agreeably join in battle. By the end, the world felt small and homogenous. I could have used more time to keep everything fleshed out and to not pay tribute to the idea that Everything Goes Perfectly and Everyone Agrees on History and Religion.
So the ending was a little too neat and a little too quick, but this was still a beautifully styled book in a nicely imaginative world.
In my early twenties I had a male roommate call me a buzzkill because I complained about a sexist show he was watching; he said it was "escapism." Interesting how in male escapist fantasy women are sex objects who live only to serve the male narrative, while in feminist escapist fantasy, women are just... allowed to do other things? Jesus, what a low bar.
Anyhoo, what I loved, loved, loved about this book was that the entire world she built (all four points of the compass and every culture therein, babyyy) was egalitarian when it came to gender and sexual orientation. Married folks are "companions" to each other, no matter their gender. While I was expecting badass women assassins and captains and dragonriders, some subconscious part of me expected them only in spotlight roles (and probably "taught by their dad to love boxing" or whatever, lol). Instead, women populate every single background role you could have--sailors and castle guards and scholars and assassins and rulers and ambassadors and healers. They're just... there. It's not a big deal. It's amazing how huge that felt to me, how I would find myself automatically picturing male NPCs until it would be like, "The guard turned right and then continued on her patrol" or something. Here. For. It.
The romance in this is lovely. Honestly, I found Ead and Tanè too similar most of the time: they're both very serious and hardworking women with lofty professional ambitions who are sometimes kneecapped by personal issues. They think and speak the same way, to the point that I sometimes got them confused with each other. Ead's complicated and quite tender relationship with Sabran, though, really sets her apart in a way that felt sweet and authentic. Sabran herself is also probably the only truly complex character of the whole book; everyone else, while interesting, tends to be exactly what they seem: Loth is stalwart and honest, the Prioress is devious and conniving, Niclays is a self-serving coward, etc. (Don't expect the plot twists to surprise you, tbh.) Sabran, however, was the perfect combination of haughtily regal and curiously needy, and the growth she experienced over the course of the book was fantastic.
I'm surprised I'm saying this, but at 800 pages, the book felt too short. Or it felt like it should have been a series of books, maybe? I say this because the first half of the book was stunning. She unfolded the worldbuilding really elegantly, bouncing back and forth between the East and West, then extending it slowly to a whole different kingdom in the South. It felt adventurous and huge and populated by so many people and cultures, all at odds with each other over religion or disease or philosophy. There was enough violence and danger to make a lot of things feel unexpected, sometimes sickeningly so.
Then, sometime in the last half, the book got really streamlined. They came up with The Big Plan, and you kind of knew from that moment on that the point of the book was just to get us to the climactic battle as quickly as possible. Characters were suddenly traversing half the world in a day or two without issue, meeting up with each other in chance ways, and even world leaders were setting aside huge fundamental differences to agreeably join in battle. By the end, the world felt small and homogenous. I could have used more time to keep everything fleshed out and to not pay tribute to the idea that Everything Goes Perfectly and Everyone Agrees on History and Religion.
So the ending was a little too neat and a little too quick, but this was still a beautifully styled book in a nicely imaginative world.
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
4.0
Fascinating structure! It's pitched as a book of short stories, and it is, but as you read you realize you're reading about one person, and by breaking David's life into individual stories, the author is doing something interesting: he's emphasizing fracture and disorientation, both from trauma that happened young and from the subsequent addictions that stem from those traumas. Also, because each story is meant to be read on its own, the narrator is constantly introducing you to people you've already read about, heightening the feeling of disconnect David has from his own community and reality.
The stories are well-placed (as my friend Sarah said, you could call them "stories" or you could just call them "chapters") so that by the time you get to the end, you are dreading uncovering the events of David's young life, since you've seen where he ends up as an adult. The title of the book might sound flip, but it isn't: horror in the movies is nothing like the horror that can happen in your own home.
The stories are well-placed (as my friend Sarah said, you could call them "stories" or you could just call them "chapters") so that by the time you get to the end, you are dreading uncovering the events of David's young life, since you've seen where he ends up as an adult. The title of the book might sound flip, but it isn't: horror in the movies is nothing like the horror that can happen in your own home.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
5.0
What a delightful little book! It's slim and quick, but each word is so, so carefully chosen. It is engaging, brief, vivid, and creepy as all hell. Legitimately terrifying moments but also sweet and charming. I think if I had read this as a child I would have been deeply scarred, but as an adult I found it enchanting.
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
1.0
Based on the dedication, which was thanking Ted Chiang for giving the author the idea for this book based on "Liking How You Look: A Documentary," I thought I was going to love this book. I did not.
Primarily because it's mostly a run-of-the-mill YA dystopian society, but with no real thought behind it. I thought this was going to be about a society's obsession with looking a certain way and the way that fatphobia, racism, sexism, and ageism play into that obsession. But not only did this have no nuance regarding those elements, it wasn't even the point! The plot begins with a flimsy "everyone gets plastic surgery to become pretty when they're 16," shtick, but it never explored that. The real plot is that being pretty also conveniently makes you dumb, and for some reason all the pretties just party once they get their surgery? Like that's the point of them is to just party?
This book made no sense, the characters were boring, the romance was flat, and I don't recommend it. However, I do recommend Ted Chiang's book of short stories, including "Liking How You Look," which was excellent.
Primarily because it's mostly a run-of-the-mill YA dystopian society, but with no real thought behind it. I thought this was going to be about a society's obsession with looking a certain way and the way that fatphobia, racism, sexism, and ageism play into that obsession. But not only did this have no nuance regarding those elements, it wasn't even the point! The plot begins with a flimsy "everyone gets plastic surgery to become pretty when they're 16," shtick, but it never explored that. The real plot is that being pretty also conveniently makes you dumb, and for some reason all the pretties just party once they get their surgery? Like that's the point of them is to just party?
This book made no sense, the characters were boring, the romance was flat, and I don't recommend it. However, I do recommend Ted Chiang's book of short stories, including "Liking How You Look," which was excellent.
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
2.0
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It's a great plot, and it seems like the new TV show adaptation might do a good job with it.
This book could have been slimmed way down. It was chatty, and not in an informative way. Instead of saying "She stabbed at the line" it will say "She stabbed at the line with her short, stubby finger ending in a long unpainted nail." Which is already too long a sentence, but usually the description doesn't inform the character or the narrator. It just seems like the author is throwing details out in hopes that it paints a picture.
The other problem was that for a thriller there wasn't a lot of attention paid to tone or atmosphere. Hazel is a legitimately creepy person, and the office racism combined with ladder-climbing and microaggressions should have created a really jumpy and unsettling aura. Instead it felt largely rote, and a lot of it was topical and kind of boring.
This book could have been slimmed way down. It was chatty, and not in an informative way. Instead of saying "She stabbed at the line" it will say "She stabbed at the line with her short, stubby finger ending in a long unpainted nail." Which is already too long a sentence, but usually the description doesn't inform the character or the narrator. It just seems like the author is throwing details out in hopes that it paints a picture.
The other problem was that for a thriller there wasn't a lot of attention paid to tone or atmosphere. Hazel is a legitimately creepy person, and the office racism combined with ladder-climbing and microaggressions should have created a really jumpy and unsettling aura. Instead it felt largely rote, and a lot of it was topical and kind of boring.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
3.0
Beautiful book, but wow, Genet was terribly, terribly written.
This book is surgically exact, with a story spanning fifty-some years that is engrossing, vivid, historically illuminating, and beautiful. The description of medical practice and surgery is stunning, managing to be both engaging and instructive without ever being too gross or confusing. I loved many of these characters, most of them not the main character. I loved his biological parents and his adopted parents; I loved their stories and relationships. Ghosh and Hema are so funny, so honest, so real. Some of the dialogue in this book managed to sketch a whole character in a few short strokes. So I was surprised that for all that this hinged on the interconnected fates of the narrator, his brother, and the girl he loved, that part of the book kind of... shit the bed.
The character Genet is honestly a huge disappointment in a book this good. So much of her character is purely defined by sexuality. Even when she engages in big, sweeping acts, the point of her ends up being her virginity, her scent when she's "in heat," and whether she will sleep with the narrator or not. So many interesting things seem to happen to her in the margins, but ultimately what seems to matter is that she regrets any choices she made that weren't marrying the narrator and giving him her virginity. I was waiting for the book to make it clear where the narrator's own perspective was hugely lacking, but the story never followed through, seeming to agree with him and taking a perverse amount of pleasure in punishing her for various "sins". She was such a flimsy plot device, such a blatantly sexualized object, and such a pointless part of an otherwise lovely book.
This book is surgically exact, with a story spanning fifty-some years that is engrossing, vivid, historically illuminating, and beautiful. The description of medical practice and surgery is stunning, managing to be both engaging and instructive without ever being too gross or confusing. I loved many of these characters, most of them not the main character. I loved his biological parents and his adopted parents; I loved their stories and relationships. Ghosh and Hema are so funny, so honest, so real. Some of the dialogue in this book managed to sketch a whole character in a few short strokes. So I was surprised that for all that this hinged on the interconnected fates of the narrator, his brother, and the girl he loved, that part of the book kind of... shit the bed.
The character Genet is honestly a huge disappointment in a book this good. So much of her character is purely defined by sexuality. Even when she engages in big, sweeping acts, the point of her ends up being her virginity, her scent when she's "in heat," and whether she will sleep with the narrator or not. So many interesting things seem to happen to her in the margins, but ultimately what seems to matter is that she regrets any choices she made that weren't marrying the narrator and giving him her virginity. I was waiting for the book to make it clear where the narrator's own perspective was hugely lacking, but the story never followed through, seeming to agree with him and taking a perverse amount of pleasure in punishing her for various "sins". She was such a flimsy plot device, such a blatantly sexualized object, and such a pointless part of an otherwise lovely book.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
2.0
There was a lot to like here, mostly in the lush descriptions of the Kentucky mountains and the poor families scratching out a living in remote "hollers". As Cussy, the narrator, says: "To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn't tread, dared not venture--the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills--but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid." Those descriptions of wildness, poverty, illness, tragedy, and perseverance were lovely. A moment where a boy dying of starvation triumphantly reads a book was particularly moving. Learning about Pack Librarians was also badass.
Some of the characters were interesting, the ones who were bolstered by their meager library loans even as they struggled. The ones who were meant to be Very Bad People, though, were thin as paper: all vicious, cruel, and cartoonish from the predatory pastor to the jealous and racist librarians. The love interest is hilariously bland and a source for some surprisingly boring melodrama, so most of the stuff to love is out in the fresh air as Cussy travels from home to home on her mule, Junia.
The dialogue was occasionally expository and stilted, like when Cussy literally says to her own father, "Remember the National Geographic article about Great-Grandpa's birthplace over in Cussy, France, the one I'm named for?" Other times it felt more natural, but then again that's a pretty low bar. I half expected her at some point to be like, "Pa, remember how you have blue skin, and when you begat me I too know'd I had the blue skin and continue to have the blue skin to this day?"
I think the big problem I had with this book was the bizarrely competitive approach it took to racial discrimination. The story is crystal clear about two things: 1) Cussy is white but with a recessive gene that means her blood doesn't oxygenate, so her skin looks blue. 2) Cussy is treated by her community as someone who might have a disease or the devil in her, but either way is discriminated against as "Colored" along with the Black families in town. That all seems to check out, seeing as this is based on the story of a very real family, the Blue Fugates. I can understand people treating her with superstition and fear.
But then the book introduces the sole Black woman, Queenie Johnson, and goes out of its way to show how much better she has it than Cussy. Queenie is a Pack Librarian who is discriminated against, given a "long and treacherous route, second to mine." How astute of you to take note of that, Cussy, thank you! Then you have lines like, "I looked down, knowing my place, knowing I was the one they were really afraid of, detested the most... any color was better than mine" and "Maybe there was opportunity and blessings for her color, but I'd never once seen one for mine." Like, seriously? Does this white author really need to write about this imagined blue woman based on one specific historical family tree and make it seem like they suffered more than BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA? I just do not understand it. I get showing the discrimination and suffering, but this weird suffering Olympics busted this book down quite a few tiers for me.
Some of the characters were interesting, the ones who were bolstered by their meager library loans even as they struggled. The ones who were meant to be Very Bad People, though, were thin as paper: all vicious, cruel, and cartoonish from the predatory pastor to the jealous and racist librarians. The love interest is hilariously bland and a source for some surprisingly boring melodrama, so most of the stuff to love is out in the fresh air as Cussy travels from home to home on her mule, Junia.
The dialogue was occasionally expository and stilted, like when Cussy literally says to her own father, "Remember the National Geographic article about Great-Grandpa's birthplace over in Cussy, France, the one I'm named for?" Other times it felt more natural, but then again that's a pretty low bar. I half expected her at some point to be like, "Pa, remember how you have blue skin, and when you begat me I too know'd I had the blue skin and continue to have the blue skin to this day?"
I think the big problem I had with this book was the bizarrely competitive approach it took to racial discrimination. The story is crystal clear about two things: 1) Cussy is white but with a recessive gene that means her blood doesn't oxygenate, so her skin looks blue. 2) Cussy is treated by her community as someone who might have a disease or the devil in her, but either way is discriminated against as "Colored" along with the Black families in town. That all seems to check out, seeing as this is based on the story of a very real family, the Blue Fugates. I can understand people treating her with superstition and fear.
But then the book introduces the sole Black woman, Queenie Johnson, and goes out of its way to show how much better she has it than Cussy. Queenie is a Pack Librarian who is discriminated against, given a "long and treacherous route, second to mine." How astute of you to take note of that, Cussy, thank you! Then you have lines like, "I looked down, knowing my place, knowing I was the one they were really afraid of, detested the most... any color was better than mine" and "Maybe there was opportunity and blessings for her color, but I'd never once seen one for mine." Like, seriously? Does this white author really need to write about this imagined blue woman based on one specific historical family tree and make it seem like they suffered more than BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA? I just do not understand it. I get showing the discrimination and suffering, but this weird suffering Olympics busted this book down quite a few tiers for me.