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gwcoffey's reviews
520 reviews
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
3.0
A friend recommended this to me. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma years ago and really enjoyed it. This book is also a nice read, in line with what I expect from Pollan: Light science and history, in a thoughtful and somewhat poetical context. I especially liked the section on the Apple, with its side eye at some classic American hagiography.
All in all a fun and interesting read.
The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
4.0
This book was on my list and I can’t for the life of me remember how it got there. But still, I’m glad it did. I knew absolutely nothing about it going in. Based only on the name I expected something more philosophical. What I got was a kind of story I adore: A deep and sometimes obsessive dive into one little nook of the human experience (in this case, life on an early 20th century gunboat) wrapped up in an intense, character-driven story.
In a way it reminded me of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach—one of my favorite novels—in the minutia and the introspective protagonist. I wouldn’t say The Sand Pebbles is as good (to me) as that, but it is very good.
Content warning: this book (authentically) portrays major anti-Chinese racism in its characters.
It’s a book that made me sit quietly and think for some time after I finished.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism
Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India by J Furcifer Bhairav, Rakesh Khanna, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan
3.0
This is a fun surprising compendium of mythological, folk, and religious monster figures throughout the Indian subcontinent. I’m not sure I’d recommend reading the whole thing from beginning to end. For me it is more fun to dip into and out of now and again for a little jolt of joy, which I’ve done off and on for several months.
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
4.0
A recommendation from my poet-child, Isabel, Red Comet is an intense and deeply engrossing thousand-page biography of Sylvia Plath. Full disclosure: I’ve never seriously read Plath’s poetry. I’ve never even read The Bell Jar. (Both I plan to remedy soon).
Red Comet twines Plath’s poetry with her life story. Given the deeply personal and autobiographical nature of her poetry, this turns out to be a beautiful way to come to understand her better. All along, as we read about her life, we read as well about what she was writing. This is sometimes deeply revealing, and sometimes shockingly incongruent, which speaks both to her honesty and her craft. I only wish everybody left us such a passionate inscrutable delirious treasure map to their psyche. As often happens with biographies, I came away with such an admiration for Plath’s unique brilliance.
And that brings us to the end. Like a lot of people, all I really knew about Plath going in was intensity and tragedy. Of course Clark must address Plath’s ultimate suicide, and she does not flinch. Clark is a stylist, and while the book sticks to the facts, with an open and compassionate approach, it does so almost poetically. This is especially true in the final chapters. As Plath’s mental state deteriorates, the book picks up pace, sentences are shorter, more disjointed, and more intense. As we read about her descent, we feel it in a very effecting way.
I got a phone call very near the end. I took the call. But I was anxious, agitated, and desperate to get off the phone–to finish the work of bringing her tragedy to an end. I felt a genuine dread in the anticipation of the bang. I’m not a fan of platitudes. But more than ever before I felt the significance of the line “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Here was a woman of intense brilliance. She had a life full of love and possibility. Her illness proved too massive a weight. It crushed her. And the tragedy of it is almost overwhelming. All I could think, all I could feel in the end was – what a loss. What a loss.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
4.0
I’ve had a story idea rattling around in my head for years about a character with a supernatural degree of empathy. I was talking to a friend about this idea and he mentioned Octavia Butler’s Parable series. If you haven’t read them, they revolve around a young woman with a “hyper-empathy” condition – she feels acutely the pleasure and pain of those around her. This is not the central driver of the plot, but it is an interesting characterization, and an idea I’ve been fascinated by for years.
This post-apocalyptic story is strangely prescient, a novel written in the 80s that you would swear is imagining a near-future post-Trump America. But that also isn’t the central driver of the plot.
Rather, this story is driven by Earthseed, a quasi-religion that seems to be loosely influenced by Buddhism, but with an evangelical flavor. I really admired Butler’s frank and self-assured portrayal of her protagonist and the movement she builds. It is refreshingly unpretentious and beautifully hopeful. This is all set against real tragedy, which makes the novel itself an embodiment of the faith its fictional world presupposes.
Butler writes elegantly about privilege and power, again in a way that feels very modern. If you’re a plot-first person you may find it a a little underwhelming. But what the book lacks in plotting it makes up for in wisdom and compassion.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
4.0
I immediately followed The Parable of the Sower with this, its sequel and conclusion. This book is more cynical than Sower, perhaps in answer to criticism, or perhaps because it comes from the mind of an older author.
It cuts between perspectives and timelines, sometimes from the protagonist of the first novel, and sometimes from her adult daughter many years later. This is a clever trick for an epistolary novel. The struggles of the mother carry more weight as we have information she does not, information about her own future.
Having finished the pair, it is obvious to me why these stories are on so many favorites lists. They are deeply though-provoking, deeply compassionate, and ultimately deeply hopeful. I really needed some of that right now.
Seven Steeples by Sara Baume
I thought of this while reading Seven Steeples. Bell and Sigh are burning with a sort of dual-self, and it consumes them entirely. All else is kept at a safe (or unsafe?!) distance.
Baume is an elegant and idiosyncratic writer. The print version makes use of layout and spacing for poetic effect, and this is captured perfectly in the audio book performance by Aoife McMahon. (Aside: Has any people on earth dreamt up more beautiful names than the Irish?) Her clipped, precise enunciation, lovely voice, and careful unhurried white-space capture what’s on the page beautifully. This is a book to simply experience. Let it do what it will with your mind.
4.0
This is a 200 page prose-poem in which nothing happens. And what doesn’t happen is so deeply observed and poetically revealed it reminded me a bit of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. But its a very different book. It’s hard to describe what it’s about exactly. The devolution of identity I suppose, in the context of what Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, called a duprass: “A valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true,” and “a sweetly conceited establishment.” That’s kind of like what’s depicted here, except the duprass of Bell and Sigh in Seven Steeples is dingy and somehow dark. I suppose any life this closely and minutely detailed would be dingy in its way, and maybe that’s the point. As a somewhat fastidious person I was definitely grossed out from time to time.
And then there’s the darkness, a sinister undercurrent despite the absence of any evil. Or perhaps it is a pall of sadness never articulated. Bell and Sigh are withdrawn, and their lives revealed closely, without really telling us what they think or feel. There are maybe, at most, four or five short lines of dialog, inner or otherwise, here. It’s as though as Bell and Sigh withdraw themselves from community, the author withdraws us from their interior state. Whatever is happening here is very affective.
At the end of her remarkable life, international bad girl Lola Montez wrote of the quiet community she found herself in (emphasis mine):
What would I give to have daily fellowship with these good people! To teach in the school, to visit the old, the sick, the poor. But that will be in the Lord’s good time, when self is burned out of me completely.
I thought of this while reading Seven Steeples. Bell and Sigh are burning with a sort of dual-self, and it consumes them entirely. All else is kept at a safe (or unsafe?!) distance.
Baume is an elegant and idiosyncratic writer. The print version makes use of layout and spacing for poetic effect, and this is captured perfectly in the audio book performance by Aoife McMahon. (Aside: Has any people on earth dreamt up more beautiful names than the Irish?) Her clipped, precise enunciation, lovely voice, and careful unhurried white-space capture what’s on the page beautifully. This is a book to simply experience. Let it do what it will with your mind.