kylegarvey's reviews
347 reviews

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

sad medium-paced

2.0

Very sad, almost too sad, but what's sadder than mortality really and isn't that the saddest thing ever and how could you be sadder. The author was this prestigious surgeon -- and you could just end the book there pretty much and have it be a not terrible memoir, stress of med school, relentless life angst, reflecting on medicine's philosophy quite profoundly -- but on to death we go. He has cancer this surgeon, you know, and succumbs to what's inevitable. A tragedy befalling all us mortals. I am serious. A plain tragedy. Plain tragedy. The whole book's sorta like Gomes's 2012 Brazilian film ONCE UPON A TIME VERONICA maybe? in parts? 

 

He puts on himself huge tasks. "When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool" (90) and "But the skull wasn’t going to close itself. There would be time for speculation tomorrow" (110) and "I recalled Henry Adams trying to compare the scientific force of the combustion engine and the existential force of the Virgin Mary. The scientific questions were settled for now, allowing the existential ones full play, yet" (146) and it falls anyway -- but I'm probably citing things weird. 

 

I definitely have my nits to pick. "The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning" (156) -- a problem for you, maybe, but a problem in general? And then "No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience" (157) -- except yours, we presume. But picking nits here seems very inappropriate. Lol (lots of love). 

 

There's an afterword written by the wife. To be frank, she lands in many of the cliché traps he avoided, so I know why she didn't write the whole thing; plain B- prose can make you really glad you'd gotten so much B+, A-, A work. Dude. The "version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak" (197) is a heck of a 'About the author, your late author', huh? 

Blindness by José Saramago

2.0

 Experiential book: I know the score. For I've read a few things, but not much more. A book about blindness, to make its readers feel blind, and to cutely miniaturize the whole world so a book can be lowered onto it and broken apart slowly, carefully, with much wisdom. In Portuguese it's 'Essay on Blindness', and here in translation I don't know what we have. Something ok I suppose! 

Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love by Diane Ladd, Laura Dern

inspiring lighthearted reflective fast-paced

2.0

 

Special book. Partly memoir. Partly mom-daughter inspiration. Rarely gooey thankfully! To get to valuable stuff like Diane Lane saying "Thanks to you, I no longer have the same fears around aging and dying. I have learned that when I’m at my weakest and want to shut myself away, I should follow your example and lean into my family, lean into love. If not for you, I would have thought I should spare them, should slink away and hide. Now I know that it is not a burden to be with someone who loves you when you are suffering. It is a gift" (537)… 

 

…we might have to get through, somewhat, Laura Dern saying "We’re lucky that now women in the workplace receive some accommodations. It’s a fight, but sometimes we have the luxury of being able to have our babies with us on set" (486); that's just fair, just the way it is! Now, you don't have to be stupid like me and weigh Dern and Ladd against each other all the time: you'll probably be able to just bask, experience, get a little bit as you will. 

 

Dern's an actress I've liked and Ladd (the only-daughter mom she cherishes) is also an actress I've liked, and their reminiscing about the craft they share is the raison d'être for the very slim but very nice, wise, comfy book collaboration that Honey Baby Mine is. Wisdom about human mortality, frankness about family troubles is a definite warm plus it has, with just the fun breeziness a celeb-authored memoir has and just the right dash of real, lovely, mom-daughter cuteness. 

 

An old folk song -- Woody Guthrie's "Crawdad Song", that was sung during the '40s to celebrate the workingmen building Mississippi levees -- supplies the book with its title, by the way. "You get a line, I’ll get a pole, honey You get a line, I’ll get a pole, babe You get a line, I’ll get a pole We’ll go down to the crawdad hole Honey, baby, mine. / Our families sung it as long as anyone can remember. It was Laura’s favorite bedtime lullaby. She and my dad sang it when they went fishing together" (194). That's Diane reminiscing. And later it can be like "Mom, you’re imperfect, but you’re magnificent" (308) and "Oh, Mom" (513) from Laura, which can get a little wearying honestly; but just interspersed, drive-by weariness, from a different family, isn't the worst weariness to see a little of, by far! 

 

The occasion for this whole book is kind of sad, though. Diane's "also furious that I’m sick. My doctor, I, and many people in my town believe that my condition is due to industrial farming in my area. They were spraying in my neighborhood with pesticides—like we were cockroaches! For three years! Without telling me! Over ten pesticides were being sprayed, including glyphosate—which can cause all sorts of terrible things! It was only after my dog, Ginger, was poisoned by the air and died in my arms that I began to realize what was happening. I was left with lungs so severely damaged that I can barely breathe. I went to one doctor after another, and no one gave me the right answers" (67). 

 

Walks, then, mother-daughter, occasioning some careful reminiscence and eventually a book, have a small function: to slowly rehabilitate the woman's lungs! Lol. L says to her mom "Well, they’re sore because you’re pushing oxygen in there. And that’s a good thing. You’re pushing through scar tissue, but you’re also getting healthier with every step, and you have to trust that. Day by day, it’ll work. You’ll see" (64). Really, the healing has begun. 

 

Reese Witherspoon, a great friend of Dern's, opens the book with a memory of the premiere of Wild (in my opinion a good-but-not-great picture; https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/wild/) We're sort of opened proper with memories by the authors of the Lynch film Wild at Heart. 

 

Other memories, on from there, can be incisive about culture but some are just pop-culture-rolodex shallow (like I'd probably write?): "Fantasia at the Century Plaza Cinemas. Remember when the devil calls up all the evil spirits during Night on Bald Mountain by the composer Mussorgsky… Glen Campbell’s Gentle on My Mind, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, Helen Reddy… Carly Simon… Johnny Mathis… Johnny and June Carter Cash, who were our friends. DIANE: Loved them" (336). To even "Dinah Shore sang it" (424). Oh? Lol. 

 

But then there's some frankness about the biz! "I didn’t want you to go into the business. LAURA: What are you talking about? Yes, you did. You were delighted when I booked jobs as a kid. DIANE: No, Laura. LAURA: What were you most worried about? DIANE: My God in heaven, Laura! The rejection! The unsteadiness of it! Never" (54). Also, of course, "not one body, but one with all! I still feel that feeling whenever I’m acting. And over time I learned that you can’t make a bad play great, but you can make it" (75). 

 

From sharp, off-the-wall humor -- "DIANE: I’m so tired today. Let’s talk about death. LAURA: Jeez, you really didn’t ease into that" (101) -- through life wisdom -- "It hurts so much being without her, but that’s part of being alive. Our hearts are at risk from the moment we come out of the womb. Life is a great opportunity. And we need to show gratitude. But life is risk. Loving someone is a risk" (1030) -- just important to listen sometimes! You know? 

 

To precious frankness about family! "What’s the expression—“A mother is only as happy as her saddest child”? We pour it all into this person. Then they grow up. Wow" (288). Or "Anticipatory nostalgia. Because I was crying thinking how sad I’ll feel when my son goes away to college.” She did not even have children yet. She was eighteen!" (283). 

 

Honestly, though, sometimes, I don't really care for how performative it can feel, how forced, constantly revisiting angst, explaining, apologizing, mother to daughter; but you know, it's ultimately not about me really, and if it feels pointlessly repetitious, and if I can't relate at all, then maybe that is ok sometimes. 

 

Still, humanist in spite of it all, and that’s A1. From Diane recalling "We burst out laughing, like kids getting the giggles in church!" (58), through "What keeps me going is that desperate longing to do more. I worry that I didn’t hold my loved ones enough, that I didn’t ask the right questions or give the right answers. I imagine myself in a coffin, pounding on the lid, saying, 'Wait! Just one more week, one more day, one more minute! Don’t bring the curtain down yet!'" (69)… 

 

All the way through Laura then: "It’s exhausting to be mean. Why do people make that choice?" (210) and then "Mom, this whole experience, these walks—they’ve meant so much. I had thought, knowing what a storyteller you are, that I could keep you going by getting you to answer questions while I listened. But I didn’t know what this time would give me" (535). 

 

I'm reminded by all this of Hawke's recent self-referential appreciation of pop culture, his biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward called Last Movie Stars. https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/the-last-movie-stars/ That film was never really about Newman and Woodward themselves: more what they each brought to, and took away from, their very special relationship, and really about how America and showbiz evolved in that time. This slim HBM book seems to me like it accomplishes just a dash of something similar. 

American War by Omar El Akkad

challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

 

Melancholy dystopia. The 2017-era American War is a book very indebted to its time. Every book very easily is, but especially one guided so much by vagaries of politics and environment (both natural and societal)… 'Sarat' is our main character. Her unusual name is explained with a mix-up around Sara T., but why El Akkad chose it is still a mystery fictionally, I guess. Sarat in Arabic's "belly"? The novel is told from the POV she has and, later, the POV of her beloved nephew Benjamin. 

 

In 2074, after a bill passes banning fossil fuels, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas secede and start another American Civil War. South Carolina's quickly incapacitated by a virus dubbed "The Slow" and Texas is occupied by Mexico, so the remaining bloc of "Free Southern States" (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, or "The Mag") continues to fight. 

 

Sarat's older brother Simon is a climate refugee like her, moved around awkwardly, soon enough orphaned, wounded badly in a massacre ("all his terminal patients, those who long ago graduated from 'This will help' to 'This can’t hurt'" (21)). Sarat's a heroine at start but, by the end, obviously enough anti-heroine? Always annoyed by identity, though, still: "So we’re not Northerners because we’re from the South, and we’re not Southerners because we tried to move north… Tell me what we are, then. Tell me what we are" (73). 

 

Important things are missing here, probably intentionally: race (In important politics), abortion and gay/trans rights and other niceties (in wedge politics). Except later in the book when racism does crop up fleetingly, almost parenthetically: "Christ, are you serious?' she said. 'So you got no fear about picking up a gun and going to the Tennessee line, but you’re too scared to go into your own people’s neighborhood because they got different skin?" (395). But the issues of my time don't necessarily hold as tightly future people? About empathy again, as always?… 

 

Similar for huge, non-issue things, like Hawaii and Japan: when/how did they disappear? I assume those would figure in to American War pretty solidly, but I don't recall quite how. I assume nice evacuation, everyone safe and happy? "See, most of these boys’ problem is they’re too dumb to realize you gotta eat a little shit to get ahead,' the driver said. 'They get it in one hand and spend it with the other. They got no discipline. But I got discipline. Yes sir, I got discipline'" (100). This war's guided, sorta, by drones from the North, now rogue murder bots, called Birds. 

 

War as war. Who says? Not me. "Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.' 'There is no one man, and you know it,' the priest said. 'There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.'" (108). Refugee camp then? "Mississippi. Row thirty-six, tent fourteen,' the assistant said. 'Remember that—it’s your address now.' In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre [referred to, later, just as "Patience"], serve as their city of refuge" (117). 

 

Other dramas crop up occasionally (eg., religion; "some soft-boiled Baptist from Atlanta instead. You know the kind—God’s heavenly plan this, God’s heavenly plan that.' Lara checked the time on Martina’s tablet. 'That reminds me,” she said. 'You coming to the service?'" (132). Or life itself; "Martina excused herself and walked back to her tent. In these hours the camp was at its calmest, and the tents running afield in all directions were beautiful in a rugged, delicate way—strange desert fauna reticent and frozen, a harvest of life" (161)… 

 

(Or, eg., cooperative spirit; "Is she ever going to like us, then?' 'She’s gonna like us when she sees all the food we got her,' Sarat replied. 'Maybe we should just take her back to the creek,' Marcus said, but Sarat brushed him off. She reached into her sack and began laying out the leaves and berries in small mounds on the far end of the pen from where the turtle had backed itself into a corner. Reluctantly, Marcus followed, setting the mushroom heads on the blanket. 'Not like that,'" (174). Or personal ethos; "You’re not coming in here covered in shit,' Martina said. 'You did this to yourself, you go get yourself cleaned up. Nobody fixing your messes from here on in but you" (185) and "Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them" (193).) 

 

Always, Southern self-image is considered, powerfully, meditatively: "Beyond them, and beyond the tent in the distance, the soft white lights of the camp’s main gate burned. And beyond those gates the great Southern world, its cratered cities and salt-eaten coasts and parched, blistered gut, lay waiting. It was a world that for Sarat now existed only in the fiery sermons of radio preachers and the lyrics of war songs and the bucolic pastorals of Free Southern State propaganda. It was an abstraction, an idea, nothing more" (197). And, furthermore, "Even back then, you could see it coming,' said Gaines. 'Before the first bombs fell, before the slaughter in East Texas, everyone knew this country was getting ready to tear itself to shreds. I was worried for my family, worried about whether I could keep my wife and daughter safe" (240) 

 

Gaines says on 242 he "sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind" (242). All this, then, 'right or wrong', it burns on for the South. But not just for them: in general too: "It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds" (309). 

 

Real-life, day-to-day politics just occasionally, eerily drop back in: "Ever since what happened at Patience [that massacre], things have gotten bad again. In Atlanta you got the Free Southern State and the United Rebels fighting over who’s gonna run the country, but neither of them got much control over anything no more. The fighting’s gotten real bad and everybody’s just waiting on the Blues to push south past Tennessee. Then you know there’s gonna be a run on the banks and President Kershaw’s gonna lock us out to keep the whole Mag from going broke" (313). 

 

All this, then, 'right or wrong', it burns on for the South still. And especially for our heroine, slowly, slowly, becoming anti-heroine. But not just for her in particular or for Southerners more broadly: in general too: "From the speakers came the sound of bourbon-clouded piano keys. A shredded nightgown of a song. You moved like honey, in my dream last night. Sarat undressed. She set her shirt over the lamp shade, and the soft light turned from amber to blood. The shirt depicted the flag of South Carolina, drawn against a red background instead of blue" (364). 

 

Guantanamo, by the way, is now Sugarloaf. "The bodies flew, dumb as idols, over the Florida Sea" (410). What awaits Sarat there is torture of a terrible kind. But after that we still see some eerie clippings, World War Z-like, signifying larger political sweep, worries: "I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over" (466). And spoiler alert, or (unfortunately, reality alert?) it never was. 

 

But nevertheless -- and here Sarat's nephew Benjamin takes over narrating the book -- there was "a passing flicker of admiration in the way she observed me" (473). An older Sarat also reconnects with Marcus, that childhood friend she had, who kept the turtle with her: "He was smiling and when he smiled she felt as though she could walk to the doors of the church and open them and find a different world waiting" (489). And years later, Sarat also meets up with one of the men who tortured her: Bud Baker. It's like the awkward but adorable conclusion of Sorrentino's film This Must Be the Place: after a crime of the worst kind, genocidal, humongously evil, there's some kind of happiness? 

 

"COL. SINGER: Neither of these boys knew that millions of lives were at stake, Senator. At the time, the Tennessee line had been quiet for the better part of a year. The Reunification Ceremony was just a couple of days away. All those two boys would have seen on that day was a busful of sick people headed north for treatment…" begins one of those Congressional transcripts, reminding us of political urgency the book has in its alt-future landscape, "I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness. SEN. AIKENS: No, Colonel. I suppose it wouldn’t" (541). Anti-kindness real Southerner then, yeah. 

 

And in conclusion, I guess -- I guess, and then El Akkad writes what I guess; or is it the other way around? I already forgot -- Southerners will be Southerners. There's just no getting around THAT: "you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own" (549). So we're left with just a convenient paradox, again, a pretty paradox, to try to explain Southern attitudes; all we have, all they have, all there is. 

Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University by

adventurous informative inspiring medium-paced

1.0

 

Monumentally pretentious, very often too blunt or facile for me, so much that I begin to resent it and feel bad while reading it, accused, pained. What's this feeling? I'm sure the assemblers of this collection were looking for something quite different all along, to instill joie de vivre in their readership or something. In acknowledgments, "kept track of countless pieces of paper"; and in preface, "unscrambles and sorts the messages of a complex world". Ok. Sure. Those are decent principles 

 

A lot of arguable stuff all along (I didn't go to journalism school, won't ever do a normal interview, yada yada) but there's really nothing that you could ever argue with here. I mean, it's all coded in this super-exceptional 'yeah, but' language that negates everything, while exemplifying everything at the same time. Weird. Can we always be "honest to a fault" (23)? 

 

Some stuff I have to react to like 'Nah. Fuck off'. "Stories are the opposite of hard news, the opposite of the easy anecdote" (155). Ok, I have a vague familiarity with journalism, but a lot of this strikes me as presumptuous, skunky trash! Just go in media res, pick some quirky departure, and you might soon have something, or you might not have anything now here for one thing but something later elsewhere for something else. Ok? Who cares? 

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

challenging reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Dewitt's the author of this Last Samurai. A polymathic tour-de-force it is, you know, a big wonder-book, many digressions, stream-of-consciousness cuts. Sibylla is an American now living in London as a single mother, and her son Ludo is a prodigy, mastered Greek and a whole host of languages at an extremely young age (plus dived into dense literary, language, scientific topics always), now obsessed with the Japanese masterpiece film Seven Samurai. 

 

A lot is as high as you'd think, like "Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese" (98) and some is surprisingly low, like "and he said he couldn’t read any of it. I said patiently That’s because it’s a different language so all the words are different. If you could read the words it would be English in different letters" (154). Ok. 

 

To 'read' prose in another language, a language you don't speak, is similar enough to 'reading' comprehensible prose, innit? "ἵνα δυστήνοισι μετ’ ἀνδράσιν ἄλγε’ ἔχητον; ē hina dustēnoisi met’ andrasin alge’ ekhēton Was it that you might have sorrows with wretched men? οὐ μεν γάρ τί πού ἐστιυ ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸζ ou men gar ti pou estin oizurōteron andros For there is nothing more wretched than man πάντων ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει. pantōn hossa te gaian epi pneiei te kai herpei Of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth. ἀλλ’ οὐ μὰν ὐμῖν γε καὶ ἅρμασι δαιδαλέοισιν all’ ou manhumin ge kai harmasi daidaleoisin But not by you and the glittering chariot will ῞Εκτωρ Πριαμίδης ἐποχήσεται· οὐ γὰρ" (183). Semi-comprehensible, or what? 

 

But lo, I read all of it, charmed a little by how it seemed to know exactly what I was thinking of it and reflected that back to me. As you do! "though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK" (188) or "Well why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? She said, I won’t say it’s better for you to work it out for yourself, la formule est banale. Even when you see what’s wrong you won’t really be ready. You should not know your father when you have learnt to despise the people who have made these things. Perhaps it would be all right when you have learnt to pity them, or if there is some state of grace beyond pity when you have reached that state" (263). Wait, 'banale': that's banal, right? 

 

A character even says, like I needed a hint because I wasn't paying attention (ok, I wasn't, but just do us both a favor and pretend I was), "Stephen has got to understand that there is more to life than how much you know" (292). Oh! News to me. Well, and then there's "Es regnete ununterbrochen. It rained uninterruptedly. It sounded so lovely in the German. Es regnete ununterbrochen. Es regnete ununterbrochen. I shall think of it whenever it rains" (383), which I guess is the next remarkable quotation I have but actually might be somewhat a counter-point thereof; but then again, I don't know. 

 

And then we begin, or continue with, a retinue of guys Ludo's thinking could be his father. Or deceiving thereabouts -- he knows they aren't, but they don't know -- or a little of this, a little of that, maybe both. One offers "the best piece of advice I can give you is never rely on anyone but yourself for anything you want out of life, he said. Everything I’ve got I’ve got by my own efforts. You don’t grow up by having people hand you things on a platter. By the time I grow up it may be too late, I said" (429) -- so they're not all good, attractive. 

 

But Ludo presses on, and ought we too to? "He said Meaning? I said Is it a game because I say it’s a game? And I said that if I treated it as a game because I thought it was a game and he treated it as a game not because he thought it was a game but because I said it was — And he said Yes — which of us was doing the thing he thought he did And he said Yes" (433). Oh, ok. Digress we can! Always! "and anyway there would always be some other thing" (473). 

 

Final (or is it?) melancholy (or is it?) digression (or is it?) reaches some fine heights, I think. Or we're just there anyway, and the actual text at that point wouldn't matter? "This was different. You might think you would get the full effect better actually being in the water, and that might be true up to a point. But in the capsule you were inside a pocket of air. What it felt like was being in a pocket of blue light—light that was blue the way water is wet" (507). Every time I hear the next thing, though, I just think this is an explanation? "I thought: This is an explanation? / STOP" (630). That's not Stop like a telegram: that's someone operating a VCR: the tape of Seven Samurai, you know. 

Persist by Elizabeth Warren

inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

3.0

 Liberal inspiration genuine here, the kind of full and ideal faith in American democracy that can treat each reader a little differently. Something might annoy you, politically, and immediately after something might inspire you in a loud way. Warren's ambitious mix of personal reminiscence interspersed with 'how I think America should be' campaigning-but-not-campaigning wide non-fiction works ok for the most part. 

 

I think an early anecdote can kind of illustrate the weaknesses, though. Childhood pretend teaching, which she recalls during the mother section, can offer a low, tiny example of petty inevitability: "of course [she writes], Sami was always the bad boy and the storybook dolls were empty-headed, but I wasn't discouraged" (16). I hate to cash into the same 'once a politician, always a politician' easy store, to latch onto one tiny thing and be an intense scold about it, humorless; but I'm afraid Warren's quick little story can exemplify deeper, weirder problems. Everything's inevitable, nothing can be changed, we're in this tug-of-war between red team and blue. We often annoy each other, but that's all it is, annoying! Some Facebook post, TV ad, radio spot, whatever; it's dreary, this politics thing, but somebody's gotta do it! 

 

I know, all that's a personal, petty problem, has little to nothing to do with the outside world, yada yada. 'There's an outside world apart from me' is a super-valuable new political lesson, by the way, that I am still just recently learning honestly (and in my honest opinion ought to be learned by many other people apart from me! said while wagging fist and rolling eyes, you know how it is). 'Believe her' [with MeToo, assault anxiety aggravated in recent years] becomes in time 'Solidarity with everyone' and becomes in time 'Love your neighbor, no matter who he is', I guess, and isn't that just swell. Kumbaya. Sincerely. 

Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

adventurous dark sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Naturally compared to Gillian Flynn (her Gone Girl adapted into a hit movie about as fast as Luckiest Girl Alive maybe? to heights somewhat less than hit), Jessica Knoll gives to pop-crime-fiction another millennial-feminist drip. Why, though? I don't think true crime can do anything like what we probably want it to do. Here especially. Right? 

 

I somewhat appreciate the crisp showcase of catty high school life. (It rings very authentic, sadly enough, to the tiny bit I could relate to; and being a woman, to which I can't relate at all, was nicely punched all the while too.) But I kept waiting, through about three quarters of this book, for some additional reflexivity that never came -- gang rape, then school shooting, and then trophy wife, and we look back at the tragedy and see a lot of regret for sure, but I still don't know if there's actual reflection. 

 

Maybe I'm just expecting the wrong thing, a masculine kind of reflection that'd be impossible under these circumstances. Or maybe Knoll's prose did other things that I missed. I don't know. But I just feel like Luckiest Girl Alive is a huge missed opportunity, clumsily-constructed bad plot I didn't get at all. 

Foe by Iain Reid

challenging lighthearted mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Very coy, unassumingly tight. Just corporate-overreach, loosened while growling and dim, flowing into hot-but-not-boiling identity break(s) around AI. If Reid were more ambitious -- I don't mean 'better'; I think he's pretty good as is -- he could stylize in a way more expansive than just 'quote marks for what "they" say but nothing for the narrator himself', but whatever, he wrote the book not me. 

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Embarrassingly, it's quite like the one other Turkish book I've read: Pamuk's My Name Is Red. Sorry if I become the chauvinist American in this case, but do Turks (Westerner-appealing Turkish quasi-Muslims that is) have some very particular feelings about death (specifically, life after death) that cover some significant part of their literature? Ordinarily of course, I would assume it was a coincidence. Sample size of two and all. But here, I don't know. Seems very formal, not coincidental. Seems cultural: can't be accidental. Right? 

 

Sometimes here, though, it seems like the titular 'dying brain remembering its own life' device is attached in a fairly perfunctory way (and removing it wouldn't detract from the story much at all). And in the second half, up until the very end, it's gone anyway. I'm of two minds on this… why have it at all, throw it out if you're not gonna use it; but also I really like it, please accentuate, devote more time and detail, etc.! But two minds about a dying brain isn't very appropriate, is it? If a brain is dying, there ought to be one single decisive mind looking at it. Aw sheesh, let's call the whole thing off. 

 

Shafak's novel, anyway, I find a lot better when we focus on our protagonist Leila, less when we're briefly running down her five friends. That 'friends are sometimes more important than family in certain lives' is a commonly agreeable theme. Details of 'Turkish sex worker, left family but found love and support in trans, dwarf, etc.' are very cool, but I think they could coalesce around a different, slightly stronger central story.