Scan barcode
storytold's reviews
379 reviews
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
3.75
This was just fun! I like a book that's up its own ass in a way that also lets it make fun of itself. Solid mystery, guessed the antagonist but not the twist, did a little gasp. Sometimes a little too glib for its own good but enjoyed it plenty, will read from this author again.
The Last One by Will Dean
Did not finish book. Stopped at 34%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 34%.
Guessed the conceit very early and once it was confirmed the characters altogether stopped acting like any reasonable person would, lost interest.
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.
Will eventually return, just front loaded too many memoirs in my reading year.
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
3.75
Compelling read and hard-hitting, but not necessarily a profound exploration. Left the book with the sense that it could have done more, but it is extremely good at what it does set out to do.
Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang
3.5
I finish this three-and-a-halfest of books in the final week of my graduate degree to qualify me as a translator. I'll admit I mainly picked it up because I wanted to see how annoyed it would make me on that basis, but fortunately R.F. Kuang is a consummate researcher and it did not make me very annoyed! I don't actually agree with how she has cast the purpose of translation in this book, but she's done enough theoretical justice that I find this benign disagreement mainly pleasant.
To be very brief about my disagreement: while it is true that there's no such thing as a perfect translation, perfection is IMO under no circumstances the purpose of translation, which precludes the possibility of any paradox involved in translating the word "translation." This said, Kuang represents very well the political ramifications of translation and I found these to be thought-provoking and generally well done at a conceptual level. Unfortunately, they could also be clumsy. In a perfect example of what both impressed me and that I found clumsy, in Chapter 6 an Oxford tutor remarks, "Translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty—rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author's ideology and biases." This latter remark is certainly correct! The former statement is needlessly self-contradictory: rewriting is a perfect example of delivering a message. To say either rewriting or translation is anything other than delivering a message is nonsense. This is the laziness about detail that I'm about to complain about at length. The concepts are certainly here, but why not invest at the detail level the way concepts are so lovingly rendered?
The answer, I think, has to do with the author's priorities in writing this book. I believe this book to be—as we are these days fond of calling literary studies penned with the intention of fanfiction writer—a "retelling" of Harry Potter. As a retelling of Harry Potter, I think it is very well done and very interesting. It is also a very good tome of popular/commercial fiction about decolonization, which is a sentence seldom strung together and which Harry Potter notably is not. I think people who love this book love one of these things about it, and rightfully so.
It is not, however, "serious" literature. Which is absolutely fine! I've been thinking a lot about "serious" literature since reading LeGuin's Steering the Craft earlier this year. LeGuin does not overtly explain what she means by what is "serious" literature, but—perhaps in demonstration of the technique—her writing advice effectively explains it. For example, on page 2 LeGuin counsels that “An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer." She talks about things like the semi-reliable narrator (p.63) and crowding as a trick of narrative focus (p.124). Perhaps in an attempt to pin down what she does mean by "serious" writing, she says, “most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot or retold without fatal loss except in their own words” (p.123).
I don't think Babel is terrifically concerned with deliberately cultivating the things LeGuin concerns herself with. Not to say there aren't robust examples of advanced narrative techniques in here! Kuang is good at knowing what she likes to read and replicates it periodically. But a commonly held complaint about this book is that details that would ordinarily serve to invest a reader are, in Babel, frequently glossed over. That is because Kuang is a good enough writer to identify, at least some of the time, when mundane minutae kill the pacing; but instead of taking the mundane and imbuing it with meaning and significance (as, it should be noted, LeGuin is particularly good at doing), she glosses over the mundane elements—like the conversations that deepen character intimacy and relationships—and instead focuses on the plot.
It's quite legal for a book to be propelled by plot. It's also legal for a book to be popular/commercial fiction. To reiterate, I think this is unusually good popular/commercial fiction: strongly researched, well thought through, constructed with clear passion. But what Kuang chooses to gloss over and what she spends time explaining in great, sometimes painstaking, detail is what ultimately makes this book—in LeGuin's framing—possible to reduce to a plot and to retell it without fatal loss.
There are narrative techniques in here that impressed me. Every time we started a new "book," I enjoyed the feeling of being re-oriented in time, theme, and/or focus. I really enjoyed the character interludes; it made clear that Kuang gave more thought to the characters we didn't necessarily comprehend through Robin's POV pages and Kuang's linear narrative instincts. But I frequently wondered why she didn't do more of that deliberate crafting.
And I think that "why" comes down to the fact that the bones of this book were, to me, so very obviously "anti-colonial Harry Potter" so much of the time. This is a great artistic study of Rowling's style and character beats, and this was so intelligent to do from a commercial perspective. It's a smart book! My main complaint is that I wish the craft effort matched the conceptual savvy.
Which brings me back to the silly sentence above that's sort of emblematic of what missed for me: the Oxford tutor's remark about how translation/(re)writing is not so much about delivering a message. In fact, the thesis of the book is entirely about writing/translation as a method of delivering a message (and/or the limitations of same). Kuang is so caught up in making her conceptual points and arguments—so caught up in saying "You thought Harry Potter was X? You thought Oxford, translation, your white friend was X? THINK AGAIN, it's actually Y!"—that she prioritizes her message from her position as the author at the expense of the subtleties that LeGuin identifies as integral to literature.
Not to say ideological subtleties are completely elided—one of the reasons I liked the character interludes was because they at least attempted to provide context for motivations, which engendered sympathies. The profs staying involved after a certain key event was also a nice touch, even if it—like certain Robin and Victoire conversations—showed the story's HP-shaped bones. But placing so, so much emphasis on the message of the book as a result of this book being a retelling (more on this in a second) means lazy sentences like "rewriting is less sending a message" aren't edited out: these details simply do not matter. Translation is extremely, expressly about communication, about sending messages. The book's themes even agree with me about this. I did not understand why this clause was allowed to live, and this was a feeling I felt frequently with the minutae of Kuang's prose and exposition—she simply wasn't concerned with these details.
It's quite funny to think of this book as a translation of Harry Potter—if we accept that adaptation is a form of translation—into a retelling of the story through a decolonial lens. Our same Oxford tutor above has hit the nail on the head about this book in that role: "Rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author's ideology and biases." Exactly like in Harry Potter, Robin and his friends spend weeks and months simply enduring the school terms and learning about their cultural environment into which they've been uprooted from their mundane lives. Exactly like in Harry Potter, this leaves something to be desired where worldbuilding and reader investment are concerned. History matters to Babel, but it is like the set of a play: it sets the stage and plot, and then is not terribly relevant to the actual prose.
Babel is nevertheless a tremendous improvement on the source text from a political perspective, and while I think its status as a retelling/adaptation/translation was inherently limiting to what Kuang perceived as possible for this story, it is a good book when we understand it in that role. I don't have the same expectation of this story as I do a piece of "serious literature," that lives less in the shadow of a legacy of one of the most commercially successful series of all time. But as a consequence I'm unable to consider this book to be an altogether serious piece of literature.
This said, in my opinion Kuang is at her best when she leans into writing highly commercial fiction. Yellowface is my favourite work of hers, and I hope to read more of that sort of work from her in the future. I'm excited to see how else she makes me unexpectedly like commercial fiction the way I unexpectedly liked this book. I would also be interested to read a book she decides is worth the effort of putting significantly more craft effort into, but this is not an expectation I have of all books, and it's not one I ever plan to have of hers.
To be very brief about my disagreement: while it is true that there's no such thing as a perfect translation, perfection is IMO under no circumstances the purpose of translation, which precludes the possibility of any paradox involved in translating the word "translation." This said, Kuang represents very well the political ramifications of translation and I found these to be thought-provoking and generally well done at a conceptual level. Unfortunately, they could also be clumsy. In a perfect example of what both impressed me and that I found clumsy, in Chapter 6 an Oxford tutor remarks, "Translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty—rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author's ideology and biases." This latter remark is certainly correct! The former statement is needlessly self-contradictory: rewriting is a perfect example of delivering a message. To say either rewriting or translation is anything other than delivering a message is nonsense. This is the laziness about detail that I'm about to complain about at length. The concepts are certainly here, but why not invest at the detail level the way concepts are so lovingly rendered?
The answer, I think, has to do with the author's priorities in writing this book. I believe this book to be—as we are these days fond of calling literary studies penned with the intention of fanfiction writer—a "retelling" of Harry Potter. As a retelling of Harry Potter, I think it is very well done and very interesting. It is also a very good tome of popular/commercial fiction about decolonization, which is a sentence seldom strung together and which Harry Potter notably is not. I think people who love this book love one of these things about it, and rightfully so.
It is not, however, "serious" literature. Which is absolutely fine! I've been thinking a lot about "serious" literature since reading LeGuin's Steering the Craft earlier this year. LeGuin does not overtly explain what she means by what is "serious" literature, but—perhaps in demonstration of the technique—her writing advice effectively explains it. For example, on page 2 LeGuin counsels that “An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer." She talks about things like the semi-reliable narrator (p.63) and crowding as a trick of narrative focus (p.124). Perhaps in an attempt to pin down what she does mean by "serious" writing, she says, “most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot or retold without fatal loss except in their own words” (p.123).
I don't think Babel is terrifically concerned with deliberately cultivating the things LeGuin concerns herself with. Not to say there aren't robust examples of advanced narrative techniques in here! Kuang is good at knowing what she likes to read and replicates it periodically. But a commonly held complaint about this book is that details that would ordinarily serve to invest a reader are, in Babel, frequently glossed over. That is because Kuang is a good enough writer to identify, at least some of the time, when mundane minutae kill the pacing; but instead of taking the mundane and imbuing it with meaning and significance (as, it should be noted, LeGuin is particularly good at doing), she glosses over the mundane elements—like the conversations that deepen character intimacy and relationships—and instead focuses on the plot.
It's quite legal for a book to be propelled by plot. It's also legal for a book to be popular/commercial fiction. To reiterate, I think this is unusually good popular/commercial fiction: strongly researched, well thought through, constructed with clear passion. But what Kuang chooses to gloss over and what she spends time explaining in great, sometimes painstaking, detail is what ultimately makes this book—in LeGuin's framing—possible to reduce to a plot and to retell it without fatal loss.
There are narrative techniques in here that impressed me. Every time we started a new "book," I enjoyed the feeling of being re-oriented in time, theme, and/or focus. I really enjoyed the character interludes; it made clear that Kuang gave more thought to the characters we didn't necessarily comprehend through Robin's POV pages and Kuang's linear narrative instincts. But I frequently wondered why she didn't do more of that deliberate crafting.
And I think that "why" comes down to the fact that the bones of this book were, to me, so very obviously "anti-colonial Harry Potter" so much of the time. This is a great artistic study of Rowling's style and character beats, and this was so intelligent to do from a commercial perspective. It's a smart book! My main complaint is that I wish the craft effort matched the conceptual savvy.
Which brings me back to the silly sentence above that's sort of emblematic of what missed for me: the Oxford tutor's remark about how translation/(re)writing is not so much about delivering a message. In fact, the thesis of the book is entirely about writing/translation as a method of delivering a message (and/or the limitations of same). Kuang is so caught up in making her conceptual points and arguments—so caught up in saying "You thought Harry Potter was X? You thought Oxford, translation, your white friend was X? THINK AGAIN, it's actually Y!"—that she prioritizes her message from her position as the author at the expense of the subtleties that LeGuin identifies as integral to literature.
Not to say ideological subtleties are completely elided—one of the reasons I liked the character interludes was because they at least attempted to provide context for motivations, which engendered sympathies. The profs staying involved after a certain key event was also a nice touch, even if it—like certain Robin and Victoire conversations—showed the story's HP-shaped bones. But placing so, so much emphasis on the message of the book as a result of this book being a retelling (more on this in a second) means lazy sentences like "rewriting is less sending a message" aren't edited out: these details simply do not matter. Translation is extremely, expressly about communication, about sending messages. The book's themes even agree with me about this. I did not understand why this clause was allowed to live, and this was a feeling I felt frequently with the minutae of Kuang's prose and exposition—she simply wasn't concerned with these details.
It's quite funny to think of this book as a translation of Harry Potter—if we accept that adaptation is a form of translation—into a retelling of the story through a decolonial lens. Our same Oxford tutor above has hit the nail on the head about this book in that role: "Rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author's ideology and biases." Exactly like in Harry Potter, Robin and his friends spend weeks and months simply enduring the school terms and learning about their cultural environment into which they've been uprooted from their mundane lives. Exactly like in Harry Potter, this leaves something to be desired where worldbuilding and reader investment are concerned. History matters to Babel, but it is like the set of a play: it sets the stage and plot, and then is not terribly relevant to the actual prose.
Babel is nevertheless a tremendous improvement on the source text from a political perspective, and while I think its status as a retelling/adaptation/translation was inherently limiting to what Kuang perceived as possible for this story, it is a good book when we understand it in that role. I don't have the same expectation of this story as I do a piece of "serious literature," that lives less in the shadow of a legacy of one of the most commercially successful series of all time. But as a consequence I'm unable to consider this book to be an altogether serious piece of literature.
This said, in my opinion Kuang is at her best when she leans into writing highly commercial fiction. Yellowface is my favourite work of hers, and I hope to read more of that sort of work from her in the future. I'm excited to see how else she makes me unexpectedly like commercial fiction the way I unexpectedly liked this book. I would also be interested to read a book she decides is worth the effort of putting significantly more craft effort into, but this is not an expectation I have of all books, and it's not one I ever plan to have of hers.
The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
Analysis of the development of a twitter feud, which is probably well done for folks interested in reading about the development of a twitter feud, which apparently I am not! Very fast read but not how I want to spend my reading time just now.
You, Again by Kate Goldbeck
Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.
this was pitched to me as a book about accepting you can be right for someone at one point of time and not right for them all the time, and be that as it may, it is still reylo first and foremost and I cannot locate the chemistry or a modicum of my own interest in this book. competently written but I felt no drive to ever pick it up
The Measure by Nikki Erlick
2.75
First half was a solid 4, but in the end it couldn't seem to care about the premise of its own story, instead turning saccharine and incapable of self-analysis. This is an extremely American novel, which one subplot attempts to address when two main characters go to Italy. There, they are reliably informed that only Americans, for some reason, care about this. This is, specifically, a post-COVID and post-Trump novel. It tries to make meaning out of political and medical injustices... on a solely individual level. It wants to be The Leftovers-esque in how it connects storylines, which sometimes hits hard and other times does feel very forced and really highlights the individualistic lens of the narrative.
I had the strongest negative reaction about Javi's storyline:a young brown man joins the army because ???? allegedly he has few other options???? is killed by ??unspecified insurgents?? in his 20s. The reader is asked to feel a great deal of pride in his actions. The reader is also expected to accept that his parents, upon learning that Jack switched strings with him, had no negative reaction to learning this information—DESPITE THAT the whole book is based on the premise of how people react to learning of their loved ones' limited lifespans. They thought they had 60 years longer with their son than they did, and they learn of Jack's fundamental deception to this end and... love and respect him? Aren't angry about this? Their only son, killed in his 20s in the death cult that is the US army? Under no circumstances. His parents should have been people the way Ben's parents were.
Parts of this book found me where I was: struggling through a pit of nihilism on a dying world. It is about facing that nihilism and pulling a life out of it where possible. This is something elements of this book do well. But the book forgets itself and turns into a family drama airing at 8pm every Thursday on ABC. It's ultimately disinterested in any truly challenging ideas about meaning and lack of meaning, and it is incapable of transcending itself. Arguably completely inaccessible to anyone even remotely critical of American cultural mindsets. I'm actually angry! It was competently written, even compelling! It could have been something and simply declined!!
I had the strongest negative reaction about Javi's storyline:
Parts of this book found me where I was: struggling through a pit of nihilism on a dying world. It is about facing that nihilism and pulling a life out of it where possible. This is something elements of this book do well. But the book forgets itself and turns into a family drama airing at 8pm every Thursday on ABC. It's ultimately disinterested in any truly challenging ideas about meaning and lack of meaning, and it is incapable of transcending itself. Arguably completely inaccessible to anyone even remotely critical of American cultural mindsets. I'm actually angry! It was competently written, even compelling! It could have been something and simply declined!!
I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
4.0
5 for suspense, briefly 1 in the back third, settled on 4 when my fears turned out to be founded but execution was good enough. Interestingly I had guessed the main twist by page 8 but I discarded it multiple times while reading, which made the reveal land after all. Very well written on every level, its only saving grace. Would like to return to this in a few years.