thesnakesaid

[thesnakesaid]

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson #2: A National Book Award winner

We’ve finally come to it... my first DNF since starting to read again in earnest FIVE YEARS AGO.

I can’t review this book. I didn’t finish it. Instead, I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned about my decision-making process around not finishing books through my experience with this book. Turn away if that’s not what you’re looking for.

So, in the last five years, I have finished every book I’ve ever started. I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is, because I certainly never made a conscious decision that I would never DNF books, and initially I felt like it came down to three things:

I love.... love... LOVE crossing things off lists.

I’m pretty good at picking books I’m going to like.

I read pretty fast and usually consider the satisfaction of being able to have a complete opinion of a book (and of settling the whole “but what if it gets better later on?” question) worth the time it takes to finish the book, even if I end up not liking it. (The caveat to this is that I have had nearly perfect luck with very long books - realizing that you’re not into a book but only having 100-200 pages to go is a lot different than having 1000 pages to go)

So, I never DNF’d a book. And while the issue crossed my mind occasionally, and I certainly finished books where I thought “well, that was not fun,” but I never found myself thinking that I really needed to rethink my unconscious policy not to DNF books.

Then War and Peace happened.

I despised War and Peace. I tried everything I could to read it and get into it and I just couldn’t do it. I read it on and off for THREE YEARS. That is literally insane. But I wanted to cross it off the list - and I was stubborn! I didn’t want War and Peace to defeat me.

So I finished it, and I gained nothing from it. I don’t remember anything about it. In the end, I was just letting it play in my ears any time I wasn’t doing any brain work. I wasn’t listening to it. I wasn’t absorbing anything from it. I was just wasting time I could have been spending listening to books that I liked much better.

After that, I made a promise to myself that I would never again allow myself to push through a book I disliked to that extent. I verbalized this to my friends. I knew I wouldn’t be challenged to uphold my promise very often because, like I said, I like most of the books I pick up. But I was serious.

Fast forward to today.

It has been 8 months since I finished War and Peace, and I’ve read 44 books in that time period. I haven’t liked all of them, but I don’t regret finishing any of them. My first challenge was Octavian Nothing and, predictably, it was a big fucking challenge to DNF.

The first time I started it, I got about halfway into it before putting it down because I was finding it hard to pay attention to. When I put the audiobook on, my mind would wander and I’d keep having to rewind. When I read the physical book, I would just start doing something else a few pages in.

But I didn’t DNF it yet. I didn’t forget my promise from before, and I knew there was a sort of symbolism to the fact that this was the first book I’d encountered that was seriously ringing those DNF alarm bells in my head since War and Peace, but I still couldn’t commit to the decision. So I put it down and started reading other things, but told myself I’d come back to it at a later time.

At this point it seems relevant to explain what my actual thoughts are on Octavian Nothing and why the idea of DNFing it was much more challenging than I expected even though I was expecting it to be difficult.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is a story about a slave boy who is owned by a collective of intellectuals whose ultimate goal is to experiment on black people to attempt to determine empirically whether or not they have the same intellectual capacities as white people. However, it takes a long time for Octavian to learn this - for the first many years of his narrative (which starts when he is a young child), he describes a life that he actually likes very much. He lives with his mother, whom he adores, and gets to learn all kinds of subjects from the academicians he lives with - violin, languages, world literature, history. One of the big, important points of this narrative is to detail Octavian’s dawning understanding of the fact that he is a slave, and while they are not torturing him or putting him to physical labor, they are still treating him unethically.

There are so many things I wanted to like about this book - not just like the idea of, but actually like. The main thing is that I have never read anything even remotely resembling this take on a slave narrative before. I was so excited to see how M.T. Anderson would develop themes relating to freedom and enslavement, personal autonomy, and human decency using this really unique plot idea as a framing device. I also couldn’t help but notice that it is a very highly awarded book - the National Book Award and the Printz Medal being the main accolades. I don’t think of myself as a reader who is super influenced by hype, but I felt that a book with that kind of hardware had to be good.

My main problem came from the actual style and substance of Octavian’s narration. He is an odd child, having been brought up in a very odd place, and since his story is really the story of him having the veil pulled from his eyes and then having to grow up in a world that is completely different than how he thought it was growing up. But a necessary facet of that narrative is that in the beginning of the story, he is going to be a mini-me of the academicians who raised him: odd, stilted, very academic and logical, and with a limited to nonexistent understanding of the power dynamics at play in his house.

The culminating effect of these qualities is that he bored me as a narrator. I didn’t connect with him. I was interested in seeing emotional reactions to the crazy scenarios posed by the “scientists” conducting their “experiment”, but at least in the first 150 pages of the story or so, I so rarely got those reactions from Octavian. I found myself looking to other characters - his mother, for example, who was a princess in her country and old enough when she was enslaved to actually understand what was happening, or Bono, another slave of theirs who knew what was going on - for the emotionality I lacked in Octavian, but his is still the lens through which these characters were filtered, and he did not understand their inner lives in a way that allowed him to narrate them in a satisfying way. I felt like I was inferring a lot of interesting things but not actually reading them.

This brings me back to the question of DNFing book.s

It was easy to think during War and Peace that I should DNF because I hated everything about the book. I wasn’t interested in the plot, I wasn’t interested in the characters, I wasn’t absorbing the themes. I might as well be reading 800 more pages of my car’s user manual. But Octavian Nothing was harder because I was interested in where the plot was going, I did have moments of being captured by the writing or the characters, and most of all, I knew that I was in the beginning of a character arc and I solidly expected that the things I was finding draining about the main character were things that would be changing any page now.

So originally, I put the book down with the vow to revisit it in my head. I read some more books, let some time pass, then picked it up again. And the same thing happened: I was bored and disconnected and just flipping pages in hopes that something truly engaging was going to happen soon.

I thought about it more. I agonized with it more. I watched videos online of people explaining their rationales for DNFing books. I watched videos of people explaining why they don’t DNF books. I go to the point where all I was thinking about as I listened to the book was about DNFing. And now here we are.

I’m still a little conflicted about it because ultimately I think I DNF’d a good book, and it’s hard for me to walk away from something I think is good - because what if I had stuck with it for 100 more pages and I would turn out to love it? What if Octavian turns out to be a character like Malta from the LIveship Traders trilogy, where I absolutely hated her guts for the whole first book but ended up loving her by the end of the trilogy? What if, what if, what if?

So... after 1500 words of explaining in excruciating detail the evolution of my philosophy behind DNFing books... I am ready to put this one to bed. Here are the final reasons I DNF’d this book even though I think it’s a good book:

I’m never gong to read all the good books in the world. I probably won’t even ever finish with my TBR list as long as I keep adding to it (which I will), so I’m not detracting from the amount of good books I’m going to read in my lifetime.

Octavian spent too long being weird and distant. He might turn out great in the end, but I disagree with the pacing the author chose for his storyline, and he didn’t allow the other characters to shine through enough to give me patience relating to Octavian.

I don’t need to completely despise books in order to be justified in DNFing them!!!

October 26, 2019

#the astonishing life of octavian nothing #m.t. anderson

[thesnakesaid]

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah #28: A book written by a comedian

What a delightful book this was! I had heard only incredible things about it (and there was a massive waiting list for the book, ebook, and audiobook at the library), but I wasn’t sure how I’d actually feel about it given that while I like the Daily Show, I don’t have any particular affinity for Trevor Noah.

The story is self-explanatory from the title: it’s a series of stories from his young childhood through his early adulthood about his experiences growing up impoverished and mixed-race with his black mother in South Africa both during and after apartheid. It’s not about his process of becoming a comedian, or his life in America, or the Daily Show - it’s all stories that really could have happened to anyone, which is one of the things that makes this memoir special. It doesn’t ride on the popularity of Trevor Noah the celebrity; it shines from its own merit of being a story that is both funny and lighthearted as well as serious, thoughtful, and introspective.

One of my favorite things about this book is that it was actually very informative about the racial dynamics created by apartheid. I knew a very little bit about apartheid, but most of what Noah discussed in this book was new information to me. 

As I was reading and listening to this book, I was also reflecting on what makes me feel like a book is “incredible” or “amazing” - 5 stars rather than 4 stars, basically. I finished this book not feeling like it was “incredible” or “amazing” and knowing that I’m not likely to read it again at any point, but at the same time, I read the whole thing in 2 days. 2 working days, I might add! I was just reading it when I could, and listening to it when I couldn’t read it. It’s kind of confusing to feel like you “love” a book while also knowing you are unlikely to re-read it, but the pace at which I tore through this book speaks for itself.

It’s just a really inviting, easy to read, and entertaining book. His personal anecdotes made me laugh out loud at times, and think at other times. I feel like that’s a somewhat rare combination, although I may be wrong, as I am not very well-versed in humor books.

I may not re-read this book, but it certainly made me want to watch his Netflix special!

March 7, 2019

#trevor noah #born a crime

[thesnakesaid]

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah #37: A book about a culture you’re unfamiliar with

A Long Way Gone is, as its title states, a memoir about Ishmael Beah’s life and experiences growing up during the Sierra Leone Civil War. What might not be apparent from the title, however, is that the story is about a lot more than just Beah’s experiences as a child soldier. 

Beah doesn’t spend a lot of time on exposition, but he does start his story establishing a simple but happy family life with himself, his parents, his siblings, and his grandmother in Sierra Leone in the early 1990s. At this time, Beah is just a normal kid who loves dancing and listening to imported American hip hop with his friends. However, very early on in the story, the encroaching war finally reaches their city and immediately and violently separates Beah from the rest of his family. 

From here, Beah narrates his and his friends’ experiences simply wandering through the bush, begging for help and shelter from whatever villages they encounter, and attempting to stay ahead of the fighting as it moves inexorably across the countryside. He spends an equal amount of time on this as he does on the part of the book where he is ultimately captured and recruited by the Sierra Leonean army, as well as the part where he is rescued by UNICEF and begins his process of rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

As I read this story, I was surprised to find myself feeling like something was... missing. I think this might have had to do with the fact that I went into this remembering having read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali several years back: her overall life story was a story of how devoutly practiced Islam can cause devastating effects on the lives of girls, but she wrote her memoir with an eye toward how her own story ties into history, culture, politics, and current events. I kept catching myself looking for these larger connections in this story and I kept not finding them.

An example of what I’m talking about here centers around something that surprised me about this story. I always imagined that child soldiers were “recruited” entirely by force - kidnapped, forced to serve in the army under threat of death, and ultimately brainwashed until they no were no longer a flight risk. This kind of child soldier “recruitment” absolutely happens, but what happened to Beah was much more insidious. He joined the army just about as willingly as he could have under the circumstances. He joined out of a need to have some direction in his life - to be running towards something as opposed to away from it - as well as a desire to take revenge against the people he was made to believe were responsible for the death of his family. I would have loved to see this narrative from his life used to start a deeper exploration of child psychology, or of the political situation that would lead to both sides of the war recruiting children, or the longer-reaching effects this would later have on his psychological health, but the story for the most part remains a rather matter-of-fact portrayal of the events of Beah’s life, the emotions he was feeling at the time, and not much else.

That being said... I am so uncomfortable with “critiquing” someone’s life story!!! I mean... can you really say “I wish this LITERAL CHILD SOLDIER would tell his story in a way that makes more connections to overarching world events and conditions”??? Lol NO. That being said, I do think it would be interesting to think about how this book might have been different if Beah had written it later in his life rather than in college. I think maybe it would have turned out to be a “bigger” story in that case.

That being said, this book was still really harrowing and moving, and I certainly would recommend it to anyone interested in reading about this sort of subject matter.

March 5, 2019

#a long way gone #ishmael beah

[thesnakesaid]

The Bluest Eye by Toni MOrrison #19: A book from Oprah’s Book Club

So... I’m torn on this book.

On this blog, I have often discussed that my reaction to books tends to be localized into one of four things that a book will bring to the table (characters, plot, ideas/themes, or writing style) and that plot and characters tend to make a book or break it for me.

On some level, my mixed feelings about this book make sense given that the plot was an impediment to my enjoyment of the story. The summary on the back seemed promising - it describes the plight of a girl who wished at a young age for conventionally attractive (i.e. white) features so that she would be “noticed”, only to have her father “notice” (i.e. rape) her and impregnate her with his child. This storyline, however, probably only took up about 10-15 pages of actual “screen time”. The rest of the book alternated among perspectives from a whole cast of characters, and while all of them are in some way connected to this main rape storyline, the stories they are telling are often quite distanced from it: characters describe their childhoods, stories of their families, stories of their everyday lives, and while this certainly serves the purpose of fleshing out the racial climate at the time, the effect of it on me was to continually detach me from storylines once I became invested in them. There just wasn’t enough time spent on any one narrative before the narrator changed to someone I had never heard of before or had no reason to care about, and the cycle of getting to know them, starting to like them, and then having my attention torn away from them would begin again.

However, despite the fact that I really struggled with this aspect of the storytelling, I just can’t say I disliked this book because goddamn did Toni Morrison knock it out of the park when it came to how she handled the themes in this book.

Typically for Toni Morrison, there are many themes at hand in this story, but for me, the main one is the idea that beauty is 1) socially constructed in such a way that non-white people will never be able to measure up to an arbitrarily defined standard called “beautiful” and 2) a toxic concept that serves only to undercut the lives of those in pursuit of it.

This is an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a few years now, and I wrote my entire bachelor’s thesis on a variation on it, but honestly, Toni just encapsulated everything I wanted to say at that time in one paragraph in this book:

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. 

While this idea - that the pursuit of beauty is a necessarily damaging endeavor - is universally applicable, this narrative with these (black) characters made the perfect vehicle for conveying it, because in the 1940s (as well as before then, and as well as today), black women could only “achieve” beauty by making themselves look as white as possible. Beauty standards are created by dominant cultures and privileged subgroups within those cultures, and as such will never reflect the biologies of anyone outside those groups, no matter how hard they might try to conform. Hence Pecola, our black girl who wants more than anything to have blue eyes.

When Toni is exploring these themes in a more explicit way in this story, I was completely invested and hanging on her every word, and couldn’t care less what was going on in the plot of the story. But this book is not preachy or proselytizing, so those moments of explicit thematic discussion were not frequent, and in between them, I found myself racing through the pages until I could get to the next theme moment, which is never a fun way to read a book.

As such, it’s hard for me to communicate my feelings toward this book in a succinct way. I liked it and didn’t like it at the same time. I think it should be required reading for white people while also suspecting that white people won’t be able to connect with the plot, like I couldn’t. I wish I had a more resolved place to end this review, but I don’t. Maybe this is what a true 3/5 rating feels like?

March 2, 2019

#the bluest eye #toni morrison

[thesnakesaid]

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

#44: A book that was originally written in a different language

Oh man... I feel like it is so appropriate that I finally finished my 2015 (!!!) book list with this book because I have such a long history with it, and that history only got longer as I read it.

I’ve probably written on here before that I had a creative writing professor in college who once said that the first and last lines of your story are your “prime real estate,” and that you have to make sure that you fill that space with something good. I think that 1Q84 has to be the best example of this I’ve ever experienced, because my first encounter with it was when I randomly plucked it off the shelf at Barnes and Noble due to its rather striking cover. The opening chapter (which really is equivalent to the first line of a short story, given that this book is well over 1000 pages long) introduces the reader to Aomame, who is dressed to the nines in a taxi on her way to what she describes as a business venture, but you later find out is actually a hit job. She finds herself stuck in standstill traffic and is worried about making it to her destination on time when her cab driver lets her know that there is an emergency stairway leading from the freeway to the street below that she can take if it’s a dire emergency. She agrees that this is her best course of action, but before she leaves the cab, he issues the following warning:

...you’re about to do something. out of the ordinary. Am I right? [...] And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.

I didn’t get much farther than this the first time I opened the book. I didn’t get to the part where you discover that her “meeting” at the hotel was really so she could kill a man, or the part where you learn that she is a hired assassin who strictly targets men who have committed violence against women. I didn’t get to meet any of the characters I would go on to love, such as the Dowager, the rich old woman who runs a battered women’s shelter and hires Aomame to take out domestic abusers, or Tamaru, the dowager’s gay bodyguard who quietly and professionally arranges everything necessary to make these hit jobs a success. I didn’t learn about any of the strange magic and alternate timelines that would have me on tenterhooks for the rest of the story in this first chapter. All I got was this enigmatic warning from a taxi driver that going down this particular stairway at this particular time of day might create a change in reality worthy of being forewarned about. But this was enough to keep 1Q84 in the back of my head for the ensuing years between the first time I saw it on the shelf and the day I actually picked it up to read it for real.

That was probably back in 2011 or 2012. I picked the book back up in October 2018 and instantly became enamored with Aomame, and found myself reading passages about her to Zebby so frequently that after only a hundred or so pages, she asked me to start reading entire chapters aloud to her. It wasn’t long ago that we had a great time reading Good Omens aloud to each other, so we ended up taking on the extremely daunting task of reading the next 1000 pages of the book aloud to each other.

That took five months.

And now I’m here, writing a review for this book, and I still haven’t talked about what the book is about nor stated directly how I feel about it.

Well, with regards to the plot summary: I’ve omitted that on purpose. The deepest, most essential storyline in this book is very simple: Aomame and Tengo are two people who fell in love when they were ten years old, and seek to find each other after 20 years apart. However, this storyline is inextricably wrapped in many other stories, and I know that no description I could think of would possibly do the plot justice without making it seem convoluted. Suffice to say that this book is a love story, yes, but also a science fiction, an adventure, a mystery, and a fantasy story all rolled up into one.

And regarding my feelings on it: I LOVED it. There were so many moments throughout these pages that I found myself gasping and screaming because of some narrative gambit Murakami had pulled - a sudden crossing of two storylines or the introduction of just the exact right piece of information to make 12 other things fall into place. There was so much in this story to think about and obsess over. Zebby and I probably spent hours cumulatively stopping to discuss what just happened or speculate what was going to happen next. It was unlike any book or story I’ve ever read before.

All this being said, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone - the pace of the story is slow even though a lot of things happen in it, and the ending left a lot more questions unanswered than I would have liked. Zebby and I discussed this too when we finally reached the end. But what I said to her is what I will say here: 1Q84 won my allegiance early on. There is very little he could have done with the ending to make me end the book feeling like I didn’t love it.

Plus, there is one more factor working in this book’s favor that has nothing to do with the book at all - 

I’M DONE WITH MY 2015 READING LIST!!!!!

As a random note to anyone who might actually read these, I made myself a book list based on a Pop Sugar reading challenge way back in college and have been using it to guide my reading ever since. I have developed this crazy system of rules for myself with regards to how to proceed through the list: I use a number randomizer to choose which book I’m going to read next, no skipping or reading ahead on the list unless I’m about to go on a long drive and the book I randomly selected doesn’t have an available audiobook, and no quitting on books. Despite all these rules, I have no qualms about reading books that are not on my list when the spirit moves me, and I never intended to even attempt to read the entirety of a given list in one year, so I don’t care that I finished my 2015 reading list in 2019.

But now that I’m done with this list, it is really cool to look back on how my life has changed since I started the list. Among other things, I

Graduated from college

Moved to a new city

Started and finished grad school

Moved again

Started at a job that I love and I’m good at and I’ve always dreamed of doing

Reignited my love of reading

To be clear on that last point, I really never lost my love of reading, but like most people at least at some point in their HS/college careers, I definitely stopped reading for fun for a long period of time. Starting this challenge literally flipped a switch for me, and I went from reading very few books per year that weren’t assigned by a class to reading 20+ books a year consistently for the last 4 years (and given that I’m at 8 books so far in February, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to match that pace this year!).

So I’m grateful to have read 1Q84 and I’m grateful to have started and finished this challenge, and I’m grateful to be proceeding on to the 2016 reading challenge!

February 24, 2019

#1q84 #haruki murakami

[thesnakesaid]

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler #29: A dystopian novel

I have wanted to read this book ever since I read Kindred ages ago for a class I took in college. That desire was only redoubled in the last few years since I started working at my job, because whenever I mention Octavia Butler to my coworkers or recommend Kindred to them, they all bring up Parable of the Sower as a book I should read ASAP.

This story is about a girl named Lauren Oya Olamina (by the way - this is possibly the best character name I have ever encountered) who is growing up on a ruined planet amidst a society on the brink of disaster. As Ms. Butler put it, it’s a world of “failing economies and tortured ecologies.” Overall, her situation is not as dire as most - while she lives in poverty, she still has her family and her neighborhood around her, and a wall to keep out the street poor who have turned vicious in their desperation. However, Lauren is seemingly the only one among her immediate social group who realizes - or, at least, is willing to acknowledge - that their situation is precarious and will not last forever.

When it all finally comes crumbling down, Lauren finds herself almost completely alone. Bereft of everything she once knew, she begins a trek north that soon becomes a pilgrimage as she collects disciples to Earthseed, her new religion, along the way.

I picked up this story because I wanted to read an adult dystopia, and on the one hand, this is the purest dystopia I’ve read in a long time. Unlike stories like Divergent or The Hunger Games, the conditions that Ms. Butler plays out to their logical extreme in this story are very believable conditions that are at play today: climate change and wage slavery. In that sense, she creates a dystopian environment that is very easily immersive and plausible. On the other hand, the dystopian setting is not the point of this story. The point is Lauren Oya Olamina.

I’ve said before that something I love about The Name of the Wind is that it’s like reading Merlin’s origin story - the most powerful wizard of all time before he became legendary. Reading about Lauren gives me the same vibes, but instead of it being like I’m reading about Merlin, it’s like I’m reading about Jesus. That’s a cool experience inherently, but it’s 10x cooler that this story lives within a black teenage girl.

I also loved reading about Earthseed. It’s such a believable religious ideology that resonated with me as if I were one of Lauren’s disciples myself. I’m full of the literary references today, but what Earthseed reminds me strongly of is the God’s Gardeners from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy - also a fictional religion that still felt very real and made a lot of sense. 

There were only two things I didn’t like about this book. For one thing, towards the end of the book, Lauren gets in a relationship with a 50 year old man. I discussed this with my friend and one thing I will say is that this relationship did not come across as gross as it would have if a man had written it - it wasn’t explicitly sexual, it wasn’t playing into the male gaze, and it wasn’t even overly sentimental. However, I still just can’t get over a relationship with that kind of age gap where the age gap is not commented on negatively at any point. It’s a particular complex of mine, but it really tainted the rest of the story for me.

The other thing - and this more than the relationship thing was really what made me give this a 4 star rather than a 5 star rating - was that while the characters in this book were really interesting, as was the process of watching a religion being born, it wasn’t a very exciting story. Things happened along their trek, sure, but Lauren never really felt like she was being threatened, and outside of these occasional dangerous situations, the entire second half of the book was pretty much just the story of their increasingly large group making their way north.

Overall, however, this book was really good! I’m looking forward to reading the next one.

February 18, 2019

#parable of the sower #octavia butler

[thesnakesaid]

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Miller #5: A book set in your home state

The last time I had a prompt that asked me to read a book set in my home (city, in that case), it did not go well. This time, seeing that I couldn’t find anything book set in Iowa that seemed inherently interesting, I picked this book because I knew that there was a popular movie made out of it, and I figured that the popularity of the story would hopefully give me better odds of liking the book. I will say that this definitely went better than last time, but I still had very mixed feelings about it.

The story is a simple one: Francesca is the wife of a farmer holding down the fort in Iowa while her husband and kids are away for the week. Robert is a wandering, free-spirited photographer who travels the world without actually connecting to it. They cross paths when a photo assignment brings Robert to Madison County and begin a brief, passionate love affair. At the end of their week together, Robert asks Francesca to go away with him, but she says that she won’t implode her family for him, so they part amicably and never speak to each other again.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings about this book, so what I want to do is share something I loved about the book, something I was torn about, and something I hated.

Something I loved: The ending of the book. The entire trajectory of this story seemed to be leading up to our two lovebirds running away together and Francesca being saved from a lackluster marriage and a boring farm life, and if that had been the way the story ended, I honestly believe this story would have been worthless. The fact of the matter is that there is not a lot of character development happening in this book, nor do we even get very much indirect characterization - the author pretty much just tells us what Robert and Francesca are like in a giant info dump and then goes right into the love story. If they had run off together, that is just where it would have stayed - no characterization, no development, just a love story that I’m not invested in. But Francesca’s choice to stay with her family demonstrates not only that she has actual beliefs and convictions, but also that she has the inner fortitude to live by these convictions even in the face of impossible temptation. This, to me, is what makes her unique as a character and not just a vehicle for a love story, so I’m glad the author had the guts to end this how he did. It wasn’t the happy ending per se, but it was the right one.

Something I’m torn on: The prose. On the one hand, the prose practically forced me to invest at least a little bit in the love story. It was undeniably very beautiful and when I could disengage from the story and just sort of live in the prose, it definitely carried me away. That being said, I think the beauty of the prose was sometimes its downfall because it was just not believable as dialogue!!! There are actually dozens of examples of this - times when the two characters monologue at each other for literal pages at a time in these sprawling poetic ruminations that just make my eyes roll out of my head - but I think that the best example of this is that apparently at some point DURING SEX, this man said “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” Like... no one says that during sex!!! What the hell!!! But I’m clearly supposed to be taking this line extremely seriously because the image of the peregrine comes back later in the story, and the author even dedicates the novel to “the peregrines.” These kinds of moments just killed the immersion of the book completely when they came up, so I honestly can’t even say if I like the prose or not because there are so many examples of it being too stilted and poetic in situations that didn’t call for it.

Something I hated: The love at first sight. The very bottom line of this book is that if you can’t at least suspend your disbelief about the idea that two people are really going to fall in love with each other within 24 hours of meeting, then you’re just not going to be able to take this book seriously. And I just can’t!!! I just can’t invest in a love story where there has been no time whatsoever devoted to actually developing the connection, or even developing the characters individually in such a way where you are able to ship them together. This was the essential problem of the book for me - the whole story was predicated on a relationship that I just didn’t find believable at all.

I think I disliked this book more than I liked it, but it’s such a quick read that I also wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it if they were interested.

#the bridges of madison county #robert james waller

[thesnakesaid]

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson #17: A book more than 100 years older than you A book that is also about vampires, just like the real #17: a book more than 100 years older than you

So, despite having watched the 2007 movie version of this book and loving it, I never really had a burning desire to read this book. I think part of why I never got that “itch” was because the movie for this book is a very simple story, so I didn’t think I’d get much out of reading it that I hadn’t gotten from watching it. The one thing that really intrigued me though is that every time I see I Am Legend being mentioned on the internet, someone always mentions how they changed the ending in the movie and ruined the whole thing. I didn’t remember anything weird or bad about the ending of the movie - I even rewatched the movie before reading this book so I could remind myself what happened in it and I still couldn’t really imagine how else it would have ended, so I was definitely looking forward to solving the mystery for myself.

I Am Legend is a story of the ostensible last man alive on an earth that has been overtaken by vampires. He lives a monotonous life consisting of the process of attending to his own needs and attempting to find a cure to the pathogen that caused people to turn into vampires in the first place, but is slowly losing his mind to the loneliness and hopelessness of his existence.

Overall, I’m really torn on whether or not I prefer the book or the movie, but one thing that I definitely preferred in the book was that Richard Matheson does a really great job of coming up with a scientific explanation behind how people became vampires, why garlic and other “folk remedies” work against them, etc., especially considering that the book was written in 1956! It’s this aspect of the book that got the book included in the “vampire trilogy” - even though it was written earlier than Salem’s Lot, it reads as a more modern story because of how convincing and well thought out the science behind this book is.

On the other hand, this book had a lot more opportunity than the movie to really delve into Neville’s own process of slowly losing his mind to his circumstances that he is in. Not only were all the monologues there, but I had to physically listen to them because of the fact that I listened to the audiobook, and since they are already so visceral as written, listening to someone read them to you is actually a really discomfiting experience. That being said, I recognize that it’s discomfort stemming from good and realistic writer, so it’s hard to say definitively whether I like the first person narrative in the story better than the point of view in the movie.

And, of course, that ending. I never had it spoiled for me, so I’m not going to spoil it for you either. What I will talk about, though, is the fact that the ending of the book is a much more ambitious ending than either of ht endings that the movie went to. I mentioned previously that I Am Legend is a simple story, and it is - until about the last 50 pages of the book, at which point Matheson really changes the game in an important way. In some way, the movie endings were more satisfying, and I would certainly not say that anybody “ruined” I Am Legend by going with a different ending, but I can report that I too think it was a mistake for the movie producers to change it so much, and I can attest that the ending of the story is one thing that makes it different and unique in the world of sci-fi/horror, which is really saying something!

February 11, 2019

#i am legend #richard matheson

[thesnakesaid]

Salem’s Lot by Stephen King #17: A book more than 100 years older than you A book that is also about vampires, just like the real #17: a book more than 100 years older than you

I love Stephen King. This is my first Stephen King story I’ve read since waaay back at the beginning of this project and I’m glad that it was not the one to break my streak of loving every Stephen King book I’ve read.

Salem’s Lot is a pretty straightforward retelling of Dracula set in the 1970s in a small town in Maine (shocking, I know) called Jerusalem’s Lot. The story starts with two new parties moving into town at around the same time. The first is Ben Mears, a novelist who lived in Salem’s Lot as a child and had a traumatic experience venturing into the Marsten House - a house which has a spooky reputation in town due to its previous owner killing himself and his wife in the house - and returned to the Lot in an attempt to write a novel inspired by the house and hopefully exorcise the trauma around this house from his life. The second is Richard Straker, who arrives in town with the intent to purchase the Marsten House. Later in the story, Straker is revealed to be the human servant of Kurt Barlow, who is the “Dracula” of this story.

The rest of the story pretty much proceeds the same as Dracula: Kurt Barlow begins preying on people in town, who then begin preying on each other; Ben Mears and some of the people he has come to associate with in the Lot form a coalition devoted to defeating Barlow; Mears and Barlow face each other in the ultimate showdown between good and evil. 

After finishing this book, the main thought in my head is that it really should be considered required reading for anyone who has some degree of interest in reading about vampires but didn’t like Dracula or otherwise has trouble with reading classics. The modern setting and writing style definitely make it easier to connect with the characters, and it’s also very faithful not only to the events of Dracula, but also to the way that Stoker imagined vampires. Because of this, I think it really delivers the “Dracula” experience.

The main difference between Salem’s Lot and Dracula other than the setting is the ending. Without going into details, Stephen King - in true Stephen King style - created a much more horrifying and gruesome ending than Bram Stoker’s. In Dracula, the ending was satisfying in a very different way, but once the endgame was initiated, I actually lost the feeling of suspense and fear due to the way the end of that novel developed, so I actually ended up liking Salem’s Lot more due to the fact that Stephen King just kept ratcheting up the fear and anxiety until the very last page.

February 10, 2019

#salem's lot #stephen king

[thesnakesaid]

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

#28: A book with antonyms in the title

Well, it’s no secret that this book has a reputation that precedes it. It’s become something of a benchmark among the “literary” types - you gain a sort of street cred if you read it. At the same time, people don’t just read it for the sake of being able to say they’ve read it - if you look up reviews of it, you’ll find it’s genuinely incredibly loved by its audience. There is a reason why it’s considered to be one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. As such, I guessed that I would come away from this story having learned some profound lesson, and I was absolutely right.

Lesson learned:

DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME FINISHING BOOKS YOU HATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I tried absolutely everything I could think of to force myself to be able to engage with this book at all. I read reviews and blog posts about what people loved about the book and tried to set a purpose for reading; I used cheat sheets of all the names to make sure I wasn’t just getting confused; I read the book side by side with the sparknotes; I read the book out loud to myself.... no matter what I did, I just could. not. pay. attention!!!

I have thought and thought about what my deal was with this book, and let me just say that I don’t think it’s because the book is bad or there is something wrong with it. I came away from this entire experience having retained almost nothing about the story, so I clearly have no basis on which to criticize the story. But where other people described loving the complexity of the inner lives that Tolstoy created with his characters, I just felt drowned and overwhelmed by details I didn’t care about.

It took me 3.5 years of on and off reading to finish this book and not to be dramatic but it was 3.5 years of pure literary torture and I’d rather die than read it again!!!

February 7, 2019

#war and peace #leo tolstoy

[thesnakesaid]

Dracula by Bram Stoker #17: A book at least 100 years older than you

First, the elephant in the room: I only just realized after finishing this book that it is actually a mere 96 years older than me! I’ll have to go back and retroactively add on a book that actually is 100 years older than me. That being said, I planned to read this book in conjunction with two other vampire books, so I’m still going to move forward with that plan.

On to the review!

I have read Dracula before in an excellent class I took in college that was all about reading literature relating to things that spread like viruses (sometimes these things were actual viruses, and sometimes they were things like vampirism, hence the inclusion of Dracula on the reading list), so I knew I liked it, and I was not disappointed the second time. There is something just so cool about reading THE definitive vampire story and feeling like you’re witnessing firsthand the birth of the modern vampire myth (even though the vampire myth existed long before Bram Stoker came along).

The book is basically divided into three sections:

The “prologue,” which details the journey of Jonathan Harker to Castle Dracula in Transylvania where he soon realizes that Dracula is a vampire (although he does not have a word to describe such a monster yet) and has to find a way to escape the castle before being turned into a vampire himself.

The first part of the main story, where Dracula has made the journey to London and begun to feed on Lucy Westenra, whose is being zealously but ultimately unsuccessfully defended by her group of romantic admirers and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who clearly knows more than he lets on about the source of her “illness.”

The second part of the main story takes place after Lucy’s death when Van Helsing is finally forced to spill the beans about Dracula’s vampirism and the gang (by now including Jonathan Harker and his wife, Mina) then devotes themselves to killing Dracula once and for all.

One thing I love about this story is that even though it does not inspire fear the same way a contemporary Steven King-like novel would, it still creates a huge amount of fear and suspense through its pacing. For example, the prologue instantly hits the reader with a terrifying setting and wastes no time with setting up the mortal danger that Jonathan Harker is in, and then it just switches setting and characters in the space of a single page and makes us wait for several chapters to learn that he has even survived.  Another example is how in the first part of the main story, Van Helsing teases the reader constantly with the fact that he knows about vampires but is withholding that knowledge until his associates are going to be ready to believe him, which I thought was an effective and satisfying way of creating suspense. The second section of the book was not as good in the way, but I found that to be forgivable given how good the first part of the book was. Ultimately, this book is just cool as hell.

That being said, the female representation of the story is really a problem.

I’m choosing to highlight this for a reason, and it is not because this is the only book recently that has a representation problem. Most books written by white people have representation problems, and I just can’t go through my life calling out all of it unless I want to be sad all the time. But I think that in the discourse around representation in literature often ends up centering around the ideas of fairness (why do white men always get the good roles in stories?) and bias (what ideas are we unconsciously reinforcing by always casting white men for the good roles in stories?). What I feel like people don’t always talk about is how good representation in a book just straight up makes it more interesting.

That’s why I can’t not talk about it with Dracula. As it is, we have a story featuring two women and four men, where the two women are the innocent, fragile victims of Dracula and the men are the brave, robust saviors. Imagine that story gender-swapped. Or if the story was all women. Or if both the “sick” party and the “saviors” party were mixed gender! Having the women be the “sick” ones and the men be the “saviors” is literally the most boring iteration of this story possible, and while I can’t really expect much different from a white man writing in 1897, all I’m saying is that we need a gender-swapped movie of this book ASAP.

February 1, 2019

#dracula #bram stoker

[thesnakesaid]

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck #31: A book of poetry

This book came onto my radar years ago when one of my favorite college professors casually mentioned that she was close enough friends with Louise Gluck that she was the one Louise called when she won the National Book Award for this poetry collection, and was the one to convince her that yes, you actually should attend the reception for National Book Awardees. When she mentioned this, I remember going home and looking up Louise Gluck poems on a whim and finding one (or a few?) that absolutely floored me with how good they are. Thus, it felt like this would be a good choice for my “book of poetry” item on the list.

Unfortunately, these poems didn’t knock me on my ass the way the ones that I read in college did (I wish I remembered which ones those were...) but I was discussing it with my sister earlier, and I came to the conclusion that with me, I basically have three modes of relating to poetry: I either love it obsessively, I’m basically indifferent to it, or I hate it deeply. For whatever reason, the structure of novels and other prose makes me a more forgiving reader who has degrees of feeling between “love,” “indifference,” and “hate,” but with poetry, it’s one of the three. All this is to say that I’m basically in the “indifferent” camp when it comes to Faithful and Virtuous Night, but that’s not because I didn’t like the poems or think they were good - it just means I’m unlikely to come back to them in the future.

I looked online for some reviews of these poems to give me ideas on how to go about talking about them, and I found it pretty interesting that I seemed to latch on to a different aspect of the collection than most of the professional reviewers. This collection is loosely based around the life experiences of an aging artist coming to terms with mortality as it applies to himself and others, but certainly don’t constitute a linear narrative when read together. The aforementioned reviewers tended to focus on the mortality aspect of these poems, and highlighted the fact that Gluck seemed to be exploring the freedom that can accompany accepting the idea of your own death. While I definitely agree that this was a theme I noticed being developed across the collection, I didn’t really actually clue into it while I was reading, but rather after the fact when reading reviews.

The theme of this collection that I noticed and was thinking about as I read was a theme around family. I think the family theme is part of what gave me mixed feelings about the collection because on the one hand, I am perfectly confident in saying that the collection has “themes around family,” but when I press myself to try to describe what these themes actually are, I find it hard to verbalize or even conceptualize, and that is definitely a factor in my feelings of disconnect from the collection. On the other hand, even though I couldn’t really string the family moments together into a cohesive message or idea, I liked all the individual instances of family situations she wrote about. Sometimes her parents were alive, sometimes they were dead, sometimes she had strained relationships with whoever she was talking about and sometimes she did not, and this allowed her to explore a lot of different elements of the family relationship as a concept in a way that I definitely found enjoyable.

I think the bottom line for me is that my appreciation of poetry rests enormously on how relatable I find the themes of the poem/collection to be. I found the themes of Faithful and Virtuous Night somewhat opaque or at least hard to describe, which means it was never going to speak to my soul the way that other poems do. 

December 28, 2018

#louise gluck #faithful and virtuous night

[thesnakesaid]

The Fates Divide by Veronica Roth #7: A romance set in the future

The second and final book in the “Carve the Mark” series, this book starts out with one of the most effective introductions to a story I have ever read. Spoilers below:

First, we get the first-person perspective of Eijeh Kereseth, brother of our protagonist, Akos, and oracle who has been taken captive by the ruthless and bloodthirsty Ryzek Noavek. We know from the first book that Ryzek has been using his gift - the ability to swap memories with people - to attempt to hijack Eijeh’s gift of foresight for himself, but what we don’t realize is that the unintended outcome of this process of memory swapping is that Ryzek inextricably enmeshes himself with Eijeh to the point that they do not have independent personalities, thoughts, or feelings. They are, as Eijeh puts it, one person in two bodies, Veronica Roth does a great job of narrating this chapter in such a way that seems so incredibly foreign to any other type of narration I’ve ever read that it actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up

Second, she kills Ryzek. 

This was a bold narrative move for several reasons. Firstly, the fact that she had just established Eijeh and Ryzek to have this shared consciousness that effectively includes a telepathic connection in such a memorable way made it absolutely shocking to me that she immediately then snuffed out one side of that connection. Secondly, the fact that Cyra took her brother prisoner instead of killing him at the end of the first book was not only a twist, but a huge moment of characterization for her, and it definitely made me think that the second book was going to go a certain direction only for Veronica Roth to cut me off from that way of thinking within the first five chapters of the book. 

It’s always hard for me when writing these reviews to determine how much time is appropriate for me to spend summarizing the book vs. offering actual commentary, but I wanted to spend some time praising that intro because damn! I had a creative writing professor once say that the beginning and end of your book/story is your “prime real estate,” and Veronica definitely used hers wisely in this case.

The rest of the story centers around the conflict between Thuvhe and Shotet. The original aggressor in the conflict between the two nations, Lazmet Noavek, has been presumed dead for many years but makes a reappearance shortly after Ryzek’s death and reveals that his disappearance had been due to his son, Ryzek Noavek, keeping him imprisoned for years. His reappearance takes the two-party conflict and elevates it to a three-party conflict: the Shotet who share the level of aggression and bloodthirst that Lazmet Noavek has, the exiled Shotet who care about their Shotet heritage but do not want to fight and kill those around them, and the Thuvhesit. Both the Thuvhesit and the latter group of Shotet have the common goal of killing Lazmet so as to reunite and deradicalize the Shotet, but they just need to find a way to actually do it.

As I said in my previous review of the first book in this series, however, I don’t think the plot is where this book shines. The best part of this book is in the ideas that it imparts and in the representation it has - in this case, that of people suffering from chronic pain.

The coolest thing about this entire series and what felt like such a great payoff when I got to it was Cyra’s realization at the end that her currentgift was more powerful than even she understood, and her new respect for her own body for being able to bear the pain of that gift. I thought it was great that Veronica Roth didn’t make it so the whole story was about finding a way to stop the pain permanently, but rather for Cyra to come to the understanding that her body was valuable even though it was “dysfunctional” in this way.

This book review has been all over the place, but I’ve been sitting on it for weeks now because for whatever reason I’ve found this series really difficult to talk about without getting way down into the nitty gritty details of the series, so I’m just going to leave it as it is and hope no one reads it lol!!!

December 18, 2018

#the fates divide #veronica roth

[thesnakesaid]

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood #15: A popular author’s first book

The Edible Woman is a story about Marian, girlfriend of Peter, who is a stereotypically commitment-phobic man until one day he flips a switch in his head and asks Marian to marry him. Marian agrees, but as time passes and it falls to her to plan the wedding, she finds herself developing aversions to various foods until she can barely eat anything at all. She attempts to share this with her fiance, but he brushes her off - a common dynamic between the two of them.

At this point, I’d like to interject into my own summary to say that what I have just described summarizes most of the first 30 chapters of the book, and throughout these chapters, I liked the book but didn’t love it. There is plenty of thematic exploration of some deep truths of the feminine experience (as is standard for Margaret Atwood) and certainly a lot to chew on (heh) in the way of symbolism relating to food and eating, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t enough to really grab my attention the way that some of her books have. The way I described it to Zebby was that I didn’t in the first 98% of the book encounter a moment that smacked me in the face. I should have known that Margaret was just biding her time, sitting on the moment that would knock me on my ass.

Throughout the whole story, Marian has been struggling to be heard by pretty much everyone she interacts with on a regular basis, most significantly by her fiance, who only wants from her his idea of a perfect wife to check off the “wife” box on the to-do list of his life, and has no interest in interacting with the true, unadulterated Marian. All this comes to a boiling point when she leaves one of Peter’s parties to go sleep with a strange boy she met at the laundromat weeks previously. While she at first is more confused than ever after this encounter, she soon clears her head and invites Peter back to her place to discuss her disappearance only to present him with a cake she had baked that was baked and decorated to look like a woman. She then says to him:

You’ve been trying to destroy me, haven’t you? You’ve been trying to assimilate me. But I’ve made you a substitute, something you’ll like much better. This is what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?

BOOM. This quote makes no sense out of context, but it still deserves the italicized-blockquote treatment in my opinion because I am so obsessed with this metaphor of the edible woman as a representation of the expectations that men place upon women, particularly in the context of relationships. In a lot of ways, this is Margaret Atwood’s way of getting at the idea of the cool girl, 40+ years before Gillian Flynn put her cool girl manifesto to paper. Men get in relationships with girls and expect them to be the perfect girl for them - in Marian’s case, she had to be made up, demure, calm, conservative at all times, and above all, unemotional. She must not have any emotional reaction whatsoever to anything he does beyond the expression of satisfaction. And in return, women must walk on eggshells around these men to keep from tainting their fantasies that they have a woman who is not only perfect for them in every way, but is also naturally that way and does not need to exert any effort to maintain her man’s affections (or, in other words, he does not even need to do anything to help her maintain the facade). 

Serving someone’s fucked up fantasy on a plate is the biggest power move I’ve ever seen, and it reminds me of this quote:

Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against “losing control” - of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.

Marian certainly resisted and repressed a lot of her natural impulses, and while some of the things she felt compelled to do were certainly more “crazy” than others in an objective sense, this perceived madness that is central to the feminine experience does not come from how objectively crazy something is or isn’t, but rather in how much men do or don’t want us to do the thing in question. Carefully and religiously applying makeup before leaving the house, for example, will never be considered crazy. Not shaving legs is a little crazy, but not a lot. Not shaving armpits is a lot crazy - you get the gist. And I think the only way out of this trap is just to embrace the craziness you feel - like Marian and her cake.

November 24, 2018

#the edible woman #margaret atwood

[thesnakesaid]

Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth  #7: A romance set in the future

New Veronica Roth!! I’ve been looking forward to reading these books ever since she announced that they were coming out, but I can’t say I wasn’t nervous about the idea that I might not like them. My claim to fame with regards to Veronica Roth is that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Divergent series, so I’ve definitely spent a ton of time absolutely poring over them in an academic way, and that came out of the fact that I really thought that Divergent had one of the most nuanced and sophisticated messages I’d ever seen in young adult literature.

Carve the Mark doesn’t reach those highs for me when it comes to its themes, but the good news is that I really like this book and it definitely did not disappoint me like I feared it might. (To be clear, this was not because I was expecting it to be bad, but because I was hypersensitive to how sad I would be if it was bad given how it would force me to stop hero worshipping Veronica Roth in my own head).

Anyway. 

I’ve been stuck for two days trying to write a summary of the plot of this book. It’s not convoluted or confusing, certainly easy to understand as you read it, but just complicated and hard to retell without retelling all the worldbuilding details as you go. I wrote and rewrote the summary and then ended up deleting all of it because to me, this book is not special becuase of its plot, but because of its characters. 

Enter Cyra and Akos. 

Cyra Noavek is the sister of the leader of Shotet, one of the two ethnic groups vying for power and legitimacy on the planet they live on. In addition to being part of Shotet’s royal family, she possesses the power to inflict pain upon whoever she touches, and as such, she serves as her brother’s greatest weapon in his war against his enemies. The sword that is Cyra, however, is double-edged: while she can inflict pain on people at will, she harbors the pain within herself when not touching anyone else, suffering constantly for her “gift.”

Akos Kereseth is the son of one of the oracles of Thuvhe, the other ethnic group living alongside the Shotet that is actually recognized as the legitimate governors of the planet by the intergalactic assembly of which they are a part. He lives a life of peace and prosperity until he is kidnapped by Shotet soldiers along with his brother in their attempt to seize power from the Thuvhesits. His brother - an oracle as well - is desired by the Noavek family so they can use his visions of the future to ensure that a future of their choosing comes to pass. Akos is taken as well because his power is that he can negate the powers of others with his touch, thus enabling him to serve as a painkiller for Cyra when she is not performing her duties as Shotet’s sometimes-executioner.

The two characters meet to begin a sweet - if predictable - love story, but their combination of powers and personalities has much more of an impact than merely making them into compatible lovers. As they get to know each other better, they come to understand themselves in a more nuanced way, developing a really important theme that in my opinion boils down to three basic ideas:

People are multifaceted. Both good and bad exists inside all of us, and any fair judgment of a person must bear this truth in mind.

People must apply this logic to themselves as well as others. In other words, our self-esteem (or lack thereof) cannot revolve entirely around our mistakes, because we are more than that.

Even if we do make mistakes or develop undesirable personality traits, it is never too late to change for the better.

This is what I love about this book and about Veronica Roth’s writing in general: she does a really good job of crafting a message that is both important to the personal development of teenagers and sufficiently nuanced to show that she clearly believes in the ability of teenagers to digest complicated things. This is what separates good YA lit from bad YA lit in my opinion, and I’m really excited to see that Roth’s magic is not limited just to Divergent.

November 19, 2018

#carve the mark #veronica roth

[thesnakesaid]

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante #6: A book translated into English

I put this book on my list specifically because of the following quote:

I decided, enough pain... I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off; for the rest, I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through the fire and is not burned.

This quote speaks so directly to that defining anger of my womanhood that I was caught up in it at the time that I read it; I knew I wanted to read the book it came from, but I did not actually think of the fact that this book was going to be a spiritual sister to Gone Girl. It had to be - how can a woman who has that to say after being cheated on not bear a resemblance to Amy?

The basic facts of Olga’s story - and the beginning of the plot of the book - is pretty much the same as that of Amy from Gone Girl. Her husband, Mario, cheats on her and leaves her for a much younger woman and she is left to deal with the profound psychic damage that accompanies a betrayal like that. The difference between their stories comes in their reactions to the betrayal. Where Amy is all about vengeance, Olga is about self-discovery: she falls into a deep depression during which she neglects her kids and turns inward, becoming a ship unmoored amidst the ocean of her despair. However, when faced with a truly dire situation regarding her children and her dog, she rises up from the despair and regains control of her life and understanding of herself separately from her husband, Mario. 

Gone Girl is definitely a more exciting book to read, but The Days of Abandonment is more realistic, and in that way, more empowering. Ferrante tells a story that does not and cannot involve any hint of revenge fantasy; it is not until the very end of the book that the reader even gets a hint that Mario has not waltzed his way into a great life without any consequences. In her story, Olga cannot derive personal empowerment from the misfortune of her ex, no matter how just that misfortune may be. This is infuriating to read, especially while she, in the depths of her despair, makes objectively wrong choices and overtly neglects her children. But the end of her story - once she has regained a sense of normalcy and independence - is made all the sweeter by comparison.

The quote I began this review with was definitely the high point from a prosaic standpoint (although she has a lot of other quotable quotes in this book for sure), and listening to the book was very difficult in a lot of ways, but it was a good difficulty that comes from listening to an important story. Ferrante does an overall incredible job of capturing the deep rage that defines the feminine experience, and because of this, the book is as cathartic to read as it is difficult. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested.

November 13, 2018

#the days of abandonment #elena ferrante

[thesnakesaid]

2016 POPSUGAR READING LIST

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente (a book based on a fairy tale)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson (a National Book Award winner) (DNF 10/24/2019)

Paper Towns by John Green (a YA bestseller) (3/11/19)

19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult (a book you haven’t read since high school)

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Miller (a book set in your home state) (2/12/2019)

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (a book translated to English) (11/13/2018)

Carve the Mark + The Fates Divide by Veronica Roth (a romance set in the future) (11/19/2018 | 12/18/2018)

Beowulf tr. J.R.R. Tolkien (a book set in Europe)

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (a book that’s under 150 pages; Pat Rothfuss recommendation)

The Other Wes Moore + Discovering Wes Moore by Wes Moore (a New York Times bestseller) (1/1/2020)

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (a book that’s becoming a movie this year)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid (a book recommended by someone you just met - someone on reddit who said to read it without reading anything about it - also recommended the audiobook)

This Is How by Augusten Burroughs (a self-improvement book)

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (a book you can finish in a day)

Bassoon King by Rainn Wilson (a book written by a celebrity)

What Happened by Hillary Clinton (a political memoir)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (a book at least 100 years older than you - this time for real!) Dracula by Bram Stoker (a book at least 100 years older than you) Followed by: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King + I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (2/1/19 | 2/10/19 | 2/11/19)

Gentlemen Bastard Series by Scott Lynch (a book that’s more than 600 pages)

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (a book from Oprah’s Book Club) (3/2/19)

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (a science fiction novel)

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (a book recommended by a family member)

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman (a graphic novel)

Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi (a book that was published in 2016)

The Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell (a book with a protagonist who has your occupation)

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Phillip Gourevitch (a book that takes place during summer)  (3/15/19)

Old Kingdom Series by Garth Nix (a book and its prequel)

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (a murder mystery)

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (a book written by a comedian) (3/7/19)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (a dystopian novel) (2/18/19)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (a book with a blue cover)

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck (a book of poetry) (12/28/18)

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales by H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft (the first book you see in a bookstore)

East of Eden by John Steinbeck (a classic from the 20th century) 

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (a book from the library)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (an autobiography)

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (a book about a road trip)

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (a book about a culture you’re unfamiliar with) (3/5/19)

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (a satirical book)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (a book that takes place on an island)

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (a book that’s guaranteed to bring you joy) (July/August 2019)

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (a book that’s on your list because nothing else by Margaret Atwood is on the rest of this list and That Is Unacceptable) (12/19/2019)

#technically i still have 3 books to go on my 2015 list #but i need an audiobook i can listen to now so #here we go!!!