2024 Books: June and July
When I was collecting the books from earlier in 2024 I noticed that most of the titles were contemporary and there was not much non-fiction- I can see how I responded to that in June, July and August- I see an effort to read older books and non-fiction titles. My non-fiction issues improved when the New York Times released its Top 100 Books of the 21st Century, which had plenty of non-fiction titles I hadn't read. That list was published in June or July of 2024. Looking back at it, I think 2024 is likely to be the last great reading year for this blog. It seems like I'm going to be spending more intellectual energy on my job and less time driving around Southern California. I don't think I read half as many books this year during the same time period.
Published: 6/3/24
Audiobook Review
The Way That Leads Among the Lost (2024)
by Angela Garcia
Sourcing non-fiction consistently is tough. Mostly I rely on the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times for ideas, but the number of potential titles is limited since I don't go in for biography, autobiography, memoir or books about current events. I also don't like books about people travelling or books about subject I am actually interested in, but are pitched at a more general audience. I also don't want to read books on subjects I'm actually interested in that are meant for specialists in the field. The Way That Leads Among the Lost is an interesting work of non-fiction about the world of Anexos, semi-legitimate drug treatment centers that proliferate in the informal economy of Mexico and in the United States near the southwestern border.
I checked out the Audiobook from the library after I read the New York Times book review, which was mixed but convinced me based on the subject matter. I'd never heard about Anexos before despite 20 plus years practicing criminal defense on the southern border. It seems like a phenomenon I would have read about in probation reports written about my Mexican national clients, many of whom have grappled with drug addiction.
Basically, in Mexico, if your kid has a drug problem and you aren't super rich, you pay a bunch of thugs to kidnap them and they are then locked inside a room with a bunch of other addicts, where they are forced to give lengthy testimonies about their history of abuse and addiction. The stay is indefinite, but can go on for months and even years. The environment is complicated by the presence of the mentally ill, committed for their own protections, and some people who simply stashed by parents who need to be elsewhere. It's all loosely based on the credo of alcoholics anonymous, particularly the part where you recount your sins in a group setting- testifying they call it here.
Garcia presents herself as a Stanford trained academic doing field work in anthropology, but she also introduces a narrative involving her own experience, in which she was essentially abandoned by her feckless parents as a young teen and forced to find her own way in the wilds of New Mexico, where she experimented with drugs and homelessness but eventually found her way to Stanford. In one particularly interesting chapter Garcia herself participates in a desert session of confession, which sounds like the camping part of Coachella without music, fun or food but with people forced to spend hours recounting their traumas.
As one can perhaps imagine about a Stanford trained anthropologist, Garcia isn't here to tell us whether Anexos work or don't work, or whether they are good or bad. They exist and they are described. Overall the tone of The Way That Leads Among the Lost is more novelistic than academic which is a credit to Garcia. Not every observation lands, and the whole thing doesn't tie together as tightly as it might, but the reader will come away with a firm understanding of the Anexos phenomenon .
Published: 6/6/24
I Who Have Never Known Men (1995)
by Jacqueline Harpmen
I was sitting in a dog cafe with my boo this week and we saw a woman reading Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Naturally I asked her what she thought since anyone who takes out a copy of Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh is begging to be asked. She said she loved it, loved Moshfegh, and the three of us sat there and chatted about books for a minute. She recommended this book, I Who Have Never Known Men, translated from the French into English in 1998. I managed to get an eBook copy from the Los Angles Public Library almost immediately. It was brought back into print in 2020 and the edition I read was from 2022, so I think this would be in the category of "rediscovered classic." It wasn't ignored back in the 1990's- the New York Times reviewed it (in two sentences, to be fair), and Kirkus compared it to The Handmaid's Tale, which is an apt comparison.
Harpmen never had another book translated into English and I Who Have Never Known Men was decades ahead of its time. We know this because The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 and didn't really take off until 2016 when the first season of the increasingly ridiculous television show (which is still running!) reminded everyone that the fiction of feminist of dystopia was a pretty rich hunting ground for think pieces. For me, the craziest part of the revival of Handmaid's Tale was that Atwood published a sequel, The Testaments, in 2019, and that this sequel actually won The Booker Prize- which has to be the biggest make up prize in the history of major literary awards.
These days, feminist-tinged dystopian fiction could take up a book shelf- I try to read all of it, since the combination of genre and literary concern is a consistent theme on this blog. It makes sense that I Who Have Never Known Men would be revived in this environment. I found it a grossly compelling and incredibly dark read. It's only 175 pages- you can read it in a couple hours. I actually got up a half hour early to finish it up and I'm sure I won't forget it.
Published 6/6/24
Audiobook Review
Every Living Thing (2024)
by Jason Roberts
Every Living Thing is a non-fiction book about the history of the attempts by humanity to scientifically classify life by species. The most famous name is Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who is generally credited with the classificatory system of life: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. Linnaeus was operating well in advance of the modern advances in chemistry and biology, i.e. the discovery of dna and genetics, and the major point Roberts makes about him is that he believes that once a species was established, it was immutable, and that renders his entire classificatory system faintly ridiculous. His system is even more ridiculous today, where genetic analysis has made it quite clear that the scientific basis for up to one third of named species collapses at the genetic level. Roberts also makes the point that we as a species have likely catalogued less than one percent of the existing life on this planet.
As the foil to Linnaeus, Roberts advances Georges Buffon, a French scholar who was making the same arguments that Darwin would raise a generation later, in other words, evolution, but was operating in an environment (Pre-Revolutionary France) where such ideas would have seen him killed. Buffon argued that species were not consistent over time, that in fact they changed, and the idea of a fixed species through history was absurd. He lost that argument, and even Darwin hadn't heard of him until he wrote a draft of Origin of Species and someone alerted him to the similarity.
Roberts throws in some interesting material about recent discoveries in genetics and DNA that call into question our somewhat settled ideas about those fields, but the meat of the book is devoted to exposing just how wrong, and successful, Carl Linnaeus was an inventor of the classificatory system of life that we still adhere to today.
Published: 6/7/24
Audiobook Review
East Goes West (1937)
by Younghill Kang
Before I wrote this post I went back and looked at my post that collected books on 1930's American Literature. Looking at the list of books- which is basically the relevant selections from the original 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die with an eye towards updating and revision, it's clear that the place to cut is from the books selected from the world of detective fiction/noir. This category is hugely over-represented, 7 of something like 25/26/27 titled over all.
Looking at replacements... I'm sure I would put a book by John Fante in there though I couldn't tell you which. East Goes West, the first novel by a Korean-American novelist, is another strong candidate to replace the fourth Dashiell Hammett novel in the 30's American lit canon. Clocking in at a stout 400 plus pages, East Goes West is a picaresque of the American east coast from Boston to New York, written by the author, a Korean national who "slipped"(used by the editors of the book) into the country the year before the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 rendered legal immigration to the USA illegal for Asian nationals (Kang never obtained United States citizenship though he spent the rest of his life here after emigrating from Japanese controlled Korea).
I heard about Kang and East Goes West while reading A Man of Two Faces by Pulitzer Prize winning author and Professor of Literature, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Kang was mentioned as a candidate for the American literary canon who had been nonsensically excluded based on racism- that was the argument in the book. This is the second and last book from his list of a handful of titles- the other was America is in the Heart (1947)by Carlos Bulosan.
East Goes West does deserve inclusion for being a strong POV picaresque and a "first" for that particular POV (Korean-American.) I thought Kang's observation of academic life in New York and Boston were interesting on many levels. You would hope that the Asian-American experience would have some representation in the American literary canon starting the 1930's.
Published 6/11/24
Audiobook Review
Clear (2024)
by Carys Davies
I know I read West, the 2018 debut novel by Welsh author Carys Davies (She/Her, I think) but I never posted about it here. West was about a would-be fossil hunter living on the American frontier in the early 19th century. Hearing about the discovery of giant bones on the Great Plains, he leaves his family in search of his own discoveries. The family notably includes his young daughter, who splits narrating duties with her absent pere. Six years later we've got Clear, a slight 150 page novel about a Scottish minister who is dispatched to a remote island between the Orkney's and Norway to evict its sole tenant as part of the clearance movement in the UK. Other than describing the fact that this guy goes to this island and interacts with this guy, there isn't anything a reviewer can say that doesn't function as a spoiler for the plot.
I listened to the Audiobook, enjoyed the accents and the whole thing was over in a little over 3 hours.
Published 6/11/24
Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande (2024)
by Raymond Jonas
by Raymond Jonas
It's a chapter of Mexican history that Americans miss out on because it happened during our Civil War, but for a brief, shining period there was a Hapsburg monarch who purported to rule over the "Empire of Mexico." Emperor Maximillian was the younger brother of the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After his brother the Emperor produced a male heir, he dropped out of the line of immediate succession and found himself dispatched to Milan to run things for his brother, but he wasn't, you know, satisfied. Meanwhile in Mexico, the Mexicans had created a republic that, among other things, confiscated and sold church property, which upset the Catholic church and Mexican conservatives.
This all led to Napoleon III floating a French "intervention" in Mexico designed to place Maximillian on the throne as a "legitimate" monarch of Mexico. Needless to say, there were, many, many, many flaws in the plan including:
1, The existence of the legitimate government of Mexico, which simply retreated and waged a decade long campaign of guerilla warfare designed to wait out the invading French army.
2. Trying to take over an existing country using borrowed money and mercenary troops.
3. The general uselessness of Maximillian
4. An inability to win over the population of Mexico to his cause.
I could go on. I had many thoughts during the course of Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande but my major take-aways were that this would make an excellent comedic prestige television show AND that it really makes American capitalism look good, because while the US was building a continent wide industrial powerhouse, the French, decades after their own revolution, were spending their money in this insane fiasco.
Maximillian was not without his positive attributes. He was an avowed fan of the indigenous population and they actually provided the bulk of his Mexican supporters, including his two top generals. He himself was not a cruel or rapacious guy, although the soldiers in his employ did get a little out of hand as they tried to suppress the guerilla tactics of the Republic. There are plenty of indelible moments in Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande, but my favorite was the afternoon that Maximillian spent collecting butterflies while his Mexican Empire was in a state of utter collapse. How 19th century European monarch!
Published 6/12/24
Audiobook Review
The Last Murder at the End of the World (2024)
by Stuart Turton
I checked out the Audiobook of The Last Murder at the End of the World by English mystery writer Stuart Turton after reading a favorable Guardian review which referenced Never Let You Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's clone book. The theme sounded interesting- the last humans on earth try to survive on a Greek island owned by a (female) tech billionaire trying to resuscitate the human race after a mysterious fog (black, with insects inside that eat you) destroys humanity. Turton comes from a detective-fiction genre background, where his books have been well received, but this book sees him determined to escape the genre restrictions while still keeping important lessons he learned succeeding with that audience- i.e. keep the story moving/everyone loves a murder mystery.
Of course, the murder mystery at the heart of the book is the trigger for a much deeper, more interesting book a la Never Let You Go. Like many authors, Turton is experimenting with a non-human narrator, here its a "bio computer" implanted in the cell structure of the island residents that allows it (Abbie is its name) to control the behavior of the people on the island and function as a voice in their head. Needless to say, "unreliable narrator" klaxons are going off on page one, and that is part of the beyond genre moves that Turton makes as the author.
Interesting themes aside, the core of The Last Murder at the End of the World is a standard who-done-it, and I felt like the machinations that Turton engineered to make it plausible within this scenario detracted from the reading/listening experience. Also would recommend the printed book over the audiobook, since it is narrated by an AI, the audiobook voice reflects that authorial choice.
Published 6/20/24
Audiobook Review
Fire Exit (2024)
by Morgan Talty
Morgan Talty's debut collection of short stories came out in 2022. I read it when it was released, but didn't write a post about it till last year when it popped up in the Maine chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where I had it at #3 for Maine, #5 for Northern New England and #12 for all of New England. I liked The Night of the Living Rez but didn't love it, probably because it was a collection of short stories and not a novel. Here, then, is the novel that the public demanded. It covers much of the same physical and mental territory: The Penobscot nation of Maine, it's people and landscapes and the intergenerational trauma and social disfunction that links his narrative to those of other Native American writers and writers from other disadvantaged socio-economic groups.
Anyone who read The Night of the Living Rez: Drinking, smoking, getting on the wagon, falling off the wagon, snowy landscapes, sleepless nights, etc. Charles Lamosway, the narrator, is a white guy who was the stepson of a Penobscot nation member whose death got him kicked off the reservation. He fathered a child with a Native woman but she chose to disguise this fact and has raised her with a Native partner who has assumed her patrimony. Charles' Mom is suffering from Alzheimer's or Dementia or both and doesn't recognize him, even though he spends most of his time in this book taking care of her. Charles is himself a recovered alcoholic who spends his free time hanging out with an active alcoholic who has no other friends.
Lamosway has become determined to tell his daughter "the truth," that he is her biological father for reasons that remain somewhat unclear. Eventually, he articulates the idea that he needs to tell her "his stories" so that she understands her history, but I am frankly unclear, and this after reading the book, what he possibly had of value to tell her.
What I did find very interesting is that Talty is an author who wrote a first novel that IS NOT a thinly veiled take on his own experience. Talty is actually a member of the Penobscot nation, so Charles, a white guy raised on the res, can only be a creation of his. This marks him out as being more advanced then the great majority of first-time authors who are either writing a thinly veiled book about their own experience growing up, or their own experience as a young adult or their own family history.
Like Tommy Orange did in There There I yearn to see Talty move back in time- to retell the Native/European encounter from the perspective of the Native side. It's a POV that has been sorely neglected by the American publishing industry and we could do with a shelf full of historical fiction from the Native perspective, authored by Native writers.
It was just happenstance that I listened to the Audiobook instead of reading the e-Book (though I might buy a copy if I see it on sale inside Maine)- the Audiobook makes sense because it is a first-person narrator, single voice novel. On the other hand, the subject matter is depressing and I would have personally preferred to grapple with this work on the printed (or e-printed) page. I would recommend actually getting a copy of the physical book.
Published: 6/24/24
Permutation City (1994)
by Greg Egan
Diaspora, Australian author Greg Egan's mind-blowing 1997 novel about life, post-life, the universe and everything, really intrigued me when I read it last month. Intrigued me enough so that I immediately turned around and checked out his 1994 novel, Permutation City, about the idea that at some point we will be able to scan ourselves "into the cloud" and live forever. It's a concept that is at the heart of Diaspora, and Permutation City can be seen as a kind of prequel- how the world got from the present circa 1990 to his post-human world of the future in Diaspora.
Permutation City has its moments but I found it almost impossible to follow. Egan labels the scanned people "copies" but much of the book involves scans who think they may be people and people who think they may be scans and the narrators include both the scans and the original people and different scans of the same people. Keeping track of it required the same level of effort I usually reserve for experimental literary fiction. The whole book is built around the idea of a limited amount of computing power in the world that prevents the copies from running at the same speed as the real world. It's a concept that has aged poorly- an impossibly advanced virtual world whose creation obsesses the main characters basically sounds like Minecraft or Roblox. In 2024, I play Minecraft on my phone and it certainly doesn't require a worlds worth of computing power to function.
Published 6/26/24
Vengeance is Mine (2023)
by Marie NDiaye
Translated by Jordan Stump
Actress Teri Hatcher physically handed me the hardback copy of the English translation of Vengeance is Mine, the most recent novel by French author and 2009 Prix Goncourt winner Marie NDiaye, so of course I had to read the book. I hadn't heard of NDiaye but reading the book flap was enough to convince me of NDiaye's merit as a writer. First of all, the Prix Goncourt is a top-shelf literary prize, and while the English translations are not always forthcoming, the handful of winners I've read are among my favorite French authors and/or titles- Houellebecq won the year after NDiaye, and Littell won for The Kindly Ones- one of my favorite books from 2000-2010. I also loved The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier (2020 Winner). What I'm saying is that I will automatically read a Prix Goncourt winner in English translation given the opportunity, even if the opportunity isn't Teri Hatcher handing me a copy.
Truth be told, I was expecting a fragmented, elliptical tale that intertwined questions of class, family and professional intrigue, and that is exactly what I got. This was a "true crime" novel about a lawyer and her relationship to the client's family in the same way that French Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano writes "detective stories." I.E., not really at all by American genre standards. Honestly, I'm super curious about why this book got a big run by AAKnopf in the first place- it looks like they signed her up after she won the Prix Goncourt but it has been pretty quiet since then. The New York Times had reviewed only one of her books- in 2016- before this book was published last year. Mysterious. I certainly would be down to check out another book by her but I wonder how much I would appreciate it, if Modiano is a clue the answer is, "not much, probably."
Published 7/11/24
Sudden Death (2016)
by Enrique Alvaro
I convinced my book group to read Enrique Alvaro's last novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated from the Spanish, a fantasia of a book, re-imagining the counter between Cortes and the Aztec empire in a way that evoked Roberto Bolano and Quentin Tarantino at the very same time. The rest of my book group didn't care for it, but I thought it was amazing. It spurred me to buy Sudden Death, his 2016 which is built around a 16th century tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and a Spanish poet, which I read on my recent vacation to the East Coast. There was a surprising level of continuity between this book and You Dreamed of Empires, even though the two books mostly take place thousands of miles apart (scenes from Sudden Death do indeed take place in post-conquistador New Spain).
What's funny about reading this book in the context of my book club is how far a book like this one- which I really loved, is from the taste of the average reader of literary fiction-like forget about the general reader- people who read romance novels and Jonathan Kellerman books- I'm talking about the audience of people who consider themselves "serious readers"- even that group is not going to read this book, simply based on the description. And yet, both books arrive courtesy of Penguin Random House and this book arrived in paperback with pages and pages of positive reviews from English reviewers. Clearly, the critical/editorial community at the highest levels of American publishing agree with me. But none of this can make normal people read and like Enrique Alvaro. It just isn't going to happen.
Published 7/16/24
The Singularity (1960)
by Dino Buzzati
Translated from the Italian Anne Milano Appel
New York Review of Books Edition 2024
Italian author Dino Buzzati isn't a household name, but his 1940 novel, The Tartar Steppe (f/k/a The Stronghold) is well known to the sort of people who care about the world literary canon (i.e. me) and it serves as a major point of departure for the very well know J.M. Coetzee novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was turned into an absolutely insane movie starring Johnny Depp. I bought The Singularity off the new release pile at an indie bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire because it looked interesting and promised a prescient look at ethical issues surrounding AI- this from a book published in 1960, when AI was barely a thing.
Also, it's a novella so it was good for vacation reading. The story is about an Italian professor who is called away by the government to a mysterious military-type project in the Italian mountains. There, the protagonist is introduced to an AI that fills an entire valley and a cast of interesting characters. Everything is not as it seems, perhaps he faces great peril, etc. If it was published today it would be tame stuff indeed but for 1960, and in Italy, wow.
At 136 pages, it won't keep you up late, but the pay off is likewise minimal. Fun book to have available if you run into a fellow fan of The Tartar Steppe but probably not a book a general reader would seek out for any reason. The Singularity is also a good example of the type of books I'd like to be reading constantly but I just can't string them together in any meaningful way, in a way that relieves the incessant burden of deciding what to read next.
Published 7/17/24
Audiobook Review
The Language Puzzle:
Piecing Together the Six-Million Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024)
by Steven Mithen
If you want to skip reading this book I can give you the ultimate thesis in a nutshell:
"When you get right down to it, fully modern language got over the hump after humans managed to tame fire, which led to them sitting around a fire at night, and listening to one another talk. The humans who were the best at telling stories around the campfire did better in the natural selection process and became the leaders of early humanity, leading to the development of modern, human language."
Mithen really takes the long view- he is very serious about the six million year timeline, if only to emphasis how late in the game what we know as language actually developed. Mithen pieces his story together using a variety of disciplines that typically operate in silos: archeology, genetics, linguistics and zoology. His references to modern languages are mostly limited to their use as illustrations of shifts that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, or deep characteristics of language that have been there from the beginning.
Even with the "this is going to be obsolete before its published" disclaimer that all popular authors writing about advances in genetic science give, the chapter related to genetics was particularly intriguing. I think I had heard that we had managed to sequence a Neanderthals genome, but I certainly didn't know the things Mithen writes about how those differences influenced language development. I gather, from this and other books, that even post-sequencing DNA genetics remains complicated because the way genes interact is complicated and it is highly unusual that you can trace anything to one exact gene.
I enjoyed the Audiobook because I actually got to hear all the different noises reference in the book instead of having to puzzle everything out on my own.
Published 7/18/24
River of Shadows:
Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003)
by Rebecca Solnit
This is going to sound crazy, but I actually had the idea to write this exact book, or something like it, then I went and looked to see if anyone had already it, and found that Rebecca Solnit had written precisely the same book I had considered writing, in 2003. I'd never heard of it before I looked it up after having the same idea myself (20 years later lol), but it won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism in 2004 as well as some lesser literary awards, so it isn't in any way obscure.
I had the idea during a recent visit to the important locations of the Modoc War in Northern California/Southern Oregon between several bands of Modoc Native Americans and the United States Army(!) between 1872 and 1873. During that war, the US Army hired San Francisco photographer and pioneer in the field of moving pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, to document the war, and he came up and took a series of photos. It was while looking at one of those photos in the Fort Klamath historical site that I had the idea for this exact book that Rebecca Solnit wrote (with the support of a Guggenheim grant!) over 20 years ago.
Of course, the Modoc War is just a chapter in this much longer book about the intersection of capitalism, photography, the American West and the motion picture business, and Muybridge is involved enough to keep the whole book interesting. In fact, I'm surprised this book hasn't been turned into a biopic or prestige TV piece- it has the action to support it- including Muybridge murdering his wife's' lover in cold blood, spectacular photography trips all over the western hemisphere and a supporting cast of characters ranging from Leland Stanford to Thomas Edison.
Published 7/22/24
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969)
by John A. Williams
I would not have read the excellent Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light by John A. Williams if I had not already Night Songs, also by John A. Williams, as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. Night Songs is about a drug-addicted jazz musician and his compatriots, while Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is about the steps taken by a mild mannered college professor and civil rights activist to incite a race war by using a Israeli hit man to murder a NYC cop who himself murdered a black high school student. It seems almost unfathomable to me that this book was published by a major publishing house, during the fall of 1969, and basically no one noticed or cared. It certainly isn't popular today, despite being the earliest example I know of the post-World War II, post-Vietnam American Civil War scenario in literature.
These days we associate a race based Civil War with the right, but Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light tells it from the other side, down to a group of militants in South Los Angeles who are depicted collaborating with the John Birch society for a common end. It isn't a perfect novel, and it is a bummer that he cuts the narrative off right at the beginning of the race war itself, but still, shocking for its time and still shocking today, no wonder it's been "forgotten."
Published 7/23/24
Good Material (2024)
by Dolly Alderton
Good Material, the new novel by English writer Dolly Alderton, is our book club pick for tomorrow night. While I'm not fundamentally opposed to a relationship/break-up novel it's not a genre I typically engage. I've experienced by own relationships and break-ups over the years and it doesn't seem like a particularly interesting topic, categorically speaking. But there are exceptions to every rule- just look at the rise of Sally Rooney, who became a literary icon based on little more then whimsical and witty banter between two young Irish people. I really liked her first novel- or maybe it was her second- the one that catapulted her to global notoriety.
Based on some positive reviews I'd read and what I know about the author I had an inkling this might be a better than average example of this category- the mere fact that it got released in the United States by a big publisher is a clue, because if you go to London you will see they have their own domestic versions of the type of books that mirror ours but which never get released in the United States. The ones that have made it across- Bridget Jones, the Nick Hornsby oeuvre- are inevitably softened and transposed as they make their way up the American cultural stair case.
Fundamentally a break-up novel, I found the first 80 percent of the book (I read it on my Kindle) extremely tedious and occasionally funny and the last 20 percent pretty gripping. Specifically, we get the whole book from the perspective of the guy in the relationship- a balding, semi-failed stand-up comedian who supports himself picking up shifts at his friend's cheese stall and mc'ing and performing at third-tier corporate events and weddings, that for some reason, want to book a stand-up comedian. Andy, as it turns out, is less interesting than Jen, but Alderton keeps us from her thoughts until the end of the book.
At various times as I made it through Andy's post-break travails, it occurred to me that Alderton might have constructed a male version of the manic pixie dream girl- a whimsical figure, typically sporting bangs and a very louche attitude to the necessities of adult life. In fact, if I could ask the author one question about this book it would be to what degree she was aware of the trope/character and whether it influenced her writing of this male character.
At the end I was gratified by the fact that Jen's observations about Andy matched my own assessment- maybe that is the point? But certainly Good Material really pulls itself together with the third fact.
Published 7/26/24
Audiobook Review
Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)
by Ted Chiang
I am a big fan of the movie Arrival about the efforts by humanity to decode the language of aliens who arrive on Earth (in the story they are on ships in orbit, in the film they hover above the ground in giant ships). Arrival was based on the title story of this collection of short-stories by American author Ted Chiang. After finishing the book- the audiobook- I was surprised to learn that this collection was published way back in 2002. Science fiction sometimes ages poorly, particularly short-stories which may become outdated with rapid changes in technology. That was not the case here- all of these stories hold up, particularly Tower of Babylon, his first story, which is a take on the Biblical tale and Seventy-Two Letters, which draws on Victorian technology and Kabbalah. Like many authors working in this genre, Chiang is strong on ideas and less strong on the mechanics of fiction, with stories that feature lengthy exposition, inner monologues and extremely limited casts of characters, but the ideas are so strong that they overcome any weaknesses. Sad I didn't read this collection decades ago.
Published 7/31/24
Pink Slime (2024)
by Fernanda Trias
I confused Uruguayan author Fernanda Trias with Fernanda Melchor (Mexican), but I read Pink Slime because it is another excellent example of the wave of speculative/realist fiction emerging out of Latin America. I could name a half dozen books just from my blog- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina), is one of my favorite books of this decade. Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023) by Agustina Bazterrica, who also wrote Tender is the Flesh, one of my favorite books from 2019. There is You Glow in the Dark (2024)by Liliana Colanzi, and I'm sure, others that I've missed. These books exist alongside their non-speculative counterparts- authors like the aforementioned Melchor, and Brazilian Ana Paula Maia.
I was so anxious to read Pink Slime that I read it on my phone, on the native reader for the Libby library app, which was a major sacrifice. Pink Slime takes place in an unnamed Latin American or possibly Southern European nation- there is a coast line, towns further inland and geographic features of the city that evoke specific cities- la rambla (Barcelona) and barrio alta (Lisbon) but appear to be used generically here. The narrator and protagonist is unnamed, working as a caretaker for Mauro who has the syndrome where he never feels full from eating and is essentially constantly hungry. Mauro's wealthy parents are absent for a reason unexplained, and the narrator is housebound as the coastal city is beset by a killing red wind that flays humans alive after infection. Respite comes in the form of a thick, bad smelling fog that allows transit around the increasingly deserted city. Food, the pink slime of the title, comes from a chicken processing plant, newly constructed amid dwindling food supplies.
Pink Slime is a novel of pre-apocalyptic survival and I found it compelling, worth picking up from the library for sure.
Published 8/6/24
Audiobook Review
Exhalation (2019)
by Ted Chiang
What is crazy about author/intellectual Ted Chiang is that he has 125 reference in the New York Times data set and none of them are a full-length book review of Exhalation, his 2019 short-story collection. Only five years later he's been hailed as a genius-level thinker about the potential impacts of AI on our society. I believe Chiang's real break-through outside the science-fiction community was the success of Arrival, based on a short story from his first collection. Arrival hit theaters in 2016, so that makes it doubly surprising that Exhalation didn't rate a full New York Times book review.
You'd have to chalk it up to the double prejudice against genre fiction and short stories. It's interesting to me that Chiang is known as an AI expert, because I think his most interesting stories are the ones that deal with religion. In this collection Omphalos- which won a Locus Award in 2020- is a good example. Omphalos takes place in a world where "young earth creationism" was proved true and accepted as scientific fact in a world that is otherwise similar to ours. Basing science fiction stories on religious concepts or themes is a particularly interesting approach to science fiction- and you could almost call it a different genre, one I think that Chiang may have invented? I certainly can't think of another example- maybe Chabon's alt-history The Secret Yiddish Police-Man's Union. But the AI stuff is good too- in this collection The Lifecycle of Software Objects was a particularly interesting take on the after life of digitally created "pets." That story caused me to think more about AI then I have in months.
Published 8/8/24
Audiobook Review
The Book of Elsewhere (2024)
by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville
Back in 2021 Reeves launched his personal IP project of BRZRKR or "beserker"- a comic book series about a deathless eternal warrior who is 77 thousand years old. I like Reeves well enough, but I haven't been a regular reader of comic books since high school and the logline didn't sound particularly inventive. Then, last month, The Book of Elsewhere was released as a "Keanu Reeves novel actually written by China Mieville." That description caught my eye, as did several reviews which came to the conclusion that The Book of Elsewhere was way more interesting than one would expect.
English author Chine Mieville has been on my radar for years but I haven't really honed in on him, maybe because this is his first novel in twelve years, or maybe it's because he has been categorized as a writer of fantasy instead of being properly categorized as a writer who bridges fantasy/science fiction/social science literature. If I'd know what he was actually about I would have read through his bibliography years ago. Based on The Book of Elsewhere, I immediately went to start with his back catalog. \
Somewhat confusingly, The Book of Elsewhere is described as taking place in an "alternate universe" of the BRZRKR comic, which suggests it's non-canon, but since canon is a twelve issue comic book about an immortal warrior who is also sad, my sense is that the alternate universe conceit isn't important. The set up is that B or UNrat- who you have to imagine as Keanu Reeves, exists in the present day as a "super soldier" for the US government. He goes out on Black-ops, where due to the vagaries of his bezerker state, he sometimes kills both friend and foe indiscriminately. When he comes out of his fugue state he is often sad about what he has done. He is also sad about being unable to die. Part of the back story here is that human civilization is actually tens of thousands of years old, and we just haven't found out about the part that came before ancient Mesopotamia.
The book shifts between the present and the past. Besides the main dude, there is the cast of contemporary characters, soldiers he fights with and scientists the government has recruited to study him. There is a similarly eternal pig who has been trying to kill him over and over again for centuries. There is a "life-based" cult who worship the pig and seek to kill B/UNrat- again for millennia.
The main Audiobook narrator is Edoardo Bellerini who is also the Audiobook narrator for the My Struggle series by Knausgaard, which is pretty insane- just writing as someone who listened to the Audiobook for My Struggle. This was actually a killer Audiobook because of the shifting voices back and forth through time. As other reviewers have noted, it is, indeed, way better than it has any right to be. I hope they make a movie/tv show out of this book rather than the comic.
Published 8/13/24
A Visionary Madness (2003)
by Mike Jay
I heard about this book on Instagram, via an account of an academic I follow. Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that the internet makes everything available forever, this simply isn't proving to be the case. A good example is the journalism written during the internet era for outlets like Vice Media or the Gawker blog family. All that stuff is just gone. I've observed this interesting dynamic between the operation of copyright upon the ability of audiences to spread a given work vs. the dynamic of public domain materials which conversely effects the ability of publishers to generate interest in a given work. This dynamic tracks the release cycle for a specific work, with the former dynamic operating at the beginning and the latter taking over after a certain number of years.
I mention that because I'd never heard of The Air Loom Gang before I saw it on instagram. It's a good example of a book that exists as a cult classic, though not a particularly succesful example of that genre. Jay writes about James Tilly, a real person who lived in the UK (with short trips to France) around the time of the French Revolution. He showed up in London after said Revolution and demanded an audience with Lord Liverpool and when he was refused he made public accusations that Liverpool was a traitor to the crown. He claimed he was part of a secret mission to France to broker a peace between the UK and revolutionary France.
At Lord Liverpool's request, he was committed to the then new insinuation of the insane asylum, known as Bedlam where he spent the next couple decades loudly proclaiming his sanity. The book delves into the nature of his madness, which is revealed as the first technologically driven episode of paranoid-schizophrenia. He makes this argument because Tilly claimed to be the victim of a secret influencing machine that was hidden below the streets of London. He sketched the device, which was equally intricate and insane. As Jay makes clear, Tilly was insane, but in a very interesting way. It's a book that deserves to be on any shelf where Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault resides but I'm pretty sure finding a hard copy outside a library is rough.
Published 8/15/24
The Hasheesh Eater (1857)
by Fitz Hugh Ludlow
The Hasheesh Eater is generally considered to be the first book that extols the "drug culture" of America. Obviously, it was written decades before such a culture actually existed, and was then revived by writers from the Beat Generation and so forth. To be clear, Ludlow was a fan of "hasheesh" which is a concentrated form of cannabis- not a form of opium. Despite a professional career in the criminal justice system I was still fuzzy on the distinction going in to The Hasheesh Eater. Ludlow's frame of reference is assuredly classical in terms of his subjective experience- the hallucinations and so forth.
The hallucinations he describes sound more like what a modern person what associate with hallucinatory drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca. He also describes a level of psychological dependence that reads as ridiculous in 2024, more in line with how marijuana was depicted at the height of the War Against Drugs of the 1980's. Even though we now live in a country where marijuana is legal in half the states (and all the important states) in America it is still hard to imagine the state of American society BEFORE marijuana prohibition- when marijuana was legal, as was cocaine and opium.
Published 8/19/24
On Such a Full Sea (2014)
by Chang Rae Lee
I read Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's 1994 debut as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, where it is part of the New York/Manhattan chapter. I enjoyed Native Speaker, so when I saw he had written a dystopian-fiction/literary fiction cross-over book a decade ago, I checked out the B.D. Wong narrated Audiobook from the library. I enjoyed the listening experience and I guess I would call On Such a Full Sea an interesting failure- again my own feelings were echoed by the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, by now Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer. I actually wanted to quote his paragraph of the state of dystopian sci-fi, literary-fiction cross over circa 2014:
Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange.” Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. -New York Times(paywall)
Amazing that Greer would single out the MaddAddam trilogy at the expense of The Handmaid's Tale, but otherwise that's a good summary. I think you'd have to put Kazuo Ishiguro in there in 2024, but besides those two things.
If I had to focus on one reason On Such a Full Sea wasn't a hit, it would be the choice of the author to use a collective second person tense to narrate- as in the, story is told from the collective perspective of the citizens of B-more, a post collapse Chinese colony occupying the ruins of Baltimore. The protagonist is Fan, daughter of B-more and a "tank diver"- someone tasked with maintaining the aqua-culture tanks that Bmore uses to cultivate fish which they then sell to the "Charters"- enclaves of wealthy post-Americans who exist largely cut off from both colonies like Bmore and the unorganized "counties"- which is a mild take on the Mad Max/The Road idea of society in the aftermath of a total collapse of government.
Fan's adventures start out after she leaves Bmore in search of her disappeared boyfriend, whose child she is carrying. Because of the second person narrator, we never get inside Fan's head and her twin desires- to find her boyfriend hopefully via her brother, one of the few colonists who have been elevated to charter life, never separate out. Time is a little imprecise because of Fan's adventures, but there is no denying that at the beginning of the book she knows she is pregnant, and by the end she is still pregnant and not one person has noticed, so we're talking a couple months tops.
But I thought the world building was interesting, and Lee is a no-doubt writer of literary fiction, so the overall quality level of the prose was very high. Not a book I would go around recommending, but I personally enjoyed the Audiobook experience.
Published 8/21/24
Brat (2024)
by Gabriel Smith
I've run into people who join multiple libraries so they can get popular books faster, on the theory that people living in dipshit Arkansas aren't going to be interested in the latest- not sure if that actually works or not, but I think about every time I have to wait three months for the latest work of hot literary fiction. Such was the case with Brat by English author Gabriel Smith, which had the good fortune to be released at essentially the same time as the Charli XCX record of the same name. He even faked an email which purported to say that Charli XCX named Brat after the novel, but that has been debunked. Still, google this book and the first 10 returns on Google all mention the serendipity of sharing a title with THE album of the summer.
The numbers haven't been great in the US- I imagine they are better in the UK. Gabriel, who I surmise is the titular Brat- though the only reference is to a shirt his ex-girlfriend owned that had brat written across the front- is a writer, in his 20's. He owes his publisher a novel, his Dad just died and his brother and sister in law want/need him to clean up the house for sale in the aftermath of Dad's death, Mom being in the later stages of dementia and confined to a home.
Gabriel is grief-stricken, handling everything badly, and to make matters worse, large sheets of his skin are peeling off. It sounds grosser than it actually is: the skin peels away to reveal...more skin. Gabriel haphazardly tries to figure out what is going on with his skin while he deals with a couple of neighbor teens with bad attitudes, a frightening deer-man who may or may not be stalking him with grievous intent, and his bitch sister-in-law. There's also his Dad's marijuana grow in the attic to attend to, manuscripts and video tapes that change their content with every reading/viewing, black mold and a collapsing roof.
In the end there is plenty of atmosphere but only the loosest outline of a plot. Smith is not concerned with a cohesive narrative, plainly. It's a fun, hipster-type read and enough to keep interested in his next book, which is hopefully neither a short-story collection nor a memoir, but not a fantastic book.
Published 8/22/24
Beautiful Days (2024)
by Zach Williams
Beautiful Days is the debut short-story collection by American author Zach Williams. I checked out the Audiobook from the library after reading the New York Times review earlier this month referred to him as a "genuine young talent...who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyche." while at the same time making many of the same points I've made here about the difficulty of writing about short-story collections. My favorite was "Ghost Image" about a divorced dad type slouching towards the end of the world at Disneyworld type resort. I also liked "Wood Sorrel House," a riff on the Groundhog Day theme featuring a terrifying infant toddler and some fine descriptive work. The Audiobook I read was well done- most of the stories (all?) feature a narrator/protagonist type with a single point of view expressed in each story, which makes for a good listening experience. I wouldn't exactly recommend Beautiful Days to all and sundry, but if you are someone who likes short stories and edgy milieus then Zach Williams is going to be your guy!
Published 8/26/24
Daughters of Shandong (2024)
by Eve J. Chung
A recent publishing trend I do appreciate are these historical novels that tell grandmothers/grandfathers story. It's an approach that gives an Auto-fictional vibe to work that otherwise might be construed as genre historical fiction. It's also great to see American authors who write books like this one instead of starting off with a bildungsroman about a character that resembles the author. As a best-seller, it's fantastic and more power to it. It's not particularly sophisticated beyond the concept itself- taking Grandma's origin story and turning it into a compelling work of historical fiction. The experience itself: the wife of a wealthy local landowner is left behind with her two "worthless" daughters when the Communist's come to town, she plots her escape out of the nascent Chinese Communist state, is very interesting.
As the author points out in her Afterword, in which she makes the "grandma's origin story" plot clear, she also points out that the major players in post-Communist victory China: The Chinese Communist Party, the British, who governed Hong Kong and the Nationalist Government of Taiwan, all had their own reasons to keep the refuge misery caused by the Communist victory quiet. You can add to that the United States, which was fighting the Korean War nearby, thus it truly isn't well documented or well understood.
I can forgive Chung her concessions to appealing to a broad, YA level audience. One point that Chung does not soften is the ingrained sexism/prejudice against daughters in Chinese civilization. It's not exactly something one can point out in polite society but it comes up all the time- Chinese families face a lot of pressure to produce a male heir and are daughters produced BEFORE sons are considered bad luck and worthless. Not something I learned about from Daughters of Shangdong but it's rare to see a work of fiction that centers this practice so squarely in the narrative. That's also either the greatest strength and or weakness- Chung's plucky grandma-as-a-girl narrator sees the world through the eyes of a strong American feminist circa 2020 alternately acknowledging subservience to and criticisms of the strong tradition of deference to elders in Chinese culture. Surely a "historically accurate" narrator would not have such a sophisticated critique.
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