Bookish Thoughts

I forget how I heard about this book, but as soon as I did, I became obsessed with reading it. It's an experimental sort of book, a collaboration between JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. It's definitely a different sort of reading experience that any other I've had before. This is a book of many layers, and it requires the reader to keep track of a bunch of stuff at once. The foundation is the "fictional" book, Book of Theseus . Fictional is in quotes because that book does, obviously, exist. You read it as part of reading this book. But all the other information about it, the author and his life and the 19 books he wrote before it, do not actually exist except in the world of this book. Book of Theseus  is presented as the final book this author, Straka, ever wrote. And he actually died before he finished it. So his longtime friend and translator finished it for him and had it published posthumously. Footnotes throughout the book comment on their relationship, as we...

It's always interesting when a story gets as much hype as Big Little Lies  has over the past year. There's always a chance that it won't live up to it. Then again, these things are often receiving all that attention for a reason, and they're usually worth checking out. The trick is to time it so that you're expectations match up with reality. This time, it worked. I loved this book. I read it so much faster than I expected to, partly because I couldn't put it down and partly because it was just that easy to read. The story opens as a murder mystery, but the mystery is doubled. Not only do you not know who the killer is, you don't know who the victim is. The book then rewinds six months to plot out all the events leading up to the murder. Full disclosure: I went into this book knowing who would die. I had a pretty good idea who the killer was (I ended up being wrong, actually). But that didn't detract from the experience at all. On the contrary, the a...

I struggled with this book. It was interesting, and I think it's important. But it also felt a little shallow and contrived. Things were a bit too perfect, whole passages felt like they'd been lifted from a textbook. So while this book was certainly affecting (and yes I cried) it also left me feeling manipulated and distrustful. Which is a shame, because I think there's important information here. But the presentation has me questioning everything. The book follows Alice, a fifty-year old professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. My only other reference point for this disease is that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, had it. So I can't claim to be an expert in any way. But after watching Pratchett struggle for many years, and continue to work and fight and speak out, this book felt rushed. The titular character, Alice, goes from a lecturing professor to unable to recognize her own children in less tha...

I struggled mightily with this book. I very nearly abandoned it (and perhaps I should have). But it's a classic and it's not very long and I was already well over halfway through it. Instead I took an extended break and then picked at it, ten pages at a time, until I finally reached the end. I'm not sure whether or not I'm glad I stuck with it. I am, perhaps, glad I read it. But I can't say that I liked it very much. The language was the biggest barrier to me. It demands too much attention for me to read a paragraph at a time while keeping half an eye on my son. But neither could I sink into it for very long. After twenty pages or so I'd find myself bored. Overwhelmed by the language and trying to hold on to what I'd just read. A more generous person might say that it's a book to be savored. And perhaps it is. If you can find anything in it that you want to savor. See the real problem is that I didn't care for either Therese or Carol. I couldn...

I saw the movie based on this book ages ago. My mom read the book at about the same time, but I didn't pick it up. It was during a time in my life that I wanted light and easy books, escapist fantasies. This book was a bit too heavy for me to commit to. But I did eventually get around to it. And I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful rumination on friendship and family. On class and culture. On guilt and atonement. It's about the ties that nothing, not distance or time or betrayal, can break completely. We first meet the protagonist, Amir, as a young boy in Afghanistan. His father is a wealthy businessman and great philanthropist. They live comfortably, in a nice house with servants. Amir's father gives back to the community in every way he can, from building and funding an orphanage to giving money to every homeless person he comes across. His great disappointment is Amir, who is constantly failing to live up to his expectations. Amir and Hassan, the servant's ...

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye , is a classic for a reason. The language is lovely, straddling the line between poetry and prose. And the subject matter is heavy, with more layers revealed the longer you sit with it. Structurally, Morrison reminds me of Ray Bradbury, though that could just be because I read Dandelion Wine  so recently. This is less of a novel and more a series of vignettes, told from multiple points of view. But unlike Dandelion Wine , where the goal was to invoke a sense of nostalgia for small towns and childhood summers, Morrison uses the various stories to demonstrate how damaging institutional racism and abuse can be. The subject of the story, Pecola, is utterly destroyed by novel's end. It's not just the various hardships she faces, both overt and more subtle, that break her down. It's her complete lack of resilience, thanks to her crappy home life and lack of real friends. There is literally no one to love her, and it ruins her li...

Ever since I read Americanah I can't get enough of Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie's work. It's a shame she's written so few books (so far), but I'm stretching them out as long as I can. Purple Hibiscus is her first novel, and it definitely reads like a first novel. Not that it's bad. It's wonderful and sad and hopeful just like her other work. But it's not as polished as the novels that came later. Not as layered or dense or long. The story is narrated by Kambili, a sheltered 15-year-old whose world-view shatters when she finally gets out from under her father's control for a brief time. Kambili is young and naive. She's been taught to worship her father, and so she does. But his abuse of her, her brother, and her mother, obvious to the reader from the beginning, becomes harder and harder for Kambili to accept. Kambili is a strange mix of naive and wise. The naivete makes sense. Every aspect of her life is controlled by her father, who will pu...

I'd been half intending to read this book for a while. It seemed like one of those books I should read, even though it only half interested me. Then I read this fantastic essay titled Men Explain Lolita to Me , and shortly after that I came across this book at a library sale. And that was that. I ended up liking this book much more than I expected to, for the most part. I entered into it worried that I would miss most of the literary references. I've only read 2/3 of Lolita , after all. But the book stretches far beyond Nabakov's most famous work, encompassing not only his other work but a wealth of classic Western authors. Most of the references are explained well enough that I was able to understand them even if I hadn't read the source material. Though the book was much more interesting when I was familiar with the work being discussed and could compare my own interpretation to that of Nafisi and her students. The book is divided into four sections. Lolita concer...

I was expecting this book to be sad. It opens with the death of a sixteen-year-old girl and follows the aftermath as her family slowly falls apart. But somehow I wasn't quite prepared for just how unrelentingly tragic it is. The tragedy stretches back years, detailing the forced compromises and abandoned dreams that led to a teenage girl with more secrets than her family could even begin to suspect. Lydia's death is the mystery at the heart of the book. Was it murder or suicide? What could have compelled her to leave her house in the middle of the night? Answering these questions takes you back to not just Lydia's childhood, but to her parents' courtship and their childhoods as well. Her father is Chinese-American, and he spend his whole life wanting to blend in. Her mother is determined to be a doctor, to study physics, to do anything but end up as a housewife like her mother. But those dreams are deferred in favor of her kids, and then deferred again and again unt...

This is an amazing, powerful, heavy book about love and betrayal and war. The story follows two sisters and their lovers and servants in Nigeria in the 1960s, before and during the Nigerian Civil War and the rise and fall of the brief nation, Biafra. I hadn't ever heard of this period in history before I encountered the work of Adichie. That's American education for you. We weren't really involved in this in any way, except for how we shaped it by ignoring it. Inside the pages of the book, one of the character is working on another book, a non-fiction account of the war titled The World Was Silent While We Died . It wasn't just silent then, it remains largely silent now. There's a lot going on here. The politics of the situation are complicated and Adichie does a great job distilling them through the use of ongoing conversations between the characters. Even moreso than in Americanah , debate is a central feature of this book. Well, the first half anyway. Once th...

I picked this book up in the airport in Istanbul when we were there in October. I'd been meaning to read Elif Shafak's work for a while, and since she's one of Turkey's most popular authors, it seemed like a good souvenir. I wasn't really sure what it was about, except that my mother-in-law really enjoyed it as an Armenian American. And boy, does this book dive into the Armenian-Turkish conflict. I'm glad I married in to an Armenian family and had some context for this book going into it. Granted, that's all from the Armenian side of things. But it was still good background to have. The book follows two families. One is Armenian-American, living in San Francisco after the grandmother was forced out during the genocide. The other lives in Turkey. The Armenians are focused on the past. Everything they do and believe is shaped by the genocide, even for young Armanoush who is threee generations removed from it. The Turkish family is more focused on the pr...

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer. Her books don't have a lot of plot, and they tend to be a bit all over the place. But the longer you sit with them, the more depths you find. These books are dense, and they take a lot of digesting. I liked On Beauty more than White Teeth . This book is tighter, more focused. Both the beginning and ending make sense to me in the context of the entire story. I know why Smith started where she did, with Jerome's emails. And I liked the ending. It was a bit abrupt, very loose and ambiguous. But it makes sense for this story. This book follows a family living in a small liberal college town in Massachusetts as they interact with a much more conservative family, the patriarch of which is their patriarch's greatest rival. Smith pokes into politics, race, class. And while she didn't really change my mind about anything, I thought she did a decent job of presenting both sides of the arguments, skewering the ones that becam...

When I first heard about The Bees , I was excited to read it. It's the tale of a worker bee, Flora 717, who discovers secrets within her hive and must save her sisters. It sounded like it would be different, unlike anything else I was reading. Unfortunately, despite the cast of bees, the book ended up being familiar and predictable. I shouldn't be that surprised. There are no new stories, after all. But bees have nothing to add to the story of a dystopian society that must be overhauled. In fact they rather detract from it, since I had a hard time viewing this working hive as a dystopian society. I did learn some fun facts about bees (all cross checked on the internet.) Bees communicate by dance as well as scent, they kill any males who are still around when winter approaches, and they make a bread-like substance from pollen. It was also interesting that Flora managed to be the most obedient and dutiful rebel ever. She doesn't overthrown tradition so much ...

Back in high school, all of my friends took AP English and I didn't. At the time it made sense. Mudd really didn't care about AP English, and since my high school capped us at 3 AP courses, I filled that space with physics and calculus. I don't regret that decision, but I did miss out on some interesting books. So I'm going back to fill in these gaps, and the latest "missed" book is Tess. I can't even really remember how my friends reacted to this book. I'm not entirely sure how I would have reacted to it. Or how it was taught. I doubt I'd have been ready for it when I was 17. But now I shuddered almost immediately when Alec was introduced - ignoring Tess' boundaries from the start and then blaming her for his every transgression. Even Angel, presented as the perfect man, comes across as pretty awful. Really this is a book about how much it sucks to be a woman. Tess is raped. Her child dies before it can be baptized. She falls in love and l...

If this book hadn't been a pick for my book club, I doubt I would have finished it. The ending lasted longer than  Return of the King 's. It's not that this book was bad. In fact it was a lot more readable than I expected it to be. Especially after I gave up on  Middlemarch  last month. But it is so far outside my normal wheelhouse. A sensation novel from the 1860s that moves impossibly slow for my more modern sensibilities. And completely predictable to boot. But getting exposure to stuff like this is why I joined a book club in the first place. There were some highlights. Lady Audley, the villainess of the piece, is nearly sympathetic until she basically throws it all away in the end. She was so close to escaping scot free. But we can't have that. So her nephew, who spends the book investigating the disappearance of his friend and having long-winded inner monologues about women, convinces her to confess her sins and locks her away in a mad house. And everyone exce...

White Teeth  is the kind of book you write essays about. Essays about immigration and family and the differences between the first generation and the second. Essays about religion vs science and progress vs tradition. About learning from mistakes and repeating the same old mistakes on down the generations. Essays about colonialism, xenophobia, racism, and never knowing where you belong. Essays about teeth and all their possible symbolic meaning and whether or not Irie ever became a dentist. What I'm trying to say is that this is a very dense book with a lot going on. It's going to stick with me for a while. But I had some trouble with it. The plot jumps around a lot, and it takes a while for some of the threads to come together. It took longer than usual for me to get into this book. Not that I was uninterested, I just wasn't particularly hooked for the first few chapters. Then it ended really suddenly, and I was left wanting more. But it didn't take me too long to ma...

I felt a little bad when I abandoned  Middlemarch  after 120 pages. I don't often abandon books, and there's always some residual guilt that comes along with it. But then I picked up Junot Diaz's  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and I fell head over heels in love on practically the first page. This is why I let myself abandon books - so I have more time to spend with the ones I enjoy. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  is not just about Oscar Wao. It's about his entire family, going back to the time of his grandfather, who was cursed. The entire family struggles with the curse, coming back again and again to play out the same tragedies, unable to break free. But it's also about the Dominican Republic, the immigrant experience in America and diaspora. About not really being able to go home, but not quite fitting in in your new home either. It's about the toxicity of machismo culture, which Oscar struggles to live up to his entire life and Lola may o...

Ugh. Okay. It may be unfair of me to "review" this book, since I didn't make it very far. But I've talked about other books I've abandoned, so I'm talking about this one, too. Middlemarch  is one of those beloved classics that everyone is supposed to have read. It's a staple of literature, telling the story of a small, English town in the early 1800s. A sprawling tale, encompassing a wealth of people and years. And it is so goddamned boring. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of these characters. Whether that's because there were too many, meaning that as soon as I might care about someone they disappeared, or whether they were actually just caricatures (the prissy maiden, the uptight doctor, the foolish eldest son), or whether I just couldn't penetrate the language I have no idea. I would read a page or two, realize I hadn't absorbed any of it, and just not care to try and re-read it. What it comes down to is that I was bo...

Boy, Snow, Bird  is Helen Oyeyemi's latest book and the third one of hers that I've read. It got a lot of attention last year, and after I fell deeply in love with  Mr. Fox , I had to pick this one up. This one didn't speak to me on quite the level that  Mr. Fox  did, and I really didn't like the ending, but it's overall a good book and an interesting meditation on race and womanhood. This story uses the framework of Snow White to comment on beauty and families and secrets. Boy doesn't set out to become a wicked stepmother, and she sort of redeems herself by the end, but she does send Snow away, jealous on some level of her beauty. Snow was born to a couple who were both from light-skinned black families. They had fled the south for Massachusetts, where they were able to pass as white. And the whole family was overjoyed when Snow was born lighter than anyone else in the family, beautiful and with a life of opportunities ahead of her. Of course her mother die...

I read this book in high school, and unlike so many other people I actually did all of my assigned reading in school. I decided to re-read it because I didn't remember a thing about it. What's weird is that I definitely remember reading this book. It was the first time I was allowed to read one of my grandfather's fancy books, so I took great care of it. I distinctly remember sitting in an auto shop, reading this for hours, while my first car got its first oil change (the first one I gave it anyway). I remember talking about the symbolism and taking quizzes. But aside from the knitting lady and the opening and closing lines, I couldn't tell you a thing about the plot or characters or anything. Having re-read it, I think it's mostly because Dickens uses so many words. He repeats himself, goes off on tangents and comes back to the point within a single sentence. His descriptions are flowery. And while he sometimes sets the scene in an incredibly powerful way, more...