Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
As the new decade approached, many websites published lists of the “Best Books of the Decade.” The novel Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill appeared on a LOT of those lists. Curious, I read it to see what all the fuss was about. It is freaking great!
“God bless the man who first taught the world how to cure olives. He and the man who invented cheese are two unsung pillars of civilization.”
“They were probably women,” muttered Fatima, fanning her face with the sleeve of her robe. “If they were men, we would remember their names.”
The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson is a historical fantasy novel about a concubine, a gay Muslim “sorcerer” (for lack of a better word), and a jinn fleeing the Inquisition after the fall of Granada. It’s good!
It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins appears to be an oral history of Daisy Jones and the Six, one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. Except it’s not. Daisy Jones and the Six never existed. None of the “interview subjects” ever existed. Daisy Jones and the Six is a completely fictional novel that uses the format of an oral history book to tell a classic tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s pretty dang great.
The thing is, I don’t think my husband expected me to be able to talk.
Pygmalion is one of the most-famous least-violent Greek myths. It’s the one in which a sculptor creates a statue and falls in love with it, the goddess of love takes pity on him, gives the statue life, and the sculptor and the now-living statue (sometimes named Galatea) get married. Maybe they have a kid or two, depending on which version of the story you read. The end.
Galatea, by Madeline Miller, takes place a little while after those events. Told from the point-of-view of Galatea, it’s a short, gut-punch of a story and a LOT darker than the original myth.
We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.
I really liked Circe, so I bought another, older book by its author (Madeline Miller): The Song of Achilles. I’m glad I did because it’s terrific.
The simplest way to describe it is that it’s The Iliad from Patroclus’ point of view. I haven’t read The Iliad, so I cannot really personally vouch for The Song of Achilles‘ faithfulness to the source material. However, based upon some wiki research and google-fu, I THINK all the important high points from The Illiad are preserved.
Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.
Along with a few Sunday school stories and fairy tales, Greek myths were some of the first stories that I was exposed to. Before I knew anything at all about hobbits or Jesus lions, I could recite the names of all the Olympians and a few of the Titans. Jason and Theseus and Hercules and Perseus were way more familiar to little-Me than Robin Hood or Wyatt Earp or Frodo. As I got older and read more of the myths, plays, and poems of ancient Greece, unedited, I became a bit uncomfortable with the casual sexism and idiotic violence of it all. Other, later works, like the Aeneid, proved deeper, prettier, and more intellectually stimulating than the Bronze Age Greek stuff. Nevertheless, I have always had a special place in my heart for the old tales.
Circe, by Madeline Miller, therefore, proved to be the perfect book to get me out of my fiction-funk. It tells the “life” story of Circe, the premier witch of ancient Greek myth, from Circe’s point of view.
History has failed us, but no matter.
[I am battling a cold/sinus thing, so apologies if this review makes even less sense than usual].
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a family saga about a four generations of a Korean family that is set in Korea and Japan. It’s a National Book Award finalist, and, in what may be an even greater honor than that, it made my Favorite Books list.
I have found that it is easier to explain why I don’t like a particular book or to point out a book’s flaws than it is to explain why I absolutely loved one. It’s like explaining why a rainbow is beautiful. I can talk about how the colors are pretty or how it made me feel, but there is something about rainbows, sunsets, and the best works of art that transcends easy explanation. You just have to experience them. Read Pachinko.
He’d chanced upon his favorite hour: a premonition of dawn without any visible sign of it.
Manhattan Beach by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan is a historical Literary Fiction novel. It is a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for the National Book Award. A whole bunch of fancy-pants critics really like it.
I guess I’m not fancy enough. The overriding emotion I felt while reading it was “meh.”
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
Tenth of December is a collection of short stories by George Saunders that was published in 2013.
Why I bought it
George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I read that earlier this year and loved it. Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel; he primarily wrote short stories before that. I wanted to explore more of his writing, so I bought Tenth of December.
Why you should buy it
If you Google “Best books 2013,” Tenth of December is going to pop up on most resulting lists. It is not overrated. George Saunders stories are most likely going to be included in a bunch of textbooks as examples of great early 21st century literature (if they aren’t already). People in the 20th century had Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. We have George Saunders.
Why his writing is good
George Saunders experiments with the forms of stories, so they’re kind of weird. But they are not just soulless intellectual exercises. They all elicit emotion from the reader and examine complex subject matter.
The following stories are in this collection:
Victory Lap
A boy decides whether to help a girl who is being kidnapped. The story switches between the point of view of the girl, the neighbor boy, and the kidnapper. The “stream of consciousness” of each of the characters is reflected in each of their points of view. They are all…different.
Sticks
Exploring themes of abuse, love, regret, and attempts at forgiveness in the span of two pages, a son reflects on his father’s tradition of decorating of a pole for the holidays.
Puppy
One upper-middle class woman shops for a puppy for her spoiled children. One poorer woman wants to sell a puppy. The story shifts between their points of view, demonstrating the consequences of an inability to see things from the perspective of others.
Escape from Spiderhead
An exploration of the nature of evil, the justifications used to commit evil, and the agency of people to avoid committing it. Or it’s just a cool sci-fi story about psychoactive chemical experiments. Probably both.
Exhortation
Written in the form of a memo from a project manager attempting to boost the morale of his staff. The most darkly funny – or funnily dark – of the stories in this collection.
Al Roosten
A failing store owner participates in a charity auction. Told from his point of view, the reader becomes privy to all of his insecurities, ambitions, pride, and anger. The reader may come to the conclusion that those internal faults are the causes of his problems and not the outside forces that the character blames.
The Semplica Girl Diaries
Written in the form of a journal from the perspective of a middle-class man of relatively modest means trying to provide for his family. This is the longest story in the collection.
Saunders’ stories are not usually poetic – the beauty of the written word is not really something he’s usually after – but this one takes the “common-man” writing style to a whole other level. As with a typical journal, whole words are left out of sentences. Almost every sentence is a fragment. It adds a certain level of “authenticity,” but truthfully I thought it was just a distracting affectation. Saunders did not REALLY commit to the form of a journal: there’s stuff in there that no real middle-class dude would ever write in a journal, at least in that fashion, and there are not enough digressions and nonsense to really sell it as “a journal.” The overrall effect is that it’s a traditional story told from a first-person point of view that’s written all wonky.
But enough kvetching about the form. It’s still a damn good story. Class anxieties, the exploitation of immigrant labor, meaningless (and/or harmful) demonstrations of wealth, how evil can be overlooked when it is commonplace, and the pursuit of status are all themes explored by this pseudo-sci-fi story.
Home
A veteran returns home with post-traumatic stress, wrestling with his past actions, trying to reintegrate with his own, complicated homelife.
My Chivalric Fiasco
On the first page of the story, the main character discovers his co-worker raped by their boss. This story illustrates the quality of Saunders’ stories. What is on the surface a simple and straightforward story contains layers and layers of meaning, in this instance, society’s reaction to a rape claim, how the chivalric response is potentially toxic and damaging, how interference against the victim’s wishes is in itself a violation, and so on and so forth.
Tenth of December
A young boy and a man dying of cancer are at a freezing lake in December. Told from both of their points of view. The story explores themes of end-of-life decisions, hope, and goodness. It’s also tense as hell, as they both work to potentially save each other.
My rating
5 stars.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled off to a sanatorium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
Her Body and Other Parties is a collection of eight short stories by Carmen Maria Machado. It is so hot right now. It’s gotten rave reviews from major critics all over the country, and it’s a National Book Award finalist. Here’s what you need to know before you jump on the bandwagon.
What kind of book is it?
It’s a collection of eight previously released short stories by Carmen Maria Machado. Its genre is kinda hard to pin down. I’ve seen it labeled a bunch of different ways: science fiction (there’s some dystopia in there), fantasy, literary fiction, horror, feminist, magical realism, surrealism, and weird fiction. I don’t think putting this book into a defined genre is very helpful for potential buyers, though. The stories experiment too much with form and style to really fit in anywhere.
What is it about?
The short stories are “about” different stuff – they are all independent of one another – but the overall theme is that women, especially queer women, deal with some scary crap: violation of bodily integrity, sudden violence from those they trust, society’s attitude towards sexual violence, judgment of body image, judgment of sexual desire and history. The stories in the book examine typically overlooked female anxieties and critique societal standards and mores. Sometimes at a subconscious level. What does that mean? It means the stories are weird.