Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship
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Books:
3-stars-and-a-half
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1250284473
| 9781250284471
| B0C1X8213B
| 4.21
| 3,345
| Mar 19, 2024
| Mar 19, 2024
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liked it
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I had to do some serious expectation resetting around this book, which is definitely not a memoir. I’d call it a collection of essays, written in the
I had to do some serious expectation resetting around this book, which is definitely not a memoir. I’d call it a collection of essays, written in the style of news articles (the author is a journalist who perhaps has not yet fully made the transition to a different form), about issues within the American evangelical movement and the experiences of people who leave. Once I accepted that and got past the introductory chapters, I appreciated how methodical it is—there’s the science chapter, the authoritarianism/“alternative facts” chapter, the race chapter, the LGBT chapter, the purity culture chapter, the marriage chapter, the child abuse chapter, the political hypocrisy chapter, etc. The author sprinkles in relevant personal anecdotes (some very personal, which can’t have been easy), but it’s not the story of her life or anyone else’s: interviewees are generally discussed and quoted for a few paragraphs before moving on. That said, I can see this book being helpful for someone just getting their head around the problems with evangelicalism. Like a news series, it’s written in a neutral tone rather than as rage bait; the author mostly sticks to facts, with opinions largely appearing in quotes from others. It covers a lot of ground, including issues I didn’t know about, like religious trauma (people raised with such an intense fear of hell that their physiological symptoms are identical to other types of long-term trauma). Also, this book definitely brings home just how “alternative” an education kids in these evangelical schools are getting, from not learning basic science concepts (the author later found a paper she’d written on photosynthesis which only briefly talked about that, and mostly about the relationship between people and God. She got a 102), to textbooks suggesting witchcraft has played a role in American history*, to generally being primed from birth for evangelical jihad. In fact, the movement has become so politicized that not only are people who oppose Trump or support LGBT rights being forced out of evangelical churches, but their places are being filled by white nationalists who may not have been religious before but now see it as a natural fit. However, for the most part the information in this book wasn’t new for me—as I’m guessing it won’t be for many Americans—which made it just an okay read. Probably most valuable for those making their way out of this world themselves, or those unfamiliar with the topic. * The author quotes a Bob Jones University Press textbook stating that “Some of the people in Salem may have been demon possessed. The Bible clearly shows that this can happen.” That part requires no commentary from me, but as your friendly neighborhood corrector of misconceptions about the Salem witch trials, I am compelled to note (since the author does not) that they also got the recorded facts wrong, claiming those executed were “mostly young girls.” Zero young girls were executed in Salem. Of the victims, 13 of the 18 whose ages were recorded were 55+, and 7 were aged 70+ (impressive for 1692!); the youngest was 35 and the youngest woman 39. (The two whose ages weren’t recorded were also clearly adults, one with a married daughter and the other estimated to be about 65.) The accusers, however, included quite a few young girls, and that flipping of traditional power structures is one of the things that makes Salem interesting. Perhaps Bob Jones hates that part, or maybe once you reach a certain level of disregard for facts, sloppiness is just to be expected. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 31, 2024
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Sep 07, 2024
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May 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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0307477479
| 9780307477477
| 0307477479
| 3.70
| 233,169
| Jun 08, 2010
| Mar 22, 2011
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really liked it
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Mixed feelings, in the end, so 3.5 stars. These days mosaic novels, or linked short story collections, are probably my preferred form of literary fict
Mixed feelings, in the end, so 3.5 stars. These days mosaic novels, or linked short story collections, are probably my preferred form of literary fiction, and I did like this—definitely literary fiction, mostly focused on the troubled lives of New Yorkers and Californians connected to the music industry. It’s well-written, with a deep and relatable understanding of its characters’ inner lives, which are more the focus than the music stuff. Most of the chapters were previously published as independent short stories, and they are solid stories in their own right, but also connect to each other, fleshing out side characters or providing new perspectives on people we’d previously met—I especially liked how two stories late in the book add a lot to our understanding of Sasha, who’s only a viewpoint character in the first chapter. Returning to that chapter, it feels written with all the later backstory in mind. There are also some really good side stories: the chapter about a man who has not succeeded in life, and his rationalizations, and then his encounter with a childhood friend who did make it, is exceptionally done and brings home the emotion of that encounter in an authentic way. A note that many of the characters are fairly terrible: the men are often awful to women, from cheating on their spouses and ogling their employees to grooming and sexual assault. And there are other assorted empathy challenges as well, like Sasha’s kleptomania and Ted’s exploiting his sister’s fear for her missing daughter to get himself a free vacation. At least these characters are interesting and well-rendered, and the viewpoint characters are generally sympathetic in some way even when some of their actions are inexcusable. Unfortunately, not all the pieces fit together well: “Selling the General” is quite a good story about a down-on-her-luck publicist and fallen movie star who combine forces to rehabilitate a foreign military man they know to be responsible for genocide, and there’s some strong word choice in that closing sentence that brings home the thematic exploration of how privileged Americans are profiting off other people’s suffering—a theme that feels rather out-of-sync with the collection overall. Speaking of which, the unnamed-countries thing feels lazy (or perhaps cowardly) in this context: there’s plenty of specificity when the characters are in the U.S. or Europe, which is noticeably lacking elsewhere. Finally, the last couple of chapters brought down my opinion of the book overall. The PowerPoint chapter feels like a gimmick, your standard “novelist writes a character’s diary as if it were a novel” except for reasons, this middle school kid is doing her novelistic diary in PowerPoint. Eh, whatever. But then the last chapter is really cringeworthy, very much a boomer in the late 00s imagining what the 2020s might look like—near futures date themselves quickly in any case, and her predicting Gen Z would have no morals is particularly unfortunate. The near-future part being so much worse than the rest has me doubting whether I want to read The Candy House after all. Overall though, a pretty good book. Sometimes it resonated with me, sometimes it didn’t particularly and felt like award bait, but it’s bold and different and well-written enough that it is worth a read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 09, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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Apr 23, 2024
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Paperback
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0593470591
| 9780593470596
| 0593470591
| 3.72
| 451
| Sep 12, 2023
| Sep 12, 2023
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really liked it
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My first O. Henry Prize anthology, after reading a few volumes of Best American Short Stories. I’m not sure why I didn’t start with the O. Henry serie
My first O. Henry Prize anthology, after reading a few volumes of Best American Short Stories. I’m not sure why I didn’t start with the O. Henry series instead: unlike BASS, it isn’t limited to American writers and even includes stories in translation; also, ordering the stories artistically rather than alphabetically makes for a more pleasing composition. And then, despite mixed responses to Groff’s own stories elsewhere, I loved everything about her introduction, from her love of short stories and recognition of their many facets (introduction writers who justify each story with a phrase really do flatten them too much), to her tiring of the endless run of first-person stories (“I began to feel at the center of a sucking collective whirlpool of anxious solipsism”). Though first-person lovers shouldn’t worry: it’s so ubiquitous in today’s stories to still account for 8 of the 20. At any rate, I loved the first 5 stories and considered that this might be my first 5-star anthology, though several subsequent stories lost me and it became more of a regular anthology from there, with hits and misses. It begins with some strongly fantastical or surrealist tales, though ultimately only 5 of the 20 stories have this as a major factor, and has all the experimentation with form that I was missing from this year’s BASS. In terms of demographics, there’s a 50/50 gender split, and about half are authors of color. Most stories were first published in the U.S., but three are translated (two from Spanish and one from Danish) and two first published in English in other countries (one Irish author and one Zambian). Notes on the individual stories: “Office Hours” by Ling Ma: A whammy of a beginning: lots of layers and interpretations, excellent writing. An isolated film studies professor discovers a unique way of handling the impossibility of the demands placed on her. I was left with so many questions: (view spoiler)[did Marie do this on purpose? What will her life look like from here? What will she do about the obnoxious colleague? (hide spoiler)] Part of Ma’s collection (which I really need to read) for those seeking more. Arguably the best of the whole anthology. “Man Mountain” by Catherine Lacey: This story is so bonkers I laughed aloud on finishing it. The author’s note is very helpful—it has serious themes, such as the stifling patriarchy that has the protagonist identifying as a “human spider” rather than a woman—but it’s also gleefully weird. “Me, Rory and Aurora” by Jonas Eika: The first translated story, and I seem to be in the minority for loving it: it’s strange, almost dreamlike, yet compelling, about a down-and-out young person becoming part of a threesome with a married couple. It has a thematic and emotional resonance I can’t quite explain. “The Complete” by Gabriel Smith: Very experimental and meta, and did less for me than the first three, but I found it intriguing and funny and appreciated its boldness. The author’s note is useful here also. “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak” by Jamil Jan Kochai: A great, emotionally resonant story of the life of a Muslim-American family, from the perspective of someone spying on them. I at first assumed (view spoiler)[the second-person narrator was a ghost, but in the end I think they’re supposed to be a government spy—though their level of omniscience seems beyond anything a real spy could achieve. (hide spoiler)] It’s an affecting portrayal of a family, with a great mix of sympathy and realism. “Wisconsin” by Lisa Taddeo: Ironically—or maybe not, given its content—this story about a love affair is where my love for the anthology began to cool. It’s a dead-mom story that might’ve fit well into this year’s BASS (though the frankness about sex pushes the limits a bit), and the protagonist (view spoiler)[taking revenge via sex on a guy she found out after the fact had broken her mom’s heart before she was even born (hide spoiler)] didn’t quite compute for me. “Ira & the Whale” by Rachel B. Glaser: This is a well-written story about the approach of death under truly bizarre and fantastical circumstances, which just isn’t a subject I enjoy. I do think it does a good job with the lives of gay men, and it is resonant and succeeds at the effect it’s trying to achieve. “The Commander’s Teeth” by Naomi Shuyama-Gómez: The first story I thought just not very good. It’s a common short-story subject: an encounter between two people who would never ordinarily meet, in this case a new-minted dentist in 90s Colombia and a rebel commander. But nothing really changes as a result, and I didn’t understand the decision to intersperse that situation with boring scenes from the dentist’s sex life, rather than digging deeper into either her history with FARC or her sexuality. Both topics seemed potentially interesting but we didn’t see enough to make me care about either. “The Mad People of Paris” by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Another least favorite. Maybe I just don’t know enough French history to get much out of this (other than that the narrator himself is definitely mad), but this didn’t make a lick of sense to me. “Snake & Submarine” by Shelby Kinney-Lang: A complex story about a writer following the blog of a former classmate dying from cancer, and writing a story with a much happier ending, featuring a character based in part on the classmate and in part on another woman he once dated. I’m not sure I fully understand the connections or why this is all so important to the narrator, but it was well-written enough that I would like to read some commentary. “The Mother” by Jacob M’hango: Another reviewer called this a folktale with pieces missing and that seems exactly right to me. It’s very elliptical, skips out on most of the actual events and keeps the reader distant from the characters. I read the end as a twist (view spoiler)[the sister was a witch after all! (hide spoiler)] and was somewhat surprised by the author’s note suggesting the story is about environmentalism, which is only briefly mentioned. “The Hollow” by ‘Pemi Aguda: Invites comparison to the previous, as both are African stories about violence against women. This one is much stronger, exploring trauma through the lives of a couple of characters and a magical house. It didn’t do much for me emotionally but I can see it working for others. “Dream Man” by Cristina Rivera Garza: This translated story is long, almost 50 pages, and I’m on the fence about whether it was worth it. It certainly leaves the reader with a lot to figure out: (view spoiler)[are Irena and Mariana sirens, and if so, are they inevitably killing Alvaro and possibly his family? Is Alvaro a figment of Irena’s imagination, let loose in the world and picked up by Fuensanta? Is everyone a figment of everyone else’s imagination because we all project our ideas of people onto them? (hide spoiler)] I also wonder about the title: (view spoiler)[at first glance Alvaro doesn’t seem superlative enough to be a dream man, but perhaps for Irena he is, because he makes himself available when she wants him and scarce when she doesn’t, all without reproach. Fuensanta seems like a man’s dream woman, but at the end Alvaro thinks she’s really more of a man? (hide spoiler)] Presumably this is here because it’s so mind-bending. “The Locksmith” by Gray Wolfe LaJoie: A short but effective tale of the inner and outer lives of someone overlooked by society, but far more complex, intelligent and kind than people might assume. Completely believable and not saccharine. See a good full-length review here. “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool” by Kirstin Valdez Quade: Vivid storytelling, but I liked this less than other stories from this author. The coming-of-age story feels very standard. I was pissed at the way the mom exploited her daughter’s labor and then gaslit her about her outrage: for all her sanctimony about sacrificing to help others, the mom sure didn’t do so herself. (view spoiler)[Of course Laura is a minor so her mom would’ve been within her rights to just order her to babysit the neighbor’s kids for free, but instead she tricks and manipulates her while being hypocritically self-righteous. The mother impliedly doesn’t work herself so could’ve pitched in, and the parents also have the money to pay Laura themselves if they think the neighbor can’t afford it, rather than forcing all the sacrifice on her. (hide spoiler)] How to Raise your Daughter to Undervalue her Work 101. “Happy is a Doing Word” by Arinze Ifeakandu: A well-written story about the lives of two friends as they grow from boys to young men. A good exploration of how homophobia can deform someone’s psyche and their life, and I tend to like stories that successfully encapsulate so much time in so few pages. Not sure I understand the title, though. “Elision” by David Ryan: A brief story juxtaposing geological and interpersonal upheaval. Its ambiguity and not striking a particular emotional chord with me meant I did not get much out of it. “Xífù” by K-Ming Chang: A great monologue by a Taiwanese-American mother to her daughter, on the perfidies of mothers-in-law. Really a pitch-perfect, earthy, very believable voice. “Temporary Housing” by Kathleen Alcott: My second Alcott story, and they seem to do much less for me than for others. The writing is good but for me the many disparate elements never came together, and little observations clearly meant to be insightful just confused me. It’s a story of a woman looking back on a less successful high school friend, with the implication that (view spoiler)[the narrator overdoses at the end, just as her friend did. (hide spoiler)] “The Blackhills” by Eamon McGuinness: This is really good, a strong end to the anthology. It’s a sort of matter-of-fact minimalism that leaves the reader figuring it out as you go. Suspenseful and best read without prior information. (view spoiler)[The great twist only a third of the way through left me expecting another, but thankfully no, that was all. The rest of the story shows us the protagonist’s life as a family man, helping us infer why he’d go to such lengths to protect his niece. (hide spoiler)] It’s fun to end the collection with a late-night story about a man taking out the trash, though after Groff’s discussion at the beginning of anthology-wide themes, I wondered about so much writing about violence against women ending in a story where (view spoiler)[the victim is never seen or heard—even if we are satisfied that the perpetrator found his just desserts. (hide spoiler)] In the end there are probably still elements I’m missing about this anthology as a composition. Someone suggested doubles as a theme, which I agree with; I’d say gendered violence in its various forms is another, though it’s much more of a literary than an issues-based collection. While the whole book didn’t live up to the expectations set by the first five stories, I’m glad to have read it and appreciate Groff’s taste in stories. For those deciding between BASS 2023 and this anthology, I’d say this one contains much more experimentation with style, fantastical elements, sexuality, and queerness. BASS focuses on more straightforward and traditional literary stories, though both volumes are quite diverse. Overall I was pleased with both. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 03, 2024
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Jul 22, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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Paperback
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1982163305
| 9781982163303
| 1982163305
| 4.07
| 10,998
| Feb 14, 2023
| Feb 14, 2023
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liked it
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All right, I liked this. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s a nice little book; the actual text is only 178 pages long. The primary appeal is that it’s ab
All right, I liked this. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s a nice little book; the actual text is only 178 pages long. The primary appeal is that it’s about the Met, so worth checking out if you’re a Met lover. (Personally, though not generally a lover of museums, I was blown away when I visited and had to spend the rest of the weekend there, still not nearly enough time. Which is why I picked up this book.) Needing space for grief after his older brother’s untimely death, Patrick Bringley gave up an ambitious first job to spend a decade working security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book is in part about his experiences as a guard, and in part reflections on art. Both aspects are worthwhile though neither is astounding. I appreciated his humility and humanity in viewing art, his interest in its history, his readiness to make room for awe and his encouragement to viewers to bring their own interpretations of what it means to be human to the work. I wished that the publishers had made room for color plates in this book, however—there are a few sketches, but in general you have to break and look at a screen if you want to see the art he’s discussing, which isn’t how I want to spend my reading time! The behind-the-scenes view of the Met is also interesting, though nothing too startling. Museum guards have a lot of time on their hands, which is what Bringley wanted. His discussions of stepping away from hustle and stress make clear the appeal (even if most of us would probably be bored!), and I appreciated his point about people in “unskilled” jobs being far more diverse in background, education and interests than in white-collar jobs. He doesn’t go too deep into his life, but what we learn is written well. Overall, a perfectly enjoyable book and a fairly quick read. My time with it was pleasant, though I doubt it will stick in my mind. The author apparently now works as a public speaker and tour guide, which sounds like a good fit. ...more |
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1
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May 2024
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May 03, 2024
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Mar 22, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250323517
| 9781250323514
| 3.71
| 1,237
| Mar 07, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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liked it
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3.5 stars A hard book to review, because it’s an unusual one. I picked it up because I am fascinated by memoirs of lives in extreme religious communiti 3.5 stars A hard book to review, because it’s an unusual one. I picked it up because I am fascinated by memoirs of lives in extreme religious communities, and deconstructing from them (my favorite such book is Unfollow). Catherine Coldstream joined a cloistered Carmelite monastery—yes, monastery is apparently the appropriate word for a female institution if the inmates don’t interact with the outside world—in 1989, in her late 20s. She had grown up in a secular, artistic, troubled family in London, and had a religious experience upon her father’s death that led to her finding Catholicism, and ultimately seeking an extreme version of the religious life. The key thing about this book, I think, is that Coldstream is a mystic at heart. She joined the pseudonymous Akenside (probably Thicket Priory in Yorkshire) eager to engage in extremes of renunciation in service of union with God. And she apparently found some of that: in this article, she describes her years of monasticism as the great love affair of her life. She writes a lot about the natural world and about her emotional experience of spirituality; although interested in theology, she doesn’t care about dogma at all. In a lot of ways she reminded me of the author of A History of God, also a former nun inclined toward both mysticism and scholarship. To her bafflement and sorrow, Coldstream’s fellow monastics seem to share neither of these interests, instead focused on “just getting on with” the daily work of the monastery, and her spiritual journey winds up derailed by some brutal office politics. I have to say, I was baffled too: who would join a cloistered monastery in the mid to late 20th century if they weren’t intense about it? Why are these women there? Sadly, we never learn that about anyone other than the author, in part probably because of the taboos the community puts on human connection and meaningful conversation—the author may never have learned herself. On the other hand, maybe she did and didn’t tell us, especially as she mentions getting to know several of the nuns post-monastery too. Because overall, the book is selective in ways that made me wonder. Its basic portrayal of the monastery’s politics is believable; I’ve seen bosses like that, who play favorites for all they’re worth, move the goalposts depending on whether they’re dealing with a favorite or unfavorite, and can’t brook criticism of themselves. It seems natural that the hothouse environment of a monastery, where everyone has made vows of obedience, suffering is part of the point, and giving up your own will part of the ideology (the nuns occasionally refer to themselves as living human sacrifices!) would breed a toxic environment when you have a bad boss at the helm. And I believe that someone who’s idealistic, earnest, sensitive and intellectually curious, as Coldstream presents herself, might rub an insecure leader the wrong way. But Coldstream has a tendency to stick to generalities, to relaying her emotions or experiences without trying to provide the whole picture (at one point she shows herself and several other nuns being punished but is vague as to what for), and to throwing shade without fully owning her feelings. I don’t doubt that the women presented as the villains of the piece behaved badly, but Coldstream presents this as if it were objective fact rather than her own viewpoint, rooted in her personal experiences with them. It can feel as if she’s seeking validation, rather than having arrived at a place where she can thoughtfully analyze her own feelings and actions as well as those of others. And she doesn’t explain most of her decisions: the problems with toxic leadership and lack of communal support were fully evident within the first year or two, so why did she stay another decade? Why did she ultimately leave? Why didn’t she provide more support to challengers when the opportunity arose for a new leader? Why didn’t she consider moving to the other monastery people kept defecting to, if it was just a personality conflict problem? What’s up with never mentioning in the book the visits from her sister, discussed in the article I linked above, and how did these visits play into her emotional journey? I think this is ultimately back to the mystic thing, and that Coldstream isn’t trying to tell a straightforward, factually complete, easily accessible tale. But that combination of mysticism and devoting a lot of chapters to why her fellow nuns were the worst isn’t quite satisfying to me. That said, I don’t want to criticize this too harshly. Coldstream is a strong writer, and brings her emotional experiences home to the reader well, alongside vivid descriptions of her surroundings. I appreciate that this as a well-written book about an unusual experience, and it made for different and interesting reading. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 03, 2024
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Apr 07, 2024
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Mar 04, 2024
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Hardcover
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0525658033
| 9780525658030
| 0525658033
| 3.90
| 355
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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really liked it
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A well-researched and ultimately engaging group biography, and work of popular history, featuring four English women writers from the Renaissance. I f
A well-researched and ultimately engaging group biography, and work of popular history, featuring four English women writers from the Renaissance. I found the first third a bit of a slog—early chapters focus on Mary Sidney, by far the least interesting of the bunch, and I still don’t know why Targoff begins with a chapter on Elizabeth I’s funeral—but happily, it got much more engaging after that, discussing the interesting lives and truly feminist works of some other notable women. The subjects, in order of appearance: Mary Sidney: A countess who began her literary career by editing and expanding her dead brother’s works, then branched out into her own loose translations, in verse, of the Psalms. She took the unusual step of actually publishing these—almost more unusual for the nobility than for a woman. Otherwise her life comes across as conventional, though she managed to enjoy some good fun in old age, and I thought Targoff was stretching a bit to relate Sidney’s translations to her life experiences. Aemilia Lanyer: Anything but conventional, this is the only non-aristocrat of the bunch, a woman from a musical immigrant family who had a colorful life, including being a powerful nobleman’s mistress, getting pregnant with his child and (standard procedure for the time) being married off to one of his musicians as a result. She later possibly dabbled in high-end prostitution (at least according to her astrologer, whose advances she rebuffed), taught girls’ education, and wound up publishing poems, including a Biblical retelling from the perspective of Pontius Pilate’s wife, making the case for women’s liberation on the grounds that crucifying Jesus was way worse than eating an apple so really men have no moral leg to stand on in claiming authority over women. Talk about radical! Her book was published, with about a dozen dedications to educated and powerful women from whom she hoped for patronage (apparently in vain), but seemingly got no attention. She was rediscovered in the 1970s under the mistaken impression that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, on since-debunked evidence. Elizabeth Cary: This is another great story: a girl born into wealth, who seems to have been a child prodigy and received a well-rounded education that even involved successfully intervening on behalf of the accused at a witchcraft trial, at the age of 10. She was still married off for money to a husband she worked hard to please, including producing a whole passel of kids, but later separated from him upon converting to Catholicism. This led to court cases and extended fights over money, the kids, and their religion, including smuggling two of them out of a castle in the middle of the night. She also wrote feminist Biblical retellings, most notably a play about Herod’s wife Mariam, as well as histories and theological translations. Again her work seems to have passed without note, to be discovered in the 19th century by Catholic scholars interested in her championing of that cause. Four of her daughters, who became nuns in France, took the unusual step of writing her biography, which gives an intimate look into her life. Anne Clifford: An extremely wealthy duchess, and not a creative writer, but the author of extensive diaries, memoirs, and family histories, resulting in an unusually well-documented life for a non-royal woman of the time. She engaged in a 40-year legal battle to gain ownership of her father’s estates (left to his brother in contravention of a law specific to these lands, requiring them to go to the children—the reason being that women couldn’t inherit titles and her father wanted to keep title and lands together). This is an interesting and dramatic story, as Clifford and her mother both devoted their lives to this cause, including arranging both her marriages to men positioned to assist. She was probably insufferable in real life (imagine someone who has a band to play her off every time she leaves an estate), but perhaps that’s the level of self-assurance needed for a woman of the time to defy the king, which she did. At any rate, an interesting book about forgotten but mostly fascinating figures. Sometimes the book detours into a more general history of the times beyond what’s strictly necessary for context, in ways that should be interesting for those interested in Renaissance British politics and culture. Sometimes I wanted more context, though: there’s a lot about guardianships here, as anyone under 21 needed a legal guardian (at least if they were wealthy or titled?), which in the case of orphaned heirs, the king auctioned off to the highest bidder. And people would bid high, because then you could marry the heir off to your own kid, and keep their property in your family. Anne Clifford’s first wedding was hasty for this reason: both were 19 years old and his father on his deathbed. From the events described in the book though, guardianships don’t seem to be applied consistently, or perhaps I was just surprised to see widowed mothers holding them despite having no legal power vis-à-vis living husbands. To be fair, widows in early England were the only women with independent legal status generally. At any rate, the prose is just slightly drier than ideal for me, but still very readable. My only other complaint is about the citation style, which makes it hard to find anything (why do some nonfiction publishers do these chapter-by-chapter summaries of sources rather than referencing specific claims by page number? Ugh), but mostly Targoff makes her sources clear in the text. Worth a read for those interested in early women writers. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 15, 2024
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Aug 23, 2024
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Mar 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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037461007X
| 9780374610074
| 037461007X
| 3.59
| 1,294
| Aug 08, 2023
| Aug 08, 2023
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really liked it
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3.5 stars A unique, humorous, but ultimately deadly serious short novel. I picked this one up because the short story it began as was my favorite of Th 3.5 stars A unique, humorous, but ultimately deadly serious short novel. I picked this one up because the short story it began as was my favorite of The Best American Short Stories 2023: it has an offbeat, unusual voice I described as “Murderbot with amnesia,” and kept me guessing throughout. The novel certainly retains that voice, and is often quite funny in the narrator’s bizarre over-descriptions of everything, but for much of the book I found myself a bit disappointed and impatient. The contents of the short story are stretched out over half the novel, interspersed with other scenes, and the strange encounters multiply to the point of being scarcely believable (though there ultimately is a reason for that). That said, Binyam brings a real whammy of a twist ending that ties it all together, recontextualizing everything that came before. Now I see why all that seemingly extraneous information was included and why the book is structured as it is. There’s ultimately more than a bit of surrealism, along with the absurdism, and it won’t work for everyone but I found it fairly effective. It was also interesting to see a literary view of modern-day Ethiopia: the narrator uses no proper nouns, so the country isn’t named (nor are any of the characters), but once I saw it in this review all the references to history and religion were obvious, and I could only shake my head at those viewing this as a generic pan-African novel rather than grounded in a specific place with a unique history. Certainly worth checking out for those interested in literary, surreal, post-colonial stories. I’ll leave you with an excerpt that gives a good sense of the voice, humor and tempo of the story: The yogurt man went back to threading the needle through his cheek. I thanked him for sharing his perspective about evolution, the existence of an alternate universe, and the physical science of hijacking a plane, and then asked him once again for directions, wondering what kind of directions I was likely to get from a self-identified conspiracy theorist with an exceptionally high pain tolerance. He looked at me, looking as if he was deciding whether or not to give me that information. To the left, he said, putting down the needle, was a town that was a grouping of rocks. He said that the town was beautiful but extremely difficult to inhabit. People built houses and storefronts with pieces broken from the rocks, but the rocks didn’t want to be houses and storefronts. They wanted to be rocks. Eventually, they fell apart. It was a big problem for the townspeople, he said, and one that would likely never be solved. Even the buildings made from modern materials eventually collapsed, sometimes killing their inhabitants in the process. I was trying to think about what the yogurt man was telling me. The issue he was describing seemed ridiculous and had nothing whatsoever to do with the principles of physical science. People had been living in houses made from stone, wood, and clay since the dawn of time, and, as far as I knew, no one in this specific town had been killed or even harmed by the sudden collapse of a built structure. But I was desperate for any excuse not to go to the town he was describing, a town that I had once lived in and believed I still knew very well. I thought that potential death might serve as an adequate excuse. I asked the yogurt man how often it was that people were killed because of these sudden collapses. He thanked me for my question and told me that the answer didn’t concern me. To me, it seemed that the prospect of death concerned all people who were still living, which is what I told the yogurt man when I asked him my question again. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the subject, most likely because his description was an elaborate conspiracy invented to justify the potential collapse of his own poorly constructed yogurt shelter. I thanked the yogurt man for his help and gave him some change, whatever amount seemed appropriate for a cup of yogurt plus an unasked-for and completely useless description of a town that was already familiar to me. He reached out his hand, and when he touched mine, he closed his eyes. I didn’t understand the meaning of his gesture, but I figured he might be expressing his gratitude, so I was happy to give him temporary possession of my hand, even though, at this rate, our expressions of gratitude might go back and forth until forever. However, they didn’t go back and forth until forever. Eventually, the yogurt man opened his eyes, removed his hand from our miniature embrace, and gave me a cup of yogurt. I thanked him, being sure to express only a verbal thanks. I crossed the street again, and when the yogurt man wasn’t looking, I threw the cup of yogurt away. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 22, 2024
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Apr 28, 2024
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Feb 02, 2024
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Hardcover
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0547485859
| 9780547485850
| 0547485859
| 4.13
| 1,128
| Oct 06, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
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liked it
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Whew—two months and I’ve finally finished this anthology! Reviews below (note that most of these stories have individual Goodreads pages as well). But
Whew—two months and I’ve finally finished this anthology! Reviews below (note that most of these stories have individual Goodreads pages as well). But first, some overall commentary. This was a worthwhile endeavor: literary speed dating, featuring acclaimed authors and stories. I would have preferred an anthology that just aimed to represent the best stories of the century, not limited to those selected for Best American Short Stories in their year (sadly, I haven’t found any such anthology). This volume has the further limitation that a prior pair of editors took their own pass 15 years earlier, in the harder-to-find The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and this book’s editors decided on no overlap, so all the pre-2000 stories here are in theory second-best. In practice, some are fabulous, some decent, some duds. There’s a tilt toward more recent stories: though they span a full century, 21 of 40 represent the final 35 years (1980 onwards). Demographically, the tilt toward male authors remains consistent throughout, at 6 of every 10 stories, while the 10 authors of color are almost all clustered toward the end. The most surprising statistic to me is just how young these authors were, with most of the stories being published by people in their 30s and even 20s! In fact, only 5 stories were written by someone aged 50+. Sadly, most of the sections written by the editors feel bizarrely off-base and banal, though reading a bit about the history of the series was interesting; I could’ve used less imaginary short story writers on book tours and more explanation of why these stories were chosen, or deeper observations on the 2,000 stories featured over the century. There’s so much railing against the horrors of plot (even stuck into someone’s mini-bio) that I just wound up curious about what an overly plot-driven short story even looks like. Also noteworthy is BASS’s awkward relationship with genre: while a few stories here have speculative elements, there’s only one I’d call a genre story, which is almost worse than none. Unlike her predecessors, the current series editor seems open to sci-fi and fantasy, but without actually reading the associated magazines (she picks up the occasional story that makes it into someplace like the New Yorker), which seems to me an unhappy compromise. Either narrow your mission (and title) to realistic literary fiction, or actually read the places where great speculative stories are published so you can represent them properly. As is, we get bizarre choices like Ursula Le Guin having being published in BASS three times—but only for realistic stories few readers will even have heard of. Anyway, the stories: 1910s: “The Gay Old Dog” by Edna Ferber: This is a great time capsule story that puts me in mind of Edith Wharton: a Chicago family gradually losing its money, a brother who loses his opportunity to marry because he has to get his sisters settled first. I was entertained by the author’s holding forth on social issues of the day (“Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made. The dead have no right to lay their clammy fingers upon the living.”), and for every dated gendered assumption that made me roll my eyes (the career-oriented sister’s unattractiveness: why would a 30-something who works indoors have “leathery” skin?) there was another that charmed me (a young man’s God-given right to fancy waistcoats and colorful socks, and the assumption that he’ll love preening in the mirror). While the story is compelling, the ending likewise feels foreign today: (view spoiler)[meeting a former fiancée while watching her son march off as a WWI volunteer makes the protagonist wish he’d married this poorly-behaved woman and had his own son to send to the trenches. (hide spoiler)] 1920s: “Brothers” by Sherwood Anderson “My Old Man” by Ernest Hemingway “Haircut” by Ring Lardner The 1920s must have been a rough decade for short stories if these are the best. Fortunately, they’re relatively short. All three feature first-person male narrators observing other men in their communities, all involving crime and some fairly obvious things the reader is meant to see through. The triptych improves slightly as it goes: I can’t fathom why “Brothers” is here and have nothing to say about it beyond that it’s a chiasmus. “My Old Man” is probably most notable for the story about the story, namely that its pity publication in BASS launched Hemingway’s career. “Haircut” gives us an entertainingly clueless narrator to see through but is otherwise a bit broad. 1930s: “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: More engaging reading than the 1920s set, but my sympathies didn’t go where the author intended. A tale of American expats in Europe, and a formerly alcoholic father trying to convince his deceased wife’s sister to return custody of his 9-year-old daughter. This guy is such a stereotype: uninvolved but plies the kid with gifts, has been sober for ten minutes and is outraged by his sister-in-law’s doubts, wants his kid back to satisfy his own emotional needs but doesn’t seem to have considered what being uprooted would mean for her. I sympathized with the “evil” sister-in-law, who struck me as someone with anxiety being expected to do something she’s not comfortable with. “The Cracked Looking-Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter: The first story that made me want to seek out more from the author. This is the story of a marriage between Irish-American immigrants, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, with vivid characters and a glimpse into lives that feel very real. “That Will Be Fine” by William Faulkner: A throwback to the 1920s stories, narrated by a young boy observing his no-good uncle without understanding what he’s up to. I liked it a bit better than the 1920s stories, perhaps just because the more challenging prose made reading it feel like an accomplishment, but didn’t ultimately buy the child narrator’s cluelessness: at 7 he’s developmentally old enough to understand mysteries (Boxcar Children are aimed at ages 6-8 and were available when Faulkner was writing!) yet bizarrely overlooks obviously sinister behavior. (view spoiler)[He encounters a man violently restraining a woman and preventing her from speaking, who gives the boy a message “from her” to his uncle to come inside, and just passes this on with no commentary whatsoever. (hide spoiler)] 1940s: “Those Are as Brothers” by Nancy Hale: Interesting mostly as a time capsule of how Americans in 1941 thought about the Holocaust. A woman who has escaped an abusive marriage feels kinship and empathy for a Jewish man who has escaped a concentration camp. Today’s readers would look askance at comparing one’s relationship, however awful, to a Nazi camp (some even complain about comparing other genocides and mass internments, thus ensuring that these atrocities will continue), but this was written before the Holocaust was enshrined as the worst thing to ever happen and the purpose of the comparison is increasing empathy for the refugees, which is interesting to see. “The Whole World Knows” by Eudora Welty: The most challenging story so far. I have read it twice, I have sought out academic commentary, and I’m still not sure I fully get it, let alone catch all the literary allusions. A structurally complicated story about a young man separated from his wife, in which his fantasies blend into reality. I think in the end that (view spoiler)[he rapes the teenage girl he’s been seeing, who then shoots herself with his father’s pistol. (hide spoiler)] I have no idea what the button sewing was about. “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever: The first perfect story. A New York couple acquires a radio that allows them to hear into the lives of their neighbors, with troubling results. I’m still trying to figure out why the ending happened: (view spoiler)[did the radio itself poison their marriage? Did it exacerbate the cracks, by making the wife more conscious of others’ judgment even in her own home, while making the husband feel he too had the right to let loose when others aren’t so perfect either? Or was this there all along? (hide spoiler)] 1950s: “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen: A hilariously stereotypical title for a 1950s story, but actually this one is heartbreaking. A mother looks back on her eldest daughter’s life, and how a lack of stability and emotional safety—mostly caused by their precarious economic situation—caused the daughter untold suffering with potential lifelong effects. Succinct, devastating and ahead of its time, and I’m still pondering the mother’s final conclusion: (view spoiler)[I can’t help suspecting her decision to remain quiet is mostly about not wanting to be judged herself. (hide spoiler)] “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin: A beautiful and powerful story about the relationship between two adult brothers—the older one stepping into the role of father before he really has the wisdom to do so—and the younger brother’s life-sustaining connection to music. I finished it feeling I’d read an entire novel about these people and I mean that as a compliment. “The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth: A boy with religious questions finds himself backed into extreme measures. I found this one weird, tasteless and rather poorly written. 1960s: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor: This is a good story, in a technical sense, though everyone in it behaves terribly and the end is miserable. The first story that’s squarely about race relations (though implicit in “Sonny’s Blues”), this one could be read as racist, or as a clear-eyed deconstruction of white attitudes: the patronizingly racist mother, the angry son whose performative antiracism mostly seems to be a rebellion against her. I fail to see the Catholic angle, unless you are already inclined to interpret human failings as a need for grace. “Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike: An adolescent boy confronts fear of death and questions about religion—a relatable phase and a well-written story, but one that didn’t do much for me. The boy ultimately reaches a narcissistic, if comforting, conclusion. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver: An overlong story about a guy who finds out his wife cheated on him a couple years ago, and which then chronicles every blessed thing he does for the next 12 hours, mostly wandering about feeling sorry for himself. Please. “By the River” by Joyce Carol Oates: Well, that’s certainly a Joyce Carol Oates story. Very Biblical, boring until it’s horrifying, though she does a good job of subtly building the tension such that I was expecting something like that. 1970s: “The School” by Donald Barthelme: Surrealist flash fiction, with a life-affirming message in the midst of death. I didn’t have a strong reaction to it but am curious about what else this author wrote. “The Conventional Wisdom” by Stanley Elkin: That was an unexpected twist. (view spoiler)[I think the story is parodying the conventional wisdom about heaven and hell, especially given the author is Jewish, but his “sinners in the hands of an angry god” portrayal is nevertheless powerful enough to give even a committed atheist a chill! (hide spoiler)] Bold and different. 1980s: “Friends” by Grace Paley: A group of middle-aged women travel to visit a friend who is dying of cancer. I can see why this story isn’t a standout for most people, but it intrigued me with its textured portrayal of the women’s lives. And what exactly did classmates see wrong with the daughter who died young? This story also contains perhaps the saddest line in the anthology so far, when (view spoiler)[the dying woman asks her friends to leave as she doesn’t have much time and wants to think about her lost daughter. (hide spoiler)] “The Harmony of the World” by Charles Baxter: On the surface this is the story of a failed musician failing at love, and I’m wrestling to understand it beyond the surface level (not too surprising since music and music-focused stories are not my forte). Is the narrator, who does indeed seem very emotionally restrained until he reams out his girlfriend for her failures as a singer, actually fatally lacking in passion? Or perhaps his problem wasn’t with his playing, but that he didn’t care enough to work on it and instead quit at the first discouragement? He and the composer of the eponymous symphony both produce apparently passionless works before their hidden reservoirs of emotion emerge in destructive ways—what does it all mean? “Lawns” by Mona Simpson: The standout of the 80s stories, this one turns out to be sickening in content but deals with an important topic in a nuanced and powerful way: (view spoiler)[it’s about a college student who’s been sexually abused by her father since childhood, finally breaking away and wrestling with her understanding of what happened. It does not pull punches in the descriptions. (hide spoiler)] Simpson’s introducing the character with her problematic behavior before revealing her trauma is artful and recreates the way one is likely to encounter sufferers in real life. I’m concerned for the character at the end: (view spoiler)[who else besides her father is likely to have written her that letter? Will loneliness keep her from making a final break? (hide spoiler)] “Communist” by Richard Ford: Another boy-shooting-birds story that impressed me even less than Updike’s, with more diffuse themes. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough to search for them. “Helping” by Robert Stone: A long story about a day in the life of a troubled veteran turned social worker, who gets triggered by a client, throws away his sobriety and is an ass to everyone around him. Reasonably well-written but the protagonist reminds me a little too much of my own asshole neighbor, the mutual contempt in this marriage is exhausting and it all builds up to nothing much. Surely there must have been better Vietnam vet stories available. “Displacement” by David Wong Louie: There are definitely better immigrant stories—this one is pretty weak—but I suppose there was less competition in the 80s. 1990s: “Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro: This one left me with a lot to think about. On the surface, it’s a story of a farm woman in rural Canada in the early 20th century, and the choices she makes under difficult circumstances. But it’s told third- and fourth-hand, by a narrator who never met the protagonist and for whom the story is bound up with her youthful resentment and adult guilt about her treatment of her sick mother. In the end, everyone’s interpretation of Flora mostly tells us about themselves: the mother is straightforward and affectionate and, as she gets ill, wishes she had a caretaker like that; the narrator resents expectations of self-sacrifice, and so wants to knock Flora off her pedestal. I saw Flora as a woman with limited choices making the best of a bad situation, which probably tells you something about me. “The Girl on the Plane” by Mary Gaitskill: So timely that if not for the descriptions of plane travel, you could mistake it for a 2020s story. A man meets a woman who reminds him of a college friend, and finally is forced to acknowledge his own complicity in a sexual assault. “Xuela” by Jamaica Kincaid: Impressive writing on a technical level, but in content, this struck me as the first chapter in a run-of-the-mill post-colonial Caribbean novel—one that neither feels complete on its own, nor made me want to read on (for those who do, see The Autobiography of My Mother). “If You Sing Like That For Me” by Akhil Sharma: Meh. “Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz: A Dominican immigrant family attends an extended family party, but all is not well at home, as seen through the eyes of a boy in his early teens(?). A common subject but I liked the story and found it well-written, fresh and raw. 2000s: “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri: A disappointment given the author’s literary stature. It feels like this story took the immigrant protagonist’s relationship with an elderly, ailing white landlady from “Displacement,” the Indian couple’s arranged marriage from “If You Sing,” which the groom has only entered to check off a life milestone, and made the whole thing saccharine instead of dismal, but with no greater depth. Clearly I have different taste in immigrant stories from the editors. “Brownies” by ZZ Packer: I’d read this before and found it a little too on-the-nose, a story about a young girl learning that oppressed people too can hunger for and abuse power. This time I appreciated more the author’s keen eye for people, places and social dynamics. I also noticed the narrator’s passivity and near-absence from the story, and am on the fence about whether to read it as an observation of someone who can draw moral conclusions but not act on them, or simply unsatisfying. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie: I enjoyed this story a lot, and in fact read it twice—it’s heavy on dialogue that feels very real; it’s often funny, though always mixed with loss; and it has a satisfying ending. At the same time, I feel unqualified to review it. It’s the only Native American story in the book and hammers Indianness hard, which is also present in the whole structure of the story: a man who wants to acquire something but continuously resists accumulating money, instead immediately sharing everything he gains. But then this seems not only cultural, but also a result of the short-term thinking brought on by financial stress. There’s also a gaping, unnamed sense of loss throughout the story, and I’m told its level of despair is considered passé among Native American readers today. “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones: Oddly, I liked this one much better when I read it a few years in Jones’s collection. Out of that context, this level of violence and misery feels almost like trolling, like Jones pulled elements from over-the-top TV shows and is laughing at what white people will believe if written by someone with the right skin color. Of course, people in prison often do have over-the-top terrible lives, and it is well-written. But I was unsatisfied by the unanswered questions, particularly around the protagonist’s backstory (at first I assumed he ran away due to poverty or abuse at home, but by the end it appears not?). Of all Jones’s stories, this is definitely a choice. Final 6 reviews in the comments due to length restrictions! ...more |
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Mar 30, 2024
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May 30, 2024
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Jan 24, 2024
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Hardcover
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0738208086
| 9780738208084
| 0738208086
| 3.63
| 1,759
| Apr 13, 2004
| Apr 13, 2004
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liked it
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I went into this book knowing it was mismarketed and that it’s really about a team of French scientists—and their Spanish minders—on an expedition to
I went into this book knowing it was mismarketed and that it’s really about a team of French scientists—and their Spanish minders—on an expedition to what is now Ecuador, in the 1730s and 40s, rather than the rainforest trek of the wealthy local woman who married an expedition assistant. (Said rainforest trek occupies 50 pages at the end.) That was fine with me: I love Enlightenment science history. And this is decent Enlightenment science history, but not the best I’ve read. Basically, a team of three high-profile French scientists and several assistants traveled to the Spanish colonies to measure a degree of latitude at the equator, in order to resolve a raging argument about the exact shape of the Earth (namely, whether it’s more flattened at the equator or the poles). The whole expedition wound up taking a decade, between the difficulties of going and returning, and the many difficulties of taking the measurements. The scientists wound up dividing into two separate parties because they couldn’t stand each other, got embroiled in local politics—one of their assistants was killed by a mob in a small town; to be fair he was an arrogant Frenchman, and the mob was provoked—but did ultimately do quite a lot of useful research, much of it not even on the subject they’d come to study. In true Enlightenment fashion, they studied everything from the local plants to Quechua grammar. In the end the academicians went home and the assistants mostly got stranded in the colony for lack of money to pay their passage. One, Jean Godin, married Isabel Gramesón, the 13-year-old daughter of a prominent colonial family, traveled from Ecuador through Brazil to French Guiana “to prepare the way” and then spent 20 years trying to get her out too. This was not because anyone wanted to stop her, but due to the incredible slowness of communication and inhospitable terrain, combined with diplomatic complications, plus the inexplicable unwillingness of everyone involved to consider literally any other route besides trekking through the entire Amazon. (I remained confused the entire book about why they couldn’t go out the way they came in, by taking ship from Guayaquil to Panama, crossing the isthmus by land and then sailing home from the Caribbean.) You think the couple of months’ delay in communication between Britain and its North American colonies was bad? When Jean Godin’s father died, his siblings wrote him a letter in Ecuador asking him to come home immediately and he got it eight years later! When a ship finally went up the Amazon to fetch Isabel, its entire crew waited four years at the meeting point for her to show up. Talk about patience and dedication to the job. All that said, the focus of the book is maybe a little too diffuse, or the author’s writing just not the most incisive. It touches on a lot of interesting topics, from the lives of those involved to the science to the culture of colonial Peru (as the whole area was known at the time), but doesn’t go in-depth on any of them. I’d have liked a little more explanation of the mathematics, and a little less Eurocentrism. Also, while Isabel’s journey was certainly harrowing, I wouldn’t call her a heroine—her survival is admirable, but she undertook the journey at the behest and with the assistance of her male relatives, and the worst of it resulted from her and her brothers’ unwillingness to brave the canoe. In the end, a fine choice if you’re particularly interested in Enlightenment science history, but if you’re new to the subject, try The Age of Wonder or The Knife Man first. Or, if you want the story of an Enlightenment-era European woman’s adventures in South America, I highly recommend Chrysalis, about a 17th century Dutch scientist and artist who traveled to Suriname on her own initiative. ...more |
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Mar 07, 2024
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Mar 20, 2024
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Jan 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250881803
| 9781250881809
| 1250881803
| 3.94
| 700
| Apr 16, 2024
| Apr 16, 2024
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liked it
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This is fairly good, but as with most recent fantasy novellas, never fully satisfying for me. It’s a story of hierarchy, oppression and resistance in
This is fairly good, but as with most recent fantasy novellas, never fully satisfying for me. It’s a story of hierarchy, oppression and resistance in space, and handles its themes well. Plenty of ideas those familiar with current discourse will recognize (physical and metaphorical chains, the symbols of oppression functioning also as the locus of solidarity, etc.), but Samatar does not feel the need to explicitly point these things out as a lesser author would—she’s confident enough to just show characters behaving like people, without comment. If the privileged seem self-centered and clueless, well, power does that to people, and Samatar’s portrayals feel believable rather than exaggerated for effect. The writing is also good, with some complex sentence structures as one would expect from Samatar, and there’s a lot of worldbuilding introduced quickly and naturally to the reader. The story is engaging and moves at a brisk pace, given the brief page count; basically, it involves a professor with lower-class roots, who has revitalized a scholarship program for ex-slaves, and the teenage boy she is mentoring as a result. The characters are sympathetic enough and I wanted the best for them, but despite some harrowing experiences (including a very effectively written bit in which the dehumanizing nature of the system is brought home through an unexpected betrayal), I was never fully invested. This is likely related to the fact that I cannot describe either of the leads’ personalities; they are more personification of roles than people. In fact the characters may be intentionally generic (to me always a bad decision, though some seem to like it), given the name thing. Neither of the protagonists is named, being referred to instead as “the boy” and “the woman.” At one point the book implies that in fact only the highest caste even possesses names (and they are the only ones named in the book), but then this situation is never actually explored, and a big deal is made at the end of a higher-caste character not knowing a lower-caste person’s name. So presumably they have them after all. In the end I think the whole naming situation is intended thematically rather than literally, and am not sure the distance and confusion it creates quite justifies it. But I would be interested to hear from a reader who loved this aspect or saw a clear purpose to it. Finally, I wasn’t fully satisfied with the ending: it’s a natural conclusion in terms of plot, but so many recent fantasies have ended in places like this that I’m reminded of Matthew Desmond’s critique of a particular strain of progressives, fluent in the language of grievance but far less interested in concrete steps forward. (view spoiler)[The book ends on what looks like the first step toward overturning the system, without envisioning how that might actually look; it’s all about delineating the oppression, rather than imagining a way out. (hide spoiler)] Of course, this may be in part because (view spoiler)[this is not the first step toward a better world but the moment where the rebellion peaks: the elite of all the fleet will now bring all their resources to bear on stamping this nascent revolution out, by destroying the whole ship if need be. To prevent that the lower classes will have to strike fast and decisively, and are they really ready for that? How can they be, when their mystical connections only snapped into place five minutes ago and no one has organized or planned for this? (hide spoiler)] Despite the criticism, however, I do think this is fairly good, and short enough to be worth a read, especially for social-justice-oriented sci-fi lovers, or those who particularly enjoy novellas. ...more |
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1
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Jul 27, 2024
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Jul 28, 2024
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Jan 03, 2024
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Paperback
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1982116366
| 9781982116361
| 1982116366
| 4.05
| 308
| Jan 24, 2023
| Jan 24, 2023
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really liked it
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This is a strong work of immersion journalism about the juvenile justice system. As with many books like this, especially those focused on vulnerable
This is a strong work of immersion journalism about the juvenile justice system. As with many books like this, especially those focused on vulnerable kids, it left me with some questions about the author’s methodology, and it’s much stronger on the storytelling than it is on policy questions or recommendations for the future. But the storytelling is really strong, putting you in the shoes of boys (it is almost exclusively about boys, who are more often arrested, and also perhaps because that’s where Jeff Hobbs felt most comfortable) in the system and the educators who work with them. So I think it is a good read, both for knowledge of a slice of life most of us never see, and for increasing empathy and understanding. The book is divided into three sections, consecutive rather than woven together. The first follows a boy named Josiah in Delaware, who has had a rough childhood (including witnessing multiple murders) and gets involved in a violent robbery the minute he’s released from a low-security sentence, thus landing him in a secure juvenile facility for his last year of high school. The second focuses on a facility in San Francisco where children are held awaiting trial—perhaps because this is usually very short-term, this section focuses primarily on an English teacher who is very invested in the kids, and also on the school principal. The third is about a kid named Ian, who is arrested after a fight between boys goes badly wrong, and winds up in a diversion program in New York that aims to prepare kids for the professional world. I found all three sections quite compelling, but especially the first and third. The book doesn’t shy away from how difficult these kids tend to be, but at the same time, portrays its protagonists and their inner lives with a great deal of nuance, empathy and sophistication—so much that I really wanted to know more about where Hobbs got all this, honestly. Especially with Josiah, who seemed very closed-off—did the author see a completely different side of him than is ever shown in the book? And if so, why isn’t this shown in the book? And to what extent did having the very close and trusting relationship with an adult that would’ve been required for him to share all this affect Josiah’s ability to turn his life around? Meanwhile, having educators as his entry point to the system seems to influence the author’s writing. When he’s speaking generally about juvenile incarceration, he’s opposed, arguing that being locked up at that formative age is particularly brutal and will crush a kid’s spirit, causing them to take on the identity of criminal and struggle to become anything else. However, his actual stories don’t tend to reflect this, often focusing on how amazing the adults working in juvenile facilities are (to be fair, the ones he focuses on do seem amazing, which is perhaps why they participated in this project at all), and on how being locked up can give a kid educational opportunities they’re skipping out on in the outside world. (Of the major characters, only with Ian did I get the sense that his stint in detention was unnecessary and harmful.) Hobbs is pretty hard on the group in San Francisco working to abolish the juvenile detention center, even as he himself suggests elsewhere that juvenile detention should be abolished. Overall though, a really interesting work. Because COVID-19 hit about halfway through his observation, we wind up seeing a lot about how that affected incarcerated kids, which is interesting though exhausting (lots of bureaucratic stupidity, including things like eliminating outdoor rec time!). It was also interesting to learn a bit about juvenile detention more broadly—the U.S. seems to be moving in the right direction, with only about 10% of the number of incarcerated kids as we had in the 90s, and conditions generally much better: from these stories, for instance, the shift from having guards to counselors seems to be genuine, even as many of them are too drained by their work to actually provide much emotional support or guidance. We see a lot of the influences that lead kids to this situation—namely, poverty, trauma, and belonging to marginalized communities—as well as some potential ways out: the diversion program in the final section seems great at setting kids on a new path, but requires exceptional teachers as well as community buy-in from those offering internships, etc. And while these kids have hard lives with no fairy-tale endings, the conclusion is hopeful for both Ian and Josiah. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the experiences of the most disadvantaged kids and those who work with them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 14, 2024
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Jul 21, 2024
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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0063275910
| 9780063275911
| 0063275910
| 3.77
| 622
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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really liked it
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Reviews of the individual stories below, but first some commentary on the anthology as a whole. This is my second time reading one of these volumes (th Reviews of the individual stories below, but first some commentary on the anthology as a whole. This is my second time reading one of these volumes (the first was 2019), and it’s interesting to compare them, giving a sense of the guest editor’s tastes. Here’s what stands out about this one: - Short means short: the average story has 14 pages, with a few at just 6-8. - First person: a full 15 out of 20 stories, which was a lot for me. Only one story does anything interesting with perspective or structure; the others (first and third person alike) are straightforward single points-of-view with at most some unreliability from the narrator. - Female-dominated, racial diversity: This is generally true of these anthologies, and perhaps the current market overall, but especially so here: 15 of the stories are by women and over half by authors of color, with a lot of diversity of background all around. - Contemporary realism only: On the other hand, while the 2019 collection included three historical stories and three dystopian or fantastical stories, the 2023 features only modern, realistic settings (a few include hallucinations, but that happens in real life too). Disappointingly narrow for an anthology claiming to represent the best regardless of genre. - But not domestic realism: Only a handful of stories deal much with marriage or parenting. Far more focus on cultural issues, on friendships, on community, on searches for identity and meaning. While I’d personally have preferred a reduction of the first-person onslaught, and a bit more risk-taking and genre variation, the anthology did ultimately win me over—it helped that I liked the second half, overall, much better than those in the first. Below are notes on the individual stories (what I always want from reviews of collections): Tender by Cherline Bazile: An immigrant high school student struggles in her relationship with her best friend, mostly because she has declared herself the only one with a right to a bad home life. Unfortunately the anthology started out with a bit of a dud for me; this one is structurally plain, has too many characters in too few pages, and we never actually see this awful home life, either. Do You Belong to Anybody? by Maya Binyam: Happily, I loved the second story, my favorite of the anthology. A man returns to his native Ethiopia after many years away, for initially unclear reasons, and it’s this absurdist tragicomedy, relayed in a voice I can best describe as “Murderbot with amnesia”—except the narrator doesn’t have amnesia, he just doesn’t feel like sharing. And is maybe neurodivergent, but certainly traumatized. I spent the whole story trying to figure out what was going on and then read it all over again once I did, which is exactly what I want from a short story. Turns out the author expanded it into a novel, which I plan to read. His Finest Moment by Tom Bissell: A famous novelist and serial sexual harasser attempts to warn his teenage daughter before the story of his bad behavior breaks. I appreciate this story for its convincing development of a perspective from which I wouldn’t want to read a whole novel, but showing that perspective is basically all it does. Almost more snapshot than story. Camp Emeline by Taryn Bowe: A family who lost their youngest child sets up a camp for disabled kids, as seen through the eyes of the teenage sister, who is struggling. Said sister gets involved with a 24-year-old camp employee, who’s also had a rough life, and this helps, I guess? As with the first story, I was underwhelmed—it’s structurally ordinary and didn’t make me feel. Treasure Island Alley by Da-Lin: After the last two stories, the sheer ambition of this one was a breath of fresh air. It’s about the meaning of death, through both science and religion, and covers the entire long life of a Taiwanese-American woman through the prism of a single day when she was five. I’m not sure it entirely succeeds—perhaps because it’s only 13 pages long; when Ted Chiang did it he took four times that—but it’s certainly interesting. The Master Mourner by Benjamin Ehrlich: Is this even a story? I’m afraid I don’t get it at all. Seven pages consisting mostly of descriptions of a couple of eccentric adults in an Orthodox Jewish boy’s community, followed by an out-of-nowhere epiphany and a deliberately vague ending. (view spoiler)[The father died, I guess? (hide spoiler)] The Company of Others by Sara Freeman: Each year, it seems, there’s one particular story that stands out for its combination of great writing and no imagination. While her husband and young daughter are away, a woman contemplates her ambivalence about parenting and her relationship with her own dead mother, and wonders if maybe she never should have married her husband at all. I wondered if maybe something would ever happen, but it didn’t. Annunciation by Lauren Groff: Another young woman seeking her path, and things definitely happen in this one, as our narrator gets to know a couple of overlooked, eccentric women in her community—her elderly German immigrant landlady, and a coworker who is an evangelical van-dweller fleeing domestic violence. There is tragedy, and the narrator comes to understand her own mother better. Some strong character sketches, and it depicts the Bay Area with a vivid sense of place. It never quite popped for me though: the narrator and her story aren’t quite strong enough as the linchpin that must hold it all together, and the ending felt a bit weak and conventional. The Mine by Nathan Harris: A South African man has risen to manage a mine, but there’s a tragedy and he feels haunted by visions locally understood to represent a guilty conscience. Unfortunately, this story just felt inauthentic to me. There’s no sense of place (and indeed, the author is American, with no mention of even visiting South Africa), everyone including the miners speaks formal American English, and the first-person voice likewise sounds like a college-educated American, whereas the narrator is supposed to have apprenticed in a mine from boyhood. Bebo by Jared Jackson: All right, now this one brings the voice, as well as the sense of place. It’s a boys-in-the-hood story featuring young teens in the inner city, in which the narrator must confront his failings as a friend to a boy worse off than himself. I found this one very strong, though tragic and sometimes gross. At first it felt like the story was being a little hard on the narrator—the whole world has failed Bebo; what is another kid supposed to do about it?—but on reflection, isn’t that the purpose of friendship, to be there for someone even if you can’t make it better? The Muddle by Sana Krasikov: This time the friends are two Ukrainian women in their 60s: one Jewish, a nonconformist, an immigrant to the U.S.; the other more of a follower, remaining in Ukraine with her Russian husband. When Russia invades, the U.S.-based woman tries to convince her friend to get out, and must ultimately confront the limits on what we can do about how those around us live their lives and what they choose to believe. A solid and timely story, and the conversations feel very realistic, though it’s missing that extra something for me, the characters a bit lacking in depth and the sense of lives lived. My Brother William by Danica Li: This story has all the depth and feeling I was missing from the last one, following the relationship of an adult brother and sister over several decades of their lives. A beautiful, poignant story, that I think will touch anyone who has a sibling they don’t see often, and that really brings the leads to life despite being only 14 pages long. The real vs. virtual world musings didn’t add much for me, but I still thought it was great. Peking Duck by Ling Ma: The one story in the collection to play with perspective, to use structure to illustrate its themes—this is a very artsy story, in other words, yet seems to be the most popular of the bunch. Featuring a Chinese-American writer who mines her immigrant mother’s experiences in her fiction, it asks questions about who really knows a story, who has the right to tell it. And it’s fascinatingly recursive: (view spoiler)[of course I wanted the final section to be from the perspective of the actual mother; it feels so authentic! But it can’t be, because it’s autofiction; Ling Ma herself is the daughter. (hide spoiler)] I think I liked it, in a complicated way; in any case, while some of the others feel chosen at random, this one clearly belongs in a best-of collection. Compromisos by Manuel Muñoz: A gay Mexican-American father tries to reconcile with his family when his relationship with a man proves to have no future. This is… fine? Like several of the stories in this collection, it’s so restrained that its emotional impact was blunted for me. We never even meet the young daughter who seems to be the father’s primary reason to return. A visually vivid story, and an interesting perspective, but not memorable for me. Grand Mal by Joanna Pearson: A literary crime story with an unreliable narrator: this one is good, and had me going back through it for clues once I’d finished. It’s also been turned into a novel, which I don’t plan to read because I don’t like murder mysteries, but I did like the story. Trash by Souvankham Thammavongsa: A 6-page anecdote narrated by a naïve and sloppy 32-year-old grocery store cashier, about meeting her ambitious lawyer mother-in-law, who of course disapproves. From the contributor’s note, the author is impressed with her own story, but I can’t say the same; it all felt obvious, with some weird moments (who would wait 2 hours in a parking lot for someone’s shift to end rather than going elsewhere or coming in? Why does the narrator think she’s “worked her way up” at the grocery store when she’s still a cashier?). Supernova by Kosiso Ugwueze: A depressed and recently suicidal young woman is kidnapped from a bus in Nigeria and held for ransom. I liked this one, particularly the Nigerian English and Isioma’s inability to muster the level of respect and fear her captors expect, all while still behaving believably. The growing rapport with the captors is interesting too. (view spoiler)[The ending elevates it I think, forcing the reader to ask the same questions I think Isioma has been asking herself all along: does anyone care about her? (hide spoiler)] Of the stories that haven’t yet been turned into novels, this is the one I’d most like to see. This Isn’t the Actual Sea by Corinna Vallianatos: A surprisingly good story about a friendship between two middle-aged artists, a writer and a filmmaker. I’m not sure I entirely understood it, but prefer a bit of artsiness over obviousness in a short story, and the portrayal of the friendship between the two women and the filmmaker’s relationship to her art felt very real. It Is What It Is by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi: A slightly bonkers story about two Iranian expat women—roommates, grad students—in Chicago, who both seem to be losing their minds. It’s the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there’s a series of tragedies or near-misses affecting their homeland (see this review for a timeline). I liked it more than I didn’t. It really isn’t about the cat. Moon by Esther Yi: An uptight young woman attends a K-pop concert and becomes completely obsessed with a member of the boy band. I didn’t really connect with this one, and thought it ended too soon: we’re still within days of the concert, too early to know whether this will actually change the narrator’s life forever or if it’s just a weird blip. The novel it turned into would no doubt answer the question but I’m not that interested. At any rate, I’m glad I read the anthology in the end; the stories are well-written (though I had a chuckle at the “‘Coincidence,’ she emitted tersely” in the penultimate story!) with some variation in subject matter if not in genre, and it introduced me to a bunch of new authors. EDIT: Well, I found out where all the experimental and genre-bending literary stories went this year! Check out The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 02, 2024
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Feb 17, 2024
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Dec 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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0735239657
| 9780735239654
| 0735239657
| 4.05
| 2,582
| 2023
| Jan 01, 2023
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liked it
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My least favorite book in a strong trilogy, about the lives of two Métis families in contemporary Winnipeg, connected by a terrible crime. It’s intere
My least favorite book in a strong trilogy, about the lives of two Métis families in contemporary Winnipeg, connected by a terrible crime. It’s interesting how different each of the books is, and how they connect to each other: The Break is narrow in time but broad in character, mostly following the victim’s family; The Strangers is narrower in character but covers several years, exclusively following the perpetrator’s family. The Circle again covers a short period of time but is extremely broad in its cast: each of its 22 chapters is from a different perspective, including both families and other people tangentially related. Structuring a novel as a metaphorical restorative justice circle is a cool idea, though I was relieved that there isn’t a literal restorative justice circle, which is probably not a good idea for these people and this crime. At the same time, it has its pitfalls. Vermette does a good job of keeping tabs on the major characters through other people’s point-of-view sections, but limiting each character to a chapter does distance the reader a bit from the central players. And where The Strangers showed a strong ability to differentiate character voices even in the third person, the deluge here makes them all sound fairly similar. Meanwhile, some of the new people don’t really have anything to do, and so their entire sections consist of talking to a main character (Waaban), or worse, talking about a main character to third parties (Izzy), or worse still, just thinking about a main character’s backstory (Larry). If this were a restorative justice circle, I can’t say I’d care to hear this much from people whose connection to the crime is being mildly inconvenienced by the struggles of someone more seriously affected, and with this being the only snippet we see, it can make the minor characters’ inner lives look overly focused on someone who isn’t actually that important to them. I found the format most successful in catching us up on recurring secondary characters, whose chapters are often quite poignant: Ben, adjusting to retirement after his wife’s death; Shawn, getting to know his biological father, who’s in a nursing home; Nevaeh, now a single mother with big plans. There’s a sense in which this structure makes the whole book feel like an extended epilogue—especially since it’s fairly short; even the 240-page count is a bit inflated, as a couple of chapters are formatted as prose poetry with a ton of white space. But don’t let that epilogue feel lull you into a false sense of security, because it’s ultimately leading up to a new and horrible tragedy. There’s certainly hope, resilience and love here, but nothing is really over. All that said, I did enjoy the broad range of characters, from different ages and generations, different walks of life, all written believably and with sympathy, even when they’re difficult. Vermette is clearly a writer who is fundamentally interested in people, and if the book feels sometimes pulled in different directions because she just wants to follow some new person home and meet their family and hear about their job and explore how they came to be who they are, I actually love that. These books have always been about a community and about how people negotiate the circumstances of their lives. So widening the circle makes sense. I didn’t love how outright preachy Vermette has gotten on social justice issues, which is a change from her earlier books, though these books are very much placed in the moment in which they’re written and her milieu has probably changed too. Some commentary on specific characters and their endings below the spoiler cut: (view spoiler)[- Jake! This kid’s death hurt. I wondered if he even knew how little Emily mattered to Phoenix as a person—that the rape wasn’t even about Emily, it was about Phoenix laying claim to her baby daddy, which made me think there was very little chance of Phoenix harassing Emily again. Although who knows with Phoenix. Also, any so-called defense lawyer who is pushing for a guilty plea to murder within a week of the supposed crime, the only evidence of which is that someone with a habit of running away has disappeared again, and all while refusing to investigate exonerating evidence, is criminally incompetent. Don’t be taken in by fancy clothes. - As for Phoenix, she’s in pretty much the same place she’s always been: you can see she has the capacity for redemption, but all the stars will have to align and stay aligned for it to work and is that ever going to happen? I felt bad for Joe and his family—they might be better off if Phoenix “just” steals their truck and gets out of there. - Cedar-Sage let me down a bit in this one: I don’t know whether it’s because of her growing up, or her not having much to do here, or from several of her appearances being through the eyes of people who sort of like her but also find her a bit pitiful (all this sitting at the window pining is a bit much) or from so much of the social justice preaching being put on her. In any case, reading about her wasn’t the emotional experience it was in the last book. And I wasn’t sure what Ziggy saw in her. - Lou continues to annoy the hell out of me. The combination of her chapters being in first person when no one else is (except Cedar, who has youth and pathos and more central story importance going for her) and her always having the most banal and obnoxious romantic drama in the midst of a family tragedy, makes it feel like she thinks she is the protagonist in a work of women’s fiction when in fact she’s a secondary character in a literary one. This time I think the annoyance must be intended because it’s such a sordid affair, and with such awful results. - Speaking of which, Tommy (now Tom) was a lot more sympathetic last time around—I wonder if Vermette soured on police in the interim, or just wanted a realistic story of someone who starts out idealistic and well-intentioned, then gets sucked into the system (and marries the wrong person, which has turned out exactly the way you’d have guessed). - Alex pissed me off too. Not only for, you know, ordering a hit on a kid just trying to protect his family, but for his warped view of his own family dynamics. Alex can’t imagine how his brother and sister turned out so selfish! Well, for the record, by “selfish” he means not involved in the family gang business, and as for how Elsie and Joe turned out, Alex apparently does not realize that he was their abusive mom’s golden child. This book doesn’t even go into that, which had me outraged on their behalf—new readers might believe him! - I was glad for Elsie’s hopeful ending though. This poor woman has been through the wringer her whole life and finally seems to have arrived in a good place, with a supportive and healthy community around her. I just wish she’d be more involved with Cedar, though I can see how feelings of inadequacy are keeping her away. - I had some doubts about Emily’s identification with asexuality. She is annoyed that her mom and therapist suspect this is trauma-related rather than inherent to her being, but I was with them, given that, you know, her first and only sexual experience was a horrific rape at age 13 and she now lives holed up in her mom’s basement seeing practically no one. But I felt like we weren’t supposed to question her identification given the overall context of the book, its embrace of neopronouns and so on, and if the point here was to include asexual representation, could it not have been literally anyone else? Why is this the only one introduced in such a way that you can’t help but question it, while at the same seeming to scold anyone who does? Maybe it’s actually a good choice, to make readers think, but it irked me a little. - It’s funny that out of all the prior POV characters still living, Stella—the one the first book’s blurb treated like the protagonist, though she wasn’t—is the only one not to reappear here. We don’t even really get an update. And she was in fact affected by the crime. (hide spoiler)] At any rate, I had sufficient emotional investment in the characters that overall I did enjoy this. I think Vermette gets people, and writes well and with complexity about a marginalized community. But for new readers, don’t start here: begin with The Strangers or preferably The Break, which anyway are stronger and more cohesive. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 27, 2024
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Feb 29, 2024
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Oct 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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0525509216
| 9780525509219
| 0525509216
| 3.98
| 52
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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really liked it
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3.5 stars An interesting look into the work and home lives of Egyptian women, by an author mostly interested in factory work. I liked Factory Girls, wh 3.5 stars An interesting look into the work and home lives of Egyptian women, by an author mostly interested in factory work. I liked Factory Girls, which focused on the lives of a few young women in Dongguan, and this book draws fascinating comparisons between the lives of Chinese and Egyptian workers, while asking the question: why hasn’t globalization liberated women in Egypt, as it has other places? The answer is multifaceted, including the economy (China’s has been strong enough to reward risk-taking, Egypt’s hasn’t), the culture (Chang sees a particular tendency in Egypt to retrench into the family in tough times), and the geography. Chinese young people tend to move to distant cities for work and can only return home once a year, thus quickly shedding familial limitations, while Egyptian workers commute from their family homes. But it adds up to Egyptian women’s incomes winning them no new authority in their families, while Chinese women’s roles are transformed. The book presents a bleak picture for the average Egyptian woman: often married off in her teens (apparently in part to stave off potential sexual encounters within the family! Significant numbers of Egyptians still feel safer marrying relatives, though studies indicate these women wind up with slightly less say on average in their new household), to a man who inevitably wants her to stay home. Not just to not work, but apparently to stay home all the time: women Chang interviewed about their activities when not working tended to report “doing nothing.” Divorce is becoming more accessible, but is still stigmatized and tends to require giving up property and even children. Interestingly, Chang traces Egypt’s history and argues that the last 150 years or so are as bad as women have ever had it: pharaonic records show a third of all property being owned by women at some points, while even after the Arab conquest, complaints about women in public places prove just how present they were. And the sharia law we think of today is an especially conservative version imposed during British rule, which actually removed the longstanding Islamic practice of no-fault divorce for women willing to relinquish property claims. Unfortunately, changing the laws in place now runs into fierce opposition from the conservative, male establishment. Chang’s look at how women resist is also fascinating. In many cases, those who stand up to their families succeed, but subterfuge helps too (as in the case of the woman who got a job while her father was away, then when he returned and objected, successfully argued “well, I have it now so I might as well do it”). However, the outlook for the unconventional woman is bleak, particularly given the poor state of education for most Egyptians. One factory worker is described as trapped, “like the heroine of an Edith Wharton novel”: “unwilling to accept the socially prescribed role of wife and mother but unfit for anything else. She valued her liberty, but turning her back on society’s expectations hadn’t made her free. It made her marginal and invisible, a person with no definable place among everyone she knew. . . . There was no one among her family or friends who understood her, no one to encourage her, no one who had pursued a dream of her own and could show her the way.” In another case, a woman who excels at her factory winds up fired, seemingly because she couldn’t stop playing power games—probably learned in her dysfunctional upbringing, and which Chang describes as common in Egyptian families. This is of course a portrait of the lower and middle ranks of society. Chang meets numerous professional women in what she estimates to be the top 1-2%, living in their own bubble and often denying the restrictions most Egyptian women face. One can see why they’re uncomfortable with outside stereotypes of their country that don’t describe their own lives, though in this analysis those stereotypes are accurate for most people. All that said, the book’s uncritical embrace of garment factories did put me off. I don’t know if these places technically qualify as sweatshops (working conditions are described favorably), but the type of work this book champions certainly involves long hours at repetitive tasks, usually six days a week, and for low pay. When Chang gives salaries, they tend to result in any worker who is supporting herself with her salary (as opposed to just saving up for appliances and household supplies for her dowry) living on about $2 a day—the U.N.’s definition of “extreme poverty.” So I certainly wouldn’t want to do their jobs, wouldn’t call it liberation, and rolled my eyes whenever someone complained about Egyptians not wanting to work (the men at least seem to have work-life balance figured out—not such a bad thing). One of the people Chang profiles is a woman from a well-off family running a small factory of her own and she really rubbed me the same way, with her self-congratulatory talk about instilling “loyalty” in the people she pays poverty wages while patting herself on the back for “only” requiring them to work five days a week (she later changes her mind on that last). Admittedly, I have worked for someone like her and the main character syndrome of wealthy entrepreneurs perhaps crosses cultural boundaries! But overall, I would have liked the book to interrogate the value of work at least a little, rather than breaking out the pom-poms for corporations and factories—especially when the author herself admits that employment doesn’t necessarily improve Egyptian women’s lives. Also, while it’s very readable, it took me awhile to fully get into this book, and I was glad to have previously read Chang’s husband’s book about their time in Egypt for context. That said, this one is very informative and I’m glad to have read it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 21, 2024
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Apr 26, 2024
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Oct 11, 2023
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Hardcover
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0060738170
| 9780060738174
| 0060738170
| 3.93
| 18,902
| Nov 01, 2005
| Nov 01, 2005
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liked it
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3.5 stars A worthwhile book that isn’t quite what I was expecting. From the title, I expected this to be a “myths about the Bible” book, perhaps premis 3.5 stars A worthwhile book that isn’t quite what I was expecting. From the title, I expected this to be a “myths about the Bible” book, perhaps premised on translation issues. But the author, besides being a renowned scholar, is a college professor, and this book reads very much like an undergraduate class, of the sort that’s much more interested in hammering home the “themes” and big picture of the subject area than focusing on the details. And if this book were a course, it would not be titled “History of the New Testament” but something more like “Introduction to Textual Criticism.” That said, it is interesting in unexpected ways. The author was once a Biblical literalist, until realizing that, well, which version of the New Testament is the correct one? This turns out to be a fraught question, because we don’t have originals of anything. Nothing written on paper survives 2000 years (unless perhaps stored in the Egyptian desert), so what we have are copies (often copies of copies of copies of copies….), made by scribes, i.e., humans. Today it’s hard to get our heads around how much time and effort went into producing a single copy of a book before the printing press: every copy had to be written out by hand, one word at a time. (Does some cultural memory of this remain, in our tendency to treat books as precious even when they’re cheap?) In the ancient world, this was done by a small class of professional scribes (some of whom could actually barely write!), literate slaves in rich households, or occasionally educated people who really wanted to disseminate something. Anything not copied, meanwhile, would be lost, as well as the originals the copies were made from. And discrepancies inevitably crept in. Some were inadvertent errors: my favorite is the guy who copied out a genealogy beginning with God, which he apparently didn’t realize was in two columns, because he stuck God somewhere in the middle as the son of some other guy! (Talk about asleep at the wheel—but then, how long could you stay focused while copying begats? Maybe he realized halfway through and just hoped no one would notice?) Others were “corrections” to the text—things the scribes thought must have been wrong, perhaps because they struggled to make sense of them or the text felt incomplete otherwise. For instance, in a story from Mark, Jesus went from being described as angry to compassionate; the last twelve verses of Mark (everything after the women fled the empty tomb) were apparently a later addition; a woman described in one of the epistles as an important apostle was retconned as a man. Still others were quite deliberate changes, to “clarify” the text or emphasize a theological or social point that a later writer wanted to make: the prohibition on women speaking in church was probably a later addition not attributable to Paul (since Paul had previously said they needed to cover their heads while doing so); likewise there were alterations to be more anti-Semitic, or to stress aspects of Jesus that other factions disagreed about (for instance, to clarify that he really was human, to remove the line “Today I have begotten you” from Luke’s version of his baptism to foreclose the interpretation that he only became Son of God at that moment, etc.). In fairness to these scribes, the “canon” didn’t exist yet (this dates to about 367 C.E., so hundreds of years after these books were first written), so scribes likely had a very different understanding of the nature of their texts than Biblical literalists today. And the biggest changes happened in those early centuries, before Christianity became institutionalized. But the author overall seems interested in exploring why changes were made and what they say about both the original texts and the later scribes, rather than using the discrepancies to point fingers. I and probably everyone else was disappointed to learn that the “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” story is not original, but the author theorizes that it was an oral tradition about Jesus that just didn’t happen to be written down till later. At any rate, the book makes no attempt to be comprehensive in covering even the most important alterations to the originals (it wouldn’t be possible to cover all of them because there are more variations among texts than words in the New Testament). Instead it focuses primarily on the historical context and how textual scholars analyze manuscripts. Specifics come into play as examples illustrating the principles. If slightly on the dry side, the book is readable for a general audience, obviously the work of a careful scholar, and it’s interesting stuff that will change how you think about ancient documents, including of course the New Testament. That said, despite the title you won’t find much here about the ways Jesus is actually misquoted: namely the fact that he spoke Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Greek (so we actually have none of his original words), plus the decades that passed before the Gospels were written down. I do have some interest in reading other work by this author, but ideally one with more meat and less heavy on the themes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 16, 2023
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Oct 20, 2023
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Jun 24, 2023
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Hardcover
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1982134445
| 9781982134440
| 1982134445
| 3.82
| 310
| unknown
| Aug 30, 2022
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liked it
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I read this—a journalistic nonfiction account of three forbidden marriages in India—shortly after The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, a similar account of th
I read this—a journalistic nonfiction account of three forbidden marriages in India—shortly after The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, a similar account of three more conventional couples. On the one hand it’s readable and engaging and brings home the challenges of marriages that violate some taboo, even today. On the other hand, its stories end rather abruptly, the poor attention to detail makes me wonder if we can trust any of it, and I definitely wanted to hear more about the author’s role and ethics, particularly when at least one of the relationships she’s chronicling becomes abusive. The book follows three young couples, mostly from rural areas, in the late 2010s. Neetu and Dawinder come from a village in Haryana, and face numerous obstacles to marriage: being from the same village means their relationship is considered incest; she’s Hindu and he’s Sikh; and they’re from different castes. They run away together, only to wind up in a seemingly exploitative shelter, and meanwhile her family turns violent toward his, destroying their property and beating his mother nearly to death. Monika and Arif are in a similar situation: she’s Hindu and he’s Muslim, and her family is middle class while his is impoverished. She doesn’t seem more than mildly invested in their clandestine romance—which he initiates while attending police training school with her sister—until she gets pregnant, and they decide to run away and marry. Her family also becomes violent and threatening, getting a local Hindu nationalist gang involved. Meanwhile the couple stays with his family, which does not work out well. Finally, Reshma and Preethi are a same-sex couple, distant relations who meet at a family event when Reshma is 28 and Preethi 18. They run away together twice, and while their family drag them home the first time, this relationship incites the least drama from third parties. They’re also most able to get to know one another beforehand as their bond doesn’t immediately incite suspicion, but this doesn’t prevent the stresses of their outcast status from taking their toll. Choksi tells all their stories in an engaging way; she seems to have gotten a lot of buy-in from the couples, who share intimate thoughts and feelings about their situations. She’s especially interested in exploring the tension between the importance of family and the desire to choose one’s partner, and the burdens that giving up one’s family (or placing them in harm’s way) to pursue romance place on the couples’ marriages are portrayed with nuance and detail. She also does a strong job in bringing her subjects to life on the page—helped immensely by including photos of each couple!—so that I felt I had some idea who these people are and what motivates them. That said, there was a lot more I wanted to know. The stories all end rather abruptly—in one case, while the couple are still in hiding, before even reaching a place of stability, even though three more years passed between that and the writing. I wound up wondering if some of the participants lost interest in sharing with Choksi along the way and that was the cause of the weak wrap-ups. I also wanted more background information outside of the individual stories: she includes an entire chapter about a murdered couple that Neetu and Dawinder are told about, but no independent investigation into the sketchy shelter, what’s really going on there, how this compares to other shelters, etc. But the biggest missing piece is some methodological note, which authors who get to know their subjects intimately but remove themselves from the text generally include. When the book includes exact dialogue, was Choksi there and recording, or is it reconstructed from the subjects’ memories? How might her involvement have affected their situations? How did she balance observing their stories vs. helping, given the poverty and danger her subjects face? And in particular, how did she handle Reshma’s abuse of Preethi? It’s unclear from the text whether Preethi realizes she’s being abused, but this is such a classic case I think by the end Choksi must have known, and from the way the two are written about my sense is that the author was closer to Reshma ((view spoiler)[and Preethi possibly cut the author off after finally leaving (hide spoiler)]). I wound up with a lot of questions about that situation and given how much everyone was clearly sharing with her, it’s not honest for Choksi to pretend she wasn’t part of these people’s lives. There’s also just a lot of sloppiness here, leaving me with questions about the veracity of the text. In the introduction, Choksi tells us of young Indians: “Four in five of us married with permission from our parents, and less than 6 percent of us chose our own partners”—so what’s up with the remaining 14%, kidnapping? She tells us in the text that the village of Chikhali is near the border of Telangana, but includes a map on which it’s nowhere near Telangana. She tells us she met the first two couples “a few weeks” apart, both in the immediate aftermath of their running away, but gives dates for their flights and they’re a solid 9 months apart. She tells us in a photo caption that Monika discovered she was pregnant too late for an abortion, but in the text that Monika opted against because she couldn’t think of an excuse to stay away overnight. That’s a lot of discrepancies and at some point one has to wonder what else is wrong and just less obviously so. Overall then, an interesting and eye-opening bit of reportage, but one that left me with doubts. A cautious recommend to those interested in the subject. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 10, 2023
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Sep 12, 2023
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Jun 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345452380
| 9780345452382
| 0345452380
| 3.90
| 6,513
| 1992
| Apr 28, 2002
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really liked it
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This is a hard book to rate because I loved the first half but had very mixed feelings about the second. It’s an anthropologically-focused, feminist w
This is a hard book to rate because I loved the first half but had very mixed feelings about the second. It’s an anthropologically-focused, feminist work of science fiction, featuring a planet habitable exclusively by women, through the eyes of those who show up on a corporate expedition but soon realize this place may become their home. The primary protagonist is Marghe, a newly-arrived anthropologist; the other major thread follows Hannah Danner, who arrived as a new lieutenant in the security forces a few years before, but through attrition has been thrown into the role of commander. It’s a compelling story, one that kept me engaged and wondering what would happen next, both in the characters’ personal lives and with the larger political threats. The characters are written with a good amount of depth and personality, as well as personal baggage and challenges, making them easy to relate to and invest in. I also really loved reading about this world, and the entirely female cast: as Griffith states in the afterword, her goal was to write about women as just people, unbound by gender roles, without stereotyping or idealizing them. The book succeeds brilliantly at that: the world feels real and lived-in, informed by an anthropological understanding of how human societies work. There’s a lot of cultural diversity. The book resists any attempt to define it by the absence of men—men are irrelevant here; Griffith’s interest is the presence of women. (It’s fair to say women from Earth would probably have some feelings about the absence of men, which aren’t shown here, but it isn’t a book about loss and we don’t hear about any of the things people marooned on an alien planet might miss. The point-of-view characters are far more interested in making the future.) And for the locals, gender and gender roles are refreshingly irrelevant. I do think those who claim that the book’s world is no different or more peaceful than our own have very limited knowledge of our world. Griffith’s women are, first and foremost, people, so violence and lawbreaking are not unheard of, and there are plenty of personality flaws to go around. But at the same time, it does feel like a society of women, with close social bonds and very little violence, particularly of the ego-driven sort. There’s no warrior culture as seen on Earth, even among the most hard-bitten tribe, and while one character promotes aggressive and unprovoked warfare, she is understood by those around her to be suffering brain damage. (view spoiler)[That anyone follows Uaithne, however briefly, is one of the least believable elements of the book to me, given their wariness of her beforehand and immediately shrugging off the cause once she’s dead. Personally I think Marghe was wrong to think the Echraidhe sought collective suicide to avoid change, and that in fact they were all just waiting for Aoife to handle the problem. And between Aoife’s family bond with Uaithne, her strong in-group bias and perhaps just a lack of leadership skills, she doesn’t act until Uaithne is moments away from getting the whole tribe slaughtered. (hide spoiler)] Basically, this book is everything I wanted to see after reading Le Guin’s “The Matter of Seggri,” which creates a similar society in a very different context. All that said, I liked the second half much less than the first. The book visits perhaps too many different groups, without time to develop investment in those met later, and it slows down significantly to allow Marghe time for personal growth. Unfortunately, to me that personal growth was misdirected: Marghe started the book a taker and remains a taker, and while I related strongly to her in the first half, the character focus later on accentuated without addressing all her worst flaws. (Some of which I share, but not I hope to this extent!) She spends the whole book doing whatever is most convenient for her, without considering others, whether it’s unilaterally committing her own people to a permanent alliance (which they lack the means to honor) to get provisions for a journey everyone has advised against, or blowing off her role as vaccine test subject—which will determine the fates of at least a thousand people—in favor of her anthropological studies. (Arguably, (view spoiler)[this is a good thing because the Company’s departure protects the natives from outside exploitation, at least for now. And there’s at least a million natives, compared to 15 people murdered as a result of Marghe’s decision, and about 1000 permanently stranded. (hide spoiler)] But Marghe doesn’t make a principled decision or engage in any moral reasoning; she just carelessly lets it happen and then takes no responsibility.) She also just generally spends her life taking advantage of others’ generosity without reciprocating, as when she strongarms her way into a family for her own convenience, and she winds up with a partner whom she totally bulldozes, without checking in on that person’s needs or wants at all. (view spoiler)[Even to the extent of getting her pregnant without discussing it first! (hide spoiler)] Throughout all this the narrative bends around her, from the partner accommodating everything, to Danner accepting her high-handed and selfish decisions with equanimity when I would expect howls of outrage in any real workplace. So I wound up very over Marghe, though at least she has a personality, and even if unintentional, it does feel like a realistic portrayal of a self-centered individualist encountering a more communal culture, where people are generous based on assumptions of future reciprocity, while the individualist admits no such obligations. There’s some strong character work with the secondary characters: I found Aoife particularly well-drawn, enjoyed Letitia, liked Danner, believed in Sara Hiam, and even Uaithne has some complexity for a villain. (I’m on the fence about whether what seems like a high level of self-awareness and ability to see others’ perspectives, when she tells her own story, was intentional on Griffith’s part. Either way, Uaithne has more self-awareness than Marghe.) It’s also just great to get to read a book with women in all the major roles, and without being about Womanhood, to boot. In the end, 3.5 stars for me, because when I started disliking Marghe my interest fell off significantly, and most of the book is about her journey. But there is still a lot to love here. Recommended for those interested in anthropological sci-fi or non-gender-focused stories about women. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 10, 2024
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Aug 18, 2024
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Jun 11, 2023
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Paperback
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0809572842
| 9780809572847
| 0809572842
| 3.64
| 2,476
| Jul 04, 2008
| Aug 25, 2008
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really liked it
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3.5 stars An unusual and ambitious novel—one that to my mind falls a little short, but I respect the ambition and can see why for some readers it’s a f 3.5 stars An unusual and ambitious novel—one that to my mind falls a little short, but I respect the ambition and can see why for some readers it’s a favorite. The Alchemy of Stone is a steampunk fantasy, set in a city in turmoil and featuring an intelligent automaton, Mattie, who works as an alchemist. The plot is, I think, the weakest part: there’s a lot going on in the city, conflict between different factions in government, parliament eclipsing aristocratic rule, xenophobia directed at dark-skinned “easterners,” brutal exploitation of the common people by the technocracy, all of it culminating in a bloody revolution—all of which our protagonist observes from the sidelines, without having much stake in any of it. The substance of Mattie’s story is in her attempts to achieve independence and her relationships with five diverse humans, drawn with a sharp eye for the power dynamics involved. This is particularly true, and particularly uncomfortable, between Mattie and her maker, a man who seems to view her as a sort of backup girlfriend and refuses to give up control over Mattie’s life. Their dynamics are well-crafted and believably portrayed, and Mattie’s friendships with other characters are interestingly complex as well (the love interest, unsurprisingly, is the least inspired of the bunch, but fortunately that’s not as dominant an element of the book as the tagline would have you believe). So I think it’s fairly successful as a character-driven story, but it does mean Mattie’s plotline largely consists of to-ing and fro-ing amongst her various friends, with all the political chaos and upheaval happening in the backdrop. It’s a bit of a mess, and at times it felt the author was struggling to tack on personal stakes for Mattie without quite succeeding—the “Mattie must find a potion to save the gargoyles” subplot seems meant to be the linchpin of the story but felt a bit unnecessary and tangential to me. All that said, I basically liked the book. The characters are intriguing, particularly Mattie herself—it’s interesting to see the book work through her advantages and limitations as an automaton, how her life works and how she views herself. She’s also an endearing character, mild and kind on the surface but with some steel beneath. I appreciated that Sedia was willing to take both Mattie’s story and the larger political one to uncomfortable places, without needing to explicitly point out everything that is wrong. It’s an intriguing setting as well, bursting with life and history, only a small sliver of which we see; one can imagine many more novels set in this world. The writing is mostly quite good, though in a few places it gets a little clunky and once uses “mendicant” where it means “mendacious” (oops! Those are very different!). And it’s a thematically rich book, raising questions about the possibility of true social and political change, about relationships across difference and power imbalances, and using Mattie’s non-human nature to explore some very human experiences of isolation and control and what personal identity and independence even consist of. I’m not quite sure what to make of the ending, which I wasn’t expecting to be such a downer: (view spoiler)[Mattie dies! Or at least, probably. If the key had survived it would probably have been easily found. And not only that, everyone important in her life fails her: by betraying her, by dying, by not caring about her nearly as much as she cares about them. It’s a true tragedy, and I wasn’t expecting that. Maybe just because fantasy authors have such a habit of contriving happy endings that I assumed Sedia would do it too. (hide spoiler)] Overall, this one is certainly worth a try for the interested. If I never found it quite propulsive, I nevertheless enjoyed the read; and if some aspects didn’t fully succeed, I still give it points for ambition and imagination, for taking risks and doing something different rather than just regurgitating an oft-told tale. Oh, and one last pet peeve for which the author is not responsible: while that cover may suit the book tonally, it bears absolutely no resemblance to Mattie. She’s a robot with a very feminine design and clothing, not a naked human with an overlarge featureless visor. And she definitely has eyes. They’re kind of a big deal. ...more |
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1
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Jul 30, 2023
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Aug 03, 2023
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May 01, 2023
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Paperback
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1912868776
| 9781912868773
| 1912868776
| 3.87
| 207
| 2015
| Nov 05, 2021
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liked it
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3.5 stars An engaging little novella about two women in the Central African Republic, who lose their husband unexpectedly and find their lives thrown i 3.5 stars An engaging little novella about two women in the Central African Republic, who lose their husband unexpectedly and find their lives thrown into chaos when his family disputes their inheritance. Fortunately they are able to rely on each other and find the energy to keep moving forward. Alongside their story is some pointed commentary about politics, corruption and injustice in their country; the story is set in 2011 and the mix of tradition and modernity is fun. It’s also well-translated and highly readable. Not quite as upbeat as I expected, with some fairly depressing elements—the men hold highly patriarchal attitudes but it seems that only through marriage to them can a woman get ahead or achieve stability, while justice depends entirely on money and connections. And there’s not really much depth or complexity to the characters. Still, it maintains a fairly optimistic tone, and overall it’s a quick and enjoyable read that provides a window into a lesser-known country. Oddly, the blurb on my copy claims this to be the first book from the CAR published in English, which it’s definitely not: Daba's Travels from Ouadda to Bangui came well before this (makes me wonder about the two other books I’ve read from this imprint that made the same claim!). I would recommend this one over Daba’s Travels for the adult reader, however. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 10, 2023
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Jun 10, 2023
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Apr 22, 2023
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Paperback
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1668009420
| 9781668009420
| 1668009420
| 3.75
| 2,532
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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really liked it
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3.5 stars I’m interested in people writing honestly about friendship and its challenges, and Tate is a good writer—this book is very quick and easy to 3.5 stars I’m interested in people writing honestly about friendship and its challenges, and Tate is a good writer—this book is very quick and easy to read. It’s soul-baring, as the author confronts her failures as a friend from childhood through her 40s, but also generally hopeful, as she finds great friends and learns to do better. It would make a great choice as a jumping-off point for a reader or group who want to think and talk about their own friendships. Of course, not everyone will share the author’s particular issues, namely envy of other women and dumping friends for boyfriends—especially in her younger and more messed-up years, when she based her entire self-worth on having a good man but struggled to find one. By the time she gets married she’s also a much more stable friend, though she still struggles with jealousy and fears that her friends like each other better than they like her. And she and almost all her friends are deeply immersed in the world of therapy and twelve-step recovery, which creates a somewhat different approach to relationships. In general they seem more deliberate and communicative than most people, though at times I thought Tate over-interpreted innocuous childhood circumstances (I suspect she feels like an inadequate outsider because she has a naturally neurotic, perfectionistic temperament, not because she shared a bathroom with her dad and brother growing up rather than her mom and sister), and that these people could be exhausting to spend time with! But I think plenty of readers will find something to relate to in her exploration of the nuances of friendship, especially as she learns to do better. Tate structures this book about her friendship with one particular twelve-step friend, Meredith, who is about 20 years older. I think this is largely successful, and it’s a beautiful tribute to Meredith that will make readers love her too; she seems like a fascinating, complicated, messy person who suffered a lot in life but recovered and was able to help others too. That said, I couldn’t help suspecting the author chose her as a focal point simply because Meredith died of cancer (not a spoiler, that’s in the opening). The two agree to act as each other’s accountability buddy/coach/sounding board as they both work on their friendships, but I don’t think either would actually have called the other her best friend. By the time they decide their friendships need working on, they’re both in a pretty stable place with a lot of great friends and their nonsense mostly behind them. This mostly isn’t a problem for the book (though it’s a misleading title), but the whole last 40 pages, after Meredith’s death, are structured as letters to Meredith and I don’t think that really works—they read almost exactly like the regular text, just carrying on the author’s story with a “Dear Meredith” at the top. Overall I found this to be quick, engaging and worthwhile reading—it feels almost gossipy, the author constantly dishing on herself, but I don’t think friendship is written about enough in comparison to its importance in people’s lives and wellbeing. So I appreciate a warts-and-all account like this. I would consider reading more from this author. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 26, 2023
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May 28, 2023
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Apr 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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