[book post] Two books

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

I remember my mom reading this for book club waaaay back in the day, and I remember her hating it, so much that she raged about it to me over the course of multiple dinners. So when I found some battered old copy of this in a little free library thing, I was like—okay, haha, let's see what all the hate's about.

( Read more... )

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

I actually finished this one months and months ago, and kept dragging my feet on doing a writeup, because while I enjoyed it greatly, it defies concise description. This book reminded me of nothing so much as that very first comparative literature class I took, my very first year of college, where I sat mesmerized as the two professors, with over twenty languages between them, delivered these masterful lectures that ranged easily between classical Chinese novels and Icelandic sagas and Spanish poetry, drawing connections between them (thematically, historically, linguistically) that were so striking and beautiful that they intimidated me out of the major entirely—not because of any lack of encouragement or warmth on the professors' part (they were lovely!), but because I simply could not conceive how someone could possibly know all that stuff, and self-selected out of the endeavor.

Hyde achieves a somewhat similar feat here, and as I'm no longer an easily-intimidated coed, I can be more fulsome in my appreciation of the thing.

( Read more... )

[book post] Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

How the hell do you talk about the last book in a series? And, especially, how do you talk about the last book in this series?

I read the first book while at a shitty hostel in San Francisco, right? And I called my boyfriend in the middle of that ~*~econometrics as doomsday prophecy~*~ scene, because I was laughing so hard I was crying and I had to share that moment with someone. Then I cornered some rando Dutch guys in the hostel kitchen to also share the moment with them (with less success, though they were awfully nice about it). Then I got back home a few days later and wouldn't shut up about it to my friends.

For a while, I pitched the novels on the strength of their worldbuilding, but in hindsight that's not quite right. There's too many seams and cracks, in this vision of the future; too much that's glossed over via faith or "wouldn't it be cool though" and Great Men wandering around doing Great Things. If you're interested in worldbuilding in the sense of meticulous civilizational realism, everything thoroughly figured out and 100% plausible, and so on, these books aren't that.

But. If you enjoy worldbuilding in the form of interesting ideas, thought experiments, manic jumping from thing-to-thing, philosopher-energy and horny-energy and showoff-energy and unhinged-energy and melodrama, all knitted together with hella panache and weirdo overly-earnest speeches—if you've ever enjoyed anime guys duking it out over Big Ideas—yeah, this series delivers, in a way entirely new to me. (In novel form, at least. When someone on Tumblr pointed out JEDD Mason has some serious Kaworu-from-Neon-Genesis-Evangelion vibes so much clicked for me, haha.)

What I'm saying is this series feels more like this great big galloping thing than a book, and I'm not sure a conventional book write-up really captures the feeling of the thing. So I've been dragging my feet talking about it!

But let's try.

( enter the spoiler zone )

[book post] Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Wow.

I do not think this was the best novel I read in 2021, necessarily, but I think it was the best novel in terms of "how much it affected me, personally" that I read in 2021. As I go back and reread it now, thumbing through the passages, pondering how to write this post, thinking about it analytically, well. It's a debut novel. There are elements that are just flaws, and elements that involve complicated tradeoffs with some serious drawbacks. But it captured such a potent feeling of stuck-ness, of being suffocated by the very air you breathe, of feeling voiceless and inchoately overwhelmed, that I couldn't put the damn thing down until I finished—not in a thriller-page-turner way, just in a miserable I-won't-be-able-to-breathe-again-until-I-come-out-the-other-side sort of way.

So.

( Read more... )