April Book Post
Apr. 28th, 2021 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaLeft Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
I picked this up on a whim, filled with vague nostalgia for Rapture Ready, a site I read a lot in my Southern Baptist youth, in the same way that most people watch, idk, horror movies. (For full context: I believed that stuff back then; I don't now, haven't for a long time.) I read that site, but I never read any of these novels which so obviously popularized it; so why not take a gander?
I was expecting Left Behind to be bad, and flat, and kinda dumb and cringe, and it was all that. In terms of writing style, it's like the worst of Dan Brown and the worst of Tom Clancy had a baby; I laughed a lot.
But what I wasn't expecting was for it to make me... kinda angry, too?
Because in the narrow, vacuous, utterly cruel moral universe of Left Behind—the moral universe of noted paranoid, bigoted, selfish asshole Tim LaHaye—the most noble and praiseworthy thing you can possibly do is a shitty used car salesman pitch for your faith, in order to bully and cajole and manipulate your loved ones into saying the magic words, so that you (always about you!) will not need to suffer an afterlife without them. This is consistently portrayed in the text as more moral than caring for the literal sick and wounded and dying around you, more moral than giving a single solitary fuck about the grieving people who are reaching out to you for warmth and comfort, more important than acting like a fucking father for your fucking daughter. And the second most moral thing you can do is become a bunch of green berets for Jesus. I'm not fucking kidding; they use the term "green berets" in the text. Definitely no vainglory happening there! What's the seventh deadly sin, again?
It'd be one thing if this were just some goofy niche novel. But this series sold over 65 million copies. So many, so many! adults in my life loved them, when I was very little; they said they were so important, thought they were so valuable for teaching people about God, etc and so on. Now I'm a little horrified, looking back, like—how much did they buy into this repugnant universe? a theological purview that, if Actually True, would force me to conclude that the only moral action would be to spite the God that deemed this Good? I get that most people are not reading texts this closely; most people profess moral viewpoints quite different from how they actually behave; I get that most folks' ideology is a fussy and inconsistent thing and thus unstable ground for judging an individual's character.
But still. Blech.
There are varieties of Christianity that I have deep respect for, varieties of Christianity that center actually giving a shit about people and suffering and redemption over fetishistic daydreams of Owning TheLibs Satanists in the great American football game of Armageddon. But that's not this Christianity.
(turns out I'm less over my fundie upbringing than I thought, who knew)
Anyway, I liveblogged the novel here, so all my pithier observations are there. And I took a bunch of notes in case I ever want to turn this into some massive essay about fundamentalist Christianity or something, but that may take a bit before I'm able to craft it into anything more sophisticated than a primal scream of disdain, heh.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This sure was basically a Nicholas Sparks novel, huh. In hindsight I should've seen this coming, but I somehow got the impression this was more of a soft-scifi novel than it was a romance novel? Alas.
Not that I mind romance; I just don't tend to go for the schmoopy-deliberately-trying-to-tearjerk variety with kinda-generic protags. The ending had me rolling my eyes. (Yes my heart is a black coal.)
That being said, as far as Sparks-style romances go, this wasn't bad. It overstayed its welcome a bit, but the chemistry between the main characters is decent, and the core conceit is intriguing/fun enough to carry the story quite a bit.
I'd be delighted to see said conceit aggressively appropriated by either some SF writers, or by fanfic writers. I'd be shocked if the latter hasn't happened already; guess I just gotta figure out the "time traveler's wife mashup" tag on AO3 or whatever—
oh, and aside: i was promised selfcest by this scandalized goodreads post? and then there wasn't even selfcest??? like, the character alludes to it for two sentences and that's about it. coward! commit to the bit—
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
People who've read this one seem to either love it or hate it. People who've read this also seem to have a lot more context than I do—they've got more opinions about trends in literary fiction and The Kinds Of Books That Brooklyn Hipsters Read and whatnot.
I, who had basically zero context going in, neither loved nor hated it.
The basic gist: there's a group of six classics majors at a ridiculously expensive rich-kid ludicrous liberal arts college in rural New England, and we find out on page 2 that five of them have murdered Student #6 in cold blood. The first half of the novel is one of the conspirators telling us how and why they decided to do it, and the second half is watching the aftermath/fallout from said murder.
It's a compelling little thriller for most of it; watching and guessing how the murder goes down is really fun; and the aftermath of the murder is a compelling bit of melodrama: lots of over-the-top meltdowns and regrets happen. The story's overall tone/mood is pretty ostentatiously Dark And Dramatic TM, in a way that is often laughable—but, if anything, I think the novel could've afforded to lean into that more, since there's something terribly fun about just going whole-hog with all these overserious, self-absorbed coeds getting Way Too Hot Topic about everything (at one point there's guns and incest and reckless alcoholism all happening on the same page lmao), and the bits where Tartt pushes for a more detached/ambiguous/realistic perspective feel a bit more "eh".
Also, I wish we'd seen more of the actual classics classes, and gotten a fuller picture of their professor, Julian, as he was by far the most compelling/novel bit of the plot. The kids themselves are Great Gatsby-ian in their self-absorbed overeducated awfulness; they're a fun enough crew of bastards to behold self-destructing. But what could've really made it unique would be a bit more of a picture of what Julian was thinking—we're given a sense that maybe Julian pushed the kids a bit toward this thing but didn't want to be exactly culpable; we're given a sense that maybe not all of him disapproves of the murder—but it's only a touch on the edges, when that really could've been a cool theme of the novel overall—how much of this was Julian being a manipulative bastard versus the Murder Gang taking shit too far; how much of this is about pagan ethics versus modern ethics, etc and so on.
I am a bit puzzled, reading about the author now, by why Tartt got such a crazy-high advance and such crazy amounts of hype for this book—it's solid, but no more solid than any number of other solid debuts? But I probably am just insufficiently New York to appreciate such matters, lol.
I picked this up on a whim, filled with vague nostalgia for Rapture Ready, a site I read a lot in my Southern Baptist youth, in the same way that most people watch, idk, horror movies. (For full context: I believed that stuff back then; I don't now, haven't for a long time.) I read that site, but I never read any of these novels which so obviously popularized it; so why not take a gander?
I was expecting Left Behind to be bad, and flat, and kinda dumb and cringe, and it was all that. In terms of writing style, it's like the worst of Dan Brown and the worst of Tom Clancy had a baby; I laughed a lot.
But what I wasn't expecting was for it to make me... kinda angry, too?
Because in the narrow, vacuous, utterly cruel moral universe of Left Behind—the moral universe of noted paranoid, bigoted, selfish asshole Tim LaHaye—the most noble and praiseworthy thing you can possibly do is a shitty used car salesman pitch for your faith, in order to bully and cajole and manipulate your loved ones into saying the magic words, so that you (always about you!) will not need to suffer an afterlife without them. This is consistently portrayed in the text as more moral than caring for the literal sick and wounded and dying around you, more moral than giving a single solitary fuck about the grieving people who are reaching out to you for warmth and comfort, more important than acting like a fucking father for your fucking daughter. And the second most moral thing you can do is become a bunch of green berets for Jesus. I'm not fucking kidding; they use the term "green berets" in the text. Definitely no vainglory happening there! What's the seventh deadly sin, again?
It'd be one thing if this were just some goofy niche novel. But this series sold over 65 million copies. So many, so many! adults in my life loved them, when I was very little; they said they were so important, thought they were so valuable for teaching people about God, etc and so on. Now I'm a little horrified, looking back, like—how much did they buy into this repugnant universe? a theological purview that, if Actually True, would force me to conclude that the only moral action would be to spite the God that deemed this Good? I get that most people are not reading texts this closely; most people profess moral viewpoints quite different from how they actually behave; I get that most folks' ideology is a fussy and inconsistent thing and thus unstable ground for judging an individual's character.
But still. Blech.
There are varieties of Christianity that I have deep respect for, varieties of Christianity that center actually giving a shit about people and suffering and redemption over fetishistic daydreams of Owning The
(turns out I'm less over my fundie upbringing than I thought, who knew)
Anyway, I liveblogged the novel here, so all my pithier observations are there. And I took a bunch of notes in case I ever want to turn this into some massive essay about fundamentalist Christianity or something, but that may take a bit before I'm able to craft it into anything more sophisticated than a primal scream of disdain, heh.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This sure was basically a Nicholas Sparks novel, huh. In hindsight I should've seen this coming, but I somehow got the impression this was more of a soft-scifi novel than it was a romance novel? Alas.
Not that I mind romance; I just don't tend to go for the schmoopy-deliberately-trying-to-tearjerk variety with kinda-generic protags. The ending had me rolling my eyes. (Yes my heart is a black coal.)
That being said, as far as Sparks-style romances go, this wasn't bad. It overstayed its welcome a bit, but the chemistry between the main characters is decent, and the core conceit is intriguing/fun enough to carry the story quite a bit.
I'd be delighted to see said conceit aggressively appropriated by either some SF writers, or by fanfic writers. I'd be shocked if the latter hasn't happened already; guess I just gotta figure out the "time traveler's wife mashup" tag on AO3 or whatever—
oh, and aside: i was promised selfcest by this scandalized goodreads post? and then there wasn't even selfcest??? like, the character alludes to it for two sentences and that's about it. coward! commit to the bit—
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
People who've read this one seem to either love it or hate it. People who've read this also seem to have a lot more context than I do—they've got more opinions about trends in literary fiction and The Kinds Of Books That Brooklyn Hipsters Read and whatnot.
I, who had basically zero context going in, neither loved nor hated it.
The basic gist: there's a group of six classics majors at a ridiculously expensive rich-kid ludicrous liberal arts college in rural New England, and we find out on page 2 that five of them have murdered Student #6 in cold blood. The first half of the novel is one of the conspirators telling us how and why they decided to do it, and the second half is watching the aftermath/fallout from said murder.
It's a compelling little thriller for most of it; watching and guessing how the murder goes down is really fun; and the aftermath of the murder is a compelling bit of melodrama: lots of over-the-top meltdowns and regrets happen. The story's overall tone/mood is pretty ostentatiously Dark And Dramatic TM, in a way that is often laughable—but, if anything, I think the novel could've afforded to lean into that more, since there's something terribly fun about just going whole-hog with all these overserious, self-absorbed coeds getting Way Too Hot Topic about everything (at one point there's guns and incest and reckless alcoholism all happening on the same page lmao), and the bits where Tartt pushes for a more detached/ambiguous/realistic perspective feel a bit more "eh".
Also, I wish we'd seen more of the actual classics classes, and gotten a fuller picture of their professor, Julian, as he was by far the most compelling/novel bit of the plot. The kids themselves are Great Gatsby-ian in their self-absorbed overeducated awfulness; they're a fun enough crew of bastards to behold self-destructing. But what could've really made it unique would be a bit more of a picture of what Julian was thinking—we're given a sense that maybe Julian pushed the kids a bit toward this thing but didn't want to be exactly culpable; we're given a sense that maybe not all of him disapproves of the murder—but it's only a touch on the edges, when that really could've been a cool theme of the novel overall—how much of this was Julian being a manipulative bastard versus the Murder Gang taking shit too far; how much of this is about pagan ethics versus modern ethics, etc and so on.
I am a bit puzzled, reading about the author now, by why Tartt got such a crazy-high advance and such crazy amounts of hype for this book—it's solid, but no more solid than any number of other solid debuts? But I probably am just insufficiently New York to appreciate such matters, lol.
