[book post] January books
Feb. 3rd, 2022 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaThe Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Wow. Absolutely incredible; it's a must-read. What a hell of a life. What a hell of a guy.
Faithful Place by Tana French
I got rec'd this via some random tweet that was like "if you like any combination of Sylvain Gautier and/or Roy Mustang have I got a book for you." Last time I followed a random tweet recommendation along those lines, it was to the effect of, "hey did you always want post-canon Zutara where the two of them have to rebuild their countries and deal with The Legacy Of Conquest and shit, and also there's Pokémon," and I was like hell yes. That book was Steel Crow Saga, and it was exactly as advertised, and it was excellent.
Similarly, Tana French's Faithful Place indeed delivers on the tweet's premise.
Our hero, Frank Mackey, has all of Roy's grim devotion to his job and haunted-by-his-past-ness, plus all of Sylvain's poor coping mechanisms and thinly-disguised self-loathing. But the book as a whole is even more laser-targeted at my tastes than that. There's an awful dinner party! There's an even awfuler night at the bar! The main character is divorced and there is so much Divorce Energy TM between him and his ex! There's a long-lost first love that he's never ever ever going to get over! There is a superbly fucked-up family! What's not to love.
What really elevates this, though, above mere "well-plotted thing that is weirdly targeted at Lua," is its incredible language and sense of place. Tana French really knows how to turn a phrase, and her ear for dialogue is impeccable—she made this dumpy working-class Dublin neighborhood feel so viscerally real that I half-expected the next bar I walked into to be peppered with Irish slang. And the setting, my god; it's been a long time since I've seen a neighborhood rendered this lovingly and painfully and vividly in fiction. (I can't get over how evocative the title is all on its own: Faithful Place. Which is the name of the neighborhood, but resonates so beautifully with the story as a whole.)
The mystery, in terms of whodunnit, did not feel all that mysterious to me, but that's beside the point anyway. This is a book about Frank Mackey Being Forced To Go Back To His Hated Childhood Home And Deal With Some Shit; the murder is fine but incidental.
What a good read. I've gotta check out the rest of French's stuff.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
This was a delightful brisk lil' goofball of a novel. Also: it's apparently a Newbery medal winner??? Which surprised me; I feel like most modern Newbery winners are Serious TM and have a Message TM or at least something kinda profound, whereas this book's plot is much more in the vein of "what if a really weird guy showed up [and demanded that some randos in an apartment building solve a murder]." But oh what a fun time they have with that. I found the mystery a little thin, but the ensemble cast was thoroughly delightful; between the weirdly-precocious day-trading elementary schooler, the fantastically vain and ridiculous Ms. Wexler, the obsessed-with-diagnosing-everyone doctor-in-training, and the delightfully crotchety restaurant owner, I think I was laughing every other page. It felt a lot like the 1985 Clue movie, actually, just a bit more kid-friendly. Worth a shot if you need a very fast read and you're into that kind of thing.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
I see why this book was popular: it's warm-hearted, it's cute (if never quite laugh-out-loud funny), and it's pleasantly readable. But I was a little surprised to see that it got a... Pulitzer?
Not that I know much about book prize committees or the like, but I'd always vaguely assumed that if a novel wins the Pulitzer, it must be Ambitious TM or Serious TM in some way, and this felt more beach-read-y on the whole.
Beach-read-y, and, on the twee side, which may mean I'm judging it more harshly than I ought—my allergy to twee is well-documented. The whole schtick is that Arthur Less is a gay middle-aged has-been of a writer, living in San Francisco, and moping over his much-younger hookup-buddy-slash-kinda-boyfriend's recent departure to go get married to some other guy. In an effort to avoid attending his ex's wedding, he decides to accept every speaking/teaching/etc invitation he's every gotten, and departs on a round-the-world trip for a few months.
At times, the book is remarkably deft, in its many transient observations about the pains and embarrassments and foibles of age, particularly as they apply to Arthur—he's irritated at (Gay) Kids These Days getting all amped up about marriage (and definitely not just making himself sour thinking about his ex); he's at some puffed-up literary awards show and picking out the personalities among his fellow contenders; he has An Impressively Pathetic Fiftieth Birthday Party with a bunch of fellow westerners who have paid way too much to ride camels through Morocco, and mostly succeed in becoming violently ill instead.
And at times, it hints at darker and deeper things. I thought the most interesting thread was Arthur's relationship with Robert, an internationally-famous genius poet some twenty years his senior, and also his partner when Arthur was about age 20 to age 40. Robert's the kind of man who, even with the breakup years in the past, still casts a long shadow over Arthur's life:
But mostly it leans on the comfort-food side of things; the fact that there's an entire standalone paragraph that baldly states "Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.", should give you a sense of the overall vibe. It's not trivial, right—I greatly enjoyed its choice of subject; Arthur's well- and lovingly-rendered, and it is talking about some real shit, but it was just a little too twee for my tastes overall.
Wow. Absolutely incredible; it's a must-read. What a hell of a life. What a hell of a guy.
Faithful Place by Tana French
I got rec'd this via some random tweet that was like "if you like any combination of Sylvain Gautier and/or Roy Mustang have I got a book for you." Last time I followed a random tweet recommendation along those lines, it was to the effect of, "hey did you always want post-canon Zutara where the two of them have to rebuild their countries and deal with The Legacy Of Conquest and shit, and also there's Pokémon," and I was like hell yes. That book was Steel Crow Saga, and it was exactly as advertised, and it was excellent.
Similarly, Tana French's Faithful Place indeed delivers on the tweet's premise.
Our hero, Frank Mackey, has all of Roy's grim devotion to his job and haunted-by-his-past-ness, plus all of Sylvain's poor coping mechanisms and thinly-disguised self-loathing. But the book as a whole is even more laser-targeted at my tastes than that. There's an awful dinner party! There's an even awfuler night at the bar! The main character is divorced and there is so much Divorce Energy TM between him and his ex! There's a long-lost first love that he's never ever ever going to get over! There is a superbly fucked-up family! What's not to love.
What really elevates this, though, above mere "well-plotted thing that is weirdly targeted at Lua," is its incredible language and sense of place. Tana French really knows how to turn a phrase, and her ear for dialogue is impeccable—she made this dumpy working-class Dublin neighborhood feel so viscerally real that I half-expected the next bar I walked into to be peppered with Irish slang. And the setting, my god; it's been a long time since I've seen a neighborhood rendered this lovingly and painfully and vividly in fiction. (I can't get over how evocative the title is all on its own: Faithful Place. Which is the name of the neighborhood, but resonates so beautifully with the story as a whole.)
The mystery, in terms of whodunnit, did not feel all that mysterious to me, but that's beside the point anyway. This is a book about Frank Mackey Being Forced To Go Back To His Hated Childhood Home And Deal With Some Shit; the murder is fine but incidental.
What a good read. I've gotta check out the rest of French's stuff.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
This was a delightful brisk lil' goofball of a novel. Also: it's apparently a Newbery medal winner??? Which surprised me; I feel like most modern Newbery winners are Serious TM and have a Message TM or at least something kinda profound, whereas this book's plot is much more in the vein of "what if a really weird guy showed up [and demanded that some randos in an apartment building solve a murder]." But oh what a fun time they have with that. I found the mystery a little thin, but the ensemble cast was thoroughly delightful; between the weirdly-precocious day-trading elementary schooler, the fantastically vain and ridiculous Ms. Wexler, the obsessed-with-diagnosing-everyone doctor-in-training, and the delightfully crotchety restaurant owner, I think I was laughing every other page. It felt a lot like the 1985 Clue movie, actually, just a bit more kid-friendly. Worth a shot if you need a very fast read and you're into that kind of thing.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
I see why this book was popular: it's warm-hearted, it's cute (if never quite laugh-out-loud funny), and it's pleasantly readable. But I was a little surprised to see that it got a... Pulitzer?
Not that I know much about book prize committees or the like, but I'd always vaguely assumed that if a novel wins the Pulitzer, it must be Ambitious TM or Serious TM in some way, and this felt more beach-read-y on the whole.
Beach-read-y, and, on the twee side, which may mean I'm judging it more harshly than I ought—my allergy to twee is well-documented. The whole schtick is that Arthur Less is a gay middle-aged has-been of a writer, living in San Francisco, and moping over his much-younger hookup-buddy-slash-kinda-boyfriend's recent departure to go get married to some other guy. In an effort to avoid attending his ex's wedding, he decides to accept every speaking/teaching/etc invitation he's every gotten, and departs on a round-the-world trip for a few months.
At times, the book is remarkably deft, in its many transient observations about the pains and embarrassments and foibles of age, particularly as they apply to Arthur—he's irritated at (Gay) Kids These Days getting all amped up about marriage (and definitely not just making himself sour thinking about his ex); he's at some puffed-up literary awards show and picking out the personalities among his fellow contenders; he has An Impressively Pathetic Fiftieth Birthday Party with a bunch of fellow westerners who have paid way too much to ride camels through Morocco, and mostly succeed in becoming violently ill instead.
And at times, it hints at darker and deeper things. I thought the most interesting thread was Arthur's relationship with Robert, an internationally-famous genius poet some twenty years his senior, and also his partner when Arthur was about age 20 to age 40. Robert's the kind of man who, even with the breakup years in the past, still casts a long shadow over Arthur's life:
What was it like to live with genius?So those bits are great, and interesting, and if he'd pushed harder with the satire or the knotted bits I think I would've liked the final product more.
Like living alone.
Like living alone with a tiger.
Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled, meals had to be delayed; liquor had to be bought, as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet's to make, and it was as often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house; the habit, the habit, the habit; the morning coffee and books and poetry, the silence until noon. could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could, he always could; it was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired; but a morning walk meant work undone, and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit, help the habit; lay out the coffee and poetry; keep the silence; smile when he walked sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Taking nothing personally. And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.
Where did the genius come from? Where did it go?
Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you'd never met but whom you knew he loved more than you [. . .]
But mostly it leans on the comfort-food side of things; the fact that there's an entire standalone paragraph that baldly states "Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.", should give you a sense of the overall vibe. It's not trivial, right—I greatly enjoyed its choice of subject; Arthur's well- and lovingly-rendered, and it is talking about some real shit, but it was just a little too twee for my tastes overall.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 02:28 am (UTC)Yes! Very much agree. I was pleasantly surprised by the unselfconscious diversity of the casting, and the clever lil' skewerings the author dropped in here and there wrt classism, ableism, etc... I never heard of this book as a kid and I wish I had; it's really well-crafted and incisive in addition to all the fun :)
no subject
Date: 2022-02-07 12:13 am (UTC)I was particularly fond of the way Raskin skewered the stock market and investing, too, because wow is that still relevant today.