Reviews and Comments

Here's another one I'm reading as part of the student extra credit assignment I offered. I haven't read a Stephen King book in a very long time. Here we go.

I offered students an extra credit assignment this semester after many reports of college students arriving on campus having not really read an entire book. They could choose any book and meet with me for an hour to discuss it. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to read all of the books, but only five students took me up on it. So, I'm going for it.

This was one of the books chosen, an interesting premise and an affecting book, but not really anything that grabs me too much. It's interesting to dip into what students in my class are reading.

The most interesting thing about this book is it's treatment of the ways language can direct attention away from horrific behavior. Cannibalism becomes normal once a society develops an entire vocabulary around it.

This book was a tough read in terms of the gore, and I didn't necessarily love the ending or some of the narrative choices. I would be interested to know how it reads in the original Spanish

Have to assume this book opened some eyes with an interracial queer relationship in 1964. The end of that relationship is heartbreaking and beautiful. The first section had me thinking of Dennis Johnson, but that was short-lived. The book feels like it flirts with Beat writers a bit but is kind of hard to categorize. A number of set pieces had me wondering what kind of research Carpenter did on prisons and orphanages.

The story is told across four decades, and it begins with an account of how a random set of circumstances launches a life. In some ways the novel continues to lay out how this randomness (often the randomness of violence) shapes a life.

When the protagonist describes the sudden death by heart attack of the head of the orphanage, we get a lesson in power. The boys were cheering the death of this man who had terrorized them, but the was easily replaced:

"Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was intangible; not a man, a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn't even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context

But, and this is what puzzled Jack now, once you grow out of this, once you learn that it is all nonsense, that what you thought as a child was nothing more than the excuses of self-pity, what did you replace it with? You had a life, and you were content with it; where did you aim it?" (114)

I had never read this, and I was surprised by a number of things: that we get a detailed account of the monster's learning process (which had me thinking of LLMs), that the Monster is smarter and more rhetorically savvy than Victor, and that the Monster's rhetorical skill is highlighted by Shelley (we hear of the monster's "sophistry" which then had me wondering: Is this where @sophist_monster comes from?

One last thought...this book is tale of what happens when science rejects aesthetics in the name of pure efficiency and function. If Victor had cared at all about what the monster looked like, then the entire story unfolds quite differently. The monster's hideous "countenance" (Shelley's favorite word by far, btw) is why he can't have a connection with person, regardless of how much he craves that connection.

I loved this book for its descriptions of a hippie commune, especially given that those descriptions come from the perspective of a child. I'm always interested in books that attempt to tell stories from that kind of perspective. How do you do it without lapsing into the cartoonish?

The latter part of the novel moves forward in time and is also really interesting. There's a pandemic - impressive for a book published in 2012. Plus, there's an interesting discussion of how cities of the 2000s are closer to a 1970s commune than rural spaces. Cities are places where people are together, living communally (often right on top of one another). An interesting idea: maybe rural life in the U.S. is as isolating as isolating urban life? Maybe moreso?

Another brutal but necessary book about a genocide happening in front of our faces. At first glance, the title might suggest a future reckoning, but Omar El Akkad is insistent on demonstrating what is happening to the world now. It will be reckoned with in the future, but that does not lessen the impact today, on Gaza and on those who are allowing it to happen.

"It is difficult to live in [the U.S.] in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be." (117)

Manchette books are always page turners and are usually funny. This one has its moments. I have read any Manchette that's been translated into English, and I will continue to do so. But this one, which has a lot of (too many?) characters and has less of the biting social critique of the other books, was kind of a bummer.

A patient in an asylum recounts his travels to the world of the Kappas, reptile-like creates from Japanese folklore. The patient meets poets, musicians, and many others, exploring the culture of Kappas. The social commentary here is interesting and makes me want to learn a bit more about 1920s Japan.

At one point, we learn that Kappas do not have the death penalty. They only need to name the crime and call out the perpetrator.

"And that's enough to make a Kappa die?" "Absolutely. We Kappas have much more sensitive nervous systems than you do."

I loved this book. At moments, it's a very typical novel, and at others it's as if David Lynch took the wheel. The NYT review says it well:

"“Ah, a nice old-fashioned novel,” the reader thinks, gliding through the opening pages of “Carnality.” The author, Lina Wolff, begins in a conventional close third-person perspective and quickly dispatches with the W questions. Who is the main character? A 45-year-old Swedish writer. What is she doing? Traveling on a writer’s grant. When? Present day, more or less. Where? Madrid. Why? To upend the tedium of her life.

Premise established, we are safely buckled in for the ride, which rumbles along a scenic track for roughly five minutes before a crazed carnival operator assumes the controls and we take off at warp speed through loops, inversions and spins."

I am definitely going to read Wolff's earlier books, especially Bret Easton Ellis and Other Dogs.

And because I'm a sucker for any moment in a book that talks about the torture of writing...

"It occurs to her that everything gets easier when she makes no attempt to write. Her should no longer aches and she no longer has to come up with topics for her columns. Somewhere deep inside her she knows she has never been a good columnist...In any case, she thinks, when you are writing you have to create the situations and the links between them yourself, but when you are living you get them for free. She says this to Mercuro, which is when he says that writing is the kind of occupation that consumes you. You pay for it with your soul, and one fine day your soul has been used up." (134-135)

This is my first time reading le Carre. I'm not not much of a mystery novel reader, but I love all of Jean-Patrick Manchette's books. After this encounter with le Carre, I learned that what I like about Manchette is his insistence on writing books about the police that are critical of the police. They mystery piece of it - figuring out the puzzle - is not my thing. But if that is your thing, le Carre is (obviously) for you.

An excellent study of the cultural forces that went into creating the idea of the "good mother" - attachment parenting and a host of other ideas constructing (mostly by men) that put mothers in an impossible bind. Be constantly available to your baby. Follow your instincts, but trust your doctors. The research portions of the book are woven together with Reddy's own experience as a mother. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, with a special focus on the women in the shadows of that research program. The wives of these famous researchers, it turns out, had lots to say about mothering (who knew?), and/but their careers were sidelined for their husbands.

"The underlying problem is that the 'good mother' isn't really a person. She's a subject of capitalism, charged with optimizing every aspect of her kids' childhood so she can produce good future workers and consumers. And this, too—the competitiveness and individualism baked into our image of the good mother sacrificing anything to get the best for her kids—is part off the trap. If we're indoors obsessing over whether our baby is meeting developmental milestones fast enough or which private preschool to select for our toddler, if we're memorizing scripts that promise to fix tantrums and googling lunchbox hack, we're not out in our communities organizing for universal pre-K or free school lunches. The good mother thinks always of her own children first." (8)

I listened to this, and I probably couldn't imagine reading it. Listening meant that I could be at peace with missing some of the historical details. If I head, I probably wouldn't stopped too often to read Wikipedia.

It is astounding to think about the research that was required for this book.