Recent Reads

Summer is my favourite season, but it's also always the busiest, most intense, most exhausting, most stressful season, and yet every year when it comes around and I'm stressed and scared and tired all the time I'm all, surprised Pikachu face dot jpeg. But it's summer 🥺!!!

Also, I watched Superman and read the graphic novel adaptation of The Raven Boys, expecting them both to be bad, and when they were (predictably) bad, I was (again) all, surprised Pikachu face dot jpeg.

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer (Horror, 2024)

A flipper couple buys a house. One day, while one of them (Charlie) is running an errand, a family comes to the house and says that this is the father's childhood home. Eve, the protagonist, lets them in. This proves to be a mistake, albeit a slow, unravelling one.

I'll be honest, the fact that they're flippers meant that a part of me was excited to see their demise, and it genuinely added nothing to the story. I don't get why they couldn't have just been a young couple who just managed to buy a house. Aside from that, for the first half, the book is genuinely unsettling and creepy and even scary at times -- yay!!!! -- and the paratextual material (various documents and footage found on the Web) adds to the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, in the second half it reads like it's flying by the seat of its pants. After a certain point Eve's inability to think about anything but her own uselessness gets tiring, and the events start feeling contrived. There's no tying together of all the loose ends and we're left hanging on many things. I think the final scene is well-constructed as a scene in itself, but horrible as a conclusion.

Some spoilers:

The idea of Thomas being an entity that uses that house as his base of operations across multiple universes is cool on its own, but in this case I would REALLY like to explore his character! Why is he doing this? Is he just evil? The cabin man was scarred and in the final scene Thomas is scarred -- was he the same person trying to put together the existence of the house across universes? In that case, if the idea is that once you solve the mystery you become the next housebound entity preying on whoever moves in, that's interesting and solid and I would've liked to see it! If they're different people, what was up with the cabin? It never got mentioned again. What was up with the neighbour?

We learn that the paratextual material is stuff Eve has been finding on the library computer in the institution Thomas locked her in, in a different universe. That's cute. I guess. But, thematically, they end up providing NOTHING except adding to the general "lol the multiverse is real" thing the book had going on, so I don't think enough was done with them.

I did find the relationship pretty convincing, though, which is a point in the book's favour.

Not tied to plot-stuff, the way this was written is my absolute least favourite: it's what I like to call adaptation bait, because it discards everything that makes the novel unique as a medium and instead tries to describe scenes as they would be directed. Godawful and, worse, CRINGE.

Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo (Fiction, 2020)

58-year-old Priya and her partner's relationship is starting to feel strained. This is not helped by Priya inviting an old friend, Prakash, who she hasn't spoken to in years, over for a night.

A fascinating book. It's 300 pages of Nothing -- like, seriously, nothing actually happens until the last 20 pages or so -- and yet it does what it seeks out to do pretty well. It starts feeling like a jealousy issue, and then it just evolves, and evolves, and evolves, and you realise that Priya is pretty much the Denial Final Boss: Honesty is for LOSERS. Memory is fallible, and, worse, malleable. Unfortunately, the past cannot be changed by narrativising it. Fortunately, the past CAN be explained by narrativising it!

My feelings are more positive than negative (far, far more positive!) but I can't help but feel disappointed at how Great this could've been. As it is currently, it's Very Good, but stops short of Great. I very much enjoyed reading about every character's blindspots (and, in the case of Alex and Prakash, their sometimes bullheaded bigotry, despite knowing better and knowing that they know better) but there were many things I wish we saw more of (like the tension between members of the same diaspora, as well as Priya's, and Alex's, life outside of their little home). As the text stands right now, I think it'd make a better play than it necessarily does a book? There are essentially two sets and it hones in on 1.75 characters (one is Priya, 0.4 is Alex, 0.35 is Prakash) that the rest of the world feels like it's happening in another universe, with only its echoes being felt by them.

Minor annoyance: there were instances of the characters being unable to find the word they were looking for, which you could argue is realistic narration, but I found it pretty lazy. This is a novel about memory, if the character is failing, then it's your job to be precise!

Belladonna by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth (Fiction, 2012/2017)

Andreas Ban is a retired psychologist, diagnosed with breast cancer, among other things. We follow his failing health, the failures of his home during WWII, and the constant failing that was/is the, well, balkanisation of the Balkans.

First of all, LONG SENTENCE JOY!!!!:

Oh yes, he would have liked to abandon all those collectives that devour, those consumers of ideas, that cacophonous din, those blank masks that disguise a still greater nullity, and give himself up to cheerful occupations, nourish his brain cells so that they pulse and drum, but a pathetic pension in the small, ruined, pompous country in which he lives (how did this horror of destiny befall him, how?), in a country in which all rush headlong to leave if they can, in a country where a minister of education threatened to introduce patriotism as a subject into the school curriculum, in which publicly, in the open air and on television, in order for the message to reach the most remote village, people sing songs with the refrain our Croatian mother bore me, so that those whom the Croatian mother did not bear feel unwanted, while all those whom their Croatian mother did bear leap up, proud and superior, prepared one way or another to eliminate those whom the Croatian mother did not bear, by stoning if necessary, in this country, a country in which people want to believe that they are brought into the world by their homeland rather than by a woman, in a country of such false decorum and hypocrisy that people have executed names, and at work address one another as director, dean, professor, boss, a pension in this country earned after twenty-five years of education, studying, after forty years of work, guarantees a relatively swift and objectively awful — death; that pension, that retirement benefit that really makes one wind down, run down, insidiously and meanly drilling into one’s ears on a dozen fronts at the same time takes one’s life away.

It is not a well-known fact, but the human organism curls up and cries and shrivels up and bawls and gets dehydrated and dies when it doesn't encounter long sentences every once in a while. This was necessary for Good Health. Thank u for coming to my TED Talk.

Jokes aside, I moved around my planned reading because this is also a novel that deals with memory, on a much larger scale than Polar Vortex, and in this case it's kind of the reverse: no amount of silence can alter memory. I enjoyed reading them back to back as a compare-and-contrast attempt, although the writing styles and approaches were very different.

I had a lot of notes for this, but I'm... not sure how to add them all, much less how to structure them. There are lots of interesting things (and I think my experience reading it would've been even richer had I first read Drndic's other books), it's very grounded in historical fact but not bound by linearity or the clarity required by historical texts, and despite it being heavy, it never once felt tiring to get through. It can be ironic and funny as hell and then you kind of feel bad for laughing because, well, the subject matter.

I liked this answer by the author, on why she included a long list of (15 pages) names (in this case, of 2061 Jewish children from the Hague, deported to concentration camps):

INTERVIEWER

Both Trieste and Belladonna feature pages-long lists of the names of those killed by Nazis. It is an overwhelming reading experience. What do you think this act of naming accomplishes in your writing?

DRNDIC

I do not think, I know what I want to say. However, I do not know how such an “act” resonates with an impatient reader. It is not only the names of the victims of war that I list. Now, almost fanatically, although for literature onerously—that is, needlessly—I obsessively name people, because I see more and more clearly that their names are perhaps the last cobwebby thread which singles them out from the overall chaos of the world, from the cauldron of soggy, stale mash we are immersed in. Besides, if football—soccer—fanatics can memorize teams of players through time, it is polite at least to scan through a list of victims for whose destinies all of us bear responsibility.

The White Road by Sarah Lotz (Horror, 2017)

Simon goes spelunking and almost loses his life, so he decides the next logical step is to climb Everest. Found diaries make an appearance.

MAN. Cave + mountain survival horror should make for such an exciting work! The premise of this is so good!!!! ...Unfortunately, Sarah Lotz can't write. Not just the execution of the ideas, I mean on a paragraph-level, this book was hard to get through. It's just so badly written! At first I was convinced that she has a fandom or web-related writing background because of certain choices, but what I now think is more likely is that she took the same lazy shortcuts you can often see in fic (and I use them too, I think they can work in fic, because it's fic) and applied them constantly here, while also just being unable to craft an interesting sentence.

Then there's also the whole, being stuck in the head of a character who's on a constant anxious spiral thing, which I associate with fic, but, again, I think it's just more likely that the author lacks the ability to write the kind of narration that fits the traits we're told the character has (which: sorry, if you're telling me this guy thinks of himself as tough and immoral, I'm gonna expect him to act awfully. Instead his internal narration is soooo fearful and WITHIN THE FIRST 60 PAGES he considered taking down his footage of dead bodies because one (1) relative wrote to him and said it's disrespectful. Like, I don't buy that a ~tough and immoral~ guy would do this). When added to this, it's hard to overlook the logic leaps and character, plot, setting holes that I otherwise wouldn't even blink at when it comes to mountaineering + survival horror(!!) (the idea is soooo good...)

I can't believe there's a book with so many of my interests shoved in and it's so bad. I, personally, deserve better.

The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead (Fiction, 2020/2023)

María has a daughter when she's quite young. A few decades later, Alicia's life changes drastically when she's young. We get to follow them both!

I think this is an overall very skillfully crafted book. Lines that very much reward re-reading, very well-contained chapters, just enough information to let you piece it all together yourself. Unfortunately, despite my being very much invested, I never felt connected -- the characters make interesting and difficult decisions, which is always something I love and admire, but there was no event that was unfolding in the book that made me feel anything. In aggregate, sure, I think it did a very good job to show how much (little) has changed for women between 1969 and now, and I enjoyed seeing PoVs whose reaction to sexism isn't acceptance + detachment (which, for some reason, is weirdly common in books where misogyny is a core theme). I also love seeing mothers who fail at it! It's just, in isolation, I never felt any real propulsion, which I think is because it only becomes an actual NARRATIVE after page 200. In that sense you can see the author's poetry background and how it doesn't really translate.

Small Game by Blair Braverman (Thriller, 2022)

Mara, raised by increasingly paranoid doomsday survivalists and now an instructor at a survival camp, signs up for a reality TV show that makes her and four other people survive in the wild for six weeks. This is a survival book, in case the repetition wasn't obvious enough. :p

If anyone reading this is at all interested in the book, I'd advise not looking up the synopsis -- one of its first lines talks about an element that comes only HALFWAY through the book as though it's part of the premise. It's, IMHO, much more of a twist than part of the selling point.

The first half was a book specifically engineered in a lab for ME, personally. I loved the second half, too, but for different reasons, and I think the author strayed from her strengths writing it. Let me get the negatives ("negatives") out of the way first: this should not have been a thriller. This shouldn't have been marketed as a thriller. it also shouldn't have been edited as though it were a thriller. I see some reviews calling it action-packed and my honest reaction is, WHERE?! There are lots of things going on, especially in that last 50%, but whatever page-turner quality it has comes from the reader's anxiety about the characters' fates, because the events themselves are entirely predictable, especially if you, like me, made the mistake of reading the first paragraphs of the synopsis -- and when I say predictable, I mean in a tragic way, though this is not a tragedy overall. This is not me bagging on the writing, which I found very good, just a fact.

What this SHOULD'VE been built as IMHO is, at the very least, general fiction, or the upmarket thriller variety of Gillian Flynn's novels and the like. The author is very good at creating believable characters and coming back to important thematic moments for them. She's excellent at sharp insights that come without sacrificing 1) Mara's mindset, 2) the momentum of the novel, 3) the reader's awareness of the stakes. While the prose is a little inconsistent, when it's good, it's VERY good. This is tightly written beyond the plot (which I'd actually argue is the weakest part of it, at least as far as conclusions go). I think it needed an additional 200 pages or so, maybe even 300, that followed everything after where the novel left off, and some (remarkably light!) editing of the material that is already there, and it'd easily take on a more ~literary bent. And I'm saying this because that's where I believe the author's strengths lie and she would've created a far superior work that way: not because this was bad, it was good, but it could've been GREAT.

Onto the positives! First of all, MARA. Pookie. Sugar bear. My little delicious cookie. I love u. She's a surprisingly rare kind of protagonist for this kind of, I guess reflective, work: practical, pragmatic, focused and driven but not highly ambitious, a repressed kind of desperate that doesn't overtake the narration or the narrative with eye-rolling-worthy moments of high-emotionality-for-sympathy-points, or moments of self-reflexivity that are all too common in recently (past ~10 years) published work and are also very annoying. She just lets herself be! Manipulative at times, petty, aware of but still removed from social norms to a level, VERY knowledgeable, humorous, very thirsty for something better. I LOVED reading from her perspective. I spent the entirety of the book making heart-eyes at her.

Secondly, the other characters! Mara spends a good chunk of this alone because her job is to forage. We only learn concrete details about their lives, like, three-fourths of the way through, but it doesn't matter! Because by that point we already have a good idea of their personalities, their reaction to things, the core experiences of their lives that led them to take part in such a TV show and what they're hoping to get out of it. And they're all sooooooooo loveable! Not necessarily likeable. Among other things, there's some extended animal abuse in this, and I think that alone would turn many people off them, LOL. But SO loveable.

Thirdly, and I guess most importantly for the book itself, the survival aspect. The author was a contestant on Naked And Afraid and is generally an ~adventurer and the experience SHOWS. The slow degradation of all a human being is to hunger was SO well-rendered. The details about plants, traps, the necessity of everyday items that you lack in such a setting (string!), the kind of skills acquired and required, and, very importantly, the awareness of the physical and mental toll of such a lifestyle, but also what would initially draw people to it. (And! Away from it! I genuinely found this book so beautifully well-rounded, perspective-wise.)

Less importantly, I liked how the F/F relationship of the book went! :) I was fearing classic thriller tropes or classic romance tropes would arrive and ruin it at any moment, but none of them did! Win!!! I was also fearing that the book would go for the melodramatic take on Our Human Capacity To Come Together And Be Compassionate due to the reality TV show's premise, BUT IT DIDN'T. SO many wins for me. Like, honestly, even if it didn't do well all those things it did well, I'd be giving it 4.5 stars solely on the basis of it managing to not annoy me even once.

The ending is abrupt, a plausible explanation for a central plot point is offered but the plot point itself never resolved, there are loose character threads everywhere, but by God did I love this. Mostly reccing it to people interested in detailed survival accounts, NOT people into thrillers, NOT people into Survivor and the other kinds of reality TV. Dear marketing team of this book I have soooooooooooo many questions for you.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Fiction, 2006)

Jacob Jankowski's parents die right before he takes his final exams to become a vet, so he enters a travelling circus.

Okay, before I say anything else: I WAS NOT EXPECTING HOW HORNY THIS BOOK WOULD BE. Good for Ms Gruen, genuinely, but Jacob's parents die and we get something like 😔 he didn't even want to have sex... 😔 I was in tears. Like, yeah, I think it's fairly typical to be a biiiit more preoccupied with YOUR PARENTS' DEATH than sex in the immediate aftermath????? But what kills me is that it gets SUPER HORNY for a paragraph or three and then it moves right along. Dude goes calm -> SUPER TURNED ON -> calm in the span of seconds every time. I don't think it was intending for me to laugh quite so much.

The book is split between Jacob now, as a 93 year old, and Jacob's time as part of the circus. The present-day chapters were, IMO, far stronger, though there were fewer of them. The descriptions of circus life were interesting and exactly what I wanted from the book.

Unfortunately, those got ruined by 1) his affair with Marlena, 2) the fact that Marlena is barely a fleshed out character, 3) the fact that Jacob keeps making Good Virtuous choices... Despite his considerable amount of flaws, once there's time for him to Make A Decision of some sort, he Always picks the correct one. Blegh. Boring!

Rosie the elephant was suuuuuuuuuuuper cute. In the middle of all the circus-typical animal abuse, too. :(

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fiction, 2009/2019)

Ex-bridge engineer, current once-a-week English teacher, and astrology lover Janina Duszejko investigates murders near the Polish-Czech border.

Partially a pick because of Women In Translation month, partially because I've been meaning to read it anyway, and partially because reading Small Game left me sensitive to animal abuse and this is an #AnimalRights book. I also spent SO LONG being confused about the word "plow" in the title like why are we calling this a "plow" (the book itself is translated in UK English, and whenever the word appears within it it's with the typical "plough" spelling), before getting that it's a Blake quote.

Well. Hm. Let me first say that it was enjoyable and it did its job of getting me out of my uber-sensitive mood. There's enough meat (hehe) in the narration to elevate it above a whodunnit. I enjoyed Janina's (and calling her that feels so weird... Ms Duszejko's) narration and her odd way of thinking, it was very fun. However, when I want to see animal rights and an anti-hunting stance, I want to see it in addition to, not instead of, care for human beings. It is perhaps unfair of me, but the caricature-ish hunters (whose views Tocarkzuc admitted she got from "a compilation of genuine sermons by hunt chaplains sourced from the internet"), coupled with the animals >>>> humans stance, started reminding me of a very specific kind of person who is usually adjacent to but not fully #in activist circles, and in turn that started grating.

Outside of that... Ok. Astrology rant. It's something that, in places where it (still) carries weight, is used as yet another way to "explain" oppression and why it is the order of things, and, in places with no cultural weight, it has mostly become the evil twin of pop psychology.

Wherever you look, it's just ugly. I get the dislike for it. I think it's well-earned. I agree with it! But, it is still a five thousand year old art, and one of my hobbies, and I deeply care for it. I got SO happy when I started reading and she mentioned the hyleg! I was like, yay, she's done research!!!!!!

Well. Hm. No, she hasn't. Or she has, but definitely not as much as I'd want. There are some things that, yes, she'd need to read a lot to get right, and it's fiction so whatever, but in the beginning Janina, after the first body is found, thinks about him possibly having Neptune and Pluto (lol) in his 8th house (lmfao), which ON ITS OWN is very limiting, but then later we get his birth date, and, like, first of all, it is impossible to have Neptune and Pluto near each other in the entire goddamn year he was born in. Then there's her general obsession with Pluto. Stop talking about Pluto!!! No self-respecting astrologer is going to be looking at PLUTO for anything. It's an extremely slow planet with very limited hyperspecific uses, and at least for me, that makes it largely useless.

Credit where credit's due:

In a natal Horoscope the date of birth determines the date of death as well. That’s obvious – anyone who has been born is going to die. There are many places in the Horoscope that point us towards the time and nature of death – one simply needs to know how to spot and connect them. For example, one has to check the transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg, and what’s going on in the eighth house. Also to cast an eye on the relative position of the Lights – meaning the Sun and Moon.

I was like, ok, a bit oversimplified, but YES. One of the first things taught about natal astrology is length of life, and it's something usually overlooked in most current astrological circles, or thought to be mean/cruel to look at, or should be outside the 'purview' of astrology. The original need to look at it first was practical: the checkbox goes like, will the baby be stillborn, will the baby get to live more than a few days, will the baby get to grow. Obviously there's modern medicine now that renders this kind of reading useless (thankfully!!!!!!) but assuming someone has followed some kind of structured self-study, which I'd assume Janina has, length of life would absolutely be something she'd look at. It made me happy to see it acknowledged!

But then she just doubles down on the oversimplification, in so many ways:

She too suffered from her own special illness – a very rare and bizarre one. She had no hair. No eyebrows, or eyelashes. She’d never had any – she was born like that. Genes, or Astrology. I of course think it’s Astrology.

Astrology reflects, it doesn't DO anything by itself. You can't "think it's astrology", because its job is to help interpret. Genes did it, it's just that you can see it on the chart.

There's also Dr Ali, who only survives being a racist caricature because he's a doctor, but of course cannot speak proper Polish -- and this could be a great way to explore the failures of language and how much Proper Grammar is in fact necessary for someone to do their job or integrate in a community, but no, he just Can't Speak Proper Polish. And I guess that's funny.

What gets me the most, between the William Blake, the English teaching, Ali, Janina's own past work in Syria and Libya, astrology, hunting, and Christianity, you have every element you could possibly want to explore interpretation. Between languages, interpretation of the Bible, the chaplains who were pro-hunting, the schism between Church and astrology (which is more recent than you'd think!), the original usage of astrology by Christians themselves. There's a great novel somewhere in there that would actually look through all these elements that the author herself put there. Unfortunately, this is not that novel -- we instead have to think "haha quirky old main character ft some general deeper ideas" suffices. It does not. It sucked when Piranesi did it, and it sucks here.

Furthermore, one of the biggest missed opportunities is that a character whose world-view is supposed to be shaped by astrology to the extent Janina's is and the presence of Ali in the story could create a much different and more interesting view (rather than this racist take) in terms of the power negotiations always present between a person who's part of the dominant group of the country and an immigrant, because when astrologers talk about Western Astrology they mean west of China and the Indian subcontinent, and not the idea of the West formed primarily around colonialism. If nothing else, this offers a different enough angle that is not only fun to explore but IMO fits the kind of character Janina is meant to be, which is #odd #weird #quirky #aWeirdo and more generally not going along with societal expectations, so it'd make sense that HER sense of ingroup/out group would be further dictated by something #odd #weird etc.

And to follow the same line of thought, this level of belief in astrology presupposes an accompanying belief: that time isn't linear. If you think that the planets reflect events here on earth, you HAVE to believe that everything that will ever happen has already happened. This is once again a golden opportunity to explore from YOUR MAIN CHARACTER'S POV. But it never happens! Even when she looks at deaths, she's looking at the past -- why not pick the ones most likely to die next? Why not think of them as already dead? So many things you can do with something like that!!! And it never! Happens!!!!

Something that vexes me: there's a reason you're supposed to go Horary astrology > Electional > Natal > Mundane. Shut up about Natal. Nobody gives a shit about Natal. Well, they do, it's 99% of what you'll find online, but that's because [complicated historical reasons] and also people only care about astrology insofar as they think it'll tell them something about themselves. Which is firstly boring, secondly the reason we got people thinking that 'omg I'm a pisces sun and an aries moon' means anything at all, and thirdly BORING. Most of what Janina was doing in the book should've involved Horary charts!!!!!

I expected better from a Nobel winner.

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (Fiction, Thriller, 2022)

Based on the true crime story of the Oakland County Child Killer, we follow Hannah, suburban wife of a certain social class, and to a lesser extent Mikey, of a much lower social class. Hannah starts an affair with a man she knows of as only Y.K., and there's a lot of time devoted to coming up to his door, with a PRIVACY! DO NOT DISTURB! sign, and... choosing different outcomes, kind of like a timeloop.

This is the third thing I know Joyce Carol Oates from. The first was when my train was delayed by several hours and I spent two of them inside a booshop reading The Book of American Martyrs (only 150ish pages of it), which alternated between being honestly brilliant and having PAGES UPON PAGES of things that should've been cut in editing. The second was that she's SUCH A POSTER she's the tumblr sexyman of the month, except twitter sexywoman of all eternity. Has some bonkers opinions but is reliably entertaining. Now, as for this book, uh, it falls close to my reaction to American Martyrs: Some of the repetition here is well-used, clever, very good at evoking the way everything leading up to a traumatic event often etches itself in memory much more clearly than the traumatic event itself. I can appreciate it!!! But OHHHH MY GOD, please, someone take some scissors to this. Snip snip. Please. Por favor. There's sooooo much that can be cut!

There are definitely many interesting things here. Oates is such a delightfully gifted stylist, the racism is very blatant, you can see how characters, who by all means should have each other's backs / be allied against a common cause, rub each other the wrong way. But while I would not call anything here surface-level, I feel like the person meant to be reading it is very much like Hannah: 40-ish suburban American white woman of a certain social class, surrounded by powerful men, in a tight misogynistic (and racist and classist. but IMO it's at its strongest wrt the misogyny) bubble she needs to burst.

For that kind of person I think it could put words to a lot of feelings that might be there about things being a bit off, and despite Hannah's neglect of her children and her treatment of Ismelda (who works at their home), it is still very easy to empathise with her. It's just that, for me, there's not much to get from this book? Entertainment is a no, some kind of aesthetic experience would be a yes if someone edited this down, but as-is is again a no, target audience is as I said a no... I don't regret picking it up, but I also don't feel like I gained anything.

What else... Oh, I was completely surprised by how many reviews I looked at didn't even mention Mikey? I thought he took up quite a lot of pagetime. Am I experiencing the reverse of that phenomenon where men think women are having equal time talking when they were speaking like 10% of the time.... Either way, I did quite like the chapters from his PoV. They were awful hateful slurfests (and I say this happily), but, unlike Hannah, 1) his life gives him no reason to want to hold onto the few good things one's social position affords, 2) as a man, he hasn't been told that he SHOULD put on rose tinted glasses and accept certain things as good, 3) his issues are different, which means that, again, unlike Hannah, his chapters are HONEST. Hannah's end up being honest too, but it takes her a while to get there.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (Non-fiction, 2003)

Informative, with enough level of detail that I feel like I gained something. Unfortunately the author's voice and comments are constant, and, although I agree with her in the vast majority of cases, it started becoming unimaginably annoying, especially when she starts talking about the "third world".

I like the way it ends!

It's the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova, translated by Elina Alter (Fiction, 2020/2023)

Kind of a mix of short stories, kind of an episodic narrative. Autofiction... kind of. The first and last parts are more obvious on that, and the middle ones are closer to the "classic" model of short story/vignette/prose poem -- and also my personal favourites.

I've been rotating this in my brain and I genuinely do not know how to feel about it, still. I find her ability to write in so many different styles and forms nothing short of awe-worthy, and the whole thing feels like a theodicy for how various kinds of suffering come to be, and with the last extended section I might be using that word literally.

Childhood fears, obsessions—there was no one who could accept my fear and transform it, return it to me in some kind of acceptable, tolerable form. Mama had too many anxieties of her own, she couldn’t handle mine, too. I was suffocated by my thoughts, I tried to control them and I couldn’t.

If I were to ignore the second and third parts (the more clearly delineated stories/vignettes/poems/folkloric narrations), what I found most fascinating was the mix of emotional responsibility the narrator/most common recurring character bore that was coupled with both a lack of guidance and a lack of physical capabilities (sometimes due to young age, sometimes oweing to drug use, etc) and freedom. The strain of that kind of situation was very clearly part of the way thoughts, events, preoccupations etc are described. But, in the end, I'm not sure it all came together... I'm not sure I'm left feeling like I finished a cohesive work.

It was somehow immediately clear to me that whatever was least acceptable to me as a person, with my elevated ideals of love, freedom, honor, and justice—that’s what was sexual. It had nothing to do with love and all those elevated feelings; I had totally different fantasies about love, romantic and lofty, and I never mixed up these two spheres.

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated by Alexandra Fleming (Horror, 2019/2021)

Almost every person living in an old mining town disappears overnight. Alice goes there to make a documentary.

Mid. In every sense of the word. At everything. Just not worth the time I spent reading it, though I guess the writing itself wasn't too bad.

The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste (Horror, 2024)

A tragedy kills Talitha Velkwood's mother and sister. Many years later, she's offered a lot of money to re-enter the vicinity.

A very thin book. An EXTREMELY dramatic book, on so many levels. This happens because the writing has no specific goal -- each sentence builds and builds and builds like a constant crescendo but then... It just flops. Horrible rhythm. Zero substance. Made it an actual pain to read.

And Talitha herself! You know that one Ginny & Georgia conversation that went like:

GINNY: You invalidate my feelings.
GEORGIA: Well, that's because you have so many. All you do is feel. You're a teenager, and you're hormonal, and you're sensitive, and you feel a lot. And I'm not gassing you up.
GINNY: Gassing up is good.
GEORGIA: Well, then, I'm gassing you all over the place, okay? All the feelings. Feel them all. Feel your feelings. They're all valid, every single last one.
GINNY: You don't have to be like that.
GEORGIA: Why, is it giving you a feeling?

Talitha is Ginny in this case, and I'm Georgia. Except Talitha doesn't even have the excuse of being a teenager!! And yet every single page every single event is like omggggg a grenade exploded inside me.

That aside, I did actually find the ending touching, and I can see how someone can find one specific conversation extremely cathartic. The ideas are there!!! It's just that the execution never manifested them well. There are some interesting discussions on mother-daughter relationships and coming to terms with one's sexuality and what can prevent this. It's cute, I guess.

Red Sword by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hurr (Fiction, Science-fiction, 2019/2025)

What worked for me:
- The ideas, both philosophical and worldbuilding-related. Who conscripts who to fight what war? To what end? How often and how far is technology pushed past the point of positive benefit? How far does coercive control extend? etc.
- It did the whole ~kindness and humanity maaaatters thing in a way that I found genuinely touching instead of painfully naive.
- The action scenes! They were pretty basic all in all, but I do love reading action scenes in so-called Novels of Ideas.
- The Double Helix chapters, interspersed, that add information about the setting and hammer in The Ideas and where they're born from. They were by far my favourites, and I think Chung's short-story-writing past helps in keeping them contained.
- The levels of dehumanisation.

According to the author (DeepL translated, sorry):

When the impeachment resolution passed, I thought of the voices of the people gathered in front of the National Assembly shouting, ‘We won! We won!’ and the countless fists raised toward the sky. However, an individual is truly small, and the world into which that individual is thrown is vast and wide, filled with countless injustices and countless struggles. I realise that such struggles are not the kind that can be easily won. What sustains me are the people who have gone through the same experiences as me and hold my hand, and I too will hold someone else's hand and sustain them in the same way. I wanted to write such a story. And I wanted to write it as stylishly as possible. So I included gunfights and swordfights, and thus it became a wuxia novel disguised as science fiction. Since it was fun to write, I have no regrets.

And, you know what, every part of this does come across!

What did not work for me:
- The characters. In a story as iterative as this one, I think it's weakened by the very broad strokes used to create everyone.
- The writing... it reads like science fiction (derogatory) instead of science fiction the category. Like the exact boring bland snooze-worthy prose you imagine when you think of Space Battles Cool Aliens Yay stories. I don't think the style fits the meditative quality of this one! And the action scenes and futuristic aspects had almost no momentum, so I can't even say it held the positive qualities of the Space Battles Cool Aliens Yay stories.
- it can be very much on the nose sometimes. thankfully not all the time.

“But why? Why have prisoners and soldiers? Why not just all soldiers so everyone would be loyal to the Empire?”

“It’s more convenient for the clones to fight each other and distrust each other. They keep each other in check that way.”

“Kill me,” he said. He opened his eyes and stared into her eyes again. “Kill me, and if you ever see me again outside of this room, kill me again. Kill every single me.”

Overall happy to have picked it up but I'm probably never leafing through it again. I'm still very excited for Bora Chung's upcoming translations! Every one of her ideas piques my interest, though I hope to like her novel-in-ghost-stories and the pain chasers book more than this one.

Happy Women In Translation month!!! 🥰