Recent Reads
May. 3rd, 2023 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firstroadYay slowly getting out of a slump! Except now I'm not sure what I want to be reading...
Hunger Makes the Wolf by Alex Wells
Western-flavoured SFF! I liked the characters - they felt like well-rounded characters while still fitting into the Fantasy Role. The dialogue is truly western-like. It reads VERY fast. The world is clear. I appreciated the labour activism.
The bad parts: it doesn't keep its initial momentum going. Things happen, sure, but they just kinda... happen, you know. Zero emotional impact.
The worst part of it is that it felt like there was no true emotional conflict between the characters - everything was either fully external, some other bigger threat, or fully internal. The one point of possible straining gets resolved in three pages flat.
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Unnamed 15 year old narrator, her mother brings home a dude who is also a crane. I enjoyed the prose in many many places, but it was so... Unimaginative, for the world it was creating. I often had to stop and check that this was indeed taking place in a SF-esque environment, because every single character speaks like they're in 2008 USA.
I also found it extremely unoriginal in its take - it takes a fun premise (what if the folktale of The Crane Wife was Crane Husband?) and somehow makes it... Just as sexist? In a very basic way... Not like the author was trying to be awful with it or whatever. But deeply, deeply basic. Like oh, motherhood hard and the eldest daughter takes care of the housework and bills and her younger brother? The mother brings home lots of people and endures domestic violence? Tell me more, I definitely have not seen this done before a million other times.
Y/N by Esther Yi
I LIKED THIS ONE.... I was expecting not to! The writing style in this is the exact kind that I like, and the narrator is so pretentious in such a 'love to hate her' way :D
Unfortunately, despite the combination of writing style I adored + a theme that intrigues me (extreme standom, the need for projection), I really felt like this would've been better as a <30 page short story. There's just not enough new material (thematically, not events-wise) in the different sections to warrant the length and the book ended up tiring me out even as I enjoyed the process of reading it in itself. (again, the writing style, I loveeeee it!)
Also, while I thought the pretentious, weird, stilted dialogue fit the narrator, it was kind of strange to see just about everyone, including pop idols, speak in the same way. If it was done deliberately then it missed the mark for me, and if it wasn't... Nobody talks like that.
The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Finally!!! A 5 star book for me!!!! I read this very slowly for how short it is -- but it was worth it. I found it effective in its construction, the focus on the report, and how short its sentences often were. How fragmented it felt did reflect fragmented truths, and overall I'd say it accomplished its aim remarkably well! I understand why the lack of concrete answers is a main thing in this, but personally I'd have appreciated a clearer narrative that came from *something* in this, even if it had been a bird, because despite how muddled people want it to be, there is one truth, in real life.
In general, though, it was aiming to show something and it did it quite well, so my complaints are not substantial.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
Look. I get it. Yeah yeah you end up empathising with an incredibly pathetic incredibly misogynistic dude. Yeah he's very human after all. Yeah that's done well. But I really do not care to get through this much misogyny, all I felt for Yozo was, like, vaguely pity.
Chlorine by Jade Song
OMG this ended up so much better than I initially expected!!! When I started this I was just like, oh my god this is so tryhard. Oh my god, nobody talks like that. Oh my god, are you seriously calling your mermaid protagonist Ren Yu?????? But after the second half I was reading SO fast, constantly turning pages and loving it :D I'll admit it's in part because I'm just biased towards anything that has to do with swimming (oh my god I love swimming) and competitiveness (oh my god I love competitiveness) and sports (oh my god I love sports) and the unhealthy mindset born from wanting to eventually end up in properly competitive sports (this one I only love in fiction). I found this a really solid debut! I can't believe I'm loving reading about teenagers again. I will never be free.
Hysteria by Jessica Gross
And fuck this book. 'Sad woman in her 20s' is a genre I typically enjoy! Like, yes, give me all the unhealthy women. But it wanted to be edgy so badlyyyyy and this is coming from a person who is, unfortunately, a 13-year-old boy in everything except being 13 and a boy. I see what it was trying to do and none of it landed -- no sexuality (as in, her being sexual, not orientation) exploration, no parental-issues exploration. Just a bunch of scenes strung together by an author who seems to think writing a lot of sex-related words is shocking enough to carry a book on its own, and also a substitute for strong connective tissue. I haven't disliked something this strongly in a while! (And, okay, strongly here just means 'omg this is bad!!' rather than 'bleh this is bad.')
None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka
I really enjoyed how the state of "online"-ness permeated everything in the narration! The overly short telegraphic sentences, the fact that Sophie never actually speaks in dialogue, but we're only told what she said indirectly -- and is only ever direct when texting.
Sophie's feelings also somehow felt more real to me, and the phrasing around them sharper, than in various other 'sad young upper middle class woman who is also painfully straight' novels. ('Painfully' because there's just too much about guys in here, as in every other novel in this "genre".) Her sense of estrangement was shown constantly, in small ways:
And she's online in a way that's just... Yeah, this author has also been very online. They know how 'online' can feel realer than real life, sometimes:
Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction by Pamela Fraser, Roger Rothman
Like all collections of essays, this was hard to rate. I found some great and some not-so-great, but mostly this left me baffled - who is meant to be the target audience? Is it laypeople? Is it humanities students/teachers? Is it arts students/teachers? Is it just artists, in general?
For example: "For art schools to engage in an ethical and critical praxis, they need to redefine the project of critique in relation to its situated communities." Cool, okay, I agree. But then it goes on to just throw random words - Must Not Be Eurocentric, Must Use An Anti-racist And Queer Framework or whatever, but it never once elaborates. What would such a framework look like? And I always resent the use of 'eurocentric' as shorthand for 'serving those who either created or assimilated into whiteness in the USA'. Words mean things, etc. But my main point was: I'd expect this kind of essay to appear for something targeted at teens or just-turned-18s, considering their more specific education for the first time, not in a book about critique that has, supposedly, a readership that has critiqued and has received critique multiple times.
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
It starts off strong... but the author has no concept of how to make characters overall likeable. The interactions are surface-level, their interiority nonexistent. Max's tape chapters are the best, and those suffer from a heavy case of "Nobody Speaks Like This!"
Like:
Who the hell says that out loud? Humans don't talk like that.
On the good parts: I love speculative fiction and semi-apocalyptic stories, and this delivered on both. The concept is unique and interesting and definitely sucks you in, and while I personally do deeply appreciate "who cares how this started? We focus on how to go on." narratives, this one couldn't decide what part of that it wanted to be. Do you want to be the loss? Do you want to be moving on? Do you want to be a solution? It handles the multiple points of view badly, in my opinion.
There's just so much on the surface! So much! I wanted to love this! It just... never explores deeply. If the shadowless can give up a memory in return for doing ANYTHING, I feel like something organised should've been born of this -- that's not, like, attacking shadowed people. Containment, medically-induced comas while trying to find solutions (stitching other shadows to them is so interesting!), altering the world to what *you* want it to be. It's just not imaginative enough for a 500 page novel.
On the subjective side, the prose was way too boring for this kind of atmosphere. It never did anything unique with its sentence structure -- and the shadowless gave ample opportunity! The people speaking English as a foreign language gave ample opportunity! And I wanted more philosophy.
-
And 2 DNFs:
The Good Samaritan by John Marrs: A character with cancer shows up and thinks about how baaaaaad treatment makes her look! Oh what else would a woman with a disease focus on, except looks? Dropped.
Our Best Intentions by Vibhuti Jain: It was just too YA-like for something not marked YA.
Hunger Makes the Wolf by Alex Wells
Western-flavoured SFF! I liked the characters - they felt like well-rounded characters while still fitting into the Fantasy Role. The dialogue is truly western-like. It reads VERY fast. The world is clear. I appreciated the labour activism.
The bad parts: it doesn't keep its initial momentum going. Things happen, sure, but they just kinda... happen, you know. Zero emotional impact.
The worst part of it is that it felt like there was no true emotional conflict between the characters - everything was either fully external, some other bigger threat, or fully internal. The one point of possible straining gets resolved in three pages flat.
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Unnamed 15 year old narrator, her mother brings home a dude who is also a crane. I enjoyed the prose in many many places, but it was so... Unimaginative, for the world it was creating. I often had to stop and check that this was indeed taking place in a SF-esque environment, because every single character speaks like they're in 2008 USA.
I also found it extremely unoriginal in its take - it takes a fun premise (what if the folktale of The Crane Wife was Crane Husband?) and somehow makes it... Just as sexist? In a very basic way... Not like the author was trying to be awful with it or whatever. But deeply, deeply basic. Like oh, motherhood hard and the eldest daughter takes care of the housework and bills and her younger brother? The mother brings home lots of people and endures domestic violence? Tell me more, I definitely have not seen this done before a million other times.
Y/N by Esther Yi
I LIKED THIS ONE.... I was expecting not to! The writing style in this is the exact kind that I like, and the narrator is so pretentious in such a 'love to hate her' way :D
Unfortunately, despite the combination of writing style I adored + a theme that intrigues me (extreme standom, the need for projection), I really felt like this would've been better as a <30 page short story. There's just not enough new material (thematically, not events-wise) in the different sections to warrant the length and the book ended up tiring me out even as I enjoyed the process of reading it in itself. (again, the writing style, I loveeeee it!)
Also, while I thought the pretentious, weird, stilted dialogue fit the narrator, it was kind of strange to see just about everyone, including pop idols, speak in the same way. If it was done deliberately then it missed the mark for me, and if it wasn't... Nobody talks like that.
The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Finally!!! A 5 star book for me!!!! I read this very slowly for how short it is -- but it was worth it. I found it effective in its construction, the focus on the report, and how short its sentences often were. How fragmented it felt did reflect fragmented truths, and overall I'd say it accomplished its aim remarkably well! I understand why the lack of concrete answers is a main thing in this, but personally I'd have appreciated a clearer narrative that came from *something* in this, even if it had been a bird, because despite how muddled people want it to be, there is one truth, in real life.
In general, though, it was aiming to show something and it did it quite well, so my complaints are not substantial.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
Look. I get it. Yeah yeah you end up empathising with an incredibly pathetic incredibly misogynistic dude. Yeah he's very human after all. Yeah that's done well. But I really do not care to get through this much misogyny, all I felt for Yozo was, like, vaguely pity.
Chlorine by Jade Song
OMG this ended up so much better than I initially expected!!! When I started this I was just like, oh my god this is so tryhard. Oh my god, nobody talks like that. Oh my god, are you seriously calling your mermaid protagonist Ren Yu?????? But after the second half I was reading SO fast, constantly turning pages and loving it :D I'll admit it's in part because I'm just biased towards anything that has to do with swimming (oh my god I love swimming) and competitiveness (oh my god I love competitiveness) and sports (oh my god I love sports) and the unhealthy mindset born from wanting to eventually end up in properly competitive sports (this one I only love in fiction). I found this a really solid debut! I can't believe I'm loving reading about teenagers again. I will never be free.
Hysteria by Jessica Gross
And fuck this book. 'Sad woman in her 20s' is a genre I typically enjoy! Like, yes, give me all the unhealthy women. But it wanted to be edgy so badlyyyyy and this is coming from a person who is, unfortunately, a 13-year-old boy in everything except being 13 and a boy. I see what it was trying to do and none of it landed -- no sexuality (as in, her being sexual, not orientation) exploration, no parental-issues exploration. Just a bunch of scenes strung together by an author who seems to think writing a lot of sex-related words is shocking enough to carry a book on its own, and also a substitute for strong connective tissue. I haven't disliked something this strongly in a while! (And, okay, strongly here just means 'omg this is bad!!' rather than 'bleh this is bad.')
None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka
I really enjoyed how the state of "online"-ness permeated everything in the narration! The overly short telegraphic sentences, the fact that Sophie never actually speaks in dialogue, but we're only told what she said indirectly -- and is only ever direct when texting.
Sophie's feelings also somehow felt more real to me, and the phrasing around them sharper, than in various other 'sad young upper middle class woman who is also painfully straight' novels. ('Painfully' because there's just too much about guys in here, as in every other novel in this "genre".) Her sense of estrangement was shown constantly, in small ways:
She buys a round of Jägerbombs for the table and we take them reluctantly, Steph holding her nose as she knocks it back in one. Someone, maybe me, says that we are too old for this kind of thing.
And she's online in a way that's just... Yeah, this author has also been very online. They know how 'online' can feel realer than real life, sometimes:
I like the tweet. It’s a fairly innocuous thing to do, but it will give him a notification and maybe then he’ll think of me. I wonder if other people think about social interactions like this, and decide that at some level they must. I’m not sure if I want Rory to understand my motives or if I want to understand his.
Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction by Pamela Fraser, Roger Rothman
Like all collections of essays, this was hard to rate. I found some great and some not-so-great, but mostly this left me baffled - who is meant to be the target audience? Is it laypeople? Is it humanities students/teachers? Is it arts students/teachers? Is it just artists, in general?
For example: "For art schools to engage in an ethical and critical praxis, they need to redefine the project of critique in relation to its situated communities." Cool, okay, I agree. But then it goes on to just throw random words - Must Not Be Eurocentric, Must Use An Anti-racist And Queer Framework or whatever, but it never once elaborates. What would such a framework look like? And I always resent the use of 'eurocentric' as shorthand for 'serving those who either created or assimilated into whiteness in the USA'. Words mean things, etc. But my main point was: I'd expect this kind of essay to appear for something targeted at teens or just-turned-18s, considering their more specific education for the first time, not in a book about critique that has, supposedly, a readership that has critiqued and has received critique multiple times.
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
It starts off strong... but the author has no concept of how to make characters overall likeable. The interactions are surface-level, their interiority nonexistent. Max's tape chapters are the best, and those suffer from a heavy case of "Nobody Speaks Like This!"
Like:
For a moment, I could feel the sharpness of a pain that had a name, and the loss of something I could still feel. Something tremendous. What have we just given up, Ory? What have we given up, and what have we gotten for it? But the more I tried to answer her, the more dull the pain became, until it ebbed away into empty exhaustion. Nothing.
Who the hell says that out loud? Humans don't talk like that.
On the good parts: I love speculative fiction and semi-apocalyptic stories, and this delivered on both. The concept is unique and interesting and definitely sucks you in, and while I personally do deeply appreciate "who cares how this started? We focus on how to go on." narratives, this one couldn't decide what part of that it wanted to be. Do you want to be the loss? Do you want to be moving on? Do you want to be a solution? It handles the multiple points of view badly, in my opinion.
There's just so much on the surface! So much! I wanted to love this! It just... never explores deeply. If the shadowless can give up a memory in return for doing ANYTHING, I feel like something organised should've been born of this -- that's not, like, attacking shadowed people. Containment, medically-induced comas while trying to find solutions (stitching other shadows to them is so interesting!), altering the world to what *you* want it to be. It's just not imaginative enough for a 500 page novel.
On the subjective side, the prose was way too boring for this kind of atmosphere. It never did anything unique with its sentence structure -- and the shadowless gave ample opportunity! The people speaking English as a foreign language gave ample opportunity! And I wanted more philosophy.
-
And 2 DNFs:
The Good Samaritan by John Marrs: A character with cancer shows up and thinks about how baaaaaad treatment makes her look! Oh what else would a woman with a disease focus on, except looks? Dropped.
Our Best Intentions by Vibhuti Jain: It was just too YA-like for something not marked YA.