Recent Reads

[firstroad]

Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit

I looked up various reviews, and was shocked to find how many characterised the writing style as some flavour of tiresome. Even people who mostly read """literary""" fiction! And many many tens of books of it per year! I find that a silly complaint. Firstly, because the style isn't at all dense. Secondly, because I do not understand... why should we expect works that include how specific structures of society break apart to solely follow established structures of language?

Me mentally fighting Reviewers Who Are Wrong (Wrong!!! I tell you!) aside, I thought this was really good. It leaves you suspended in time and largely takes place in a bedroom and you see all the consequences this old couple faced due to their being part of a revolutionary cell, with the inability to take their son to hospital being something that haunts a large part of this. The ending makes you question a lot of things about the novella too, even though the... seeds? I guess? were already there.

On a fun note, the introduction of my edition is done by Julián Fuks (who also translated this to Portuguese) & I remembered liking Occupation when I read it years back, the translation of which to English was done by Daniel Hahn, who also translated Never Did The Fire to English! There's also a second book(let?) dedicated entirely to the process of translating this which I would love to get to.

I will actually just copy a portion of said introduction to sell this to anyone who might be reading this ^~^

We are in an uncertain year, a year of dismay like so many others we have seen. In the year in question, one recollection recurs: the unpunished death of General Franco, the unseemly death of the fascist dictator untouched by any justice. Nothing to celebrate in that death, or in the insistent memory of the death: perhaps that’s the greatest expression of the defeat of so many emancipatory struggles, the absurd triumph of the Spanish dictatorship, or of almost all dictatorships. In this uncertain year, already distant from that occurrence that’s so real it becomes a symbol, there is no hope that might pay us a visit, no confidence that it could be possible to attain the slightest dignity, or at least an effective democracy.

We are once again shut up in a constrained space, inside a Beckettian room perhaps, the room from whose walls the same voice echoes incessantly. What’s different, however, is the delirium, what’s different is the madness that is ordered here – we are surrendered to the unending recollections of a life run through with politics. The experience of militancy becomes the centre of all memories, the many mistakes made during the resistance, mistakes that are re-enacted in the present, in the friction between bodies, in the non-viability of any real contact, of any understanding.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated by Nguyễn An Lý

I actually read this quite a bit later than NDTF, but they are so similar that I have to place them near each other -- not in how they read, which is totally different, but both follow a woman (kinda) whose son is facing complications because of his father (kinda), and loss, and how the political climate is affecting them, and, most importantly, both are written in a way that connects seemingly unrelated ideas SOOOO well. Look. Am I oversimplifying? Yes. But I promise it's a comparison made out of love, I really liked this one too. The impact politics have on the narrator is less so because of active involvement (like in NDTF) and moreso just a consequence.

While we wait to defend our theses in Russia, we should use the time to join the party, wouldn’t “Subdoctorate” look so nice followed by “Party member” on our visiting cards, and we mustn’t forget to buy a refrigerator and a TV set so as to have something to fill our overseas crates, not to mention some dozens of pressure cookers, and hundreds of wheel bearings to act as cushioning for the tottering goods during the three-month voyage. If there’s still time, why don’t we go on to have a baby boy, an early taste for butter and milk and a smattering of babbled Russian will mean he won’t seem such a bumpkin when he comes back at eighteen in his turn.

Lots of loopiness and obsession and lines that segregate.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

I love poems and poetry and in my life I've probably read more poetry than prose (in number of works read not words), but I'm going to need (the mmajority of) poets to stop trying to write novels. Or do so, but then keep them in the drawer for 25 years and then take them out and publish them.

Characters had a general metanarrative purpose but Akbar mistook this for having created Realised People. Which he did not do. Cyrus was the closest thing and he was so whiny and almost narcissistic that I'm not sure calling him a realised person is any kind of compliment. Not that I need characters to be likeable (I love assholish douchebags. The brute is my favourite character archetype.) but I don't think Akbar meant for Cyrus to come across as whiny and narcissistic and the disconnect does affect my enjoyment. Like, there's this part of his interview with The Believer:

KA: The book has a choral perspective, in which you never hear from the protagonist in the first person—everyone else is speaking in the first person about him, but you get his experiences only in the close third person. I was also interested in this because it’s the language of hagiography; it’s how the Gospels of the New Testament are constructed. That was important to me to replicate, because depending on how you interpret a few key moments in the text, the entire novel can be read as a hagiography of an unlikely martyr-saint. I’m interested in the possibility that such martyr-saints walk among us. Talmudic Judaism believes that at any given moment, there are thirty-six saints on Earth. Thirty-five of them have a direct line to God and can hear exactly what he wants them to be doing, but there’s one who does not have access to God—who just accidentally does all the right shit, purely organically. Isn’t that the best?

BLVR: That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that before, but it’s a beautiful idea. The most unlikely person or character might secretly be that thirty-sixth saint.

KA: Exactly. And that one poor person walking among us might even be a piss-pants drunk who can’t look beyond himself to the love he receives from the world. There’s something appealing, even charming, about that. It was important to me that one could read my protagonist, Cyrus, in that light.

Likeeeeeeeee. LIKE? Tears in my eyes.

This book also makes ME. MEEEEEE. feel like it was over-written at times. I just defended Never Did the Fire from this kind of criticism but at least NDtF had, how do you say, exploration of ideas and substance that justified its contortion of language. Martyr! did not explore most of what it purported to be about. It didn't even go below the surface. It didn't even properly research Iran! As an Iranian-American author writing an Iranian-American character who is admiring an Iranian artist, who obviously doesn't think the only important part is what comes after the hyphen (or the Iran-related parts wouldn't have existed). That choice is puzzling. I think this is the other way the fact that Akbar is a poet shows itself: it tries soooo haaaaard to be about so many things, some of which at least do get, on some level, explored (grief, addiction, sobriety after addiction), and some of which he does nothing with (the American expansionist mindset and imperial imagination, death in itself and at which point does a death become a "meaningful" death, which you would think would appear more, given that so much of Cyrus' whole deal starts with the Iran Air flight 655 tragedy, and the fact that ~meaningful death~ is, like, supposed to be this novel's whole Thing.)

You could absolutely tackle all of that in a poetry collection of 300 pages! It would be very very doable! But in a novel, especially when it is your very first novel, that is not the case. It's too messy. My admittedly uncharitable take is that a lot of this reads like authorial overcompensation.

It does have some gorgeous passages. Actually most of it! It's very pretty. But its attempts to be wink wink nudge nudge self-aware do not work for me.

For weeks, I kept thinking about that tablet. Walking around the shavings, hens running from my boots, the image of that ancient stone hung in my mind. For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

and then, a chapter later:

And you want to end this book about martyrs with yourself, Orkideh had said. Did he? Cyrus wanted to sit on a park bench. He wanted to get something to eat.

Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated?

It also brought to mind meikuree's post about first- and second-order descriptions. This book tries to discuss both the Iranian and the Iranian-American experience, and in its desire it imo lands on the unfortunately common diaspora practice of self-exoticising:

Gilles Deleuze called elegy la grande plainte, “the great complaint,” a way of saying “what is happening is too much for me.” In Iran, Ashura is a day of elegy where people fast and mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, killed in 680 CE on his fifty-fifth birthday in the Battle of Karbala. A day of elegy. “What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us,” Iranians say. It is in our blood, la grande plainte. Shekayat bazorg. We remember. Of course we remember.

—from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

If I am being extra mean, it mostly has to do with the praise and prize nominations this book has received. If I take a step back, I think it's fine. Eminently readable. Fun. Not the kind of godawful book that makes you wonder how the hell this got published. I just don't think it's good. I think the author absolutely has the skills to do better next time. I think this very book could've been better! If it got published a few years later! And was left in the oven for a bit!!!! I also think the self-exoticising and Identity-ing is doubly funny when namedropping Deleuze but that's a separate discussion.

There's also something to be said about how a poet, who by all means understands the relationship between form and structure and impact, used both in such an uninspiring way... Like 'Look I'm trying to do something here! Yeah I gave up halfway through making it interesting.' But this is already too long.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

I would actually love to say something about this book, but Hesse is soooooooo loved by both of my parents and was formative for them and they have been talking to me about ideas they first read from him for so long that I kind of can't look at it objectively. That said, it reads much more quickly than anticipated, and I had a lot of fun! Even though it lacked novelty, haha.

The White Dress by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer

Every time I read something by Léger I swear I come out of it with more highlighted lines than not... I just deeply love the way she writes, and the translator did such a good job! It is in part autofiction, and it reminds me the ways in which autofiction can be FUN. I also respect it far more than the memoir (of the average person), because at least autofiction is interesting.

Also, style sample that makes me giggle and kick my feet:

This foolishness, this over the top, sentimental gesture—misplaced, according to quite a lot of people—was without doubt a grand gesture, and a grand gesture is not a coalition of intentions cleverly conceived to serve our shamelessness, a grand gesture, I mumbled, a grand gesture might also be a failed gesture, history easily demonstrates this, at least in that it only records the successful gestures, fixing them in capital letters when one might rather investigate the possibility that the meaning of things and of lives—I mean the living, yes, the living—can only be written in lower case and must perhaps even be scratched out. Who would dare to claim that an individual failure cancels out the overall idea? Is it the case, though this is just an example, is it the case that the very idea of writing is rendered ridiculous because someone whom one thought was a writer failed to erect a small monument in words to Pippa Bacca?

Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

So many paragraphs, hell, so many SENTENCES, started of really strong and I had a lot of fun reading them and then just kinda... petered out. It feels like it was either designed to be skimmable in a ~stylish way, or like the editor got bored and decided to not do their job. The ability is there! But it feels like nobody cared to realise its potential. This is a book that makes me wonder if the author spends a lot of time writing in online spaces. Not sure if it's AO3-ish, but it's definitely very online. I do not care to engage with chaarcters as victims. While I understand the concept in the wider culture and obviously I think it is necessary, I find victimhood reductive.

I liked the metafiction-ish attempt towards the end. Overall meh. Where are the editors!

The Potato Eaters: Stories by Farhad Pirbal, translated by Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse and Jiyar Homer

Experimental, imaginative, FUNNNNNNNNN. SO MUCH FUN. Enough to make me squint past the undercurrent of misogyny. Unconventional and different and touching on the unique pain of displacement. I have a hard time saying anything about short story collections but I think anyone into absurd stories who can stomach darker themes would have a good time with this.

In The Shadow of the Mountain by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

I can appreciate what she does for CSA survivors but everything about the way this book was written was awful. If she hired a ghostwriter, please hire a better one next time, and if she didn't, please just hire one. I actually bought this physicallyyyyy I want my money back.

The Murder at Sissingham Hall by Clara Benson

Iiiii had things to say! But, then I read that the author was writing these for herself, and it was only her family that published them much later, which tbh automatically negates any negative point. This was actually very very fun and readable and the prose was nice and each character very distinguishable with clear voice. Some setting-typical attitudes were there, but honestly, I read many contemporary novels that are far more misogynistic than this was, so, yay? The narrator coming back to England from South Africa had me all um 👀 well!!!! When I thought this was published in 2013, but for an English person born in 1890...

The ending was unintentionally hilarious. And kind of intentionally hilarious. Overall I liked it! Would rec if anyone is looking for a breezy locked room mystery to read in 1-2 days!

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

I AM NOTTTTT the target audience for this. I knew when I picked it up. But ACTUALLY? IT WAS FUN? I could not believe my eyes. I mean I did pick it up expecting it to be fun and also because I've been in a mood for mysteries, but like, it was better structured than I thought and it was handling more plot threads than I thought and honestly Pip was very cute! I think The Message of it all is pretty cute for <16 year olds, who I assume are the actual target audience. Very adorable I enjoyed myself :)

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Yayyy my first Rooney. Nayyyyyy I did not... like this.... When it comes to Peter it's like, yes yes I Get It Catholicism brings shame and exploitation breeds alienation yes yes nod nod blah blah all these problems are exacerbated by the housing crisis blah blah, but like brother, Jesus Christ your problems are not problems!!!!! As for Ivan, ummmmmm, I do not want to read from the POV of an (ex-)incel ... he's fine otherwise. I guess. Sorry I simply do not care about men.

Last sentence was only half a joke, because for all that class played a role, and from this book alone I'd defend Rooney from some criticisms I've seen regarding her not integrating class in her novels, and for all that it wanted to talk about alienation, and the feeling of precarity, at the end of the day it does not seem to even vaguely blink at the direction of discussing (I'm not asking about challenging!) very shallow, low-hanging fruit ideas around gender essentialism. Like wow those sex scenes were atrocious & franklyyyyy atrociously male-gazey. That might be on purpose and I'm willing to buy that argument because power differentials seem to be a topic of interest, but if the focus is meant to be on said delta of power, I find the choice to give none of the three women any kind of personality bad! After a too-long-for-its-content book, what do we know about them? And we even get Margaret's POV!

Anyway hilariously I read this because Andrea Long Chu had takes (here) that didn't make my eyes roll hard enough to land in the back of my head, which is in turn something rare enough to deserve me putting effort to read the book they praised. That said they also called her approach a lover's theory of marxism which is, how do you say, cringe. Sorry that is what you might call a cop-out.

This novel is the equivalent of that 'the feminism leaving my body when [BLANK]' meme except like the materialism leaves her body and the text the moment classes Rooney more comfortable with/less staunchly against are on page. I think you have to be fully checked out of your own politics and framework to put in a line like " I think I would find it humiliating, having to negotiate all that with another person. I would feel I was offering something very inferior." About not having penetrative sex. After we're ignoring what her disability (?) actually is. After the 4934328328th description of how white something is. Like. Girl????

I understand why Sylvia's injuries' nature is never named as she describes the accident to have ruined her life, but the vague nature of her disability, coupled with all the sob sob wah wah ue ue of her not being able to have PiV sex anymore (oh the horrors), coupled with the fact that we don't see it affect her life or career in any significant way (unless I missed something and, again, except WRT her r/ship with Peter), it's just... well it's a choice! I'm genuinely unsure if we got to paint a picture of her family & I just skimmed it or skipped through it somehow. On a less serious/important note the prose is simply boring. I say this is my first Rooney but it will also be my last Rooney, because life is too short to bother with books I do not like ❤ which is not a slight against her, I honestly respect the way she conducts herself, she really seems to walk the talk, I love that she's cancelled her book tours and is very loud about her politics. From what I've seen she seems to hate fame, but it is much easier for me to respect her as a public figure than a novelist.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

I have literally nothing good to say about this book. At all. I was considering buying this physically when I was at the bookstore, because I said I'd buddyread this with a friend, and if I had a physical copy I could annotate to have more to discuss, and maybe also add in her thoughts as well! But I ultimately decided otherwise, and I'm SOOOO GLADDDDDDD THIS WAS BAD. I swear I keep picking up books and wondering WHERE the hell the editors are! Were they on vacation? Bored? Lazy? Are they simply incompetent? Like the writing quality varies so much within this one book and it happens even within a single chapter and it makes me wonder if I skipped entire paragraphs on accident.

It's supposed to be about four (three) sisters and their lives and how each of them deals with grief, but even still I can't forgive how shallow their mother's characterisation is. It contradicts itself on-page more than once. In theory I would be very into what was happening most of the time except it was... badly written..... every scene where Lucky was talking to people especially, they all felt Wattpad-y. Also all sisters wallowed in self-pity the exact same way which I found boring... 3 different people and they act the same? Yawn!

It also commited the worst book sin, to me, which is being SKIMMABLE. It went literal paragraphs without any observation any interesting line... Heartbreaking. I thought I was going to like this 😦 😦 😦

In the spirit of not being a total hater and having proper criticisms, it really suffers because none of the sisters have any principles. They move through life literally no thoughts head empty. They have nothing they believe in except their own intoxication, but then that is never addressed as a collective shared trait, or as influenced by their dad's alcoholism. They just kinda do everything in a sort of stupor and we're in along for the ride but... what do they stand for? Anything??? Please?????? Like, even something as shallow as eternal and everlasting rage would be SOMETHING.

I also hate that the book never challenged Nicky's belief about motherhood -- about how she wanted to continue to suffer with her endometriosis instead of getting a hysterectomy because she so badly wanted to be a mother. There are many ways to be a mother and not all of them involve carrying a child! But we're supposed to see Nicky's death as a tragedy because the drugs (I hate calling them that) that she took to reduce her pain also killed her :'((( while just kind of just skipping over the fact that she refused the hysterectomy for entirely stupid reasons! And I'm aware that hysterectomy isn't the easiest most magical cure or decision to make, but with how much pain Nicky was in? And all that for what???? An extremely fixed idea of motherhood? Like it does read like a tragedy, but not in the way the author meant it to.

Another part that I hated is the stark difference between F/F sex scenes and F/M ones - men get to move and be described nicely, prettily, while women are described as disembodied body parts. Avery literally compares her body to her wife's which is like- am I supposed to get attraction from this? Women are CONSTANTLY jealous of Lucky, because as we all know, women have nothing in their mind except competing against other women for Who Will Be The Most Attractive.

TL;DR -2000000000 out of 5. I'm fairly sure my 15 year old cousins write better than this.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older

Amazing premise. Boring execution. Fast read, I liked how much worldbuilding was packed in here. The writing is, at best, bland. ...................It exists? I wish I could find something substantial about it to compliment, but there's nothing.

SEEING THE BODY by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

It's been a while since I read a poetry collection front to back without taking a break. I think it would've actually been better if I had taken said break, because while each poem was unique and I genuinely loved most of them, the thematic repetition started grating on me. Which isn't fair! It captures grief & mother-daughter relationships very well. I wanted to copy some poems I liked from it but I have no idea how to preserve the formatting, so I'm copying one of the ones with the least amount of it:

Weeks after her death I came to the garden window

to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering

past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.

Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Beneath the talon of a red-tailed hawk a pigeon

moved briefly until it didn’t. The hawk stripped

the common bird, piercing its thick neck. Beak probing body

until I could see the blood from where I stood inside.

This could happen, naturally enough, even in Brooklyn.

This could happen whether or not my mother was dead.

I didn’t eat for weeks because it felt wrong to want bread & milk.

The hawk’s face turning red, beautiful as it plucked & picked

its silver-white prey apart. It wasn’t magic, but hungrily, I watched.

As if I didn’t know memory could devour corpses

caught alive in midair. I opened the window,

knelt on the fire escape. I was the prey

& hawk. This was finally myself swallowing

those small, common parts of me. Tearing all of that away

into strips, my breast open to the bone. I saw myself

torn apart, tearing & tearing at the beautiful face,

the throat beneath my claw. My grieving face red

with being exactly what I knew myself to be.

I'm in the middle of 3 other books but I don't think I'll finish any before 2025 arrives in every single part of the world :( sad. But! Happy new year!!!

Comments

[aquietjune]

I’m always happy to read your reading wrap ups because your selections are usually very interesting and close to the things I usually read; I also enjoy a genuine rant about a book (although I’m sorry so many books didn’t work for you). Not a fan of Sally Rooney! Not of her writing, nor of the persona the media so desperately wanted to sell us at the peak of the hype for her, mixing how she leads herself as a person and what she writes and how she writes it. Have a happy New Year’s Eve!

[firstroad]

!!! That makes me very very happy to hear!

Admittedly, I kind of live under a rock, so peak-of-her-hype Rooney was mostly just me seeing Normal People in every bookstore I entered and I only realised how HUGE she is, like, maybe last year or the one before that? I have no idea what the persona was/is meant to be! (Which is to say, please do tell me about your dislike if you want!)

Andddd, I have to ask, are there books you've really liked this year? I've evidently been making the wrong choices lately, so I'd love recs!

[aquietjune]

Admittedly, I kind of live under a rock, so peak-of-her-hype Rooney was mostly just me seeing Normal People in every bookstore I entered and I only realised how HUGE she is, like, maybe last year or the one before that?

You're lucky. The discourse has been unsufferable. I particularly dislike how she's been hailed as this revolutionary (also in the political sense!) writer when she's at best an okay contemporary romance writer. She may have a better skillset than most and she's been chosen to be marketed as literary but... it's all very basic. And it's okay, but the "literary readers" want to have an easy hero. When the marketing for one of her book included pop-up shops, decorated mini vans and bucket hats... I'd keep her politics out of it. I hope she will keep being private and keep away from all this commodification of everything; I don't like her as a writer but it's better if she can live well off of this (but not ridiculously).

Andddd, I have to ask, are there books you've really liked this year? I've evidently been making the wrong choices lately, so I'd love recs!

I am not making the best choices either, but 2024 was the year I read all of MXTX novels apparently ^^'' so at least that has been fun.

The best books I've read: I'd say Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis, Memorial del Convento by José Saramago (I think it's titled "Baltasar and Blimunda" in the English edition). Butter by Asako Yuzuki was a bit too "explainy" but also quite gripping expecially in voice and charisma of the central character.

Best noirs: the Milanese Quartet by Giorgio Scerbanenco (read 3 of 4)--he was so so great at character writing and at understanding social settings, very gorgeous writing (at least in Italian), but mind the homophobic bits (heh).

Decent (adult, but very YA-adjacent) fantasy: The Sun and the Void by Gabriela Romero Lacruz (interesting, complex world building inspired by the conflicting cultures and religions in South America). I enjoyed Gideon the Ninth but I don't feel the need to continue the series for now. (maybe when the last one comes out I'll feel more compelled? I also got a lot of spoilers.)

Murderbot I've listened to quite a few installments (up until the first novel?). I think it may do great as a tv series, but as novellas and novels... I find it terrible. You too may have called it toothless.

Piranesi, which I needed to read for role-playing reason, was also terrible.

So, yes, these are the highlights, good and bad.

But I saw that you enjoyed The Taiga Syndrome (also a favorite of mine when I read it!) and I recommend The Iliac Crest (and after that, I recommend reading Amparo Davila's fiction!). I'm looking forward to Cristina Rivera Garza's next book that is coming out this year.

[aquietjune]

Realizing that my critique of Rooney is what the article by Andrea Chu tries to defuse, but heh, that was what I got from Normal People at the time, and I still stand by it. The fact that romance novels are by now so codified that they have to end in HEA (for example), or have the three acts structure, and that so many romance novel authors are very bad writers, does not take away from the fact that Rooney's Normal People is a romance novel where you have the class disparity as the obstacle (and it's, like, highlighted by some detail in a line before every conflict between the characters, yes, it's so blatant xD) ... like many romance novels; and the problem is even resolved at the end with the most acritical take on the publishing industry ever! Rooney's defenders say that it's something something capitalism critique that makes Rooney do it; I'd say then that every romance novel does it -__- A lot is projection, and as a reader of literary fic as well as genre/commercial fic, I'd rather have good, well-written and thought-out commercial novels taken seriously than saying that since Rooney writes pretty (read: she went to the right uni and frequented the right scenes to be considered serious) then she's more political and more literary than others.

[firstroad]

Thank youuuu for the recs! I actually had read SVSSS many years ago + I watched The Untamed this year, but I do not have it in me to read 700k words of badly-translated prose for TGCF 😭 and my Chinese is not good enough to read xianxia without pausing to look up words every paragraph! So that's one MXTX work that will likely continue to elude me. I also have the bad habit of putting off things that I know for sure I'll enjoy (which is why I still haven't read The Iliac Crest! I really need to get to it), but Amparo Davila + The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf are shooting to pretty high up on my list, they sound perfect! Might also attempt A Private Venus as far as Scerbanenco goes <3

Re: Rooney, "pretty okay romance novelist" sums it up for me too. Intermezzo does seem like an attempt to lean more literary, at least compared to everything I've heard about her three previous books, but at its core it feels a lot more like a struggle with love(tm) than it does a novel processing grief (and shame, etc etc, for all of which an attempt was made, but it was not sufficiently explored, imo). I cannot blame her for marketing tactics she has no control over but, well, to reach that level of unquestioned popularity you kind of have to be a bit mid!

I'd rather have good, well-written and thought-out commercial novels taken seriously than saying that since Rooney writes pretty (read: she went to the right uni and frequented the right scenes to be considered serious) then she's more political and more literary than others.

!!!!!! Same. I have a bone to pick with the genre/litfic divide in general (when it comes to the publishing side moreso than the writing one), but I think (particularly USAmerican, but blah blah post-WWII cultural hegemony etc etc we all have to inherit the worst traits) publishing houses have backed themselves into a corner with #genres and #trends and providing #escapism and being #accessible and most importantly with the hefty dose of political quietism and atomisation (and I suppose even MORE importantly: calculability, when it comes to their product and their audience) that they support, that they then have to market writers like Rooney as literary, despite her being meh. But the traits that make her a literary novelist are things like the fact that she doesn't start trembling and shaking and crying at seeing Heavy Political Labels such as 😱 communist 😱 and that she can string a sentence, however shallow, together. It's just, as you said, "romance novels are by now so codified that they have to end in HEA (for example), or have the three acts structure, and that so many romance novel authors are very bad writers", so now we need to act like anyone who doesn't follow this highly specific structure is a literary writer with everything that label carries (or used to carry, I guess) -- being assessed and taken seriously being part of it. Not even touching on the damage to literature brought by all the cold-war-born writing programmes and all their heavy funding, which makes Rooney's actually-grounded-in-Irish-reality POV seem extremely refreshing and unique while she's not actually presenting anything challenging. The sad part of it all is that it's an industry problem and not a Rooney-specific problem, so it's not likely that someone will push her to be more revolutionary (in any sense of the word) in her works.

[aquietjune]

but I do not have it in me to read 700k words of badly-translated prose for TGCF 😭

I get it -- in fact I do need a language "detox". I'm also reading The Apothecary Diaries light novels as they are released, and while they're better written than most, the language of the translation is still... ?!?! English is not my first language, so I really need to take it easy and ... read good things to remember how the language sounds like.

(And no chance for reading anything in Chinese for me, but atm danmei proved to be good "comfort reads", at least different in gimmicks than... bad western fantasy novels (romantasy and all... oh dear... I have read Fourth Wing ahahahhaah) so I plan to dive in some more when I get in a reading slump.)

Not even touching on the damage to literature brought by all the cold-war-born writing programmes and all their heavy funding

I'll just say that if there is a book by an American author and they got out of a MFA in creative writing... I'll skip it. (There are exceptions of course, but given that we're in January and all the lists of "most anticipated books in 2025" are coming out... we will not find those exceptions here and now, let's say.)

[firstroad]

YOU READ FOURTH WING. You're stronger than I could ever be. In theory I very much respect Romantasy + the average danmei/baihe webnovel for going full balls to the wall insane with their indulgence, but my gripes with the genres are that they usually operate within suuuuuch narrow confines of convention... I can suspend my disbelief and I can handle something not being good, but I can't excuse it not being entertaining on top of it! Danmei/baihe is at least more likely to actually be insane.

if there is a book by an American author and they got out of a MFA in creative writing... I'll skip it.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. That's SO valid. And I'm actually going to steal it as a picking-books strategy 😂

[sushiflop]

Heartily enjoyed this wrapup! I have heard that there is wayyyy less money and time spent on editing what is published even by big houses now, anecdotal but I would believe it, to the detriment of us all. :/ Maybe that explains some of this.

[firstroad]

Yayyy, I'm glad! I definitely believe it! A lot of the ones I disliked weren't straight-up bad, they just really really needed editing. There was a book I DNFed which read like it was literally copy-pasted straight from AO3 -- it opened like this:

The sun is just beginning to scatter its light through the tops of the oaks when Riley throws her cell phone into the lake.

If asked, she wouldn’t say she’s given this decision a tremendous amount of thought. Standing there on the bank with her boots half-sunk in the mud, watching the spreading ripples where the phone went in, she realizes that it doesn’t feel like a decision at all. It feels like the natural culmination of a long series of events, each gathering with the other into something with unstoppable inertia. Rolling down the days and weeks and months.

Didn’t have a choice in it, she thinks, in the feeling of the solid little weight leaving her hand and the sound of it hitting the water with a soft splosh. It was just time.

Which of course gets her wondering about the last thing she really did have a choice in. She isn’t sure what that would have been.

Riley shoves her hands into her pockets, tips her head back, and stares blankly up at the blue sky cutting through the network of branches and nodding leaves above her. Once in some long-forgotten and therefore likely forgettable piece of writing, she read that the sky was the face of God.

Which! At least! Is blatant enough that I didn't waste my time finishing it. AO3 writing and AO3-y styles are great when on there, but I can't believe it made it into a trad-published book 😭

[meikuree]

your Intermezzo review is sending me, I'll be quoting it to all the rooneyheads I know. (jk, I don't know any of them because my friends have reasonably good taste, but MY GOD the optics of it all). I laughed hysterically at the 'materialism leaves her body'. also autocomplete male gazey porn scenes are tired... we don't need another contribution!!

[firstroad]

PLEASEEEE. It read exactly like that! I'm trying so hard to not be a full-on hater but it was so painfully mid -- it read mostly like it was meant for progressive-leaning people who are too ashamed to fully indulge in their #trad fantasies so they need something that's at least nodding towards being self-aware-ly #trad. 😭 But always happy to make people laugh!