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Slowly but surely, I chip away at my backlog of outstanding reviews.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe ・ The Book of Spells ・ Breathe ・ Burnt Sugar ・ The Colour of Magic ・ Experience the Mystery of Tarot ・ Girl, Wash Your Face ・ Gold Diggers ・ The Light Fantastic ・ How to Build a Girl ・ How to Make a Bird ・ The Inspired Houseplant ・ The Kingdoms ・ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet ・ Magic for Liars ・ The Silver Bough vol. 2 ・ Thick as Thieves ・ A Thousand Ships ・ The Westing Game ・ The Witness for the Dead ・ Yearning for the Sea
What I Finished Reading This Week
Coming Soon – Dania Schiften
Accessible and informative, and light years better than the crap I had access to as an adolescent.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
Burnt Sugar – Avni Doshi
Burnt Sugar is a novel about how restrictive cultural expectations and parental neglect reverberate across lifetimes, and it is as gripping as it is emotionally wracking to read. It opens with the main character struggling to care for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. But even bigger stakes are at play: the mother has much to answer for, and her declining mental faculties may deprive her daughter of any reckoning or closure with the past.
The narrator’s recounting of her abandonment, and worse—at the hands of her parents, her grandparents, the adults running the ashram and the Roman Catholic boarding school where she was periodically warehoused—and treatment in adulthood at the hands of an incurious and patronizing spouse, are straightforward and unadorned, which is what makes them so effective and harrowing. Doshi’s depiction of the roots of narrator’s inability to form meaningful attachments to others is both expertly drawn and heartbreaking. Having blazed through this book in under two days, I initially found its abrupt and inconclusive ending dissatisfying, but having mulled it over in the months since—and this is a book you will mull over, if you read it—I think that may have been the point.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe – Patricia A. McKillip
This is the fifth book I’ve read by McKillip and the fifth that has frustratingly failed to land. Her descriptive prose is beautiful, page after page of stunning writing that makes me pause and say, Oh my god, what a sentence. Her fantasy imagery is everything I want from fantasy imagery: haunted towers, menacing ghostly faces in doors, white harts, bloodred moons between flaming horns, gold and green primordial forests.
But then.
( Then we come to the characters. )
TL;DR: The narrative language is beautiful. The imagery is stellar. The characters and padding, unfortunately, limited my enjoyment of the whole.
How To Make a Bird – Meg McKinley
First off, the illustrations in this book are beautiful: I love the detail, the airiness, and the color palette. The prose is something that young children can take at face value as a whimsical story, with allegorical overtones that adult readers can appreciate. I liked the magical realism and the slightly melancholy but optimistic tone.
Gold Diggers – Sanjena Sathian
Gold Diggers starts with a brilliant conceit: that Hindu alchemy allows the practitioner to transmute a piece of gold jewelry into a potion containing its owner’s desirable traits: intelligence, ambition, charisma, and so on. The novel's protagonist, first generation Indian-American Neil Narayan very much needs that potion to make good his family’s ambitions for him. If he fails—and even achieving success on his own terms counts as failure in his parents’ eyes—he negates every sacrifice they made to give him a “better life” in America. It’s a terrible burden to make a child bear, and Gold Diggers is at its finest while it follows Neil’s attempts to navigate the myriad competing demands of his adolescent suburban world and parental expectations. Indeed, I can’t think of another author who has so expertly captured the voice of the standard-issue adolescent—and middle aged—American male.
But, as a novel, Gold Diggers very much resembles its protagonist: there’s much about it that’s attractive and has latent potential, but it lacks direction and the focus to see things all the way through. The novel is, at various points, an intergenerational saga, a tale of adolescent identity seeking, a Judd Apatow-style comedy about an eternal manchild, a melodramatic cautionary tale about hubris and ambition, a romantic drama, an examination of systemic racism and sexism, an exploration of the tension between cultural preservation and assimilation, and an over-the-top heist thriller. It manages some of these elements—particularly regarding questions of personal identity and belonging—more successfully than others, but never manages to synthesize them into a coherent whole. These disconnects are jarring, particularly when they involve major tonal shifts, or avoid logical and seemingly unavoidable fallout so Sathian can give her characters happier outcomes than the results of their actions would seem to dictate.
Breathe – Belisa Vranich
Prior to reading this book I would have said I was pretty conscious of my breathing, thanks to a combination of athletics, music, and yoga, but wow, do I hold my breath a lot. If nothing else, Breathe has helped me to do a better job of breathing steadily and deeply while reading, working at the computer, or engaging in any number of other routine tasks, and that outcome is probably enough to justify the effort of having read it. People who are paradoxical, shallow, or non-diaphragmatic breathers would stand to benefit even more from picking this book up.
That said, Breathe isn’t without its faults. Vranich makes sweeping claims about good breathing habits (No, it's not going to cure your carpal tunnel syndrome) that aren't backed up by any kind of serious scientific evidence. Much of the content and exercises will be familiar to readers who have practiced yoga, or meditation, or any other discipline in which respiration plays a key role, although the focus on breathing as an end in and of itself is pretty neat. Finally, there’s a relatively high ratio of filler to content: line drawings that don't seem to illustrate anything, identical passages repeated across multiple sections, and plenty of testimonials from trendily named “Madisons” and “Gunthers” about how good breathing solved their interpersonal conflicts with coworkers, upped their game on the courts, and spiced up their sex lives. So, yeah. I wouldn’t recommend paying money to read this book, but it’s worth checking out from a library.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Magian Tarok – Stephen E. Flowers
Better so far than a lot of Tarot fare, although I have reservations I'll lay out in my review once I've finished it.
Ferryman – Claire McFall
One third of the way through, this is a light but fun read.
The Spirit of Herbs – Michael Tierra
The companion volume to one of the oldest decks in my collection.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I picked up Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman, because I've just not been keen on reading it in ebook format. Last week I acquired The Infinite Noise by Lauren Schippen and Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Coming Soon – Dania Schiften
Accessible and informative, and light years better than the crap I had access to as an adolescent.
What I Finished Reading At Some Point In The Past Four Months
Burnt Sugar – Avni Doshi
Burnt Sugar is a novel about how restrictive cultural expectations and parental neglect reverberate across lifetimes, and it is as gripping as it is emotionally wracking to read. It opens with the main character struggling to care for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. But even bigger stakes are at play: the mother has much to answer for, and her declining mental faculties may deprive her daughter of any reckoning or closure with the past.
The narrator’s recounting of her abandonment, and worse—at the hands of her parents, her grandparents, the adults running the ashram and the Roman Catholic boarding school where she was periodically warehoused—and treatment in adulthood at the hands of an incurious and patronizing spouse, are straightforward and unadorned, which is what makes them so effective and harrowing. Doshi’s depiction of the roots of narrator’s inability to form meaningful attachments to others is both expertly drawn and heartbreaking. Having blazed through this book in under two days, I initially found its abrupt and inconclusive ending dissatisfying, but having mulled it over in the months since—and this is a book you will mull over, if you read it—I think that may have been the point.
The Book of Atrix Wolfe – Patricia A. McKillip
This is the fifth book I’ve read by McKillip and the fifth that has frustratingly failed to land. Her descriptive prose is beautiful, page after page of stunning writing that makes me pause and say, Oh my god, what a sentence. Her fantasy imagery is everything I want from fantasy imagery: haunted towers, menacing ghostly faces in doors, white harts, bloodred moons between flaming horns, gold and green primordial forests.
But then.
( Then we come to the characters. )
TL;DR: The narrative language is beautiful. The imagery is stellar. The characters and padding, unfortunately, limited my enjoyment of the whole.
How To Make a Bird – Meg McKinley
First off, the illustrations in this book are beautiful: I love the detail, the airiness, and the color palette. The prose is something that young children can take at face value as a whimsical story, with allegorical overtones that adult readers can appreciate. I liked the magical realism and the slightly melancholy but optimistic tone.
Gold Diggers – Sanjena Sathian
Gold Diggers starts with a brilliant conceit: that Hindu alchemy allows the practitioner to transmute a piece of gold jewelry into a potion containing its owner’s desirable traits: intelligence, ambition, charisma, and so on. The novel's protagonist, first generation Indian-American Neil Narayan very much needs that potion to make good his family’s ambitions for him. If he fails—and even achieving success on his own terms counts as failure in his parents’ eyes—he negates every sacrifice they made to give him a “better life” in America. It’s a terrible burden to make a child bear, and Gold Diggers is at its finest while it follows Neil’s attempts to navigate the myriad competing demands of his adolescent suburban world and parental expectations. Indeed, I can’t think of another author who has so expertly captured the voice of the standard-issue adolescent—and middle aged—American male.
But, as a novel, Gold Diggers very much resembles its protagonist: there’s much about it that’s attractive and has latent potential, but it lacks direction and the focus to see things all the way through. The novel is, at various points, an intergenerational saga, a tale of adolescent identity seeking, a Judd Apatow-style comedy about an eternal manchild, a melodramatic cautionary tale about hubris and ambition, a romantic drama, an examination of systemic racism and sexism, an exploration of the tension between cultural preservation and assimilation, and an over-the-top heist thriller. It manages some of these elements—particularly regarding questions of personal identity and belonging—more successfully than others, but never manages to synthesize them into a coherent whole. These disconnects are jarring, particularly when they involve major tonal shifts, or avoid logical and seemingly unavoidable fallout so Sathian can give her characters happier outcomes than the results of their actions would seem to dictate.
Breathe – Belisa Vranich
Prior to reading this book I would have said I was pretty conscious of my breathing, thanks to a combination of athletics, music, and yoga, but wow, do I hold my breath a lot. If nothing else, Breathe has helped me to do a better job of breathing steadily and deeply while reading, working at the computer, or engaging in any number of other routine tasks, and that outcome is probably enough to justify the effort of having read it. People who are paradoxical, shallow, or non-diaphragmatic breathers would stand to benefit even more from picking this book up.
That said, Breathe isn’t without its faults. Vranich makes sweeping claims about good breathing habits (No, it's not going to cure your carpal tunnel syndrome) that aren't backed up by any kind of serious scientific evidence. Much of the content and exercises will be familiar to readers who have practiced yoga, or meditation, or any other discipline in which respiration plays a key role, although the focus on breathing as an end in and of itself is pretty neat. Finally, there’s a relatively high ratio of filler to content: line drawings that don't seem to illustrate anything, identical passages repeated across multiple sections, and plenty of testimonials from trendily named “Madisons” and “Gunthers” about how good breathing solved their interpersonal conflicts with coworkers, upped their game on the courts, and spiced up their sex lives. So, yeah. I wouldn’t recommend paying money to read this book, but it’s worth checking out from a library.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Magian Tarok – Stephen E. Flowers
Better so far than a lot of Tarot fare, although I have reservations I'll lay out in my review once I've finished it.
Ferryman – Claire McFall
One third of the way through, this is a light but fun read.
The Spirit of Herbs – Michael Tierra
The companion volume to one of the oldest decks in my collection.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I picked up Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman, because I've just not been keen on reading it in ebook format. Last week I acquired The Infinite Noise by Lauren Schippen and Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders.
これで以上です。
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