Book reviews written before the website existed. Sometimes edited.
Like and unlike Hamlet, Makina is contradiction; ageless intellectual force yet feckless and indeterminately ageless. Circumstances sweep both away: while Makina lacks Hamlet’s legendary dithering, she maintains his ephemeral ability to simply vanish, which—in a Hamlet-analogue that is so good it seems planned—means she verses like no other. Take a moment, please, to hear from the voice of the translator:
Read MoreCirce isn’t misunderstood—she’s perfectly understood; she turns men into pigs because men see her body as their property and try to claim her with their strength. She needs no narrative overhaul for us to understand her actions; she needs no revamp to be sympathetic. The system is, and always has been, designed to quite literally fuck her over.
The gods do it, and have always done it, and won't stop until someone with power equal to their own challenges their depravity. It is always a game or all a joke to those who hold the power. But not so to the ones “so very bad at getting away.” This is a direct indictment of a system and has the overarching and amorphous quality of a parable. Which is good, because that's what myths are. Circe is jerked around by a society that lets those in power say and do things that are fundamentally revolting; myths represent humans trying to understand the world, and this particular understanding is relevant now more than ever.
It’s risky to extrapolate my enjoyment of Lanfear, considering that I do not know where the books ultimately go but lots of other people definitely do: maybe Lanfear will miss the Medea or Elphaba treatment and be saddled by the standard “foul temptress gets an ironic comeuppance” character arc. Or perhaps she will be the bland metonym for never being so evil that you are unable to be redeemed? Forsaken, until you aren’t:
Read MoreThe Wheel of Time, the High Fantasy series equivalent of Moby Dick at least in terms of wordcount, has popped up enough times for me lately for me to give it a serious look: “One thing we can do. We can try. What seems like chance is often the Pattern. Three threads have come together here, each giving a warning: the Eye. It cannot be chance; it is the Pattern.” And so I’ll start this journey, for the second time. I’ve read up until at least book six—possibly eight, because I at least recognized that cover—of the fourteen novels. The first book, The Eye of the World, still does as good a job setting everyone up, building out a world, and having as silly a climactic battle as it did when I was sixteen.
Read MoreThe clenched pace induced by the clipped sentences, the pages of panting tension after rather languid novel; it makes the heart race.
This draws a subtle line across The Wolf Border, carving out a space of high literature within a compelling novel. Rachel sees as the reader sees. She constructs—her fear palpable—a dramatic scenario from nothing. What is writing, what is reading, other than that self-same creation? Both are visions wrought by solely by ink.
It isn’t that the action or plot or characters are new or unique; they aren’t. What’s new is the acknowledgement—the anticipation—of how audiences will interact with the conventions of the mystery genre, and how Magpie Murders leans into those conventions to make something new.
Read MoreThis idea—of struggling to have an internal identity that is recognized by society and the world—is not a concept that I, as a white American male, have ever had to consider. I can be whatever I choose, because I am the Western global default; I don’t have to battle against a prebuilt stereotype. There are no modifying racial or ethnic verb prefixes when you’re talking about white Americans.
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