Book reviews old and new mingle here.
There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
Read MoreImagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.
“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?
Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.
Read MoreIf it is a story of the failures of capitalism, the collapse of the promise of an attainable American Dream for the generation reading it, then it is a clunky one. The book is called Pizza Girl, a job that delineates, without defining, the narrator. It is what pushes the plot forward, what serves as a call-and-response from the catalyst-character of Jenny Hauser, who eventually drops the, “Hey, Pizza Girl” detachment and perhaps sees her as we see her, as a someone who is both less and more than her occupation:
Read MoreThere was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to.
Beyond the expanded scope from adventuring party to nation-state wrangling, the plot has to slow for another major reason: Travelling. Rand can warp around, collapsing time and distance in such a way that “the journey” as a trope barely exists anymore. And “the journey” is the beating heart of the Fantasy genre: we all live in the travelogue that “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale” built. Now that he and a few others can move around the world near-instantly, plot-restrictions-via-distance are a thing of the past.
Read MoreWhat I wrote about Perrin in The Shadow Rising holds true for Nynaeve in this volume; she is a microcosm to understand another of Rand’s problems. This time, it isn’t about delegating responsibility and accepting your limits, but about understanding—maybe even embracing—who you are; even if you don’t want to. Rand has to come to terms with Lews Therin: his past, his present, and his refusal to put women in danger, even to the point where Moiraine has to sacrifice herself to save him.
Read MoreIt is weird feeling of anxiety, balancing reading through a book quickly because it pleases you, but slowing down because there is not an easy way to pick up the next in the series. For good or ill, the third book in the Wheel of Time is where the series finds its feet. All the characters are who I remember them being: Mat’s not a jerk anymore; Perrin is a little boring; Elayne, Egwene, and Nynaeve start rolling their eyes with exasperation at “men” on the reg:
Read MoreIt’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 MoreWhen something is slippery, when you can’t quite hold it in your mind exactly the way you believe you ought to be able, that is how something burrows in. Weirdness holds you askance; interpolated meanings wrap your mind like so much fallen foliage covering the dead earth. To understand something completely—or believe that you can—leaves nothing to puzzle over.
Read MoreIt doesn’t matter, you can know Le Morte D’arthur en français or Indiana Jones and Monty Python from their Comedy Central broadcast edits, you’ll end up at the same place in Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. I appreciate the lack of judgement. Honestly, you really don’t even need to know more than their titles: Last Crusade, Holy Grail, bing bang boom you’re good to go.
Speaking of titular, Tuesday is a lady, and the type of protagonist we all love: misanthropic but actually super thoughtful; clever in a way people usually can only be when they’re going over what they should have said on the way home.
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 MoreI finally solved a mystery before a mystery book ended! It only took knowing the exact reference—and having that exact reference mentioned by name—for me to get there.
Read MoreFor Drive Your Plow, I didn’t know the genre. I knew I was going to read it, so I didn’t look at the book jacket. I didn’t read someone else’s thoughts first. If you’re looking at reviews to decide if a piece of media is worth your time, you’re not going to be surprised in the same way. You cannot be, simply as a function of how time and/or brains work. You already know stuff, at the minimum the stuff I have told you. Which I don’t think is bad: your free time is limited, maybe, or you already have a lot of books and you can’t read everything! But I just want to point out that I think it is weird not to care if you know whether a book is about fantasy warriors or cowboys or Victorian-era ghosts, but do care to know that Rey’s lineage comes up in The Rise of Skywalker.
Read MoreTwo households, both alike in dignity, except this time fair Verona is the entire space-time continuum. Because they’re not just rival agents and star-crossed lovers, but interdimensional beings butterfly-effecting the timestream, unstitching each other’s work while needling their own intricate patterns.
Read MoreIf Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory were an infinite number of stories in length, I would simply continue to read it.
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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