This a Book Review Post

I have been reading mainly bookclub books lately. One of my clubs selects books a season at a time and so I get over-excited and read them all at once, and inevitably struggle to remember what I actually thought of the later books when it comes time to discuss. Writing about them is a good way to keep track of my thoughts, as well as share them with a wider audience. These are also a slightly wider range of books than I would normally read, which is the point of bookclubbing—to be exposed to books I wouldn’t choose for myself, and have people to talk to about them.

I’m Also Trying Out a New Template for the Newsletter—Do You Like It?

Beehiiv, my newsletter platform, has gotten a bit het up about new features, and has been giving me some new templates that aren’t pink/I didn’t build myself. What do you think?

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

This charming and fairly light-hearted collection of essays from 2016 is fun to read and gently funny, and does make some interesting points about race, family, and immigration—those are the big themes but there’s lots of other little bon mots, and she’s also just a fun easy writer. I did not think a lot about this book after I was done reading it though. I think it was perhaps a bit awkward to come to this book as my introduction to Rae, and 9 years after it was published. It is apparently based on her TV show by the same name, which was based on her webseries by the same name, but I’d heard of neither. And since the book was published she’s done another TV series and tonnes of other stuff and is quite a big deal in TV and movies, so some of the stuff in the book about being worried about money, overweight, and not particularly successful might either be dated or stuff she wouldn’t want to say in public now. The book also suffers from the “celebrity funny memoir” disease in that each essay repeated some of the stuff in others and went awkwardly back and forth in time. It seemed written fast and to sell to people who might not be as excited about this person in a year (but she did in fact get more famous, so that was wrong). Again, it’s a fun book and an interesting perspective but not particularly well put together—I’d actually put that more on editing than anything.

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

I can’t remember if I’ve shared a review of this one here or not yet but just in case, here is what I put on Goodreads about this horror novel, in translation from Spanish.

I HATED this book. Which is different than that I didn't think it was good, which is a different question than whether I loathed it personally and also a difficult question to evaluate when is in a state of violent dismay. But just for a sec: the situation of the novel is that there is a virus that poisons all the animals and makes them toxic so all the animals are murdered. With no animal meat to eat, and for some reason everyone refusing to become vegetarians, cannibalism becomes the next logical option—the government starts hiving off the lower classes for food. I thought there was so much attention paid to making plausible the idea of a world in which humans are farmed for meat, there was almost no plot, no character development, indeed no forward motion of any kind. We work our way through guided tours of breeding facilities, slaughter houses, a butcher shop, a hunting lodge and an experimental lab, all with a maximum of gruesome horror, all with a kind of "see, see, this is exactly how it would be for animals only now it's people, SEE????" and I did see. As a thinly thinly cloaked allegory, I got it within a couple pages. Eating meat is pretty bad and most people are far too accepting of it. The book is an eloquent antidote to that but as world-gone-mad fiction it is lacking. In the novel, everyone is horrible, everything is nuts, no one had any moral scruple except the main character and then I started to wonder about him. AND WHY COULDN'T ANYONE BE A VEGETARIAN?

This is the most unpleasant book I have ever read, I learned nothing, it was very gross—but the ending truly shocked me, after 200 pages of attempted shocks. I have never ever read anything like it and hope I never will, but I suppose I am glad it exists because it's at least another type of writing in the world and I can't precisely say it is bad. But I want it out of my house.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

I read this book pretty fast, and sometimes a bit open-mouthed. The writing style is very odd, with an odd grasp or lack thereof on tense, and a certain amount of repetition. But the content, and to a degree the protagonist is SO INTERESTING that it doesn't really matter. She got very close to the seat of power at Facebook, saw an incredible amount, did a lot of weird things, and shares anecdotes in a compelling manner. And a lot of what she saw was BAD. Facebook's leadership sounds awful, the stories especially about how they crafted various national strategies, ad strategies, etc. are pretty monstrous. Wynn-Williams herself stayed way too long after it was clear the core was rotten, and her reasoning jumps around from "couldn't find another job" to "wanted to keep health insurance" to "didn't believe it was that bad" to "thought I could do more good on the inside" to "wanted to keep my equity shares." In the end, her account of herself as the only moral person in the room seems unlikely—she was probably more complicit or at least compliant than she admits—but I do believe most of the bigger picture stuff. Facebook was and is pretty monstrous. Again, book club books are not often things I would pick for myself and I’m not sure I precisely enjoyed this but it was fun to be reading abook everyone is talking about and be able to jump into conversations and say, “Oh yes, I’m reading it too, and I think…”

Cam and Beau by Maria Cichosz

Unlike the above tomes, Cam and Beau is really up my alley—a meditative love story set in Toronto from a small press. Nevertheless, I wasn’t crazy about it, although when I stopped to think about it, it wasn’t that Cichosz isn’t a good writer, because she really is—the descriptions of Toronto, of Northern Ontario, the experiences of drugs both prescribed and street, sing. I really felt present with the characters at every moment. But the characters are wildly unpleasant, immature, and deeply familiar—it wasn’t that I didn’t like the book, I just didn’t like what the book was about. Cam and Beau are each other’s only friend since grade school, with the exception of their drug dealer. Beau is without family and Cam has only his mother, who he can barely bring himself to visit for a few hours on Christmas day, so desperate is he to be independent. Cam has a soul-wringing crush on Beau, going back over a decade, and Beau is oblivious. Of course they live together. Neither character seems to have ever dated anyone. Both seem to think their monastic lives completely normal. Of course Cam is a grad student—this is exactly the sort of person you run into in grad school, and it’s a good thing he only wants the one friend. This plays out in the exact sort of extended misery you’d think—except the drug dealer is an utter mensch, just wants everyone to be happy, and gives away a lot of free drugs. I did not like any character besides the drug dealer, but they were all realistic enough. It’s just that I also don’t like real people like this.

The Lucy Barton/Amgash Books by Elizabeth Strout

This has been going on for a while. I read My Name Is Lucy Barton years ago, didn’t like it, then saw the play last fall and realized I had misunderstood everything and in the shining light of the play reread the novel and got it. Then I read Oh William, which I thought came next in the series (and really it is the next novel), and I thought it was pretty good. Then I found a list that revealed that the order of the series put the short story collection Anything Is Possible second in the series. That collection is stellar, probably my actual favourite in the series so far, but unbelievably grim. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, her mother visits her in the hospital and tells her stories of people in their hometown, Amgash. The stories in Anything Is Possible each follow one character or family mentioned in that hospital visit, and tells what happened to them, which is incredibly satisfying, but not many of those things are happy. Oh William is the third, and Lucy by the Sea, which I just read, is the fourth. It’s a pandemic book, which is obviously interesting to me since I wrote one, and it’s not a terrible book, but it’s jammed with too many different themes and sort of rambling. I didn’t love it. I thought the fifth book and final book in the series would be The Burgess Boys but wrong again; Goodreads lists it as something I’ve never heard of called Tell Me Everything. The Burgess Boys is not listed as part of the series so I don’t know what is going on. I don’t usually read series and this is baffling to me. I’m sure I will read both of these in time—all of these books have been excellent, even the pretty flawed ones—but for now I think I will take a little break from Strout and just do something completely different.