The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars

This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were all in play and in place, then murder it must be. There’s a funny level of topicalness in this one as the murder weapon, so to speak, is ephedra, recently banned in the US and Canada because of how it could interact with certain heart conditions. Like a lot of natural substance, ephedra (also called ma huang) had long been used in naturopathic and homepathic medicines around the world, but it wasn’t until it was mass produced (and I think synthesized) for weight loss drugs sold over the counter in the US (think: Ripped Fuel) did it lead to closer inspection and eventual banning.

So for the mystery we are set. But the novel takes a turn that feels so out of place with this series, to use the detective’s private life and police career to start angling for a meta-arc about corruption and the like. I often feel it’s one of the worst things a series can do, chumming the waters for more stories, and it feels very forced in this novel.

(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cruelest_Month)

 

The Last Colony – 2/5 Stars

I only mostly liked Old Man’s War, and didn’t really like The Ghost Brigades, and so it shouldn’t really surprise me that I really didn’t particularly like this one. We meet up with our protagonists from those two novels, now married, caring for an adoptive teenage daughter, and living on a colony on one of the farflung planets. They are approached by a colonial official from their past and recruited (though basically conscripted) to help set up a new colony on a disputed planet to stake a claim. When it becomes clear they have been used as pawns in a political game, the stakes grow higher, etc etc.

Reading any John Scalzi book requires you to put up with the quirks of his writing, and much worse, his humor (which is terrible), so while this one is expressly trying to be funny, it does have all the other hallmarks. But the real crime of this novel is that it’s really quite boring. Old Man’s War as a conceit mostly works as a riff off of Forever War and Starship Troopers without a lot of insight or depth to it, and the second novel works as a continuation of that idea with special forces as the focus. So to scrap all that and to expect us to be invested in colonial issues in this particularly undeveloped and uninteresting universe is too much to expect. So while he plays in this sub-genre there’s just a host of better novels out there waiting for you.

 

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – 4/5 Stars

The classic spy novel who’s name gave me all the wrong impressions when I came upon in when I was younger. I literally thought this novel would take place in cold climates for some dumb reason. It even has a white cover to support this idea. Instead, it’s a George Smiley novel (but like great series, he’s not in the forefront almost at all, but lurking a little hear and there in the background, to show up later. This might even be his first novel, but because I’ve read others first, it’s like a little cameo). Instead what we have is a spy being brought in from service abroad and because like all spies his sense of “real life” is an impossibility he struggles mightily with civilian life and takes to drinking and antisocial behavior. He ends up in a fight and going to jail, and like all of us at one time and another, he falls in love with a Communist.

But of course, this novel is not so simple as all that. Quickly once everything is established, we start to question what we know and don’t know about the plot and circumstance as the plot starts to spiral back in upon itself.

 

All Quiet on the Western Front – 4/5 Stars

This is the classic anti-war novel that becomes increasingly more interesting as the 1930s inevitably leads to WWII. I first read this book in a German lit in translation class in college as a Freshman, and I think it had about the same impact for me then, minus one key detail. This is one of the rare books from the Weimar era which is about broad ideas and themes, but is not positioned as expressly anti-Nazi. It’s one of those, here’s the way the world is and should be books, but without the positioning of anti-Nazi ideology. I think this is probably because the book came out and the movie quickly followed and was a big hit and won the Oscar for Best Picture. So the book itself along with the movie is clearly positioned. None of that is to say there’s anything off about the bulk of German language books from this era being expressly anti-Nazi or anything (or in the case of other writers, authors who would be exiled or killed outright later on) only that it’s a feature of this book that makes sense to me.

The book begins in media res with our narrator and protagonist Paul on the battlefront of the German army during WWI. As we see the different ways in which war debases people, we flash back to Paul being convinced to join the war by a teacher. The novel then takes on multiple, various episodes from life in wartime for a soldier, and presents each with stark and often disgusting detail. It’s anti-war not just for being anti-violence, but in the ways that war dehumanizes (especially modern warfare) everyone it touches.

 

My Mum is a Twat – No Rating

A funny and touching Audible original based on a play by the same name. Obviously the name stands out here and it’s the opening line of the production. This is a one woman show, and we meet our protagonist thinking back on her adolescence as her mom abuses and abandons her, and leads her to a life of moderate to severe coping behaviors as a “juvenile delinquent”. The list of these behaviors include drugs, alcohol, violence, sex (in, let’s call it, unhealthy ways), and all other kinds of that self-destructive and self-annihilating we associate with teens in distress. We find out that her mom has essentially joined a cult, a kind of wellness group run by a guru figure who controls and manipulates the mother into neglecting first, and then abandoning her child by moving to Canada (from London) to set up another wellness center. This continues on in Canada with the mother not providing any financial support and even making our narrator pay for her own trips over to see the mother.

Oh, and it’s a comedy. It’s actually quite funny. It has some of the same energy and flavor as Oranges are not the Only Fruit (minus the queerness).

 

Bella Bella – No Rating

A one man show written and performed by Harvey Fierstein, and performed here as an Audible Original. Bella Abzug is having a bit of a comeback right now culturally because Margo Martindale’s stint on Mrs. America, a show I haven’t seen, but I have to imagine she captures both the voice, the charm, the character, and the physical presence of Abzug throughout the show. This is a different thing altogether. For one, this is based on Bella Abzug’s writing, so much of the dialog spoken here is direct from the source. But obviously Harvey Fierstein, well, among other things is close to a foot taller than Abzug and his wonderful rasp is only faintly reminiscent to Abzug’s own voice and accent. So there’s some imagination working here. It’s a good play and interesting too, but it’s a buyer’s market right now.

 

Intimations – 4/5 Stars

This is a collection of essays and ruminations, mostly associative and impressionistic, and none fully baked (though that’s good too) by Zadie Smith written during quarantine. Normally this is the kind of book that bothers me, but the proceeds are going to charity, and the work is mostly quite good (and isn’t just wasting everyone’s time by repeating the same collective thoughts we’ve all shared the last couple months). Smith here is living and working in New York City, which gives her one position on the series of events and chunk of time that is prescient. She’s also a Black middle-class (middle-aged) woman giving her another position. She’s working as a writer and educator, and she’s not American. She’s also generally quite honest with herself in her writing about her own privilege and feelings, so while you may not agree with her entirely, you know where she stands without dissembling.

The collections covers ideas about health, community, race, identity, and wealth in a variety of interesting ways, and while one or two of the moments in the book feel facile or fleeting, only one argument falls flat to me. Her take on “hate crimes” is both misguided and myopic, and worse, horrendously outdated and skirts very close to the “all lives matter” lines that so much of the book excoriates.

 

A Princess of Mars – 2/5 Stars

A seminal, and bland as hell adventure novel from the writer of Tarzan and the book that became the flop with Tim Ruggins from Friday Night Lights. This is one of those books like other early science fiction (although this is fantasy, despite being set on Mars) that clearly is instrumental in shaping the genre in a number of ways. Every time I read something that references these early works this makes the list. It’s read in Jo Walton’s Among Others and in Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country both of which give us long lists of works the main character is reading. But like a lot of books like this (and in music, certain bands) the influence is greater than the actual work. Sometimes it’s both, but here, while this book set a lot of the terms, it’s kind of boring.

 

The Terminal Man – 2/5 Stars

This book is dumb as hell, and acts smart as hell. A lady scientist! Better describe her breasts, after the book is only 200 pages, better squeeze that in! The 1970s of course was obsessed with computer technology and the next phases of psychology. We have a kind of Dr Jekyll type story here. A man with a neurological disorder (he’s having a specific kind of seizure) commits acts of violence and aggression, and in order to save his life and maybe restore his functionality to society, is going under an experimental brain surgery where a computer chip will be plugged into his brain to control these seizures, almost like a pacemaker. So the book is mostly a kind of case history/case report on this surgery and the people involved. And of course it goes awry. This book is super boring in some ways, and annoyingly cocky and arrogant in others. If you’ve read other Michael Crichton from about this same time, you might know what I mean. It’s funny because it’s science fiction, but desperately tied to a specific zeitgeist. One thing I do love is that it’s a little cocky about the computer technology available. And it makes me laugh because the computer used here, well, I looked it up, and my phone is about 200,000 times more powerful than it is. I get the same feeling when I read about the supercomputers in Jurassic Park.

 

Leviathan – 3/5 Stars

By law, every American writers born in the 30s, 40, or 50s, must write one novel that grapples with the history of violence of the 1960s in some way. Often these books are dealing with a sense of overwrought guilt or taking a little step back, or trying to take a big step forward. It’s interesting how much of the 20th century is punctuated with bombs in American culture, but also how few bombs (with some obvious big exceptions) the 21st century has been. Here, like with a lot of Paul Auster novels, our narrator is a novelist who is writing about a fellow novelist who has recently accidentally (?) blown himself up in a car in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest. In what he calls a rush to get the story correct, we are reading his account of his friend and colleague to tell the story on its own terms. The novel then backs up a few decades to talk about this friendship between the narrator and the other novelist, who has produced one novel (which when Paul Auster describes it, sounds amazing–a kind of USA Trilogy by way of Thomas Pynchon) and is working on another. A series of breakdowns in his life (in part brought on from this friendship) leads to the novelist slowly losing touch with reality.

The novel here on its worst impulses feels like a watered down Don Delillo novel, but on it’s best is a frenetic Paul Auster. It’s a mixed bag.

 

The Old Man and the Sea – 4/5 Stars

I haven’t read this book in a long time, and now as I approach 40, I get nothing out of it and it’s entirely full of lies. Aging is great! No but seriously I read this for the first time in college, and while the writing is good, I couldn’t make much sense of the old man needing so much to win this battle against nature, against time, and against himself, both physically and mentally as he reels this fish in or struggles to. What’s more interesting to me than taking the novel at face value is the interaction I think you inevitably have with it, as you position yourself in the same moments. Now, I couldn’t be in every single novel I’ve read, but I could very easily see myself taking on a much bigger and more dangerous physical task to prove to myself (even more than to others) that I still have control of myself and my surroundings.

 

The Light of Day – 3/5 Stars

A spy novel (kind of) from the 1960s that would become the movie Topkapi starring Peter Ustinov. The novel takes some time to warm up as the main character is developed and defined for us, and I was under a significant misunderstanding through much of the novel as a consequence. We meet Arthur Simon Simpson as he’s attempting to swipe a few traveller’s checks from a book in a hotel, having sneaked into the room of a foreign guest. We are in Greece in the 1960s, and Simpson is the son of a British military officer and an Egyptian mother who has spent his entire life in a hybrid of cultures, families, and climates, never fully in any and all forms of his identity (both internally and externally) in question and up for debate. So on the day he’s caught stealing the checks, it’s routine for him (he even has a system). He’s caught, as happens in novels, and he’s extorted into writing a confession letter by the man, who then uses this as leverage to force Simpson to becomes a mule of some sort. Because he has a Turkish passport, he’s told to drive a car into Turkey, go through customs, and deliver this into the hands of the colleague of the man. He doesn’t know what’s in the car, and he realizes at the border that his passport is out of date. He’s searched, and the car has been filled with various weapons to be delivered to some kind of criminal or terrorist group. He’s the forced into working with the Turkish police as a counter-agent.

I enjoyed the novel, and my misconception that led me to have to rethink so much of the book is that I thought Simpson was still quite young, as he spends long sections of his narration talking about his schooling. But I became aware that he’s actually in his fifties, which does shift things around a lot. My other issue with this book is that despite Eric Ambler being a very well-known writer, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this felt a lot like a Graham Greene novel. The only issue with this is that Graham Greene would have laced this book with humor, this book, while full of irony, was not very funny, and kept feeling like it should be.

 

Omeros – 4/5 Stars

There’s a great moment in a nonfiction work by VS Naipaul where he talks about wanting to be a great writer some day and then finding out that a young, headstrong Trinidadian writer had just published a brilliant, but young, collection of poems and was poised to become a great world literary star. Naipaul recalls being excited and pissed because he didn’t think there’d be room for two. He is comforted by his thoughts that poetry and fiction are too different and that will work for him.

That young poet was of course Derek Walcott, and while he published many, many books during his long career, this long, reworking of the Odyssey, clearly vaulted him forward toward the Nobel Prize. This book is also one of those books I found out about when I was a teenager, and thought it sounded amazing, but a full, book-length poem is an intimidating book to be confronted with (for me, at any age) and I kept putting it off, owning and getting rid of copies several times without reading it. The reading experience for me is fractured, as I am not a great poetry reader for a number of reasons, but I really enjoyed Walcott’s take on the epic, using it in a way to reinvestigate the history of the transAtlantic world throughout the last several hundred years, along with looking at contemporary life. It has a funny, almost Christmas Carol feeling to it in this way, while also being a lot like the Ducktales/Odyssey episode.

 

Humiliated and Insulted – 3/5 Stars

I think I have to make a rule for myself or something because I shouldn’t read two Dostoyevskys in one calendar year. I read The Idiot a few months back, and while I liked it, it also exhausted me. This book mostly just exhausted me, and I went into feeling like it probably would. I came across this book from watching the Elena Ferrante tv show a few months ago, and this is one of the books that gets passed around in the flirtatious relationship between Nino and Lenu in their teens. And the kind of melodrama presented in this book makes sense for this kind of little moment between them. It’s a book that feel so different to me from the other books of his I’ve read because although he was around forty when he wrote it, it feels sentimentally tied to a much younger writer. It’s not, but the lead character seems likely to be based on Dostoyevsky in his youth, fresh of the publication of his first novel. The novel is oddly syrupy for an older writer to work through and the rewards of the later works are less present here. It would be a good first novel of his read to but a few of the novels with older characters, more evil character, and more worn down one, it didn’t work for me.

 

Rumblefish – 3/5 Stars

Another short novel by the writer of The Outsiders, and in a lot of ways, despite being about half the length, a much more mature and thoughtful book. Our narrator is a 14 year old boy who is kind of but not exactly in a number of gangs around his town. He’s one of the toughest kids around, and has to prove it throughout. We meet him when he’s older looking back and having met up with an old friend who made it out while our narrator had gone to juvenile hall.

In the past, we find him living at home with a drunk (but not otherwise abusive) father and an absentee mother, whose lack of presence dominates the novel, and a wayward older brother who is a lot like the narrator, but has one foot out. The novel spends a lot of time dealing with the motivations and impulses, the trauma and anger, that these characters are clearly going through, while having no actual ways of dealing with or processing or living through them. The title comes from the fish that the older brother buys one day (a Siamese fighting fish) who are so filled with spite and anger that they can’t find any real connections, and would even fight themselves to death if presented with a mirror.

 

Becoming Abigail – 2/5 Stars

This is a short, and not very much fun at all, novella from Chris Abani, a Nigerian novelist who writes and publishes in English. I’ve been interested in a few of his novel throughout the last couple years but never got around to reading any, so listening to this short novella as an audiobook was perhaps a way in. I don’t think I enjoyed this very much as the bulk of the novella is about a series of abusive relationships involving our lead character Abigail. I wasn’t even sure what the book was about going in, so I casually jumped in and well, it ended up being a little too much, too quickly. So be forewarned. The writing was good however, but the sadism with which her abusers inflict pain and humiliation on her, well, like I said, it was a lot.