Charlie

This book was fantastic! I love reading books that I know would have really impacted me when I was a teenager, and this definitely falls into that category, although it's not strictly YA. There are some familiar elements here, as the story centers around a group of youngsters shipped off to a school who become fast friends and learn and grow together. But this book is so novel and inventive and Kuang does such great things with that setup that one really must read it. The first thing that sets it apart is the system of magic, which is unlike anything I've ever read. The magic, which centers around translation, is a fascinating and thoughtful experiment that plays with both the concept of language and the extractive, exploitative nature of colonialism. Secondly, the aforementioned friend group begins in a happy little bubble of their environment, where nothing can go wrong and they spend some halcyon years just being together. Of course, this is pretty typical of the boarding school novel, and it's also expected that at some point the bubble will pop and the protagonists will have to contend with the real world. This book goes far beyond what I was expecting in introducing conflict, with Kuang not just popping their bubble but ripping apart their world. The conflicts towards the end of the book are both extreme, unlike anything I've ever read, and wholly logical evolutions of the world Kuang has created.

I'd readily recommend Babel to anyone, and I can't wait to talk with people about it; I think it will be very, very popular.

This book was a thoughtful, solemn meditation on connection and solitude and society as a whole. The prose was absolutely beautiful without being flowery, matching the stark setting of the lighthouse and its island. Another thing to recommend it is its length; although very short, it was fully developed and I didn't think it was lacking for anything. I would readily recommend An Island to anyone, but especially to those who liked Camus's The Stranger.


Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC!

A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my all time favorite books, so I was elated to receive an advance copy of its companion novel/sequel The Candy House.

Like Goon Squad, the novel is composed of several interrelated stories, with the same characters popping up or at least referenced over and over again. Writing a novel with such a complex web of character relationships might come across as forced, but I really like it. Is it necessary for some minor character to be the second cousin of the ex-roommate of the wife of the previous story's protagonist? No. But is it fun? Absolutely.

The theme of this book, as much as there is one, is big tech. The specific innovation at the center of this story involves the digitization of one's memories. That's not particularly inventive, but Egan also created a faction dedicated to fighting against this tech, which I thought was a fresh approach. In my lifetime, backlash to big tech has started to snowball, but much of it still relies on social media campaigns and individual action, such as #deleteFacebook. As Silicon Valley's influence over society continues to grow, I think that we may see more organized forms of resistance and backlash and Egan will have been proven prescient.

The book's title is an apt metaphor for the tech world and one that I hadn't considered before. It's a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale as well as a poetic, if much more sinister, spin on the rather trite saying around that “if a product is free, you are the product.” You come to the candy house to eat, but end up being eaten.

Ultimately, though, the book is all about people, and big tech is just a tool to learn more about them. I love that we get to see these characters at all different points of their lives. I think that Egan's particular genius is in understanding the vast range potential that each person holds, and making full use of that in her writing. A lesser author would take a talented and popular kid and have him grow into a talented and popular adult. Egan can take that same kid and show him first excelling on the Little League field, then in middle age as a high-strung lawyer with all the markings of success but whose life is teetering on the brink, then as a divorced and impoverished recovering addict. And at each stage, she's able to make the reader feel for the character.

I very much enjoyed this book, and I would quickly recommend it to anyone, but especially those who liked A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I was afraid when starting this book that it would just be a collection of mediocre stories joined by their superficial connection to the lost manuscript that gives its name to the title. Ultimately, I thought that that connection was indeed pretty tenuous, but the stories ended up being much more engaging than I was expecting, and I raced through the book in just a couple of sittings. Overall, I'd say the book is much more style than substance, but I'd recommend as a beach or plane read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC!

This was a wonderful follow-up to 2019's Essays One. I knew that Davis was translator — it was her beautiful story “The Walk” that inspired me to read Proust — but I didn't grasp just how much of her life she has dedicated to translation. While Essays One had some pieces sharing her process in writing fiction, it was also very outward-focused, with much of the content being critical essays about visual artists and writers. Essays Two, in contrast, is extremely process-focused and highly technical; if Stephen King's On Writing is a “memoir of the craft,” then Essays Two is a memoir of the science of the written word. Davis emphasizes repeatedly that translation isn't exact, that there is no such thing as a perfect translation, but she also demonstrates that arriving at a satisfactory solution, of which there may be several, is extremely difficult.

In some cases, translating just a single word requires knowledge of the word's plain meaning and potential synonyms, of its etymology, and of life in 19th century France. The most striking case of this is the translation of the word boule, the title problem from the essay “Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle.” One would imagine that from context it would be simple to tell which meaning the author intended, but Davis outlines in great detail just how tricky a problem this is, before revealing and justifying her choice of hot-water bottle.

There are glimpses of Davis's gentle humor throughout. In one instance, after considering that an alternative translation may be better than the on she settled on, she remarks:

“Then again, maybe not. (If I were to write a memoir about being a translator, I might title it: Then Again, Maybe Not. Or, then again, maybe not...)”

However, given the subject matter, Essays Two is bit dry, although this is certainly deliberate and I don't think the collection suffers from it. If one were looking to read for entertainment, I'd steer them towards The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, as Essays Two is indisputably on the informative end of the spectrum.

On the whole, I really loved this book. Davis is perhaps my favorite author, and I'm very grateful that she has shared so much about her methods for translation and language acquisition.


Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

On NetGalley, the description of Jerusalem Beach, Iddo Gefen's debut collection, begins, “For fans of Etgar Keret...” I was immediately interested, as Keret is one of my favorite authors, but also skeptical that they shared anything more than the superficial connection of being contemporary Israeli short story writers. However, all my doubts disappeared after reading the first line of the first story, “The Geriatric Platoon”:

Grandpa enlisted in the Golani infantry brigade at the age of eighty.

Here is an author who can match Keret's wit and whimsy, drawing very real emotions from very surreal situations. I don't mean to imply that there is anything imitative or derivative about Gefen's work; it so imaginative that there are no proper comparisons for the stories themselves, just the genius of their author. The collection takes the reader from a desolate army outpost, to a Berlin that exists only on social media, to a microplanet abutting the sun.

Gefen is a neuroscientist, and his experience flavors his writing without overpowering it. In one story, a father seeks desperately for a technology to see into his daughter's dreams. In another, a woman and her fiancé set out to transfer memories to each other. But in all cases, the humanity is foregrounded and the technology is there only to support the author's message.

I absolutely loved Jerusalem Beach, and I plan to read Gefen's future work as quickly as someone can translate it (and maybe even faster if my Hebrew improves).

Thank you to Astra House for the advanced copy of this fantastic collection!

I greatly enjoyed Bullet Train, a thriller that takes place almost entirely aboard the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Morioka. It was certainly violent in parts, but I also found myself laughing out loud, which I was not anticipating at the start of the book. There's a great cast of characters, none particularly lovable (they are killers after all), but some much more likable than others. The top review on Goodreads likens it to a Tarantino movie, but the comparison I kept coming back to was the Coen brothers. The characters are all pretty quirky, and the duo of Lemon and Tangerine especially would have fit right in in Fargo. There are lots of interweaving plots, but they were easy to keep track of and there are several details included in the first part of the novel that come back towards the climax and contribute to its fantastic conclusion.

I'm glad it comes out in August, because I think it will be the perfect beach read!

I was provided an ARC by Ecco in exchange for an honest review, which can be found below.

There's really a lot to admire about this novel, but on the whole it failed to amount to much. The writing is consistently good and it's packed with lots of unique details and insights. However, it felt cluttered, as a lot of those details distract from what should be the crux of the story: the relationship between Edwina and Marlin.

The backdrop to the book and the source of many of Edwina's anxieties is the looming prospect of her visa expiring and her ambition to secure a green card. Chin does an excellent job of dealing with this particular aspect of the story, but at its heart this is a procedural problem, full of forms and qualifications and checkboxes. And yet it seems to bleed over into the relationship aspect, too, which becomes a binary: he wants x and she wants y. Some of this is understandable, like Edwina's need for a spousal endorsement for her green card application compounding her worries about finding Marlin. But ultimately, it leads to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion to the book. Chin demonstrated throughout the ways in which Marlin and Edwina differ: the fact-oriented engineer vs. the imaginative literature major, sudoku vs. crosswords, etc. Interestingly, the conflict ends up being a reversal of their personalities, it seems. Marlin becomes the irrational one, desperately searching for meaning in the occult following the loss of his father, while Edwina is paralyzed by her fixation on her immigration status. Chin addresses this explicitly towards the climax of the novel:

Was I now taking cues from a government form in the same way? Learning how to be a person, a wife, a daughter, from numbered questions? Maybe that was precisely what Marlin was resisting.

I thought this was the setup to reconciliation and compromise, with each party recognizing the other's needs and feelings and the couple ultimately drawn back together by their shared experiences — chronicled so lovingly in the “Before” chapters. Alas, no. In one of the final paragraphs Edwina states:

But it was impossible. I might manage to go along with his vision for a moment—this moment—or maybe even an hour, a day, a week. Yet even if I didn't know myself very well anymore, I was certain I would forever regret not finding out whether that green card would materialize.

And so it turns out that the problem at the beginning of the novel, “my grief-stricken husband spiraled out of control and left me,” is the same problem at the end of the novel. There is a lot that goes on in between, almost all of which felt fresh and novel, detailing their upbringings in Malaysia, their experience as immigrants in the Trump era, and Edwina's ordeals as the only woman in a toxic tech startup. But given the conclusion to the main storyline, all of this felt inconsequential, like it was just inserted to pad the middle of the book.

I can't say that I'd recommend Edge Case to a friend, but Chin is clearly a very talented writer and I look forward to reading her future works.

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of Anthony Veasna So until reading his obituary in The New York Times, and now that I've read this collection I'm saddened anew at the loss of this bright young author.

I normally prefer novels to short stories, but just a single line from that obituary compelled me to immediately add Afterparties to the top of my reading queue. I'm happy to say that that impulse was well-founded, as the rest of the collection is just as sharp, original, and darkly funny as I could have hoped for. Those who have read the piece have perhaps guessed, but for the curious, the aforementioned line was:

Tevy, he writes, would “do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!”

These sentiments pervade the collection, and the central tension of many of the stories is generational: parents dealing with the trauma of staggering loss and the pressures of surviving in a new country, and their children, whose problems are minor by comparison but no less consuming. These children, who So centers more often than the older generation, struggle in trying to understand and honor the past, while grappling with the uncertainties of their own futures. He captures this beautifully in the last story of the collection, which is also perhaps the most intimate. The story, “Generational Differences,” takes the form of a letter from a mother to her intensely and morbidly curious son, who can't stop asking about “the regime, the camps, the genocide.” The mother writes:

Every slight detail you would demand to know, as if understanding that part of my life would explain the entirety of yours.

The title is a giveaway, but So was fascinated with what comes after: after the genocide, after immigrating, after college, after the mass shooting, after death. I'm sad that we won't get to see what would have come after Afterparties, because I'm certain it would have been fantastic.

Thanks to Ecco for the ARC.

I was provided an ARC by FSG in exchange for an honest review, which can be found below.

I am a huge fan of Edward St. Aubyn, and I was ecstatic to receive an ARC of his latest book, Double Blind. I breezed through it pretty quickly, and there's a lot to love about it. St. Aubyn's prose is absolutely gorgeous, and while this one isn't as funny as Lost for Words he still imbues it with a healthy amount of wry wit. There were some elements I didn't like, such as the plot thread dealing with the “Happy Helmets,” which felt clumsy to me, as does a lot of contemporary fiction that tries to grapple with the tech industry. Overall, however, it was a highly enjoyable read and one I'd readily recommend.

Rather than placing a single person at the center of this novel, St. Aubyn gives equal attention to a smattering of characters, interacting in a smattering of locations. The diversity of its plot threads and settings, as well as its tone, reminded me of Jennifer's Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad or last year's The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. Any novel with half a dozen significant characters sets itself up to be a relationship study, and Double Blind is no exception. The three characters at the center of the book, two old school friends, Lucy and Olivia, and Olivia's boyfriend, Francis, make up the central hub from which all of these connections radiate. These relationships are numerous and quite diverse (paternal, fraternal, romantic, collegial, etc.) but the novel never felt cluttered. Each of the characters is well crafted and fits perfectly into the narrative.

It is certainly the most expansive of St. Aubyn's works that I've read, but that was probably necessitated by the themes he chose to address. While the Patrick Melrose novels were a masterclass in suffering, the problems therein are largely human-inflicted: abuse, drugs, bankruptcy, infidelity. While all of these are present in Double Blind, they're presented against the backdrop of much, much bigger problems: climate change, capitalism, cancer, fate. And while I thought that centering problems like these would result in a pretty bleak novel, especially at the hands of a cynic like St. Aubyn, the result was surprisingly hopeful. Early in the book, he says of one of the characters learning of an impending extinction that “...the scale of the crisis invited a sense of impotence equal to his sense of horror.” The author is no optimist, but I think he believes that there's just as much grace in accepting your problems as in ending them, and knows that most people just try to do the best they can.

I was provided a galley by Tin House in exchange for an honest review, which can be found below.

The The House on Vesper Sands was perhaps the perfect cozy winter read. While none of its elements seemed novel in isolation, each piece was executed exceedingly well, and the work as a whole is delightful. Taking place in the well-trod streets of Victorian London, the book tells the story of a student, a journalist, and a detective whose paths converge in hunting the truth behind the disappearances of several working class girls.

O'Donnell has the rare distinction of being an excellent prose stylist who is able to use his prose to propel his plot, rather than encumber it. I found myself racing through the book, with no run on sentences or dense constructions to impede my progress, and yet it was downright beautiful in parts, with every word seemingly perfectly placed throughout.

I was also pleased with the addition of a fantastical strain, which both enlivened the book and provided the impetus behind the central mystery. Without giving too much away, it reminded me of The Golden Compass, though O'Donnell certainly has a fresh take, putting it in service of a captivating, if heavy-handed, story of class.

Although it's been billed as a mystery and has a detective at its center, I would classify this novel as more of a crime thriller, such as the movie Se7en. The characters certainly do their legwork in tracking down the villains, but readers coming looking for a whodunnit with clues doled out along the way will, I think, be disappointed.

If you had asked me before reading this whether there were any fresh ideas to be had in the way misanthropic male detectives, I probably would have leaned towards “absolutely not.” And yet, Inspector Cutter is a welcome addition to the coterie. The combination of his fiery and cantankerous nature, which I would associate more with American detectives than the cold Sherlocks of Brit Lit, and his almost Wodehousian wit made for a truly fresh and enjoyable character.

Mrs. Cornish eyed them for a moment longer before standing aside. “Who's the young miss? Looks like death, she does. You ain't going to tell me she's a police officer and all?”“You are right there, Mrs. Cornish,” Cutter said. “I am not going to tell you.”

I highly recommend The House on Vesper Sands, and I eagerly await the author's next book, hopefully a sequel!

This was a pretty good book overall. Orlean interweaves the story of the library's burning in the 80s, the history of the LA Library system, and lots of information about libraries today into a pretty engaging story. The book really suffers when she veers from the facts into weird, gimmicky, first person attempts at profundity, such as the chapter dedicated to her burning a book in her back yard or a very strange interlude late in the book wherein she imagines the events that caused the fire.

I read a lot of acclaim for Cleannesss but was sorely disappointed. This book was described as collection of linked short stories and as heavily autobiographical, but it fails as both fiction and memoir. The stories have very little depth, and despite the fact that each shares the same first person narrator, I came to the end of its 200 pages with no sense of his inner life. At its best, this approach yields some moments reminiscent of Hemingway, not only because of the sparse prose but also the subject matter: an American expatriate and no dearth of suffering. Hemingway, however, was not bound by reality in the way the Greenwell apparently was here, and could create settings, characters, and plots. Without the ability to do likewise, Greenwell has delivered something that reads more like a middle schooler's “How I Spent My Summer” essay than literary fiction.

The stories barely interested me at all, and what interest they generated was derived from the idea that they may have actually occurred; if presented as works of pure fiction, most would have been complete duds. This failure goes back to the book's lack of depth and introspection. Some of my favorite books in recent years have been described by their detractors as “tedious” (Elif Batuman's The Idiot), “boring” (Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One), and “a protracted, pointless exercise in nothingness” (Lydia Davis's The End of the Story). I genuinely love books in which authors write about mundane things, but that writing must go deeper than the events themselves, as this book does not.

Is this the worst book I've ever read? Yes.

This was an absolutely fantastic collection of essays. I mostly know Davis for her short stories, but it was great to get a better understanding of her life and work through these non-fiction pieces. My favorites were the “Forms and Influences” essays, four in total, which discuss her methods and the other writers she's read over the years. Because her stories are so short, there are a couple of instances where she was able to include several versions of the same story in its entirety in order to show its evolution, which provided some great insight into her process. I was less thrilled with some of her essays on visual artists, but even they were worthwhile reads simply for showing the breadth of her writings. I can't wait for volume two, which I believe will focus on her work as a translator.

As someone who primarily reads fiction, I'm finding it hard to base my assessment of this book on its structure rather than on the quality of its content (I mean, Philip Glass only has one life to draw from).

My first complaint about the book is purely technical: there were portions that were inaccessible to a non-musician. These portions are mostly towards the beginning of the book, but I though that Glass could have done a better job of explaining these elements to an untrained audience.

My second complaint is that he kind of seems like a jerk. Although, since he wrote the book himself, there are no explicit criticisms of his behavior, it's not hard to imagine where his single-minded focus on his art might have negatively impacted his relationships. I can't dock him points for that, per se, but I do think he could have done a better job of deciding what to include here. For example, according to Wikipedia, he's been married four times, yet he only mentions two of his wives by name in the book.

I'm a fan of Glass's music, and he certainly has led an interesting life, which I greatly enjoyed learning about. My favorite thing about biographies and memoirs is discovering relationships between notable figures that I otherwise would not have known existed. Glass has been in around and in the avant-garde art scene long enough to see his life intersect with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Lessing, and Samuel Beckett, and I came away from the book with a better understanding of art in the 20th century.

This book had a really fun premise and a cast of great characters! A little hokey, but a perfect read for my Christmas break. Can't wait to read Bellweather Rhapsody!

Since seeing Knives Out in theaters this fall, I'd been in the mood to read a cozy mystery, and where better to start than the Miss Marple books? I knew very little about Miss Marple before reading Murder at the Vicarage, but I imagined her as an elderly, female Poirot. Instead, I was surprised to learn that she solves crimes using the power of nosiness and gossip, which I found to be a refreshing and humorous take on the detective genre. While the details of the murder itself were inventive, I didn't find the motive of the killer to be entirely convincing. I'm looking forward to reading the next installment.

This is the second of Fr. Martin's books that I've read, and though it's still a memoir, it was less personal than In Good Company, blending his experience on the production with quite a bit about the historical figure of Jesus. He also provides little bios of many of the actors, and it's been fun seeing them in other roles, such as Stephen McKinley Henderson's portrayal of a priest in Ladybird.

This book has been on my list for a long time, and I'm surprised how long it took me to get around to it, because “Jesuits in space” was a premise that really excited me. What a disappointment.

The novel really started to fall apart for me when I realized that the makeup of the mission was to be a bizarre, effortfully diverse mishmash bordering on caricature. In addition to the protagonist, you have the folksy Texan fighter pilot (“yee haw!”), the demure Quebecois naturalist (“mon dieu”), and the stern lady scientist (“...”). I was eager to forgive the book's hokey setup, assuming that it would be in service of some greater philosophical parable. It wasn't.

While the premise of the book is novel, it merely serves as a veneer for a pretty unoriginal and uninspiring reflection on God and suffering. The existence of sentient, extraterrestrial life poses some really fun and funky theological questions, and Russell leaves every single one of them unasked and unanswered. The aliens have no bearing on the plot; this book could have taken place in Florida.

The portions I enjoyed the most were those taking place in the retreat house after the protagonist has returned to Earth. In these chapters, a friendship is forged between him and some of his fellow Jesuits as he struggles to cope with his trauma and tell his tale. Given the fact that his tale is so unremarkable, however, these sections do little to alleviate the drudgery that is reading The Sparrow.

I'm a huge fan of John Hodgman's podcast, and I was extremely eager to read this book. I love books of humor and books about travel, particularly dull, work-related travel since it's so much more relatable and so much less enviable than the travel people tend to write about.

I was surprised to see how closely Hodgman's voice on the page mirrored his voice on the podcast and disappointed that it didn't quite work for me. While there were plenty of laughs, a lot of the humor felt quite awkward. Watching improv comedy can be fun, but reading the transcript of an improv sketch? Less so. This was most pronounced in Hodgman's use of fake dialogue, which was pretty jarring in parts and consistently undercut genuinely humorous situations. These asides work well in audio comedy, where they're aided by Hodgman's inflection and a giggling, kindly co-host, but including them here felt like a disservice to the reader. The world is funny enough as it is; why resort to injecting your reimagining of it?

Overall, this book was a lot of fun to read and I really appreciated the moments of sincerity and vulnerability, which are plentiful. I already know which essays I'll think back to, and they're the ones that have nothing to do with points and everything to do with people. My favorites are: the one about pets, the one about jobs, and and the one about the election. I'm now really looking forward to reading Vacationland, since my impression is that it's an even more personal and humanistic work.

I greatly enjoyed The Testaments, which I couldn't quite say of The Handmaid's Tale. While I think that the latter is the better book, this one was a fantastic thriller that sucked me right in. Three characters provide their perspectives in The Testaments: Aunt Lydia, a powerful figure and one of the highest ranking women in Gilead's hierarchy; Agnes, a girl growing up in a well-off family in Gilead; and Daisy, a girl growing up outside of Gilead, in Canada.

The novel serves as a great expansion on the world of The Handmaid's Tale, and it was interesting to hear from such diverse viewpoints. Early on, it's revealed that Aunt Lydia is working against the regime. Her case serves as a timely reminder that, for the most part, the difference between “bringing down the system from the inside” and “full and enthusiastic participation” is imperceptible. Ultimately, I think that this lesson is the book's most noteworthy contribution, especially coupled with the knowledge that, while the book had a happy ending, it could just as easily not have.

This was my second time reading The Golden Compass and I was surprised to find that it didn't quite live up to my memory of it. I think that much of the magic and wonder that I had associated with it was actually contained in its sequel, The Subtle Knife, but bled into my mental image of this book since I read them in such quick succession.

The plot of this novel is pretty straightforward, and much of it is dedicated to establishing the universe of the trilogy and the mysteries that are to be solved in the subsequent installments.

Although it's not my favorite, The Golden Compass will no doubt remain a staple of the YA fantasy canon for years to come. I'm looking forward to seeing the upcoming HBO show, as this series is extremely deserving of a good adaptation.

This book has been on my list for a while, but the upcoming TV show inspired me to finally pick it up. I'm not much of a comics reader, but it's easy to see why it remains such a popular story.

I haven't seen the 2009 movie, but I've heard it's not fantastic, which is surprising because I was absolutely blown away by how cinematic the book was. My favorite of the 12 sections was Dr. Manhattan's origin. Moore and Gibbons tell a story with lots of complex temporal and spatial elements, which could really only be done in a visual format.

I love westerns, though I don't read nearly enough of them. This novel has two entwined storylines, both of which are classics of the genre: a homesteading family beset by hardship (draught and the menace of a powerful rancher), and a vagrant rider running from the law. I loved the way these two narratives, one stationary and the other itinerant, alternated and ultimately converged. I think I saw this book billed as magical realism, but there was only a pinch of magic, which was really the perfect amount.