Erica Simmons
Evelyn Waugh is my guilty pleasure. His books are like candy, they are so easy to read. But if they are candy, they are lemon drops coated with arsenic. Waugh's bitter, sarcastic, and completely devastating portraits of humanity warm my heart. His characters destroy each other's lives so casually, and I love it.
In The Loved One, Waugh takes on L.A. British neocolonial snobbery in post-war Southern California, set in a Disneyesque funeral home (actually a “memorial park”) and a much less classy pet cemetery (“The Happier Hunting Ground”): how much better can life be?
Not Waugh's best. Certainly no Handful of Dust. Often racist. But still an insightful satire of colonialism, war journalism, and the intersection of the two.
A fun book to read, especially during a time when I was flying a lot (cliched, I know). But this is definitely a case where I preferred the movie.
I love George Eliot. I love her intelligent, erudite, incredibly critical, and, yes, pedantic view of the world. And I find that the longer and more pedantic her fiction, the more I like it. If you want to check her out, don't go the lazy route and read the much shorter Silas Marner, because it's just not that good. But Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are vast, sprawling, and wonderful. This book takes commitment and stamina, but it's worth it for the complex and compelling characters and the astute narratorial asides. The central narrative of Daniel Deronda's spiritual journey is somewhat naive and two-dimensional, but the story of Gwendolyn Harleth and her quashed ambitions is what makes this book so resonant.
The perspective of this book is fascinating, and the artwork is incredible! I'm excited to see where this series goes.
A classic, well written critique of the way we teach history in American public schools and its social and political consequences. For me the biggest revelation of this book was realizing that most Americans do not study history past high school. (I know, that's an incredibly naive, elitist thing to be surprised by, but I hadn't really thought it through before.) I've always known that grade school history textbooks were problematic, but of course students are taught more than just that, right? Unfortunately, for many students, the answer is no. And that is scary.
Chapter 1: I wasn't expecting to like Wallace Stevens, but so far he has me totally engaged. We'll see how I feel in 600 pages.
After 600 pages: Parts of this book are beautiful, others slow, others problematic. I wavered between wanting to give the book up and being completely captivated. It's a fascinating depiction of Western history, and overall I'm glad I read it.
Informative and usually entertaining, but nowhere near as good as Assassination Vacation or The Partly Cloudy Patriot.
Note: I didn't read this translation, I read “Within a Budding Grove.” Which, accuracy aside (I don't speak French so I don't know), is a much better title. Much less awkward and (perhaps) overly literal...
This book is a powerful critique and warning about the dangers of big data: how use of algorithms at a broad scale throughout or society to inform hiring decisions, financial offerings, policing, etc. can increase inequality and ruin the lives of vulnerable individuals. As big data becomes more ubiquitous, this book provides a compelling argument for creating accountability and applying analyses in a thoughtful way to harness their potential for good and challenge their threat to do harm.
I admit, at times I found this book a bit boring. But it's also an insightful book about the social history and significance of walking. After finishing this book, I kept thinking of it on my travels. It gave me a new framework to consider the social spaces I explored (as well as where I live), and that makes it a valuable book.
Now that so many people are suddenly interested the white working class, J.D. Vance seems to have a knack for timing. But coming from rural Maine - another area of multigenerational rural poverty and little economic opportunity - I have always felt that our policy and discourse has let down, if not completely ignored, people from places like Appalachian Kentucky where Vance's family is from. Vance does an excellent job weaving sociological research in with his family's experiences, providing a touching portrait of a family struggling in the face of poverty, addiction, and trauma. This book expresses empathy for people facing so many structural barriers to their success, but it is also critical of the bitter defeatism and xenophobia that many in this setting have embraced.
I loved the first 50 pages of this book. They were brilliantly sharp and dry and laid out a situation for which a novel would never be written this century: a scandal of entitlement among local clergy in a small town in England. There were no women. (Why is it that I, a modern feminist, am most drawn to novels by the most committed misogynists? Is it their bitterness that I like? Or their complete lack of interest in the traditional love story?) But then it felt like Trollope just lost interest and kept writing the last 150 pages on autopilot. They served more to close out the wonderful opening than as a middle and end of a novel worth reading.
Never has a book made me so glad to have aged out of the neurotic ambitions and disappointments of my early 20s!
This book - a (somewhat trashy) history of the American mafia's dealings in Cuba in the 1950's - explores an interesting topic, with some fascinating anecdotes. For someone who knows very little about the history of 20th century Cuba, this book was an entertaining and illuminating description of the effects of American imperialism, a corrupt dictatorship, and “creative” business, and the ways that the culture of corruption and criminality gave Castro's revolutionaries momentum. This is not the most scholarly history book I've ever read, but it was fun.
Beautiful art, badass woman protagonist, intriguing details - overall a fun and inventive read.
A tale of immortal gods who return every 90 years to live as pop stars for two fabulous years being dying, The Wicked + The Divine is, appropriately, gorgeous, fun, fast and foreboding. I'm excited to read the next volume!
I loved the Chewie / Flerken story (more space cats!!!), but the Lila and Grace plots weren't nearly as compelling.
I don't know what it means to have “read” a cookbook, but during this pandemic I've decided to go through my cookbooks more methodically. Instead of making a recipe here or there, I'm actually reading the introduction, and trying to be more systematic in making (and recording) a bunch of recipes from one cookbook.
Genius Recipes has been a go-to for me for a long time. The recipes tend to be simple but delicious, often with unique insight into flavor combinations or cooking techniques. A few of my favorites are Heidi Swanson's Chickpea Stew with Saffron, Yogurt, and Garlic and Moro's Warm Squash and Chickpea Salad with Tahini.
As a compilation cookbook, this book provides recipes from a bunch of different sources - which has the benefit of variety, but the downside that there isn't a common set of ingredients that the recipes share. Overall, this cookbook is a great resource with some of my favorite go-tos!
As a mediocre endurance athlete, I identified with a lot of this book, and it inspires me to get out there, even on bleh days. Murakami incisively describes the personality traits that motivate people who run crazy distances, and how it informs our approach to life and work (in his case writing). But it also could feel rote and banal, and at times like Star Trek's Data describing human behavior. Overall a good read.
The artwork in this book is amazing. Tezuka's panels blow me away. It's worth reading for that. The writing is less awesome, and the dramatic tension did not hold me for the entire 830 pages. Also, it's pretty racist, and lots of bad things happen to women in a disturbingly non-chalant, that's-just-life-let's-move-on-now sort of way. Certainly a fascinating portrait of Japanese society in the early '70s.