Kelly

A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It's just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response. What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.

There's a description in The Goldfinch of a main character's “oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call ‘the Planet of Earth.'” When I read this book I thought of that quote. If I had one word to describe Saunders' outlook and his writing, it would be “humane” - both in what he would term a “moral-ethical” dimension, and also in a literal sense of always pertaining to humanity and humanness, for which he demonstrates such an oddball and unthwartable faith.

Prior to this book, I had read a handful of classic Russian short stories, and always because it was compulsory, part of some curriculum. I don't gravitate to short stories or older fiction, so the thing that brought me here was all Saunders. In this book, he shares thoughts on thinking, reading, writing, and revising, and how each of those things can shape the way we understand ourselves and each other. He does so in response to works of Russian literature by four of the greats (helpfully embedded in the book).

I highlighted so much of this book and can't wait to reread it.

“And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone's hands, exist. It was a consensus about the organization's comfort level moving forward that stopped the reporting. It was a consensus about the organization's comfort level moving forward that bowed to lawyers and threats; that hemmed and hawed and parsed and shrugged; that sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization's comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole.”

A beautifully written memoir of addiction, gender, obsession, and healing.

“Even as I write this, I acknowledge that it may also be ridiculous. Maybe I just wanted to read meaning into his inability to show up and be a good man. And isn't that just an extension of women's work, too? The excavation and analysis of men's trauma — unpaid work they won't do themselves — the ascription to them of some deeper reasoning, so that we may explain away the ways they mistreat us. How generous we are with context.”

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.”

A slower, sparser offering from an author whose books I will always read, because she rocks.

If you are not from an island,you cannot understand what it means to be of water:to learn to curve around the bend, to learn to rise with rain,to learn to quench an outside thirstwhile all the whileyou grow shallowuntil there is not one dropleft for you.I know this is what Tia does not say. Sand & soil & sinew & smiles:all bartered. & who reaps? Who eats?Not us. Not me.

Gorgeous. As always, I am miles behind and am now intent on catching up with Acevedo's oeuvre.

All her life Corrine has watched [wrath] move through her students and their parents, through men sitting at the bar or in the bleachers, through churchgoers and neighbors and the town's fathers and mothers. She has watched her own kith and kin pour this poison into their best glassware, spoon it into the plates their ancestors hauled in wagons from Georgia and Alabama, all while proclaiming they worked for everything they ever got and nobody ever gave them nothing, they earned it, living and dying in that refinery, in those fields, and they can't do a goddamn thing about the people who control the purse strings and hand over their paychecks, who can put them out of work with a wink and a nod, but they sure can point a finger at somebody else. If they say it for long enough, and in different ways, they might stop seeing the child of God standing on the other side of those words, or buckling under the awful weight of them. . . And while Mary Rose maybe has a better reason than most of these fools and sinners to open the door for unbridled wrath, Corrine also knows this: one way or another it will eventually kill you. But goddamn, you can do some damage on your way out the door.

What a beautiful debut that uses one of my favorite techniques: individual vignettes that dovetail into intersecting storylines. Many thanks to my friend for giving me this ARC over a year ago.

Also: the whole time reading this, I couldn't help thinking of the (excellent) Old ‘97s' song of the same name: “Of all the many things that you were counting on/well there ain't none better than a girl who's moving on.”

“Stella's mouth curved, like she was going to smile or cry, her face, somehow, caught in between. Like a sun shower. The devil beating his wife, her mother used to say, and Jude imagined it every time she heard her father rage. The devil could love the woman he beat; the sun could burst through a rainstorm. Nothing was as simple as you wanted it to be.”

If you're looking for a very obvious mystery that, in its ignorance of mental illness, wildly stigmatizes whole groups of people, look no further. I cannot believe how frequently psychosis is conflated with psychopathy in this dumb book. How misinformed and dangerous.

Some veryyyyyy tough gender stuff in here as well — seems like it was written in 1980 and not 2014.

Lastly, whenever an author describes their protagonist as brilliant but does not themselves have the intelligence/skill to portray it, and you're left with a bog standard character who supposedly has a turbo-genius IQ....it's embarrassing.

Back then, I was blind to the idea that an institution could still be destructive even if its members were good people.

This book is a doozy: a meticulously detailed self-led investigation of a fifty-year old unsolved murder case, AND an ambitious, wide-reaching commentary on true crime in general, authorial overreach, women in academia, and elite institutions' privileging of themselves over truth/justice. Recommend!

Rena thought the point of the game was to identify the proverb that was the worst of all possible proverbs, and make a case for its failure. She'd run through a number of contenders before deciding on In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.

Interesting but certainly falls into a classic anthology trap of mixed quality and unevenness. Strongest essays for me were from Harriet McBryde Johnson, Jessica Slice, and Wanda Diaz-Merced. 3.5 stars but rounding up.

As funny and charming as expected; a balm for these troubled times!

Immediately adding to my “to re-read” shelf. The piece on stop and frisk is particularly wonderful.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

This book is exceptional. It is also, appropriately, very painful. It is also beautiful. I can't think of an American who wouldn't benefit from reading. Specifically, if you are a white American, I don't care how woke or educated or well-read you you are: unless you have purposely, specifically, and sustainedly devoured information about American caste and its relationship to other caste systems in the world throughout your whole life, this book will be an intellectual and moral education.I know no one who matches this description

“If the layout of Center City—all right angles and symmetry—is evidence of the staid and rational minds that planned Philadelphia, Kensington is evidence of what happens when intention is distorted by necessity.”

This is a book where a starred review is insufficient . . . I love Darnielle's writing, but I just don't have any interest in RPGs, and that made parts of this story a little tedious to me. But the way he wrote certain interactions was beautiful, and - as one would expect from the frontman of the Mountain Goats - suffused with radical empathy throughout. I hope he writes another novel.

This is story of a woman who lives forever and starts each day with a blank slate. It's immediately reminiscent of (and even directly references by name!!) Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, with one major exception: Addie LaRue is not MADDENINGLY, FRUSTRATINGLY REPETITIVE.

One of my all-time fave reviews on Goodreads was a two-star review of Life After Life that perfectly distills the tedium of watching a woman die over and over without learning a single fuckin' thing along the way:

She just goes along with the program, a plastic bag beaten about by the wind. All the dumb things she has done along the way, all the idiots she enters into relationships with, it all starts over, and then you're confused as to who's alive and who's dead in this new life of hers and is she still with this person? Is she a mother this time around? A spinster? And then you start to realize that who cares. It doesn't matter. She'll just die again anyway.

The difference in this book is that the lead character has agency; she learns as she goes and modifies her plans accordingly as she lives a cursed 300-year life that takes her from rural France to Paris in the midst of revolution to a war-ravaged Europe and prohibition-era New Orleans and modern New York. And the whole time, no one remembers her for more than a day.

Cool premise, good writing (albeit purple in parts), and beautiful ending that made me cry. Recommend!

Somewhat interesting but not illuminating. I'm no expert in psychopathy, but armed with a mere BA in psychology and an admitted interest in the macabre, I was eminently more informed than Ronson appeared to be in his interviews. (I was surprised, for instance, that anyone with a passing interest in the diagnosis of psychopathy would not be immediately alarmed by its potential for misuse and abuse.) His writing style implied an unexamined acceptance of whatever expert or skeptic he was speaking with at the moment.) It was also oddly unfocused – why the interludes on pediatric bipolar disorder and delusional conspiracy theorists?! Could have been so much better.

The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by.

Creative, bold, funny.

In bearing witness, we're trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water. Over time, long periods of time, water always wins. What I want to know, even now, is: how?

But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.

“There's a subtler danger, too, when we focus on stories of individual characters and crimes, because the greatest crimes, now and always, have been systemic, and systemic stories are harder to tell.”

The introduction to the anthology included the above quote, which was never realized in the disjointed collection of essays mostly about. . . individual characters and crimes.

“It took me many years to realize that it's hard to live in this world. I don't mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it's harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It's natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that's something of a miracle.”

Gorgeous.

Post-World War II tortured marital ennui? It's gotta be Yates, and it's gotta be great. . . s.

We've been taught to see the world as divided between the sacred and profane, the religious and the secular. We've been taught that there's someone a line that makes a church building sacred and a supermarket secular. That vertical line is an invention. Imagine a a horizontal line between the shallow and the deep. It stretches across every place and every person. When we can sink below the blur of habit, we can be present to that portion of our experience where we find deepest meaning.