This book had a fun premise, in which a twenty-something slacker who is incidentally a werewolf gets sucked into a dodgy self-help movement. But then it went a bit sideways, and kind of trite, complete with fight scenes and ‘found family.’ I am not sure where I wanted this book to go, but it was not that way. But it was fun in any case.
Tag: USA
THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler
I gave up on this book, but I still enjoyed it. The 300 pages I did read were jam-packed with ideas. Basically it asks the horrifying question on what would happen if octopuses acquired our level of intelligence. This I consider a really big concern. Because let’s say dolphins did, or parrots, they don’t have opposable digits, so basically nbd. But octopi have four times our number of opposable digits! Its set in the far future, and is one of the few really believable far futures I’ve ever read. There’s a slave ship for scraping the last protein from the ocean, which has slaves on it because they are cheaper than robots, there’s a cyborg whose feelings are hurt because academics can’t agree if he is conscious or not, there’s customized hologram boyfriends, and that’s before the octopi get super intelligent.
There’s also a cool part about how our brain floats around in total dark, and our whole sense of the world comes from electrical impulses sent to it in its black chamber. I love this image.
WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley
Here is a book the author describes as being about: “four best friends who fuck around with The Moon and then very quickly Find Out about The Moon.” As you can maybe tell, it is a triumph of voice, and specifically GenZ voice.
The friends do a spell that pulls the moon from the sky.. The moon then comes to their house and wants answers. This plot, while wild, is really neither here not there. What matters is the vibe. Let me not talk about it, let me just quote extensively from the first page:
“Twitter is crumbling, fittingly, into a timeline of what is no longer called Tweets, now called Xs. Twitter is dead & so is nature, probably. Jen’s never having kids. That’s what Jen’s college application was about, framed through a lens of climate grief, ‘the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction or climate change.’ Jen’s college counselor thought grief was a very powerful world. She said Why say grief and not sadness & Jen said Sadness is local, grief is cosmic. Global heating. Universal heating, maybe, who knows. So Jen’s not having kids but she is going to Yale.”
I’ve never read a book quite like it. I can’t say I know what it was ‘about’ – my female friendship? I didn’t care about the characters or anything like that, but I don’t think that was the point.
VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin
I don’t know why this wonderful book is not more famous. I loved it. It tells about a woman trying to be an artist, and covers the terrible fear and dread of that activity better than anything I’ve ever read. Apparently there is a name for the coming-of-age novel of an artist, and it is kunstelrroman, and this is considered by some to be the first female one. (How do we feel about that this only happens in 1978?)
The book is written from the perspective of her early 30s, and covers her confidence as she graduates college (she won a college prize!), to the hard road of the next ten years, during which she has to do commercial illustration, and does less and less of her actual art. She has a LOT of casual sex (is this what the 70s was like? Does not seem hygenic), and suffers very much over how she is intentionally wasting her time and distracting herself from the fact that she is failing – not just in the world’s eyes, but in her own. She is interested in the dates of birth of famous artists, so she can calculate their age at the time of their first big success, and give herself hope that it is not too late for her.
Try this: “New York from across the river resumed the manageable proportions of a maquette, a harmless little table model on which I could project my dreams. It had looked like this when I rode the Carey bus into its center nin years ago from Newark. I still felt the old twinge when I looked at it now. I still wanted to leave my mark on it, even though it had left so many marks on me.”
Substitute London for New York, and I hear you Gail Goodwin, god I hear you. I see this author is still alive and was last published in 2020, so I am for sure going to read more.
GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
I don’t really read genre fiction, except for Emily Henry. She writes clever, fun rom-coms. I was excited for this new one to come out. But it wasn’t really for me. It is about two authors striving to be given the chance to write a celebrity’s memoir, and the main story is intercut with a summary of memoir’s plot. This means half the book is a summary of another, less good book? So I was underwhelmed, though the other half of the book was fun, standard, Emily Henry.
OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley
In this memoir we see what happens when selfish people get divorced. The book is by the son, who was nine when his parents split up. His father was immensely wealthy, and did a good job of making sure his mother (third wife) got very little. She responded with high drama, asking Sean (the son) to DOUBLE SUICIDE WITH HER, and then GUILITING HIM when he didn’t. You would think his weeks with his father could only be better than this, but the new wife, the step-mother, is Snow White levels of bad. As a small example, at the dinner table, she has herself, the dad, and her kids sit at one end, and then leaves some chairs before Sean’s chair on his own. There are much more, and much harsher rules for him, and she tells Sean a lot about how his father doesn’t love him.
Predictably, Sean explodes as an adolescent. He is clearly a loving person, and this book is as much about the friends who get him through it, as the parents who are the ‘it’. The book in my view was a little long – we could have lost 100 pages without trouble – but I still enjoyed it, and admired the author rising above his childhood so magnificently.
FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros
Here is a multi-million copy bestseller. It’s about school for dragon riders, kind of GAME OF THRONES meets HARRY POTTER, with some added TWILIGHT, and you can see where that got the publisher’s immediate greenlight, because let’s give the people what they want. I read a charming article with the author, Rebecca Yarros and learnt she is a military wife (and mother of six!) who’d written twenty or so contemporary romances that sold only middlingly well, before she hit on this mashup of high fantasy and romance, which has made her famous. Her mind is blown.
So I love the author, but I’m afraid this is not really my kind of book. I just can’t get passed how dumb it is. I think this is more a me-issue than the book’s issue though, and is all down to my being rigid and joyless. A better person would not be immensely bothered by the fact that the love interest’s name is ‘Xaden’! I mean: Xaden?!?. In any case, I did read the whole thing – it’s very more-ish, with lots of plot and twists and turns and will-they won’t-they – which I really admired. And I’m delighted for this lady’s success.
DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner
In this novel a woman scraps her wedding after falling in love with the best man. JUICY! Interestingly though, this exciting premise only takes up the first maybe 20% of the book. Then we follow the main characters – the ex-groom, the wife, the best man, through what turn out to be long and interconnected lives. It’s pretty sad at the end. This is not because they lead sad lives. It’s full of all the stuff lives are full of, children, jobs, crises, etc. It’s not even sad because at the end they are old, and deal with the stuff that comes if you are lucky enough to get old, dementia, cancer, etc. It’s more just a feeling of: so that was that. All that drama, changing husbands, breaking hearts, and you all end up at the same place in the end.
I really loved some of the descriptions. We’ve got a child “seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie;’ we’ve got chimpanzees “lounging around their enclosure like Romans after an orgy;” or this, on Haloween: “Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer. ”
Or this, from when the bride first meets the best man, Garrett:
“He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender. . . . Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time – what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk ‘a bit of a hard time’ generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction of both.”
LOL. Well done this author. This must have taken some serious work.
PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross
I had a lot of contradictory feelings about this lengthy book. On the one hand it was full of incident, covering a year in the life of a fourteen year old child actor, who is being groomed by a family friend, while his parents consider divorce. On the other hand it was kind of dull. And yet I read the whole thing. And I guess I’m happy I did, it was so detailed and fully realized, I feel like it was a kind of vacation in 1980s New York adolescence. Mostly it made me glad to be an adult in London in the 2020s.
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson
Here’s a piece of non-fiction about the 1893 World Fair in Chicago and the ‘Murder Hotel’ a serial killer set up to profit from it. Clearly anything called a Murder Hotel is going to be pretty interesting, but to my surprise the World Fair was even more so.
Paris had just had a spectacularly successful World Fair (for which the Eiffel Tower was built!), and Chicago was determined to better it. They only had 2-3 years to pull it off, and they had an unhinged level of ambition. As the organizer, Burnham said: “Make no little plans; they have no power to stir mens’ blood’ (which btw I have always found to be very good advice).
They built an entire display city, that used THREE TIMES the electricity of all of Chicago. For many people, it was the first electric lighted streets they’d ever seen. They also had a wild array of displays from all over the world, even sending an explorer out to Africa who was ‘confident he could acquire as many pygmies from the Congo as he wished’ (spoiler alert, he died of fever almost immediately because Africa does not play). They had new products – it’s where Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jack, and Shredded Wheat come from. And then they had what their competitor to the Eiffel tower – a structure designed by a young engineer called Ferris – which seemed so dangerous and insane it nearly did not get built at all.
The highest point of the Ferris Wheel was as high as the highest occupied floor in the highest skyscraper in the world; the axel alone at 142K pounds was the heaviest thing ever lifted into the air, and that was only the beginning of their problems. Ferris’ wife took the first ride in the wheel, to prove his confidence in it. The fair ended up being a huge success, with more people gathering in one place than ever before in the world in peacetime.
All these people were obviously a gold mine so lots of hotels were built to accommodate them. One of these was by this HH Holmes. Holmes did not like to pay his workers, so they would often walk off the job, which was good for him because it kept the costs down and because it meant no one really knew what he was building. Because what he was building was a murder hotel. Some of the rooms were airless, with gas jets he controlled in them. Some were soundproof. There was a chute from the top floor to the basement, and in the basement was a FURNACE. He was especially fond of killing young woman, of which there was a large supply, because girls were getting their first freedom and excited to come to the big city. He also managed to convince four different women to marry him (none survived). Estimates of how many he killed range from 50-200. He was eventually caught when he killed – for zero reason – the three children of one of his accomplices.
Who knew Chicago in 1893 was so interesting!