Wednesday is the Mind-Killer
Jan. 22nd, 2020 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones was fantastically good. I lost hours to it without even thinking. The characters are fifth-graders during a terrifying (real-life) run of unsolved child murders in Atlanta. Each of the three parts (one for each fifth-grade POV character) begins with carefully observed humor and ends in unbearable sadness. The author's ear for casual childhood cruelty and confusion is perfect. One likable oddity of the book is that there is a very minor character, a classmate, called Tayari Jones. Tayari Jones sniffs glue, turns in improbably complex posters too obviously made by her mother, and ruins a much-anticipated sleepover by telling her parents it wasn't going to be supervised -- definitely my favorite appearance by the author in a work of fiction in some time.
I guess Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King is my first disappointment of 2020. Salman Rushdie and Andrew Sean Greer both loved it, according to the back cover. I respect their opinion, but I did not. Not that it was terrible or anything. It was a story rooted in family legend and carefully researched. There's a beautiful photograph in the back of one of the women soldiers who inspired it, and a note in the acknowledgements thanking the real women who told the author about their families' experiences during Ethiopia's war with Italy. All that made me feel like kind of a heel for being bored out of my skull.
Why was I so bored? The characters, at least for me, didn't make the leap from beautifully written speculations about photographs to characters. They wore specific clothes and breathed in vivid local scents and terrible things were done to them while the book-voice entreated them to be strong, but it wasn't enough. Why not? I think part of the problem had to do with the pacing. This is a slow book with a lot of metaphors to share and it never stops taking its sweet time ambling thoughtfully from one gesture to the next. Every violent act gets wrapped up in five layers of lyricism and set adrift on a sea of universal sadness. I don't think that's definitely always a bad way to write a book, but it didn't work for me here -there were so many significant slow-mos and mid-torture flashbacks and dark milliseconds of the soul that it actually made the story hard to follow.
What I'm Reading Now
Dune, for the intermittent sci-fi book club. I like it even more now than I remembered liking it ten years ago. It has the cacklingest, most cartoonish Evil Gay villan you will ever meet, whose first line of dialogue literally contains the words, "I, Baron Harkonnen," so you'll know right away that he knows who he is and doesn't mind saying so. Honestly, all the characters are a little bit ready-made, but Frank Herbert's steal-everything worldbuilding is so rich that you (read: I) barely notice. Dune takes place in a far future where space travel is an economic and political necessity, but computers have all been destroyed in a holy war. Instead, special guilds of human beings are trained to perform complex calculations, with the help of a mysterious rare spice that works on the brain a little like coffee, a little like cocaine, and a little like something uniquely itself. As a sci-fi fan who doesn't always understand how machines work, I deeply appreciate Frank Herbert for deciding to imagine a spacefaring culture based on drugs, meditation, and the power of positive thinking.
I've also started The Vicar of Wakefield, thanks toosprey_archer and our mutual friend William Dean Howells. So far, I love it. The narrator (the Vicar in question) is more than a hair short of 100% self-aware, and that makes him both sympathetic and funny.
What I Plan to Read Next
I just ordered Don Quixote from the local booksellers, so I guess this is happening.
Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones was fantastically good. I lost hours to it without even thinking. The characters are fifth-graders during a terrifying (real-life) run of unsolved child murders in Atlanta. Each of the three parts (one for each fifth-grade POV character) begins with carefully observed humor and ends in unbearable sadness. The author's ear for casual childhood cruelty and confusion is perfect. One likable oddity of the book is that there is a very minor character, a classmate, called Tayari Jones. Tayari Jones sniffs glue, turns in improbably complex posters too obviously made by her mother, and ruins a much-anticipated sleepover by telling her parents it wasn't going to be supervised -- definitely my favorite appearance by the author in a work of fiction in some time.
I guess Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King is my first disappointment of 2020. Salman Rushdie and Andrew Sean Greer both loved it, according to the back cover. I respect their opinion, but I did not. Not that it was terrible or anything. It was a story rooted in family legend and carefully researched. There's a beautiful photograph in the back of one of the women soldiers who inspired it, and a note in the acknowledgements thanking the real women who told the author about their families' experiences during Ethiopia's war with Italy. All that made me feel like kind of a heel for being bored out of my skull.
Why was I so bored? The characters, at least for me, didn't make the leap from beautifully written speculations about photographs to characters. They wore specific clothes and breathed in vivid local scents and terrible things were done to them while the book-voice entreated them to be strong, but it wasn't enough. Why not? I think part of the problem had to do with the pacing. This is a slow book with a lot of metaphors to share and it never stops taking its sweet time ambling thoughtfully from one gesture to the next. Every violent act gets wrapped up in five layers of lyricism and set adrift on a sea of universal sadness. I don't think that's definitely always a bad way to write a book, but it didn't work for me here -there were so many significant slow-mos and mid-torture flashbacks and dark milliseconds of the soul that it actually made the story hard to follow.
What I'm Reading Now
Dune, for the intermittent sci-fi book club. I like it even more now than I remembered liking it ten years ago. It has the cacklingest, most cartoonish Evil Gay villan you will ever meet, whose first line of dialogue literally contains the words, "I, Baron Harkonnen," so you'll know right away that he knows who he is and doesn't mind saying so. Honestly, all the characters are a little bit ready-made, but Frank Herbert's steal-everything worldbuilding is so rich that you (read: I) barely notice. Dune takes place in a far future where space travel is an economic and political necessity, but computers have all been destroyed in a holy war. Instead, special guilds of human beings are trained to perform complex calculations, with the help of a mysterious rare spice that works on the brain a little like coffee, a little like cocaine, and a little like something uniquely itself. As a sci-fi fan who doesn't always understand how machines work, I deeply appreciate Frank Herbert for deciding to imagine a spacefaring culture based on drugs, meditation, and the power of positive thinking.
I've also started The Vicar of Wakefield, thanks to
osprey_archer and our mutual friend William Dean Howells. So far, I love it. The narrator (the Vicar in question) is more than a hair short of 100% self-aware, and that makes him both sympathetic and funny. What I Plan to Read Next
I just ordered Don Quixote from the local booksellers, so I guess this is happening.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 07:35 pm (UTC)I wonder if Tayari Jones really was in fifth grade when those Atlanta murders were going on. I remember them: I was a freshman in college. (Her self-insert sounds cute.)
I loved Dune when I read it in 8th grade--haven't really been back to revisit but it did make a strong impression. And I'm with you on a spacefaring culture based on drugs, meditation, and the power of positive thinking ;-)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:20 pm (UTC)Dune is extremely satisfying!
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Date: 2020-01-22 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-23 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-23 09:50 am (UTC):lol: I know I've said it before, but I do so love your reading posts. ♥
May there be few other disappointments to follow!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:27 pm (UTC)There will probably be a few more than last year, because I'm reading more at random and less out of the Burgess Faves Masterlist - but hopefully not too many more!
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Date: 2020-01-25 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 06:57 pm (UTC)But my favorite thing about the book was always the way it felt, the way atmosphere in that universe I was visiting, and I think that will probably remain.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 07:13 pm (UTC)Libertarians probably like the Fremen because they have "free" in the name and don't pay taxes - other than that, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say it's a preachy book. It might be, deep down, but worldbuilding covers a multitude of sins.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 07:31 pm (UTC)Yes, I'm much more willing to go along with the journey if it's intentional--and as you say, it's a thousand times better than all the dudes who just didn't bother to write female characters.
I'm glad to hear it's not preachy. I think it's definitely worth me checking out again.