There's a certain subgenre of history books that you can classify as Well Actually books - they involve an author taking a super fun, romanticized subThere's a certain subgenre of history books that you can classify as Well Actually books - they involve an author taking a super fun, romanticized subject and going, "well actually, the truth is much more depressing and much less fun." It's a blast and a half.
Cordingly is attempting to provide a general history of piracy, with chapters organized by different aspects of pirate life, rather than devoting each chapter to a different historical figure. The underlying goal of this book is to look at the realities of pirate life and try to figure out why they've endured as these romantic antihero figures of pop cultures, when actually the reality was much different.
With the book flitting from one subject to another and never spending a significant amount of time on one thing, readers will walk away from this book with a surface-level knowledge of a lot of different aspects of pirate life, but very little in-dept knowledge. If anything, I would say this is a good book to read if you're wondering what to read next - find out which historical figures featured here interested you the most, and then go find a different book about that specific person.
(For me, it was definitely Anne Bonny. What do you mean, she didn't get executed after her trial because she was pregnant but after that we have no idea what happened to her? How do we not know what happened?! If you know a good Anne Bonny source please let me know - what's written in Under the Black Flag CANNOT be the full story.)
This is a good introductory book for someone who wants a nice broad overview of the facts and fiction surrounding piracy, but it's very broad and remains a superficial history at best. ...more
The Queen of the Damned picks up right where The Vampire Lestat left off, with Lestat's concert getting crashed by Akasha, one of the two original vamThe Queen of the Damned picks up right where The Vampire Lestat left off, with Lestat's concert getting crashed by Akasha, one of the two original vampires (and she's not alone). The narrative goes deeper into Akasha's lore, and also introduces us to the Talamasca through one of its members. And best of all, we get the conclusion to the vampire origin story that was started in The Vampire Lestat and go alllllll the way back to the beginning to find out how vampires came into existence. And perhaps best of all, we get to revisit our pal Daniel Molloy from Interview with the Vampire and learn what he's been up to since his "novel" was published. He's, uh...been better.
The book only lost its momentum at the very end, when Akasha reveals her entire Evil Plot, because it's, in a word, stupid. To Anne Rice's credit, other characters point out how laughable bad her ideas are, and I'm pretty sure that the plan is supposed to be bonkers because Akasha has been in an atrophied state for centuries and her brain is toast. But it was still annoying having to read her I'm-going-to-take-over-the-world-and-here's-how monologues. Frankly I think she didn't even have a ton of faith in what she was saying.
(God, I cannot WAIT for the AMC show to tackle all the story lines in this book. It's going to get WEIRD and I need them to announce the Akasha casting yesterday)
Based on some other reviews I've read of the Vampire Chronicles series, the quality starts to dip after the third book, but honestly I think I'm going to continue with the series and see how far it takes me because I'm having so much fun....more
This is one of the Discworld installments where you can tell that Sir Terry sat down at his computer and said, "Let's have some fun with it!"
He's gettThis is one of the Discworld installments where you can tell that Sir Terry sat down at his computer and said, "Let's have some fun with it!"
He's getting a little loose with this one, in other words, and having fun with some good old Pratchett-style parody. Considering that this is a Death installment, and so far those have proved to be the Discworld books most likely to wreck me, it's kind of a relief that this one is so light. Plus, this functions as a kind-of sequel to Mort, and we get to meet Death's granddaughter! Her name is Susan.
Plus, all the music industry in-jokes are worth the price of admission alone, even if Pratchett's view on rock music does veer pretty hard into Get Off My Lawn territory. How can you say no to a book that features a band called We're Certainly Dwarfs?
(aka They Might Be Giants. Shut up, Pratchett's a genius.)...more
The 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa is one of the most enduring mysteries in the art world, purely because unlike, say, the Isabella Stewart Gardner heistThe 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa is one of the most enduring mysteries in the art world, purely because unlike, say, the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, this one was solved - a little over two years after disappeared, the painting was returned and the thief went to prison. But the simple fact that the painting did get recovered, and by the thief turning it in to authorities himself, has raised a million more questions, but at the top of everyone's list is the most simple one: did the thief return the real Mona Lisa, or did he swap it for a fake? Jonathan Santofler tries to give us an answer to this mystery by centering a story about the thief's direct descendant and his search to find the truth about his great-grandfather and the famous painting he stole.
It's such a cool setup, and what wrecks it almost immediately is how easy and obvious the entire investigation is. Our hero is Luke Perrone, whose family changed their last name from Peruggia to avoid association with the infamous Vincent Peruggia, and he's on his way to Italy because someone found his great-grandfather's prison journal, and Luke is going to read it and find out The Truth.
It's really just that simple. One of the most famous criminals of his time kept a prison journal which apparently no one else knew about? And luckily for Luke, the journal goes through the crime step by step, sparing no detail and naming all the names. Luke's "research" into his family history just means going to the research library and reading the journal. Luke, and it cannot be overstated, is dogshit at research. He doesn't look up a single other primary source about the theft, or indeed do any other reading about it at all aside from a handful of newspaper articles. He's Vincent Peruggia's great grandson, yet at no point does it occur to him to call up some family members and ask them for more information about the man. 1911 was not that long ago!
Oh, he also goes to the Louvre to view the Mona Lisa. This is another confounding element of Luke's character, because despite being merely an associate professor of art history, can apparently cold-call the fuckin' Louvre and get immediately connected to their curator of Renaissance art, and then schedule a private viewing of the Mona Lisa without so much as a professional reference.
Say what you will about Dan Brown, at least he took the time to establish that Robert Langdon is a world-famous symbologist. Luke Perrone is just a guy, and the level of access he's granted with no effort whatsoever is astounding and also so, so lazy on Santofler's part.
The whole book is lazy. There's almost no suspense whatsoever, and aside from a feeble bait-and-switch with the villain in the third act, all the characters basically step onstage and tell the reader, "Hello, I'm so-and-so and I'll be playing the villain tonight" or "Hello, I'm the love interest." The love interest is especially frustrating, first because her Secret Motivations are obvious pretty much from the jump, and also she acts like a character in a badly written thriller, always making vague statements about how she couldn't return Luke's calls because she was...away. Doing...something. Something he mustn't ask her about! Also, Luke frankly had a ton more chemistry with [redacted], and if Santofler had any guts he would have given those two a forbidden romance. (I mean, why on earth would you write a scene where Character A finds Character B wounded and takes them back to their apartment to bandage their wounds and NOT give that scene to the female love interest?!)
All in all, an incredibly frustrating dud of an adventure novel. I kept hoping until the very end that there would be some twist to redeem it, that it would turn out that Santofler was playing me like a fiddle the whole time and nothing was ever as obvious as he made it seem.
I don't know, maybe the ending will do it for you. It certainly didn't make it worth it for me. ...more
This is one of those Gamechanger books within the Discworld series, where Terry Pratchett moves the needle a little bit by introducing a new aspect ofThis is one of those Gamechanger books within the Discworld series, where Terry Pratchett moves the needle a little bit by introducing a new aspect of the Disc, or a new piece of lore, or in this case, new technology. One of the joys of reading Discworld in chronological order is seeing how the world of the Disc slowly moves from a classic pseudo-medieval fantasy setting into its own industrial revolution, and Men at Arms is a major one in terms of upping the stakes: in this one, guns are introduced to the Disc.
It's going to be really interesting to see how this new technology affects the rest of the series, and I'm especially excited to finally get to Monstrous Regiment, which was technically the first Discworld book I tried before realizing that I needed to go back and start with Book 1.
Also, the City Watch books are just so much fun. In additional to Corporal Carrot (we love you, Carrot!) and Captain Vimes (who is trying and failing to retire) we get some fun new additions to the watch, who are trying to recruit more men into their ranks. They get new recruits, all right, but none of them are men. Hijinks ensue....more
I'm shelving this under "detective fiction" because this is, by all definitions, a straightforward murder mystery, and plenty of page space is devotedI'm shelving this under "detective fiction" because this is, by all definitions, a straightforward murder mystery, and plenty of page space is devoted to the investigation. But those considering this book should bear in mind that this is an Elin Hilderbrand joint first and foremost, which means that our author is going to be much more comfortable in her usual wheelhouse of lavish beach houses, idyllic scenery, mouth-watering meals, and men named Tag.
To Hilderbrand's credit, this is a perfectly serviceable mystery setup: on the morning of thee wedding of the Nantucket season, a bridesmaid is found dead in the ocean outside the venue. The bride was the one to find her, and also the best man is missing.
Hilderbrand does a good job of making sure every major character has a *mostly* plausible motive for murder, and everyone's various timelines and alibis on the days leading up to the murder are convoluted enough to keep you interested. But the story suffers from two major flaws:
The first is that in order to make certain twists work, our heroine Celeste has to be staggeringly passive and sheltered, to the point where she often seems less like a modern day woman in her late twenties and more like a teenage girl raised in an 18th-century convent. Run by mice.
She's tough to root for, is what I'm saying, and I know that I was supposed to be cheering her along and hoping she gets the courage to take control of her own life - and I did, to some extent - but mostly I just kept wishing someone would shove her into a puddle.
(Here's where I admit my own bias and confess that Celeste lost me as soon as we get to her meet-cute with the groom, which happens when Celeste - the director of the Brooklyn Zoo, because that makes sense - is giving a tour of the reptile house and taps on the glass of a cobra's enclosure to get it to stand up and flare its hood out. If you've spent more than ten minutes in any decent zoo in the last ten years you know that this is super shitty behavior and a fucking zoo director would know better. Also Celeste uses the term "poisonous snakes." They're not poisonous, Celeste, they're venomous, and you should be fired.)
Hilderbrand is also handicapped by her own format, because the gimmick of the book is that the investigation takes place over a continuous 24-hour period, with breaks in the narrative for flashbacks that show all the events leading to the murder. Cool, but unfortunately real-life murder investigations take months, and Hilderbrand doesn't have that kind of time. No spoilers, but the way the cops absolutely botch the investigation is straight-up embarrassing.
Look, it's fine. The characters are fun and their various motives are appropriately bonkers, and almost nobody behaves like a normal human being. If you're a detective novel fan already, there isn't going to be anything here you haven't seen a dozen times before, but this is a fun, easy-breezy read with lots of great atmosphere and decent plotting. ...more
About a decade after first reading Interview With the Vampire, I decided to pick up the series again thanks to the AMC adaptation and wanting to get cAbout a decade after first reading Interview With the Vampire, I decided to pick up the series again thanks to the AMC adaptation and wanting to get caught up on future plot lines (guys, the show is seriously so good).
The Vampire Lestat picks up in 1984, almost a decade after Louis du Point du Lac's infamous interview and the explosive book that followed. This book is supposed to be Lestat's own memoir, written with the intention of clearing up everything that Louis got wrong.
(Well, not really - the events of Interview With the Vampire are barely touched on, so no, this is not the same story told from a different character's perspective. And honestly, thank god)
Also, in 1984 Lestat is living in disguise as a human, and is the world-famous frontman of a glam-rock band, where he "pretends" to be a vampire as part of his stage persona.
A warning to anyone considering reading this based just on that description alone: this is not a story about Rockstar Lestat. This is Lestat's origin story, going back to 18th century France when he was turned - there's very little of the "modern day" scenes, but ultimately this didn't bother me, because Lestat's story is so good. On top of that, he's also a fantastic narrator, like when he tells the reader that another character could be "gorgeous, if someone stuck her under a waterfall and held her there for half an hour." Another time, another vampire tells Lestat that Satan will strike him down for his heresy, and Lestat replies, "You keep saying that! And it keeps not happening, as we can all see!" Honestly, Whiny Louis could never.
Plus, Lestat's view on modern life are worth the price of admission alone. Do you want to know what Lestat thinks of 1980's pop culture? You're in luck.
"In the amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room, I watched on the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was, and it sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. 'You must make a friend of horror and mortal terror,' says the mad commander in the savage garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers as he has always answered: No.
No. Horror and moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no real place.
And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place.
Except, perhaps, in the art that repudiates evil - the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales - or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself."
This book also has Lestat, and the reader, starting to learn about the origins of vampires themselves, and as Lestat considers the long history of his own kind, he's also facing down the prospect of living for eternity, and how to survive that. With The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice is expanding on some of the ideas she discussed in Interview With the Vampire, and making her characters really consider what it means to be immortal, and whether or not they have the mental strength to endure it.
"Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, 'Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,' things like that to each other? It was a rather detached and intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. But it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn't it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.
I'd know that all my life. It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to heaven and my mother might go to hell and that I should hate her. I couldn't hate her. And what if we were in hell together?
Well, now I know, whether I believed in hell or not, that vampires can love each other, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love. Or so it seemed for that brief instant. But don't start crying again. I can't abide all this crying."...more
I still can't believe that I was even in the right headspace to read this, considering that this is a novel about the collapse of society after FUCK.
I still can't believe that I was even in the right headspace to read this, considering that this is a novel about the collapse of society after a flu-like pandemic ravages the United States and wipes out enough of the population that all infrastructure falls apart. Like...I knew going into this that this was not going to be a comfort read, yet it ended up being simultaneously the most devastating and hopeful thing I've ever read.
The book opens the night before the pandemic begins in earnest: during a performance of King Lear, the actor playing Lear has a heart attack and dies on stage. Following his death, the story tracks the actions of the actor's ex-wives, his best friend, the man in the audience who tried to save him, and a little girl in the play. We see how each of these people reacted in the initial days of the pandemic, and then how they're surviving fifteen years later.
The crucial element that keeps this from being a depressing slog is that St. John Mandel doesn't spend a lot of time in the brutal, desperate year right after the pandemic hit. The majority of the action takes place fifteen years later, when things are still desperate and difficult, but overall have mellowed out just enough.
Brutality lurks at the edges of this story, making its presence known and reminding us of the stakes, but it stays outside the main narrative. There are ominous references to "ferals" living outside the established communities that have sprouted in the aftermath of ruined cities, and the adult version of the little girl from Macbeth has killed two people and doesn't remember how she got the huge scar on her face. St. John Mandel trusts her audience enough to know that we'll be able to read between the lines and understand how dangerous this world is, without needing to throw in a rape scene for shock factor.
It's not an accident that our main characters post-apocalypse are members of a traveling theater troupe. In the middle of all the death and devastation and harshness of this new world, there are still people making art, and there are communities, and people protect each other. We keep going. It'll be different, and it'll be harsh, and not everyone will have good intentions. But humanity keeps going, despite everything. ...more
"Paul consulted his memory of the vision: in it, he'd left here with the names of the traitors, but never seeing how those names were carried. The dwa"Paul consulted his memory of the vision: in it, he'd left here with the names of the traitors, but never seeing how those names were carried. The dwarf obviously moved under the protection of another oracle. It occurred to Paul then that all creatures must carry some kind of destiny stamped out by purpose of varying strengths, by the fixation of training and disposition. From the moment the Jihad had chosen him, he'd felt hemmed in by the forces of a multitude. Their fixed purpose demanded and controlled his course. Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it!"
Oh yeah. Book 2 of the Dune series and Frank Herbert is starting to get freaky with it. Strap in.
Dune Messiah picks up fifteen years after the end of the previous book. Paul is the all-powerful emperor, with a literal cult following and unchecked power. As an added bonus, his gift of prescience is now so strong that he knows exactly what his future holds, and because he's unable to change it, goes through the motions of his life like an actor following a script.
So the scope of this novel, which covers topics like destiny and fanaticism and the lie of the Messiah myth, is also a very small-scale human drama: the core of this novel, when you really peel back the layers, is about Paul and Chani and Irulian and Alia. This is a family soap that affects the destiny of a galaxy, and the way Herbert balances the small and large scale dramas is incredible to watch.
Also, it cannot be overstated, this book is so goddamn weird. To give any more details would be giving away spoilers, but rest assured that Frank Herbert is operating on a whole other level. I can't wait to see where he takes things next. ...more
"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experi"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
-from 'Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib' by the Princess Irulan"
Part of me wishes I had read this series before seeing the Villeneuve movies, because I think the way they've adapted this story for film is fascinating and so, so well done, and it would have been cool to watch the movies and have a full appreciation of how they changed the story to fit a movie format. (On the other hand - I went into the first Dune movie knowing almost nothing about the books and I never felt lost for a second, which tells you what a good job they did)
But I can also appreciate that I had a kind of primer before starting this. Paul's prophetic visions also bleed into the narrative style of the book, and you can see Herbert frequently hinting at characters or scenes that will become important much father down the line (for example - one of the early excerpts from an in-world novel is from "St. Alia of the Knife", and we don't learn who that is until much later in the book). This is a story that is just slightly unmoored in its own timeline, and having seen the movie helped keep me grounded in the narrative.
But movie adaptation aside, this is just a rock-solid fantasy epic that is also so, so fucking cool. Herbert does atmosphere like nobody's business, and his characters are so well done that I didn't even realize how much of this story is just different peoples' inner thoughts until another reviewer pointed out.
Also, the writing is...incredible? Frank Herbert has a way of turning a phrase that is just incredible to witness, and I just wish I had marked more passages to quote. I did manage to get this one, from the arena scene with Feyd-Rautha:
"'You!' the man moaned. Feyd-Rautha drew back to give death its space. The paralyzing drug in the poison had yet to take full effect, but the man's slowness told of its advance. The slave staggered forward as though drawn by a string - one dragging step at a time. Each step was the only step in his universe. He still clutched his knife, but its point wavered."
"Did Jann Wenner embody the vices or virtues of his generation? Certainly the rock-and-roll hymnbook of the 1960s had promised something else. At one "Did Jann Wenner embody the vices or virtues of his generation? Certainly the rock-and-roll hymnbook of the 1960s had promised something else. At one time, holding Rolling Stone was like holding a piece of hot shrapnel from the cultural explosion of the 1960s while it still glowed with feeling and meaning. An entire identity was coiled inside. Rick Griffin's logo, the promise of never-ending provocation, never-ending progress. The rock-and-roll story lit the way. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. But those visions had morphed into the Me Decade, and the Me Decade had turned into Me Decades, and finally the falcon could no longer hear the falconer, not even in the pages of Rolling Stone.
Well, it was just a story. A long, fine flash. This one began with John Lennon and ended with Donald Trump."
The best biographies approach their subjects with a clear-eyed and unbiased view, and don't shy away from the more unsavory elements of the people they're covering. Sticky Fingers excels as a rock-and-roll history because it acknowledges that, while Jann Wenner had a unique and brilliant vision for his historic magazine that tapped directly into the feeling of the 1960s, he was a complicated person who ultimately couldn't keep up with the times.
One thing I appreciated the most about this biography is how Hagan never makes any attempt to convince us that Jann Wenner is some kind of brilliant music critic. He is, in fact, the exact opposite of a critic: Jann Wenner is a fanboy and a starfucker, and the creation of Rolling Stone was really just in service of his ultimate goal, which was to become friends with as many celebrities as possible. He wasn't a critic, and he definitely wasn't a writer, but he at least could recognize talent in others, and hired accordingly.
"Wenner reportedly said that he started Rolling Stone to meet John Lennon. But it was just as true that he wanted to be John Lennon - as famous, as important, as talented in his sphere. After all, the best and the brightest of the baby-boom generation (a term not yet in common use in 1967) weren't necessarily going to Harvard or Yale anymore. They were dropping out and inventing a new generational order with the Beatles as their soundtrack. This was Jann Wenner's story line."
It's wild to read this book and realized that the tastemaker of the 7o's was just some guy who wanted to meet famous people. An artist's success back in those days lived or died by what was written about them in Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone in its heyday was based almost solely on Jann Wenner's personal tastes. And he, uh, had some biases, to say the least. (In fact, I learned about Jann Wenner thanks to a now-infamous interview he gave recently, where he said that the reason Rolling Stone didn't cover more black musicians is because they just weren't as talented. Again, this was the guy who was calling the shots about what people listened to for decades).
"Rolling Stone was corrupt until it wasn't, imperfect until it was. But after 1978, it was never again an experiment in American publishing, a thing that burned strictly to the rhythms of Jann Wenner's fascinations. ...'My god, we could have ruled the world,' said Peter Gambaccini. 'But Jann wasn't into ruling the world; he was into ruling his world.'"
Come for the detailed and fascinating history of music in the 1960's and 70's (including plenty of cameos from rock legends across the decades), stay for the well-researched and ruthless portrayal of a man who almost singularly defined pop culture for decades, and who couldn't maintain his grasp. ...more
This is How You Lose the Time War is less of a novel and more of a series of episodic scenes. Our main characters are Red and BlIt was fine, I guess?
This is How You Lose the Time War is less of a novel and more of a series of episodic scenes. Our main characters are Red and Blue, two people (?) on opposite sides of a war where operatives travel back and forth in time, going to different "braids" and making or unmaking events that will effect the war the final battle that's coming. In the midst of all of this, Red and Blue are making their own moves, tracing each other's movements across time and leaving letters for the other to find. And of course, they're also being traced.
The prose is fantastic, although the letters specifically get a little too flowery at times (Blue even catches herself in one of the letters, admitting that her prose is getting too purple so she should end the letter. Baby, it's been purple this whole time!). Red and Blue, despite having almost no concrete character traits or descriptions, manage to seem like fully fleshed out characters, and their voices are distinct enough that the letters don't become monotonous.
I dunno, though. I think ultimately what made this just a three-star for me was how brief it was. I'm not saying I wanted a thousand-page epic, but at about 1/3 of the way into the book I found myself thinking, okay, I get what we're doing here, they're writing letters to each other and falling in love, now something else needs to happen. Something eventually does happen, but then the book is over shortly afterwards.
This is also very clearly a short story that was stretched into a novel via clever formatting - it's double-spaced and has wiiiiiiide margins, like a college essay written at the last minute that needs to hit its page count. The book felt more like a fun writing exercise between two authors. Cool experiment, but ultimately I finished it feeling like there hadn't been enough there. ...more
Obviously, I should never have doubted Abdurraqib's incredible talent and ability to make me cry over things I never would have imagined getting emotional about. I will admit that some knowledge of NBA history definitely helps during certain sections of this book, but rest assured, this is about a lot more than basketball. Among other things, this collection of interconnected essays is a kind of love letter to Abdurraqib's home state of Ohio, and in a larger sense, a gentle rebuttal to the idea that success means leaving the place where you grew up. (Oh, to be a fly on the wall and see what happens every time someone has ever suggested to Hanif Abdurraqib that he should really move to New York or LA).
There are a dozen excerpts that I wanted to quote, but this was the first lengthy passage I marked:
"Three days after Christmas in 2002, a white pair of kicks, clean enough to still be worn, swings from the telephone lines a few blocks outside of Value City Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Jordan 7s. White and blue. The pair that had just dropped two weeks earlier. If one looks long enough, the thin wires blend into the dark sky and the shoes emerge as though they are swinging from nothing, ornaments at the mercy of the clouds. There are a greater number of older white people than usual in this neighborhood today, a cluster of them walking ahead of of me, nervously trying to make sense out of the mythology of the sneakers swinging from phone lines, rattling through rumors they'd heard from their kids or things they'd read on the corners of the still-young internet. Drugs, they decided. People sell drugs here. ...I didn't know the kid who was shot a few blocks south of here on Christmas Eve. I knew he was younger than me, and he could hoop. I'd seen him at the park in my old neighborhood once or twice. Quick first step, never passed but could get to the rim anytime he wanted. The bullet that hit him wasn't meant for him, but the bullet doesn't apologize and isn't especially discerning. The bullet only knows what is in front of it. I don't trust people who don't love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud."...more
"Vera said: 'Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?' So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if"Vera said: 'Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?' So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it."
I won't shelve this under "memoir" because this is, technically, fiction - but as everyone knows, Heartburn is a very (very) thinly veiled story about Nora Ephron's divorce from journalist Carl Bernstein. I only know the most basic cliff notes of that scandal, and it's been probably fifteen years since I saw When Harry Met Sally (which meant I couldn't identify the lines from this novel that were recycled for the movie script), so I was able to approach this as a novel without getting bogged down in figuring out which character was a stand-in for which real person.
This is a light, brief novel about the end of a marriage, and although the subject is, by nature, extremely tragic (the Ephron stand-in, Rachel, finds out her husband is having an affair when she's seven months pregnant) Ephron's narrative voice and sharp one-liners keep the book from getting too depressing. Plus, Rachel's character is a food writer, which means the novel is sprinkled with recipes that, apparently, will actually work (even though most of them are just brief paragraphs or even a few lines that read like they were dashed off quickly before Ephron could forget them).
It also helps that Rachel as a character is, honestly, kind of a pill - although she is very much the wronged party in the divorce, she's far from perfect, and her very human flaws meant that although I sympathized with her and understood her point of view, I also recognized that nobody in this story is the hero.
Her shitty ex-husband is definitely the villain, though....more
"They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had s"They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. Packed so tightly onboard that they could barely move, they traveled through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles - one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. ...Six months later, another boat washed ashore, this one landing in a blizzard off the southwestern coast of Chile."
This is one of those stories that has to be read to be believed. In 1740, the ship the Wager left England on a mission to intercept a Spanish treasure galleon. The ship, under the charge of a rookie captain, was trying to make the notoriously dangerous crossing around Cape Horn when it hit a storm and wrecked on a tiny deserted island. Two years later, a group of survivors made it to the coast of Brazil, and they were hailed as heroes who had overcome starvation and miraculously fought their way off the island and back to civilization. But a few months later, another boat of survivors showed up, and their version of events was even wilder: the first group of survivors were mutineers who had rebelled against their captain and deserted their fellow crewmen. The other group responded with their own charges, claiming that the captain's mistakes were the reason the ship wrecked in the first place, and that while stranded on the island, he had murdered a crewman.
This book is, obviously, not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. Like all accounts featuring starvation, the descriptions of what the sailors went through as they tried to survive on the island are visceral and vivid and disturbing, and the whole account is so unrelentingly hopeless and sad that it's sometimes overwhelming. There are no heroes in this book - all anyone can do is cling to life by their fingernails, and every single man who made it back civilization had to do horrifying things to make it there.
But what makes this book fascinating is how David Grann is telling us the story of the Wager and using it as an example of the ultimate hubris and stupidity of colonialism. The whole reason the British were sending warships after Spanish galleons was ultimately just a pissing contest between the two nations, and Britain's view of South America as a savage nation just waiting to be liberated from their own barbarism directly contributed to the Wager disaster - one of the most frustrating parts of this story comes when a group of locals show up at the island (sidebar: at this time, there was a Patagonian tribe that lived on canoes, to the extent where they would have shelters and lit fires onboard, and it was so cool) and try to help the survivors. This was a chance for the men to actually get off the island, or at the very least, learn some actual survival skills from people who had been living in these inhospitable conditions for generations. But what happened? Some of the sailors tried to rape the native women, and all the locals were like, lol fuck you guys then, and packed up their canoes and left. The mindset of the British sailors were actually incapable of believing that these "savages" could have anything to teach them, and this arrogance resulted in the preventable deaths of dozens.
I'll admit that I didn't love the ending of the book, because it felt extremely rushed - after chapters and chapters of reading about men sitting around a deserted island trying not to die, once the survivors make it back to England everything starts to move very fast, and you kind of get whiplash from it. Once England realized that there were two groups of survivors with conflicting narratives, the government decided that someone needed to be blamed for the Wager sinking, so they held a trial to determine who was at fault. Gann essentially speed-runs the trial, to the point where he's wrapping it up almost as soon as it starts, and who knows, maybe he was doing us a favor by not spending a lot of time on it, but it felt like he was suddenly in a hurry to be done with the book....more
Amina al-Sirafi was once one of the most notorious pirates of the 12th century, but is now retired and living in mostly-happy obscurity with her familAmina al-Sirafi was once one of the most notorious pirates of the 12th century, but is now retired and living in mostly-happy obscurity with her family. *movie trailer voice*
Until one day...she's pulled back in for one last job.
This story had such a great setup - badass former pirate has to bring her crew back together for one last job, and goes on an adventure full of sea monsters, magic, backstabbing, and lots of be-gay-do-crimes fun for the whole family.
I loved the pirate angle, I loved the 12th century Middle Eastern setting, I loved the characters (even though Chakraborty does fall a little too frequently into the trap of annoyingly quippy dialogue)...but ultimately, this one never fully got off the ground, and I finished it feeling mostly let down.
The pacing is what really killed this novel for me. The adventure should move smoothly and gradually pick up speed as we get closer to the climax; instead, it lurches unevenly along, often slowing down or jerking to a complete stop just when we want Chakraborty to step on the gas. After the first big villain confrontation, Amina gets separated from her crew (and the plot) and has to spend entire chapters trying to get back to the main story. Without getting too spoiler-y, basically she's trapped on a magic island, and then a character is like, "there's a way you can leave, we just have to talk to the council first!" And all I could think was, no, I don't want to go talk to the council, I want to get back to the story, we are wasting time. It's extra frustrating because the whole Amina-talks-to-the-council nonsense was only so that Chakraborty could clumsily set up the sequels.
It can't be the book it wants to be. The jail break scene isn't clever enough, the battle sequences aren't cool enough, and Amina isn't the badass that Chakraborty tries to make her out to be. Amina is one of the protagonists who is constantly surrounded by characters who keep insisting to the reader that she's such a badass, she's so ruthless, she's so scary...and this absolves the protagonist from actually have to do anything ruthless or scary. There's no way around it: Amina al-Sirafi is nice, despite how hard Chakraborty tries to tell us otherwise, and it takes all the wind out of the book's sails.
This novel could and should have been a standalone, not the first in a sequel. As I said, the justification for next few books in the series is clumsy and is also spelled out so clearly that it made me even less interested in reading them, because Chakraborty basically lays out her plan for the next few books right in front of us, as if that's going to make us care. Also, the title The Last Adventure of Amina al-Sirafi was RIGHT THERE. Come on, Shannon!
Oh, speaking of which...I don't want to get too bogged down in this, but I feel like every review of this book should clarify that "SA Chakraborty" is a white woman. That's the name that Goodreads attaches to this book, but my edition has "Shannon Chakraborty" on the title page, so going by only your initial and your Middle-Eastern married name to sell your novel about a Middle Eastern protagonist is...a choice, that's all I'm going to say.
Look, like I said, I don't want to get bogged down in the ethics of this move, and I also think it's always dangerous territory when someone starts talking about how "so-and-so isn't allowed to write about this topic", but on the other hand, there's something very Yellowface about being a white woman who writes a book set in the Middle East, with a Middle Eastern protagonist and almost exclusively POC characters, and then publishing that book using a name that will lead readers to believe you are also a POC. Like, it's not deliberately lying, but considering that there's been such a huge push in the past few years to support non-Eurocentric fantasy written by POC, and people may have purchased Amina al-Sirafi thinking they were supporting one of these authors...I dunno. It feels gross. ...more
Around the fourth or fifth time I caught myself thinking, “Harriet, either get back together or cut him out of your life completely, just please pick Around the fourth or fifth time I caught myself thinking, “Harriet, either get back together or cut him out of your life completely, just please pick one so we can move on” I realized that this is perhaps not the book for me....more
Honestly, this one's on me. I know I don't like Ruth Ware's thrillers, so why did I read this? Because I needed something to read on the train to workHonestly, this one's on me. I know I don't like Ruth Ware's thrillers, so why did I read this? Because I needed something to read on the train to work and this was the first thing I saw on the "available now" section of my library's e-book section.
The plot of this book feels like someone got a bot to create a word cloud of the most popular BookTok terms ("dark academia", "true crime", "rich kids", "Oxford", etc) and then tried to make a story around them. Unsurprisingly, this is a poor strategy. ...more
I had read one other Grady Hendrix book before this (The Final Girl Support Group) and was mostly underwhelmed by it, but I saw that How to Sell a HauI had read one other Grady Hendrix book before this (The Final Girl Support Group) and was mostly underwhelmed by it, but I saw that How to Sell a Haunted House was getting consistently good reviews, so I decided to give Hendrix another shot.
This is a book that makes no pretensions about what it's trying to be. Sure, you could make an argument that it's an exploration of grief and what it's like to lose a parent, and the specific struggle of being an adult grappling with the aftermath of your parents' death and all the complications that come with that; and it's also a good exploration of childhood trauma and the imperfections of memory.
But this is first and foremost, and I cannot stress this enough, a book about an evil puppet.
Hendrix lays the foundation early, when we meet our protagonist Louise on her way home to Charleston after the sudden death of both parents in a car accident. Lest we think that this is just a random tragic accident to get the story moving, Hendrix drops some truly creepy details around their deaths - Louise's parents appeared to have left the house in a hurry, leaving behind her dad's cane. There's a hammer abandoned in the living room, and the attic door is nailed shut. This story is, on surface, about Louise trying to sell her parents' house, but learning quickly that the house doesn't want to be sold.
It's a great premise, and there are so many moments and setpieces in this book that are downright bone-chilling - Hendrix excels at creating a creepy and deeply unsettling atmosphere, and when he gets this haunted house story off the ground, he cranks things to eleven over and over.
But it's also frustratingly uneven: about halfway through the book, Louise leaves Charleston to fly back home to her daughter, and the momentum Hendrix had been slowly building up over the previous pages grinds to a screeching halt. This story has at least three separate climaxes, and it reads less like Hendrix continuously upping the ante on the previous confrontation and more like he couldn't decide which ending he liked best and just decided to use all of them. The novel often reads more like it was originally a screenplay that Hendrix couldn't sell so he decided to turn it into a book, and you can see the stitches on the uneven patch job he did.
It's a fun, scary ride (again: evil puppet) and I would definitely recommend this over The Final Girl Support Group, but How to Sell a Haunted House never manages to fully reach the heights it's striving for. ...more
The first disappointment I had with this memoir was how short it is. I remember picking it up from the library (after a two-month wait list, thank youThe first disappointment I had with this memoir was how short it is. I remember picking it up from the library (after a two-month wait list, thank you very much!) and feeling an immediate sense of deflation when I saw how thin it was. Now, having read the entire thing, I can actually appreciate how brief it is and why it's actually a good thing we didn't get a 500-page brick (we'll get there), but it was still kind of a letdown to dive in knowing that we were here for a good time, not a long time.
This book starts out slow, as Spears takes us through her rocky childhood and early days as a child in show business (I said it in my review of I'm Glad My Mom Died and I'll say it again: all stage parents should be in prison), and this was the point where I started to get frustrated with Spears. I genuinely believe that she didn't use a ghostwriter and this memoir is 100% her words, and I do not mean that as a compliment. Her narrative voice is lifeless and monotone as she describes her ascent to super-stardom, and the first half of this book is a just a dull litany of "and then I got signed to this record label. Then we went to the studio and recorded 'Hit Me Baby One More Time.'" I found myself wishing that Spears had been able to do a better job of making the reader feel like they were experiencing these things alongside her - I was constantly saying to the pages, "But what was that like, Britney? Stop just telling me that stuff happened and describe it!"
This excerpt gives you an idea of the kind of writer Spears is, and I think it perfectly illustrates what I found so frustrating about the memoir:
"To get my confidence back, in September 2002 I went to Milan to visit Donatella Versace. That trip invigorated me - it reminded me that there was still fun to be had in the world. We drank amazing wine and ate amazing food. Donatella was a dynamic host. I was hoping things would turn around a little bit from that point. She had invited me to Italy to attend one of her runway shows. Donatella dressed me in a beautiful sparkly rainbow dress. I was supposed to sing but I really didn't feel like it, so after I did a little bit of posing, Donatella said we could take it easy. She played my cover of Joan Jett's 'I Love Rock n' Roll,' I said hi to the models, and we were done."
Thrilling.
But then, shortly after this excerpt, Spears meets and marries Kevin Federline, and her life becomes a living hell.
Once Spears is placed under a conservatorship and finds every aspect of her life and her finances controlled by her abusive, alcoholic, absentee father, this memoir turns into a Gothic horror novel. What happened to Britney Spears during the thirteen-year period when she was under her father's control is nothing short of criminal. Her father should be in prison. Kevin Federline should be in hell. (And don't think we forgot about you, Justin - eat shit and die, you sad, pathetic little man)
This was the point in the book that I realized it was actually a blessing that it wasn't longer. The things Britney Spears was forced to endure during her conservatorship - including financial abuse, separation from her children, and being institutionalized against her will - are almost too much for the reader to bear, and it's almost a kindness that Spears doesn't get into all the gory details of her years of abuse. And maybe this also explains why the first half of the memoir is so vague and unsatisfying: Spears only recently regained control of her own life, and is still doing the work of healing from decades of trauma. It's entirely possible that the reason the early years of her career are presented in a kind of fog is because that's actually how Spears remembers them - any emotional insight from this period is lost in a haze of trauma.
By itself, this is not a good memoir, but it's important to view it in the larger context of everything Britney Spears has endured: she's a free woman after over a decade of virtual (and sometimes literal) imprisonment, and the trauma is too recent and too raw for her to be able to give a coherent or satisfying account of her own life. The fact that this memoir was written at all is a miracle in itself. ...more