Once upon a time on the Disc, the eight son of an eight son (eighth sons all become wizards, because magic on the Disc follows the rule of eights) hadOnce upon a time on the Disc, the eight son of an eight son (eighth sons all become wizards, because magic on the Disc follows the rule of eights) had seven sons. And then he had another son, who was destined to be the most powerful wizard of his time: a source of magic. A sourceror, if you will. He was guided by his magic staff, which, naturally, was possessed by the spirit of his dead father.
This book is not about the sourcerer. Terry Prachett only bothers to keep us updated on the movements of the sourcerer (a boy called Coin) when there's no other way around it. This is a book about Rincewind the wizard, which means that our protagonist spends the majority of his time hiding, if not actively running away, from the plot of his own book. For anyone reading this book with no prior knowledge of Discworld, this will make him a confusing and frustrating protagonist. If, however, you're like me and adore him with all your heart, you will be delighted.
Honestly though, how can you not be delighted by a hero who's faced with a blatant Call To Adventure and reacts like this:
"A thing with a goblin's face, harpy's body and hen's legs turned its head in a series of little jerks and spoke in a voice like the peristalsis of mountains (although the deep resonant effect was rather spoiled because, of course, it couldn't close its mouth). It said: 'A Ourceror is umming! Eee orr ife!' Rincewind said "Pardon?" But the thing had gone past and was lurching awkwardly across the ancient lawn. So Rincewind sat and stared blankly at nothing much for fully ten seconds before giving a little scream and running as fast as he could."
The whole book is endlessly quotable, honestly, and also I'm kind of at a loss to describe the plot in any more detail, so here are some more quotes I bookmarked while I was reading:
"This happens to everyone sooner or later. For example, in a tavern someone jogs your elbow and you turn around quickly and give a mouthful of abuse to, you become slowly aware, the belt buckle of a man who, it turns out, was probably hewn rather than born. ...In other words, it's the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek."
"'I can't hear anything,' said Nijel loudlly. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say 'don't look now,' would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn around aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash. Anyway."...more
I learned about Jake Adelstein's existence through, of all things, Tumblr. There was a post going around about the time that actual Yakuza gangsters sI learned about Jake Adelstein's existence through, of all things, Tumblr. There was a post going around about the time that actual Yakuza gangsters sat down and reviewed a line of Yakuza-themed video games, and gave the rundown of what was realistic and what wasn't. The reporter who gathered this group of criminals and sat them down with a Playstation and some whiskey? Jake Adelstein, who, it turns out, has been working the crime beat in Tokyo since the late 90's and has cultivated professional relationships with a wide variety of characters from Japan's criminal underworld. (here's a very brief blurb from The Atlantic about the experiment)
So his book has been floating around in my mental "to-read" list for a while, and what finally made me decide to get the book from the library was finishing (and thoroughly disliking) Lost Girls and Love Hotels. I still had a "seedy Tokyo underbelly stories" itch to scratch, and it seemed like Adelstein's book would do the trick.
Jake Adelstein started working as a crime reporter in Tokyo right out of college, and quickly learned that in order to do his job, he would need to establish a few close professional contacts within the Tokyo police force, who would then provide scoops on various criminal investigations. Tokyo Vice follows the trajectory of Adelstein's career as he learns how to locate and charm sources, suss out information, and investigate various criminal operations without getting brutally murdered.
I have this book shelved under "essays" because that most accurately describes the format of this book: disconnected stories from Adelstein's decades-long reporting career, most of them having little to do with each other. The book doesn't really gain focus until Adelstein does - later in his career, he decided that he was going to focus specifically on investigating sex trafficking in Japan, an obsession that ended up getting him a job directly assisting the FBI with their investigations of various gangsters, and also resulted in the brutal rape and murder of one of Adelstein's sources.
This is not light reading, obviously. Adelstein was well and truly in the shit, often being forced to sit down and share drinks with men who he knew were responsible for countless murders and trafficked human beings. Adelstein himself is a difficult protagonist to root for - when he's not humblebragging about the time he had an affair with a yakuza gangster's mistress, he's telling us about how he always chose working over spending time with his wife and young daughter as if this is just a natural consequence of the journalism field and everyone should just be cool with it. Also he's a journalist, not a novelist, and therefore his "just the facts, ma'am" style of writing means that his narrative voice is often dry and removed, and the stories often don't carry the air of drama and excitement that I felt they should....more
I've said before that my personal favorite literary genre is Murder At A Private School, but honestly I'm probably going to enjoy just about any mediaI've said before that my personal favorite literary genre is Murder At A Private School, but honestly I'm probably going to enjoy just about any media that falls under the larger umbrella of Murder And Money.
The Last Houseguest, in my most generous interpretation, is sort of like a modern take on classic murder mysteries like Gosford Park, which explores the aftermath of a crime through the dual viewpoints of the wealthy guests at an English manor, and the staff. (So I'm shelving this under "detective fiction", although anyone considering picking this up should know that the book fits that definition in only the broadest sense)
In The Last Houseguest, the setting is a Hamptons-esque town in Maine, where society is sharply divided between the rich people who own summer homes, and the locals who work for them. Our townie heroine is Avery Greer, and our Poor Little Rich Girl is Sadie Loman. Despite the strict class structure of the town, the two girls managed to become friends as teenagers - and then Sadie is found dead. The police rule it a suicide, but if you've ever read a book before you know that it was most definitely muuuuuurder. The book follows Adult Avery trying to figure out what really happened on the night Sadie died, and keep herself from becoming a suspect.
All in all, a perfectly serviceable page-turner. I probably won't be going out of my way to find other titles by the author, but I had a good time with this one and wouldn't dissuade anyone from giving it a try. ...more
Directly following Equal Rites with Mort (two of the most popular mini-series within the Discoworld fandom seem to be the Witches and Death) means thaDirectly following Equal Rites with Mort (two of the most popular mini-series within the Discoworld fandom seem to be the Witches and Death) means that it feels like Prachett is really hitting his stride, in terms of fleshing out the mythology of the Disc and creating some delightfully memorable characters.
Like Equal Rites, this installment has a decidedly traditional-sounding fantasy setup: village boy Mort goes to the Disc's equivalent of a Career Fair to try to gain an apprenticeship. Unfortunately, poor Mort isn't particularly skilled in anything, so he gets passe up by everyone until finally, at the very end of the day, he receives an offer to apprentice for Death. Death speaks in all caps and rides a horse named Binky, because in case we've forgotten, this is Sir Terry Prachett's world and we're all just living in it.
Mort has been an apprentice for basically ten minutes before things go pear-shaped: he is sent to collect the soul of Princess Keli, who has recently ascended to the throne following the assassination of her father and is due to be shortly assassinated as well. Unfortunately for the fabric of reality itself, Mort decides to intervene and save her life, creating a new timeline that's being slowly threatened by the timeline where Keli died as planned.
You ever screw something up at work so badly that you have no choice but to go to your boss and explain what you've done and that it's now their job to fix it because you don't know how? Mort is kind of like that. ...more
After watching and (mostly) enjoying the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone, I did a little research into Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse and found thaAfter watching and (mostly) enjoying the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone, I did a little research into Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse and found that, at least according to my Goodreads friends, that the general consensus was that while the Shadow and Bone trilogy was good, Six of Crows was infinitely better. And I totally get why: Bardugo's first trilogy follows the kind-of-tired YA fantasy blueprint of Chosen Girl Saves The World While Caught In A Love Triangle, whereas Six of Crows has a much more appealing premise: magical heist.
What I didn't want to do was force myself to get through all three Shadow and Bone books just to have the proper foundation for Six of Crows, and if you're like me and just want to skip ahead to Magic Heist Time (subtitle: Kaz Brekker & Co present Be Gay Do Crime!), rest assured that you can get all the world-building info you need from the tv series and go straight into Six of Crows.
(Also, having finished the series, I would actually recommend just flat-out skipping all the Nina/Matthias scenes when you watch the show, because a) they never even interact with any of the other characters until the very end, so you will miss literally nothing important and b) their story is told backwards in the book, which makes it a lot more compelling)
This book was just fun to read. First, you've got the previously mentioned Magical Heist, and on top of that, every single character in our core group of thieves is a goddamn DELIGHT. I would die for each and every one of them, but especially Kaz and Inej. And Jesper. And Nina. I love everyone in this bar.
The heist itself is pretty damn seamless, give or take a couple of minor plot holes, but by the time those came along I was having too much fun to care. (Bardugo also points out in her afterword that it's a lot harder to write a good heist in novel format, because when it's a movie you can rely on the audience getting too swept up in the excitement to notice inconsistencies and plot holes, so I appreciate her just for making this attempt. You can see how much work went into the plotting of this book, and I'm duly impressed.)
As an added bonus, Bardugo also names a few of the books she used for research, and I've already added the art heist book and the London slum history to my library queue.
Can I also add how happy I am that this is merely a duo, and not the first of three books? Having less of a commitment is kind of a relief, frankly, and I'm super excited to start Crooked Kingdom knowing that it's the end of the series. (view spoiler)[If Kaz and Inej don't get to make out at least once in the second book I will FLIP ALL THE TABLES IN THE WORLD (hide spoiler)]...more
The elevator pitch for this book was definitely "trauma, but make it sexy!" Basically if you watched Lost in Translation and thought this is good and The elevator pitch for this book was definitely "trauma, but make it sexy!" Basically if you watched Lost in Translation and thought this is good and everything, but I wish every single white person was 500% more repulsive, then this is the novel for you.
Our heroine is Margaret, who fled to Tokyo in order to escape her traumatic home life back in the United States. By day, she works as an instructor at a school that trains Japanese flight attendants; by night, she does her best to lose herself in drugs, alcohol, and one-night-stands with strangers (oh and also Margaret likes it when guys tie her up during sex, and it's heavily implied that this interest in kink is a byproduct of her mental illness - love it! Definitely not a dangerous myth to perpetuate! No notes!) She's aided in these trysts by Tokyo's "love hotels", which can be found all over Tokyo and offer rooms that can be rented for short periods of time.
The biggest disappointment of the book is Hanrahan's inability to handle her subjects of generational trauma and mental illness with anything even vaguely resembling tact and understanding - Margaret's brother suffered from schizophrenia, and her life is spent constantly numbing herself against the fear that she will end up "crazy" like him.
And I could have almost gotten over that, if Hanrahan had been willing to commit herself fully to the balls-out hedonism and substance abuse practiced by the heroine and her fellow dirtbag expats. It would have almost been worth it if Lost Girls and Love Hotels was a Bret Easton Ellis-esque drug-fueled fever dream of a novel, where Maraget drifts from one hookup to another and loses herself in Tokyo's underbelly. But unfortunately, that's not the book we get.
I'll be perfectly clear: for a book that full of drugs, booze, and kinky anonymous sex, Lost Girls and Love Hotels is pretty fucking tame. Often, it reads like the work of a sheltered high schooler doing her best to imagine what a wild twenty-something alone in Tokyo would do, and all of Margaret's destructive actions feel very performative and not genuine. I mean, for god's sake, she has an affair with a Yakuza gangster and somehow Hanrahan manages to make it boring!
The only reason I picked this up at all was because I stumbled across the trailer for the movie adaptation, which I then proceeded to hear nothing about for an entire year. So either the movie suffered because it was released in the middle of the pandemic, or because it failed to improve on the original material. My money is on the latter.
Looking back through my reviews, I learned that I reviewed Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, all the way back in 2012 - wLooking back through my reviews, I learned that I reviewed Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, all the way back in 2012 - which means that between the beginning of the series and the end is a span of almost ten years.
So there's really no way for me to try to summarize this series as a whole, and I'm even at a loss to say anything specific about The Mirror and the Light, because I finished reading it months ago and can't remember most of the little details (pandemic-related mental fatigue means that writing reviews has become kind of a struggle lately, so I have a backlog of reviews that I'm slowly chipping away at). This series has definitely been moved to the top of the to-re-read pile.
All I can really say about The Mirror and the Light is: god damn this series is good. God damn, Ms. Mantel. God damn.
"Is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves, the dragon’s footprint; the hand breaking the waters of a lake. His forefathers interrupt his sleep to castigate, to warn, to shake their heads in mute disappointment. At a prince’s coronation, God transfigures him, his human faults falling away, his human capacities increased; but that burst of light has to last him. That instant’s transfusion of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life."...more
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is set up as a series of letters the main character writes to his mother - a Vie"I miss you more than I remember you."
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is set up as a series of letters the main character writes to his mother - a Vietnamese immigrant who is also illiterate - after her death. Although the protagonist's fraught and complex relationship with his mother forms the bulk of the story, the author is also using the stories he tells about his mother and aunt as a jumping-off point for his own personal story.
Ocean Vuong is known primarily for his poetry, which means that the prose in this book is very beautiful and stirring, but often veers dangerously close to purple prose (one of the few sections that I bothered to bookmark is when he claims that a comma is based on the shape of a fetus, a statement so outrageously incorrect that I had to put the book down and spend twenty minutes on Wikipedia reading about the history of punctuation marks to calm down).
I also had a hard time with the book as a whole, because I have a tendency to take things very literally, so I kept getting stuck on the fact that this is a book written to a woman who cannot read. Vuong is writing about his mother, but at the end of the day, he's the focus of the story.
"Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who had not been denied cannot know. I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases - a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw - is, in itself, replication - the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last."...more
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record nuOn May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship - the fastest then in service - could outrun any threat.
As with all of the best books, I finished reading this and immediately became impossible to have a conversation with for at least two weeks. Any attempt to talk like a normal person was immediately derailed by my brain going, ask them if they want to hear about the sinking of the Lusitania!
Before going into this, I only knew the barest outline of the Lusitania's story - that it was a luxurious ocean liner in the vein of Titanic, which was torpedoed by Germans in the early days of WWI and sunk, resulting in mass casualties.
Larson goes into the story with his usual level of intensive research and talent for humanizing details, and, similarly true to form, gives us multiple perspectives on the disaster: Dead Wake alternates chapters about the doomed ship with chapters from the perspective of the German U-boat that sank the ship. Larson also does a really interesting thing where he'll directly quote one of the passengers, and because he doesn't always specify if the quoted bit is a letter sent before the sinking or after, we're kept in suspense about which of the characters we've been following will survive.
There was so much about this disaster that I didn't know - on the day of the sinking, the sea was so calm that passengers on the deck could see the torpedo heading for the ship! And the thing that especially blew my mind was that unlike the Titanic, which we all know took over two hours to sink, the time between the Lusitania getting hit by a torpedo and fully sinking was less than twenty minutes.
Larson spends a little bit of time delving into the conspiracy theories surrounding the sinking, but for the most part this is a clear-eyed, humanizing look at one of the worst tragedies to ever occur at sea, and how the events of one single day had long-reaching and deadly ramifications for the rest of the world....more
In the autumn of 1973, a fundraiser to refurbish the dilapidated palace of Versailles was conceived. The organizers arranged a fashion show, where tenIn the autumn of 1973, a fundraiser to refurbish the dilapidated palace of Versailles was conceived. The organizers arranged a fashion show, where ten designers - five French, five American - would be invited to showcase their collections. The show was originally intended to be a neutral showcase, but as soon as the press became aware of the American designers that were invited, the event was blown into an all-out competition between the two factions - and what was originally billed as the Grand Divertissement a Versailles became the Battle of Versailles.
Givhan gives us a quick primer on the history of couture, and then throws us right into the intense planning and strategizing that went into this event. Nothing was simple, from the question of who should be invited, to the set list, to the hotel arrangements for the models. In addition to the logistical headaches that come with any large-scale event, this was also the fashion event of the year, and dealing with the oversized personalities and egos of everyone involved was a task in itself.
Unfortunately, Givhan's book isn't nearly as exhaustive as I wanted it to be. She'll mention offhandedly that part of the arrangements for the show involved weeks of negotiating and cajoling the various designers, but then breezes right past that statement. The show itself, from beginning to end, takes up just one chapter. One of the best history books I've ever read ( Vienna, 1814) is great because the author goes in-depth into all the petty personal squabbles that were going on between these huge historical figures, and how that inter-personal drama changed history forever. That was what I wanted The Battle of Versailles to be - I wanted to hear all about the massive egos, the fights, the negotiations, who was sleeping with who, etc. I wanted Givhan to give us the dirt, but she mostly skims over that, maybe out of a fear that her audience wouldn't care. But I assure you, I care very much.
It takes us almost to the very end of the book – practically the epilogue – before Givhan finally gets down to the thesis of The Battle of Versailles: that the success of the show can be attributed, not to the designers, but to the black women who modeled in the American designers' show. The ten women who walked the runway at Versailles revolutionized the way fashion shows were staged and performed, and this should have opened up a new world of diversity within haute couture. Instead, they were left behind, and nonwhite models to this day struggle to earn their place in the high fashion world.
You can see another book peeking out from behind the pages of this one - an exhaustive history of black influence on high fashion and how that influence has been minimized and uncredited for decades, where the Battle of Versailles is merely a chapter or two of a much larger work. The Battle of Versailles is a perfectly serviceable introduction to high fashion in the 1970s, but ultimately it can't decide which story it wants to tell. ...more
Louis CK* has a stand-up bit where he talks about time travel, and how it's really only fun if you're a white man. For anyone else, visiting the past Louis CK* has a stand-up bit where he talks about time travel, and how it's really only fun if you're a white man. For anyone else, visiting the past is statistically going to be a real bad time. Butler takes this premise - what would it be like for someone who isn't at the top of the societal food chain to travel back in time?
Butler throws us right into the action, when we meet our protagonist, a black woman named Dana, who is inexplicably transported from 1976 California to mid-1800s Maryland. The first thing she sees is a young boy drowning in a river, and she instinctively saves him. When the boy's father arrives on the scene and threatens Dana with a gun, she goes back to her own time. It's only a matter of hours before Dana gets sent back, meeting the boy after a few years have passed in his own time, when she once again intervenes to save him from a fatal accident. Soon, Dana realizes why this is happening - the boy (the son of a slaveholder) is the future father of her ancestor, and Dana has become his unwilling guardian angel.
Like all good time travel stories, Butler doesn't waste any time trying to explain how this happens. She sets the ground rules - Dana gets called to the past whenever her ancestor is in mortal danger, and placing herself in mortal danger sends her back to the present - and then lets things play out naturally.
Unsurprisingly, things get brutal fast, and it's almost a mercy that the novel is barely 200 pages long. It's a brief book, but it feels like a marathon, and Butler doesn't waste a single page.
*yes, I am aware of the great irony that lies in this bit, where a man who used his power to abuse talks about how much it rules to be a man in power. CK is a bad person but the bit is still funny, death of the author etc. ...more
"...The power in knowledge cannot be understated. Whenever people ask me for advice, I tell them two things: Never give up on your dreams, and do your"...The power in knowledge cannot be understated. Whenever people ask me for advice, I tell them two things: Never give up on your dreams, and do your homework. ‘Homework’ can mean a lot of things, but do your homework in life. Style will get you up the steps into the revolving door; substance and knowledge will allow you access to create new horizons. My great depth of knowledge is the number one skill I possess and has carried me throughout my career to this day. Rivers deep, mountains high. All the people who mattered in my life have approached me because of my knowledge. Throughout my career, designers liked spending time with me because I studied, and I studied, and I resolved to learn as much as I could."
In the documentary The September Issue, two of the senior staffers at Vogue made an immediate impression on me. The first was Grace Coddington (who has already published her own account of her time in the industry, Grace: A Memoir), and the second was Andre Leon Talley. He was a larger than life figure in every sense of the word: a massive black man in a sea of petite white women, swanning around the offices dressed in silk caftans and fur coats, who sat in a meeting and declared "I am starved for beauty!" His memoir has been on my to-read list for a long time.
Andre Leon Talley got his start as a photography assistant for Women's Wear Daily when he was a recent college graduate; in record time, he was living in Paris, covering fashion shows, and becoming friends (well, "friends" is maybe a step too far, but we'll get there) with the likes of Andy Warhol and Karl Lagerfeld. It's all detailed here, from the early days of high fashion shows, to inner-office drama at Vogue, to Met Gala dirt, to Talley's complicated relationship with the devil in Prada herself, Anna Wintour.
If you're on the fence about whether or not this book is for you, there's a very simple test to help you decide - just read this passage about the first Galliano runway show Talley saw:
"The synopsis of the fashion show had been written by Amanda Harlech, Galliano’s creative director and muse. Her idea was that the models were Russian tsarinas, leaving the Winter Palace during the revolution, and ending up in Scotland on their way to Ascot in England."
Now, you're going to have one of two reactions to that passage. If you read it and thought, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, these people need to go outside", then The Chiffon Trenches is not your jam. If, however, you read it and thought, "cool" (or, like me: "...go on") then you're gonna have a good time.
As far as fashion memoirs go, Talley's is especially interesting because of his unique perspective. High fashion was, and remains, an industry dominated by the rich, thin, and white. Talley - a black man from small-town North Carolina who continues to struggle with his weight - is an anomaly in more ways than one. His race is what most clearly sets him apart from his contemporaries in the industry, and Talley could have easily sidestepped this entirely, and written a straightforward memoir about his rise in the fashion world without hammering this fact in. Instead, he addresses it head on, and isn't afraid to acknowledge that the business he's devoted his life to is uhhhhh...not exactly a bastion of equality.
"Racism is systemic everywhere, but no one in Paris talked about race. Racism was always underneath, sleeping below the epidermis of everything I did. It was mostly dormant but would raise its head every so often. I knew my very being was shocking to some people. That I was black, sure, but also that I was so tall and thin, that I spoke French meticulously. I had a strong opinion and I looked people in the eye. My knowledge and my passion and love for fashion and literature and art and history gave me confidence. I was in Paris to edit and style pictures, and I intended to do so successfully. I was living my moment. My dream achieved. I didn’t have time back then to contemplate my plight as a black man making it in the world. I was too busy trying to make it work. For the most part I barely noticed it and only now, looking back, do I realize the blinders I had to keep on in order to survive. Instead, I internalized and buried the pain deep within myself, as black men and women have been forced to do time and time again."
When Talley recounts the racism he encountered, both micro and macro, he's open and honest about the fact that his success rested largely on his ability to ignore and compartmentalize the prejudice he was up against. One of the most startlingly clear-eyed statements in the book comes when he writes, simply, "I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision."
The real dirt comes, of course, when it's time to discuss Talley's long and fraught relationship with Anna Wintour. In her own memoir, Grace Coddington shrugged off Wintour's portrayal in The Devil Wears Prada as the exaggerations of a bitter and "disloyal" ex-employee; Talley all but confirms that Miranda Priestly is an accurate stand-in for Wintour:
"I was a friend to Anna and I knew I mattered back in our earlier days together. Today, I would love for her to say something human and sincere to me. …there are so many people who worked for her and have suffered huge emotional scarring. Women and men, designers, photographers, stylists; the list is endless. She has dashed so many on a frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule."
And yet, Talley still desperately craves her love and acceptance. This is a theme throughout the book. Starting with his early days in Paris, Talley explains how people like Warhol and Lagerfeld would befriend people and then, without warning, cut them off completely. Lagerfeld in particular had a habit of bestowing expensive antiques on people as gifts, and then later demanding they be returned. Talley's acceptance of this weirdness makes more sense once you realize that the people in his social circle are just...like that. When recounting how he fell out of favor with Lagerfeld (merely for attempting to intervene on behalf of a woman on Lagerfeld's blacklist), Talley seems to be shrugging resignedly behind the text, as if a fashion journalist being permanently banned from attending Chanel shows is a natural consequence of crossing Lagerfeld. In another illuminating passage, Talley is traveling on Naomi Campbell's private jet and warns his underling (with complete seriousness and no self-awareness whatsoever) not to speak to or even look at Ms. Campbell. Galliano's anti-Semitic rant that got him fired from his own label is hand-waved away, and Talley assures us that he's not a bad guy, really. Over and over, we see Talley coming up against people who are vapid, cruel, callous monsters. And all he wants is to be their friend. Even as Talley is telling us what a terrible person Anna Wintour is, it's clear that he would happily push his own grandmother into traffic if it meant being allowed back into the inner circle.
Talley himself is not exempt from the casual cruelty demonstrated by his friends: until I read another review of this memoir, I'd completely forgotten about his stint as a judge on America's Next Top Model. Talley and Tyra Banks had a falling-out, so not only does he never mention his time on her show, but Banks' name never appears once in this entire memoir - a memoir that specifically makes space to highlight the influence of black people in fashion. Like his buddy Lagerfeld, Talley bestows gifts, and snatches them back.
It goes without saying that your mileage will vary when it comes to reading the exploits of shallow, spoiled, careless fashion people - but to dismiss this memoir because Talley is not a good person is to miss the point. I don't watch Hannibal because I want to watch nice people doing good things. Sometimes, you just want to watch beautiful monsters tear each other apart. ...more
The oral history of this book really shouldn't work - this book is literally just 400+ pages of interview segments, with no narrator or other third-peThe oral history of this book really shouldn't work - this book is literally just 400+ pages of interview segments, with no narrator or other third-person perspective to give us historical context or background information. This is, pure and simple, a story about the rise and fall of the punk movement told by the people who created it, witnessed it, and experienced the brutal destruction it wreaked on the lives of the ones who devoted their lives to it.
Real credit goes to Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, who had the daunting task of cutting and pasting pieces from thousands of hours of interviews and crafting it into a narrative. This book is essentially one giant interview, but it flows like a novel.
The only thing preventing this from being a five-star book was entirely on me - you have to really know your stuff when it comes to this era of music in order to fully follow what's going on, and a lot of the names that pop up here didn't mean anything to me (and like I said, there's no narrator or anything to clue you in, so you're on your own if you don't know who somebody is or why they're important), so some of the important moments that get recounted were kind of lost on me - for example, after having Bebe Buell interviews interspersed throughout the entire book, at the very end she casually drops that she's Liv Tyler's mom and my mind was blown.
But at the same time, I don't want anyone to shy away from this book just because they're worried they won't recognize all of the famous names. In fact, it would almost be more fun to go into this knowing nothing about the punk movement in America, because the book is really that masterful - even if I started out not knowing who, say, Danny Fields was, the characters all drift in and out of the narrative that the editors weave, and everyone is so memorable it's not too hard to keep the huge cast of characters straight in your head.
And now, just because I liked it so much, here's my absolute favorite bit of the book, from Ari Delon (illegitimate son of model/groupie Nico and Alain Delon):
"When my mother died, Alan Wise took me to the probate registry in order to inherit the royalties, and the debts. When I got my mum's royalties for the firs time I spent the money on smack. I was hooked. I was taking a gram a day. So I called my psychiatrist doctor in Paris and I spent two weeks in the hospital. I got off heroin. Then I got a check from the Velvet Underground and bought a ticket for Raroia, Tahiti. I was taking Valium, pot, and beer and I got beaten up, then arrested, and someone tried to kill me with a harpoon. Back in New York I went out of my mind. I spent winter out on the street; rescuers found me in the river Hudson. Then on Staten Island I fell down a chute, fifteen meters, into an old flour mill. I now have steel pins in my feet. Workmen found me and said, 'Are you crazy?!!' Maybe I was. I had no money, no passport, nothing. Someone told the cops, who took me to a psychiatric hospital. They gave me five brain electric shocks. A friend got me out and took me back to Paris. I had two months of treatment in psychiatric hospitals there and then in the south of France. Now I'm trying to get back into myself. I'm not yet strong enough, but one day, when I am, I will confront my father, and I will do it for the sake of my mother."
Holy shit! This is the first and last time we hear from Ari Delon in the entire book, and I am obsessed. Like, not to diminish any of the other people in this book and their equally crazy stories of drugs, misadventures, death, and (sometimes) redemption, but...where is this guy's book?!...more
Maybe part of the reason for my lukewarm reaction to this was the fact that I read the books as they were released, which meant prolonged suspense as Maybe part of the reason for my lukewarm reaction to this was the fact that I read the books as they were released, which meant prolonged suspense as I waited for each new installment to come out, and therefore the excitement over the eventual conclusion maybe got more built up in my head than it would have if I'd been able to blow through all four books in a month. Maybe I had leftover disappointment from my meh reaction to the third book, or maybe I was still unsure that Bray would be able to justify giving this series a fourth installment, rather than condensing it into a traditional trilogy.
(I still stand by this last point: The Diviners could and should have been cut down into three books, especially when you consider how much of the third book felt like Bray just setting the stage for the last installment. A merciless editor could have carved a trilogy out of this material, and I'm disappointed we didn't get the more streamlined version of this story.)
Based on the other reviews I skimmed, it seems like my lukewarm reaction to the conclusion of the Diviners series was a pretty common one. I don't want to turn anyone off reading this book, or even imply that it's not suspenseful, entertaining, and scary (this one has ghost towns!), but it just felt...kind of bloated. Everything gets wrapped up neatly, there are all the good character moments you hoped there would be - except, of course, for (view spoiler)[poor Mabel, who unfortunately does NOT turn out to be a badass Force Ghost or something (hide spoiler)] - so I would encourage anyone who's maybe on the fence about the book to give it a try anyway. If nothing else, Bray finishes the series strong, and ultimately I can't even pinpoint specific complaints about it. It just didn't really do it for me.
The biggest issue, really, is that the Diviners get split into groups at the beginning of the book, so we are forced to follow along on three separate adventures, which - while compelling and full of great character-building moments! - take up a lot of page space. The adventure to Bountiful, Nebraska, which Bray has been teasing since the previous book, ends up feeling more like a side quest. And possibly the reason said side quest takes up so much time is because the final confrontation with the Big Bad (Capitalism) is...pretty easily resolved? Ultimately, it felt like this series was a lot of buildup for very little payoff.
I wish that Bray had stuck to a more episodic formula, where each book is its own self-contained adventure - in this sense, Lair of Dreams is probably my favorite of the Diviners novels, because the ghost mystery feels the most like its own adventure, separate from the King of Crows stuff. Bray worked so hard over the course of three books to build up anticipation to a big showdown with the Diviners and the King of Crows, and ultimately we ended up with...this.
Oh well. I guess at least this one didn't end with Sam getting turned into a tree, so, progress!...more
Three books into the Discworld series (which, yes, I am reading in the order of publication and no, I will not be taking feedback about this from hardThree books into the Discworld series (which, yes, I am reading in the order of publication and no, I will not be taking feedback about this from hardcore Pratchett nerds), I finally get my formal introduction to Granny Weatherwax, and she's just as delightful as promised.
Equal Rites has the most straightforward and dare I say traditional fantasy setup of any book in the series that I've read so far - it lends itself to easy summary, to the point where the setup sounds suspiciously like your typical YA fantasy adventure. The book starts with a dying wizard accidentally bestowing his powers on a newborn - what was intended to be the eight son of an eight son, who would carry on a proud tradition of wizards in the Disc. Unfortunately, the child turns out to be a girl named Esk. Her early magical education therefore falls to local witch Granny Weatherwax, until Esk decides to travel to Ankh-Morpork and attempt to get accepted to the Unseen University, where (strictly male) wizards are trained.
The setup, in other words, sounds like a very typical Tamora Pierce-style adventure, where our spunky heroine infiltrates a traditionally male space and dominates at everything. But of course, this is a Terry Pratchett book, and after only three books I already know that he won't go the traditional route. The plot structure of Equal Rites is definitely not what I was expecting, and if I had one major criticism of this book, it's that the plot only really picks up speed when we're almost at the end. But it's still a fun ride from beginning to end, and honestly the characters are such a delight I don't even need them to be having world-in-peril adventures; I can just watch them hanging out.
The Catch-22 of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory is this: the ideal reader for this collection of short stories is someone who has The Catch-22 of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory is this: the ideal reader for this collection of short stories is someone who has never seen BoJack Horseman, because this book serves as a great intro course to Raphael Bob-Waksberg's particular storytelling style, without ever reaching the incredible heights he achieved with his Netflix show. But the only people who will seek out this book are the ones who are already familiar with the show (which, it cannot be stressed enough, is a cartoon about a talking horse that will make you cry real actual tears).
So maybe there's a chance that this review pops up in the update feed of someone who has never seen the show, but has maybe heard of it, and needs a reason to dip their toe into Bob-Waksberg's writing. If that's the case, and it managed to find you, I encourage you to give this a shot. Some of the stories are silly, some are sad, and some manage to come close to something truly heart-shattering. And then you can go watch BoJack Horseman.
Here, have an overly-long excerpt from "You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?", which I absolutely read in Will Arnett's voice before I realized the speaker was a woman:
"Here is my impression of a play: Okay, so first you gotta imagine it's a hotel room, right? Just a normal, boring-looking hotel room, on the nice end of things, as far as hotel rooms go. And the audience is coming in, and they're taking their seats in this dinky little theater in lower Manhattan, barely bigger than a Winnebago, this theater with seats that feel like someone just glued down some thin fabric over a block of hard metal. The main thing of a theater - like the whole point of it - is that there's going to be a lot of sitting in it, so you'd think they would at least consider investing in some comfortable chairs. Word to the wise: if they can't even get that part right, which absolutely most of the time they cannot, then buckle the fuck up, because I can tell you right now you are in for an ordeal of an evening. ...So then the play starts and the first thing that happens is two ladies burst into the hotel room, one after another. These ladies are supposed to be sisters, probably, because when plays aren't about hookers, ninety percent of the time they're about sisters. But, of course, because it's a play, these sisters look nothing alike. For starters, one of them's like fifty and the other one's like twenty, because apparently when you're hiring people for plays, it's impossible to find two women who are about the same age. The older one goes right for the minifridge and pulls out a bottle of white wine, even though since it's a play, the white wine is actually water, if there's even something in the bottle at all, which - spoiler alert for all plays - there probably isn't. The younger lady kicks off her shoes and jumps onto the bed. And they start talking in that very fast, stutter-y I'm-a-character-in-a-play way that guys who write plays think is naturalistic, even though nobody actually talks that way except for people who just tried cocaine for the first time." ...more
On the morning of February 2nd 1922, film mogul William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his home at Alvarado Court Apartments. Although he was initiaOn the morning of February 2nd 1922, film mogul William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his home at Alvarado Court Apartments. Although he was initially declared dead from a stomach hemorrhage, when police turned the body over they discovered the bullet hole in his back. The list of suspects eventually included three actresses at varying parts of their career trajectories, con men, rival producers, and no shit, Taylor's butler.
Mann's book covers much more than just the life and eventual murder of William Desmond Taylor (a case which, officially, is still classified as unsolved, although Mann offers a possible solution that sounds pretty plausible) - in telling the story of his death and the media circus that followed, Mann is also taking us through the history of early Hollywood, when powerful producers were fighting each other for control of a brand new market, and new film stars were discovered, exploited, and discarded in record time. Film was such a new medium, and the concept of a "movie star" was in its infancy, so everyone involved was really just making it up as they went along - identities were invented and past scandals were buried, and rumors and truth were inextricably muddled together.
Mann has the difficult task of teasing out the truth that's buried under decades of scandals and lies, and its an understatement to say that the research here is extensive. If the book has one downside, it's that the murder of William Desmond Taylor - the story at the center of the whole book - is abandoned by the narrative for long periods of time, because you quickly realize that the true purpose of Mann's book is to explore the personal and professional rivalries of several powerful Hollywood producers, and how they shaped the industry as we know it today. The murder mystery is really more of a Trojan horse to get us sucked into the story that Mann really wants to tell, so be warned that you might find yourself frustrated by how often this book seems to completely forget about the murder. But like I said, Mann does propose a reasonable solution to the mystery, so you don't walk away from this unsatisfied. ...more
A plea to authors: please, for the love of god, somebody write the next Big Twisty Thriller that knocks Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train off their A plea to authors: please, for the love of god, somebody write the next Big Twisty Thriller that knocks Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train off their Ultimate Big Twisty Thriller pedestals, so publishers can stop shoving every novel about a fucked-up marriage in my face and shrieking FOR FANS OF GONE GIRL AND THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. Like seriously guys: just because it's got a shitty husband doesn't mean it's anything like Gone Girl. Stop, this is getting embarrassing.
This novel suffers from bad marketing more than any actual lack of quality. First there's the regrettable Gone Girl/Girl on the Train comparisons (and if we're being brutally honest, it's more accurate to say that this novel has nothing in common with Gone Girl and is merely a bad knockoff of The Girl on the Train; and then there's the fact that every single plot description available just screams at you LOOK OUT THERE'S A HUGE TWIST IN THIS THAT YOU'LL NEVER NEVER GUESS. Because of course then the readers spend the entire time specifically trying to guess said twist, and any clues that might have otherwise flown under our radar get immediately pinged.
So I guessed the Act One twist pretty easily, but I wasn't too upset about that because even as I realized what the authors had up their sleeves, I had no idea where they would take the story after they dropped the first twist at the midway point. Unfortunately, even though this was the point when the story should have picked up steam and become a runaway train of toxic relationships, secrets, lies, and mistaken identity, instead it just slowly runs out of gas.
Once the authors reveal that (view spoiler)[Richard is an abusive gaslighting creep (and honestly it's pretty obvious where this is going as soon as he tells Vanessa "I don't like your name, here's what I'm going to call you instead) (hide spoiler)] the authors don't really have much else to throw at us, and the novel becomes this depressing slog of "and here's another way this woman's life was turned into a living hell." Anyone who has been in an abusive relationship, or even known someone who suffered from domestic partner abuse, is gonna have a real bad time.
(For real though, I almost stopped reading when (view spoiler)[Richard got Vanessa a dog, because of course something bad is going to happen there, and the whole interlude was actually really upsetting to read about. The only saving grace of this subplot is that the authors do a pretty good job of convincing us that Richard didn't actually kill Duke - I genuinely believe that he just called the agency and had him taken back, which is horrible, but at least we didn't have a dead dog anywhere in this book. Also in my headcanon epilogue, Vanessa contacts the adoption agency and gets him back SO THERE (hide spoiler)])
The authors, maybe realizing that their story was running out of steam and they didn't have anything new to shock us, try to throw a last-minute twist at us and I don't know how anyone else felt about it, but it really didn't land for me. All of the subplots and revelations relating to the Deep Dark Secrets of the main character's college years felt super half-baked, to the extent where they almost seemed to belong in a different novel.
I guess the one positive I took from this novel (and I didn't even really hate it that much!) was this valuable lesson: do not trust the marketing team when they tell you they have the next Gone Girl. They are lying to you, and you should steer clear. ...more