Play it again! I read six more books over the last three months. As always, you can read my trying-hard-to-sound-smart takes over on goodreads.com and you can read my stringing-multiple-words-together-with-hyphens-quality writing here.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Long-gone blog contributor Dee described this as one of her least favorite books by one of her favorite authors, and I can't put it more concisely than that. This is my third Murakami book after the very accessible and non-Murakami-esque Norwegian Wood and the very weird and surreal and Murakami-esque The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, both of which I absolutely loved. This I could appreciate, but it made no lasting impact on my brain beyond me trying to figure out how its two parallel narratives were linked. I was so underwhelmed by this - relative to the other two Murakami books I've read, I should stress - that I never even bothered to fill out a Murakami Bingo card, and trying to do so now I find myself unable to remember certain necessary details. Alas! For what it's worth, I still enjoyed and respected this book a great deal. Pretty sure I gave it four stars on goodreads. But for an author who'd earned nothing but unabashed fives from me, sure, this was a minor disappointment. That said, it definitely expanded my Murakami horizons and probably just sets my expectations better for future works of his - of which I have plenty.
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Speaking of minor disappointments from authors I respect a great deal, here's Fitzgerald's final novel if you don't count the one he never finished. This was his favorite of his own works, and it's easy to recognize several of Fitzgerald's recurring themes here and thus easy to see why this might have been his magnum opus. First part's about a pretty young girl just star-struck and infatuated by a cool and confident older man. Third part's about that same man, aging and drinking and losing his cool and unable to hold onto that same young girl who used to throw herself at him. But none of the characters or motifs are as memorable as Nick or Gatsby or Daisy or that dang green light, and as such, the book pales in comparison to that one. (But hey, what's more F. Scott Fitzgerald than being unable to recapture the talent and magic he had as a younger man? Life imitating art, and so forth.) This was fine, and maybe even good. But it wasn't great.
Journey by James A. Michener
Here's an obscure little historical adventure novel by an author I've read once before, long ago. I dug it. Thanks to The Terror, I got way the hell into the story of the Franklin expedition earlier this year, this poor doomed travesty-mystery of a hundred or so men who set out to find the Northwest Passage and ended up iced in above the Arctic Circle for two years instead, starving and freezing and diseased and then dead. This is a very similar story about British pride and hubris in the face of the brutal Canadian wilderness. It's set in the 1890s and depicts the vainglorious attempt by five men to reach a place called Dawson in the Yukon territory without ever setting foot on American soil. Here, let me show you where that is and what that entails:
Ha! Buncha dumbasses! You can't tell from this scale, but Dawson is located on the Yukon River, which is navigable all the way out through Alaska to the coast. So, the easy way to get to Dawson back in the 19th century is of course just to sail there from, say, anywhere at all in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, our proud British boys catch the train from the eastern coast of Canada all the way out to Edmonton and then spend a goddamn year and a half trekking through byzantine lake-and-river networks and around mountains until they stumble at last into Dawson, way the hell after they wanted to get there and long after the gold rush there has ended. Oh, and a lot of them died. You almost get the sense that Michener was looking at old maps one day or something, and realized what an absurd thing it would be to try to reach the Klondike region by Canada instead of Alaska, and then wrote a little novel about doing exactly that. Probably not for everyone, but this history-and-geography nerd was into it, at least.
Authority by Jeff VanDerMeer
It's the sequel to Annihilation, and oh my God is it a snoozer. Where that book was thin and quick and just atmospheric as hell, this one is 400 pages of corporate office drudgery and conspiracy theories. Here's hoping the final book in the Southern Reach trilogy sticks the landing, because holy shit, this was a slog!
The Chapo Guide to Revolution by Chapo Trap House
I've been a big fan of Chapo Trap House this past year and a half or so; their "dirtbag left" jokes and takes and sensibilities have kept me sane during what's been a, uh, shall we say a wild ride? For those who listen to their show - and really, I can't imagine anyone else is buying this thing - the book offered nothing drastically new or different or even particularly insightful. But I mean, shit, it's a book in the political humor section at the end of the day, and the contemporary alternatives in that category are more or less John Oliver calling Mike Pence's pet rabbit gay.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
I was just about blown away by Little Fires Everywhere, so I had high hopes for Ng's first novel, Amazon's 2014 Book of the Year. Eh. For whatever reason, this never really connected with me. I blame myself more than Ng or her book for that, as I just kept putting the book down for extended periods of time instead of sinking into it, investing in these characters, losing myself in their stories - but then again, doesn't it say something that I was able to keep putting the book down for weeks on end? This is the story of a family in crisis. Specifically, an Asian-American family in 1970s suburban Ohio hiding secrets from one another and harboring resentments and leaving just so many things unsaid, either out of embarassment or politeness or something else entirely. I can relate to that! I can even see a lot of my own family's dynamics in that. But for whatever reason, this didn't really register with me. Hey, so it goes!
So that's twenty books on the year. I'm on pace to finish 2018 with 26 or 27 reads, which would be my most since 2012. Not bad! Unfortunately, it's a far cry from the 30 I resolved to read in 2018. Ten more books in three more months? Fuck it, let's do this!
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