Standalone reviews for books that do not have literature notes. More on Goodreads.
A note on ratings
My book ratings depend mostly on my personal whims and may have very little to do with the quality of the book itself:
- ⭐ – I did not like it. Doesn’t mean the book is poorly written, I simply did not enjoy reading it, or even regret the time I spent to finish it (I do not rate a book I have not read all the way through).
- ⭐⭐ – It was okay. Eh.
- ⭐⭐⭐ – I liked it or found it had interesting ideas, but I have no intention of rereading it or referencing it frequently.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐ – Something about the book’s concepts, characterization, or prose was very compelling to me, or it changed my perspective in a meaningful way. I could see myself rereading it for its own sake, even if I do not gain any new knowledge.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ – A favorite.
Reviews
2024
Worry by Alexandra Turner
Read 2024-05-10 – Goodreads – ⭐⭐
This book might appeal to those who want the physical equivalent of scrolling on a social media feed: ephemeral fragments with no continuity or real lasting power; thinking to myself, I think I’ve heard this exact take 50 times already today. The sloppy, inconclusive ending reinforces this, because what good way is there to wrap up an eternal feed?
I am unfortunately an enjoyer of character development and in this book there is hardly any, just more examples rehashing the same somewhat insufferable traits. The family dynamics, which are far more interesting than any of the quips about being online, are left entirely unexamined, and it seemed like the author was more focused on showing how tapped in she is to the internet zeitgeist than any narrative cohesion.
The protagonist has some moments of incisive self-criticism, and Tanner captures the frustration and arrested development of being with family in a very natural way, hence two stars. Probably best for a light beach read.
The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
Read 2024-04-10 – Goodreads –⭐⭐⭐⭐
It is hard for me to decide whether McCarthy speaks to the social terrain between men and women with precise, timeless accuracy, or whether she only appears to do so by her own wit. There are a lot of topics of particular early 20th-century interest—Catholicism vs. Protestantism and puritanism, communism and Trotskyism, and psychoanalysis—that nevertheless remain engaging as vehicles of universal human behavior. I entirely see what basically every other reviewer means when they describe this book as similar to a maliciously truthful friend, speaking unsympathetically about its protagonist in confidence. There is something very frustrating about sexism laid bare, unbuffered by theorizing. Is McCarthy being unnecessarily cheeky or telling it like it is?
How indecent and anti-human it had been, like the tussle between the drowning man and the lifeguard! And of course she had invited [the boys to lunge at her], just as she was inviting it now, but what she was really asking along was not that the male should assault her, but that he should believe her a woman (103).
The ideas he put forward, familiar enough when clothed in their usual phraseology, emerged in his writing in a state of undress that made them look exciting and almost new, just as a woman whom one has known for years is always something of a surprise without her clothes on (169).
The theme of asceticism was particularly thought-provoking to me: the expression of asceticism as restraint and sacrifice even while performing a sexual act, restraint again from making an intellectual commitment. Moderation is always performance in our consume-restrict tradition (something something Girard mimetic rivalry with excessive behavior).
That her asceticism should have to be expressed in terms of sensuality deepened, in a curious way, its value, for the sacrifice was both paradoxical and positive; this was no abstention like a meatless Friday or a chaste Sunday: it was the mortification of the flesh achieved through the performance of the act of pleasure (114).
It was true; he never swallowed any doctrine whole. Like a finicky eater, he took pride in the fact that he always left something on the plate. There was something peculiarly American and puritanical about this abstemiousness of his; in other countries children are taught that it is bad manners not to finish everything that is set before them (172).
Anyway. I enjoyed it. I think this quote from the final story, about the protagonist’s appointment with her psychoanalyst, also captures the cleverness of McCarthy’s writing, and I’d be interested in reading more:
“I wasn’t listening,” she said, knowing this was not quite accurate. She had heard him, but the mind’s time is quicker than the tongue’s. Through the interstices of one of his measured paragraphs her whole life could flood in (280).
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Read 2024-02-22 – Goodreads – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My first truly modernist novel, or at least, that I can remember (according to the Goodreads records I read To the Lighthouse once, might as well have been in another life). Instead of being discrete, credible individuals, characters in Mrs. Dalloway spill into one another, and attributing an experience to a single character often feels like a game of catch-up.
Feeling indifferent toward the (in?)famous stream-of-consciousness style. There were many parts that did not engage me at all, but whenever I was tempted to set the book down, there would inevitably be a passage with words strung together in such a singular way that I had to read on.
I like what Eagleton says of Woolf’s characters in How to Read Literature: “the self is just a bundle of chance sensations and perceptions, with only a vacancy at its core.” Clarissa does not need to act to fulfill a particular image to herself, others, and us readers. Only Septimus brings his inner narrative complexity to the physical world, and he is the most cohesive character by far, with an obvious origin (wartime traumas, inadequacy of mental health services in 20th century society) and evolution (spiraling to his own demise). Is it valid to define oneself by unused inclinations and potentials? To me, the fact that the characters in Mrs. Dalloway are so interchangeable, aside from the one guy who actually does things, suggests “no.”
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Read 2024-01-21 – Goodreads – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The best book about food ever.
The first 100 pages are deceptively plausible. Around the time that other characters start literally appearing out of nowhere, sitcom-style, it becomes clear that every element of the novel, especially the main character Arrowby, is a surrogate for Murdoch’s moral and social philosophy. Like an overworked fable, both its literal content (a retired man pursues his childhood sweetheart) and themes (delusional love, fate and aging, unreliable narrator to the max) come off as trite. The novel goes on and on about the same details of Arrowby’s psyche (though it is his diary, to be fair) and glosses over, in my opinion, some of the most bizarre and thus interesting parts, like anything said or done by cousin James. Maybe that’s why I finished the second half so quickly—eager to move past the former and discover more of the latter. Somehow, it works wonderfully all together.
2023
Atta by Jarett Kobeck
Read 2023-12-30 – Goodreads – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This story is interesting to compare to the “speculative nonfiction” type book I am currently reading, When We Cease to Understand the World, though this one leans more toward the speculation. The broad strokes of Atta’s life, though, are mostly factual; every part of the “plot” is mentioned on his Wikipedia page.
Growing up after 9/11, I can’t quite appreciate what cultural niche this book fills. The most obvious point is that Atta’s religious fervor is riddled with contradictions, way too many to be worth listing. They are best summarized by Jarrah, an accomplice he hates for his “uncontrollable passion,” when he tells Atta:
Quote
“You should not have forbid yourself the excesses of this strange world. You would know that cocaine and alcohol are the same thing. And expensive cars and luxury hotels are the same. And the love of a woman is the same. And so too is jihad. It’s all drugs, brother, and I am an addict.”
Atta has a vision of perfection for the world but a very poor understanding of reality itself (including, maybe as a literary device, poor theory of mind). His faith, like the Platonic-esque architectural forms of the ancient world, cannot be embodied. This book makes his mind somewhat tractable.
The Saddam Hussein story at the end was also nuts. I have nothing else to say.