A Fan's Playground

The Great Gatsby entered public domain this year, and of course there are immediately people doing things with it, because it is enormously famous. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a retelling of the novel from the character Jordan Baker's perspective, with bonus magic, and also Jordan is bisexual and Vietnamese.

And somehow this book is exactly that. I don't know what I was expecting but.... it fits so tidily into exactly what the premise would imply, and I think I thought that Vo would go somewhere interestingly unexpected with it?

But it is in fact a straightforward retelling of the events of the original, following remarkably close, including all of the expected scenes. Oh, it's definitely a more enjoyable book to me than the original, extremely queer and much more interested in complexities of identity and where people come from. But it is still at its heart a retelling of The Great Gatsby, updated.

The addition of magic and demons doesn't do much for me either tbh. It seems to be added solely to highlight the themes that were/are already present in the story -- and it doesn't strike me that it actually adds much of anything? Those themes were already clearly legible without it!

Idk, I guess my overall issue with the book is that it seems to have been written from a place of love for the original canon. Yes it's criticising the original in some ways, but it comes across to me like criticising a thing you love. And I emphatically do not love The Great Gatsby!

Is this book good at doing the thing it's doing? Absolutely! But it's not quite the thing I hoped it would be doing.

As you may know if you read my book posts regularly, I am a wuss. And this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. And I am a wuss!! It's very tense and emotionally intense in places. It's really good though so I am glad I read it.

Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.

Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.

So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.

This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!

My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.

A collection of letters from Rabindranath Tagore at the end of the 19th century, consisting largely of descriptions of scenery, weather, people-watching, and philosophical musings. The letters are sometimes beautifully evocative and thoughtful, sometimes self-consciously pretentious in that arrogant-young-man way. Overall the style of writing is...very much the kind of thing I expect of a person who has received major acclaim for Literature, which is not so much my kind of thing. I don't think I would have made it through this book without the Librivox reader, who did a good job of putting animation and feeling into what she was reading. (note though that there's a fair number of editing errors in the audio for this book, more than I have generally found in Librivox)

Tagore almost never mentions anything personal in the letter excerpts he includes in this book. But occasionally he mentions his travels by houseboat, practically the only personal detail that makes it in, and he makes that sound very pleasant indeed. Of course, he's a well-off enough person to be able to just wander extensively by houseboat to wherever he wants, taken care of by servants all the way.

It's pretty clear from Tagore's attitudes throughout the book that he comes from a well-to-do, high-class family and he comes across in places as rather out of touch as a result. The letter where he talks about the servant who comes to work late one day because his daughter died, and then just sets to work as usual, and Tagore takes this as inspiration to reflect on how work can be a consolation in the hard things in life......oof. You don't know your servant's interiority, sir!

There's a part in the letters where he reflects at some length on The Thousand and One Nights, and I found it fascinating to read an orientalist perspective from a non-european. The way he talks about that book!!

He's also sexist, but that one didn't come as a surprise to me.

( cut for discussion of pedophilia )

The thing is, I went into this book predisposed to like it. On a trip I took to India several years ago, I visited the Tagore family estate near Kolkata, where Rabindranath Tagore died, and which is now a museum dedicated to him. And I have very fond memories of that visit. It was a pleasant day, and we got there just after a major rainstorm, so the covered outdoor walkways on the second floor were wet. The sensation of the warm, wet, smooth painted walkways under my bare feet is a sense-memory that still brings me happiness. And it was so nice to just wander that huge estate quietly on my own -- it felt so peaceful, after spending time in Kolkata, which had been overwhelming to me and my sensory processing disorder.

So I wanted to like Tagore, because of those pleasant associations! But I do not like the version of him who exists in his letters, at the very least, and I am appalled by his personal morals around sex. Perhaps there is value in his poetry or his short stories or other works that I can't see in these letters. But I'm not feeling inspired in the slightest to seek out any more of his works, despite how important and influential a writer he was.

I am beginning to emerge from the post-surgery haze of exhaustion enough to...okay, not to actually read any entire novels (I am instead mainlining Great British Bake Off which doesn't require too much of my engagement), but to POST about books I read before? I think I can do that.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo is a fascinating book which I mostly really liked! Set in 1890's colonial Malaysia amongst the Chinese population there, Li Lan is a young woman who has led a very circumscribed life, until it is proposed that she become a "ghost bride", the wife of a dead man.

It was a little slow at the start to capture my attention, and I think the ending isn't quite its best self in terms of accomplishing what it's trying to do, but the whole middle part of the book, where Li Lan is discovering what it's like to be a spirit, is great.

But here's what I don't like about the ending.

( yes okay discussion of the ending is probably spoilers )

On the other hand there's lots of other great stuff in this book! And I could see what the ending was going for and appreciate the intent, I just wish it had stuck the landing a bit better.

A magic realism novel about American slavery written using the conceit that the Underground Railroad was a literal actual railroad underground. It's an interesting and compelling book in many ways but honestly....I am kind of confused by the point of the conceit in the first place. Possibly (probably) I am just not Literary enough for this book and am failing to recognize important thematic details that the corporealized railroad draws out but that part of the book doesn't work for me personally.

And between that and another part of the book that seems out of its historical context from my knowledge ( (one small spoiler) ) it makes me doubt the historical veracity of everything I'm reading. Yes, it's fiction, but what parts of its historical setting are based on fact and what aren't? How much is part of the alternate-world fantasy? I have no good way of judging. And so I could never get a handle on how to interpret the setting.

Which is a shame because there's a lot to love about the book. It's a vivid and gripping story about a young woman's experiences with slavery and with the many faces of racism and prejudice as she attempts to escape. I cared a lot about Cora and about many of the characters she meets along the way. It's a powerful book, and an important one. I'm just....very slightly off mark for being the right audience for it because of the magic realism. I'M SORRY.

Back when this book was new I kept on seeing hype for it everywhere but didn't ever quite feel like it sounded enough up my alley to be bothered reading it. But then I read a short story by the author which I really enjoyed, and decided maybe I should get around to All the Birds in the Sky after all. It took me a while, but finally I did!

And this is definitely a good book, but like.... I don't know what to do with it. I'm not convinced I like it, but it is certainly very interesting. It's not quite like any other book I've ever read. And I don't know what to say about it! But I'm glad I read it.

( Read more... )

The first time I read this book was in high school english class. I remember clearly how delighted I was to read this book at the time. High school english is heavy on the Serious, Depressing & Literary, but this book had whimsy. It was still about serious topics (particularly focusing on censorship and free speech) but it managed to be that while also being a charming and fun read! REVOLUTIONARY. It felt all the more special because it wasn't supposed to be on the syllabus but my teacher managed to talk the english department into letting him teach this book instead of the Serious, Depressing & Literary book we were supposed to be reading.

Rereading it now, I don't love it as much as I did in high school, I think because I'm not comparing it to all the books one reads in high school english classes, and ultimately although this book is much closer than those to the kind of book I most like to read it's still not quite my jam. But it's still definitely a good book.

Time for my second annual round-up of books I started reading but abandoned before the end! With thoughts of varying lengths to go with each one.

( 1001 Nights vol. 1 translated by Richard Burton )

( Magebane, by Lee Arthur Chane )

( D&D Essentials DM Handbook )

( Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle, by Georgette Heyer )

( Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus by Ched Myers )

( A Glove Shop in Vienna, by Eva Ibbotson )

( The Reverse of the Medal, by Patrick O'Brian )

( Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson )

( Enchanted, by Alethea Kontis )

( Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley )

( The Green Hero: Early Adventures of Finn MacCool, by Bernard Evslin )

( Requiem, by Frances Itani )

Okay wow I'm not sure exactly where to start in discussing this book? It's very good, and pretty weird (although actually not as weird as I thought it was going to be), and also very famous. I remember it from high school days when I helped reorganize the collection of books the English department owned; I remember thinking at the time that it looked like it might actually be worth reading, unlike a lot of the books a high school English department has.

Cue the passing of many years in which I did not read it.

Then a recent episode of Crash Course Literature was about Slaughterhouse-Five, and - okay, here's the thing. Generally speaking when I watch Crash Course Literature episodes about books I've read, I disagree with the majority of the stuff John Green says. He's just.... so literarily pretentious? And the things he thinks are important to talk about are often very different than the things I think are important to talk about. So it's always odd watching Literature episodes about books I HAVEN'T read, because everything Green says sounds very plausible and he's very passionate about what he says, but when I remember what I usually think about his opinions of books I have to be suspicious. Regardless, when I watched the episode about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was really intrigued by the book, so I decided to put it on my to-read list. And when I was wandering a used bookstore not long after and saw a super-cheap copy, I picked it up.

And then last week a friend was over for dinner and saw my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five sitting out and said some vastly complimentary things about it so I decided to bump it up on my priority list.

And now I've read it and I don't know what to say about it. ( In which I say things about it. )

So I just reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since my grade 11 English class, lo these many years ago. I utterly hated it at that time.

My opinion now: well, I can see its virtues. On a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence level the writing is rather good. And the whole thing is very evocative of time and place and mood. But wow, I still hate every single character in this book! And am completely unsympathetic with their problems! And just wish they would all shut up and go away!

I guess my problem here is that I am really really really not into that particular genre of "literary fiction" that is all about horrible people being miserable. It is a celebrated genre and many people are into it and there are lots and lots of books in it published every year but I am NOT THERE. (see also: why I hated Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" so much, because it was written in the patterns of that genre despite being also a fantasy novel. NO GET YOUR LITERARY MISERY OUT OF MY SFF PLSKTHX)

So I think the highest praise I can give The Great Gatsby is that it is a really excellent example of horrible-people-being-miserable literary fiction? Because it is! BUT I STILL HATE IT.