Book Roundup

Earlier in the summer the stars aligned, the ancient prophecy came true, and my malfunctioning brain neurology settled down enough to let me read several entire books in a short time space. That blissful era has now ended, but I thought I’d write up some quick reviews and recommendeccies of what I got through.

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

I’m not familiar with Cruz’s prior work, although to be fair this seems to be the book that put her on the map for most people, given the amount of buzz it’s gotten. It’s a story of a first-generation immigrant who moves from the Domincan Republic to America in the 60s, while also facing an accelerated journey into adulthood via a coerced marriage to a grown man at the age of fifteen.

Not exactly a barrel of laughs, as you can imagine from that description, but the tone is saved from being unrelentingly bleak due to the protagonist’s wit and sense of acerbic humour. Likewise, the book is thematically a pretty vicious deconstruction of the idealised immigrant experience and The American Dream that still manages to come around to an optimistic--if not quietly triumphant--note by the end. 

One of those books that’s very much “of the moment” despite its historical setting, depicting as it does a world where immigrants of colour can eke out the opportunity and prosperity that moving to the USA is meant to grant them, but must do so in the face of massive hostility from an established American society that very much doesn’t want them to move beyond downtrodden servant roles.

Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Boy, was this a let down.

I’m a huge fan of Never Let Me Go and was excited about the idea of Ishiguro returning to science fiction, but Klara And The Sun left me totally cold. Writing from the viewpoint of an android, Ishiguro gives the first-person narration a bunch of quirks and odd turns of phrase that I think were meant to immerse the reader in a non-human mindset, but which I just found irritating and kind of twee.

Ishiguro seems to have developed a major tin ear for dialogue between writing The Buried Giant and this; in particular children’s dialogue sounds incredibly off-kilter (“Oh mother, he’s perfect” a thirteen year old American girl says, very convincingly), which is surprising because one of the most striking things about Never Let Me Go was its very believable invocation of the hidden world of children. Here the kids act like miniature adults, and the adults act like characters in a badly written novel.

The book is similar to Never Let Me Go in that it throws the reader into a science fictional near-future without explaining anything up-front, except here basic facts about the setting and premise are kept from the reader for way, way longer. As in, two thirds of the way through the book it’s still not clear exactly what purpose the “Artificial Friends” the story is about serve, and by the time you do find out I had stopped caring.

I’ll have to look elsewhere for the near-future soft SF content that I crave.

Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby

A crime thriller that’s been described as a literary version of The Fast And The Furious. I’d describe it as No Country For Old Men’s southern cousin.

It’s an extremely gripping read from start to finish, but after I put it down I found myself a bit cold on it thematically. It’s clearly trying to deconstruct the trope of the Interesting Bad Man that’s so prevalent in modern American entertainment, depicting a protagonist who you come to understand is really not a good dude, and not in a way that makes him seem more awesome the more not-good he gets like Walter White but in a “this guy really should just fuck off and leave his friends and family behind because he’s going to get them all killed.”

At the same time, the book falls into the common trap that a lot of fiction of this kind falls into, in that it can’t stop making him seem like a badass at the same time as it’s condemning him. It just about manages to swerve back on track with a downer ending that’s highly ambiguous and leaves the protagonist falling short of the redemption that a lesser story might have granted him, but even still, I can’t quite get past all the earlier scenes where you’re obviously meant to find his violent, self-destructive actions cool.

Still, the book made me enough of a fan of Cosby’s writing that I plan on checking out his next release, Razorblade Tears.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

A 1994 novel that only recently got translated into English and was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

This is going to (and already has, based on the online reviews) annoy the hell out of people going into it expecting something akin to The Hunger Games or even 1984, but if you look past the somewhat dishonest way the synopsis frames the story (the dystopic memory police of the title aren’t the true focus of the plot) then you’re in for a haunting and absorbing surrealist fantasy a la Haruki Murikami’s more accessible novels.

Also, even though it falls by the wayside by the end as the book moves further and further away from literalist storytelling, the dystopian elements are actually quite well-executed, as far as conjuring up an atmosphere of all-consuming claustrophobia and dread. Ogawa even works in some really nail-biting suspense sequences. Fun for all the family!

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

I’m not normally a big poetry reader, but the positive word of mouth around this made me check it out. It’s one of those books I ended up regretting that I read on my Kindle, as it includes visual elements like photographs and artwork that don’t show up well on an ereader screen.

Still, I got enough of the effect anyway. It’s like taking a brisk wander through a modern art exhibit on black disenfranchisement over the last two decades, largely via the medium of microaggressions. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at that term, Citizen is a raw exploration of what it really means; I found the section detailing the media hostility to Serena Williams and the way it gradually wore on the author’s mental state particularly affecting. The big, visible eruptions of anti-blackness in America--the shootings, the police brutality--are largely downplayed here in favour of presenting a world that’s made of shark skin, constantly inflicting tiny wounds with every moment of friction.

Any book that can place the reader so deeply in the viewpoint of someone not like them, experiencing things they’ll never experience, is an automatic recommendation from me.

Things In Jars by Jess Kidd

I ended up not finishing this, through no fault of the book itself: halfway through a migraine flare-up hit me, and it hasn’t yet abated.

It’s an absorbing and creepy yarn that does the whole “hidden underworld of supernatural creatures” plot in a much more interesting way than your average urban fantasy (or just straight-up fantasy, for that matter) with some wonderfully gothic touches.

At the same time I found the construction of the plot, and in particular the ways the book ties the protagonist’s past into the present events of the story, a little messy. It very much feels like two completely separate story ideas that were stitched together, much as a rogue taxidermist might create a fake mermaid by attaching a fish-tail to a dead baby, which is a thing that happens in the book and not just a really weird metaphor I came up with, only in the book it’s pretty obvious that the mermaid is 

You can see the stitches a little too well, is my point. 

I might go back and finish it at some point, because I was finding the story pretty interesting.

Bonus Round

These last two books aren’t ones I actually read recently, but I’ve intended on recommending them for a while but lacked the energy to do full write-ups, so I’m taking the opportunity to include them here. They’re pretty much my current go-to choices whenever anyone asks for good fantasy and sci-fi respectively.

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

If you’re any sort of fantasy reader then you already know about this, thanks to Jemisin’s record-breaking triple Hugo award win.

I’m actually not quite as hot on it as a lot of people are due to some criticisms that I might get around to at a later date, but I still think it blasts away 99% of the competition. It’s not just that it’s good, it’s that it’s effortlessly good in a bunch of different ways, and it keeps finding new ways to be good even when you think it’s run out of tricks.

Deserving of the hype, check it out if you want a fantasy novel that gets delightfully weird and apocalyptic and which plays with the conventions of narrative in interesting ways.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Another wildly original genre story, this one manages to make its setting--a xenopunk near-future Nigeria--feel completely believable and grounded despite introducing a bunch of absolutely wild sci-fi concepts.

I found the protagonist alternatingly dull and kind of off-putting, but the story he’s part of is gripping enough to make up for that, and besides, this is one of those rare cases where saying that the main draw is the setting and world-building doesn’t feel like an insult.