Read and Dream: My Book Life: 2018

Mini Reviews: Karate Chop (Denmark) and Savage Theories (Argentina)

Today I'm back with two books to share with you. After a little break from the Read the World challenge, I'm now feeling completely energized again to get on all these books. These two were from a huge stack I picked up at the library.

The first is a collection of short stories from Danish author Dorthe Nors called Karate Chop, and the second is a grand sort-of novel by Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac. Here are my thoughts!

Title: The Incendiaries
Author: R.O. Kwon
Publisher: Riverhead Books

Blurb: Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn't tell anyone she blames herself for her mother's recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.

Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group—a secretive extremist cult—founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves North Korea and Phoebe's Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he's tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, seeking answers to what happened to Phoebe and if she could have been responsible for this violent act.

Me: What did this book mean to me? I feel like I could best express everything in a letter to the author, R.O. Kwon. So here goes...

This month for FemLIT, we decided to read a book that's been buzzed about a lot since last year: The Power by Naomi Alderman. Here's my review of it!

Hey! Welcome back - today, I wanted to talk about a topic that's been increasingly relevant in my bookish world: re-reading.

This month for FemLIT, we finally caught up to the trend and read Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. I'd been aware of its categorization as a feminist work of poetry, and though I had my severe skepticism, I thought it was worth giving a read...possibly so I could critique it even more.

I finished the book in two sittings, had some thoughts, then went on twitter and had a tiny angry rant.

To put it simply, I cannot stand Rupi Kaur's poetry, or basically any "insta-poetry" for that matter.

Title: Just Kids
Author: Patti Smith
Publisher: Ecco

Blurb: In Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.

Me: The most stunning, inspiring, sincere memoir I've read.

Title: Mornings in Jenin
Author: Susan Abulhawa
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Blurb: Forcibly removed from the ancient village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejas are moved into the Jenin refugee camp. There, exiled from his beloved olive groves, the family patriarch languishes of a broken heart, his eldest son fathers a family and falls victim to an Israeli bullet, and his grandchildren struggle against tragedy toward freedom, peace, and home. This is the Palestinian story, told as never before, through four generations of a single family.

Me: Such an important story for our world today, but the writing doesn't do the story justice.

Title: Open City
Author: Teju Cole
Publisher: Random House

Blurb: Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.

But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

Me: A recommended read from my AMAZING English teacher...but not sure how to feel about it. Nothing like I've read before, that's for sure.

Title: A Lucky Man
Author: Jamel Brinkley
Publisher: Graywolf Press

Blurb: In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires.

Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

Me: This is the first short story collection I've savored and adored (and possibly the first that I made it all the way through). It's delicate but unapologetic and so incredibly written.

I'm 12 years late to the party and buzz surrounding this book and probably 15-20 years under the target age. In fact, if I hadn't heard so much about Elizabeth Gilbert and then hadn't seen this book at a used book store for a dollar, I wouldn't have picked it up at least for another decade, or maybe never. So why did I read it? And what'd I get out of it? Why am I bothering to talk about it here?

Hey! After I've been gone for what seems like a while, I just wanted to update you on this summer and everything that's happened. It's been a busy month or so, and I truly feel so lucky to say that I've been able to make so many new friends and memories.

Title: The Sun Also Rises
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Genre: Classic

Blurb: The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Me: Maybe the first Hemingway I truly enjoyed. Brisk, unapologetic, and surprisingly meaningful.

Just a few weeks ago, I began reading This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, one of the most famous American writers alive today. I wasn't thinking of much other than the excitement at finally reading a book by a name I'd heard everywhere. But my choice happened to be eerily timely.

Looking up Diaz's name, I found this New Yorker article published last month where Diaz discussed the effects of trauma and distress of childhood sexual assault on his life. It was a powerful, emotional article that showed how the trauma had repercussions all throughout his life. He mentioned that he continued to cheat on his partners, despite knowing how bad it was. Reading the article, it was crazy how much his personal experiences spoke to the fiction I was reading.

The God of Small Things Review

Title: The God of Small Things
Author: Arundhati Roy
Genre: Magical Realism, Fiction
Publisher: Random House

Blurb: The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river...

Me: Still so thankful I got to read this in a high school English class. Refreshing and heartbreaking. It breaks the boundaries of the novel again and again.

Title: Exit West

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Genre: Fiction, Contemporary

Blurb: In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.

Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Me: Such a relevant, poignant, simple yet moving story of two people in extremely difficult situations. I loved it.

Title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Author: Joan Didion
Genre: Essays

Blurb: The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Me: I almost didn't write this review, because it's been a while since I've been so ambivalent about a book. It was well-written, but it left me empty and didn't add any astonishing insight.

In 1999, the legendary Stephen King wrote the legendary book about what he did best, On Writing.

Ever since, it's become required (or at least highly recommended) reading for any aspiring writer or really, any type of creative. The book has timeless wisdom and it doesn't hurt that the advice comes from one of the most successful authors alive today.

I don't talk about writing on here nearly as much as I talk about reading. I think it's for a few reasons. One, the blog was started to log my reading journey. Two, I am much less confident in my writing ability than my reading ability. Three, I don't feel experienced enough to really "talk" about writing.

Title: Black Boy
Author: Richard Wright
Genre: Classic, Memoir

Blurb: Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

Me: With Black Boy, Richard Wright just absolutely took the title of my favorite writer about anything related to race. Incredible.

This month for FemLIT, we read both a feminist and an African-American classic, Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, to celebrate Black History Month. Here were my thoughts.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading my third complete book I've read in French, L'Étranger by Albert Camus. It was the first French book that I read that I felt had complex literary meanings, and it was pretty daunting to try and absorb that in a different language. But it was so worth it.

Title: The Bone People
Author: Keri Hulme
Genre: Fiction

Blurb: In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

Me: Unconventional and groundbreaking, but also confusing and unresolved.

Title: My Life on the Road
Author: Gloria Steinem
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Random House

Blurb: My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria's growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality--and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women's Conference to her travels through Indian Country--a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world.

In prose that is revealing and rich, Gloria reminds us that living in an open, observant, and "on the road" state of mind can make a difference in how we learn, what we do, and how we understand each other.

Me: Revisiting this old favorite was such a necessary decision. It has brought me clarity and a solid foundation in navigating the new year.