Walden by Henry David Thoreau

4/5 stars

What's it about? Thoreau’s treatise on individualism and respect for the natural world originated from his two years of self-sufficiency beside the shores of Walden Pond. A blend of philosophy, memoir, and field guide, Walden urges readers to shed frivolity and experience life at its simplest.

How’d I find it? Though a longtime resident of the TBR list, Thoreau became a pressing read. I borrowed my spouse’s copy for the occasion.

Who will enjoy this book? Rather than who, Walden requires guidance on how to read it: ever so slowly. A chapter a day was the perfect amount to chew at a time. If you liked Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, this book will speak to you.

What stood out? The questions of truth and resistance in Walden are relevant no matter when you read them, and Thoreau’s descriptions of the flora and fauna he encounters around Concord provide context for his experiment in the woods. A time capsule of 19th-century Americana.

Which line made me feel something? “The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broke strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.”

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

4/5 stars

What's it about? Julie and James leave the city to buy their first home, and the experience exposes their raw and ugly through a nightmarish possession. Is the house and its sinister history to blame, or have the tensions in their marriage finally stretched to breaking? A thoroughly haunting story that creeps under your skin and refuses to fade, much like Julie’s mysterious bruises.

How’d I find it? I comb horror lists every year, and The Grip of It makes repeat appearances. Spotting the unsettling cover at Greedy Reads inspired me to take it home.

Who will enjoy this book? The destabilizing effect of The Grip of It recalls Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things or the more recent (but decidedly less satisfying) Barbarian. Horror fans, you must pick this up.

What stood out? Jemc knows how to spook a reader, and The Grip of It leaves one panting with dread. A scene involving a Mardi Gras mask had me tossing and turning all night. The book is content to leave many of its questions unanswered, including the motives of the voyeuristic neighbor next door. Successful elements aside, the language can become overworked in more emotional moments (“we buck and shatter against the tedium,” for example).

Which line made me feel something? “There is still a chance that everything might be true, that we both might be filled with scars and substances that cause our synapses to fire inefficiently, that cause us to make decisions that are unwise and fantastic, and to believe what shouldn’t be believed, but that is not to say that the world outside our minds is reasonable. That is just to say there is no sense in knowing where the line is drawn.”

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? Oh, the buzz! Folks have been talking about this one for some time, so I picked up a copy at Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Why not 3 or more stars? Humans are being bred for meat, and all is not what it seems. In the opening pages, slaughterhouse employee Marcos may not want to remember how this new reality came to be, but he sure does, in blunt prose that explains the world of Tender Is the Flesh. After being spoon-fed all this backstory, I figured Bazterrica had a fast-paced adventure in store. Alas, rubbing readers’ noses in the horror appears to be the ultimate goal, and the myriad ways in which characters debase and mutilate each other quickly turn gratuitous. In one particularly gross scene, the penis of a rock star is served to a game reserve proprietor who strongly channels Hannibal Lecter. Most disappointing is Jasmine, the “First Generation Pure” female gifted to Marcos. She gets no agency, no chapter, no voice, or any real opportunity to challenge the morality of this depraved system.

In a book so dark that it contains puppy murders, the yuck has to be justified. Is the turn to human meat (called “special meat”) a ploy by the government to curb population growth? What should we make of the Scavengers, the people who lurk outside the slaughterhouse hoping for scraps? Does anyone buck against the new order? What is the difference between human and food?

Do you need to read this? You don’t need to read this.

Emergency by Kathleen Alcott

3/5 stars

What's it about? In these seven stories, women face turning points in their lives and seek exits. A powerful collection about reckoning with the self and embracing the fallout.

How’d I find it? I read “Temporary Housing” in Harper’s, and my socks? Blown off. I swiftly ordered Emergency from Lost City Books.

Who will enjoy this book? If you want to hang out in a long Lana Del Rey song, this read is for you.

What stood out? As a lover of Lana and sad girl ennui in general, this book felt written for me. Yes, the stories are California even when set in New York. Yes, the female friendships are overwhelming. Yes, Alcott’s work pairs well with a drink. The stories sag in certain places, and another round of editing might have cleared out distracting details (i.e. Helen’s jeans in “Emergency” — are they on or off?) to let narrative shine. Either way, “Temporary Housing” is a knockout and worthy of any reader’s eyes.

Which line made me feel something? Because many of my favorite excerpts appear at the end of these stories and I wouldn’t dare spoil one, here’s a tidbit from “Part of the Country”: “This was something my mother had warned me about, the spring I met him, but by then I saw her advice like something in the back of a fridge, likely past its expiry and suspect anyway for how rarely one had reached for it.”

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2/5 STARS

How’d I find it? As with a number of my most recent reads, this was in a large stack of goodies checked out from Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Why not 3 or more stars? This collaboration serves up truly sumptuous language— “an ant’s sip of juice” and “cloying honey-heavy light” —but doesn’t sell me on Red and Blue’s love. When I peeked behind the pretty words, I realized that half of this quick read is an unvaried epistolary exchange, and the other half’s low stakes and sentiment feel flimsy. I see your hand trembling, book!

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

5/5 STARS

What’s it about? Though When We Cease to Understand the World defies easy description, think of it as a treatise about the responsibility of discovery and the cost of our species’ relentless pursuit of knowledge. Labatut takes on this theme through accounts of Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and other luminaries as they redefined their disciplines, be it quantum physics or mathematics. Running through the book is an undercurrent of dread as scientific breakthroughs inevitably become tools of war.

How’d I find it? Shout out to Enoch Pratt Free Library for always having the hot titles available. I strolled in to pick up a hold and there this was, waiting.

Who will enjoy this book? When We Cease to Understand the World felt like a book by Milan Kundera, one of my all-time most beloved authors. Labatut’s blend of fiction and history, use of humor, and the slipperiness of madness and obsession hearken back to the Czech master. Fans of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer will also enjoy.

What stood out? Hot damn, this is a good one. Labatut picks apart the insularity of academic research by visiting great minds at work in the battlefields of World War I or at a sanatorium among convalescing patients, settings that highlight the loneliness and mania of genius. The blurry line between fact and fiction keeps the reader unsettled, uncertain — thoroughly effective in a book that feels like a warning.

Which line made me feel something? From the section “Prussian Blue:” “An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantryman of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it”

Generations by Lucille Clifton

4/5 stars

What’s it about? Lucille Clifton sketches her family tree as she journeys with her family to her father’s home for his funeral. Each section is dedicated to one of Clifton’s ancestors, but others crowd in with their own tales and entanglements, mimicking the jockeying and overlappings within any family. Honest, powerful, and brimming with love and pride.

How’d I find it? I found this book by happenstance at Enoch Pratt Free Library and can never resist an NYRB title. This was gobbled up over beers while a football game held surrounding friends rapt.

Who will enjoy this book? At less than 90 pages, Generations is worth any reader’s attention. Folks who liked Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith, who opens Generations with a beautifully written introduction, will particularly appreciate this title.

What stood out? The structure of the book reinvents the memoir genre. Clifton curates an impactful collage of photos, dialogue, secondhand stories, memories, lines from Walt Whitman, and snippets of her journey to Buffalo. This is the experience of a funeral in real time, recreating the barrage of interconnectedness that loss unleashes, the lore we fall into when surrounded by the people who made us possible.

Which line made me feel something? “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. ‘We come out of it better than they did, Lue,’ my Daddy said, and I watch my six children and know we did.”

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

1/5 stars

How’d I find it? With much anticipation, I picked up my copy at Atomic Books on publication day.

Why not 3 or more stars? I know. I eviscerated Fourth Wing like a clubtail. Don’t expect much different from Iron Flame. Xaden’s jaw is ticking, Violet is lifting her chin, and Ridoc is clapping people on the back. Repetition of key plot points, characters’ states of mind, and personality traits ensure quick consumption of this book’s 622 pages, with twists served up so gently and obviously that you feel like a genius for having guessed them. I give this five stars for entertainment value and anxiously await the third installment.

Jaw tick count: 11

The Girls by Emma Cline

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? As a true crime fan, this novel enticed me while browsing at Busboys & Poets after lunch.

Why not 3 or more stars? In 1969, teenage Evie becomes a tangential member of a group that eventually commits horrific acts of violence, a crime that is mercilessly teased over many pages until its ho-hum reveal. Nuggets of interest abound — Russell, the unlikely Pied Piper; the fame and fortune of Evie’s actress grandmother; Evie’s obsession with group member Suzanne; present-day Evie’s reckoning with her past — but all paths peter out. While The Girls wants to say something about female relationships, sexuality, and identity, it doesn’t reach beyond well-trod territory. It excels, however, in head-scratching descriptions of minutiae, such as “breaths like the beads of a rosary.”

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

4/5 stars

What’s it about? A medical student recounts her training as a doctor, meditating on her path to medicine, the failures of modern care, and the mystery of existence. DeForest plays with truth and perception in this odd, dark novel that lingers.

How’d I find it? I had read a review of this book in the New York Times last year and came across it at Enoch Pratt Free Library. I enjoyed this enough to want to buy my own copy to flip through again later.

Who will enjoy this book? The tone, length, and bending of reality in A History of Present Illness reminded me of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, but its ennui shares much with Jenny Offill’s Weather.

What stood out? Every dreary, dreamy book on existence brings something a touch different to the table, and A History of Present Illness serves up the jaded view of a physician reckoning with death, all the more convincing since DeForest is a neurologist herself. I loved how our narrator tells the reader little lies throughout, manipulating and editing her story as she goes. She’s a challenging character through which to experience medical school and residency, and it makes for compelling reading.

Which line made me feel something? “Remember looking in the mirror as a child, saying your name? This face, you’d think, these hands. This house and yard and mother, going to bed without dinner on cabbage night, jumping from the roof of the shed. The bravery of it all, the obvious import. But this is how it ends: surrounded by strangers, your clothes cut off with shears, cold blue hands, and gone then, with your body humiliated and left alone to stiffen.”