Book DepositOri

Ori, she/her. Personal blog to post reading updates. Trying to read more fiction. Will post about graphic novels and non-fiction too on occasion. Feel free to recommend books any time.

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Reading List:

Just to help me keep track of things, I decided I should make a solid reading list for future reference. I made this account to motivate myself to read more fiction, so that's all that's listed here. I'll still make posts about non-fiction and graphic novels, but this reading list is just for fiction. I'll try to keep this pinned and update it as needed.

Physically Owned: - Arrow of God (Achebe) - Wuthering Heights (Brontë) - The Summer Book (Jansson) - One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) - Love in the Time of Cholera (Márquez) - Pedro Páramo (Rulfo) - Lurkers (Tan) - A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller) - How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez) - The Glass Hotel (Mandel) - The House of Spirits (Allende) - Dear Life (Munro) - The Wind That Lays Waste (Almada) - The Sons (Kafka) - Time of Silence (Martín-Santos) - Wilderness Tips (Atwood) - The Trail We Leave (Palma) - Half in Love (Meloy) - In the Eyes of Mr Fury (Ridley) - Pachinko (Lee) - Men Without Women (Murakami)

Not Owned: - My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Moshfegh) - Wizard of Earthsea (Le Guin) - Nevada (Binnie) - No Longer Human (Dazai) - Kindred (Butler) - Hole (Oyamada) - Detransition Baby (Peters) - Summer Fun (Thornton) - Lote (von Reinhold) - House of Leaves (Danielewski) - Station Eleven (Mandel) - Piranesi (Clarke) - Pather Panchali (Bandyopadhyay) - The Last Picture Show (McMurtry) - Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky) - The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (Enriquez) - The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Assis) - The Bluest Eye (Morrison) - Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (Cho) - Untold Night and Day (Bae) - Theatre of War (Jeftanovic) - Convenience Store Woman (Murata) - Elena Knows (Piñeiro) - The Iliac Crest (Garza) - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong) - Hangsaman (Jackson) - The Fall (Camus)

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A quick non-fiction update: I just read Making Movies by Sidney Lumet.

Lumet is one of my favorite filmmakers so having the opportunity to read his personal insights on his body of work was really exciting. I really love how this book starts with a discussion on how and why he chooses to make the movies he does, and more importantly, the ones he doesn’t. Also, it’s really interesting to see someone in his position come out so strongly in opposition against auteur theory. He’s really honest about how much in his films can be credited to him as opposed to his collaborators. In general, from reading this book, he seems like someone who surrenders himself to whatever film he is working on. He doesn’t aim to make a Sidney Lumet film, he seeks to realize a script in whichever way is the most appropriate.

Though, honestly, this book taught me that I’m maybe not that interested in learning about film production. I can read mountains of books about music history and theory, but reading the more technical sections of this book didn’t inspire me much. There’s definitely a lot here I’ll take away, Lumet has a lot of great things to say about the art of visual storytelling, but the actual process work that goes into film doesn’t interest me much it seems.

Also, reading Lumet’s comments about Dog Day Afternoon were consistently disappointing. It’s really saddening to see Lumet continue to misgender and gawk at the film’s subjects even decades later. Every trans person I know who’s seen that film loves it passionately, so it’s always disheartening to see how input from trans people was ignored both during the film’s production and after its release. As time passes, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that film was inspired by spectacle more than it was empathy. It’s the one thing keeping it from being one of my favorite movies sadly.

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Just read Pedro Páramo for a book club with some friends! This is a book I’ve been looking into for a long time so I’m glad to have gotten to both read and discuss it. Me and my friend, Sarah, decided on this book because of its short length, thinking I could finish it in a couple sittings, but the book ended up being a bit too dense for me to accomplish that.

While it is pretty easy to go through this book’s 124 pages in an afternoon or two, I felt myself slowing down frequently due to how the book’s written. Rulfo has a very specific writing style in which the context to understand a passage isn’t presented until the end of said passage. This is also a non-linear book taking place in both the present and the past, so often times the reader will be following scenes from the perspective of someone who’s identity isn’t obvious until they are provided with the necessary context-cues.

While it took me a while to work through, I deeply loved this book and I absolutely plan on re-reading it several times in the future. The surreal writing might make the plot a bit tricky to follow, but it allows the reader to absorb these meditations on mortality through a through the experiences of every character in this novel. The world of this book feels purgatorial and the full context and chronology of each scene is given less priority than what these events tell us on an emotional level.

Im so glad I got to discuss this in a book club setting. There’s so much I had to say about the titular character that’s hard to get into without discussing spoilers. Pedro is this almost omnipresent force in the book. Even when you don’t know who is talking and when, conversations almost always lead back to Pedro. This book’s narrative is often centralized around Pedro’s fight for control in a way that at times it feels like he is taking control over the narrative itself.

This was such a unique experience out of all of the books I’ve read this year. I really want to replace my copy so this can be a book that stays on my shelf for years to come (the “good condition” blurb on ThriftBooks was a little misleading, lol). So thankful I got to share this book with friends this month.

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Post-vacation post 4/4

Lastly of the books I read on the trip, I finally read my first Toni Morrison book. Read it on the flight home that got delayed several times, so it kept me company while stuck in Philadelphia. It definitely left me excited to read more of her work.

It’s been so long since a book has immediately gripped me within the first five pages. Morrison is able to express so much with so few pages and maintains that same momentum for the entire book. I read this book over the course of about 36 hours, but when I finished, I felt as if I had been reading it for months.

This is already one of my favorite examples of magical realism I’ve seen anywhere. This book is full of so much authenticity and texture even after its supernatural premise is revealed in the first couple sentences. This book doesn’t read too differently from many realist novels I’ve read despite its setup. The heavily spiritual imagery also does wonders to amplify the emotional palette presented to the reader. Feelings of loss and guilt and given physical shape in ways that shook me to my core.

This was one of those books I felt like I could’ve just read forever. There’s a decently sized chunk of chapters in the middle of the book where the plot doesn’t progress much, but it was one of my favorite parts of the book because just spending times with these characters and Morrison’s prose is so engaging in itself. I also found myself going back to reread passages much more often than I usually do because there’s so many incredible examples of symmetry and rhythm between how certain chapters are written.

Then also, I usually don’t talk about spoilers in these posts, but I really want to talk about the later chapters. The one thing that stuck with me the most about this book was Sethe’s moments of introspection towards the end. Specifically the idea that even though she has been freed from slavery, the experience has left her spiritually tarnished. Lots of books, films, songs, etc discuss the physical suffering that American slaves endured (and for good reason, as it’s a subject that’s still horrifically under-taught in this country), but I haven’t read much that discusses this spiritual aspect. An important aspect of the tragedy of Sethe’s character is that while she is free in name, her soul has been left permanently altered by what she experienced. There’s no amount of revolutions that would undo that.

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Post-vacation post 3/4

Me and my boyfriend are both readers, so I knew while on the trip, we’d spend a lot of time reading together. I brought this short story collection to read in bed so I’d have something to read in several short sittings. I’d been wanting to read Plett for a long while because my friends are fans of hers, so I got really excited when the reprint of this book was announced and I ordered it immediately. One funny coincidence I immediately discovered is that I’ve actually read one of these stories before! I read one of them years ago on Plett’s blog before I ever knew who she was. I still think about that story all the time, so I’m glad to have finally discovered who wrote it.

From what I gather, Plett used to primarily write blogs. While most of the stories are written in typical narrative styles, some stories, like the one I recognized, are written in the tone of guides despite telling a specific story. One story, “How to Stay Friends”, follows a meeting between two women in a strained friendship, but written in the style of a tutorial. The perspective character’s anxieties manifest as “if and” prompts and hyper-specific tips. This style of writing could very easily be used as a gimmick, but the way it’s done in these few stories is incredibly effective. It puts you so deep in these characters’ heads that they hit me on a personal level.

Again, these stories probably only make up about 25 pages of a 300 page book, filled with stories that use more familiar framing devices. From my understanding, it seems like the stories are printed in the order they’re written in, which would make sense because it feels like they grow in complexity the further you read. I do like the early stories, but I feel like the last two longer stories in the book are where Plett’s storytelling are in full bloom. Specifically the story “Not Bleak” has been one I’ve been talking about with friends nonstop since reading it. It’s a great example of how Plett is able to succinctly write characters with complexities that make it hard to decide how to feel about them. That’s such a big part of life that I feel doesn’t get touched on in fiction often.

In the afterword of the book, Plett expresses worries from earlier in her career about not being a good “representative” for the trans community. While the stories in this book can be really vulgar, and I definitely wouldn’t want my mom reading them, I am so thankful that a book like this exists. There are so many dark, ugly emotions that unfortunately come with being trans in our current social climate. They can be really hard to talk about sometimes because of the standards we’re held to, so it’s so liberating to see them laid out so openly in this book. Though, again, I will probably hesitate before recommending this book to any of my friends unless I’m like, 1000% sure that they’re cool, lol.

Really got a lot out of this read. Look forward to hopefully reading Plett’s other work in the future.

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Post-vacation post 2/4

While I was traveling, we celebrated my birthday and my boyfriend gifted me this book, Pardalita, for the occasion. This is the first Portuguese graphic novel I’ve read and it’s by a publisher I hadn’t heard of before. Hopefully this opens me up to a lot more books I didn’t know about.

This book is a coming-of-age story that employs some mixed-media elements. Comic pages, in-character diary entries, and standalone illustrations all come together to tell a loose, yet sequential story. The result is a pretty light read you can probably get through in about an hour, but I found it to be a lovely experience.

A lot of scenes are short and mostly comprise of brief anecdotes. This, along with the diary entries, makes the book feel like a series of half-remembered moments that relate to each other emotionally rather than narratively. The writing felt really authentic to the experience of being a weird teenager surrounded by other weird teenagers. The format used for this book really compliments its subject.

The illustration in the book is pretty simple and can appear messy at times. I can see this being a turn-off for some people, but I really loved it. While characters are drawn pretty loosely, environments often use a good amount of photo-referencing, which creates a really satisfying masking effect. There are also so many inspiring page layouts in this book that really demonstrate the intentionality behind the book’s visual aesthetic. There’s one sequence around the middle of the book that i won’t spoil, but I can’t stop thinking about.

Really pleasant surprise of a book. Super thankful my boyfriend knows me well enough to pick stuff out that’d resonate with me like this.

Oh, and last little note, I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a colophon in the back. Such a nice surprise.

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Post-vacation post 1/4

Hey everyone, I just got back from a week trip in Boston. While I was there, I did a lot of reading, but not much writing, so I’m going to make some brief posts talking about what I read over the next few days.

On the flight to Boston, I took Normal People by Sally Rooney to read on the plane. I chose it because I read Rooney on my last flight and one of the blurbs on the cover suggested reading the book in one sitting. I honestly don’t really agree with that sentiment and I’ll touch on that later.

This is my second book by Rooney after reading Beautiful World, Where Are You and I was really excited to read more by her. Instantly, I sort of realized I created an inaccurate picture of Rooney in my head. The prose in Beautiful World was stylized to such an extreme that I assumed all of her books would be written in the same way. Beautiful World is written in a way that’s drier than any piece of realist fiction I’ve read and I fell in love with it because of that, so when I read Normal People and it was written somewhat more conventionally and didn’t have that same absolute objectivity, I was a bit disappointed, but I still got a lot out of the book.

This is in essence, a book about being trapped by societal expectation, even when those expectations are not actually enforced. You follow the cast over the course of several years, starting in their late teen years. One of my favorite things about this book is how convincingly the characters go from acting like teenagers to being more grounded adults. A lot of time passes between chapters and characters introspect and grow a lot between them in a way that never feels sudden or forced. That’s why I don’t really agree with the recommendation to read this book in one sitting, because so much character growth is done without the reader present.

Also, I do sort of wish this book had a different title. I definitely get the reasoning behind it and it definitely fits a book about a bunch of kids learning how to be people, though it sacrifices a lot of subtlety the later chapters could’ve had. Every time a character pondered about the concept of “normal people” I would feel a tad annoyed. I still like many of those passages, but when they’re all so concentrated at the end of the book, it feels like Rooney’s bluntly telling you what to feel about her characters.

While I don’t want to give it away, I did genuinely really love the ending to this book. It’s really mature in a way that was really refreshing to me. I’m tempted to throw my copy at someone just to get to talk about the ending, lol.

Overall, I think I might be a bigger fan of Rooney’s later work, but I still got a lot out of this. Really appreciate the experience this book gave me. Definitely going to read any future work of Rooney’s.

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Recently finished Gilead, my second Marilynne Robinson book. I really loved this one, but I’m not really sure how to talk about it if I’m entirely honest. It’s a really unique book.

The book is conceptualized as a long-form letter written by a pastor to be read by his young son once he’s reached adulthood. Along with stories from his life, the pastor introspects on religion and his own mortality throughout. The entire book is written as if you’re reading this letter, with the only pauses being the occasional line break where the pastor himself is taking a break from writing.

I really got a lot out of this book, but due to its format, I’m not really sure how to go about talking about it in any way more complicated than me just saying it was good. It has a very specific goal in mind and it accomplishes it amazingly. This book is an incredible character study and you are allowed a very intimate proximity to its central character. The pastor probably isn’t someone I would agree with on many things in real life, but this book left me with a really deep understanding of him and how his beliefs have developed.

This was a really interesting turn from Housekeeping, Robinson’s previous novel. Housekeeping is sometimes characterized by some as a book that uses intricate prose in place of things like story or character writing. Though Gilead is a book that is technically comprised entirely from dialogue and focused on authenticity. Everything written in Gilead is written in the way I believe the pastor would have wrote it. It’s such a hard shift from the often abstract imagery presented in Housekeeping and it’s a testament to Robinson’s command over the medium that she could make such a confident stylistic shift like this.

I loved this book, but it maybe wasn’t the best one to pick up after such a long reading hiatus. As it’s such a conversational book, I wanted to fully absorb everything the pastor told me and I ended up only reading a handful of pages a day, which is part of why it took so long to write this. I absolutely recommend this book if any part of this sounds interesting to you, it’s an entirely unique experience.

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Dont know if I’d call this a book haul post or not, but I figured I’d post an update with all of my recent book acquisitions because I’ve been inactive for a while and I’ve slowly been picking up some books Im really excited about.

Some notable books I’ve gotten recently include:

Chinua Achebe - The African Trilogy

I LOVED Things Fall Apart, it was a book that occupied my mind during all of my waking hours when I read it. I wanted to read the rest of the trilogy and decided to sell my paperback and replace it with this hardcover of the entire trilogy. Very excited to read these last two books and maybe even re-read the first.

Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping

This is actually a book I’ve already read. After I read it the first time, I gifted my paperback to my mother and since then, I’ve been reflecting on the novel and I’m starting to feel like it might be my favorite novel I’ve read. It’s full of such gripping, visceral prose from cover to cover and the more I thought about it, the more I thought I wanted to read it again. So now I have this 40th anniversary edition of the book to replace the one that previously occupied my shelf.

Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

Naturally, loving Housekeeping so much, I wanted to read more by Robinson and picked this up as it’s one of her most universally beloved. If you notice in the picture, there’s a bookmark in this one because I’m already 100 pages into it. For the unaware, this book is written in the form of a letter, written by an old pastor for his only son. Essentially, the book is structured as if the pastor is telling you all of this directly with no chapter breaks or changes in perspective. Very unique experience and I think I’m really getting a lot out of it. I’ll post another update about this one soon.

Gabriel García-Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

I don’t have much to say about the contents of the book themselves. I am excited to read this because I planned on reading a lot more Latin American literature this year (as you can probably see from the shelf picture). Though I’m a tad miffed because I went out of my way to find a copy without the “Oprah’s Book Club” stamp on the cover and ThriftBooks sent me one with it anyways. Aaaaaaaa why do all books have these on them now, why can’t these just be stickers I can remove after buying it, why do these have to be permanent?

Anyways, I have a lot of reading to do now and I’ll update y’all on it during the coming weeks.

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Hey y'all, haven't been on here in a bit. These past few months, I was working on my senior project and I just graduated with my BFA last week. On top of being busy with that, I had multiple classes that regularly assigned me with readings, so I haven't have much freedom with what I've been reading lately and haven't been posting as a result of that. Just to break the ice with posting again, I'm going to write some quick thoughts about all of the graphic novels I read during Spring, all of which are memoirs coincidentally.

Gabrielle Bell - The Voyeurs

Of everything here, this is the one book that wasn't assigned reading from a professor. Bell has been a long-time inspiration to me and I felt like it was a good idea to dig deeper into her work while I developed my senior project. This is also my first time reading Bell since I got my first published essay by writing about her work.

This might have been a bit of a downer read while finalizing my degree in sequential art. Much of this book focuses on Bell's struggles with monetizing her work despite how much respect she has earned in the industry. What's worse is that many of her criticisms of the comic industry are ones I deeply agree with. I sort of felt like I was in an echo chamber of my own pessimism while reading sections of this book, lol.

Though this book really struck me with its visual storytelling. The opening sequence could have been a really great 3-page short story thanks to how it presents you with such a striking concept and image as soon as you open the book. Then all throughout the book, despite the visual simplicity and static page compositions, Bell consistently creates active environments and character that fully take advantage of the comics form.

This isn't a new observation, but I'm always so captured by how introspective Bell's writing is. I especially love all of the scenes in which the subject of Bell's autobiography work is brought up. The book presents you with a lot to think about concerning the nature of the autobiography. Questions that are very interesting to think about when paired with Bell's brutal honesty regarding her more negative personality traits, lol.

Lynda Barry - What It Is

Despite my long-held interest in her work, this is my first time actually reading a full Lynda Barry book. I absolutely plan on looking deeper into her bibliography in the near future. This is a book that I think was really important to read while in the last semester of my art education.

This book is very abstract in nature and its lack of consistent narrative makes it stand out against other graphic memoirs. The one central subject of this book is the concept of images. What is an image? How do images work? Why do images make us feel?

This was an incredibly unique and engaging read that made me ask a lot of questions that were very important for this moment in my life. I just wish this wasn't and assigned reading so I could've read it at a more relaxed pace. This is definitely one to re-read.

Maia Kobabe - Gender Queer

I whole-heartedly believe it was really important to read this book as well as other books that are currently being challenged on a large scale in this country. Though, unfortunately, as a narrative, I was left a little unsatisfied with this book.

I think it's really great that this book exists. I think its really good for young queer people to be able to recognize themselves in media as that is something that has been historically denied from them. I also really respect how honest Kobabe is about eir sexuality and eir sexual development, I could never be this intimate with my readers. Though, as a narrative, I feel like this book wasn't as introspective as it could have been. While I do think it's good to have representations of transition like this, I feel like this is probably a book that won't hold as much relevance in a future where more trans narratives are readily available.

After reading this book, I felt like I didn't know much about Kobabe other then eir relationship with sexuality and gender (and trashy fan fiction, which I actually do appreciate). Which is fine, this is literally a book called "Gender Queer", though the discussions of sexuality and gender within the book are simply just personal experiences without much in the way on introspection or interrogation. That's also fine though, I don't feel like I have a very nuanced perspective on my own sexuality in full honesty, though as a narrative I felt like this was lacking both as a discussion about queerness and as a gateway to conversing with Kobabe. I think this book maybe could have benefitted from Kobabe reflecting on these experiences for a couple more years and developing a deeper perspective on them.

Junji Ito - Cat Diary: Yon & Mu

This was the one re-read of this selection of books. This was something I first came across during my teenage binge of all of the Junji Ito books I could find (thanks Alfredo).

Reading this now, I admittedly didn't get too much out of it. I do still really appreciate this book and it's my go-to example for how much visual expression can influence a reading experience. There's undoubtedly a mountain of web comics you can read that feature very similar subject matter to this book, but this one stands out for *how* it communicates that subject matter to the reader. Visual storytelling is the ultimate factor in comics. One story can be told an infinite numbers of ways through variations in visual storytelling and this book is a testament to that.

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Osaka devouring Chiyo-chan

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Monthly reading update for February

I meant for this to be another bimonthly one, but I forgot to update it a couple weeks ago, and by the time I remembered it was almost the end of the month anyway. At the time, I was thinking "it's a short month, I've not been reading much, it'll be fine" but it turns out I actually did read a lot. So it's gonna be a long one today:

Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire

Spent most of this time thinking that it was just a political intrigue type book disguised as science fiction (not necessarily a bad thing, I love scheming!). The sci-fi elements are a bit more important than that, upon reflection (e.g. the imago machines play a pretty significant role), but the scheming is the real reason to read it. If you like the early chapters of Dune better than the revolution part, you probably don't need me to tell you that you need to read this. I'm definitely going to be getting the sequel next time I'm at a bookstore.

Amelia Earhart - 20 Hrs., 40 Min.

Earhart's been a longtime hero of mine, albeit one I don't think about much these days. I found this one in a box of old books I pulled out of the basement to sell to the used bookstore, and that childhood love led me to hold onto it. Sadly there's not really much of interest in there; the autobiographical part doesn't cover any ground I'd not heard before, and the supposed central event of the book (crossing the Atlantic) is handled over the course of about 5-10 pages. If you want to hear about weather keeping her trapped in Newfoundland for weeks, then maybe give it a shot? But I'd not recommend it.

Cecilia Gentili - Faltas

This one was absolutely incredible; really loved Gentili's narrative voice. It's about growing up trans, growing up abused, growing up poor, but despite all that it feels almost triumphant. Probably that's because it's written in the form of letters to people who didn't leave the town, whereas she got out and made something of herself. Not really able to talk about what I loved about it, but I'll definitely be recommending it.

Forman Brown - Better Angel

It's gay fiction (thinly veiled autobiography) from the 1930s, what more need I say? He reads too much, gets a superiority complex about his intelligence, and ends up unfit for heterosexual society. Basically, he's just like me. He seems to have a very dim view of 20th century gay society though; perhaps the result of discovering homosexuality through reading ancient Greek literature? But what would you really expect from a socially respectable gay guy from 90 years ago?

Junichiro Tanizaki - Quicksand

Immediately after reading The Makioka Sisters for the first time, I was ready to proclaim Tanizaki as one of my favorite authors ever. Every book I've read of his since then has slowly been changing my mind on that. Superficially, The Makioka Sisters seems like it sticks out in his discography (it's almost like Jane Austen, whereas his other work seems to be different ways sex can ruin your life), but it doesn't really? It's all just different ways of saying that he thinks modernity is killing Japan; in this one, Tanizaki's modernity of choice is bisexuality. It's kinda fun reading about the evil lesbian for a bit, but it all just comes to a sudden stop, as if he got bored with it and just threw one last chapter in to provide an ending.

Min Jin Lee - Pachinko

I am such a sucker for these multigenerational family sagas. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homegoing, Pachinko: I'll read them all, just keep them coming. I'd not known anything before about the Korean community in Japan, and now I do (or at least I think I do), so that's pretty cool as well. Noa is, sadly, another "he is so me" type character; always reading, a bit snobby, dead-set on being One Of The Good Ones.

Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

I'd read Notes of a Crocodile a while back and never really knew what to make of it. There was a bit of a narrative there, but not really? And you never got a sense of anyone. Anyway, Last Words from Montmartre is like that too, but a bit more understandable as the narrator is trapped in a spiral of isolation that it's too late to get out of. Knowing Miaojin's fate, it's hard not to think that the distance between author and narrator was extremely thin, if not non-existent. I started feeling really bad about my own life while reading this, and I think that it was probably a contributing factor, because I started to feel better as soon as I finished reading.

Luke Dani Blue - Pretend It's My Body

It's a trans short story collection, but none of the stories really do much for me. Maybe the one about the "con" who's planning to upload her consciousness to the Internet? Maybe it's just a small sample size, but nearly all of the trans short fiction I've read hasn't really done anything for me in the past (Casey Plett's work being the main exception). I'm not sure why that would be the case though, because basically every trans novel ends up impressing me? I guess it's possible I don't like short fiction as much as I think I do. If y'all have any other trans short story recommendations, I would love to hear them though!

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Just finished Chilly Scenes of Winter this morning. Definitely not what I was expecting, but I think I got a lot out of it.

The book follows Charles, a miserable, lonely, selfish man who is constantly longing for his ex who married a different man. There are countless stories about men like Charles, written by men like Charles in an attempt to achieve catharsis or validation in their unpleasantness. This book caught my attention because while the plot description sounded familiar, this book was written by a woman, which was a bit surprising.

The entirety of this book is told from Charles’s perspective in extreme detail. Conversations and events Charles participates in will echo and resurface several chapters later, eventually fleshing out his inner world in a way that makes the reader feel like they’re actually living in this character’s head. The more this goes on, you begin to notice all of the pretension and cognitive dissonance Charles employs in his efforts to “win back” his ex.

I overall really liked this book, though the writing style did trip me up a little initially. This book is written with almost exclusively dialogue or Charles’s thoughts. There is very little scene description in this book, and sometimes there will be scene changes which the reader must infer through context clues. This style is definitely interesting, it almost felt cinematic in a way, though it took a bit for me to get used to.

This definitely isn’t a book for everyone, I doubt many would want to spend 300 pages inside the mind of self-pitying misogynist, but the verisimilitude of Charles as a character was very impressive to me and I appreciated the experience.

(And a side note: theres is a character in this book who is impatiently waiting for a new Bob Dylan album to come out, and I’m glad I know enough about Dylan to infer that the book was referring to Blood on the Tracks despite never naming it.)

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Finally finished To Strip the Flesh, a short-story collection by Oto Toda. This collection is named after the one-shot that made a name for Toda internationally. I had initially read that story months ago and decided to pick up this collection based on how much I appreciated that story.

To Strip the Flesh itself is a story I got a lot out of back when it was a hot topic. In the back of this book, there’s an interview where Toda talks about writing that story and finding it difficult to write something that accurately depicted the wide range of experiences queer people go through, so they opted to instead write with specificity as their main focus. I absolutely think this choice was for the best because my favorite part of the story is how thoroughly fleshed-out (pun unintended) its central character is. The experiences of trans men go unexplored in most media, especially in an industry like the manga industry, so the verisimilitude of this story is a testament to how diligent Toda’s research was.

I was very excited to read more of Toda’s work because To Strip the Flesh left me with so much good will, though unfortunately I didn’t get much out of this collection. The other stories in here ranged from thematically uninspired to weird and kind of hard to make sense of. Most of the characters in these stories felt defined by cliche, so even with some of the more creative imagery in these stories, it was hard for me to become engaged with them. There were a couple stories with odd visual storytelling too that made them a bit confusing.

Overall, my biggest issue with most of these stories is that they lack specificity, something with To Strip the Flesh has in spades. It appears most of the stories were ordered reverse-chronologically, so I’m left with the impression that Toda has grown a lot as a storyteller since creating most of these short stories. Because of that, I’m still excited to see what Toda makes in the future, but as for this book, I was left a little disappointed.

[bookdepositori]

Treated myself by going to the used book store today. Got a couple books on my list plus an interesting sounding one I hadn’t heard of. Going to try to get some reading done today while it rains.

[bookdepositori]

Just finished The Friend by Sigrid Nunez after blind-buying it at a thrift store. I feel… mixed on it.

The first thing that really surprised me by this book is it’s structure. From chapter 2 onwards, the book abandons any attempt at kayfabe to present you stream-of-conscious writing in essay format. The plot presented in chapter 1 serves more as a thematic starting point than a consistent storyline you’ll follow in the rest of the book. Nunez is someone who’s been in the writing industry for a long time, writing several books as well as teaching in English programs, and most of this book draws from her thoughts on literature as a whole.

Overall… I did not enjoy the writing style used in this book. After reading chapter after chapter explaining *why* the book is written the way it is, I was begging to just see it in practice instead of just reading more counter-arguments. I am a big fan of the works of Laurie Anderson, and I’ve always been confused by people who vehemently hate her writing, but reading this book made me sort of understand how this style could be grating when it doesn’t click with you. More chapters are used talking about the writing than are spent on the writing itself. Then even when I did finally get to a chapter that was written in third-person prose, I felt like it was just repeating ideas presented in the previous chapters.

This is all such a disappointment to me, because I feel like if I met Nunez in person and had a conversation with her, I’d get a lot out of it and appreciate the experience. I feel like I agree with a lot of her observations, but the way they are presented here are so defensive and circulatory. Specifically I emphasized with her disappointment when discussing classics with her students. She talks about how gifted she feels to be able to read the works of Rilke, but her students interpret his work as something elitist that must be challenged and defeated rather than learnt from. This is an attitude that I’ve observed in my classmates that’s really disheartening to see and I whole-heartily agree with Nunez on the subject. Though this book often falls into “kids these days” dismissal that made the reading experience feel bitter and honestly annoying to read.

At the end of the day, I think this book just wasn’t for me. If I was more ingrained in the writing industry, I’d probably find this more interesting, but to me this just felt like a series of self-satisfied independent statements strung together into novel-length. Someone else might get more out of the book, but I don’t think I would’ve finished it if it wasn’t so short.

[bookdepositori]

A bit late to writing this, but I finished Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe back on Tuesday. I think this might be the fastest I finished a novel after buying it, with me buying it only 10 days before. This book hooked me almost immediately and even though I was very busy, I read chapters between classes every day because this book was all I could think about.

Normally I’d talk a little bit of what I thought about the plot, but honestly I don’t want to spoil anything about this. Part of me wishes I didn’t even read the blurb on the back of the book before reading it. If you’re at all interested in international literature and want to read a depiction of Africa that goes directly against the grain of the English literature that came before it, please please please read anything by Chinua Achebe.

The one thing I rarely see mentioned about this book that I loved is its characters. The book’s structure made me sink really deeply into these characters’ daily lives and their relationships to each other. I’ve seen some people get a bad taste in their mouths’ because the perspective character is a very unpleasant person to read about, and that’s absolutely fair. I’m very interested in what he represents in the story though. Okonkwo is someone who’s personal identity has been shaped by his insecurities and biases (especially towards women), and while this may not be fun to read for some, I felt that it really emphasized the book’s thesis (which I will not spoil).

This is maybe the first novel I’ve read where the last paragraph made my jaw hit the floor. When I realized that this book was doing in its final chapter, I was blown away. This is a book I’m going to remember forever.