Literary Vice

[literaryvice]

The Guardian and the Thief

Who knew a book so heartbreaking could be so suspenseful. Maybe there are lots of examples? Well here is one: Megha Majumdar’s The Guardian and the Thief. Set in the near-future of India where the climate catastrophe has brought famine and social/political unrest we follow two families as they try – in their unique ways – to escape the conditions that keep them hungry and suffering. A terrific…

[literaryvice]

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: You didn't know snails could be this interesting

I forget who suggested I read Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, but whoever you are, remind me please, because it’s so surprisingly delightful. Non-fiction following Bailey’s year spent in bed with a mystery disease and her close – oh so close – observation of a snail. That’s it – narrow in scope but so wide in interest. Like there are a trillion facts about snails that I…

[literaryvice]

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all. Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love,…

[literaryvice]

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: In which I try to convince myself this vampire book is something more than a vampire book

Victoria Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is the kind of book you will see on racks promising it will be an absorbing read (and it sort of is) and that is also literary (I’m less convinced) and also important or thematically rich (not really). But if you want a bit of a romp through lesbian vampires who are also complex because they Hunger (and at what point does hunger erase the…

[literaryvice]

Flesh: Weird and great

It’s hard to describe the narrative style of David Szalay’s Flesh, except maybe to say it’s unsettling? Other reviews describe it as ‘sparse,’ which I guess is a nod to the matter-of-fact descriptions and the abrupt changes to our protagonist, István’s, life. Like between two paragraphs he murders a man (accidentally?) and then in the gap between chapters goes to prison or war or or or. I…

[literaryvice]

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Necessary Edits

Dear Suzanne Collins, What were you thinking? Maybe you were thinking that writing a prequel to the Hunger Games was a necessary extension of its literary universe. That you wanted, in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to understand the motivations of the villain in the Hunger Games universe (Coriolanus Snow) and you thought giving us an epic 500+ page deep dive into his history would…

[literaryvice]

Awake: A Memoir

You might be forgiven for thinking it a tad masochistic to read Awake: A Memoir which is, among other things, about the journey through divorce, at a time when I am doing the same. But! Hear me out. This is a very bad book, and there’s nothing misery loves more than silently judging something for being terrible (or in this case, publicly judging). Jen Hatmaker writes Awake in the years after she…

[literaryvice]

When Will There Be Good News? (That's the book title, but also)

Did I choose Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News for its title? Maybe. Because don’t we all want to know? When. Will. There. Be. Good. News. Until that day we can read charming mysteries with well drawn characters and (what’s the opposite of graphic?) engrossing plots. Jackson Brodie is a decent detective, but I prefer his counterpart (and why isn’t she the #main detective?) Louise…

[literaryvice]

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun. But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in…

[literaryvice]

Careless People: Lessons in Narration

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to be the director of public policy at Facebook. She got fired and then wrote a book about her experience working at Facebook and with the senior executives there. She doesn’t think much of the people or the organization – offering many scenes of casual and direct cruelty, indifference and pursuit of profit above all else. Yes, Careless People is a gentle title for the…

[literaryvice]

Silver Elite: Romantasy for Your Broken Attention Span

If you are concerned that you can no longer read a full book because your attention has been fragmented and blown apart by social media and the internet, you are not alone. The feeling that sitting and slowly absorbing a dense novel might be a kind of torture – or an impossibility akin to a couch to marathon pace – is shared. And you can make arguments about whether long form reading needs to be…

[literaryvice]

Book of Dust Book One - La Belle Sauvage

I enjoyed Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (book one of the Book of Dust triology) – at least the first third when Malcolm is getting hooked in to the mysterious elements of dust, of factions vying for control, of trying to sort out how a baby, Lyra, might fit into it all. Once the flood comes (spoiler, there’s a flood) the story turns into a quest narrative of trying to get through the various…

[literaryvice]

Dream Count: Some parts are brilliant

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count has some spectacular sections (and you sense in there the corollary that there are some that just draaaag). Following the interconnected lives of friends/relatives Chimaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou – Nigerian expats living in America (or Nigera but with some time in America) – the book explores their lives before/during/after the pandemic. How their…

[literaryvice]

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time. It is – perhaps with…

[literaryvice]

The Black Wolf: I hate to say a bad word about Louise Penny, but.

I usually just say I love Louise Penny for the comforting and cute the Gamache mysteries. But I have to say The Black Wolf is pretty bad. Ack, it feels like such a betrayal to say so. But it is – a plot that doesn’t really hang together and/or is so hard to follow that you can’t be bothered, characters that are so underdeveloped they have to continually be reintroduced as ‘the one who Gamache is…

[literaryvice]

Curiosities:

So you have to trust me that it’s worth getting into Anne Flemming’s Curiosities. You’re going to start it and think ‘this reading old english-style spelling is too annoying’ or ‘the narrator as archivist is a bit of a gimmick’ but then! It’s going to be so great. You’ll get to romp through the plague, and arctic exploration/starvation, and witch trials, and romance – and you’re going to be…

[literaryvice]

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the…