Books of June

This month in nonfiction:

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior — Catherine Johnson and Temple Grandin (2006)

Ms. Grandin has a unique per­spec­tive on ani­mal behav­ior that is informed by her own autism. She is very opin­ion­at­ed but you have to trust the opin­ion of a woman who has spent so many years care­ful­ly watch­ing ani­mals. It is inter­est­ing to see some of the folk­lore  of ani­mal train­ers and man­agers (such as the loca­tion of hair whorls on the faces of hors­es and cat­tle cor­re­lat­ing with flight­i­ness) backed up by expe­ri­ence and exper­i­ment. The ref­er­ences are some­what dat­ed but the book is full of insights that are now being proven in sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments. I will be very inter­est­ed to see how she expand on these ideas in her lat­er book “Animals Make Us Human.”
* shift your per­spec­tive for a while *

 

 

Train the Dog in Front of You — Denise Fenzi (2016)

The best piece of dog train­ing advice I’ve got­ten this year. Maybe ever. Train the dog you have. In order to do that you have to pay atten­tion to your dog’s par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty and learn­ing styles. Fenzi offers a hand­ful of modes/aspects/facets that you can use to begin to orga­nize your thoughts as you observe your dog. Well worth the rather steep price.
* there is no point in wait­ing for the per­fect dog *

This month in essays:

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life — Samantha Irby (2017)

Ah, this one caused me a good deal of grief as I tried to for­mu­late an opin­ion. Angry POC women are a com­mon essay buck­et at the book store these days. It’s about time that they got a chance for their voic­es to be heard and yet. And yet. POC, queer, and dis­abled is no guar­an­tee of interesting.

A lot of peo­ple loved this book. I just did­n’t find it that fun­ny; fun­ny requires orig­i­nal and a glimpse of human­i­ty that is tru­ly dar­ing. There is a guard­ed­ness about her rev­e­la­tions — a sense that she is dar­ing me to not find the sit­u­a­tions fun­ny that –under­cuts these essays. Her overeat­ing, pover­ty dri­ven mon­ey fetishiz­ing, trash tele­vi­sion lov­ing life does­n’t speaks to me of larg­er human con­cerns in a new way.
* TMI isn’t the same as imi­tate — it just isn’t *

This month in fiction:

The Shipping News — Annie Proulx (1993)

Yeah, late to the par­ty. I’d nev­er read it. The Shipping News is much more dark­ly com­ic than I was led to believe. I enjoyed it, even the weird writ­ing style. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of all those frag­ments with the long lists of things. I was also impressed by how much she knew or learned about Newfoundland, fish­ing, and boats — espe­cial­ly build­ing boats. The excerpts from the knot book at the begin­ning of the chap­ters were inter­est­ing on their own and added nice­ly the sto­ry. All in all I found this rather to my taste even though I hat­ed Brokeback Mountain. So, do I dare to read anoth­er of her books?
* Weird, eerie, and dark­ly comic *

 

 

Camino Island — John Grisham (2017)

Great engag­ing plot. A caper involv­ing the theft of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s man­u­scripts and a block­er writer recruit­ed very much against her will to entrap the man who may have bought the man­u­scripts from the thieves. Grisham’s prose is dry and thin. Lakes are pret­ty. Girls are tall. Buildings are old. Some peo­ple claim that it’s taut; I think it’s just unimag­i­na­tive. The char­ac­ters aren’t all that well-rounded either. The woman from the insur­ance group who recruits the pro­tag­o­nist is such a stick fig­ure that I can have torn her out of a fash­ion mag­a­zine. Widely reviled by the Grisham faith­ful. But as a non-Grisham read­ing fan of both the capers and that genre of mys­tery known as the cozy it worked well enough for me.
* a beach book for the fan of both capers and cozies *

 

Gwendy’s Button Box — Steven King and Richard Chizmar (2017)

This novel­la about of a girl giv­en a gift by a mys­te­ri­ous man in a bowler hat cir­cles the rim of out­right hor­ror but nev­er quite dips into the whirlpool. The man in the bowler hat gives Gwendy a box that will deliv­er two gifts (choco­lates and sil­ver dol­lars) when­ev­er she asks. But there oth­er but­tons on the top whose use is left unex­plained. As time goes on Gwendy begins to devel­op a the­o­ry about their pur­pose. Only once does she use one of the but­tons on the box and at the same time an ene­my is van­quished in a prop­er­ly hor­ri­fy­ing man­ner. Did Gwendy cause this or was it coin­ci­dence? She nev­er quite sure but becomes con­vinced that the box is dan­ger­ous and its actions fraught with unin­tend­ed con­se­quences. How should Gwendy deal with the box and it’s pow­ers? Can she stay on the right side of good and evil?
* what if some­one gave you Pandora’s box with­out an instruc­tion manual? *

 

The Book of Polly — Kathy Hepinstall (2017)

Another child nar­ra­tor — as the book begins the 10 year-old Willow is pre­oc­cu­pied with the idea that her moth­er Polly will die. As well as telling out­ra­geous lies about her moth­er, she is obsessed with a secret that her moth­er is keep­ing. The rela­tion­ship between moth­ers and daugh­ters is explored in the con­text of an old­er moth­er, well estab­lished in her sar­cas­tic know every­thing per­son­al­i­ty, and her equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al late-in-life child. As Willow turns 16, Polly is indeed dying. With the help of her miss­ing broth­er’s odd ball friend , Willow sets out to get a mir­a­cle for her moth­er and in the process to dis­cov­er her secrets. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive is Hepinstall’s cre­ation of a unique voice for the teenage Willow.
* south­ern goth­ic with a heap­ing side of humor *

The Books of May

This month in prose:

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories — Mehvesh Murad & Jared Shurin(eds) (2017)

A col­lec­tion of  new and tra­di­tion­al tales of the Djinn. Several of these are excel­lent. One is a com­mon­ly reprint­ed bit of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where the Djinn is a taxi dri­ver. Other sto­ries range from the tra­di­tion­al, to poet­ry, to ones set in mod­ern Islam. There are also a cou­ple of pret­ty ter­rif­ic future world/Sci-Fi sto­ries. The range of sto­ries and ver­sions of the djinn in Islamic folk­lore is amaz­ing. Happily this book is far from a bunch of white folks riff­ing on some­one else’s cul­ture. Also it has one of the high­est rations of good sto­ries to meh sto­ries in any mul­ti­ple author col­lec­tion that I have read in the last three years.
* eclec­tic can be a fab­u­lous thing. *

 

The Thirteenth Tale — Diane Setterfield (2006)

Another twins sto­ry. The writer Vida Winter has told a thou­sand and two sto­ries about her ori­gins, all untrue and most fan­tas­tic. But now at the end of her life she decides that she will tell one biog­ra­ph­er the truth. Her cho­sen biog­ra­ph­er is Margaret Lea, a ret­i­cent book­worm who lives above her father’s anti­quar­i­an book shop. At the end of their ini­tial inter­view Ms. Lea announces her only con­di­tion for the work: that Ms. Winter only the truth. The truth in this case is at least as fan­tas­tic as any of the sto­ries that the author has told to pre­vi­ous interviewers.
There are secrets on top of secrets and mis­di­rec­tions and … in spite of it all you feel for both the talk­er and the lis­ten­er while this eerie and trag­ic tale unfolds. With a whol­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry, though not quite inevitable, twist at the end. Well writ­ten enough to make the sto­ry paramount.
* good, though I think I might be done with trag­ic twins for a while *

Rabbit Cake — Annie Hartnett (2017)

“A new nov­el about the griev­ing process” is absolute­ly not a tag line that would make me pick up a book. But once in a while Amazon gets the “If you liked A you might like B” thing right and throws a book that you would oth­er­wise not con­sid­er into your pile.  So I read the sam­ple. And then I read the book. Because… what if you were an almost 12-year-old, and what is your name was Elvis, (and what of it if you’re a girl with a boy’s name,) and what if you have a weird­ly fact filled head, and what if your moth­er drown while sleep­walk­ing (actu­al­ly sleep-swiming), and what if you know that you should be griev­ing but you aren’t sure you’ve doing it right? That’s a lot of “what-ifs” to find in the first 10% — the Amazon sam­ple length — of a book. Enough what-ifs to make me want to spend time in the head of this won­der­ful­ly odd-ball 12-year-old.
* what-if you ignored the blurbs and just read the book *

Sharks in the Rivers — Ada Limon (2010)

Yes, there are sharks here. Free swim­ming, clear­ly, and decid­ed­ly out-of-place. Things in places where they don’t quite belong are the sub­jects of these poems. And often the thing that does­n’t quite belong is the writer herself.
* things that are out-of-place are more inter­est­ing that things that are where they belong *

 

This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse — Ada Limon (2006)

Stories in verse are some­thing that I would usu­al­ly run away from.  They tend to be too much about the sto­ry and not enough about the poems them­selves. These are dif­fer­ent. Each poem stands on it’s own and advances the nar­ra­tive at the same time. Prodigious work. Our pro­tag­o­nist — the man in the grey suit, the unrec­i­p­ro­cat­ing object of his affec­tions — the hard­ware store lady, his rather inco­her­ent friend Lewis and the object of Lewis’s epis­to­lary obses­sion, Ronald Reagan wan­der through the their days and inter­act — each with each oth­er and their own desires and obsessions.
* let­ters to RR maybe the odd­est thing I’ve seen in a poem recently *

The Books of April

Cutting for Stone — Abraham Verghese (2009)

The book is very long. I start­ed it in March and it took me most of April to fin­ish it.
The twins (Marion and Shiva Stone) at the cen­ter of Cutting for Stone come into the world in a messy and pecu­liar way. Their moth­er, a shy Indian nun, dies giv­ing birth to them and their father, and American doc­tor, runs off in a pan­ic. So the boys are left to be raised by the doc­tors and matron of the Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. The two boys act and think as if they were a sin­gle enti­ty for much of their child­hoods. It is as if they were born (con­joined at the head) and then agreed to split up the world and their reac­tions to the world. Marion tak­ing on the out­go­ing, pleas­ant, social per­son­al­i­ty and Shiva tak­ing on all of the dark, moody, and anti-social bits.
I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed with how it ends, I mean it had to go some­where — I get that. and… it seemed inevitable that the twins were not going to have a hap­py res­o­lu­tion. That some­how there hav­ing been two of them, sep­a­rat­ed but still act­ing as one — that in the end there could­n’t be two of them in the world. And is that their indi­vid­ual faults or the fault of being born twins? I liked the book, but I’m not sure that I am encour­aged to read oth­ers by the same author. It’s a kind of fun­ny thing when it comes to read­ing such “oth­er” expe­ri­ences — I rarely want to expe­ri­ence them a sec­ond or third time from the same point of view. I, mag­pie like, want to go on to col­lect anoth­er point of view. That is in cas­es where the writ­ing does­n’t make me swoon. And here the writ­ing does not make me swoon. It is com­pe­tent and in places quite pleas­ant but its noth­ing special.

Rules of Civility — Amor Towles (2011)

Not as nifty as The Gentleman of Moscow. But the his­toric back­ground does­n’t play near­ly as big a part. Here we have a young woman in NYC on New Year’s Eve 1937 sit­ting with her pal in a second-rate club wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen. That some­thing is Tinker Grey. Katey Kontent (hate the last name it tripped me up every sin­gle time I read it) is an okay nar­ra­tor. She’s a bit bland around the edges but I think that’s part of the point, she’s Every Girl mak­ing her way in the big city. The peo­ple who sur­round her for the year of the sto­ry are the inter­est­ing points and in fact the writer via Katey as much as admits that it’s the case that some­times we find our­selves sur­round­ed by peo­ple and events that will catch us up in their swirl with­out actu­al­ly hav­ing much effect on our­selves. They whirl around us and then leave us to go on in anoth­er direc­tion with oth­er peo­ple. (It’s some­thing that I’ve thought about a bunch myself — how we seem to be so inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed with peo­ple as we are in a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion but so eas­i­ly lose them when the cir­cum­stances change and we are no longer thrown togeth­er by some­thing larg­er than our­selves.) The whole thing is a bit like Fitzgerald — who I don’t actu­al­ly like. I find him dry and his char­ac­ters off-puttingly shal­low. This book comes close to being that shallow.
The title is tak­en from the young George Washington’s list of Rules for him­self. And the rules are includ­ed at the end of the book. Young GW was a pris­sy lit­tle shit.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk — Kathleen Rooney (2017)

Lillian Boxfish is 85, it’s New Year’s Eve and she’s decid­ed to take a walk across Manhattan. First to Delmonico’s and then to a par­ty host­ed by a young pho­tog­ra­ph­er that she met in the park. It’s a long walk and we are treat­ed to not only Lillian’s ver­sion of Manhattan in 1985 but along the way to her life sto­ry. And it’s a pret­ty crack­er jack sto­ry. Running from her first days in Manhattan to her reign as the high­est paid adver­tis­ing woman in America (writ­ing copy for Macy’s in its glo­ry days) through a mar­riage a birth, a break­down, a divorce, a free­lance career, and now as a woman of a cer­tain age liv­ing on her own in a city that she dear­ly loves but that has changed in unpleas­ant ways. Lillian and the book are both wit­ty, wise, and a bit wicked.

 

Everybody’s Fool — Richard Russo (2016)

Sully is back and with a mild bit of good for­tune in his wake and a not so hot report from the car­di­ol­o­gist at the VA mar­ring his future he’s not sure how the world is sup­posed to work this week. And then there’s Police Chief Raymer whose grief at the loss of his wife is tem­pered by the sus­pi­cion that she was intend­ing to leave him the day she fell down the stairs and the stray garage door remote that he found in her car. The rest of the crowd is here too. There are some snakes (both the hiss­ing kind and the human kind) and whole lot of peo­ple try­ing to make sense of their lives and cir­cum­stances. Russo writes with humor and deep insight into the ways in which we all flit­ter and flus­ter our ways through life. (Read Nobody’s Fool first.)

Books of March

Fiction:

The Bear and The Nightingale: A Novel — Katherine Arden (2017)

Best fairy tale I’ve read in a long time. I was skep­ti­cal at first. But the hero­ine is more than a pret­ty face with an inter­est­ing fate. I can’t be sure, as I am no expert, but the sto­ry seems to be more Russian than most set in that fairy tale world. The author was a Russian major in col­lege. Well writ­ten, you won’t find your­self con­stant­ly thrown out of the sto­ry by a bad turn of phrase as you are so often in fairy tales.

 

Nonfiction:

Minding the Muse — Priscilla Long (2016)

Better than the aver­age book on cre­ativ­i­ty — it allows for indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. And it’s a reminder about the need for dai­ly (near­ly) work that I need to hear.

 

 

300 Arguments — Sarah Manguso (2017)

Don’t both­er. I like books of frag­ments (99 God and Bluets are exam­ples) but this one does­n’t hang togeth­er as any sort of nuanced state­ment on the world. It got a lot of praise but I just did­n’t find the thread that was sup­posed to link the apho­risms to make them some­thing oth­er than a jum­ble. There are a few that cut to the quick though. The best being:

“There will come a time when peo­ple decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.”

Poetry:

All of this mon­th’s poet­ry books are con­cerned with the domes­tic — but what dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences of home the poets bring.

The Day Before: Poems — Dick Allen (2003)

I remem­ber lik­ing these poems while I was read­ing them but a month lat­er I don’t remem­ber any­thing spe­cif­ic about them. What’s up with that? I don’t know what to think of poems that I like but that don’t leave a sol­id mark on me. I had to go and look at them again to write this review. These poems are pedes­tri­an — in a good way — the way in which some­one with­out anoth­er des­ti­na­tion in mind wan­ders down the street in a mid­size town just look­ing and won­der­ing about every­thing they see. They are root­ed in times and places and peo­ple and above all the lit­tle bits of nature that exist for us in every set­ting. But they did­n’t stick. Hmmm.

 

 

Bright Dead Things: Poems — Ada Limón (2015)

When she writes about her expe­ri­ences of being dis­lo­cat­ed from the city to rur­al Kentucky, Limon writes with humor and appre­ci­a­tion of both envi­ron­ments . Her descrip­tions of Kentucky horse coun­try from the point of view of a non-rural, non-horsey per­son are delight­ful­ly vivid. She also brings her fresh per­spec­tive to her rela­tion­ships and the loss of her step-mother. There is a won­der­ful imme­di­a­cy and hon­esty in these poems. Very down to earth, even when she’s being man­i­cal­ly unrealistic.

 

 

 

The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected ‑Lynn Emanuel (2015)

Lynn Emmanuel is one of my favorite poets. I am always tak­en with her bit­ing, clear-eyed look at the places and peo­ple who make up her life. This vol­ume includes a cou­ple of my favorite old poems and some new favorites as well.

The Books of February

Slade House — David Mitchell (2015)

Fans of Mitchell’s recent work will enjoy the lit­tle bumps against his Bone Clocks. I won’t spoil it by telling you how it ends but you’ll enjoy the fris­son of recog­ni­tion. Once every nine years a house appears in Slade Alley and one spe­cial per­son is allowed to enter. Except that entry might not be the best thing to hap­pen to you. Mitchel writes a tight book in four parts. Each part stand­ing alone as a nice­ly creepy short sto­ry and the whole mak­ing a part of the uni­verse estab­lished in the The Bone Clocks. Worthwhile for fans of Mitchell and the milder forms of horror.

 

Swing Time — Zadie Smith (2016)

We start with an unnamed nar­ra­tor (why that choice? and why did­n’t I notice), her self-educating moth­er and lov­ing if unam­bi­tious father. The arc of the book fol­lows the nar­ra­tor’s child­hood friend­ship with Tracey, root­ed in a love of dance and old musi­cals, through the end of the girls’ friend­ship in high school. Though they go their sep­a­rate ways there is a link between the two girls that con­tin­ues to influ­ence their lives. After col­lege our unnamed nar­ra­tor begins to work for a pop mega-star as a PA. She los­es much of her own life — sub­sumed by the require­ment that she ded­i­cate all her time and ener­gy to par­tic­i­pat­ing in the star’s life. Eventually com­ing to dis­cov­er that she has no life of her own. That rev­e­la­tion — that she has no life of her own and that she has thus not man­aged the dif­fi­cult work of matur­ing from a twenty-something free spir­it. (Was she ever real­ly free?) into the sort of direct­ed thirty-three year old that her edu­ca­tion and intel­li­gence sug­gest that she could have been. She los­es her job at thirty-three and must begin again at the stage most of us reach three or four years out of col­lege when our first jobs give way to a career.
This a book that has gar­nered mixed reviews. I did­n’t find the scene switch­ing (loca­tion and time) to be dif­fi­cult to fol­low. Smith’s writ­ing is quite clear enough to make her leaps per­fect­ly obvi­ous. And in gen­er­al I liked the writ­ing. I do wish that Smith had either come down hard­er on the ques­tion of west­ern “med­dling,” espe­cial­ly by the famous but igno­rant, in poor­er regions of the world or that she has stuck to the theme of dance and had actu­al­ly done some­thing with the title musi­cal. Swing Time.
I also thing that the book did­n’t need all that wrap­ping up. I was will­ing to let the sto­ry wind down to the denoue­ment of the nar­ra­tor being set adrift to find her­self at a late age. Rather than see­ing the mess unwinding.
Anyway — did I like the book? Yes. Did I like that char­ac­ters — sev­er­al of them no. Did I like the writ­ing — yes. So go read it and don’t be a wee­nie because the nar­ra­tor (hero­ine) isn’t a full per­son — she’s not meant to be.

A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini (2007)

I liked A Thousand Splendid Suns but it was a ter­ri­ble strug­gle to deal with at moments. It is at its core the sto­ry of two women (Miriam and Laila) — a gen­er­a­tion apart — who have to deal with life shit­ting on them. And the shit is awful. There are some tru­ly awful human beings here. Not the trag­i­cal­ly flawed ones like Jalil (Miriam’s father) but the hus­band Rasheed is despi­ca­ble. Anyway — it’s a heart stop­ping book. You keep think­ing that things must work out, or that they can’t get worse and yet in a war-torn Kabul things can always get worse. Insights into the Afghan soul per­haps, but the things described are so uni­ver­sal that you nev­er feel left out or alien­at­ed. And you’ll cheer like mad when kar­ma and Rasheed final­ly run into one anoth­er head on, even if it is at great cost to all the oth­er char­ac­ters in the book.

 

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper — Phaedra Patrick (2016)

Light weight, not too fill­ing, not even well writ­ten but if you liked Backman’s Ove and sim­i­lar grumpy old men then you may like Arthur Pepper and his predica­ment. The premise — the find­ing of a mys­te­ri­ous charm bracelet that belonged to his late wife is promis­ing and yet, the charms and their sto­ries don’t add up and the con­trivances of how Arthur man­ages to find out about most of the charms are far too “con­ve­nient.” None the less Arthur is kind of endear­ing and so you read on.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles (2016)

The sto­ry of what hap­pens to an aris­to­crat, Count Alexander Rostov, who returns (you might think unwise­ly) to Russia after the rev­o­lu­tion and finds him­self not up against a wall offered a final cig­a­rette but, because of piece of rev­o­lu­tion­ary poet­ry that he wrote, turned into a Former Person and sen­tenced to house arrest in the famous Metropol hotel. Spanning more than 30 years of the Count’s life and fea­tur­ing two young ladies who inter­sect with and utter­ly alter his life, this is an engag­ing book with inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and a lot of per­son­al action on a large his­toric back­ground. Perfect beach book.

 

Daring Greatly — Brené Brown (2012)

Self help book by a researcher who is best known for her work on shame. I’ve read her before and things here stain that odd­ly mushy feel­ing. There’s real­ly noth­ing here that you haven’t heard and seen a dozen times. Though I did find her explic­it­ly call­ing out of the set of gen­der expec­ta­tions that men car­ry around to be a refresh­ing change from the usu­al focus only on wom­en’s expe­ri­ence of gen­der roles. I’m just not sure I buy that val­ue she places on vul­ner­a­ble. Bravery I get and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in rela­tion­ships I get but vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to the whole world. No — I think not. That’s how you get tak­en advan­tage of. Basically you can sum up the con­tri­bu­tion of this book as “be brave even when you’re scared.
Anyway — much of a much­ness with her oth­er books and oth­ers in the genre. I’m sor­ry I both­ered with it.

Caraval — Stephanie Garber (2017)

The pro­tag­o­nist sees col­ors to go with her emo­tions. Which gives you a pret­ty good idea of how the writ­ing is going to go. There is a fairy tale begin­ning — evil father, lov­ing sis­ters and a dia­bol­i­cal regime of con­trol and pun­ish­ment. Sisters Scarlett and Donatella must some­how escape their ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion. (It would­n’t be a fairy tale oth­er­wise) The girls run away (or are kid­napped it sort of depends on who you’re talk­ing to at the moment) to Caraval, a 5‑night fan­ta­sy game with an impres­sive prize at the end. It’s all a bit The Night Circus with­out the great and imag­i­na­tive writ­ing. The end works well and the twist isn’t one that I saw com­ing but once revealed it all made per­fect sense. Really if the habit of explain­ing every sin­gle one of Scarlett’s emo­tion­al respons­es (com­plete with col­or) had­n’t got­ten in the so often way I might be rec­om­mend­ing this book much more high­ly. Also the dress­es — way too much time is spent describ­ing a round of fan­ta­sy dress­es that all sound exact­ly the same except for the colors.
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Bad Feminist — Roxane Gray (2014)

The star­ring essay on nature of priv­i­lege car­ries a reminder that lack of/possession of priv­i­lege must not be used as means of silenc­ing oth­ers voic­es. A reminder that we need giv­en the hot and heavy rhetoric in the cur­rent cli­mate of resistance.
The essays on real­i­ty TV and a hand­ful of books that I haven’t read aren’t inter­est­ing. None of them makes me want to expe­ri­ence what­ev­er (TV or book) she’s talk­ing about. If cri­tique does­n’t intrigue with its insights then what is the point?
Several of her essays reflect on the need to be care­ful and pre­cise with lan­guage. Not in a pris­sy way. She’d be all for being pre­cise­ly hor­ri­ble if that was your inten­tion. As long as you are match­ing lan­guage to inten­tion it’s all good. There is some­thing to be said for an atti­tude that removes the “nice” and puts the empha­sis on con­ci­sion and inten­tion­al­i­ty. Be true, even if your truth is harsh or unpopular.
I also liked her on trig­ger warn­ings. She points out that they are in the end, point­less because the world isn’t safe, but there are places where the illu­sion of safe­ty is nec­es­sary and trig­ger warn­ings have their place in them. The argu­ment is lit­tle more nuanced that just this but it basi­cal­ly comes down to you can keep your trig­ger warn­ings in your safe spaces to pro­mote a sense of safe­ty (illu­so­ry) but don’t expect me to cre­ate safe spaces in my spaces. My spaces aren’t safe. Never will be, so don’t come here if you need an illu­sion of safety.
Isn’t that just the rub — so much safe­ty vs dan­ger. and where is the dan­ger? One won­ders. Is it nec­es­sary to use some­one else’s def­i­n­i­tion of dan­ger? Interesting ques­tion. Is it like that vol­ume of Best American Essays that I did­n’t like where the edi­tor’s main cri­te­ri­on was risk. Risk as defined by whom was the first ques­tion I want­ed to ask. Risk as the main cri­te­ri­on for judg­ing the val­ue of work seems shal­low. I think that the same applies to dan­ger­ous ideas. If the only thing that your work has going for it is dan­ger, then what have you actu­al­ly got?
(No this para­graph length aside does­n’t belong in a book review — but hey they’re my reviews for my pur­pos­es so it stays.)
Anyway — there are a cou­ple of good essays here and a whole lot of bor­ing pop-culture gush­ing. Read it or don’t. It’s not that impor­tant of a book. (Sigh — I was hop­ing that it might be.)