I am officially saturated with P.G. Wodehouse. The plots seem contrived instead of functioning like wonderfully intricate clockwork, and the characters’ personality traits were irritating instead of warmly familiar. There’s not anything wrong with either of these books, I just need a break from Wodehouse.
The Cat-nappers also has the best original title of any Jeeves and Wooster: Aunts Aren’t Gentleman.
After reading four of her books (The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and The Penelopiad), I am willing to say that Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors. The language she uses is both expressive and economical, and the stories are gripping - even if, as in The Blind Assassin, they only grab you after around the 200-page mark. The Penelopiad is a slightly lesser book, it’s still a nice, short read.
The Penelopiad is Atwood’s retelling of the myth of Odysseus (of The Odyssey) from the perspective of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who waited at home for him for almost 20 years. It is part of a project/challenge for authors to re-imagine well-known myths from a different perspective. It falls short of her other works, with her own original stories, but benefits from her gifts at writing. Atwood can still craft a fairly compelling story, even when the outline of the story has already been written and she is simply filling in the inner life of a character that was peripheral in the original story. It’s a decent book, although not great.
Eduardo Galeano is a difficult author to describe - his books are composed of short vignettes, a few lines to a few pages long, narrating history or his own experiences, with language that falls barely on the ‘prose’ side of the prose/poetry divide. Even this description doesn’t really capture the way he meanders from one topic to the next, briefly touching on each. When the book is done, you have a full picture of the author himself and his worldview, as it is embedded in each snippet that he shares. The Book of Embraces covers Galeano’s heart attack, his wife’s pregnancy, his wife’s dreams, his meetings with other authors, the lives of other artists and revolutionaries, the writings on walls in his native Uruguay as well as Argentina, Cuba and Ecuador, and many other topics. It ranges from the profound (the meaning, or lack thereof, of modern life) to the mundane (the loss of his keys). The style is a sort of magic realism, and while others might find the underlying mysticism off-putting, others, like me, accept it and then get sucked in by it.
Although Galeano often writes of great sorrow and loss, it is always full of hope and love. It is a small miracle that someone who has seen such heartbreak and suffering can remain so compassionate, and even humorous. I previously read parts of his trilogy The Memory of Fire, which uses the same method of small, poetic vignettes to capture the history of the Americas - but The Book of Embraces is quite different; it draws you in in a way that The Memory of Fire does not, as Galeano not only relates his own life, but more vividly expresses his point of view on what he sees other people going through. It is not as thematically unified as The Memory of Fire, but is warmer, more personal. The Book of Embraces works alright if you read it a little at a time, but I recommend sitting down and reading through a few dozen pages - you will be more enveloped in his unique point of view, and will appreciate his sly, loving and insightful commentary on the world we live in.
The Gift of Fear (and other survival signals that protect us from violence) is a book that is well worth a read for the information presented, even if it is not particularly well-written. The book focuses on situations where we fear violence, and tells us how to analyze the possibility that someone will actually commit violence. De Becker is a renowned expert on violence in many forms - domestic violence, sexual violence, workplace violence, assassins, celebrity stalkers, even teenage suicide/homicide violence. The title comes from de Becker’s focus on intuition; the gift of fear, he tells us, is that it alerts us to danger that our mind has noticed without necessarily going through the rational part of our brains. True fear (i.e. not constant, crippling anxiety every time you walk to your car after work, but sudden, unexplainable fear that you are in danger) comes from small changes in the sound around us, a sudden flash of an image that we can’t process consciously, or the strange behavior of someone around us. These things, according to de Becker, tell us to fear attack.
De Becker is well-informed, and has a wealth of stories from clients to demonstrate his points. The book is most entertaining when he gets into his own viewpoints related to the topics - particularly his views on the media’s glorification of assassins, or his condemnation of the way our society treats children & teenagers. It is also interesting in the mis-steps he sometimes takes in making a point - in one chapter, he tells us about pre-incident indicators of violence in situations where one would not necessarily worry for safety. As an example, he tells us about three signs that a kangaroo is going to attack, which he says is a rare occurrence. After listing the indicators, he informs the reader that he actually just made it all up to point out that people sometimes spread false information. Wait, what?
The Sweet Hereafter is an absolutely lovely, tragic, and unpredictable book about the ways that a small town deals with the death of many of its children in a freak school bus accident. It is lovely in the ways that the survivors fight for meaning in their lives, and how much empathy is given to them; tragic in their devastating loss; and absolutely unpredictable in the ways that it develops emotionally. Even if it had been predictable in the way it develops, the quality of the writing would make it worth reading - but Banks has more on his mind than ‘predictable’.
This book (the full title is It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments) belongs in a category I think of as ‘bus books’ - it will pass the time when you are on the bus, on the treadmill at the gym, or waiting for an appointment, and you can read it in small chunks and/or forget about it for awhile and not really lose anything.
Marcotte’s book is essentially a series of glib 2-4 page sections on various topics. Marcotte is a prominent blogger at Pandagon, and the book reads like a series of blog entries - short, pithy, more snark than substance. It’s the kind of book that assumes a basic knowledge of, and agreement with, modern feminism; if you already have that basic knowledge, there is not much reason to read the book (except to pass the time on the bus), as it doesn’t add anything to that knowledge or apply it to new areas. Yeah, purity balls and chastity rings are creepy - but there’s nothing here that would convince someone who doesn’t already agree, and no new analysis for those who are already convinced. Likewise for the creepiness of guys who see women who aren’t interested in them as a ‘challenge’ instead of as someone they should leave the hell alone.
The book is made to look like an advice book, but there’s not much advice here. The advice for young girls who are being pressured to attend a purity ball is that it may be grounds for legal emancipation - as if many 16-year-olds have the money or skills to do so. But that’s not really the point, for it to be real advice, it’s just supposed to be amusing. The advice for someone who is being pressured into having a big formal wedding is to tell the people putting the pressure on that you are going to have a true ‘formal’ wedding with ballgowns, evening gloves, and a string quartet; according to Marcotte, the minute that the relative or friend hears that there won’t be a DJ, they will relent.
The big problem I have with this book is that actual advice for how feminists and progressives might talk to relatives and friends with different beliefs is actually needed. How do you explain to someone close to you that you don’t want to have a big wedding, why you’re a vegetarian, and how it connects to your values? Those girls who are being forced to go to purity balls and pledge their virginity to their fathers (super creepy!) - isn’t there any real advice to them as to how they can talk to their parents and convince them that it’s a bad idea, without separating from them permanently? I think there is, but there’s not enough nuance or depth here to really start any of those conversations. There’s not really room here for much but smug satisfaction at what you already know to be true. But, like I said, it’s a good bus read.