Bookwormish, 4th quarter of 2019

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Books! Here are my favorites from the 4th quarter of 2019.

This was a bit of an odd quarter for me; I ended up reading much less than usual because of serious life stuff going on (only 5 books in October, and only 3 books in November???) And I was doing my big reread of the Raven Cycle at the same time… so this list is probably going to seem like it’s about half Maggie Stiefvater!

Also, somehow I didn’t end up with any “very top books” like I usually would (runaway favorites that I just have to gush about), though of course I’ve got a whole bunch of books that were good and I recommend. So this time around I’m just calling the first category here “good books.”

 

GOOD BOOKS

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein) – A slim little novel that says a lot. It’s set in cosmopolitan, immigrant Rome, nominally based around a murder, but really it’s a study of all the different characters and cultures bumping up against each other at close quarters in urban, modern Rome, and the attitudes they have towards each other, especially towards those who are immigrants.

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat – Interlinked stories about a community in a small town in Haiti, that are somehow delicate while also often being heartbreaking.

Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater – Ooh, gosh, Stiefvater’s done it again. I’m definitely hooked on this series. And am probably again going to be let down by the final book when it comes around… No, that’s not fair, because this series already feels a lot stronger than the Raven Cycle in some ways – especially in that Stiefvater has finally moved away from writing cartoonish villains that are so unnecessary in her otherwise gorgeous worlds. Here, we get three main perspectives, and some of these POV characters function directly as the evil, must-be-taken-down-at-all-costs antagonists for other POV characters. Every character is the hero of their own story – which is what makes good villains! And of course, it’s Stiefvater, so the characters and their interactions are as rich as ever; it can be a dicey proposition to try to expand upon an already beloved canon (see…everything J.K. Rowling has done since the end of the Harry Potter series), but I think it works here. There are nods to the stuff we already loved from the Raven Cycle, but most of it is its own new thing.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater – Speaking of the Raven Cycle, I think this book might still be my favorite of the series; so much going on here, in this complex examination of different types of masculinity/male identity. Plot-wise this one is the most of a digression from the overall Glendower plot of the series (aside from the mystery of how to get Cabeswater back, the book is really all about Ronan and his dreaming) so it’s funny that it’s maybe the richest and most engaging of the series. BUT I read that the initial idea that eventually became the Raven Cycle was one Stiefvater had very early on in her life, and that it was originally only about Ronan and his dreaming. So it makes sense both that she would detour so far into this subplot, and also that this thread would be maybe the richest. (It also makes sense of how much she adores Ronan, and urges the reader to adore him, despite what an asshole he is at the start of the series… He’s clearly the author’s favorite.)

Langston Hughes (Voice of the Poet series) by Langston Hughes – An audiobook of Langston Hughes reading his poetry, and also giving background on when and where and why he wrote some of his most famous poems.

The Prince of Los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco – This memoir (of growing up caught between worlds, in a Cuban immigrant family in Miami) didn’t engage me much in the first third or so, and the captivated me utterly in the rest of the book. I think that’s because it’s told chronologically throughout the author’s whole childhood, so the point where it kicked into gear for me was when he got old enough to begin exploring the value of both his cultures, and also growing into his identity as a gay man.

Let Me Hear a Rhyme by Tiffany D. Jackson – A beautiful portrait of friendship and community in Brooklyn in the 1990s, as three friends try to honor the memory of their friend, a brilliant rapper, after his death.


EVEN MORE GOOD BOOKS

Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater – The third in the Raven Cycle. I’m not sure this one engages me quite as much as some of the others in the series. On rereading, I think this is partly because a lot of it is set-up for the final book. (Or… set-up for things that should happen in the final book, but then ultimately don’t… But that’s a whole other conversation!) I go back and forth on whether the four books of the series and the four main characters can be matched up to each other (in the way that book 2 is clearly Ronan’s book) but ultimately I do feel justified, I think, in calling this one Adam’s book. In book 2 Adam learned some things about his new role as Cabeswater’s magician, but here is where he really grows into himself as a person, learns to actually communicate with Cabeswater, and finally questions his conception of himself as “unknowable.” In fact, the theme of this third book is, more generally, friendship and interconnectedness. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on people being stronger together: Adam, Gansey and Ronan at the trial; Adam accepting Blue and Noah’s help when he’s fixing the ley line, and of course the Maura, Calla and Persephone triad. There’s stuff I don’t like about this book (the deaths, the villains) but Adam’s ending (“I’m awake”) is really lovely.

Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid – An early novel by Mohsin Hamid, whose Exit West I loved so much! Here, a disaffected young professional in Lahore, Pakistan, jealous of his wealthier friends and desperate after losing his job, spirals into a morass of bad decisions.

The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan by Nancy Springer – I started reading the Enola Holmes series (the adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ little sister!) because it comes up often in Holmestice, but I hadn’t been especially engaged or impressed by the series so far, so it’s taken me forever to get to each next book in the series. But this one I really enjoyed! So, hopefully I’ll finally finish out the series. :-)


HONORABLE MENTIONS

The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater – I still disagree with a lot of the authorial choices in this final book of the Raven Cycle, but on reread at least I knew what was coming plot-wise, so I could pretty much ignore that and just focus on the character interactions. Where as always, there’s so much to love! It was also interesting to me how much I missed about Gansey’s trauma on first read, and how much more it stood out to me now. (His motivations are less clear and obvious than those of the other characters, but it’s actually right there if you’re looking for it.) So if we’re aligning characters to books, I do think book 4 is Gansey’s – it’s where he finally confronts his trauma and his life/his mortality, and more crucially: the question he’s never had to face before, of who he is if he’s no longer defined by his quest. I’d argue Gansey’s is the main character arc in this book, the way book 2 is Ronan’s, and book 3 is Adam’s. (I think it’s fair to say book 1 is Blue’s, since she starts out feeling like the main POV character of the series, introducing us to the rest of them through her eyes. Whether she actually has a strong arc through that first book, I’d have to go back and look.) All in all, I’m happy to say I didn’t hate this book like I did on first read! The follow-up short story “Opal” is also great, and it all leads well into starting the new Dreamer Trilogy, with Call Down the Hawk, described above.

Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa) – More a thought experiment than a novel (what if, one day, death simply stopped happening?) so it was interesting in parts, but didn’t really keep me turning pages.

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro – This fourth book of the wildly uneven Charlotte Holmes series was…actually good? I think? (I LOVED the first book, then was crushed by how disappointing the second book was, and then the third book was so neutral that I literally couldn’t remember the plot as soon as I’d finished it. …It's a weird series.) This final book is what the series probably should have been all along: from Charlotte’s perspective, with her actually confronting her demons rather than her family problems/addiction issues/history as an assault survivor being tossed around as fun plot points. Too little, too late, Cavallaro, but I’m okay with the series wrapping up on this note. (Though I’d probably be happier if I’d only ever read the first book and left it at that!)

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves) – This seems to be one of those books people either rave about as a favorite, or… they don’t. The setting in Barcelona under the Franco dictatorship was expertly rendered, but the plot itself I found absurdly melodramatic, not always engaging, and often misogynistic.

Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro – This definitely suffers from first-time novelist problems (exposition-heavy dialogue; a tendency to describe every…single…detail of the character’s daily life) but it has a lot of earnestness in both confronting police brutality, and depicting a character living with an anxiety disorder. (I’m jealous – someday I want to learn how to depict characters who struggle with the things I struggle with, but I haven’t gotten there yet; Mark Oshiro has clearly gotten there!)


UGH

Find Me by André Aciman – Ergh. I probably shouldn’t even include this here, because I have a policy that I don’t include the books I don’t like in these posts. I already have enough books I love and want to recommend, I don’t need to spend my time tearing down the ones I didn’t like! If I include a book on my list, even in “honorable mentions,” it means I truly did think it was worth reading, even if my commentary is mixed, not just positive. But this is a sequel that relates closely to a book I did love, so I felt I had to include it.
       Find Me did have flashes of brilliance and lovely human insight, but for the most part it was highly disappointing, both as a novel and as a sequel. It made the beloved characters of Call Me By Your Name largely unlikeable (only Elio remained somewhat himself; Oliver comes off as a misogynistic jerk, and Samuel as a smug jerk) and revealed flaws that in Call Me By Your Name were only potential flaws or could have just been flukes. The lack of interest in female characters’ interiority and agency? In CMBYN that could have just been a one-off, because that book was so intensely focused on a love story between two men, who were young and thus naturally self-absorbed…but no, it turns out that’s endemic to Aciman’s writing. The deeply introspective character voice I loved so much in CMBYN, that drew me deeply into the character’s perspective? Now it turns out: that wasn’t Elio, apparently Aciman just always writes that way – in this book we get three POV characters, and they all think and sound exactly the same. i.e., as it turns out, like Aciman.
        Basically, I couldn’t believe it when I picked up this sequel to the soaring gay love story Call Me By Your Name, and it started with…a middle-aged guy rediscovering himself through an affair with a much younger woman? The same as…about half of all novels ever written by boring middle-aged white dudes throughout all of history? (And I saw an interview where Aciman literally seemed to think he was very innovative for doing this, and it was far more interesting than if he’d had the characters be boringly the same age…) I stuck it out assuming the book would get better, but it didn’t particularly. I also read that Aciman had initially started writing the older man-younger woman plot as a separate novel, and then decided that the man in question could be the same character as Elio’s father from CMBYN, so he shoehorned it all together as a sequel. I wish he hadn’t! It cheapened a character that had been so wonderful in the original. Overall, the sequel cheapened the beauty of the original. As one reviewer said somewhere, that last short section of CMBYN did, far better, what this sequel tried to do in a whole book.
        In a way I can’t even blame Aciman, though – sequels are hard to get right. There’s always going to be someone unhappy with the direction you chose. I feel vindicated by the fact that every review I’ve read utterly panned this book, but there are also people who read and loved it, and I would never tell them they were wrong about that!

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