Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart

By Chinua Achebe

It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

I'd always heard about Things Fall Apart, but been a little reluctant to read it because, you know, who wants to spend their free time basically taking lessons in English literature, but I happened to already have this on the shelf, and the challenge was a good kick in the pants to do it.

Don't fall into the same mistake!  It's actually a very simple, easy read - it's much shorter than I thought it would be, and the style is very matter of fact and not torrid or melodramatic at all.  Things Fall Apart centers around Okonkwo, a warrior whose greatest feats lie behind him, and who sees nothing but weakness in the changes coming to the village.

I don't know why great literature is so obsessed with tragic heroes.  Or tragic figures, since I don't think Okonkwo is ever really a "hero" in Things Fall Apart.  Protagonist, surely, but from Chapter 1, we know that he's too worried about his standing in the village hierarchy to suffer pangs of conscience when he beats his sons for not being manly enough. And it is somewhat tragic what happens to him, but the tragedy hanging over the book is that we, as readers from the future, know what lies in store for Umuofia and Mbanta: the loss of cultural traditions and the breaking up of tribes, the insidious takeover by the white Christians.  And while the people have survived, and while I can't argue that all of their original cultural traditions were super great, still, it is a tragedy that it is lost.  Notre Dame cathedral burned today, and while Catholicism hasn't always been a force for good, still it's hard to see this thing that has lasted for centuries burned away in a night, and it feels like that in Things Fall Apart as well.  I could try to stretch the analogy further by allowing that the cause of destruction was not intentional but caused in both cases by some cold and crucial indifference to the existing structure, but I'm already too sad already. 

I suppose it is a talent of Achebe's that you're not actually rejoicing when Okonkwo dies. Considering he kills three people in the course of the book, including his own foster son, and random a sixteen year old, you'd definitely forgiven for hoping he gets what he deserves.  Of course, for what we might consider morally the worst of those - murdering his foster son even though he's been excused from attending the killing at all - there is no punishment at all, except for his own semi-guilty conscience.  And for the murder we might consider the most excusable - the attempt to stop a hostile takeover of Umuofia by the Christians - he submits himself to the worst punishment, death. That's how you know it's a tragedy, when the villain dies for the wrong reasons and it's not fair.  

I did appreciate some of the negative reviews on Amazon. "There are endless discussions in the novel about the cultivation and economics of yams. I don't get why the author spent so much time discussing yams." Let's be real, there was a lot of yam-talk. But for a book that's kind of about the destruction of native cultures and traditions via the onset of Christianity, it's a pretty soothing, easy read.  There's not a lot of character development - we hear very little about the rest of the family, and they exist only as two-dimensional ideas for Okonkwo to butt up against, but this book really only works as an allegory, and not as, like, a thriller.  

What's interesting is that although the point of the book seems to be Okonkwo's downfall, we spend very little time on the events directly leading up to it.  I almost feel like this would work just as well as a short story.  The first two sections of the book, in which Okonkwo lives in Umuofia and then becomes exiled, and then lives in Mbanta until his exile expires, are so much scene setting.  It's interesting, since it's a relatively uncommon setting for a book, but does have the sense of nothing really progressing, narratively.  It's also a little disjointed, as the book is more like a series of vignettes than a more typical a then b then c.  But overall, an enjoyable enough way to wallow in shitty missionary history via a great author.


32: A Book Written By An Author From Asia, Africa Or South America

Hey Ladies!: The Story of Eight Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails

Hey Ladies!: The Story of Eight Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails

By: Michelle Markowitz & Caroline Moss

Hey Ladies! is a laugh-out-loud read that follows a fictitious but all too familiar group of eight 20-and-30-something female friends for one year of their lives  Told through a series of email chains, text messages, and illustrations, this book takes you along for the roller coaster ride of holiday celebrations, book clubs, summer house rentals, wedding showers, Instagram stalking, brunches, breakups, and, of course, all the inside jokes and harsh truths that only best friends share.

I think this book was supposed to be funny, but it just made me sad.  Maybe I'm too close.  Maybe we're intended to just laugh at how ridiculous and over the top (OTT!) everything is, but the authors have intermittently spaced actual thoughtful conversations at various points throughout, so by the final month, when Gracie calls Ali and Jen out on making every single thing about them and the wedding, including her own birthday, all I felt was horrible that (1) everyone then turned on Gracie and (2) that Gracie didn't burn the wedding to the ground. The final email from Gracie celebrating her own engagement with these shitheels did not give me a "Haha, here we go again!" zany laugh, but the feeling of watching an abused person return to their abuser.  As I said, maybe I'm too close.

The book is a breezy and quick read, with a cute design. It's a modern day epistolary novel, using email chains, texts and some graphic pictures.  We're dealing with eight women in their late twenties.  Although it seems like a lot to keep track of, most of the women are paper thin caricatures and the bulk of the messages are between just four of them: Jen, the bride-to-be, Ali, the type-A Maid of Honor who constantly books things and asks for reimbursement, Katie, the one who keeps hanging after this shitty guy who pukes on one of them during a weekend in Portugal, and Morgan, who has no real characteristics except to be "the voice of reason" every so often when Jen, Ali and Katie are becoming extremely unlikeable again.  That happens frequently throughout, as each of them are completely self-absorbed.   

The other four are: Nicole, whose storyline basically just involves her trying to make the bridesmaid dresses and then going bankrupt, Caitlin, who is a lifestyle/diet/yoga guru who sends thinly veiled marketing emails, Ashley, who is in Connecticut and never has service, and the aforementioned Gracie, who lives in Brooklyn and has a separate life and therefore does not participate in the shenanigans.

 I think there's plenty of comic relief in the idea, but the execution left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  Partly is the unlikeability of most of the "main" characters combined with the shitty way they treat the few likeable people in the book.  Second is the limitations the format has on the action: we get the lead up and the planning each time, but almost never hear anything about how the actual party/night out/bachelorette weekend/friendervention actually went, except for one or two details or comments.  What that does is create the feeling that the friendship consists entirely of crappy emails, and not of any actual fun.  It leaves you struggling to answer the question of why these people are even friends at all, and maybe that's a point the book is trying to make, but it's not one you can really hit hard while you're also trying for laughs.  The last two pages make that very clear.  

I will definitely cop to being part of a group chain of six friends from school, but it just makes the question of why the ladies in Hey Ladies are so awful even more glaring.  There's plenty of comedy to mine without backing into clownishness. And parts of it were funny!  But it felt like they were using a hammer for the comedy - it wasn't enough to make the joke, we have to drive it into the ground - and in the process, really reiterate again and again that I could be reading House of Leaves for this prompt instead and I'd probably be less grossed out.   Much as I wanted to like this book, it just wasn't for me.  Send it off to someone who will appreciate it!  Send it to someone who can treat it right; I'm sure there's plenty of readers out there who'll love it.

46: A Book With No Chapters/Unusual Chapter Headings/Unconventionally Numbered Chapters

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

By Stuart Turton

Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. 

There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. 

We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. 

Understood? Then let's begin...

***

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others...

Talk about a weird ass book. Did you have any idea what was going on?  I did not. I was like Aiden, except worse, because I, as a reader, had no incentive to remember anything, so I was constantly surprised by things that had already happened and therefore should not have surprised me.

Also, not really relevant to the story, but can you believe that this book and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo came out within nine months of each other?  It's like when Antz and A Bug's Life came out back to back, like we really want multiple movies about bugs talking, only here, it's titles about at least seven things relating to Evelyn H.  Anyway.

So, I have to talk about the SPOILERS.

The idea that the whole thing is a prison is something that could easily be explored in a book all by itself, but he kind of casually tosses it in there, like, oh, this is why everything has been happening. I mean, let's unpack that!  First of all, it seems ridiculous that allowing murderers to atone for their crimes by solving other crimes is a legitimate justice system.  I mean, that's basically the premise of Silence of the Lambs, and we know how that ends (Hannibal kills more people).  Honestly, if they have the technology, it seems like it makes more sense to wipe them down and let them wander off with new personalities, without warping them by playing murder mystery games with them. 

I'm not entirely sure any of that was adequately explained.  [I mean, I'm pretty sure it wasn't explained at all, but I will acknowledge that I sometimes overlook important paragraphs].  For example, the most unpleasant part of the process (for Aiden at least, since Anna was under the radar this go-round) was the other prisoner/player.  Without him, there's really no urgency or difficulty aside from the regular difficulty of waking up in a body not your own and trying to solve a murder.  But who was the other person, and how did they end up in the worst of the worst simulation - especially when it seems like Aiden kind of had to petition to get in?

Not for nothing, but why is anyone listening to Aiden at all?  Why do they let him compete in this whole charade, why does the Plague Doctor let him decide when Anna is rehabilitated?  I mean, Aiden doesn't even fucking remember himself anymore, we should probably not allow him to convince us he knows someone else so well after, basically, a week's acquaintance, that they should be let out of prison.  Especially when like, uh, more people than just Aiden's sister were hurt by her. If we're doing the whole restorative justice thing, shouldn't we be giving the other victims a voice too?

Leaving all that aside (and really, it is very neat way of explaining the set-up, even if does completely make no sense) I will say that this whole thing is meticulously plotted.  At one point, I almost made an excel chart of where everyone was at different times and who was interacting with who.  It would have been a very satisfying chart.  Turton does a good job at atmosphere making a very moody, suspenseful mystery.  There's quite a bit of violence (although again, it didn't seem to be incredibly inherent to the mystery so much as it was to the prisoners) and rain, always rain.  I know some of the reviewers were put off by the confusing, repetitive and drudgy nature of the first half or so,  but I do think it's one that you would want to re-read for clues, now knowing the answer and the future.  At the very least, it's a very exciting and unique take on the genre, and really adds to it.  

Also, there's a book club list of discussion questions in the back and can someone please explain to me how Evelyn Hardcastle died 7.5 times?  I mean, Aiden has eight lives, and she died in seven of them, and then in number eight we find out it's actually her friend she sets up to die, so Evelyn didn't die in any of them...? Except then she definitely gets murdered in day eight, so.... does that count as a half-life? Someone please help me, I'm not smart enough for this.


24: A Book That Takes Place In A Single Day

Comic Bonanza

Here's a round-up of a couple of kid-friendly(ish) comic books I've been reading:

Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

By Ted Naifeh

Courtney's parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She's not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

This one is why I'm calling these "kid-friendly (ish)" emphasis on the "ish".  Courtney is a somewhat darker take on the beginning witchcraft dabbler tale, both figuratively and literally.  I mean, everything is kid-appropriate, but at one point a changeling takes away a baby that Courtney is watching, and although she tries to get it back (being captured and sold herself) her uncle basically tells her in the end, "Forget about trying to get the baby back, these things happen, his parents won't even notice." And they don't!  That was a more chilling story than I expected it to be.  Anyway, these are set up as four short stories, all in black and white.  I would have loved to have them in color, but I suppose it sets the mood.  Courtney herself is an entertaining little curmudgeon.  The last story finds her losing energy, only to realize she's been replaced by a doppelganger who is living her life (and doing much better at it apparently).  In the final confrontation, you think that Courtney will let the doppelganger just take over since everyone seems to prefer it to her, but she comes out swinging hard with a "fuck everyone else, I'm a difficult and unpleasant person, and that's exactly how I want to be!" that completely saps the doppelganger.  Good on you, Courtney.  I would never want to meet you in real life, but bless your confidence. 

Goldie Vance Vol. 1

By Hope Larson and Brittney Williams

Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery.

This one is a lot of fun to read, colorful, bouncy, basically Nancy Drew in 60s Florida, if Nancy weren't so lily white.   Whereas Courtney was a loner and preferred it that way, Goldie has a colorful cast of supporting characters, including friends, enemies, potential ladyfriends, adults who seem to exist mainly for spoiling fun, and also: aliens!  Yes, I was really getting into the story when it took an abrupt right turn into Martian colony weirdness.  This was set up so the mini-stories merged into a longer connected story, so we'll have to see if all of the mysteries end like that.  It was a little off-putting, but I (a) enjoyed the rest of it enough to keep reading and (b) can kind of see where they're going with the 60s cold war and space-focus (one of Goldie's friends wants to be an astronaut) so I will allow it for now.

The Lost Path

By Amélie Fléchais

Three young boys set off from Camp Happiness, map in hand, determined to be the first to find the treasure before anyone else. But the shortcut they take leads to something far more spectacular and sinister! All manner of magical beasties live in these woods, and the kids find themselves caught between warring Forest Spirits. Will the three boys find their way out of trouble? Get your map and ready, set, go!

This was something I picked up and bought during my sojourn on Free Comic Book Day solely because of how beautiful it was, and that definitely panned out.  It is gorgeous, done in multiple color and drawing styles.  I would have liked something 100% in color, just because the coloring that was there was so beautiful, but, I acknowledge that (like Courtney) the black and white was an appropriate style choice for those sections - when the three boys are simply wandering in the woods.   I agree with a lot of other reviewers that felt the story-line was lacking in comparison to the illustration.  The story is good, but it felt oddly incomplete and only half explained.  We wind up in the middle of fighting forest spirits, but it was hard to tell who was on what side and why.  A crown/hat becomes a Chekov's Gun that never goes off, and when I got done, I went to look if this was intended to be a stand-alone story or not.  So far it is, which is a let-down.  Overall, a beautiful, but otherwise somewhat empty, little book. 

Truly Devious

Truly Devious

By Maureen Johnson

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

Holy Shit! What the fuck did I just read?!  Take a secluded high school campus, a bunch of high-strung "genius" kids, a cold case 1930s Lindbergh-adjacent murder/kidnapping mystery, an actual dead teenager, the most dangerous game of Never Have I Ever ever, and end it on a bunch of frigging cliffhangers, and you'll get Truly Devious. 

You know what, I knew this was a bad idea.  This series is clearly identified as a trilogy, and only two of them have been published so far.  But the prompt!  And it sounded really cool!  So I stepped off into the pool and now here I am, hung out to dry, waiting on the next one to come out WHO KNOWS WHEN.  God, I hate WIPs.  This is going to be awful.

Suffice it to say, this got me out of the serious-book blues. And perhaps not surprisingly, I've already read the second book too, so we can talk about both in this review.  As you can tell, I did very much enjoy the book.  It can be confusing, and be aware that unlike many trilogies, this one is actually more like a single book than a series - things are mentioned and dropped, to be picked up (hopefully) in later books.  Questions are asked in Truly Devious that don't get answered until The Vanishing Stair, and others are left for the third. 

The lead character, Stevie, is not always very sympathetic, and there were a few times I was surprised by her actions (particularly romantically) which is a little odd, considering it's being narrated by her.  I also think the first book is stronger than the second (which is parodied in The Vanishing Stair, as Nate, the resident blocked author bemoans having to write a sequel - can't you just do a set-up and a denouement?) but given how closely intertwined and plotted out everything seems to be, I have faith that the author isn't artificially bloating the story or going to wind up writing the mystery into a corner.  It helps that people keep DYING, honestly, if we weren't following Stevie around I would probably have arrested her by now. It's not a good look to discover three bodies in a matter of a few weeks.  Especially since it's also her first semester at boarding school.  You gotta pace yourself, man.

I was also recently re-reading Murder on the Orient Express, which is also loosely inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping, and it's interesting to see how each author has taken the story and molded it into very different murder mysteries.  Christie set up a classic revenge novel with the people whose family and friends were affected, and by the end, it's a visceral, cathartic feeling to know they'll get away with it.  In Truly Devious [And SPOILERS for The Vanishing Stair], the actual intended victims, Alice and Iris, are barely fleshed out, and our sympathies ride on Dottie, the clever, poor girl, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The mystery is a puzzle, not a tragedy.  Although we do get some of Ellingham's sorrow afterwards, the way Truly Devious sets it up, it honestly sounded like he faked his own death, again alleviating some of the tragic consequences.  Now The Vanishing Stair seems to counter that, having him die in a confrontation with the kidnapper, but the whole picture probably won't come out until the third. 

It does feel a little cheap that after teasing the tin box in Truly Devious, we find out that Frankie and Edward are only very distantly involved in the kidnapping and then only by coincidence - they happened to write a threatening letter, as a prank, and Frankie's comments seemed to trigger the whole plan (accidentally), and it's also unclear to me how Stevie determines that they had nothing to do with the kidnapping, since I don't think the mere fact of their being students would eliminate them.  They could just as easily have hired minions to do the dirty work as the actual kidnapper did.

I can definitely see how it would get tiring to read three books all hashing out the same mystery from different perspectives, but Johnson does a pretty good job not just of giving new clues and insight, but also of creating large new mysteries to focus on, while leaving Ellingham in the background.  It's kind of the same problem that Veronica Mars, another excellent teen detective story, had, especially in the second season, and I don't think there's really a good around it, while still keeping the flow right.  In the third season of Veronica Mars, they went to several mini-arc mysteries instead, and that's not really doable here.

Overall, I am certainly intrigued and ready for the third book.  We still have to find out who projected the message on Stevie's wall (and what it means), where Alice is, or was, what actually happened that night, who killed Fenton, why Johnson seems to be trying to make Jenny Quinn a person of interest, whatever happened to Hayes and Ellie the night he died, how Ellie knew about the tunnels but couldn't get out again, and whoever is assisting Johnson on her legal references, because this whole nonsense about a secret codicil is in fact that: nonsense.  You can't prove up a will and leave out the codicil.  It's a public document.  Everything gets filed.  Now, it's possible that he wrote a trust and the "codicil" is actually a trust amendment, but in that case, everyone is calling it the wrong thing.  It was definitely possible for someone in that time period to do a trust, so I don't know why not just say it's a trust instead, and leave me some peace of mind, but all it does is bother the heck out of me.  Maybe book three will involve a discussion of why Vermont law in 1938 didn't require the filing of the will and codicil, which would be both hilariously specific to my interests as well as genuinely appreciated by this estates and trusts attorney. 



30: A Book Featuring An Amateur Detective

The Cruelest Miles

The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

By Gay Salisbury and Lainey Salisbury

When a deadly diphtheria epidemic swept through Nome, Alaska, in 1925, the local doctor knew that without a fresh batch of antitoxin, his patients would die. The lifesaving serum was a thousand miles away, the port was icebound, and planes couldn't fly in blizzard conditions—only the dogs could make it. The heroic dash of dog teams across the Alaskan wilderness to Nome inspired the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and immortalized Balto, the lead dog of the last team whose bronze statue still stands in New York City's Central Park. This is the greatest dog story, never fully told until now.

I was actually set to read something else for this prompt (Overnight Float, if you must know) but as the Iditarod rolled around and I found myself reading the Wikipedia page about the original Serum Run and sobbing, I thought, well, why not just completely wallow in it?  What better than to really immerse yourself in the shared terror of small choking children slowly dying without life saving medicine which is only available through gale force winds, 60 degree below zero chills, and the luck of some dogs' noses?

Actually, the Iditarod truly is a phenomenal feat of athleticism, by both dog and man.  It is also one of those things which, avoiding excessive commercialism and set in some of the country's wildest territory, manages to still feel pure in the sense that watching the World Series definitely does not. The Cruelest Miles manages to take the story and bog it down with facts and history and reality, which all distracts from the feel-good sports win mentality of the thing.

That can be a difficult thing with books about specific historical events: you want to get more detail and background than you can with, for example, a deep dive through Wikipedia, but you also want to keep things zippy, or else you're going to lose readers.  Killers of the Flower Moon kind of runs into the same problems: it's an incredibly interesting situation and events, but in an effort to make it novel-length, the pacing can get dragged out and lose suspense.  Which I know is a ridiculous thing to say about a non fiction account of a historical event that you can definitely just look up and see how it ended.  But still!  One I read last year, Destiny of the Republic, manages to straddle this line well, I think partially because it really did take that long for Garfield to die (spoiler alert!), but it too got draggy there towards the end.

Anyway, if you want to know all about turn of the century and 1920s Nome, this is the place to start.  Honestly, nothing about how it is described sounds appealing.  Not only are you encased in snow for seven or eight months months and cut off from outside contact, contagious diseases also run rife through town.  

Once we skip past the introductory information and get to the dogsled race against death, it does pick up the pace, pun very much intended.  What's interesting is that, because the authors were working with whatever historical materials were available after the race, you can kind of see how some of racers get overlooked for the "celebrity" ones.  I have to assume that some of this was probably because of the native heritage of the non-celebrity dogsledders.  (I know that there is a better term for that but I already returned the book to the library, so we're sticking with "dogsledders").  There were twenty plus racers on the route, but only a few are highlighted.  Maybe the Salisburys had more they didn't want to include for fear of bogging it down, but I would read all twenty racers' recollections and not be satisfied.  From the accounts included, a lot of them also felt that it was simply a necessary task, and perhaps didn't know at the time just how much publicity it was getting in the lower 48, but stoicism is the bane of the historical record.  You gotta get out there and get those memories down, because everyone dies. 

The dogs get their proper dues in the book as well.  Due to the kerfuffle between Balto and Togo (and Seppala and Kaasen), the authors definitely have to explore that aspect of it, but since they don't really come down on one side or the other, I think in an effort not to tarnish anyone's efforts or memories, it doesn't really add much to the story.  The authors do discuss the second batch of serum, but don't really go into that relay at all.  There's definitely also a sense that they spent a lot of time on airplanes for nothing, since they were never used in the Serum Run, and I can see that they were trying to foreshadow the Serum Run as the last hurrah of the sleddog era, but it's an unnecessarily long detour away from the real action.

Anytime you have sleddogs and unforgiving nature, you want to spend as much time as you can on that story.  You have only to look at this year's race, where the front-running team decided to go on strike to realize that the dogs, loyal, clever, and brave, are the real heroes.  Which is what Seppala was arguing about all along - without them, would Nome still be on the map? Or would it be another ghost town, a cautionary tale about living beyond the edge of the world?


Cancer Ward and The Cruelest Miles have been, well, not depressing, exactly, but definitely not as light and frothy as some of my other selections (ahem, My Lady's Choosing) have been.  As a preemptive strike against gloominess, I'm now reading two very silly books: a YA crime mystery and a chick lit epistolary novel.

21: A Book By Two Female Authors

Cancer Ward

Cancer Ward

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances, and also reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes. The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Solzhenitsyn himself became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered.

Wooo, finally finished!  This one I knew would take a while, but that's what happens when you choose a Russian Great as the alternative to a romance with a fish-man.  Since the prompt was "book with a zodiac or astrology term in the title" I felt pretty much out of luck, since the only books I was coming up with astrology terms involved either "read the stars" guides, books about fucking various astrologically based men, and books that are, sadly, very out of print.  So when Cancer Ward popped up, I jumped on it.  Not only would a book by a Nobel winner hopefully give me impressive bonafides, but also, I was personally interested to read about the treatment of cancer in the Soviet Union forty years ago.  Little did I know that the entire book was more or less an allegory about the cancer of the Soviet Union.  It's a metaphor!!!!!!!

Despite all that, and despite my difficulty in remembering characters from one chapter to another, particularly when they'll be referred to either by two first names, or by a last name, and then also occasionally by a nickname, this was a relatively enjoyable read, despite not really having a plot. Basically, we enter the cancer ward with a hard-line party person (that's the Communist party, not, like, LMFAO) Rusanov, and we gradually get introduced the other residents of the ward and the doctors and nurses, get biographies and listen to conversations amongst the various characters.  We end up spending the most time with an exile, Kostoglotov, who winds up being "cured", has romances with both nurses, and, in the final chapter of the book, wanders around town before getting back on a train to the edge of nowhere.  

The overarching theme of the book (and you can tell it's by a really fancy author, because this book has themes and metaphors and probably other literary devices I was not paying attention to) is basically, a critique of the Soviet exile system and the ways in which the Russian people essentially became two halves of a dystopic whole: one half was sentenced to prison or exile for crimes built on wisps of air and gossip, the other half was commended and applauded for doing the sentencing.  There's a particularly relevant conversation between Kostoglotov and another patient in the ward where the other patient tells him that although he was exiled, at least he was permitted to tell the truth, keep his honor.  Rusanov, who embraced the idea of it, rose high in the party only to become paranoid when he hears that one of the people he denounced unjustly has been released.

This wasn't hard to read, exactly, it just requires you to pay attention.  Also it's a long book about a Soviet cancer ward, so the action is not exactly hoppin'.  But Solzhenitsyn is an artist - his descriptions and characters are excellent, and he draws you into their lives, making each of them a living being.

Because of the idea of cancer as metaphor there's somewhat less focus on the process itself, although Solzhenitsyn does not gloss over the daily procedures and treatments the patients undergo.  Instead though, we spend more time on the hospital's habit of releasing patients it can't cure, so as not to bring down their excellent statistics; of a nurse's glossing over of treatment options because it's easier to tell a patient what they'll be doing than to explain why this method is the best - particularly when the staff themselves aren't even sure. 

It's not really a pessimistic book (although after this one and the next one I found myself needing a definite change of pace) but it's a heavy book.  You do feel weighted down by all the burdens - mental, physical, emotional - these people are carrying.  The book's final chapter is Kostoglotov's walk through town, including a last minute decision to walk through the zoo (something another patient on the ward is literally almost dying to do) and he finds an empty cage for a monkey which died because a man threw pepper into its eyes.  We end the book on this image, I suppose because the act of senseless cruelty is meant to be akin to the cruelty imposed by Russians on their own citizens and neighbors. But in fact, the cancer has equalized them - party liner and exile alike suffer through the same indignities.  So in the end, the gulag system worked!  Haha, no, I don't think that's what we're supposed to take away from Cancer Ward.  But that's the danger with metaphors - if you take them as they lay, sometimes you wind up going backwards on your unicycle.  You see? Now this metaphor has gone too far.



33: A Book With A Zodiac Sign Or Astrology Term In The Title

Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things:Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar

By Cheryl Strayed

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.

Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar together in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond.  Rich with humor, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.

Cheryl Strayed is a heck of a memorialist, but I can only say that if I had actually written in to her for advice, I would definitely have been sitting there with her answer, crumpling the paper, screaming, "Get to the point!" She takes each letter and starts off basically with a "let me tell you about a seemingly (and in fact sometimes actually) unrelated event that happened to me, and after several pages of that I will analogize it to your problem".  I was so struck by this method, I'll attempt to recreate it for this review:

I read, regularly, certain advice columns.  This has not always been the same column, as it depends on those that I can most easily access, but for the last few years, it has included Dear Prudence, which used to be written by various other people, and then was written by Emily Yoffe, and then, most recently and dramatically, it was taken over by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (formerly Mallory Ortberg of The Toast).  Words cannot express how inadequate the advice given at the beginning of Ortberg's reign was.  It was so uniformly awful that there the site moderators had to tell people (repeatedly!  They left this as a message at the top of comments for weeks!) not to make derogatory comments about Ortberg's skills as an advice columnist and ask for Yoffe to come back.  It truly was a rocky road.  (Note that Dear Prudence's overlords at Slate seem to think "terrible advice column" is a successful business strategy,  as they are employing it once again with a sex column answered by two people, who, in one now infamous example, told an older heterosexual man who was having trouble connecting with his wife to "try a glory hole".  And yes, that is how "try a glory hole!" has become shorthand acknowledgement of shitty advice on one small corner of the internet.  I think broadly speaking though, that's going to be shitty advice 99.9% of the time, so feel free to expand its reach.)

As the wheel turns, gradually Ortberg became better at the job, being less sarcastic, and has mostly stopped uniformly recommending that people having communication problems with their significant others simply break up with them (I suppose as an alternative to having a difficult conversation, but I don't think we should encourage breaking up, since it's already such a tempting way out).  He's still hot on lengthy speeches for people to give, although we're hoping to wean him off those eventually too.  When he first started he was short and snappy and kinda fun, albeit somewhat too snappy in some cases.  I think the backlash from the appearance of flippancy has made him backpedal into the quagmire of five minute explanations of why you need space from your friend, when really, all you have to (and in most cases, should) say is: "I need some space."

All of this is to say that there's definitely some columnists who set the bar low, and give you confidence that you could easily do this job yourself.  Strayed (and Dear Sugar) is not one of them.  She is empathetic, sympathetic, warm, funny, and insightful.  Now, you do have to wade through a ten year history of Strayed's life to get there, but there is a great place to be. 

I did think it was kind of hilarious early on when she does a list of FAQs (sidebar: why do we say FAQs? It's always plural. Never has anyone typed FAQ and meant "Frequently Asked Question".  And yet, I feel compelled to make it clear this is a plural situation going on here. Society's mores are killing creativity!) and one of the questions is: "Are the letters you publish really sent in by anonymous people? Most are so well written that it seems you or The Rumpus writers must be creating them." Her answer (basically, she has so many that she can choose the most well written, and yes, aren't they all lovely) is a delightful eliding over the fact that the letters all kind of sound the same, too.  "I'm not smart, but I know what love is" and "please be honest, blunt, and give me a new perspective on my multifaceted problem" and "how do I reconnect with him in a genuine way?"

I have to say that it seemed unlikely to me, too, that all these people writing in were so erudite and clear in their desperation, but it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of her answers.  Her responses are such that I found myself on the edge of tears more than once. It's not only that she gives good advice - though she does, frequently telling them not what to do, but how to decide it - but that she allows the reader to view their problems with the same compassion and generosity of spirit that Strayed sees them. What infinite patience Strayed has for the person who overheard their friends talking about them behind their back, for the woman who likes kinky sex, for the person whose father is telling them things they don't want to hear, for the high schooler whose friends are messy. 

Or for the person who is afraid to say the word love:

"We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime."




Footnote: I don't mean to be unduly harsh on Ortberg - he really was just awful when he started, but he's gotten a lot better since!  There's very few columns now where he strikes out more than once.

10: A Book With "Pop" "Sugar" Or "Challenge" In The Title

Pride

Pride

By Ibi Zoboi

Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable.

When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can’t stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding.

But with four wild sisters pulling her in different directions, cute boy Warren vying for her attention, and college applications hovering on the horizon, Zuri fights to find her place in Bushwick’s changing landscape, or lose it all.

It is a truth universally known that Jane Austen adaptations - particularly those of Pride of Prejudice -  are a booming business.  Pride is a P&P "remix" which places the action in and around Bushwick, in Brooklyn, NYC, and centers the action on Zuri, one of five Haitian-Dominican sisters with working class parents.  Interestingly enough, although most modern adaptations age them up, in Pride, the sisters' ages are pretty close to the original Bennett sisters, although their concerns are college and social media, rather than marriage and, well, despoilation for marriage.

Zoboi also focuses a lot of Pride on gentrification.  Zuri's initial impression of Darius (her Darcy figure) is of a renovated brownstone, formerly boarded over, now bougie.  I mean, he's associated with the brownstone, not that he is a brownstone.

This book does convey the class stratification better than most adaptations do, and I think the choice of setting was a good one to set off the themes of the original (even though it is a little more aggressive in its approach to those themes).  The actions of the characters only felt a little shoehorned into the plot, and mostly that centers around Darius' interactions with Zuri.Which had to be done because unlike the original, people didn't conveniently camp out for months at a time at a relative's house who happens to be conveniently nearby your best friend's new man's house.

Okay, I will be very honest: I read this like four weeks ago, and have been meandering my way through Cancer Ward ever since.  I started this review as soon as I finished it but it's been so long I have forgotten all my opinions about it, if I ever had any.  Frankly there's also been a lot of upheaval in my life since then, and sometimes, books are just secondary characters.  At least, this one is.  Look, I love Pride and Prejudice, I think it's amazing, it's witty, touching, and sensible.  Do we really need to repeat it endlessly in different iterations? No, but it's not harming anyone.  It's a classic story, and entertaining enough to support all the later weight of these loving knock-offs.  I think Zoboi does yeoman's work in making her version snappy, appropriate and generally logical.

People have been asking for years why Pride and Prejudice has inspired this kind of following, while, say Little Women, though beloved, has not.  I think that's pretty clear, but I will answer it for you anyway: people definitely see themselves in Elizabeth Bennet, and I think we're all pretty well agreed that Jo blew it with Laurie, and Professor Bhaer is not every young lady's dream guy.  What was Alcott thinking?? If you want to be immortalized, you gotta pick a sexy man who pisses off his mean aunt to be with you, not a shlubby teacher twenty years older than you. 

15: A Retelling Of A Classic

Provenance

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of  Modern Art

By Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

It is the astonishing narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate cons in the history of art forgery. Stretching from London to Paris to New York, investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo recount the tale of infamous con man and unforgettable villain John Drewe and his accomplice, the affable artist John Myatt. Together they exploited the archives of British art institutions to irrevocably legitimize the hundreds of pieces they forged, many of which are still considered genuine and hang in prominent museums and private collections today.

I really enjoyed this book.  I have a semi-jaundiced eye towards art collecting to begin with, and this only proves my point: if the value of art is no longer based on the piece itself but some other extrinsic factor, then it is no longer art, but commodity.  The artist/forger Myatt makes the point (as do several others): the painting has not changed, only the name of the producer.  Why then does the price drop by the order of several hundred thousand?  Apparently the answer to Shakespeare's famous question is: no, a rose would not smell as sweet by any other name. Nor would a Giacometti.

Provenance is a really interesting book about a very specific fraud on the art world, but also about greater questions in personal responsibility, confidence, and the many cracks and seams that are available to be exploited by people without care for collateral damage, both in general terms in our modern society and also very specifically in the fine art forum.

Just this week as I'm reading it, the New York Times had two articles about long lost or newly discovered art pieces of great artists, an unearthed Caravaggio, found in an attic, and some purported Rembrandts, discovered in a collection held for six generations.  Honestly, both made me barking mad, since it seems like each loses sight of the forest for the trees. Look, all of this rush to decide whether this painting or that is painted by a "master" - authorship is more fluid than that (at least in paintings).  Stop attaching such importance to an unimportant feature.  In Provenance, they kinda wrap up the whole escapade by talking about art fraud via a broader lens, and mention that Picasso (and possibly other artists as well) would sign works done by other artists.

I've also been watching Fake or Fortune on Netflix, which is a fascinating look as the show people take paintings and try to authenticate them. It shows some of the avenues that people would use to support the provenance. It all seems to me like a giant guessing game, but there are definitely people out there who dedicate their lives to art, and in some cases, specific artists, so closely that they "know" immediately if something is off or not.  That sixth sense there is almost like a superpower.  What's interesting about this fraud perpetrated here is that it was able to succeed despite multiple people finding the forgeries lacking, because the provenance allayed all doubts.  That was the true con (obviously, otherwise they wouldn't have called the book Provenance). 

All of my aggravation about provenance aside, I am absolutely appalled at the utter gall of Drewe to callously upend historical archives for his own personal agenda and pleasure.  I am definitely a black and white seer, a rules follower, and no matter how silly I think it is to search for value in a trail of owners, I am utterly disgusted at his behavior.  Obviously, not only in this regard, but also in his refusal to acknowledge what it is. Just admit you did it for personal gain!  You're a piece of shit, John Drewe, have the self awareness to admit it.

48: Two Books That Share The Same Title