Things My Brilliant Friend is about, a partial list: female friendship, yes, but also childhood, poverty, male violence, education, books, social mobility, Naples, subcultures, competition, and love.
Things My Brilliant Friend is about, a partial list: female friendship, yes, but also childhood, poverty, male violence, education, books, social mobility, Naples, subcultures, competition, and love.
Finished reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein. This was an intense page-turner, about two girls growing up in poverty in post-war Naples. The ending was abruptly and exquisitely unhappy, and was in hindsight the only way it could have ended. I’m still thinking about this one, and plan to read the remaining three in the series, but with a break to catch my breath.
A few days ago, I finished rereading Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. They’re even better on the second read, and straight together with the third. Together they’re a vivid evocation of Harlem of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
Finished reading Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead, concluding the story from Crook Manifesto and Harlem Shuffle. Just a great hang, funny and poignant, thoughtful about New York City and family and how a person grows, or doesn’t. Makes me want to immediately reread the previous two, like I don’t have a million books to read already.
Forgot to post, but sometime last week I finished reading A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett, third of his fantasy murder mystery series. As with the previous two, there’s a body horror motif that doesn’t go too far for me (and I’m somewhat sensitive to it), and like the second book, he has some thoughts about the real world that he’s working out in his stories. I’ll read the fourth whenever it comes out.
Finished reading Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, featuring time-traveling fascists during the London Blitz of early WWII. This book felt like Declare by Tim Powers, one of my favorites, but I think this was better. Certainly seems like it’ll be at the top of my year-end list.
Finished reading Radiant Star by Ann Leckie, latest book in her somewhat loose Imperial Radch series. This was a banger from page one, although/and I kind of figured out what was going on about a third of the way into it. It was just what I wanted, is what I’m saying, and at this point I’ll pretty much read anything with her name on it.
Finished reading Trudeau & Doonesbury by Joshua Kendall, a biography of the fairly reclusive cartoonist. This was very interesting, especially as someone who read the comic fairly religiously in the ’80s and ’90s; the throughline of the book was Trudeau’s growth from callow prep school lad to thoughtful feminist and advocate for veterans.
One thing I meant to mention about The Every: It struck me how in some ways the book’s namesake shared a philosophy, at least superficially, with the Utopians of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, but shallow or weaponized.
Finished reading Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. This was a short post-apocalyptic novel, set in a First Nations reservation in northern Ontario, focused entirely on the community: The nature of the apocalypse is entirely irrelevant to the story and thus never discussed, and its effects to the south only barely so. The prose was simple and straightforward, which I think made the story more vivid and, sometimes, harrowing.
Finished reading The Every by Dave Eggers. It’s a bit of a mess, a novel about a kind of near-future Google/Facebook hybrid, that attacks automation, social media, AI, and (the ideas of) David Brin’s The Transparent Society. With humor that does not consistently land. The first part of the book dragged, too. But by the end it had turned into a pretty good corporate espionage thriller. I would be the prime audience for a better-executed version of this book, but this wasn’t the one.
Finished reading Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney, a survey of our understanding of the Proto Indo-European language and its descendants. I knew bits and pieces of this, but Spinney wove it together into a clear, compelling whole. This was one of my fastest non-fiction reads in quite a while.
Finished reading Civilizations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor. This was an alternate history where the losing emperor of an Incan civil war conquers much of Europe, introducing religious tolerance and maybe a kind of proto-socialism in the process. I loved the first half of the book; the third quarter kind of lost any sense of stakes, and I started to feel like Binet was writing cleverly rather than well. The end of the book turned me back around, with a sort of epilogue that I haven’t quite fully absorbed. Overall quite good, even if not quite as good as I thought when I started.
Finished reading Real Tigers by Mick Herron, book 3 of the Slough House series, a couple days ago. Another fun read, continuing the humorously cynical tone but this time with a bit more optimism for the slow horses.
Finished reading The Mills of the Gods by Tim Powers. Classic Powers (Phoenician gods + Paris + Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso), executed … well, acceptably. Not one of his great works (start with Last Call or Declare, not his later books), and a little heavy-handed on the Catholicism (were all of his books like this?), but includes a truly harrowing oil lamp–lit journey through the Paris catacombs.