2017 READING ROUNDUP #36-40

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THE TURN OF THE SCREW | HENRY JAMES

I love a good ghost story, but unfortunately Turn of the Screw is just too old timey for me to get into. Like a lot of women in period books, our heroine, a nanny, has unbelievably outsized emotional reactions to trivial things (someone just being at a window) for about a hundred pages, and then a kid dies from having too many feelings but maybe also ghosts. There is some fun eerie stuff toward the beginning, but when she starts to uncover what the malicious ghosts that are influencing the children are, the source of corruption and evil is just an affair. Apparently, the Big Literary Debate about this is whether our protagonist is mentally ill and whether or not there was anything supernatural going on. Unfortunately, I didn’t really care enough to even come down on a side; it was written ambiguously, that is all. D

THE DISPOSSESSED | URSULA K. LE GUIN

Science fiction books that are statement pieces about philosophy, to the detriment of character and even plot, are difficult for me. The Dispossessed was not the most memorable of Le Guin’s works for me, not because her observations on this very polarized world of Liberterian Science Anarchists in space versus Hedonistic Capitalists on Earth are without merit, it just feels like a very labored narrative with a lot of unnecessary physics discoveries to deliver the point. I will give Le Guin this: the plot progresses in a way that demonstrates her thesis about these two philosophies in a very organized progression. I find it puzzling that the book is considered a feminist utopia, as it doesn’t depict a particularly ideal society for anyone, much less women. Were I to judge the book on what it was trying to do rather than whether it entertained me, I’d set aside the boringness and give it a B.

YOU WILL KNOW ME | MEGAN ABBOTT

Marley’s praise for this book was that the author knows how to write tension. Other reviews of the book are rhapsodic about how much creepier it is to feel like you don’t know those closest to you than it is to be menaced by a stranger. These are both absolutely the greatest strengths of this murder mystery centered around a family and their high achieving gymnast daughter. And yet while the book was well-written and I remained engaged in the unfolding mystery, I did not find the narrative as compelling as others. I give major props to the author for building a world and characters which I found inescapably believable while maintaining tremendous ambiguity about what really happened. B+

WHEN TRUE NIGHT FALLS | C. S. FRIEDMAN

Book two of this utterly ridiculous trilogy was even more extra than the last. It also contains the most weirdly petty line from a noble priest protagonist I’ve ever encountered. It is almost certainly a “you had to be there” to understand why Ibba and I just completely lost it laughing for fifteen minutes, but I’ll quote it anyway, “The food consisted of the kind of thing noncampers might purchase for a camping expedition– mostly sugared snacks and mixes for dried soups– but there was some dried meat and cheese and a flat, hard bread that promised to travel well…. Could have been worse… could have been much worse.” Mind you, this isn’t G-Mart. We’re never treated with descriptions of food and this character has never observed any level of detail excepting the beautiful curve of his deadly enemy/friend/crush’s mouth. As for my recommendation: if you’ve read the first one and wonder if book two is gayer, it is.  D

DUNE | FRANK HERBERT

The fact that Dune is basically about an annoyingly Gary Stu child who becomes Prince of Everything by being Wiser and Better than everyone should be more off-putting than it is. Smarter folks than I have probably analyzed the racial undertones of its world building, but despite some eyebrow raising vibes, I found myself invested in the progression of the plot. The book does what books like Stranger in a Strange Land do, where the protagonist goes from ignorant child to magic philosopher king very quickly. So as a seasoned genre reader I know to let the boring bits wash over me to set up for what will probably an interesting series now that we’ve epically “powered up” our protagonist. Unfortunately, its pacing and datedness limits my eagerness to continue. A-



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