Books I read in December 2024
Dec. 31st, 2024 02:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1Total: 17 books
-- Madness by Sam Sax;
-- Darkness Visible by William Styron;
-- Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior;
-- The Long March by William Styron;
-- In the Clap Shack by William Styron;
-- Conclave by Robert Harris;
-- Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker;
-- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima;
-- The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai;
-- The Tale of a Niggun by Elie Wiesel;
-- Train Dreams by Denis Johnson;
-- DK Eyewitness: Vietnam War by Stuart Murray;
-- On Killing by Dave Grossman;
-- Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse;
-- Casa Valentina by Harvey Fierstein;
-- Vietnam: A Complete Photographic History by Michael Maclear;
-- Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien.
Poetry, a bite-sized memoir, a comic book, a war novella, a play, a political thriller, an art book, a short novel, a Japanese novella, an illustrated poem, a Western novella, a children's nonfiction book, two very opposing nonfiction books, another play (gay this time), a photo book, and a National Book Award winner -- it's a pretty good balance. Only three of the books were really big and meaty; the rest were small and varied enough to keep things fun.
I made it about halfway through "We Bury Our Dead," a nonfiction book about a murder at Harvard that sort of muses about archaeology and history, memory and meaning. It's well-written, and when I do pick it up, I blitz through several chapters at a time. But then I leave it untouched for days.
Least favorite book ... On Killing, but even that had value, was worth reading. And I got through it in one sitting, even though it's pretty thick. On the one hand, it's a compassionate book to Vietnam vets and makes some valid points about PTSD and man's resistance to killing other people. But it's also an unashamed propaganda piece, and the author has used it to launch his career teaching U.S. policemen to shoot anyone who doesn't obey orders quickly enough. If it weren't for what the author's done with it, I would have rated it 4 stars -- despite several rhetorical flaws, including faulty research. But knowing the motive behind it, what he's done with it, I had to rate it a 3, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth for days. I'd recommend Achilles in Vietnam instead. It makes many of the same insightful points about PTSD and murder, and it's also compassionate, but it's much more frank and realistic. It doesn't shy away from the atrocities in Vietnam.
Favorite book ... ooh, that's tough! Illustrator II got me back into drawing. The Long March and Going After Cacciato are excellent war novels; TLM is more subtle, GAC is more beautiful. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea is probably the best book I read this month; writing-wise I'd rate it above all the others. But, like On Killing, this one is more difficult to rate when you add the context of Mishima's life and death to it. Without that context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written allegory about the perils of Japanese nationalism. With the context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written manifesto. Train Dreams is short, lyrical, gritty, and haunting -- it takes a nonlinear view of a man's life on the frontier at the turn of the century, with elements of magical realism.
But all things weighed, I gotta go with Casa Valentina. It's a fictionalization of the Casa Susanna story -- blisteringly funny and heart-wrenching, also an excellent time-capsule peek into queer struggles/discourse that have completely changed over time, to the point where they're unrecognizable. And in a battle between five good straight books and one good queer book, the queer book is always gonna win with me XD (Wait, did I just classify Barker and Mishima as straight?? "Sailor" is definitely a "straight" story, no textual queerness, but queerness haunts it; "Illustrator" of course is very queer, textually and subtextually. But "Casa Valentina" is a Queer Story through-and-through).
-- Madness by Sam Sax;
-- Darkness Visible by William Styron;
-- Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior;
-- The Long March by William Styron;
-- In the Clap Shack by William Styron;
-- Conclave by Robert Harris;
-- Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker;
-- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima;
-- The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai;
-- The Tale of a Niggun by Elie Wiesel;
-- Train Dreams by Denis Johnson;
-- DK Eyewitness: Vietnam War by Stuart Murray;
-- On Killing by Dave Grossman;
-- Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse;
-- Casa Valentina by Harvey Fierstein;
-- Vietnam: A Complete Photographic History by Michael Maclear;
-- Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien.
Poetry, a bite-sized memoir, a comic book, a war novella, a play, a political thriller, an art book, a short novel, a Japanese novella, an illustrated poem, a Western novella, a children's nonfiction book, two very opposing nonfiction books, another play (gay this time), a photo book, and a National Book Award winner -- it's a pretty good balance. Only three of the books were really big and meaty; the rest were small and varied enough to keep things fun.
I made it about halfway through "We Bury Our Dead," a nonfiction book about a murder at Harvard that sort of muses about archaeology and history, memory and meaning. It's well-written, and when I do pick it up, I blitz through several chapters at a time. But then I leave it untouched for days.
Least favorite book ... On Killing, but even that had value, was worth reading. And I got through it in one sitting, even though it's pretty thick. On the one hand, it's a compassionate book to Vietnam vets and makes some valid points about PTSD and man's resistance to killing other people. But it's also an unashamed propaganda piece, and the author has used it to launch his career teaching U.S. policemen to shoot anyone who doesn't obey orders quickly enough. If it weren't for what the author's done with it, I would have rated it 4 stars -- despite several rhetorical flaws, including faulty research. But knowing the motive behind it, what he's done with it, I had to rate it a 3, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth for days. I'd recommend Achilles in Vietnam instead. It makes many of the same insightful points about PTSD and murder, and it's also compassionate, but it's much more frank and realistic. It doesn't shy away from the atrocities in Vietnam.
Favorite book ... ooh, that's tough! Illustrator II got me back into drawing. The Long March and Going After Cacciato are excellent war novels; TLM is more subtle, GAC is more beautiful. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea is probably the best book I read this month; writing-wise I'd rate it above all the others. But, like On Killing, this one is more difficult to rate when you add the context of Mishima's life and death to it. Without that context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written allegory about the perils of Japanese nationalism. With the context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written manifesto. Train Dreams is short, lyrical, gritty, and haunting -- it takes a nonlinear view of a man's life on the frontier at the turn of the century, with elements of magical realism.
But all things weighed, I gotta go with Casa Valentina. It's a fictionalization of the Casa Susanna story -- blisteringly funny and heart-wrenching, also an excellent time-capsule peek into queer struggles/discourse that have completely changed over time, to the point where they're unrecognizable. And in a battle between five good straight books and one good queer book, the queer book is always gonna win with me XD (Wait, did I just classify Barker and Mishima as straight?? "Sailor" is definitely a "straight" story, no textual queerness, but queerness haunts it; "Illustrator" of course is very queer, textually and subtextually. But "Casa Valentina" is a Queer Story through-and-through).
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Date: 2025-01-01 12:54 am (UTC)The Dictator's book is on my to-read list too, bumping that one up. :) Love seeing these as always.
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Date: 2025-01-02 11:19 pm (UTC)