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amado1So:
1) A Cruel God Reigns by Moto Hagio.
I read 10 (and a half) volumes of this early 90s manga, which has really luscious art (I might have made it to Vol. 15 if I hadn't stopped so many times to copy panels in my sketchbook). It follows Jeremy, an American teenager whose unstable mother marries an English aristocrat and businessman. I'm honestly blanking on this guy's name, but he spends the good first half of the manga secretly, sadistically, and sexually abusing Jeremy while simultaneously exerting total control over his life -- moving Jeremy and his mother to England, enrolling Jeremy in the same school that his bio children go to, etc.
In the second half, both parents die in a fiery car accident -- thanks to Jeremy -- and the narrative follows his recovery from trauma and drug addiction as well as his increasingly toxic relationship with his older step-brother Ian, who can't accept (at first) that his father might have deserved to die.
I'm sure I'll go back and finish this someday soon, like I did with Kazeki. It's just that both manga are so long and dark that you need to take a year-long breather before you continue!
2) The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins.
Wow, it feels like I read this MONTHS ago! OK, you might remember that I also read Robbins' recent book, "The Teachers," which follows a similar formula -- and I was not very kind to Robbins in my review of that. But I felt "Overachievers" was a much better work. Like "The Teachers" Robbins follows a select group of over-achieving teens over the course of a single year at an elite high school, and she intersperses these narratives with more general facts about high school stress and college admissions. But in "The Teachers," these general facts definitely felt like Robbins had just copy-pasted them from other people's blogs. In "The Overachievers," she draws her conclusions from personal, journalistic conversations with various sources from outside her regular subject group -- over-achieving kids at low-funds non-elite public schools in the West, for example, or college admissions officers from various different universities, or college admissions "counselors" who help clients game the system.
I think it helped to have a wider cast of subjects -- "The Teachers" only had three. "Overachievers" followed somewhere around 6 or 7 named students, including one starting his freshman year of Harvard. Since the students all attended the same elite high school, the narrative felt more like a rigorous deep dive rather than a brief, shallow dip into three very different schools (as we saw in The Teachers). So overall, a much more satisfying book.
3) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
This was a short, brisk novel set in the 90s and following two outcasts at a Japanese high school. The unnamed narrator, nicknamed "Eyes", is bullied because of his lazy eye. His new best friend Kojima is bullied because of her poor hygiene. Throughout the novel, Eyes and Kojima initially find solace and solidarity in each other (although their friendship is extremely secretive and furtive). Neither does anything to help the other when being bullied in school; they pretend not to see. But as the year stretches on, we start to see an uncomfortable divide between Kojima and Eyes: Eyes is bullied for something he can't help, was born with. Kojima, however, deliberately skips baths and dirties her clothes to rebel against her mother.
Soon Eyes realizes that he and Kojima differ in another important way: Kojima sees victimhood as a purifying, almost religious experience. Submitting to violence gives her power, she says, over the handsome, straight-A students who bully her. But Eyes struggles to feel the same way. When he learns that his lazy eye can be corrected with a cheap, simple surgery, he yearns to go for it, and Kojima senses his yearning and is distraught, disgusted -- accuses him of abandoning her and never really understanding what they had.
It all culminates in a dramatic sexual assault in the park in the rain. Eyes finally takes a stand against his bullies -- but can't bring himself to be violent to them, the way they've been violent to him. Meanwhile, Kojima takes submission to the extreme. She willingly strips, fully naked, and then beatifically approaches her bullies, trying to touch their hair -- until they run screaming.
In any case, the bullies are caught and exposed; Eyes has his surgery; and he never speaks to Kojima again. The reader is left grappling with who was right -- Kojima's self-starvation and degradation seem wrong-headed, but in the end, she's the one who "won" by making the bullies run away. But did she really do anything? If she hadn't willingly stripped or approached them, we know that adults would have stumbled upon the scene anyway, been horrified, and chased the bullies off. So her self-submission was for nothing, and in the end, you get the impression that Kojima will continue to willingly suffer for the rest of her life. Eyes, meanwhile, has changed something fundamental about himself in order to shake the bullies off ... but he sees clearer now, and the blurriness that comes with a lazy eye is gone.
In the end, maybe the person who comes closest to being "right:" is Momose, one of the bullies. Momose claims that he never bullied Eyes because of the lazy eye, or Kojima because she stinks. The bullies choose their victims simply by testing everyone ... and then seeing who will put up with it and who won't; who's too weak to fight back. It's a very sociopathic speech, where he derisively waves away the idea of having moral responsibility for his actions and instead blames Eyes for putting up with it. Momose feels that the world isn't split into good vs. bad, it's split into strong vs. weak, and obviously, it's better to be strong. Eyes is just weak.
I don't think Momose is exactly right about all this; after all, when Eyes gets his surgery, you sense that something has inherently changed for him -- and anyone who's been bullied notices that it tends to be already-marginalized people getting the short end of the stick. But I think he's dead-on about how bullies justify their actions to themselves and how they select victims (to an extent).
4) Franz Kafka - The Drawings.
Eh! OK, I love Kafka, and I kind of collect volumes of drawings by famous writers. I've got Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Victor Hugo, and Vladimir Nabokov. And now Franz Kafka! So that's cool. But I tend to agree with Kafka that his drawings are no good.
I mean, they chose the cover very well. They took essentially the only drawing he ever made that COULD be on a cover! OK, slight exaggeration. Kafka's drawings wildly vacillate between "ok no one should have saved this from the trash" to "holy shit that's evocative." But the book contains maybe 5 evocative drawings, and all the rest are the sort of clumsy, idly-doodled stick figures that just ... like ... of course he threw those away, Brod!! Why did YOU dig them out of the trash?!
It's daylight robbery, okay?
5) Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro
This, however, is excellent.
This is a short novel following an elderly woman, Elena, over the course of one day. Elena has Parkinson's and is struggling to solve the murder of her adult daughter (and former caretaker). The issue is, Elena's body won't obey her, so she's desperate to get across town today and convince someone she knows to solve the case for her.
As the story unravels it becomes viciously clear to the reader that there was no murder. Elena's daughter committed suicide, and Elena simply can't accept it. We see glimpses of their hostile, complex relationship and the stress of dealing with Elena's advancing disability through flashbacks. Elena is a hard-nosed, judgmental woman who criticizes her daughter endlessly and is Not Kind to her daughter's hunch-backed boyfriend. Her daughter is equally hard-nosed and judgmental, but also deeply religious, and once "saved" a stranger from having an abortion. That stranger now sends them a Christmas card every year with a picture of her daughter, and that's who Elena's going to see.
Unfortunately, it turns out that lady doesn't send the cards at all -- her abusive husband does. And she's very glad to hear that Elena's daughter committed suicide.
It's a great (and harrowing) meditation on women's bodies: Elena's, which won't obey her anymore, taking over by the disease (which Elena characterizes as female, the disease being called "Herself"). Her daughter's body, which refused to yield children, and which Elena herself once violated with an invasive gynecological appointment, described in horrific detail. And of course it explores her daughter's "body" in the sense of "her corpse." And finally the body of the woman whose abortion was thwarted 20 years ago.
6) Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
Excellent, brief meditation on war photography. It starts out examining a text by Virginia Woolf that I'd never even heard of before -- a sort of feminist essay in answer to a letter from a man asking her what "we" can do to end WWI. As Woolf pointed out, it wasn't really up to women to end it. Then she studies a few different war photos, which she believes are the key to ending the war. Stoke empathy with grisly pictures, invoke world peace. Easy solution.
Ofc war photography was kind of new back then and Woolf's optimism isn't surprising, but Sontag challenges Woolf's view by examining the real, practical uses of war photography that are more common IRL -- that is, as propaganda, with photos of generic dead bodies often being identified by each side as "ours", a victim of a terrorist attack or oppressive violence from the enemy. Once she's explored propaganda thoroughly she moves on to the numbing effect -- do war photos actually numb us, or is it a myth, or does it happen with some people and not with others, and if so, why? Or do war photos still have the ability to move us and stoke our empathy (often, yes ... but why)? Are war photos frequently staged, and if so, what does that mean? Should we really care if they're staged? How much of photography is journalism and how much of it is art? She ends with an incredible little essay about a staged war photograph that shows a sprawling landscape of dead Russian soldiers in a made-up battle. The dead are gruesomely made up, but they're also vibrant and full of life -- like, men with their legs blasted off sitting up and playing poker, guys with no jaw listening intently to a funny story told by a comrade, etc. At the same time, living enemy soldiers pick through the remains and scavenge weapons, money, etc., unnoticed by the dead.
Honestly, I'd give it 5 stars just for that ending.
7) Hex by Jenni Fagan
I was seriously unimpressed by this novella.
It follows a modern-day witch who projects her spirit backward in time to the 1500s, so she can spend some time with a real-life convicted "witch" who was executed in Scotland hundreds of years ago. The vibe of this book is very "The Princess Saves Herself in This One." You know, like. The story and the characters don't matter to this author; what matters is hammering a very basic feminist message into every line. The prose is nauseatingly goopy and seems to be crafted purely so readers can Instagram the quotes. There's an uneasy focus on women as child-bearers that gives the book's feminism a TERF-y feel, and ... okay, King James is obviously not a good dude, and he was pretty directly responsible for the witch trials. That's just a historical fact. But I feel like the main characters could have commented on King James' role in this mess WITHOUT making a point to mock him for being gay every time they brought him up??? Like, that's bizarre. If the 16th Century witch was the only one who did this, and it was meant to be a reflection on how simply being oppressed by men doesn't mean that any two women hold the same values ... that would be one thing. But both the 16th Century witch and the modern witch make these comments and it left a sour feeling in my mouth.
I have seen plenty of reviewers give this book 5 stars and say it made them cry, and I can only assume that they've never read any other book about an execution, because this is easily the worst I've read.
8) David Bowie's Serious Moonlight: The World Tour
I love "Serious Moonlight" so I'm obviously a sucker for this. It's mostly a travel journal/photo book, with plenty of gorgeous photos of Bowie and his crew in various locales, from the U.S. to Australia to Thailand. But it's also stuffed with cute anecdotes and introductions to his musicians, explanations of how the sets were built, etc. I got this on Thriftbooks but it's definitely worth paying full price for ... although it's also, like, out of print XD So you won't have to pay full price anywhere lmao.
9) Petshop of Horrors by Matsuri Akino
This was brought up in one of the servers I'm in, when someone asked "What's the first manga you ever bought?" I really like everyone's taste there, so I immediately pulled this one up and read it when it got recommended. I'd heard of it before but never checked it out -- great art, dark stories; I think I would have adored this as a 13-year-old but as an adult it's just a 4/5 star rating: perfectly fine, nothing wrong with it. Nothing particularly great about it either, at least in Vol. 1.
It follows the mysterious Count D in a U.S. Chinatown, where he runs a supernatural pet shop a la Gremlins. A few select customers are given access to Count D's abnormal fare in the back room, where the "pets" tend to look more like humans. Clients sign strict contracts with rules they must not break (the rules vary chapter-to-chapter) and take their pet home, where they pretty much always break the rules, with deadly consequences. The stories are tragic, dark, ironic, and gory, but they're also a bit too short to feel fully satisfying.
10) And Much of Madness by K.M. Claude
This is my friend Claude's book, a collection of zines featuring Tiefer and Jehan (a priest and the altar boy he molested). The artwork is crisp and juicy; the storylines are darkly seductive and explore trauma in all its forms. I already have most of these zines, but it's very nice to have them in paperback form, where they're more protected and harder to lose (I am not an organized person).
This particular volume dances around in the timeline and gives us a good sense of Tiefer in particular -- his own incestuous sexual abuse that he suffered as a child, and his ambivalent feelings toward his abuser; his ill-fated relationship with Jehan's father when they were young; his relationship with Jehan both as a child and as an adult, when Jehan himself has become more ambivalent, uncertain whether he hates or loves Tiefer.
I like the malleability of Claude's timelines here. There's a fluidity to the boundaries between each zine and an ambiguity about what's "canon" that bears a strong parallel to the real-life haziness of a survivor's memories and emotions.
11) Know My Name by Chanel Miller
I reviewed this one more fully already, but to recap, Chanel Miller is the "Jane Doe" victim from the Brock Turner case, and this is her memoir, which starts with the night of the rape and weaves backward (to show us her childhood) and forward (to show us the trial and her attempts at recovery through art).
Chanel's an excellent writer. This was a little bloated and could have been pared down, but overall the quality is excellent and I definitely recommend it.
12) I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Hell, everyone's talked about this book, so I don't need to. It's fantastic, the hype is real.
13) Oxygen Mask by Jason Reynolds
This was an excellent little graphic novel about 2020: specifically about COVID and George Floyd, as experienced by a Black teenager sitting at home with his family. The story is told through three long run-on sentences, or "breaths", where we see our unnamed protagonist anxiously watching TV. His mom is absorbed in the television; his younger brother is glued to his gaming system; his sister is tuned into her phone; and his dad is shut off in the back room, wheezing from COVID, maybe dying.
The artwork is great and absorbing -- it's presented like a lined notebook with liberal amounts of paint and construction paper layered over it to create a collage on every page. I blitzed through this book in about 30 minutes. It captures you and kind of holds you there until you finish it -- those run-on sentences act like a magnet to keep you turning the pages and desperately hoping that whatever you find next won't make you burst into tears.
14) How Can You Write a Poem When You're Dying of AIDS?
Speaking of tears...
This is a collection from the early 90s, composed of poems written by dying patients or their lovers and friends. Most of the poems are VERY good. Some are kind of abysmal. I liked this one, for example:
Quietus est
I fell in love with him against my will. The silence of my
desire laid me captive. I acquired a taste for despair, and
shaved my head in penitence.
Then one night I made love to him. I held him still alive in
my arms and, kissing him one last time, left him quiet in the
morning sun.
Did you not tell me once that you desire your boyfriend most
when he's asleep? You draw down the sheets and view his
body, as pale as death's, in the half-light.
by Howard Lester
15) How to Disappear Completely by Kelsey Osgood
I'm ambivalent on this one. It's an anorexia memoir of sorts. The actual memoir portions are pretty good; Osgood's an engaging, crisp writer. But for the most part her book is an examination of anorexia memoirs. Do they do more harm than good? Is there any way to write an anorexia memoir WITHOUT it becoming fuel for someone else's anorexia?
Along the way Osgood also examines "wannarexia" and argues that, in this day and age, everyone who develops anorexia starts out as a wannarexic -- i.e., someone who deliberately takes on an extreme diet and copies anorexic behaviors in the hopes of becoming thin (or staying thin).
I found the view on wannarexia refreshingly honest but a bit misguided. Osgood's conclusion seems to be, "Memoirs have made anorexia look glamorous. So glamorous that teenage girls WANT to become anorexic, so they do! The solution is to make anorexia a stigmatized disorder and to stereotype sufferers as vain and vapid." I think she's started from a true observation about wannarexia and come to a flawed conclusion here. Osgood characterizes anorexia as a condition that sufferers actively choose to have -- a condition that can be fended off by simply telling them, "Ew, you're anorexic? How gross. You must be soooo self-obsessed!"
IMO what happens with wannarexia is the same thing that happens when a latent schizophrenic smokes his first joint. Let's say that a 100 teenagers smoke weed and 100 teenagers try an extreme diet to fit into their prom dresses. Of those 100 first-time smokers, 1 of them will be a latent schizophrenic, and that joint will awaken his symptoms for the first time. Of those 100 extreme dieters, 1 of them will be a latent anorexic, and ditto. I doubt the "ewww anorexia is so lame" strategy will work, since Osgood herself tells plenty of anecdotes about objectively ghastly-looking anorectic teens who still desired to lose weight ... even though they knew they didn't look good.
Osgood comes across, unfortunately, as a bit jealous -- she spends a good amount of time harping on Marya Hornbacher's 80s memoir "Wasted" (which is an excellent book, but DOES go into lots of detail about Hornbacher's anorexia-era diets and weights). There are valid criticisms to make about Hornbacher's memoir, but the amount of time Osgood spends on it (repeatedly circling back to it throughout her memoir) becomes uncomfortable by the midway point. And sometimes her "criticisms" are just mean-spirited (see: her dig at Hornbacher for writing further memoirs about mental illness). There's an odd interlude where Osgood actually contacts Hornbacher and notes that, to her frustration, Hornbacher is kind, intelligent, thoughtful, has spent time ruminating on the negative impact of her memoir -- but Osgood never shares any of those ruminations with us, and I can't help but wonder if she deliberately left them out despite having Hornbacher's permission to share.
Final comment: I'm kind of accustomed to anorexia memoirs taking the time to address privilege and race. The stereotype of an anorexic girl is that of a wealthy white girl. And most books address that 1) that stereotype exists for a reason and 2) many anorexic patients do not fit this description. Some books dig into what it means to be one of the outsiders -- what does your treatment plan look like when you're poor? How alienated do you feel when you're the only Black girl on the ward, or the only man, or the only person over 30? Osgood doesn't take the time to examine this, but she does that uncomfortable thing where she ONLY describes someone's race if they're non-white, and she also only does this for nurses, so...
16) Normal People by Sally Rooney
J'adore. Well worth the hype. This follows two Irish teens who grew up in the same small town and then went to Trinity together -- and it shows us how their relationship changes in different settings, how the power dynamic fluctuates over time, how each of them struggles with their past. Connell is working-class and painfully shy, the son of a single mom; he has difficulty understanding his own emotions and sorting through his thoughts on a variety of topics. His classmates seem mystically self-assured to him. But despite this, in high school, he's one of the popular kids. He doesn't have to work for it. He's handsome, he's on the football team, he conforms, and that's all it takes.
Marianne is extremely wealthy -- and the least popular girl in school. Connell's mother Lorraine is her housekeeper. Marianne is fiercely intelligent, argumentative, cold, opinionated (and well-informed). She's bullied incessantly but scarcely seems to notice or care, and scorns her classmates as much as they scorn her. When she and Connell start dating, Connell insists they keep it a secret (and refuses to classify it as "dating") -- and their relationship ends when Connell tells Marianne he loves her one night after sex and then asks one of Marianne's bullies to the school dance the next day.
When they go to Trinity, everything changes. Marianne is revered for her intelligence and admired for her wealth. She becomes the center of every party, effortlessly popular with hordes of friends. Connell finds himself awkward and out of place. He isn't automatically liked by everyone in class anymore; in fact, he has to put in effort to introduce himself, to sell his personality as one worth knowing -- and he has no clue how to do that. There's a sharp class distinction between Connell and his classmates, and only Marianne seems willing to overlook it -- she reminds everyone that poor or not, Connell is the smartest person here.
As the story winds on, we watch Connell struggle with guilt over how he hurt Marianne in high school, deal with suicidal thoughts and depression, his social conscience and the deep pain that comes from the Working Class stamp on his forehead -- there are some excellent ruminations to be found here about why people bully and how it affects them later in life. On Marianne's side, we slowly peel back the layers of abuse she went through as a child and how it affects her relationships as an adult, constantly seeking out men who can hurt her, starving herself, testing Connell and miscommunicating, sometimes blithely, infuriatingly ignorant to her own wealth.
Anyway, I found the characters totally plausible (all of them!) and authentic, and it was just ... God, in every aspect, a very good book. Prose, dialogue, plot, development, everything. There was never a single moment where I squinted at the dialogue and thought, "Yeah, that's a bit contrived..." (which happens AT LEAST ONCE in just about every fiction book I've ever read). The end was quietly devastating but painfully mundane and real.
17) A Study in Scarlet Marquis
Y'all know I loved this one :)
18) Lawrence of Arabia's Clouds Hill by Andrew Norman
Alright, not bad. Some editing would have been useful -- Norman tends to repeat information a lot in the second half of the book. But my T.E. Lawrence novel involves a lot of Clouds Hill, so this was immensely useful to me: it has photos, blueprints, a timeline of repairs made to the cottage, profiles on his neighbors and friends in the area, even little stuff like what types of flowers and trees surrounded the cottage (and when). I also greatly appreciated the more emotion-laced sections on Lawrence's suicide attempt, his relationship with John Bruce (the soldier he paid to flog him), his masochism, and his rape trauma in general.
Despite some minor flaws, I liked it enough to order Andrew Norman's other T.E. Lawrence book.
19) Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial, and Overcoming Anorexia edited by Katie M. Taylor.
This is one of the books excoriated by Kelsey Osgood in "How to Disappear Completely" and... well, I thought it was excellent XD Here are Osgood's criticisms, all of which are true (to an extent)
A) The book is supposedly meant to counteract stereotypes about anorexia, like the idea that anorexics are perfectionists and overachievers, or the idea that all anorexics are rich white girls
B) ...but the book features a bunch of Ivy League graduates and Pulitzer Prize winners...
C) ...many of whom are rich white girls...
D) ...and many of whom describe anorexia rhapsodically, almost like it was a tool that shaped them into the amazing overachievers they are today.
There's nothing I can say about the first two points (except that, well, if I'm reading a collection of essays, I do appreciate it when a few of the writers have won Pulitzer Prizes). For the third, to this book's credit, it takes care to include a good mix of writers: there are Jewish, Black, and Hispanic writers and several male writers, as well as essayists from a wide selection of generations -- meaning that some of our writers must have been in their mid-20s when this book was published, and others must have been in their 70s or 80s.
For the fourth point, the most egregious point, I'll say that I appreciated the honesty. Many of these writers had a period of anorexia that, like it or not, coincided with a period of great productivity and personal gain. One writer remembers how his anorexia "helped" him study hard and get accepted into Harvard (when his guidance counselor, at his small border-town high school, wouldn't even let him look at Harvard brochures -- she didn't keep them in stock!). However, all or most of these writers note that this productivity is natural during the early stages of anorexia, when many patients experience a rush of endorphins that gets them addicted to starving, and most writers also examined the deterioration of their minds as they sunk deeper into the disease.
Hm. I can't remember which essay it was, but there was one I particularly liked -- it examined the practices at Renfrew, where inpatients are encouraged to eat Oreos and cakes instead of healthy nutritious food. The idea is, apparently, that an anorexic can't recover AND be health-conscious at the same time. The essayist notes that this typically has two outcomes: either the anorexic refuses to recover at all, knowing she'll get fat ... or she obeys, and she swings from one unhealthy end of the spectrum to the other. The essayist proposes that we instead focus on helping anorexics let go of the obsessive behaviors while still allowing them to eat healthy and control their weight (with healthy strategies, and healthy weights).
In any case, although "Going Hungry" does list weights for some of its essayists and it's not as ideologically sound as "How to Disappear", I think it's leaps-and-bounds better. The essays are marvelously written; I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.
