Review: Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

Review: Crying in H Mart, Michelle ZaunerCrying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Narrator: Michelle Zauner
Published by Random House Audio on April 20, 2021
Genres: Biography, Memoir
Pages: -2
Length: 7 hours, 23 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

This memoir lives up to all the hype I’ve heard about it. It’s a moving portrait of a mother-daughter relationship. The book grew from Zauner’s award-winning essay, “Love, Loss, and Kimchi,” for Glamour magazine. Zauner narrates the audiobook.

I was incredibly moved by Zauner’s descriptions of caring for her mother during her illness and trying to connect with her mother after she died by watching YouTube videos to learn to cook the foods her mother hadn’t had time to teach her. Zauner describes how her mother’s friend made jatjuk when her mother couldn’t eat most foods because of the sores in her mouth. Jatjuk, Zauner explains, is often prepared for sick people. After her mother’s death, she wanted jatjuk, but she didn’t know how to make it, so she sought a recipe on Korean YouTube cook Maangchi’s channel. I’m embedding a video of her making jatjuk below, but I think it is a newer version than the one Zauner watched.

I teared up a bit listening to this part of the book because I, too, have learned cooking skills I had struggled to learn through watching the YouTube videos of Helen Rennie. In particular, after years of trying to learn pie crust, I watched this video in which Helen walks through some tips and tricks, and I finally, finally made a good pie crust.

I love these kinds of memoirs that combine a love of food and culture with a family history. I highly recommend this book, and I’m glad I (finally) read it.

five-stars

Review: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold

Review: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie RubenholdThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
Narrator: Louise Brealey
Published by Highbridge on October 8, 2019
Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction
Length: 10 hours 19 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

This book was very moving. I cried twice: while listening to the Introduction and while listening to the Conclusion/A Life in Objects. What I particularly appreciated about this book is that it focused on what is known about the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper and not what he did to them. The book also did not focus at all on the killer himself. I appreciated this fresh approach. One problem I have with true crime as a genre is the way it can be overly glib about horrific crimes; people forget that real people were at the center of these crimes. Hallie Rubenhold handled the story of each woman gracefully. She has done a wealth of research into these women’s lives. The great tragedy that seemed to be at the heart of most of their stories was that they were poor and struggled with alcoholism. Rubenhold argues that the women have been dismissed as sex workers, the implication being that perhaps the world was better off after they were killed. However, not only is it untrue that they were all sex workers—as though that even means they deserved what happened to them, which Rubenhold also dismisses—but she also emphasizes their relationships with family members, loved ones, and friends. This book was a refreshing biography and should be the model for other books about famous crimes. It’s a shame that we, as a people, are more fascinated by a psychopathic misogynist than the women he killed.

five-stars

Review: Above Ground: Poems, Clint Smith

Review: Above Ground: Poems, Clint SmithAbove Ground by Clint Smith
on March 28, 2023
Genres: Poetry
Pages: 128
Format: Audio, Audiobook, Hardcover
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

The number one New York Times bestselling author, intellectual, and spoken-word poet Clint Smith gives his devoted readers a collection of poetry straight from the heart. It is a meditation on the country he studies through the lens of all he has learned from fatherhood. The poems are manifestations of Smith's wisdom and latest observations, starting with the precarious birth of his son, to the current political and social state of the country, to childhood memories, and back again. Smith traverses the periods of his life from four different cities and the process of realizing what it means to build a life that orbits around his family. Amid all of it, he has watched as the country has been forced to confront the ugliest manifestations of itself, and he has thought about what it means to raise children amid the backdrop of political tumult. Smith is a poet who uses the form to interrogate his own autobiography and the state of the country today, affording those who prefer reading poetry a shot of news, and those who normally seek out nonfiction, some lyrical beauty. Above Ground is a lyrical, sometimes narrative work of poetry that follows from Smith's first book of poetry, Counting Descent.

I thoroughly enjoy everything Clint Smith writes. My students read Smith’s previous collection Counting Descent, and we engage with his work in other ways over the course of the school year. I was very excited about this collection when I first heard about it and pre-ordered it from Loyalty Books in Silver Spring, MD, so I could get a personalized, signed copy. Smith is my favorite living poet, hands down. I love what he says about poetry in his guest spot on The Late Show.

I downloaded the audiobook to listen to Smith reading the poems as I followed in the book. I highly recommend you do the same because these poems are meant to be savored both in print and in Smith’s reading voice.

Some of my favorites in the collection:

  • “When People Say ‘We Have Made It Through Worse Before'”
  • “Your National Anthem”
  • “For Willie Francis, the First Known Person to Survive an Execution by Electric Chair, 1946”
  • “Roots”
  • “Pangaea”
  • “The New York Times Reports That 200 Civilians Have Just Been Killed by U.S. Military Air Strikes”
  • “Nomenclature”
  • “This Is an Incomplete List of All the Reasons I Know I Married the Right Person”
  • “We See Another School Shooting on the News”
  • “The Gun”
  • “Gold Stars”
  • “The Most Remarkable Thing About Dinosaurs”
  • “Ars Poetica”
  • “The Andromeda Galaxy Is the Closest Galaxy to Our Milky Way”

If that sounds like a lot, well, that’s because this collection is incredible. I really liked all of the poems, but the list above stood out to me as I read.

April is National Poetry Month. Do yourself a favor and enjoy this new collection of poems by one of the greatest living poets.

five-stars

Review: Weyward, Emilia Hart

Review: Weyward, Emilia HartWeyward by Emilia Hart
Narrator: Aysha Kala, Helen Keeley, Nell Barlow
Published by Macmillan Audio on March 7, 2023
Genres: Fantasy/Science Fiction, Historical Fiction
Length: 10 hours and 51 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

I am a Weyward, and wild inside.

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great aunt she barely remembers. With its tumbling ivy and overgrown garden, the cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she begins to suspect that her great aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.

1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer who was stampeded to death by his herd. As a girl, Altha’s mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous, and as the evidence for witchcraft is set out against Altha, she knows it will take all of her powers to maintain her freedom.

1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family's grand, crumbling estate. Straitjacketed by societal convention, she longs for the robust education her brother receives––and for her mother, long deceased, who was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom.

Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart's Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.

This was an engaging read. I know I’m enjoying an audiobook when looking extra forward to my walks so I can listen and when I actually don’t mind doing dishes. I like to listen to audiobooks when doing tasks that don’t require concentration. In fact, I actually listened while sitting on the couch and mindlessly playing with a coloring app. That’s how I know I am really enjoying a book: when I have trouble putting it down.

Of the three characters, Altha was probably my favorite. I really liked the narrator who read her part quite a lot. Kate’s story resembled the plot of Sleeping with the Enemy. However, I didn’t find that to be purposeful or stilted—I suppose when you get down to it, stories of abusive relationships will often sound familiar.

Men do not come off too well in this book, but to be fair, Violet’s brother Graham, Kate’s father Henry, and a minor character, Adam Bainbridge, are all good, decent men. However, all the other male characters are flat evil, using their power as men to hurt the women in their lives. It seems to me the difference is fear. The good men in this book are not afraid of women and are not threatened by female autonomy. They also view women as fully human. This book has a lot to say about the harm of misogyny—both to women and men.

The family historian in me loved the idea of discovering the rich history of one’s ancestors in the way that both Violet and Kate do. Who wouldn’t want to discover they had inherited a centuries-old cottage and a gift for communicating with animals?

The setting is also well-drawn in all three eras. The idea that the families who stayed in Crows Beck flitted into all three women’s stories as minor characters—the Kirkbys, the Metcalfes—made the story feel more like an authentic family saga while also offering an Easter egg for the reader.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes historical fiction about witches. I also love how it reclaims the title of “witch” from its negative history. It’s a great read.

five-stars

Review: Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, Julian Sancton

Review: Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, Julian SanctonMadhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
Narrator: Vikas Adam
Published by Random House Audio on May 4, 2021
Genres: Nonfiction
Length: 13 hours 28 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on Amazon

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

The harrowing true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry—with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter.

In August 1897, thirty-one-year-old commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail aboard the Belgica, fueled by a profound sense of adventure and dreams of claiming glory for his native Belgium. His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica. But the commandant's plans for a three-year expedition to reach the magnetic South Pole would be thwarted at each turn. Before the ship cleared South America, it had already broken down, run aground, and lost several key crew members, leaving behind a group with dubious experience for such an ambitious voyage.

As the ship progressed into the freezing waters, the captain had to make a choice: turn back and spare his men the potentially devastating consequences of getting stuck, or recklessly sail deeper into the ice pack to chase glory and fame. He sailed on, and the Belgica soon found itself stuck fast in the icy hold of the Antarctic continent. The ship would winter on the ice. Plagued by a mysterious, debilitating illness and besieged by the monotony of their days, the crew deteriorated as their confinement in suffocating close quarters wore on and their hope of escape dwindled daily. As winter approached the days grew shorter, until the sun set on the magnificent polar landscape one last time, condemning the ship's occupants to months of quarantine in an endless night.

Forged in fire and carved by ice, Antarctica proved a formidable opponent for the motley crew. Among them was Frederick Cook, an American doctor—part scientist, part adventurer, part P. T. Barnum—whose unorthodox methods delivered many of the crew from the gruesome symptoms of scurvy and whose relentless optimism buoyed their spirits through the long, dark polar night. Then there was Roald Amundsen, a young Norwegian who went on to become a storied polar explorer in his own right, exceeding de Gerlache's wildest dreams by leading the first expeditions to traverse the Northwest Passage and reach the South Pole.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of the Belgica's voyage and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, Sancton tells the tale of its long, isolated imprisonment on the ice--a story that NASA studies today in its research on isolation for missions to Mars. In vivid, hair-raising prose, Sancton recounts the myriad forces that drove these men right up to and over the brink of madness.

Belica in the ice by Adrien de Gerlache
Belgica dans la glace by Adrien de Gerlache

This is a terrific nonfiction account of a harrowing experience in Antarctica during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Julian Sancton’s author’s note and notes on sources demonstrate a thorough and dedicated effort to tell the story of the Belgica’s winter trapped in the ice as faithfully and accurately as possible. However, his writing style renders the story as gripping as any adventure film. In fact, I can’t believe this book hasn’t been made into a movie. Surely someone out there has purchased the rights and plans to film it.

This book reminded me quite a bit of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. I can’t say I had the desire to travel to Antarctica before reading it, and if I did, I’ve been cured—much like Krakauer convinced me climbing Everest is not in my future (not that I wanted to, but after reading Into Thin Air, I really didn’t want to). I knew the crew survived mostly intact because this account existed, but it was harrowing to read, and Sancton kept me guessing how in the world these men would get out of Antarctica alive.

I have to say, Roald Amundsen comes across as a complete and total badass. I don’t know that I would have liked him personally, but no one could argue he wasn’t brave. Look at this dude.

Belica in the ice by Adrien de Gerlache

He’s a complete and total Viking.

I highly recommend this book. Even if you think you are not interested in Artic or Antarctic exploration, trust me, this book is captivating. I also recommend the audiobook. The author clearly enjoyed reading this breathtaking adventure, and his narration added a good deal to my enjoyment of the book.

 

five-stars

Review: The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue

Review: The Pull of the Stars, Emma DonoghueThe Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Narrator: Emma Lowe
Published by Hachette Audio on July 21, 2020
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: -2
Length: 9 hours 6 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

This book is yet another book I picked up to fulfill a reading challenge, in this case, the Decades Reading Challenge, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s probably one of the most harrowing books I’ve read in a while, and Nurse Julia Power is a worthy hero. I also had an opportunity to learn about Dr. Kathleen Lynn, whom I’d never heard of, and she was a fascinating historical figure. The 1918 flu pandemic and the aftermath of World War I in Dublin are drawn in sharp relief. It’s hard to believe, but Donoghue finished this book in March 2020, just as the world was beginning to come to grips with the fact that COVID-19 was a global pandemic and threat to millions of lives. I did not realize that the 1918 flu pandemic killed more people than World War I. Why is it that we have discussed this horrible pandemic so little? Would we have actually learned from history? I suppose that’s something we never do as a species, so probably not. The book made me extremely glad that I gave birth to my children when 1) more modern medical practices existed, and 2) a pandemic was not raging. All the women everywhere, at every time in history, who gave birth under such uncertain circumstances are heroes.

five-stars

Review: Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel

Review: Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John MandelSea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Narrator: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter
Published by Random House Audio on April 5, 2022
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Fantasy/Science Fiction
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Sometimes I feel like books find us when we need them. I read Emily St. John Mandel’s wonderful book Station Eleven and found it unlike anything I’d read before. And then, I found myself living amidst a pandemic, and snatches of that book came back to me and terrified me. As soon as I heard about Sea of Tranquility, I put it on my to-read list. There were passages of great beauty in Sea of Tranquility, but more than anything, what I admired about the book was recognizing what it was like to live through a pandemic and what it is like to contend with understanding the impact of colonization and even to wonder if the reason everything seems surreal is that we’re living in a simulation.

Emily St. John Mandel has said she is fascinated with the way we behaved in February 2020, when we could see the pandemic distantly but really didn’t understand it would affect us in the United States in the same way as it affected people first in China. I remember my own thinking at the time was that SARS had been contained, and Ebola had been contained. Still, as Mandel reminds us in this book, SARS can always come back in a new guise—my understanding is that we owe the speed with which a vaccine was developed for COVID to the fact that research had long been underway on how to vaccinate for SARS using mRNA vaccines. One of the characters in Sea of Tranquility has written a pandemic novel—Olive Llewellyn seems to be a version of Emily St. John Mandel contending with the popularity of Station Eleven and its adaptation (which is also great!). In Olive’s novel Marienbad, she writes

We knew it was coming.

We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children—and ourselves—in the decades that followed.

We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways—”Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?”…

We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it. We deflected the fear with careless bravado…

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

I found myself nodding along as Olive contemplates the surreality of living through a pandemic—meeting via hologram (and how exhausting it is) is the Zoom of 2203; the loneliness is the same. Olive’s contemplation of the sirens and what they mean is chilling. I remember during one particularly surreal moment in 2020, a local church sent a car around the neighborhood with a recording playing over a loudspeaker that they were praying for everyone. Olive reflects during one of her holographic interviews:

My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

After that section of the novel, I had to pause the audiobook and cry for a minute because it seemed like something slid into place. Our world is not uniquely terrible. Living through the pandemic was not uniquely terrible. The world has always been terrible. Imagine what it was like to live through the Plague. Yet in the midst of all that terribleness is beauty. It’s impossible to read Sea of Tranquility without glimpsing those moments of beauty, too. What we don’t always understand is that we create those moments, in spite of everything.

five-stars

Review: The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

Review: The Age of Innocence, Edith WhartonThe Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Narrator: David Horovitch
Published by BBC Audiobooks on July 13, 2010
Genres: Classic, Historical Fiction
Length: 12 hours 5 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

In the exclusive world of upper-class New York, Newland Archer anticipates his marriage to May Welland, a beautiful young girl from a suitable family "who knows nothing and expects everything.: Into this well-ordered community May's cousin, the captivating and exotic Countess Olenska, arrives.

Many years ago when I was in undergrad, I watched Martin Scorsese’s film based on this novel. I remember I was still in college because I took a course called American Realism and Naturalism, and we read another of Wharton’s novels, Summer. I remember being excited to read the book because I had loved The Age of Innocence so much, but I didn’t enjoy Summer very much. Later, I read Ethan Frome and enjoyed that book quite a lot. I am not sure why I haven’t read The Age of Innocence until now. I tried to pick it up a few years ago, but I’m not sure I was in the right frame of mind. In any case, I finally decided to read it since Audible offered it for free with my membership. I must say that the film is quite faithful to the book. Perhaps that is why I waited so long to read the book—I had heard the movie was a faithful rendition of the story. The differences between the book and the film are minor; perhaps the largest difference is that Ellen Olenska has dark hair, while Michelle Pfeiffer is blond, and May Welland is blond, while Winona Ryder has dark hair. Other than that, the film is entirely faithful to the book in all but the most minor details… except for one critical detail. Newland Archer is a dick.

Daniel Day-Lewis manages to make the viewer care for and empathize with Newland Archer. The novel’s Newland Archer is selfish. He becomes engaged to a vapid society girl, congratulating himself on the notion that she’ll never surprise him and always know the right thing to say. Meanwhile, he falls in love with May’s cousin Ellen, if you could call it love, because I’d contend he only ever fell in love with an idealized version of the person he thought Ellen was. Idealization is powerful; the real person can never live up to the perfect dream concocted in the mind. I think Newland realizes that by the end of the book, too. I’m not sure he ever realizes how he has mistreated two women. If he was in love with Ellen before he married May, then he never should have married May. Once he married May, he should have stopped playing around with Ellen’s heart. To me, May is the most innocent party in the whole affair. I don’t think she was as dumb as Archer thought, either. I think she was just satisfied with their life. Newland secretly was, too, or else he would have found a way to do what he thought was going to make him happy.

When I saw the film, I felt frustrated with Newland for not going upstairs to see Ellen again at the end. After reading the book, I have a much greater understanding as to why he didn’t. He never had the courage of his convictions, not really. Ellen did. You might even argue that May did, to an extent. But Newland was afraid to really live and to really love, so he spent his life instead of saving it, to paraphrase one of his own sayings.

In spite of Newland’s maddening behavior, I loved the book, as I suspected I would. Edith Wharton captures Gilded Age New York like only a critical insider could possibly capture it. In her hands, Old New York society feels as perilous as any literary monster. It devours its own, and if one could personify it, it might be one of the more compelling and frightening villains in literature.

five-stars

Review: Villette, Charlotte Bront

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Narrator: Charlotte Ritchie
Published by Penguin Audio, Penguin Books Genres: Classic
Length: 21 hours 20 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
three-stars

With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey—a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.

Well, I disagree with the Goodreads blurb above that this book eclipses Jane Eyre in any respect. I found it to be kind of mid, as my students say. I wanted to give up on it but saw I had about five hours left to listen to, and by that time, I’d sunk about 15 hours in, so I plunged ahead. If Charlotte Bront’s teacher (and major crush, according to Bront lore) Constantin Hger was anything like M. Paul Emmanuel, he’s a hard pass. I didn’t understand how Lucy Snowe came to fall for him in the first place. They spent most of the book sparring, and he was a misogynistic jerk. I didn’t find Lucy as likable as Jane Eyre.

The coincidences and revelations were implausible. M. Paul Emmanuel’s plantation in Guadeloupe was surely a slave plantation, and it’s completely glossed over. Well, I guess it would be, given the time of the novel’s composition. I understand Jamaica Kincaid wrote a postcolonial response to Villette called Lucy. The novel had its moments, and the characters were well drawn, particularly Ginevra Fanshawe and Madame Beck, Lucy’s nemeses. The ending is ambiguous, and I have to give Charlotte Bront props for not wrapping everything up in a tidy bow at the end.

three-stars

Mid-April Reading Update

I finished a couple of books this week and decided to roll the reviews together.

Mid-April Reading UpdateA Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
Published by Random House on January 12, 2021
Length: 14 hours 44 minutes
Format: Audio, Audiobook
Source: Audible
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
five-stars

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

My husband and I listened to this on audiobook. He has been trying to get me to read George Saunders since an aborted attempt at Lincoln in the Bardo. I just couldn’t follow that one on audio, but I do want to try to read it in print. I see this book as a companion to Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Essentially, it’s a master class in how literature works using short stories by several Russian authors as a focus for analysis. If I had to pick a favorite short story, it would probably be “The Nose” (Chekov) or perhaps “Alyosha the Pot.” The book has a wonderful cast of narrators, including Rainn Wilson, B. D. Wong, Glenn Close, Phylicia Rashad, and Nick Offerman. Saunders narrates the analytical parts. I bought a print copy for use in my classroom. I’m not yet sure how I might use it, but I can see the potential.

Mid-April Reading UpdateThe Familiars by Stacey Halls
Published by MIRA on February 19, 2019
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 335
Format: E-Book, eBook
Source: Library
Buy on AmazonBuy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads
three-stars

Young Fleetwood Shuttleworth, a noblewoman, is with child again. None of her previous pregnancies have borne fruit, and her husband, Richard, is anxious for an heir. Then Fleetwood discovers a hidden doctor’s letter that carries a dire prediction: she will not survive another birth. By chance she meets a midwife named Alice Gray, who promises to help her deliver a healthy baby. But Alice soon stands accused of witchcraft.

Is there more to Alice than meets the eye? Fleetwood must risk everything to prove her innocence. As the two women’s lives become intertwined, the Witch Trials of 1612 loom. Time is running out; both their lives are at stake. Only they know the truth. Only they can save each other.

Rich and compelling, set against the frenzy of the real Pendle Hill Witch Trials, this novel explores the rights of 17th-century women and raises the question: Was witch-hunting really women-hunting? Fleetwood Shuttleworth, Alice Gray and the other characters are actual historical figures. King James I was obsessed with asserting power over the lawless countryside (even woodland creatures, or “familiars,” were suspected of dark magic) by capturing “witches”—in reality mostly poor and illiterate women.

I love reading books about witches, “real” or not, and I wanted to like this book more. It was compelling enough for me to finish; however, some of the author’s choices were perplexing. I didn’t find the protagonist, Fleetwood Shuttleworth, to be all that engaging, and I kept thinking about how much more interesting the story might have been if the protagonist had been one of the accused witches. It seems like a missed opportunity to me to have a relatively privileged outsider tell the story of the Pendle Witch Trials. Also, Fleetwood rides a horse all over Creation while hugely pregnant. I’m not sure how she got on the horse, never mind rode it, in that condition. Granted, I’m not a horsewoman, so what do I know. Another issue I had was that Fleetwood discovers early in the book, within the first few pages, that her husband is secretive, and she finds he’s hiding even more important information. They have a falling out, and it seems implausible when they reconcile. The author didn’t really lay the groundwork for that reconciliation to make sense. Still, I did learn some things about this interesting historical event.