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In 2023 will I actually keep up with book reviews? These are from last year, so signs point to no.
Title: Chain Letter
Author: Christopher Pike
Published: 1986
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 451,125
Text Number: 1576
Read Because: I was curious to read some Pike after watching the firmly mediocre The Midnight Club; borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: After a deadly car accident, a group of teens receive a chain letter blackmailing them into increasingly self-destructive stunts. The writing here is workmanlike for sure, but it's hard to begrudge that in such a pulpy book and it allows the more stylized sections (like Alison's attack) to shine. Similarly the characters are uninspired but serve their purpose: their blandness is an entertaining juxtaposition to the increasing tension of their predicament. The mystery is also on the right side of legible. I remember Pike having more gleeful & less morose antagonists/violence, so I'll probably read a few more. But as an experiment in "how does Pike read as an adult" the answer is: utterly unsurprising, but that's not a bad thing.
Title: The Library of Babel (La biblioteca de Babel)
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Translator: James E. Irby
Published: Wednesday Books, 2019
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 10
Total Page Count: 451,525
Text Number: 1578
Read Because: reread Piranesi, was thinking about infinite buildings, and then obviously thought of Jacob Geller and mention of this infinite library; read on the Internet Archive
Review: So does the food in the vestibules magically populate and, if so, is that where babies come from? I ask because there's details of the worldbuilding that have a haunting specificity (see: burial practices) and some have meaningful consequences for the library-as-thought-experiment (the social practices, both established and deviant, that attempt to create structure in a world so information-saturated as to lack all meaning); meanwhile others are left pointedly unaddressed because they would be hilarious if they were addressed, sapping a lot of the gravitas from the story.
Anyway, I still loved this. Nothing so encapsulates how libraries make me feel as the image of a library, infinite: potential so extensive as to be overwhelming, therefore meaningless, but nonetheless beautiful.
Title: These Violent Delights
Author: Micah Nemerever
Published: Harper, 2020
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 470
Total Page Count: 452,095
Text Number: 1580
Read Because: finally, a list of queer dark academia books steers me in the right direction; ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Sometimes I read something so me that I get defensive about it in a mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known way. So here's two nitpicks: 1) Opening in medias res does this no favors—I can see why an editor would recommend some early action, but it's just a confusing gimmick. 2) I read a lot of speculative fiction, so a novel with a claustrophobic focus on just one relationship, without a bigger-picture premise, sometimes feels narrow. Oh also 3) I like but don't love the end; more bombast or petty nastiness, please, and less of this middle ground.
But sincerely these are mere defensive nitpicks, because I loved this. Leopold-Loeb and Parker-Hulme are my ur-murders, and this is how those cases make me feel: two young men are drawn together, magnetically, toxically; queer and Jewish, they're uniquely alienated from society, and they're atrociously, relatably awful at coping with it; being an adolescent is brilliant and vulnerable and yet profoundly mundane; the love that saves is intense enough to destroy, intense enough to warrant violence or, at least, to make anythingfeel warranted. This is absolutely my shit and I picked up 100% of what Nemerever put down. I love the meanness of the characterization and the changing perspectives characters have of each other. Violence-as-intimacy is my favorite dynamic, and is here both indulged and interrogated. Criticism 2, above, is ultimately a lie because the larger social setting is crucial. If there is a legitimate nitpick is that maybe these things I love are too raw, too indulgent, too centered in the narrative. But this book feels like written just for me, "to Juu, sole recipient, a gift made with care," so that's the one nitpick I don't care about.
Title: Chain Letter
Author: Christopher Pike
Published: 1986
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 451,125
Text Number: 1576
Read Because: I was curious to read some Pike after watching the firmly mediocre The Midnight Club; borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: After a deadly car accident, a group of teens receive a chain letter blackmailing them into increasingly self-destructive stunts. The writing here is workmanlike for sure, but it's hard to begrudge that in such a pulpy book and it allows the more stylized sections (like Alison's attack) to shine. Similarly the characters are uninspired but serve their purpose: their blandness is an entertaining juxtaposition to the increasing tension of their predicament. The mystery is also on the right side of legible. I remember Pike having more gleeful & less morose antagonists/violence, so I'll probably read a few more. But as an experiment in "how does Pike read as an adult" the answer is: utterly unsurprising, but that's not a bad thing.
Title: The Library of Babel (La biblioteca de Babel)
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Translator: James E. Irby
Published: Wednesday Books, 2019
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 10
Total Page Count: 451,525
Text Number: 1578
Read Because: reread Piranesi, was thinking about infinite buildings, and then obviously thought of Jacob Geller and mention of this infinite library; read on the Internet Archive
Review: So does the food in the vestibules magically populate and, if so, is that where babies come from? I ask because there's details of the worldbuilding that have a haunting specificity (see: burial practices) and some have meaningful consequences for the library-as-thought-experiment (the social practices, both established and deviant, that attempt to create structure in a world so information-saturated as to lack all meaning); meanwhile others are left pointedly unaddressed because they would be hilarious if they were addressed, sapping a lot of the gravitas from the story.
Anyway, I still loved this. Nothing so encapsulates how libraries make me feel as the image of a library, infinite: potential so extensive as to be overwhelming, therefore meaningless, but nonetheless beautiful.
Title: These Violent Delights
Author: Micah Nemerever
Published: Harper, 2020
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 470
Total Page Count: 452,095
Text Number: 1580
Read Because: finally, a list of queer dark academia books steers me in the right direction; ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Sometimes I read something so me that I get defensive about it in a mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known way. So here's two nitpicks: 1) Opening in medias res does this no favors—I can see why an editor would recommend some early action, but it's just a confusing gimmick. 2) I read a lot of speculative fiction, so a novel with a claustrophobic focus on just one relationship, without a bigger-picture premise, sometimes feels narrow. Oh also 3) I like but don't love the end; more bombast or petty nastiness, please, and less of this middle ground.
But sincerely these are mere defensive nitpicks, because I loved this. Leopold-Loeb and Parker-Hulme are my ur-murders, and this is how those cases make me feel: two young men are drawn together, magnetically, toxically; queer and Jewish, they're uniquely alienated from society, and they're atrociously, relatably awful at coping with it; being an adolescent is brilliant and vulnerable and yet profoundly mundane; the love that saves is intense enough to destroy, intense enough to warrant violence or, at least, to make anythingfeel warranted. This is absolutely my shit and I picked up 100% of what Nemerever put down. I love the meanness of the characterization and the changing perspectives characters have of each other. Violence-as-intimacy is my favorite dynamic, and is here both indulged and interrogated. Criticism 2, above, is ultimately a lie because the larger social setting is crucial. If there is a legitimate nitpick is that maybe these things I love are too raw, too indulgent, too centered in the narrative. But this book feels like written just for me, "to Juu, sole recipient, a gift made with care," so that's the one nitpick I don't care about.
