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juushikaTitle: I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
Author: Michelle McNamara
Narrator: Gabra Zackman, Gillian Flynn, Patton Oswalt
Published: HarperCollins, 2018
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 324,710
Text Number: 1142
Read Because: reviewed bytruepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This tracks the serial burglaries, rapes, and murders across California which proved to be the escalating crimes of a single offender. But what makes it interesting is that it's written from a true crime fanatic's PoV—the author is present and self-critical, without parroting current criticism of the true crime genre's audience, and the text is interrupted by her early death, resulting in reconstructed and transcribed sections which vary the narrative and add an unavoidable emotional appeal. That there's since been an arrest in the case allows closure; that the afterwords interrogate if/how this text contributed to that arrest continues the conversation on true crime and prevents the tone from growing sentimental. So while no single element is groundbreaking, the cumulative whole is unique and metatextually fascinating.
Title: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Author: Steven Johnson
Narrator: Alan Sklar
Published: Tantor Audio, 2006
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 310
Total Page Count: 325,020
Text Number: 1143
Read Because: I found this on some now-forgotten list of books about disease, which I was digging into for obvious living-in-a-pandemic reasons; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: "Cholera is fascinating!" I said to my partner multiple times while reading, so I suppose that's my review: Cholera is fascinating, or rather the relationship between social structures, social practice/knowledge, and disease is fascinating. Johnson has an unexpectedly present voice, opinionated and even chiding as he focuses on central figures of cholera research while knocking down the great man theory and placing them, and their discoveries and achievements, within that same social context. It's specific, clearly-drawn, interconnected, compelling—and frustrating, sometimes for the wrong reasons.
Namely the epilogue, which segues into a disjointed, overreaching "what now?" that looks to the future of relationships between society and disease. It's bleakly hilarious to read during the COVID-19 pandemic, because all the theorycrafting about maps and the power of the internet is rendered obviously ridiculous—while the underlying thesis about the social element of a disease, which remains heartbreakingly pertinent, is nearly buried.
Title: Vita Nostra (Метаморфозы/Metamorphosis Book 1)
Author: Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko
Translator: Julia Meitov Hersey
Published: HarperVoyager, 2018 (2007)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 415
Total Page Count: 325,435
Text Number: 1144
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A young woman is compelled to attend an unlikely college. This engages the magical school trope in fascinating, infuriating ways. The questionable pedagogy of Hogwarts pale against the noncommunication, emotional manipulation, and unhealthy environment of obsessive study presented here, and it becomes a conversation about magic systems and narrative construction:
Magical concepts have to be comprehensible to the reader in order to render a satisfying plot, but if they're too comprehensible the sense that the magic is unknowable, evocative, magical is lost. Moreover, what can be communicated to the reader presumably could be communicated to the protagonist in advance. So the magic is partially depicted through ambiguating literary references—but is it sufficiently unknowable? Could it have been explained? Do whatever limitations of communication which do exist justify the treatment the protagonist receives? Are the unhealthy study habits necessary to the magical process, or do they only engage our fantasies of higher education? Why is fear the only effective motivator, and is this reliance on abuse insufficiently interrogated by characters, or by narrative, or both? Magic and pedagogy become synonymous in form and in their flaws, and the way the reader engages the constructed narrative parallels the way the protagonist engages that magical system and school.
So it's a great book to argue with, and that argument makes for active, absorbing reading—despite the deceptive lack of structure that results from the bad communication and unknowable magics; despite the slow pacing of study, exams, and social drama.
Author: Michelle McNamara
Narrator: Gabra Zackman, Gillian Flynn, Patton Oswalt
Published: HarperCollins, 2018
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 324,710
Text Number: 1142
Read Because: reviewed by
truepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: This tracks the serial burglaries, rapes, and murders across California which proved to be the escalating crimes of a single offender. But what makes it interesting is that it's written from a true crime fanatic's PoV—the author is present and self-critical, without parroting current criticism of the true crime genre's audience, and the text is interrupted by her early death, resulting in reconstructed and transcribed sections which vary the narrative and add an unavoidable emotional appeal. That there's since been an arrest in the case allows closure; that the afterwords interrogate if/how this text contributed to that arrest continues the conversation on true crime and prevents the tone from growing sentimental. So while no single element is groundbreaking, the cumulative whole is unique and metatextually fascinating.
Title: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Author: Steven Johnson
Narrator: Alan Sklar
Published: Tantor Audio, 2006
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 310
Total Page Count: 325,020
Text Number: 1143
Read Because: I found this on some now-forgotten list of books about disease, which I was digging into for obvious living-in-a-pandemic reasons; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: "Cholera is fascinating!" I said to my partner multiple times while reading, so I suppose that's my review: Cholera is fascinating, or rather the relationship between social structures, social practice/knowledge, and disease is fascinating. Johnson has an unexpectedly present voice, opinionated and even chiding as he focuses on central figures of cholera research while knocking down the great man theory and placing them, and their discoveries and achievements, within that same social context. It's specific, clearly-drawn, interconnected, compelling—and frustrating, sometimes for the wrong reasons.
Namely the epilogue, which segues into a disjointed, overreaching "what now?" that looks to the future of relationships between society and disease. It's bleakly hilarious to read during the COVID-19 pandemic, because all the theorycrafting about maps and the power of the internet is rendered obviously ridiculous—while the underlying thesis about the social element of a disease, which remains heartbreakingly pertinent, is nearly buried.
Title: Vita Nostra (Метаморфозы/Metamorphosis Book 1)
Author: Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko
Translator: Julia Meitov Hersey
Published: HarperVoyager, 2018 (2007)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 415
Total Page Count: 325,435
Text Number: 1144
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A young woman is compelled to attend an unlikely college. This engages the magical school trope in fascinating, infuriating ways. The questionable pedagogy of Hogwarts pale against the noncommunication, emotional manipulation, and unhealthy environment of obsessive study presented here, and it becomes a conversation about magic systems and narrative construction:
Magical concepts have to be comprehensible to the reader in order to render a satisfying plot, but if they're too comprehensible the sense that the magic is unknowable, evocative, magical is lost. Moreover, what can be communicated to the reader presumably could be communicated to the protagonist in advance. So the magic is partially depicted through ambiguating literary references—but is it sufficiently unknowable? Could it have been explained? Do whatever limitations of communication which do exist justify the treatment the protagonist receives? Are the unhealthy study habits necessary to the magical process, or do they only engage our fantasies of higher education? Why is fear the only effective motivator, and is this reliance on abuse insufficiently interrogated by characters, or by narrative, or both? Magic and pedagogy become synonymous in form and in their flaws, and the way the reader engages the constructed narrative parallels the way the protagonist engages that magical system and school.
So it's a great book to argue with, and that argument makes for active, absorbing reading—despite the deceptive lack of structure that results from the bad communication and unknowable magics; despite the slow pacing of study, exams, and social drama.
