Book Review 70 – Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto

Read: 9th April 2024 – 11th April 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   Tokyo Express doesn’t have much in the way of strong character development or vivid interior worlds, but its short and quick-paced enough that you’re never left to linger for too long. The main appeal, of course, is the central mystery – how did two bodies end up on a shore, and how was the central suspect apparently hundreds of miles away when this occurred? Using train timetables to construct and then dismantle this mystery is quite an ingenious plot device, and I did find Matsumoto’s handling of it sufficiently deft to keep me second-guessing the whole way through.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 6th May 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6415691521

Book Review 69 – One Day by David Nicholls

Read: 6th March 2024 – 19th March 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   I’m obligated to preface this review by saying spoilers ahead – I have never been so angry at a book which I loved so much. Genuinely, the last forty or so pages knocked a full star off its rating. One Day is a beautiful book, a book that captures the tribulations of growing up as an adult with a keen emotional intelligence and realism that I found so refreshing to read. Emma and Dexter are about as polar opposite as two human beings can get, and that’s why they have such an innate understanding of each other. Of course, this is a romance, but you never feel like there is something artificial or forced about their connection. The natural chemistry between them is palpable, the strength of their friendship solid despite the storms that sometimes shake its foundations. In all honesty, it was such a joy to read about them, such a joy to watch them navigate life apart and together, making mistakes, messing up, just being two normal people with their luggage and their pasts, their hopes and dreams, an understanding as natural as breathing between them. Nicholls’ prose is just the right fit for this novel – doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is very funny in places while at the same time never feeling lightweight or silly. Whoever the narrator is, you feel like you’re in the character’s head, listening directly to their voice, and it’s such enjoyable reading.

   So. Why the full star being removed? I think I just felt cheated, to be honest. I’m sure at the time Emma’s death felt like a breath of fresh air, a shocking narrative conceit meant to make the reader sit up and gasp (which I did). Perhaps I’m just too used to gays being buried to find any appeal in this, perhaps I just feel like I’ve seen this so many other times or so in the decade and a half since One Day came out, but it just felt like robbing the reader. Emma and Dexter finally have their happy ending – and to be honest, I didn’t think they would get there, I thought the book would end with their relationship not being able to survive the fires of romance and the lesson would be that sometimes, things just don’t work out, even when you want them to. Emma dying in an accident, a parable on the fragility of life though it may be (carpe diem, I’m sure), just steals that growth away from her and Dexter. I suppose that’s what death is like, and God forbid I ever lose a loved one in a way like that, but it just left me feeling so bereft. I don’t dispute at all that Nicholls must be a good storyteller to make me feel like that, but still. My reading, my rating.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 27th April 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6321077934

Book Review 68 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Read: 25th February 2024 – 4th March 2024

Rating: 3/5 stars

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If nothing else, Jack Kerouac is a poet. His descriptions of America as Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Tartarus, Eden, Hades, the promised land and the apocalypse, are some of the richest, most evocative I’ve ever read. Almost too much so. I appreciate that having to read this book in just about a week before I had to return it to the library meant that I had to read it very quickly, but even so, the soul of it pulses with such intensity that it’s almost blinding, like staring straight into an eclipse. Kerouac has his vision of America, and something tells me that he doesn’t care that much if the reader can’t fully see it, only in snatched glimpses. That level of self-assurance is pretty captivating, yes, but it does mean the book does veer on the overwhelming side. One day I might re-read it and take my time, to see if I’m able to digest this sumptuous banquet a little bit better then, but I don’t think that day will be any time soon.

The unfortunate accompaniment to this feast is also the fact that I didn’t like most of the characters. It’s unfortunate to say that when they’re based on real people, but if I have to read a sweaty Dean Moriarty saying “yass, yass”, one more time, I may just lose the will to live. I understand it was a different time, and in many ways I admire how fully they commit themselves to reckless abandonment, to spontaneity and the thrill of the road – but on another, I just find them incredibly irritating. Dean is the kind of person you’d be fascinated with on first approach, but whose poison, on every subsequent meeting, latches a little bit more and more of your own life energy from you. You’ve got to grow up some time, after all, and learn how to have a little bit of restraint.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 11th April 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6294013529

Book Review 67 – The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Read: 18th February 2024 – 23rd February 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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   How do you write about an earthquake after the fact? How do you capture the sense of human misery and suffering when the humans are gone and all that is left is the shattered earth, the broken buildings, the crumbling tombstones? How do you cope with the vacuum of that loss, when everything that seemed so solid before has suddenly collapsed in on itself with all the hunger of a black hole? Joan Didion gives it a pretty good go, trying to render tragedy banal, to normalise and compartmentalise it, to give it near parameters and define the black hole. But then it breaks free of the vortex and she’s back at square one, standing amidst the wreckage and the ruins as the winds hurl around her, fiercer every single time.

   It’s unfathomable to even contemplate what a loss like that must be like, of over half a lifetime and nearly half a century lived together, but what I learned from this is the power of love to change, to shape, to mould, but also to compromise, to harmonise, to accept and forgive and challenge. Love as a force that persists even after the object of the love is gone, that maybe even becomes stronger after the love is gone to try and fill the shape they have left behind. They’ll take different paths through the park, but they’ll always find each other again before they get to the exit.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 21st March 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4407219073

Book Review 66 – The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe

Read: 12th February 2024 – 18th February 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   A most interesting reading experience. In many ways one of the funniest Japanese books I’ve ever read, but funny in the sense of “Did that really just happen?” or “Was that really just said?” rather than stomach-breaking laughter. Poor Mole is perhaps one of the most pathetic narrators I’ve ever encountered, though in a way, his acceptance of the increasing incredulity of his circumstances – from insects that eat their own faeces to teenage girls kidnapped by a militia composed entirely of old men to getting stuck in a toilet whose suction power could quite literally rip a leg off – and his stoic forbearance are quite admirable. On one level he’s definitely insane, but on the other, is he really? Kobo Abe does a good job of showing us that maybe it’s everyone else in the world who’re actually the crazy ones. And maybe it’s that the world is crazy itself!

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 10th March 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6256350953

Book Review 65 – Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Read: 4th February 2024 – 10th February 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   One of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It genuinely had me in stitches at certain moments, so hilariously ludicrous that I actually had to dump the book down, let the laughter come, and then go back to it. As a satire of that great English tradition of the wild country house and its wild country inhabitants, Cold Comfort Farm is part-Wuthering Heights, part-Tess of the D’Urbervilles, part-Emma if Emma were a mid-20^th century young woman called Flora Poste who pulled no punches with the literary conventions of the genre in which she apparently finds herself. It’s not that Stella Gibbons looks down on the pastoral romantic or thinks it inferior – surely only someone with a genuine appreciation, or at least latent fondness, for the genre could poke fun at it with such humanity. Nothing in this book happens that isn’t true to how it feels, with Flora and her Starkadder cousins all devotedly earnest in their views of how Cold Comfort Farm should be, but much of the innate humour that would come naturally from Flora finding herself in such an alien environment is racked up to eleven by just how over-the-top the Starkadders are. Have a shot every time you read “she saw something nasty in the woodshed” and you’ll be drunk as a skunk before you’re even a third of the way through it.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 23rd February 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3206863110

Book Review 64 – A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Read: 21st January 2024 – 31st January 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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   Lucia Berlin’s prose is electrifyingly lucid, the kind of prose that makes me feel like I’m never going to be a good writer because when writing like this exists, how on earth are you ever meant to compare? She says only what she has to say, never wasting a single letter, not a single space on the page, and the result are stories that skim surfaces while casting ripples below, shadows that soar and dive and spread themselves across your mind, seeping into your skin and bones and organs to the hidden places far inside you. It’s impossible to tell where reality begins and fiction ends, but that’s the fun thing. Berlin keeps you on your toes – blink over a sentence and you’ll miss a crucial detail, something that anchors the entire picture.

   The stories that stood out to me most were Carlotta and her sister Sally. Their relationship as sisters growing up under the shadow of an abusive mother, and who then find each other years later when time is melting away like ice under a hot sun, has a bittersweet catharsis to it – you’re glad they can look back on the past from a safe distance, but the end is growing closer too, from not such as distance, and it’s heart-breaking. I feel like I was lying with them in Sally’s apartment, listening to the rattle of her breathing, watching sun shining through the window. Or perhaps I’m with Lucia in rehab, where she confronts alcoholism with unflinching realism, showing its horror and its hilarity in stark, uncompromising detail. That’s the thing, the book is often so funny, so silly, finding any speck of light it can in the darkest, deepest places, and Berlin is skilled enough of a writer to be able to balance the two sides of the world like a knife between her fingers.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 12th February 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5944588377

Book Review 63 – Alias Grace (Re-read) by Margaret Atwood

Read: 8th January 2024 – 20th January 2024

Rating: 5/5 stars

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   I cannot remember the exact quote, but there is something said by Doctor Simon Jordan about halfway through Alias Grace, roughly, likely towards the end. He is reflecting on his sessions with Grace, on her weaving (not just the story), and he describes the almost soporific quality of her words. This is my first time reading the book, and each time I think I love it even more, but this passage especially stuck out to me this time for some strange reason. I can see her there in her cell as clearly as if she were before me in reality, head bowed with her little cap on, but just the hints of fiery hair, the eyes lowered in concentration as she fingers duck and dive through cloth like birds swooping through the air, the words coming steady as the beating of a heart and yet just as vital, just as urgent. We are both Dr Jordan and an interloper, a third presence in that little cell with its high window, hiding in the shadows, inching closer and closer to Grace as she weaves us into the fabric of her life so far. We find our fingers alongside hers as she scrubs flagstones, our eyes seeing the icebergs of the Atlantic and the angelic handkerchiefs scattered amongst the trees.

   There is a quality, I believe, to be enjoyed in watching people at work. A joy to see production and effort, an appreciation of the fact that you are not working yourself in that time. But you can feel it in your body and perhaps your mind, the acknowledgement of hard work and dedication. Much of Alias Grace is the life story of a servant, so of course much of it focuses on the domestic, the menial, the quotidian drudgery of keeping a house clean so that those who run it can mess it up and keep the wheel ever-spinning. Yet, her way of narrating is so vivid that these tiny tasks become an engrossing story, a tale as wide and expansive as life itself. Of course, we see only what she wants us to see, but even if Grace is a consummate actress lying through her teeth, the Grace of her memories feels so real that I think she is just as true a character as the woman in her cell fifteen years later. Even if a construct, even if just how Grace wishes she had acted rather than how she did act, that is the truth that I find myself accepting. Perhaps I am being hoodwinked, but oh well.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 4th February 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3967576001

Book Review 62 – Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey

Read: 1st Januar 2024 – 7th January 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   I will start this review by confessing that I found myself genuinely quite surprised by this book’s rating on here. Usually I am quite good at predicting what others will think of something, and I thought Goodreads and large swathes of the clientele it attracts would, to put it simply, eat Really Good, Actually up. So imagine my surprise to see it closer to 3 stars – much closer – than to four, although I would concede that it’s somewhere in the middle.

   The book’s strength is undeniably its narrative voice. It’s effortlessly funny, often uproariously so, and there are moments of genuine heart in there as well. For someone looking for a satire of modern millenial life, look no further than Monica Heisey’s take on how to be a divorced twenty-something tumbling through life and failing to land on your feet more often than you succeed. Maggie is a character who is instantly recognisable as That Girl, the specific kind of young woman who would, after all, think nothing about spending hundreds of dollars on handmade scented candles in the name of self-care (her prerogative, of course, who am I to say otherwise?).

   What I found surprising though, as I read on and on, is that the tender moments peppered through the comedy began to feel less and less sincere, for one reason that only really hit me about halfway through – Maggie, to put it bluntly, is an insufferable narcissist. I haven’t read much chick lit, so take my commentary on its tropes etc. with a pinch of salt, but surely you can’t expect us to spend nearly four hundred pages with a character who acts as self-centred as she does and expect us to stay fond of her? In the beginning, there’s something about how awful her life gets that everyone who has been through a bad breakup can relate to. What’s that quote about mirrors and seeing how you really are reflected in someone else, and hating it? Whatever the quote, it applies here. You can give Maggie some leeway in the earliest, darkest days of her trauma – God knows I’ve been there myself – but it’s her inability to pick herself up, dust herself off, and realise that she just has to buckle down and get on with it that really grated on me. Even by the book’s conclusion, I felt that things were resolved too neatly. Your best friend of years feels like she can’t tell you about her engagement because of how you’d react? Honestly, get over yourself and stop looking for serenity at the bottom of a bowl of crystals.

   As I say above, there’s likely an element of satire in all of this – of course a girl like Maggie would go for crystals – but I think what makes it less effective is that we can only see things from Maggie’s perspective, and even when she admits her flaws and wrongdoing, there is a fundamental inability to consider things from the other person’s point of view that just makes me know I would be up to high doe after an hour in her company. Thank God she doesn’t exist outside of this book.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 14th January 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5213525871

Book Review 61 – Circe by Madeline Miller

Read: 13th December 2023 – 22nd December 2023

Rating: 5/5 stars

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   Every time I read this book, I find myself devouring it. Madeline Miller is truly one of the greatest authors of our time, and what I particularly find myself drawn to is how deftly she updates classical myths that are thousands of years old with a voice that is bitingly contemporary. This retelling of Circe is profoundly feminist, and there’s more than a hint of Margaret Atwood in how Miller examines the power of women in reduced circumstances, women on the side-lines, women living on the edges of society, scorned by all others and with only themselves to rely on. Watching Circe grow from a girl who knows very little to a woman with a power even the gods don’t have is emotionally quite gripping, but what is equally as gripping is moving alongside her emotional journey, the relationships she has, whether daughter, sister, lover, or mother. Every one is seen through a different lens, and in each one we see a different facet of Circe, but nevertheless, it’s always her. She is loving, she is vengeful, she is proud, she is patient, she is a multitude of characteristics that make her feel like a living, breathing character. Read this even just once, and your life will all the better for it.

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Originally posted on Goodreads on 2nd January 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3120768715