I loved this one so much! A celebration of adult friendship and intimate conversation, a book that's not only about our constant speculation about whaI loved this one so much! A celebration of adult friendship and intimate conversation, a book that's not only about our constant speculation about what other people are thinking and feeling but also about our collaborative storytelling by way of gossip, designed to get a little closer to their experiences and to our own. This Strout installment features Olive Kittredge and Lucy Barton, the central figures in Strout's two interlaced series, talking to one another, and Olive is so abrupt, direct, and judgmental, and Barton is so tender, dreamy, and speculative; they make a very satisfying odd couple.
Strout makes the trauma of the past and the tentative attempts at repair in the present her perennial theme, and while her view of the world at large is very pessimistic (as is mine), she commits to the idea that on the small scale, we can care for one another, whether strangers, friends, or lovers....more
You don't need me to tell you, this one is a STUNNER. Everett's satire is very funny as enslaved Jim code-switches to keep the white people around himYou don't need me to tell you, this one is a STUNNER. Everett's satire is very funny as enslaved Jim code-switches to keep the white people around him docile, but he also digs in deeply to slave narratives in order to flesh out the world beyond Twain's horizons. In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louise Gates Jr. writes about the trope of the talking book as a means of liberation; here, Everett thinks through the force of the Black pencil, the revolution of a Black man writing about his own experience, threatened with extinction through lynching. As the book flows towards its conclusion, like the powerful river it describes, it accrues anger and grief, forbidding the reader to look away from rape and torture as did Twain. ...more
Though Brown does a beautiful job with marine life in this installment, as well as capturing the way that capitalism ensnares good individuals in destThough Brown does a beautiful job with marine life in this installment, as well as capturing the way that capitalism ensnares good individuals in destructive projects (a theme that also came up in The Wild Robot Escapes), this installment is more straightforward and in some sense mournful than the other two. Roz travels through a poisoned ocean, insulated only by her own artificiality, and she encounters marine life who have resolved to destroy the mining vessel creating this pollution. Perhaps it's because I read this installment after the election, which bodes horrifying things for the planet; it was more difficult to bring myself to a hopeful place in the conclusion of the novel. The plot is ripped from the headlines, as I had just seen a John Oliver episode on deep sea mining and how destructive it is likely to be in spite of its proponents' claim of sustainability. ...more
I loved this one too! Again, Peter Brown is a profound ecological thinker, as Roz the robot serves as enslaved labor on a farm, so he subtly invokes tI loved this one too! Again, Peter Brown is a profound ecological thinker, as Roz the robot serves as enslaved labor on a farm, so he subtly invokes the long history of human enslavement for agricultural labor. Drawing on a Haraway-ian sense of the posthuman, Roz becomes friends with the animals who make life on the farm and profit from its work possible. By telling the children a new kind of story about robots and animals, Roz lays the groundwork for her own escape and also for them building a new kind of future (as hopefully will Brown's child readers)....more
I loved this book and its simple, stark illustration style! I would love to teach this with Donna Haraway's "The Cyborg Manifesto" and/or Staying withI loved this book and its simple, stark illustration style! I would love to teach this with Donna Haraway's "The Cyborg Manifesto" and/or Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. In this fable of interspecies kinship and care, Brown makes an argument for ecological relation that embraces the posthuman in both robot and animal forms. A tender, touching, and vividly imagined book....more
I loved this poetry collection, which interweaves reflections on motherhood, memory, and ecology. The poet-speaker is constantly orienting herself in I loved this poetry collection, which interweaves reflections on motherhood, memory, and ecology. The poet-speaker is constantly orienting herself in space and time and imagining the orientation of others (like her two young daughters). My favorite of the poems, "Dresser," describes how childhood always feels just on the edge of our "now," like a childhood home or mood feels like it could be right outside the window or in the other room if we just found a way to edge ourselves through that barrier--in part because childhood impressions are so intense:
Everyplace I ever stepped seemed like some potential way to always be, as though I might have stayed there-- a thing I didn't choose, but could keep as an everlasting option--a mood--
like staying inside on a cloudy day, and wanting the living room to be quiet, the white clouds, the ageing year maybe touching one of two keys on the piano . . . (lines 65-71)
As in her other collection, A Forest Almost, Countryman also thinks about how we perceive and define or demarcate outdoor spaces--"That time we were in the forest we felt we had almost reached the forest" ("Forest," line 1)--and what the relationship is between our feelings of dwelling there and the velocity of our passing through: "It was never a matter of reaching the forest. It was a question of being / invited in, and then of staying long enough that eventually when / leaving it we might have the illusion that our car wound slowly, as / though pushing against a rubber band, when really it must have / whooshed through the trees toward adjacent forests." Her imagination lingers at the thresholds of spaces--caves, reefs, forests, stairs, hallways--and wonders what makes us imagine that one side is one thing and the other another. The movement of bodies blurs those conceptual lines, and Countryman's poetry uses language to capture that telescoping sensibility of both being here and elsewhere and refusing to pretend that the map is constant or safe.
Also, though unrelated to all I have said above, I love this line: "Our kiss like two manatees bumping in gentle fear of motorboats" ("Circular," line 2)....more
I found this collection of short stories (are they still called short stories when they are in comics form, or should I just call them "comics"? Also,I found this collection of short stories (are they still called short stories when they are in comics form, or should I just call them "comics"? Also, seems like memoir rather than fiction) about the hair of Black girls and women very powerful. I was especially struck by the way that Flowers connects physical pain and discomfort (from hair regimens) with larger forms of pain and trauma stemming from racism. The vignette about her sister's anxiety and hair-pulling was particularly poignant and disturbing in this way. Flowers communicates the intensity and vulnerability of childhood and adolescence, particularly as a time when girls learn discomfort with their bodies, a transition intensified by our white supremacist culture....more
Not nearly as wonderful as his The Thursday Murder Club series, but my hope is that the central relationship between the father and his daughter-in-laNot nearly as wonderful as his The Thursday Murder Club series, but my hope is that the central relationship between the father and his daughter-in-law will become more robust and interesting as the series goes on. Osman's narration is still witty, and part of the novel takes place in South Carolina (which is where I live, so I appreciated that). A lot of hijinks and flying around the world in this one, which didn't maintain my interest as much as I would have liked....more
I devoured this book! Moore creates a vivid sense of place as well as evoking the costs of cis-heteropatriarchy and capitalism in a thriller that is fI devoured this book! Moore creates a vivid sense of place as well as evoking the costs of cis-heteropatriarchy and capitalism in a thriller that is faithful to its characters and its context (a summer camp and the community surrounding it). I found it very satisfying that the culprit was right in front of my eyes the whole time, and yet I didn't see the solution until the conclusion....more
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