December Reading Recap

I closed out the year with a poetry collection in addition to the usual assortment of novels. In my next post, I'll take a look back at my reading year as a whole.

→ HOW TO COMMUNICATE by John Lee Clark: This excellent collection of poetry includes a range of styles and subjects, but the theme of communication remains prominent. Clark is a DeafBlind poet and historian who is active in the Protactile movement, so his perspective on communication includes many personal and historical barriers as well as innovations. He writes about these in ways that are often emotional and just as often quite funny. "On My Return from a Business Trip" and "Goldilocks in Denial" are both good examples of Clark's insightful humor.

I really liked this collection. I found the ideas more accessible than poetry on average, and I recognized and appreciated that occasional meanings were not fully accessible because I don't know Braille, Protactile, etc. I was glad to have some concepts from these introduced, and to receive an introduction to DeafBlind history. The book prompted me to do additional reading on assorted subjects, but that homework isn't required to enjoy these poems.

→ FLUX by Jinwoo Chong is a disorienting book to dive into without knowing anything, as I did, but that's part of what made the experience fun for me, so I won't reveal too much. The novel opens with a first person narrator (unnamed for a while) addressing a fictional character who's loomed large in his mind since childhood, a detective from an old TV show. His love for the series has been recently complicated by disturbing revelations about the actor who portrayed the character, making him reexamine the show's other problematic aspects. These issues of celebrity and fandom are explored throughout FLUX, but the plot that eventually emerges is about something else entirely. The narrator's uninspiring but stable job at a magazine is yanked away when the company is acquired, and his day only gets worse from there. Then a second narrative thread adds a science fictional layer to the story and increases the mystery of what's going on.

I was fascinated by all the storylines of this novel and enjoyed trying to understand how everything fit together. Many pieces click in satisfying ways by the end, but much is also left unexplained. While I would have preferred a little more clarity, particularly on a couple of events that seemed to be leading to reveals that never came, I was generally okay just soaking in Chong's engrossing story world. A major current of grief runs through the novel, leading to some emotionally affecting scenes. I recommend this to readers who are up for these challenges and interested in unusual science fiction, especially stories that play with time.

→ CHANGING PLANES by Ursula K. Le Guin is a set of travelogues about imagined worlds that lets Le Guin focus on the anthropological details she's so good at. The book is organized around the premise that while stuck in the misery of an Earth-bound airport, it's possible for travelers to pass the time by changing planes of existence and visiting other realities. Each chapter focuses on a particular plane (a planet, basically) and the cultures of its generally humanoid inhabitants. Usually one or a few characters emerge, along with a bit of plot, but these are less stories than well-presented bits of worldbuilding.

I'm a big fan of Le Guin's invented cultures, and I enjoyed this collection and its mix of tones. Most of the chapters contain some humor, and many tackle dark subjects, often together. For example, "Great Joy" concerns a plane developed with resorts themed around holidays popular among American Earthlings, then considers the native population pressed into service of this enterprise. Some sections are sort of thought experiments about how a type of society might function, like in "The Silence of the Asonu," where people possess a spoken language but rarely utter it past childhood. My favorite was "Seasons of the Ansarac," which describes a culture with a distinctive migratory life cycle and brings it to life in evocative detail.

→ MIDDLE SPOON by Alejandro Varela unfolds as a series of emails the main character is writing but not sending to his ex-boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to process the heartache of their breakup. The two men were involved for about a year, and they were deeply in love. But Ben ended things because the narrator is also in a loving but open marriage with his husband of 20 years, and Ben reached the difficult decision that being part of a polyamorous relationship couldn't work for him. So the heartbroken narrator writes email after unsent email about his grief and his inability to move past it, thinking back on the relationship and describing how he's getting through his days. He shares his heartbreak with his very patient husband and his increasingly less patient friends, as well as his two therapists (who he keeps secret from each other!). Occasionally he switches things up to complain instead about systemic failures of entities like the United States health care system, making points that are valid while still kind of trying everyone's patience. And that's about all that happens.

I expected something different when I started this book, imagining from the title and marketing that it would focus on a poly relationship occurring, rather than not occurring. Then I expected something else different as I read and imagined several shifts that might transpire, rather than nothing much really changing within the span of the story. I often didn't have a clear sense of when I was meant to be sympathetic to the narrator and when I was meant to find him ridiculous, which frustrated me. There's some interesting material over the course this novel, but I was mostly disappointed to not get any of the other versions of the story that I imagined.

→ THE PARIS EXPRESS by Emma Donoghue: A train leaves Granville on the coast of France one morning in 1895, scheduled to reach Paris in the late afternoon. The novel introduces numerous characters: the four crew members and a wide variety of passengers traveling in the first, second, and third class carriages. Over the course of the seven-hour journey, the story checks in with each character periodically, exploring personal concerns and developing small dramas. Hanging over the story is the foreshadowing from the end of the first chapter, that this train is "heading straight for disaster."

I was drawn to this novel for the same reason Donoghue was drawn to fictionalize the real-life incident it depicts: Photographs of the aftermath are striking and invite questions about what happened. But what happened turns out to be fairly simple, and only the final few minutes of the journey are truly relevant. So to weave in more tension, Donoghue invents a different potential threat, a misdirection I wasn't wild about. The bigger problem, though, is that there's not much life to most of the scenes. The characters, including notable figures who were in France at the time but not actually all on the train together, tend to deliver exposition about their biographies or discuss social issues of the time in ways that don't feel natural. I wanted a more interesting version of the story, with more nuance.

Donoghue wrote the remarkable ROOM, and I was expecting the same high caliber of writing from this book. I may still try another of her historical works, since several reviewers say they're better than this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel considers Books as Art Projects: "Yesterday, I got two pieces of mail that were completely different approaches to making books as art objects. The first was the new issue of the McSweeney's magazine, which is designed as a 1980s Lisa Frank-style school binder complete with a spiral notebook, plastic geometric ruler, and more. The second was the first installment of Benjamin Percy's apocalyptic-novel-as-serialized-newspaper The End Times.... I was excited to receive both not just because I paid for the subscriptions, but because they are interesting physical objects in an age when much of my reading is done on a cellphone or laptop screen."