Reading Round-Up: March 2020

Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing.

Going strictly by these numbers, March was a slow reading month for me. Except not really. It’s just that a good chunk of what I read in March was proofreading, copy-editing or beta-reading on books that won’t be out until later in the year: one novel, two novellas, a memoir, and a large pile of short stories. They’ll be added into the tally for whatever month the books actually come out in.

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues as “books.” I read or listened to 8 books in March: 5 in print, 2 in e-book format, and 1 in audio format. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #118 (March 2020 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were Kristina Ten’s “Tend To Me,” Tahmeed Shafiq’s “Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands,” and A.M. Dellamonica’s “Living The Quiet Life.”

2.       The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark. An intriguing novella set in an alternate Cairo in which magic works and supernatural creatures interact with humanity, with a very steampunk feel. And it’s a mystery, featuring two detectives trying to figure out exactly is haunting the titular tram car and how to exorcize it. Interesting characters, strong world-building.

3.       A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark. This is actually the first novelette set in Clark’s alternate history magic-imbued Cairo, but I read them out of order. The order doesn’t really matter – there are two characters from this one who play supporting roles in the other, but otherwise they are stand-alone tales in the same setting. I really, really loved the lead detective in this one and hope to see more of her. This is a very “fair play” mystery – all the clues are there for the reader to follow.

4.       Choke Hold (Angel Dare #2) by Christa Faust. This made it onto my To Be Read Challenge for 2020 because I should have read it a long time ago. It’s a sequel to Faust’s award-winning first Angel Dare thriller, Money Shot, and it’s every bit as intense and full of violence and sex. The sex isn’t particularly graphic, but it’s also not completely off-screen. Faust is one of only two female authors to appear under the Hard Case Crime imprint, and I have to assume low sales are why we haven’t seen a third Angel Dare book, as this one ends with a strong hint that Angel’s story isn’t over. Sad, because for noir/crime/thriller fans this should be an ideal series.

5.       Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Recommended by my friends Dan and Mikayla, I finally listened to Ali’s first memoir, narrated by the author. What an incredible story of indoctrination and rebellion at the personal level and how it can also affect the larger picture. I find that I get much more out of memoirs when I can listen to the actual author read/perform their own story.

6.       Spider-Gwen: Ghost-Spider Volume 1: Spider-Geddon by Seanan McGuire, Rosi Kämpe, others. I have been out of touch with most Marvel and DC Comics for a long time, including the Spider-Man family of books. I started buying monthly issues again largely because of the comics work Seanan McGuire, Saladin Ahmed, and Kat Howard have been doing the past two years, including Seanan’s Spider-Gwen runs. I have to say Seanan did a wonderful job introducing me to a character I was completely unfamiliar with and getting me to care about her quickly. And the art is fun, even in the midst of a line-wide crossover event (Spider-Geddon) for which I was not reading ANY of the other titles.

7.       Spider-Gwen: Ghost-Spider Volume 2: The Impossible Year by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa, others. The second and final Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider volume collects the second half of McGuire’s initial run at the character, setting up the title’s relaunch.  More solid characterization, and lots of “let’s blow up everything in Gwen’s world” scenes.

8.       Ghost-Spider Volume 1: Dog Days Are Over by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa, others. A new, shorter, series title for a relaunch that sees Gwen taking advantage of her status as one of the only Spider-folk who can cross dimensions on her own to go to college on Marvel’s core-Earth where nobody knows who she is. Except the Jackal does, and he wants her as he’s wanted every version of Gwen. McGuire writes the creepy stalker character very well.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 366 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) this year (366 because it’s a Leap Year). Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “Giant Steps” by Russell Nichols, from Lightspeed Magazine #118 (March 2020 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “Living The Quiet Life” by A.M. Dellamonica

3.       “Many Happy Returns” by Adam-Troy Castro

4.       “Reliable People” by Charlie Jane Anders

5.       “Viewer, Violator” by Aimee Bender

6.       “Tend To Me” by Kristina Ten

7.       “Three Urban Folk Tales” by Eric Schaller

8.       “Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands” by Tahmeed Shafiq

9.       “Another Beautiful Day” by Seanan McGuire, on the author’s Patreon page.

10.   “The All-Night Horror Show” by Orrin Grey, from The Dark #58 (March, 2020), edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace

11.   “The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved” by Natalia Theodoridou

12.   “Escaping Dr. Markoff” by Gabriela Santiago

13.   “Casualty of Peace” by David Tallerman

14.   “Goodbye” by Jim Butcher, from author’s email newsletter

15.   “Whoever Fights Monsters” by Cynthia Ward, from Athena’s Daughters, edited by Jean Rabe

So that’s 15 short stories in March. Once again way under “1 per day,” putting me further behind for the year so far. (March 31th was the 91th day of 2020.)

Summary of Reading Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 1 read; YTD: 3 of 14 read.

366 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  15 read; YTD: 58 of 366 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 3 read; YTD: 7 of 52 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 8 read; YTD: 39 of 125 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 1 read; YTD: 4 of 24 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 0 read/watched.

Complete the Series Challenge: This month: 0 books read; YTD: 5 of 16 read.

                                                                Series fully completed: 0 of 3 planned

Monthly Special Challenge: March was Women’s History Month, so my goal was to read primarily female writers. Of the eight books read in March, five were by female authors (okay, yes, three were by Seanan McGuire.) (Also, of the 15 short stories read, 8 were by female authors.)

April is National Poetry Month. I am notoriously not a reader of poetry, but I’m going to try to read at least a little.

Review of Under The Sunset

TITLE: Under the Sunset

AUTHOR: Bram Stoker

136 pages, Wildside Press, ISBN 9781592249779 (paperback)

(editions available from several publishers, though)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Far, far away, there is a beautiful Country which no human eye has ever seen in waking hours. Under the Sunset it lies, where the distant horizon bounds the day, and where the clouds, splendid with light and color, give a promise of the glory and beauty that encompass it. Sometimes it is given to us to see it in dreams. This Country is the Land Under the Sunset. This is the story of that Country, and what happened when evil came to abide there. It is a story all of us must hear.

MY RATING: Three stars out of Five

MY THOUGHTS: Over the past few years, I’ve been attempting to read through all of the works of Bram Stoker. It’s been a slow project. I usually put one owned-but-unread Stoker work on my TBR Challenge list each year, but there have been years where I don’t complete the Challenge and the Stoker choice for that year goes unread. I’m also pacing myself on the Stoker books I do own until I get around to buying the ones I don’t. Semi-regular re-reads of Dracula, and less frequent re-reads of The Jewel of the Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, don’t help my pace either. All of this to say that I’ve been meaning to read Under the Sunset for years. I finally got around to it in May – and I’m tempted to say that’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. But it’s certainly not Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories in terms of consistent quality, either.

I’d first read some of Stoker’s short stories in a tidy little volume called The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion, acquired at a library book sale somewhere in my teen years during my early fascination with Dracula and Lair of the White Worm. I liked most of the stories in that volume, many of which felt very Poe-like, and only later found out that a number of them were either novel excerpts or pulled from other collections, like this one. So I was prepared to enjoy a collection of fairy tales set in a land like our own distant past but a little bit different. A land where Evil hasn’t take root, except when it has. Or maybe it hasn’t, and all the bad things that happen are just because people are stupid and selfish? Or they’re stupid and selfish because Evil did sneak past the angelic guardians at the borders? So maybe it is all Evil’s fault after all? I’m not sure, by the end of the collection, that even Stoker knew exactly what his point was for the over-arching theme.

The title story theoretically sets the tone for the book as a whole, and the tone this one sets is stilted direct address to the reader, flowery almost purple-prose writing that is archly Victorian without any of the whimsy that makes the fairy tales of, say, Oscar Wilde so enjoyable. Not every story employs this tone, but the damage is kind of done after the first couple of pages: Stoker warning his (theoretically young and impressionable) readers that they had best pay attention and learn the lessons of the stories to follow, to think upon the fate of the Land Under the Sunset once they (knowingly or not) let Evil in to do its will. But then that thread, as I mentioned, seems to drop from most of the stories – Evil isn’t really behind most of what happens in the succeeding stories despite the overblown introduction.

My favorite story in the collection, “The Invisible Giant,” feels very Wildean: a young girl is the only one who can see an oncoming Giant, a race the humans of the Land have long since stopped believing exists, and the only one who believes her is an old hermit from outside the town. Everyone ridicules the both of them, until people start dying and the Giant turns out to be Plague. Another story of battle with a giant, “The Rose Prince,” is also enjoyable if slightly longer than it needs to be. If you can get past the awkward pre-teen romance and some very repetitive segments, it’s a good yarn about a Prince who saves the day when whole armies are incapable of the feat. And Stoker employs the “story within a story” model well in “How 7 Went Mad,” which is at once a morality play about paying attention in school and being careful what you wish for and also a surrealist farce where numbers and letters have life and talk. The ridiculousness of the final few pages of the story put me in mind of the zanier parts of The Phantom Tollbooth.

Other stories don’t work as well. The moral of “Lies and Lilies” is so blunt, and the characters so one-dimensional, that Stoker may as well have written “Don’t Lie, It Ends Badly” and saved a dozen pages or so. “The Castle of the King” is circuitous and feels unending as it slogs its way along. And I fell asleep twice trying to read “The Wondrous Child,” whom I didn’t find so much wondrous as manipulative and annoying. (It’s possible the title character is a call-back to the angelic babe who features in the title story of the collection, but I came to a point where I no longer cared if the connection existed or not simply because the characters in “Child” are so annoying.) And I’m still really not sure what to make of “The Shadow Builder,” another story that feels overwritten but also manages to include some wonderfully creepy scenes and (dare I say it, Lovecraftian?) turns of phrase.

I think ultimately my problem with this collection is that the stories feel derivative. Now I realize that a) at the time they were published they probably were not derivative even of Stoker’s peers and b) it’s impossible to be derivative of works that weren’t published until decades later (like Lovecraft and the Phantom Tollbooth). But I do think that anyone coming to this collection for the first time at this late date and after having already read Wilde, Poe, Lovecraft and Juster (not to mention the more well-known traditional fairy tales of Perrault, Grimm and Andersen) is likely to feel, as I did, that the stories in Under the Sunset feel a bit overwritten and a touch too familiar.

Review of I AM MALALA

TITLE: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot By the Taliban

AUTHOR: Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb

330 pages, Little Brown, ISBN  9780316322423 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (From the back cover): When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. In October 2012, when she was fifteen, Malala almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala’s heroic recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she emerged as a global symbol of peaceful protest. A year later she became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: I’ll admit, I have a hard time writing in-depth reviews of memoirs. Who am I to judge the authenticity of an author’s recounting of their own life? But as Malala’s memoir is one of the books I chose for this year’s To Be Read Challenge, and as that challenge requires me to post a review of each book, I’m going to make the attempt.

The first thing to note is that while this is a memoir, Malala tells more than just her own story. I’ve seen some complaints in other reviews that she effectively turns herself into a subplot for most of the book, spending so many pages on Pakistan history in general, the history of the Swat Valley in particular, and her family’s history in specific. My take-away, as someone who really was not familiar with Pakistan’s history or geography, is that it was vital for Malala to help people like me understand why her world was as it was – things like what happened to Malala do not happen in a vacuum. Understanding the culture surrounding the event, and especially the upheaval that culture has been experiencing not just politically but geologically (earthquakes, flooding, mudslides), made it easier to understand the event itself and its aftermath. No, this is not a textbook on Pakistan history, but Malala gave me enough detail that I wasn’t completely lost as to the socio-political attitudes around her.

Not surprisingly, Malala is at her most passionate when she’s writing about the cause that matters to her above all else: education for all. When she’s talking about the Taliban shut-down of schools, or her first sighting of illiterate children scouring garbage heaps for something to sell just to be able to eat, or even her mother’s struggles with learning to read and write, her voice is clear and her call for change is compelling. The portions of the book that do deal with Malala’s day-to-day life and schooling prior to the shooting are perhaps the least interesting to read: she talks about friendships and her relationships with her brothers a bit more dispassionately, almost as if someone (co-author Christina Lamb, perhaps) told her the book needed more slice-of-life to make her seem like a “real” kid and she included them grudgingly. I find myself wishing that she’d been able to directly include the reports about life under the Taliban that she wrote under the pen name Gul Makai; those might have lent a different view to the everyday-life sections of the book. Even Malala’s descriptions of what happened after the shooting are a bit clinical, which makes sense given how little of it she actually remembers.

The final chapters, about her new life in England and how she wishes to return to Pakistan, bring the passion back to Malala’s voice. She renews her call for education for all, for an end to the Taliban’s bombings of schools and other terrorist acts, and in these final pages it’s easy to see the effect all of this has had on her. I cannot imagine, at sixteen or sixty, being told you can never return to a place you loved, and that the immediate family you have with you are likely the only people from your childhood you will ever see again.

My preferred method of “reading” memoirs lately is in audiobook form, when narrated by the author. So I also have to wonder if I’d feel differently about the levels of passion/interest if I’d been able to hear Malala read her own words.

This is the second book I’ve read this year for the To Be Read Challenge.

Review of WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

TITLE: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

AUTHOR: Shirley Jackson

214 pages, Penguin Books, ISBN 9780140071078 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover) All is peaceful at the Blackwood Estate – until a murderer strikes.  Merricat Blackwood lives on the family estate with her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian. Not long ago there were seven Blackwoods – until a fatal dose of arsenic found its way into the sugar bowl one terrible night. Acquitted of the murder, Constance has returned home, where Merricat protects her from the curiosity and hostility of the villagers. Their days pass in happy isolation until cousin Charles appears. Only Merricat can see the danger, and she must act swiftly to keep Constance from his grasp.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has always been one of my favorite short stories (up there with Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”), and her novel The Haunting of Hill House is wonderful, so you would think with all the American Literature classes I’ve taken and reading I’ve done on my own that I would have long-since read more of Jackson’s work. And yet, I’ve only just read We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the first time. I suspect it will be joining the list of books I reread more often than not.

I came into Castle with no more awareness of what it was about than the back cover described plus the book’s reputation as a classic. It’s great to be able to approach a book that’s been analyzed for decades with fresh eyes and no real preconceptions. I’m not sure how any of what I’m about to say maps onto published literary criticism of the work. Maybe I’ll go looking at reviews after I post this. Or maybe I’ll continue in my own world, as the book’s main character does. That would perhaps be appropriate.

The first thing that struck me, slowly over the opening chapters, is the development of Merricat’s voice, the slow revelation that she is both divorced from every-day reality and hyper-aware of it. I tend to really enjoy unreliable narrators, but it’s not obvious at the outset just how unreliable Merricat will be. Early indications are that she lives in a bit of a dream-world and has some coping mechanisms that help her get through situations that give her social anxiety, but that she’s otherwise a normal teenager stuck in an abnormal living situation as one of only three survivors of a family tragedy; how all-pervasive her dream-world is, how little of what she says is just creative turns-of-phrase by a lonely, awkward teenager, only becomes apparent as the novel progresses. The change in how Merricat expresses herself – the increasingly dream-like quality of her language – is brilliantly crafted and paced.

Chapter One’s description of the town and the Blackwood family’s disconnect from it feel naturalistic. We get glimpses of the locals, and meet a few through whom we start to see how socially awkward Merricat is. We get a sense of the layout of the town in relation to the Blackwood estate, and the first hints that there’s more darkness in this family’s history than just the recent murders. Even that nastiest interaction with locals in chapter one, and there are several, feels light in comparison to what comes later. This could be the lead-off scene of any novel about small-town life in these United States.

But from the very first pages of chapter two, the book veers from slice-of-life to American Gothic and never swings back. We learn, in little bits of detail strung in among Merricat’s less-lucid moments, the Blackwood history: willingly removed from town life, from their richer friends and even from direct family, they’d become a small, insular group of seven, replete with power struggles and mis-communications that festered. Most of this is revealed through the ramblings of Uncle Julian, the regrets of Constance, and the neediness of cousin Charles, as filtered through Merricat’s unique world-view. Insular family cut off from local social life; a dark old estate; family history skeletons hinted at but never fully revealed; the intimation of romantic flirtation between first cousins Constance and Charles … if these aren’t the tropes of a Gothic suspense novel, nothing is.

Perhaps it’s because of her skewed world-view that Merricat is the only one to see the danger that both the villagers and cousin Charles pose. And it’s not that she’s wrong about the danger – she is clearly correct in worrying that Charles’ arrival portends a drastic change in her daily life. But I also can’t say that Charles, as self-serving as he is, is completely wrong when he points out how Constance’s social anxiety after her acquittal have removed Julian and Merricat from the medical/psychiatric help they both so obviously need. But Charles’ selfishness and greed supersede any good he may have accomplished.

The book is also current in a way Jackson could not possibly have predicted. Gossip, the “social media” of the era, creates an expectation of the surviving Blackwoods that is at the very least inaccurate and more dangerous: the angrier the townspeople get about how distant and disturbing the Blackwoods have always been, the more desperate they get to know what really goes on in the Blackwood house, the less civilized they act. Polite veneer falls away even before the tragic arc of the book hits its peak, and a finer description of mindless mob mentality I have never read. I had to put the book down for a while after reading that brutal, raw scene.

If the book starts with a very concrete, naturalistic feel, it ends with a tone that is ephemeral and fantastic. How much time actually passes in the final chapter is a question I’m not sure Jackson herself wanted to answer. To Merricat, it seems like only weeks, but there are hints (the house in now vine-covered; the legend of “the ladies” grows more morbid) that years, if not a decade or more, have passed. Which I think is a brilliant way to end a book so deeply mired in the dream-world Merricat lives in.

The truth behind the murders is almost the least important plot point to be resolved, even though it’s the point the townsfolk are most stridently obsessed with. It’s obvious to the reader, I think, long before the characters actually discuss it – the hints are certainly all there. When it is revealed, it’s done so subtly that I almost didn’t realize what was being said.

Obviously, I highly recommend We Have Always Lived in the Castle to any fans of Gothic suspense. It really is a fast read at a little over two hundred pages, but gives you a lot to absorb and think about. This is also the first book I’ve read this year towards my 2019 To Be Read Challenge.

Review of Arion Golmakani's SOLACERS

TITLE: Solacers: An Iranian Oliver Twist story: a memoir

AUTHOR: Arion Golmakani

331 pages, Bowker, paperback and e-book formats, ISBN 978-0989898157

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Solacers tells the touching story of a boy's search for family life and safety following the divorce of his parents in Iran during the 1960’s. The first child of a heartless father and a discarded mother is left to fend for himself on the streets of Mashhad, seeking food and shelter wherever he can. His lonely early years are an unbelievable tale of cruelty and betrayal on the part of nearly everyone who might be expected to help, save for one aunt who does her best to keep him from starving. But living a harsh and solitary existence has one advantage for this little boy: other than forcing him to be self-reliant, no one attempts to indoctrinate him on Iranian society's archaic cultural values and religious beliefs. And so, he never accepts his wretched state as fate, choosing instead to dream big dreams about getting an education, having his own family, and starting a new life – possibly in the faraway land called America. He makes a plan and by the age of 17 he boards a plane to the land of possibilities, where his dreams eventually also take flight.

MY RATING: Four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Solacers is not an easy book to read. The author’s storytelling style is breezy and friendly enough, but the subject matter is almost unrelentingly raw. I kept having to set the book down, thinking “how could anyone treat a child this way?” As unfathomable as the behavior of most of the adults in Alireza (Arion) Golmakani’s childhood might be to me, a middle-class American with parents who weren’t perfect but were always present, it is entirely real and too common still. Poverty of the level Golmakani describes isn’t a thing of the third world countries past – it still exists today even in prosperous nations like the United States and Canada. And that’s what makes this very personal memoir so universal and so eye-opening.

It is the 1960s, well before Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Alireza’s childhood is spent mostly homeless in a small northern Iranian city. He and his life are about as far removed from politics as one can get, so we don’t really get an eye towards how Iran was interacting on the world stage at the time – Golmakani leaves that to history books to discuss (except towards the end, when a nearly-adult Alireza joins the military and applies to be sent to study abroad in the United States). Th book otherwise is a very street-level look at family, city and religion and how they intertwine to keep Alireza in the horrible conditions he somehow (with the limited aid of those he calls ‘solacers’) to survive.

The book’s subtitle comparison to Charles Dickens’ classic work is apt, as Alireza is bounced between his estranged parents and a multitude of foster homes and fending for himself on the street. I suspect that had Golmakani totally fictionalized the story, reviewers would have said the tale was almost too Dickensian in terms of the characters. There’s the plucky street rat kid; distant but ultimately loving foster mother and brother (the true ‘solacers’ of the title, although there are points where even they spectacularly fail the boy); the brute of a birth father who physically and emotionally abuses everyone; the heroic stepfather with feet of clay that prohibit him from being the man Alireza needs him to be; the loving grandfather who dies too early; the birth mother whose own abuse at her ex-husband’s and lack of self-worth enable her to abandon her son. Alireza’s relationship with any one of these people would be the stuff of awards-nominated novels and Oscar-bait films, and in real life the boy dealt with, and survived, all of them.

And here’s the remarkable thing: despite how horribly most of these adults let the pre-teen and teen Alireza down, often putting him in dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations time and again, the author chooses to concentrate on the love (as limited and fallible as it was) he was given, the solace he received from sometimes unexpected quarters. He returns time and again to complimenting the foster mother and brother who made sure he got an education even though they often left him alone for the summer months, and the aunt and grandmother who occasionally were able to give him a place to sleep and hand-me-down clothes even when they were too poor to feed him along with their own families. Even his descriptions of his mother’s abandonment, moving with her new husband and children to Tehran, is tempered with a hindsight understanding of why she was the way she was (obsessive-compulsive, guilt-ridden, and beaten down).

Throughout the book, it is clear that the adult Arion Golmakani is grateful for what little scraps of support and affection he was shown. It is telling that he chooses to name the book in honor of those providers of limited solace rather than focusing on those who so drastically failed him. I marvel at his ability to see the positive in the worst situations as much as I marvel at how he managed to survive and rise above.

Review of Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART

TITLE: Things Fall Apart (The Africa Trilogy #1)

AUTHOR: Chinua Achebe

209 pages, Anchor Books, ISBN 9780385474542, $11.95

PREMISE: (back cover copy) Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo’s world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: When I was setting up my various reading challenges for 2018, one of the things I was aware of is how woefully under-read I am regarding literature from the African continent and the African Diaspora. In the past year or so I’ve made efforts to correct this; in fact, Things Fall Apart was purchased almost two years ago for this exact purpose (along with a bookstore clerk’s emphatic recommendation). It affected me enough that I immediately purchased the remaining two books in Achebe’s Africa Trilogy, and made the series part of my “Complete The Series” Challenges for 2018.

Achebe’s writing is lyrical, poetic, descriptive, emotional, but also spare and pointed. He doesn’t waste words describing Okonkwo’s pre-colonial world; he gives us the broad strokes of how the village (and Okonkwo’s compound within it) functions, how the village relates to other villages, but he lets our imagination fill in the color and proliferation of fauna, the exact facial features of the main characters, the way the villagers dress. Nor giving us the exact years as to when the story takes place; he assumes we are either familiar with when European colonialism swelled across Nigeria or that we can look it up for ourselves after the fact. Achebe also doesn’t waste words, or time, explicitly showing us any scene that doesn’t propel the narrative: years go by between chapters, and sometimes even between scenes. The lack of these physical and time details helps maintain the novel’s fable-like structure and tone.

Another thing that intrigued me: Achebe doesn’t go out of his way to make his main character likeable. Oknokwo is domineering, mean, judgmental, rigid, closed to advice from even his closest friends unless that advice involves “saving face” in the community, quick to blame others for things that are clearly his own fault … essentially full of what we would now call “toxic masculinity.” And yet, he’s also a captivating figure. I could not look away from the narrative, had to know what would happen next. As much as I didn’t like Okonkwo, I had to know how he would navigate (or fail to navigate) the cultural changes around him – both those of his own doing (like his banishment to the village of his mother for something he was advised against doing) and those outside his control (the mesmerizing hold of the European Christian missionaries on the disaffected youth of the villages).

I did like a number of the other characters in the story, especially Okonkwo’s daughter Ezinma who starts out seeming a little bit spoiled but grows to a strong, impressive woman by the end of the book. Ezinma’s mother Ekwefi also stood out, as an exemplar of how far a mother will go to protect her daughter, whether that protection is wanted or not. Okonkwo’s friend Obierika provides some moments of good counsel and some moments of comic relief. But Ezinma, Ekwefi and Obierika are about the only characters Okonkwo lowers his guard and shows love to.

Okonkwo has a number of sons, but the only ones whose names we learn are his foster son Ikemefuna and his natural son Nwoye. Repeatedly, Okonkwo laments how he wishes Ezinma was a man because his sons are disapointments to him. Okonkwo ignores Obierika’s advice about Ikemefuna’s fate and pays the price later; his relationship with Nwoye is an almost textbook example of how withholding love and affection results in deep family rifts.

Ultimately, Okonkwo is so rigid in his beliefs, and in his own sense of self, that he cannot bring himself to accept the way the world is changing around him, nor can he see himself as a part of that world as it moves forward and envelopes all he loves. I read the closing pages thinking “I know people like this; I know men who can’t talk about what they really feel because it would make them ‘weak,” men who are still so mired in what they believed decades ago that they are driving their children and grandchildren away.” This not to say that everything Okonkwo believed was wrong, or that he was wrong to react strongly to certain changes – I cannot imagine what it feels like to see one’s history and belief system not just subsumed but obliterated. In the end, although I didn’t like Okonkwo I could feel pity for him, could understand where such a strong-willed and rigid man would be battered by the sea-changes around him and find himself unequal to the task of changing. And that, more than anything else, is what moved me about the book and made me want to read the rest of the Africa Trilogy as soon as possible. I need to see where Achebe takes these themes in the succeeding books.

Things Fall Apart was the second book I read this year towards the TO BE READ CHALLENGE hosted by RoofbeamReader. Click here to see my original post about the challenge and which books I chose for 2018.

Reading Round-Up: January 2018

Reinstating what I intend to be a monthly summary of everything I’ve read, since I’m not reviewing every single book or story the way I used to try to do on Livejournal. Here’s what I read in January of 2018:

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in ebook format as “books.” I read or listened to 14 books in January: 11 in print, 2 in audio, and 1 in ebook format. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #92 (January 2018 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories and novellas. This month’s favorites for me were Catherynne M. Valente’s “Golabush, Or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy,” Sarah Pinsker’s “The Court Magician,” and José Pablo Iriarte’s “The Substance of My Lives, The Accident of Our Birth.”

2.       Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz.  A wonderful first-person gay coming-of-age story about two Latino boys in the Southwest in the 80s, endearingly read on audio by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I didn’t quite get the sense that Ari was as angry as the cover-copy made him out to be (conflicted yes, over-the-top angry not so much).

3.       Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman, by Andy Mangels, Judit Tondora and others. Fun, fun, fun team-up between two of my favorite 70s TV icons. Mangels skillfully melds bad-guys from both shows into a formidable menace, and there are lots of great nods to both shows’ supporting casts (especially the female members). But there’s also an sub-plot that’s never resolved, indicating Mangels expected there to be a sequel mini-series/trade paperback. And Judit Tondora’s art is just wonderful to look at.

4.       Beneath The Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3), by Seanan McGuire.  The story of the portal-children at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children continue, this time with a quest into a Wonderland-like candy world that could have dire consequences for several members of the cast. What I love about these novellas is that you don’t have to have read the previous installments at all: McGuire tells you everything you need to know in each installment. But of course, reading them (in or out of order) gives you a much bigger picture to absorb.

5.       Sherlock Holmes and the Green Lama: Heir Apparent, by Adam Lance Garcia. Love Holmes pastiches, love the “modern pulp movement.” Not overly familiar with the pulp history of The Green Lama, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this crossover which draws on both the Lama’s and Holme’s overlapping experiences in Tibet. The tension is well-spooled-out, the action sequences well-done. I’m sure I missed some of the nods towards other pulp characters and settings.

6.       The Squirrel on the Train (Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries #2), by Kevin Hearne.  Another fun novella in the Iron Druid Chronicles narrated by everyone’s favorite Irish wolfhound, Oberon. The IDC novels and short stories told from the human characters’ perspectives are fun and exciting, but the voice Hearne gives Oberon is more endearing and intimate and just plain joyful.

7.       Binti: The Night Masquerage (Binti #3), by Nnedi Okorafor. The Binti trilogy of novellas concludes as solidly as it started: with amazing poetic prose, beautiful descriptions of people and places, action propelled by characterization, and at least one story twist I personally did not see coming. Folks whose first exposure to Afrofuturism was the Marvel movie Black Panther really need to check out this series.

8.       Lumberjanes Vol. 7: A Bird’s Eye View, by Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Carey Pietsch, Ayme Sotuyo, Maarta Laiho. After a couple of volumes where I felt the story had slowed or the art wasn’t quite up to the standard of the first few, I feel like Volume 7 is both a return to form and a departure, with several new interesting supporting characters introduced and other supporting characters returning and being given more depth – all without shirking development for the core cast. I hear there might me a television version in development, and I hope none of the spark and strength of these girls is lost in adaptation.

9.       Ironcastle, by Philip Jose Farmer, adapting J.H. Rosny Aine.  It’s taken me way too long to get around to reading this Farmer classic. I enjoyed it. There will be a longer review sometime next week, since this is one of the books I read to meet this year’s To Be Read Challenge, which requires an individual review to be posted.

10.   Superman: The Phantom Zone, by Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Tony DeZuniga, Rick Veitch, Bob Smith and others.  I loved this four-issue mini-series when it was published in the early 80s, before DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, as goofy as the story is. Gerber told a great story (although the follow-up story in DC Comics Presents was a bit more convoluted upon re-reading than I remembered). Colan’s art here is not necessarily his best compared to Tomb of Dracula, or even the Silverblade and Nathaniel Dusk minis he was drawing for DC around the same time, but it’s still fun. The man was a master of shadow and fluidity of movement.

11.   Kiss Me Like A Stranger, by Gene Wilder.  I can’t believe I haven’t read Wilder’s memoir before now. It’s become my habit to listen to, rather than read, memoirs if they’re read by the author, and I feel like I got a better sense of what Gene was trying to say (and what he was shying away from saying) by listening to him. I think, especially when it comes to the estrangement from his adopted daughter, he had blinders on as to what the problem actually was, but then again it’s very easy to judge from the outside things that aren’t as obvious when you’re in the middle. And his love for Gilda as well as the woman he married after her passing are very very strong and clear.

12.   Iceman Volume 1: Thawing Out, by Sina Grace, Alessandro Vitti, Edgar Salazer, and others.  I really intend to write a longer blog-post about this eventually. As I said on Twitter, I felt like Grace really captures the act of coming out “later in life” (a subjective term, to be sure, but I think Bobby Drake coming out as gay in his late 20s, after having “come out” as a mutant in his teens, qualifies), and the different pressures and roadblocks that come with it. Bobby’s journey in these few issues very much matches my own coming out in my late twenties after years of trying to convince myself I was straight and having lots of failed relationships with otherwise wonderful women, many of whom are still good friends.

13.   Cry Your Way Home, by Damien Angelica Walters. A wonderful short story collection by one of my favorite authors, about which I don’t want to say too much here because my full review will be forthcoming at Strange Horizons in about a month.

14.   The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 3), by Rick Riordan.  I have not been as captivated by the Magnus Chase books as I have by the Percy Jackson and Kane Chronicles series, but this concluding volume of the first trilogy (which features a short guest spot by everyone’s favorite son of Poseidon as well as Magnus’ cousin Annabeth) grabbed me. A slightly slow start gives way to a fast-paced adventure that resolves all of the extant main and sub-plots and gives us more depth to the supporting cast of Magnus’ hotel-mates.

So fourteen books in January, which Goodreads told me was a few ahead of goal for the month/year. Ironcastle is the first book read for the 2018 To Be Read Challenge. Four graphic novels meets my “one graphic novel per week” reading challenge, while nothing I read in January helped meet any of the “Complete the Series” challenges, nor the “Bustle Reading Challenge.”  Those Reading Challenges were described HERE.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I did read and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too (with some short notes for stories that really stood out to me). If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “The Streets of Babel” by Adam-Troy Castro, from Lightspeed Magazine #92 (January 2018 issued), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “Golabush, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy” by Catherynne M. Valente

3.       “The Eyes of the Flood” by Susan Jane Bigelow

4.       “Someday” by James Patrick Kelly

5.       “Auburn” by Joanna Ruocco

6.       “The Substance of My Lives, the Accident of Our Births” by Jose Pablo Iriarte

7.       “Divine Madness” by Roger Zelazny

8.       “The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker

9.       “A Thousand Nights Till Morning” by Will McIntosh

10.   “Written in Water” by Seanan McGuire, a Patrick-and-Dianda story, on the author’s Patreon page.

11.   “Guerilla Marketing” by Sanjay Agnihotri, from One Story #236, edited by Will Allison

12.   “Our New Lives” by Helen Coats, from One Teen Story #53, edited by Patrick Ryan

13.   “Trouble Comes” by Neal Bailey, stand-alone ebook available on Kindle

14.   “Tooth, Tongue and Claw” by Damien Angelica Walters, from her collection Cry Your Way Home, edited by Leslie Connor.

15.   “Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden In My Smile” by Damien Angelica Walters

16.   “On The Other Side of The Door, Everything Changes” by Damien Angelica Walters

17.   “This Is The Way I Die” by Damien Angelica Walters

18.   “The Hands That Hold, The Lies That Bind” by Damien Angelica Walters

19.   “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale” by Damien Angelica Walters

20.   “The Judas Child” by Damien Angelica Walters

21.   “S Is For Soliloquy” by Damien Angelica Walters

22.   “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” by Damien Angelica Walters

23.   “Take A Walk In The Night, My Love” by Damien Angelica Walters

24.   “Falling Under, Through the Dark” by Damien Angelica Walters

25.   “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter” by Damien Angelica Walters

26.   “Umbilicus” by Damien Angelica Walters

27.   “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” by Damien Angelica Walters

28.   “Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home” by Damien Angelica Walters

29.   “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice” by Damien Angelica Walters

30.   “In The Spaces Where You Lived” by Damien Angelica Walters

31.   “How The Marquis Got His Coat Back” by Neil Gaiman, the full-cast BBC Audio production available on Audible.

32.   “The Way Home” by Seanan McGuire, an Alice Healey /Tom Price “Incryptid” story, on the author’s website

33.   “The Lay of The Land” by Seanan McGuire

34.   “Target Practice” by Seanan McGuire

So that’s 34 short stories in January, more than one per day, putting  me exactly on schedule for the year so far.

2018 TO BE READ CHALLENGE

Most avid readers have a “to be read” pile, in our office or near our bed: books we bought intending to read, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  Some of us have “to be read” bookcases.  This year, book blogger RoofbeamReader  is re-instituting his To Be Read Challenge after a two year hiatus. (The first year RBR didn’t run the challenge, I challenged myself and succeeded; in 2016, not so much.)

You have to go to RBR’s website to officially sign up for the challenge if you want to be entered to win a gift card to Amazon or the Book Depository at year’s end: https://roofbeamreader.com/2017/11/07/announcing-the-official-2018-tbr-pile-challenge/  but the basic rules (other than how to enter) are:

The Goal: To finally read 12 books from your “to be read” pile (within 12 months).

Specifics:

1.       Each of these 12 books must have been on your bookshelf or “To Be Read” list for AT LEAST one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2017 or later (any book published in the year 2016 or earlier qualifies, as long as it has been on your TBR pile). Caveat: Two (2) alternates are allowed, just in case one or two of the books end up in the “can’t get through” pile.

2.       Crossovers from other challenges are totally acceptable, as long as you have never read the book before and it was published before 2017!

*Note: You can read the books on your list in any order; they do not need to be read in the order you have them listed. Audiobooks count. Graphic novels count. Poetry collections? Essay collections? All good!  As you complete a book – review it, go to your original list and turn that title into a link to the review. This will keep the comments section here from getting ridiculously cluttered. For an example of what I mean, Click Here.

MY 2018 TO BE READ CHALLENGE LIST:

1.       THE LADY OF THE SHROUD, Bram Stoker     (1909)

2.       THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART, Lawrence Block    (1965, reissued 2011)

3.       IRONCASTLE, Philip Jose Farmer and JH Rosny   (1976)

4.       GIOVANNI’S ROOM, James Baldwin    (1956)

5.       WHO FEARS DEATH, Nnedi Okorafor  (2010)

6.       THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe    (1958)

7.       SOLACERS, Arion Gokmakani    (2012)

8.       THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, Grace Zaring Stone    (1932, reissued 2014)

9.       BECOMING NICOLE, Amy Ellis Nutt     (2016)

10.   THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Junot Diaz    (2008)

11.   SOFT APOCALYPSES, Lucy A. Snyder    (2014)

12.   INVISIBLE PLANETS, translated/edited by Ken Liu   (2016)

ALTERNATES:

A.      REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales, Yoko Ogawa (Stephen Snyder, translator) (2013)

B.      BUTCHER ROAD, Lee Thomas     (2014)

I have a few other reading challenges that I’m setting myself for 2018 that will overlap partially with this. I’ll be posting about those over the next few weeks.