Beverly Garside's Blog: Books: Mine and Others'

People Like Her

People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




Ellery Lloyd's (actually a husband and wife team) "People Like Her" is one of those stories I will never forget. I may not remember the title or names of the characters, but the story and the glimpse into the secret world of influencers will never leave me. Emmy is an Instagram influencer whose celebrity for performing parenting overtakes any interest in actually being one. Every aspect of her family's private life becomes fodder for a tiny screen, and every moment of her time is devoted to feeding the demands of her ever-more parasitic fans. Emmy's husband, Dan, is a failing novelist who begins to resent his wife's success.
They are the perfect pair of anti-heroes, and the serving of schadenfreude is generous. For through all their travails, it's the unspoken that colors the entire text: Ellery and Dan consider themselves too good to be ordinary. No work-a-day life for this couple-- it's a media star and a famous novelist or bust. And bust they do, all the way down to the threat of tragedy. And yet...the ending has a twist befitting the characters.
"People Like Her" reads like a fable and a morality tale, coated in danger with a twisted cherry on top. It's a treat to be savored.



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Who Are They?

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques F. Vallée

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a very informative read. Vallee's research compares modern UFO sighting and abduction stories to folklore and fairy tales going back almost 1000 years. He takes on the founding doctrine of one of the UFO religion's denominations' (and UFO-ology is indeed a religion with warring denominations) theology that UFOs appeared in our skies after 1945 because of inter-planetary concern over our development of nuclear weapons. Vallee's research deals this theory a fatal blow.
Vallee compares the stories of UFO sightings and kidnappings with the Celtic "Fairy Faith" and other indigenous traditions involving fairies, elves, dwarves, leprechauns, trolls, etc. from around the globe and finds definite similarities. Citing newspaper articles, police reports, church records, and mythologies, he finds stories of "flying ships," behaving in impossible ways in the skies. The flying ships land, contain beings of various descriptions who kidnap people into the crafts or take them to their own worlds, releasing them later with memory lapse, unexplained time lapses, and nightmares about needles and medical experiments performed upon them. He then examines how these beings and craft appear differently to observers and victims according to the culture and collective psychology in which they live.
Drawing no conclusions about the nature of all these sightings and experiences, Vallee proposes one theory that I find much more credible that the prospect of living beings travelling millions of light years through space in mechanical craft to reach us -- the demonic theory. This theory of alien visitations has always seemed more plausible to me, and Vallee's research appears to back this up. Visitation by beings apparently from other dimensions, or perhaps just beyond the reach of our physical perception, are legion and as old as our existence on the planet. That some of them appear benign or even helpful, and others clearly malign and harmful, also corresponds with the experience and folklore of peoples in centuries past.
Apparently, Vallee's book was considered a scandalous betrayal by the UFO community when it was first published in 1969. Not being a partisan to any particular religion, this doesn't interest me. I do, however, have credible experience with people who have been visited by "fairy folk" of various forms and dispositions. From their experiences, I learned that most of them don't mean well. I would call them predators.
Vallee has done a great service by tracing the history and dimensions of this universal phenomenon. Highly recommended reading.







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Dietland

I so wanted to like this book. It started out with a lot of promise. But in the end I just couldn't bring myself to like the heroine, Plum. She reminded me of a jellyfish - just passively floating along in the waves with no will, no agency, no spine, and stinging everyone who touched her. Plum had no interest in anything outside of herself and her own appearance, and blamed everyone else for her problems. It's a shame because the feminist activist group, that should have been the center of the story, really intrigued me. I loved the antics that turned London on its head! But instead that story was relegated to a sub-plot and we spent most of the book inside Plum's head, with her resentments, her endless self-pity, and intimate descriptions of everything she put in her mouth. This is not a fair portrayal of large women or a good model for feminism.

"That thing under your roof..."

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Megan Abbot is the queen of repressed emotions, desires, and longings that fester and transform into monsters that leap out and take control of us when we least expect it. She follows the "inner child" that pulls into the darkest places and traps us in secret lives, lies, and denial. "You Will Know Me" is the author in top form. And despite knowing more about the truth from early on, the ending still surprised me. Truth really is stranger than fiction, and in reality, the good guys don't always win.



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A Cult Expose

I'm most of the way through this very enlightening book about the multi-level-marketing and pyramid scheme sub-culture. Basically, it's an expose of this neighborhood of get-rich-quick cults complete with a single page take-down of the mathematical absurdity of its economic model, as well as the psychology and character of victims. Being that the authors were former adherents themselves, they confess in great detail their journey from normal people to addicts in a universe of "winners" and "losers." Families and friends become mere dupes to be used to enrich the MLM member and propel them into the"winner" category. The inevitable wreckage of broken relationships, lost jobs, and depleted bank accounts leaves the addict, incredibly, craving more of the same, chasing the dragon of that one last best scheme that will actually transform them into a wealthy "winner" - at the expense of everyone else.

A Fatal Grace

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Three Pines has got to be the murder capital of North America. But never mind. These stories are so wonderful you don't care about that little stretch in plausible belief. I'm in the process of reading this whole series, if a bit out of order. Three Pines, with all its plausible lapses, already feels like home. And Inspector Gamache, an honest man trapped in a hopelessly corrupt, hostile bureaucracy, speaks to me in a way I wish I did not understand.



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"I and You" at Rutgers!

I and YouApparently, "I and You" is BAD LITERATURE - bad enough to be so interesting that they are studying it at Rutgers! I'm proud to be sharing the syllabus of this class with such luminaries as James Baldwin and Joe Sacco (graphic novel "Palestine.") And since in the academic language, very little means what it says on the surface, I've studied the matter and discerned that it is, indeed, a compliment! Here's the syllabus from the Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers University, Fall 2016 term:

Short Fiction
195:135:03; Index 10942
MW7 (6:10PM-7:30PM), FH-A3; CAC
Instructor: We
Fulfills SAS Core Code AHp
Does not count towards major or minor

“Bad Literature: Genres of Fiction, Genres of the Human”.
This course deals with various fictive failures: failure to be good literature, to be fictional, to be or become human, through racialization, gendering, ableism, colonialism, and special boundaries between human/animal. In what contexts are they failures and how do we read their “badness” otherwise? We will read texts from spaces inside and outside the U.S.-Europe and that push the boundaries of literature. What “makes” (and not what “is”) a good literature? Sylvia Wynter wrote about “genres” of the human to describe the inherently exclusive definition of the human. We will explore different genres of fiction and the human.
You will be expected to read little, but be prepared to discuss the reading at length in detail. Topics in the class will be dense, affectively challenging to the common sense, and also, fun. Readings are varied in form, genre, location, and fictiveness: we will read politicized literatures like manifestos, graphic novels, short fictions from the others of Euro-American canon, fables, theoretical texts as fictions, novellas, online textual and video production. In short, we will read texts that are short but push the boundaries of the human as fiction. They include works by:
Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortazár, Dazai Osamu, Gerald Vizenor, Junot Díaz, manifesto (Combahee River Collective, Zapatista Manifesto, and Cannibal Manifesto), Miyazawa Kenji (fable), Joe Sacco (graphic novel Palestine), Luis Négron, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Audre Lorde, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's essays, Tierno Monénembo, Choi In Hoon, Leslie Marmon Silko, Beverly Garside (graphic novel I and You), Kim Nam Cheon, Cathy Park Hong’s Engine for Empire, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”

The Sociopath Next Door

Have you ever wondered how cops could, in violation of their own rules, allegedly put a handcuffed suspect of a minor crime in the back of a police van with no restraints and deliberately aim for pot holes and take sharp turns for a "rough ride" that breaks his back and eventually kills him? Or how Casey Anthony could allegedly kill her own child in favor of a party lifestyle? Why a coach or music teacher gets such pleasure out of humiliating his students? Or even why your neighbor's husband refuses to get a job OR to help around the house?
These kind of enduring mysteries were answered for me in this shocking book. "The Sociopath Next Door." I learned what makes bullies, sadists, and other sociopaths tick, how many different types there are, and more chillingly, just how common they are. If you've ever been in the cross-hairs of one of these people, this book will be one of those you never forget.
Maryland has an obscure law about murder "with a dark heart," that the 6 cops in Baltimore will likely be charged with for their alleged "rough ride" that killed Freddy Grey. I find it interesting that the issue of "dark hearts" found its way into state law over a century ago. Now that I understand "dark hearts" better, I can see them throughout history - both the world's and my own.
This book should be required reading in every high school. Only by arming ourselves with such foreknowledge can we protect against these predators.

The "Raw" Story

It's not often I don't finish a book and this one of them. I like to find meaning and understanding in fiction, to meet people and experience subcultures I would otherwise never encounter and learn what the world looks like from their shoes. So "nineties" held a lot of promise: privileged teenage girls in Manhattan. What is their world like? Why do their parents let them run wild, drinking, smoking, doing dope and getting into cars with strange, older men? And why do they do it? This promised to be fascinating.
Unfortunately, Ives chose to tell the story from the point of view of the young protagonist as if she were a goldfish with a 3-second attention span. No insight, no reflection, no explanation - just a drive-by of images, feelings and events at the speed of light. I realize this is a deliberate style. Many reviewers call it "raw." I call it "boring." About half way through the author just starts listing, one by one, 15,000 nouns that were in the public consciousness in the 1990s. Maybe if you have a print version of the book you can skip this, but I was listening to it on audio, where skipping is a more iffy proposition. So I yanked it out of the player.
This is a style of fiction that you either love or hate, and I am firmly in the latter camp. (less)

OMG

A Twisted Faith: A Minister's Obsession and the Murder That Destroyed a Church by Gregg Olsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A Twisted Faith: A Minister's Obsession and the Murder That Destroyed a ChurchA I don't read much true crime, but this tale of a Christian role-playing church, complete with apostles, prophets, exorcists, and a minister with an entire harem of married women taking turns in his bed was one I could not put down. By the time the demons are cast out and the prophecies are announced, you can almost forget about the suspicious death. For me, the most fascinating aspect was the degree of deception we are willing to swallow in the name of "love" and the alleged voices of God and the angels.



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