in case you missed the first one, here's the description: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'my becoming-a-genius project, part 2!
in case you missed the first one, here's the description: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
and yes, i chose this one due in no small part to miss phoebe bridgers.
DAY 1: THE HUSBAND STITCH this is truly one of the raddest pieces of writing i have ever read. i don't even know what to say. lovely writing, gorgeous allusions, wonderful style, brilliant structure, fantastic ending, genius title. a pitch-perfect retelling. i can't even deal. rating: 5
DAY 2: INVENTORY a story about sexual encounters during a pandemic quarantine is hitting a bit too close to home for me right now. rating: 3.75
DAY 3: MOTHERS you know that feeling when you start a short story and you're working at full attention to figure out where you are and who you're with and what's going on because you'll only have a few pages to both know and appreciate it? that feeling stuck around until the very last with this one. in a good way. rating: 4.5
DAY 4: ESPECIALLY HEINOUS hey so Carmen Maria Machado is f*cking amazing. this is brilliant. rating: 5
DAY 5: REAL WOMEN HAVE BODIES i keep waiting for a dud of a story and it just...won't come. genius end to end. rating: 4.5
DAY 6: EIGHT BITES okay ouch, carmen!!!!! this is starting to hurt!!!! rating: 4.5
DAY 7: THE RESIDENT so maybe this one actually scared me!!! what about it???? rating: 4.5
DAY 8: DIFFICULT AT PARTIES not my favorite. actually probably my least favorite. rating: 3.5
OVERALL this is a brilliant work by a brilliant author, and it's greater than the sum of its parts. i didn't miss a single day (despite having work and holidays and cross-country flights in that time), and not only that, but i looked forward to my time with this every day.
Honestly, all you need to know about my reading experience with this book is the following: - I never (EVER!!!!) get scared of books. - My least favoritHonestly, all you need to know about my reading experience with this book is the following: - I never (EVER!!!!) get scared of books. - My least favorite genre of movie is horror, because they're not scary and are therefore just ~boring~. - I am obsessed with ghost stories but they are never satisfying to me. - This book made me so frightened, in broad daylight, at 10 am with my roommate in the next room and a cat on my lap, that I had to put it down. - BROAD DAYLIGHT I TELL YOU!!!
This book is The Blueprint.
Also I felt a huge affection for the characters, I loved the writing, I felt the spirals and the rollercoasters alongside our protagonist, and the ending was...chef's kiss.
Already raised this from a 4 to a 4.5...now wondering if I should raise it higher.
Bottom line: Just remembered I drunkenly lent my copy of this to my neighbor. DON'T LET DRUNK ME NEAR MY BOOKS EVER AGAIN.
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yes i DID finish reading this in the wee hours of Halloween night under a full moon. thank you for asking.
review to come / 4.5 stars
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feel like i'm legally obligated to read this in october...more
Well, I suppose I will begin with the Lofty Assumption that most of you reading this review have not read this book, because the oWhere to even begin.
Well, I suppose I will begin with the Lofty Assumption that most of you reading this review have not read this book, because the only reason I even justified myself finishing it is because I very much wanted to be the top review of this and give it one star, and I only validated my own belief in my ability to do so by threatening all of you who TBRed it with grievous bodily me-yelling-at-you. (Goodreads admin, this is not a threat, just a possible scolding.) (Don’t take down my review, please.) (You have never done that to this point and to be honest it feels like I’m playing with fire at this juncture.)
Anyway.
This has spoilers in it, I guess, but honestly I don’t know what there is to spoil. I don’t say what the ending is, and this book has no real plot, but there’s your warning.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT An Irish expat, Ava, who moves to Hong Kong for truly no reason, except perhaps for the challenge of surrounding herself with 100 percent white people in a not-majority-white country, or otherwise being a one-woman force of colonization. She starts working as an English teacher for kindergarteners, and she’s comically reprehensible at it.
Ava then meets Julian, a relatively nice banker who is treated with all the warmth and friendliness warranted by the biological offspring of Satan.
Later, after milking Julian for all he is worth and while living solo in his intensely bougie apartment and solely off of his kindness, Ava starts sleeping with Edith, who might be the first Asian adult with dialogue in the whole book. (This occurs at, like, the halfway point.)
WHAT THIS BOOK IS FILLED WITH Casual racism; privilege not only the characters but the author exist in total unawareness of; unrelenting and sickening entitlement; self-serious prose that is only sometimes as good as it thinks it is; and more stuff of nightmares.
Let’s get into it.
But first, let’s say that it’s actually disturbing that this proudly presents itself as A RECOMMENDED BOOK FROM: The New York Times Book Review * Vogue * TIME * Marie Claire * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * Esquire * Harper's Bazaar * Bustle * PopSugar * Refinery 29 * LitHub * Debutiful
Like...thank you, The Caucasian Review.
CASUAL RACISM A lot of the racist overtone / undertone / overall tone of this comes from the fact that, as my dear darling Lily pointed out to me when I was still hopeful this would be the Sally Rooney-esque lit fic of my dreams, there is really no reason for this to be set in Hong Kong.
Not only is it treated as interchangeable with really any Asian country (gross), it could really be set anywhere and be equally effective. It’s disturbing. (Also deeply ironic to title the book “exciting times” when it exists in utter ignorance of the political climate in Hong Kong that would warrant that phrase.) (Not to mention nothing about this plot is exciting.)
But this point would be really hard to prove in a witty, quick way using mostly acerbic commentary on dumb quotes. So thankfully the racism also comes in more egregious varieties.
Let’s start off relatively subtle, like this moment when Ava is thinking about her class: “My favorite students were the girls with neat copybooks. I knew they’d grow up to be like Edith, and was glad Hong Kong had a long-term supply.”
Can you spot the racism? Let’s say it together. Okay, in unison: Drawing On Stereotypes Of Asian Female Students And Describing Them All As Interchangeable With Your Asian Girlfriend Is Not A Good Look! Nice job, everybody!
Time for round 2! How about when our white author has the only Asian character say, “Basically,” Edith said, “my gran is the Hakka version of a British expat.”
You need a little bit of history to ID this one...any guesses? If you wrote down “It’s also not a good look to compare a citizen to a colonizer because (checks notes) said citizen still speaks their native language,” you’re correct!
But let’s meander on back to stereotyping. One of only a handful of Asian characters with speaking lines is Edith’s mom, who is, you guessed it, a classic Tiger Mom archetype. That’s gross enough, but it, as always, gets grosser when Ava’s self-centering analysis gets involved!
Edith, who is very rich, tries to speak to Ava about the guilt she feels over how her mother treats the maid. Here’s how that goes: “‘Just [my mom], in general. She’s so rude to Cristina [the maid] and I act normal about it, like that’ll make it less awkward. But it’s not about social graces anyway. There’s no way of treating her that would make her working conditions okay.’ ‘Aren’t working conditions part of how you treat someone?’ I said. ‘That’s why I hate Benny. It’s not that he doesn’t ask nicely. It’s that he’s not really asking.’”
Yes. You read that right. Ava is comparing her job at a school where she doesn’t really like her boss to a maid’s job where she is underpaid, discriminated against, and dehumanized :) how does Ava live :) her life is just simply...so hard :)
This story also follows, in its entirety, a white person who is not only gentrifying but colonizing a nonwhite country. This constantly feels icky, but at no point does it feel ickier than in this conversation between Julian (who speaks first) and Ava: “‘Can you [find somewhere to live]? I know you said your salary wasn’t very high.’ ‘It’s good compared to locals’. They all live somewhere.’ ‘With their parents, or else in coffin homes.’”
You honestly have to admire the amount of shittiness in these three lines of dialogue. Gentrifier colonizer bullshit, topped with a lack of self awareness that they are the ones driving up rent costs for those locals, causing them to have nowhere to live, combined with a total ignorance of homelessness, combined with an inability to recognize one’s own privilege, combined with a god complex.
Chef’s kiss.
PRIVILEGE, ENTITLEMENT, AND OTHER WHITE PEOPLE THINGS If you are still one of the white people who gets overly defensive of their whiteness - like, the kind whose first thought upon seeing a Black Lives Matter protest is to cry about “reverse racism” - first off, wow, you can read? Amazing. And secondly, you should read this book, filled with white people so intensely intolerable in their whiteness that any white pride will flutter out of your lil brain.
(Also, I’m white. I just want to take that arrow out of the quiver of whoever’s going to get mad at me in the comments of this review.)
We follow a protagonist who is constantly having thoughts like, “Something I admired in him was that he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness - not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually.” Imagine thinking it’s cute to do bits about your privilege in 2020.
Or this conversation, between Ava and her then-girlfriend Edith: “‘You’re not noticing because you’re white,’ Edith said. ‘People see me and assume I’m from here.’ ‘But you are from here.’ ‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘But you miss things when you spend your teens abroad.’ It sounded like something a therapist might have told her, oddly phrased to squeeze developmental insight into not very many words.” Can you imagine having such a patronizing and condescending response, as a white person when a person of color who is important to you is trying to share their experience? Straight to jail, Ava. No, electric chair. No, worse: I sentence you to a life where every jellybean you eat is somehow buttered popcorn flavored, no matter what color it is.
It’s a similar case with Ava’s response to Edith describing colonial segregation in Hong Kong: “I wanted her to give me one of her spiels.” So condescending and dismissive :) I changed my mind - it’s the electric chair again :)
Or when Julian’s dad tells Ava a story from Hong Kong history, she feels “it would have been a better story if I’d known more about the figures involved.” Ah, yes. The story’s fault. Not because you moved to a country and expressed no interest in learning anything about it. AVA, YOU IGNORANT SLUT. (This is a The-Office-referencing-SNL reference. Not me calling Ava a slut. Thank you for your time.)
A lot of this book’s inexplicable moral compass can be enlightened when Julian talks about his ex, a girl with a rich father who mocked him for going into banking while her father paid her as she did unpaid publishing internships that he used his connections to garner her. Julian explains, and Ava tells us, that “The ex was probably a better person now, he said. Everyone was terrible aged twenty.”
The foundational assumption that everyone’s early-twenties rough patch includes a disturbing amount of privilege working hand in hand with an utter ignorance of it, plus an unwillingness to recognize it, explains how this book is so f*cking intolerable.
GENERAL STUPIDITY It’s been a long time since I wrote a rant review this long, but old-timers will recall that whenever I get so mad that I have to whip out the bolded subheadings, there’s always a General Stupidity section. This is where I tuck away minor errors, things that will only make me mad but I still won’t shut up about, and...hilariously inaccurate medical statements considering today’s climate. Apparently.
Yes, we have a face-mask faux pas: “Next day at work I had a cough that cut off all my sentences. Joan gave me a mint-green face mask. I said I didn’t need one and she told me that if parents saw me coughing without it, they’d worry I’d infect their kid. At lunch I googled and discovered the mask was likelier, if anything, to breed germs by trapping hot air.” It’s just so funny. The author had no way of knowing that when her book was published, we’d be in the early stages of a global pandemic that disproved this mildly racist assumption, but I do find it amusing how stupid it makes her look anyway.
Ava is also a very bad person who is bad at her job. On her last day, she notes that “Many [students] brought cards, including the ones whose names I forgot.” Imagine being a white person teaching Asian students for months on end and not even bothering to learn their names. IMAGINE IT!!!!!!
IN CONCLUSION I very much wish I could have liked this book. In fact, I liked it for a little longer than I should have: It drew comparisons to my favorite author, Sally Rooney; it contains lines like “It was as if someone else ironed everything for her - her whole life - and her role was to make new creases”; it’s very readable.
I’d like to think that eventually, I would have realized on my own all the ways in which this book was not okay, but I don’t know if I would have. In truth, it was Lily who very kindly and patiently explained to me what was wrong. And she did so even as my initial response to her was to be somewhat defensive.
Being an ally is an ongoing process of learning. I’m trying but I’m not that great. I am extremely grateful in my process that so many of you will kindly tell me when I’m f*cking up, even though that can be scary for you to do.
All I can tell you is that I will keep putting allyship over my comfort, and I will keep trying. I hope I net out more positive than negative, but I’ll keep trying either way.
Bottom line: F*ck this book and please don’t read it. <3
--------------- pre-review have you ever read a book so terrible that you have to annotate it to keep track of how terrible it is?
meet that book.
review to come / realistically 1 star
--------------- currently-reading updates reading the book that made lily tweet this:
white authors writing books that are set in asia, but have a set of characters that are 98% white with only a few token, stereotypical asian characters
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the complete stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the complete stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
DAY 1: THE GERANIUM it must be a real nightmare to be an old racist white guy. imagine what an unpleasant experience having that brain would be. good story though. go off, flannery. (anyone also who can't separate the narrator from the author - by page 1 it's clear this is not the book for you.) rating: 3.5ish
DAY 2: THE BARBER in a way it's reassuring to know that elections have been this horrible for decades. rating: 3
DAY 3: WILDCAT well, i skipped two days, because saturday was my birthday and sunday i was quite busy nursing the hangover of a lifetime, but we're back in business. this was not my favorite. also if every story contains this many n-words we might be going back out of business. rating: 2
DAY 4: THE CROP this one just simply rules. loved it from the first sentence. can't even explain it, but i love Willie and i would die for her. rating: 4.5 stars
DAY 5: THE TURKEY in my head this kid is played by Macaulay Culkin. also, it takes a f*cking good writer to make you feel a tension and unease about a kid walking down the street with a turkey. go off, flannery. rating: 4
DAY 6: THE TRAIN i have once again forgotten i was doing this. i'm going to be honest, this story did not do it for me. i saw what it was trying to do, the writing was good, i had moments of sympathy, but the overall conflict / backstory just didn't hit. rating: 2.5
DAY 7: THE PEELER this is one where i want to spend the day thinking about it and let it sink in a little before i decide. also, ain't religion confusing. rating: 2
DAY 8: THE HEART OF THE CITY yesterday i said i wanted to think more about the story i read before rating it, and flannery o'connor complied by giving me another story about the same characters that allowed me to realize i hated both. rating: 2
DAY 9: A STROKE OF GOOD FORTUNE i really liked this one. i don't want to say why i really liked it, because it spoils the whole thing, but i really liked it. rating: 4 or 4.5
DAY 10: ENOCH AND THE GORILLA remember how earlier i was like, all confident that i was going to hate every story about this specific group of characters? sorry flannery. i was wrong. first time for everything, and all that. rating: 4
DAY 11: A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND YESSSSSS. this story made me miss being in college lit classes with such an intense, sharp nostalgia that it's probably going to be my cause of death. rating: 5
DAY 12: A LATE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY will i ever manage to get to this project on a saturday? no. anyway the careful and complex feelings that flan gets you to have for each character in this story...masterful. rating: 4.5
DAY 13: THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN "The old woman's three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens." flannery please write my internal monologue. great title too. rating: 3.5
DAY 14: THE RIVER jesus christ, flannery! rating: 4.5
DAY 15: A CIRCLE IN THE FIRE you really do start to get a sense of how these stories are going to go. rating: 3
DAY 16: THE DISPLACED PERSON some super interesting race and xenophobia commentary in here, but also this was way too long for its purpose. rating: 3.5
DAY 17: A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST i am liking the freak show motif for what it does, but not actually liking reading any of instances of it. am liking the voice of this one though. also the title and what it means. rating: 4
DAY 18: THE ARTIFICIAL N***** i have to tell you i am really losing my ability to deal with these race exploration stories, teeming as they are with uses of the n-word. rating: 2
DAY 19: GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE what the hell and amazing, in equal parts. rating: 4.5
DAY 20: YOU CAN'T BE POORER THAN DEAD for the first time in this whole reading experience, as soon as i started this i felt the urge to skip it. and i should have run with that feeling. rating: 2
DAY 21: GREENLEAF they had me in the first half not going to lie!!! (aka the first half of this did nothing for me but it won me over by the end.) rating: 4
DAY 22: A VIEW OF THE WOODS oh my god i love this. what is wrong with flannery o'connor and can every story have an ending like this one. rating: 4.5
DAY 23: THE ENDURING CHILL reading 3 stories today because i missed 2 days and also i don't want to lug this tome home for thanksgiving. this is like if flannery o'connor wrote a salinger story and therefore i love it more than anything. rating: 5
DAY 24: THE COMFORTS OF HOME i mean, like...okay? the villain of this story is The Concept Of Getting Laid, so determine whether that choice does it for you before reading, i guess. rating: 3
DAY 25: EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE this would be more interesting if it weren't the 346728346738th deeply similar race story in this book. i like it more than some of the others, though. rating: 3.5
DAY 26: THE PARTRIDGE FESTIVAL intellectuals do be silly, it's true. rating: 4
DAY 27: THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST not going to lie, this was way too long. rating: 3
DAY 28: WHY DO THE HEATHEN RAGE? short and sweet. well, not that sweet, but veryveryvery short. rating: 3
DAY 29: REVELATION this was an interesting one. a thinker. hm. rating: 4
DAY 30: PARKER'S BACK no thanks. rating: 2.5
DAY 31: JUDGEMENT DAY at first i thought this was the same set of characters as The Geranium, but it wasn't, and then i thought maybe it was the same ones as in The Train, but it wasn't, and then overall i just felt like A Late Encounter with the Enemy should have been the closer instead of this one. rating: 2.5
OVERALL these stories could feel a little bit repetitive reading them one after the other, but really flannery o'connor is a one of a kind, fantastic writer. 4 stars....more
next time i feel like my life is bad, i'm going to imagine being a young boy named HAMNET in 1580s england dying of the plague. and then your dad writnext time i feel like my life is bad, i'm going to imagine being a young boy named HAMNET in 1580s england dying of the plague. and then your dad writes a play with a title that's almost your name.
life advice: achieve peak know it all status by pontificating about the forgotten sixth borough of New York, and when people try to fact check you, fllife advice: achieve peak know it all status by pontificating about the forgotten sixth borough of New York, and when people try to fact check you, flex on them and say that Jonathan Safran Foer wrote about it in the opinion section of the New York Times.
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it is very pleasing to me that this is filed as OPINION: A WORK OF FICTION....more
This book is beautiful, enchanting, miraculous, magical.
The writing is lovely. The characters are charming and real. The stories give an immersive looThis book is beautiful, enchanting, miraculous, magical.
The writing is lovely. The characters are charming and real. The stories give an immersive look at the as-yet-otherwise-unknown-to-me experience of a Scandinavian summer that feels totally new, and simultaneously gives a look at a childhood summer that is so familiar and comfortable and nostalgic.
It's a dream. That's all.
Bottom line: I don't intend to let another summer go by without me reading this book during it.
------------ pre-review
saw this one coming from a mile away.
review to come / 5 stars
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have you ever picked up a book and instantly known it was exactly what you needed it to be?
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