Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Maybe it’s because I’m off Twitter, but I haven’t seen too much discourse about the Booker prize this year. I’m thinking about the years in which people whined about too many debut authors, because this shortlisted book struck me as very “debut-y” – or maybe it’s just me. 

Two trusted reviewers, the hosts of Novellas in November, who chose this book as a buddy read, don’t feel that way. Cathy found this story of a grieving eleven-year-old girl coping through a newfound love of squash, deep and satisfying:

“The narrative arc of Western Lane has all the staples of a standard Hollywood movie: rising from tragedy through sport, a romantic love interest and a thrilling climax of competition, but Maroo presents this recognisable story with a restraint and insight that elevates it beyond cliché.”

Rebecca found it illuminating in terms of “what is expected of young Gujarati women in England; on sisterhood and a bereaved family’s dynamic; but especially on what it is like to feel sealed off from life by grief”.

Rather than write a comment on their blogs about why I disagree, I thought I’d better review it myself. But I find that I can’t refute their points! The things I found trite or formulaic, they found “accessible with hidden depths” (that’s Rebecca.) I agree that the lack of “stylistic flair” (Rebecca again) is effective, and becomes a style of its own through repetition of certain metaphors. I just didn’t like the metaphors. 

My issue isn’t with any individual scene, or the style, but with the structure of the book as a whole. I felt like I could see the plot outline underneath the finished product, like if I could go back to an earlier draft, I’d see a note:  “insert squash metaphor here.” In fact, all eight chapters begin with a squash metaphor. They were well written, but to me, utterly obvious in what they were meant to convey about grief, and after the first few chapters I was sick of them. 

Had the writing not been restrained (as per Cathy,) this could have been a disaster. In between sports metaphors and the family members alternatively falling into or resisting gender and birth order roles, there were quietly powerful moments, some even illuminating. I gasped at a pivotal moment, when the young protagonist makes a decision that seems out of character, but actually reveals a lot about how grief and family turmoil have affected her. But even this moment makes me feel like I can see a ghostly Google doc comment like “put an obstacle in the character’s way before she gets to the final battle.”  

Cathy and Rebecca aren’t the only ones giving rave reviews. Canadian author David Chariandy calls Western Lane “a book of simmering intensities, reverberating silences, and exquisite literary timing.” This is an apt blurb, as his debut novella Brother touches on similar themes of grief, sibling relationships, and second generation immigrant experiences, with an overarching metaphor (music in his case). In my mind, Chariandy’s book was much stronger, as the structure wasn’t visible to me. Nothing felt repetitive or forced, and the musical metaphors, which I suppose were as obvious as the sports ones in Western Lane, were revealed at just the right moment to create a very emotional reading experience. 

But as my mom says, there’s no accounting for taste. We’ll find out what the Booker judges think soon enough!

The Short End of the Sonnenallee by Thomas Brussig tr. Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson

Good news, everyone: my status as a Franzen completist is secure.

After finally achieving this status in late 2021, I unknowingly let it lapse for several months, after Franzen’s latest German translation was published in April of this year.

For reasons I cannot fathom, the Franzen tier ranking I published right at the end of 2021 has been my highest-performing blog post ever since. The stats page (like much else) on WordPress is pretty useless, no longer displaying many search terms or links or anything that would help me. Does anyone else know how to find out? Is a Franzen tier ranking really hitting some obscure SEO parameter?

Anyway, I updated the tier ranking, and as you might imagine, this one falls into the bottom tier along with Franzen’s other translation projects. Not to say they are bad, but they are not essential reading, in my view. I actually quite admire The Kraus Project. I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone but a completist.

As for The Short End of the Sonnenallee, I sum it up in the tier ranking:

What if Spring Awakening was set in 1980s East Berlin, and the tone was “silly” rather than “tragic”? What if Franzen translated what is basically a YA novel, to add to his very mixed bag of translations? Read this novella to find out!

It is a rather silly book, about horny teens, but as Franzen points out in his introduction, that’s something of an accomplishment, given the very serious setting. These teens are living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, harassed by guards and jeered at by gawkers from the West, with very limited possibilities for their futures. And I’m being a little silly myself when I call this YA. It is certainly concerned with youth, but we occasionally get glimpses into the post-reunification future. The parents and other adults, often played for laughs, have their moments too, as when Micha’s mother finds a Western passport of a much older woman, and attempts to make herself up to match the picture, but can’t follow through and actually leave. A running gag about asbestos is similarly played for laughs until it suddenly becomes serious.

The book didn’t really grab me. The tone was a bit too uneven, the focus a little too adolescent, but it is short and sweet, and great for Novellas in November. I’m also seriously thinking about a Purity reread, now knowing that Brussig inspired the section on 1980s East Germany. And that’s saying something, since Purity is only a B-tier book.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz

The title “Extremely Online” gave me the wrong idea about this book from the start. To be “extremely online” means not only to be online all the time, but to be steeped in the deep lore, to know who the “main character” is on any given day, to know a “bean dad” from a “wife guy”. After thirty years on the net, I would count myself as part of that group. I’ve posted on plain-text message boards in the 1990s, had a TikTok comment go mildly viral in the 2020s, and posted (or at least lurked) on many platforms in between. 

But this book is not about posters or lurkers. Extremely Online is about “creators” – the people who are online to make money. The “extremely” part describes their reach and earnings. Lorenz profiles the creators in the 0.1%, who got in early, took undisclosed sponsorships, then legit ads and brand deals, sold branded merch, made millions, burned out publicly, were redeemed, or not, and spawned scads of imitators. They’re people I’ve heard of, maybe, but not the ones on my For You Page. Think Logan Paul and Mr. Beast.

The first section, on the roots of creator culture, did spark some fond memories. Socialite Rank is cited as an early example of the virality that “creators” today strive for. I was obsessed with that site and it makes a great case study. But after that, when the fates of creators become inextricably tied to social platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and Vine, the book becomes a dull litany of names, platforms, management companies, subscriber counts, and brand deals.

A boring nonfiction book can still be informative, especially for people new to a subject. But for me, this book misses the point entirely. Lorenz’s premise is that creators don’t get respect, and that she is here to give them their due. She marvels that platforms don’t “get” creators, don’t value them, won’t cater to them. She seems so close to taking this line of thinking a step further, and acknowledging that social platforms don’t exist to cater to creators, or users, or anyone except advertisers. They exist to capture attention and data and serve it back to you as ads. The content, and those creating it, isn’t the point and it never was.  

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Nonfiction and Novellas in November: Week 1

November brings a variety of great book blogging events, and I’m lucky if I properly participate in just one. This year I’m going to attempt to join two of my favourites: Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, and Nonfiction November, with a new slate of hosts, including Liz and this week’s host Heather.

Both events are organized by weekly themes, the first of which is: celebrate your year in nonfiction/novellas. Forgive me for grouping the weekly posts, but this is the only way I have a hope in hell! 

My Year in Nonfiction

I’ve read nine nonfiction books this year, or about 20% of my total. That’s a little low for me, but a few were standouts (good and bad). 

  • I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour is a biography of Jean Rhys and while Rhys is a strong interest of mine, the book itself hasn’t stuck with me.
  • Run Toward the Danger by Sarah Polley is a memoir presented as essays. I didn’t have a special interest in Polley or her iconic role as Anne of Green Gables, but this one absolutely stuck with me. I will never look at a child actor the same way. 
  • Run, Hide, Repeat by Paula Dakin is another memoir, more traditionally presented than Polley’s, that compelled me with its maddening story of family dysfunction and delusion. 
  • The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell is a groundbreaking and emotionally complex biography. What it lacks in candidness (at times) it makes up for in empathy and care. Mini-review here.
  • Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying by Light Watkins is more practical than literary, but I have kept up a pretty consistent meditation practice since reading it.
  • How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey was not groundbreaking by any means; more of a comfort read for those of us who are into productivity culture.
  • Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman was also not groundbreaking but a fun read for those of us into crypto schadenfreude. Review here.
  • The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi is a sort of meta-memoir in essays, including many reflections on the Holocaust, and it was by far the most challenging of these books. Review to come.
  • Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz is about a fascinating subject, but I was let down by how it merely skimmed the surface of influencer culture. Review in progress – pray for me, the author already blasted me on Twitter for simply sharing someone else’s negative review!

My year in novellas

I’ve read four novellas this year, plus a surprising number of novels with just over 200 pages – but those don’t count. I hope to increase this total in November!

  • McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh concluded my reading of all her novels. This one was delightfully depraved (aren’t they all!) 
  • The Ladybird by D.H. Lawrence was also pretty depraved, though a little more restrained than McGlue. 
  • Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin was the weirdest book I’ve read this year, which is saying something (see: McGlue)
  • The Nun by Denis Diderot rounds out the theme, with a weird and wonderful tale of sadistic and amorous nuns. Review to come.

We’re off and running! See you for another weekly post soon and hopefully a review or two besides. 

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman

I’ve learned a lot about crypto over the past few years, from various articles, tweets, and podcasts, but this is the first book I’ve read on the subject (no, Bitcoin Widow doesn’t count.) Ben McKenzie (yes, that Ben McKenzie) proves a pretty apt narrator. He’s skeptical by nature, educated in finance, at loose ends due to the pandemic, and just enough of a “name” that he can randomly reach out to an established tech reporter (Jacob Silverman) and convince him to embark on a years-long project. Easy Money is full of insider access (notably, an interview with a pre-indictment Sam Bankman-Fried) with an outsiders’ point of view – but I didn’t learn a lot about crypto itself that I didn’t already know.

That’s not McKenzie’s fault. If you’ve heard one crypto story, you’ve heard them all – they’re all Ponzi schemes, and they always collapse – then the founders disappear (or die?), or get arrested, or move on to the next scam. Like gambling, the key is knowing when to walk away.

More interesting, to me, were the insinuations made in this Bookforum review – the gossipy one, that perhaps McKenzie and Silverman had a falling out (a bit tenuous, based on this tweet), and the observation that this book was probably meant to serve as an eventual film project. 

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Novellas in November 2023 planning

Thank goodness we get a couple months off in between 20 Books of Summer and Novellas in November. I must have needed it, seeing as I’ve only posted once in the interim (so far). One year I’ll have the stamina to do Victober in between, but this year is not that year. Here are my plans:

The recent additions: These books are newly borrowed or acquired, and just happen to be under 200 pages. They also happen to all be in translation.

  • Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches. A straggler on my 2023 International Booker Prize reading list.
  • The Nun by Denis Diderot, translated by Leonard Tancock. A 1001 Books pick that I may have already started…
  • The Short End of the Sonnenallee by Thomas Brussig, translated by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson. I need to maintain my Franzen completist status.
  • The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Inspired by the title of a Law and Order episode, of all things, but might be a timely read.

The TBR: Recent additions to my ever-growing TBR – meaning I haven’t acquired these yet but would like to.

  • A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. I couldn’t begin to tell you have many times I’ve heard people sing the praises of this book. Here is the most recent.
  • Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. This was in the “references” section of recent Giller and Booker nominee Study for Obedience, and that’s all I need to know.
  • Night Walks by Charles Dickens. Based on this review; perhaps I’ll do a little Victobering after all.

The official group reads: Our hosts chose these books as the group reads this year. I approve.

  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. I already owned this, in a bind up with Three Guineas. I probably haven’t read it in twenty years.
  • Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. I bought this as a brand new hardcover, despite knowing little about it. Living on the edge!

Thank you as always to Cathy and Rebecca, who have posted their own, truly intimidating TBRs!

“Goodreads for movies”? How about a Letterboxd for books?

The fact that Letterboxd still bills itself as “GoodReads for movies” on their about page is hilarious to me, and not just because they’ve inexplicably styled “Goodreads” with a capital “R”. Letterboxd surpasses Goodreads in almost every way: user experience, functionality, aesthetics, not being owned by Amazon… and while Goodreads members outnumber Letterboxd users ten-to-one, surely the potential is there – how many people do you know who watched a movie in the last month? How many who read a book? And which do people talk about more? 

Goodreads has a stranglehold on the book-tracking market, despite not serving anyone particularly well – readers, authors, or publishers – and despite persistent bad press. Is it just network effects? First mover advantage? I spent a little time investigating why things have been allowed to get this bad, and then had some fun imagining what a “Letterboxd for books” would be like. 

Why is Goodreads the way that it is

There was nothing wrong with Goodreads when it launched in 2007. In a web 1.0, barely-social world (Facebook had just opened to the public) it was a boon to readers. The problem is that the site has barely changed since then. 

My homepage. Ignore my circa 2009 profile pic

The founders, a couple who met at Stanford and later married, had tech and journalism backgrounds, but they strike me as readers first and developers second. They sold to Amazon after rapid growth in the early 2010s and have since stepped away from the site. According to this recent Washington Post article, Amazon never intended to do much with Goodreads, apart from mine its data. Insiders claim that Goodreads is built on such old code and infrastructure, it would cost too much to update – I work in “digital transformation” in the public sector, so I get it – but if Jeffrey Bezos can’t afford to update some old technology, who can? Amazon decided it wasn’t worth it, and by letting it limp along into 2023 with 125 million members, they’ve made sure no one else has a chance make something better.

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Abigail by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix

We’ve reached the end of 20 Books of Summer 2023, and with this, I have read and reviewed eight books, which I count as a huge win! Three of those were 1001 Books, two were by women in translation, and at least one had been on my shelf for more than ten years. Huge thanks to Cathy and all the participants for the motivation.

I just about died recently, when I heard someone on Booktube refer to The Idiot (Batumen, not Dostoyevsky) as “dark academia”. In what world? I’m not saying an adult, literary novel can’t be classified this way but like… The Idiot just isn’t it. It’s missing the gothic setting and magic and whatnot. It’s a campus novel at best, and I’d argue it’s not even that because a fair amount of the book takes place off-campus.

It got me thinking about adult novels that do have the requisite lush settings, closed societies, mystery, and danger, like The Secret History and Vita Nostra, and whether a book like Abigail fits.

Most of the action in Abigail takes place in a fortress-like boarding school, and it’s got some sorta-supernatural elements, namely, a statue named “Abigail” the school girls confide in via written notes, and who sometimes writes back. It’s a closed society but it’s very much in the real world of Hungary in 1943, and it’s a very refreshing take on the coming of age novel, in that romance and friendship are present, but are not the drivers of Gina’s journey. 

Gina enters Bishop Matula school as a child, with no idea why her beloved father, “the General,” banished her from her comfortable, cosmopolitan life in Budapest, to a religious school in the middle of nowhere full of naive country girls. By the midway point, she is forced to grow up when her father tells her the truth about why he’s hidden her away, and about what’s really happening to Hungary, and to him.  

The mystery and magic of “Abigail”, as in, how a statue is able to respond to the various crises and complaints of the girls, drives the early narrative, but for me, this was a story about bullying, and adults trying to exert control over the uncontrollable force that is teenage girls. The real dark side of academia!

I grew up in a time where bullying was seen as pretty normal and nothing to get worked up about, while my kids are growing up with pink shirt days and no-bullying pledges. Despite having been bullied myself, in a somewhat similar way as Gina (this book is most realistic depiction of bullying I’ve ever read), I’m skeptical of anti-bullying campaigns. Isn’t the whole point of bullying that kids get to subvert the social order adults want to impose, the “play nice” messages they’ve been fed since preschool? A way for those with little control over most aspects of life to exert control over the most relevant things in their view: their peers? Why would a social marketing campaign cooked up by adults change all that? Maybe I’m too cynical, but I just don’t see bullying going away.

There’s more to this story than bullying, though. What makes it so genius is that it parallels the social control inside Bishop Mantula (both official – the strict rules and routines – and unofficial – the unspoken social rules the girls concoct, and severe consequences for those who don’t conform to both) with the social control exerted by a nation during wartime. Communication is strictly controlled and mostly propaganda in both cases, so the sudden appearance of anti-war messages on landmarks, in train stations, and even in the church feel just as magical as the messages from Abigail. The girls nominating one student to sing hymns loudly in the dayroom, so the rest can gossip undetected, is just as ingenious as the dissident who breaks into the church, and switches all the readings and hymns to ones with anti-war messages. Teenage girls are dissidents in training – by the end, quite literally.

I still don’t know if this all counts as “dark academia” or if that even matters, but fans of The Secret History or Vita Nostra will probably like this, as it takes its young student characters seriously while still portraying them as suitably naive, and all the more dangerous for it.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Howards End is #754 on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. See the whole list and my progress here. This summer, I’m reading from the list for my 20 Books of Summer challenge, and instead of straight reviews, I’m going to compare the 1001 Books write ups with my own impressions.

If you’re my age (an ageing Millennial or a youthful GenXer, depending who you ask) you might have seen that genre of TikTok that points out that the way we thought about the 1960s as teenagers is the way teenagers today think about the 1990s (i.e. as ancient history.) This made me think about the classic lit equivalent: the way we thought about Victorian literature as teens is the way we should think about Edwardian literature today. 

The metaphor doesn’t really work, because my microgeneration felt like whatever was going on in the 90s was fresh and new, whereas Victorian and Edwardian literature have only even felt “old”. But the fact remains: when I was a teenager getting into classic lit, books from 100-125 years ago were Victorian, and now books that old are Edwardian. Maybe it’s time to stop obsessing about the Brontës and Dickens and see what those Edwardians were up to*. 

Howards End is the perfect place to start, written 113 years ago, navigating feminism, politics, and those newfangled “motors” that were taking over the roads. I enjoyed it thoroughly, though Forster (this is my first) does tend to get a little… off track at times. A lot of random philosophizing when I just wanted to know how the family was going to deal with Helen’s latest scandal.

The 1001 Books write up is on the bland side, so I started flipping through the adjacent pages, to see what else was happening circa 1910. Plenty of fellow modernists like Woolf, Lawrence, and Mann, but also the more traditional John Galsworthy. The write up for The Forsyte Saga (1906) could have applied to Howards End in that it mentions Beauty (with a capital B) and the urge to possess it, and how the family unit can stand in for society. It also calls it a “monument to the Edwardians.” 

These books are both great depictions of the last gasps of Victorian-era morals and the emergence of Edwardian concerns. Forster contrasts the artistic Schlegels with the practical Wilcoxes, while Galsworthy gives us Soames Forsyte, representing the pursuit of property and power, while cousin Jolyon and wife Irene represent the pursuit of love and feeling. Galsworthy wanted to “only connect the prose and the passion” as much as Forster did, he just didn’t come up with such an eloquent way of putting it (and sorry, but legally, you have to quote this line in a review of Howards End.)

But they offer a pretty limited view of the lower classes. In both books, artistic, passionate men of a lower class are brought in to cause a commotion among the wealthy characters, and then they (spoiler alert) immediately die. Women of the lower classes are even more incidental – servants or prostitutes, mostly. There’s nothing to connect there. Why don’t we get a prosaic poor person to contrast with the passionate Leonard Bast in Howards End, or with Irene’s lover Philip Bosinney? 

After perusing the 1910 era of the 1001 Books, I flipped all the way to the end. #4, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, is a loose retelling of Howards End, and while I read it too long ago to cite the details, I’m pretty sure it addressed the class shortcomings. The write up says it’s a novel about “art, love, race, class, family” which sounds about right. I looked up an ebook preview to see how Smith adapted Forster’s opening chapter that begins “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” (yep, with email transcripts). A reread might be in order.

As for which adaptation is better, please stand by: a DVD of the 1992 Howards End is on hold for me at the library. Don’t hold your breath though, The Forsyte Saga (2002) is one of my favourite historical mini-series ever!

*I do not actually plan to stop obsessing about the Brontës

20 Books of Summer check in and catch up

We’re well past the halfway point, and I’ve read six and reviewed four of my 20 Books of Summer. This is pretty average for me, though I feel like something’s shifted – like I might be coming out of whatever reading slump/brain fog I fell into at the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve read 31 books so far this year, and struggled to get past forty for the whole year in 2020-2022. I’m not sure why I’m on an upward trajectory, as I’m busier now (back in the office part time, kids in activities etc.) and my own health has gone downhill in the last year (maybe it’s ageing, maybe it’s perimenopause) but I’m not going to question it too much. 

The challenge is going well: I’ve read some new favourites, built up my 1001 Books tally, and had the distinct pleasure of reading a book that has long been recommended to me by a friend, and loving it.

But this challenge is *really* about reviewing! To catch up and clear the decks, here are some mini-reviews to tide you over until I write a longer one.

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell

Apparently there is some DNF discourse going on over on Booktube, and it might have started with this video, but I first came to it in Brian’s video about the dangers of DNFing in which he mentioned Tomb of Sand. He makes the obvious point that a book is more than its first 50 pages or first chapter – it might get better! – as well as the more interesting point that maybe you shouldn’t impose your preconceived notions about a book – maybe it’s supposed to be slow or hard to understand or whatever! Maybe that’s the point! And you’re going to miss the point if you can’t go in with an open mind. 

I came close to closing Tomb of Sand several times, and had I not a) paid full price and b) been invested in the International Booker Prize, I probably would have done so after the first 100 or 200 pages. And I wouldn’t have been wrong! This is the rare case where I didn’t get a lot out of an IBP book. But I will say the failure is at least partly mine. Tomb of Sand is written in a stream of consciousness style that reminded me of Ducks, Newburyport, though if Ducks is a 10 on the stream of consciousness scale, Tomb of Sand is maybe a 6. But that consciousness is steeped in a place and culture that was so unfamiliar, I felt like I couldn’t be swept along. I was taken out of it every time I didn’t understand a reference, which was often. So while I agree with Brian that you can’t go into a book with a rigid idea of what you want it to be, and that you should think before DNFing after a few pages, I probably should’ve trusted my gut after 200, 400, hell 600 pages of this one.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell

It took me more than twenty years to get through the major works of the Brontës. I hope I can pick up the pace when it comes to the minor, biographical, and critical works. I started here and I’m glad I did. This biography is devastating and intimate. Gaskell is far from an objective observer. She was Charlotte Bronte’s friend and colleague, and was commissioned to write this book by Charlotte’s father. Various introductory texts will tell you how Gaskell suppressed unsavoury aspects of Charlotte’s life, and you can tell she’s being awfully careful in parts. She lets Charlotte speak for the most part, quoting her letters at length, but interjects with extremely evocative descriptions of Charlotte’s world, understanding the time and place in a way no modern biographer can. Gaskell’s selectiveness would probably be framed as dishonesty, but for modern readers of this work, it’s one way we can attempt to understand what it meant to be a woman with ambition and genius in a hostile society, and the compromises those women had to make.

Next up, I am reading the very juicy Howards End. I’m only disappointed that I can’t find the movie adaptation streaming anywhere.