Some Thoughts on the Books I've Read Recently

A goal of mine for 2022 is to finish a book a week. So far, I have done so several weeks in the year. Below are some thoughts on those books.

Week 5: Caliban's War, James S.A. Corey: In this follow-up to Leviathan Rising (Week 1), our solar-system-spanning cast of characters adds two more competence-porn deliverers, ramps up the tension about the Captain Kirk guy losing his moral mojo (and his relationship—uh-oh!) and continues the series' somewhat lamentable trend of ending a book with a vaguely magical twist that may be a turnoff to some. They sure are for me. Third volume is, I'm told, on its way from the library.

Week 7: The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel: Interesting "how we live now" social-issue novel, sort of like if Hannah Arendt had called it "the ennui of evil" and knew the word "relatable". For some reason, I found the first 100 or so pages hard to get into, but by the end I was fully "invested" (significant look). Makes the economic emotional (or connects the historical to the biographical, as C. Wright Mills would say).

Week 7: Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner: Memoir of a young woman going home to care for a problematic mother who's dying of cancer. Obviously not an easy read emotionally, but an interesting one, and a prose experience a little like a big Korean meal, with lots of different flavors and textures, from infodump to travelogue to anecdote to poetry.

Idle thought for later: Memoirs have weird shapes; the stories they tell often leave me unsatisfied, and I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug (c.f. my lengthy unwritten letter to Harper's circa 2003 about their memoirs under discussion being boring because they were written by boring people doing boring things and recommending they read / review Cometbus and Burn Collector instead).

Week 9: The First Day of Spring, Nancy Tucker: Hellaciously intense novel of poverty, violence, willpower, and so on. Very good, very harsh. Does include some violence by and against children, so it's certainly not for everybody, but I found it extremely good and quite rewarding. Recommended.

Previous entries:

1. Week 0 - Week 4: https://alcindorblock.blogspot.com/2022/02/some-thoughts-on-some-books-ive-read.html