Drunk Book Reports, Winter 2017
(FYI this post is not at all about games. This is about the books I read this winter when I was too stressed out to play games.)
Rejected Princesses
Jason Porath
This charming book uplifted my spirits. How nice, a children’s book filled with brave women (many of color!) having important adventures, despite the near infinity of troglodytes and their wagging fingers. How nice it would be for this to feel not nearly so topical. Ho ho, we’d chortle, a group of powerful women drinking something fruity, remembering with rosy fondness and a smidge of superiority the distant past in which we might have been discouraged from following our dreams. What brave souls they were! Pass the Sangria! And then we would drink in our sunglasses, in joyous celebration and not existential despair.
Things being as they are, it’s hard not to notice that most of these women died, horrifically, far too soon, with little remembrance. Feels like the takeaway is, keep your head down, little girl, and live to enjoy the apocalypse like everyone else. Or don’t, and maybe in 500 years you, too, could get a cute cartoon representation of your (youthful, skinny, drawn-beautiful) self stirring up mischief. Oh that mischievous Boudicca.
Also, why the hell does the author have to be a male software engineer. I’m tired.
Underground Airlines
Ben Winters
I don’t know how to write about this book in the age of Hair Twitler. The premise is that slavery still exists in the US. The premise, sideways, is that it never really stopped existing. It works brutally well. I don’t know why the terror of speculative fiction works better than reality, which is plenty terrible as is. But this book would not have worked without the extra step. That step recasts it as horrifying fiction, not guilty present. It’s a lot easier to condemn fictional Americans, who are obviously godawful, than to recognize that we are awful too. It’s too good a book, it scares you shivering.
(ps why is this book also written by a white man?!?!)
Every Anxious Wave
Mo Daviau
This reads like a first novel trying SO HARD but it makes it, the little sucker, and it’s a pretty fun ride! This kinda sad 40-something-old dude (why are they always so sad??) discovers a time travel portal in his closet and, because the book needs a nostalgic and dorky conceit, only uses it to visit concerts he wishes he’d seen. The fact that he doesn’t go back to 1876 Bayreuth makes his lame-ass priorities abundantly clear, but soon he’s boning a gothy, chubby astrophysicist in an effort to recover his best friend, who’s accidentally been sent back to 970 Manahatta and keeps sending texts about delicious raw fish. The twists and turns solidly twist and turn, like one of those old-timey wooden roller-coasters, but the people are all so performatively gross, it keeps whacking you over the head with its “debut novel”-ness. Look! Goth astrophysicist is so real, she’s fat (which he appreciates, sexually, but she is insecure about, GIRL YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL), her eyeliner is smeary, she’s survived a vicious trauma, and she farts all the time (but it’s hot? Apparently?) but hey, a fun book, and Daviau makes you care enough about the people that all the conceit fades away a bit. Great plane reading.
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
I don’t understand books with alienated, absent characters who share no connection with their families or friends. People stick to you way too hard. Annoying, shitty people for sure, but people nonetheless, texting you for coffee and asking if you sent in their grade yet and wanting to know if you have dinner plans. These book characters and their husbands seem so absent. They get married for no reasons beyond a silkily worded literary one: “he thought she had something missing, so he married her to find out what.” Bitch, no one gets married for that. Then he never loves her at all, paints flowers on her preternatural/disturbed/awesomely nude sister, then fucks said sister on the pretext of creating a film for art show. Why? Why is this book so riveting? The plot is awful, the characters suck, the theme is so heavy handed, but the words make silence, create silence, and you read forward to lean into that void. Has Sheryl Sandberg ruined the phrase lean in forever? Can’t we just be swans, imperiously leaning out and pecking anyone who gets close? I will be a squat bitch of a swan.
I liked the book. The vegetarian. Would have preferred more cannibalism, but nevertheless.
The Sellout
Paul Beatty
When the protagonist gets shot in the guts, he talks about closure. How black people don't need “closure.” It’s a white concept, the idea of something amorphous closing. That’s what Amfortas needs too—the wound literally to close. Schliessen, not heilen. Beatty writes his main character as a man far past giving a fuck, but that’s not radical enough; his protagonist lives fully in a world where fucks are not a thing a reasonable person gives. It’s a post-fucks world. He’s fully detached, an auto-didact with more than enough resources from books and brains to not be hurt anymore. He enslaves a man out of kindness towards him. He re-segregates his school system so the children in his community have something to be proud of: their school is “No Anglos,” masking how the lack of white kids is entirely economic. The best defense is a good offense, yeah? If you don’t want us, well, we didn’t want you anyway. Look at our sign. He spends his supreme court hearing entirely high on weed, which he smokes while his lawyer gives a closing statement. His brilliant, bitter girlfriend drives a bus and reads Camus. Worrying about nonsense is for white people, worrying about better-than and perfect and doing everything right is for dumbass white people who think that’s an option. It’s not. Shine bright and hard and spine-covered.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter M. Miller
Well I fell asleep listening to this book several times so I’m not sure whether or not the wandering Jew lookalike in the book did, in fact, live as many centuries as he bragged. If the world ended, how long before the new dark ages passed? How soon before the new nuclear war and the cycle repeated itself? One of the characters towards the end says “Sure, they destroyed the earth over nuclear war before, but now they know better. They see the effects of a nuclear holocaust 2000 years ago in the deformed children who keep being born, which they send out to the desert. They wouldn’t do it again. They’re not crazy.” But in their faces one sees something more terrifying than a malevolent sparkle, because evil is not best executed with hatred but with a dead-eyed, apathetic sneer. They destroy the earth, again, as narratively planned, because of course they would, they already did, they always will. Whelp, that's enough for tonight.
Us
David Nicholls
What on earth remains so endearing about a hapless, middle aged man whose wife doesn’t love him anymore? She doesn’t love him anymore for a reason, people. We have to assume that behind the current grand romantic gesture (a massive trip through Europe which will Bring The Family Together Again TM) lurks half a lifetime of hogging the couch and politely “helping” her with the chores rather than fucking doing them for himself like a goddamn adult. It’s not babysitting if it’s your own kid, friend, and I don’t care how many semantic hoops you jump through to prove that he’s “always been more hers than mine.” Maybe that’s because you’re an endearing loser and she sounds awesome. But he can’t manage to be more awesome, no one’s ever made him and he’s clearly at the limits of his abilities just planning this awful trip (only 2 nights in Amsterdam? Traveling 8 hours every third day? This was never going to be relaxing, buddy, even without all the snippy British squabbles). I was cheered that she, indeed, left him at the end and got back together with her wild child first love and our dude’s gonna go date a nice Swedish dentist.
