mmcloe's reviews
232 reviews

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix

5.0

Oh good lord this is permanently etched into my brain

Thinking about the burden of bureaucracy and suffocation through detail, about hauntings, about the Nakba and the ongoing genocide, about the ecological destruction central to settler colonialism

Required, required, required reading for all Americans
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Running Dog by Don DeLillo

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adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

My first pre-White Noise Dellilo and it's fascinating to see him work through the conceptual and stylistic quirks that make his writing so distinct. I think this one was a little muddled and a little too many characters but it was nevertheless a really engaging and damning exploration of the way that governmental, corporate, media, and erotic heterosexual institutions are all increasingly indistinguishable in the wake of the Vietnam War. The US is a militaristic profit machine with a lot of psychosexual hangups and Delillo draws attention to this oddness really well. I also appreciated the early mentions of surveillance capitalism that would come to define the following decades into the present. 
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Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It was OK! It was a little too rooted in tropes (moon colonies, time travel, simulation) to be much more than a slightly elevated sci-fi story but I liked that the day to day of the future wasn't radically different than the present. 

Pandemic parts were a little dorky 
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Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place by Jessica Cory, Laura Wright

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I skimmed through a handful of chapters that weren't particularly relevant to my work or theoretical interests but I dove deep into a few others. Chapters by Pendygraft and Vernon were especially helpful, as was the introduction by Cory (an academic friend of mine!) and Wright. 

The book does a good job at troubling the notion of Appalachia as a kind of ur-rural for the US. It's a complex region and ecology and many of the contributors to the collection reflect that. 
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories by John Cheever

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medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Cheever's first (kinda) collection of stories and while many of them aren't too revelatory outside of an anthropological capacity, there's a few little gems like "The Enormous Radio," "Torch Song," "The Hartleys," and "The Sutton Place Story" that showcase the sort of suburban imaginary realism that would appear throughout his later work. 
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir K. Puar

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced
One of the single most essential analyses of Israel's ongoing genocide in Palestine. Goes through the eugenic impulses that underscore every part of the Zionist project, from warfare-as-torture to bizarre pro-natalist actions to the restriction of mobility on personal and geographic levels. 

At the same time, the book levies queerness and the abolition of settler colonial states as a locus of radical confrontation and departure from oppression. 

I encourage anyone unsure about what's happening in Palestine right now to read this cover to cover. It's dense but deeply important. 
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith

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adventurous challenging emotional funny informative medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

What a gift this novel is. The turn of the century is a baffling and uncertain and unstable time, infinitely more so (I imagine) for immigrants and the children of immigrants living in the corpse of a still warm empire. I like to imagine Chalfen's rat as a kind of metaphor and cipher that everyone reckons with in some way or another as they stumble through the world. How can something modified, changing, surveilled, tiny, futuristic, sick, and eternal all exist in one little assemblage? Quite good stuff. 
Blackouts by Justin Torres

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Absolutely sublime, just go and read this it's one of the best novels I've read in ages. Archives, memory, queerness, desire, yes; but also hauntings, art as liberation, art as trap, art as object. 
The novel itself is also a beautiful noun to hold - the subtle brown text and the images are simply beautiful. A reflection of the world and yet another object in it, to paraphrase Borges. 

In excellent company with Shola Von Reinhold, Pola Oloixarac, Saidiya Hartman, Catherine Lacey, Samuel Delany, and the like. 
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad fast-paced
Absolutely essential reading always and right now - shocking how much has stayed the same in the almost 2 decades since this was written. 

This is also a great read: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/no-human-being-can-exist/
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Hangman by Maya Binyam

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Just so so so so good. Like the titular game, I read this book to be about all of the futile ways that people try to guesswork their way through what life can mean and symbolize,  if anything is actually there or not. In the context of migration and globalization, the novel talks back really strangely (in a good way) to the expectations that people from the metropole expect of immigration stories. I'm reminded a lot of Noor Naga's "If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English" in that sense. 

Also the prose was just excellent - a little bit of Camus with some more modern sensibilities.