steveatwaywords's reviews
1212 reviews

Parvulescu's book is one of the more unique reads on time travel that I have met, not because the opening scenes of a future traveler's arrival in late 19th century Romania isn't gripping, but that the book pretty consistently thwarted my expectations every moment following it. The beauty of Life Begins on Friday isn't in the time travel story, it isn't even in the whodunnit mystery which loosely wends its way through the narrative.

No, it's about, I think, letting ourselves settle into the community we find ourselves in, about meeting people and appreciating their complexities and needs, about navigating where we are and thereby understanding who we are. I don't say this as a spoiler for the book but as a guide to reading it.

Life Begins takes its time, sweeps us across and through a good dozen characters at length, takes us through the thinking and priorities of the Bucharest of a century ago, their absurd comedies and easy tragedies, about the propriety of leaving cards of calling, of messages not delivered, of designing the reported news of the day, even of assassination plots and national symbolic scandals, of characters struggling and living richly, and of the treacheries of love. And each character along the way is slowly unveiled, is offered to us in intimacy.

Oh, and there is the time travel part, too, I guess. Almost an afterthought for all of us. 

So let's start with the strangely polarizing reviews around this book. There is no small number of dismissive one-sentence summary-judgments about its value. I suspect that this is because of a shallow bar of expectation: "all books about Emily Dickinson must be simple biography or academic analysis, and the author must take a distant backseat to present the unarguable facts." This is, of course, nonsense.

Personal scholarship, uniquely poets writing of poets, hybrid forms of genre (here creative memoir and biography/analysis) are all established and sound means into understanding their subjects. The notion of impartiality or objectivity in analysis (quaint as it is) is difficult to defend. As individual readers, we each phenomenologically wrestle with the texts before us, discover what we ourselves find (layered on top of the archaeology of our own reading experiences), and share it as much for its process of meaning-making as for what it discovers.

In Howe's case, that often means an analysis that at times waxes poetic itself, because--stay with me, doubters and haters--it is entirely possible that the subtlety and complexity of poetic meaning itself defies common exposition.   Howe embraces this, and what results is not  another dry, academic, and largely wrong-minded judgment of Dickinson's life and works (we truly have enough of these, really); instead it is a sometimes associative, figurative, thoroughly-researched redemption of the work of one of America's most powerful poets. 

Howe accomplishes the redemption in the first two chapters, demonstrating how the historical textbook portrayals of Dickinson fulfill patriarchal expectations for an unmarried domestic poet. She argues cleanly and clearly that Dickinson's "intellectual conscience" is not to be under-estimated, reveals in plain terms the multi-valent roles of the omnipresent dash and the not arbitrary capitalization. If that means a passage like the following must be itself as poetry, juxtaposition of concept, in order to apply it by analogy, it's a gift:

Yes, expect some passages like this (and linger there) and with this lingering approach the text assembled together from various sources to see what Dickinson herself experienced. Then, when we look again at her verse . . . 

And, after those first two chapters, the final lengthy and extraordinary examination on "My life had stood -- a Loaded Gun" in the light/shadow of Browning's "Childe Roland"!  Yes, Howe reaches richly into American Calvinism, into Manifest Destiny, into the Civil War, into her anxious relationship with Higginson and others, but she also breathes relationships between the texts which Dickinson had close: Shakespeare, Cooper, Brown, E. Bronte, her newspapers. Instead of drawing academically-tidy irrational "causal" relationships, Howe offers sensibilities, circumstances, and that ever-elusive rendering of meaning which permeates all verse. 

Readers considering this text are wise to open-mindedly see the architecture Howe works with, to read the book (as with all texts) as it is presented instead of a lazy tradition of prejudgment. Howe sets her own infrastructure in place early on: Stein, Cixous, Gilbert & Gumar, others. She says plainly as she writes of Thoreau's Concord River, the river that will carry him into time: "Emily Dickinson is my emblematic Concord River."  From a powerful poet writing and redeeming a historical genius, her mission and approach could not be more plain.

Carter--famous for his own series of sword-&-sorcery works largely steps away from his own ego-driven talks to offer an historical overview of sources from ancient to modern which largely fed the Tolkien universe. (And that slam about his ego is hardly mine alone; he does in fact, close the book with a few sentences about how his own upcoming works--never completed--will echo Tolkien.)

The only real critique I have of this thin book is that about 1/3 of it is relatively useless. He spends four fairly lengthy chapters simply summarizing the four main books for us; does he presume that some of his audience are interested in Tolkien without having read a thing about him? I skimmed these, finding nothing original there.

What is valuable, though, is that historical tracing. While the real Tolkien nerd may find interest in the origins of names like Gandalf and Thorin, places like Numenor or Mirkwood, broken swords and eternal trees--all of this requiring no small amount of digging in pre-internet 1969--what I found most interesting is the tracing of the historical hero and fantasy epic across ages and regions. This makes itself for a great reading/source list for those seeking early incarnations of literary imagination. More, Carter is not afraid to share which are most valuable to today's readers and which may be skipped over for their tedium or poor translation. 

So while Tolkien's work stands as a pillar dividing fantasy into Before and After JRR in the 20th century, it hardly exists in isolation. Linguist and scholar Tolkien intentionally worked to modernize regional mythology (much as Wagner did), but more, Tolkien inherited a centuries-old tradition or infrastructure of epic works which, appropriately, his Lord of the Rings sits atop.  Everything which follows (A.JRR) are efforts to recapture his genius or to make their own space alongside. 

Howe takes "found poetry" to a new level, assembling fragments and her own thinking into provocative frames. Some of these lean closer to display art than poetry (indeed, pieces of the title poem have been framed as wall art), and in fact the entire work has somehow been released with musician David Grubbs on vinyl (and streaming).  But that deserves its own review.

I was most compelled and inspired by the opening length prose poem, "Since." Slipping through time and across figurations of language and poetry, this (I think) autobiographical reverie is haunting in its connections and, in her own words, "chthonic echo-signals."  Now what does that mean? I think, that as the words are invoked, arranged, patterned, and deferred, we sense evidence, markers, of not just undertone between them but of something deeper still, underworld.

And so "reading" this book is not exactly what we are about (though the final poem of three, "Space Permitting" is accessible enough), but perhaps intoning, examining for installation, or submerging.

This is not an artist flippantly tossing fragments onto paper--I am currently reading her famous My Emily Dickinson which powerfully redraws our cliched tropes about this brilliant poet--Howe is onto something much larger than mere narrative or traditional verse can tolerate.  

A delightfully fresh story that first appears as a hybrid of old tropes, Nimona surprised me over and over from beginning to end.

Initially dubious about anything birthed from a "mere" web comic, I almost completely failed to anticipate that the narrative omissions were well-planned, that a small detail in an early panel would evolve later in the series. Perhaps I've been jaded by so many graphic novels which fail to have a unified narrative across their larger series. But Stevenson's "simple" cyber-fantasy government conspiracy story is more about friendship, othering, ethics, loyalty, and love.

More, the story sits in some tension to its plainly-rendered graphics. No character is static or one-dimensional and each gets their turn (though sometimes too brief) at revealing their struggles. Will all the relationships and conflicts work out by their end? Do we receive all the explanations for a "proper" denouement? Not in ways the reader is likely to anticipate, but in Nimona's resolution, we leave almost entirely satisfied. 

A terrific pre-teen read with plenty of prejudices to explode along the way.

A lot wrong with a book like this, as many reviewers discuss. Ready is pompous, self-assured, factually wrong, in need of an editor (is an introduction or conclusion requisite?), and so overarching in his praise of Tolkien and dismissal of contemporaries and predecessors that one wonders on what his arguments are based. Has he read Tolkien? It's anyone's guess. 

Still. . . . Still, we might find in Ready's rhetoric the traditional British erudite littérateur, waxing in the parlor one evening, about the power of this work of fantasy. In such a venue, he hardly need do more than expound, has few demands accept to mesmerize through words. And he does.  This is not the plain-spoken backgrounder on Tolkien of Carter, Kocher, or Chance, but one who presumes a certain aesthetic sensibility about our beloved fantasy epic. 

Both reveling and highly speculative late in his career, yes, Ready is off-putting to Tolkien fans who seek to learn author or trilogy facts. I'm largely with them. On the other hand, a sometimes poetic and broadening take on a subject that is too often pedantic trivia skirmishes. 

So many reasons to appreciate this excellent book by Amanda Leduc. While it serves as a fitting and straightforward discussion of its subject--the role of fairy tales and their impact on individual and cultural behavior around disability--it is also part memoir, allowing us into her own medical history and social interactions meeting that impact.  The result is a near-perfect hybrid of personal scholarship, carrying us richly into each sphere and forging the truth of its thesis.

It's little wonder, when we see them systemically across history, from Perrault and Grimm to Disney and Pixar, that the folk and fairy tale make ample and denigrating use of disability. Characters born differently-abled, those by misadventure, or even punished by some moral justice, are too often aligned with the unnatural, the pitied, or the villainous. Happy endings are found extensively around further punishment or, in the case of protagonist, cures. The end result is that in virtually no instance do our childhood tales make space for normalizing otherness in society. 

Leduc surveys dozens of these tales, examining at length their lessons and effects on us. We misunderstand potential solutions to creating healthy social spaces (for instance, "curing" people so that they can better fit what already exists rather than recognizing how limiting our spaces are); and the disabled struggle to understand themselves as worthy of those spaces (having been inundated by heroes and princesses of hyper-real beauty). We see the language of these misunderstandings even in the medical records of Leduc's own doctors (which she shares at some length with commentary). 

Yes, we see more and more policies create accommodations for some who with different physical and mental capacities. But none of these address some of the roots of our initial ignorance: that our traditional stories have already trained us from childhood to our own ignorance, our own failures to understand.

The only area that Leduc's book falls short is in its own brevity. This is an important opening, an introduction, to the discussion, but it has hardly been explored fully yet. Hopefully we'll see more from her and others on this topic. 

Another brief, tight, tragic novel from the master of rural Americana. Wharton's Summer, similar to her better-known Ethan Frome, in some ways surpasses it, mostly in nuance and theme. While Ethan's love of Maddie is overtly tragic both in conception and in realization, here Charity's infatuation with Lucius is not equally foolish, and the role of the older gatekeeper Mr. Royall hardly as stark as Zenobia Frome.

What results is what Wharton herself called "the hot Ethan," and the sensuous details of the rural summer are played to the extreme (again in contrast to the near-eternal winter of Frome). We have a petulant and almost deliberately ignorant Charity Royall who is difficult to respect; still, her desire to love who she chooses (especially one her own generation) is just enough. And if readers know Wharton at all, they know from the start that this will not work out happily--not a spoiler.

The conclusion, however, is fairly controversial, and not because it imitates the grotesque, almost absurd fate of Ethan Frome. No, it is far more realistic for all that, but what I found most interesting is the complexity of Charity's guardian, Mr. Royall, which is never fully revealed through the narrative, yet is ever-present in the limited glimpses we are offered of it through our teen protagonist Charity. Almost enough to make one question, if this is tragedy, then whose?

This is definitely an under-appreciated and evocative read.

Vonnegut can hardly fail to entertain and provoke, and this late work in his omnibus career is no exception, unique that it is from his novels.

This is a collection of short anecdotal essays (collected with an artist he has collaborated with for the project) that examine seemingly dozens of topics: the nature of humor, meeting people, death, political nonsense, war, schooling, buying a stamp, aspiration, the creative process, and generational gaps. Each is written with the same conversational and unthreatening tone readers have come to love from him, the kind of ironic tension he has learned to build so affably: we imagine the friendly uncle with his arm around our shoulders good-naturedly confiding the genuine misery we all experience. 

Fortunately, for the most part, Uncle Kurt is laughing (happily, resignedly, sadly, and bitterly all at once), and so we laugh with him, comforted and discomforted. After all, how many choices do we have? So sit down with this elderly Vonnegut for an hour or two and appreciate his wisdom; time well spent.

First, there is an audio book version of this title, which I do not recommend, not because it isn't well done, but because Chomsky's argument and language are not as approachable without the written text in front of you. I went back to get that text after trying the audio alone!

Second, if you don't have a background in linguistics (even a basic one), you will likely find this incredibly dense, even off-putting. Chomsky presumes from his use of acronyms, jargon, and precise style that we all are already somewhat familiar with the basics of language theory and cognitive research. These essays--together fairly brief as a book--are nonetheless demanding of close attention.

After settling in, however, we are in for a treat of his insights, delivered with the confidence of research and great reflection, to link speech to cognition, cognition to mind, and mind to body. For many reasons, our human ability to articulate what we know is limited both by what our bodies are capable of sensing (even through metaphor) and what the words we have formed from those physical brains are limited to. The consequences of such a delineated theory are multiple, both in terms of how we understand historical debates (from Plato to Piaget) and how we understand our society's construction. 

All of these are the subjects of Chomsky's brief but encompassing examination. Over and over I said aloud to the text, "Wait, slow down. Let me turn that over for three years." Sadly, it's possible that some readers of this text see its brevity as equivalent to the time it takes to consider it. But no worries: Chomsky wrote quite a bit more that expands on it!  

This was my first book-length read of Chomsky (only previously having read essays and read interviews). Yes, he is worth more time. And yes, as humbling as his ideas are to my notion of imagination, I will make more.