it's that time of year! reading roundup, film feelings, operatunities, cultural conclusions, judgy judgements, the usual unsubstantiated personal opinion!
books first. this year i did pretty well on reading more (43 in total), but quality was few and far between. there has to be a better way to decide when to give up on reading something that doesn't catch my attention or interest. only hindsight is useful.. which is useless.
8 memoirish - i can't seem to stop seeing this genre as easy reading, with mixed results. half of them were pretty damn good, particularly Notes on a Foreign Country (Suzy Hansen), When in French (Lauren Collins) and in my prize for most unexpectedly nuanced, Jill Soloway's She Wants It. The Lonely City (Olivia Laing) was a very interesting beast, musings on psychology, lived experience intercut with art history and biography.
15 non-fiction focused on special areas of interest. most alarming - Why We Sleep. largest and most edifying yet depressing, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. most inspiring - The Evolution of Beauty and The Wonder of Birds. in another life i might become an ornithologist. i fulfilled my goal from a year ago of starting to learn and understand chinese history. i particularly liked Mary Gaitskill's collected review/criticism (Somebody with a Little Hammer), i'll read anything that she writes.
12 traditional fiction - my harshest judgement is reserved for this category, where i increasingly can't stand navel-gazing contemporary literature about the minutiae of the titular life (The Idiot, Elif Batuman [who wrote a fascinating longform article on the japanese rent-a-relative industry]), this whole genre of autofiction. i write my own in my journal every night and it's more entertaining! nor do I enjoy historical fiction (Pachinko, Min Jin Lee) anymore, sorry not sorry, everyone raved about that one. everything is always telegraphed in advance, character stereotypes abound, i find myself skim-reading just to confirm my plot predictions. this is not to say that a traditional love story (Normal People, Sally Rooney) or myth transposition (Everything Under, Daisy Johnson) can't be written well in new lyrical ways, but sometimes it's more fun to blow shit up and blur the boundaries between waking and sleeping as in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Otessa Moshfegh), which was particularly disorienting to read in bed while falling asleep. i was disappointed by Philip Pullman's plotless canoe adventure La Belle Sauvage and also, typically for the booker prize, the first graphic novel included on the shortlist (Sabrina, Nick Drnaso), where just because something is a commentary on its time and media (social and populist) doesn't mean it's interesting or make up for the fact that the characters are barely distinguishable and everything looks like it happens inside a cardboard box. "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all" - clearly i don't hew to this view, on the mostly anonymous internet, but i don't like to only write positive things because that just contributes to publication bias. scientific method and all that.
conclusions: i'll take provocative writing with brilliant turns of phrase for now, thanks. i'm looking forward to the next books by Otessa Moshfegh, Nell Zink, when oh when is Alison Bechdel going to release hers?
films:
my worst movie experience of the year - i love a good documentary and also i love public libraries. Ex Libris: the New York Public Library went for over 3 hours (we walked out at the 2:45 mark) and lacked any sort of narrative structure or aesthetic interest, with way too many administrative meetings and american self-congratulations. i liked where they showed the automated processing of returned items, and that was about it.
i saw a lot of blockbusters this year and they were pretty much mostly forgettable. Isle of Dogs was good, i do like wes anderson. rewatching the royal tenenbaums though - it was not as good as i recalled from 14 or so years ago.
Phantom Thread was pretty great, all interiors and crunching and eating and jockeying.
hands down the best film i saw was also the most recent, The Favourite. it was in the smallest theatre in the most multiplexy of black concrete-walled lightning bolt-carpeted cinemas, and it was great. i haven't seen something where what felt like a small like-minded community of audience members laughed so much at genuinely wicked/funny/black dramedy without ruining it. throw in deadpan barbed verbal jousting, excellent shooting outfits, hefty emotional undercurrents and associated nuanced acting, unpinnable/flexible sexualities, baroque organ/harpsichord soundtrack, i haven't even gotten to the strong female characters yet. absurdist period drama, i'm here for it.
(shoutout to the moment in its sibling film The Lobster and the pony with the beautiful hair. i'm still laughing about it.)
i watched the most TV this year that i have ever, i think. Westworld was cerebrally entertaining, at least it kept us discussing and conjecturing and wending a way through all the plot convolutions. Killing Eve and Maniac are probably my picks of the year. i also watched a lot of Parts Unknown and other food-related tv, RIP anthony bourdain and jonathan gold, sigh.
the classics:
why is lucia di lammermoor, a tragic opera, in mostly major keys? is this a bel canto thing? i tried to expand my horizons and felt like laughing the entire time. Jessica Pratt was great, though, a rare treat in sydney. i would love to see this opera with a black comedy production.
ho ho ho this year i went to glyndebourne, on a trouser role pilgrimage (frankly, i wouldn't do it for anything less). it is definitely the fanciest pants thing i have ever done, trying to not stand out too much among the black tie garden picnic crowd who thought that a bling mcmansion fluoro set for Der Rosenkavalier was just not traditional enough. i think i finally understand what it means to see operas when you already know and love them, to hope they will surpass your experiences and expectations. who will be the next mezzo Giulio Cesare after Sarah Connolly hangs up her golden chestplate? that opera is just hit after hit after hit. to see Kate Lindsey in her first outing as Octavian in those sublime stretched Strauss moments was very special, i hope she has several more to come.
a final highlight, also in london, was seeing John Eliot Gardiner with the english baroque soloists and monteverdi choir do several Bach cantatas, ewig in dulci jubilo indeed.
till next year! let us put our phones down and appreciate everything else.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Monday, January 1, 2018
art and context, aka 2017: a year in reading and other things
much as the catholic archbishop of sydney mourned 2017 as an annus horribilis, trite as it may seem, so has my year in reading been. for different reasons, yet not unrelated. notwithstanding but acknowledging the underlying backdrop of a hairsprayed orange wreaking global havoc, we can both (and i would not put myself in the same sentence as the catholic archbishop of sydney otherwise) point to the socio-geopolitical climate: as a local example, 'progress', though not without unnecessary trauma and damage (the same sex marriage debate here in australia) can be lamented on both our parts, for myself the way in which it occurred of course. ugh!! means, ends, all that? smug gloating by 'leaders' afterwards. horrible. streams of obscenities issuing internally and in the presence of friends. furthermore, ignorance truly is bliss. a full 30% of the eligible voting population chose to actively deny equality to others on a symbolic point! (by which i mean alternative lifestyles are happening no matter what, this was just legality catching up to real life.) the flip is that 50% chose to actively support equality. which of those figures is less depressing? some things are just better left unknown, but that requires leadership and empathy for the least defended, both of which have been lacking in australian politics for a while.
i have always been slightly morose in my optimism, but new depths of cynicism have been reached - it's not just that it's a shitshow, but that it has always been thus; we are all muddling along in barely overlapping venn diagrams thinking that the system is one way or another and if only we got our act together etc etc... yeah, right. like in mean girls, *light-bulb* the system does not exist! western democracy is oligarchy, institutions/constitutions hold no power, meritocracy has been co-opted by 'communists' and communism is a dirty word. the press needs a hippocratic oath. who is the press?
with books, as always, let us begin with the middling to bad.
i have always been slightly morose in my optimism, but new depths of cynicism have been reached - it's not just that it's a shitshow, but that it has always been thus; we are all muddling along in barely overlapping venn diagrams thinking that the system is one way or another and if only we got our act together etc etc... yeah, right. like in mean girls, *light-bulb* the system does not exist! western democracy is oligarchy, institutions/constitutions hold no power, meritocracy has been co-opted by 'communists' and communism is a dirty word. the press needs a hippocratic oath. who is the press?
ahem, sorry not sorry about that political rant. but as a person interested in how the world works, it can't be ignored if i only blog once a year. all that to say that reading fiction has felt trite and superficial to me for most of the year, until i realised again that appreciating the art of fiction writing is a rewarding and balancing balm and should be applied liberally to:
a. offset the detrimental effects of current geopolitics and reading about it and history, sometimes in the form of books but mostly longform things on a phone :/
b. avoid the trap of reading nonfiction of unmemorable quality, which i did rather too much of this year.
with books, as always, let us begin with the middling to bad.
i did not learn my lesson from last year, and read too many (10) memoirs (see b. above). i learned about people butttt maybe no one that interesting. Ariel Levy's The Rules Do Not Apply did not wow me like i expected, having read its central and most moving chapter previously published online. i liked Bill Hayes' Insomniac City but definitely prefer Oliver Sacks in his professional writing rather than in memoir form. i did enjoy Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker, or rather the deep dive into an area of expertise. in that vein then, my favourite of the year is David Sedaris' Theft By Finding, if i can count slightly tidied and published diaries as memoir, because yes, he's a funny guy, has had a varied and interesting life, but really it demonstrated the honing of his craft. very close second is Myriam Gurba's Mean, as an example of the heights of such craft.
the other non-fiction i read this year fell only into two other categories: russia (2) and psychoanalysis (3). i have and will continue to read most things that Masha Gessen writes, and my dad has piqued my interest in pre-20th century chinese history. Damion Searl's The Inkblots was a fascinating look at hermann rorschach the person and psychoanalyst, the art and sensitivity/specificity of the actual rorschach test, its latter-day bastardisation and usage in popular culture, quite far from the original. the other highlight, which i need to revisit, was Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (pub. 1981). the performance of which in real life is also very inaccessible to the average person. we need to invest in mental health, well, treatment for more than just the most severe at a start, then for everyone who needs it, then prevention and health maintenance for all. see "muddling along" above.. i have only endless ellipses. not quite yet resignation.
in an effort to place more emphasis on fiction, here are most of the 11 that i read this year, somewhat in order of reading, with snarknotes as per usual:
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus - yeahhh as the first of its kind to say, women can write like this and be seen as serious writers, sure. otherwise, no. (and yet, gasp on that last page, ugh!) vacillation/would not read again
What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell; A Greater Music, Bae Suah (trans. Deborah Smith) - i read these at opposite ends of the year, but found similarities in the internal voice of a quiet person, the role of memory in that voice and the remove of living in a different country as an adult perhaps forcing that quietness. classical music throughout the latter book, which i like to think i understood as part of an internal monologue. what do people who don't know that world think of this book? '...our hands trembled and our ears seemed to pick up the sound of our hearts breaking, not as a clean crack but as a wrenching of fibers...'
Purity, Jonathan Franzen - i liked him more before the internet, there i said it. does he have a neurosis about the internet? being known for not liking it, yet having it play such large obvious roles in his recent books, j franz do you have an inferiority complex about the internet? other than that, money, too much of a complicated yet tidy plot, typical franzen female and male characters, i don't really care for it.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien - fictionalised 20th century china, a page-turner with a family book myth as the hook. dragged in the end. see above, pre-20th century chinese history.
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney - i liked this in some ways, it reminded me of emily gould's friendship, but also some parts i just didn't care about. at all. as a portrait of a contemporaneous young female person, valid, but also eye-rolling slash wish it wasn't like this.
Swing Time, Zadie Smith - this one grounded me back to the search for quality in fiction at the end of the year. pondering what it means to live and to be better in relation to oneself or others, demonstrated via a complicated yet tidy plot, not completely spelled out, modern with the impact of omnipresent screens in our lives. j franz you wish you could be zadie smith. 'She kissed her teeth.' call me inordinately biased but zadie smith has always gotten teeth right.
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders - mmm i wanted to like this and i did, though not intensely, but felt somewhat muppet's christmas carol about it all. concept, execution, man booker prize: fine, typical. personally i prefer fewer and deeper characters. 'Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.' !!!
Autumn, Ali Smith - i love the way ali smith plays with words and speech patterns, swirling between internal monologue and in this book, dream sequences, which sounds faffy and vague, but no, great. How To Be Both is in my opinion the best example of her work thus far in the culmination of style, flow, concept and intensity of meaning. i can't believe i haven't mentioned it previously on these end of year lists, but apparently i missed summarising the year i read it (2014).
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers - oh man! one of the best of those southern gothic tales, where months pass in sentences, everyone slightly repulsive, devastating nonetheless. i am a sucker for an unusual woman.
all in all, not quite so terrible a year, given the circumstances, but i aim in future not to have to read so frantically in december in order to have anything at all to write about.
documentaries i watched of note and interest:
the 13th - ava duvernay, so good
the putin interviews - not objective. enlightening nonetheless
icarus - started as an attempt to see the effect of doping on one person's cycling performance, and devolved into an exposé of systematic doping in sport. the system does not exist.
the vietnam war by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick - i have been glued to the tv for 2 hours every weekend. rigorously objective and global context provided. hugely educational.
notable concerts of the year:
finally, some Monteverdi in and around the place! i loved hearing the 1610 Vespers in st mary's cathedral, by the Song Company and choirs. can't say the same for the madrigals done by Les Arts Florissants, which suffered irrevocably from intonation issues after the first 15 minutes. madrigals ARE intonation; i wanted to clutch my ears and applauded only at the end out of courtesy, that's how bad it was. a significant dearth of press reviews followed, considering the high international profile of the group. publication bias, i know you, i see you.
my first Poppea, thanks to Pinchgut Opera. do i love a countertenor eminem-alike Nerone? no, give me sarah connolly any day. but the production was fine, and i get it, finally, having considered L'Orfeo more accessible previously; sometimes only listening to records doesn't make sense.
SSO concert stagings of Pelleas et Melisande, and Bluebeard's Castle, courtesy of opera theatre renovations. resulted in similar sinus clearings of my understanding and man, that high C climax of bluebeard with a full symphony orchestra, extra brass on the landings and the opera house organ, was just about transcendental, as intended.
and with that, happy new year folks! may we appreciate what we have and think of others. and keep appreciating and critiquing art. in the words of cameron esposito, 'art dismantles power or else it's propaganda'.
the other non-fiction i read this year fell only into two other categories: russia (2) and psychoanalysis (3). i have and will continue to read most things that Masha Gessen writes, and my dad has piqued my interest in pre-20th century chinese history. Damion Searl's The Inkblots was a fascinating look at hermann rorschach the person and psychoanalyst, the art and sensitivity/specificity of the actual rorschach test, its latter-day bastardisation and usage in popular culture, quite far from the original. the other highlight, which i need to revisit, was Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (pub. 1981). the performance of which in real life is also very inaccessible to the average person. we need to invest in mental health, well, treatment for more than just the most severe at a start, then for everyone who needs it, then prevention and health maintenance for all. see "muddling along" above.. i have only endless ellipses. not quite yet resignation.
in an effort to place more emphasis on fiction, here are most of the 11 that i read this year, somewhat in order of reading, with snarknotes as per usual:
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus - yeahhh as the first of its kind to say, women can write like this and be seen as serious writers, sure. otherwise, no. (and yet, gasp on that last page, ugh!) vacillation/would not read again
What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell; A Greater Music, Bae Suah (trans. Deborah Smith) - i read these at opposite ends of the year, but found similarities in the internal voice of a quiet person, the role of memory in that voice and the remove of living in a different country as an adult perhaps forcing that quietness. classical music throughout the latter book, which i like to think i understood as part of an internal monologue. what do people who don't know that world think of this book? '...our hands trembled and our ears seemed to pick up the sound of our hearts breaking, not as a clean crack but as a wrenching of fibers...'
Purity, Jonathan Franzen - i liked him more before the internet, there i said it. does he have a neurosis about the internet? being known for not liking it, yet having it play such large obvious roles in his recent books, j franz do you have an inferiority complex about the internet? other than that, money, too much of a complicated yet tidy plot, typical franzen female and male characters, i don't really care for it.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien - fictionalised 20th century china, a page-turner with a family book myth as the hook. dragged in the end. see above, pre-20th century chinese history.
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney - i liked this in some ways, it reminded me of emily gould's friendship, but also some parts i just didn't care about. at all. as a portrait of a contemporaneous young female person, valid, but also eye-rolling slash wish it wasn't like this.
Swing Time, Zadie Smith - this one grounded me back to the search for quality in fiction at the end of the year. pondering what it means to live and to be better in relation to oneself or others, demonstrated via a complicated yet tidy plot, not completely spelled out, modern with the impact of omnipresent screens in our lives. j franz you wish you could be zadie smith. 'She kissed her teeth.' call me inordinately biased but zadie smith has always gotten teeth right.
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders - mmm i wanted to like this and i did, though not intensely, but felt somewhat muppet's christmas carol about it all. concept, execution, man booker prize: fine, typical. personally i prefer fewer and deeper characters. 'Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.' !!!
Autumn, Ali Smith - i love the way ali smith plays with words and speech patterns, swirling between internal monologue and in this book, dream sequences, which sounds faffy and vague, but no, great. How To Be Both is in my opinion the best example of her work thus far in the culmination of style, flow, concept and intensity of meaning. i can't believe i haven't mentioned it previously on these end of year lists, but apparently i missed summarising the year i read it (2014).
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers - oh man! one of the best of those southern gothic tales, where months pass in sentences, everyone slightly repulsive, devastating nonetheless. i am a sucker for an unusual woman.
all in all, not quite so terrible a year, given the circumstances, but i aim in future not to have to read so frantically in december in order to have anything at all to write about.
documentaries i watched of note and interest:
the 13th - ava duvernay, so good
the putin interviews - not objective. enlightening nonetheless
icarus - started as an attempt to see the effect of doping on one person's cycling performance, and devolved into an exposé of systematic doping in sport. the system does not exist.
the vietnam war by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick - i have been glued to the tv for 2 hours every weekend. rigorously objective and global context provided. hugely educational.
notable concerts of the year:
finally, some Monteverdi in and around the place! i loved hearing the 1610 Vespers in st mary's cathedral, by the Song Company and choirs. can't say the same for the madrigals done by Les Arts Florissants, which suffered irrevocably from intonation issues after the first 15 minutes. madrigals ARE intonation; i wanted to clutch my ears and applauded only at the end out of courtesy, that's how bad it was. a significant dearth of press reviews followed, considering the high international profile of the group. publication bias, i know you, i see you.
my first Poppea, thanks to Pinchgut Opera. do i love a countertenor eminem-alike Nerone? no, give me sarah connolly any day. but the production was fine, and i get it, finally, having considered L'Orfeo more accessible previously; sometimes only listening to records doesn't make sense.
SSO concert stagings of Pelleas et Melisande, and Bluebeard's Castle, courtesy of opera theatre renovations. resulted in similar sinus clearings of my understanding and man, that high C climax of bluebeard with a full symphony orchestra, extra brass on the landings and the opera house organ, was just about transcendental, as intended.
and with that, happy new year folks! may we appreciate what we have and think of others. and keep appreciating and critiquing art. in the words of cameron esposito, 'art dismantles power or else it's propaganda'.
Monday, January 2, 2017
2016, not my most successful year in reading
nevertheless, a revisiting!!
29 books read.
9 (!) memoirs. i should expand beyond this category because my enjoyment hit-rate was one-third. they do make for easy travel reading. the best of the lot was Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. i don't know that i can add to the effusive aura of praise it wears. poetic and philosophical in ways that i don't usually enjoy, but really did. it (and the eileen myles collection i'm just starting on) may be turning my head towards poetry and its efficiencies.
3 biographies, 2 of patricia highsmith (which is quite enough) and one of romaine brooks, who, although also complicated and bigoted in early 20th century ways, did not seem to be quite so terrible. the placing of famous artists on pedestals and then finding out they are real flawed people is a conundrum of having our tastes define our self-image i.e being a fan. ahem, wagner anyone? i wouldn't read ayn rand but maybe this is hypocritical? maybe i am just becoming an adult.
however, i will make a special sidenote and mention the objective undeniable quality of romaine brooks' paintings and drawings that i flew across the world to see. i don't know much but i don't know of any other queer female painters who had so much money they could just paint whatever they wanted rather than having to make art that would sell.
2 korean translated fiction, both great! The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Your Republic is Calling You by Kim Young-Ha
2 widely hyped but quite disappointing tomes. Fates and Furies almost excuses the patriarchal coddling of average men, without quite acknowledging it. faux-literary and unbelievable, and just plain repetitious. if i want to read about marriage i want realism and insight into the human condition; i know art uses augmentations to make a point but this didn't work and put me off reading about conventional (read: straight) marriage, like, i know enough about it from general life thank you very much.
A Little Life was not overly well written, very verbose, and i liked the buildup much more than the actual reveal; also, what is so bad about suicide as a form of euthanasia? maybe we ask too much of people. again, augmentations to make a point. one glaring omission: rounded female characters?!??
2 widely hyped historical fiction. the centering on lady scientist characters in The Signature of All Things and The Essex Serpent did not exempt them from melodramatic rendezvous with mysterious perfect men, telegraphed well in advance. boring.
clearly the lesson here is that i need to adjust my hype filter.
two promising authors: Ottessa Moshfegh demonstrating the value in realism as character insight (and then promptly reverting to cliche, sadly) in Eileen; Helen Oyeyemi a rollicking storyteller with fascinating ideas in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, although the recurring themes were unnecessary and laboured.
my three books of the year:
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
The Door by Magda Szabo
all transporting, with fascinating and flawed characters.
29 books read.
9 (!) memoirs. i should expand beyond this category because my enjoyment hit-rate was one-third. they do make for easy travel reading. the best of the lot was Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. i don't know that i can add to the effusive aura of praise it wears. poetic and philosophical in ways that i don't usually enjoy, but really did. it (and the eileen myles collection i'm just starting on) may be turning my head towards poetry and its efficiencies.
3 biographies, 2 of patricia highsmith (which is quite enough) and one of romaine brooks, who, although also complicated and bigoted in early 20th century ways, did not seem to be quite so terrible. the placing of famous artists on pedestals and then finding out they are real flawed people is a conundrum of having our tastes define our self-image i.e being a fan. ahem, wagner anyone? i wouldn't read ayn rand but maybe this is hypocritical? maybe i am just becoming an adult.
however, i will make a special sidenote and mention the objective undeniable quality of romaine brooks' paintings and drawings that i flew across the world to see. i don't know much but i don't know of any other queer female painters who had so much money they could just paint whatever they wanted rather than having to make art that would sell.
2 korean translated fiction, both great! The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Your Republic is Calling You by Kim Young-Ha
2 widely hyped but quite disappointing tomes. Fates and Furies almost excuses the patriarchal coddling of average men, without quite acknowledging it. faux-literary and unbelievable, and just plain repetitious. if i want to read about marriage i want realism and insight into the human condition; i know art uses augmentations to make a point but this didn't work and put me off reading about conventional (read: straight) marriage, like, i know enough about it from general life thank you very much.
A Little Life was not overly well written, very verbose, and i liked the buildup much more than the actual reveal; also, what is so bad about suicide as a form of euthanasia? maybe we ask too much of people. again, augmentations to make a point. one glaring omission: rounded female characters?!??
2 widely hyped historical fiction. the centering on lady scientist characters in The Signature of All Things and The Essex Serpent did not exempt them from melodramatic rendezvous with mysterious perfect men, telegraphed well in advance. boring.
clearly the lesson here is that i need to adjust my hype filter.
two promising authors: Ottessa Moshfegh demonstrating the value in realism as character insight (and then promptly reverting to cliche, sadly) in Eileen; Helen Oyeyemi a rollicking storyteller with fascinating ideas in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, although the recurring themes were unnecessary and laboured.
my three books of the year:
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
The Door by Magda Szabo
all transporting, with fascinating and flawed characters.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
2015, a year in reading
37 books read.
8 memoirs, of which H is for Hawk (Helen Macdonald) was the runaway winner. fine, specific details and i rather liked being inside her head. i actually now have a hawk memoir section to my library (n=2).
8 non-memoir non-collection non-fiction; it has been an illuminating year. 3 books on food/digestion/health, 2 on music, 2 on the end of the world as we know it, 1 very interesting investigative expose by Masha Gessen (Words Will Break Cement). everyone should read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Martin Blaser's Missing Microbes, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. perhaps that should be 3 books on the end of the world.
JS Bach enthusiasts should read John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven. i used to hate music theory, but it's funny what i've come back to now that i don't HAVE to do/like/read anything. leisurely learning Bach Partitas and only Bach Partitas on the piano for the entire year? tick.
5 essay collections. Meghan Daum continues to dominate. David Sedaris' dentist essay was worth the other more average inclusions in Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. i really enjoyed a collection on solitary cooking and/or eating, aka my present enjoyable condition (Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, ed. Jenni Ferrari-Adler). combined with my almost ecstatic solo travel experience in nyc and dc this year, with associated solo dining, i have never felt more comfortable with myself. this may just be happiness. or hermitage.
i also pondered choosing childlessness while reading Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed (ed. Meghan Daum) but would have liked to hear from non-writers.
2 kathy mallory books by Carol O'Connell. my pick would be The Chalk Girl, a return to the classic style of tightly plotted nyc cops and rich people getting away with shit. and of course kathy mallory, swoon-worthy sociopath. i can't decide who would play her in a movie. i don't think such a person exists. also i'm glad that she doesn't age as such throughout the 13-book series, because who needs that.
7 queer-related fiction books. hmm. highlights were The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith), which i liked for its oblique, distant yet close third-person narration. Mislaid (Nell Zink) was another with the strange sped-up/slowed-down presentation of only the important stuff, in great detail, with barbed tongues (to mix descriptors) jabbing everyone at least a little.
and my favourite book of the year, Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker), the only one i read twice. how had i never heard of this book before? it needs to be in the mainstream or even queer canon much more than it is. dark and debilitating. deflating both neurotic narcissism and boring convention with two sides of the same reflection. making the weird headspace the norm (shoutout to the last book i read this year, Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin, for also inhabiting this perspective). we are all weird and it's alright.
8 memoirs, of which H is for Hawk (Helen Macdonald) was the runaway winner. fine, specific details and i rather liked being inside her head. i actually now have a hawk memoir section to my library (n=2).
8 non-memoir non-collection non-fiction; it has been an illuminating year. 3 books on food/digestion/health, 2 on music, 2 on the end of the world as we know it, 1 very interesting investigative expose by Masha Gessen (Words Will Break Cement). everyone should read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Martin Blaser's Missing Microbes, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. perhaps that should be 3 books on the end of the world.
JS Bach enthusiasts should read John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven. i used to hate music theory, but it's funny what i've come back to now that i don't HAVE to do/like/read anything. leisurely learning Bach Partitas and only Bach Partitas on the piano for the entire year? tick.
5 essay collections. Meghan Daum continues to dominate. David Sedaris' dentist essay was worth the other more average inclusions in Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. i really enjoyed a collection on solitary cooking and/or eating, aka my present enjoyable condition (Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, ed. Jenni Ferrari-Adler). combined with my almost ecstatic solo travel experience in nyc and dc this year, with associated solo dining, i have never felt more comfortable with myself. this may just be happiness. or hermitage.
i also pondered choosing childlessness while reading Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed (ed. Meghan Daum) but would have liked to hear from non-writers.
2 kathy mallory books by Carol O'Connell. my pick would be The Chalk Girl, a return to the classic style of tightly plotted nyc cops and rich people getting away with shit. and of course kathy mallory, swoon-worthy sociopath. i can't decide who would play her in a movie. i don't think such a person exists. also i'm glad that she doesn't age as such throughout the 13-book series, because who needs that.
7 queer-related fiction books. hmm. highlights were The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith), which i liked for its oblique, distant yet close third-person narration. Mislaid (Nell Zink) was another with the strange sped-up/slowed-down presentation of only the important stuff, in great detail, with barbed tongues (to mix descriptors) jabbing everyone at least a little.
and my favourite book of the year, Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker), the only one i read twice. how had i never heard of this book before? it needs to be in the mainstream or even queer canon much more than it is. dark and debilitating. deflating both neurotic narcissism and boring convention with two sides of the same reflection. making the weird headspace the norm (shoutout to the last book i read this year, Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin, for also inhabiting this perspective). we are all weird and it's alright.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
dear eleanor catton, please don't read this. respectfully yours.
oh hello. i am beyond behind in my book reviewing (in fact i added 13 books to my 'finished' folder in my kindle, plus also read some printed books since we last convened) but have been entreated to entertain the notion again, given my moaning and groaning about the latest man booker prize winner and also the booker prize in general.
the luminaries, eleanor catton
hmm where to start. if i ignored the fact that it won the booker prize, here is how i would review the book. the only reason it is upwards of 800 pages is that it tells the same mystery story in and around itself a total of four separate times. the first is a recounting by a group of men to a naive newcomer. the second, after all the back stories and explanations, is a summary of the first. (which is somewhat necessary given the convolutions, but really. if it was really just about plot it would render the first telling unnecessary. more on this later.) the third (after a fashion) is a courtroom scene, in which... the story is told again. there is a veritable ending and comeuppance (more on this later as well) and all that good stuff. nope, only page 600 or so. what is the last 25% (in kindle parlance) of the book dedicated to? oh, it's not enough to know why everything happened, it must be literally spelled out by showing the very scenes which we assume to have occurred. nonono. if it's going to be a mystery, leave it as such. it's much more mysterious that way.
the style of writing was of that 19th century pulpy mystery story type. so one doesn't really read it for the writing. to be honest the only thing which kept me reading was the plot. so why have it four times?! slightly more details are added at each retelling, but as any seasoned reader of crime novels of the type that i have read knows, follow the money. the money trail was pretty clear after the first couple of plot runthroughs, and nothing much was a surprise after that. i guess i kept reading to see if there was anything else that was going to make it revelatory and booker prize-worthy... nope.
further, while most everything was shown and retold excessively, some plot points were left unexplained. why these? it makes them stand out all the more. and not for any good reason that i can see. in fact one of them involves the murder of a 'chinaman', the last in a string of unfair situations for this guy. this entire secondary story arc (begging for justice and revenge) was then summarily ignored and not addressed again. no punishment for his killer, just a secondhand account of a 'rap on the knuckles'. the main plot involved a vicious takedown of the villain. why not also give satisfactory justice to the 'chinaman', huh huh eleanor catton? this is not acceptable for a modern book, 'victorian style' and otherwise accurate cantonese transcription be damned.
speaking of which, as a young female author, i feel that eleanor catton has seriously gone the patriarchal route and stuck to the cliched and typical. a total of three women in the book and two of them are 'whores' and the other one is an abused downtrodden wife? please. if you're going to write a victorian mystery then you should at least shake it up a little, modernise it, subvert cliched expectations.
i guess the only other thing to talk about is the structure and title. to be honest i thought this was the weakest and least interesting part. yeah each chapter was half the length of the preceding chapter. there were star signs and other stuff as chapter titles and theoretical groupings of characters. did it impact/enhance my reading of the book? nope.
4.5/10 for effort. excessive effort that doesn't pay off in any revelatory way about the human spirit or the art of fiction writing. it goes without saying that i don't think it should be on the same list as 'midnight's children' or 'disgrace' or even 'the blind assassin'. but perhaps my expectations were altered by choosing to read it because it won the booker prize. or (even more likely) i am failing to understand what the booker prize is really rewarding. maybe we can go down the path of arguing 'it will get more people reading' a la 'the da vinci code' but in my opinion it should be more dignified.
the luminaries, eleanor catton
hmm where to start. if i ignored the fact that it won the booker prize, here is how i would review the book. the only reason it is upwards of 800 pages is that it tells the same mystery story in and around itself a total of four separate times. the first is a recounting by a group of men to a naive newcomer. the second, after all the back stories and explanations, is a summary of the first. (which is somewhat necessary given the convolutions, but really. if it was really just about plot it would render the first telling unnecessary. more on this later.) the third (after a fashion) is a courtroom scene, in which... the story is told again. there is a veritable ending and comeuppance (more on this later as well) and all that good stuff. nope, only page 600 or so. what is the last 25% (in kindle parlance) of the book dedicated to? oh, it's not enough to know why everything happened, it must be literally spelled out by showing the very scenes which we assume to have occurred. nonono. if it's going to be a mystery, leave it as such. it's much more mysterious that way.
the style of writing was of that 19th century pulpy mystery story type. so one doesn't really read it for the writing. to be honest the only thing which kept me reading was the plot. so why have it four times?! slightly more details are added at each retelling, but as any seasoned reader of crime novels of the type that i have read knows, follow the money. the money trail was pretty clear after the first couple of plot runthroughs, and nothing much was a surprise after that. i guess i kept reading to see if there was anything else that was going to make it revelatory and booker prize-worthy... nope.
further, while most everything was shown and retold excessively, some plot points were left unexplained. why these? it makes them stand out all the more. and not for any good reason that i can see. in fact one of them involves the murder of a 'chinaman', the last in a string of unfair situations for this guy. this entire secondary story arc (begging for justice and revenge) was then summarily ignored and not addressed again. no punishment for his killer, just a secondhand account of a 'rap on the knuckles'. the main plot involved a vicious takedown of the villain. why not also give satisfactory justice to the 'chinaman', huh huh eleanor catton? this is not acceptable for a modern book, 'victorian style' and otherwise accurate cantonese transcription be damned.
speaking of which, as a young female author, i feel that eleanor catton has seriously gone the patriarchal route and stuck to the cliched and typical. a total of three women in the book and two of them are 'whores' and the other one is an abused downtrodden wife? please. if you're going to write a victorian mystery then you should at least shake it up a little, modernise it, subvert cliched expectations.
i guess the only other thing to talk about is the structure and title. to be honest i thought this was the weakest and least interesting part. yeah each chapter was half the length of the preceding chapter. there were star signs and other stuff as chapter titles and theoretical groupings of characters. did it impact/enhance my reading of the book? nope.
4.5/10 for effort. excessive effort that doesn't pay off in any revelatory way about the human spirit or the art of fiction writing. it goes without saying that i don't think it should be on the same list as 'midnight's children' or 'disgrace' or even 'the blind assassin'. but perhaps my expectations were altered by choosing to read it because it won the booker prize. or (even more likely) i am failing to understand what the booker prize is really rewarding. maybe we can go down the path of arguing 'it will get more people reading' a la 'the da vinci code' but in my opinion it should be more dignified.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
oh you see that now australian bookstores? it’s not just me. see how 125 ‘famous authors’ have ranked their top 10 books giving william faulkner the 2nd highest number of books and the 6th highest number of points? (never mind that the true winner here is tolstoy because he has the highest number of points and a lower number of books to win them with)
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/30/writers-top-ten-favorite-books/
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
i just carb-loaded and this is apropos
the finkler question, howard jacobson
i will not be too rudely scathing but i put this book into the ‘sell’ pile right after finishing it. like, flipped through the intentionally blank pages at the end and then closed it and stood up and walked to the pile and put it on top. i finished reading it to see if there was anything which singled it out for the booker prize. i wonder how much better or worse or less comedic the book would be if did not substitute ‘finkler’ for ‘jewish’. it is a book that makes me not care about it. it was also a primarily male book with uselessly characterised main characters with stupid preoccupations and no significant narrative culmination and that also made me not care about it.
3/10 because now i know what jonathan safran foer thinks is ‘hilarious’
i will not be too rudely scathing but i put this book into the ‘sell’ pile right after finishing it. like, flipped through the intentionally blank pages at the end and then closed it and stood up and walked to the pile and put it on top. i finished reading it to see if there was anything which singled it out for the booker prize. i wonder how much better or worse or less comedic the book would be if did not substitute ‘finkler’ for ‘jewish’. it is a book that makes me not care about it. it was also a primarily male book with uselessly characterised main characters with stupid preoccupations and no significant narrative culmination and that also made me not care about it.
3/10 because now i know what jonathan safran foer thinks is ‘hilarious’
Monday, March 25, 2013
why do australian bookstores not carry william faulkner? serious question
light in august, william faulkner
this was such a good book. sooo interesting. i don't know enough about anything but the idea that the unconfirmed suspicion of race and subsequent prejudice/fear can have such far reaching consequences and make people so crazy. i couldn't finish the last two epiloguish chapters but i got the general gist. the way faulkner wrote narrative and family histories through retelling by a character for pages and pages on end, and especially in using a speaking style and turn of phrase to describe certain controversial events. if one skims one misses major developments.
8.5/10
this was such a good book. sooo interesting. i don't know enough about anything but the idea that the unconfirmed suspicion of race and subsequent prejudice/fear can have such far reaching consequences and make people so crazy. i couldn't finish the last two epiloguish chapters but i got the general gist. the way faulkner wrote narrative and family histories through retelling by a character for pages and pages on end, and especially in using a speaking style and turn of phrase to describe certain controversial events. if one skims one misses major developments.
8.5/10
Saturday, March 23, 2013
philippe jaroussky with australian brandenburg orchestra, city recital hall 22/03/2013
ABO gave uniformly good baroque ensemble and musicmaking. love the valveless horns which must be a bitch to play. valveless trumpets as well. brandenburg's onstage formality is still pretty lax, with rolled up sleeves, wiping face on upper arm seen, and the ever present onstage applause for the soloist. however tonight it was pretty well deserved.
jaroussky sang a program of duelling handel and porpora arias, showcasing both the differences and similarities in style. porpora's alto giove was a slow highlight, reminding me in many ways of handel's scherza infida as well as the backbeat soft entry similar to ombra mai fu. after each break jaroussky would start an aria with a really great tone and fresh sound for the first two lines, then slightly slip back into his standard sound. timbre and stability of tone was pretty good, much clearer and less nasal than i had expected. when it comes to coloratura he nails all the runs, and not as mechanically as i've watched on youtube before. however in the fast runs it sounded best with eyes closed; he still has some physical tics and jerks making it look like a great effort to make it all happen. with my eyes closed it sounds effortless. hopefully he'll be able to get to a stage where he can make it all look and sound easy. also a good consistency of tone at the extremes of the range; not too nasal at the high end, and not too soft/feathery at the low. maybe it's a countertenor thing but the projection was not fantastic; i was sitting in the 5th row and expected a bit more penetration. i expect the acoustics would have been pretty good up in the balcony of city recital hall. perhaps the italian pronunciation could have been rounder and not as long especially on the e's.
shaun lee-chen also played locatelli's violin concerto - fast runs and arpeggios of a study/scale nature; impressively performed but the overall piece was not a memorable one. the first movement took him a little while to get into the baroque tuning but from then on intonation was fine. the incongruity between normal finger positions and the expected sound a semitone higher is difficult and uber confusing.
jaroussky had encores of verdi prati (after mi lusingha il dolce affeto in the program proper) and porpora's nell'attendere which had a trumpet-singer duet bringing the concert to a close on a high note.
8/10
jaroussky sang a program of duelling handel and porpora arias, showcasing both the differences and similarities in style. porpora's alto giove was a slow highlight, reminding me in many ways of handel's scherza infida as well as the backbeat soft entry similar to ombra mai fu. after each break jaroussky would start an aria with a really great tone and fresh sound for the first two lines, then slightly slip back into his standard sound. timbre and stability of tone was pretty good, much clearer and less nasal than i had expected. when it comes to coloratura he nails all the runs, and not as mechanically as i've watched on youtube before. however in the fast runs it sounded best with eyes closed; he still has some physical tics and jerks making it look like a great effort to make it all happen. with my eyes closed it sounds effortless. hopefully he'll be able to get to a stage where he can make it all look and sound easy. also a good consistency of tone at the extremes of the range; not too nasal at the high end, and not too soft/feathery at the low. maybe it's a countertenor thing but the projection was not fantastic; i was sitting in the 5th row and expected a bit more penetration. i expect the acoustics would have been pretty good up in the balcony of city recital hall. perhaps the italian pronunciation could have been rounder and not as long especially on the e's.
shaun lee-chen also played locatelli's violin concerto - fast runs and arpeggios of a study/scale nature; impressively performed but the overall piece was not a memorable one. the first movement took him a little while to get into the baroque tuning but from then on intonation was fine. the incongruity between normal finger positions and the expected sound a semitone higher is difficult and uber confusing.
jaroussky had encores of verdi prati (after mi lusingha il dolce affeto in the program proper) and porpora's nell'attendere which had a trumpet-singer duet bringing the concert to a close on a high note.
8/10
Monday, March 11, 2013
helLO and welcome to your infrequent irregularly scheduled program
it chooses you, miranda july
this started out meanderingly enough and i had read the first chapter somewhere on the internet. interviews with random people from the pennysaver, combined with the struggle of creating and making a movie.. it all came together in the end very poignantly.
7/10
pulphead, john jeremiah sullivan
i love a few types of longform essays and one of them appears to be the john jeremiah sullivan type. i read every single one of these investigative pieces with interest and with interest in looking up their subjects more. separately they are all fantastic essays but together the common factor of the american south came through.. very interesting.
8.5/10
the inevitable: contemporary writers confront death, ed david shields and bradford morrow
well as you might surmise from the title this quickly became a somewhat morbid read. which i don't usually shy away from but when everyone is writing a form of non-fiction then it quickly becomes quite melancholy. there was a whole range of writings and themes, though some were similar in describing relatives or spouses who had passed away recently. ultimately it became a showcase of the very different types of writing that can form around a common theme.
6.5/10
this started out meanderingly enough and i had read the first chapter somewhere on the internet. interviews with random people from the pennysaver, combined with the struggle of creating and making a movie.. it all came together in the end very poignantly.
7/10
pulphead, john jeremiah sullivan
i love a few types of longform essays and one of them appears to be the john jeremiah sullivan type. i read every single one of these investigative pieces with interest and with interest in looking up their subjects more. separately they are all fantastic essays but together the common factor of the american south came through.. very interesting.
8.5/10
the inevitable: contemporary writers confront death, ed david shields and bradford morrow
well as you might surmise from the title this quickly became a somewhat morbid read. which i don't usually shy away from but when everyone is writing a form of non-fiction then it quickly becomes quite melancholy. there was a whole range of writings and themes, though some were similar in describing relatives or spouses who had passed away recently. ultimately it became a showcase of the very different types of writing that can form around a common theme.
6.5/10
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