February was a wild reading month. Confucius next to splatter, a Silk Road travelogue next to Czech historical fantasy, Milanović next to the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, which will definitely take your breath away — not necessarily in a good way. And in the middle of it all, a few books I really wished worked better than they did.
Hemlock
Melissa Faliveno
This novel is about processing trauma (including generational), addiction (alcoholism), keeping relationships together/apart, and isolation/depression. Usually authors would take these motifs and weave them into some kind of plot. For some reason, that just didn’t happen here. You get plenty of internal monologue, lots of lyrical moments, plenty of pure madness and an unreliable narrator (who is wounded and insufferable in equal measure). And even though these “sliding into madness” novels often attract me, this one didn’t have nearly enough meat or anything to say. It was still an interesting experience in a way, but mainly because I really actively WANTED to like it more than I actually did.
You Invited It In
Sarah Jules
I wasn’t expecting a work of art. The premise was sort of fun. Once the twelve-year-old kid started acting like a six-year-old, I started DOUBTING, but good lord the way things developed, and the unbelievable cringe of the antagonist reveal. I was sometimes embarrassed to be reading it.
Out of Istanbul: A Journey of Discovery along the Silk Road
Bernard Ollivier
An honest, straightforward, and opinionated diary of a pilgrimage from Istanbul to Iran, on foot. Along the Silk Road, threatened by bandits, exhaustion, the army, and dysentery, Ollivier keeps going and is definitely not afraid to voice his concerns about what he sees. Is he super objective and respectful of every aspect of the culture around him? No. Is he entertaining and interesting? Absolutely.
The Analects
Confucius
I read the Simon Leys translation with added context, and that made all the difference. With the added context, even though many of the proposed social solutions (and of course Leys’s commentary, including random raging against non-binary people as a plague destroying society) aren’t exactly to my taste today.
What could be understood as a collection of dialogues with fairly limited significance transforms, with the commentary, into a coherent vision of society, morality, and meritocracy in the best possible sense, with clear value-based moral principles. Highly recommended.
The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety
Guo Jujing
It doesn’t happen often that you read a “collection of ancient wisdom” and just go “what the hell, dude.” At least 12 out of 24 triggered this in me. Highly recommended.
The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World
Branko Milanović
A good description of basic facts and trends, reasonable extrapolation, and a few good insights and polemics around the rise of China. However, the last chapters overshoot a bit.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones
Starts mysteriously, gradually transitions into extreme grittiness, gore, and perhaps a touch of excess — and then near the end switches into something so absurd, so totally out of character and weird that it had to be an intentional genre pivot. I had fun, would recommend, it felt a bit like a Zach Cregger film.
Letnice
Miroslav Hlaučo
Two points for the commissioner/captain Rosenkrantz. No seriously: it didn’t work for me. The constant references to “well, it’s a turning point, miracles are disappearing” became self-serving and tiresome, the attempt to build an ensemble of interesting characters broke down for me on the fact that a large portion of them simply weren’t interesting. What worked well was a certain playfulness, mystery, and a pleasant boldness toward strange things, all fine — unfortunately it met with actively dreadful romantic subplots. Romance here happens at first sight, randomly and without any development, like flicking an on/off switch — and the whole thing is crowned by a mass wedding that a Bollywood blockbuster wouldn’t be ashamed of.
The Secret of Ventriloquism
Jon Padgett
The Ligotti influence here is very strong — for better and worse. The prose is definitely stylish (though the style wore on me pretty quickly), the plots are fairly unique and willing to explore interesting ideas (Organ Void felt interesting in this regard), and some parts really hit that metaphysical dread, fine.
It’s just too foggy. Dream logic applies everywhere here, characters move through a kind of haze and nothing ever changes, everything just progresses on a descending spiral toward the end and complete puppetness. I’m glad I read it, and it’s at least fairly short and brings an interesting puppet gimmick, it just doesn’t bring much of anything else.