The 16+ books I read in March, ranked.

I didn't read quite as many books as last month, but the books I did read were weightier.

16.) Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James: I wrote a “good, bad and ugly” post on this book, and I’d rather not talk about it again. It sucked the impact out of every other violent thing I read for two months. This was the only truly intolerable book I finished this month. The marketing for this book was absolute scorched earth, and I was shocked to see The Mary Sue, a site for nerd culture for women, advertising this book on Twitter when the narrative is so brutal toward women.

The rest of the books on this list are just splitting hairs over various degrees of goodness and what I happen to be in the mood to read at any given moment.

15.) In The Woods by Tana French: This was a recommendation from my friend Abby during The Great Book Slump of 2018. She said she liked the storyline. My mom read it, too, and said it was "creepy." It was a methodical murder mystery where every detective got drunk and didn't do a great job... doing their job. The murder was eventually solved, but the story didn't grip me immediately. I think it had something to do with the sleazy detective telling the story. I wasn't crazy about him. I don't normally gravitate toward murder mysteries, either. I appreciated reaching for something that was outside of my comfort zone, though!

14.) Cress by Marissa Meyer: Last month, I read “Scarlet,” the second installment in this saga, and this month, I listened to “Cress” on audiobook with my Libby app. It’s Rapunzel… IN SPAAAAAAACE! This book was very emotional, with Crescent (Rapunzel) falling in love with Thorne (kind of a Han Solo type of guy) and having to survive a desert and make it to civilization after her surveillance satellite crashes to earth. I loved it.

13.) Jessica Jones: The Pulse: The Complete Collection by Brian Michael Bendis: I was going to group Alias and The Pulse in the same entry, but The Pulse was so markedly different in tone and content, that I decided to split them up. The Pulse focuses on a press initiative by J. Jonah Jameson of The Daily Bugle to cover the lives of superheroes in the city. Also, it focuses on Jessica and Luke Cage's relationship. It's not as dark as Alias was, and parts of it had crispy, clear art, as opposed to the watery, moody art of Alias. Jessica's personality was really different, too, and not in a good way. I was not as impressed with this iteration of Jessica Jones, and I got the sense that the writers didn't seem to know what to do with her, but she's still my favorite superhero.

12.) The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss: I enjoyed this book for its deep mythos, world building and setting, magical mechanics, and entertaining characters. I’ve already started the second book, "The Wise Man's Fear" in this unfinished trilogy. It reminded me a lot of the writings from one of my favorite fantasy authors, Robin Hobb. I did not enjoy it for its benevolent sexism and casual ill treatment of women. As insurmountable an obstacle it might seem, it is not difficult for men to regard and speak to women like they are equals and real human beings. When women are treated as others, and not seen as people, it is a stepping stone for them to be mistreated more cruelly elsewhere in literature and in real life.

11.) House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig: I received this book from NetGalley and wrote a review of it, and my feelings about fairy tale retellings, here. This was awfully dark, but really quite good.

10.) All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: This book was very well written, but since historical fiction isn’t really my thing, it’s farther down on the list than might be comfortable for some people. It won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2015. I felt like this book was a little too compassionate to Nazis, especially in the current political climate, which I wrote about here.

9.) Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight by Kelly Sue DeConnick: I read this ahead of the movie to get a sense of what Captain Marvel was all about. The greatest joy I derived from a dour fan who wrote after Issue 2 that he was sad he couldn’t drool over a nonautonomous lady in a swimsuit anymore (this is a vast oversimplification of the tone of his message, which was straight sexist trash garbage.) After subsequent issues, Captain Marvel fans raked him over the coals. I didn’t just like this book, but I loved the Captain Marvel movie. It’s taken time, but Marvel movies have grown on me. I think they just needed to grow beyond origin stories and the subsequent “Do we really need superheroes?” conversations to evolve into something deeper.

8.) "Die"(the first four issues) by Kieron Gillen: I found this series on one of those “100 NEW BOOKS YOU NEED TO READ YESTERDAY” listicles. The easiest way to describe this series is that it’s a cross between Jumanji and D&D. There’s a healthy dose of darkness, adulthood trauma and Lord of the Rings references, which is always a plus. I feel like the first four issues said a lot, but I need to spend more time in the universe to get a feel for whether I like it or not. It seems promising. The compilation of a handful of issues comes out in June, if you prefer that format. I read the first four issues and pre-ordered the fifth.

7.) Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: Nope, I didn’t have nightmares after reading this, not me! I read Flynn’s “Gone Girl” a couple years ago, which was ultra creepy, but Sharp Objects was even more disturbing. I must have been in the mood for a creepy story, because this one left me dazed and enthralled. I'm going to have nightmares about missing teeth for the next month. I read it because I was curious about the HBO series that was based on this book. The themes reminded me of the real-life news story where a girl planned the death of her mother because she was the victim of Munchausen by proxy.

6.) Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This book is about a Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who moves to America, lives there for a while, and then moves back to Nigeria. This book was A LOT in the very best way. It had a lot of the same conceits as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years In Power” (see below,) but also it had a fictional story that covered all the nuances between being African-black and Non-African-black and made observations about racism in America through Ifemelu’s blog posts. On top of all that, it had a romantic story arc that reminded me of something straight out of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” only modernized of course. There was a quote in there about how the word “nuance” is just code for making white people comfortable, ("Nuance means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as individuals and everyone got where they are because of their achievement.") but I felt this book was nuanced in the sense that it gave me more information about the subtleties between black people in a very clear way.

Here’s another quote from “Americanah" that I felt was really pointed:

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.” 

5.) Saga Vols. 7-9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples: Hazel’s monologue at the end of Vol. 7 got me right in the feels. I’m only a little disappointed that the series seems to have backed off the role of the romance novel in causing unrest. The end of Vol. 9 was a big surprise in the most tragic way, but I’m not necessarily buying it. I mean, if The Will is alive to mess things up for the good guys, this most recent development doesn’t really hold, does it? I have hope. And no, I won’t spoil it.

4.) The Vision (Two volumes: “Little Worse Than A Man” and “Little Better Than A Beast”) by Tom King: This story was heartbreaking, but I really loved how it married the superhuman and mundane. It’s difficult to describe, but watching Vision’s family, who are invincible, work through common domestic issues, was the most interesting. If I were a habitual re-reader, I’d probably read this again.

3.) How Long Til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin: I got some Black Mirror vibes, whiffs of fairy tales, and some sharp, calculated social commentary from these short stories. In one of the stories, a king eats the heart of a dragon and learns about the folly of taking and using power that isn’t his. Another one is a “proof of concept” story from the Broken Earth trilogy (my FAVORITE books.) One peculiar tale is called “L’Alchimista,” which is about a demon who plays “Chopped” with a chef. He gives her a sack of weird ingredients, and she makes him food. The way the food is described is the way I talk about books sometimes, which is why I found it charming. Some of these stories were perfect vignettes, but I hope Jemisin uses others as a foundation for a new trilogy because I wanted to know more.

2.) Jessica Jones: Alias Vols. 3 and 4 by Brian Michael Bendis: Jessica Jones is my favorite Marvel superhero because you don’t have to look too hard to find real life in her. I watched the Netflix series first, and I was instantly in love. I read Vol. 1 and 2 of Alias about a year ago, and just got 3 and 4 recently. There’s so much to like about this series: There are illustrative comedic bits where Jessica listens to her clients impassively. She’s dating Ant-Man, the Avengers make appearances and her best friend is a pre-redesign Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel swimsuit-ogglers, eat your heart out.) Her struggle with the Purple Man doesn’t happen until Vol. 4, and I was a little disappointed at how it was resolved compared to how Jessica "defeats" Kilgrave in the Netflix series. (It was still good! No spoilers here.) I’m still drawn to the way Jessica Jones perfectly illustrates how it feels to be in an emotionally abusive relationship (especially the self-blame, the struggle to get out, and people not believing/seeing what you’re seeing.)

1.) We Were Eight Years In Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Facebook post about this book turned into a little mini book club and I was all about it. Good talk, friends. Anyway, this book deeply affected me. I’m not going to go on an anti-racism tirade here, but I have lots of feelings about Coates’ ideas and evaluating my own role in perpetuating white supremacy as a straight white lady, and then actually DOING SOMETHING about racism in America.

UNRANKED

Me and White Supremacy Workbook by Layla F. Saad: I’m not ranking this because it’s personal, and I'm not going to rank it on its literary merits. I'm only mentioning it because if you want to read it, it’s free and the author kindly sends emails about other resources you can use. I learned about this book in the midst of some racist things going on in the knitting community (and now the romance author community.) If you're a white person, you should read it to interrogate your own role in white supremacy privately.


YOU'LL SEE IT NEXT MONTH

Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian
Winter by Marissa Meyer
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

Review: House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

“House of Salt and Sorrows” by Erin A. Craig is a grim retelling of a Grimm fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Set in the fictional coastal estate of Highmoor, tragedy befalls the Thaumas family when the mother and four of twelve daughters (Elizabeth, Ava, Eulalie and Octavia) die in quick succession. With a bleak mourning period ahead of them, Annaleigh, one of the remaining eight daughters, tries to investigate her sisters’ deaths as murders. But something haunts the remaining sisters’ dreams, and the youngest, Verity, begins to see visions.

If it weren’t for my intense curiosity for so many other genres and my new and persistent comic book habit, I’d read fairy tale retellings all day, every day. It’s probably a guilty pleasure at this point, since this book is clearly for people half my age. My favorites, and probably the most common, are retellings of "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast." This retelling, shaped from a lesser-known fairy tale, is so unique in its execution, so haunting and emotional, that I couldn’t help but love it.

Authors can’t go wrong with a good fairy tale, especially in the Young Adult genre. I have a theory about why this is, so bear with me: Fairy tales normally target young children. Young Adult literature targets teens, usually with a focus on highly emotional content to help teens deal with all their own heady emotions. A fairy tale retelling bridges the gap between the books we reach for as children and the themes we want in our books as teenagers and adults. It’s why they work so well, I think, and partially why I reach for them so often. I always like to see what various authors do with the stories everyone knows.

“House of Salt and Sorrows” has a hefty helping of death and grief, and all the things people do to cope with it. After the sisters’ mother dies, their father remarries a mysterious woman named Morella who just seems to want to belong to the family. The book addresses Annaleigh’s feelings toward Morella, which are mostly civil-to-welcoming, but it also validates Camille’s emotions, which focus on hostility and the feeling of being replaced.

Whenever I read a book, I feel like a sommelier tasting wine: I caught hints of :: sip :: The Twelve Dancing Princesses, of course, but that was overshadowed by :: SLORP :: Jessica Cluess’ “Kingdom on Fire” trilogy, which I did not like at all and :: slurp :: a Goodreads reviewer said Guillermo del Toro’s “Crimson Peak” and I have to agree and :: sip :: possibly the parts of “A Song of Ice and Fire” that deal with what happens on Pyke, but not a lot, just the smallest hint. This book has an element of true horror, with enough decay and scary childbirth and bodies falling from vast heights to go around.

I was intrigued to see “House of Salt and Sorrows” was a standalone novel. It would be interesting to see other obscure Grimm fairy tales told in the same universe, especially since the author makes it clear there are other parts of the world to entertain, as well as a rich pantheon of supernatural beings to consider.

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. “House of Salt and Sorrows” will be released in August.

Other fairy tales, retold 

One of my favorite retellings is the OG, “Ella Enchanted” by Gail Carson Levine.

I’ve enjoyed working my way through Marissa Meyer’s “Lunar Chronicles,” which include “Cinder,” “Scarlet,” “Cress,” and “Winter” in a sci-fi quasi-dystopian war between earth and the moon. It’s SO cool.

In January, I read “The Beast’s Heart” by Leif Shallcross.

I’ve heard good things about Anna-Marie McLemore’s “Blanca & Roja.”

Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf: The good, the bad and the ugly

In a nutshell, Marlon James' "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" is about an oddball group of characters that goes on a quest to find a boy in the African wilderness. The story is told from the point of view of Tracker, a nonbinary person who loves children, but whose softness for children is masked with anger and violence.

The story is structured nonlinearly, with Tracker telling an inquisitor what happened on the quest, and why the boy he sought was now dead. All of the press I've read on this book suggests that the other two books that have yet to be written will detail the same story from different points of view.

The good

I preordered "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" in January on Audible and listened to it in audiobook format. The guy who reads the book, Dion Graham, is a supremely talented reader. I could recommend this book on his talent alone, but I cannot recommend this book for any of its other components.

As someone who majored in English in college, and as someone who reads A LOT, I understand the literary merits of this book. The prose is almost stream-of-consciousness. The African mythology is pretty cool. The story is altogether solid, but ultimately, it's not about a whole lot. The experience of listening to this book was a dream-like jostling through fights and travels and stories on top of other stories.

The bad

Early on, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" was touted as an "African Game of Thrones." Then, after all of the pre-release hype died down and books were sold, the author came out in subsequent interviews saying that comparison had been a joke.

The language, the time jumping and the literary elements point to this book being for an advanced niche reading audience. Aside from a thin storyline about a debate over a young boy being the rightful king, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" has very little to do with "Game of Thrones." If you're looking for "African Game of Thrones" in this, you're not going to find it.

The ugly

"Black Leopard, Red Wolf" has its merits, but it is all overshadowed by an oozing, crusty scab of graphic violence. This book has everything you need to make you cringe and clutch your pearls: rape, gang rape, torture, pedophilia, bestiality, graphic murder, mutilation and incest. If you are not utterly put off by all of those things, you're in for a liberal sprinkling of casual and overt misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. There are orgies, physical and emotional abuse and graphic sex scenes. I don't know that this book should have been advertised to such a vast audience in the way that it was, when it's clearly a tough book to get through.

James himself has spoken about how he writes violence in The Guardian:

One thing the new novel shares with its predecessors is a uniquely intense presentation of violence. I ask him whether he ever feels that his work strays close to gratuitousness, to a kind of willful lingering over scenes of pain.  

“You have to risk it or you won’t get close to the power or the horror of it,” he says. “You have to risk going too far. Man, I sound like Foucault. I actually think this kind of antiseptic, clipped, edited version of violence I see in literature sells it short. If you don’t read the scene of the murder of a child and find it unbearable, then that scene failed. I think people are used to violence, but they’re not used to suffering. In Hollywood films, we see violence, but we don’t see suffering. In my writing of violence I do not escape suffering and I think one of my violent scenes is equivalent to 30 of someone else’s. I get this rap of being too violent, but actually what I’m saying is that violence comes with consequences and suffering and I don’t blink at either. So it’s going to reverberate longer in my books.”

I would argue that the book's violence doesn't just stray close to gratuitousness, it is gratuitous. "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" was A LOT for me, someone who can tolerate violent content fairly well. It's the most disturbing book I've ever read. If you're sensitive to such things, I'm warning you away from them right now.

The way this book was marketed is much different from what it actually it is. I would not recommend reading it.

Quick! Thoughts about Anthony Doerr's "All The Light We Cannot See"

This won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015. Has anyone read it? What did you think?

What's it about?

The book jumps around in time in various points during World War II in France and Germany. In one storyline, a blind girl named Marie-Laure flees with her father to Saint-Malo with a diamond from a museum. They are pursued by a Nazi sergeant who wants the diamond.

The other storyline is Werner Pfennig's a young, small boy who grows up an orphan in a mining town in Germany. He has an aptitude for radio, and is taken to evil Nazi school to join the Hitler youth, hone his interests and help invent a tool for finding rebels transmitting contraband radio broadcasts. He experiences doubts about what he is asked to do.

Pros: The writing was eloquent, the allusions to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" were really cool, had strong scientific and math elements that clearly took some research and knowledge on the author's part. Did I mention the writing? It was so immersive. Since one of the main characters was blind, the author relied on other sensations to describe what was going on. It was an experience.

Cons: The nonlinear structure made the book spoil itself a few times, like, "Oh no, this character is in danger, but in a previous scene set in the future, they're alive, so I know they can't die here." Time jumping is fine, but you have to know it sucks the life out of scenes that are meant to be life-or-death tense and harrowing. It was a WWII book, so there were Nazis. So many Nazis painted humanely. This book was written in the halcyon days of 2015, when compassionate depictions of Nazis were mostly fine, but in today's political climate it wasn't great, especially today, with the terrorism in New Zealand occupying my thoughts.

Final thoughts: I don't normally gravitate toward historical fiction, but this book was really good. I can imagine WWII buffs possibly enjoying it. Afterward, I looked at pictures of Saint-Malo and read about some of the history behind it.

Quotes: 

"How do you fight a system? You try."

"God's truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick, fading spark in fathomless darkness. That's God's truth."

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."