1/16/23

 What have I been watching?: Welcome to Chippendale's

It's the final book post for 2022's books. 

• To Shake the Sleeping Self -- Jedidiah Jenkins

I rated this one 7.5/10. This book was about a guy, a lawyer, who decides to leave his job and his life as he knows it to bikepack from Oregon to Patagonia (tip of South America). For most of the trip, he is accompanied by a male friend. He and his friend have different styles--his friend is fairly unprepared, underpacked, under financed. This causes some tension between them as they go on. 

I really liked the wanderlust aspect of this book. They are living out of bags on their bikes and making their way across multiple countries on their bikes powered by themselves. This allows them to intimately experience their environments and be immersed in the scenery. They alternate between camping and staying in hotels depending on where they find themselves and how they're feeling. It was a very cool adventurous, seize the day sort of vibe. 

The only thing (and unfortunately it was a pretty prominent thing) was the very persistent religious themes and rhetoric throughout this book. The author and main character is Christian and that is a huge part of his life. It comes up pretty frequently as he is discussing his experience. I am not religious and didn't enjoy the persistent religious ponderings.

• The Guest List - Lucy Foley

A modern mystery. The setting of this book is pretty cool--a small island in Great Britain home to a historic little manor turned event venue. The island is also accompanied by its own little cemetery plot and creepy swamp. It's a quiet, dreary, rainy place, which sets the perfect creepy vibe for the story. A wedding is being hosted at the island and tensions are running high among and between both the guests and event staff.

I've said it once and I'll say it a million more times: mysteries are not my favorite and I tend to be wary of them. Nevertheless, I thought this was decent. There were twists I didn't see coming, interweaving threads lingering beneath the surface that didn't reveal themselves until the end. I didn't know how things would end up. I rated this one 8/10.

• Everything I Know About Love -- Dolly Alderton

I adored this memoir, and I rated it 9.5/10. It was funny, honest, and genuine. It was real. Here are some quotes I found noteworthy:

"I've watched it time and again--a woman always slots into a man's life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don't like this rigamarole any more than men do, but they're better at it--they just get on with it."

"A week into my big New York adventure, I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside."

"I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small price of an uncomfortable conversation."

• The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle -- Stuart Turton

This was a fabulous mystery. It feels like it can hardly just be described as a mystery, though. There was murder, there was blackmail, there was suicide (or was there?), a ticking clock, a stranger in a plague mask. It was giving The Good Place, it was giving Groundhog Day, it was giving Clue, it was giving Happy Death Day. Set again in a somewhat remote historic castle/manor, our main character finds himself unwittingly placed as a pawn in a sick sort of race against time to solve a murder. He has only so many opportunities to do so and must figure out how best to use his time before he runs out of it. As time goes on, he must re-evaluate who is friend and who is foe. I rated this 8/10. If there is one thing this book wasn't, it's simple. It was a complex story with so many interwoven layers across characters and across time. A bit difficult to keep up with at times.

• Want Me -- Tracy Clark-Flory

I didn't like this memoir as much as I thought I would. I couldn't shake this sense of hypocrisy from this author. She was a sex author, writing regular columns about sex and giving sex advice, all the while faking her own orgasms for years and years. She made her career off of sex advice but wasn't being truthful with herself or with her partners about her sex life, and that came across as so disingenuous to me. Something about that really bothered me. I guess this book was all about that journey. I think the author could have been a bit more explicit in acknowledging her hypocrisy, though. I just didn't find myself resonating with her at all. I gave this 6.5/10.

Despite not loving the author, I did find parts of the book valuable and took down some quotes:

"It would be many more years before I had any inkling of how white women in particular use hip-hop to cast off the strictures of 'pure, chaste' femininity, as the author Brittney Cooper argues, and just how profoundly race and class factor into constructions of innocence. 'The ability to take on and peel off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by the term "white privilege," she writes.'"

"My mom had recently told me, 'Many women confuse fear with attraction.'"

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

"As John Berger famously wrote in Ways of Seeing, 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.'"

• Beheld -- Tarashea Nesbit

This didn't do it for me. I was so drawn to the gorgeous book cover, and I ended up much preferring the cover to the book's contents. I didn't really take anything away from this, and I rated it 5.5/10.

• Flowers for Algernon -- Daniel Keyes

I read this in middle school, I believe, and decided to read it again for the first time since. I recalled it being good and remembered the gist of the plot. But I'm so glad I decided to read it again, despite knowing generally how it would end. It is an emotional and thought-provoking book. I highly recommend that everyone read it. I rated it 9/10. It's hard to describe the substance of the story without giving away critical things. Basically, the main character is mentally challenged and becomes a participant in an experimental study in which he is the first human participant. The experiment is in some ways successful but in other ways very damaging. We read about the experiment's effects on the main character's life through his own journaling. A super cool aspect of the book is how the main character's writing, vocabulary, and grammar change throughout the course of the book.

Here are some quotes I took away:

"I say it, because you have no gratitude or understanding of the situation. After all, you are indebted to these people if not to us--in more ways than one." "Since when is a guinea pig supposed to be grateful?" I shouted. "I've served your purposes, and now I'm trying to work out your mistakes, so how the hell does that make me indebted to anyone?"

"The problem, dear professor, is that you wanted someone who could be made intelligent but still be kept in a cage and displayed when necessary to reap the honors you seek. The bitch is that I'm a person."

"He asked me dd I have any friends or relatives and I said no I dont have any. I told him I had a friend called Algernon once but he was a mouse and we use to run races together."

• Cultish - The Language of Fanatacism -- Amanda Montell

This was a cool read. I learned a lot from it and rated it 9.5/10. I learned about Jonestown and a lot of other American cults I hadn't heard of before. I learned that there were very few survivors from Jonestown because the cult members were essentially sequestered and forced to kill themselves. There was one cult in which all the members lived together in a large house and they were all found dead in their bunk beds following a mass suicide. If I recall correctly, they were all dressed in matching clothes and thought they were going to ascend together to some other realm. This kind of stuff is so intriguing and captivating. It's like all the true crime podcasts I listen to. Some of the content is creepy and devastating, but you still find yourself so drawn to it.

In addition to talking about some well-known, typical cults, the author also discusses some other trends, hobbies, and pastimes that are cult-like.

Here are some quotes:

"Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem 'culty'--it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem."

"In June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism s a public health crisis with 'It's FLOYD-19'), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place was not really 'for everyone.' And the linguistic red flags had always been there. By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along."

"But while MLMs talk a lot of smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant capitalist theory."

"To this day, unemployed women, especially those living in blue-collar towns, continue to make up the majority of MLM recruits."

"Amway's two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name should sound familiar. The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump's secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald FOrd, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates' coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump."

"The term 'gaslight' originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she's gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslight in their house and insisting that she's delusional every time she points out the change."

• There There -- Tommy Orange

I had no expectations of this book and didn't know what it was about. I discovered that it was very well-written, eloquent, and emotional. I rated it 9.5/10. The story was told from the perspective of various different Native characters who at first don't appear to have any connection apart from being Native. As the story goes on, it turns out that they are not totally random, unconnected individuals. The book gave me a little bit of insight into being Native in modern America. I found it a little bit difficult to keep track of who was who since the perspective regularly switched characters, but it was worth it. Here are some quotes:

"As for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub."

"Roosevelt said, 'I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.' 'Damn, TS. That's messed up. I only heard the one about the big stick.'"

"We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread--which isn't traditional, like reservations aren't traditional, but nothing is original, everything coms from something that came before, which was one nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere."

"Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people--which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation."

• Unbroken -- Laura Hillenbrand

I read this over the course of, gosh, literally several months because my partner and I took turns reading it out loud to each other on car rides, while cooking in the kitchen, etc. Reading a book out loud takes forever and is exhausting. He had wanted to read this book and so I said okay, I'll read it to you. I ultimately had to renew the e-book loan like three times because it took so long to finish reading it out loud. 

As I think I've mentioned before, reading a book out loud rather than in your head really exposes the writing. Everything is laid out bare--every word articulated. When you read in your head, in contrast, you are able to omit what your brain interprets as unnecessary things. Maybe this allows you to not only read faster, but also to enjoy what you are reading more. Maybe our brains just have a way they like to read and they alter the writing to accord with that. Anyways, this book really dragged on and my brain wasn't really able to omit was it interpreted as unnecessary words and whatnot. The story, based on a real man's experience as an Olympic athlete (track), American soldier, and prisoner of war in Japan, was very interesting. From it I learned a lot about the horrors of being a prisoner of war under Japanese control. They were starved, regularly beaten brutally, tormented both physically and mentally, were left to succumb to treatable diseases, and were worked essentially to death.

• Heart Berries -- Terese Marie Mailhot

I regrettably did not care for this memoir much at all, and I rated it 5/10. I found it very difficult to understand. The writing style was so obscure, like poetry, that I couldn't understand the story very well. It was just so abstract, too much so for my liking. I honestly could barely even tell you what this book was about. I'm sure there was much of value in it, but I unfortunately was unable to see it.

I took down one quote:

"When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much."

• Wordslut -- Amanda Montell

This was my second Amanda Montell book of this batch of books. Another lovely piece of nonfiction. I rated this one 9/10. Here's some cool bits I saved:

"It's a dialect of sorts, which one can drop into or camp up whenever the situation calls for it. This is called 'code switching,' and sexuality aside it's actually something almost all English speakers do. Most of us speak more than one dialect of English, which we might learn from our ethnic community, the geographic region where we grow up, or a new region we transplant to (think of, say, a native Texan living in Los Angeles who speaks Standard English around Californians, but drops into their hometown accent the second they're around other Texans). Consciously or unconsciously, we all adjust our codes depending on the context of the conversation."

"In recent history, acts of verbal dominance have gotten worse, not better. A 2017 study analyzing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from 1990, 2002, and 2015 determined that as more female justices were added to the bench, interruptions of women did not improve but escalated. Using the logic that more female justices would normalize female power, you might expect the opposite result. 'Interruptions are attempts at dominance . . . so the more powerful a woman becomes, the less often she should be interrupted,' the researchers wrote. Instead, they found that in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices."

"In the Dominican Republic, there happens to be a high incidence of a rare genetic intersex condition called 5-ARD. Babies with 5-ARD are born with what appear to be female genitalia, but at puberty, their bodies--from their faces to their nether regions--start to masculinize, and by adulthood, they look like hairy, barrel-chested men. In Dominican culture, people with 5-ARD are labeled guevedoces, which literally means 'penis at twelve.' In this community, people with 5-ARD are raised as girls, but after puberty, they are considered men for the rest of their lives, and they often take on new, masculine names."

"All the while, some people still use the word gender when what they really want to talk about is sex--like when pregnant parents reveal the 'gender' of their unborn babies. (My theory is that some Egnlish speakers continue to do this simply because prudish Westerners are too afraid to say the word sex out loud)."

"In the 1990s . . . a gender theorist at UC Berkeley named Judith Butler . . . came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn't something you are, it's something you do."

• The Butcher and the Wren -- Aaina Urquhart

This book was authored by a co-host of one of my favorite true crime podcasts. I thought it was a pretty decent crime thriller, and I rated it 7.5/10. The book is set in New Orleans and features a medical examiner who is called upon to help solve the case of what turns out to be a serial killer in New Orleans. The serial killer leaves clues at the scenes of his crimes and the medical examiner and police are always figuring them out just a moment too late. It turns out the medical examiner has a secret history of her own. The book was concluded in a way that makes me think a sequel will follow.

• Book Lovers -- Emily Henry

This was a cute and funny rom-com. Parts of this book truly made me chuckle out loud, so that's something. It's a feel-good read and it made me smile. Of course it was quite cheesy as well at times, but that's to be expected. The main character is a publicist for authors and she helps coordinate between them and their publishers. She takes a trip with her sister to the small town that inspired the setting of one of her client-author's books. The small town turns out to not be quite as dreamy and picturesque as the book portrayed it. Nevertheless, aspects of it draw them in and they integrate themselves nicely into the community. I rated it 7.5/10.

• The Paris Apartment -- Lucy Foley

My final book of 2022 was The Paris Apartment. This is another mystery/thriller, and I enjoyed it, although it featured a lot of typical-cliff hanger type language. In this story, a somewhat estranged sister shows up at her brother's apartment in Paris for a rather impromptu visit. She is surprised, however, to find him absent, despite having informed her just earlier that he was expecting her. With nowhere else to go and with few others in the world apart from her brother, she sticks around and starts investigating the other residents of the apartment building. I rated this one 8/10.