I have been slacking, so I have a lengthy book post for you. 2022's reads continued:
- Trespassing Across America -- One Man's Epic Never-Done Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland -- Ken Ilgunas
Okay, it's been a long, long time since I read this, but even if I wrote this post last month, I would still say that this left no lasting impression on me. I am really drawn to the wanderlust-esque books, but this one wasn't particularly noteworthy to me. Usually I'm a sucker for that kind of book. The premise here is that the guy decides to go on this backpacking trek across America, with the catch that he intends to go straight through private property as well (including expansive fields with roaming animals). His biggest fear in doing so is encountering a particularly gun-happy private land owner who doesn't take kindly to trespassers. Nevertheless, he embarks on the trip anyways and for the most part encounters very friendly folks across the country. I rated this book 5/10.
- White Oleander -- Janet Fitch
This book was stunning. One of my favorites of 2022. I consider it a feminist novel. I described it on my Instagram story as "dark, but rich." The female protagonist has a complicated relationship with her mother, who commits a violent act against an ex-boyfriend, resulting in her imprisonment. This sends the main character, the daughter, into the foster system. I imagine the daughter resents her mother for this, for engaging in such a crime knowing that if caught, it would leave the daughter homeless and at the mercy of the system. Much of her mother's, and her own, turmoil stems from their relationships with men. Indeed, the main character gets involved (or perhaps better stated, preyed upon) by a foster father in one of the homes in which she is placed. This enrages the foster mother, who then takes it out on the main character.
A common theme in this book is male entitlement and privilege, which of course I always love to see acknowledged. I found the writing very compelling. I rated this book 10/10. Here are some quotes I noted:
"If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."
"Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs."
"Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up."
"He stumbled away, and in a moment we heard him kick the front door. 'You fucking cunt. You won't get away with this. You can't do this to me.' She threw open the front door then, and stood there in her white kimono, his blood on her knife. 'You don't know what I can do,' she said softly."
"'Men,' she said. 'No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.'"
- The Vegetarian -- Han Kang
I don't know what the fuck this was. I rated it 3/10. It was apparently one of the 10 Best Books according to the New York Times's 2016 book review. I hated it. I found it utterly incomprehensible. I thought I would find something of value in it because it is, in part, about a despondent wife who defies her husband by refusing to eat meat, and I am a vegetarian who can get on board with that. But it gets really fucking strange and sexual and exploitative. If there were underlying messages and themes that I was supposed to be inferring from this bizarre narrative, I was unable to find them.
- Everything I Never Told You -- Celeste Ng
This was a bit cheesy. I realized this only after reading part of this book aloud to my brother. Reading it in your mind, you can kind of skip around some of the cheesy bits and interpret it according to your liking. Like when you get used to reading in your head a lot, you end up not actually actively reading every single word--you read a few words and get the gist of things and move on, subconsciously. So the cheesiness slides under the radar. But reading it aloud puts it all out there, bare. My brother actually told me to please stop, or read something else, because he found it so cheesy. This book left no meaningful impression on me. I rated this 5.5/10.
- All That She Carried -- Tiya Miles
This was a wonderful and informative piece of non-fiction. It is a mix of both general historical information, plus information specific to a lineage of Black women in slavery. Much of the information about these specific women is unrecorded, which is kind of the point of the book--to draw attention to the complete lack of documentation in history about huge populations of people. Some of the only sources from which information about these individuals can be drawn are the ledgers and business/financial records of slave owners and slave traders. They are literally only recorded in history as property. The only reason that tangible records of their existence in this world exist are because people tracked their finances--the purchase and sale of slaves.
This book is based on a satchel that has wording sewn on it, detailing the contents that had been placed into it by a mother for her daughter in preparation of their separation. It was passed down from mother to daughter and eventually was unearthed and placed into a museum. I rated this book 9.5/10. Here are some quotes I pulled from the book because they taught me things:
"Because states like Louisiana and Alabama forbade the sale of individual children under ten, many more children than seems credible were listed as ten to twelve years of age in slave traders' business records."
"The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants."
"Of course the word 'pecan,' like so many other American words in English, derives from a Native language (in the Algonquian linguistic family) and reveals a substrata of cultural exchange over centuries. Indigenous people used the term pakan for 'hard-shelled nut.' French settlers learned the word from Natchez people in Mississippi in the 1700s and spelled it pacanes. From this we take our 'pecan,' which is pronounced differently in the South and the North, depending on which syllable is emphasized."
"Jacobs was so distraught that her infant son existed as movable property with no surname to speak of that she prayed for the newborn's premature death. But when her son actually became ill, she desperately sought a reprieve from God, begging for the child to be spared. 'Alas what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life!' Jacobs bemoaned. 'Death is better than slavery.'"
"Charleston is the only American city that required slaveholders to purchase badges. These badges, meant to be worn visibly on the body, displayed an enslaved person's occupation and announced the master's permission for that person to be mobile for the named work and even to live in a separate, independent household while carrying out the work."
- Missoula -- Jon Krakauer
This was one of my favorite Jon Krakauer books so far. I definitely liked it better than the one about fundamentalist Mormonism, even though I find that topic very interesting. This one was just easier for me to follow, whereas the one about Mormonism involved so many different players, so to speak, that I struggled to keep track of who was doing what and at what time period.
I rated this book 10/10. This one was about the high prevalence of rapes on a college campus in Missoula, Montana. It describes the stories of several women who experienced rape and sexual assault on or near campus and details how the University handled the situations. The University's football team bore a disproportionate number of these alleged offenders. The book also allowed a look into the administrative procedures implemented by the University as compared with legal proceedings brought by actual prosecutors for the state of Montana. The two proceedings involve different standards of proof and different rights.
The subject matter of this book was, expectedly, graphic. However, it was well-written and told the stories well from the victims' perspectives.
- Nowhere for Very Long -- Brianna Madia
This was a novel about a woman who buys a van and renovates it to live out of it and go on adventures in the American southwest. She has several dogs and they live with her in the van. I honestly don't remember a ton of details about it except for that at one point she and her husband actually ran over their own dog with the van while they were driving and the dogs were running outside along the van. I can't remember if they themselves or someone they know put up a GoFundMe or something like that to raise money for veterinary care for the dog. The dog survived after extensive surgical intervention. The weird part was that the fundraising for the dog's vet bills didn't disclose that it was the dog's owners themselves who actually ran over the dog. The GoFundMe just kind of generally described that the dog was hit by a car, which makes it sound like someone else did it. So that was a bit icky and weird, and the author acknowledged that too and seemed to feel not good about it. Anyways, that's the part about it that stuck out most in my mind. I rated it 7/10.
- Nothing to See Here -- Kevin Wilson
I read this after seeing some references to it online. It was really bizarre lol but it was cute and kind of heartwarming. As the cover art indicates (although I didn't realize it when I read it), the story involves children who randomly set ablaze. They are kind of misfits in the view of their rich family (politician father and politician's wife step-mother). Shunned and not really a part of the family. The main character is hired as a nanny of sorts for the kids, although she doesn't know at first what she's getting into. She ends up taking quite a liking to the children and they help each other grow. It was a cute read, and I rated it 8/10. A quote I liked from this book is: "A lot of times when I think I'm being self-sufficient, I'm really just learning to live without the things that I need."
- I'm Glad my Mom Died -- Jennette McCurdy
This is a new memoir by former iCarly star Jennette McCurdy. It was really interesting and I rated it 9.5/10. This memoir tells us of Jennette's childhood and upbringing and unhealthy relationship with her mother. Her mother aspired for Jennette to become an actress, and so she did. Something interesting that I learned was that Jennette was born into a Mormon family and church was a big part of her childhood. She liked getting out of the house to go to church, in part because her mother was a bit of a hoarder and the house was just in rough shape. I also found Jennette's first description of what she later learned to be OCD symptoms really interesting. She thought at first that the impulses/rituals she felt compelled to do had to do with her religion.
A big portion of the book revolves around how Jennette's mother fostered an eating disorder in Jennette. Her mother taught her horrific eating habits and ideas about food and body image. Her mother was just overbearing and controlling in general. She made Jennette feel guilty for growing up and growing apart. This book was worth reading and gave an interesting look at the lives of child actors and what they go through.
- The People in the Trees -- Hanya Yanagihara
This is the second book by this author that I have read. The first one I read is called A Little Life. It is a very long, very trauma-filled, very sad book. It has a lot of triggering topics. This book, The People in the Trees, was similar in some respects, but was mostly distinct from A Little Life. A Little Life is more domestic, more relationship-based. The People in the Trees is more exotic, mystifying, foreign.
I think the author's writing is great, but the topics she repeatedly selects for her books is interesting, to say the least. This book was at times very unsettling and just made me uncomfortable. The same was true for A Little Life. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. I think it is a mark of good authorship to be able to describe a scenario in such a way that evokes such a response in the reader--like my stomach would literally be twisting with anxiety and discomfort at times in this book. It felt perverse to be reading some of the things I was reading.
The setting of this book was very interesting to me. The story (which is based on real events, by the way, which makes the book all the more horrifying) is set in the South Pacific. The main character, a man, travels there with a couple other individuals for research purposes. That component of the story is super interesting. The descriptions of the environment, the flora and fauna, the temperature and the weather, really took me back to my time in Fiji. The story takes place in the jungle as well as in a village on the island. The characters survive in the jungle on common fruit and sleep on the jungle floor. They are guided by local men who navigate and translate for them. The characters end up making a very promising discovery that has huge implications for the medical field and the the concept of aging. This discovery changes the island and its people and culture in ways that can never be reversed.
The book touches on themes of pedophilia. And at first, for most of the book, it really does just "touch upon" it rather than delving deeply into it. But it does become a more explicit and prominent component of the story as things develop. It forces us to address the concept of cultural relativism versus universalism. This part of the story, the pedophilia aspect, is also based on the real-life man on whom this story is based.
I didn't end up rating this book because although I thought it was extremely interesting and well-written, it didn't feel right to highly rate a book that didn't condemn pedophilia. It's not to say that the author is condoning pedophilia with the book, she is just writing from the perspective of characters who condone it. Still, its an unsettling topic and one that I didn't feel comfortable attaching a high book rating to. This is the only book from the entire year of 2022 that I did not rate.
- In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote
I didn't realize when I checked this book out that it was really old. It was written in 1965 and it showed. Some of the language was pretty antiquated and it just felt like from a different era. That was exacerbated by the fact that the book is set in a rural, small-town, agriculture-based area. It also used the occasional slur.
This was a mystery, but due to its age it was unlike the modern mysteries that I am used to seeing promoted these days. The modern ones seem to pander to the genre a bit, ending chapters with cliche cliff-hangers and generic copy and paste phrases. This isn't to say that I preferred this older mystery to new ones, however. I found the book a little dry and it didn't leave much of an impression on me. But I like true crime as a general matter, so this was okay. I rated it 6/10.
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