jayeless's reviews
337 reviews

This is another of those books I had to read for class; I only really read half before I had to submit the essay I was reading it for, but it was really good, so I wanted to read the rest of it in my own time.

Basically, it's an account of Aboriginal resistance in the 1920s, particularly about the influence of Black nationalism, the AAPA - an all-Aboriginal organisation - and Fred Maynard, a leading activist. In one of the early chapters there's a lot of fascinating stuff about links between Aboriginal activism and activism of other black peoples around the world. And at other points it talks about the leading roles played by women in the AAPA - that they weren't just politically dismissed the say women in many political organisations of the era were.

Basically, so interesting! And important to know about.

I read this novel years ago for school, but I was clicking around Goodreads randomly and I realised that, for some bizarre reason, this book has a lot of positive reviews, so I thought I'd try to counterbalance that a little.

This book made me really angry. For a start, it's just so boring -- you'd think it'd be easy to avoid putting too much padding in a 109-page novella, but no, this book will do such things as devote an entire page to describing a tree, and honestly, I do not care about trees that much. So. That happens.

But worse, I despised the plot. Basically what happens is this: a woman in sixteenth-century France marries this man, Martin Guerre, who is abusive and generally a despicable person. At some point he up and leaves her, which would seem to me to be the highlight of their entire marriage, except for the part where this leaves her in a precarious position in sixteenth-century France. Eight years later, Martin Guerre finally deigns to return, only now he's much kinder and warmer, a really nice guy, someone it wouldn't be hell on earth to live with. This means Bertrande (the woman) becomes convinced that he's not really Martin Guerre at all, but an impostor. Most of the rest of the book is then about her struggle to make everyone else realise he's an impostor, even though he's clearly a vast improvement on the man she was married to before, so I personally would be very inclined to bury my doubts.

Then at the end he's proved to be an impostor because the real Martin Guerre actually returns, and promptly abuses Bertrande anew to thank her for making the impostor's life as hard as possible in spite of what a great guy he was. Oh sorry, I mean for "cheating" on him. Because he was definitely entitled to her loyalty after being abusive and abandoning her, after all.

I mean, I do hate novels where characters seem anachronistic, and my teacher at the time gave me a lecture about how I just didn't understand how deep the fear of hell ran in Bertrande's time. But quite honestly, I think this depth of fear of hell would have been equally unusual in Bertrande's time as ours. In the last millennium, Europe has been full of people who had affairs or even, god forbid, sex before marriage - and this is a guy who could quite easily have been Bertrande's true husband, just a bit more mature and with an actual conscience. So fine, Bertrande is part of that small minority of people who actually think remaining loyal to an abusive husband is better than the possibility of eternal damnation. This is not really a segment of society I care to read about. Each to their own, though.

I'm definitely more liberal with the five-star ratings with nonfiction books than fictional ones… regardless though, this was a great book. It should be compulsory reading for any right-wing idiot who wants to claim Orwell was against revolutions; the entire point of this book was that he was fighting to defend it, and his criticism of the Communist Party is scathing not because they wanted revolution, but because (under orders from Moscow) they were determined to wreck it. His political analysis is brilliant – he uses the phrase "state-capitalist" before Cliff had ever theorised state capitalism - and above all, is passionate in his support of working-class revolution, with no pretense of being "impartial". The truth is not impartial, basically.

Overall I loved this book. I'm definitely going to have to read more of his work; of course I've read his novels, but this has given me a taste for his nonfiction, too :)

I was given this book by my mother, who only managed to read part of it before giving up angrily, declaring it was too depressing. It probably is, but I really enjoyed it, nonetheless. At least until the end, it's incredibly realistic, and depicts the everyday tragedies that are constantly happening around us. For me, Krystal Weedon's relationship with her mother was really familiar, reminiscent of my mother at her worst (which, I suspect, is the real reason she couldn't finish the book). There's a ton of unhappy marriages, parents who regret having their kids, small-minded small-town small businessmen who are callous enough to think that cutting off drug addicts (and their entire families) from any kind of help or resources is a good idea, and so it goes. It's an exercise in showing the world as it really is, rather than as we might wish it would be.

I did have some issues with it. Mostly, I didn't like the ending very much.

It seemed like the characterisation, which had been impeccable thus far, suddenly went a bit off. It's hard to believe that Krystal left her toddler brother to go wandering off near a river – she's certainly not shown as having perfect judgement, but better judgement than that, I'd think, no matter how desperate she is to get pregnant so she can escape her hellish living conditions – for that very brother's sake! And as well, much as I despised her, Shirley never seemed like the husband-murdering type, and the image of her prowling the streets of Pagford with an Epi-Pen clutched in her hand seemed a bit far-fetched. In neither case did these characters start acting hugely OOC, but they did a bit.

It just made the conclusion seem a bit melodramatic and contrived, although I wouldn't say it was rushed, at least.

The other thing that bothered me was the pronunciation respelling in the Weedons' (and co's) dialogue... even words that they were pronouncing as per the standard, like "could" (which became "cud") and "was" ("wuz"). I'm generally opposed to writers doing this to begin with – it usually comes across as patronising, and while I don't think it does here due to Rowling's obvious sympathy for the Weedons, I do think it did when she used the same technique for Hagrid in Harry Potter. Furthermore, it's unnecessary. These characters' speech patterns differed from what might be considered "neutral" English – lots of use of "ain't", double negatives and the particle "right?" tacked on at the end of sentences, for a start. Just as an example, the sentence, "But I ain't done nothing wrong, right?" would convey the accent just as well as "Bu' I ain' done nuffin' wrong, righ'?" which is what this text probably would have preferred. Also, Rowling did this (changed the speech patterns but not the spelling) for Andrew Price's dialogue, who it seems spoke much the same way as the Weedons, and in places it got really hard to read. Mostly when Terri was speaking, which probably evokes how hard her slurred speech would have been to understand in person anyway, but still, overall the technique irritated me.

On a slightly related note, the book also has a few sections where multiple paragraph are enclosed within parentheses, and it seems like this was hard to edit because there were also a few spots where there was a closing parenthesis at the end of a paragraph with no pair that I could find. The writing feels a bit casual, but that doesn't bother me, just the apparent lack of editing.

Still, all in all, I loved this book. I wouldn't say it's slow, but a lot of the "action" is characters bickering with each other, so if you have no patience for that this book probably isn't for you. It's not usually my thing either, but I found the characters here so compelling that it worked. I really, really recommend it, and I find it kind of sad that its rating on Goodreads is so low just because of all the Harry Potter fans who read it and had their delicate sensibilities wounded by swearing and frank depictions of sex. I like Harry Potter, but this is a completely different kind of book, and yeah. It worked for me.

This review probably won't be very long. Basically, this is about the general malaise of obscenely rich kids in LA who have nothing better to do with their time than do lots of drugs. This means they make lots of bizarre and illogical decisions, and some of them seem very fuzzy on the idea that all human beings are entitled to bodily integrity and

not being abducted, raped and/or murdered on camera

. At least the narrator isn't so bereft of ethics that he enjoys watching that, but he doesn't go to any lengths whatsoever to try to stop it either. He says things sometimes about how caring is too hard, it just makes you get hurt, so he tries not to. I'm not sure if the book is nihilistic or a denunciation of nihilism or both.

To its credit, the book is hard to put down – it just kind of rattles along at a consistent pace until the end, and the segments it's divided into are mostly shorter than a page each so it's really easy to do the "just one more... just one more" thing. Plus, it's really short. That doesn't make it fun to read, though.

This book made me reflect a little on anthologies, as a form. I mean, I did really like this book (at least the first half - I felt the last three stories were weaker), but I felt that the fact that it was a series of short stories in an anthology meant that I enjoyed it less than I'd have enjoyed a novel on similar themes.

There's a couple of reasons why I think this. The first one is that every story meant introducing an entirely new set of characters, and this was something I don't think she did very effectively, at least in the last three. For each of those stories, I spent quite a few pages puzzling over how each of the characters was supposed to relate to each other, and in the case of "Yellow Jackets", I never quite did work it out fully. Over the course of a novel, it would have been the same group of characters, and I'd only have to work out the puzzle once. And then the second reason why I didn't like the anthology format as much is that there was no compulsion to keep reading. After reading the first couple of stories, I didn't bother reading any more for months. I read the rest over the course of about a week, but it's such a short book, I could have read faster if I'd been compelled to. But when you're creating a new set of characters every twenty pages, it's hard to get invested in them, and you certainly can't be driven to keep reading out of passionate curiosity to see what happens next.

So that's what I was thinking about the limitations of this form, but then there's more to say about this book beyond that.

As I've probably mentioned, I really liked it. It's a collection of stories that seem pretty well based on the author's own experiences, or the experiences of people in her circle. Some of the characters I can recognise to a certain extent, like the left-wing organiser who calls you up to guilt-trip you into coming to this or that event, or people who think they're really progressive because they can talk about war or capitalism and patriarchy, when actually as people they're kind of shit. There are mothers who neglect their children, lovers who feud because one has joined a left-wing organisation so distanced from reality that it seems a bit cultish... and it goes.

Anyway, I am a left-wing activist, so I don't really just want to rubbish on left-wing activism. The point I'm really trying to make is that there's a lot I could recognise in this book from my experiences, and it was an interesting read because there's really not many books that describe the same kinds of things. One of the characters even leafleted!! It was exciting stuff.

I guess I just came away feeling that much as I enjoyed this, I might have enjoyed a novel on the same themes even more. I mean, she does keep coming back to the same archetypes - the annoying sanctimonious left-wing activist, the depressed single mum, the well-intentioned liberal who thinks radicals are a bit weird, the ten-year-old girl who has to fend for herself, this kind of thing. What limited information I've found through Google suggests that Clausen has also written novels though, and these are maybe some things I should seek out.

I'm not sure how easy this book can be to find - I picked it up at a clearance sale where an entire bag of books went for a dollar. If you stumble across it though, it's well worth a read. Especially if you're familiar with the kinds of milieux she's writing about!

I watched the movie before reading this book. I watched it months ago. I'm not sure I'd have liked the book any better if I hadn't seen the movie (or, conversely, liked it any worse), but I think it's probably important to note that the entire time I was reading this book, I just had the movie in mind. I visualised the scenes from the movie. Overall, I came away with the feeling that the movie was an amazing adaptation of a pretty sweet book, and I think the movie also had a better climax - in terms of what happened the climax is the same, of course, but because the format of the book is a series of letters Charlie is writing to a mysterious someone, the climax is basically Charlie writing, "

so basically, I realised that what I dreamed about Aunt Helen is true and now I've been in the hospital for two months

," which... was not really as good as the way it happened in the movie.

Nonetheless, I really liked the book.

This is a collection of 12 short stories which, in general, cover the same kinds of themes - being an immigrant in America, being an Igbo academic, being an Igbo writer, facing war and persecution in Nigeria, having to reclaim your identity and history from white colonisers. These are essentially themes I don't have a lot of experience with, so I can't comment on how they're used or anything, but it was a collection of stories and themes I found interesting.

In response to some of the other reviews I glanced over - I don't think it's a problem that the stories were all largely on similar themes; to me it makes more sense for a collection to be on similar themes than for a collection to consist of things that have little to do with each other. But another criticism I read is that a lot of the stories have weak endings, and this I agree with; a lot of the time it seemed that they stopped suddenly, with no real conclusion reached.

As I mentioned when I reviewed Half of a Yellow Sun, I really like Adichie's prose. She also clearly writes things that are close to her, and her experiences - she returns to the same social layers, the same towns, etc. to tell her stories. It all seems very personal.

So in the end, I'm giving this four stars. For me, probably the highlight of the anthology was the last story, "The Headstrong Historian", but there were quite a few good ones. I recommend it!