Little List of Reviews #6: Short Fiction

It’s time for another little list of reviews! This time I’m focusing on some short fiction that I’ve read recently, from a classic, to science fiction, to a modern fairy tale.

Little List of Reviews #6: Short FictionTitle: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Published by Riverhead
Published: March 7th 2017
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 231
Format: Hardcover
Source: Borrowed, Work
Goodreads

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.

Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

 Exit West seemed to be all over the place once it was released, and with everyone I knew talking about it and a lot of people at work buying it, I thought I should give it a go because it sounded timely and relevant to today. Mohsin Hamid’s lyrical writing draws you into a world that ultimately you as a reader only catch glimpses of the heartache, the fear, and the love each of the two main characters experience for themselves and with each other. In a style that bends time and space to fit the journey, the two main characters escape what is a war-torn country in the Middle East, and we follow them as they make their way westward. It is all at once a tale that speaks of the plight and routes refugees take from Syria and other nearby places and a tale that speaks to the ultimately human journey to adulthood and discovering oneself. It is a story of discovering what it means to have an identity and of holding onto love when it’s necessary and learning to let go when it’s time to let go, no matter how unprepared you might be for the end.

 

Little List of Reviews #6: Short FictionTitle: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Published by Penguin Modern Classics
Published: October 1st 2009
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 158
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

 We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a Gothic novella about the Blackwood family home and the lengths Merricat, the youngest Blackwood, goes to in order to preserve their way of life. Throughout the book, you get the sort of foreboding feeling that something is not quite right about Merricat’s behavior, especially when cousin Charles comes to visit, and while the story plays into a lot of the Gothic genre’s tropes, it doesn’t fail to thrill. It’s an exacting commentary on the preservation of oneself and one’s family in the midst of change, either in the house or in the world beyond. It asks the question what does identity mean? The meaning of identity is not generally answerable in itself but in the implications and complications that arise in the midst of everything else. Why else would Merricat say she put “death in their food and watch them die?”

 

Little List of Reviews #6: Short FictionTitle: We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ
Published by Penguin
Published: January 1st 1970
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 128
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

When I saw the covers of the Penguin Worlds science fiction classics collection, I knew I had to get them all. Not only for the covers but for the selections as well. One of my areas of research is science fiction because I feel like it’s an underrepresented genre in the grand scheme of the great literary canon, and Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… is a masterful novella about the agency a woman has, doesn’t have, and should have over her own body. Instead of conforming to the little civilization her companions decide to form in the wake of a spaceship crashing on a relatively unknown planet, the narrator decides to learn how to die when all hope is lost. Reading this book today feels very trope-y and cliché at times, but it’s important to put this in the context of the genre today. It plays with those tropes, gives a woman agency over her own life instead of submitting her body to be a vessel for reproduction, and shows us the very humanity in deciding on whether or not to live or die when you know there’s ultimately no hope for rescue or survival anyway.

Little List of Reviews #1

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Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
Published by Harper
Published: February 11th 2014
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 304
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Library
Goodreads

I liked the premise of it, but like I mentioned in my Goodreads review, I thought the narrator made Bartholomew a bit slower than I probably would have imagined the character if I had read it instead of listened to it. It can be discerned from the story sometimes that the social awkwardness and social anxiety may place Bartholomew on the autism scale, but sometimes people who care for their overbearing, needy mothers in the way he did do end up being more socially reserved than others and not on the autism scale at all. I felt a lot of the story was too trite and stereotypical in a way that didn’t sit well with me. I don’t mind language, but one of the characters cannot speak two words before interjecting “fuck,” and the overuse of the word “retard” by the main character to describe himself got old and frustrating by the second time he used it. By about a quarter of the way through, I kept asking myself why I was still listening to it, and realized it was sort of like watching a train wreck. You don’t want to stop watching in case something better happens. Halfway through, I realized nothing better would happen and let it go.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham
Published: August 11th 2015
Pages: 288
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Library
Goodreads

The premise sounded so interesting! It’s going to be made into a movie! I don’t read many books about Australia! Unfortunately for me, the characters fell flat, there wasn’t any connection among all of the characters introduced by the time I was halfway through the novel, and I didn’t feel like I cared about any of the characters or what happened to them. I might give the movie a go if it ever comes to Netflix because sometimes these kinds of stories work better on film.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Published: September 30th 1999
Pages: 162
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

I can’t believe this was released in 1999. I remember when it first came out, and it makes me feel a little bit old. I read this last year in hopes of reading all thirteen by the end of 2015, but that didn’t happen. With the announcement of Neil Patrick Harris’ casting in the role as Count Olaf in the new Netflix series, I decided that in 2016 I am going to read all of them. For whatever reason, I’ve never read the last three, so I’m excited to discover how this story ends. These are great books for everyone who likes a good deal of dark humor, word play, and shenanigans that play on popular tropes, so if you haven’t read them, do give them a go!

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber
Published: September 7th 2006
Pages: 199
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Goodreads

Faber apparently wrote these to appease himself and his fans who wanted to know what happened after The Crimson Petal and the White ended. To me, they read as deleted scenes of sorts. Good in their own right, but not good enough in the context of the novel. I liked the story with Sophie the most because it offered a peek into a relationship arrangement that would be considered scandalous even today by some people, but it didn’t offer the sense of completion I was hoping for. C’est la vie.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Night Manager by John le Carré
Published: November 7th 2013
Pages: 473
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

The things I do for Tom Hiddleston? I liked Tinker, Sailor, Solider, Spy, which admittedly I read after seeing the film and enjoying Gary Oldman’s and Benedict Cumberbatch’s roles in the film. I really don’t know why I took so long to read this (literally from March 2015 to February 2016), but I think I attribute it to the fact that I read it before I went to bed/fell asleep, so my brain got in the habit of wanting to fall asleep soon after picking it up again. It got really good in the last quarter of it, and the amount of building up that it took to get to that point might be why I let it linger for so long. I’m looking forward to the BBC/AMC mini-series, and I think it will translate nicely to screen as le Carré’s works tend to do.

I think I might make this a regular feature. Here’s a little list of reviews for books I’ve read up until now. Some of them are rereads, some of them are books that I didn’t devote enough time outside of reading to devote a whole review post (like write down my favorite parts, keep notes in a notebook, etc.), some of them are books I didn’t finish. I’m going to start with the ones I didn’t finish, just because I’d rather get the not-so-great out of the way.