ARJ | January 2016
Some quick thoughts on the books I finished or started this month — i.e. I abbreviated my Goodreads reviews for you. In order of frickin’ amazing to ehhh. Approximately.
books finished:
waheed has an acute ability to wrench your heart with no more than a few words. each poem unravels you, leaving you raw and hurting in the way that ailments sting and heal. Her previous collection salt. is also amazing and one of my favorite poetry collections.
i try to write with weight and air. this way you are held and set free at the same time.
Helen Keller’s poetic musings on the beauty and perception of nature invoke those of Whitman and Thoreau. She graciously illustrates both her and humanity’s tools of perception of the world and links them to grasp at something greater, a spiritual truth beyond our species’ erring lenses. Perception, Nature, Universe, and Reality are deftly juggled in her artful hands.
The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.
Haidt combines insights from fields like moral psychology, social psychology, evolutionary biology, ethics, and political philosophy to understand how morality emerged in our species and what its functions are.
The Righteous Mind is breathtaking in scope. Perhaps a little too ambitious. But fun and telling.
Bonus points for being a relatively easy read while maintaining some rigor. It’s devoid of high-level academic speak and generous in its chapter summaries.
^These two were just kinda there. A couple of standouts from Circadian but not much else to say. Overall, unmemorable.
The premise was promising — a collection of swan songs? deathbed reflections from some of humanity’s greatest poets (from the Western canon, as curated by Harold Bloom)? Yes!
That said, it was disappointing read. Part of my disappointment lies in the misleading title — not all of these were final works, and not all of these were poems. Bloom does qualify his selection in the author’s bio and intro to each piece, with something along the lines of “this wasn’t actually his last piece, but it talks about death and his fears, so I think it counts.” He tried to get at the essence of what a Last Poem should encapsulate or symbolize.
The result is lackluster, chiefly due to Bloom’s equally unsatisfying was Bloom’s cumbersome formula of short bio of how amazing, original, iconic, celebrated this poet/playwright/author was + introduction to piece + excerpt. It amounted to poorly executed literary speed-dating.
As for content, Bloom does succeed in gathering a healthy selection of works from famous and not-so-famous muses. While I did appreciate the chance to get to know a little about those lesser known writers’ lives, for me that alone did not redeem this volume’s faults.
I appreciate Badani for putting forth a book with powerful themes — a transnational South Asian family that weathers domestic abuse, racism, sexism among other challenges, written through the perspectives of three sisters of vastly different vocations, mindsets, and motivations.
However, it suffers at the hands of her inexperienced prose, though it’s not entirely unexpected of a debut novel by a career lawyer. The ambitious approach to having three protagonist-narrators also fell flat. I would often forget which sister is talking.
Books that explore these themes are important, but so too is the ability for readers to connect with the characters and engage with the book; I failed to get that from Badani.
Of these poems, perhaps I liked three. Leav certainly matured since her debut Love & Misadventure (below), while retaining her focus on her niche audience of lovesick young adults. She is successful in capturing the spirit of her generation’s so-called Tumblr poets. That said, I am still unable to find myself enjoying most of her writing.
What was it like to lose him? asked Sorrow. There was a long pause before I responded: It was like hearing every good-bye ever said to me—said all at once.
As her bio says, Leav aims for her writing to express “a complexity beneath its childlike facade.” I get the concept, but I didn’t connect with the end result. Rather than childlike, it seemed childish:
“Love is good,
it is never bad —
but it will drive you mad!”
I could be missing the point: maybe the language is a commentary on the childish impulses of the young heart. Still, I am respectfully unable to think of anyone I would recommend this book to.
books started:
So far, it’s fucking beautiful.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
Orwell’s, like, a really good writer. “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant” have a gritty, timeless appeal.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
I started reading this because of an excellent Buzzfeed article by Matt Ortile, a self-proclaimed child of Barthes and Carrie Fisher. Check out his stuff too, he’s a captivating writer himself.
