Book 50 - Hanya Yanagihara "A Little Life"

Hanya Yanagihara "A Little Life" (Picador)




I’ve just finished reading A Little Life, and am not sure how I feel about it. I probably should wait a few days to digest it before writing anything, but I doubt I will be any clearer in my mind then.

Essentially the story is about four college friends and their wider social circle, and it follows them throughout their lives. At the epicentre of the story and their lives is Jude St Francis. Brilliant, beautiful, talented and very very broken. Jude never talks to people about his childhood – and when we find out about it, it’s not hard to see why – but it is gradually revealed throughout the book. He has a problem with his legs, so sometimes he needs to use a stick and sometimes he needs a wheelchair. He has no biological family, and is a huge mystery to everyone else. But they love him and accept him just the same. His best friends, Willem, Malcolm and JB all have their own issues, but it’s clear that this is Jude’s story.

There were certain characters I liked; out of the four friends, Malcolm was easily my favorite – but my favorites were ones outside of the core group. Harold and Julia, the older couple who come to mean so much to Jude and vice versa were my absolute favourites.

Here’s where I feel bad though – I really really did not like Jude. When his terrible childhood experiences are revealed – to the reader at least, if not the other characters – I found it hard to imagine such a catalogue of horror happening to one person. (The author has admitted that she did not do research into this issue, and I think it does show.) And despite understanding why Jude has so many problems trusting people in later life, I found him to be tiring and exhausting to read about, and incredibly selfish. It’s hard to see why so many people loved and cared about him, or stuck around, because he generally treated most of the people who tried to help him pretty badly. I think he was supposed to be a sympathetic protagonist, but it didn’t come off that way.

The writing is often a bit overblown and too ‘wordy’ but despite this, I still kept reading and enjoyed parts of the book. If I didn’t feel compelled to finish every book I start though, I may have given up by about halfway. It’s not a book to make you feel good; in fact, it left me on a bit of a downer. There’s a lot of hype about it and I wanted to see for myself what it was all about. It’s not awful, but I won’t be in a rush to read anything else by this author.

Book 51 - Patti Smith "Year Of The Monkey"

Patti Smith "Year Of The Monkey"(Bloomsbury Publishing)





I found athis to be a very comfortable and trippy home between the covers of this book. It has a great feeling of drifting and reflecting on the events and people in Patti Smith’s life of 2016. The book is thankfully far from a sequential and orderly reciting of dates, happenings, and places. Every so often, in amongst the pages, is one of her famed Polaroid photos, which fit so well with her words. With her previous memoirs, Just Kids (which had such a life to it, as she described her time with Robert Mapplethorpe) and M Train (which was more reflective, but not to the extent of this book), I didn’t remember liking them nearly as much as this one. In Monkey, her writing seems much more fluid, and the line between a memory from a specific point in her life and her dreams, has a comforting and vague definition to it.


Let me quote the book’s jacket, “Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland.” I loved being drawn in, as she travels the California coast near Santa Cruz, describes her time in the Arizona desert, travels to a farm in Kentucky, and visits her declining personal mentor/producer/manager, Sandy Pearlman, in a hospital. It was Pearlman (a rock critic) who approached Smith very early on and told her that she should front a rock band. Patti’s response was straightforward (and pure music to this former bookseller’s ears), “I just laughed and told him I had a good job working in a bookstore.”
In this memoir, she is dealing with the intense sorrow of losing her friends (Sam Shepard and Pearlman), the collective shame and pain of our national politics, the heaviness of modern life, thoughts of her past, and her approaching 70th birthday. She reflects on all of it, and searches for and finds hope for the future.#
She was there for her former lover, Shepard, as he was struggling with ALS, and trying to finish his very last book, The One Inside. She was his hands as much of the final writing and editing on the book was finished.

I appreciate all the wisdom, wit, writing skill, and heart that she brought to this book, without it ever becoming awkward or heavy-handed. Between the covers of Year of the Monkey, was a fascinating, stimulating, humorous, and always interesting world of the real and the delightfully ethereal.

Book 52 - Miranda July "No One Belongs Here More Than You"

Miranda July "No One Belongs Here More Than You" (Canongate Books)




The entire reading of No One Belongs Here More Than You wasn't a complete loss. Eight stories into the collection, there's a gem called "Something That Needs Nothing." Farther down the list, the last story, "How to Tell Stories to Children" was also a good one. I'll even throw in "Mon Plaisir" as something worth the time.

But in the end, there isn't anything special about Miranda July's work. Even the blurbs on back cover are less than convincing. One even goes off to say he's coined a new phrase - July-esque. However, I couldn't help notice that July's work reminded me of another female author's writing, one I failed to mention above because I was saving her for this: Margaret Atwood. So George Saunders, perhaps your newly found phrase should be Atwood-esque.

I won't be holding my breath for July's next collection/release, however, but I'm not denying her a second chance. I think I'm going to do that from now on. Give authors who failed to capture me the first time around, a second chance.

Book 53 - William Doyle "The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction"

William Doyle "The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford Universsity Press)




Doyle provides a very compact and dense summary of the French Revolution. He summarizes the causes which started the revolution, the events which happened during the revolution, and the effects it caused, some of which have reverberated down to the modern day. The short chapters make the book easy to read in a few sittings, and the chapter titles give the reader the direction for the chapter (Why it happened, how it happened, what it ended, what it started). Doyle mentions all the key players, political parties, and the international incidents the revolution impacted.

Also included is a very detailed timeline, a note on the Revolutionary calendar, and a nice selection of suggestions for further reading. As always the Very Short Introductions pack a heavy punch in spite of their small size (this one is just 100 pages)