Book Write Up: Fortune Smiles

Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fortune Smiles proves what a truly versatile storyteller Adam Johnson is. From the empathy filled stories about a father taking care of his son after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the two North Korean exiles living in South Korea, to the far out story about the man with the man who designs the digital simulation of the American president, Smith shows that he can write about anything and somehow it is still a coherent volume. Fortune Smiles was a good reading experience.

Book Write Up: Trick Mirror

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a great essay collection and really each essay deserves to be talked about by itself, but I'm too lazy to do that right now. Highly recommend anyway.

Book Write Up: Long Bright River

Long Bright River by Liz Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have mixed thoughts about Liz Moore's Long Bright River. It dives into a complex relationship of sisters trying to get by in the midst of the opioid crisis. The point of view is from the sister that is a cop, but unbelievably naive about police corruption and exploitation. 90% of the novel is a slow burn about the sisters' background and relationship, which is the strongest aspect of the novel. But then it rushes to a crime thriller ending that feels like a totally different novel in tone. People seem to really like this novel, so maybe this is pairing is just what the market/publishing industry required for people to be satisfied. *shrug*

Book Write Up: The Violent Bear It Away

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Violent Bear It Away is so full of Catholic imagery and themes, that despite being a very well written novel, I'm not sure I got as much out of it as I could have. O'Connor is a master at description and imagery and writes characters at the extremes of belief. I enjoyed it on the whole and am glad I read it, but also a pretty big CW for racist language.

Book Write-up: Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell

Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In Since I Laid My Burden Down, Brontez Purnell creates an amazing portrait of a character at the coming together of a lot of intersections: black, queer, Southern, San Franciscan, Lutheran, Baptist, lover, son, uncle. This book is sometimes hilarious, sexy and heartbreaking, and always honest. I devoured it in one sitting.

Deshawn is an artist living in San Francisco. He returns to Alabama for a funeral, and flashes of his life between the two spaces appear. Family and lovers enter the narrative and disappear again. The pace is fast, though there is less emphasis on plot than on character and how these seemingly contradictory identities play out in the central character. The time frame and setting shift mostly between Alabama and San Francisco.

Book Write-up: Ida by Gertrude Stein

Ida: A Novel by Gertrude Stein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ida is a fascinating and difficult read. It's modernist and experimental. It doesn't flow, sentence to sentence, like you would expect a novel to. It's like a cubist painting made from text. Multiple points of view collide in a single paragraph so that each sentence may be a repetition of a previous sentence but from a different point of view. This style makes Ida difficult to read, at least until you get the hang of what's going on.

In terms of plot, things do happen: Ida is born, gets married, has dogs, likes things, hates things, is out and seen in Society. But this is a novella driven by the structure and style rather than character or plot. Ida the character remains opaque. We get so many points of view at once that any real sense of Ida is fragmented.

Ultimately I think this is a smart way to write about the beginnings of celebrity culture. Everyone sees Ida differently, and these different versions of Ida make a fragmented tableau that supplants narrative about the character Ida as a person.

Ida is enjoyable in as much as it is fascinating. If you enjoy looking at how a text is constructed and how the style itself gives meaning, you might enjoy this read.


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Book Review: A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Gibney

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Gibney aims to show "how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity." and "acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts--acting, in other words, as sociopaths--the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco."

The primary premise within this book is that "as a generation, the Boomers present as distinctly sociopathic, displaying antisocial tendencies to a greater extent than their parents and their children." And it certainly is a bold premise, promising to provoke enough controversy to propel sales. It does not work as serious methodology, no matter how seriously Gibney tries to sell or it how honestly serious most of Gibney's economic and social policy diagnoses are. That is a shame. The seriousness of the discussion in the later chapters is overshadowed by the ridiculousness of the starting premise.

Thanksgiving, Exploitation, Steinbeck and Some Other Goodies

I have to admit I have never liked Thanksgiving and I want to take a second here to meditate on the holiday's meaning for me. It is hard for me to like a holiday that celebrates America's settlement by Europeans and the birth of America's original sin. Steinbeck said it really well in The Winter of Our Discontent when he called America's founders puritans and pirates, being the same thing basically due to their desire to take property (land and people) for exploitation. 

It's such a great quotation bringing together both puritan - shining beacon on a hill - New England and Southern slave plantation settlement origins with nascent American capitalism and the appropriation of lands and peoples for exploitation. And then he turns around the racist trope of the Indigenous and African people as closer to monkeys and says that the Europeans are the real monkeys!! being less evolved in a presumably moral sense. And all of this in three sentences! 

More on The Winter of Our Disconent

The Winter of Our Discontent is by far Steinbeck's darkest novel with its critique of 1950s consumer driven capitalism, excessive shallow consumption and the character arc of its main character going from good man to bad. The seed of this transformation is in the American character itself, drawn from the American original sin mentioned above. It is a tragedy in the classical sense with a protagonist who falls due to an inherent flaw, and yet it it modern in its use of irony. Ethan Hawley is seen as a successful member of society because he becomes wealthy, even though he has sacrificed his own morality. And that brings us full circle to the title of the book: The Winter of Our Discontent is a line from Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York," Richard III announces that the dark times of Lancaster rule over England have ended and a better reign by his brother is commencing. Of course Richard III has designs on the throne for himself, so there is irony in his words. The irony is similar for Steinbeck's book. Ethan Hawley comes out of his moral isolation, but being a part of this society means moral duplicity and exploitation. I think it is a gloomy yet spot on meditation on the American condition.

Review: The Sea Wolf by Jack London

My Rating: 4 of 5 stars

More than an Arctic Sea adventure, Jack London's The Sea Wolf is an extended meditation on the possibility for cruelty among men and a critique of Social Darwinist and Nietzschean philosophies. Creating monstrous, larger than life characters is something at which Jack London excelled and the character dominating the landscape of The Sea Wolf, Wolf Larsen, is no exception.

Without putting out too many spoilers, the basic plot of The Sea Wolf is that a rich, pampered young man is shipwrecked and rescued by the captain of the schooner Ghost. Rather than return him to civilization, Wolf Larsen forcibly enlists Humphrey (now deemed Hump by the captain) Van Weyden in the ships crew and sails to the Arctic for the seal hunting season. Hump must learn to survive independently and become tough in the face of Wolf Larsen's often murderous brutality.

While Humphrey Van Weyden's development into a toughened, independent yet still compassionate character is well thought out and drives much of the plot, it is the monstrosity of Wolf Larsen that steals the show. Jack London created an amazing character who can quote philosophy and literature while subjecting his crew to torments and cruelty.  He is meant to be the living embodiment of Nietzsche's super-man philosophy. Jack London's take on the philosophy is rather obviously negative and reflects the cruelty and certainly sociopathic behavior of Wolf Larsen.

In the end, Van Weyden's contrasting moral views (belief in the soul, belief in inherent good and that men should act justly under all circumstances) are strengthened through the encounter with Wolf Larsen, but there are certain points in the narrative where it feels like this outcome isn't guaranteed. This is probably what makes it work so well. Jack London explores the ideas fully through Wolf Larsen's dialogue and actions in such a way that they are ideologically consistent. It is only nature that ends the encounter.

The Good: Wold Larsen is a fully developed villain that embodies a philosophical tradition taken to its ideological end. He is scary in a way that makes the protagonist (and the reader) think.

The Bad: Without giving the ending away, it does seem a little deux ex machina. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but an ending driven by the characters would be more satisfying.

The Bottom Line: Read The Sea Wolf for its villain because he is as interesting as he is frightening.

Captain Atom Vol 1 Evolution

Captain Atom Vol. 1 Evolution written by J.T. Krul and Illustrated by Freddie Williams II
My Rating 2 of 5 stars

Captain Atom is described as a nearly all-powerful super hero who struggles with the ideas of how to use his power. The idea is interesting, although not very novel, and the execution misses the mark.

Captain Atom is a pilot, who through an accident becomes an atomically powered superhero. It's not a particularly novel origin, but in comics this sort of cliche is pretty common and I'm willing to overlook it.

Thematically, the first volume deals with Captain Atom's isolation from humanity and his struggle with how to deal with his powers. I like the idea of exploring these themes. Comics don't have to be action oriented all the time. But these themes aren't particularly novel and they aren't explored here very well.

Captain Atom is isolated from humanity. The superhero isolated from humanity has been done a lot already. We get that he is a superhero and he's lonely, but there isn't much of the humanity he is isolated from in these issues. He only has one friend and she's a pretty flat, unfleshed out character herself. There's nothing here to feel isolated from in the first place. It feels like a hollow cliche.

Captain Atom has incredible powers but doesn't know what to do with them. How far should he go? Again, this has already been done and it isn't very well done here. Captain Atom's meditation about the ethical reach of his powers are disjointed from any sort of story line, so they feel more like a disruption than the integrated angst of the superhero.

The artwork isn't anything remarkable. It has sort of a watercolor effect to it but somehow it doesn't feel finished, especially with the backgrounds and other characters. The world outside of Captain Atom is as unfinished in its illustration as in its written incarnation.

The Good: I give the creative team points for wanting to have a comic series that focuses so strongly on ideas rather than just action.

The Bad: The execution here is just unoriginal and badly done. It's not coherent as a story line and the ideas aren't fleshed out enough to be anything more than hollow.

The Bottom Line: Captain Atom is a noble attempt at a series with lots of ideas, but the execution is some of the worst writing and illustrating of DC's New 52.