Waywords Book Reviews
Quick Takes on My Reading SteveAtWaywords on Storygraph Steve Chisnell on GoodreadsEver since I retired from the public school classroom, I have voraciously been consuming titles new and those I regretted missing. And in keeping with my goals, I want to find the value of the widest range of reading. Here are many, rating them based upon their own purpose or ambition.
“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.”
–Oscar Wilde
Quoted in Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Stuart Mason (ed.) (1908)
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Kurt Vonnegut: “A Man Without a Country”
Vonnegut’s sardonic charm and open-handed critical wit are turned all the way up in this brief collection of short essays and observations, personal curiosities and writing advice. Worth the stay!
Edith Wharton: “Summer”
Wharton’s hotter take on Ethan Frome is also far more nuanced, with a resolution worthy of much debate.
William Covino: “Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy”
Covino’s thoughtful overview of the history of rhetoric does more than merely parallel empiricism’s relationship with magical thinking; it reveals blind spots in the awareness of each.
Aleksandar Hemon: “The Lazarus Effect”
Hemon’s tight crafting of sentence and omissions is a slow burn opening into history, politics, and identity, obscure and satisfying.
Camille Paglia: “Glittering Images”
Informative, brief, and too-safe book by the otherwise witty and insightful Paglia. Did I expect too much?
Joseph Campbell: “Sake & Satori”
Campbell’s sometimes quaint, sometimes uncomfortable musings on his daily travels across East Asia is definitely for fans: it lacks any substantive looks at his own life or the mythological thinking he will develop later. But great for some formative insights!
Lord Dunsany: “The Gods of Pegana”
Fascinating and sometimes beautifully written fictional mythology to little narrative purpose or storytelling. More similar to sketches for a larger idea that was never attempted. Why read them but for curiosity?
Samrat Upadhyay: “The Royal Ghosts”
Every story of love, treachery, aimlessness, abuse, or job security is drawn against a haunted national background, of traditions tested, of a horror at the palace.
Jason Lutes: “Berlin”
Lutes’s graphic novel demonstrates the breadth of the genre, offering a thick ground-level set of stories to the title city’s people just prior to Hitler’s rise to power. Refreshing and compelling.
Nell Stevens: “Briefly, a Delicious Life”
Stevens’s unique approach to historical fiction offers potential for genuine intimacy into the romantic struggles and creative processes for artists George Sand and Frederic Chopin but too often stops short for details on their physical adventure.
Ling Ma: “Severance”
Ma’s end-of-the-world lands not too distantly from its present; and her layered themes grow rich until a quick plot-level close that abandons them.
Sayaka Murata’s “Earthlings”
Not for everyone, Murata’s social critique is too bound in problematic caricature.
Stephen Graham Jones: “The Only Good Indians”
Jaded characters, fraying traditions, nail-biting b-ball, and a creature determined to hold it all to account. Grimace through the horror tropes and you’ve got a great novel.
Yu Hua: “China In Ten Words”
Yu’s personal experiences growing up in Maoist and post-Mao China are genuine and revealing, his division of Chinese life into broad concepts helpful, and still the subject is too large to embrace!
Jul Maroh: “Blue Is the Warmest Color”
Maroh’s story is well-told and finely illustrated, if filled with fairly predictable homophobic responses and tensions; flawed, perhaps, by its final third that disrupts the pacing and storytelling.
Milan Kundera: “The Art of the Novel”
Kundera’s thick and allusive talks about the decomposition of the novel as art form asks much of readers, both in his wearying nostalgia and his insightful and compelling persuasion.
Stephen King: “End of Watch”
The trilogy’s close is contrived and predictable, but nonetheless accomplishes what fans usually want: tight style, fun asides, and plenty of tension!
T C Tolbert: “Gephyromania”
Tolbert offers at once an intimate and obscure opening into queer identity as a complex humanity, at times turning poetic form on its head.
Haruki Murakami: “Novelist As a Vocation”
Definitely for fans of Murakami, this sometimes intimate sets of essays relates the author’s career history, his attitude towards success, and similar musings. Little here in writing strategies or awakening insights, as he says at the book’s outset.
Jack London: “The Iron Heel”
Despite its preachiness and flaws as a novel, London’s book is a political manifesto on class conflict, exposing some of the less understood dynamics of privilege and power.
Salman Rushdie: “Knife”
Rushdie’s memoir of his attack and recovery is grisly reading, but his reflections on its meaning or lack of meaning feel vital and true.
Katsuhiro Otomo: “Akira” Vols 1-6
Otomo’s place in the history of graphic art and manga is well-established; and while he has pioneered setting and tone, I remain confused about the fanatic draw to this work. I ask, humbly, for someone to _kindly_ enlighten.
William Gibson: “Pattern Recognition”
For Gibson, a ho-hum mystery plot against a fascinating world consumed by its own brand-obsessions.
Viktor Mayer-Shonberger: “Delete”
While quite dated (2008), Mayer-Schonberg’s argument remains true, and we still won’t have a real conversation about the nature of the impact of digital memory on our culture or biology.