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)
“Pet” by Akwaeke Emezi
This YA story is at once a serious look at repressed trauma (personal and societal) and a sensitive examination of diversity and compassion. A wonderful introduction to community and responsibility.
“The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt
Those looking for quick takeaways about totalitarian regimes, especially in our current climate, are disappointed that Arendt hasn’t offered the complexity of the issue in bullet points. But of course, the complex and nuanced and even contradictory history of the world isn’t built that way.
“Hardears” by Matthew Clarke
Clarke’s original Caribbean hybrid of history and myth is an act of art and decolonialization, of imagination and resistance to the mainstream, though not wholly penetrable to audiences beyond the island culture.
“Omeros” by Derek Walcott
Walcott’s epic poetic work is at once a refiguring of Homer and the colonial history of St. Lucia, of the indigenous everywhere, of the myths which mark poet and people. An extraordinary layering of all.
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce
If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera
Kundera’s near masterpiece is compelling story, hypnotic characters and interactions, a profound theme, and . . . something else more elusive still.
“The Refugees” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nguyen’s short stories are, each individually, a situation of struggle in identity across generations, gender, economies, traditions, and circumstance; absorbing and revealing.
“Gilgamesh” trans. by Sophus Helle
. . . elliptical, paradoxical, mysterious, adventurous, at once a strange rollicking adventure to kill giants and subdue women but also a careful meditation on mortality and love and power.
“An Unnecessary Woman” by Rabih Alameddine
Alameddine’s unusual book creates its own rules for reading, bringing us close indoors in a small apartment in Lebanon where an elderly woman lives the quiet final days of alone-ness and translates novels no one will read.
“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid
Hamid’s layered narrative, in an implied second person point of view, traps Western readers in revealing ambiguity, in genuine and healthy discomfort.
“Enheduana” by Sophus Helle, trans.
Helle’s translation of the collected tablets is backed by wonderful scholarship, approachable and fascinating looks into the archaeology, the culture, the politics, and the question of authorship itself.
“Enuma Elish” by Timothy J. Stephany
Here is the creation myth presented as direct translation from the tablets themselves, where we have them, without a “modern retelling” or desperately opaque circumscriptions.
“Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick
Dick’s short Cold War sf apocalypse story has little to surprise but is a solid story on its own; and no matter what might be said of its tropes, Dick got there first.
“The Birth of Tragedy” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah, if only art was the tempestuous genie in a bottle!! And, Nietzsche’s frequent exclamations and exclamatory marks themselves push against the reader’s expectations for coherence.
“Steering the Craft” by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s style tips and exercises are terrific warm-ups for emerging writers and delivered with a comfortable and fresh voice; for more experienced writers, there is little here not found in other style books.
“Planet of the Men” by Pierre Boulle
In this unproduced Boulle script, the questions are again raised about what power supports our notion of civilization, and Boulle links the cognitive and physical, the technological and the linguistic.
“Carpe Diem: Seizing the Day in a Distracted World” by Roman Krznaric
Krznaric’s quick efficient philosophy is nonetheless valuable insight into how a translation error has been unethically turned upon us all.
The Code of Hammurabi (CHW Johns)
As a literal translation largely without notes or other clarity, readers are left to make what they can from the meaning or values that emerge.
“Storm Front” by Jim Butcher
Butcher’s popular Dresden Files series beginning with “Storm Front” is a brief, amusing hybrid of over-the-top noir suspense, a page-turner if nothing else.
“Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” by Roddy Doyle
Clarke’s hilarious and misfortunate 10-year-old narrator dominates the novel, almost obscuring our unease about this deeper bildungsroman.
“We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Early Soviet dystopia, the terror at the loss of humanity, the glorification of service to State, and a protagonist who may not want to be saved.
“Culture and Anarchy” by Matthew Arnold
Arnold’s goal to protect the humanities and a culture of critical thought is worthy; but his definition of culture and his portrayal of the various agencies that might save education are . . . problematic.
“Anti-Education” by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Industrial Age scared a lot of people. But Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Germany’s failing schools (or our own) does not at all signal the kind of “reform” he proposes.
“Anne of Green Gables” by L. M. Montgomery
Montgomery’s book series, staid and wholesome and nostalgic and idyllic as it is, remains a charming and amusing read for young people. It’s not as cool as anything produced for teens today, but pre-teens and pre-tens, it can be a fun family read.