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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“Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done” by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell
A troubling approach to a complex grotesquerie of history, not enhanced by the graphic medium.
“Itself” by Rae Armantrout
Armantrout’s sometimes deliberately obtuse poetry strays too often into frustration rather than enlightenment.
“The Smell of Starving Boys” by Loo Hui Phang and Frederik Peeters
A fascinating premise, an uncomfortable voyeurism, a disappointing resolution.
“Engine Empire” by Cathy Park Hong
Hong’s poetry parables are chameleon, shifting voices and attitudes as they move across setting and time, all pushing hard at the broken societies we embrace.
“Tale of Sand” by Jim Henson
Early early Henson, mimicking much of absurdist theater in graphic novel (more picture book) form. A curiosity and offering insight into Henson’s sense of humor pre-Muppet.
“A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” by Yiyun Li
As brief as they are, Li’s stories are layered in both present and past entanglements; none are fully noble, and their ends thankfully unpredictable.
“The Middleman and Other Stories” by Bharati Mukherjee
Mukherjee’s stories of people struggling to move across the planet are intimate, gritty, and unpredictable. We rarely find genuine resolution, left in uncertainty or failure; but this, too, is the experience.
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston’s novel hurts as we read through the fateful choices characters make within a universe full of intent or wholly indifferent.
“Ducks” by Kate Beaton
Set aside your expectations for the story of a young woman working the oil sands of Canada; this is about people, both comic and poignant.
“Go Tell It On the Mountain” by James Baldwin
A structure of overlapping stories in time and relationships unpacks a cacophony of messages, none cleanly suited to be called “justice” or “faith” or “love.”
“Faust, Parts 1 & 2” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Though recommended by Thomas Mann (high praise), the Priest version is an earlier English translation and makes some choices that are perhaps problematic.
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
Each of our lives intersects and encapsulates; we sublimate and revise our guilts; so too does this novel work upon us, compelling us to peel back and see up close, to admit, to understand.Â
“Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde
Decades later, Lorde’s arguments for freedom and love, even when captured in anger, endure–better, they are more common today than ever.
Stigmata” by Helene Cixous
Feminist and theorist, Cixous dives into the sub-ether of words, uncomfortably settled into her subcortical reveries into language and self.
“Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel’s now famous work of trauma, grief, sexuality, and family dysfunction paralleled by rich literary allusion is, if anything, too brief.
“Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The magnificent poetic work of Goethe retains the feel of the original German from Priest, if not the accuracy and nuance.
“Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid
Hamid’s magical telling of the realities of immigration and the denials from distance hit powerfully; a necessary read.
“Killing Commendatore” by Haruki Murakami
A sprawling and less adept story while also somewhat troubling in its uses of women characters; nonetheless, enough satisfying of the Murakami-scape to be worthwhile for fans.
“Wendell Berry and Higher Education” by J Baker and J Bilbro
In presuming much of Berry’s philosophy through implications in his fiction, the authors offer us a narrow, ideological, and Christian-evangelized vision of nostalgia and of reform.
“Democracy” by Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna
Not glorified mythology, this history of the precarious struggle towards democracy in ancient Greece is worth the read.
“V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore
As an early work by Moore, the structure and composition are stretched, relying on tropes and infallibility rather than empathetic protagonists. As a result, it is an interesting introduction to Moore and to resistance in literature, but little else.
“Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry
Berry’s characters offer reflections and philosophy which are not a match for much thinking today–and that’s the point.
“Four Hundred Souls” by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
Unique and important revelations on black history, each told in five-year increments, At times uneven in scholarship, still a vivid and important story that we otherwise rarely see.
“Proxies: Essays Near Knowing” by Brian Blanchfield
Blanchfield’s self-isolated and personal essays are genuine and a curious experiment, if not compelling to readers.