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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“Jerusalem” by Alan Moore
Moore’s monster epic is worth every word and distorted bending of reality, from its angelic jokes to bizarre art shows. How much of history can it digest at once? More than I caught on a first read, for certain.
“Ban en Banlieue” by Bhanu Kapil
Kapil’s mesmerizing and complex work belies its sobering demands upon its readers, meeting the artist’s own internal sacrifices.
“Life Begins on Friday” by Ioana Parvulescu
Settle in for a slower living, a community stumbling and embracing, a whodunnit, and also (kind of) time travel.
“Preacher” by Garth Ennis
As with so many series, Preacher wanders and repeats its plot-level tropes too often, but its ambition, audacity, and trio of protagonists largely compensates
“The Strain” by Guillermo del Toro
What begins as a terrific premise and opening set-up for an original tale quickly devolves to action tropes and rehashed storytelling.
“Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained” by John Milton
Both spectacular reads after we get past Milton’s narratological problem; and my take: Regained is the stronger work!
“Pontypool Changes Everything” by Tony Burgess
Don’t forget to put some kind of excerpt here! Use it for social media.
“Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury
Beautiful, sweeping, small town American horror centered around our fear of mortality and personal unease.
“The Tower” by William Butler Yeats
Perhaps self-indulgently caught up in desire, Yeats’s reflections on our lives as magic and myth, as narrative, as aging and remorse, remain sumptuous thought.
“Rosemary’s Baby” by Ira Levin
Levin’s clean and modern anesthetized prose simultaneously distances us from the possibility of horror and creates it. A novel more successful than its filmic-visual counterpart for what it blinds itself to.
“The Edge of Running Water” by William Sloane
Sloane’s novella, a hybrid cosmic horror/whodunnit, is a satisfying read, not despite of but because of his slow burn deferral to character behavior over “unspeakable horror.”
“The Serpent’s Sage” by Phillip Arrington
Arrington’s elusive novel is a critique of southern small town politics but more, a challenge to the foundations of faith and its rhetoric and our failures to question.
“Literary Fiction Tourism” by Nicola E. Macleod
Macleod’s frustratingly general expository scholarship is rarely enlightening and often pedestrian. And at such a price!
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
The tremendous 1818 version of the tale, heady and philosophical, its principle horrors gutted by the film versions which followed.
“Tales from Watership Down” by Richard Adams
A kind of denouement to the novel along with several new stories and more developed legends of the mythical trickster rabbit.
“The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole
Absurd, laughable, and even at times wry, this is a fun diversion from more serious works.
“What Kind of Creatures Are We?” by Noam Chomsky
Dense and hardly introductory linguistics, Chomsky’s essays clearly and persuasively establish the limits to human understanding and language, an epistemological box called biology.
“Spellbound” by Penguin Books
It almost seemed (more than almost) that the editors did a Google search for poetry with keywords for their titles: “Houdini,” “Wizard,” “Charm,” etc. and then grabbed them all and threw them together…
Susan Howe: “My Emily Dickinson”
A re-examination of Dickinson’s work through the mind and tongue of a poet, a necessary set of eyes to find meaning when “objective analysis” is impotent.
Susan Howe: “Concordance”
Howe’s found poetry and auto-historical reflection work to form patterns which, in her own words, form “cthonic echo signals.” A collection not to be read so much as intoned.
Noelle Stevenson: “Nimona”
Simply drawn, richly storied, Nimona has enough nuance and surprise, uncertainty and nonsense, to keep anyone entertained and satisfied!
Amanda Leduc: “Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space”
Part-academic analysis, part-memoir, and all illuminating: an extended look at the tales that have affected our lives. Full of personal stories and the written records of her doctors, we find that our systematized prejudices are more pervasive than we imagine.
William Teets: “After the Fall”
Itinerant grittiness to poem after poem, revealing speakers tormented by false theologies, swindling opportunistic politics, and violent despair. It’s beat poetry made anew.
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!