I don’t know exactly what I want this to be, but I read a lot, and I have a lot of thoughts about the things that I read. I think this will be a space to try to organize some of those thoughts.
If it leads to discussions, great! If I end up just shouting out into the void, that’s great, too! I am a big proponent of journaling, but also of looking back on the past. I love going through my old Snapchat memories or Instagram story archives to see what sorts of things I was posting a year ago, two years ago, today. Oftentimes I notice that my worries back then seemed so palpable, when they really were fleeting, but the good things persist.
In 2023, I went through more change than I ever had in my life before. When you get to college, it feels like you’re finally an adult, and when you graduate college, you realize that you’ve never known what being an adult really is. I graduated, moved out of my parent’s house, and got a job. I also finally started a medication that saved my life and learned how to budget for myself and cook for myself and generally live by and for myself. I have a roommate, but the feeling of being An Adult is still ever-present even if I am not doing everything truly alone.
Reading is one of the things that joins this present to all of my past. In the same way that a song can remind you of when you first heard it, or that time it was playing at your cousin’s wedding, a book can elicit feelings in me that bring me back to times that I love to remember. Even if they were bad times, I love to remember them, because in the context of the page, they were simply moments that made up the story of my life so far.
Sometimes I reread books that I loved when I was younger, just to see if they hold up. I have a terrible memory, which is why I write book reviews (often short, but now they will be longer). But I love when I’m reading a book that I have read before, long ago, and feel the same excitement over a line, or gasp at a twist that I vaguely remembered, or relive the moment of closing the book one last time and sitting with my racing thoughts.
All that to say, I love reading.
I choose my books using a random generator that’s built into the reading list I keep on a website called Notion. My to-be-read virtual pile is currently, at the time of me writing this, 163 books long. I read about 50 books a year, which means that it will take me more than 3 years to get through it. And for every book I read, it seems that I add at least two more to the pile, creating a hydra that I fear will never die.
I think that’s one of the beauties of reading, though. People talk about how much content is on the Internet, but there is already so much content in the books that have been written, and those span centuries. I will never be able to read every book. And that bums me out, but it’s okay, because I will never be able to do anything in full. That’s the curse of living, but it’s also a blessing, because I get to try so many things.
So far this year, I have read 15 books. In the future of this scream into the void, I’ll be writing longer reviews, but I’m going to summarize those 15 and review them really quickly here, just so everyone’s caught up to speed.
And if I’m here, reading this in the future, maybe one year from today: hello! I hope you’ve read some good books. I don’t know if I hope your to-read pile is smaller or bigger.
Not Forever, But For Now
Chuck Palahniuk
243 pages - 2023 - fiction, horror
December 4th, 2023 — January 4th, 2024
Rating: ⭐
You’ll notice that the dates read span exactly a month. I could say that it was because I was traveling over Christmas, or I needed time to get settled into my apartment after moving in September, or any other excuse. But it took me so long because I didn’t like this book very much at all.
Chuck Palahniuk, best known for his book Fight Club, has a few novels that I really enjoyed. I read Haunted during my senior year of high school after being recommended it by one of my cousins, and it was jarring in one of my favorite ways. I feel that he has a control over gore and bodily horror that is often lacking in the works of authors like Stephen King.
But this one was a bit much for me.
In it, two brothers who are part of high society are stuck in a time when they were little boys, thinking that they are still young, despite being nearly middle-aged. They basically stopped developing when their father died. They also work as assassins and often have sex with anyone and everyone, including each other. That was one of the parts of this book that I found unpalatable.
I watch a good deal of horror movies and read a good deal of horror novels. I find that there is a lot of fiction I can stomach. True crime is difficult for me, I think just because I know it is real. But reading and watching fictional stories unfold is doable, mostly because I can close the book or turn off the television if ever it gets to be too much.
And let me tell you, I closed this book a lot.
I would say stick to Chuck’s earlier work if you’re going to try.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jesse Andrews
298 pages - 2012 - fiction, YA
January 4th, 2024 — January 6th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
I love YA books, and usually I find that the ones that are often talked about or adapted into screen versions are ones that I either love or hate. This book was staunchly in the middle, maybe because I haven’t seen the movie, and maybe because I’m getting older.
I found the characters to be compelling, for the most part, but I did not find myself really rooting for anything. It felt like It’s Kind of a Funny Story, but without a lot of the charm that I really enjoyed about that book. Even now, I don’t really remember much of it, but I remember feeling like I wasn’t going to remember it even as I was reading, which is not a good thing.
Still, it was entertaining, especially juxtaposed against the previous book I read. Maybe a little outdated now, twelve years after its publication, but it happens.
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr
693 pages - 2021 - fiction, fantasy
January 7th, 2024 — January 11th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
Admittedly I’m being picky about my five-star ratings, and for a bit, I thought this one would make it. There were a few moments when I thought the book was dragging along a bit, but the interwoven plots are sort of a device against that boredom, and it worked.
An old man is working on staging a play in a library when a man arrives, planning to bomb the place and wielding a gun as well. We hear from the old man, Zeno, as well as the bomber, Seymour, through varying perspectives. Seymour at first is the evil of the story; then deforestation is, when reading Seymour’s backstory.
We also get to read perspectives of Anna and Omeir, children living in and near Constantinople, each on either side of the wall during the war. Konstance, on the other hand, is a child aboard a spacecraft heading towards an inhabitable planet, but a plague breaks out on board and she is forcibly quarantined with only a machine named Sybil.
What connects these characters is the story that is being staged into a play—Cloud Cuckoo Land. Anna and Omeir read it in their ancient city; Zeno is working on translating it and putting it on as a play to help keep the story alive; Konstance finds the book on her father’s bedside table and begins to read Zeno’s translation. It is a book about threads and time, permanence and impermanence.
Overall, I did not care much for the story of Anna and Omeir, but I think that’s because the more modern and post-modern characters were much more relatable somehow. I found Konstance’s story particularly compelling, especially with the twist reveal towards the end. I won’t spoil it, but it is definitely worth reading. And the story of how Seymour was pushed to the edge, leading to his decision to shoot up the library, is one that is tragic. It pulls morality into question.
I pulled one quote from this book that I keep thinking about, especially in realizing that everyone is living a full life around me.
Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.
I heard some women talking in a book store recently, and one picked up this book, said she read it, and as I opened my mouth to strike up a conversation, she told her friend that she hated it, and they continued on. I wanted to implore her to try it again, but I know this might not be for everyone. Still, I found that there was so much grace in balancing all these stories and exploring how time changes and stays the same.
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
Trenton Lee Stewart
441 pages - 2008 - fiction, children’s, sequel
January 12th, 2024 — January 22nd, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½
I love kids’ books too. Maybe it’s the nostalgia, or the feeling that they go by so quickly. But I think I love them because they are often the most clever books I get to read.
One of my favorite series to this day is A Series of Unfortunate Events. The twists, the riddles, the solves in that book floored me as a kid and really showed me what writing could be. It was because of that series, along with quite a few others, that I wanted to start writing myself. I was a little insufferable; I drew the VFD eye on every surface and often wrote my notes in code so that other students couldn’t read them. I pored over those books and placed sticky tabs on all my favorite sections and lines (which caused the books to become frankly unreadable). I still love the series, maybe because of the nostalgia.
I never read The Mysterious Benedict Society as a kid, but I know that if I did, it would have had nearly the same chokehold on me as A Series of Unfortunate Events did.
It has all of my favorite things—interesting characters, mysteries, action, found family, total trust and love. I was so lucky to be able to read the first in the series without knowing anything at all about it, so I could experience it like I was a child picking up the book from the library for the first time.
The second book was similarly exciting. It was not at the same caliber as the first, but I don’t think it would be fair to compare them. As its own story, this is a great one; cool mysteries to solve, a team of spies working together, and a beautiful ending with lessons to be learned about love and sacrifice.
As a sequel to the first, it also works quite well, developing the relationships between the characters even further. Characters in children’s books are often caricatures, because those archetypes are easier to understand when you’re young and haven’t experienced real nuance. But I found that these characters had incredible depth. We are in the mind of Reynie for the most part, and we get to see him fighting with inner monologues that often can be less than kind, while he still maintains his composure. As a kid, I struggled with a lot of those similar things. I often still do. It was refreshing to see it portrayed so well.
I’m excited to see where the next book takes these kids. And I’m excited to reread this series a few years down the line. Kids’ books are appealing to me because of their re-readable quality, and this series is no exception.
LoveStar
Andri Snær Magnason
315 pages - 2002 - fiction, sci-fi, dystopian
January 23rd, 2024 — January 25th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½
I randomly found this book in a common room in one of my college dorm buildings one day while goofing off with some friends. In college, nobody wants to pay for anything, and I thought that all these books were just for show, so what would it matter if I took one of them? It had a “clearance” sticker on it anyway, so they wouldn’t be losing much money on it.
I knew nothing about it going in, which is probably a good thing. This book is BIZARRE. The main story is quite interesting, but then they introduce carnivorous Mickey Mouse (yes, that Mickey Mouse) and a wolf with a zipper in her stomach so those eaten by her can escape. Bizarre.
The main story surrounds Indridi and Sigrid, who are in love, so they applied to inLOVE, a service that matches individuals with their perfect soulmate. They believe that they are soulmates, so naturally they’ll be matched with each other. This is a subcompany of LoveStar, run by LoveStar himself, a man who is constantly innovating and coming up with new ideas. His ideas include LoveDeath, which is a service that will shoot a loved one’s body into space, burning up in the atmosphere, creating a shooting-star-like display and fertilizing the ground below.
The inLOVE results come back, but only for Sigrid, who at first refuses to learn about her soulmate. Indridi, depressed, throws himself to the aforementioned wolf at one point. Indridi also has been basically turned into a walking advertisement; at any point, his speech centers can be hacked and he will start screaming about a product or a service or even sometimes reminders to nearby people or neighbors. It’s incredibly dystopian and wickedly capitalistic.
LoveStar comes up with an idea for a service called LoveGod, which is about as devious as you would think. Power starts to take over and everything gets a little too big to handle.
I feel like this book was almost two books in one—one focusing on the company LoveStar and the creator, and one focusing on the maybe-soulmates. I wish it had focused only on the latter. Their story was fascinating, and it really brought us into the world, explaining the company’s influence over regular people. The parts with carnivorous Mickey were honestly unexplainable, and I don’t even know why they were in there.
Overall, this book was worth a read, just for how bizarre it is, but also because it was genuinely fun to read. It felt like a dystopia with just a little more removal from reality than normal, which can be comforting sometimes. If a dystopia feels too real (as many of them do nowadays), it doesn’t always make for the best reading experience. For now, though, this one is purely fiction.