Review: In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the big name forerunners of the True Crime genre yada yada (and also inspiration for the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, if you've heard of it). Seems like a pretty straightforward account of a major murder case that took place in Kansas in the early 60's, but it delves particularly into the perspective of the murderers themselves, from their upbringing to their motivations and behavior going into and after the crime, and it also takes the effort to present the case vividly with techniques you'd find in fiction (like an almost-omniscient narrator), something more or less unprecedented for its time.

The writing is good for the most part (I'm not a huge fan of how people speak, but that can't really be helped given where the incident took place: rural Kansas), and some sections, particularly the recollection of the incident itself from the criminals' perspective, are rather gripping if not also harrowing. But at the same time, the level of detail can sometimes go too far into the other end of the spectrum where it starts to drag a bit. I'm not sure how much detail or remembrance from every little player in the story was really necessary, or if Capote was just trying to encapsulate the entirety of a moment in his own way- regardless of how well it worked in the narrative functionally speaking.

In fact, I'm not even entirely sure how much detail is actually true, considering that Capote himself apparently didn't take notes when he interviewed the criminals and thus seems to have recounted a lot of witness accounts directly from memory. Like realistically, most people wouldn't be able to repeat such long accounts word-for-word without some level of paraphrasing (and then you have to take into account how truthful the witnesses are, which is a whole other story)- so either the guy had an amazing voice recorder-like memory, or he probably wound up rephrasing some things around for the sake of providing a solid and consistent narrative.

Given the way the book seems to take a lot of its own recollections at face-value, I get the impression Capote was probably more concerned with writing a good story, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, than he was with preserving its veracity, which otherwise would come with a level of uncertainty or ambiguity the way a lot of witness-dependent crime cases do in real life. (That's not to say that there isn't any ambiguity, though; you could probably draw out a huge debate from it on capital punishment and the use of the death penalty in our justice system, among other things.) Honestly, I don't really know I how feel about that- whether it's worth fudging the truth a little for the sake of... art, I suppose, especially in an otherwise nonfiction narrative. Were this book about a more serious and relevant topic today, I'd probably be more vocally against it.

At the end of the day, I didn't really find myself sympathizing with the murderers after their stories were said and done... but I did pity them, realizing that regardless of how much we like to dehumanize criminals, and murderers especially, these people were still human at the end of the day. Perhaps impossible to understand or empathize with, but still recognizably human in motivation and spirit, even when at their ugliest. This may be my own worldview speaking, but these were broken people, through and through. It's sad- but then again, all crimes (and the people entangled in them) are sad when it comes down to it.

Review: The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I picked this up in a bookstore a year or two ago and decided to finally open it up on recommendation from a friend. It'd been a while since I last read something by Virginia Woolf, so I'd almost forgotten how hard it was to understand her novels until midway through the first section when my mind started wandering like crazy... wait, were they always this hard? I took a peek back at my copy of To The Lighthouse and compared a few passages at random, and yeah, I think The Waves is a lot harder to grasp... which is probably saying something even for Virginia Woolf.

Evidently this book can be hardly be called a novel persay- it's a lot more experimental compared to her other works. The story is told entirely through a series of interchanging soliloquies between the 6 main characters: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda, which means there is absolutely no dialogue in this book. There isn't even much of a plot; you can only find a few concrete moments at best (half of which revolve around the 7th figure, Percival, although he doesn't show up for some pages), and the rest of the time you're just meandering in a stream-of-consciousness like way through the scattered reflections and observations of the main characters as they progress through the course of life (which technically is what her other novels are like also, but it feels even more abstract than usual here).

That said, I feel you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in real life who thinks the ways these "characters" do, as they are way more articulate and poetic about the greater substance of life than some person's stray thoughts would ordinarily lend themselves to being. For how difficult it is to understand, the prose in this novel is actually quite beautiful and well thought out, though, which is probably more important for Woolf's purpose than actual realism. As is typical for Woolf's writing, the subject matter of this novel is largely based around observations and reflections on life itself - the passage of time, the connection between one's self and others, the effectiveness of language, the prospect of facing death, among other things, and it's in those few moments where the writing elucidates this most clearly that the novel really shines. What I liked the most was the way in which the characters's voices blended together, almost in harmony, in the few scenes where they were all present, in stark contrast with the glumness of their individual passages. (Incidentally this also made it difficult to distinguish them apart at the beginning, when their identities are first being formed. Probably would be good to take notes.)

This is not really a book I'd recommend trying to read in bed right before falling asleep, as per personal experience you don't really remember much afterwards. Even when fully focused I found myself having to repeat certain sections again because I forgot who had just been speaking or got lost in someone else's thoughts (typical, haha). I probably will have to go back and revisit this book again at a later point because there was a lot that I couldn't retain from a first reading- just looking at the quotes section for this book, I'm seeing a lot of stuff that I only half-remember coming across. I did have my doubts going into it at first, but with enough time, it's a pretty worthwhile read.

Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of this book may be a little misleading- while it technically is about the history and role of HeLa cells in modern-day science and the life of the woman from which they originated, it is just as much the author's personal account of her search to connect with the people involved, particularly Henrietta's daughter, Deborah.

With that in mind, it's a decent but possibly flawed book; enough information and content to address issues that have been historically controversial in the scientific and medical communities, such as patient consent and the marginalization of blacks (part of an obviously wider issue in the 50's-60's)- but at the same time muddled with distractions coming from an otherwise interesting story about the author's interactions with Deborah and her family and her personal feelings about it in the process. In a sense the author herself is as much a main character in this book as Henrietta is, and that's just... odd?

In other words, it feels like two different but related books forcibly crammed into one narrative, and for that the focus comes off a bit weaker than it could've been, especially towards the end when the book shifts its attention to wrapping up Deborah's story. Still fascinating to read, but just don't get your hopes up if you were expecting a more formal nonfiction treatment of science history.

Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I feel like I woke up in some alternate universe where Dickens and Austen had a precocious love child who decided to reinvent Harry Potter and somehow wound up making it nowhere near as contrived as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This is actually one of the most original fantasy novels I've ever read (...of the few I've gotten around to, anyway), even though the topics- magicians, early 19th century British society- aren't exactly original in themselves; even their combination, a what-if magic existed in the history of Great Britain, could be likened to an adult Harry Potter as some publications have put it. But it feels like so much more than that.

The first thing that struck me while reading this book was the sense of wonder it arouses. The writing style, inspired by the likes of novelists like Austen and Dickens, contributes a lot to this: each chapter progressively introduces the reader to a new or different aspect of the universe at large, in such a tone that you never really know who or what to expect next. In spite of what the title may suggest, there's actually a rather large and significant primary cast combined with a set of intertwining plotlines just as in the old 19th century novels, as well as a bunch of almost-encyclopedic footnotes used for exposition where there isn't room in the main story. In the case of the latter, it flows a lot better than forcibly integrating them into the plot considering how seemingly expansive the backstory is- both fictional and historical. You can also tell that the story is well-researched in its historical context, calling upon events like the battle of Waterloo and historical figures including mad King George III, Napoleon, Duke Wellington, Lord Byron, and so on.

I've heard it argued recently (by the likes of MrBtongue and more implicitly in other fantasy book reviews) that magic as a concept is done best when it is kept unknowable and mysterious, because that essentially is what defines it in the first place. In that respect, JS&MN handles this pretty well; magic in the series is valued for its utility as a problem solving tool, but at the same time it never is really fully understood even by the magicians themselves, who spend much of their time trying to rediscover and reinvent spells that have been lost in England for centuries. (It feels odd to admit, but it reminds me a lot of the experience of learning how to program... that sense of awe you experience when you start to realize how much you're capable of and how much you still don't know.) Whenever magic does show up, it always feels otherworldly and fantastic and never to the point of common convenience. And yet in spite of all of this, it somehow integrates surprisingly well with the story's historical setting. It plays to one of the book's major strengths how jarringly good it is at juggling commentary on 19th century social conventions on one hand and then inserting crazy fantastical magical shenanigans on the other within the same scene.

All of this broadens the scope of the story, which helps justify its length (and to be honest I was ready to read another several hundred pages by the time it ended). That said, given the pacing and number of pages, it probably isn't for everyone, and if you don't have the patience for the gradual expository writing style, the plot can seem to drag for a while. But it's nowhere near as bad as the ASOIAF/Game of Thrones series though, and in that respect I found it incredibly refreshing. Nothing about the plot feels overwritten or unnecessary in comparison; on the contrary, after finishing the book, a lot of the earlier chapters feel more intentional in retrospect, for their foreshadowing and development of the world. Honestly, it's best to enjoy the journey and experience of it while you can early on, because later on those last few hundred pages can zip by fast as events start to ramp up.

One other element that surprised me was how... misleading the book summary was, or at least to me. That's not to say that the description listed on the back cover and here on goodreads is inaccurate, but rather that the expectations I had set up for both Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as well as how the plot would progress were totally different from what it ended up being, which to be frank was better than anything I could have imagined. The heroes and villains in this story are not who you would expect them to be, if you could even call them heroes and villains. And I'll leave it at that.

(For the spelling nazis among us, the randomly old-fashioned spelling choices for some words like "chuse," "sopha," "surprize," "shewed," and so on can be a bit distracting... but I got used to it after a while.)

To summarize, refreshingly original and well-written, and a great example of how to take inspiration from other sources history and fantasy-based without overtly plagiarizing or overdoing them. That said, I've been realizing over the years that I'm a sucker for the Dickensian style of writing and plot exposition when it's done well with even decent characters (for the record, I couldn't stand most of the cast of Great Expectations), and this novel was no exception; I was quite enthralled the entire way through for it. Bravo.

Review: The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nice and quaint. Reminds me a bit of the world of Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, the Flopsy Bunnies, etc.) except that it's graduated into that awkward adolescent phase of stories that seem like they were meant for picture books but have the writing chops of an adult novel. Most unabridged versions of this novel will have illustrations of some sort that only bolster its association with children's books, and yet it uses words like "debonair" and "paroxysms" that I probably wouldn't have known at that young of an age... or maybe I'm underestimating what literate kids are actually capable of... or at least back in Grahame's day.

The stories here cover a wide range of classic adventure scenarios and felt really familiar in a way- for anyone who's seen Disney's "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" or remembers Mr. Toad's Wild Ride from Disneyland, this is the book that Mr. Toad's story is adapted from. To be honest, I never really knew the original story in its entirety until reading this book, but I'm a bit glad that the whole hell sequence from the ride wasn't there originally (that was always my least favorite part).

Mr. Toad himself is a pretty iconic and recognizable character, someone who somehow manages to be both impulsive and incredibly conceited while still remaining loyal to his friends at the end of the day; it's really a bit jarring to still feel compelled (or should I say obligated) to like him after seeing all of the crap he pulls off. I have to admit that part of the appeal comes from the fact that decent creatures like Mole and Ratty and Badger are willing to invest in Toad and try to improve him, and in spite of how often the latter brushes aside their efforts to satisfy his own whims, he actually does try to listen to them sometimes. I'm guessing the less sympathetic adults among us in reality would probably have no qualms about throwing Toad's ass in jail and keeping him there in comparison.

Aside from the adventures, there's also the more pensive moments like the Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the Wayfarer chapters that may seem strangely out of place at first given how domineering Toad's narrative is (or maybe it's the other way around since Mole and Ratty came first in the story). But these seem to center more on fundamental emotional experiences and longings, and almost to extremes to the point of inspiring a sense of awe and wanderlust about the world at large for the first time. It gives you this sense that there's so much more going on out there, but without dwelling on it for too long because such heightened awareness tends to only last for so long before people fall back to their usual routines. Such is everyday life.

All in all, a worthwhile read even for adults, if you're looking for a sense of nostalgia without actually needing to have gone through the experience beforehand.

Review: Atonement

Atonement by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A bit of a slog to get through initially, and even moreso in hindsight when you realize not every thought/scene needed as much attention as it got. It takes a while for the premise to take off, but once it does, the story does get considerably more interesting to follow, even though it still tends to meander here and there.

The prose itself is pretty nice- almost reminiscent of authors like Woolf in a way but without plagiarizing them outright- and there are some really great, moving sections of the book, like the scenes at the hospital and the meditations on how relationships change over time. But then there are also other less engrossing scenes that still flutter with the same kind of style, to the point where it can feel a little pretentious at times.

It becomes more clear by the ending that a lot of what goes down in this book amounts to the author's ambitious attempt to make a statement about the nature of writing and storytelling. He arguably succeeds at this (especially if you feel like you're being tugged at by the heartstrings), but in such a manner that will also likely make you feel cheated or infuriated, not to mention (or else just) depressed. Of course, if you make it to the end and all of this just flies over your head, then this book is probably only okay at best, because there isn't a whole lot else to it once you take that lofty ambition away. Personally, I feel kinda mixed about it.

Just realize that if the ending makes you upset, then you're playing exactly into McEwan's hands. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. (I hear the movie does a good job of conveying the same emotions.)

Review: Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Relatively short (literally a combination of a short story and a novella) and sweet and fun to read, but with an unexpectedly subtle sort of sophistication involved. It gives off a familiar sensation if you've read Catcher in the Rye, particularly with regards to main characters who dislike phoniness in other people and whatnot, but the tone seems to have matured a bit here, in part due to the Glass family members being older and in a different stage of life than Holden was. If anything, I'd say this is much better than Catcher was, although I can see why that novel is still widely taught in high schools today; Franny and Zooey is a rather different kind of beast altogether and seems to more appropriately address the college-age-to-mid-twenties-going-on-thirties crowd.

This being my first introduction to the Glass family (Salinger wrote a sizeable number of short stories covering the other family members as collected in Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam among other things), I found myself really enjoying reading about Franny and Zooey and the unique dynamics of their relationship with each other and the rest of their family. Their quirks or flaws so to speak can be a little offputting at first, particularly Zooey's condescending attitude towards his mother and sister, but at the same time, there's a devastatingly honest sort of self-awareness that punctuates each interaction, one that underscores the overall mood of the work.

It might sound odd, but the Glasses strike me as the kind of people who I'd love to meet in real life: not perfect or necessarily even decent by any means, but still able to examine themselves and others earnestly, and in Zooey's case, truthfully without flinching. He may be an asshole at times, but he's such a likeable and well-intentioned one at that (or so I found, anyway) that he comes across rather amusingly and more than makes up for whatever crap he's said or done by the end of the novella. The ending itself blew me away both in its implication and in how calmly it came about, or perhaps I've been experiencing too many loudly climactic stories lately.

It's one thing to read a story about a dysfunctional family; it's another thing to read a story about a dysfunctional family that not only is well aware of its flaws but is still able to somehow function in a somewhat satisfactory and also surprisingly beautiful sort of way. I don't know really know how else to put it. But let's just say I'm looking forward to reading another one of Salinger's Glass family stories in the near future.

Review: Watchmen

Watchmen by Alan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adapting this from something I wrote to a friend, for personal reference and so that I don’t forget. It’s technically been years since I last read Watchmen, so it remains to be seen how much my opinion of it will change when I get around to re-reading it.

Watchmen strikes me as one of the better comic storylines I've seen, but mainly since the majority of American superhero comics I've come across, frankly, aren't that great to begin with. A lot of them tend toward forced complexity or drama for the sake of appearances without really doing anything interesting with it, and thus wind up feeling like fluff. On the other hand, I can see a certain level of calculated design behind Watchmen that I can appreciate—heck, even the panel arrangement is intentional— to a point where I'd go so far as to call it literature (or the comic book version of it).

To be honest, I find that the characters are not really one of the graphic novel’s strong points. But at the same time, I think story is less about the development of its characters to begin with and more about how ineffectual they are at being heroes because of their obvious character flaws. None of them are really sympathetic or likable, and their approaches to the world's problems range from apathetic (Manhattan) to impotent (Rorschach- his inability to interact with the storyline to me is intentional) to nihilist (the Comedian) to cruelly utilitarian (Ozymandias). And all of this stems from, or in spite of, their shared history together as superheroes. In other words, a failed Justice League (not that the Justice League doesn’t have its own take on failure).

It's basically a subversion of everything the superhero genre is about, since these qualities are arguably more common in actual world leaders than the idealized altruism you usually see in those works, which often take it to the point of fetishism/escapism. And I'd venture it’s a better reflection of what costumed superheroes would look like if we had them in society and forced them to deal with real world issues, since the nature of being a famous costumed hero is kind of an extreme in itself. It's a way of saying: look, the human psyche isn't actually that well-equipped to deal with the kinds of expectations we heap on superheroes. And here's what could happen.

That's more or less what I like about Watchmen. It feels the least "dated" to me out of any of the comics I've read from the 80's because of how well it's written in comparison (aside from other ones that usually get mentioned - Killing Joke, Year One, Swamp Thing, and so on), and I find it more interesting to talk about because there's a lot that can be said or even debated about it on an analytical level. It's not really a work I like so much for its characters (honestly don't give a crap about most of them having said all of the above), but more for its overall story and themes. I feel like half of what I like about the superhero genre are its deconstructive works anyway haha.

But I have to admit that it's probably harder to appreciate without some familiarity with the genre and the tropes/conventions it was trying to fight against. I kinda had it tossed on me as a must-read rec and I didn't really appreciate it as much at first (the ending left a foul taste in my mouth), but I wound up appreciating it more as time passed. The movie (which I didn't enjoy as much) made me like the comic more ironically lol.

Review: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty interesting and informative overview of the history of cancer- or rather:

1. our understanding of what cancer is
2. and how to treat it

(explained in reverse order in the book) which wind up as two parallel developments within science/medicine that up until recent times have largely not been correlated or dependent on each other, surprisingly. The author makes a good point that many of the successful treatments that exist today were developed without a full or even decent understanding of why or how they worked, and that even now, with our improved understanding of what causes cancer, we don't really have a treatment that has been developed or even enhanced because of that knowledge. But there is hope for the future.

Some chapters, notably toward the second half when the subject shifts from treatment to the genetics discoveries, can get technical enough to the point where it might feel hard to follow for anyone who didn't take biology in college or hasn't studied it recently. If you're reading this book, chances are you do have an interest in biology or medicine to begin with (considering most of the people I know who've read it were pre-med), in which case it'll be fine. Overall it's a fairly accessible read, and the author does a decent job of linking anecdotes and history and science together in one fun package. Just don't expect literary greatness or anything like that, because the writing can resort to certain repetitive cliches, and sometimes the quotes that preceded each chapter could feel forced or inserted just to give off an air of being pretentiously literate. Not all allusions and metaphors were created equal.

This book is incredibly thorough, or perhaps even too thorough, about each person, idea, concept, treatment, case study, and what-have-you that has been involved in the history of cancer. So much so that it made it rather difficult to get through at times, because after a while I'd start forgetting which professional was responsible for what treatment or theory or whatever happened ten pages ago because there's too much detail to keep track of. And I say this after both audiobooking AND THEN rereading parts of the same chapter multiple times until I just gave up and moved on (which is why it felt like it took forever to finish).

That's not to say the book isn't memorable or fascinating, because it is. I just wish my short-term reading memory capacity were better without having to resort to studying this book like a college textbook for a class. Of course, you could also check out the multi-part PBS documentary based off this book that just came out recently too.