Review: Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the short story version of this a long-ass time ago (like middle school), but even though I was familiar with the overall contours of this story already, the novel version still packed a punch emotionally speaking. Elements of Charlie's story really got to me-- both on its own terms (I mean, who doesn't identify wanting to be acknowledged as a person?) and also in how it made me rethink the reality of the disabled people in my own life. The additional family backstory element from the novel also hit home harder because of this.

For most of the book, I had a tendency to think of early and mid-book Charlie as essentially two different characters, but seeing end-book Charlie really put everything into perspective-- considering how I've struggled with the idea of what it means to change as a person over time in the past. I've seen this theme explored in different forms of media, particularly with regards to memories (Memento and Gemini Rue come to mind), but while memories do play a big role in this book, I think seeing the evolution of Charlie's writing, and through it, his personality over time while keeping a lot of his memories more-or-less intact highlighted other factors that I hadn't thought as much about till now. It's a drastically sped up version of what the process is like for growing people in real life, but it gets the point across.

I'll be honest, some of the minor additions to the novel version did feel a little superfluous compared with the short story version (the whole romance subplot kinda meandered for bit), but overall I appreciated the chance to ruminate in Charlie's head for a longer while and really feel the emotions he described, coming to terms with past experiences that he was never fully capable of understanding until now. Especially in light of this Socrates quote from Plato's cave allegory, which never really hit home for me until it turned up near the end: "up he went and down he came without his eyes."

Like the other characters in this book, I'll probably never understand what the experience must really be like on a day-to-day basis for mentally disabled folks in real life-- but I really appreciate Keyes' attempts to make this struggle feel real and understandable in all of its complexities, including the foward-thinking aspects (i.e. what happens if we ever do discover a "cure"). We talk a lot about amazing scientific endeavors and medical advances happening in real life, but rarely is it that we visit the consequences or long-term effects of the these efforts on the people who had to make sacrifices along the way, the Charlie Gordons that we take for granted in our day-to-day.

tl;dr for emotional people: I didn't cry immediately when I finished this book but dammit I want to cry now. I almost wanted to stop this book 3/4 of the way through and pretend that the ending didn't happen.

Review: House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Can seem kind of intimidating-- I mean just google pictures of this book and you'll know what I mean-- but honestly not as difficult to make sense of as other well-known convoluted books (I'm looking at you, Infinite Jest). Though it still takes a bit of effort to read regardless.

The main storyline itself is pretty engrossing and made me wish I were watching a film adaptation of it right now; it's basically like reading the script to a good horror film, considering it literally is the description of a film. I wasn't into Johnny Truant's story as much in comparison, though, and honestly I got tired of the randomly inserted academic criticism... not sure if it's saying much that I almost couldn't tell it was supposed to be satire at first, or if my opinion of academic literature is just that bad haha.

I feel like if I had read this book a decade earlier (like literally when I added this on goodreads) I probably would've appreciated it a lot more. It's making me wonder how much my opinions might have changed of other notoriously difficult books from the past. At this point I think age is making me have less patience to put the work into trying to decipher stories that purposely try to be as laborious as possible (thinking particularly of one of the letters in this book).

Or rather, I think I can still appreciate it if I believe that the themes are worth it, but I'm not entirely sure if I feel that way here. If anything the criticism already in this book, satire or not, actually turned me off trying to actively think about the story in more meaningful ways... even though I can tell there are more interesting interpretations behind some of the events that happen here.

All of that said though, it's a cool experiment in trying to capture some of the more claustrophobic/film inspired moments in metatextual form, and I'd recommend this as a gateway book for people looking to explore more difficult/oddly structured forms of literature outside of the usual stream-of-consciousness fare (Pale Fire, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, etc.)