Review: Doctor Sleep

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tbh not sure why this needed to be a sequel to The Shining rather than its own work. Because in comparison to that work, it... doesn't feel in the same league at all, but it's a fine enough work on its own.

I guess it's nice to imagine how Danny turned out as an adult (about as traumatized as you'd expect) but the villains and rest of the book don't feel as related to the first apart from a major Shining tie-in near the end that feels shoehorned in (to the point that I think the movie version stripped it entirely).

That said apparently the film also restored elements of The Shining book that got cut from Kubrick's film so I should probably watch that later...

Review: The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Henry James, why do I have such a love-hate relationship with your words? Why does it take so many of them to describe simple things like what two people said to each other last night? Why do I feel like I still don't have a handle on what happened even though I literally just read what happened? Why am I such a masochist? (Don't answer that.)

If Hemingway is the master of icebergs (leaving many things hidden under the surface of what's spoken), James is the master of... showing many things including what's hidden under the surface, but leaving you confused anyway. Because it turns out that what was hidden was just a long sequence of words that stretch the definition of what a paragraph (let alone a sentence) is, which is probably meant to be something tangible but I'm also probably too much of a fool to see it. Trying to grasp the meanings of James' language is like trying to hold onto a cloud.

And then whenever people actually do talk in dialogue, it's only to make statements like:

She's magnificent.

She's prodigious.

She's an actual person.

She's a dove.

Only to have to bang your head against the pages trying to answer, what do these people even mean???

I think that captures the gist of what it feels like to read this.

Oh also the villains of this book are not the type of people I expected them to be (if I were to summarize the latter half I would call it "what happens when you suddenly realize you have morals and agency") so kudos to James for that. Although I would've preferred less of Merton and more of Kate.

Review: Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Honestly need more time to dwell on/revisit this one (I have a backlog of essays I want to read on this lol). But initial thoughts:

I was drawn to read this one first over Pynchon's other books on account of the subject matter: the charting of the Mason-Dixon line, today known as that weirdly straight line that now marks the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The parts of this book that actually deal with that and the long trek into the heart of the American country; the tense encounters with local tribes and colonial slaveowners; Mason and Dixon's philosophical differences and their intereactions; those segments were the most engrossing for me.

And then you have a talking dog (who makes you go wtf and then somehow touches your heart when he shows up again 600 pages later). And a revenge-seeking sentient animatronic duck. And George Washington getting high on home-grown pot with the main characters while his wife serves munchies. And it's like I can't tell what's real and what's not anymore.

It's not as "difficult" to read as Gravity's Rainbow experientially speaking but that's not saying much if you've ever tried to read that book and know what it's like. Pynchon will continue to Pynchon with his random digressions that seem to go nowhere, only this time in a 18th century dialect and an Archaic Printing style that Randomly Capitalizes words like This (except wait the words that thematically matter are capitalized!). I appreciate the dedication and commitment, but seriously.

What it comes down to though is trying to capture what the Enlightenment was like experientially, in all its fantastical possibilities. And then you think about the absurdity that came about because of it. That the powers that be on the other side of the world (including the British East India Company) decided they could arbitrarily put down a straight line as a border subdividing land without accounting for the people who already lived across it (Middle East, anyone?), and that this line would have profound implications for the debates and livelihoods of folks affected by slavery, the Civil War, Native American displacement, among other things. And that moment near the end of their journey, when Dixon starts to realize this...

It all builds up to an experience that is larger than life, which I guess is maximalist bread and butter at this point.

To be honest at this point I am probably much more interested in reading articles about this book than immediately re-reading at the moment (a problem I find with a lot of other text heavy books these days) but I think I'll come back to it again someday. Merits a selective chapter re-read if anything.

Review: Martyr!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Would agree with others that it's not perfect (felt a bit meandering in the middle until the bigger revelations) but ultimately I appreciated the way all the different threads in this book came together in the end and the message that it had. Think it touches well on our need for closure in difficult life/family circumstances vs the way life actually pans out in reality.

Review: Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I originally had to read the first half of this book for school some 2 decades ago and never got around to finishing the second half (my teenage self thought it was terrible)... but as it happens I'm also a masochist who regularly retries foods he doesn't like every year just to see if he still doesn't like them (read: how I learned to love mustard after 30 years of hating it. or Stockholm'd myself into doing so), so the same concept must apply to books, right?

Well, to quote a video essay I listened to on this... "it's a Romantic novel with great prose and terrible ideas about the Middle Ages." Maybe worth considering that the 3 other people I follow on goodreads who've read this book also rated it 2 stars.

Basically it's an interesting historical window into how people who lived two centuries ago were thinking about how to think about people living six centuries before them. Because when we think about all of the modern day ideas we have about the Middle Ages today (knights and jousts, chivalry, Robin Hood, the Black Knight, etc) we don't realize how much of these are really anachronistic reinventions from a Scottish guy...

who didn't live in the times himself and really was just trying to build a vision of a unified England and Scotland through the lens of England's own unification of Normans and Anglo-Saxons, which wasn't actually even a concern at the time Scott said it was (sorry that was a mouthful).

Anyway, the book itself hasn't really aged well. It's progressive for its time (see: treatment of the Jewess Rebecca) but also still unfortunately racist (see: treatment of the Jewess Rebecca. and others). It's overly concerned with historical matters that don't really matter much today. And of course the dialogue takes a while to get used to (not quite Shakespeare difficulty but it's trending in that direction).

So was it worth it? Let's just say I'm more interested in reading Scott's Waverley novels (on the Jacobite risings) that actually take place in Scotland now lol (curious how he treats a subject he's actually well versed in). But it probably helps that I literally ran into his monument in Edinburgh on accident a week after reading this and then was bombarded by all the "we <3 Walter Scott" quotes/propaganda in public transit there.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As someone who's personally benefitted from 2 of the treatments discussed in the second half, I am predisposed to like this book. Overall I think it's a good survey of the subject matter and what options exist, and helping start to demystify what trauma really means experientially because it's more than just whatever culture normally thinks of as PTSD.

I found the frequent backhanded comments about the DSM and its limitations interesting (this author really has a vendetta/axe to grind lol) but also in a way that makes me prone to see parts of this book less objectively. I don't know if I gleaned enough of a sense of why the system that leads to its revisions is set up the way it is other than "this is frustrating." 

Some caution on trigger warnings for some of patient anecdotes discussed. Other reviewers have mentioned concerns about the lack of consideration for the victims of the patients who themselves caused harm on others-- I think it's partly reflective of the cycle of abuse, but worth noting especially if that is likely to bother you.