​The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a story set in a postapocalyptic world where everything has burned to ash. It follows an unnamed man and son who travel together on a road south toward the coast. They believe at the end, they’ll find warmth and relief. On their journey, they push along a shopping cart and hide from other people on the road. They have many encounters with other survivors, the first of which a man tries taking the son, but the father kills him. They meet other people: an old man who they give some cans of food, a house with a basement filled with people that were going to be eaten, a baby charred on a spit roast, a man who stole all their stuff, so they took all the thief’s clothes from him. Though, once they get to the coast, it ends up being like everything else: desolate. They continue into a town where the father is shot with an arrow and eventually dies from the wound. Finally, the son is picked up by another man who is assumed to be in good faith.
 
McCarthy is a master in how smoothly the moments and narrative flow, and what really held the story together was the bond of the father and son. Their conversations are little more than a few words each, but what felt so powerful was the way they were in context. For example, in one moment, they scavenge and find a Coca Cola, and the father gives it to the son. However, the son prods the father to drink some as well, “You have some, Papa./I want you to drink it./You have some./He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let’s just sit here.” Their relationship is encapsulated when McCarthy writes, “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” Which felt so true throughout the interactions: the way the son holds the father back from entering buildings and taking risks and how the father takes care of the son when he has a fever. The novel is about how two people can survive in a broken world and how that brokenness forces them to grow closer.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

What belongs to You by Garth Greenwell is a novel about the intimacy and friendship of an English teacher and a male prostitute, Mitko, in Bulgaria. It follows their encounter in a public bathroom, and then continued encounters in other cities, other homes, until they become more than simply strangers. However, during their encounter in a different city, they fight after Mitko brushes off sex multiple times in a hotel room. The narrator believes he’s owed something after paying for the trip while Mitko grows angry because he feels he’s seen only as an object. Mitko soon promises to never see the narrator again. For a time they go their separate ways, until one day as the narrator is teaching English, he gets a note telling him his father is about to die. This thread pulls out the narrator’s past, describing his fathers disdain for him sexuality. When he was still a child, the narrator befriended and then kissed another boy, K. Though, after the kiss, K pulls away from the narrator, starts dating a girl, and, in the final glimpse of the memory, he watches as K and the girl kiss and then is given a blowjob as a way to tell the narrator that he isn’t gay. He becomes estranged from his father, from K, and what he feels is the rest of the US. The narrator, after the memories resurface decides against seeing his father before he dies by throwing away the note. The narrative returns a few years later, where the narrator has a loose relationship with a Columbian guy, but it all comes into question when Mitko shows up at the narrator’s door. Mitko tells him he has syphilis, shows him his penis for proof, and asks for money for treatment. This later encounter shows Mitko at a much lower point, where for a few months he had to be hospitalized. The narrator decides to get tested, of which he’s told it’s positive and he soon gets pills to take. Then his mother visits him in Bulgaria and they take a train where he watches and talks to a boy who reminds him of Mitko, possibly a version of Mitko before things went wrong. Finally, one night Mitko comes knocking on the narrator's door again but this time he’s high and drunk. He confesses he’s going to die, so they lay down for a few minutes, holding each other, before the narrator soon cuts Mitko off and tells him to leave. In the last moments he watches Mitko as he walks into the night.

The novel is structured in three parts, meeting Mitko the first few times and the small fall out, the walk and memories of his father and his childhood, and finally the illness and decline of Mitko. This structure evokes the idea that the narrator sees Mitko as a strong and loud figure (re: the scene in the hotel) in the beginning, but soon sees a man who has become weak and childlike (even explicitly paralleling the child on the train to Mitko). In his mind, the narrator also sees two versions of Mitko, the charismatics and simple natured friend, and the hustler simply looking for money to say alive. These two versions pop up throughout and battle, at times hating Mitko and believing he is just taking advantage of the narrator, and other times really loving him. I loved the interiority of the novel, how easily the narrative flows, and the complexity of the narrator's feelings. Overall it was a heart wrenching and deeply emotional novel that I will certainly be returning to.

Final Rating: 5/5

​The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 is a collection of lists, poems, stories, essays, and comics edited by Dave Eggers, with an introduction by Guillermo Del Toro. It’s a thick and somewhat intimidating collection, but regardless, I enjoyed many of the stories within its pages. These stories/essays included ‘We Show What We Have Learned’ by Clare Beams (about a teacher whose body falls apart in front of her students), ‘The Deep’ by Anthony Doerr (about a man whose mother kept him from the world because of his heart condition), ‘Weber’s Head’ by J. Robert Lennon (about a roommate feud between a sculptor and a web editor), ‘The Suicide Catcher’ by Michael Paterniti (about the real-life Mr. Chen who catches people from jumping off the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge), and ‘Pleiades’ by Anjali Sachdeva (about in vitro septuplets dying due to health complications). These stories were tender, loving, and ached with life. Specifically, I thought ‘The Deep’ was powerful in how it treated the mother’s overprotection and the son’s desire to live even if it meant he was bound to die.
 
The story by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘A Hole in the Head’, had an interesting premise and was written well enough for me to be held by its narrator. Though the story felt like it fell squarely within the territory of genre fiction and read like another story of hers in Best American Short Stories 2011 about a daughter who can’t identify her mother’s body. Another story in the collection that I didn’t feel too enthused about was ‘Art of the Steal’ by Joshuah Bearman mainly due to the same pitfalls of Oats’ story, in that it didn’t do anything fresh with the genre. Overall, however, I enjoyed the variety, and many of the stories.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​A Captain’s Duty by Richard Phillips is an account of his harrowing story off the shore of Somalia where his cargo ship was captured by pirates, and he was taken hostage in a lifeboat in 2009. The book goes through Captain Phillips’ actions to prepare for an attack, what he did to keep his crew safe, and how he survived. The tension between the pirates and Captain Phillips is palpable as he accounts the mock executions, the humiliation, and his crews’ actions. It was interesting to read his account because I remembered the event in the news. Though, the book revealed specific actions he’d done to keep his crew safe on the Maersk Alabama by running drills, building repertoire with the pirates, and alerting his crew over the radio. There were so many things that he’d done right, but it was interesting for him to recount and focus on the mistakes he made. And while the book’s style/content wasn’t particularly one I usually read, I still found it held up. Overall, I enjoyed the depth with which it went into Captain Phillip’s mindset and his perseverance.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a novel set in the eighties in a town called Mallard which no one outside of Louisiana has heard of. The town exists a way for the founder, a black man, to create children whiter than him. The novel focuses on a pair of twins, who leave Mallard for a time. Though, one of the twins, Desiree, comes back after some time with a daughter who is far darker than anyone else in town. The other twin, Stella, runs off with her boss and tries to distance herself from her black identity as she passes as white and marries a white man. Along the way, the two twins have daughters with vastly different upbringings, one in a predominately white neighborhood, and one in Mallard. They meet in Los Angeles where the daughters, Kennedy and Jude, eventually learn they’re cousins. Stella wants to keep the lie that she isn’t black while her daughter wants to know the secret. Along the way, Jude falls in love with Reese, a trans man, and Kennedy becomes a midlist celebrity starring in off-Broadway plays. Near the end, Stella learns Kennedy has found her out and confronts Desiree, asking her to keep Jude away from her family. The novel ends with the twin’s mother dead, and at the funeral the one person absent is Stella.
 
I loved how this novel interrogated identity and questioned our understanding of what makes a person. It was interesting to read about a town where, even if they appeared white, people distrusted and killed them. It took the “one drop rule” and applied it to social issues rather than governmental ones. This was also paralleled in how Reese was introduced to Jude, where both felt different from the people around them. It was nicely contrasted in how Jude’s identity was external with being darker skinned in a town of mostly white passing people, while Reese presented as a man whose identity was much more internal. I enjoyed the interactions between Reese and Jude the most because they recognized each other’s pain and through that had tenderness for each other. Overall, I thought the book’s emotions, relationships, struggles with identity, and family worked in a powerful and personal way.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a book focusing on the craft of writing, how to approach writing, and some nuggets of wisdom gathered in her career. Lamott provides some of the tools that she uses and reassures the reader that writing is an arduous but rewarding process. I thought her anecdote about her brother’s bird project was poignant and compelling, when her father told him to complete the project bird by bird. As with other craft books I’ve read recently (On Writing by Stephen King), one of the tenets that keeps coming up is to tell the truth and be truthful to the reader, the characters, and the story. And as I am beginning in my writing career, I will hold this close to me because if the emotions and moments aren’t true, then why even write them in the first place? Other practical pieces of advice discuss being okay with imperfect prose, to gather in writing groups, and to break the writing into easier to complete portions. The writing is beautiful with moments of Lamott’s life sprinkled in throughout to give context and support to her advice. I liked the breadth and depth is goes into on being a writer, though its advice didn’t seem particularly different than other craft books I’ve read. Lamott does discuss writing in a unique way, and overall, I enjoyed its tenderness, love, and dedication to the craft.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian novel about a society that creates genetically bred castes of citizens, dulls them with drugs, and controls them with hypnotic messaging. The novel follows three characters: Lenina, Bernard, and John (the Savage) as they meet. Bernard and Lenina are of the highest class of society and decide to take a trip from London to New Mexico where there is an area that hasn’t been civilized. To Lenina and Bernard, being civilized entailed being genetically altered, with the world around them sterile, no relationships to hold them to a single person, and no parents. They meet John after a ceremony done by the “savages” and decide to bring him back to London after realizing the mother and son are related to the Controller (one of the top leaders). They parade John around their society, give his mother drugs which eventually kills her, and are sent off from society because they have become too independent.
 
There are a few parts about this novel which I felt were either technically sound or gave depth to the different references created. First, near the end of chapter three, Huxley takes three/four different concurrent narratives, and threads them together with single lines of dialogue. I found his approach to work seamless in how he slowly introduced the method with only two threads with longer passages, and then worked to shorten them until they were beautifully woven. The other part I found interesting was how the only book John read was Shakespeare which not only influenced what he said but how he thought.
 
There is a somewhat longer section of dialogue between John and the Controller discussing why a society like the one in the novel exists and why it must stay that way. The kernel of the argument was that a society must be happy to be productive, and the only way to be happy is for an authoritative government to control every aspect of a person’s life down to their DNA. I was particularly drawn to the line spoken by John in that conversation, “’But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’” The only thing I am hesitant on is the way the “savages” are meant to be Native Americans, which seems slightly racist (though perhaps that’s what Huxley was trying to convey). It’s a strong novel to discuss social hierarchy, what a utopia in reality would be, and how one fits in the world.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Out by Natsuo Kirino is a crime/thriller novel about a group of women factory workers who must dispose of a body because one of them killed her husband. The group consists of four women: Masako (the calculated leader), Yayoi (the one who killed her husband and is guiltless), Yoshie (the obedient one), and Kuniko (the debt ridden and arrogant one). After Yayoi kills her husband, she asks Masako to help her, where the rest of the group is employed to cut up the body and throw the pieces away in trashcans. They’re able to keep what they did under wraps until the body gets found in a park and a local club owner is accused of the killing. The club owner, Satake, subsequently loses his business and decides to go after the four women. For Satake, it draws up a moment in his past he wants to relive, torturing/raping/killing a woman decades ago. All the while, the four women begin to crumble where Kuniko continues to rack up loans and debt, Masako’s crumbling marriage is finally unearthed, Yoshie’s caretaking responsibilities increase, and Yayoi is constantly accused and questioned. Though, Masako is employed by one of Kuniko’s debt collectors, who has connections to the Yakuza, to cut up bodies for them to dispose of. It goes well until Satake kills Kuniko and sends the body to Masako to cut up. Satake continues to terrorize the group by robbing Yayoi of all her life insurance money and following the rest of the group. Satake finally is able to entrap Masako, rape her, and is about to kill her when she slashes his face with a scalpel, where he bleeds out and dies. Though, near the end, Masako begins to understand Satake’s feral violence and passion and feels sad about the death.
 
The novel is told from the viewpoint of each main character: Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie, Kuniko, the debt collector, and Satake. With this type of story, the POV switching helped to keep the tension high. I also enjoyed the way the story went into the mindset of Masako and Satake, particularly how they see themselves as different and then finally as more similar than initially. Kirino is an expert in pacing, and while I don’t usually read crime fiction, I was enraptured in the narrative. It made me question why I was rooting for one main character, while all of them had done morally questionable things—and that nuance is what I felt made the novel that much better.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Kenyon Review Winter 2023 features short stories, essays, poetry, and visual art, with a folio focusing on bridges and how people/connections/moments can be bridges for other things. This issue has a few fascinating stories, one of which is called ‘Block Party’, by Danny Lang-Perez, which features a magical man who can cook/make anything from his mobile kitchen and his son, Charles, who people adore. When Charles doesn’t appear one night because his mother asked him not to help, the neighborhood goes crazy, throwing things at the man and running him out of their cul-de-sac. It’s an interesting way to look at how the entitled treat workers, and what happens when things don’t go their way. I also enjoyed the language in ‘Eight Poems’ by Abbas Kiarostami and ‘The Orphanage’ by Emeline Atwood. Though, everything else felt a little lackluster.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a short book on what Pressfield believes to be behind being an artist and how to work to achieve that goal. It’s split into three sections which each detail Resistance (which Pressfield describes as the force that creates fear and creative blockages), how to combat Resistance, and how to use what you have at your disposal to go beyond Resistance.
 
I’ll start with what I liked (because there are far more things I disliked and sometimes baulked at). It’s a straightforward read, one that is short, and its language/structure is concise. It has a matter-of-fact tone that is convincing enough if I didn’t already have a strong understanding of craft/artistry. And finally, Pressfield’s prestige gives an air of authority that some people would find appealing.
 
However, the thesis and supporting arguments for Pressfield’s ideas on Resistance are framed and contextualized in bad taste. The title, The War of Art, frames the idea of creation and artistry as of a way to defeat/destroy/annihilate this unknowable force he calls Resistance. Personally, I dislike this idea because it places the reader in a mindset that to become a great artist, one must have a warlike attitude. It’s a very macho-esque and toxic view on how art is made. Its tone reads as if there is a winner and a loser, a war between good and evil, and gives no nuances. The way it’s written though makes sense because of his background in religion and his time in the Marines. Neither of those identities on their own merit rejection of his word, but it’s his synthesis of sin and Angels paralleling the writer and writer’s block, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t think art should be approached in an aggressive/combative mindset (it reminds me of the grindset tech bros and gym rats).
 
The first section of the book is focused on defining what Resistance is which still unsettles me. Pressfield explains that Resistance is the object that prevents us from producing art (I’m fine with that part) “…is the most toxic force on the planet.” and is itself worse than “…poverty, disease, and erectile disfunction.” (Literally what is he talking about?—and I won’t even approach the disingenuous way he groups those three ailments together). Later in the book he discusses that many times he goes about implying that even illness and cancer can be conquered (sometimes blaming companies of making up diseases, and other times describing cancer going into remission just because a woman decides to do what she loves). It’s a deceptive and icky tactic to try and give credit to the idea that it’s all about mindset and not about situation, poverty, disease, genetics, location, family, or any other factor that occurs in someone’s life. I am also deeply unconvinced of his logic when he says, “…it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.” If that were the case, then wouldn’t we have millions of current day Hitlers now as well? Also, I don’t think it's mutually exclusive for a person to either be an artist or someone who creates genocide.
 
The latter half of the book is written is a way to seem deep—to compel the reader to be an artist—and what is stopping them is Resistance and themselves. It’s the same thing that generic inspirational speakers and rat-tail Shia LaBeouf would say, which is to just do it. There’s discussion of Muses and God giving the gift of being creative, but at that point in the book I already knew it wasn’t worth putting weight behind Pressfield’s words. The one redeeming quality of the book is that it’s so short I don’t have to spend any more time thinking about his nonsense.
 
Final Rating: 1/5