Why I am no longer talking to White People about Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge

"A charged and necessary wake-up call to pervasive,
institutionalised racism, Eddo-Lodge’s searing polemic reconstitutes the frame of the argument around race, removing it from the hands of those with little experience of its resonances. From ambient and lazy cultural stereotyping to open hostility, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is a clarion call of understanding."

I was originally very wary to read this book. I am not someone who is a proponent of encouraging "white guilt." I don't think it helps fix the issue nor do I think I should feel guilty for being born into a certain race. The quite inflammatory title put me off and made me worried of how emotionally biased the content would be. 

However, I am happy that I read this book. As someone who comes from the very racially tense country of South Africa, and is myself a first generation immigrant to the UK though white, I found this book quite close to home. 

Eddo-Lodge's book is well written, well researched and intelligent. Focusing on structural racism and our own preconceived biases, she gives everyone the tools to start noticing and addressing racism that we see around us. She gives many examples of how, by separating our different social problems, we fail to see how these things interconnect and how race does play a part. However, I must say that some of the book is ambiguously described. "Structural racism" is a term I know from my own personal reading and was not well defined for your casual reader. I also felt that her discussions on immigration was overly simplifying on a deeply complicated topic while only using the very extreme arguments against immigration as the standard. 

I specifically really enjoyed the focus on the little spoken about racial issues in the UK, though I would have enjoyed more history as I found that fascinating. With most of my race knowledge coming from South Africa where racism is still pretty obvious, it was interesting to read about the more subtle forms that it takes here. 

Age Rating 16+. Due to the accessible writing style this book is suitable for a younger audience. Especially useful to encourage talks in a family environment. 

Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan

"Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes
naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.

How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.

With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality."

I loved this book, but to be honest I have nowhere near the education to be able to evaluate the validity of the arguments presented in this book. I have seen grumblings here and there around the book about the validity of some of the arguments that are put forward, and I will certainly doing more reading on this fascinating subject. 

Despite being academic and approaching a variety of very weighty subjects the tone of the book is conversational, even jocular. I found the tone endearing. It reminded me of that brilliant, but cool professor whose lectures are both fun and educational at the same time. 

The author's do not advocate any change in lifestyle for anyone, which I appreciated, only to be open minded about what they believe to be the biological drives which people have. There are too many fascinating arguments about too many related subjects to do the book justice in this space however it is sufficient to say that the arguments blew my mind, hugely increased my knowledge, left me with a lot to contemplate and an interest to find out more on this subject.

There were, however, a few points that irritated me. A few examples: they conflate testosterone with happiness, they mainly write about the needs of men and forgo discussing women and their complexity, and they ignore the multifaceted cultural,  societal and emotional factors that relate to mating. I would also write more about their heteronormative perspectives, with homosexuality only coming up a handful of times in one-liners.

Overall an enlightening book that I would recommend however I will certainly being doing more of my own further reading. 

Age Rating 16+. A scientific look at human sexuality. However there is adult content and a few wink wink moments. 

The Sound of the Mountains - Kawabata Yasunari

"Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night
he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing."

A deeply meaningful book that I didn't understand at all. It is a book that I don't think can be read casually, as I did. It would better suited in a book club or high school literature lesson. It must be dissected. The motifs. The meaning of the Noh masks, the different flowers, the stray dog giving birth under the porch. The themes, of aging, love, family, loyalty, trauma and modernity. The subtle word choices and rhythms that Kawabata chooses to employ. If not then you loose much of the authors intent. 

As a metaphor for aging and the difficulty of family relations, it works well. As an actual story... there is barely any plot with nothing coming to any resolution. It was a slice of life book, a slice of the main character's life and existential ponderings used to illuminate certain human foibles to the reader but not to engage us. Not for us to have any conventional feeling of pacing, plot or character development. 

Kawabata crafts the relationship between Shingo and Kikuko beautifully on the cutting edge of sensuality and sympathy. Both the characters thrive separately in their miseries and still somehow in a bizarre way find a spiritual connection with each other, making the reader curious for the unheard. The tension of the unsaid and nervously wanted was certainly the highlight of the book for me. 

A beautiful and unique bit of writing that deserves study but certainly not a story. 

Age Rating 15+. Abortions, affairs and a creeping sensuality. 

Killing Commendatore - Murakami Haruki

"In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in
Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art."

This is my second Murakami and I think I prefer this book to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. While still infused with Murakami's trademark surrealism and many similar metaphors and motifs, Killing Commendatore seemed more coherent. The plot was simpler and the message that Murakami was trying to convey was elegant and present. 

The painting elements were compelling and beautifully written. There's also a deep point about the life of ideas and how they travel to people and places, moving outside of time and how ideas have a life of their own outside their original thinker. 

However, I feel pretty conflicted. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading it until the final 100 pages or so turned into a slog. I genuinely love Murakami's focus on the mundane and the sense of ennui that it encourages in the reader. On the other, it's repetitive and minimalistic in a way that felt generationally out of touch.

The unnamed main character is in one of these classic Murakami in-between periods in his life, where everything has fallen apart but he's somehow fairly financially comfortable and has time to re-evaluate things. He gets involved with a questionably shady guy, and they start investigating some slowly unfolding mysteries.

That should be great, but the edge parts simply don't work. In particular, the main character has a lot of deeply uncomfortable conversations with a teenage girl about her breasts, conversations which continue on and off for about 400 pages. She's such a poorly imagined character that it seems like it's all she thinks about. Also pretty much every women we meet has their breasts sized up to the point where it is the first thing that we know about them. That's never been ok in these books and it's not ok now.

Murakami novels rely on the uncanny, on coincidence and strange encounters that seem normal but have an undercurrent of anxiety and oddness. The main reason I love them. Some of that was here in a watered down form. The problem is the novel is simply too big for the small amount of story it contained. It has the essence of his tropes but the prose is too weak and stretched to utilise them fully.

Age Rating 16+. Some weird sexual elements with the main character having many affairs and being mildly obsessed on his dead 10 year old sisters breasts. 

Ninth House (#1) - Leigh Bardugo

"Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman
class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive."

I really enjoyed this book, it was right up my alley. Secret Societies, Old Universities, Magic and Academia, Ghosts, Magic Tattoos, Tradition and the "Old Boys Club" being infiltrated by someone who definitely doesn't traditionally belong there. It was a bit slow to start but I, personally, enjoy slower paced books. Bardugo's atmosphere building is top notch and her plot kept me guessing and interested. There are also some really stunning writing/ aesthetic moments that, if I had any drawing skills, I would love to draw. The dialogue was fun and snappy. The character's a good mix of cliché and unique. 

I am not very fond of Alex’s character just yet, she’s indeed a hard girl to love but I think she might grow on me after a while. I already love her wits and confidence so I just need another push to be sure I love her.

I feel that Leigh Bardugo definitely seems more suited to writing more adult slanted content. There is no YA, which seems to have come to mean tweens and up, content here, okay. This really is young ADULT. 

If this book is one thing, it's violent. There are some graphic scenes that show sexual abuse, rape, drug addiction and the sexual abuse of minors. There is trauma and pain and it's not glossed over. That said, it isn’t the grimmest, or bleakest book I’ve ever read. In fact, Bardugo sometimes tries too hard for big, dramatic horror, and the violence comes off as gratuitous, her ghosts sometimes too chain-rattling to believe. Ninth House is about all kinds of trauma, yet I found that the consequences of such a monumental thing are barely brushed upon. The novel is rife with flashbacks, seen through Alex’s eyes as she passively witnesses the horrifying events of her past, but her trauma-suppressed memories seemingly only resurface whenever it's convenient for the plot, and without much of a statement being made besides. And that occasionally struck a sour note.

There’s a lot going on in this book. It is something hard to get into because the beginning is extremely confusing. The action is quite slow and not necessarily that complex, but somehow, until the end, there is something there. Something that leaves you thinking that you actually really enjoyed it. I am keen to read the second instalment when I think the magic aspect of the series will also come into it's own and we will get a better understanding of the characters. 

Age Rating 17+. As said above, quite a brutal book that includes no small amount of abuse. 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James

"Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a
nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all."

Defying the more Western belief in one definitive version of a story, this book is structured as an oral epic in which stories lead to more stories which lead to yet more, ultimately providing the reader with a conundrum of reliability: who tells the truth and whose story is being told? Marlon James chooses to leave that entirely up to the reader. There are many elusive layers of detail to sift through from the very beginning: a test of endurance, almost asking "do you really want to hear this story?"

And I found that my answers was...No, not really, thank you. 

This is a deeply disturbing book. 

First, my purely literary criticism. I don't mind having to sometimes work for a story. some of the best stories take patience to dissect deeper meanings. But what is really happening here is Marlon James hiding behind his fancy words and complicated sentences to distract the reader from the lack of substance and development. The rhetoric in this story is dense, convoluted, and bogged down with false promises of something worth reading. The prose is evasive and meandering, dragging the reader around and around in circles without an end in sight. The pacing is uneven and the whole experience one of crazy disorganisation. It reads like a dreamscape, full of portent and stark brutality. The writing is often staccato, list-like, with small, well-crafted sentences that are a perfect foil for Marlon James’ ability, showcasing his striking imagery and unusual connections. Well, I would like to think that this was a stylistic choice of James's to create a feeling of unreliability or a drug induced haze and the book wasn't just an disorganized mess. Yes, it’s beautiful at times, but, for me at least, emotionless.

Now onto the really disturbing part. The amount of lewdness in the book is obscene. I'm not easily deterred by things sexual in nature, even perverse stuff as sex and the way we use it can give us a huge amount of insight into the human psyche. Bring it on. But this is too extreme for me. A big neon flashing trigger warning is necessary for the following: rape, gang rape, paedophilia, bestiality, incest, mutilation of bodies, graphic murder, physical and emotional abuse, repetitious orgies, torture, constant misogyny in all the characters, etc. and none of it has any relevance to the plot or progression of the storyline. I understand that mythology doesn't shy away from such brutality, but there is a difference between being aware and having these events happen for a reason and just being down right offensive for shock value. This book is the latter. 

Characters have limited realism, some act as symbols, some merely a means of upping the violence levels still further. When read all at once, it’s an endless and eventually numbing litany of misery and horror that loses any meaning. Such a lack of humanity ensures there is nothing redeemable or relatable about this book. Had this been a story about a tracker and a shapeshifter finding love while in search of a missing boy, deeply rooted in African mythology and cultural folklore fantasy, I would have loved this to bits. The concept is phenomenally creative. but this book is nothing that it claims to be. Instead is showcases toxic relationship after another, a disturbingly misogynistic and awful main character (that I really hope doesn't mirror the author's own feelings towards women)  that has zero character growth and reduces queer men's relationships to nigh-  on bestial sex. 

I wouldn't recommend it but it was certainly an experience that brought something new. 

Age Rating 18+. Please believe me on this one. I am not being overly sensitive, just trust me.

The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern

"Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he
discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life."

The Starless Sea is a love letter to literature, story telling as a whole and  to those of us dogged with the invisible burden of unbelonging that sends us out into the pages in search of solace. The writing is truly stunning. Morgenstern's prose is fluid, memorable and painfully beautiful. It kind of reminds me of Laini Taylor's newer works. The overall aesthetic is just spot on too, I wanted to climb into the book multiple times just from the sheer beautifulness of everything being described. 

The Starless Sea starts with a fascinating inciting incident. This guy named Zachary finds an old book at his library that tells his story. On a quest to discover why this book tells his story, Zachary soon finds himself in this magical library/world with some magical people. 

However, what follows is a disappointing series of seemingly endless fish-out-of-water scenes as Zachary bumbles along, trying to make sense of this magical place. But even when things started to "come together" in the last 100 pages or so, I still had no idea what was going on. I constantly asked "but what is the point?" while reading this book and never, even at the end, got a satisfactory answer. Who are the Owls, who are the bees, why does the starless sea exist, why does it rise or sink? There was also no antagonist or central conflict. Again, I'm utterly confounded. Without an antagonist or a cohesive plot I am reading beautiful meaningless prose. 

But I am going to shock everyone now... I didn't mind being confused hugely. I think each person could read this book and come away with a hugely differing moral or take. Maybe the bees are God, maybe they are the first story tellers and stories make the world? Who knows? Maybe that was Morgenstern's point. Maybe this is a prolonged show of the mailability of stories and their meanings. If so she was very brave and I can see this being incredibly frustrating for many readers, myself occasionally included. 

However the one thing that did really grate on me was the irritating love story. I didn't buy Zachary and Dorian's relationship for a second. They kind of saved each other's lives once or twice, but never had any time to develop a deep connection. They spent an evening drinking wine and reading together, (and by "reading together" I mean reading different books in the same room together) but had no other significant interactions. They never flirted or talked to each other more than a few sentences. Then all of a sudden Dorian confesses to Zachery very dramatically.  Uh, what??!? At this point in the book, I wasn't even sure that Dorian was into men and liked Zachary, let alone was in love with him. It is hinted at that Zachary and Dorian are meant to be together because of some prophetic nonsense, but my god, what a cop out. Throw some scenes of them getting to know each other with some cute banter in this huge book so that I can believe they are in love.

Age Rating 14+ Nothing inappropriate.