Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

I am fiercely glad that this book was published, because I can relate a lot to adult Scout. I can relate to her frustration with coming home and seeing your racist/sexist family with new eyes, and I can relate to her concerns about getting married and losing her self. It's exactly the stage I am in life, and I am grateful to have Scout keep me company in my rage against what it's like to grow up.

I began reading this thinking, this is a perfectly good book, in line with most contemporary fiction at the time, whatever inspired her to write To Kill a Mockingbird instead? Whatever inspired her editor to think that she'd be capable of To Kill a Mockingbird, when the story of a liberal twenty something's disillusionment upon returning to her small southern hometown might've felt far more relevant and modern? The answer came to me as the story went on, though: I don't know much about the politics of this time, but I wonder if Harper Lee decided that -- instead of writing a novel about a young person's who's critical of racist politics, and being just another New York voice condemning the racial dynamics in Alabama, why not write a novel that logically lays out the social conditions, and ties racial injustice back to the Constitution? Maybe somewhere in the writing process, she did realize that she could make more of a difference deriving proof of human kindness, than expressing her frustration with it.

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is killing it. His second book is ever more impressive than the first, which was already fantastic.

I think Jo's partly writing a satire here: award winning literary book veer towards abundant sex, discomfitting brutality and gore, more sex especially focusing on genitals, pretentious stuff like Balzac and palpitating balls, and characters that are completely unlikeable. And now Jo comes along and shows us you can write a perfectly good book with warm characters (rich with personal dilemmas beyond the realm of the job), good plot, and not much view of anyone's balls (although we can't escape the occasional dick).

The Vorrh, B. Catling

I thought this book was highly inconsistent and, in many parts, lacking.

The first chapter shows the promise of a concise, erudite short story that is unique in its conception and thoughtfully detailed; in other words, I think B. Catling proves himself capable of doing a lot better than he did. Then the rest of the book has great ideas, but they seem lackadaisically executed. Essenwald is a fascinating concept -- a city that feeds on a forest -- but the descriptions of it are highly generic. I wanted to know more about this place that sounds much like something you'd find on Geoff Manaugh's BLDBLOG, but we're not given the kind of specific, thoughtful details that make a setting tangible rather than a vague anyplace. The setting merely seems like feels like a weak mirror of present day or historic social, political and economic dynamics between city and industry. That's how I felt about most of the rest of the book: very interesting ideas, undeveloped.

I found it hard to care about the characters, and I didn't get the sense that the author cared that much about them, either. The cyclops, Gertrude, Cyrena, the frenchman... are all interesting, but that's like reading a miscellaneous piece of news in the papers and going "oh, interesting." I find them forgettable after I close the books. Most of the characters that populate the book seem incidental and not really relevant, which may be the point of surrealist art, but with an omniscient narrator and a story whose rasion d'etre is obscure, what is there to glean from scrutinizing the minute interactions between them? The only character who felt truly fleshed out is Muybridge, and I suspect this is because he is based on a real person. I know from writing fanfiction that it is far easier to write about a ready-made character, than to develop characters yourself to the point where they feel convincingly like real people. And maybe that's the problem here: the author is a better at writing about real events, real people, using real models for a place. It is not enough to imagine an interesting place like the Vorrh and call it done, for a setting to matter, it has to be fleshed out.

Yes, you can have a great novel with a generic setting and incidental characters, focusing instead on exploring a particular philosophy or scientific theory, or a single generic character's rich internal world. But the Vorrh is ostensibly about a place, and if the place is vague and elusive, then it must be through the character's adventures that we learn about it -- and the characters leave us little to learn.

crazy rich asians, kevin kwan

kevin kwan wrote the book that i'd never write, dealing with a topic (asian culture) that i'm super interested in writing about.

guys, i know people like these. spendthrift aunties, sensitive bromance guys, smart girls who go to top schools whose life is incomplete according to their families until they marry.

kwan's world is so rich with stereotypes, references, canto "pidgin" dialect (i love it when writers introduce dialect to english novels), all the secret acronyms popular amongst asians. like rachel, i'm only dimly aware that there are crazy rich asians, but this is the world i grew up in. kwan gets it and shows it so well.

i think a good writer is a good observer of human nature (and culture), and kwan's characters and settings ring true. this book is really a documentary, with the very conventional catty chicklit plot as a vehicle for us to be voyeurs to a culture that is largely undocumented. most hong kongers live these lives that are materialistic, paradoxical, but few reflect upon it (unless they've had some sort of foreign contact) because it's the norm. and kwan has captured it in all its material contradictions, its habits, all the -las and fucky fucks that locals think and talk in.

at times i was frustrated that kwan doesn't go deeper be literary rather than poppy -- he's quite capable of it, just read his sentences, acute one-liner descriptions of a character of full chapters devoted to the shallow Christian aunties -- but i think the shallowness is intentional. crazy rich asians is unabashedly voyeuristic, and i think it works that way. too much self-reflection gets didactic; here we're forced to draw our own conclusions, feeling slightly guilty that we enjoy the details of rich people's lives so much.

it's not a bad thing to write for a pop audience -- i think, now, of how many people more people are made aware of this social phenomenon of the dynastic families and the nouveau rich of asia. the beginning is perfection -- we all have these stereotypes about asians, right? and with Ormsby/Wormsby's racism at the outset, kwan's saying, get ready for a whole new set of stereotypes. a set more intricate and nuanced than you're aware of.

i wonder if, two hundred years ago, Vanity Fair would've been put on the chicklit shelf. if victorian novels of the nouveau rich were just newcoming bestsellers. this book is GOOD. maybe there's nothing wrong with it chasing a pop formula.