2018 Wrap Up

Hello, friends. It is I, the supremely late Sonnet, rolling into this review post on April 2, a full 3 months past the New Year. It has been quite a wild ride, though, so I'm only a little mad that I'm so late! Definitely planning on making more of a concerted effort to schedule myself this year, though. (Shut up, I don't say that every year...) Anyway, here are some quick thoughts (and hot links) on the books I read for the 2018 Read Harder Challenge!

She Came By The Book by Mary Wings
January - mystery by LGBTQ+ or POC author
I said it in my main review and I'll say it again: any book that starts with "As a lesbian..." is bound to be an interesting one for me. I loved discovering Mary Wings' work at the Affirmations book sale, and I loved that the queer part of the story was just as important as the actual mystery.

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
January - celebrity memoir
Space Mom! You were too good for us, and I hope we do you proud. I loved getting a peek into Carrie Fisher's young mind, the raw honesty and cleverness.

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie
February - female protagonist over age 60
I love Miss Marple. I want to be an old lady knitting and solving mysteries and unobtrusively telling everyone she's smarter than them. Not in so many words, of course.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
February - social sciences
Ijeoma Oluo is one of my go-to writers now, when I want to try to understand something powerful that is happening in the world. Everyone should read this book, but especially white people. R E A D  I T .

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
March - Oprah Book Club selection
Hamlet in the Midwest! I am a sucker for retellings, especially ones that stretch the conceivable bounds for a retelling. Don't get me wrong, I'll read Beauty and the Beast in a slightly different European forest all day, but take a Danish monarchical tragedy and put it in rural Wisconsin? Sold.

The Power by Naomi Alderman
March - sci-fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
Can you imagine what it would be like for women to be suddenly infused with the terrifying power and strength to take the world back? No? Maybe read this book then? (And also, like, a lot of other books. Work on your imagination, bro.)

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi  (Legacy of Orisha #1)
April - first in a new-to-you YA series
I can't keep saying "I love this book" and move on to the next blurb. But I love this book. Sure, I have some quibbles, so I made everyone I know read it so I could argue with them about it, but overall, Blood and Bone is so important in terms of representation and expansion of pan-African influences in young adult media and Tomi did a bang-up job. Waiting on #2 now. . .

Monstress Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie M. Liu
April - comic written or illustrated by a POC
Unreliable narrators who are possibly also a little evil, paired with an art style dense with line and emotion, in a matriarchal version of Feudal Japan.

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
May - true crime
Wow, it took a long time to get to the actual murder! But I know more about transatlantic communication (also skin removal) than I ever thought I wanted to know.

Moonstruck! Vol 1: Magic to Brew by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle, and Kate Leth
May - one-sitting read
I read this queer graphic novel in bed on my birthday and I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about it. Cozy and happy and gay.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
June - post/colonial literature
This is a pretty famous pivot in literature, telling a famous story from a minor character's perspective, and I very much enjoyed this addition to Jane Eyre, one of my favorite novels. The play with point of view alone in this book really resonates.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
June- published posthumously
I knew whatever book I chose for this was going to be rough, and I decided to just put myself through the ringer for this one. My father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last March, and so of course I decided to read a book about a man who died from (brain) cancer and wrote about his experience. This was a beautiful, raw little book and it solidified a lot of things for me.

Double Bind: Women On Ambition ed. by Robin Romm
July - essay anthology
Am I ambitious? What does that even mean? I really dug deep with this one, asking myself the same questions all the contributors asked in the penning of their essays. Is ambition motivation? Follow-through? Drive? Success? Can it waver, and come back? I'm working on it.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
July - children's classic written before 1980
I've always loved The Neverending Story the movie and long since thought I should read the book. The book was interesting, the movie only covers the first half of it, and honestly I'm glad, because second half Bastian suuuuucks.

The Revolution of Marina M by Janet Fitch
August - book about a BRICS country (Russia)
Wow this was a TOME. A thicc introspective dive into the Russian Revolution. I fell in love with Marina, and my heart hurt for every one of the zillion heartbreaking things that happened to her in an inconceivably short amount of time. This is the kind of book that made me want to write historical fiction.

What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz
August - book about nature
I work for Backyard Brains, and I plucked this book off our office library shelf. We recently started doing experiments with plants, and this book is essentially the backbone of our research with them. How can we understand plants in a way that translates to understanding ourselves as people?

Yellowthroat by Penny Hayes 
September - western
Two words. Lesbian. Western. Need I say more? Sure, there were some sleepy tropes, but ultimately I was happy that the author did not live there, in those tropes that are unfortunately still all too common in queer media.

Ash by Malinda Lo
September - romance novel by/about a POC
Did I mention that I love retellings? And queer things? And this was a queer fairy tale retelling?

Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist
October - genre fiction in translation
John Ajvide Lindqvist is consistently an author who gives me the creeps in absolutely the best way. He makes the horror so banal and close to home that you cannot distance yourself from it at all.

Heat Wave by Richard Castle
October - book with a cover you hate
I love Castle, and I love that they ghostwrote this book by Castle! It was so on-brand for the show and I truly got confused between cases on the show and the case in this book. Oops!

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
November - assigned book you never finished
I did it! I finished the behemoth! I learned so many words, some of which are not real words, and I think I maybe followed most of what happened, but I think part of the point of Infinite Jest is that you maybe don't fully understand it.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
November - comic written and drawn by the same person
I am literally so excited for the 2020 adaptation of this. Noelle Stevenson is such goals!

The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins
December - classic of genre fiction
SO. MUCH. RAGE. Just click through and read my tweets. It's touted as a classic, but I had too many problems with it for it to land on my favorites list.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Book One by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack
December - graphic novel not published by Marvel, DC, or Image
Spooky teenage girls with powers! Netflix adaptations with badass ladies!

One of my goals for 2019 is to be better about scheduling time for myself to write, especially about the things I love. I went through bouts where I didn't write at all about these books, and there are gaps in my posting. This is just for me, I'm sure, but I want to be more organized in 2019. I really love the heightened challenge of two books and reviews a month, but I think I still need to get my groove.

That being said, this year was pretty great personally. I bought a house with my love and we just started our first major renovation project on it; I skated multiple games for the charter team and I'm hoping to amp up my track time for 2019; I started training for a strongwoman competition (finally), I finished NaNoWriMo (though not the draft of my novel!).

Previous years:

~ 2017 ~ 2016 ~ 2015 ~ 2014 ~ 2013 ~

DEC - The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

December review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Vol 1: The Crucible by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack (Artist), 2016. [comic not published by Marvel, DC, or Image category]

Netflix adapted Chilling Adventures of Sabrina last year and I, like many horror fantasy fans, was rightly excited. Kiernan Shipka looked perfect, and I couldn't wait to see Miranda Otto in a new light. Needless to say, I greedily binged the series when it came out and went out in search of the original graphic novel, to really round out my obsession.

The graphic novel is certainly much darker than the Netflix adaptation, killing Harvey instead of his brother, and playing into the trauma surrounding Sabrina's father more deeply with (~spoilers~) his spirit coming back in Harvey's body. I think I liked what the adaptation did, shifting the darkness in certain ways, such as those mentioned above, to make the horror hit a little more closer to home, not as on-the-nose.

One thing I really liked about the graphic novel was the Riverdale crossover: we actually got to see characters from the Riverdale universe come into Sabrina's world (much to their dismay, however), and I look forward to seeing whether that will come into play in the adaptation as well, seeing as the Riverdale TV show is so very popular already.

Reading this copy of Chilling Adventures: Vol I, there was an introduction by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, talking about his process, how he came to the story and how he found the right feel. I absolutely feel like the art style was positively reflected in the Netflix adaptation, and I found it perfectly on-key for the vibe of the story. I look forward to moving further into Sabrina's world, both reading and streaming.

DEC - The Woman In White

December review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, 1860. [Classic of genre fiction category]

I really, really wanted to like The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins. It's the OG gothic horror novel, called the first "sensation fiction" and one of the first mystery novels, and there were parts of it that were really good! The mystery was fun (one of the reasons I actually finished it) but there were just some needling things that I could not get over. This was my December 2018 book, but I just needed such long cooling-off periods in between reads that it stretched over into the new year. (As did the penning of this blog post....) But here we go. The Woman In White starts with "an eerie encounter on a moonlit road," according to all the summaries of it, but I'm going to be honest and say I just didn't find it quite that eerie. Maybe because I am distanced from the time in which it was written? But I digress. Walter Hartwright meets a woman on a road late at night, she tells him a story, and disappears into the darkness (despite wearing the brightest white the guy has ever seen). Then he hears a rumor she might've escaped from an asylum. My knee-jerk reaction is to always sympathize with women who claim unlawful incarceration, especially in asylums, especially with the imbalance of power that comes from taking away a human's agency and the stability of their mind. So I was already on this woman's side, and not Mr. Hartwright's, so I might not have been Mr. Collins's intended audience. I was forging my own path. 

Things happen, Mr. Hartwright continues on to his job which (coincidentally) is tangentially related to that weird occurrence. He is to teach drawing to this young woman on an estate, whose uncle is psychosomatically incapacitated and particular, but thank goodness for the woman's sister, Marian, who could maybe fight for her if anything were to happen. But then enters my true rage. Marian begins to say things about her character as a woman being deficient for pretty much anything, all the while holding herself in high esteem. 

Allow me to just summarize some of my feelings by treating you to a sampling of my rage-tweets on the matter:

So. the women are not allowed to be even full humans, let alone strong or capable or even fucking interesting. I have feelings. Continuing on with the mystery, enter new players that make me super skeptical, and another woman who just lives at the behest of her husband and is also portrayed as a viper and someone you should not like at all. Marian ends up spying on this husband and his friend (who is now married to her sister and trying to basically extort her but he's her husband so that's ok), and she overhears these things--cue more rage-tweets:

Marian of course catches her death while she eavesdrops and is PRETTY MUCH INCAPACITATED FOR A GOOD PORTION OF THE REST OF THE BOOK, allowing the next step of the shitty men's plan to come to fruition. AWESOME. But it's not like she could've done much, anyway, remember? She's just a woman.

The anger continued as I stubbornly made my way through the rest of the book. The twist was relatively interesting, and something that I only partially saw coming (the gist of it, not the particulars), and so I soldiered on.

Stayed home sick from work today in this #polarvortex. Thought I would power through #WomanInWhite but it's just making me ANGERY #ragereading #currentlyreading pic.twitter.com/TZjuUSZvn4

— Caitlin Sonnet Boom Clayton (@SonnetWrites) January 31, 2019

The book is sort of an epistolary fiction, taking sections from each player and point of view, their diaries and correspondence, so it was interesting to move through different "versions" of the story, especially at the end when so much comes to a head and things are revealed. I can't really summarize the end because I am too tired for it and also no spoilers, but needless to say shit goes down, women get some measure of power, but ultimately it is the men who "fix" everything. Because of course. I would have liked this book more if the power the women got was sustained and appreciated. If Marian had actually used her strength to get her sister out after she, too, was wrongfully shut up in an asylum, instead of the men "allowing" her to do it behind the scenes. The suggestion that every move a woman made was foreseen and encouraged by the men around them was just infuriating, and the systematic denial of the women characters any sort of thought or even self-appreciation was just exhausting. I don't know if Wilkie Collins hated women or had complicated feelings about them and was just toeing the party line of the late 19th century, but the fact that this was a highly original type of story is diminished in my eyes by his treatment of these characters. In fact, the entire premise of the mystery depends on the subjugation and other-ness of the women involved, so really, this story could not have been told if he felt any differently about women.

Reader, I finished it. I suppose I am glad to have read it (something I always gauge myself on when I finish something I don't love), and I am glad to have had the outlet of Twitter and my friends to keep me sane through the reading of it.

NOV - Infinite Jest

November review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 2005. [assigned book you never finished]

My friends and I started reading Infinite Jest a few years ago, but our little book club petered out. It sat on my shelf for a long time, until this category! I do love the language, the way DFW plays with words, but it was difficult to get through, especially in the way I've been reading, snatches on my commute or drowsy in bed. That being said, I am glad I finished it.

How does one really summarize Infinite Jest? It is a postmodern encyclopedic novel, a behemoth of a text that I used as a headrest on more than one occasion. It has been described as "meta modernist" and "hysterical realist." It's set in a halfway house and a tennis academy, features junkies on both sides, told in a stream-of-consciousness similar to that popularized by Virginia Woolf, but very very clearly written and created by a man. There is an Infinite Jest wiki that was wildly helpful throughout my reading, because god knows the footnotes were just as cryptic as the book itself.

So much of this book is figuring out DFW's language/shorthand etc. He uses footnotes for wildly differing reasons, from defining the technical composition of drugs to parenthetical interviews to asides to fucking defining POV but there's nothing that is like "when I say demapped it means killed or suicide" like most normal footnotes. The truth (Truth) in this book is constructed, rather than reported (page 1048, footnote 269). The footnotes can be used as construction, in various ways: through asides (264), definitions (308), parentheticals (325), and research (304), among others.

A friend's review of IJ, immortalized

I am glad to have read this book, I am stubborn enough to have finished it, but I am equally glad that it is over. David Foster Wallace is a very talented and complicated man, to be sure, and a genius with wordplay, and he is truly worth studying.

NOV - Nimona

November review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, 2015. [comic drawn and written by the same person]

Nimona is so many things I've always wanted in a graphic novel. Scrappy girl protagonists, magic, upending of the dichotomy of good and evil, magical bureaucracy, and shapeshifting! Plus Noelle Stevenson, the author/artist is like, the coolest (and now she has made She-Ra on Netflix, which is equally rad).

Nimona comes to Sir Ballister Blackheart as a new sidekick and pretty much throws a wrench in all of his plans. Sir Ballister is pretty much the top dog in a magical world that blends magic and sci-fi tech, and he never really gets much done until Nimona shows up. He has to try to teach is protege restraint (she always wants to go around killing people and setting things on fire, which is a bit too far for the cerebral villain Sir Ballister. Nimona is a fiery little girl with a butch haircut and a big mouth who also happens to be a shapeshifter! How incredibly cool would it be to be Nimona?

Nimona and Ballister go on missions, quibble about the level of villainy that is acceptable, and slowly become close. The Good Guy Brigade (I mean, the Institute) employs Ballister's archnemesis, the hero Goldenloin, who has some serious history with our villain. As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the less-good things about the Institute, Goldenloin gets more and more disillusioned with his job sitch, and Ballister and Nimona burrow their way into each others' hearts, and of course the inevitable happens, where they hurt each other and leave, but Sir Ballister works to find her again, and set things right. Nimona deals with such heavy shit in such a completely understandable and accessible manner, even though it is sci-fi, and it is going to be a classic for a long time.

Nimona in a nutshell

OCT - Handling The Undead

October review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Handling The Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist, 2009. [genre fiction in translation category]

Handling The Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist is a spooky book. But spooky in the way that it's pretty much our normal, everyday world, except for this one supernatural turn. I recognize that a lot of horror (and also thriller) can be explained this way, but my point is that Lindqvist doesn't come at the novel from the perspective of writing a scary story. He introduces human emotion and watches what happens when the world is turned upside down. What does grief do to a person, especially in the face of the impossible?

When the city is faced with a heat wave and weird occurrences start bringing people's loved ones back to life...but are they the same people? David's wife is the first one to come back, and he always knew she was too good for him, so how is he supposed to carry on and raise their kid without her? Or how can a grandfather go on without his favorite grandson? Or an old woman whose husband died recently, and his recurrence makes her question everything about her faith? Slowly, the country figures out what to do with the risen dead, calling in the army to sequester the increasingly more violent problem, and people pack in to see their loved ones when everything goes terribly wrong. Again, Lindqvist manages to tap into the most human part of horror, and Handling The Undead will leave you with the slightest of tingles at the base of your scalp long after you've turned the last page.

OCT - Heat Wave

October review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Heat Wave by Richard Castle, 2016. [book with a cover you hate category]

I had to think real hard about this, because I often do the opposite: choose to read a book purely because I am intrigued by the cover. I don't know that I have ever actively hated a book cover: I am generally OK with movie tie-in editions, although I don't profess to *love* them, as long as I can still get my own attractive copy. So I had to dig deep and think about what I would really roll my eyes at when I saw a book. I settled, in the end, on romance novel covers (inexplicably glistening pecs and mid-swoon damsels) and pulp crime novels.

Heat Wave by Richard Castle is a little bit of both, arguably. It is a sort of tie-in with Castle the TV show (starring Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic), and I read it just as I was starting my partner on the show. Needless to say, the similarities between the Heat Wave characters and their inspirations are many and sometimes I had to double check which case I was in. Having that backstory (from the show) certainly enriched the experience, and I felt a little closer to the story than I maybe would have if I had just picked it up with no knowledge. All in all, I enjoyed this quick little read, even if the cover drove me a little crazy.