Good evening!
Unfortunately I’ve had a largely disappointing week of reading, but a positive has been that I’ve enjoyed considering why I haven’t enjoyed the particular things I’ve read. Plus I am fundamentally a hater so it’s been nice being a bit of a bitch when I’ve spoken about them to other people. I’m also aware of how ironic this is after I talked quite extensively about how I don’t often read bad texts because I pick what I read quite carefully about a month ago -- oopsies.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Firstly, I finished Elliot Page’s Pageboy (2023). I think I was slightly spoiled by Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), a celebrity memoir that is well-written and well-structured. I mentioned last week that the style of writing wasn’t really working for me, because of the run-on sentences that made it difficult to read in some places. I think I managed to get past that, but as I got nearer the end I did notice that this was reflected in the general structure. To be frank, it’s a mess -- there’s no rhyme or reason to it,other than Page remembering things as they came to him and expanding on them. He’d mention one person and then mention them again about 15 chapters later without any hint of who they are and how they appeared in his life. In the end, I stopped flicking back to try and work out who he was talking about by finding previous mentions of them and just kind of gave up. This needed a much more robust edit. It’s a shame, because he had a lot to say on Hollywood, homophobia and transphobia, but it was couched in bad prose and a badly-formed text.
I then picked up Vidgis Horth’s Long Live the Post Horn! (2012), translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, which I enjoyed quite a lot. Post Horn follows a woman working in a PR agency who feels extremely isolated and apathetic. It begins with her colleague suddenly quitting, leaving a note in which he calls her a bitch. He also leaves behind an ongoing project with the postal union, who are opposing an EU law that would see the postal service fall victim to the gig economy, taking away working rights for contracted staff and allowing a share of the work to be taken over by uncontracted workers. The Labour Party conference is coming up, and the union, along with the PR agency, need enough delegates on their side to vote against the law. The protagonist meets a multitude of postal workers who are passionate about their work and how it benefits both their communities and the national economy, making her reconsider her place in society and ultimately quashing her apathy.
This is a novel that is very much about communication, and how modern forms of living and working makes us isolated from one another. The postal service becomes a conduit through which the protagonist thinks about her relationships with her family and her partner, as she considers how she can be better connected to them. Seeing the passion that the postal workers and union staff have for something that can very much connect people by the simple act of sending someone something through the post, whether that be a letter or a gift, makes her reconsider herself as someone that is isolated by social design. The end of it was a bit laboured, in that it really hammered home the ‘point’ of the novel and how she felt after her experience, but other than that it was a very nuanced and actually quite fun look at how we build communities and interpersonal relationships.
The last book I finished this week was a real doozy. I read the first 50 pages of Jade Song’s Chlorine (2023) last week and finished it this week and my God, was it a slog. It’s easily the worst book I’ve read this year. This is a classic example of a good concept absolutely butchered by bad writing. It’s about a high school student called Ren who is part of a competitive swim team and who opens the novel stating that she is a mermaid, and that the story that follows charts her transformation from human to mermaid. The protagonist is under immense pressure to get good grades, win swim meets and impress Ivy League college recruiters. She lives with her mother, as her father has returned to his native China to set up a business and send money to America. Her best friend is Cathy, another girl on the swim team, who is not as impressive as her and is in love with Ren.
Ren has what amounts to a mental breakdown, which manifests in her denying her queerness in favour of sexual relations with boys she doesn’t like and taking solace in her swimming. Her swim coach Jim is clearly manipulative and abusive, something she doesn’t outright acknowledge -- what I will compliment Song for is how much she allows her reader to take from the text without Ren stating what is actually going on. Ren can’t process her relationship with swimming and therefore convinces herself she is a mermaid, which results in a gruesome scene of body horror. All of this would pull me towards a book because there is a lot in there that is really, really interesting but there was just too much wrong with the writing for me to enjoy this, even marginally.
The main thing that really pissed me off was the tone, which is very ‘I am trying to sound clever.’ There was a lot of ‘plucking’ instead of picking up, a lot of ‘merely’s (which I HATE), and so on and so forth. All of the characters spoke in the same way -- there is nothing to distinguish between them -- and none of them speak in a way that real people do, despite it clearly aiming to do that. This felt like this could potentially work for a younger audience, but I don’t think it is marketed towards the YA market.
I’m about halfway through Francisco Garcia’s We All Go Into The Dark (2023), a book about the formation of the myth surrounding the serial killer Bible John. I’m enjoying it very much so far and have zipped through what I’ve already read, so I hope that I’m on the up with my reading.
Books on my radar
I’m incredibly excited about Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All Stars, the debut novel from the writer of the short story collection Friday Black (2018). Friday Black is one of the best collections I’ve ever read. I’m also intrigued by Megan Nolan’s new novel Ordinary Human Failings -- both novels were published yesterday.