Edgar's Book Round-Up, October 2021

Well, that was October, and I barely remember it, but I did read some cool stuff. Links go to Bookshop, as per.

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First up this month was Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. A fix-up of Peterson’s viral Buzzfeed article, the book does exactly what it says on the tin: how and why are my demographic and I so fucking tired all the time, so incapable of what seems like basic adult achievements? Whether it’s something as simple as going to the post office or something as complex (and possibly nonexistent) as achieving financial stability, Millenials as a group are fucking it up, while also somehow still being culturally viewed as self-centered teens with Sidekicks.

Breaking down a broadly varied topic into its component parts, Peterson examines in turn the cultural moment in which Millenials came of age; the shifts in housing, and labor practices and regulations that have led to widespread precarity; current parenting norms and mores (which, honestly, sound like pure hell, so hats off to my Millenial parent-friends! You’re doing your best! See you when the kids are old enough to entertain themselves!); and, of course, the tolls of all these various pressures. Peterson does a good job of acknowledging the diversity of American Millenials, both along socioeconomic axes and identity-based ones, and her background in academia and journalism both come to bear in addressing, albeit lightly, these nuances. I also appreciated her assertion that, as usual, the problem is capitalism. Perhaps fittingly, I read this one as an ebook on my phone, mostly while at my job (generationally-aspirational by virtue of its stable schedule and benefits). Had there been anyone else in the room when I finished it, I probably would have gotten some funny looks at the sound that came out me — something like a strangled laugh, something like a sob — when I reached the her open-handed slap of a final line:

Don’t underestimate us; we have so little to lose.

I next finished, in audiobook form, The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson. The first of what seems to be at least a duology, the novel follows Immanuelle, a young woman born under some kind of mysterious ill-omen, as she seeks to eke out a living for herself and her family by sheep-herding in the repressive, religiofascist society of Bethel. Under the leadership of the Prophet (scarcely the only Meaningful Capitalized Noun in this one), Bethel has known relative prosperity, and safety from the witches who ostensibly dwell in the forests that surround the territory, during Immanuelle’s lifetime. But when she is drawn into those very woods, following a lost sheep, she will bear witness to a series of increasingly frightening privations forced onto the only community she has ever known, and uncover the dark secrets that underlie not only her birth, but Bethel itself.

It took me a minute to warm to this one, in part because I had somehow gotten the impression that it was in some way an historical fiction or folk horror kind of story. It’s not not either of those things — but whatever genre it is, it’s much closer to Full Metal Alchemist than The VVitch. By that I mean, the setting bears some resemblance to real-world societies, but with a strong underpinning of a pretty solidly-developed fantasy world (that clearly also has industry somewhere, but that somewhere isn’t Bethel). Which is great and I love it — I just wish the packaging or any of the advance notices I had seen had given any indication of what I was in for. But once I had my expectations set, the story rolled along nicely, ramping up the tension with every passing plague, fracturing Imanuelle’s relationships and her worldview along the way to its extraordinary climax. This one was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to its sequel, due out later this year.

I followed that one, or rather, read concurrently as an ebook, Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket. The title, suggesting as it does something more systematic and perhaps academic, is a hair misleading: while Lorr does paint, with rather broad strokes, the rise of supermarkets and the kind of overabundance they demand and represent, the book is much closer to a journalistic expose than anything. The focus is much more on Lorr’s experiences at different points in the voracious ecosystem of American food supply and suppliers: a series of interviews with Trader Joe himself; a couple of weeks riding along with a long-haul trucker; working in a Whole Foods in New York City. Bouncing from trade shows to shrimp-fishing vessels, Lorr does his best at being Virgil to the reader’s Dante, shining the light of his own willingness to do stuff on the dark corners of how Americans get their food so fast and cheap.

Of course, there’s a problem here: Lorr positions himself as a kind of everyman consumer, seeking to get food that isn’t obviously unethical of any kind he wants pretty much whenever he wants. It’s a nice pose, but I couldn’t quite buy it. Who doesn’t know that working in a grocery store fucking sucks? Who isn’t aware that industrial food production and farming is a machine all-but-literally lubricated by workers’ blood? Who can actually walk into a grocery store, whether it’s Whole Foods, HyVee, or whatever regional chain has your area in a stranglehold, and not realize just how unnatural a display of human hubris the whole deal is? This is not to say that the book is bad — it’s very engaging, and for all Lorr’s did-you-know-this-shit-sucks posturing grated occasionally, his style overall was readable, pleasant and funny, reaching its finest moments, for me, when he wandered dazedly through a food start-up trade show — only that it is designed for a reader who I don’t think exists. Then again, I had similar, if somewhat less embittered, feelings about Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords, so I guess maybe that reader is terminally online doomers’ parents or something.

Here, though, I had the absolute joy of finishing an actual honest-to-god printed-on-paper book: Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune. Longtime readers may recall my affection for The House in the Cerulean Sea, and in no way did Klune’s latest outing for adults let me down. The novel details the postmortem adventures of Wallace Price: an unmourned asshole of a lawyer, Wallace is thrust into a situation where being an asshole lawyer won’t get him his way. Drawn by a chipper young reaper to the Charon’s Crossing tea shop, Wallace is told that he must find a way to transition into way comes next — but he also must find a way to deal with Hugo, the handsome, caring ferryman who runs the tea shop.

While Klune’s cosmology was… deeply odd, to say the least, the novel’s ensemble of characters, and Wallace’s personal growth in particular, were delightful and fun. But neither does the novel turn from the fundamental place of grief and mourning in its story: sad things happen and people hurt each other, and what I’ve loved about Klune’s work is that his novels don’t shy from that fact but rather greet it with resilience and renewed commitment to being the people they’d like to be. Also, in what is mostly a coincidence but not entirely, I have been drinking an absolute shitload of tea. Highly recommended, on all counts.

I next finished In the Woods, the first in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels. I’m pretty sure I’m going to read the other ones, and also I’ve got a bunch more books to discuss before the end of this round-up, so I shall pass over it for now, except to note that it’s fine, I guess, but it’s definitely a first novel and The Witch Elm is still, as far as I’m concerned, French’s finest work.

But then I wrapped up the audiobook of Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne. The first novel in the Burning Kingdoms trilogy (the next book is due out next year), this book largely centers around Priya, a young woman whose past ties her to the Hirana, a half-ruined temple, now used to imprison disgraced princess Malini. As the novel progresses, it rapidly becomes clear that Priya and Malini will need each other as more than servant and noble: Priya holds powers Malini need to ensure her own political machinations are set in motion, and Malini may be the key to independence for Priya’s native Ahiranya region.

For Ahiranya is part of a vast empire, Parijatdvipa, over which Malini’s religiously-zealous brother is emperor, and the novel takes it imperial connotations seriously. Based in Indian history and legend, the setting is rich and well-realized, its politics and magic intimately intertwined, and this is one of its great strengths: rather than simply letting its imperium rest on its laurels, The Jasmine Throne instead shows a place alive with political disputes, played out through violence, yes, but also through a robust artistic culture of poetry and artwork. While it takes some time for the plot to really pick up steam, it doesn’t drag in its early pages; rather, it allows the setting to flourish. While this first entry does leave the characters at a threshold, it doesn’t cut off in a big cliffhanger — but I’m no less excited for subsequent entries in the trilogy.

I finished another audiobook next, though in fairness, this one was only novella-length: Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Drawing on Japanese folklore, the story follows Cat as she accompanies her fractious friend group to a Heian-era mansion, so her best friend and his fiancee, Nadia, can live out her dream of being married in a haunted house.

Now, take a minute to look at the cover, and the imprint (it’s Tor Nightfire, for the incurious and harried) and tell me if that sounds like a good idea.

It’s scarcely a spoiler to say that it’s not.

Leaving aside the mansion’s grisly history, the faultlines in the friend group gathered for the nuptials would have made it an unpleasant destination wedding all by themselves — but then there’s all those ghosts. The fact that Khaw writes like a fancy knife, beautiful, sharp, and designed to do awful things, certainly helps, too. Briefer and somehow even more brutal than The All-Consuming World (in which, lest we forget, the main character gets out of bad situations by shooting herself in the head), Nothing But Blackened Teeth is deeply uncomfortable in exactly the right ways. Highly recommended.

But look: I know this book was in my last round-up. I know I basically just read it. I super do not care, because here is where I finished rereading Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots, this time in ebook form. I’ve got Cameron on it now, too. And let me just say: it stands up well to continued to scrutiny.

I’ll bypass rehashing the plot; it’s a good one, and Anna is a delightful protagonist. One of the joys of rereading, after all, is already knowing the plot beats, and getting to spend more time with the details. And they’re great details: Anna and June’s pick-me-up exercise of roasting guys on Tinder; the incisive, brief depictions of minor characters (“the Excel pervert” — good god); Anna’s unfolding relationship with her body as she understands what it can and cannot do. In discussing the novel with a coworker who also read and loved it, we agreed that it was in many ways reminiscent of Martha Wells’ MurderBot Diaries (discussed elsewhere, but most recently here) — less in its content and more in its tone and approach to the central character. Anna is saddled not only with the damage wrought on her body, but also by a complex weight of social expectations and her own desires: even before she is injured, her work directly interferes with her ability to just go on a normal date; she takes the time to sharpen her eyeliner as a way to psych herself up for unpleasant tasks; she loses friends in pursuit of her ambitions, and the novel provides no easy answers as to whether that was worth it. Once again, I urge fans of strong character writing, superhero stories, and, since you’re reading this, you specifically, dear reader, to give this one a go.

I next finished another audiobook (and I’d like to again thank my public library system and especially the Libby app for enabling me to spend all this time with ebooks and audiobooks), The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. The novel presents us with Andrew and Eric, a nice, bougie gay couple, and their adopted daughter, Wen, as they try to enjoy a nice vacation and are instead subjected to a truly disturbing home invasion — and the invaders claim that, if Eric and Andrew don’t sacrifice one of themselves, the world will come to an end.

Further plot details might spoil things, but also, that’s most of the plot: an awful situation, and what comes of it. That sounds like it might be a dig, but honestly, it worked extremely well. The characters, even the home invaders — even the seven-year-old Wen — were well-rounded and deep, but better still was Tremblay’s approach to horror as a genre in this novel. It felt like cosmic horror, and it read like cosmic horror, but is it actually? I would argue that it’s horror if you also think John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester is horror: more than feeling grossed out or psyched up by adrenaline, both novels engender a kind of overwhelming sadness that feels more like terror than anything else. The narrative does not reveal whether there’s any truth to the home-invaders’ claims, but the horrible, creeping what if they’re right? hangs over the novel like a pall.

And we close out this roundup with a book I borrowed from my beloved KU Libraries, where the stacks are open again and the undergrads are suffering, probably. But I was there for fun, and I certainly found it in Experiences in Translation by Umberto Eco, translated by Alastair McEwan. The slim and readable volume is roughly in two parts: the first detailing Eco’s experiences as an author being translated, and the kind of guidance and thinking he provided to his translators and what they did with it; the second, exploring theories of translation.

My Italian is barely equal to directions to the bathroom, so I cannot comment on McEwan’s translation here. But I can say that the English-language prose was readable and direct, and issues of localization and translational intuitions treated with grace. The book is compiled from a series of talks Eco gave in Toronto in 1998, but the essays in the book feel very polished indeed — some changes were certainly made in the intervening three years. I literally looked at this one on the shelf, compared it to another book nearby on translation studies, which I felt I ought to read, and said to myself, “No, today I will have fun.” And I did! It was great.

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That’s all I’ve got from last month. I’ve had some real fun so far this month, in terms of reading if along few other axes, and perhaps someday I will get my shit together and start on these in a timely manner. And of course, you can follow me and Cameron on Twitter, where he is much more active than I.