June was an excellent reading month and I’ve finally settled on a star system I’m happy with! I admit, the star system is a rather reductive and crude way to measure how good a book is, which is why I opted not to include one in my last reading wrap-up.
But I’ve since changed my mind about it. Though simplistic, the star system is still a quick, bite-sized way to communicate how I feel about a book. It also helps me decide how I feel about a book in relation to other books I’ve read.
Here’s my personal star system:
5 – Absolute banger!
4 – Amazing book but lacks an extra oomph
3- Good read, would recommend to others but I wouldn’t read it again
2 – Wouldn’t recommend
1 – Pure utter regret for all those hours I spent reading this book—hours of my life I’ll never get back!
Now, let’s get on with all the book reviews!
FICTION
1. Tropical Baroque, by Nick Joaquin (PHL)
“Too often, one is only an innocent bystander at one’s own fate.”
The quote above nicely summarizes the themes binding this book—it’s not that people don’t have agency, but that we’re always subjected to societal forces. Written by one of the greatest Filipino writers of all time, Tropical Baroque is a collection of four plays set in Manila about Filipinos and examines how religion, colonialism, modernity, gender, and greed play out on an interpersonal level.
This was my first time reading a Filipiniana fiction book in recent memory, and I was so pleased with it! I was nervous at first because I didn’t know if short stories are going to have as much of an impact as full-length novels, but the plays here each packed a punch. If I were to rank each of them, my favorite would be The Beatas, followed by Tartarin, then A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, and lastly Fathers and Sons.
I found that Joaquin has particularly sharp insights into how gender norms affect both men and women. He examines masculinity with unwavering compassion and critique, especially in Tartarin and Fathers and Sons. Through such plays, he shows that patriarchy doesn’t only constrain women, but also men.
He has this interesting thesis that gender norms revolve around violence—how men perform masculinity by inflicting violence, and how women perform femininity by receiving violence. He seems to show that men are often socialized to express their emotions through violence—through anger, dominance, and brutality—and how these values are passed from one generation of men to the next, to detrimental consequences.
I’m honestly surprised by how feminist Joaquin was in his depiction of women here, by how much he understands the constraints women face because of patriarchy. He presents a wide range of female characters—housewife, sex worker, spinster, nun—but never condescends to any of them. Impressive!
Tropical Baroque is an excellent dip into Filipiana literature, and I look forward to reading more of Joaquin’s body of work!
2. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer (USA)
“It’s not that you’re a bad writer.” Finley pauses for effect. “It’s that you’re a bad gay.”
Looking for a good reason to decline his ex-boyfriend’s wedding invitation, D-list author Arthur Less accepts gigs to travel across the world. From New York City to Italy, Germany, India, and more, Less traverses the international landscape to escape his problems and his feelings.
Less is a rare character that I’ve grown to care so much about, not because of what he symbolizes but because of how he is as a human being who naturally makes mistakes and wants to do better. He mourns over so many things—a lost love, a lost youth, and a lost career—which is why he doesn’t think highly of himself. He may seem aloof, silly, and endearing on the outside but inside, he suffers quietly. Actually, most of the characters here suffer quietly but try to keep going with the best of what they have.
As Less approaches his 50th birthday, he also begins grappling more intensely with questions about youth and aging—and I’m a total sucker for those themes. I realized that youth may really be wasted on the young. When Less was young, he busied himself with acting like a grown-up and now that he’s older, he desperately wants to be young again.
I know this book is starting to sound depressing but I assure you it’s actually very funny! It’s quite difficult for books to be genuinely funny actually, and the fact that I laughed out loud so many times while reading Less says volumes about its comedy. Like I said in my 20 Questions Book Tag, there was this one scene where I had to put the book down because I just couldn’t stop laughing!
Overall, Less is a dark comedy with so much heart and at the end of the day, it believes in happiness. And in a world where it’s easy to get caught up in all the hate and cynicism and logic and dehumanization going around, I’m very grateful for a book that makes me believe in love and happiness more again, however naive that may be.
3. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh (USA)
“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
Sometimes, at the end of a long week of studying or work or both, on the brink of burnout and mental exhaustion, we might tell our closest friends, “I just want to sleep forever.” Well, what if you give in to that desire? You get My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
This outrageous novel chronicles an unnamed protagonist’s attempt to sleep for one whole year using increasingly heavy pharmaceutical drugs. Just like Arthur Less from Less, the girl here also aims to escape her problems and her feelings. But while Less travels the world, this girl attempts to sleep it all away, hoping to emerge from her one year of hibernation with a better outlook on life.
Just like Less, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is also a dark comedy—but without an iota of wholesomeness. It’s so dark, painful, and very morbidly funny; I almost feel bad laughing at certain jokes because they’re so vulgar in the best and most honest sense. This was truly unlike anything I’d ever read before.
Reading about a girl trying to sleep for one year may sound incredibly boring, but I assure you, it’s amazing how Moshfegh dissects and depicts the intricacies, details, and logistics involved in this hibernation project. Still, I wish Moshfegh somehow took her concept further and explored it more, because I feel like everything was tied up too neatly and quickly in the end.
One of the best things about this book, however, really is its prose. Moshfegh’s writing makes you feel like you too are in a constant state of haze, confusion, bitterness, and nothingness like the main character—like you’re just floating through, and everything and everyone else is just floating through. Sooner or later, reality will also feel like it’s slipping away and nothing will matter except for sleep, slumber, and snooze. That’s how good the writing is.
This book is definitely not for everyone though, especially for the faint-hearted! Let me put it this way, nothing is sacred for this protagonist. Nothing. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is rude, gross, and explicit. But, as one reviewer put it, “if you’re willing to read something dark and dangerous, to laugh at wicked, sardonic humour, to listen to a pitiless, confrontational story, then you are in luck.” Are you up for it?
4. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner (USA)
“A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words.”
A centerpiece of modernist literature, The Sound and the Fury flits between past, present, and subjective memory as it tells the downfall of the Compson family in 1928 Mississippi. Each chapter unfolds through a different character’s point of view, each illustrating their own variation of desperation to cling to the past.
Here’s the thing. I largely enjoyed the book because of what I learned from it rather than the process of reading the book itself. This is hands-down the most difficult book I’d ever read in my life, and while the rewards for having read it are great, no way am I ever going to read it again! Reading it was kind of painful, even with the help of an audiobook.
What I personally love about The Sound and the Fury then is its experimental form. You can barely catch your breath from the fast pacing and stream of consciousness writing that fuses past and present. I greatly appreciate Faulkner’s experiment on how time and subjective experience can be communicated not just through the content of the novel, but also the very form of the novel itself.
For example, when a character gets passionate about something, Faulkner doesn’t just describe their passion—he shows it by removing all the punctuation marks and capitalizations and basically throwing every single grammatical rule out the window until we’re left with pages and pages of just words. And it worked. I felt the character’s passion and urgency and even panic more acutely because words are just seemingly spilling out from them. Readers don’t get to take a pause, similar to how the character’s constant thinking doesn’t either.
It’s my fascination with the writing style that ultimately compelled me to finish this book. Otherwise, I wasn’t entirely gripped by the content and drama of it all, probably because it’s a very American novel and something I’m not particularly interested in. But the characters here are well-rounded and the novel depicts complex micro-level workings of power—of who only seems to have power, who actually has power, who’s dependent on whom for power, and the ways in which that power is enforced.
I’d recommend this for people who want to try reading something more challenging or are interested in more experimental writing styles!
NONFICTION
5. Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence?”
Through the intertwining stories of the abducted Jean McConville, Old Bailey bomber Dolours Price, former IRA commanding officer Brendan Hughes, and former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, Say Nothing tells the complex tapestry that is The Troubles, the Northern Ireland conflict which lasted for 30 years from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Say Nothing shines a light on the personal stories behind all the politics and violence of that period in history. I think Radden Keefe portrays all the key players in The Troubles comprehensively, fairly, and with utmost dignity. And because of such depictions, I now hesitate to say that there’s such a thing as people who are all good and those who are all evil, because it became clear to me that everyone just does what they feel like is the right thing to do at any given moment.
During the Troubles, ordinary people are swept into violence, ordinary people inflict that violence, and ordinary people later grapple with the guilt and trauma from that violence. It became clear to me that people resort to violence in achieving their political aims not because they’re evil or inherently cruel, but because they’re desperate. On Bloody Sunday, for example, British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights supporters conducting a peaceful protest, killing 13 civilians and injuring 14 others. Truly, I can’t blame the people for being incensed by such a gross display of power and abuse. But then, everything also spirals out of control.
I admit, I was faced with really difficult questions while reading this book and I still don’t have satisfying answers for any of them. Can violence ever be justified, especially in the fight against colonization? How about violence in retaliation to violence? What kinds of violence are deemed acceptable and which ones are not, who determines these classifications, and most importantly who benefits from such classifications? Does state-sanctioned violence (e.g., war, genocide) not count as crime at all even though people die just because it’s carried out by the state, which is the very body enforcing the law? My head is still exploding from all these questions I have, goddamn.
If you’re interested in learning about the Troubles or thinking about the politics, ethics, and human dimensions to violence, warfare, and history, then you will find this book very engaging and intellectually stimulating. I cannot recommend it enough.
6. Building Great Sentences, by Brooks Landon (USA)
“Longer sentences—and this is important—when carefully crafted and tightly controlled, are essential keys to great writing.”
Building Great Sentences is a very helpful book on how to write long, complex sentences (key: it’s all about keeping the sentence’s logic intact + a few other rhetorical tips and tricks!). I read this because I wanted to learn how to write better, and this book really taught me many ways on how.
Landon primarily challenges the argument that writing straightforward and simple sentences is the best way to go about writing, which is certainly the general practice in academia, journalism, commercial writing, and so on. What he argues instead is for complexity—that writing complex sentences allows writers to let their individuality shine through better, to pack sentences with a punch, and to improve communication with readers (and I’m sold on the idea!).
Building Great Sentences breaks sentences down into their building blocks and specifies the mechanics of sentence construction. This may sound boring but Landon makes it fun! He teaches in a straightforward, kind, and funny way, and his enthusiasm for prose style, writing, and literature is infectious. Landon also gives you exercises to do at the end of each chapter, which are helpful in turning his lessons into actionable steps you can take to hone your writing skills now.
Armed with all his lessons, I can say analyzing long sentences is much more manageable now and the logic behind them strikingly clear. This book definitely gave me the confidence and tools to build great sentences on my own! Whether my writing has actually improved, however, is yet to be seen.
Writing simple and clear sentences can suck all the energy out of writing, so I’m grateful that Building Great Sentences showed me a fun alternative! I totally recommend this book for those who want to improve their writing; bonus points if you’re interested in writing more lyrical sentences.
What are some good books you read last month? Let me know in the comments!
And I hope you were able to get some good book recommendations from this list. For more book reviews and recommendations, feel free to check out the Bookworm section on my blog. There’s heaps there!
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That’s all for now. Happy reading!
— Alyanna
