All the books I read in July and what I thought of them

can't stand this season, too hot, no school, bored, blah blah blah etc. etc. 

In July I read 9 books :D

✨✨✨

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I would recommend this book to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler enjoyers because I think this book is about being a writer in the same way that book is about being a reader, but I'm not really a writer, so I can't say for sure. This book is one of my favorite entries into the mystery genre because there are no stakes. The guy is already dying. Well, the guy is always already dead, but with Sebastian Knight, the question is about what his life was like, not who killed him. I'm phrasing this in a very confusing way; it's not a murder mystery because no one killed him. I loved reading literature analyses of Sebastian Knight's fictional books, and I think The Real Life of Sebastian Knight sort of imitates the style of Sebastian Knight's fictional books, and that's very cool. The blurb spoils the ending, can you believe that? The ending is not exciting or revelatory. I have to believe it because it's my life. 

✨✨✨

An Unauthorized Fan Treatise by Lauren James

rating: ⭐⭐⭐✨

I am very online—well, I used to be more online—and peripherally involved in fandom drama, and this book felt deeply familiar. The protagonist of this book, an online fandom conspiracy theorist, makes the Gaylors seem like they lack commitment. I admire Gaylors for their tenacity and attention to detail, but I also think they are delusional. I read an article once that suggested that many young women who have conspiratorial tendencies find an outlet for that behavior in Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, which is a good thing, because otherwise they might be QAnon true believers. 

✨✨✨

Either/Or by Elif Batuman (reread)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I love this book and its compatriot (The Idiot) so much, and they are collectively my third favorite book of all time and now I want to read the OG Either/Or. I love Selin. I love being inside her head. When I was rereading these books, I started thinking like Selin, and I couldn't stop for several days. I'm very easily influenced. One thought I had was something along the lines of how interesting it was to complain about the heat and then drive a car that contributed to problems with heat. That's how Selin thinks, only she does it better. 

This book is delightful because Selin has no preconceived ideas or biases. Most of us obviously have background knowledge that we use to make sense of what might be happening in the world and make decisions, so if we encounter an idea or suggestion which is obviously absurd, we won't even consider it. Selin does not think this way and considers every new idea with great seriousness and usually tests it herself. This leads her to have fun thoughts such as "maybe Zoloft is making me enjoy rap music." On the other hand, because she believes she has no important knowledge, she is always trying to solve the problems in her life with other people's ideas. In The Idiot, it was linguistics and art; in Either/Or, it is literature and hookup culture. Predictably, it doesn't work.

I also really like it because me and Selin are at exactly the same point in our lives. I will forgive Elif Batuman if she doesn't write another addition to this series for many years as long as Selin is always the same age as me when any following books are published. The next book could be pastel green or pastel blue. The colors of these books match the pastel highlighters my grandmother gave me. 

At one time, I said I was jealous of Selin, which is interesting because I don't remember being on drugs when I made that comment. This book is often very sad. Selin is just a little guy, and stupid men have really put her through it. But, I think things are looking up for her. 

✨✨✨

The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall (rerereread?? I sort of read the same books over and over again when I was younger, so it's hard to say)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ and ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ respectively

I don't have enough to say about these books separately. This is a really nice series, and I like how every character has such an interesting personality and contributes to the overall dynamic. The second book particularly is saying deep and interesting things about serious topics in a way that kids can appreciate, even 19 year old kids!! But I read about 100 pages of the third book and now I'm sort of bored of the whole affair. It's entirely possible I won't get around to reading or reviewing the fourth and fifth books, so instead I want to say here that Batty is my favorite Penderwick because she's a musician and I'm a musician. The Goodreads reviewers of the last book are so unbelievably incensed because the wrong characters get together. I can't imagine caring that much about anything. But the series is very Little Women inspired, so now I at least know what it was like in the OG Little Women fandom when Laurie married Amy and Jo married that guy and the fans were not happy. 

✨✨✨

Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

One of the reviews I read of this book said that this is an interesting dystopian book because whereas, say, 1984 is making the point that authoritarianism is bad, Bend Sinister is saying that authoritarianism is stupid and shoots itself in the foot. Vladimir Nabokov says that every character but the protagonist and his son is a two-dimensional stereotype, and you should read the book for the relationship between the father and the kid. I've outsourced the serious criticism of this book to other people because I don't have a lot of thoughts about it. This book was a big step up from The Gift but a big step down from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. It was giving me incredible anxiety that the protagonist wouldn't tell the kid that his mom had died, but I guess it came out to the same thing in the end. If you want to know what I meant by that cryptic comment, you should read the book. 

✨✨✨

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I know I said that I never wanted to read Lolita because it was the opposite of Pnin but everyone else was talking about it, so I had to. This book spoils the ending of Madame Bovary, so maybe I should have stuck with the original plan at least until I read Madame Bovary. 

I can't handle unreliable narrators because I am constantly doing astonishing mental gymnastics to explain to myself how everyone in a conflict-ridden situation is fundamentally kind-hearted and a little bit right (Selin does this, too). This is something I have learned about myself from reading Lolita and also in court for my internship. But pedophilia is not just a big misunderstanding!! Child abuse is really bad!! This is my message to you today. 

I read somewhere, probably in the introduction to Pnin, that Vladimir Nabokov's favorite character was Pnin, but his second favorite character was Dolores. This checks out because Dolores is iconic. The great tragedy in this book is that Dolores never gets to be just an irreverent adolescent because we only see her through the eyes of a pedophile in abuse-themed situations. She really had her adolescence stolen from her.  

Humbert Humbert makes a lot of puns on his name, which are both painful and very clever, like everything else about this book. 

✨✨✨

My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I made the unfortunate mistake of listening to this book as an audiobook. I don't know whether I disliked the writing or the narration, but, either way, the story felt flat and generic because of the writing and/or narration. Allegedly, the point of this book is how the protagonist's bad experiences with relationships and sexual assault persistently affect her and influence her behavior, but I didn't get any sense of how that was happening, so I'm not really sure what the point was. 

I liked the protagonist because she reminded me of myself on many levels (college student, Jew, knitting enjoyer), except that I have a backbone. I don't think the author knows anything about knitting because she has an inaccurate understanding of how long it takes to make a scarf. Clearly, she knows a lot about being Jewish. One good choice the audiobook narrator made was giving the protagonist's dad a New York Jewish accent, which made the book feel potentially more aggressively Jewish than it already was. 

✨✨✨

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I would have liked it more if Vladimir Nabokov hadn't spoiled the ending. My professor kindly recommended this book to me and then told me not to read it because it would make me cynical about love. For me, this is a glowing recommendation. But I don't know why he said that. Admittedly, there are characters in this book who don't know anything about love or how to make a relationship work, but there are all kinds of characters in this book, and I don't think it's saying much about love at all. Insofar as this book was making a point, the point was how being really bored makes you do self-destructive things. I'm very bored (so I felt seen), but Emma is a lot more bored than even I am. If I were ten times more bored than I am, I would probably do stupid things, too. I'm disappointed in this book because it didn't make me any more cynical about love than I already am. 

I would really like to put Emma in the modern world. I think that would be really entertaining and not end poorly. Maybe it would end a little poorly. I think Emma would love gossip blogs and polyamory. I realize someone has definitely already put Emma in the modern world, and that is called a Madame Bovary retelling, which almost certainly exists. I googled it; this book was written by Mario Vargas Llosa. It's so nice to live in a world where I can read a book and wish something about it were different, and then I can read A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE SAME BOOK by a Nobel Prize winning author!! 

It's getting very late, so I should wrap this up. 

✨✨✨