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

I hope the readers of my blog are having a better summer than me. I am so bored on the days I don't have my internship, but this is potentially a positive thing for the readers of my blog because all I can think to do with myself is read. Consequently, I read 11 books in June. 

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Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

rating: ⭐⭐✨

This is the first memoir Salman Rushdie wrote about the fatwa. It is such a shame that Salman Rushdie is a good writer who had a fascinating experience and yet did not manage to write a good book about it. I understand (because I read the book) that being fatwaed and then locked up in your house/other people's houses for ten years is an emotionally taxing experience and maybe you want to rant about it for 600 pages, so I'm glad he wrote the book if it was vindicating for him, but that doesn't mean it's a good book. Joseph Anton is doing great things as a vehicle for expressing angst and airing grievances, but it is not doing great things for literature. I would have liked this book a lot more if it hadn't burdened me in excruciating detail with knowledge of what every writer and public intellectual who has ever lived had to say about The Satanic Verses, and all of his 200 friends' social gatherings and health challenges, and every squabble he ever had with his protection team/the government/his significant others. I guess this is true of almost all memoirs, but there is so much personal information in this book that you could not waterboard out of me. I mean, you could, but you would have to waterboard me. 

I also think it's odd that Salman Rushdie seemingly never internalizes that cheating on your significant other is morally wrong. He tries to blame all of his problems on Padma Lakshmi. You know, I, for one, enjoyed Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi. I like Salman Rushdie better in Knife, and I'm glad he underwent character development. 

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King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I enjoyed this book and I think it is the only time anyone has written a love triangle well because it is not at all concerned with the chemistry between characters; it is concerned with their profound incompatibility with each other. Every major character in this book needs to have a restraining order against every other major character. They are terrible for each other. The first half is a little slow, but I don't really care because I would probably read Vladimir Nabokov's grocery list at this point. The second half is wild. I didn't see any of that coming. 

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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

I have said this before, but I think Salman Rushdie's editor should build a machine that keeps track of Salman Rushdie's word count and hits him over the head with a baseball bat if he goes over 400 pages. I like this man a lot, and he has an interesting writing style, but nothing about this book justifies its length (560 pages). It is very confusing and becomes tedious. 

If this book were better, I would have more to say about it, but as it is, I was only reading it trying to understand how anyone thought it was fatwa-worthy. I don't think it's fatwa-worthy, both because I believe in the freedom to insult other people's sensibilities, and because the author is just a guy trying to have a serious and necessarily provocative conversation about religion as a nonbeliever. If you read the chapters about Ayesha, you will see that he is taking religion seriously. I think Iranian religious leaders have bad reading comprehension. I want to extend my apologies to Salman Rushdie because he has said he doesn't just want people to talk about fatwa-themed subjects in relation to him, but I'm not that sorry because if he wanted me to talk more about the book itself, he should have written a better book.

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Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book is doing amazing things in the modern literary fiction genre. I love books that have no plot and no point, but sometimes one comes away feeling like no one learned or did anything interesting and/or depressed. Although this book has mostly no plot, there is clearly varying emotional intensity that sort of resembles a plot structure. The characters in this book are also very funny and charming. It's about a large family that is basically not at all dysfunctional. For a book where nothing happens, it's very constructive, and I think many people would enjoy this who want character-driven books that feel rewarding instead of obsessively introspective to the detriment of any real point.

This book has a million great lines, and I really enjoy the author's sense of humor. The way characters talk sort of reminds me of Lemony Snicket. From an objective writing quality perspective, the characters' personalities sort of blend into each other because they have few distinguishing characteristics, especially the two narrators (Greta and Valdin). The author is projecting a certain manner of speaking and acting onto all of them—maybe her own sense of humor an amalgam of how her family behaves. If I was her editor, I would tell her to work on this. But, obviously, I am not her editor, and I think her writing style and sense of humor is delightful. For the purpose of getting a look into her mind and appreciating her unique voice, a comedy routine/memoir/blog would perhaps be a more logical medium than a novel, but the end goal was accomplished, so I'm not inclined to complain about how it was accomplished.

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Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book is maybe not quite as funny as Gideon the Ninth and slightly more tedious, but the bar was very high. I am very confused about many aspects of this universe, and I want to know what happens next. I agree with most reviewers and the general feeling toward this series: it is creative and funny and confusing in a fun way, I'm excited for the series to be completed, and no one is doing it like Tamsyn Muir.

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Bunny by Mona Awad

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

My friend Bella kindly recommended this book to me. I think this book is good in the way I think all horror books are good (you are making me frightened of a piece of paper). The Bunnies are very funny to me in the way they combine buzzwords and general girlboss coquetry with horrific cult practices. They're just girls. I felt certain ways about aspects of this book until the internet told me I was incorrect to take an unreliable narrator at face value. But I always take the narrator at face value. This is why I don't understand satire in books. 

There is a part of this book where a bunny runs away from Samantha. I felt very represented and seen by this because last semester I really wanted to pick up a bunny, but whenever I approach a bunny, it always runs away from me. I don't understand it. I'm so nice.

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The Idiot by Elif Batuman (reread)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

More than maybe any other book I have ever read, I lose track of time when I am reading this book. It is so immersive. This is because Selin is completely delightful and I love her. Her perspective is really unique because her observations show how everything that happens in her life is either an indignity or an absurdity. It took me several days after finishing the book to stop thinking like Selin. 

I think Selin's problem is that she feels like there are big important truths she doesn't understand, and she is trying to figure out her life by studying linguistics and art and by going to Hungary, but she is painfully cerebral and it isn't working. At the end of the book, she explains that she changed her major because she hadn't learned anything, and after reading that, I said out loud, exactly!

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Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

It's challenging to have a strong opinion on this book because, towards the end, it becomes extremely disjointed and dramatic in terms of the plot. I have no idea what I just read. Every character is awful and I hate them, and the first half is very unsympathetic to college students and people my age (obviously we are not necessarily supposed to agree with the narrator). The second half wasn't nicer, it just didn't have any college students in it. 

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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

When I first borrowed this book from the library two years ago, I stopped reading it on page 59, so that is where the ribbon was left in the book. When I borrowed it from the library again last month, the ribbon was still on page 59. I really would have expected someone else to read it in the intervening time. The fact that I had to read it twice before I successfully finished it makes me think this is not a very engaging book. I think I was only engaged in it this time because I was under the impression that something really wild happened on the last page (nothing wild happened on the last page). The format of this book is very clever (mentally unstable academic gives commentary on a poem that he is convinced was cryptically written about him), as anyone will tell you, but it is only really worth reading as long as you are desperate to know what happens next, which I guess is true of most books. 

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Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (reread)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I couldn't stop thinking about this book so I had to reread it (a month later). I just love Pnin so much. 

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The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov

rating: ⭐⭐

This book has some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, but it is too long to be so aimless, and I was very bored. I liked the line about a street "beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel." That's so clever. This is maybe the best sentence I've ever read in my life. 

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