All the books I read this fall and what I thought of them

I would like to assure the readers of my blog that, although I was too busy this fall being an academic weapon and being insulted by various individuals, my book blog will never die, so long as men can breathe or eyes can see. 

In August, I read 5 books. I read The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson so I could review it for my job, and then I did review it, but they didn't put it up anywhere, but I still got paid to read it. I have since tried to convince my academic advisor who also directs the organization I work for to pay me to read other books, but I don't think they would put up those reviews either. This book was fine and I pretended to have sophisticated opinions on it. It is trying really hard for an academic book to not be boring; they almost succeed. I read Engine Summer by John Crowley because (and again I am very embarrassed to admit this) the AI robot recommended it to me because I wanted to read books about what happens after the end of the world, or, as Ludmilla says, a book "that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world," except she says it in Italian. I didn't like this book very much because I thought the protagonist was going to go more places and meet more people and really get a sense of the world after the end of the world, but he didn't meet very many people or learn much about life and such. But thinking about this book still makes me feel a little nostalgic for the summer and how I kind of felt like I was living after the end of the world, like Rush That Speaks. This is also how I feel about The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, which I didn't like very much, either. In Engine Summer, one of the only things left of our civilization are roads, and the characters come across a highway clover leaf, and they don't understand why it was built like that. Sometimes I still think about this.

Then I read The Sorrows of Young Werther and I thought he was very melodramatic, and everyone wanted to spoil this book for me. But The Sorrows of Young Werther was on University Challenge, so I'm glad I read it. It wasn't a recent episode, I was watching an episode from four months ago with the young woman from the University of Edinburgh who knits her own sweaters, like me. I read The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, and I thought it was very well-written and surprisingly sophisticated, except the author has decided that all colonial American women were illiterate, which is profoundly untrue. As a group they were so literate. Then I read Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak, which I felt was promoting a militant agnostic agenda in a way that was very tiresome because it was ostensibly going to argue with itself about religion, but both the devout people and the irreligious people were straw women. All of the dialogue sounded weird and forced. 

I read three books in September. I read True Grit for my book club, and it was okay, but I don't like Westerns, I guess. I read the new R.F. Kuang book Katabasis because I, too, feel like I'm descending into the Underworld whenever I try to get my professor to write me a letter of recommendation (he doesn't answer emails). I read this book in, like, a day, and it's not even long, so I can't talk too badly about it because it was obviously very engaging. But it did not convince me not to go to grad school, which was clearly what it was going for. It was very unconvincing in that respect because it seemed to be telling me that true love is more important than grad school, but that's just a stupid thing to say. My Greek professor said he didn't appreciate the romance arc because not everything needs to have a romance arc (incredibly based). He really wants me to read Babel and I might, but it's not a self-directed interest. My other big grievance is that the author skipped several layers of hell in every meaningful sense. Dante didn't skip any layers. Inferno is better, but this is good, too. I also read Vera or Faith by Gary Shteyngart. I thought it was really, really good, and I love Vera for the same reasons I love Selin. I like that we establish that Vera doesn't have to be worried about the things she worries about. Maybe I don't have to worry about the things I worry about, either. The book is taking shots at Vera's dad for being really into fountain pens. I enjoyed this because I also like fountain pens. I have a fountain pen that looks like a shark. 

Speaking of The Idiot and R.F. Kuang, I would like to take a paragraph to comment on something I read on R.F. Kuang's Wikipedia page that she is writing a book set at a university in Taipei that is ostensibly going to be "in the larky style of the American novelists Elif Batuman and Patricia Lockwood." I am obviously going to read a book that is described this way, but there is not even the slightest chance that R.F. Kuang could write a book like Elif Batuman because R.F. Kuang always has an agenda (I have formed this opinion based on secondhand information about her books) to the point that I cannot imagine she could write a believable character who has no preconceived ideas. She is a good writer, but the person who made this comparison is irresponsible or illiterate. I can't comment on the Patricia Lockwood comparison, I read 10 pages of one of her books once. 

In October I read Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor. I liked where it was going very much until the plot twist. I thought the female protagonist got off too easy in a way that feels to me like benevolent sexism. I still enjoyed reading about college students in Boston. I've never been to MIT; I might go visit, but I'm not sure I liked the book enough. 

I read four books in November. So, you see, I did not totally forget how to read for fun this semester, I just forgot how to blog, which is probably less essential in any case. I read the Salman Rushdie memoir Knife about being stabbed because it fixed some problems I was having two years ago, and I thought it might fix similar problems I was having last month. I don't know whether it fixed them, strictly speaking, but I'm not having those problems anymore. This is a great memoir, I like the chapter where he has an imaginary chat with the guy who stabbed him. I read Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity by Lauren Caldwell because my Latin professor mentioned it in passing. Whenever I haven't been reading much, I go crazy for a dense ancient history book. It was really disturbing and I learned many disturbing (and interesting) things about how I really could not have hacked it as a young woman in Rome. I enjoyed myself; Ludmilla says that calm people read upsetting books (she says it in Italian). I reread Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, which was very good as usual, and I read The Wedding People for my book club, and I didn't enjoy it, but I thought the dialogue was very good, so maybe the author should get into writing plays. 

In December I did an intellectual exercise wherein I reread my Latin book The Golden Ass by Apuleius (in English) concurrently with another book about that book as well as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which is basically a retelling, although I'm not sure it was intentional. But you will of course hear more about this in my next blog post which will occur who knows when. I am planning to undertake similar intellectual exercises wherein I read two very similar books concurrently with a book analyzing one or both of them. Every time I go to bookstores now I look in the literary criticism section because I am hoping to find a book about another book that interests me. But unfortunately literary criticism seems to just be another word for "essays," and the only people who write books about other books are classicists and Mario Vargas Llosa. I started chatting with some lady in a bookstore because she was intending to buy the book I was looking at, which was Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, and I told her I think Anne Carson is a very pretty writer, but I absolutely don't trust her translations farther than I can throw a rock, she is just making things up. I hope the bookstore lady inferred that I am a student of ancient Greek, because I can't stand when people have opinions about translations from languages they don't understand. You don't know what it said. 

I might read Eros the Bittersweet concurrently with Heart the Lover by Lily King because those are basically the same title.

The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson ⭐⭐⭐

Engine Summer by John Crowley ⭐⭐⭐

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ⭐⭐

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak ⭐⭐

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang ⭐⭐⭐⭐

True Grit by Charles Portis ⭐⭐⭐

Vera or Faith by Gary Shteyngart ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor ⭐⭐⭐

Knife by Salman Rushdie (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity by Lauren Caldwell ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Wedding People by Allison Espach ⭐⭐