My Favourite Book of All Time // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 30

Today is the thirtieth and final day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I have been writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "your favourite book of all time".

We did it. We've made it to the final "day" of the 30-day book challenge, which thankfully was not unambiguously called the "one-month book challenge"; if it had been, that might have prevented me from shamelessly dragging out these 30 days over the course of several months, only posting if and when I felt like it. But that is indeed what I did, and while you can say what you like about my lack of commitment to the exact goal of the challenge (to write a post every day consecutively), I'm still very happy with the result that I did eventually complete the challenge in some form, and I now have 30 more posts here on this blog than I did previously.

So, in this final post, to celebrate the fact that I got here in large part due to interpreting the general challenge in a way that was most convenient for me, I am also going to cheat on today's prompt.

I don't really have one specific favourite book. What's more, most of the books I would consider naming or would place in my Top 10 Favourite Books, I have already mentioned in other posts throughout this challenge. So in the interest of not repeating myself or forcing myself to pick one book when I really don't want to, I'm going to use this post to talk about my favourite book that I've read recently: Severance by Ling Ma.

Severance is one of three novels I checked out of my local library the day before the coronavirus pandemic sent my city, Paris, into total lockdown. That sequence of events was almost eerily appropriate, as Severance is also a novel about a fictional pandemic.

As usual, here is your Goodreads summary of the plot:

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

So I should admit, perhaps my checking out Severance merely a day before lockdown wasn't so eerie, as I chose to borrow Severance specifically for its subject matter. Some people want escapism during times of crisis; I wanted a roadmap. I hoped that if I saw similar events to what was currently happening play out on the page, it might give me some idea of what to expect. 

As I had sort of perversely hoped, Severance's story seemed almost prophetic. The novel's story focuses on the impact of a global pandemic and its aftermath on one person, and while not every aspect of the book's events mirror coronavirus (for example, while Severance's Shen Fever also originates in China, it doesn't lead to widespread anti-Asian racism in the way that COVID-19 has), it is nonetheless incredibly resonant. 

The book jumps back and forth in time, between Candace's life pre- and post-apocalypse. While the latter veers into dystopian territory that, thankfully, is not quite so reflective of real life yet, the pre-apocalyptic chapters were very, very relatable. In Candace's world, the impending pandemic lays bare the hollowness of everyday life, the inertia of which forces it to continue all the way up to the brink of global catastrophe. We see its repetitiveness and its loneliness, and how the pandemic both solidifies and threatens society's commitment to this quotidian lifestyle. 

I don't want to spoil too much of the novel, as usual, because I would strongly recommend reading this book yourself, especially given its relevance to the current global situation. However, I would like to share a quote from Severance which I have actually previously shared on my Instagram. This section of the book is from just before a storm hits New York City, after which the Shen Fever pandemic will fully take over the country. I find it rather haunting, not just for the way it mirrors how many of us felt before COVID-19 properly hit, but because of what it says about our daily lives even beyond the pandemic:

I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn't go to brunch instead. 

Brunch? he echoed skeptically. 

Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else. 

A day off meant we could do things we'd always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

I don't know if you get that though, I said.

***

On that note, we have finally reached the end of the so-called 30-day book challenge. I hope that it has been of some entertainment or interest to those of you who have read any or all of the 30 posts. Whether you have read 1 or 30, I appreciate your reading what I've written and letting me know what you thought of it. I hope that some of you will continue to read future posts on this blog, too. If you think you will, I would love to know if you have any preference for what I write about next - perhaps you have a specific topic you'd like to me to give my thoughts on, or some recommendations you'd like to hear. Either way, fingers crossed it won't be too long until I'm back here with another post. Until then, thanks for reading!

A Book Everyone Hated but I Liked // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 29

Today is the twenty-ninth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book everyone hated but you liked".

[Note: So I actually wrote this post about a month ago and was ready to post it, but given everything that has been happening around the world lately, it didn't seem quite right to post my frivolous book posts at a time when far more important things needed people's attention. That's why this post is so late and also why it lacks a proper introduction, as I had to delete the original, now-irrelevant one.]

Fun fact: This post marks the third in a row which focuses on a book with LGBT+ themes. Previously, we had the twisty novel Fingersmith and the poignant essay collection Sister Outsider. Today these two are joined by another novel, My Education by Susan Choi.

The plot of My Education, as explained by Goodreads, is as follows:

Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

So before I get into why I liked the book, let's address the first half of this prompt: why everyone hated it.

My Education seems to be nothing if not contentious, and not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. On a certain online shopping website that shall remain nameless but which you definitely know of and definitely begins with an A, My Education has an average rating of 3.4 stars out of 5. The distribution of reviews for each star rating is as follows:




Its ratings on Goodreads are a similar story, albeit with a greater proportion of reviews sitting around the middle of the scale, around 32% of these being rated 3 stars out of 5. Here is a chart of these ratings which I shamelessly stole from the Goodreads website:



So why the dislike? To get an idea of what people don't like about My Education, I have selected a few choice quotes from online reviews of the novel:

• "boring inarticulate book"

• "UNINTERESTING COULD NOT FINISH AS COULD NOT CARELESS WHAT HAPPENED"

• "how did this get published?"

• "one of the most boring and distasteful books that I have ever had the misfortune to read"

• "too wordy"

• "None of the characters are likable or sympathetic"

• "achingly dull"

• "overwrought [...] exaggerated and pretentious"

• "Hated, because annoying inconsistencies. Annoyed, because grammatically complex and faddy."

• "spectacularly bad. Overwritten, barely sensical in its flow, frivolous."

• "selfish, self-absorbed, whiney characters."

On top of the above reviews, I also saw a comment on Autostraddle refer to it as "A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE BOOK". Considering Autostraddle is where I first heard about My Education, that one stung especially badly.

Beyond the general complaints that My Education is just a generally awful, objectively terrible book, I think there are three major complaints among its negative reviews: the book was boring, its writing was overdone, and the characters were unlikable. In order to best defend the novel, I'm going to go through these points one by one and explain why I don't agree with them and why I actually like the book, its plot, and its characters.

First of all, the writing. Ignoring the plot and characters for the minute, the most controversial aspect of My Education seems to be its writing style. A lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I would disagree with other reviewers' statements that the writing is "too wordy" or "barely sensical". I enjoyed the flow of the writing, its use of unusual words (the second page of the book alone gives us "esoterica" and "stultification"), and the expressive, detailed prose. If at times it veers slightly into pretention, I took that as a representation of the not wholly-likable main character (a graduate student attempting to fit in among the lives of successful academics) and her mindset at the time.

As for the book's characters and plot, I feel that these two must in some way be analysed together, as the book's plot revolves almost solely around the emotions and personal conflicts of its characters. This is not a book with events on the scale of saving the world or even having an impact on a community - most of its plot has its impact limited to three characters, perhaps five at a stretch. If you are disinterested in these characters and thus are not invested in the personal stories, the book's plot will naturally not be of interest to you either.

In my case, I found the plot intriguing because I found the characters to be so as well. None of them are intended to be likable, as some readers were disappointed to find out. They are deeply flawed people who make terrible mistakes. Yet for all the blurb seems determined to paint Brodeur as some sort of sexual predator, none of the characters are that far beyond redemption. They are tragically human people, whose desires and skewed moralities lead them to make equally tragic decisions. I understand that sort of plotline might not appeal to all readers, but I found it fascinating.

The funny thing about writing this post, and reviewing all of the negative things people have said about my chosen book, is that it made me question my own judgement of the book. It's been a while (a couple of years, to be precise) since I last read it, so I am not so well equipped to argue its merits as I would be had I read it only recently. However, the memory of loving the book when I first read it is still strong in my mind. Perhaps if I were to read it again today, with all of these criticisms lurking in my subconscious, I wouldn't enjoy it so much. Still, that doesn't change the fact that when I read it I felt as positively about it as many other people felt negatively. 

Favourite Title of a Book // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 28

Today is the twenty-eighth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite title of a book".

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to the second post in two consecutive days from this blog. It's a miracle which I would honour by going on about it some more, but I have a suspicion this post will be quite short and I don't want to use up half the wordcount on a lengthy intro. So, let's move on.

The topic for today's post is "favourite title of a book", for which I have chosen Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

Unlike the books mentioned in this challenge's other posts, Sister Outsider is not a work of fiction. Rather, it is a collection of essays and speeches by the renowned poet and writer Audre Lorde.

Lorde is a writer I first encountered almost ten years ago, when I was first coming to terms with my own identity as a young closeted queer. Reading Lorde at that time was significant, as she produced her work from the perspective of her identity as a black lesbian woman. All of the pieces in Sister Outsider are coloured by this point-of-view, some addressing it on a more personal level while others address systemic oppression - or, as is often the case, they look at the overlap between the two.

The title of the book, Sister Outsider, encapsulates one of the key themes in this collection: unity in exile. By exile, I mean being marginalised by greater society, as so many minorities are - especially those groups to which Lorde belonged, as a queer woman and a person of colour. Sister Outsider, as a title, at first seems paradoxical. How can one have sisterhood or camaraderie as an outsider? How can a person who lives their life on the margins expect any sort of community? Not without difficulty, surely, but once you realise you are not the only person on the margins - nor the only exile, nor the only outsider - then establishing such unity doesn't seem such a far-off concept after all.

In one of Lorde's most famous pieces, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", she stresses the need to embrace our differences as marginalised people (specifically women in this case) and to lean on each other, rather than merely hoping to be tolerated by those in power:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill.  It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.  For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.  They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. 

To me, this paragraph emphasises the dual meaning of Sister Outsider: of the need for unity, and the importance of acknowledging our status as outsiders. We cannot have one without the other, as Lorde so poignantly illustrates.

I chose Sister Outsider as my favourite title partially because of its clever wordplay, at first seeming paradoxical but then becoming perfectly logical when you understand the tenets of Lorde's philosophy. The other reason I chose it is because of the value of this very philosophy, so much of which is contained within just these two words. I don't know of another book whose title has managed to say so much in so little. For that reason most of all, it is my favourite. 

The Most Surprising Plot Twist or Ending // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 27

Today is the twenty-seventh day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "the most surprising plot twist or ending".

In spite of the numerous delays we've encountered since I began this (supposedly) 30-day challenge, we are finally in the last stretch! I'm hoping to get these last few posts out in relatively quick succession - fingers crossed.

I'm a little unsure about how to approach today's prompt - "most suprising plot twist or ending" - without spoiling the very twist/ending that I thought was so effective when I read it. Most likely I will just make this post quite short and vague, and if you want to find out what happens in the twist you'll have to look it up yourself. However, I would strongly suggest you do not do this and instead just read the book, as the twist really is worth experiencing in the context of the story.

With that all said, the book that I have chosen for today's prompt is Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

If you're not already familiar with her work, Sarah Waters is a Welsh writer best known for her historical novels featuring queer women protagonists. Her most famous books are probably Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, both stories set in Victorian England that focus on the relationships between her female characters. While Tipping the Velvet is more of a coming-of-age novel and Fingersmith leans more towards the crime genre, the two novels have a lot in common. I had previously read Tipping the Velvet and enjoyed it, so I was excited to read Fingersmith a few years later, especially after I found out it was due to be adapted into a film by one of my favourite directors, Park Chan-wook. While Fingersmith sat on my TBR pile for far too long until I finally got around to reading it, when I eventually did I ended up loving it even more than Tipping the Velvet.

As always copied from Goodreads, here is a spoiler-free plot summary:

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.

One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.

With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Over the course of the novel's 500-or-so pages, there are a number of surprising twists and turns, but there are two especially big ones that stand out in my memory: one partway through, and another at the end - meaning this book qualifies for both the "most surprising plot twist" and "most surprising ending" awards.

As it's also one of my favourite book adaptations and movies ever, I have to mention Park Chan-wook's film version of Fingersmith here as well. Released in 2016 under the name The Handmaiden in English, the film keeps the essential details of the book's plot but changes a number of elements. The setting moves from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea, and certain characters (most notably Mrs Sucksby) have their roles significantly reduced. I actually didn't mind these changes at all when watching the film, as I felt they were made carefully and in such a way that the most important parts of the story were preserved. The result is that reading the book and watching the film are linked yet unique experiences, which I think creates greater enjoyment for those who've read the book than a word-for-word adaptation might (although adaptations closer to the original text have been created previously, such as the Fingersmith BBC miniseries).

Most relevant to this post, though, is the fact that The Handmaiden changes elements of the twists which I alluded to before. Perhaps not surprisingly given Park's skill as a filmmaker, these changes are done cleverly and with respect to the original novel. One of the twists which I mentioned before does not make it into the film, simply because other changes to the plot precluded it from happening, so I think part of the reason why Park may have modified the other twist was to provide readers of the book with a new surprise when watching the film. I definitely enjoyed the modification Park made to the twist, and it allowed me in some way to relive the original shock I experienced when reading Fingersmith for the first time.

In general, I don't read books purely for plot twists. Sometimes I feel like they can be gimmicky, an attempt to lure readers in towards books that don't have many other redeeming features. That said, I can appreciate a well-done twist in a good book, and Fingersmith's several twisty reveals definitely qualify. Likewise, The Handmaiden is a masterclass in how to adapt (and, yes, even drastically change) the plot of a book without undermining what made it great in the first place. I would highly recommend both the book and its film adaptation if you enjoy shocking twists in your stories - or, in fact, even if you don't.