Book Reviews
I’m doing a good job with my reading goal this year on Goodreads. I finished a few novels in early 2023 that got me excited about reading again and I haven’t done a book review on my Medium for a long time, so here we go!
When I was a junior in high school, for AP Lang, I read about half of that year’s New York Times Top 10 Fiction. Over the next few years, many of those books became mainstream and started appearing on the front shelves of bookstores. I felt a little pleased with myself at having “discovered” them before everybody else, although I couldn’t really tell you much about why I liked them at this point. I still check the Top 10 every year it comes out, but now I don’t find myself sticking to the list as closely. In the few books I have read in recent years, I’ve found myself gravitating toward certain topics and writing styles more than others. I used to think that the plot was the sole driving force behind whether I could enjoy a certain book, but I feel that the author’s manner of writing seems to have more of an effect than I imagined. For example, I read Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and reviewed one of them on my blog a couple of years ago, and there was something so familiar about the writing when I read Klara and the Sun this year.
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
I had heard so many good things about Murakami’s writing and had been meaning to read one of his books for the longest time. Last fall, I was at Daunt Books in London to get one of the tote bags I saw everywhere in the UK when I saw a few of Murakami’s works. I figured it was a little embarrassing to call myself a reader if I went to one of the most famous bookstores in London just for their tote bag, so I ended up buying the first two books of 1Q84 to go with it. 1Q84 is technically one story, but due to its length was split into three “books”. A Japanese author, Murakami is described by Guardian as a cult writer in both the conventional and surprisingly, literal sense. 1Q84 is sort of a book about cults, although I would disagree with Guardian and say that’s not precisely the primary focus.
It’s actually a bit difficult to say what exactly is the primary focus of 1Q84, though. For someone like myself with absolutely no experience in Murakami’s writing, this book starts off as maybe a thriller with some sci-fi, then transforms into something quite fantasy-like, and then at the end you realize it was just an elaborate romance all along.
But make no mistake. This is not just some novel about a heroine battling the odds to find a lover. Murakami captures much of the injustice and consequential desensitization of the world, and there are some rather unsavory and repulsive scenes throughout this book. The fantastical elements are not so much wondrous as they are troubling.
Altogether, these thoughts made for a rather confusing read. I thought Murakami had a tendency to oversexualize certain characters (usually women) and certain scenes for no apparent reason. I wondered for a while if this was a tactic to build a more nuanced narrative — maybe something about the way women are perceived versus their nuanced position in the overall narrative — but in the end, I felt that I couldn’t reasonably justify this. Murakami’s writing style (and a combination of his translator’s, most likely), is also rather interesting. New chapters often reconstruct scenes already established and rehash the emotions of the current narrator. I felt a little bit like I was watching a season recap on Netflix before starting a new one. Still, Murakami has an affinity for describing the feeling of one’s environment well. I get the sense that every object he places in a scene seems to carry some significance in characterizing its current occupant.
I made it to the end mostly out of a desire to reach a conclusion about the fantasy world that Murakami had continuously teased throughout the earlier two books. But I was ultimately left unsatisfied. I had substantially more questions going out of the book than I did going in, but I eventually came to terms with this and reached the conclusion that this book was more about the experience of being in this sort of bizarre world than it was about getting the full story.
This is How You Lose the Time War, Amar El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
If books are meant to be sensory experiences, then this is certainly another one of them. After being my “plane read” for much of early 2023, I finally finished this book during my Asia trip this summer. This story is primarily told through the letters of Red and Blue, two agents who leave each other discreet messages on their battlefields as their opposing factions fight to control the space-time continuum. I like the idea of time travel, and I find that each author tends to have their own way of portraying it. With time travel, there seems to be some notion that we are merely playing out a predetermined script, and depending on who you ask, this may or may not allow us to still make our own decisions and create our own destiny.
Whereas 1Q84’s love seems to develop out of some basic instinctual knowledge, I find the romance in this novella pure and somewhat cute. But it would be a little shallow to call it flirtatious. The characters develop their affections through a correspondence that starts off cautious but develops into something quite poetic and tender. One reads this book for the prose, really. The plot itself gets a little repetitive towards the middle, but I think the resolution at the very conclusion of this novel makes up for it. The agents’ language is littered with figurative language and it must be said that there’s undoubtedly a flair for the dramatic, but given the nature of the protagonists’ relationship, it’s warranted.
According to Wikipedia — and this is something I was curious about and just learned myself — each author took on a character of their own when writing this novella. Although they had written a general outline ahead of time, their reactions to each letter were developed genuinely. Which is exactly how I imagined this book would be written when I learned there were two authors.
Given its futuristic and outlandish backdrop, This is How You Win the Time War is unrelatable as an everyday romance, which gives it a detached omniscient feeling, but it’s endearing nonetheless.
The Poppy War trilogy, R.F. Kuang
R.F. Kuang is a younger author who recently became well-known for her novel Yellowface and even newer novel Babel, but I was introduced by a friend to her debut novel The Poppy War. Without knowing much about the inspiration for the trilogy, I dived right in, thinking it would be a classic tale of the chosen one. That assumption held together for no more than the first third of the book before it was shattered. Rin, a poor orphan adopted into a cruel family in the south of fictional nation Nikan, decides at the age of 14 that the only way to escape her fate is to ace the Keju, a countrywide examination that determines who will be eligible to attend the nation’s best academies. The story moves fast in these books, so I don’t feel bad about spoiling that Rin does end up very quickly at the nation’s top military academy. Before the end of the first book, she realizes that she will be used as a weapon in the war that the Federation, a rival nation to the East, has just declared on Nikan.
**It’s worth noting that as I’ve read the entire trilogy, it’s almost impossible to comment on the other two books without spoiling some of the developments of the first one. As such, you should be warned that there are broad comments in the following paragraph that reveal the nature of Rin’s journey.
Like many fantasy novels, this book contains a map of the mythical world these characters live in. Looking at it for the first time, I thought its geography may have been heavily inspired by East Asia, and as I continued to read Kuang’s books, I had a sneaking suspicion that they were in fact totally inspired by East Asia. In order to prevent my own historical knowledge (which admittedly, is rather limited) from influencing my perceptions of the characters and plot, I decided to wait until after I had finished the series to confirm my theory.
As you may have guessed, the fantasy elements in this story give Rin an advantage over her peers at the military academy, but I like that Kuang has written a world in which great power comes at great cost. Throughout the trilogy, Rin is not an enviable hero. She struggles against herself and her former friends. She’s manipulated and seems to be fighting off betrayal almost every step of the way. I liked this at first. I enjoy reading from the perspective of unreliable narrators and find the protagonist’s lack of noble righteousness somewhat refreshing. But throughout the second book, I failed to see much character development, and it made the entire book feel very frustrating to read from Rin’s point of view. I didn’t particularly care if she became better or worse, I would have just preferred to see some internal representation of change. Her motivations for doing things never seemed to waver, the mistakes she made were consistently of the same type.
This series would have also benefited from more 3rd party perspectives. I felt that a lot of interesting characters were underdeveloped, especially in later books. Despite these characters’ importance to Rin and the overall plot, their motivations seemed to go mysteriously unexplained. As a result, there is a lot more telling rather than showing in many sections of the books, which like Rin’s character, feels repetitive.
One of the redeeming points of this trilogy was its candid commentary on war, politics, and colonialism. I find that in many YA fantasies, there always seems to be a good side and a bad side, and we just take it for granted that those on the bad side indeed have evil intentions. I liked this about Murakami’s 1Q84 too, but I think Kuang describes it more principally— that is, in war, there may not be good and bad. There are just those who win and those who don’t. Murakami would describe an opponent as merely a force created to maintain the balance of the world, but Kuang takes no interest in the opponent’s source of power. She focuses on the contradictions of the players of war instead: doing bad deeds to get good things, preaching loyalty while betraying allies, and acting like a conqueror while begging for others’ help.
As a whole, this trilogy was frustrating to read, in some unwanted ways, but in also some positive ways. Character development and plot pacing aside, I do believe that some of the frustration was necessary for an appropriate, non-oversimplified story. Returning to the point I made earlier about the map being uncannily similar to East China, I discovered that this book was actually inspired by the prompt “What if Mao had been a teenage girl?” Rin’s story closely mirrors the Chinese Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War. Kuang expressed in an interview that she considered writing the history of this period in China from a biography standpoint, but opted for fantasy instead, as it “gives the mind more space to roam”. This is the first book that I’ve encountered that has taken such an approach toward historical storytelling, and I found it intriguing and engaging in ways that biography is sometimes not. I learned, through allegory, about the historical experience, which is useful to me, even if I don’t know all the facts.
Dark Matter, Blake Crouch
In the 1970s, Prof. Masahiro Mori coined the term uncanny valley to describe the effect of unease towards certain humanlike robots. He observed that our affinity for robots grew as they became more lifelike, but only to a certain point. After that, we begin to feel a sense of strangeness and unease. We don’t like it when things look too human, but at the same time, not quite human at all. These days, I’ve heard people use the term uncanny valley to describe AI-generated images of human faces, of landscapes that seem right, but have something off about them.
So why did I just spend a paragraph describing that phenomenon? I actually just wanted to liken the experience of the main character Jason Dessen in Dark Matter to that of witnessing the uncanny valley of his own life. This book is about parallel universes. You’ll be able to glean that from the tiny synopsis written on the back cover. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles and magical implications of the Marvel multiverse. And that’s what makes it creepier. Much of the intrigue of this novel lies in its mystery and experience of parallel worlds, so I won’t say too much, but I will present a thought experiment.
Think for a moment about what it means to actually live in a world where an infinite number of parallel universes exist. Would you want to meet yourself? I thought about this after finishing this book, and I eventually concluded that I would rather not. The idea that there are worlds out there with people who are and simultaneously aren’t me frightens me, and so does the thought that I am not a single being, unique in thought or spirit. I don’t consider myself particularly exceptional in the grand scheme of our universe, but at least there’s only one of me. I feel small in this world, but the insignificance I imagine I would feel with the knowledge of parallel me’s waiting to take my place is astronomical.
Exhalation, Ted Chiang
This was my other plane read for the last year, and it was perfect for that purpose. Exhalation is a collection of short stories with a very humanistic viewpoint of sci-fi. Chiang builds fantastical and peculiar worlds that allow the reader to examine the concepts of humanity through a different lens. Our place in the universe takes on different meanings. This is the only overarching theme of his stories. It’s hard to say more. It’s very beautifully written.
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu is another collection of short stories similar in “flavor” to Chiang’s writing. I would recommend both.
The books I talked about above were all first-time reads of these authors, but I also returned to some other authors I had enjoyed reading in previous years. As I mentioned earlier, I also read Klara and the Sun this year. It wasn’t out of this world, but it was very characteristic of Ishiguro, although I felt that it lacked some of his former books’ novelty and element of introspection.
I also read Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, who if you recall, also wrote Beartown, which I read a couple of years ago. I really like Backman’s funny way of describing people, and the characters he imagines are so unique. Some part of me always wonders if these kinds of people would actually exist in real life, but I guess that doesn’t matter. This was a comforting story.
I was really excited to read Joan is Okay by Weike Wang, and I just finished it less than a week ago. I remember being very emotionally impacted by Chemistry, Wang’s debut novel and I was excited to read her second book. I haven’t reread Chemistry in a long time, so I imagine that my state of mind must have been very different when I read it. I liked Joan is Okay too, but I didn’t have as cathartic an experience when I read Wang’s last novel. This one was more about the Chinese-American experience and one woman’s difficulty in relating to the habits and desires of those around her, whereas Chemistry was more about an existential crisis on all fronts of someone’s life. Perhaps I myself was having an existential crisis at the time.
Lately, I’ve been flipping through a few fantasy books that I loved reading a few years ago, many of which were classic YA fantasy. I don’t know what it is, but I don't seem to enjoy them as much as I used to, and this made me a little disappointed and a little sad, I guess. I don’t necessarily think my taste has changed or become more “refined” now, and maybe it’s because I’ve reread those books so much that there’s no suspense left, but I couldn’t find the same excitement that I used to have for them. I somehow feel as if I’ve sullied the memory of all the enjoyment I derived from reading those books when I was younger by reading them again.
I will gladly take suggestions for books to read. Preferably fiction. Doesn’t matter what kind.
