books

Circumstances recently led to me reading several books at once:

-Priestdaddy (Patricia Lockwood) because while each chapter was fun enough, they all tended to feel like more of the same. (And "the same" was typically an anecdote about how her father was a useless misogynistic piece of shit, and it started to feel disturbing how she was still trying to play it for laughs instead of disgust or "and this is why I never spoke to him again.") So I wasn't psyched to read more than a couple dozen pages a day. I finished it because I was holding out hope that it would turn out to have an arc in which she realized she was actually writing a horror story, but alas.

-Pale Fire because I did not want to spend too much time at a stretch inside the narrator's head. Clever book, though it has been 30 years since I read Lolita and think it will be at least 30 more before I pick up another Nabakov. Are ALL of them about unreliable narrators, one-sided obsessions, and unethical sex? I think I would have appreciated this more reading it as part of a class with good discussions.

-Palaces of the Crow (Ray Nayler) because I needed something other than those two. While I think we already had enough WWII books in the world, I enjoyed this one because it was focused on refugee mutual aid and also crows. (In addition it had diversions into the Finnish Winter War; I had to look that up to remind myself of its background.)

-Family of Spies (Christine Kuehn) because I realized my book group was coming up more quickly than I realized. It's a compelling story about a woman who realizes decades later that her family were all Nazi spies (see, there's no escaping WWII). Its writing was much less sophisticated than everything else I was reading though and it suffered by comparison. (It could be incredible in the hands of Lockwood or Nayler! But definitely NOT NABAKOV; we would never know what was going on.)

(Sidenote: my great uncle's last name was Kuhn. He was deployed by the US to India during WWII; the family theorized so he couldn't do much damage if he happened to be a German spy. I think they worried about the wrong guy!)

(Side-sidenote: I have no idea what the US was doing in India; maybe supplying China against Japan? But I refuse to become a WWII guy and get a book on THAT.)

-The Game Master's Guide to Fantasy Mapmaking (Cody King) because it was sitting on my coffee table and easy to look at while waiting for my dog to come inside. I picked it up from the library on a whim because I thought it would be about making maps which made logical sense based on the worlds in which they were supposed to take place. Alas, it was about drawing; I guess I should pick up books about settlement patterns and geology instead. (NOT WWII.)