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The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

-- a reaaaally fast read. Um, some interesting personal/moral questions I guess? I dunno, it had some probably on point if a bit blunt things to say about post-war Germany generational guilt and accusation and shame, etc. The first person pov and insistence on "I remember this/I remember that" gave it an immediate sort of intimacy and allowed the author to elide a lot of physical descriptions in favour of emotional ones - the few physical descriptions he gives are almost all of Hanna, with the surroundings being described in relation to her (she stands next to this thing or touches that thing, etc), which gives the effect that she's the only real thing to him and that her presence makes other things also real. For all that she remains opaque, but not in that really annoying and frustrating way that men writers tend to write women characters, as sort of unknowable inhuman ciphers. The author managed something really different. I'm going to have to unpack it for a while I think?

Ummm I didn't much like anyone in the book, but I ended up liking the book quite a bit. Probably not enough to ever re-read it because wow disturbing and depressing! But I think it's kind of a deceptive read because it seems to tell everything all on the surface but I get the sense that there's a lot more lurking underneath. So if I ever managed to stomach it, and re-read it, I think it would be a rewarding experience.

Guernica, by Dave Boling, ughhhhhhh, PAINFUL but really really REALLY good. The twist at the end was well telegraphed and actually fairly plausible, though kind of a stretch, but at that point I didn't even care because I was just so happy that there was a little bit of happiness left. When the bombing happened (this is a historical book, covering historical acts, so), I had to fight off tears. The writing up to that point had made me care about the characters and the place so deeply, and though I knew it was coming I didn't want to face it. I actually put the book down for a few months to not to have to face it, but I'm glad I picked it back up to finish.

I really loved the men-women dynamic all throughout and the presence of family and the different occupations, and the strength and goodness in so many of the characters.

The Picasso bits were probably not very necessary, but they definitely didn't harm the book.

I really really loved Justo; he was probably my favourite character. And Alaia and Miren's friendship was wonderful too.

I want to follow up on reading this by going through some of the books in the bibliography at the end, actually, because the window into Basque culture was really enthralling, and the history enraging and disturbing.

I'd definitely re-read this book, despite having thought I'd never want to look at it again, because it's worth it and the ending didn't rip me to shreds. It was a very human and gentle yet devastating book.

Tamora Pierce's duology, Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen - a lot of things worked but a lot of things also didn't work.

On a fairly basic level, in Queen there's a lot of continuity errors and inconsistencies that could have been fixed with a better editing job. The first few pages are also bizarre and kind of, idk, clumsy?

From a storytelling POV, the story put into a cumulative 800 or so pages probably needs at least another 400 because even with broad swathes of telling, not showing, there are STILL too many gaps in the narrative. The net effect is less story and more summary, to be honest. I enjoyed reading it but I didn't feel drawn in to the same extent her other books have managed. And with so much summarizing, a lot of the time I had to fight boredom/wandering attention. She probably needed another book to do the plot justice, because the idea was huge and so was the scope, and the writing fell down quite a bit...

The two books are also significant in that they don't track the protagonist learning/acquiring her skillset but rather applying one she's developed from childhood. Pierce tries to fix this by adding excerpts of letters and books that have instructed Aly (protag), but it doesn't do anything to make me sympathize or empathize with her. Although I really do have a competence kink which she fulfills quiiiiite nicely. In this, Aly's story aligns a bit more with Daine's than it does with Alanna or Kel's (the other major Tortall story arcs), but it's also much less dynamic.

In a way this is good given the focus should rightfully be on the political plot, which is fairly complex and interesting. But which I am also a bit conflicted over! It really dangerously skirts the white/outsider savior line very often and in its basic premise, and is (maybe?) saved from this by acknowledging it, in a way, and also by making Aly less wholly autonomous and more a tool of a god. Still walking a reaaaally fine line though. And for the most part the books do a good job with fraught race relations? And I think a lot of research went into that, too, especially when it came to the mixed demographic, but there were still moments where my face went -_-

I really enjoyed Dove and Winna and Sarai (and the echoes or Sarugani, and Nuritin and Chenaol and Ochobu and etc), and Ulasim and Lokeij, and felt sad at all the character deaths (though the books didn't work at making me sad), and I really enjoyed Nawat and the crows, but I found how much got glossed over and sort of handwaved annoying after a while. I would have liked more detailed spycraft, and thought it was a little lazy that Aly recruiting her pack of spies and training them wasn't shown, and made me not really care about these random people showing up in random scenes, etc.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, it needed more books to really develop properly and do the characters and plot justice. It also needed tighter editing, especially for continuity errors. It had some really shining moments and I truly loved Dove and was fond of Aly. Overall a pretty fun read!

Also I liked Taybur a lot and wished he could have been a bigger part of the story though I liked how he was used over all. And I actually really loved Sarai's whole plotline, except for the part where the goddess got involved because it muddied the consent and that is awful :/

I'm trying to read (finish) a book a day, and I'm starting out easy with JK Rowling's Beedle the Bard. It was fun and quick! I'd avoided reading it way back but I really enjoyed it and the additional notes. It's fairly timely considering the announcement of the upcoming movie, too.

I enjoyed the notes quite a bit, and I liked how it deepened some canonical characters (I really want to know what versions of these fairy tales Draco Malfoy was being spoonfed, as well as the flipside of the Weasley brood...), but it was pretty overwhelmingly monocultural. So, it was good for what it was, and overall a little disappointing; not at all surprising but fairly delightful nevertheless.

Onward!

March Violets
The Pale Criminal
A German Requiem

A trilogy set in Berlin starring a PI, spanning the lead-up to WW2 and then jumping to life after it. I'm pretty much ambivalent about these books. They were interesting for certain historical aspects but nothing really jumped out and grabbed me. I read the first two pretty much back-to-back; March Violets was stronger than The Pale Criminal. I got around twenty pages into A German Requiem and then for some reason put it down and didn't pick it up again. I will probably do so, if only for completion's sake, but The Pale Criminal just wasn't very... interesting. Well, it had interesting points, I suppose, and it tried to resolve loose threads from March Violets, but it didn't really hold me. It's worth reading these if you're into the noir genre though since I think they fit well within that canon. I think one of my main problems with the series was how unsympathetic I found every single character, even the mostly-benign protagonist.

Eh. After I finish A German Requiem I probably won't re-read these.

Child 44

This was a surprising read, actually, because I thought it would be essentially a brainless thriller airport book. And it sort of is, and it sort of isn't.

It made the rounds through my family a few months ago - it's the first book in a trilogy (I won't go out of my way to read the other two but if they pop up I will probably at the very least flip through them) about the Soviet Union under Stalin with an action hero type protagonist in the form of Leo Demidov. There's a sharp divide between "official" reality and ACTUAL reality, which is shown most clearly when a serial killer is on the loose hunting children - something that cannot happen in a Utopian state, and so is denied to be happening on multiple levels, etc and so forth. A lot of the details are gone from my mind now because it's been so long since I read the book.

Things that stood out: the atmosphere - deprivation and ruin and exploitation, the community/politics, the food mentions/descriptions, the self-brain-washing Leo had to do, the perfunctory meth use, the violence (I thought it was well done and appropriate, but I'm not a scholar of the time period, so take that with a grain of salt), Leo's awakening to the way others live in this state, Raisa - Leo's wife whose entire arc is magnificent, her history and rationale and the way she fights and angles in every way possible to survive and how all of the harsher actions and thoughts she exhibits are not shown to make her into a villain but shown to be entirely justified and smart (I loved her a lot. So much. God).

Things that I thought were weak: the writing alternatively worked for me and got supremely annoying. There were so many ellipses and sentence fragments and it got to be a little bit TOO MUCH. I get that he was probably going for something stylistically speaking but jfc. I kept wanting to edit it while I was reading. Also there was a huge plot element that I thought was stupid and unnecessary and actually lessened the impact and the horror rather than heightened it. The story would have been better served without it (and many degrees of magnitude more believable, too).

I don't know that I would re-read this because it was a very depressing book, but a very interesting one too.

Pretty simple, though the wrappings take a little while ~ la,

FILLING:

lentils - I have very green and very red lentils, but also not so-green lentils, and it was the last that I used

-- I put as much lentils as I wanted in a pot and rinsed them. Lentils get a bit bigger cooked than when they are dry, so I overestimated slightly and got a little bit too much lentils. A handful or a cup or half a cup is probably good enough, it all depends on how much you like lentils, I suppose. And then boiled the lentils until they were well mushy. (Had to add extra water at certain points.)

small yellow onion - chopped small while the lentils were boiling and cooked in canola oil very slowly until soft and tender and transluscent

savoy cabbage & ginger - or I guess any cabbage would work, but I didn't have napa and savoy works just as well in a pinch. I sliced it think from the head and then the opposite way to get a good, comparable-to-the-chopped-onion size, until the amount of cabbage was about equal to the amount of onion. I got a two and a half inch chunk of garlic (though more or less would also work, depending on individual taste) and peeled and grated it, and tossed the cabbage and ginger in with the onion and mixed it all well. You know it's right when the ginger starts to sizzle and smell extra fragrant like magic.

When the lentils are well mushy, drain them and throw them in with the onion and cabbage and ginger. Mix it all.

salt - add as much as you think you will need. I added a lot, because I like salt. Table salt for this works best I think because kosher or coarse or sea would make it difficult to control the salt levels.

Let it all cook together in a smushy way until the flavour is all blended, but nothing is burnt. Around fifteen minutes? Maybe more like ten.

WRAPPING:

This is best to prepare a few hours earlier, like in the morning if you are eating for lunch, or in the afternoon if you are eating for dinner, or in the evening if you are planning a midnight snack. Or the day before even if you like to be prepared or have some extra time. (Extra resting time for the dough makes it better behaved, actually, like a toddler needs a nap.)

Put some flour in a bowl. It depends on how much gyoza you are planning to make. I put in 1 and 1/2 cups. Then pour in some water, tap is fine, unless you are fancy and want bottled. Stir with a fork and add more water if necessary, to get the flour all wet and dough-like. Add salt. Lots of salt. Then more salt. Delicious salt. (Salt is bad for you if you have high blood pressure, so if this is the case, omit salt.)

Knead the dough a little in your hands, but only for around a minute or two. Put it back in the bowl and cover it with something, like a towel or cling wrap (I put the cling wrap right next to the dough), and then put it in the refrigerator for a while, or just somewhere cool and dry would also work.

A few hours later take the dough out and separate it into two balls, or more, if that is your thing. Or you can keep it in one, but that gets unruly if you have a limited working station.

Pour flour on a flat surface and roll one of the dough balls around on the flour to make it not-sticky, and thus suitable for rolling out with a rolling pin. Or a wine bottle, which also works, or pretty much any non-stick oblong weighted object.

Roll out the dough ball. Roll it out some more. Roll it out until it is very flat. You can flip it around a bit, from side to the other, if it starts acting up. This should coat the surfaces in flour and make them calm down. Flour is a calming influence on most pastry and dough-type things. But also when it is compressed and heated it becomes explosive, like a bomb! Beware flour's dual nature.

Once the dough ball is a dough sheet get something with a round circumference to cut circles out of it, like a large cup or small bowl.

Cut circles ad nauseum. To keep them from sticking together, flip them in the flour. Set each circle aside onto a long piece of cling wrap. You can stack the circles. Make sure the cling wrap is extra long so that you can wrap the stack of circles up and keep them from drying out. Cling wrap is super practical and every kitchen should stock it! Unless it is an environmentally conscious kitchen. I don't think cling wrap is actually all that good for the environment.

Repeat this process until all the dough is rolled and circled and stacked. It will take a while. Have something playing in the background to amuse you!

Prepare a pan with hot canola oil for the frying, and then prepare the gyoza by taking a dough circle, putting it in one hand, scooping some filling, putting it in the middle of the dough circle, lining the edge of half of the circle with water, and closing the circle with the filling inside. Tweak the edges of the now-half-circle so that they fold together like a pleat in a skirt. Put the gyoza in the hot oil and listen to it fry.

Fry on one side until it is golden and flip and fry on the other side until it also golden and then remove from the pan. This takes a few minutes. While it is frying, prepare the next gyoza, and the next, and the next, until you have a pan full of frying gyoza, and then a plate full of fried gyoza, and then a stomach full of delicious gyoza.

Et voila! Vegan gyoza.

I would have pictures but I ate all the gyoza. Wups.

Codename Verity

Gah, I saw this recced all over the place, and when I saw the list of keywords, I immediately thought yes please! Because: spies, pilots, best friends with people who are nothing at all like yourself, war, intrigue, yes.

But for around the first... quarter? of the book, I was disappointed. It could have been that I was spoiled or that I had my guard up against the unreliable narrator convention, because I was constantly questioning the book, its validity, and that really destroyed my ability to get into it. The writing won me over though, especially because it was about the inception and core of friendship, and then the second half happened and - because of the drastic shift - I could immediately get into it and buy into it and empathize, and it destroyed me. It just destroyed me, god. And then I went back to the first half and I understood what it was accomplishing, because it was meant to be read with wariness and suspicion (considering who it was overtly meant for, as a type of confession), but that didn't make the - the meaning underneath the words any less true, the facts were obfuscated but the story itself - it was there. The friendship, the history and the sacrifice, it was all there and so powerful and heroic. It was so goddamn heroic.

And fuck, Anna fucking Engel. I mean, jesus, jesus.

This book is the book I would give to all the kids ever and stock in multiple copies in every library ever, because it got everything right, it was flawless and perfect and it hurt. It didn't punish women for being ambitious or heroic or strong, or for standing up for each other and protecting each other and saving each other and hurting each other, and it was just. Amazing. Every time I read it I'll be wrecked. Because goddamn.

And it definitely definitely rewards re-reading.

Deathless

Russian folklore/Russian revolutionary history, crossover/fusion/whatever. It read like one long extended fairy tale.

I'm pretty aromantic and asexual in general, so I wasn't all that sure about this book when it got to the more romantic bits. I don't know why but sex scenes in books make me a little uncomfortable in the "why is so much of the page devoted to this", not in the "ew sex" sort of way. I guess I'm too used to reading sex scenes as more PWP than scenes in a book? But I really enjoyed the (hahaha) bit with Baba Yaga's pestle, ahahaha, it was perverse and wonderful and smutty and kind of horrendous, but also powerful, because of how explicitly sexual power was shown to be power, period.

I mean, this book was about power relations. Not in a community, network kind of way, exactly (though that gets mentioned here and there), but in an elemental way - two opposing, passionate forces. Life and Death, Husband and Wife, Predecessor and Successor. It had some very big ideas and by the end it convinced me of those ideas. But the storytelling occasionally fell down.

Valente is a very good writer. She's won at least three major awards that I know of and probably more besides. Her writing isn't always something I can lose myself in; it takes a little work, but it gets me after a few chapters. But I wasn't all that emotionally invested. I think the book skipped around chronologically a little bit too much, I think. I didn't feel present in it. I felt more like I was watching it through a viewpane or something. I found it hard to invest in the other characters, too.

I did love all the folklore and fairy tale shout outs though, especially with how they melded with Stalinist Russia (the domovoi and the dragon and the three sisters, especially).

And for all that it's a type of love story, it's really about power, and how it shifts between two forces, and how it shapes those forces, and - yeah. A lot of the things it said about marriage, I recognized in my parents' marriage. A lot of the things it said about history, I recognized in my own history. And almost all of the storytelling weaknesses I noticed make sense through the lens of folktale.

Pretty sure I will re-read this one, though I don't know when.

EDIT:

OMG, just found this. Wooooooow. I'm somehow not surprised? Ahahahahaha god, um, well I don't regret reading the book but I kind of regret buying it.... Oh well! I won't buy anything more from her at least. Idk, the racist things really made me bluh.

The Raw Shark Texts

Christmas present from my bro - along with John Dies at the End (not yet read); fast read but a bit underwhelming. It had a lot of cool moments and ideas, but a lot of failures as well. It's also a book that is trying, metatextually, really REALLY hard to be cool, in a cult sort of way. Which automatically makes me side-eye it a bit.

Things I liked: the cat, the inn characters, the Nobody scene - suitably creepy, the letter-map, Scout, the lair type place, the Ludovician.

Things I didn't like: the protagonist, the plot, a lot of the writing (seriously! needed an editor to tighten certain things up, such as using ten words when one would do, god).

It was a bit of a frustrating book because it felt like it could have been awesome and amazing and mind-blowing, but instead it just... wasn't. Also dude really needs to learn how to write women in a way that is not kind of creepy. Written in the way that makes you think he doesn't realize he is being creepy. But he is. Not quite misogyny - but nice-guy-ism? Is that still a catch-all phrase? Well, whatever.

Could definitely tell the Murakami influence, but nowhere close to the Murakami feel. Like a cheap knockoff.

Not on the re-read list.

Book Thief

Read this a few months ago, enjoyed it in a sort of destroyed way. There were points where it teetered on the edge of being too postmodern, but then pulled back, or anchored itself just in time.

I'm not sure how accurate it is, but I think it is pretty accurate? of what life was like in WW2 Germany for people just living in villages, trying to get through, some worse and some better than others. And the importance of reading, of books, of writing, and of words.

It rewards re-reading, I think; I need to get a copy in dead-tree form. I read it on a tiny little netbook during a power outage, furiously racing the battery clock to get through just one chapter and then the next. I had a candle lit next to me for light so that's what I associate with this novel, a sort of franticness, and a quiet stillness, the hush of no electricity anywhere and beeswax melting on the coffee table.

Not sure if I would like anything else by Zusak. I think this book might be the exception?