Lost a few months. Harback, Wainaina, and Alarcón

Fall semester. Lost months. Can't remember what I've read. I see my copies of three recent ones lying around, so I'll attempt a few words about them, for my own record:

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón
Excellent
Beautifully crafted, interestingly structured, masterful storytelling about a young actor in a three-person traveling theater troupe in a post-war Peru-like country. But the ending? What up with that?

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Decent.
Smoothly told, easy-down page-turner about a college baseball player. Compelling characters... though the women perhaps a bit less so. Well crafted.

One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
So-so
Lush, loose, rich language, but somehow--despite the turbulence of the time and place--this memoir of growing up in Kenya somehow kept me at a remove... it felt like nothing much was happening... even though it was. Maybe it was that the writing was so opulent that the forest got lost for the trees.

AMERICANAH by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Decent

Best when she’s writing about race and culture. But the love story—the bulk of this novel—is ordinary and slo-o-o-ow. The protagonist, a Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S. and then back home, writes a social commentary blog (and makes a living at it; nice work if you can get it). The blog posts are the snappiest, freshest parts of the novel, but get weighed down in a nearly 600-page version of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy again. I’m not giving anything away. You know what’s coming. Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun was better. This is getting more attention, imho, because it hits certain PC high notes in its frank and on target discussion of being Black in America.

THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin

Very good

I subsist largely on a diet of contemporary literature. I don’t think much about it, until I read something else. Chopin’s slender, poignant novel about a woman in a unhappy marriage was written in 1899. It expresses emotions that are just as valid today, yet with a formal quality and language that mark it as not of this time. The ying-yang of the crisp, cultivated writing with the universal feelings worked on me like an elegant meal.

BREATHE by Kelly Kittel

♥

My friend Kelly has written a frank, raw, brave memoir about losing two children, and embracing life with passion and vigor in the wake of soul-crushing tragedy.

ONE DAY by David Nicholls

Very Good!

Delightful, tender, funny, smart. His life/her life on one particular day each year.

THE DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

Excellent!

Nothing really happens—a woman’s  husband of many years has an affair. They get over it. But nothing really needs to happen. The writing is magnificent—compact, outside the box, poetic, compelling, insightful. I read it in one sitting.

New new rating system.

Pencils very cute. But x out of five not working for me. If I reserve five pencils for Richard Wright or Ursula LeGuin or William Faulkner, give four pencils to the books I've loved and would recommend, that means three pencils for the very good ones--maybe not "Oh, you *have to* read this," but "Oh, this was good; I think you might like it." Three pencils isn't enough for that. And what about good (but not fabulous)? Now we're down to two pencils, and that just isn't right.

So I tried to do it with simple words.

Truly awful. Bad. So-so. Decent. Good. Very good. Excellent. Truly stellar.
Okay. That's better. But that's eight pencils. Too much. So for the moment, I'll just use those words and see if it's working. And I'm going to add a ♥ icon if the book was written by someone I know. So I don't have to stick it with a rating, and can just enjoy my friends' accomplishments.

(This is why I hate putting a grade on student work. Among other reasons.)