July 16, 2025 · 6:02 pm

V for Vendetta: Perhaps I am too old to learn to like it

M. and I are going to start a book club, or maybe we already have, it’s hard to know when a book club officially starts if you’ve been talking about books with a friend for years already. But V for Vendetta was the first book I read on purpose to talk about with him and so maybe that’s the official start.

Who cares, I know, I know, no one. But let me say I wouldn’t have read it were it not for the book club urging, and I certainly wouldn’t have finished it because the pictures were Very Confusing and I couldn’t keep any of the characters except for V straight in my mind. Actually, reading the last post about how confusing I found Ministry of Time and this one together – maybe the problem is me. To be fair, this is probably peak distracted time in my life – so I’ll give myself a break. And tell you that for sure, for sure V for Vendetta has a great little premise about political action and some neat scenes of Big Eyes and Terror. And maybe a harsh book to read in this moment of such Doom.

But I was less sure about the women in the book – mostly there to be dead, or to prop up a big speech by V. Or prostitutes. Or victims. Very cheerful.

So yeah, not one I’d have read otherwise and not one I’m a huge fan of (sorry, M.) but glad, still, to have tried something new.

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July 16, 2025 · 5:50 pm

The Ministry of Time: Such a great premise and yet

Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time promises to be such a great read from the plot description. It’s the near future and things are Not Good politically or environmentally, but Britain has discovered time travel. The appointed Ministry of Time is responsible for bringing back a sampling of historical figures as an experiment to see how they handle the journey through time (like does it destroy their bodies or minds?). Each figure is assigned a ‘bridge’ – a contemporary person who will be their translator for the present and who will live with them for the year helping them understand all the intervening years and discoveries since their historical time (as well as their own sense of self and identity displaced by centuries). Our protagonist is one such bridge, paired with a British naval officer from the lost Franklin expedition. Their romance is at once inevitable and a slow burn.

There are attempts to make the book political – with nods to contemporary crises of refugees, climate wars and deteriorating democracy. But most of this gets lost in the weave of trying to literally understand what is happening in the plot of the novel where the story gets muddled with explanation of time travel (or failed explanations), too much cloak and dagger spy missions where the reader is (I guess) meant to understand in the limited narration way of our protagonist but is – at least I was – just confused about what is going on and why. It culminates in a climax where I remain entirely unsure what happened in terms of basic plot points, nevermind if it was a satisfying ending for the affective threads that had been – at least at first – so carefully stitched.

So sure – if you happen to be very focused and willing to take notes and maybe to just give up on the idea that there’s understandable world building to be had then maybe it’s enjoyable? At the very least it’s an enjoyable first 70 pages as you’re absorbed in the novelty of the plot. And then it’s just… not.

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June 5, 2025 · 9:22 pm

Playground: Meh?

I don’t know. Richard Power’s Playground is a book I *should like. It’s an interweaving of different characters that all converge at the end. It has (some) good writing (a lot of it, though, is over written and exhausting). There’s interesting (?) questions about the nature of humanity – how we might or might not be distinct from animals or machines. Certainly compelling questions about friendship and how our friends can define our lives.

But ultimately I’m here to report it’s pretty boring. End of the day, bottom line, if I had to read another description of a coral reef or game of Go I think I’d have hurled the book across the room.

Do we care that there’s an AI character? And that I am someone who is (ostensibly) interested in AI? Not really.

What about an intrepid woman scientist who explores the oceans trailblazing for other women (while suppressing her sexuality – there can only be So Much Trailblazing)? I guess that’s interesting enough, but somehow it reads as.. not very.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my mood – it’s hot and I wish the air conditioning was on. Perhaps if you were to read this book in the winter it might be a different experience.

You tell me – have any of you enjoyed this one? What am I missing.

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May 7, 2025 · 9:53 am

Oh William! In a world of too many books to read, read Elizabeth Strout

There’s an argument for God* to be made in the way that sometimes, right when you need it most, a book finds you. It’s how I felt about Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and it’s how I feel about Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William. The book was already extremely overdue at the library, and I had intended to put it in the pile among (too many) others that I ambitiously checked out only to run up against the realities of my limited time. But I’d been looking forward to it, having recently finished Tell Me Everything which I loved, and I figured what is the worst the public library can do? (I know, I know, I owe the library more respect then that. I do know.)

And well Oh William is like all the other Strout books I’ve read in its direct tone, in its simplicity of story, in its beauty of writing. In this one Lucy Barton reflects on her first marriage with William. What brought her to him, why she left, what the staying and leaving cost her, what she needed from him when they were together, what she needed from him after, and how you can love someone through all the many odd and unexpected permutations of a life.

More then a story about their marriage though – or alongside it maybe – is that of William’s mother, Catherine. How she left her one-year old daughter to go start a life with another man, and how the rest of her life was haunted by that decision (and William in discovering this secret must confront the truth that his mother was not who or how he thought she was, but someone more and different, and aren’t we all). Lucy makes the parallels to her own leaving of her daughters when she left William and how this decision hurt her daughters and was necessary. I guess something about what sacrifices mothers are called to make, or make differently from fathers (or presented as such, I guess).

Why did I need this book right now? I suppose there was something to the reminder in it that the stories we have about ourselves and the people we love are just that: stories. That they are written, rewritten and edited in the too many experiences or misunderstandings of our everyday. That we are not and are relationships are not One Thing.

And in a time – still a time – when there is much that is far, far beyond our scope of control (if not influence), there is something so heartening and humbling in the reminder that of this – the story of your life and its decisions – you do have some authority.

*Stipulated I do not believe in God, but you can try to translate as something like love, or interconnection, or mystery.

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