What I Read: The Sky is Yours

We should all know better than to judge a book by its cover, but when I saw The Sky is Yours in my NetGalley menu, with the neon dragons in the ouroboros pattern against a brick wall backdrop, I was instantly intrigued. The premise only further cemented my interest, and I was lucky enough to get a review copy.

Smith's world building is par excellence and the way she incorporates elements of our present and past is seamless and, of course, entirely plausible. Small things like: one character happens to find a book of poetry by her father and notes in the copyright page that it was "print on demand." Her immediate thought is that he must have been a writer of incredible renown, to have his book so constantly in demand. Or another character suffering "affluenza" that needs the occasional administrations of an inhaler.

What kept me from rating it any higher is how much of it there is. Smith includes a lot of asides and multiple perspectives, which results in a complex and gritty world that feels very real, even though there are a pair of dragons flying around and laying waste to New York City. The multiple voices are handled deftly, so that you can always tell which character with you're with. It's an altogether big project and Smith pulls it off well. Nothing wrong with any of that.

On the other hand, much of it doesn't serve the plot in any significant way. I don't think plot should be the be-all, end-all of novels, but there's a fine line between complexity and getting lost in your own head. There are bits and asides here and there that mostly seem to be written for the sake of a gag or two, and whether the payoff is worth it will always be a subjective issue. Not all of the characters Smith chooses to develop in their own chapters are interesting enough to warrant the attention, either. (Spoiler alert: some of them end up dead pretty quickly, so there's not much point in getting to know them.)

Still, sometimes I read a book and even if it's not entirely my cup of tea, I stand in awe of the craftsmanship. So it is with The Sky is Yours.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Day 17, Part I: Road Trip to Maine

It's showtime!

This day ends up being long, to the tune of 20 hours long: I got up at 4 am and I finally crashed at around midnight. It was basically two days crammed into one, so I'll split it into two parts.

A insisted at the close of last night that she'd be up to say goodbye, but of course she wasn't and I knew she wouldn't because she's an exhausted mother of two children, so I wasn't surprised. I managed to make it out the door without leaving anything behind, except Her Smoke Rises Up Forever. I didn't realize that for a while, and when I finally did I was a little sad because I get sentimental about books from friends, but I already have other books from Noah in my library (The Fifth Season, Harpo Speaks!, Name of the Rose) so I wasn't as heartbroken as I might have otherwise been when I finally realized what had happened.

"I absolutely do not trust myself to drive on any leg of this trip," I told L as we get ready. "Driving myself? Fine. If I eat it, whatever. But you're a dad now. I couldn't live with myself if something happened. I'll stay up and keep you company, though." Which is a bigger deal promise than maybe it sounds because I can fall asleep in cars at the drop of a hat.

"That's fair."

It was still dark when we took off. The only other cars we saw were trucks and tractor trailers. Every time we passed one, I held my breath and tensed up. I trusted L; I did't trust truckers on the road at 4 am.

"The one thing I really wanna do on this trip is get breakfast at a proper greasy spoon truck stop diner," L said early on in the drive. "A place where you can sit on stools at the counter. I can't do that with the boys. I was thinking we could find one once we get to Massachusetts."

"Omigod, yes. Sweden doesn't do diners. That sounds perfect. My treat."

We hit Mass at around 6 in the morning, and after a little futzing with the GPS we decided to try a coffee shop in a strip mall. I was wary, because it's hard to have a proper diner in a strip mall, but coffee is coffee and you want the driver on your road trip to be as awake and alert as possible, so I took the compromise.

Except it wasn't a compromise, and inside it was a proper full-on greasy spoon, including the low-budget Americana decor.



Yes, we got to sit on stools at the counter. L was pleased as punch and so was I.

Big fluffy American waffles!

"If this isn't nice, what is?" I thought to myself, and for the half-hour or so that we were relaxing and having a proper roadtrip breakfast, I could forget about all of the stress and awfulness going on around us.

The glass display counter by the register had some baked goods, because of course, and so we each picked out a donut to have as a snack later as I paid up. The shelf behind the register also boasted a number of teas; in addition to the usual English Breakfast and Earl Grey, I spotted THIN MINTS TEA.



"Holy crap, they make thin mints tea now?!"

The waitress gushed. "Oh yeah, it's great. Here, take a bag. Free sample."

"Aw, nice. Thanks!"

Spoiler alert: it's a pretty tasty tea.

The sun was up now. It was weird to think that it was 7 am and we'd been up for hours. Bolstered by our food (diner food is magic, I'm pretty sure), we continue northwards. There were other cars on the road now; it felt more normal and less lonely and apocalyptic. Once we hit Maine, we pulled over in a rest stop to have our donuts and change out of lazy driving clothes into proper wedding clothes.

This was when L realized that the pants he meant to wear, with the cigars he bought for the occasion, were at home, but the good news is he had everything else, including another pair of dress-y pants in the car already, so it wasn't a sartorial emergency. We also realized that we didn't have the address for the church and since neither of us had data on our phones, I put in a call to A to do some Internet sleuthing for us.

"Hi sweetie!" A chirped. I was calling from L's phone.

"Hi sweetie yourself," I joked back. She laughed.

"Oh, hi Koba. Everything going okay?"

"Yeah, peachy keen. But can you do us a favor and look up an address for us? The invitation only has the address for the reception, not where the ceremony's going to be."

"Sure, just a second." I could hear her negotiate with the oldest over use of the tablet, and some wondering aloud about if the place she found Googling was where we were going, but eventually she found it.

"Sorry I wasn't up to see you guys off. I totally meant to, but..."

"Nah, it's fine. We left super early."

"Well, have a good time! It was good to see you. That was a good talk we had. It's a lot to think about."

"Anytime. It was good to see you, too. I'm sure I'll be around again at some point. People can't stop getting married." Four more friends from this college crowd aren't married yet and I can safely assume I'll be invited to those weddings, plus Noah's if they decide to take that leap. Plus the odd assortment of friends I have outside of Hamilton. "Have fun with the boys."

"I will. Bye Koba!"

"Bye!"

L had estimated the time for the wedding ceremony wrong, but in our favor: he was planning for 10:00 am, not 10:30. "Oh, sweet. Then we have time to get some Moxie!"

I laughed. "Yes, definitely."

We found the nearest grocery store according to the GPS and L helped himself to the remaining cases of diet Moxie left on the shelf, four in all. He knew that an anniversary present from A arrived in the mail the other day, but I had no idea if he knew that it was Moxie. Well, it's not like it'll sit around unappreciated, I thought.

"Someone likes Moxie," an older woman remarked quizzically, confused over why someone would stock up on so much regional soft drink. Diet, at that.

"We don't have it in Albany," L explained, and the woman maybe nodded or said something, I forget, but we made a beeline for the checkout, loaded up the car, and returned to the church-adjacent neighborhood to find some parking.

Friday 5: Groundhog Day

What’s your favorite Bill Murray performance?

His cameo in Zombieland is one of the best cameos ever, in any movie or TV show.

What’s been a highlight of your winter so far?

I've got some very good news about a couple of creative projects, which I'm being vague about here for multiple reasons.

What’s there to look forward to in the next six weeks?

The return of the sun and an end to the ice. I want to be able to go out running again!

Too early for flapjacks?

Maybe, but never too early for waffles.

If someone in a bar asks to buy you a drink (and let’s just say for the sake of the question you are amenable), what do you order?

A Long Island iced tea. Always a Long Island iced tea.

What I Read: Dark Places

The Facebook book club I mentioned in my last review also organizes a yearly book swap around New Year's. My book swap partner in 2016 (going into 2017) was incredibly gracious and sent me not one but two books! One was Both Flesh and Not, which they sent based on the prodigious amounts of David Foster Wallace in my GoodReads, and one book they had really enjoyed during the year: Gillian Flynn's Dark Places. I tore into Both Flesh and Not right away, but kept on putting off Dark Places. I don't normally read thrillers (though I love mysteries, so go figure) and everything I knew about Gone Girl was so unappealing that I was afraid Dark Places would be more of the same.

It's not, at least not entirely (false accusations of sexual misconduct are still a major plot point, things that make you go "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm"), but if I've understood the chatter around Gone Girl correctly, there's still equivalent gore and gruesomeness. Be prepared for some unflinching descriptions of a triple homicide and some serious violence done to cattle.

I put off reading Dark Places for so long that it became eligible for my 101 in 1001 goal of "read one book that you've owned for over a year but never read," and so in the absence of anything else left on that list (which also included Journal of a Solitude, Gösta Berling's Saga, and Bödeln, among others), I finally picked it up on New Year's and finished it within a few days.

Image courtesy Phoenix

 Ultimately, I'm glad that I finally got around to reading Dark Places. I'm still not much of a thriller fan, but there's a neat symmetry to the way that Flynn builds the story as it alternates between present-day and the day of the murder. It's worth reading just for the structure alone, to see the way things are set up and subverted, to see how clues are revealed, to see how even small things turn up again in the end when you least expect them, to see how people can interpret the same events or scenes or scrap of evidence completely differently (sometimes tragically so). Dark Places is an excellent book to dissect if you're writing your own story in a similar genre.

Friday 5: Returns

What was the last item you returned or exchanged at a store?

I'm generally pretty conservative in purchases and don't need to return or exchange things that often. I guess the last thing was some moldy veggie burgers? You can't exactly see that something's moldy through the cardboard packaging.

When did you last leave the house and then turn right back around and go back inside?

I do this fairly often, because I don't have my life together. The last time I wish I had done that but couldn't was when I realized I had forgotten the right journal page en route to a student.

What’s the latest you’ve ever returned a library book?

I'm a really good library user; I'm never more than a few days overdue, and rarely then!

What location among places you’ve traveled would you most like to see again?

I absolutely loved my long weekend in Indonesia and would love to go back for a longer visit. I'm also looking forward to traveling to South Korea for a wedding in 2019 (knock on wood!) and revisiting all of my favorites there--and possibly making some new ones?

What’s an unlikely movie sequel you’d like to see?

One of my fellow teachers in Korea once joked about "why didn't anyone make a sequel to Titanic" except I wasn't entirely sure that he was joking. I've never seen Titanic, though, and I have no interest in it, so that wouldn't be a sequel I'd like to see (unlikely as it may be). Otherwise, is anything really an "unlikely" movie sequel these days? Anything and everything is up for grabs in terms of becoming a franchise, or at least a trilogy.

What I Read: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Or rather, Var blev du av Bernadette, since I read it in Swedish.

Image courtesy Wahlström & Widstrand

Stockholm Library has ongoing book sales (rather than the yearly binge that US libraries seem to favor) and I always check the "for sale" shelves at my closest branch for anything of interest. It's usually spotty, but there have been some bright spots. This Swedish translation of Where'd You Go, Bernadette? is one of them. I'm really bad about keeping up my Swedish reading now that I'm not in class anymore, so I figured this would be a cute, easy thing to help maintain my Swedish.

If you were going to run my book reviews through an algorithm to count up the words and phrases I use the most, "I realize I'm late to the party on this one" would probably be near the top. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? was first published in 2012 and here I am, like with so many other books, just getting around to it now.

It's surprising that I didn't pick this up sooner (well, I bought my library edition back in 2016, for what it's worth), considering that the hype is in the sweet spot of "enough to get me interested, not enough to make me cynical." And book bloggers and vloggers I followed seemed to be relatively mixed—Natalie didn't care much for this book, for example. Yes, I'm way more likely to be interested in a book that some people dislike than in a book that everyone loves. That's just how I roll!

Bearing in mind that I read it in Swedish—and I say that not to poo-poo Samuelsson's translation, but rather to highlight my own lack of nuance in Swedish—I had a great time. Some of the complaints that Natalie had might have also bothered me if I'd read in English, but the gauzy veil of reading in a foreign language (even one I understand reasonably well) smoothed out some of those peaks and valleys so that I didn't mind switching back and forth from documents to Bee's narration to documents again. Bee, especially was fun to read. The best kind of teenage protagonist: sometimes insightful, sometimes naive, never stupid. (I have THOUGHTS about adults who write teenage or child protagonists and make them needlessly stupid.) And I appreciate Semple staying away from working in any kind of shoehorned romance or love interest for Bee. It's like adults who write for teenagers can only remember the boy- or girl-crazy part of teenagerdom angst, nothing else.

I will agree that the one thing that makes the transitions between sections feel sloppy is that, out of necessity, the chronology is out of whack. When the book starts, Bee's mother is still missing, and her little bit about talking to her father about Bernadette's disappearance makes it seem like Bernadette went missing years ago, rather than....weeks? I think Semple or her editor had an intuition that the timeline would be an issue here, and that's why every extract is clearly dated. I have my own opinions about how I would have handled it as a writer or editor, but whatever, those aren't that interesting!

The one thing I'm not entirely sure about is the Asian gags. There are two and half points here: the fact that Elgin's secretary (who I read as Korean-American but I realize now could also be Chinese-American) is an overall kind of insufferable character (depending on your preferences) and the one-liner Bee has comparing her to Yoko Ono. As another blog points out, this grates both because Soo-Lin is pretty obviously not Japanese, and because the "Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles!" meme is fucking tiresome. So even when Bee apologizes later for the remark and realizes how it must have come off, the "Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles" meme persists. On the other hand, Bee has just graduated middle school and so is around 14 years old. I'm sure I hated Yoko Ono when I was 14, too. Even though my favorite Beatle was/is George. So that's half a point.

It's Soo-Lin's continual gossip-y insufferability that's more cringe-inducing, especially when the only other Asian characters that appear are a group of Japanese tourists on the Antarctica cruise Bee takes with Elgin. There is an inherent fish-out-of-water humor that comes with foreign tourists, a group of people who are plopped down outside of their normal context, but still. They don't add anything to the plot; their presence is just a comic device intended to render the setting of the cruise as absurd as possible. That's one point.

The other is that Soo-Lin's partner in crime and even more insufferable gossip pal, Audrey (who is the semi-accidental antagonist of the whole book) gets to have a redemption arc while Soo-Lin remains just...there. Still kind of a shitty-but-you-feel-bad-for-thinking-so character, no redemption, just literally handwaved away by Bernadette.

Despite this small misgiving, overall I had a really good time with Var blev du av Bernadette. It was a compelling read, and it was just the thing for me to kickstart my Swedish reading in 2018.

What I Read: Whistler's Mother: Portrait of an Extraordinary Life

Part of my 101 in 1001 list is always to try to read one non-fiction book a month. I'm eternally interested in the world around me and reading a constant and broad range of non-fiction helps me do just that.

Biographies are some of my favorite non-fiction to read, as they can help contextualize what historical events and epochs would have meant for the day-to-day lives of more or less ordinary people. Whistler's Mother does just that. Even though the focus is ever on Anna McNeill Whistler, Sutherland and Toutziari seamlessly tie her life into larger events happening around her and show how she was immediately affected: outbreaks of influenza and cholera; the American Civil War; the railroad boom that led to the Panic of 1873; the reign of Tsar Nicholas.

Like other, more historical non-fiction I've received from NetGalley (The Radium Girls)*, there is an abundance of names and people to remember. Anna came from a large family and maintained a large social network (via copious letter-writing); as a result there is a large cast of secondary characters, as it were, to keep track of. This can be hard going in ebook or Kindle form, at least for me. On the other hand, it is as exhaustive and detailed a biography of an individual as you could possibly want. Unsurprising, then, that it's from a university press (in this case, Yale). The result is hardly light reading and relies heavily on excerpts and quotes from Anna's own correspondence. But for anyone with a committed interest in art history, 19th century American history, or either of the two through a feminist lens, it may be a read that is worth the work.

*in exchange for this review