august 16, 2024
"In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world."
i read prolifically when i travel. i went to many gorgeous places this year and read many brilliant books that left me in existential crisis.
without further rationale, here is my map of my reading itinerary for the first half of 2024, and a brief sometimes not so brief review of each of the books and where i read them.
zoom in and drag to see labels, and click on the red markers to see information on location!
book review is a serious thing. so we're Turning On The Proper Capitalizations.
needless to say, spoilers ahead!
I loved the trilogy. I watched "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" before reading these books, got tons of Hunger Games content put on my TikTok feed, and falsely believed that Peeta dies at the end. A dear friend of mine, Sofia, kept up with that lie throughout the four months I was reading this trilogy, and it was only on the last page that I realized that I was lied to.
I've read a ton of dystopian young adult literature, two that immediately come to mind are the Divergent and the Maze Runner series. I liked this series the most out of the three, mostly because of its worldbuilding.
Unlike Divergent and Maze Runner, where development of the plot relied on one novel revelation after another, almost like a picture that keeps being expanded at its edges, with new content being drawn in with each successive expansion, conflicts arise naturally from the worldbuilding in the Hunger Games. Katniss is chosen as the tribute in the first book, her defiant action with the poisonous berries unknowingly sparks a fire of revolution in a poverty-stricken and oppressed Panam, with her as the unwilling mockingjay. The second book sees President's Snow's attempt at putting out the fire started by Katniss, and the revolution goes into full fledge in the third.
While reading, it really feels as though the whole picture of Panam is laid out at once, and the conflicts are seeded from the start. The plot develops naturally from the structure of that world, and not from, for example, Tris's mother suddenly being a divergent herself or Thomas actually being part of the organization that created maze.
Another highlight of the series is arguably the character construction. I am a huge fan of unlikeable and flawed protagonists, and Katniss is undoubtedly both of those. She's selfish, cold, indecisive, and impressively short sighted for a main character of a dystopian novel. Her not being purely good or very intelligent makes her perspective much more interesting than and compelling. The good characters don't end with her, I loved Finnick, Haymitch, Effie, Cinna, Rue, and maybe! Even Gale.
The theme of determinism is also strong here. Specifically, the lack of control Katniss has over what happens to her, her family, and the revolution really reminded me of this quote from the next book in line:
"You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it."
work in progress! luisa has gone back to reading My Brilliant Friend.
luisa has finished My Brilliant Friend and started Pachinko, now continuing the book review from a train in Italy.
This is probably my favorite book this year.
I read this book mostly while wandering in Lisbon in April, and have come to associate this book with that city. I stood in a busy train to Cais Do Sodre while Joey was mingling with Jenna and fishing out his engagement ring from his own feces, I was eating a cheap McDonalds meal when Lalitha died in a car crash that devastated Walter, and I was on my way to the airport when Patty and Walter, despite all odds and years suffering together, because of each other, came back together at Walter's cabin.
One particular theme I loved in this book was the one of goodness. This theme is everywhere - in Walter in his ambition in nature conservation and his mountaintop removal project, in Patty in her affair with Katz and her struggle with parenthood, and in Joey in his morally questionable work involving rusty car parts for the US military and his love triangle with Connie and Jenna. Franzen asks the question of goodness constantly about his characters: all of these people have made bad decisions, but are they really so black and white?
When Walter finally gives in to kiss Lalitha and allows himself to fall in love with her, it's hard to argue he is in the wrong because of how dysfunctional his relationship with Patty has become. Patty's love affair with Richard Katz is a darker shade of gray, but her youthful misfortune and unfulfilled talent, and her subsequent struggle with purpose, ultimately makes her character not good but also not despicable. Joey is nothing but an entitled and selfish brat for most of the book, stringing along Connie and his suffering mother, but he does eventually come to a final moral epiphany and disengages with both Jenna and the gig involving rusty car parts.
No matter their history, all the characters are redeemed at the end, and go on to make an honest attempt at being good people. I loved the book because the outlook Franzen presents on humans is a genuinely optimistic on: people are deeply flawed and make mistakes, but they can still be redeemed, and be good, and be loved.
queue my favorite quote from Kant!
"Nothing in the world — indeed nothing even beyond the world — can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will." — Kant
I got this book while hurrying through an airport, and mostly read it on my way back to Lima. "A long petal of the sea", referring to Chile's long and narrow shape on the western side of South America, follows Victor Dalmau, a medical student at the time of the Spanish Civil War, through his long life dealing with fascism in both Spain and Chile under the dictatorships of Franco and Pinochet. There are themes of love and companionship, of belonging and family roots, but the definitive main theme is fascism and its effect on ordinary people. Though Victor and Rose are extraordinary in their ability to adapt to the hardships brought by war and migration, they are nonetheless victims of fascism, and their struggle of building and rebuilding their lives over and over as the democracies collapse speaks immensely to that theme.
In the book Victor actually fled to Venezuela to escape Pinochet's dictatorship, which is obviously very ironic given the recent events in the Venezuelan elections.
Overall a really great read with a beautiful plot and lots of well researched history. This is one of those books one can easily write an essay about linking it to the uprise of fascism across the world today, but I won't do that. Onto the next!
I started reading this while flying back to Boston from Peru in May, and finished it while going to Paris at the end of June.
Lots of world events happened during the life of Violeta Del Valle: the Spanish Flu when she was born, the Great Depression that led to her father's bankruptcy, World War II, the Cold War, the Chilean dictatorships, and even the COVID19 pandemic in 2020. The book is a wise and honest autobiography of the narrator, and it feels really intimate. Regardless of what sort of message you take away from her experiences, it's a gorgeously written and captivating story spanning a hundred years of rich history.
i really struggled on this one and can't find a way to put thoughts into words, so a summary will have to suffice here.
queue "Little Girl", whose lyrics violently remind me of the relationship between Andreas Wolf and Annagret.
Honestly very promising premises and characters, but very disappointing and abrupt ending. It feels like there was so much that could have been said, but so little that was actually written.
Forgive the STEM brute in me, but at this point I can't form a coherent book review, so I will leave my comments as individual bullet points, and sprinkle in my favorite quotes, because Franzen has written some banger one-liners for this book.
"No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched."
"She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene."
"The love that was a granite impediment at the center of her life was also an unshakable foundation; she felt blessed."
"Rain pattering at dinner. Rain pattering while she did her homework. Rain pattering while her mother knitted. Rain pattering on Christmas with the sad little tree that you could get for free on Christmas Eve..."
"The sky was as clear as if there'd never been such a thing as fog."
"...under a mercilessly clear sky"
"If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it. "
"The mark of a legitimate revolution -- the scientific, for example -- was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred."
*at a halloween party* "("I am the Excluded Middle," a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door)"
"To paraphrase Frank Kappa, she'd thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin."
and that's the book reviews! overall a great reading year thus far, probably won't keep it up since i'm not traveling that much after this (the fall semester is upon us), but perhaps there will be a part 2, or i'll at least update the maps if i don't write more.
the source code for the map can be found here