Stay With Me

Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A perfectly balanced novel of marriage, motherhood, Nigeria, manhood, family, tradition, and loss. As propulsive as any thriller, we untangle the life and marriage of Yejide and Akin. Adebayo's writing immersed me in their lives and in their psychology, their experiences were profoundly interesting and empathetic. The culture, tradition, and history of Nigeria played a big part of the novel, but in such a way that a foreign reader would both understand and respect it. Highly recommend.

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Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only one that exist?

The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones that others remember.  Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were when we are gone.

They were sorry that I had lost a child, not that she had died.

The Hating Game

 

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cute, fun romance. Pretty predictable. They hate each other. There is paintball. The flu where they get close. There is a wedding. In the end, you know they will get together. They do have some pretty good zingers. Despite being a bit more hot and heavy than I thought it would be, Thorne keeps the story moving. I've decided after reading a few of these romances that while movies objectify the girl, romance novels make it impossible for real men. All the leading men are ripped, compassionate, romantic, smart, drive nice cars, and if they have character flaws, it is only that they are misunderstood. Jeez--single women should not read these. There is no man like that anywhere!! Given that, this was a fun read.

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My Dear Hamilton

 

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton by Stephanie Dray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because I read Hamilton by Chernow and seen the play, I worried a bit that this book would be redundant. But while the book and play may have given this novel context, the authors did a great job at keeping the focus on Eliza, her children, and their domestic life. Of course, politics play an important role, but births, illnesses, moves, and deaths take center-stage here. And I welcomed the change of perspective. Dray and Kamoie create a well-rounded, complicated character for Eliza, and I think, dealing with the unknowns in believable ways. While not perfect, it was definitely an insightful read, if only to investigate what living with such a powerful, passionate, and imperfect man would have been like, and how smart, compassionate, and forgiving she must have been to have been his partner and his champion.

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My heart felt in the throes of reverse metamorphosis, where the butterfly was to fold its wings and become the ugly, misshapen worm.

Love is a kind of faith.

Lawrence in Arabia

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

T. E. Lawrence was not only an original--smart, rebellious, relentless--but he also championed the Arabs in the Middle East during WWI. It was so interesting to be introduced to this idealistic man have to take on the responsibility and horrors of war and watch him change into a dervish of war, manipulating commanders and wreaking havoc and violence in order to achieve his objective. Having read tons of books about WWII and the Civil War, I truly learned so much about WWI. Not only did Anderson chronicle Lawrence's life but he also introduced and followed several other key players in the Middle East during WWI. Somehow through all this Anderson related all the pertinent information without getting muddled in minutiae. I also appreciated how he pointed out parts of the movie that were fictionalized for drama, and even called into question several passages from Lawrence's own memoir, with evidence to explain the discrepancies. This was definitely worth the time to read.

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In war, language itself often becomes a weapon, and that was certainly true in the Middle Eastern theater of World War I.

Part of this may have stemmed from a common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades—no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer—but

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to snatch defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one’s own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray.

“No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? … Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked.”

The proper strategy going forward, in Lawrence’s new estimation, was to keep the Turks settled into Medina almost indefinitely. To do that, it didn’t mean shutting down the Hejaz Railway altogether, as the British were hoping to do, but rather allowing that supply line to operate at just enough capacity to keep the Turkish garrison on life support. Sustained enough to survive, but too weak to withdraw or go on the offensive, that garrison would then essentially become prisoners—even better than prisoners because the burden of sustaining them would continue to fall on the enemy.

Of course, the best way to avoid having one’s ideas shot down is to never explicitly voice them.

In West Mills

 

In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an ok book. A group of black neighbors living throughout the decades, hiding and revealing secrets. Nothing shocking--nothing too revelatory about human nature, or even blackness--the various wars, civil rights movements, etc. are just footnotes. Not boring, just not amazing.

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10:04

 

10:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is ostensibly about an author writing a book amidst health problems, personal relationships, and natural disasters. But it's really about art and how it reflects, albeit distorted, our experiences and observations. What do you recycle? How? It makes the premise infinitely more interesting. I can't say I loved the main "character", but it may just be because barring his health problems, who couldn't help envying a life in New York, living off your writing while going to art openings and writer's retreats? Weirdly, I think this will be a book I read again (recycling it, hah!) for inspiration/instruction.

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Including myself, I was older and younger than everyone in the room.

the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.

her, “I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”

“If I take the drugs, it’s like dividing myself into two people.” He ignored her again. “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.”

On the wall behind Dr. Roberts hung a tactically inoffensive abstract painting, rhythmic brushstrokes in lavender, blue, green—very competently executed visual Muzak.

“But the problem, one of the problems”—cold spreading through him, as when they’d injected him with contrast dye—“ is that these images of art only address the sick, the patients. It would be absurd to imagine a doctor lingering over one of these images between appointments, being interested in it or somehow attached to it, having his day inflected by it or whatever. Apart from their depressing flatness, their interchangeability, what I’m saying is: we can’t look at them together. They help establish, deepen, the gulf between us, because they address only the sick, face only the diagnosed.”

When he got out of bed late the next morning and had his coffee—iced so as not to disrupt the clotting—he realized: I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza’s hair, the incommunicable beauty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened.

prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all.

It was as if I could register in my hands a subtle but momentous transfer of weight: the twenty-one grams of the market’s soul had fled; it was no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital.

An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exorcism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade—an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price.

nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.

The tapetum lucidum, the “bright tapestry” behind the eyes, bounces visible light back through the retina, making the pupils glow. I remembered the red-eye effect in the photographs of my youth, the camera recording the light of its own flash, the camera inscribing itself in the image it captured.

Just as in the poems, he has to be nobody in particular in order to be a democratic everyman, has to empty himself out so that his poetry can be a textual commons for the future into which he projects himself.

But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape.

I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them—the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural.

If I were to learn she was faking her death, she’d be dead to me.”

What if she lied about lying in order to release me?”

the doctor arrives to read your future in your organs, the modern haruspicy that exorbitant insurance barely covers.

“I could long to be nostalgic. Yearn for the time when I will yearn for the past.”