Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an uneven collection of short stories. “The Husband Stitch” expands and riffs on the story of the woman with the black/green ribbon around her neck. It’s well done and the audience involvement is a genius touch, but it’s chilly tale is ultimately just a retelling. “Especially Heinious” is especially overlong, convoluted and unreadable. “Real Women Have Bodies” is the most original, with a tight storyline that comments on the sacrifices we willingly make as women to fit into society’s mold of fashion and conformity. It is probably the best of the bunch. Several more stories are simply forgettable. “The Resident” is haunting but confusing. And “Difficult at Parties” is simply unreadable. It’s always hard to find a solid collection of short stories but I would simply seek out “Real Women Have Bodies” in an anthology and call it good.

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Babies are heavier than you’d think.

 Her mouth is an endless cavern, into which light and thought and sound descend, never to return.

 Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence:

My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline wasevaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

The receding bubbles leave strange white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A book about alternate realities...my favorite! Totally different spin on the idea of seeing where your life would go if you had made a different choice. Sweet love story...crazy plot twists...good enough ending. My main gripe is the one sentence paragraphs. Like a book written in serial on Twitter. Made it a fast read, I guess.

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The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book kept reminding me of The Terror by Dan Simmons. It has the same tone and both are about sea expeditions gone awry in the ice. Simmons was the better writer, but McGuire does a passable job. It’s also MUCH shorter and therefore much tighter. There is enough tension in the story to keep you turning the pages, and the ending is gratifying. Themes of redemption, fate, God, and morality against a backdrop of the crudeness and harshness of life on a whaling ship.

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The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?” “They come from our experience,” Sumner says, “from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.” Otto shakes his head. “If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards

The Lady of the Rivers

The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fine historical novel that follows Lady Rivers through her life. Lots of historical detail mixed in with a little mysticism. Lady Rivers and her husband always seem to be in favor of the “right” thing to do, or have a premonition of how things will work out. When history favors the queen, Lady Rivers and her husband support her, But when history shows that they lose, they seem to be the only people to have tried to talk the parties out of it. I don’t know enough about history to know how much is Gregory’s elaboration, but I didn’t like that only the Rivers’ seemed to see things from a larger view. Surely they were swept along just as much as the other characters? Still, English royalty is forever entertaining and this was no exception.

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Landmarks

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Macfarlane takes on the mission of reintroducing the world to forgotten/rare words that describe the world around us. Or more specifically Great Britain. (From the list of words I’m thinking hedges make up a great deal more of the landscape there than it does here in America.). His main argument is that if we know more vocabulary about the outside world we will appreciate it more. He may be onto something. The other day when it was neither rainy nor misty but somewhere inbetween I thought “hey, it’s mizzling”and enjoyed it that much more. Macfarlane is an amazing writer and an even better reader, pointing out the intricacies of nature writers’ works that would have passed me by. I do admit that the book may have gotten a bit long, even though it’s not a long book to begin with.

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Remnant Chronicles

The Beauty of Darkness by Mary E. Pearson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Solid ending to a solid series. Even a “hidden” twist in the epigrams before the chapters (so don’t gloss over those). This was a fun summer read that I read with my daughter. Yes, it has a love triangle. Yes, there are swords, arrows, recoveries in caves, as well as twists you see coming. But there are twists you don’t see coming, and a nice character arch for all 3 of the main characters as they try to determine what loyalty, duty, love and trust looks like. Destinies are fulfilled in surprising ways and the ending is satisfactory. Definitely a YA series I could recommend to young women and one that was fun to read with my own YA.

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Where The Bird Sings Best

Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was an magical realism retelling of the history of the authors geneology. I am a sucker for magical realism and I thought it was an interesting way to recall your history. So much of the stories that get passed down are fraught with a tinge of myth anyway, and this just goes over the top. Who will ever forget two lovers preserved in honey or a ghost that gets passed down through the generations? Still Jodorowsky comes from some disturbing lineages and there were times I almost stopped reading (and probably should have) because of some of the cruder passages. The ending also felt sort of anti climatic to me, like it was rushed at the end. Some of the imagery and stories were so magical I wish the whole thing could have been more readable.

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In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out from loneliness receive compassionate teachers who are really the children themselves, sent back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding light to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.


For a month now, you’ve been lying here pretending to be dead. You don’t rot because you are alive but overcome by indifference.

If a wise man is one who knows that he doesn’t know, then at this moment I’m a wise man.

A silver coin, half a shekel, half a kopek, the same symbol, rich and poor giving a half, the mortal half, while receiving the sum of eternal life.

God hides so we will search for Him. By learning to see Him in everything, we are born.

There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.”

my work, which was to lead all beings to Awareness, progressively eliminating God by absorbing Him in existence so that we would all become an exclusively human Universe. All of that was achieved with the consent of the Father, who, out of absolute love, creates us to be his tomb. From the putrefaction of the divine, our eternity will be born.

“A man sees a frog. The frog says to him, ‘Kiss me, please.’ “The man thinks, ‘A frog that speaks must be an enchanted princess. I’ll kiss her, she’ll turn back into what she was, she will marry me, and I’ll be a millionaire.’ The man kisses the frog, feels an explosion, and finds he’s been turned into a frog. “The first frog says, ‘How wonderful. You were enchanted for ever so long, and, finally, I was able to save you!’”

around an illusion, may elect him president. “But the capitalist regime, aside from some superficial reforms, will go on exactly as it is. It will go right on selling the country, and hunger will only be pacified with bullets. There is a third candidate that few see, who has no possibility of being elected because he preaches outside the circus, that is, from jail. He’s proposing an impossible truth, this Luis Emilio Recabarren. Instead of asking for small victories, like a monkey in the zoo who demands to be well treated by his keepers—a few extra nuts—but doesn’t consider destroying the cage, Recabarren wants everything; he wants to abolish borders, 

Why don’t they show a luminous, triumphant Christ in churches? It would be a bad example to the workers. If I, instead of lugging around these hundred pounds, were shooting light all over the place, I wouldn’t get money, food, and sex—rather, I’d get whippings and a sore backside for being a political agitator.”

As it is, no feline will dare come close. So I understand that sometimes it isn’t good to seek security, because it leads to death. Sometimes it’s better to live in uncertainty. But you know these things because you’re a saint. What work it has cost you to purify you soul. I saw it on your body. You’ve been beaten, had ribs broken. You’ve had to fight against many wills. You feel your parents didn’t love you as they should. All that weighs more than the Christ on His cross. If you like, I’ll lighten you. Memory is like a corset. Your memories stick to your chest, your back, all over your skin, and they form an invisible shell that separates you from the world.”

Each apple is different, because during their growth each receives the sun in a different way.