"We Spread" by Iain Reid (2022)

 

I don’t know which one is more frightening, fear of death or losing your memories through dementia. This book is everything I didn’t want to read about in my current state—suffering from a killer routine where days and nights keep looping and looping seamlessly. That’s why I could relate to Penny. Perhaps, way too much to the point where the book pushed me away. Such a shame, really. I wanted to love this one as much as I enjoyed Ian’s first two books. But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read something like that. Don’t get me wrong. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this one. Yes, it’s predictable from page one, but it was a nice dissection of old age, immortality, and the meaning of life and equally death.

"Fox Tales" by Tomihiko Morimi (2022)

 

“When the sun sets and the lamps come on in the streets, I often think about all the people living in the city. Most of them are strangers, but I know they’re connected by mysterious threads I can’t even imagine… I think that if I could trace them all to their source, they would lead me to a mysterious, shadowy place at the very core of the city.”

 

Tomihiko Morimi has chosen Japan’s old capital, Kyoto, to be the setting of this book as he spins four clockwork spooky stories revolving around a curio shop called Hourendou and the legend of kitsune as its central theme. There are magical lanterns, wild parties, rain, a beast wearing people’s faces, rain, a water-craving monster, and lots and lots of rain. It’s a circus of a novel—exotic, bizarre, and thrilling. It reminded me of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities where a certain, insignificant item connected to the curio shop can have a domino effect on the lives of the stories’ characters.

The four short stories are quite independent of each other, but they share the universe of Kyoto. They are as follows:

1. Fox Tales (4.5/5)

Mutou, a sophomore student decides to work part-time at a curio shop called Hourendou. His job is basically about making deliveries to clients. One of them is called Amagi, a recluse living in a large mansion at the top of hill. Amagi keeps asking Mutou for favors, exchanges of items of little importance. One item after another until Amagi gets his hands on something unexchangeable.

It’s my absolute favorite. Morimi has invested tons of time to build up a kind of ambience that is eerie, suffocating, and extremely tense. However, the structure of the story doesn’t allow for a pronounced ‘shock value’ since readers knew from the very first pages that the temperamental Amagi was up to no good.  

2. The Dragon in the Fruit (2/5)

An unnamed character, also a student in a university, is infatuated by a senior student. The narrator retells the fascinating stories his older friend used to tell him before he vanished.

3. The Phantom (3/5)

Again, an unnamed narrator works as a tutor to the younger kid of a liquor store’s owner. As the narrator goes to the Nishida Spirits where the house is, he develops a habit of walking down the intricate maze-like alleys of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, a rumor has spread that a ‘phantom’ has been attacking passersby at night.

4. The Water God (4/5)

An unnamed narrator, the son of one of three siblings, waits patiently along with his uncles during the wake of his grandfather for the arrival of the family’s heirloom preserved by Hourendou.

 

The collection of Fox Tales isn’t about invoking a negative reaction through fear or horror or shock. All what Morimi was trying to do was churning the humdrum texture of everyday life to make it more layered, meaningful, and mystical.

To do so, Morimi has made ‘a departure from the departure from the departure’ when it comes to the source material. Many Japanese writers tend to take a traditional folktale, or an element of it, and turn it into something new, something cute (like Vulpix in Pokémon) or powerful (like the Nine-Tailed Beast in Naruto). However, Morimi wants to return to the original, awe-inspiring, bizarre, and even sinister nature of Japan’s traditional folktales, kind of like the Grimm Brothers’ original tales. (Hence, the second departure).

Even so, Morimi feels that by duplicating the source material would betray what the text intended which is to brush the monotonous reality with a stroke of charm and magic. So, he created his own monsters keeping the spirits of the old in them. (the third departure).

Fox Tales is very rich in Japanese culture and its symbolism. How couldn’t it be when the setting is in Kyoto with all its shrines and temples and festivals and rituals and vending machines and the neon-lighted stores upon stores fighting for space in its alleyways?

 

One of the issues I’ve encountered was the subtlety of the theme buried within the folds of the four stories.  

“What is the reading of a text except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests…”

                                                    —Italo Calvino (If on a winter’s night a traveler)

In light of the previous quote, I had so much trouble trying to thematically glue the four stories together. Indeed, there are some bridges between them, but they’re so shaky and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. All I could come up with are sub-themes concerning the minor characters like maturity, compulsive lying, imagination, the monotony of everyday life, the influence of history and its tales on the present. Perhaps, the missing piece that could bind the tales is the necessity of the spiritual/magical in our daily lives.

________________________

 

Summary:

Due to the relatively long span of its tales and their open-ended nature, Fox Tales might not receive the reaction it’s asking for. In other words, it might not be to the majority of the readers’ liking.

That doesn’t mean Fox Tales is not a book unworthy of reading. There are so many tricks and hidden meaning and even some cunning and clouded plot twists up its sleeve for serious readers up for second reads.

Fox Tales is all about that dark corner in everyone’s mind about the uncanny and the unsolved that wish for no explanation lest they lose their magic. It’s like Spirited Away meets Junji Ito meets One Thousand and One Nights in the sense of stories within stories.

"White Noise" by Don DeLillo (1985)

 

I honestly don't know how to rate this book. I simply lack the necessary emotions and energy to prompt me to express how I feel either negatively or positively. My thoughts are confused, disoriented, and blank.

 

I am awash in white noise.

The following points could be the reason:

a) I’m not smart enough to get it.

b) I read it in a different decade, so a lot of references flew over my head. 

c) Being in my 30s, I’m not ready to grasp and feel the true meaning of its themes and relate to them.

d) It's not my cup of tea.

At any rate, the plot-less story is about Jack Gladney, a head department professor at ‘the College on the Hill’, who singlehandedly founded the section of Hitler studies. He lives with his wife Babette along with a bunch of kids from different marriages (which sort of encapsulates the trending shift of composite families back in the 80s where traditional families of a husband and a wife and their own kids became a rarity, or at least not the norm anymore). Anyway, the book is divided into parts that chronicle the humdrum of everyday life of the family and their reactions to what is referred to as ‘the Airborne Toxic event’ and the aftermath of its proliferation and dissipation. 

This book is weird, absurd, and postmodern where the police consult gypsies and psychics… where mediums like the TV and the radio are characters which sometimes enter the scene unannounced with unrelated comments… where the protagonist’s word for awesome is ‘first-rate’… where characters always tend to redefine well-established concepts. For instance, 'What is ‘light’?' 'What is ‘night’?' 'wet?' 'radio?'... where conversations are deep and philosophical but also unnatural, forced, and jarring.

White Noise isn’t my entry book to Don DeLillo. I’m more familiar with his later works like Point Omega and Zero K. So it’s pure chance that I read two books with the same theme which is the fear of death. It haunted DeLillo when he was 49 (White Noise) and when he was 74 (Zero K) and probably still does. My point is I didn’t feel he added anything new to the table. The reason why most of his fans find his later body of work to be somewhat prosaic, bland, and thematically repetitive.

Otherwise, the book is so quotable and rich in ideas and begs for second reads. You can pick any statement and it will make you sink into deep thought.

The used language is purely poetic for prose, the diction well chosen, the ideas provocative, the humour subtle and dark.

________________________

Summary:

I’ve had high expectations for this book and I refused to watch the movie adaptation because I didn’t want to ruin my first impression of it. It just didn’t sink in me the way I hoped it should. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. If you can tolerate divergent narrative and stylized, awkward dialogues and a plot wearing a camouflage jacket 24/7, then this is book is for you. Whoa! That came out sarcastically negative. Scratch that. What I meant was White Noise is a book that provides a deep analysis of Americans back in the late 20th century, touching on issues like consumerism, parenting, adolescence, finding identity, aging, etc.

DeLillo has proven himself to be a master of ‘show but not tell’ when it comes to social commentary in a subtle and guile manner. The main reason why some readers may find his narrative style to be challenging or even pretentious but otherwise quaint and rewarding.

"Maxwell's Demon" by Steven Hall (2021)

WOW! Simply… WOW!

 

Just finished it and my mind right now is suffering from a hangover plucking myself from the immaterial world of the book back to the physical world I’m currently occupying.

‘Is the world you inhabit right now made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from bank statements, articles, certificates, records, files and letters?’

 

It’s innovative, puzzling, mind-shattering, and everything I couldn’t have imagined on a piece of paper. After like fourteen years since the publication of The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall has returned with papyrus bagful of surprises and is ready to blow minds with this one. It’s Inception meets The Trauman Show meets Being John Malkovich … but at the same time, not being any of them.

 

Briefly, Maxwell’s Demon is about Thomas Quinn, son of the renowned Stanley Quinn in the literary world, a struggling drowned-in-debts-and-bailiffs writer who becomes obsessed (like Ahab and his whale) in chasing after Andrew Black—who had been his father’s protégé—and Black’s book of Cupid’s Engine.

 

To describe my thoughts and feelings about this title, I can safely divide it into three parts:

1) The first part was a hook as the character Sophie described it. From the very first pages, I knew I was onto something monumental and full of wonders.

2) The second relied on exposition and deep musings concerning big ideas like entropy, mathematical manifolds, thermodynamics, the lost gospel of Q, etc. I was surprisingly intrigued by the science, but the biblical stuff and the exhaustive digging around for symbols and finding meaning behind them, well, I wasn’t a fan. This part was a bit of a drag and confusing in a manner that left me disoriented wandering where the plot was. Luckily, these issues didn’t pull me away from the book. In fact, they stimulated me to want more of it.

3) The last third was the grand finale, a garden of thorns full of twists and turns and mind-boggling revelations.

 

This book is so meta like Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare (talking within the book about the book of The Arabian Nightmare), like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (talking about the book of House of Leaves in chapter XX)… and here we are reading Hall’s Maxwell’s Demon (talking about Andrew Black’s Maxwell's Demon). It’s self-referential like the Liar Paradox, when a book contains itself within itself… and that’s where it shines when it highlights the importance of the physicality of books and the creative process of writing them.

 

Good stories are the ones that trigger, invoke, and propel readers to talk and analyze and write wordy reviews about them. Personally, this book is an insta classic that, I believe, it has cocooned itself in amber for future generations to appreciate what a good story looks and feels like. It has rewound time for me back to when I was in my twenties, a time when I was truly savouring the act of reading and imagining.

   

Summary:

Maxwell’s Demon is not a love letter to the written word. It’s an obituary to the dying physicality of the business of paperbacks as it struggles to be relevant in a fast-changing world that cherishes ones and zeros. It’s a Rubik’s box of a novel, a machine, an intricate, wind-up, tick-tock-ing machine about grief, loss, identity, the breaking down of character archetypes and the form of the novel… about the creative process of writing books and how consuming it is.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea. There’s a chiaroscuro, a contrast, in readers’ impressions regarding it. It’s an either-love-it-or-hate-it sort of a book. The best way to approach it is to take your time reading it. It’s heavy and dense and populated with loads and loads of concepts that may pull readers away. Read small chunks of passages, contemplate on them, and if necessary, reread them, and I’m sure, you’ll find the process highly rewarding. 

"Foe" by Iain Rein "2018"

What a grand way to start my 2023 reading challenge! After finishing a couple of generic thrillers, Foe felt like a breath of fresh air. It’s simply one of the best atmospheric novels I’ve ever read. It’s profound in a classical way with nods to the styles of Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami (at least, that’s my impression of it).

 

Anyway, the story is simple. You’ve got your one-in-a-million couple living on a farm in the middle of nowhere when suddenly their harmonious life is disrupted by a nighttime visitor who tells them that the husband’s name has entered a lottery where the prize is leaving Earth and temporarily settling in a space station called the Installation.   

Sounds too science fiction-y? Well, it is, but the story is all about relationship dynamics along with a bunch of other concepts like identity, purpose, existential crisis, self-determination, etc.  

 

As I started reading, I couldn’t help but notice an insidious sense of unease and dread creeping inside me, quite typical of Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The rural setting just multiplied this feeling tenfold. So, I kept guessing and guessing and ultimately I saw the ending miles ahead. Still, that didn’t take away the value of the book as an entertaining and thought-provoking work. Foe represents one of the cases where readers aren’t looking for actions or plot twists more than trying to figure out what’s the writer’s comment on the human condition.

While I’d place Foe under the genre of suspense/thriller, a great number of readers tagged ‘horror’ to it. It doesn’t make sense, right? But if you put yourself in the character’s shoes, you’ll start to see where this ‘horror’ comes from. There’s no talk of psychos or deformed monsters or menacing aliens… true horror stems from the realization that reality is subjective.

 

Summary: Foe is one of the most underrated books I’ve ever encountered. Pure chance played a major part in discovering it. And I’m glad it did. This is a true gem if you’re in the mood for books that will leave a big impression on you and keep you thinking for days. It’s part mystery, part philosophy, part horror (especially if you’re in a relationship and you think things are all fine and dandy).

 

"The Woman in the Window" by A. J. Finn (2018)

 

So, I picked up this one right after I’d finished The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. And boy, what a sense of déjà vu I’d been having. It was so strong, I almost checked the book cover twice to make sure it wasn’t Ware’s!

Basically, these two books are the same: a drunken female protagonist who witnesses a murder that nobody believes it happened because the victim is unknown or doesn’t exist. And all that happens in a confined setting, a cruise ship, or a house. God! Finn! You could’ve done better than relying on a [thriller_generator.exe]. Not saying that The Woman in Cabin 10 was any better.  

But I don’t blame the authors. It’s the short-sighted, play-it-safe publishers’ fault. They’re too comfortable regurgitating the same thriller formula over and over again, readers can predict the plot while they’re still in the first half of the book. Then again, I don’t blame the industry. I do blame the readers in the first place for encouraging such trends. I admit… I’m one of those readers. But no more! No more going to bookstores and buying mainstream stuff. From now on, I will be too eclectic in choosing the kinds of books that deserve to have a seat in my library.

With that being said, I feel I should point out that The Woman in the Window isn't all that bad. It fulfills—though not quite satisfactorily—its purpose which is to entertain. It's all about expectations and my desire to love the time reading it. But there are issues that stood in my way of having fun, such as the chosen diction, the repetition of certain phrases, the plethora of references, the relentless butting-in thoughts of the protagonist, etc. The cardinal sin it committed, however, was the agonizingly snail-pacing build-up which took about 70% of the book, and the other last 30% wasn't good enough to redeem the work. 

________________________

Summary: Don't even bother buying it. The title is generic. The plot is generic. The characters aren't any different; they're sooo flat, I'm a fully-fledged Flat-Earther. 

"The Woman in Cabin 10" by Ruth Ware (2016)

 This is my second book by Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key being the first. To be frank, I expected more from Ware, but considering that The Woman in Cabin 10 was published in 2016 while The Turn of... in 2019, I guess all is forgiven. This clearly shows that Ware is maturing as a writer and I hope her next releases would get better.

But what about The Woman in Cabin 10? Is it worth reading?

Well, in the world of books, The Woman in Cabin 10 feels like the jack-of-all-trades. It's got something from everything, and by something, I mean 'an aspect' of other authors' works. Some readers made comparisons between this book and The Girl on the Train. Ware isn't even hiding it. Printed on the book's cover, The Sun describes the book as the following: "Agatha Christie meets The Girl on the Train." 

When I read that, I thought 'Sheesh! At least be subtle about it!'

I'm not insinuating that Ware plagiarized other authors' works. She just took their formula and, sadly enough, did a bad job at executing the ideas. I mean, with a bit of some tightening here and there, the book could have made it to four stars... but that was in another universe.

Don't get me wrong though. The book isn't bad, not at all. At least not the first 40% which I was going to literally pour gasoline on it and let it burn to a crisp. *no offense Ware*

The section between 40% ~ 90% was the crème-de-la-crème of the whole book. Good building-up. Tense claustrophobia. Decent plot twists.

And then came the ending... which was-hmmm-not so good, and not so bad. It just felt like a flat denouement, falling for the cliche of the rich bad guy.

________________________

Summary: If you're looking for an entertaining book and not one to leave its mark on you, then this one is for you. It has a decent plot with decent plot twists that will keep you turning the pages... but sadly, you'll forget about the whole book as you're finished with it.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell (1949)

 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell weaves a tale about what it is that makes us human. Through Winston Smith’s eyes, a mere face-in-the-crowd, we get a glimpse of the horror of the world he’s living in—the world of Big Brother. It’s a world where stars are a few kilometres away, a world where 2 + 2 = 5, where white always mates in chess, where 'thought' is abolished and logic is meaningless.

 

1984 is a terrifying piece of horror. Imagine living in a world where you’re under surveillance 24/7, even when you’re in the so-called comforts of your house, the eyes of Big Brother’s telescreens are always fixed on you… in a world where your own children rat you out to the government… in a world when even the act of love and ‘loving’ is forbidden… in a world where ‘thought’ is a crime.

 

While 1984 is meant as a warning for the future—even though it’s disproportionately back-and-white or exaggerated—one cannot help but wonder if it’s happening right now in some parts of the world where totalitarianism meant not only the seizing of the country’s economic resources but also extends to the seizing of its citizen’s ‘range of thought and consciousness' to reach a homeostasis of unified general consensus: the deconstruction of the past for a controlled conformist present.

 

 from Little Nightmares II

The reading process was painful. The people in Winston’s world are so drowned in the hegemony of Big Brother’s party, they know nothing else. For all we, readers, know, there's only Airstrip One, the UK, and nothing else after the nuclear bombs. No Eurasia. No Eastasia. Heck! Maybe even no wars. People of Airstrip One are like fish born in a fish tank. Their whole existence is defined by the perimeters of the tank’s glass. This is their world and the outside is nothing but an illusion. That’s why the mere act of thinking in opposition to the status quo takes a great amount of courage and no lesser amount of unique sense of individualism, to shed yourself from the blob of everyone else’s way of thinking, to think for yourself.

from Inside

In this sense, Winston is like the Matrix’s Neo, even greater, because, unlike Neo, Winston got no Morpheus to guide him. Winston had to work it out by instinct… and sadly, suffer the awful consequences of his subtle short-lived freedom.

While reading 1984,  I've had a love-hate relationship with its chapters. There are parts that I loved and others that didn't do the trick for me. The world-building and atmosphere and descriptions were so polished, I found myself roaming the streets along with Winston and shielding my face from the gritty wind and the miasma of the proles' odors. 

As I progressed, however, I noticed how Orwell exploits the outline of novel writing to pour his political projections every chance he got... which is fine. But what pulled me away was the heavy emphasis on prose with little regard to dialogue, especially when it climaxed as Winston embarked on a long journey reading the party's manifesto of 'the Book'. It was a breaking point that I thought of shelving 1984 to gather dust for good. 

I'm glad I didn't.

The ending, however depressing and ambiguous, redeemed all the struggles and pains that I'd experienced.

_____________________________________________

Summary: In a time dominated by Lenin's communism and Hitler's fascism, George Orwell sums up the entirety of his life in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a testament to the atrocities of totalitarian regimes, a warning to the freedom of speech, independent thought, and privacy.

For an individualist, this book is the nebula of all nightmares. For a conformist, well, they wouldn’t notice a difference... and that's the most horrifying aspect about 1984, the descent into a decentralized hierarchal society without even realizing it, into mindless zombies. 

"The Last Time I lied" by Riley Sager (2018)

 

This is the second book I read by Riley Sager, Lock Every Door being the first one. I gotta admit, I think Sager's way of writing is growing in me. He simply doesn't disappoint and his books certainly live up to the hype.

In The Last Time I lied, we are introduced to twenty-eight-year-old Emily as she unravels the big bang that sends shock waves throughout the four-hundred-or-so-page-long book fifteen years ago—the disappearance of her three fellow roommates in Camp Nightingale. Riddled with guilt and shame, her life is in disarray, spending her time painting landscapes of forests with the three girls buried beneath layers of paint. One day, at her gallery, a woman named Franny, the one who owns the camp and the surrounding swaths of land, pays her a visit and invites her to the camp as an art instructor. Emily's thought is to turn down the offer, but after some thinking, she accepts it with reluctance; she needs closure.

The book is medium-sized, but I wasn't distracted or felt bored. The story is so engrossing and so atmospheric. Sager's descriptions were spot-on and minimalistic focusing on the dynamics between the characters and their character building. There are of course things I didn't like about the book. One of them is the two-dimensional nature of some of the side characters. But they are 'side characters' after all and their background stories or their mind processes don't advance the plot, so all is forgiven. 

_______________________________________________________

Summary: The Last Time I Lied is a story about guilt, forgiveness, revenge, and letting go of the past. It's a brilliantly told story, so intricate and so gripping, you won't put the book down until you reach the final page. And boy, what a hell of an ending that was!

"Lock Every Door" by Riley Sager (2018)

Meet Jules Larsen, a twenty-five young woman who hits bottom and her life was in a shambles. Shortly after, the fates guide her to an ad about being ‘an apartment sitter’, which is basically a job to be a resident in a fancy unit at the top of a gothic old building called ‘the Bartholomew’. What’s interesting about the ad is that it doesn’t require previous experience and demands almost no expertise in any field, and what’s more, it pays a shit ton of cash. Does that raise all kinds of red flags for Jules? Maybe, but spelled by her wishful thinking, ‘the queen of magical thinking’ decides to take the job.

Lock Every Door isn’t as scary as advertised, but as it kicks off at nearly the 55% mark, it has an insidious quality to it that leaves readers sickened and nerve-racked. Luckily, there are so many, many clues sprinkled throughout the book about what’s really going on. If you’ve paid enough attention to them, and also if you’ve watched Netflix’s Archive 81, it’ll lessen the tension just a notch but without sacrificing the book’s entertaining value.

At first, I struggled at the beginning with the prose; it felt overly ornate and unnecessarily complex… just like the gothic architecture of the Bartholomew building. But then, all my worries were no more as the story moved on.

___________________________________

Summary: Lock Every Door is a gripping thriller that has its ups and downs that offers a story about the drastic outcome of capitalism (the expanding chasm between the upper and lower classes and the disintegration of the middle class). It teeters between fantasy and fiction, between the paranormal and the work of foul play, but doesn't leave readers' questions unanswered. I have my reservations about the long and slow build-up, but the last third of the book paid off.

The bottom line is I loved every second of it... and the ending—my god!!! I can't wait to read more of Sager's books.

"Confessions" by Kanae Minato (2008)

 

                         

From the very first pages, I knew I was about to embark on a rollercoaster of a ride. First of all, the book starts with ‘drinking milk’. And I know for a fact that there are no bad stories that have their characters drinking milk: A Clockwork Orange, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, to name but a few.

The 240-page-long book is divided into six chapters, each of which retells the main event through their own eyes. 

In essence, Confessions is a revenge story, but it’s much, much more. It’s a social commentary on bullying, on prejudice (against people with HIV/single mothers/ sexual ‘deviants/ etc). But what I noticed the most was the recurring theme of ‘other people's expectations and their effects on self-value’. The author comments that societies in general (and the Japanese especially) put more stock in what other people think of them, that their sense of ‘worthiness’ is external to them. Every character in Confessions seems to clearly display this kind of awareness:

Moriguchi: when she says: 

the teacher and the school were blamed—how could they expose impressionable young people to sexual deviants…or gays…or even single mothers.

Naoki’s mother: when she says: 

If he just stays home without a diagnosis, the neighbors will start calling him a hikikomori (a dropout).

Shuya: who forges his own logic and self-esteem based on countering and belittling the logic of his peers of ‘middle school kids’.

__________________________________

Summary: Confessions is a compelling page-turner of a novel. It's as satisfying as it's shocking. What prevents me from giving it five stars is the unusually long chunks of monologue-like paragraphs and the decision to present the order of the chapters as they are.