Tag: English

Orbital

Still reading books, bad at posting here!

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, which was a significant factor in its selection for my monthly Swedish book club. There is a Swedish translation, but we all read it in English.

We all hated it, too! Gratifying!

Orbital gives us 24 hours in the life of astronauts on the International Space Station. Cool concept, but since Harvey spends most of the book describing Earth from space instead of really getting into anyone’s heads, or dissecting any relationships or examining any characters, it’s just pretty blah. It feels like reading an Instagram account: each chapter its own post, with a meticulously described view over the Earth and then an accompanying “caption” in the form of a crew member’s thoughts, always too short to plumb any depths.

The orbital perspective—the fact that we are constantly presented with the image of the Earth as a whole, as a single planet out in space—suggests profundity, but in the end goes no farther than suggestion. Nothing is asked of the reader. If you find the constant descriptions of Earth repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over them does nothing to diminish your experience of the book. If you instead find the internal narrations and thoughts of the astronauts repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over those parts likewise changes nothing. The super typhoon that the astronauts track throughout the book, whose damage Harvey occasionally zooms in to describe, doesn’t actually have personal repercussions for any of the characters since we never find out if loved ones lived or died. The omniscient narrator informs us of a crack in the hull, but nothing comes of it.

The judges have their reasons, I suppose, but I wonder if one of the most important reasons was their sheer exhaustion with the world. If I were still in academia I might be tempted at this point to write a monograph on the concept of the “burnout novel,” with a nod to my boy Byung-chul Han. That’s the new genre to which I’d say Orbital belongs: the burnout novel. Every day we are inundated with crises and catastrophes that demand our attention and our empathy, and maybe it turns out those are not boundless resources. Likewise it seems our ability and our means to renew those resources are becoming increasingly stunted. In that context, Orbital is a book that can gently wash over a passive reader with no effort whatsoever. There is no urgency, no message. How easy to read a book that makes no emotional demands. How relaxing.

How pointless.

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?

I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s  Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.

At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?

This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!

This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.

Gabi: A Girl in Pieces

The third and final part of my Fat Triptych was Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero.

This one didn’t make the rounds quite as much; I think I only saw it on one blog, but that one review was enough to get me intrigued. And then my US library had an ebook copy!

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces focuses on Gabi Hernandez’ senior year of high school, told in the form of her diary. On the one hand, I could summarize it as high school drama, and that would be way more glib than the book deserves. On the other hand, I could summarize it as an Issues Novel tackling things like racism, addiction, body image, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and family trauma, and that would be far more of a downer than the book actually is. Really, in the end, the story is about a year in the life of a very particular human who is going through very particular things, and that’s what keeps Gabi from becoming an overwrought or anvilicious After School Special. I’m pretty sure that high school me would have respected Gabi and related to her; grown up me wanted to protect and encourage her.

No surprise then when I say that Gabi was a welcome palate cleanser after Dietland. Where Plum was an absolute blank void who only served as an excuse for Walker to lecture her readers, Gabi is an actual character. She has a personality, she has strengths and weaknesses, she has opinions, she has interests. Gabi isn’t a manifesto, and Quintero doesn’t have an axe to grind. She just has a character—people—that she cares about.

It’s also refreshing to read a YA novel that isn’t a stealth attempt to sell books to fully adult readers looking for a bit of lazy, easy escapism. Gabi is actually for young people, and I mean that as a compliment and in the best way possible. It’s not up to me to say that Quintero understands the readers she’s targeting, but it’s clear that she respects them.

Dietland

The second part of my Fat Triptych from Christmas 2025 (yes I’m writing this in May 2026) was the splashy and much-lauded Dietland by Sarai Walker.

I had been so excited to read this one back when it was first announced. All of the book blogs I was following at the time loved it and kept comparing it favorably to Fight Club and it just seemed like it would be a really fun and life-affirming read!

It was not.

I wonder if I would have liked it better if I’d read it on first release—when I was a different person, when the world and The Discourse was different as well—or if that wouldn’t have made any difference at all. It left such a disappointing taste in my mouth that I had to immediately schedule a meeting with the other member of the Bad Reads Club to give vent to my spleen.

Dietland just comes across like Walker’s own personal airing of the grievances: with Weight Watchers, with Victoria’s Secret, with unattainable beauty standards, with anti-depressants, with advertising, possibly with a few blind dates that went spectacularly poorly. That’s not the same thing as social commentary, even if her grievances touch on social or cultural phenomena.

Obviously a book that includes a radical feminist underground that carries out vigilante justice on behalf of sexual assault victims and kidnaps British media moguls as a response to Page 5 Girls is not realistic in any sense, much as nothing about Fight Club is realistic in any sense. But there is a lack of emotional? psychological? realism in the small moments that made it impossible for me to connect the book to real life in any sense. People are absolutely cruel, but in Dietland everyone’s top priority seems to be going out of their way to make fat women (namely Plum) suffer. And I do mean everyone. Plum herself is also nearly completely without self-insight or reflection, and this obviously has to be by design because the book isn’t about Plum, and it was never about Plum: it’s Walker’s manifesto. Plum has to constantly be lectured and explained to so that Walker can have a soapbox. On occasions when Plum turns it around and has an epiphany of her own, they’re full of secondhand embarrassment because they’re just so…shallow.

One that stuck with me and I think sums up the entire mood of the book: at some point near the end of, or perhaps right after, her anti-makeover (or “makeover,” complete with scare quotes, if you prefer) Plum is sitting on the subway and contemplating a fellow passenger. A man. And she thinks to herself that being fat has given her the superpower of seeing people’s true selves—selves that they would never reveal to thin, beautiful women. (By “people” here, she really seems to mean men in particular.)

My reading of the text is that Walker means this “I’m 14 and this is deep” kind of insight completely unironically and straight-faced. Plum doesn’t really evolve beyond that point or come to a more nuanced understanding. Walker doesn’t really criticize it or show Plum to be wrong in any way; none of the soapbox lecturer characters talk to Plum about this claim. If anything, it’s the enlightenment they were pushing her towards for the entire book.

It’s been ten years since Dietland. I hope Walker’s feeling better.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Every year around Christmas I habitually re-read a beloved childhood classic that survived my move across the Atlantic. While my reasons for this are tactical and pragmatic—these are very easy reads to squeeze in at the end of the year if I’m behind on my book count goals—it’s also a nice bit of cozy comfort reading that’s appropriate for the season.

This year it was The Phantom Tollbooth, which I read in ebook form on my flight to the US. There is something about ebooks that ruins the magic of these kinds of books, I have to say. It’s harder to appreciate Jules Feiffer’s charming illustrations when you’re staring at them on a tiny smartphone screen, never mind the tactile loss of the feeling of the edges of the pages against your fingers as you turn them.

Which reminds me of a point Maryanne Wolf made in either Reader, Come Home or Proust and the Squid: everyone of a certain age right now, or at any given moment in time, had access to similar levels of technology. Everyone my age, definitely everyone older and certainly some of the ones who are younger, learned to read from books because there were no tablets or smartphones or ereaders. That’s the experience built into our learning brain. Maybe generations who grow up learning to read on those devices will have the same emotional association with reading on them that we have with reading books? So much depends on what the young, growing brain is exposed to, after all.

That’s a post for another day, though!

Otherwise everything else was just as magical since the last time I read it. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the few books I would actually bother to reread, I enjoyed it so much. But even so it had been several years, making this my first reread as an adult. Exactly the kind of comfort food you need in these deeply and unpleasantly weird times.

Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat

Out of something of a fluke, I ended up reading three very different books with very similar themes and topics (in this case, fat) in very quick succession while I was visiting my family for Christmas. I suspect this was the byproduct of working through my TBR backlog and hitting the vein of fat acceptance/health at every size/body positivity books that I had added to the list in 2017 or so, but still a bit weird for the cookie to crumble in just that way! But since they were anthropological nonfiction, a YA novel, and a dishwater attempt at satire aimed at adults, I decided there wasn’t much to be gained by combining them. At least for review purposes.

The first in this Fat Triptych is Susan Greenhalgh’s Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat. It isn’t impenetrable by any means, but it’s definitely an academic and scholarly approach that’s a cut or two above more popular science fare. Greenhalgh is an anthropologist (specializing in China, apparently, which was not at all apparent to me reading Fat-Talk Nation!) and admits in the introduction to the book that she fell into writing about this topic basically by accident. Class discussions in a course on feminism she was teaching brought diet culture and fat shaming into her awareness when before it had largely been absent for her; being a person of average weight, she explains, meant she hadn’t personally been subject to body scrutiny. Stories from students prompted her to conduct an entire research project that eventually became Fat-Talk Nation.

The bulk of Greenhalgh’s material here consists of student essays, the majority of which from her own students (writing such an essay was an optional piece of extra credit for a class she was teaching). She may have followed them up with personal interviews as well? I’m writing this three months after the fact and some (many) things have since slipped my mind. But all the participants included in the book give informed consent, names and so on are changed, and Greenhalgh situates their stories in the context of diet culture (local to Southern California but also nationally), biology, and so on.

(Expertise in China might have surprised me, reading her biography now several months later, but “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society, and their consequences for human health and social justice writ large” are very much part of Fat-Talk Nation.)

Much of the book centers around BMI, both itself as a concept and also a wedge or vanguard for larger discussions about what Greenhalgh calls “biocitizens” in arenas like doctor’s visits or public schools. Reading these initial chapters brought back memories of countless gym and health classes where we dutifully learned to crunch our own numbers to see if we were fit or not; embarrassing visits to the school nurse for check ups. My second grade teacher posted our photos, heights, and weights on the bulletin board for a month or two. It was dressed up in the cutesy way elementary school teachers do bulletin boards (I think maybe we were all, like, apples hanging on a tree?) but I still wanted to melt into the floor. The second-fattest kid in the entire class.

And all that misery without BMI!

In retrospect it seems so pointless. Everyone can see who the fat kids are, including the fat kids themselves. What good does it do to also tell them that, according to this metric, you are going to keel over dead?

Greenhalgh also uses the BMI categories to structure the book, looking at the experiences of students according to whether they were underweight, average, overweight, or obese. This is the bulk of the book and, for me, is a compelling case for empathy. (Granted, I went into this book biased.) There are plenty of absolutely brutal stories about how parental anxieties and concerns about (bodily) perfection in their children strained or even ruined family relationships. Greenhalgh makes the point that the appearance of scientific legitimacy given to BMI makes it easy to stoke concern in parents who might say or do horrible things out of genuine concern for their child’s health. At least one of the respondents in the underweight and overweight categories talked about how their parents had never been worried about their weight, or were even aware of the metric, until the school nurse sent home some kind of note or comment about the child’s undesirable weight.

Upon reflection I would say that the focus on BMI is maybe the book’s only flaw. It’s not that I think Greenhalgh is on a hobby horse or anything, far from it. When you’re looking at “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society,” then BMI becomes the most obvious marker for that in a discussion about obesity. It looks quantifiable and objective, it’s easy to calculate, it’s used everywhere under the guise of being “scientific.” It’s more that our pop-science understanding of obesity, and the terms we use to discuss it, have evolved. It’s only in the last section that I think Greenhalgh has overstated the case, waxing overly optimistic about the potential good of taking BMI out of public discussions—and, indeed, about the overall potential of the body positivity movement.

This is also an Obama-era book, so Michelle Obama’s various First Lady initiatives to reduce childhood obesity get mentioned a lot—relic of a bygone era. It would certainly be interesting to see an updated version or even a sequel, a full ten years later. I can’t help but think that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs would replace BMI as the locus of state, science and biocitizen discussion.

Even though Fat-Talk Nation feels a little, or very, out of date in places when it comes to discussions of policy, overall it holds up because of the survey responses. People’s lived experiences will never feel dated in the same way that reading about First Lady Michelle Obama does. I’d also like to think that those are the most persuasive sections of the book, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a big ol’ softie.

On the off chance you’re curious about this one, be aware that there are several books with “Fat Talk” in the title that come up when Googling. Double check the full title.

The Safekeep

Yael van der Woulden’s The Safekeep was an International WhatsApp Book Club pick, and with a publication date of 2024 it’s probably the newest book I’ve read so far this year. It even came right on the heels of Filosofins tröst from 523 CE for a bit of chronological whiplash!

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep focuses on Isabel, who is living in a house her family happened to acquire during World War II. (“Happened to acquire” = yes, you can look at that timeline and probably guess the means by which they came into it.) Isabel’s situation is rather tenuous, however; the house is actually willed to her brother Louis in the event he ever decides to marry and start a family, and Isabel is understood to simply be the caretaker until then. While things look promising for Isabel on that front—to quote the immortal bards LMFAO, Louis is “running through these hos like Drano”—it’s still no guarantee.

A series of incidents leads to Eva staying at the house with Isabel while Louis goes abroad for work. The two women could not be more different: Isabel is aloof, distant, and proper, while Eva is gregarious and uninterested in following rules. Sparks fly, the tightly-wound Isabel finally lets her hair down, and the two women begin a passionate love affair.

Isabel’s erotic fixation on Eva is simultaneously very obviously telegraphed but also very in character. Right at their first meeting at an awkward family dinner, Isabel zeroes in on all of Eva’s physical failings: the roots that need a touch-up dye, the way the buttons on her dress gap, the shoddy hems, and so on. It’s clear to the reader that Isabel is hyperaware of Eva’s body and Eva’s looks, even if it’s not immediately clear to Isabel herself. Whether or not readers enjoy that kind of signaling is a matter of taste. Are you the kind of person who relishes the obvious ignorance of the protagonist to their own desires, or does it just try your patience?

The other plot twist, which is late enough in the book that I would consider it a spoiler, had similarly obvious telegraphing but that I found to be much less satisfying. It’s a delicate balance to strike for van der Wouden, trying to find the balance between too many hints and not enough. The difference between the two cases for me is that 1) Isabel’s disconnection from herself at the beginning of the novel is part of her characterization and 2) the love affair resolves much, much earlier on in the story. This is a pretty horny book at times.

In the end I wasn’t blown away by The Safekeep, but I was glad I read it. I appreciated the focus on post-war Netherlands, a particular piece of history I know very little about. There is a precision and an exactitude to van der Wouden’s prose that I enjoyed, plus the shift of perspective in the penultimate section proves that she’s quite versatile as well.

Save Me the Waltz

A series of random events that began with my dad catching COVID on a cruise last year led to me standing in the English section of the library at Medborgarplatsen (can’t get used to calling it the Tranströmer library yet) on a Monday afternoon and noticing Zelda Fitzgerald’s name on one of the spines. Of course I knew who she was, but I didn’t really have any awareness of her as a writer—plus I happen to find her husband’s work more or less insufferable.

Plenty of interesting women have insufferable husbands, however, so I figured it would be only fair to give Zelda her due outside of Scott’s reputation. Unfortunately, even the relatively recent Vintage Classics edition from 2001 still puts Save Me the Waltz squarely under the shadow of Scott:

One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.

Is it even possible to talk about Save Me the Waltz without centering F. Scott Fitzgerald? Impossible to say.

Save Me the Waltz is deemed a largely autobiographical novel about Zelda Sayre’s childhood, marriage, and crushed ballerina aspirations. In that sense the book is pretty easy to summarize: the impulsive, carefree Alabama grows up, courts several different men but marries David, has a daughter, moves to Paris, takes up dance and moves to Naples, then loses first her dance career and then her father within a few months of each other.

Anyone who knows anything about the novel (and more than I did going into it) knows that it was a flop, critically and commercially. As someone who didn’t hate the book, and even liked it better than The Great Gatsby, it’s hard to know what to make of this response. It’s hard for me, nearly a hundred years later, to see what’s wrong with Save Me the Waltz that isn’t wrong with something like The Great Gatsby. Alabama isn’t a “likeable” protagonist (absentee mother numero uno), but that was hardly the same concern for novels in the 30s as it is now; besides, I’d argue that Gatsby is full of psychopaths. The entire second half captures in a taut, subtle way the frustrations that come when you have a wildly famous and successful artist for a spouse, and the obsession to prove yourself independently of their notoriety. The prose is flowery sometimes, but never so much that it’s not fun as well. I think the last sentence is an absolute banger, for example:

They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living-room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.

Thus the temptation to lean hard in the other direction and hail it as an overlooked and unfairly dismissed classic; to name Zelda an artistic genius who never got a fair shake. Is that so? The truth is I can’t tell and that’s deeply unsettling. It’s the inverse reaction, in a way, to Tropic of Cancer or Ulysses: instead of the fear that I would be unable to recognize greatness in a manuscript, the fear that I would be unable to recognize mediocrity.

Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

I don’t remember how I came across Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, but I remember that it took me the better part of a year to read it. This was largely a problem of format, since my copy was an ebook gifted to me by a friend. If an ebook isn’t a library loan or a book club read, then it is doomed to take forever because I’ll treat it as a backup book to pull out in desperate times rather than an active project with a looming deadline.

Burnout was published in early 2024, so Proctor is addressing very recent political events; she began writing it during the COVID lockdowns in response to the electoral defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The book obviously went to press before Trump’s re-election, however, and I wonder how different the book would (or wouldn’t) be if she had started writing in 2024 rather than 2020.

To quote directly from the back-of-the-book summary from publisher Verso:

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

…

Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward – neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and to do both without compromise.

Perhaps it’s my own inattentive, piecemeal reading that’s to blame here, but having finished the book I’m not sure I can articulate “how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.” Nor can I really describe the different way forward that Proctor is offering, beyond “quashing the individual for the sake of the movement doesn’t work.” Maybe my brain is simply too melted from easily digestible pop science and self-help books with punchy, pithy bulleted lists to grasp the more complicated or ambiguous solutions she raises.

Even if my brain is fully melted, the historical scope of Burnout still made it a rewarding read for me. Proctor covers a broad swathe of leftist organizing history through eight discrete concepts: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. Each concept is illustrated by specific historical movements or moments, such as exiled Communards as a framework for looking at nostalgia. Reading it felt like catching up on years and years of history that I should have already known about. Now that I have the history in place, I can give it a more careful re-read and come away with a better understanding of the lessons Proctor believes we can learn.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.