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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (review by Andrew R. ’17)

January 13, 2016 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americanah bears all the hallmarks of the traditional epic story: between the protagonist Ifemelu’s emigration from Nigeria to the other side of the Atlantic, sparking a long process of depression, race-inspired musing, and eventual financial success, and her childhood friend Obinze’s thwarted attempt to make a life for himself in London, the novel encompasses all the heartbreak, alienation, and self-realization that characterizes the best epic novels. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted a novel that handles a difficult topic—race relations, especially in the cultural interactions between African-Americans and non-American blacks—incisively and powerfully while refusing to pander to the reader’s opinions or reservations. Every character (and, given the prodigious heft of this novel, there are many) is treated with a rare mixture of sympathy and harsh honesty, resulting in a cast that strikes the reader as impressively human. Maybe the conclusion, when Ifemelu comes to terms with the personal changes her decade and a half of Americanization has wrought, trails off less powerfully than a novel of this magnitude deserves, but overall Americanah easily proved one of the best books I encountered all year: utterly convincing and unapologetic, the kind of book that it would be a shame to miss.

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Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken (review by Andrew R. ’17)

January 11, 2016 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One character stands out above all the rest in Elizabeth McCracken’s flamboyant collection of short stories: Aunt Helen Beck, an imposing and imperious wanderer who moves from stranger’s home to stranger’s home, masquerading as a long-lost relative until she is kicked back out onto the street. Judging by the vast array of circus sideshow performers, eccentric tattoo artists, and itinerant poets with handlebar mustaches on display in this collection, colorful characters are McCracken’s forte, and the supporting casts of each of the nine stories included here are really what give the collection its drive. Sometimes, as in the case of “Mercedes Kane” (an unsatisfying sketch about a middle-aged former child genius), the author’s tendency to prioritize characters over plot becomes tiresome; often, as with Aunt Helen Beck, the tradeoff is entirely worth it. Overall, just as with so many other short-story collections, the humorous genius of a few pieces is marred by their less impressive neighbors, and, like Aunt Helen Beck, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry is best picked up, briefly enjoyed, and then cast away once more.

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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (review by Tiffany Z. ’17)

January 5, 2016 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire, consists of an eponymous poem written by a fictional American poet, John Shade, and the annotations to that poem, written by the enigmatic Zemblan professor, Charles Kinbote. Fear not, however, that this work will be didactic or esoteric: Kinbote takes advantage of the commentary section in which he is supposed to elucidate aspects of Shade’s poem (a quiet introspection on the poet’s life) to tell his own adventure story of an assassin’s tenacious pursuit of an overthrown king. His thrilling tale, placed in the middle of a placid text, jars at first. But as Kinbote’s story picks up pace–in stark contrast to the mellow, unhurried rhymes of Shade’s poem–little details in both narratives begin to click together, and in the book’s last pages the two narratives coalesce in a bizarrely thrilling rush. I heartily commend Nabokov not just for the technical feat of composing a 999-line poem and “discarded” drafts in a fictional writing style, but also for whisking us on a maddening journey that, hours later, made me think. I only suggest that readers have a dictionary open while reading this.

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The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang (review by Andrew R. ’17)

December 8, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Iris Chang’s account of the Rape of Nanking, the month-and-a-half-long period of looting, barbarism, and murder after Japanese forces captured the then-capital of China in 1937, is the first book of its kind to be published in English. Part of the reason for this appalling lack of coverage of the massacre in the United States is that certain details, like the exact death count (somewhere in the hundreds of thousands), are still debated and may never be known for sure; Japanese officials’ ongoing reluctance to acknowledge the episode, as well as the intense pain associated with it for the families of all involved, have also prevented it from being intensely studied by American historians. Chang’s book, then, is enormously important in that it fills a gaping hole in the library of English-language studies of World War II, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it. The Rape of Nanking is painful to read, with its graphic descriptions of mutilation and abduction and its photos of the episode’s victims, alive and dead; the early chapters especially are as unpleasant and intense as they are informative. This is a brave book, an important book, but you should know what you’re getting into before you pick it up.

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Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (review by Jacqueline H. ’18)

November 16, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been yearning to read Go Set a Watchman for the longest time. A highly anticipated sequel of sorts to the acclaimed classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchman was released just this summer. I bought a copy last week to annotate and read, and I can now say that while this sequel isn’t for everyone, it certainly has its perks. The novel characterizes the life of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who returns to her Alabama hometown after a few years in New York. During her visit, the dissonance between her childhood memories and the reality of her town becomes clear. Disillusionment is a key theme in Lee’s novel–Jean Louise realizes that the world isn’t a dichotomy of good and bad, but rather a morally gray setting that people simply make the best of. Watchman is more realistic than Mockingbird. Although it is more somber, it is nevertheless poignantly written. While Lee’s prose is incisive and delightful to read, there was a discrepancy to her characterization that I found disturbing. For instance, it was very difficult to connect the older Jean Louise to Scout in Mockingbird. Watchman also reads more like a rough draft than a full-fledged novel–and the ending wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped it would be.

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Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead (review by Andrew R. ’17)

November 13, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A ballerina smuggles a celebrated Russian dancer away from his Soviet handlers and into the United States, where they have a tempestuous love affair; later, said ballerina raises a dance prodigy who himself experiences some painful romance, while all the while minor characters around them (the neighbors, the owner of the ballet company, more haughty defectors from the USSR) fall in and out of their own miniature romantic dramas. As a novel primarily focused on the way dance shapes the lives of those who dedicate their souls to it, Astonish Me sometimes seems to be taking place onstage, what with its preoccupation with beauty and drama and tangled romantic threads, rather than in the Cold War-era society it tries to recreate. That said, though, Shipstead pulls off the intertwining love triangles at the novel’s center with impressive success, and the resolution brought about in the last few chapters feels satisfying without coming off as too neat or too overblown. Fans of ballet, and probably of the domestic drama as a genre, are certain to appreciate this book, but to the wider population the tendency of Astonish Me to prioritize aesthetics over real character development might not be entirely appealing.

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On the Road by Jack Kerouac (review by Lisa L. ’16)

November 9, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book made me want to throw on a denim jacket, steal a packet of cigarettes and hitchhike across America to wind up in a damp basement in New York City to crank out pages of leaky ink poetry on a typewriter. On the Road invokes a sense of nostalgia for the way America used to be, when the roads were full of strangers promising money at their brother’s house in California, and the good life was hauling groceries up a hill outside San Francisco, and everyone was mad, mad about their loneliness or their art or the American Dream or their girl or their drugs. Or all of it at once. Kerouac takes the hitchhiking words of the English language and throws all the vagabonds, the orphaned teenagers, the Midwestern farm boys together to make lines of beautiful metaphors and descriptions. This book is the essence of spontaneity and trying to create the purest form of art out of the whimsy of the human mind. It’s gritty, dark, and hopeful all at once, and definitely one of my favorite books.

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Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta (review by Catherine H. ’17)

November 3, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jace Wilson is fourteen when he sees two professional killers murder a man in front of his eyes. He is then put into a wilderness survival program for teenagers deep in the mountains of Montana in an effort to lose the trail of the killers. There, he must try to live as Connor Reynolds while the police try to track down the killers. When he realizes that the killers have come to him, he must try to escape without letting anyone else get hurt trying to protect him. Each character in this book has such a unique and well-written personality and story that I couldn’t help but like every single one of them, even the two murderers. Michael Koryta successfully unravels this story, allowing the reader to slowly become aware of important facts as the story progresses, and even in the end there are more exciting surprises. I thought this was a thrilling book and I highly recommend it for anyone to read.

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (review by Andrew R. ’17)

October 27, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In “The Glass Essay,” her long and brilliant verse meditation on aging and self-knowledge, the poet Anne Carson invokes the middle Brontë sister again and again as a parallel to her own experience: “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, / my lonely life around me like a moor, / my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation / that dies when I come in the kitchen door.” On its surface, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s only novel, is a gothic romance: it follows the cruel and sinister Heathcliff and his consuming, almost maddening obsession with a childhood lover. But, for Carson and for me, it’s not the romantic tension that sets Wuthering Heights apart from all other eighteenth-century British novels—it’s the fog of gloom that pervades the book’s pages, from the somber, mist-shrouded moors where the story takes place to the towering tragedies that loom large in the protagonists’ destinies (and in Brontë’s own life). Unremitting gloom might not sound like a compelling backdrop to a romantic novel, but in the end it’s precisely that quality that makes Wuthering Heights linger in my mind in a way few other classics do.

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Into the Valley by Ruth Galm (review by Jacqueline H. ’18)

September 17, 2015 mspelmanlibrarian Leave a comment

Into the Valley by Ruth Galm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Into the Valley is a debut novel by Ruth Galm that chronicles the adventure of B., a thirty year old woman who wanders through 1970s California, trying to assuage a “carsickness” that plagues her thoughts. B. is unable to cope with the coarseness of the present world, yet rejects the traditional binds of the past. This tension is an interesting dichotomy throughout the novel, although it is never resolved at the end. The ending was surprising, but it left me hanging. Into the Valley reminds me more of a collection of individual narratives than a cohesive plot. Nevertheless, the novel was beautifully written and I found it hard to put down. The characterization of B. is excellent – the author represents her as an eccentric and neuroatypical itinerant. Written in raw, haunting prose, Galm’s exceptional use of unreliable narration and stunning portrayal of California in the 1970s leaves an indelible mark in the reader’s mind. I would recommend this book to anyone craving a dreamy, existential read.

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