I’m so sad. This book hurts my heart. Mukasonga, sent from Rwanda to Burundi with her brother, chosen to be the ones who survive. What a weight placed upon her. How must one deal with that? Lists of the dead, bodies never found. My daughter watches Pokemon or plays in the yard, unimaginable to her another world where by seven she’s been uprooted, vilified, chased, cowering in fear by the side of the road while soldiers throw grenades in her direction.

You can’t rate a book like this — a book that gives witness, a book that gives a paper grave to Mukasonga’s family, most killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, slaughtered after decades of persecution. You can’t say Oh the writing was [adjective] or The imagery was [adjective] or anything that one generally says in a book review. How could you? On a book to document the existence of people whose existence was negated, whose existence was attempted to be erased? And what if you were the one chosen to survive, to keep the memory alive?

…whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living — Theodor Adorno

To go on living. The weight of survival. The weight of the dead.

I’m so sorry.

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga went on sale October 4, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I am in the process of making friends with a poet. So I decided to read a book of poetry, and figured a Best Of meant that I wouldn’t have to suffer through a bunch of drivel. Of course, now that I’ve written the first two sentences of this review, I’m thinking I should have planned and made it in iambic pentameter or something, which would mean looking up exactly what iambic pentameter is because I think what I think iambic pentametic is (da da da da da da da; da da da da da da da da) may just be a rhythm that children’s books are often written in.

So I don’t read much poetry. I know that I like reading poems that rhyme, but then (I thought quite hard on this) I realized that saying I like reading poems that rhyme really means I like reading When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne, because very few poems rhymed in Best American Poetry 2016 and, the ones that did, I didn’t enjoy as much as the ones that didn’t. I read a few poems from the anthology each day, letting them shine on me like equatorial sunshine. That’s what I think good poetry should do, make you feel like one is standing in a southern Italian sun, by the beach but not on the beach, with that white light we don’t get here (too far north). Clarity. To be of pure white light is how I described my daughter; good poetry should be like that.

For the most part, Best American Poetry 2016 was like that. I felt cleansed.

Best American Poetry 2016 edited by Edward Hirsch went on sale September 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In which Meghan discovers that most of what she thought happened in The Inferno was actually from 1998’s What Dreams May Come.

So, yeah. I pretty much have a big, gaping lack of knowledge about The Classics, which was why I requested The Inferno on Netgalley. It’s a Dover edition, so pretty bare bones. I used Lit Charts after each Canto to get an idea of what was going on. I think, without the Lit Charts’ explanation, I’d likely have only gotten about half of what was going on, but if I’d attempted reading this without the Lit Charts’ explanation, maybe I would have concentrated more to understand. My mind wandered a lot and so my first attempt at reading translated 14th century Italian poetry was sort of a bust, as I had to force myself to read five Cantos a day until I was done.

I could see the whole thing being made into a really creepy Anime or European movie, if they could somehow account for the lack of plot. Dante wanders about with Virgil and sees all the poetic punishments for a variety of sins, while calling out some 14th century Italian “celebrities” for the transgressions that condemned them to Hell (like cannibalism or enjoying sex). I guess at the time, these punishments were more shocking, but in the age of Saw and Martyrs and extreme anti-gay violence, some of the impact was lost.

As for Doré’s woodcuts, my four-year old Kobo didn’t do them justice. I looked at some online afterwards, where one could see the detail better. I did appreciate that people in the illustrations, some, like me, had paunches or flabby arms or meaty thighs. Actually, that’s probably what I enjoyed most about this copy of The Inferno: a reminder that our current obsession with the correct form of body is just that: current.

So I read A Classic. Yay me. Now to return to my modern novels that I understand, and enjoy, much better.

The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (Dover Edition translated by Longfellow and with woodcut illustrations by Doré) went on sale July 20, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(And, as always with dead authors, I checked yes on the Netgalley for being interested in connecting with the author so that my interest in Netgalley‘s necromancy program is again noted.)

I know this book came out last year. I wanted to read it. I’m pretty sure it was on Netgalley around the publication date and, as so many of my emails from Netgalley say, my request was denied. Then, suddenly, it’s on Netgalley again, a year later, free for anyone to read. Well, I’m an anyone. Huzzah!

So Eileen. A quarter of the way through, I thought to myself Okay, the narrator says something is going to happen. A third of the way through, I thought to myself I wonder if this something is going to happen soon. Half way through I thought It would be nice if instead of the narrator telling me that something is going to happen that whatever that something is actually does happen. Two-thirds of the way through I don’t think I’m going to care about whatever this something is when/if it does happen. Three-quarters of the way through Shut up narrator and just let the something happen already!

Then the something happens and it’s nothing you couldn’t see coming from a couple miles off. There’s definitely an ick factor that’ll have the story stick to me like a bad smell, but by the time it happens, I did not care. It’s like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness — all that buildup and for what? Some pearl-clutching distaste and the horror, the horror. A sourness, a souring of the imagination.

I didn’t enjoy Eileen, not that one is meant to. I feel sort of slimy after reading it because, as I said, from a couple miles off I could see what was coming, but I read to the end anyway. What does that say about me?

Although, I could have done less with Moshfegh telling me something was going to happen and just getting to the crux of it already.

Repetitive narration wrapped in very good writing.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh went on sale August 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m going to make the villain a poo. No, a sausage!

This book is awesome. I love it. This book is all about drawing and making your own story. You also get to read along with what the duck Carl says. Kids will enjoy this book. My favourite thing was when I got to draw Carl’s disguise.

Are there others in the series? I want to do the other ones!

(Tesfa, age 7.)

Doodle Adventures: The Pursuit of the Pesky Pizza Pirate! by Mike Lowery went on sale September 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Leanne Shapton owns many bathing suits. This is a large, sociological difference between us. I own one bathing suit. When it falls apart, I throw it out and buy another. A whole section of photographs of bathing suits and their accompanying stories fills out the middle of Shapton’s Swimming Studies. Then little vignettes: where purchased, why, worn when, why. It felt like floating, as much as reading about buying bathing suits can feel like floating, in a warm pool. One can hear the lap of waves on the tiles at the edge of the pool. Schlap schwap schlap schwap gelap.

The book is all mini-essays, mini-memoirs. There isn’t really a story or a plot. Just the idea of being in water by choice. To swim (feet off the ground) versus to bathe (feet on). The sound of water, as said, comes through the writing. But for a book with so many pools, I’d expect the smell of chlorine to come through too. It didn’t. Maybe Shapton became inured to it after all her hours of swimming practice. I expected it though, the smell, tangy and chemical.

No purpose to the book, but there’s no purpose to swimming, racing or not. But we do it. We write, we read, we swim or bathe. The book is like a distillation of the idea of a swim. Like a thread you can show to an alien species to say Here. We do this because of these reasons.

I like swimming. I like swimming more than reading about swimming, but reading about swimming can be okay too.

I had this book on my want-to-read list for a long time. I found it recently on Netgalley. It was published in 2012. Maybe the publisher forgot it was still up there. Maybe it’s a reissue. But I found it there, so I downloaded it, then got annoyed that the pictures weren’t there, so I took out a copy from the library. A sort of round-about way of getting to read this book.

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton went on sale July 5, 2012.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

As I was taking the cows to pasture, a policeman came and hung me from the walnut tree.

Books by poets are always more about sound than anything else to me. Maja Haderlap is a poet; I can tell even in translation from German. Angel of Oblivion is all sound, rhythm, cadence. But then it’s transient too. We can float only until we realize that not much happens in a book of sound.

There are stories. Our narrator grows up, a Carinthian Slovene in Austria, within sight of the Yugoslav border. Post-war, her community is a melting pot of troubles, othered by the German-speaking Austrians for their Slovenian dialect and their group’s partisan resistance of the Nazis (and hence any collaborating Austrians) during the Second World War. Everyone is troubled. The traumas of the older generation (concentration camp survivors, PTSD suffering former partisans, torture victims) leech into the lives of the young. You can think of it like genetic memory. You can think of it like poison from both nature and nurture.

And they tell stories. The partisans meet again and again as our narrator grows to tell their stories again and again. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is let go. Poems smuggled out of Auschwitz published in minority Slovenian Austrian journals. Who betrayed whom. Who fought valiantly. Who was taken. Who survived. Who didn’t. Telling ourselves stories in order to live.

Our narrator goes to Bled, as we all should do. Here’s a photo I took there.

Rhythm, sound, fragments. Don’t forget, but don’t expect a linear plot line and a traditional story either.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap went on sale August 16, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Some time ago I read an article online, now lost to the pits of the internet found it! about libraries weeding books. All through reading P.S. Your Not Listening, I kept coming back to that thought of weeding. Would I weed this book? Or would I let it be, with the understanding that it’s a product of its time? On one side, it’s an sweet, slightly bland, story about a teacher’s first year working with “unteachable” kids. On the other side, it’s from the 1970s, the language is dated (mongoloid, retarded, etc.), and other than a testimony of its own existence, there’s not a lot of depth there. Or, I suppose there is depth there but, it’s not the depth that was put there at the time of writing, but rather reading the book now, from a 2016 perspective, man, being a working woman was awful back in the 1970s. Sure, it’s fine for your husband to go out for drinks in the evening, but if you’ve got a work meeting in the evening, well then, aren’t you just cutting into family time. Aren’t you just a lousy wife and mother, which should always come first.

So yay second wave feminism.

But, yeah, probably not the point of the book.

So weed or not? Clearly, as it’s being republished in 2016, there’s an argument for letting it lie. But, as for a purpose in the larger universe of books, I’m not sure. Short and quick to read (although did she get consent from the kids she’s writing about? How much exactly is fictionalized? I guess that’s another whole issue to consider with this book), interesting from a sociological/historical standpoint, but also dated. Hedge-clippers or not, you be the judge.

P.S. Your Not Listening by Eleanor Craig was re-released on May 13, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Maybe I don’t get comic books. I always think I’m going to like them more than I end up doing. Like Private Beach, which seemed like it would be kind of quirky and sullen, but in a good, spooky way, and then just reads like an idea of a story rather than a story itself. The “newly added resolution” didn’t help much (maybe, like comic books, resolution is something I don’t get either). The idea of the story, I liked that. I liked that a lot. But it’s just a throw-away. There’s more time spent in having the main characters neg on strangers and generally be misanthropic.

Time speeding up so [undetermined creatures] can feed on our misery faster! How can you just dangle that in front of us and then just go back to pedestrian twenty-somethings trying to be hipster ironic and cool? It grates on me to have such a good idea squandered.

Private Beach by David Jerome Hahn went on sale July 20, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read this book in one day, in one sitting. Even with the gaps, the lacking years, the bits and pieces that are missing, it’s a full life of a story. An antithetical to our current need to know everything, to dredge up everything, to consume ourselves with the misery of others. What happened in the truck? Or with her father? Or with snakes? We can drive ourselves crazy with the desire to know everything, or, instead, we can wrap ourselves up with what we have, a story like a blanket: a mother visiting her daughter in the hospital. We aren’t there. This story is for the characters and we are already greedily enough peeking in.

Take all you can from My Name is Lucy Barton. Even in its slightness, whole worlds exist.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout went on sale January 12, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.