The compendiums. I often shy away from such collections because, to be blunt, I don’t like them very much. I love reading short story collections, but when I do, I like reading them all from one author, like a big chunk of chocolate rather than an assortment of tiny bits of candy that mixed anthologies always end up feeling to me. But the blurb for Africa39: stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who I’ve been reading since Purple Hibiscus came out) and Dinaw Mengestu (who writes about Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Diaspora, so you know I love), so I read it and these are my random thoughts regarding that decision:

The first story is Adichie’s and I’m thinking okay, this can work. I can overlook an introduction that makes liberal use of etc. etc. (it’s a pre-release; maybe the intro is still getting polished) and talks about dialectical materialism like I should know what that means more than my vague sense it has something to do with Karl Marx. So we have our amazing first story: heart rendering and true feeling and what you want a short story to be. And the second story is by an author unknown to me, Monica Arac de Nyeko and it’s also amazing, capturing class and religion and childhood and wrapping it all up in a banana leaf like a tamale.

And then the quality becomes variable and I ended up slogging through most of the other thirty-seven stories. It’s just everything I dislike about compendiums like this. The quality of the stories is variable. The style is variable. My mind gets all turned upside down as I go from stories with lazy storytelling:

…check my reflection in the glass door. [this is followed by five lines of what she looks like in the mirrored doors]

Number 9, Nadifa Mohammed

(Don’t have a character look in the mirror and tell me what they look like. I’m pretty sure that’s on page one of Writing Fiction);

to stories of rhythmic, melodic lists ending in tea:

It’s a prison of files arranged alphabetically — Assorted toiletries, Baby Foods, Body Building, Body care, Bulk Items, Confectionary and so on until Teas.

Day and Night, Mehul Gohil;

to descriptions so spot on that I’m angry I didn’t think of them myself:

He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light, she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her.

Sometime Before Maulidi, Ndinda Kioko;

to scenes I want to steal:

‘Bury me in the evening, under glittering stars from above and a sea of lit candles from among yourselves.’ … how we in our pyjamas fobbed moths which somehow understood the gravity of our collective mourning.

Rusty Bell, Nthikeng Mohlele;

and sentences I’m going to use myself somewhere, someday:

I used to like my brother’s girlfriend, until …

Echoes of Mirth, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

and then back to overwritten strained metaphors:

…it seemed that the countryside was quietly hysterical.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Mary Watson

until I’m so confused that I have no idea if

They all had penises the size of semicolons … After a while they all had to leave his loft and find another place for their semicolon parade.

No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimmy Hendrix is Playing, Clifton Gachagua

is good writing or not. Is it clever? Is it overdone. I have no idea. I’m so lost.

Then, too, these aren’t all short stories. Some are, but some are excerpts from novels or, far worse, novels in progress. So I read a fully enclosed story, followed by open ended scenes that need the rest of the novel there, that introduce characters I should have already met, and hint at situations that haven’t been resolved, and thus I feel cheated. Add to this that some of these excerpts are stream-of-consciousness and I have nothing to situate myself in, nothing at all. I am adrift.

I once took a music CD out of the library about music in Africa. It was sixty or so songs, from all over the continent, in many different languages and pretty much all styles: rap, reggae, country, rock and roll, instrumental, traditional, techno, and mash-ups of any of those and more (best song on that album Barra Barra by Rachid Taha). It seemed very much like the music company was saying Look, African music isn’t all Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba (although both were on the CD). This collection should likely be viewed as a wordy-sampler offering the same thing. Look Africa can do crime novels! Mystery! Literary! Stream of Consciousness! Didactic fables! But, at the end, after what felt like a slog, I don’t know if I needed to be convinced of all that. But it was a diversion to have a book of Africa with minimal Europeans and no lions and a cover without a picture of an acacia tree with the setting sun in the background.

So, should you read this book: Yes? No? It jumps all over the place that I can’t tell you. If you are interested in works by POC, maybe? How do you rank, or recommend, or anti-recommend, a collection of stories where some were worth it and others just made you want to [insert your least favourite chore to do here, like I really hate scrubbing the bathtub or dusting] rather than read another page? I’m new to this reviewing business so I don’t know. You spin the wheel, you take your chances, as my mother says. You’re going to have to make up your own mind.

Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey goes on sale October 28, 2014.

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

Apparently the full title is The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn’t Mean To. That is a pretty lengthy title. If nothing else, this book might win the award for the longest titled book I’ve ever read.

Sometimes I read a book and from very close to the first page, I know this isn’t a book for me. I know stories come to the author as they come; an author cannot necessarily give his characters or her setting some drastic makeover to appease me, a small-time writer in a distant corner of the internet, still, when it comes right down to it, the best I can say about this book is that it is about a bland man, who has a bunch of bland friends and moves around Europe inoffensively interacting with the local populace, with the exception of one event near the beginning of the novel, when he drives the car in which Archduke Francis Ferndinand is assassinated in. So there’s his bit of exceptionalism, along with almost having beaten a chess master as a child, which, I guess, is supposed to make up for his monotonous personality through out the rest of the novel. Bland plus minutely exceptional still equals dull.

The characterization of the non-Johan characters in this novel is easy to comment upon, in that there isn’t any. Secondary characters have no depth and seem to exist soley to prop Johan up – from his friend Cicero who putters Johan around after Johan starts to lose his mind, to Count Kaunitz who essentially gives Johan an everlasting and infinite amount of money to propel him through the rest of the novel, to his true love Lorelei who decides to be faithful and search forever for her lost love Johan to remind us constantly, basically in every chapter, how extraordinary Johan is, even though there’s no logical reason why she would spend the rest of her life pining over someone who is, essentially, a lump of person with no personality. Lorelei is, essentially, like every other woman in the novel – there to actualize the male. None of the women (Johan’s mother, Lorelei, Cicero’s two wives, Cicero’s daughter, all the nurses Johan encounters) have any purpose or motivation that isn’t intrinsically tied to either Johan or Cicero, neither of whom are compelling enough to merit this; when characters need conventionally attractive sycophants to reassure readers how marvelous the characters are, that’s lazy writing. Plus, I haven’t read such a nurse fixation since Garp:

He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses’ toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying … From the nurses and their love, [Johan] extrapolated a theory that explained everything.

And so we get to another part of this book that is not for me: the quirky bits of overwriting. Some people like this. They find it twee and endearing and sort of charming. Me, I sometimes think that we should ban all adjectives, similes, and metaphors, or at least, one should require a license, gained after extensive testing, to use them. For example, this book uses resplendent three times. That is four times more than necessary. One never needs to use resplendent, in the same way I don’t ever need to read

the now rhythmic pentameter of a matured summer storm, finger drumming on the cracked pane behind him

or

Cicero’s smile dislodged osmotic endorphins from within Johan

or

stroppy, ignorant, short-tempered, garlicky, sweaty, stumpy Frenchman

or

The long-term effects of booze intake had permanently loosened his retinal musculature.

Too many words. I will allow however “shitting a sea urchin” to stay. That one was amusing enough.

By the end, maybe in the last fifty pages, Johan sort of grew on me, basically after most of his friends had died and I realized that this wasn’t actually a time-traveling story like I thought it was (based on a off-handed remark of Johan’s in the opening pages:

These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time.

Yeah, he meant memory and I totally spaced on that, plus my mind still on the previous book I read, which was about alternate universes). Although, a time traveling story might have made some sense as to why Johan, as a student in 1912, had both Ulysses (published as a book in 1922) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published 1928) on his “dustless shelves” and how, while confined in a mental asylum in 1941, Johan was having imaginary discussions about the Marshall Plan (developed 1947, implemented 1948) with Churchill. I also wonder about Johan’s infinite wealth in that in 1914 his wealthy friend put Serbian money in an Austrian bank account for Johan, and with World War One, hyperinflation, the Anschluss and conversion to Reichsmarks, World War Two, and then conversion to what after that – Austrian money? Yugoslavian money? that the initial Serbian money would have stretched out until the end of the novel, sometime in the 2000s. Would it have? I need to find a monetary historian of Europe to ask. But, of course, if he were a time traveler, I assume money would be no object, so he is a time traveler? I don’t know.

Now that I’ve started the train of questions, why was there the framing device where the son is telling the story that his grandfather heard from Johan? That seemed unnecessary. I guess I could suppose it’s also a true story and the author is less of an author and more of a transcriber. But, by now, there’s a lot of stuff I need to be convincing myself to make this novel make sense.

Who should read this book: I started this review by saying this was not a book for me. Ergo, is a book for someone else. Usually when I think of the idea of someone else, what I am really thinking about is my mother. Now, my mother likes to read and I like to read, but we rarely enjoy reading the same thing (obvious exception in that we both love White Teeth, as most people do). But I think my mother would like this book. It’s similar to another book I disliked, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, which I gave to my mother because I knew she would enjoy it, and she did. The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms is similar in that, other than a suspension of belief, the book asks very little of its reader. Unfortunately, that’s just not my bag.

The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms by Ian Thorton went on sale November 21, 2013.

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

Is it not fitting that right after I decide to cut back social media/email, I get a book from Netgalley about the drain, yet the draw, of cultivating one’s online persona?

But before I review, I need to make one thing clear: Meatspace isn’t one book. Meatspace is two books. In my ePub copy, there’s a charming book that’s a fun diversion from real life from pages 1 to 216. Then from near the top of page 216 to the last page of book on page 229, comes a book that is such a waste of my and everyone’s time that I wanted to throw my kobo against the wall and DSAFJADSLRFE*RF#@%$!$GFSDAF.

So let’s divide this review in two then. I’ll try to get a nifty spoiler box for my review of the ending, as it gives all away and perhaps my upbeat review of the earlier 94% of the book will convince you to take a chance, no matter how idiotic the ending is.

So, here we go:

Is lad-lit a thing, like chick-lit? Probably, and if so, this book is firmly ensconced in lad-lit, but, dropping the gendered boxes book marketers shove books into, this is a funny book about contemporary London. This is a book about the guy with the same name as you showing up at your door and expecting you to take him in because name buddies!. This is a book about someone who decides to get the same tattoo as a Doppelganger he finds online. This is a book about how now all your family is on facebook and twitter and following you and maybe having someone tweet you’re going to a masquerade sex party for all the world to see isn’t how one should properly engage with social media. It’s a lark. It’s a farce. I spent two afternoons and an evening reading the book and giggling. To take a quote from the book itself:

Not Hollinghurst or Rushdie. Just funny and twee and harmless.

(Although I must say that I loathed the one book by Hollinghurst I read, and I’ve never read Rushdie.)

And of course, if you’re a minimally successful writer (like myself) reading about an author who, while higher up the success lattice than myself, but still pretty low to the bottom, there are the quotes and scenes you recognize because your family has, well-meaningly, said them to you too:

You’d be better writing a bestseller. One with police detectives in the countryside. One with murders and car chases. Something you can buy in an airport and a supermarket.

I do not believe there is a writer on the planet who has not heard some variation of the above quote.

Part that made me smile the most: Kitab fretting about correcting kerning when getting his tattoo. If I were getting a tattoo, that would be exactly the thing that I would be freaking out about. I spent over an hour moving font around on Tesfa’s birthday invitations this year. I totally get it.

Annoying stylistic tic: Writing out all numbers as numerals. I don’t need to see The 2 of us drank wine in a novel. I don’t care if it’s a comment on the twitterfication of literature. Write out the darn number.

Read this book if you liked: the first two Bridget Jones books (don’t worry about the third one or the movies – those, like the ending of Meatspace, aren’t necessarily worth your time, unless your a completist and not finishing things causes you undue anxiety).

Now hopefully I can find a plug in for a spoiler box to discuss the waste of the space the last few pages of Meatspace are.

I think you’re supposed to click to reveal the spoiler Not super sure how that works on mobile devices. Maybe I need Kitab from Meatspace to come and give me some pointers.

[spoiler]We can all agree that the twist ending at the end of The Sixth Sense was worth it. I’m sure there have been some other forms of media with an equally appropriate twist ending, not that I can think of any because most of the time twist endings are simply a schlock way adding drama or intrigue or depth at the expense of the attachment the reader/viewer forms with the characters. Kitab is an amusing narrator. Silly things happen to him. He’s kind of a dick, but you love him anyway. I one hundred percent do not need to have the last thirteen pages of the book be all He’s having a break from reality. All that says to me is that Shukla couldn’t think of a clever ending or he got lazy or he was up the night before the deadline and this is what got banged out. It’s a total cop-out ending. Of course Aziz’s story of saving the baby from out under the New York subway while dressed as a masked vigilante was fake. Trust the reader to know that. Then adding in Azis being fake, I don’t think wordpress has emojis or whatever, but I’m sure there’s a gagging emoji to express my disgust. Picture on in your head. If I never read another Oh, it was all in the protagonist’s head ending again, it will be too soon.[/spoiler]

There are not enough stupid‘s in the world to describe the inanity of this ending.

Meatspace by Nikesh Shukla went on sale July 3rd.

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

Back in the early oughts, it seemed as if everyone I know was self-diagnosing themselves with Asperger’s. At the time, I was in a big math/engineering school, so I am willing to bet that there was a higher incident of ASD there than in the general population, but it felt like on Friday we went from a handful of people who were autistic to on Monday ninety percent of the men I knew claiming Asperger’s. Did they actually have Asperger’s? I’m not a psychiatrist so I can’t comment, but I did do some of the online self-tests myself to see if I had some form of ASD and firmly got smack in the middle of the scale, which makes a bit of sense as I tend to be a bit obsessive and good with patterns, but I’m fairly confident that my dislike of social situations and awkwardness around pretty much everyone I have ever met has less to do with some degree of autism and more to do with introversion and general anxiety disorder.

Still, when Tessie Regan writes:

Everyone knows the rules to the game. They all have the right equipment and have lingo and special hand signals to give each other shortcuts or warnings. They are organized and conditioned well. They remembered to stretch and tie their shoes and drink lots of water. And me? I feel like I went to bat with a bendy straw and I’m wearing a colander for a helmet.

I can’t help but think yes, this is exactly it. I know exactly how that feels.

The stories here are more like small, personal (although perhaps fictional; it’s never really one hundred percent clear) essays about life as an alcoholic, life as someone with Asperger’s, life coming back to God, and the intersection between them. Regan writes the religious parts as a personal narrative with no proselytising or assumption that you agree or disagree with the path she takes back to religion.

People like to think of god [sic] swooping in and making a Cinderella story of assholes like myself. But the really uncomfortable truth is that when I was dying, when I was busted broke by the world, all I could do was cry and pray really simple prayers.

Perhaps these stories are true. Perhaps not. But the feeling of truth pervades every story which matters more than the actual truthiness of the tales.

Phrase I wish I’d written first: “rubbing pennies together hoping they would magically procreate into a nickel.”

Who should read this book: People struggling with addiction, people leaving or coming to religion, people interested in ASD, people who like personal essays. Actually, scrap that; this book would likely be of interest to anyone who likes to read.

Such Bright Prospects: Short Stories about Asperger Syndrome, Alcohol, and God by Tessie Regan goes on sale October 21st.

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