Book Review: September 2023

I solemnly swear I’ll try to avoid spoilers in these micro-reviews. Also, I wrote this in September, but kinda forgot to post it until now (October 8th). Oops!

A few months ago, a stray, viral, and mysteriously compelling tweet by Twitter user bigolas dickolas inspired me to read This Is How You Lose the Time War. It’s a creative, poetic, sapphic, science-fiction time-travel when-the-hell-did-I-start-crying love story. Not exactly how I was planning on getting back into reading, but it certainly did the trick: many YouTube reviews, book hauls, and author interviews later, I had amassed a backlog of books that were at least marginally interesting. Consequently, for the remaining year, I set a lofty goal of reading 16 books.^{1 2}

Of course, a goal is just a number. For a number of reasons, September has been the first real month I’ve been able to dedicate significant amounts of time towards reading. As you’ll see, there was no real theme to the books I read in September: I pulled 2 (and a half-ish) books off the top of my Goodreads queue and got to work. In celebration and reinforcement of the good habit, I figure I can hold myself to write reviews of the books I’ve read every month — easy content!

Without further ado: what did I read this month?

Demon Copperhead

Christ on a bike, what a book. Set in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a loud, in-your-face exhibition of the realities of living within the vicious cycle of institutionalized poverty and marginalization. Kingsolver does a fantastic job of making you care about Demon, despite a persistent outcome: the kid gets crushed under the weight of the world. There are very few moments in this book where you feel psychologically secure in what’s happening — there’s always a lingering specter of concern for Demon’s actions, surroundings, and motivations.

I liked this book so much that I felt the need to watch two interviews with the author. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but finding out Kingsolver grew up in a small town in eastern Kentucky made perfect sense in retrospect — there were moments in the book that felt like they were pulling from a deeply-lived and loved reservoir of memories, people, language, and culture.

For so many reasons, this book was fantastic. A bit longer than I had planned on tackling relative to my return to reading (546 pages), but quality over quantity! Five stars!

The Stranger

The Stranger is my first read from famed French writer-philosopher Albert Camus, and it was a trip. Our protagonist, Mersault, presents as almost entirely indifferent, unlikable, inscrutable, and yet fully-set in his ideology — this is not a coming-of-age story of growth and development. Through him, Camus explores how we interpret the world in shades of good and evil – what is right versus what is wrong – rather than facing the facts: things just are.

When I first started reading, I (naturally?) assumed the titular stranger referred to the man Mersault senselessly murders on a beach. On reflection, however, it’s clear that it’s Mersault himself who is a stranger — to society, to religion, and at times, even to himself. Of course, experience begets interpretation – forged by our own experiences and biases – and up until the book’s conclusion, Mersault’s role is that an unknowing messenger: the world and the stars do not think of you, and what you do (and don’t do) has no real bearing on your final outcome.

Overall, I enjoyed this book! I’ve heard strong praise for Camus’ later works – The Plague and The Fall – and I’ll keep them in mind whenever I’m feeling a bit cerebral. Four stars!³

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Revisionist history note: I finished reading this in early October, but I’m gonna count it as a September read…hehe sneaky!!

Let me tell you: reading this after The Stranger was a perfect treat. Before the Coffee Gets Cold follows a very simple premise: there’s a café where, if you sit in a certain seat and follow a restrictive set of rules, you can temporarily time travel! It’s presented as four short stories – a woman attempting to reconcile a recent break-up, a nurse losing her husband to Alzheimers, two sisters who diverged in a yellow wood discovering their dreams, and [THE LAST ONE IS VERY TOUCHING I WON’T EVEN DESCRIBE IT]. The characters are recurring and overlap, so although they’re short stories, you always feel a sense of continuity and world-building.

A big part of this book is, obviously, the time-travel mechanism. After seeing time travel be done well in This Is How You Lose the Time War, I was excited to see what spin Kawaguchi would apply. Honestly, it was a teensy bit…disappointing. At first, the reader has a solid sense of the rules – and you may even convince yourself that some pretty glaring plot holes are in your head – but it feels like the rules get bent more and more, until you don’t really understand the mechanism much at all.

But enough about time travel: after all, this is a book about people and relationships, and time travel is merely the means through which we learn more about them. And to its credit, it does this part very well: it’s well-paced, it’s a cozy read (like it was written for you to read by a fireplace! 🥰), and the character development (both individual and communal) was heartwarming.

Above all else, I really enjoyed the plainly-simple message this book has to offer: the past is fixed, but the present is unbounded in its capacity to change the future. So, despite some of the 🧢 on the sci-fi side, I sincerely enjoyed the message, characters, and Kawaguchi’s delivery. Three (and a half) stars!

(A very tangential, if not shallow, side-track: this book has a pretty cover with a cute lil cat on it⁴, and naturally, I wanted him. But, for the life of me (read: ~15 minutes of searching), I couldn’t find this book on Amazon as a paperback with the original cover. The paperback preview available on Amazon⁵ had a not-so-great cover and was in large print. If, like me, you prefer paperbacks to hardcovers, I eventually did find the international edition with the original cover and cheaper! 🎉 You’ll just have to settle for (mis)spellings like “centred” and “mum” — bittersweet!)

Next up…

So, as of the end of September, I’m up to 10 out of 16 books; technically a smidge behind where I should be for the year. Looking forward, October has a pretty stacked case for possibly being my best reading month yet:

1. It’s my birthday month.
2. It’s a full 31 days.
3. 🦂🦂🦂 It’s Scorpio season baybee! 🦂🦂🦂

More importantly, I’ve got a tentative list of reads planned for October! Here’s a lil blurb about each:

1. Man’s Search for Meaning: I don’t know if it’s because I went to a Catholic⁶ high school, but this book was part of our required reading for my sophomore (?) year religion class. Needless to say, as required reading, I didn’t give the book and its message the time of day it truly deserves. Back then, I knew this book was special and would demand a re-read once I had enough time to enjoy it on my own — and here we are!
2. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence: I remember listening to Dr. Lembke on two different episodes of the Hidden Brain podcast (1, 2) and found her perspective on the modern dopamine problem refreshing. A few of her quotes – especially in that second episode – resonated with me and shot her book to the top of my queue.⁷
3. Breasts and Eggs: to be totally honest, I don’t totally remember where I got the idea to read this book (probably a YouTube book review). I know the themes of womanhood and coming of age in contemporary Japan are front and center, and after reading⁸ Lonely Castle in the Mirror, I’ve been eager to read more Japanese literature (soon: Murakami?).