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Book Review of Good Morning, Midnight, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

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Good Morning, MidnightI won a copy of Lily Brooks-Dalton‘s Good Morning, Midnight through Goodreads:

Description from Goodreads:
Augustine, a brilliant, aging astronomer, is consumed by the stars. For years he has lived in remote outposts, studying the sky for evidence of how the universe began. At his latest posting, in a research center in the Arctic, news of a catastrophic event arrives. The scientists are forced to evacuate, but Augustine stubbornly refuses to abandon his work. Shortly after the others have gone, Augustine discovers a mysterious child, Iris, and realizes the airwaves have gone silent. They are alone.

At the same time, Mission Specialist Sullivan is aboard the Aether on its return flight from Jupiter. The astronauts are the first human beings to delve this deep into space, and Sully has made peace with the sacrifices required of her: a daughter left behind, a marriage ended. So far the journey has been a success, but when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, Sully and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.

As Augustine and Sully each face an uncertain future against forbidding yet beautiful landscapes, their stories gradually intertwine in a profound and unexpected conclusion. In crystalline prose, Good Morning, Midnight poses the most important questions: What endures at the end of the world? How do we make sense of our lives?

Review:
Liu Cixin has several short stories involving space explorers that return to Earth to find nothing left, or Earth so changed as to no longer welcome them. This reminded me a lot of some of them. It has a similar kind of emotional distance to it, a similar feel.

The writing in Good Morning, Midnight is really stunning. As is watching the emotional growth of the characters. This is a book that happens almost entirely in the minds of two brilliant scientists, both of whom are confronted with their own version of isolation, forcing them to consider and reconsider their lives. It’s beautiful, even if it’s not action packed.

However, there is a VERY LARGE mystery that is never solved for the reader and a fairly large reveal that the reader is aware of and the characters not. I found both of these profoundly dissatisfying. Yes, I can see how they force the reader to share the characters’ confusion and frustration at simply never knowing, but I found it difficult to accept. All in all, though, a good read.

What I’m Drinking: According to the tin, it’s Yun Chinese tea. If I could read Chinese I would tell you more. This is tea that someone gave me, so I know very little about it, beyond that it’s Chinese black tea. (I tried preparing it as green once, with the water at 175° instead of boiling, resulting in a very disappointing brew. Definitely what I would call black.) When prepared properly, it’s nice though. Plus, it’s a happy coincidence that I paired a book that reminded me strongly of a famous Chinese science fiction writer with it.

Book Review of The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen, by Taylor Marsh

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The Sexual Education of a Beauty QueenI won a copy of Taylor Marsh‘s The Sexual Education of Beauty Queen through Goodreads.

Description from Goodreads:
“The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen” is at once memoir, commentary, enlightenment, and a little dose of self-help. Taylor Marsh was Miss Missouri and performed on Broadway, hosted a radio show, and starred in a one-woman show. She was also a relationship consultant for the nation’s largest newsweekly, edited the web’s first megasuccessful women-owned and -operated soft-core pornography site, worked as a phone-sex actress, and studied sexuality and relationships for years. She’s been single, a girlfriend, a mistress, and a wife. She has the inside track to what men want, what women need, and how we all tend to muck it up. As a political commentator and popular writer, Taylor is intelligent and inspiring. She blends personal experience, pop culture, and the politics of sex in an entertaining, engaging, and inspiring read.

Review:
This was not a big winner for me, for several reasons. This despite the fact that I actually agreed with a lot of her final conclusions, appreciated her take on feminism and thought some of what she had to say, especially about the church, was very brave. The problem for me was that I think she should have stuck with an academic argument and left out the autobiography. Because often the biographical sections just came across as braggy and cluttered up the message she was trying to convey. But let me break down a few of my more specific complaints.

Marsh tried to simultaneously hold onto her “I’m so innocent,” Midwestern beauty queen person and tell the reader about all the sexually liberated, kinky things she was doing. And it just didn’t work. They really are kind of mutually exclusive.

Further, despite presenting herself as ultra liberal and accepting—she talked to prostitutes like people, after all—the book is full of micro-aggressions against the same people and demographics she’s claiming to liberate. For example, stating that managing circus talent was the perfect previous experience for corralling the misfit strippers, models and XXX-raters who worked at a porn startup and denigrating the men who called the phone sex line for some of the more deviant fantasies. She seems to want to simultaneously be believed to be open and accepting of all fantasy, while also making it clear she maintains the moral and societal high ground. Again, it just doesn’t work.

Also, several events in the book feel very re-remembered. For example, she claims to have started working in a sex phone bank explicitly for the opportunity to talk to men about why they call for phone sex. I seriously doubt she was being that introspective at the time. Some of these re-remembrances go all the way back to childhood. This goes along with how grandiose she seems to feel her contributions to feminism have been, though the scale doesn’t seem to have been borne out in reality.

I get that this is an autobiography of sorts, but it’s also presented as a bit of a self-help, behind the curtain look at various aspects of the sex industry. But very little of that materializes. The author says over and over again, “I was…” or “I did” or some variation there of. She was the first editor of a soft porn internet site. She was the first person to introduce an alternative personals page to a syndicated newspaper. She interviewed dominatrixes and prostitutes. She worked for a sex phone bank. But she says very very little about these things other than that she did them and even less that I would consider particularly enlightening on the subject. The whole thing just comes across as a self-centered brag book. We learn about her boyfriends and her relationships and she dropped several references to her own previous publications, but I finished disappointed. I mean a whole chapter in the beginning is dedicated to what she watched on television growing up. And while some of the feminist critique of early Hollywood was interesting, I just didn’t care.

Worst of all, after telling the reader how bad rules on how to get a man are, even taking a website to task for swearing they wouldn’t and then doing it, she ended the book on a list of rules for how to get your man. She didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. Sure, it starts with know what you want, which is great and more female centric than a lot of lists, but it’s still a ‘what to do’ list!

Put simply, a whole lot of this is about Taylor Marsh, not sexual education or sexuality or sex. And while that might work for some, it wasn’t enough to keep me interested. I mean, where are all those “Relationship Secrets from the Trenches” we’re promised. We never take our gaze off the narrator long enough to even realize we’re in a trench, let alone learn anything from it.

Addendum: It’s not really relevant in the content review of the book, but for those looking to read the paperback, it’s worth noting that the font can’t be any bigger that 10pt (it’s notably  smaller than standard) and it’s single spaced. I found it hard to read and I don’t yet have age related eye constraints.

What I’m reading: Coffee with cream

Mexico: Stories

Book Review of Mexico: Stories, by Josh Barkan

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Mexico: StoriesI won a paperback copy of Mexico, by Josh Barken, through Goodreads. I had hoped that it would be a book I count toward my #DiverseRomanceBingo challenge, being as it is set outside the US/UK, which is one of the points. But despite being set in Mexico, I do not believe I can count it toward the challenge.

Description from Goodreds:
A powerful, deeply original short story collection about people living in Mexico whose lives are turned upside down by the violence and chaos of the drug cartels

The characters in Josh Barkan’s remarkable story collection Mexico are ordinary people—everyday citizens, expats, and travelers visiting the country for their own reasons—who find themselves inexorably caught up in and impacted by the criminality and brutality of the Mexican cartels. In these pages readers will meet a tourist who is kidnapped off the street, a teacher whose students risk death if they fall in love with the wrong person, a chef who must cook for a gangster under pain of death, a plastic surgeon forced to alter a fugitive drug lord’s appearance, and many more compelling and memorable characters suddenly thrust into harrowing, life-changing situations. But for all that the characters in Mexico have their lives touched by crime, these are much more than simple “crime stories.” Rather, they are complicated and deeply human tales that touch on universally recognizable themes such as a parent’s desire to connect with their children, an idealistic belief in young love, and the struggle to maintain faith in a world full of hardship. *

Review:
Another reviewer said, “To be honest, I’m not sure Americans really need to hear more violent stories about Mexican crime and corruption. Mexico is a beautiful country that still has much to offer. In my opinion, this book concentrates too much on the negative and gives a narrow view of the country in general.” And while I went into the book knowing it was focused on members of the drug cartels, I very early on felt the same as this reviewer and by the end my opinion hadn’t changed.

Mexico has such a bright and varied culture and focusing so narrowly on this one aspect felt very much like reinforcing the painful stereotype that all Mexicans are involved in the violent drug trade—the women as victims and the men as jefes and/or henchmen. What’s more, I went in search of a bio of the author, thinking that my opinion might be altered if he is himself Mexican and writing from a place of emotion and familiarity. But he is a Yale educated, world traveling, white, American male and that just seems to make this writing feel even more like perpetrating a harmful stereotype from a place of safe privilege. When I started the book, I’d hoped Barkan would pull it off but I’m afraid he didn’t.

Further, to title the book just Mexico, as if it encompasses all of and only Mexico is adding insult to injury; especially since these aren’t stories about Mexicans. They’re stories about Americans in Mexico. But Americans, outsiders, who pretend to speak with an insiders’ knowledge and authority. They all naturally paint a bleak, unflattering picture of the country (with nothing positive to balance it out), in which corruption reigns supreme, cruelty is pervasive, women are dismissed and plenty of Mexicans die pointlessly, but never the American. Mexico and its people are just props for their northern neighbors to learn lessons and make decisions and act big. It felt VERY judgmental and appropriative to me. How did no one in the publishing process notice this? Were they all just too busy, as I imagine them, congratulating themselves and each other on writing/publishing gritty, down and dirty, important works about those poor unfortunates down south to pause and consider how nationalistic it might be?

As with any story collection some stories are better than others, but the fact that they all have a similar overriding factor, even as the themes and details differed, meant that I felt that repetition and eventually started to bore. Only one had any significant female characterization in it. All the others were full of men who were basically clones of one another. Many of them even had essentially the same transformative experience. The writing itself is ok, nothing to write home about, but not bad. It does tend toward pretension though, and there is a certain subtext of affluence to it that only adds to that impression. I do really like the cover, so there’s a positive note to end on.

*As a side note, it really annoys me when blurbs read more like reviews than book synopses. Maybe that’s just me though.

What I’m drinking: Homemade, iced Organic Golden Peach tea from St. Dalfour.