lunabee34

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is . . . a really weird book, and I don't know what to think about it.

The basic premise (and it's not spoiling anything to say this because Ehrenreich tells you this in the first chapter) is that she has an experience she can't explain as a late teen and continues to periodically have similar experiences throughout her life though none with the intensity of that first instance.

The book uses a journal she wrote starting when she was 12 and going through her undergraduate degree to help her construct the narrative, and part of the weirdness of this book is the erudition of the journal and discussion in it of what she was reading. I mean, I don't think she's lying about it because the journal exists and she can just show it to people to prove that as a thirteen year old she really was writing disquisitions on the existential meaning of life and Camus or whatever. But it's just weird to read that level of intellectual prowess in the journal entries from someone that age when I struggle to get my college students to successfully read Kant. LOL

I appreciate that she comes to the conclusion that connecting to other people is the answer to her existential questions, but the conclusion of the book is so abrupt and also, well, weird. She spends the whole book being uber rational and scientific and exploring all kinds of explanations for her experience, including dissociation because of her abusive family (which I think, honestly, is the most likely explanation), only to end the book in the last like ten pages by saying she's now not really an atheist and thinks there's an Other out there that she connected with. I think that's actually a fine conclusion to come to; it's just that she doesn't spend enough time on it compared on the 200+ previous pages of how nothing like that could be possible for the argument to be successful.

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Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chesnutt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent collection of short stories set during slavery and Reconstruction. Most of them are deeply sad, but humor runs throughout.

It's not 5 stars for me because I find reading dialect such a slog.

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Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Part of my re-read books from childhood project except I'm keeping this one.

Excellent YA fantasy novel with beautiful prose. Features a talking, mischievous, adorable animal.

I had no idea this was part of a trilogy, so I'll be reading the other two at some point in the future.

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Dubliners by James Joyce

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Well, my distaste for modernist poetry and prose sure is coming to a middle.

These stories are boring or bleak or boring and bleak, and most of them lack any kind of satisfying resolution.

No thank you.

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Helianthus (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Helianthus by Ouida

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is not my favorite Ouida novel. It was unfinished at the time of her death, so it lacks resolution. It is entirely devoid of humor, and while there is a plot, pages and pages go by of social commentary and critique rather than anything happening. The balance is definitely off compared to other novels.

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