millennial_dandy's reviews
339 reviews

 "There was a moment when we exchanged smiles. My smile was 'I'm happy to be here, amazed I lasted this long.' His smile was 'I'm going to kill you.'"

I'm still not sure, having finished 'King's Gambit', why Hoffman decided to give it this particular subheading, but this odd choice notwithstanding, it's an excellent quasi-ethnography of chess culture, and I really enjoyed my time with it.

No doubt in part because of his socialite positioning in New York, work in top editing positions for titles such as Discover and Britannica (plus a little bit of luck in some cases) Hoffman had opportunities to rub shoulders with all of the top players of the 2000s chess scene. As a result, he had some great anecdotes to tell of having dined with the likes of Kasparov and Karpov, a slew of world champions, and top women players like Jennifer Shahade and Irina Krush. Also, a few off the wall experiences like getting flown to Libya to interview and play chess against General Gaddafi and ending up playing the insane, chess-obsessed Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: funder of the infamous 'Chess City' and president of the republic of Kalmykia as well as FIDE's president from 2003 - 2018.

He gave us a colorful depiction of his time in Moscow as a chess journalist during which he was taken to a speakeasy located under a KGB building by several top players in the tournament he was covering.

And to what end are we regaled with these wild tales of neurotic players, corrupt officials, and prisoners playing at Grandmaster level while serving life sentences for murder? Well, it's to show just how wacky and weird the 'game of kings' can be. Throughout the text, Hoffman (as well as many of his subjects) muse over whether or not being sane and being a chess genius are mutually exclusive. Ultimately, he leaves the answer open-ended.

The structure of the book and the amount of time spent discussing chess strategies and moves leads me to think this is aimed at an audience already fairly familiar with the game (and certainly one must have an interest in its intricacies to want to follow along during these digressions). However, the time dedicated to a history of the game and vignettes of famous historical players would imply that this is a book someone just dipping into the world for the first time might pick up. So, a target audience is somewhat hard to pinpoint.

Indeed, many of the reviews seem to be split between old hats whinging about the lack of depth and casual readers complaining that it isn't friendly to a lay audience.

I think they're both right, which does make this a rather hard sell as it really is only for readers squarely in the middle.

That being said, as someone closer to the lay reader side of things, I still found it a page-turner, and didn't mind too much that the chess strategy stuff often went a bit over my head; I could still get the general idea, and he didn't do so much of this that it bogged down the reading experience too, too much.

What I do think fairly splits readers down the middle is the titular father and son story about Hoffman's relationship to his own father. He tried very hard to connect his tumultuous relationship with his father to chess, and sometimes he could. But large swathes of that plotline (if you will) really had nothing to do with the subject of 'the world's most dangerous game' as the title would lead one to believe. Hoffman is a good enough writer that I followed the little family saga with some interest, but I do wonder, considering that Hoffman has done a lot of work in editing, how that section made it into the final edit when it really felt like a completely separate story and topic that only once in a while tied back to memories of his playing chess growing up.

I get that he was trying to frame all the chess history and interviews and investigations with his own experiences as a player and trying not to succumb to the seduction of chess obsession, and in particular, not wanting to let chess get in the way of his relationship to his own son, and so on and so on. He's the reader's 'everyman' perspective. Makes sense. But still, there must have been a better way to streamline that because as it is, the genre of 'King's Gambit' is muddled.

Is it Hoffman's autobiography? Is it an ethnography of the culture of high-level chess playing interspliced with a bit of history and some dramatic tales of intrigue?

Well, it's trying to be both, so you really have to know that and be on board with that to like the book.

I didn't know that, but I'm pretty amicable, and so I did get on board, and I really enjoyed doing a bit of chess globetrotting and parasocial elbow rubbing with the who's-who of the chess world of the 2000s. So if you're interested in that more socio-psychology side of the game, this is a good springboard. Hoffman's bibliography and even just the way he brought high level but less uber-famous players to life offers fertile ground for those looking for further reading.

There are definitely sections I'll read again. His first-hand stories about the Kasparov/Karpov rivalry (really, all his stories involving either of the 'Ks') are a delight. 

 "I didn't get decapitated, so my affair with chess really wasn't so bad."(2)

I postulate that the reason most memoirs are...of a... questionable caliber is because the author simply did not understand why they were writing it. And more specifically, for whom. As such, many memoirs-- no matter how interesting the life of the writer--feel under-edited, navel-gazey, and sloppily organized. Very often while reading memoirs I find myself thinking "so what?"

Happily, this is not such a memoir.

Sasha Chaplin may have made all the wrong moves when it came to chess, but he made all the right ones when it came to putting this memoir together.

"All the Wrong Moves" tells the story of a man chasing the dream of being interesting, being extraordinary, being a winner...and crashing and burning and feeling miserable (both physically and spiritually) as a result.

That's right: this is secretly a self-help book. But not one of those preachy ones with steps and little daily tips; this is a self-help book meant to humble its audience when you, the reader, realize you may also have, at some point or another, suffered from main character syndrome. "How would the rest of this go? I wondered. Like, the rest of my life? [...] Running from one distraction to another, finding any defined life unbefitting of a never-ending sense of grandiosity." (174)

Chaplin positions himself as the 'everyman' and yet, as we follow his tumultuous chess journey from one exotic location to the next, we are let in on a little secret: you don't have to be a chess champion to be interesting. His character sketches of the people he meets, and his quintessentially Millennial self-deprecating sense of humor move the narrative along while in between anecdotes about himself he sprinkles in lessons he's learned from past mistakes, and quirky little fun facts about the titular sport of chess.

And yes, this is a book about chess as much or more so than anything else, so you do have to be at least a smidge interested in it to pick this up, yet Chaplin keeps things accessible in a way that suggests the chess stuff is geared towards a fairly unfamiliar audience. That is: you would probably walk away from the book knowing more than you did before. Certainly, you'd walk away knowing a few fancy names for various chess strategies. You'd also come away with a good sense of a few of chess's 'main characters'; quirky grandmasters, neurotic (and normal) chess superstars, a slew of wacky (and normal) people Chapin played during his pursuit of chess fame and fortune, including the last person he ever played chess against.

If you have even a fleeting interest in the world of competitive chess and how it could land a guy on a questionable toilet in the middle of nowhere in India a few years after leaving it all behind to move to Chiang Mai with a girl he'd just met, 'All the Wrong Moves' could be for you.

And if you're still not sure, read it to find out the secret of chess from grandmaster and prominent side character, Ben Finegold -- it really hits once you finally get there. 

 "He resented whiteness as a reference point: sometimes he tried to replace it with greed, the drive to control others, and tribalism, but those terms always gave way to whiteness and blackness, and he wondered when he would stop being a shadow of England and a person in his own right."p.159

I buddy read 'Spirits in the Dark' with a friend from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and one of the first things she said about the novel in our discussion was that there is no Isabella Island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It made me wonder why author H. Nigel Thomas chose to fictionalize the setting of the plot, but not any other location referenced in the text (e.g. 'America', 'England,' etc. are all written about by name). I can only assume it's to create the opportunity for generalization, which would only make if the assumed/intended audience was a non-Vincentian one.

Unlike Barbadian author George Lamming's 'In the Castle of My Skin' (referenced by name in 'Spirits in the Dark' as a contentious book read by a primarily white class in St. Vincent that causes trouble among the students when the Black minority of the class support Lamming's representation of a white plantation owner), 'Spirits in the Dark' comes across as having been written for a white audience.

Much of the focus of the protagonist, Jerome's, inner turmoil centers around his identity as an educated Black man struggling to thrive in a recently independent former British colony. Through this lens we see how he is forced to be twice as good as his white classmates only to get half as much (or less). Unlike his white classmates, he isn't able to cut up because while they would risk (at worst) a slap on the wrist if caught, he risks expulsion.

The existence of this sort of caste system is something his white friend and classmate, Peter, tries to empathize with, but cannot. And despite his earnest attempts to express how (what we would now call) 'woke' he is, how much he understands the situation -- perhaps even better than Jerome does himself-- Jerome never rewards him by letting him off the hook as 'one of the good ones' and in fact grows increasingly irritated with him, especially after an exchange during which Peter accuses Jerome of giving him and the other white students 'the cold shoulder.'

It was this exchange that made me suspect the intended audience of 'Spirits in the Dark' was white people. As someone who has been this white person, I can say with my full chest that it is deeply cringe to whine like this, as though anyone owes you their friendship just because you want it and just because you think not being racist entitles you to it. Stop that.

Moving on.

As the novel progresses, Jerome's exasperation and irritation with well-meaning white people begins to metamorphose into flat mistrust and hatred, culminating in him blacking out while having sex with a white-passing colleague. Later, she reveals to him that he tried to choke her. "I can' help how I look Jerome," she says. "and now that yo' tell me yo' choke me that night cause yo' think I White, I think I woulda prefer not to know. I woulda prefer to think of you as a weirdo."(p.159)

What's interesting about this plotline is how it illustrates the complexity of racialized generational trauma. Of course it's not acceptable for Jerome to go around choking out random women he perceives to be white, nor is it fair to instantly mistrust a someone just because they're white (especially when the white people we see him interact with are in large part not bad people), but it is understandable why growing up under a cultural legacy of racialized oppression would result in a hatred of 'whiteness'. And, I mean, yeah. 'Whiteness', conceptually, is something most people should be leery of--white people included.

'Spirits in the Dark' masterfully demonstrates how high a task it is to ask a person to interpersonally compartmentalize very raw feelings of resentment while at the same time not condoning or rationalizing generalized prejudice. 'In the Castle of My Skin' grapples with this push and pull as well, but not as a main plot thread.

Racial tension between white and Black people isn't the only thing 'Spirits in the Dark' is about, though. While we do spend a lot of time on it, we spend just as much, if not more, on the racial tension between Black residents of the island, where in many ways, the racial hierarchy imposed by whiteness is upheld; the closer a person is to 'passing' as white, the better off the are socially. This is most thoroughly explored when a group of Ghanian students arrive on the island for a few weeks of cultural exchange.

We see through their interactions with the islanders how, over the course of many years of colonisation, 'African' has become synonymous with 'backwards' and 'barbaric.' He writes of how the islanders would tell stories of African cannibalism and how 'African' was used as an insult. Whereas, on the other hand, British culture is a bar of civilization to be met: "While he walked the half mile home he thought about bad English and good English and he decided he would speak good
English, the English the librarian spoke. Not the English his mother spoke." (p.6)

And yet, even if he "is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of [Britain's] cultural standards" (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks), he will always be Black.

It is while showing one of the Ghanian boys around that Jerome (and the reader) is first directly confronted with the simultaneous truths that Black people are not a monolith, and yet there are many shared experiences between Black people even when they are from countries with vastly different cultures. And the experience that binds Black people together and forms the backbone of the Black identity is: subjugation under whiteness; a bond through shared historical trauma.

And then, as though these two themes weren't enough for so small a novel, Thomas adds one more layer of complexity: Jerome is gay.

Being rejected by the academic world he loves is one thing; in some ways it's something that doesn't surprise him. But his investment in literature and academia more broadly isolates him from his family (his father often pooh-poohing his son's 'obsession' with reading). He finds it hard to fit in with his 'own people.' Then he begins having sexual thoughts about other boys, something he knows, were he to act upon those thoughts, would at best get him ostracized and at worst...

Jerome can't stifle or hide being Black, but he can stifle and hide the fact that he's gay. And he does. For thirty years.

He tries to find community in the Christian church, but ultimately rejects it when he realizes Christianity is just another tool of subjugation--something pointed out by one of the Ghanaian students at the beginning:

After giving up on faith in a white Christian god, he succumbs to the mental pressure of trying and failing to fit in somewhere and has a nervous breakdown. Then another one. And another one.

In the end, in a last-ditch effort to find peace within himself and to feel a sense of belonging he's been missing his entire life, he decides to join the Esosusu (Spiritualist Baptists), a religious sect that is a fusion of Christianity and West African spiritualism. In order to join, he must first undergo a spiritual cleansing in the form of spending three days more or less isolated in a pitch-black room.

Whether or not his attempt at psychic healing is ultimately a success, I leave for you to discover when you read the novel yourself. 

 "Emperors aren't morally superior. We've never claimed that. We're not above morality either. We're like...we're like the Greek gods, capable of great good and great evil. Some of us are on the side of humanity, some of us aren't. But even when we're on your side, you have to accept us." (p.252)

Reading 'Steel Gods' is like eating a disappointing pomegranate; there's a good idea in there somewhere, but you as the reader have to do more work than the book is to tease that little bit of goodness out.

The idea of a sub-grouping of humans that have telepathy on a sliding scale has interesting political implications that Gronmark tries to work in as the backbone of 'Steel Gods', but since our POV character is a normal person, not an emperor (which is a stupid name for these beings, but ok, that's a personal quibble), we are told, not shown, how emperors have influenced geo-politics throughout history, and how they might influence it in the near future.

He also doesn't seem to have completely worked out the limitations of these telepathic abilities before writing the story, because for most of the book it operates one way: the emperors can functionally erase a person's memory by telling them to forget things, and they can manipulate their actions by putting ideas in their head to do certain things. Depending on how strong the emperor is, the things they can get them to do range from getting a person to choose a particular item off a menu to getting a person to commit suicide or murder.

However, since the climax hinges on the emperors in-fighting, suddenly we're introduced to the idea that they can use this power on each other and also that there's a physical component to it somehow (as in: during the climax, one of them seemingly causes a storm to brew overhead???).

So that's all a bit messy, but could have been forgivable if the plot itself had been interesting. But it's not. It's also kind of all over the place.

We get introduced to our main POV character, David, in a prologue of him meeting our principle 'good guy' emperor, James Lord, while they're both students together in high school, but after James Lord witnessed the assassination of Robert Kennedy, of whom he was a ward (I assume? Why he was hanging out with Robert Kennedy while he was a kid is kind of glossed over and doesn't really end up mattering).

Then we do a huge time jump and suddenly David's in his late-thirties and has a wife and a daughter, Anna. Anna is an emperor. At first, this is only relevant because David has to teach her how to surpress her power so she doesn't just run around manipulating everyone to do what she wants. But then it's revealed that she's actually super important because she's the only female emperor that any of the other emperors know of.

Then the entire plot becomes: James Lord (good emperor) fighting against Mr. Spear (bad emperor) over control of Anna because whoever controls her can marry and have children with her and create an emperor dynasty. This is gross and very ick at the best of times, but Anna is fourteen in this story. And that doesn't seem to really matter to anyone, least of all the author of this novel.

Most of the novel is just us following her father running around trying unsuccessfully to protect her from this entire conflict.

Blah blah blah lots of stuff happens and then there's an emperor showdown blah blah blah.

I didn't even really care by the time we got to the end because I kept getting distracted by filling out my 'things that give me the ick' bingo card such as:

1. Gronmark calling every single person of color 'the black' the very few times they appear in the story (as in 'the black handed him the book off the table')

2. Gronmark describing Anna as hot, which was gross both because she's 14, and also because we get this information from her father since her father is the third person limited POV character.

3. Gronmark inexplicably having David's childhood bully threaten to rape him as the endgame of chasing David into a vacant locker room area. And also him describing the bully as having: "a black, crinkly mop, as close to an Afro s a White could get" (notice how he capitalizes White but not black on top of everything. Like, girl, what is that about?)

4. Gronmark having a hot twenty-two year old fawn over David (who has been described to us as a pretty unimpressive, schlubby middle-aged man who doesn't bother taking care of himself)

5. Whatever this paragraph was trying to insinuate: "The reporters' secretary, Francesca, had managed to get a producer's job after years of trying. She'd also stopped dating neanderthals whose idea of fun was to bounce her around the room like a squash ball, and had got engaged to a meek little civil servant who treated her like a goddess. Inevitably, she was making his life hell." (p.95)

6. An underage girl being drugged, raped, and impregnated by an adult man, and then forced to birth the baby.

Bye! 

 Such a delightful little book.

This is one of those stories with a breezy lightheartedness to its satire and with that quintessentially dry sense of British humor that won't be for everyone. Indeed, I could see how a person could read this and not understand why anyone would find it funny, and yet I got a few belly laughs out of it.

The Diary of a Nobody is just that: a diary of the daily goings on of an ordinary man. There's no grand character arc, nothing dramatic happens, the little dramas are, for the most part, completely mundane. The fussiness of the protagonist and his fear of ever breaking social rules combined with the sincerity of his otherwise good nature make him incredibly likeable if somewhat neurotic.

We open with a short saga involving his boot scraper which continuously trips everyone who comes to visit and his explanation of how this is embarrassing, but ultimately not his fault. Just like in a real diary, there are many recurring little grievances like this, and we see how, depending on his mood, the protagonist handles them. If he's in good humor, he'll make a little joke that he'll note down as being particularly good. He writes down his anxieties such as not being sure what type of dress would be appropriate for a given social engagement. And he documents the comings and goings of his best friends, Cummings and Going

We meet his family and friends. His wife, for all his little foibles, clearly adores him, and it's really lovely to see that underneath it all they have a very stable, loving relationship. Their son, Lupin, is everything that his father isn't: he's hip to the jive, he's capricious and impulsive, he's in tune with the shifting of the social tides. But he's also very thoughtless and spoiled, superficial, and devil-may-care, and he plainly doesn't value the feelings or wishes of his parents, whose greatest hope is to see him settled into a stable career at his father's office.

There is something a tad curmudgeonly on the part of author George Grossmith about how he typifies the upcoming generation in this way (and they are all typified in this way), and maybe it's just because I'm closer to the 'younger' than the 'older' generations of our current times, but generalizing young people as self-serving, vain, and lazy always strikes me as a smokescreen for envy. Which is ironic, because nothing ages a person more than mocking the slang, interests, and ambitions of people younger than you are.

Nevertheless, 'Diary of a Nobody' is a very fun book to read, and a great option for anyone in a reading slump.

A specific suggestion would be to get a copy with the introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who does a stellar job setting the reader up for the novel and writes of it with the same joy and enthusiasm with which Grossmith wrote 'The Diary'. I cannot express it better, so I'll let Alan speak for himself:

 

 i have to warn you, my love. the men will try to convince you that we stole the poetry from them. [...] "give it back!" they'll shout at us until their throats start to bleed. they mean give back the dead men who thought they were taking poetry with them to the grave. [...] the irony? it was our men who demanded we go outside to tend to their sunflowers, never dreaming of the possibility that we would wander away into their cemeteries.

Even without looking at the copyright, I could have accurately predicted that 'the witch doesn't burn in this one' was published sometime around 2016/2017. This collection of poetry is very much an object that exists as a time capsule of #MeToo-era feminism. It tries to be intersectional, but is ultimately too personally tied to its author to lift its head out of her navel despite trying to present a sort of universal womanhood.

That's not to say that it's a flop, however. There's nothing wrong with an artist creating something deeply personal -- indeed, that's where a lot of great art stems from. However, though clearly a reflection of her anger and sorrow at the ways women in America have always been let down by the patriarchal system they're born into, Amanda Lovelace fails in 'the witch doesn't burn' to move beyond those emotions. She hammers the notion that women are like fire, contain fire, can swallow fire, can survive all these things, but it rings untrue when the concrete examples she cites are about victimhood.

And there's nothing wrong with writing about that. Actually, I'd argue that her engagement with victimhood is far more interesting and nuanced (especially for that time) than almost any of the other topics she attempts to grapple with. It was pretty new at that time to push back against victim blaming by pointing out that the only people who have the power to prevent rape are people who rape. She talks about how by presenting rapists in media as primarily being villains hiding in the shadows rather than people you know is actually dangerous and is a big reason why victims don't come forward or why, if they do, they are often unsupported by their families.

She goes back and forth between speaking to men, speaking to women, and speaking to herself as a sort of avatar for 'the universal woman you' in this collection.

When she speaks to men, she's very angry. And that does contextually make sense. One piece, 'expectations vs. reality', unpacks why it can be so frustrating to talk to men about rape culture:

But the fact that she does so often speak to men despite this book being dedicated to and, I assume, marketed towards women makes pieces like 'expectations vs. reality' feel like shadowboxing.

And then there's the witch metaphor and the matches and the fire imagery.

Ok, this may be just my personal feeling, but I was really over hearing about women breathing fire/eating fire/being fire by the end of this. Maybe someone would find it empowering, but it just struck me as patronizing and it got old really quickly.

I'm also not completely sure I could tell you what the overarching theme of this collection was supposed to be other than broadly 'the #MeToo Movement and Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid left me feeling really pissed off and sad and I just want to get those emotions out onto paper.' It feels unedited somewhat, it feels ironically very reactionary. Not reactionary as in right-wing, but reactionary as in, this feels like it's coming from an emotional, unprocessed place that can lead to bad logic and unintended contradictions. It feels like a starting point, not an end product. She talks about eating disorders, body dysmorphia, rape culture, domestic violence, the erasure of women’s accomplishments throughout history. But they're all fairly disjointed, and it's not always clear why given pieces were put in the order that they were. Nevertheless, this is presented and put together as though it is one complete piece of art, not a collection of unconnected poems.

Even the stylistic choices she made in a good number of the pieces feels unintentional. How she constructed many of them on the page doesn't feel like an artistic choice that was thought over with each word carefully put in its proper place (at least, that's how it felt), but more so 'I need to get this down, and this is how poetry should look on the page.'

That wasn't true for everything, and there were plenty where I could glean the artistic choices behind how she chose to construct a given piece, but they still often felt derivative. And when they weren't derivative, they seemed only half-baked (the poem 'there's plenty of room for all of us' has this line: "those pushed so far into the margin of the paper they're dangling off the edge". In it, the word 'dangling' is actually written vertically so that it 'dangles' in the middle of the page. But wouldn't it have been cooler and more illustrative to have it actually dangling off the margin at the edge?)

I would never fault someone for having a messy first draft, especially of a project they were clearly so vested in, but very much like Jeanette McCurdy's memoir 'I'm Glad My Mom Died', what is being presented as a finished product suffers from not being allowed to simmer longer on the stove so to speak.

As a matter of fact, 'Barbie' (2023) feels like the fully baked version of 'the witch doesn't burn in this one' (with arguably similar white feminism flaws as a matter of fact) and I wonder very much what Amanda Lovelace thinks of it.

The top tier version of these themes, though, is probably 'My Dark Vanessa' by Kate Elizabeth Russell (again, with the 'white feminism' caveat to an extent, but less than 'Barbie' and far, far less than 'the witch doesn't burn').

It'll be curious to see how the evolution of contemporary feminist art continues to evolve as we continue to march through the 2020s.

Also, also, a good place to branch into a more intersectional version of all of those aforementioned works would be pretty much anything Roxane Gay has been involved in, but perhaps particularly, 'Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture'. 

 "Listen, there's a house
halfway up the mountain. Nobody lives there,
just the thunder."

As the name of the collection, 'Facing High Water' suggests, the poetry herein is tied together by a sort of push and pull between angst and heartfelt humanism when facing a future that feels, yeah, like the existential threat of slowly but steadily rising water.

War seems to be the threat he focuses on rather than climate change, but regardless of whether you fear the end in the form of nuclear annihilation or the slower destruction and death brought on by global warming that feeling is certainly just as relatable now (if not more so) than it was in 2008.

But that's where the collection's through-line stops. It's a bit difficult to understand the organization as we zip back and forth in time and place. Some poems are reflections on places he's travelled, others are portraits of people he's met, others meditations on emotions or religio-philosophy (he seems especially to be taken by eastern religious philosophy). It's kind of all over the place.

That also massively influenced my overall feeling about the collection as a whole. Those that I enjoyed the most tended to be the ones that were a bit more meditative, a bit more reflective. Those that captured a sort of je ne sais quoi that is recognizably 'the human experience' -- the good, the bad, the mundane. For instance, lines like
"Compost needs turning,
stomach's blocked. Bad cheese, political turmoil,
lottery tickets scratched the wrong way." (3 in the Afternoon)
encapsulate in a list only a poet could put together what angst feels like, what it's made of. It's wonderful.

Another stanza that struck me this way was in the poem 'Has the old Homeland Changed?' when he writes:
Down below, it's all on fire.
People grasp at inflated dreams, take refuge
in lies that catch like burrs on every promise."

Each word just feels so ripe for interpretation, for mulling over. Where is 'down below?' Down below from where? Who are the people there grasping at inflated dreams? Is the narrator looking down from Heaven and talking about earth and the people living on it? Or is 'down below' being described by a monarch looking down from their castle? Academics peeking at the world from the ivory tower? Is this about class? Is this someone from a 'free, first world' country commenting on the plight of people living under a fascist government?

It's so interesting and probably somewhat revealing to think about.

And there were many pieces like this in the collection that I really, really enjoyed.

However, and this is just a personal feeling, but I really, really don't like it when people from western countries do this thing where when they travel, especially to non-European countries, and especially when they travel to places in Asia and South-east Asia (though this isn't exclusive to those places), they write about the people and culture there in one of two ways:

1. like they're fountains of wisdom and knowledge and spiritual insight that are just there for white people to drink from and gain enlightenment, and not as though they're three-dimensional individuals with complex inner worlds and emotions.

2. like they're exotic sheep to be pointed at and exclaimed over and commented on while you're passing through. That type of otherizing and/or generalization is just, it's so dehumanizing.

I don't want to say these things plagued 'Facing High Water', but they were definitely there. For instance, in 'Teaching in the Rust Belt' he describes the names of the immigrants he teaches there as "hardly pronounceable" and the experience of entering the school as being "engulfed in waves of black, sienna, mahogany, a glistening undertow of beaded dreads."

He then goes on, now that we've completely dehumanized his students, to talk about how their insights into their own traumas help him develop a broader sense of empathy: As the days progress, my chest hammers with brown rivers and delirious jungles, desert wars and refugee camps."

All of it just smacks, to me, of the 'magical Negro' trope, albeit broadened out to 'the magical person of color' trope and it gives me the ick.

Something else that gave me the ick was the expression 'swollen triangle' to describe a vagina, but I fully accept that that might just be a personal thing.

Overall, though the 'white person interacts with people of color' lens was irritating and played out, I did really like everything else, and though he clearly still had/has a lot of growth to do in that area, John Brandi obviously has a fabulous poetic sensibility when it comes to broader human experiences and feelings.

Compliment sandwich-style, here's one more quote I really liked:

It's the hour without hands
where clocks become stars and truth books its desire." (A Dancehall in Baracoa)

Side Note: I found my (signed!) copy in a used bookshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while I was studying there at a Thai language school, which I think would make the author smile. 

 In a phrase, 'Guardians of Atlantis' is Magic School Bus for adults if Magic School Bus was sci-fi and Ms. Frizzle was a Saudi Prince.

This is an adventure story, so you have to go into it expecting and wanting an 'all plot, no vibes' kind of book. And indeed, that was what I was in the mood for and it was exactly what I got.

Who are the characters and what makes them tick? Well, one of them is a freshly fired American working as a tour guide in Cairo (he will proceed to fail upwards for the remainder of the story), the other is another American, a girlie in Cairo on vacation between her Bachelors and Masters in zoology. She is also a 10. We are reminded of this several many times. It's important to the plot maybe...probably...

Anyway, it doesn't really matter who they are because we aren't here for them, we're here because we want to go on a fun, National Treasure-style adventure but with magic/aliens (?).

And the author, Rick Chesler, just really let his imagination go wild in this one because once we get underneath one of the pyramids, things just start happening and then don't stop happening pretty much for the rest of the book. These things include, but are by no means limited to:

And that's just most of the 'creature-features' and includes none of the other shenanigans. And make no mistake: there are many, many shenanigans including some somewhat dubious physics.

The funniest part about the breakneck speed to me was how it left basically zero time for the characters to react to anything that happens, which at times verged on almost campy. Especially the woolly mammoth bit. Possibly also the Ammit bit depending on how dark you like your campy humor. Like, these absolutely wild, wild, life-changing, earth-shattering, unbelievably insane things happen to them and all they have a chance to say about it is 'wow' before the next unimaginably unhinged thing happens.

Again, coming from my background as an avid fan of campy mid-2000s shonen anime, this was right up my street.

It's made apparent at the end that this entire episode serves the function of setting up a series of books in this vein with these characters, and I'm sure it is/will be super fun, but that does force this story to come to an end somewhat abruptly in order to leave space for that set-up.

Chesler obviously had a really fun time researching for this book because he couldn't help sprinkling in very unnecessary, very obvious exposition and fun facts throughout (e.g. why the science team at the beginning has this specific type of dog as a sled dog, an array of facts about the pyramids, Egyptian beliefs and rituals, etc.). I've read enough fanfiction in my time to find this kind of info-dumping charming and delightful. I recognize, however, that some might find it inelegant and clunky, and that is a completely justifiable quibble that is worth pointing out when evaluating the writing and organization on a technical level, it just didn't bother me personally.

Right, so, in summation: is the math mathing in 'Guardians of Atlantis'? Absolutely not. The math ain't mathing, the science ain't sciencing, but Chesler cared enough to give it a good varnish of reality on top. The story remains at a 10 from about page twenty, and if you squint too hard none of it really adds up, but like, come on, this wasn't meant to be taken too seriously; it's meant to take you for a ride...at about 200 miles an hour.

So: seatbelts, everyone! This will not be a normal fieldtrip.

Side note It's pretty hilarious that in a book like this the most unbelievable thing is that a girlie travelling alone unblinkingly decided to accept a ride from a car full of guys she didn't know. Oh, Chester, my lad. You sweet summer child. Thank you for momentarily letting us into your personal utopia. May the real world one day reflect this beautiful fantasy. 

 All this time I told myself we were born from war -- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence." (p.231)

I was talking to a friend about this book recently. I had already finished it and she was in the middle. "This book is called 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous', but where's the gorgeous part?" she asked. And she was right to do so because much of this book is an exploration of things that are distinctly not gorgeous.

War, intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, mental illness, addiction, racism, poverty, internalized homophobia, disease, decay, death. These are all described and dissected in oftentimes graphic detail, albeit in poetic prose.

My friend compared the reading experience to 'A Little Life', but I vehemently disagree. 'A Little Life' is a void that, by the admission of the author, is horrible for the sake of it and as a result, it feels soulless. Ocean Vuong, however, takes the bleakness and the ugliness of life, stares them in the face and says: 'I choose love. I choose beauty.'

But he's not making the claim that suffering is worthwhile because it can result in art. He's not claiming that there is beauty in misery; he's saying that these things are real, that they matter, but that it's still possible to choose beauty, however 'briefly gorgeous' it may be.

He describes the oftentimes abusive relationship Little Dog had with his mother; the beatings, the emotional manipulation, but he also, especially towards the end, he acknowledges the brief moments of happiness he experiences with her. He writes of his mother with deep compassion even as he doesn't excuse her abuse. And this quiet forgiveness and understanding doesn't actually seem like it's for her (given that this letter is written and she can't read); it's for Little Dog. In the end, after the catharsis of all the moments of anger and fear and sadness, he chooses the lens of beauty because it makes him happier.

The same could be said of the tragedy of Little Dog's relationship with Trevor. It was overall not a good or healthy relationship, but still it had moments of beauty, of tenderness, of love, of friendship, and those moments still matter. Maybe they matter the most.

So, yes, in the end, this is a novel about the brevity of beauty in otherwise very dark and ugly situations, and Ocean Vuong is not suggesting that we use the lens of beauty to overlook the broken systems that lead to that ugliness and pain (and he's pretty blatant about who is at fault for those broken systems), but that the way we view our memories is within our power, and that that choice is something that can release us from aspects of cyclical abuse and violence, at least interpersonally. He says that finding that beauty in our memories is what can fuel a person to strive for something better for themselves and ultimately for the world.

If you liked 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' and want another queer story built on many of the same themes, all the way down to having a protagonist exploring the intersection between his queer and cultural identities while reconciling his relationships with his mother and grandmother, check out 'Jonny Appleseed' by Indigenous Canadian author Joshua Whitehead. 

 I think I may have read 'Icequake' too soon after reading 'Guardians of Atlantis' (also set partially in Antarctica).

Where 'Guardians of Atlantis' was happy to not let science get in the way of a good time (to the tune of some truly bonkers plot points), 'Icequake' takes the science very seriously. At least, it certainly reads that way. I'll let the glaciologists argue over that one.

In any case, Crawford Kilian obviously had tremendous proximity to the subject matter in 'Icequake', which, incidentally, is really more about the aftermath of the icequake than the lead-up to it, making this more of a survival story than I expected, but honestly, I'm glad that was the case.

Pretty early on the big icequake happens, stranding anyone unlucky enough to have been in Antarctica at the time, including our protagonist, a science journalist from New York (if memory serves). She and all the scientists, engineers, and everyone else keeping the lights on at their base camp spend the rest of the novel trying to figure out the likely global consequences of such a massive natural disaster as well as how/if they'll be rescued by anyone who's left.

Some parts were on the dry side of interesting because of how much technical information Kilian infused the novel with, but I like a good post-disaster survival story, so even if the pacing dragged in places, at least we were still staying on topic.

The characters were serviceable but not especially memorable. There were definitely too many people to keep track of, so I didn't bother trying. Over time I could at least keep the principle cast straight, and that was good enough.

The ending, when it finally came, was super abrupt, but I suppose that's on-brand for a story like this. And it also became clear by the last chapter that this was intended to be the first book in a series, which makes sense of a few otherwise odd decisions towards the end.

It was a good time, there was definitely a strong and obvious man vs. nature struggle going on with an environmentalist bent. And boy did Kilian make sure you felt cold reading this novel. The realism of the frostbite, the sunburns, the instant freezing of anything not weighted down by fifty pounds of clothes... brrrr!

Apparently, there's a 2010 movie called 'Icequake' but the plot of this novel is infinitely more interesting than that sounds, and frankly, had Kilian's novel been published just a decade later it would likely have been a cool 90s disaster movie blockbuster. And I would have watched it for sure.

If you want to feel cold and learn about how to survive in Antarctica and about how a Hercules plane works, check out 'Icequake'!