Author: Alex Doenau

If you knew how Catherine House ended, you would never start it. The book is enough of a hodgepodge of blind alleys, ciphers of characters, and that deadly mix of hedonism and anhedonia granted only to the particularly privileged already, and then you hit the final sentence. You are in the house and the house is in the woods. But the book is thrown across the room.

With its conclusion, Catherine House transforms from an unenjoyable novel to a loathsome exercise. This ending was better in 1985, but so was the whole book leading up to that functionally identical conclusion. Readers do not forget.

In 2013, Ohioan debut author Ann Leckie cleaned up all of the major science fiction awards with Ancillary Justice, a slow burn, pseudo-gender-neutral, dual timelines, interstellar space opera that spans thousands of years. It makes sense, even without looking at the other titles it was against, but Ancillary Justice is not to every taste.

You may have noticed that there are things happening in the real world, hopefully outside your window, and that you will never have to venture outside again. Station Eleven is (was?) due to become an HBO series starring Mackenzie Davis and Himesh Patel this year, so it was already on a reread list. 

This particular reading of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven commenced after things had kicked off globally and ended the day before “shit got real”, as Danny Butterman has been known to say. Station Eleven is a novel about a global pandemic, for certain, but it has something that the real global pandemic of 2020 currently lacks: hope for humanity.

If you recall Tom Cruise’s 2017 incarnation of The Mummy, you may also remember that it was supposed to kick off a shared monster continuum called the “Dark Universe”, which was already cast and featured one Johnny Depp as The Invisible Man. 2020’s The Invisible Man, while still produced by Universal, is not that movie. It’s a Leigh Whannell (Upgrade) and Blumhouse special, which means that its budget is so vanishingly small that it should make money no matter what it does. The Invisible Man is not particularly heart warming, but rather a twitchy and paranoid gaslit thriller lead by a woman who can only take so much before she snaps.

Most anticipated book lists are a way to plan out a month, a season, a year, in reading. American Dirt showed up on so many lists that you think you could trust it. On the day it came out, the day that Oprah lauded it, the internet exploded. American Dirt’s author has historically identified as white (as recently as 2015), but has rebranded to vaguely latinx courtesy of her Puerto Rican grandmother. She is described as being married to a formerly undocumented immigrant (undisclosed in the text and promo material: he’s from Ireland), and the material is adapted and twisted from material written by people closer to the source.

American Dirt is not a good book, for multiple reasons. It’s not #OwnVoices, which is a problem that this reader keeps coming back to (particularly from the cottage industry of gay teen books written by straight white women), but if you can look beyond that (and maybe you can, but take it on board anyway), you should consider its perfunctory nature, its clumsy writing, its irresponsible presentation of Cummins’ alleged research, and its carefully manicured apolitical stance that turns out to have a dubious political stance after all.

Some books are classics, but in the modern era they serve better as blue prints for adaptations. Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel Little Women is a landmark novel, but to the eyes of today it is fragmented, moralistic, and bigoted against the Irish. In her own version of Little Women, writer/director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) takes most of the greatest elements of the novel — and at least part of one of the dumbest — and fashions them into something vibrant and new.

Xavier was dead: to begin with. This exploitation novel by W.A. Harbinson, a man who in the nineties would put out a “non-fiction” book claiming to prove that Nazis are using concentration camp labour to build UFOs in Antarctica, is a curious beast without a centre. Can you exploit someone who was never really there?

A moment of context for Meat: it was found at the equivalent of a Free Little Library, offering the promise of a silly and quick read that would hopefully toe the right side of the exploitation line. It emphatically does not achieve that goal.

This review references systematic sexual abuse, so please avoid reading if that bothers you.