The Lost World / Michael Crichton

First things first: I don't think I will ever be able to spell "Crichton" without help, as it is a nonsense spelling and pronunciation that completely evades my memory.

I somehow missed out on Jurassic Park when I was young, and when I say "somehow" I mean "I'm very easily spooked and Jurassic Park (in book and movie form) was way too scary for me, and then I just kinda forgot about it". I didn't pay it any attention until a couple of years ago at grad school, when, while settling on a group project idea for Multimedia Literacy, a pal of mine said, "let's focus on Jurassic Park" and my fate was sealed. Cue the Year(s) of the Dino, where I devoured the movies and the book and a Rollercoaster-Tycoon-esque game called Jurassic World Evolution which is as great as it sounds, but then stalled out on The Lost World and didn't pick it up again until my nieces challenged me to a summer reading contest this year (a contest I intend to WIN).

So I finally read The Lost World and yes, it's bananas, and yes, I loved it. There are characters who are evil for no reason and meet a suitably grisly end! There's a douche who no one likes but who they work with who does very typical white rich guy stuff who gets shown up by other people! There are children who are, for some reason, geniuses! And most of all, best of all, there is Dinosaur Drama APLENTY. When I watched Jurassic World my main takeaways were that a) it's not good!, and b) the main reasons it's not good are joylessness and a lack of wonder for the natural world! The Lost World (both book AND film even though they are very different from one another) retains the fun and joy and wonder (and genuine scares!) that make Jurassic Park so damn good.

One thing Crichton seems to love doing is carrying a story smoothly along and then taking BREAKS FOR SCIENCE!!!!!!!! We open on our main characters, squirreled safely (?) away in the high hide, observing the Noble Apatosaurus turn on a Vicious Velociraptor in order to defend the herd with its mighty tail!! Now is a good time to discuss the complexities of the idea of natural selection AT LENGTH! It's ridiculous and I love it. Every other scene has Ian Malcolm declaring that "complexity/chaos theory can perfectly explain this!" and/or having a character put forth inexplicable knowledge on a subject FAR away from their field (slight spoiler but WHY would a mathematician know about prion risk in sheep???).

Will reading The Lost World change your life? Probably not! Does that take away from its fun in any way? It doesn't!

The Witch Elm / Tana French

There were a couple things in this book that really irked me:
a) how Toby kept talking about how hot his cousin Susanna was;
b) the oft repeated use of the description of anger as “taking my breath away”, and;
b) a final act completely out of left field and narratively dissonant with the rest of the book.

Other than that, I think what stands out to me most about this story is that it’s not so much about the mystery or who did what or what their motivations were as it is about how consequences for the same action are different for different people. In that sense, I guess the final act wasn’t so dissonant, but it was a very jarring turn nonetheless. I think I liked this book, and I know I disliked Toby and all he represents (blasé, blithe “I’m a nice guy” toxic masculinity here we come). I don’t think anyone is actually meant to like Toby. A lot of the reviews for this say “the main character was so unlikable” and yeah, he was, but he wasn’t MEANT to be someone the reader wants to be friends with. I mean, I would avoid this entire extended family and (spoilers) Melissa made extremely the right choice when she broke up with Toby (/spoilers) but having an unlikable narrator isn’t exactly a bad thing. Why should we like Toby? Why is likability something readers find so important? Am I thinking about this too much?

Toby is the kind of person who thinks we should all be civil and get along, who’s severe lack of introspection or empathy leads him to disregard those around them (thereby putting them in danger), who refuses to acknowledge his privilege in any except one very small way near the end of the book, who puts others at risk for a laugh, and who’s convinced that he’s just a "lucky" person and that's why things go his way. He’s a White Dude in the one of the worst ways, so of course he’s unlikable. He becomes more and more revolting as the book goes on, and that feels like the point. 

I feel like I could try another Tana French book at some point, because this was a good book and her examination of Toby was spot on, I just think I need to take a wee break.

Content warnings for this book: sexual violence (past events described by a character), suicide, violence.

Justice for Rafferty.

The Invington Diaries / Monty Don

It's no secret that I love plants and gardening, and it is probably also no secret that I also love pretty much everything Monty Don has written or filmed, and this book is no exception. This was my second time reading it, and I don't doubt there will be a third time. It goes through a year in his garden (although the entries are taken from about a ten year span), reflecting on the hows and whys and whens of everything, all while being thoughtful, gentle, and informative. I'm very aware that gardening books aren't for everyone, but if you watched some Big Dreams, Small Spaces or Monty Don's French Gardens on the netflix and enjoyed it or felt buoyed up in the bleak midwinter, then I highly encourage you to see if your local library has this book on its shelves.

There are bits about children and family, and bits about plants, and bits about dogs, and bits that I read out loud to Josh, and bits that made me laugh, and all in all it's a really good example of how well a journal can work as not just a record, but a way to tell the story of a place and a way to see patterns emerge. While I was reading this I got an idea for a haskap berry hedge mulched with woodchips and underplanted with crocuses.

The only glaring fault in this book is the weird design choice on the front cover to put the dot of the "i" into the loop of the "g". Once I noticed it I couldn't stop staring.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina / Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Robert Hack

   Do you ever read something and say to yourself, "oh, this was extremely written and drawn by  men." This book has it all, including a sequence of pages focused on the all important question: should a 13 year old girl completely change her appearance in order to be more sexy? Remember, it's best if this sexiness is imposed on her by a male relative without her consent. There's also a panel where the foreground is completely taken up by one characters breasts and the mid-ground is focused on a teenage girl in a bikini.

   LISTEN, I really wanted to like this book, and I did like parts of it! But there was so much in here that was just so off-putting that I finished the book feeling frustrated and upset. And I realize that this blog has kinda become a (very sporadic) negative review blog in that last while and that's not my intention for it! I want to like the things I read! Anyways there's a LOT of spoilers ahead.

   So, this book, ostensibly about Sabrina, opens with a prologue focused on her father in which he betrays and then attacks her mother, while taking Sabrina as his possession. Sabrina's whole family and community knows that her mother is a) alive, and b) incapacitated and institutionalized by her father, but they all tell her that her mother is dead. So we begin Sabrina's life with control being exerted over her and those around her by her father. Skipping forward, Sabrina's father has been somehow encased in a tree, and Sabrina is a 13 year old going to public school for the first time. She's getting ready for school when her cousin comes in and says she needs to be more sexy, and casts a couple of glamours on her while she says "don't cast a glamour on me". While at school she sees a football player and is like "wow, I love him, and I hate the girl who also likes him and said 'he's mine', also both of us are fully developed even though we are, again, 13" Upon returning home from school Sabrina displays one of her few moments of agency-exercising by, you guessed it, taking agency away from someone else by casting a spell on Harvey to make him like her!

   I realize I'm just typing out a cynical synopsis but I'm so annoyed with this book! It could have been so good!

   Once again, I'd like to remind everyone that this book is ostensibly About Sabrina. So Betty and Veronica are witches now and they raise Madam Satan from the dead (she killed herself so OF COURSE she was sent to, and this is a direct quote, "that particular circle of hell reserved for suicides" WOW! I HATE IT!). Madam Satan threw herself to hungry lions, literally, because Edward Spellman aka Sabrina's father said he wanted to marry a mortal woman instead of her. This is the same mortal woman, remember, who was violently and brutally attacked by Edward earlier in the book. Madam Satan goes to the place where Diana (Sabrina's mother) is institutionalized, tells her her story, and then decides to - instead of helping her - give her "clarity" and thereby subject her to further pain and torture at the hands of doctors and nurses!

   Here's something I really hate: when books pit all of their female characters against each other, especially women hating each other because a man chose one of them over the other one. The man caused this problem! Not the woman! Rosalind and Sabrina hate each other because hey both liked Harvey. Madam Satan curses Diana because they both liked Edward.

   Meanwhile, Sabrina is now dating Harvey and he is pressuring her for sex. She asks her aunts if she can have sex and they say "no, you have to be pure for satan", and she doesn't question that at all. Madam Satan, by now disguised as a teacher, uses her breasts (I am not kidding) to distract Harvey (the 16 year old boy) from his football game and then says "oops, sorry for distracting you, by the way isn't it just too bad that Sabrina runs off into the woods at night, probably for sex with randos?" Which of course makes Harvey angry so he runs into the woods to find and rebuke Sabrina. Sabrina is, of course, going to her "dark baptism" in the woods which is a big ceremony where it's implied she is going to have sex with satan?

   In The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the netflix tv show, Sabrina decides, of her of volition, to not go through with her dark baptism and accepts the consequences. It's a good moment! In The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the comic book I'm currently writing about, Sabrina's dark baptism is interrupted by Harvey and he stops it, and then is killed and eaten by the witches who were there while some other witches scream at Sabrina that she is so horrible for ruining the dark baptism (because of someone else's actions that she has no control over?). Now Madam Satan, who manipulated Harvey into trying to find Sabrina, goes to manipulate Sabrina into raising Harvey from the dead.

   The two times in this book that Sabrina shows an interest in furthering her skills in spell crafting and casting are both times when she wants to make Harvey do something. Oh yeah and after Harvey died his mom gives a ring to Sabrina and was like "he was going to propose, isn't that beautiful" and I was like "they're??? 16????? He only liked her??? because of a spell???"

   So Madam Satan gets Betty and Veronica to come and help Sabrina get through a trial and then the four of them reconvene to raise Harvey from the dead but SURPRISE Madam Satan ACTUALLY released Edward's spirit from the tree it was encased in and put it into Harvey's body. So! Harvey/Edward goes back to Harvey's parent's house where Harvey's mother murders his father because he's like "Harvey is dead and I have a bad feeling about whoever is knocking on the door" and then Harvey/Edward is like "Harvey isn't here anymore" and then ties her up and phones Sabrina (HIS DAUGHTER) and says "I'm back". End book!

   So! We begin with Edward controlling, attacking, and lying to women and we end with Edward controlling, attacking, and lying to women! This book, once again, ostensibly about Sabrina, focuses way way more on Harvey and Edward, with the women in their lives acting as a backdrop. Once again, there is SO MUCH this book could've done and/or talked about, and it just, didn't.

   I also know that other people really liked this book and I am so curious about your opinions!! Did I read this book entirely wrong????? Did I miss something??? Honestly I would like to have missed something!!

River of Teeth / Sarah Gailey

River of Teeth is a hundred pages and change, which results in a four hour-ish audiobook, and my biggest takeaway from it is that I wish it was longer. Here again we have a great concept well-executed, but it is Very Rushed, and listen: I like a good twist and/or turn, but if a novella has a "but theEeEeEeEennn" moment every single scene it gets to be a BIT MUCH. And the action moved so quickly and I couldn't get a grasp on how much time was meant to be passing and I was like "I know I'm SUPPOSED to feel betrayed/shocked/happy about what these characters are doing, but I haven't had time to get attached!!!!!!!" 

A definite strength of this book is the very varied cast of characters. There's a non-binary character who is always referred to as they/them, even by people who don't like them or want them gone. No one uses gendered language as a weapon against them, and there aren't scenes where they have to explain what their pronouns are, or explain what being non-binary is, they just ARE, and it's refreshing. There's a scene in the book (mild spoiler ahead) where the crew has to decide what to do after losing the only white man on the team when there's someone expecting a white man to come and get something, and it was nice to read about a book where the world looks like the world actually looks. 

I WANTED TO LIKE THIS MORE, is what I'm saying. I'm hoping the second book is a little less break-neck and a little less "but it turns out"-y with one or two fewer Shocking Reveals. You know? Gimme them good hippos.