Interlude - on failure and success

Has life ever gotten in the way of doing something you really wanted to do?

The good news is that over the summer I got accepted to a cybersecurity training program. The bad news is that put a serious dent in my fiction reading time. However, I'm not giving up.

Failure in one sense

In a way, this is a defeat, as I will not complete all 25 categories that I set out to read in 2022. Of course I'm disappointed. But I've tried to keep 2 things in mind:

• This isn't school. No one's grading me on any of this.

• Self-compassion is always a good idea. Beating myself up about falling short isn't somehow going to make me a faster or more organized reader.

Success is still possible

So now what? Basically, I'm committing to finishing this challenge, however long it takes. However, I think part of the reason I didn't meet the original timeline is that sticking to these categories felt a bit too rigid, so I'll be weaving this in with other reading. I love my highbrow stuff, but I also need a commercial palate cleanser every once in a while.

So now what?

I already have a couple of books in the can that I read for a book club I belong to which meet the challenge requirements, so those writeups will be up soon. I'm also part of a couple of other online reading groups, so I might post some thoughts on the books I read there, too.

One of those online reading groups is centered around classic literature, so I probably won't review that material in the same way I've been reviewing books on this blog to date. It feels tacky to say, for instance, that I don't recommend a particular Shakespeare play, even if I don't personally enjoy it. But I would like to discuss these works in some way, so stay tuned. Normal service is resuming.

Book Review | Abigail

My tenth book in the 2022 challenge is Abigail by Magda Szabó. The book satisfies Category 5 of the challenge, a lesser-known book of a popular author. Describing this book as "lesser-known" might surprise Hungarian readers, as it is her most widely-read book in Hungarian. However, it was only translated into English in 2020, over a decade after Szabó's death and a good 50 years after it was originally published.

In the English-speaking world, if people know of Szabó's work at all, they probably think of The Door, which received renewed attention in 2015 with a new English translation. Incidentally, the person who did that translation, Len Rix, also did this translation of Abigail.

Szabó has a wide literary output that unfortunately remains mostly unknown outside the Hungarian-speaking world. She also wrote for a variety of age groups. Indeed, most people familiar with Abigail consider it a young adult novel, and Szabó wrote for even younger audiences, too.

The book

Gina Vitay is the beloved teenage daughter of a widowed general living in Budapest. She lives a comfortable life going to teas put on by her aunt and rubbing elbows with members of high society, including some romantic interest in a young army lieutenant. Although World War II is in full swing, it doesn't seem to have much effect on the day-to-day lives of these people.

Everything changes when the general tells Gina he is sending her away to a Calvinist boarding school in a small town in the eastern part of the country. This seems to come out of nowhere to Gina, and she doesn't take the news well. Her father's insistence on secrecy and refusal to explain his motives don't help, either.

Gina struggles to adapt to the strict rules at her new school, and a social gaffe makes her an outcast among her peers. Her only chance for help comes from a statue on the campus that everyone refers to as Abigail. Local legend says that students with big problems can leave Abigail a note explaining their situation and she will help them. Can Abigail help Gina with her problems? Are even bigger problems on the horizon?

What I liked

"World building" is often discussed in genres like fantasy and science fiction, but I think it's worth mentioning here, too. Szabó does an excellent job of showing the contrast between Gina's life in Budapest and her life at the school. Because everything at the school is so foreign to her, her process of figuring things out performs a similar function for the reader without things getting too info-dumpy. Szabó taught at a school like the one described in the book, so I'm sure that informed her writing, too.

In contrast to my complaints regarding some recent books, I found this book very structurally sound. There are no loose ends in the storytelling. We need to know about Gina's life in Budapest so we can see what a shock her new school environment is for her. When characters disappear, you know why they disappear.

I also want to throw a quick shout-out to Samantha Desz, the narrator of the audiobook version, which is how I consumed this book. Her pronunciation of Hungarian names is on point, which is hard to come by in the English-speaking world.

What I didn't like

There was one recurring bit in this book that almost felt like a tic. On several occasions, the book says something like, "Years later, when Gina was with her husband and children...", and those bits took me out of the story. I think they might have been included because there was less tolerance for seeing kids in danger in stories than there is now. For instance, The Hunger Games clearly does not have this problem. These reassurances may have felt necessary at the time but are more likely to feel like unnecessary interruptions for today's readers.

Overall verdict

YA doesn't make up a huge percentage of my bookshelf, so I worried that the book might be too simplistic for my tastes (my mostly unfounded genre trepidations seem to be another recurring theme in this challenge). But not every book needs to be some great literary challenge. Sometimes books can just be fun with good storytelling and decent characters. This can be a good palate cleanser after reading something you find particularly taxing.

What's next?

The next book is Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins. This satisfies Category 6, a novel written by a woman published before 1940.

Do you enjoy YA novels? If so, what are some of your favorites? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | The Bone Fire

Content warning: violence, death (including suicide)

My ninth book in the 2022 challenge is The Bone Fire by György Dragomán. The book satisfies Category 21 of the challenge, a novel with a woman protagonist. I'm also counting Dragomán as a Romanian author, as he was born in Romania, not to mention that the novel takes place in Dragóman's native Transylvania.

The book

The story centers around Emma, a recently-orphaned 13-year-old in the months immediately following the Romanian Revolution. After a short stay in an orphanage, Emma is picked up by a grandmother she has never met and is only referred to as Grandmother throughout the novel.

After some initial difficulties, Emma begins to adjust to her new life. In addition to discovering some of her talents, Grandmother also begins to teach Emma what appears to be folk magic. However, many townspeople regard Grandmother with suspicion because they believe she was a Securitate (secret police) informer during the communist era.

What I liked

Dragomán's prose is some of the most vivid that I've encountered recently. Almost Toni Morrison levels of vivid, which is quite an accomplishment. When he describes something, it's very easy to imagine yourself in the middle of it.

Another element I enjoyed was how the post-revolution paranoia seemed to play out pretty similarly whether it was between Emma and her classmates or Grandmother and her fellow townspeople. One of my favorite bits in the novel is when a teacher breaks up a fight between two students where one accuses the other's father of being an informer. The accuser is eager to spill all these accusations to the teacher, who points out, now who's the informer? I thought this was a great illustration of how it's so easy to turn into the thing you claim to despise.

I also appreciate that Dragomán leaves certain elements of the story open to interpretation. One person who my wife and I discussed the book with put forth the theory that there was nothing magical about Grandmother's acts, but because it's so unfamiliar to Emma, it seems like magic to her. It's cool to me that the story works either way.

What I didn't like

Man, could this book have used an editor. There were so many tangents that, while they were interesting anecdotes in their own right, didn't advance the story. I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this to the point where I should probably explain what I mean by that.

Advancing the story doesn't have to be one of those plot-on-rails situations. Indeed, I don't usually find those particularly enjoyable. But I feel like a scene should either advance the plot in the simple sense or shed light on a character's behavior or motivations that are relevant to the story. If the reader is left wondering, "Why are you telling me this?", then that's a problem for me. In The Bone Fire there's an entire subplot that's just wrapped up with no explanation of what actually happened.

Like the subplot mentioned in the previous paragraph, I felt like the book just kind of ended, albeit in a different way than I'm an Old Commie! did. That book felt like it just kind of ran out of steam. The Bone Fire felt more like the ending of The Sopranos - a sudden fade to black with no explanation.

Overall verdict

This was mostly an enjoyable read. Although Emma is a less interesting character than Grandmother, I still think it makes sense to have her as the protagonist, as it's useful to see this world through fresh eyes. And Dragomán is very effective at crafting beautifully written scenes.

What's next?

The next book is Abigail by Magda Szabó. This satisfies Category 5, a lesser-known book of a popular author. This classification might surprise Hungarian readers, but I'll explain it in my review.

What's your take on tangents in a story? Are you ok with a little side journey here and there? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | The Bucharest Dossier

Content warning: violence, death

My eighth book in the 2022 challenge is The Bucharest Dossier by William Maz. The book satisfies Category 12 of the challenge, a contemporary novel that takes place in communist times.

A bit of history

Most Americans don't know much about the Romanian Revolution, and even the ones who know some things probably don't know as much as they think. You may know that communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown in this revolution, and that he and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad after a very quick military tribunal. You may even know that the protests that sparked the revolution started in Timișoara over the removal of a Hungarian pastor. Even if you know all those things about the Romanian Revolution, there's still a lot you don't know.

For instance, was the revolution entirely an inside job, or did they have outside help? People have long speculated that the CIA or the KGB (Russian/Soviet intelligence during their communist era), or maybe even both, covertly supported the revolutionaries. If the possibility of KGB support surprises you, know that then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Ceaușescu despised each other. But regarding what actually happened, the general public doesn't know any more about that than we did in 1989. It was also widely speculated that the Ceaușescus had Swiss bank accounts, but nothing was ever proven. If those accounts existed, what happened to the money? The novel explores this and other open questions surrounding the revolution.

The book

Maz describes this book as a love story inside a spy thriller inside a historical novel. The history in question is the last days of Romania's communist government, i.e., the days leading up the 1989 revolution.

The protagonist, Bill Heflin, is a CIA analyst who is encouraged by one of his Russian contacts to come to Bucharest, Romania's capital, as the communist regime there is crumbling.

What Heflin's Russian contact knows that even many of his CIA colleagues don't is that Heflin is actually Romanian by birth and came to the US with his family as a child. Even "Bill Heflin" is a name he chose for himself as a young man, and only a handful of people know his birth name.

Among the many people Heflin left behind when his family fled Romania was his childhood love, Pusha. Could he find her when he returns to Bucharest?

What I liked

Maz has a lot of fun with the things we don't know about the Romanian Revolution. Was the CIA involved? The KGB? Intelligence agencies from other neighboring countries? Did the Ceaușescus have secret foreign bank accounts? Intriguing elements like these are the backbone of any good spy story, and Maz delivers on this front.

Maz also spends more time than you might expect examining the immigrant experience and what it's like to have multiple cultural identities, and I consider this time very well spent. Although born in Romania, both Heflin and Maz are of predominantly Greek ancestry and spent time in a Greek refugee camp between leaving Romania and arriving in the US. In Romania, his family were the Greeks. In Greece, they were the Romanians. In the US, they were the immigrants until Heflin changed his name. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that he seems most comfortable around other people with similar experiences.

While the book is ultimately from a pro-American perspective, it's not an entirely uncritical one. Heflin witnesses events and learns things about some of his intelligence community colleagues that leave him quite disillusioned by the time he leaves Bucharest. Maz further explores the history of that time and the moral questions that people face in such situations in this fascinating guest post for Crime Reads.

What I didn't like

I'm always concerned when a book's protagonist shares a lot of similarities with its author. In my experience, books like that often tend to veer into wish-fulfilling territory, and there's some of that here. At times Heflin feels like an idealized version of Maz as a young man. It doesn't happen enough to derail the book for me, but I know this is something that turns off many readers.

Overall verdict

I don't read a lot of spy thrillers, so I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. I feared it would be a dumb plot-driven fantasy (in the sense of wish fulfillment, not genre), but those fears were mostly unfounded. It was also enjoyable to get yet another angle on what living under communism was like in Romania. In short, it's a fun page turner with enough contemplative elements to keep it from becoming a generic potboiler.

What's next?

The next book is The Bone Fire by György Dragomán. This satisfies Category 21, a novel with a woman protagonist.

Do you like spy thrillers? If so, what are some of your favorites? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | I'm an Old Commie!

My seventh book in the 2022 challenge is I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu. The book satisfies Category 13 of the challenge, a psychological novel.

The book

The story centers around Emilia, a retired woman who was a metalworker in a factory during Romania's communist era and has struggled to adjust both to life after the fall of communism and to aging. Her daughter Alice has left the country and established a life in Canada with her new husband.

One day Alice calls Emilia to discourage her from voting for the former communists in upcoming local elections. To Alice's horror, Emilia expresses some nostalgia for the life she had in those times. As the novel progresses, we learn that Emilia credits the communist system for getting her out of the rural life where she grew up into a more sophisticated urban life. Emilia also misses the camaraderie that she enjoyed with her coworkers.

However, Emilia also has enough self-awareness to understand that her perceptions of the past might not match up with reality. The rest of the novel involves her examining past memories and talking to people who knew her in her factory days.

What I liked

There's a lot more humor than you might expect from a book like this. Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the more brutal European communist dictators, and his national money-saving efforts caused a lot of suffering among the Romanian people. But even this didn't stop people from telling jokes about the dictator and his equally notorious wife, Elena. Several jokes about the Ceaușescus appear in the book, and there are many other funny interactions among the characters themselves.

That said, no system is all good or all bad. And it's not like corruption ceased to exist in Romania after the Ceaușescus were removed from power. It's easy to understand why Emilia feels nostalgia for a time that was bad for many people around her because she benefitted from those circumstances. It explains a lot of political choices in any country, come to think of it.

What I didn't like

There were two things that frustrated me about this book. The first is that it's kind of just a series of conversations and flashbacks. Since nearly the entire book involves Emilia looking over her past, not a whole lot happens in the main timeline. There are times when that works, usually with the present-day timeline as a framing device for a past story (think Titanic). But the past anecdotes don't form a cohesive story on their own.

The other thing I didn't like was that the story just kind of ended. Obviously all stories end at some point, but usually there's some illustration of whatever transformation has taken place over the course of the story, and I didn't really get that here.

Overall verdict

The theme of examining nostalgia for when times were different resonates with me. There's also kind of a sub-theme that Emilia is blind to the privilege she had, which also often makes for good material. Despite feeling that the plot stakes were kind of low, I still recommend the book. The characters are well developed, and the story sheds light on a time and place that a lot of Americans might not know much about.

What's next?

The next book is The Bucharest Dossier by William Maz. This satisfies Category 12, a contemporary novel where the action takes place in communist times. If the title gives you spy thriller vibes, you're right, but there's more to the story than that. Stay tuned!

Can you think of a time when nostalgia has clouded your judgement? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | My Sister, the Serial Killer

Content warning: violence, death, partner abuse, child abuse

My sixth book in the 2022 challenge is My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. The book satisfies Category 16 of the challenge, a popular novel published after 2010. I have chosen to interpret popular to mean commercial. This refers more to a novel's aims more than its quality. Indeed, this book was nominated for the Booker Prize, as have other books that most readers would deem commercial. But commercial books tend to be more accessible and plot-driven than their more literary counterparts. Not better or worse, just different. A blog post on Spread the Word offers a thoughtful discussion on the differences between commercial and literary fiction, as well as times that they can overlap.

The book

Korede, a Lagos-based nurse, would do anything for her sister Ayoola. This includes Korede using her medical training to clean up after Ayoola kills her boyfriends. The book begins right after the third killing. However, Korede's loyalties are tested when Ayoola shows interest in a doctor colleague that Korede has had her eye on for ages; even more so when that interest appears to be returned.

In the meantime, Korede airs her frustrations, including describing her sister's crimes and her own complicity in them, by talking to a comatose patient in the hospital where she works. But what happens when that patient wakes up? What does the patient remember, and what does he want to do about it?

As the story progresses, we learn more about why Korede, and to a lesser extent, Ayoola, make the choices they do. While you may not endorse the sisters' behavior, you do come to understand it better.

What I liked

The book is a really easy read. It doesn't get as grim as you might expect, given the subject matter. I'm not opposed to grimness when it serves the story, but after Beloved and Goliath, this was a palate cleanser.

Also, it was cool to read a story set in contemporary Africa—Nigeria in this case. Being in the US, not only are a lot of books set here, but it's also easy not to branch out. There's definitely enough material that I could only read books set in the US for the rest of my life if I wanted. But part of the fun of reading for me is getting insight into how people who are different from me live their lives. And while, for the most part, contemporary Nigerians are motivated by the same things as Americans, and presumably people just about everywhere, there are some differences that it's good to be aware of.

For instance, Braithwaite touches on how powerful men are often given license to basically do whatever they want, regardless of who they hurt in the process. Certainly that happens a lot here, too, but there were elements that played out differently because of that specific setting.

What I didn't like

Most of the chapters in this book were super short, like 2-3 pages. That's neither good nor bad in itself, but in this particular case, I felt like it kept me from getting to know the main characters as well as I would have liked.

Overall verdict

This was a quick, fun read for me, which is generally what commercial fiction aims for. That said, it did give us at least some depth to the main characters, which commercial fiction often lacks. If you're the kind of reader who gets frustrated when characters make choices that you disagree with morally, this book probably isn't for you, but then again, neither is most reading.

What's next?

I'm going back to Romanian literature with the next book, which is I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu. This satisfies Category 13, a psychological novel. This will also be my first book by a living Romanian author.

Do you enjoy stories about family dilemmas? Leave your thoughts in the comments!