I only read six books in June, a serious slowdown attributable mainly to three things: my new job (haven’t had time for my usual leisurely summer reading lunches), the terrible decision to download “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite!” on my phone, a stupid time-suck of a game I will get bored of soon, and the fact that two of my six June books were the first two in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series—more in the review section on that.
Of the other books I did have time to read this month, one—The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern—was simultaneously one of the worst books I’ve ever read and one of the most popular books I’ve ever hated. This jarring gulf between my opinion and what seems like the opinion of the rest of the book-reading world happens occasionally, of course (Where the Crawdads Sing is a recent example from this very newsletter), but this time I started to almost feel bad about it.
Was I wrong about the book itself? No, I decided—I truly think it was bad, and I also think it’s okay to have whatever opinion you have about something! What I started to worry about was whether it was wrong to take such pleasure in writing up all the things I hated about the book, especially when—based on review after review—so many people feel like this book is truly something special. Meaningful. The one book they would read again for the first time if they could.
Where does criticism cross the line into a personal attack on something that’s special to people? Everyone knows that gut-twisting feeling of hearing a friend disparage something you liked, or thought was cool.
But, by the same token, everyone knows the fun of finding a person who also secretly thinks a popular thing is bad, who shares the same gleefully subversive opinion as you. And when books are as worldwide-bestseller-popular as The Night Circus, or Where the Crawdads Sing, or even—maybe my edgiest bad book opinion—All The Light We Cannot See, I end up feeling like the least I can do to stem the tide of what starts to seem like collective hysteria is to be honest about the fact that I hated it.
I think that my compromise to myself is that it’s mean to be awful about a book someone loved and recommended to me like a treasured gift: I can be honest that I disliked it, but maybe not gleeful in my hatred. It’s more than mean, of course, to be awful about a book someone I know actually created, or to purposefully bring a bad review to the creator’s attention. A friend recently told me that he’s glad, as a filmmaker, that I don’t review movies. Am I that mean? I thought. Maybe I am—you can be the judge when you read the review portion in like two more sentences. But I like to think at least that I punch up, that I reserve the reviews that veer from hopeful disappointment into rabid venom for those books that can take it: authors’ pockets, fans’ sense of community, and all.
And so, for those of you who don’t think that The Night Circus changed your life: read on for this month’s reviews!
June book reviews
The Game of Kings, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
Queens’ Play, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
Reviewing these two out of order so that you don’t have to sit through two very similar opinions as bookends. I, however, did bookend my month with these, the first two in Dorothy Dunnett’s fantastic, endlessly rich, almost impossibly complicated tapestry of Scottish historical fiction. A large part of why I only read six books this month, as I mentioned above, is just how dense these two (also quite long) books are—rather than giving concrete examples, I’ll just say that someone wrote a companion book for the entire series that footnotes every historical allusion, translates every French and Latin and Gaelic phrase, poem, and song, maps out every Scotch-English family tree… honestly, I should buy the companion. These books are tough. I have read this series once before and I still found myself largely bewildered.
And yet: the moments of clarity are so shining they’re almost precious. Just as dense as the text itself is the character of the protagonist, Francis Crawford of Lymond: you don’t know what to make of him, so hidden is he under layers and layers of self-disguise and cold calculation. But just once, at the end of each book, his true self starts to shine through, and it’s breathtaking. That is your reward as a reader: the promise of a character that you can love, not just admire from afar, and the promise of a series of novels that will (as I know!) become so engrossing that they (almost) cease to feel dense. I can’t wait to continue my re-read.
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern [*]
Here’s the thing about The Night Circus: I was insulted by this book, which was advertised to me as a love story about magical rivals that happened to take place in a circus and was, instead, almost 500 pages of description about a black and white circus (you’d think that would cut out most of Morgenstern’s opportunity to describe colors, but somehow it does not) pasted over the junky, fragile framework of a half-hearted attempt at a plot.
You can’t write a book that purports to be a love story about dueling circus magicians and then include none of the following:
Any kind of emotional rivalry. Any indication at all that the rivals themselves are invested in the competition. Any indication at all that the rivals have personalities, motivations, or flaws.
A magic system with coherence, logic, or defined laws of any sort.
A love story. Here is an excerpt from the “love story,” (sic on the line breaks!) which is basically two people meeting twice and then we are told they’re in love, I guess mostly because the girl is pretty:
To Celia, there is suddenly no one else in the room as he holds her in his arms.
But before she can vocalize her surprise, his lips close over hers and she is lost in wordless bliss.
Marco kisses her as though they are the only two people in the world.
All of this book was this stilted, but worse. There were no contractions in any of the dialogue and I think—I honestly think—none in the whole book. It was like reading bad robot dialogue. Nothing about this book made sense; it took place, allegedly, at the turn of the twentieth century, and yet it had no more connection to that historical era than any other aside from maybe top hats. There was a side plot that took up as much or more space than the main plot and went nowhere—there were characters named Poppet and Gidget, and they were redhaired twins—there was a maze made of clouds—there were two evil adoptive fathers who we never learned anything about—there was a mysterious Japanese woman who we never learned anything about—there was caramel at the circus and it all smelled like caramel—there were so, so many chapter breaks where an irritating omniscient narrator told us, once again, that the circus was all in black and white, and that it smelled like caramel. These chapter breaks were written in the second person.
What there wasn’t—again—was a story. Certainly there was no plot capable of sustaining the bloated, endlessly verbose weight of the 15th chapter break describing the circus again, or the redheaded twins describing the circus, or the Japanese woman describing the circus. Don’t read this book!!! Look at a picture of a circus in black and white for 6 hours instead and then punch yourself in the face.
The White Book, Han Kang [***]
I think I gave this tiny, sparse prose-poem of a book three stars mostly because it was such a relief after The Night Circus, like a resting place for my irritated and swollen brain. I don’t remember much about it, honestly, except that it was quiet, slow and occasionally lovely; I wish I had read it in winter, in the snow. I was just so glad to read something that felt restrained.
The Red-Stained Wings, Elizabeth Bear [****]
Part of the second trilogy I’ve read from this author that takes place in the same fantasy world, this book was as consistently good as the four that came before it. Bear writes extremely solid fantasy, full of interesting magic, compelling religion, and realistic and engaging world-spanning politics. But what I like most about her books is that she consciously sets them in non-Western cultures and worlds: it’s both refreshing and interesting to read, in this book, about Rajnis instead of queens, about Himalayan mountain dogs and white elephants as animal companions instead of horses and magic cats, about a culture where war can be waged by preventing the rainy season with weather magic so that the river won’t rise and an army has an easier route for their attack. This is fantasy, not historical fantasy, so Bear isn’t writing an accurate culture. But to me, this—as with her other books—feels as far from appropriative as literature can be. I’m also just grateful not to have to read another “creative” religion that’s just Norse mythology re-named.
Orange World, Karen Russell [****]
I am not generally a short story fan, mostly because of what I like to think of as Cokey’s First Law of Short Stories: in order to pack an emotional punch into such a compact package, the author must very often rely on tragedy, which conveys emotion more quickly and intensely than any other type of narrative. Thus, short stories are Sad, and I don’t as a rule like Sad Books.
But I tried Orange World mostly because of the cover, which is bright and compelling and called to me from across the lobby of the Boston Public Library. I’m glad to say it made me revise my First Law, which I developed while reading Hemingway in ninth grade and so maybe needed some revising. There were some sad stories in here, and a bunch of melancholy ones, and some that were funny. Many were hopeful, and a few were beautiful: one in particular, “The Tornado Auction,” left me stunned, full of a fierce rush of gladness, sweeping with awe. That was the high point, though—other stories were less consistent, less bright. Still, though, the book as a whole made me revise my short story reluctance: even if there’s only one “The Tornado Auction” per collection, that ratio is worth it.