Four more Book Bingo books

Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

For the “Suggested by a library worker” square.

Readable but didn’t grab me. Stories and stories and stories—in addition to the titular book that drives much of the novel’s main narrative, nearly every character with whom we spend any time gets a chance to tell a pivotal story in their own personal history to the tune of a few pages or more. The individual stories, including the overarching one, are compelling enough but the book didn’t really cohere that well for me. The book’s tone is one of magical realism, the matter-of-fact prose of a Gabriel García Márquez but with events that feel sometimes larger than life but hardly supernatural. There is a lot of talk about parallel universes but aside from various characters musing on the concept it didn’t seem integrated into the actual plot in a way that landed. So my overall experience was a bit disjointed and not terribly satisfying.

Letters of Note: Grief, compiled by Shaun Usher

For the “Grief” bingo square.

A collection of letters on the subject of grief. An interesting collection of perspectives, but I expected it to be more moving than it often was. Too many sixteenth- through eighteenth-century dudes telling people they should actually be happy their loved ones are with God or whatever, or that grief is pointless or indulgent. And many others written from people themselves in the throes of grief, some seeming to try to hold it at arm’s length in that prim Victorian way, some—maybe too few—really just giving into it. If this collection is trying to include a lot of different perspectives, I think it would benefit from more material from outside the U.S. and Europe. If it’s trying to be moving, I think prospective readers should listen to A Crow Looked At Me instead.

Anastacia-Reneé, Side Notes from the Archivist

For the “New-to-you format” square.

I think this was the worst square on the bingo card, but I tried to take it seriously. I don’t read a lot of poetry and I’m not good at it, and Side Notes from the Archivist is not just poetry but poetry with unorthodox formatting. So all in all it was a pretty new experience for me. But because I don’t read a lot of poetry and I’m not good at it, I’m not sure how to talk about it. The kaleidoscopic multiplicity of styles and themes (year-stamped snapshots from the 80s, an imaginary TV show about a black girl, Aunt Jemima as Dream House, thin columns of trisyllabic lines and blocks of prose poetry, lists and statistics and parenthesized words and elided words and expanses of blank space) maybe make this a challenging read even for people more accustomed to poetry than I am. The jumble of the collage on the book’s cover feels appropriate to the content. But I do think the stylistic experimentation is effective: it conveys the explosion of thoughts and experiences that come with being a Black queer person in the U.S. And throughout, there’s a very compelling rhythm to the words. I often found myself hearing the voice and cadence of Moor Mother in my head while reading it. As a collection it’s a bit bewildering but it rarely seems indulgent; the disorientation feels appropriate to the emotional landscape being mapped out.

Chris Abani, Smoking the Bible

For the “SAL Speaker (Past or Present)” square.

Another book of poetry! This one is far more sedate than Side Notes from the Archivist, more meditative, less experimental by far. I’m gonna say some things that reflect more on me as a reader than on Smoking the Bible itself, but what the hell, it’s my blog, not a professional book review.

I have some self-judgment about how I read. Reading a lot of trashy fantasy and sci-fi novels in middle and high school taught me how to read very fast, with not a lot of deep understanding because it wasn’t really necessary for those books. But I think this hurt me when I had to read math textbooks and shit in college, and like math textbooks, I don’t think you can effectively read poetry this way. In some senses Side Notes from the Archivist was easier on me: the formal experimentation felt like it allowed me to be OK with not fully understanding. Smoking the Bible reads more like (what I have been taught to think of as) Literature, so I had a familiar feeling that I was just not really picking up what the author was putting down.

But even if I didn’t get every reference and allusion and metaphor, or even what every poem was “about” in a broad sense, this was a beautiful and lyrical collection of poems. I read a few of them aloud to myself at my sit spot and it didn’t help me understand the meaning because I was too busy savoring the texture of the words.

Some of these poems—about a dying brother—are better meditations on grief than much of anything in the Letters of Note book reviewed above. There’s not a narrative from start to finish so much as a sketched-out arc, sweeping gracefully from a sort of invocation of a Muse and a terminal diagnosis to some vivid, hard-to-read imagery of new death and what seems like some kind of peace. Along the way: an abusive father, smells of cooking, peregrination. Trying to write about this book, I feel like maybe I should read it again.