Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in June.
1. MEDICINE AND HEALTH: Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Medicine Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery
Maya Dusenbery ends her book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Medicine Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick with the following words: “Listen to women. Trust us when we say we’re sick. Start there, and you’ll find we have a lot of knowledge to share.” To anyone who cares to listen, these words are a wake-up call for those who have ever disregarded women’s complaints and maladies as “hysterical and all in their heads”. Including other women.
Too many of us have been on the receiving end of services provided by healthcare practitioners who don’t take what we say seriously. And this book intends to highlight both how surprisingly common that is and how we are at greater mortal danger because of it. Providing examples from the American healthcare system, this book will sadly resonate in the minds of women of different nationalities and cultures as well for this problem is pervasive in other countries of the world too. But the bottom line is, the author says, men are treated differently by healthcare providers than women. And (in the case of the United States) Black or Hispanic women are treated differently than White women. So if you’re a Black or Hispanic woman, you’re doubly at a disadvantage and more likely to be treated poorly by healthcare providers.
Nonetheless, women are raising their voices. And this book tells us, “Listen!”
I gave this book an I Liked It But Will Probably Not Read It Again.
2. ROMANCE: The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
The film based on this book is now an all-time classic and the author is very popular in the genre. We all know the story, so I won’t summarize it here, but I will say that it is very sad. It is also a vivid reminder of how heartbreaking and painful the end of a life can be, both your own and that which you have built with your spouse. Noah is the husband we all wish we had and his love for Allie is palpable through the pages but no matter how much we love Noah, he can’t save the book from the way it was written. Unfortunately this was too simple and mundane, and at times the emotions we’re expecting the book to convey from such a heart-wrenching love story are flat or simply not there. The narration of everyday actions to the minutest detail, like when Noah and Allie had crabs for dinner one night, was too much. I like detail, but it has to be detail with a purpose. This had no purpose and it just lagged the story. It was boring, and I was falling asleep through it.
The love story itself is told as a flashback, and this too did the book a disservice. The flashback wouldn’t have been necessary if the author had used the notebook itself as a writing tool to its fullest potential. The ending of the book, however, differs from that of the movie and I liked the ending in the book more.
Will I read another Nicholas Sparks book? Not sure. I’ve seen several of the movie adaptations for his books and more than a few are very sad (like this one and Best of Me). I didn’t hate this book (like Practical Magic by Alice Hoffmann) but I do think that the movie was better. I gave this book an Okay rating.
3. TRUE CRIME: Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo
Guns don’t kill. The problem is the people who use them to kill. And this book wants to highlight how many people have died because of firearms, their illegal smuggling, and the violence caused with them. Because it is, in fact, a problem. The truth of the matter is that guns and gun violence affect the lives of people in both the United States and Mexico. And politics are heavily immersed in this debate. More specifically, Mexican-American politics. After the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, the presence of American government officials in Mexican soil is not wholly accepted by Mexican citizens and to date the presence of any American on official business in Mexico is severely criticized. There is a reason why every president after Felipe Calderón has refused American help in eliminating the cartels. Previous experience wasn’t all that great and little, if any, of the relations between Mexico and the US is taught in classrooms on either side of the border to the detriment of the population, both of the US and Mexico. And I think that understanding these relations is important to understand the position of the US and Mexico on the latter’s current war on drugs.
I gave this an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
4. CLASSIC: Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
I’ve read Emily and I’ve read Charlotte. This was my first Anne Brontë book and frankly it’s my least favorite of all the books written by the Brontë sisters that I have read thus far. The plot is rather simple and I did not connect with the heroine, Agnes Grey, at all even though I commended her efforts to become independent and earn her own money. I did appreciate that the author tries to portray the reality of women in English society of the 19th century, as the story is based on the author’s own experience as a governess. However, it was not my favorite. I gave this book an Okay rating.
5. SERIES/TRILOGY: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings is a series that needs no introduction. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, the work is divided internally into six books that were published in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. I picked up the first volume of this series for one of my book clubs and decided to continue on with volumes 2 and 3. I Really Liked It and I agree that this series is important for its role in helping to create and shape the modern fantasy genre, but it is also not without its faults. For example, the enormous amount of unnecessary description. As I said before, I like description when it has a point but a lot of the details minutely described in the Fellowship, for example, when Frodo and his companions go into The Dark Forest (and meet Tom Bombadil) are just not necessary and bog the narrative down. The same happens later when Gollum leads Frodo and Sam into Shelob’s Lair. That passage, which drags on into The Return of the King, is much longer than it needs to be and I found myself rather bored by it. I was more invested in the Companions’ storylines—Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, Gandalf, Boromir, as well as Faramir, Eomer and Eowyn—than in Sam and Frodo’s. But the worst part for me was the last chapter of The Return of the King where the hobbits go home and find out that Saruman has taken over the Shire. I understand the importance of this chapter, where we are reminded that the work of overcoming evil isn’t the work of a hero or group of heroes but of all of us; in overcoming our fears and standing up for what is right. But I think that a lot of description in this and in other parts of the series could’ve been put to better use in describing the world and its history (wherever relevant to the plot) to a greater degree.
When heroes stand up for what is right, they change. And they change the society they live in as well, which is what Merry, Pippin, and Sam do after Saruman is defeated. But Frodo, though he too takes part in the Scouring of the Shire, fades in the background, and ultimately leaves Hobbiton. Yes, the fate of Middle Earth rested on his shoulders and he alone bore the burden of the One Ring to save the good of the world, but I didn’t like how his storyline ended. Unlike his Companions, including Merry, Pippin, and Sam, Frodo ultimately fails in his quest. Standing in the heart of Mount Doom, he is finally overcome by evil and claims the ring for himself. This was very anticlimactic, and while I knew it could happen, I wasn’t happy when it did. But I can’t be too harsh on Frodo either. At this point, he is literally standing in the house of evil, the Crack of Doom, where the One Ring was forged. It is obvious that the ring would be at its most powerful (and ironically its most vulnerable) here. And Frodo has been fighting the power of the Ring for so long, I am surprised it didn’t overcome him earlier. But I think that’s where Sam comes in. His innate goodness and love for Frodo counteracted all the evil the Ring wrought (or could wrought) in Frodo.
Another thing that I didn’t like was Arwen’s character in the book. She has no agency at all and is definitely not the elf that saves Frodo from the Black Riders at Weathertop. The second thing that bothered me was the blatant absence of Elves, Dwarves, and other Races in the War of the Ring. Sauron wants to conquer all of Middle-Earth, so why are men (and Legolas and Gimli) the only ones fighting him? Nonetheless I am glad I read this series, for it has been on my TBR for a while now (since the movies came out) and I can say that I have read it now. It is an important milestone in my reading journey.
6. MAGIC REALISM: Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
This is one of the most important novels in Mexican literature and it is “an uncannily beautiful story of love and the everlasting echoes of the dead.” This book is “the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father,” Pedro Páramo. But when Juan Preciado, the protagonist, reaches Comala, he finds that the small town is “haunted by memories and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Páramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo with the voices of tormented spirits that share the secrets and traumas of the past. There emerges the tragic tale of Pedro Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.”
This is a very good synopsis of Pedro Páramo and I borrow it here from the website of Grove Atlantic, who will publish a new English translation of this book by Douglas J. Weatherford (available November 14, 2023). Despite its short length (157 pages in my edition), this novel has a very complex structure; it is divided into 72 small ‘chapters’ or narrative fragments that add up to become a conglomeration of the memories, thoughts, and whispers of the citizens of Comala, living or dead. The problem is that you don’t know which character is alive and which one is dead. That is, until the protagonist of the novel himself, Juan Preciado, realizes that he too is dead and that he is telling the story of his arrival to Comala to the dead woman buried with him in his grave. This happens halfway through the book, and it isn’t until then that Juan Preciado also starts listening to the whispers and memories of the dead around him and finally learns what happened to Pedro Páramo.
Magic realism is hard to do well, but Rulfo does a superb job here at dwindling the already fine line between the living and the dead and at making the extraordinary seem quotidian. I gave this an I Really Liked It rating. This book also has one of the most famous opening lines in Mexican literature: “I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there.” (Borrowed from the Margaret Sayers Peden translation)”.
That’s all for today. Thank you for reading. My next post will be my Mid-Year Freak Out Tag.
