Between the Assassinations

Aravind Adiga

I picked up Between the Assassinations because I was fascinated by Aravind Adiga’s previous book, The White Tiger, a story written as a dictated letter about the life of its main character, a man from a rural village in India who eventually rebels against the cruelty of the caste system he was born into. I liked a lot about the novel, but it had a meandering plot that was sometimes hard to be eager to get back to. Despite this, I was really engaged by the presentation of India’s people, its social and political systems, and the complex relationships everyone seems to have with the expectations that are placed on them.

This book will live…

In my library

It is already in my library! I am excited to have another book that explores the complex social and cultural experience of characters from India. Many American readers, like me, are likely to have limited exposure to stories from this perspective and I am glad to add another, especially by an author who has been shortlisted by the Booker (my favorite literary prize).

Between the Assassinations ended up being the perfect follow-up for me. When I started it, I didn’t realize it was a collection of short stories. I saw the author, noted the focus on the imagined Indian town of Kittur, and dove in. This approach was a bit confusing, but also rewarding. About the time I got to the fourth story in the collection, it became clear that the book was not going to circle back around to any of the characters whose experience I had already followed, and yet I started to see this as a feature rather than a weakness. Each of these characters exist in the same world, have experienced the social and cultural pressures of their society from different placements in its complex system. By initially thinking of this book as a novel, I started to think of it not as a story of a character, but rather the story of a place. After finishing the book, I still see this as the best way to look at it. India is presented a place buried in its history while trying to build something new on top of it; a place where help is essential but holding others back may be the only way to survive; where pride in self may be all a person has, even as they need to steal and cheat to hold on to what little they have to be proud of.

Despite being consistently engaged by the setting, I really enjoyed the characters here. Readers don’t spend a ton of time with any of them, but I found them all pretty compelling. Adopted brothers fighting against the odds together until they feel held back by the other, young kids taking rebellion a bit too far, businessmen being burdened when they learn how corrupt their world is… I consistently liked returning to them all and each new voice was great.

Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I read this book because it was a selection from my reading group. I went into it with uncertain expectations. I’ve read a few books that fit into or are related to the gothic fiction genre, such as Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I expected the novel to have elements of the gothic romance Jane Eyre, but I wasn’t sure what this would mean when applied to Mexican culture or tradition. I also didn’t know much about the era this book would be set in. Gothic lit always feels a bit dated (it is the old buildings — so many old buildings), but applying a decidedly English genre to a new cultural perspective feels unambiguously modern.

This book will live…

In my library

I have two copies in the library already and have already had some students borrow it. It has been rated a 9/10 from students so far.

The mixed expectations meant it wasn’t possible to be entirely rewarded by what I read or to be entirely disappointed, although I did find a bit of both. Mexican Gothic did end up having quite a lot of Jane Eyre in it, but it is decidedly a haunted house novel. The house that has been imagined here and the family that calls it their ancestral home are unsettling and delightful. The supernatural elements are real and threatening and the human evils are just as terrifying. The book lets me down a bit in that the Mexican cultural elements are fairly surface-level; the plot transports a young Mexican debutante into this haunted house and mostly uses her as an easy means to point out how archaic and racist the antagonists are. The protagonist probably could have been from any non-Anglo (white) area of the world and the book would have worked just as effectively, which is a bit of a shame.

Still, I enjoyed the book and can easily imagine this being a student’s first step into gothic romance. The haunted house is great, the threat is tangible, and there are characters that are easy to care for. There is some unsetting content involving sexual assault and manipulation that are not handled especially well — mostly it is a way of making the are-they-evil bad guys seem definitely evil — but I don’t think it should hold anyone back from reading the book unless they are sensitive to these issues.

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

This novel is probably the most epic and mysterious love story I have ever read. The circus at its center is one that captures the imaginations of all of its visitors; it shows up in the middle of the night in a random location, its acts represent the finest arts of the human mind and body, and then as suddenly as it arrived, it is gone. Those who are fortunate enough to experience it never forget it and those that hear of it can hardly believe it is real. But, for the reader, the how of the circus is far less important than the why. When a book begins with sorcery, the how can (literally) be explained with the wave of a hand.

This book will live…

In my library

The size of the book may intimidate many young readers, but the story is lovely and consistently captures the imagination in ways few books do.

But the why is no less mysterious. The why encompasses a competition of sorts that may mean life and death, as it does a romance that is forbidden. These young lovers (star-crossed, you might even say), are each fully realized and lovely, approaching a shared craft in different ways. One thing I really like about these two characters is that their most important quality, the thing that binds them, isn’t passion or beauty or pride or jealousy, but respect. I love that these characters are almost professional peers first and foremost. Our female protagonist isn’t a seductress imposing on the men and the male protagonist doesn’t dismiss her as an inferior.

And beyond and around these two characters is a cast of characters who are robust and interesting and engaged in playing a part in this grand competition/romance/public spectacle. It is so easy to delight in the book, which is appropriate for a book that is so deliberately about wonder and joy. Morgenstern’s writing is also delightful. Descriptions are effective and beautiful without being distractingly ornate and chapters move at a brisk pace. It is a large book, but it didn’t feel so large as I was reading it and I was pretty much always eager to open it up again.

If They Come For Us

Fatimah Asghar

This poetry collection explores a complex relationship between place and history and present and self. One complexity is Asghar’s relationship with the Muslim faith and its interaction with the other elements of her identity, including her relationship with her own body, with the expectations placed on her as a woman, and with the places she calls (and has called) home, including America and Pakistan. But even when religion and belief are set aside, expectations set by society — expectations born from historical and cultural traumas like September 11th in America and the partition of India and Pakistan — and Asghar’s responses to them are central.

This book will Live…

In my library

This is an excellent poetry collection that may help students learn more about what poetry can be. Some students may find difficulty in unfamiliar cultural details and there is some very frank discussion of the female body that may require a more mature reader, but this is a collection that speaks, and any line is worthy of closer examination or an appreciative nod.

The last poetry collection I read that focused on Muslim female voices was actually the one that led me to this one. Halal If You Hear Me is the third in the BreakBeat Poets series, and focused on intersectional Muslim voices, especially those of queer women. That collection — and Asghar’s poems within it — made me want to spend more time with her work, and If They Come For Us does not disappoint. I tend to dog-ear poems that speak to me, whose words capture something tangible and close-to-perfect, or whose ideas are so effectively structured and conveyed that I map them out in my mind. If these dog-ear's are the measure of a collection, then this collection is doing so much right for me. Of the roughly 45 poems, I’ve folded nearly 25 corners. This doesn’t mean that nearly half of the poems are bad by any stretch — every poem can’t speak to every reader. Mostly, of those poems that didn’t grab me, I found that I lacked overlacking experience or knowledge. What I know about the Partition of India and Pakistan is limited, as is my familiarity with Muslim religious traditions. While I would try to look things up for clarity, this couldn’t make up for the obstacle of insufficient shared schema.

Despite the places where my limited cross-cultural knowledge was a barrier to entry, Asghar has some absolutely fantastic poems in here. She regularly plays with form and structure, with a number of poems not resembling anything close to what most of my students would consider “poetry.” There is a phenomenal sonnet sequence toward the end, titled “A Starless Sky is a Joy Too” that I need to get into a lesson in AP Lit.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have actually read this before! I rarely return to books a second time, but this was a rare exception. While the first time I read through the physical copy of the book, this time I am listening to the book with my girls (Lillith, 8 and Elena, 11). I was not totally sure that they would be into it, but we had previously listened to The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary (All by author Andy Weir) and they loved all three. Children of Time is a bit more hard sci-fi than the other three and it has a bit more adult language and content, but I thought I would give it a go anyway. They loved it.

Children of time tells two stories. One is of an ark ship cast into space following as part of a human diaspora, hundreds of thousands of humans in stasis, and they are hoping to basically restart the human species after Earth has become uninhabitable from a mix of hubris and ecoterrorism. On the ark ship are a few key characters we follow through an epic journey through both time and space; they wake up to manage issues with the ship, uprisings, and conflicts with remnants of technology left behind after the fall of humanity, but when these conflicts are resolved, they return to stasis as well. These inconsistent periods of wakefulness mean that each character may age at a different rate, experiencing different events despite sharing a vessel with limited living space.

This Book Will Live…

In my library

It is already here! I would love more people to get into this novel. Not everyone initially loves the giant spiders and some get a bit tired by humanity always being at least a little bit insufferable, but the book deserves a wider audience.

The other story of the novel is of a planet that was terraformed for the purpose of human colonization, but before colonies can be established, that previously-mentioned mass extinction event occurs (yes, even way out in space!) and the planet is left to develop on its own… Well, kind of. One part of the terraforming project was to accelerate the development of evolution so that a human species could natively develop on the planet, but this doesn’t go quite right and the dominant species ends up being quite different: insects. Spiders, mostly. These spiders develop as the masters of the planet of spectacular amounts of time, developing complex social systems and cultures.

Of the two stories, I enjoy the spider narrative the most. Although there is less consistency of character (spiders don’t have long lifespans or stasis pods), the spider storyline is inventive and filled with great, admirable characters attempting to overcome novel, surprising challenges. The humans, meanwhile, do the things that humans do: they create factions and accidentally (or intentionally) try to destroy each other. Hope is not lost for humanity, but I often found myself more excited for the spider segments than I did the human ones. In either case, the book is a delight and a must for science fiction fans.

The first semester of the school year had a good mix of books for me. Although these are only the books that I finished — it seems redundant to talk about books in progress, as many in progress last semester have since been finished — I think it still speaks to a productive and varied reading experience. I’m proud of the variety here — short stories, poetry, science fiction, gothic romance — and the fact that my reading includes multiple books outside of my normal reading preferences; I don’t read a great deal of romance and would likely would not have gotten to The Night Circus or Mexican Gothic without my reading group.

During the 2023 year overall, I read a respectable 27 books. My goal was 36, so I fell a bit short, but I am still pleased at the number of pages I turned overall. I have again set my Goodreads Reading Challenge to 36 books, and am well on my way. As of this writing (March 2024) I have finished seven books with an additional eight “in progress,” although only about 5 are receiving regular progress. Still, I am confident that this year my goal will be met and many of those completed books will find their way into my library.