Auntie Zadie doesn't actually live here.

Book: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Author: Zadie Smith

Published: 2009 (Penguin)

Pages: 297

I had been saving this collection since I bought it for something ridiculous like 90% off cover price in the last gasping summer days of my hometown Borders. Why? Because It's Zadie motherfuckin' Smith, author of three of my favorite novels, the first and the best of which she got published when she was twenty-four. White Teeth at twenty-four!

And so I was saving this because if I read it right when I bought it, it'd be over with too soon. I'd have no ZS to break the monotony of dead white lit fic I have a habit of putting way too much hope in.

And so, when her essays reveal a tremendous knowledge of literary theory and intellectual cultural analysis and only the briefest, unadorned glimpses of personal life, I was reminded of Stuff I've Read on the Internet (fuck save us all) that said she's kind of a cold person. 

I really don't want her to be like that. I want her to be a sister of literature, like she talks about in her essay on Their Eyes Were Watching God. I want to feel like she'd find a funny, easy way to break her favorite subjects down for us while letting her methods reveal how her own brain works.

Maybe these essays do, and her mind just works a lot more like a straightforward scholar than I want it to. Her collection of movie reviews for The Guardian are the strongest arguments for the possibility of her being the person I want her to be; but they're her briefest and least seriously structured. And I could track various tropes in her novels in subject matters, at the very least: Golden-era Hollywood, old fathers who started second lives, mixed race and age-gap marriages, straddling cultural lines and not being quite accepted on either side.

These are solid, excellently-written essays. But I was expecting a series of those chats you have with your best friend at two in the morning outside wandering back to their car when the air is clear enough to shoot your ideas back and forth on invisible telepathic lines. What I got was a series of discussions from a really good teacher. I learned more this way, but I missed the emotional high that comes from the matching of minds.

Translated: I am shamed into thinking I should've been an English major.

Doctor Who double feature

Book: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (#81)

Author: Terrance Dicks

Published: 1983 (Target)

Pages: 128

Book: Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep (#110)

Author: Victor Pemberton

Published: 1986 (Target)

Pages: 189

Let’s be honest, I got into Doctor Who for David Tennant and his thousand-yard stare.

But I very quickly stayed for everything else. And these novelizations of the original TV show are just like watching episodes from when all the special effects were spray-painted cardboard instead of cheap CGI; that is to say, rollicking, unintentionally hilarious adventures where everyone is shouting exposition at each other and the Doctor just knows everything somehow and the companions alternate between terrified and indignant that no one believes him and there are monsters.

Fury from the Deep occasionally read like a PSA because the main monster was this giant sentient seaweed that tried to choke everybody and control their minds on this series of oil rigs, so “evil weed!” and “vile weed!” (heh, shot of honey mustard, stat!) were sprinkled in there. The characters were all pretty flat, of course, but I was disappointed this included the Doctor. And one of the companions, Jamie, was a Highlander only when the author remembered. Seriously, y’all, he said “Och!” and “duna worry” in between speaking like an American high schooler. And they got rid of the seaweed by amplifying the shattering sound waves of companion Victoria’s screams. And then afterward she decides to stay behind on the oil rig because she’s homesick and tired of almost getting killed by traveling with the Doctor.

BECAUSE A 20^TH CENTURY OIL RIG IS SO MUCH LIKE THE VICTORIAN ENGLAND SHE ORIGINALLY COMES FROM.

Haha, I told y’all this was good.

The Five Doctors was better writing, more complex plotting, and more distinct characters. All five regenerations of the Doctor get pulled from their time streams back to Gallifray to play this deadly game buried deep in the timelords’ planet so they unwittingly spring the traps so the president chief timelord dude can get to the ancient ring that promises immortality. Which he gets, only in living stone instead of life like he thought.

I liked watching the Doctors interact with each other. They were each distinctive in appearance and temperament and I never mixed them up. This book brought together all the feistier companions, too, and including a brief cameo from Jamie that revealed he WEARS A KILT AND TAM O’SHANTER. ALL THE TIME.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still all terrible writing. So many adjectives and adverbs, y’all. So very many. But I feel like Cardboard David Tennant approves. 

Fangirl time!

Book: A Perfectly Good Family

Author: Lionel Shriver

Published: 1996 (Faber and Faber)

Pages: 277

I’m reviewing this book because it gives me an excuse to fangirl about Lionel Shriver. Ready? Here goes.

AHHHHH She’s such a good author she expresses all the internal intricacies of life so well she’s not afraid to explore and expose the ugly parts either she gets the interplay of duty and selfishness and wanting things both ways and the consequences of that exactly right she articulates the personal war between discipline and what’s “good” for you with the spontaneous joy and equally unexpected heartbreak that comes from living recklessly she’s even got a cool name that she chose herself because she didn’t like her own AHHHHHHHH!

Okay. So, needless to say, I like this book. It’s part of a Shriver buying spree I went on after I read We Need To Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World and loved both and discovered I could buy the whole rest of her output (six or seven other books) for like $3 each on Amazon. They came one by one into my school mailbox in a delightful trickle that almost perfectly matched my reading pace.

A Perfectly Good Family is about three siblings who are warring over what to do with the giant North Carolina mansion they just inherited after their mother dies. The two brothers each want to buy the other out, and they each enlist the sister to go with them; she goes along with both because she can’t make herself choose one over the other.

The characters are fantabulous conflicted mixtures of loyalties to radically different things (parents that they didn’t especially like, the house one of them loves and the other just wants to sell, each other as siblings, an audio tech business that’s hemorrhaging money) and vices (destruction, self-discipline, being wishy-washy). It’s so, so great to read such detailed people—including the parents, who are presented as saints to the outside world but are revealed as both more and less than their children ever needed.

Even the house negotiating plot is so much more interesting than it sounds because it’s presented as the official, legal embodiment of the family’s struggle. The clashing passions with their clothes pressed and their hair combed.

The ending, though, I really, really must protest. It’s much too happy for Shriver. Everything just magically works out. She doesn’t do happy endings, usually, and I love her for that because it makes her work seem more real.

This fangirl is also worried about how the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin is going to bring all that internal conflict which is the vital core of the plot into a primarily visual medium. PLEASE NO VOICEOVERS OH GOD THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO ISN’T IT.

Sigh. But I’ll end up going to see it anyway, dammit.