ReaderWriterVille

I’ve been reading across various genres this year, with a lot of literary fiction mixed in. Reading litfic requires mental muscles that I don’t exercise as much in genre, not because genre doesn’t require brain power, but because I’ll happily read a genre novel for its emotional payoffs or comfort-read benefits. If it’s not technically strong, I can live with that. Case in point: the Expanse series book I read earlier this summer. The writing was workmanlike at best and the plot meandered, but it was an interesting world and I was happy to fall into it.

With lit fic, I’ve been having the opposite reaction: the reading experience itself may not be great, but once I’m done and writing up my reactions, I realize the book’s strengths and have to give the author credit for them. Case in point: Ill Will by Dan Chaon. I put this on hold at the library when The Morning News announced its Rooster summer reading challenge.

I was excited enough about the challenge to buy the first book, A Separation by Katie Kitamura, but that one turned out to be a major disappointment. As I ranted at my LibraryThing page:

I loathed this book, and that doesn’t happen often. I could live with the stream of consciousness and the lack of quotation marks. I was fine being in her head as a writing approach. I just found her, the narrator, deplorable. I don’t know WHY I was in her head. The book is marinated in privilege, and the occasional line of self-awareness doesn’t excuse the overall treatment of Greece and the Greeks as backdrop to Aimless Rich One-Percenters. But even that I could have put up with, if I hadn’t been so revolted by the narrator, especially in the 2nd half. I was OK with her in the first half, but she really went off the rails for me in the second. In real life you would find this person appalling, so what am I supposed to get from her as a fictional character? What does she illuminate?

Also, I now hate comma splices with the heat of a thousand suns. I didn’t hate them before this book, but I’m transformed.

Nevertheless, I gave the book 3 stars because I thought it was trying to do something interesting and worthwhile, and I could see how the approach might work for a different reader.

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