strange and random happenstance: Zadie Smith

Showing posts with label Zadie Smith. Show all posts

Friday, August 24, 2018

Politics and Prose Bookstore

Bookstore: Politics and Prose Bookstore

Location: Washington, D.C.

The Official Patter: "Politics and Prose is an independent bookstore located in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. The store was founded in 1984 by co-owners Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, who expanded the store fivefold to its present size. After a failed sale attempt in 2005, the two co-owners eventually sold the store to current owners Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine in 2011. Politics and Prose is known for its knowledgeable staff and is seen as a part of D.C. culture. Its author events attract famous speakers, such as Bill Clinton and J.K. Rowling, and have a reputation for their astute audiences."

Why I Love Them: When I went to D.C. back in 1996 oh how I wish I knew about this store. But then again, being seventeen with my parents planning the entire trip, it's not like I got much say, even if the trip was technically for me. I was going to accept an art award which I was late to. Thanks Amtrak. I also got sick on the trip. Yeah. I totally know how to party don't I? But with a name like Politics and Prose, I just feel like this isn't just the perfect store, but the name perfectly embodies what a bookstore should be in our nation's capital. And what I find most interesting is that they don't seem to have any genre bias. Hosting a whole range of authors from women's fiction to YA. Now that's something our government should try to embrace, inclusivity.

Best Buy: Being in the Midwest you kind of have to resign yourself to the fact you might never meet your favorite author unless you're willing to travel to the coasts, and Robin LaFevers is easily one of my favorite authors. I first discovered her through her Theodosia Throckmorton books that will delight the heart of any budding Egyptologist. But it's her His Fair Assassin series that showed a new more mature side to her writing. I instantly fell in love with the strong female leads and their various struggles. Thankfully for the second book in the series, Dark Triumph, Robin had a signing in Illinois, which I eagerly jumped in the car to attend! Because I was able to get the first book in the series, Grave Mercy, also signed at that event there was no way I was going to not have the whole trilogy signed... and of course I wasn't so lucky this time with her tour stops... but luck was still on my side when I saw her Mortal Heart schedule and noticed that Politics and Prose was on the tour. I had previously ordered some books from them, literally two ends of the genre spectrum, one being a Zadie Smith book, the other being a Leigh Bardugo book, so I knew they were good people. And sure enough, the book arrived in perfect shape and my collection was complete... for now. Because one of the reasons this book is so important to me is that Robin has finally returned to writing and is continuing this series with a new duology! And while I hope with fervent fingers crossed that she stops in the Midwest, I know if she stops at Politics and Prose I will still be able to get another best buy...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Dark Triumph, Grave Mercy, His Fair Assassin, Leigh Bardugo, Mortal Heart, Politics and Prose Bookstore, R.L. LaFevers, Robin LaFevers, Support Your Brick and Mortar, Washington D.C., Zadie Smith

Friday, June 3, 2016

Book Review - Zadie Smith's White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: March 19th, 1999
Format: Paperback, 448 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

On New Year's Eve 1974 Archie Jones sets out to kill himself but ends up being unsuccessful, yet like a butterfly leaving the cocoon, he leaves that gas filled car a new man. A new life and a new wife await him! His old army buddy Samad Iqbal has been saying to him for awhile that what he needs is a new young wife, like his own Alsana. That night Archie meets Clara Bowden and by Valentine's Day they are man and wife. Archie is escaping the life left in that car and Clara is escaping her mother, Hortense, whose religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness have stifled Clara's life. It isn't long before the middle aged men are fathers. Archie has a lovely daughter, Irie, and Samad has twins boys, Magid and Millat, who couldn't be more different.

It is 1984 and now Samad's life is about to change forever. He falls hard for his son's music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. The lust stirred in Samad has him questioning everything. But the attraction is mutual, and soon he has a new outlet for his lust. Yet his religious beliefs and the sin he is committing because, as he claims, the lure of the Western world has seduced him, leads him to do something that his wife will never forgive him for. He feels that if he could be degraded in this way, his sons are in even worse danger. He wants to send them back to Bangladesh, but only has the financial resources to send one of them. Magid and Millat are separated and Alsana can never forgive him until Magid is returned to her.

The 90s have come and Irie is grown up and in love with Millat. Millat has indeed fallen prey to the lure of the West as his father feared. He sleeps around, does drugs, gets into fights, and is still somehow the object of Irie's affection, which he doesn't return. One day at school Irie is confronting Millat near resident nerd Josh Chalfen when there is a drugs bust. The three of them get brought before the principal for Millat's marijuana. In the hope that Josh and his illustrious family, his mother Joyce is an author while his father Marcus is a genetic engineer, will be a good influence on Irie and Millat they are to go to the Chalfens once a week and have Josh tutor them. Soon it's everyday. Joyce takes an extreme interest in Millat while Irie starts to work for Marcus as an assistant. Even Magid, back in Bangladesh, befriends Marcus and decides to return to England. But the life of Chalfenism is divisive, and soon Josh has joined an animal rights group, FATE, to protest his father's genetic engineering of FutureMouse, while Millat has joined a fundamentalist Islamic group, KEVIN, to turn his back on his old life and the fact that Marcus prefers Magid. On the eve of the new millennium, everyone gathers to herald the arrival of FutureMouse... most with differing ideas as to how the evening will go.

From the little blurb I have assembled above you might be drawn to the false conclusion that this book actually has a plot. It doesn't. Well... it kind of does at the very end where Zadie Smith apparently realized she needed one and just threw in a handful of new characters and a whole bunch of organizations with stupid acronyms and built words into an unsatisfying conclusion with guns and Nazis and genetically engineered mice. That is right, she brought in Nazis. And I think that's the problem, she brought in whatever she wanted randomly and then just threw it aside when she got bored. Though she never seemed to get bored of slightly tweaking the reader with little asides in some random post modern moments of incomprehensibility. So the book actually feels like a bunch of interconnected short stories, some of which might have been good if they hadn't been thrown in with the morass of crap and depravity that makes up the majority of this book.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend and she asked me if I had read Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I replied that I had, mainly because it was a loosely, if failed, reimagining of Howards End, and was mentioned on The Vicar of Dibley. She was wondering if I was put off by the very detailed descriptions of one of the character's nipples. I honestly said that I had no recollection of this, most likely I had blocked it from my memory. I can honestly say though, after reading White Teeth, I will never forget Zadie Smith's obsession with nipples ever again. In fact, this book can be summed up as very boring with a veneer of eww. If I wasn't bored senseless I was quite literally wanting to throw up. Thirty pages of a 57 year old man masturbating (a different friend claims it might have been more, perhaps I'm preemptively blocking this out). Domestic abuse, where the children are placing bets on their parents. Teenagers marrying men in their 40s (proving Smith has daddy issues). A father of Irie's classmate calling her a big black goddess and ruminating about her breasts, when she's only what, fourteen! The aforementioned nipples, except for multiple characters, not just one. I wanted to wash my brain after reading this book.

Now, you're thinking that I missed the point, that the book wasn't about these accumulated repugnant and repulsive moments. I totally get that the book is about heritage and ancestry and genetics and what limitations we are burdened with, nature, nurture, fate. The second generation versus the first generation. You would have to be blind to miss this, especially once we get to FutureMouse. But the truth is, I can't, I couldn't, give a tinker's damn. It doesn't matter if you set out to write the most amazing, most profound story, if your characters are not only unlikeable, but reprehensible, then there is no way I will care. With all this ick as I will pejoratively call everything in this book, there wasn't a redeemable character or any reason to even finish reading this book except for the fact that I am incapable of leaving a book unfinished. So I finished. I read ever last work Smith wrote and I hated it. Mine is an educated hate, you can't say fairer than that!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Acronyms, Ancestral, E.M. Forster, Eww, FutureMouse, Genetic Engineering, Howards End, Jehovah's Witness, Masturbation, Nazis, On Beauty, Pedophile, Religion, Vicar of Dibley, White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Monday, November 9, 2009

Tuesday Tomorrow

Under the Dome by Stephen King
Published by: Scribner
Publication Date: November 10th, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 1088 Pages
To Buy

Official patter:
"On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when — or if — it will go away.Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens — town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing — even murder — to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out."

Sure everyone's excited about the whole, Stephen King might have finally written a book to best The Stand (at least in length). Personally, as a graphic designer, I find the whole concept of the cover fascinating. Not only was Scribner willing to sink a ton of money into it, but it was also all from Stephen King's own wishes! A publisher doing the bidding of an author? How novel... but then again, if you're Stephen King... To perfectly create the town he created within the dome of their doom the cover had almost as much work done on it as a big blockbuster movie! From using photos to illustration to computer rendering to CGI, plus we must not forget the "big reveal," this cover has generated a lot of buzz. I think it turned out pretty well, I do like the full panorama going on.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
Published by: Penguin Press
Publication Date: November 10th, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections-"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"-Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers-E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others-have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences-in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond-that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively."

Sometimes you just feel in the mood for some reading that's not a novel with an elaborate plot but a nice little article. But on top of that, it's sometimes such a hassle to find new writers. So what could be better than a writer you already know and love releasing exactly what you were craving? Nothing! Zadie Smith, the celebrated author of White Teeth has often contributed articles and other writing to the world of literature, but now they're all collected in one place. Ah convenience! Plus I love how the cover is designed to integrate into your "Zadie Smith Section" of your library, being reminiscent of the On Beauty cover. I love consistency...