Unraveled Wednesday: 8/30/23

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers today for the last Unraveled Wednesday in August. Time flies when you're working on the Captain Ahab Hitchhiker and want to see the colors changing.

I'd like to be able to finish this by next week sometime and get started on my next Wollmeise roll, but we'll see. 

I finished a bunch of books last week. Some were three-star fill-in books that I read between holds (The Anomaly, The Firm, LT's Theory of Pets, and Open Throat). They were perfectly fine reads, but there were also a couple of five-star standouts. The first was Above Ground, a stellar book of poetry by Clint Smith that Kat recommended. I was not familiar with Clint Smith, but I'm grateful to have read this book. It's a remarkable collection of exceptional poems about birth, parenthood, dancing in the cereal aisle, odes to the electric baby swing, double stroller, and those first fifteen minutes after the kids are finally asleep. There are also poignant poems about civilians being killed by US military air strikes, New Orleans after the storm has passed, George Floyd, and Willie Francis, the first known person to survive an execution by electric chair, 1946. Clint Smith knows exactly what to say and how to say it.

"What is the difference between science
and a miracle other than discovering new
language for something we don't understand?"

The second standout was the current Read With Us book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I'll be honest, it was such a difficult book for me to read initially. We had chosen it for Read With Us so I felt I had to read it, but the overwhelming violence and carnage brought my reading to a halt at least three or four times. It wasn't gratuitous violence but rather necessary in a book about the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. And along with the violence, this book also requires you to think and gain some sort of grasp of what was going on in Sri Lanka. Shehan Karunatilaka cleverly gives the reader an abbreviated shortcut to the factions and abbreviations in the form of a cheat sheet that Maali provided to clueless Western journalists, and I appreciate all the editing he and Sort of Books did over two years to make the book more accessible to Western readers.

Once I got past the initial blood, butchering, and bodies everywhere, I came to appreciate the world of the Afterlife that the author built. Narrated by a dead man in the second person, there are waiting rooms with endless queues, ghouls, ghosts, spirits, and worse in the In Between, and Maali Almeida has seven moons to finish any unfinished business so he can move on to The Light. It's a murder mystery, ghost story, political, and historical novel about evil and violence. It's also full of dark comedy and well worth reading.

"Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder."

What are you making and reading this week?