In the foreword, Roach takes great care to mention her attempts to research and write this book without bias; she does a reasonable, if imperfect job at that. Honestly, when speaking of the nature of reincarnation, ensoulment, ghosts and various other things of that nature, I believe it to be impossible to be entirely objective. Personally, I've read enough self-insert fanfiction to hope for a screwy amalgamation of reincarnation and infinite universes.

Not a single boring chapter, though my favorite is definitely the discussion of ectoplasm and the many possibilities of where it could be hidden in and/or on the medium producing it. Harry Houdini himself is threatened with "a good beating" for daring to question the vercity of one such medium's claims. The drama! The gossip! No wonder spiritualism had such a hold on society during the 20s and 30s.

Overall, there was a lot more math than I was expecting. I definitely appreciate the candor about her ignorance of quantum physics & thermodynamics (something she and I have in common) as well as her ability to break down the interviews she has with experts into terms a layman interested in pop science can easily grasp. I'm well aware my strengths do not lie in the STEM arena, but I'm still interested! So thanks, Mary Roach, for being the middleman between me and scientific academia.

A footnote that really appealed to me:

"Oh, they're all weird or embarrassing one way or another," said a spokesman [of Harvard Medical School] some years ago when I expressed surprise at Mack's [alien-abduction researcher] tenure. "Besides," he added ominously, "there's a lot of weird science that turns out to be not-so-weird once it's proven."

3.5 stars, but we all know how Goodreads feels about that.

If you haven't, in the throes of stressful life situations, wildly considered faking your own death and leaving Other You's problems behind, I congratulate you on being a more level-minded person than myself (and many others, as obviated by the existence of this book).

By going to Frank Ahearn for advice, Greenwood has given me another title to read: Ahearn's own book How To Disappear. I'm unlikely to do such a thing (mostly because I'm lazy), but I'm also a firm believer that all knowledge is worth having.

Ahearn talks to Greenwood about the men searching for the "palm-tree lifestyle" while his clients who are women mostly want to disappear due to abusive husbands or stalkers - I think it says a lot the gender & power divide in our society. John Darwin, a man who was caught & convicted of [death] fraud, seems to think that more men try pseudocide than women because they are "more reckless, more adventurous than women. Women are more cautious and careful and think things through." Or maybe, as Greenwood postulates, women are socialized to "shoulder the burdens of family and community" - meaning they cannot shrug off the responsibility of children and loved ones as easily. And maybe those who did do the deed are just better at it - you can't be added statistically if you're never caught. Greenwood makes a second mention of this later, when she attempts to contact an ex-girlfriend of a psuedocide conspirator:

Most of the women who had been in some way connected to male death fakers did not get back to me. While I would love to have heard their stories, their silence reinforced my sense that women are superior at pseudocide. They know how to commit to making themselves scarce.

The fourth chapter is about Michael Jackson's death and the subsequent group of Believers who are convinced that he has faked it in a spectacular fashion. It is very relevant, if ultimately uninteresting - I just personally do not give a fuck about this particular subject.

This was a weirdly enjoyable book overall (considering the subject matter) and I think the tone of The Millennial Writer™ is really sold it for me. Conversational prose with casual cursing and exaggerated language is my balliwick - I immediately felt at home. And now I know to plan a vacation to the Philippines should I ever want to fake my own death.

Man, Stephen King is so likeable.

I actually learned quite a bit from the whole of On Writing, which was a surprise. I normally hate being told how to write, even if the only audience that exists for my own work so far has been in fandom; it's a problematic piece of my personality. Of course, this is less of a "how to" guide and more of a memoir that focuses on how his life has influenced his art on a personal level.

Overall, though, my favorite idea of King's is actually in the first foreword, where he's speaking about his (to me, utterly surreal) band of authors - "We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know." He brings it up again in the first section "C.V.", saying that "your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up." That resonates with me and my path as a writer. He also validates me in my neverending disgust at writing plot instead of situations ("plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest."); after all, that's how he rolls and a man with a gazillion novels sold can't be wrong, yeah?

King does castigate writers like me for our love affair with adverbs, though. I've heard it before, okay? I just can't help myself, Stephen. I'll try harder.

On impulse, I decided to join the local library's book club and this was October's selection, so I picked it up on one of my many trips there. Upon scanning the back summary I thought, "This is going to be some heavy shit," and promptly procrastinated in reading it to protect My Feelings for a while longer. While I wasn't wrong, this book is much more than an unrelenting shitshow of the horrors of war & the heavy toll of espionage - it's funny as hell too. To sum up The Sympathizer briefly and inadequately, it is a confessional novel written by an unnamed NVA spy working in the ranks of the South Vietnamese Army, starting with the official end of the war in 1975 and moving through his life as a refugee in America and then back to Vietnam once more. My fellow bookclub members mentioned how difficult they found getting started, but I was hooked from the very first.

Viet Thanh Nguyen mentions that he wanted everyone complicit in the war (French, American, Vietnamese) to be held accountable in this narrative and boy howdy, he held nothing back. Zero chill, no one was safe and it was amazing. I'm American with a dim view of how our government polices the world, so perhaps I am a more receptive audience to commentary like this:

But I was one of the unfortunate [refugees] who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

While most people I have spoken to about this novel were taken by the feeling of being nothing, the narrative of The Other, the Captain's inability to find a comfortable place to straddle his many worlds, I was more drawn to idea that was espoused by Mao and repeated by the Captain: "Art could not be separated from politics and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them." Separating art from artist (and thus their ideals & politics) has always been a struggle of mine because I'm never sure if I should. This is exemplified when the Captain becomes a consultant on a famous Auteur's film about the war, ostensibly to provide realism and representation to the Vietnamese actors, only to realize he's played into their game without any hope of bringing about effective change. The Hollywood machine cranks on, warts (racism, sexism, homophobia) and all.

The Sympathizer is just a WOW book, but I find myself struggling to define all the ways I enjoyed it. I did, though, and I think everyone should give it a whirl. Even if, like me, you're not super informed about the particulars of the Vietnam War, you won't be lost.

I'm both ready and wary for the sequel. The author says:

“I realized [the narrator is] a misogynist and I’m enjoying writing from the viewpoint of a misogynist, so what does it mean about him and what does it mean about me?” he said. “The sequel will still be very much about revolution, politics, ideology and commitment, but also about sexuality and masculinity – his, but also mine too, and that’s not something that I’ve thought about too extensively in my life and I need to grapple with these issues much more explicitly in the sequel."

I'm interested to see how how he pulls this off as a man writing the journey, since he never explicitly states that the Captain will change his views. The Captain clearly thought himself as a progressive man in regards to women, which means he would never believe there's anything to change. His treatment of women, through thoughts and deeds and microaggresions, was the biggest thing that held me back when it comes to becoming a sympathizer (hah!) toward his character. Time will tell.

This is not the book for you if you're unfamiliar with modern weaponry and military lingo - context clues will only get you so far. The characters aren't interested in babying you; they want to tell their fucking stories without stopping for bullshit, peppered with copious profanity. Each chapter is a new story, with new people; I made severely disjointed notes that will be helpful to exactly no one.

redeployment
The dogs, man. That is fucking heartbreaking.

frago
Soldiers have some unique insults - "dumber than Fabio on two bottles of NyQuil."

after action report
"When Corporal Garza reached up to grab my balls, which he sometimes does to fuck with me ..." - man, the hypermasculinity of the military sure is kinda gay.

bodies
I didn't even know there was a Mortuary Affairs Corps, but it makes sense. A horrible sort of sense. Further research shows that the Marines didn't even have a dedicated unit until Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some legacy Bush has granted us.

oif
This is a story of too many acronyms and a wearied sense of duty, which I think is a general metaphor for our whole military system.

money as a weapons system
"Istalquaad," I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.
"I think that's how you say it," Bob said. "It means freedom. Or liberation. Something."
"That's nice," I said.
"They didn't name it," he said. "We did."

This chapter was just an unrelenting landslide of how US bureaucracy stomped into Iraqi culture and fucked all sorts of things up.

in vietnam they had whores
I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic to this particular plight (lack of brothels during deployment). This whole chapter was very ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for me.

prayer in the furnace
This chapter was too real. As a chaplain, how can you justify war as part of God's plan to the men who go out in it every day? A hopeless endeavor. The list of suicides from the chaplain's battalion after deployment is depressing, to say the very least.

psychological operations
"... talking with anybody who thought they had a clear view of Iraq tended to make me want to rub shit in their eyes." Aaaaand scene.

war stories
I can see Jenks's facial disfigurement. The term "boiled-pork-pink smoothness of his skin grafts" really sticks with you.

unless it's a sucking chest wound
"I was out of the Corps. I wasn't a Marine anymore." This belies everything I have ever heard as a civilian.

There's such a sad, resigned quality to all of the stories from the Marines, running under the cursing and overtly offensive language. The ending of After Action Report sums that up best for me:

[complaining about a fellow soldier bragging about attention from women due to his bullet wound scars] "What do you want him to say?" I said. "He got shot in the neck and he's going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants."
I could heard Timhead breathing in the dark. "Yeah," he said. "Whatever. It doesn't matter."
"No," I said. "It doesn't."

This is definitely a case of picking up a book because of its gorgeous cover - I had no idea I had already seen one of the chapters (His Face All Red) on the interwebs. Reading it again in this format is so much more powerful, more real.

Also, I kind of adore the font she chose.


All these stories are creepy, in a slow and invasive sort of way. They're never ended in a bundled, neatly-tied manner, leaving the reader at the mercy of their now amped-up imagination. It is, as they say in Pokemon, super effective.

Benny never can keep his nose out of other people's business.

Erek's predicament always seemed incredibly sad to me, even amidst the literal child soldiers fighting a guerrilla war. Created for a singular purpose, only to outlive it in exchange for thousands of years of loneliness.

NEWT
(lying)

Graves stands outside, watching Credence intently. Credence spots him, hope flickering across his face. Utterly enthralled, Credence moves across the street toward Graves, barely looking where he's going-everything else is forgotten.

...

GRAVES
Shhhh. My boy, the sooner we find this child, the sooner you can put that pain in the past where it belongs.

Graves gently, almost seductively, moves his thumb across the cuts [on Credence's hands], healing them instantly.

4.5 stars, for sure.

For all his vaunted intelligence (he is a Holmes, after all), Mycroft is still given to the follies of youth. He is aware of them, of course, but dismisses any problems his arrogance might cause until it catches up to him. Cyrus Douglas, his best friend, is an older man who indulges Mycroft's need for adulation for while keeping his own counsel on Mycroft's naiveté. It's a shifting of the traditional Sherlock and Watson dynamic. We don't need two pairs of the exact same characters running about, after all.

In Trinidad, there is a lougarou terrorizing the people and Mycroft is going to get to the bottom of it - if only because the disappearances of the island natives is causing emotional distress to Douglas (an ex-pat) and his fiancée Georgiana, with whom he is thoroughly twitterpatted. He manipulates his boss, the Secretary of State for War, into sending him there to prevent an (entirely exaggerated) incipent revolt just to pursue this investigation.

A baby student Sherlock shows up briefly before Mycroft leaves for Trinidad. I got unreasonably excited at this interaction. Mycroft schools him on "allowing [his] feelings to get in the way of [his] deductions" regarding an old case Sherlock was pondering over. Immediately after they box while Mycroft needles him into deducing why he came to visit Sherlock in the first place. You can very clearly see the roads the authors are laying about Mycroft's influence on Sherlock's older, canonical personality.

"You are insufferable."
"So I've been told," Sherlock said, "more times than I care to recall. Though I do, unhappily, recall each time."

Very quickly, the mystery of the lougarou becomes the mystery of Georgiana. It is apparent that she's keeping secrets, secrets that lead to a near fatal poisoning and then a severe beating for both of our intrepid heroes. As Mycroft unravels the thread of her story, he becomes more and more despondent as he realizes that he never knew Georgiana at all. She is The Woman to Mycroft, as damaging to his emotional state of being as Irene Adler will be to Sherlock's ego. This experience, both with Georgiana and the hardships he endures while in Trinidad, hardens his heart exponentially.

Basically, this was a delight and a half to read despite the increasingly heavy subject matter. I would absolutely love a sequel, with more of Mycroft and Douglas' adventures in politics and intrigue.