5 books I’ve read that i can’t admit i’ve loved

 by alexandra richardson

001 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

If you haven’t read Nabokov’s most controversial novel, you’ve probably heard of it. Both popular and academic culture are positively mined with references to the memoir of “Humbert Humbert,” an aging, European silver fox, as he recalls his doomed, disturbing obsession with thirteen-year old “nymphet” Dolores “Lo” Haze.

Ok, ok, just hear me out.

Nabokov’s prose is beautiful, and his command of imagery is striking and subtle, deceptively simple, and, ultimately, intensely complex. The narrative is littered with wry wordplay and a sarcastic, old-world-Europe observation of American culture, which is particularly appropriate given that the novel was set just as the United States were well on their way to world-superpowerdom.

The highly disturbing subject matter is so intriguing because: what, in the hell, does it mean? The narrator has so well deceived himself (we literature students love an unreliable narrator!), that we-as-reader are at once intrigued and repulsed. Some critics have refused to do more than take the story for face value: aging pervert violates child. Others spin the power dynamic on it’s head, understanding Lo not as an innocent, but as a demonic she-creature, corrupting a weak-willed emasculated man. And still others emphasize the novel’s study of tyranny, reading Lolita as an extended metaphor for the totalitarianism of Nabokov’s native Russia. To be sure, the plot is a constant construction and deconstruction of unstable power dynamics, meant to represent the clash between the values of old-world Europe and new-world-power America, but, ultimately, the novel is strangely, darkly intriguing in its presentation of love (and lust) as corruptive in it’s obsessive potential.

It is also worth considering the text’s broader implications. The “manic pixie dream girl” character trope has, too, permeated film and literature, seemingly emerging from a broader Western obsession with  -- and sexualization of -- the “woman-child,” the waifish (even boyish) girl who never grows. Lolita forces a confrontation of that cultural perversion of girlhood and demands a reckoning with the potentially problematic aspects of the of the woman-child character trope that is long overdue.

002 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, by Alexander Freed

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: did she just out herself as the biggest nerd in the…Galaxy?

(I am so sorry, I had to, it was right there). Yes, I did, BUT DON’T JUDGE ME YET.

You might be asking yourself, there are novelizations of all the Star Wars movies? You might also be asking yourself who, in their right minds, reads movie novelizations, to which I would respond…me. You see, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, was my favorite of the famed films, so when I saw it on Amazon… well, I deliberated long and hard, but let’s just say it ended in “Add to Cart.”

It’s no secret that Star Wars captured the imaginations of people of all ages, involved in the film industry or otherwise, and has done so for over four decades. Consider my imagination captured, enslaved, locked in a cage; I don’t know what it is, but despite the at times shaky and over-complicated plots and rickety dialogue, I can’t get enough.

If you haven’t seen the film consider this your crash course: petty thief Jyn, a young woman incarcerated in an Imperial (the bad guys’) prison, is recruited by the Rebel Alliance (the good guys - sort of) to facilitate an introduction to a group of rebellion-turned-sort-of-terrorists who ostensibly have information regarding a weapon of mass destruction that Jyn’s father, an Imperial scientist, has allegedly built (cue the daddy-issues). In classically Star Warsian fashion, the plot is convoluted, and the cast of characters is strange: in addition to Jyn, we have Rebel spy, Cassian; a defected Imperial pilot, Bodhi Rook; two monks, Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus; a very tiny, very angry Imperial general with a white cape; and rogue rebel leader Saw Gerrerra who was Jyn’s other father-figure at one point (cue daddy-issues, part two). Several planets are blown up, there are many traumatic deaths, and Jyn recruits a cadre of unlikely heroes who break protocol and storm an Imperial stronghold to capture the schematics of  the aforementioned of mass destruction (the very famous Death Star).  

I have skimmed other books set in the Star Wars universe and, because the authors vary book to book, the quality of the writing is unpredictable. This was the first I read in full and Alexander Freed did not let me down. The story follows the film to the letter, sticking close to the screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, but contributing admirably to the canon with evocative description and carefully crafted exploration of the psyches’ of the film’s motley crew of renegade heroes. The novel gives the film an increasingly intimate dimension, pushing character complexities to ultimately inject the narrative with much needed complexity. Also, I’m a sucker for an intense, well-developed and thoughtfully written female lead (bonus points if she isn’t aggressively sexualized!) and Jyn is all of those things. The Force is strong in this one (I’m sorry, I’m done now).

003 The Other Boleyn Girl, by Phillipa Gregory

I read The Other Boleyn Girl when I was fourteen, picking it up off my mother’s night stand (she was a big fan of historian-novelist Phillipa Gregory, the so-called “queen” of British historical fiction) and promptly swore off historical fiction.

In retrospect, it was probably too early for me to attempt such a book, and here’s why.

Gregory’s novelization of the iconic Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall – from mistress of Henry VIII to his second queen, to accused witch, to beheaded – in the famed Tudor Courts, told through the wide eyes of Anne’s younger sister, Mary (herself one of Henry’s mistresses) is, certainly, compellingly written, rich in detail and description. The character arcs, set against the high stakes of national politics, court social culture and the broad, sweeping arc of England’s military history are dramatic, to say the least, rising and plummeting like waves during the mother of all rainstorms in Hell. The story is rife with scandal, treason, death, rivalry – some incest, fair warning – tyranny, and is a veritable web of power dynamics: between families, within families, between husband and wife, between husband and mistress, between women of all social and political ranks, and, most fascinatingly so, between sisters. There’s a gay brother; a nice, sweetly wholesome, spineless little at-court rival for our ambitious, dark-eyed anti-heroine-as-heroine to snipe with; several elopements; and lot’s and lot’s and lot’s of sex (seriously, so much sex). Not for the faint of heart, but if you’re a history geek with a wild side, The Other Boleyn Girl will take you on the ride of your life..

004 The Legend Trilogy, by Marie Lu

I read this series back in my junior year of high school, and my God, it f***ed me up. I couldn’t think about anything else for the two weeks I devoured the trilogy. Set in a dystopian United States, this futuristic retelling of Javert and Jean Valjean of Les Miserables (if Javert were a sixteen-year old military-trained genius and Valjean were a sixteen-year old runaway and wrongfully accused terrorist living on the streets of a San Francisco deformed by global warming), captured my teenaged imagination in a way other YA dystopian novels had failed to do. The story is, I admit, unbelievable, but the tension-that-becomes-chemistry between the two main characters, the “prodigy” June and the “legend” Day, is unbelievable (or maybe it was just my fevered teenaged imagination? A therapist would probably have a field day with this. It’s probably best not to consider it too closely). The star-crossed-lovers trope gets a badass twist, a rock-and-roll edge, painted against a political and environmental backdrop that is uncannily familiar and irreconcilably different to our lived reality And, also, I mean…all the feels.

005 The Infernal Devices Trilogy, by Cassandra Clare  

Allow me to begin by saying that Cassandra Clare was the writer I didn’t know I was missing in my life. Fellow nerds, this woman knows. Her. Sh*t.  Not only is The Infernal Devices rich with eloquent description of place, careful attention to detail, characters with distinctive voices, and dialogue fit to break your heart, but Clare proves herself an admirable literary historian. The three stories are structured along the lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and the trilogy is rife with literary allusion. Count on everything from loose reference to direct quotes of other texts of the time and place. Protagonist Tessa, is a full-time bookworm, and is never without a book. Half-angel (yeah, you read that right), bad-boy love interest Will has a literary pun perpetually at the ready.

Clare’s series is positively uncanny in its grounding of a fantastical, magicked worlds well-within the ordinary human world. Biblical stories stitching angels, demons, Heaven, and Hell are transplanted into Victorian England. Her world-building rivals that of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling, in my utterly unqualified opinion. English majors everywhere, this is the fantasy series for you.

Here’s the situation: Tessa Gray, a newly orphaned sixteen-year old from New York, moves to London with her brother, only to discover (in a series of highly believable events involving a kidnapping, and two funny little warlock women called “The Dark Sisters”) that she is not human, but is, in fact, some kind of magical creature, possibly a demon, but no one knows what exactly. She proceeds in a very straight-forward manner to discover the Downworld,which exists alongside her own reality. She befriends the so-called “Shadowhunters,” the off-spring of angels, and is pitted against the mysterious “Magister,” a shadowy presence with ominous plans to utilize Tessa’s shape-shifting abilities to, first, take her as his child bride (men are weird), activate an automaton army (even weirder), and take over the world (understandable, but still not ideal). The cast of characters includes but is not limited to the tragic-in-the-tradition-of-Sydney-Carton, Will Herondale; his best friend, the witty, tortured violinist Jem Carstairs who also happens to be dying; the HBIC, Parisian vampiress Camille;  and a flamboyant, queer warlock by the name of Magnus Bane. For a heroine extraordinary in her ordinariness, mechanical automatons, plenty of literary and historical references, casual questions of morality (light and dark, good and bad, the whole shebang), some good, old-fashioned young adult angst, and a fair amount of glitter, try this series.

Alexandra Richardson | @ali_darcy