AJ Dunn Reads

  Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes I guess I was supposed to have read Flowers for Algernon in school, but I don't remember it at all. The form of the writing in this book is great, from Charlie Gordon's initial entries that reflected his bad spelling, grammar, and misuse or no use of punctuation, through his life as a genius after the operation and the way his writing reflected all of that, and back to the beginning as his mind deteriorated. I enjoyed the thoughtfulness of that form usage, which allows the reader to be in Charlie's same frame of mind. What a sad story! Another thing I liked about the form was that Charlie's mother, who was so awful to him as a child, suffered from mental deterioration as she became an old woman, a mirror of what was going to happen to Charlie. The motif of windows, looking at oneself through them and looking at others through them, was powerful. We often feel like we are on the outside looking in at others and at ourselves, separa...

  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart Shuggie Bain is one of those rare books in the literary world that deals with the working class life. I wish there were more of them. It's a world I can relate to, people the likes of which I am all too familiar, and the sordid lives they live as they just try to get by. Like Shuggie's mother Agnes, whose love of the bottle impairs her sight of what she's doing to herself and to her kids. Though a lot of Agnes's troubles were not of her own doing exactly, her response to them is entirely her fault. It's the same old story, one I've seen play out many times. Poor me, look what has happened; I'll make poor choices in order to deal with it and to hell with anyone who gets in my way. My children are just collateral damage. Shuggie Bain hit some personal notes for me, not just with his alcoholic mother and absent father, but with the abuse he himself suffers at the hands of other kids and even one adult man because Shuggie is a ...

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage If there is any book out there that makes you glad you're not a parent, it would be Baby Teeth , which explores psychopathy in a 7 year-old little girl who is out to harm/kill her mother. Zoje Stage did a great job of telling this story from both the mother's and daughter's perspectives. She explores the thoughts that go through a parent's mind when they struggle over the guilt about having a child who is not the child they expected they would have, and what to do about it. Hanna, the daughter, tells her side of things in a literary way. The visuals and connections are that of a child, but the prose doesn't cause the reader to feel like they're reading a middle grade novel. And Hanna is devious, and her reasons for acting out against her mother are often creepy. All of the characters are deliciously flawed and you both like and dislike all of them, but I think you lean more toward dislike for all three: Hanna, Suzette, and Alex, the fath...

  Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer Okay, so I don't think sci-fi is my jam. I will not likely pick up another one. This book was so difficult for me to get through, the prose just hard for my brain to grasp. The sentence constructions, the asides, the circle-talk...it was all just too much. Needless to say I didn't like it. It was as bad a read as the first in the trilogy. The second book was the best one, by far. The only thing I liked about this book was the gay lighthouse keeper and his story line. This book gets 3 stars, only because of that. The trilogy as a whole I'm giving 2 stars. That's all I have to say about it.

  Authority by Jeff VanderMeer Authority is a better book than Annihilation . At least this one has character names and descriptions, which helped to invest me more in the characters. However, something about the writing of these books isn't to my taste. I can only really pinpoint a couple reasons for why that is: the author never uses contractions, which is unnatural in regular speech patterns; far too many unnecessary asides in the sentences; I didn't like the characters; and there's just something about the construction of the prose that bothers me and is hard to read. All that said, the second half of the book is better than the first. The biologist from the first book in the trilogy is a side character in this book, which is fine because I didn't have any sort of attachment to her. Control, the main character in this book and the director of this organization (whatever it is, that's how lost I was), is a more interesting and better-developed character. What th...

  Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer I'm not really a science fiction reader, but I thought I'd give the Southern Reach trilogy a shot. Annihilation is the first book in the series by Jeff VanderMeer. One of the weirdest things about this book, and I think the thing that most inhibited it for me was that there are zero descriptions of what the characters look like and they are not named. As a result, I couldn't get a picture of them in my mind as I was reading. The story vacillates between the present mission of a group of researchers in the abandoned Area X and the main characters past relationship with her husband, who was a part of the previous expedition's team. I liked the bits about the biologist (the main character) and her husband and could have read a whole book about that. But the present parts were pretty boring to me until about the last third of the book, where some interesting stuff happens. I will read the other two books in the triology, Authority and Acc...

 The Stand by Stephen King Stephen King has a fondness for the name Sally. He uses it at least three times, if not more, in The Stand . I've read this book twice before and it is still one of his best works. My main issue with the book is that the climax, the undoing of Randall Flagg happens so quickly; the point the whole book builds up to is over in a couple of short paragraphs, which is kind of disappointing. That and the Sally repetition are my only qualms with it. This book is especially interesting to read right now during the Covid-19 epidemic. You imagine, "What if this is the way this all turned out?" It's a solid 4-star effort for King. The characters are well fleshed out and memorable, the stakes are high, the descriptions are vivid and fresh, the settings alive. All of the things King does best. I'll likely not read this book again; I did so this time as I read through King's works in order (I still need to get to the Bachman books!). But I'm g...