All the Ms: Machado to MacHale

Machado, Ana Maria: Me in the Middle is a little preachy but still quite impressive. It is the story of a girl who hears both her great-grandmother and her great-granddaughter in her head. It’s a very Gabriel Garcia Marquez idea in an uncomplicated way. 

Machado, Carmen Maria: “Inventory” from Her Body and Other Parties is interesting because it is about a virus/plague slowly killing off people. The narrator is listing past lovers as she likely expects to die. I assumed at first that the inspiration was COVID, but the book of short stories was published in 2017. So similarly dark and reflective but without the “yeah, well, people do keep going” reality of the real thing.

Machado De Assis, Joaquim Maria: One of the interesting aspects of this reading experiment is encountering designated great authors that I didn’t know about. De Assis Machado is one of those greats! I started Dom Casmurro. The translation is excellent. And…there’s a reason I don’t know many great authors. Namely, I don’t find great literature all that interesting. 

Machias, Jules: Both Can Be True is about a main character who is non-binary and the boy who becomes the main character’s friend. The main character’s voice is engaging, but after the end of the first chapter, I just felt enormously sad. I’m not sure the author realizes how much the Rainbow Alliance in the first chapter comes across as stricter than any club I attended in high school in the 1980s. Instead of biological sexes being expanded to encompass the truly unusual, the supposedly unusual is broken up into smaller and smaller monitored bits. Allowed. Not allowed. Accepted. Not accepted. The moment pronouns become grist for the equivalent of hall-monitoring, finger-pointing "you've gotta make a decision about that" expectations tend to follow. 

Here is the reason that organized "safe places" ultimately fail. In Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, Wimsey ruminates that even in a "well-regulated" world where everyone has been parceled into government programs, the bright young things will creep away to night-clubs:

"Nature will have her revenge. They will slink away from the Government Communal Games to play solitaire in catacombs over a bowl of unsterilized skim-milk." 

True individuality always, eventually, makes itself felt.  

MacHale, D.J.: Curse of the Boogin starts with a dad falling off a roof, a surprisingly tragic beginning for a kid’s books even in this day & age. It appears to be Supernatural for young teens.