“The Trespasser” by Tana French

As you may have noticed, I am really into French’s novels. She does a wonderful job with writing mystery stories and creating characters that are borderline assholes, but still making you care about them. Her portrayal of Dublin is also spot on and demonstrates what Ireland is like, down to the most mundane details. I’m hooked.

In this latest installment, she focuses on Detectives Conway and Moran as they get their first real murder case that isn’t a simple domestic or bar fight. Conway is the narrator and often discusses how she feels alone on the squad as the only female D and the rest of the male D’s want her gone. This results in the added factor of having the detectives not trust their own squad and having to be careful around them as well as the witnesses and suspects.

In fact, at multiple points the reader does not know who to trust. This includes the various characters but also the narrator herself makes it abundantly clear that her knowledge is incomplete and often paranoid. Which really shows off how French can get right inside her character’s heads, so much so that you can point out their flaws and weaknesses.

What’s interesting in this book is also how it’s slightly different from her other novels in terms of how it ends. Most of her other books involve someone’s last case on the squad, as they have to leave or resign or whatever afterwards. This book is similar, but there’s a twist on it in that you think it’s obvious how and who are leaving, but then it changes and it alters again. Wish I could talk more, but you really have to read it for yourself.

As usual, a winner from French, and I hope she writes about this pair of cops again. She usually swaps protagonists every book, but I really liked these two. Usually there’s one or two characters that get reused book to book (Quigley seems to be incompetent in nearly every installment), so they might pop up again in the future, who knows.

The World Ends With You: A Retrospective

So you may remember my earlier post about a Nintendo DS game from 2007 called “The World Ends With You.” Every once in a while I get the urge to replay that game, and this summer I went through the whole thing again. It’s still amazing, with a powerful message, unique gameplay, and memorable characters. There’s a reason why it has a dedicated (if small) fan base online.

This game dropped while I was on the verge of going from middle school to high school. Not exactly the easiest part of a person’s life. I picked up this game because I saw a ton of hype for it online, and thought that it looked interesting. Not exaggerating here, I think it was formative for me to be playing this game during these years.

Back in those days, I was starting to get into thinking about philosophy, and how I want to live my life. This isn’t the only piece of culture that influenced it, there was also Ishmael by David Quinn and other various works that turned me into more philosophy. But this game was influential because of its message about opening yourself up to other people.

“The world ends with you” is a sentence dropped by the archetypal teacher in the game, instructing the protagonist to quit holing himself in and talk to other people. It doesn’t refer to the end of the world or any of that dystopian stuff, it actually refers to the world inside of your head. To the literal world that ends with you. To grow and change you need to open up to people, talk to them, and expand your world bit by bit. If you stay stuck in your own world, it’ll never grow, and you’ll never learn or change. That’s not a way to live.

(Note: in Japan, the game’s name is “It’s a Wonderful World” which, to me, is less related to the message of the game and I don’t like it as much. But to each his own.)

This message is so important now, more than ever. People are being trapped inside their own way of thinking and ignoring everything that comes into conflict with it. People aren’t bothering to clash and learn from each other, they’d rather ignore it and continue down the path of ignorance. This isn’t going to solve anything, these problems are just going to fester and grow until we have a major problem on our hands. And I’m not immune to it either, we all need to seek out and talk to people that disagree with us and expand our world and theirs to solve any problem.

But there still isn’t a sequel to this game, even though it’s been nearly 10 years now. The signs are there, it could easily get one. The bonus chapter at the end alludes to it, and when they released the mobile version there was the image of a new character who could possibly be in another game. Specifically, in Another Day when you find Mr. H he says something along the lines of “you want to help me huh? Well that time could be sooner than you think.” Mr. H it’s been 10 years! I want to help you!

I hope that Square Enix doesn’t forget about this great game, or the fans that it has inspired over the years. Video games can create so much good in the world, as they are another way to consume stories and grow from them. It would be wonderful to see it get more attention and support, as it certainly deserves it. I know that I, personally, won’t be forgetting about this game anytime soon.

Arcade Fire: “Everything Now”

I’ve been a big fan of Arcade Fire for a while now, but this new album has blown me away. You need to get the physical CD in order to really get what the band is saying, it’s very clever.

The cover art features the title of the album “Everything Now” as a neon sign on a gate. The scene looks desolate, but there’s also a color and a vibrancy to it. The dust jacket adds tiny hand drawn stars to the sky, and there is a texture to the mountain, but only above the gate. Flip it over and there’s a small figure of a horse (the figure is also textured, and has more stars) and some small fires. There’s also a “For Sale By Owner” sign, the owner is Arcade Fire, unsurprisingly. The dust jacket on the back reads “Everything Now Presents Arcade Fire in partnership with” and then it lists the titles of the songs on the album.

The lyrics sheet deserves an award or something, it’s designed to look like a coupon booklet. The titles of the songs are the different products being advertised, and the price instead displays how long the song is. There are also pictures of the “products” being sold, such as a green shirt for “Peter Pan” or marshmallows for “Creature Comfort.” And of course there’s the lyrics instead of descriptions.

We haven’t even started listening to the music and there’s already a statement being made about consumerism. The cover art hints at a dark side to all this, with the brush fires on the back and the empty landscape. This only continues with the lyrics.

It starts with “Everything Now,” a song where the refrain is “you’ve got everything now/I need it/everything now/I want it/everything now/I can’t live without/everything now.” The dark side is clearly evident in the verses, as the singer tells us to “stop pretending” or asks his dad why he isn’t around. The “shit I couldn’t live without” is everywhere, without any empty spaces. “Every inch of road’s got a sign” just as the essential clutter has filled up the narrator’s life. I could probably go on and on about this one song, but you get the idea. We have so much and it’s all just shit, we don’t have anything meaningful, we’re just pretending. Remember how the lyrics sheet is a coupon book? Yeah, that shit.

We continue on to “Signs of Life.” The chorus here is “looking for signs of life. Looking for signs every night, but there’s no signs of life. So we do it again.” What I think they’re getting at here is that as a result of having everything we’ve forgotten how to live, there’s no life anywhere. Third song is “Creature Comfort,” which is fairly self-explanatory. The song talk about people being unhappy and attempting suicide, saying that they either want to be famous or have a painless death. Either they are turned into the materialistic, perfect objects around them or they’re done living. “Peter Pan,” the next song, is kind of the opposite. It idealizes childhood by comparing the person’s old lover to Wendy and Peter Pan. Together they can escape this madness.

Skip ahead to “Infinite Content.” This song is actually a play on words, they’ve got infinite content, and are now infinitely content. (But are they though?) There are two infinite contents, the second is slower and more mellow, it pretty effectively casts doubt on the second statement just with it’s mood.

“Good God Damn” is similar thematically to “Creature Comfort” but the thing holding people back from death is that maybe there’s a good God out there. Since “he made you” the possibility exists. This continues with “Put Your Money On Me” which changes the context of this consumerism. If the only thing good in life is other people, put your money on them instead of the objects that make you hate yourself.

However this idea gets flipped in “We Don’t Deserve Love.” Here the lover doesn’t think that they’re worthy of love, because that’s what they’ve heard their entire life. They hide and wait for a “Christ-type” to save them, when really all they have to do is “roll away the stone” and save themselves.

The ending brings us back to “Everything Now.” The narrator is “in the black again” and stuck in Everything Now, unable to escape without their lover. A depressing ending, but it tells us how to avoid the same fate. Valuing other people, loving other people, rather than monetary goods is what will get us out. Love is what will save us, more than any objects we can buy.

“You’ll Grow Out of It” by Jessi Klein

The contents of this book could be roughly summed up as a hilarious take on what it means to be a woman, but not in the stereotypical sense. I thought that I would detest this book. However, I was incredibly wrong.

Klein is a hilarious writer, she often talks about her experience with stand-up comedy and comedic writing. (Funnily enough, I went to the same undergrad college as her, which is where she started sketch writing.) She could be writing about anything and I’d probably listen and think that it was amusing just due to her writing style. Plenty of footnotes are used, more often than not to call herself out on whatever slight lie she stuck into the test. (These are usually about the amount of wine she was drinking, or something similar.) The whole thing is very conversational and feels as though the stories are being relayed to you by a friend instead of an author.

And the stories themselves are great. Each chapter deals with a separate topic, they run in a sort of rough chronological order, but not completely. And yeah, most of them are about not fitting into everyone’s idea of what a woman should be or act like. Speaking as someone who has struggled with this for her life, Klein just gets it. You get a great sense of what it’s like to be Klein, but in my experience, most women can find a piece of themselves within her voice.

So just goes to show that first impressions are still wrong, this book is entertaining, witty, insightful, and a pleasure to read. I can’t recommend it enough!