The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

This book is a beautiful meditation on art, memory, and forgiveness after great inhumanity. Judge Teoh, the narrator, returns to Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists, where she served an apprenticeship many years ago. As she sets down the paths her life has traveled, and attempts to bring the garden--the only Japanese garden in Malaysia--back to order, some of the mysteries of the past are unraveled and she is forced to reassess the choices she's made. I really enjoyed reading this book--it's beautiful and mysterious, and it really makes me appreciate how little of the history of Southeast Asia I know.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

This book is about the Fall of the House of Compson, as told through the points of view of its last three sons--Benjy, who is mentally retarded, Quentin, who is suicidally insane, and Jason, who is morally bankrupt--and a third-person, omniscient narrator. Although the majority of the narration technically happens during Easter weekend 1928, the story is continually haunted by its past traumas, which keep slipping in and out, along with Faulkner's cruel golf jokes. This book is a hauntingly beautiful warning about the dangers of getting caught up in the past and about the dangers of settling for a flawed modernity.

John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War by Franny Nudelman

This monograph looks at the ways that Civil War-era practices of portraying the body, starting with the song "John Brown's Body" incorporate people into the nationalistic labor of supporting the war effort. Nudelman reads a wide variety of cultural texts, from "Benito Cereno" and Melville and Whitman's war poems, to battlefield photographs, to practices of dissection. The book's arguments were convincing--and Nudelman sold me on her work's relevance to modern instances of violence.

Cities of the Dead by Joseph Roach

I found this book both helpful and intriguing. Roach posits that we gain a lot by investigating what he calls circum-Atlantic culture. He is particularly interested in memory, performance, and grief--and the way these three topics are related by the process of surrogation. Although the book centers around New Orleans and London, it allows its focus to encompass broader areas of inquiry as they're applicable, and, perhaps as a result, the organization of the text isn't quite as clear. Still, Roach's book gives a fresh approach to theorizing questions of race and cultural interactions in the (here, mostly anglophone) Atlantic world.

Resisting History by Barbara Ladd

I think I could have found this book more helpful than I did. In some senses, Ladd seems to be trying to recuperate the way Faulkner writes women in As I Lay Dying and Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse. Her concerns are gender, choice, agency, authorship, and the act of writing in As I Lay Dying, A Fable, The Golden Apples, and Tell My Horse. She contends that the presence of women and hybridities in these stories challenges the monolithic narrative of History and divides it into several different narratives. Her readings apply Walter Benjamin's Marxist analysis to these texts and attempts to include the study of space in addition to Benjamin's temporal approach. As this review may indicate, though, I had trouble following exactly what unified this study.