The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
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Thursday, January 10, 2019 — 5B

2018 was yet another whirlwind 
year in the hurricane that has been 
the last half-decade, but luckily 
books, new and old, kept writers 
from all beats on Daily Arts sane. 
The Book Review asked a handful 
of them to write about their favorite 
moments with a book, literature or 
even reading itself this past year.

“Just 
Kids” 
by 
Patti Smith

My exposure to Patti Smith 
before I opened the first page 
of “Just Kids” was limited to 
childhood car rides with my 
parents and assertions by my 
friends that she was their second 
mother. I knew she had an album 
called Horses, which I had never 
consciously listened to, and thanks 
to the person that lent me the 
now treasured book (which I still 
must give back) I was aware of her 
relationship with photographer 
Robert Mapplethorpe.
“Just Kids” sets Mapplethorpe 
and Smith’s relationship against 
the backdrop of the New York City 
art scene of the late 1960’s through 
the ’70s. It would be an easy task 
for Smith to romanticize or brag 
about her impactful presence in 
post-Warhol New York, but she 
never comes off as anything short 
of sincere. Her genuine tone never 
breaks: From her retelling of the 
difficult arrival in the city to her 
eventual stardom, she doesn’t ask 
for anything from the reader other 
than to listen to her and Robert’s 
story.
Dispersed throughout the story 
are Mapplethorpe’s photographs 
and drawings. By placing his work 
in her memoir, Patti is able to give 
Robert a voice in the narrative to 
which he can no longer contribute. 
The reader feels her respect for 
Robert and all of the renowned 
artists she has the pleasure of 
sharing spaces with. Often, these 
artists come into her life on chance 
encounters, such as when Patti 
anxiously takes the stairs instead of 
the elevator to a recording studio to 
buy more time and runs into Jimi 

Hendrix who calms her by saying 
“parties make me nervous.”
Patti Smith’s memoir is a bay 
window into a magical era in New 
York City that she graciously opens 
to us. “Just Kids” introduced me to 
a world I wouldn’t have otherwise 
known existed. Every five pages I 
had to look up X location, Y person 
or Z reference.
On the inside flap is a quote 
by Joan Didion: “This book is so 
honest and pure as to count as a 
true rapture.” I’m with Didion. 
“Just Kids” shook my core, in only 
beautiful ways.

— Joseph Fraley, Blog Editor

“I Love Dick” by 
Chris Kraus

When I read “I Love Dick,” I 
avoided being seen with it. It was 
like walking around with a bad 
Redbubble sticker on my book. 
And it’s not that I don’t love dick — 
It’s that “I Love Dick” looks like a 
nonchalant-sensational 
attention 
grab, and after so many annoying 
unsolicited remarks I was pissed 
off. 
The first half of the book doesn’t 
help much. Part one chronicles 
the not-so-fictional relationship 
between 
author-narrator-
filmmaker Chris and her husband, 
literary theorist Sylvère Lotringer, 
as Chris pursues an unrequited 
erotic crush on Dick, a renowned 
cultural critic. Chris’s crush is 
realized through a lengthy series 
of letters she and Sylvère compose 
to Dick, punchy epistles that wring 
and wrap their feeling in enough 
cerebral wit to render the obsession 
safely translucent. They do some 
kooky shit, they hurt each other, 
they entertain you in the padding 
of irony.
It could end there. Instead, 
Kraus flips the table by writing 
herself into the entire moment of 
part two, rejecting the brand of part 
one with so much conviction the 
prose practically drops 15 degrees. 
Chris’s letters to Dick morph 
into personal journals, a turn of 

direction that taps into the power 
of her raw, unresolved feeling for 
the first time. “Fifteen years ago … 
whenever I tried writing in the 1st 
Person it sounded like some other 
person …” Kraus shares. “Now I 
can’t stop … it’s just more serious: 
bringing change & fragmentation 
… down to where you really 
are.” Chris Kraus encounters the 
eroticism of her voice right there on 
the page, and it’s hot.
What’s even hotter about Kraus’s 
narrative coup is how masterfully it 
identifies and resists gender bias in 
the artistic community. She begins 
by permitting her own discontent, 
revisiting 
instances 
in 
which 
her work has been simplified by 
language like “insincere” and 
“quirky.” Instead of lapsing into 
echo-chamber diatribe, however, 
Kraus uses her intense feeling to 
critically bolster a series of similarly 
marginalized 
female 
artists. 
Hannah Wilke, Coco Fusco and 
Jennifer Harbury become motif-
contributors as Kraus weaves their 
work into an originally networked 
acknowledgement, 
calling 
to 
mind the dynamic sampling of 
Maggie Nelson’s “Argonauts,” a 
comparison I rarely award.
It 
seems 
important 
to 
acknowledge how the uncanny 
way I acquired and read “I Love 
Dick” set it up to be a watershed 
book in my personal library. It 
was recommended to me by a 
woman I have never met who 
was hired to edit the letters I was 
hired to write my students, then 
read across the borders of varying 
(united, psychological) states. The 
stars of reading circumstance 
certainly aligned, but I can’t shake 
the feeling that this situational 
voodoo is actually the work of 
Kraus. The generosity of her truth 
is so powerful it could wring 
whatever stars of circumstance 
into alignment.

— Verity Sturm, Book Review 
Editor

Book moments that moved

1. Roma 

Before I saw “Roma,” I didn’t 
know I could be moved by piles 
of dogshit in a carport. I never 
noticed how the arrangement 
of family members around a 
television screen after dinner 
can constellate the dynamics 
of familial love. I didn’t think 
about how much it means 
when someone takes the time 
to wake you up in the morning 
— how intimate, how full of 
love, that is. But I don’t often 
know what image or scent or 
sound will lay sudden siege to 
my memory when I revisit sites 
of significance to my past. Nor 
do I know how to make these 
sudden sieges of memory legible 
to people other than myself. 
How to articulate gratitude 
to the inhabitants of these 
memories, to express gratitude 
for the ways they loved me 
without 
thinking. 
Alfonso 
Cuarón (“Gravity”) vindicated 
me of these frustrations.
In 
“Roma,” 
Cuarón’s 

intricate, 
semi-
autobiographical ode to his 
family’s 
housekeeper 
Lido 
(to whom he dedicates the 
film) as well as her role in 
his 
upbringing 
amid 
the 
socio-political tension of late 
20th-century 
Mexico 
City, 
speaks the language of memory 
and of honor to the women who 
shape our upbringings more 
fluently than any filmmaker 
in recent memory. Penning the 
story of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), 
Lido’s 
fictive 
counterpart, 
Cuarón 
amplifies 
quiet 
sufferings and desires, arranges 
before our eyes the unlikely 
keys to memory, and wisely 
selects certain doors to unlock 
and others to leave shut out 
of respect, reminding us that 
in a terrible, beautiful world, 
extraordinary love is just as 
possible as extraordinary evil. 
It’s as simple as that: “Roma” 
will remind you that there is 
a reason to live in this world, 
and 
people 
— 
specifically 
our mothers, biological and 
surrogate alike — to love and 
love back and thank. It is a 
welcome, well-timed reminder.

– Julianna Moranno, Daily 
Arts Writer

2. 
Spider-Man: 
Into the Spider-
Verse 

An awe-inspiring labor of 
love for all involved, Sony 
Pictures’s “Spider-Man: Into 
the Spider-Verse” seamlessly 

fuses 
numerous 
animation 
styles 
and 
mediums 
to 
create 2018’s most visually 
groundbreaking 
film. 
In 
a 
superhero genre oversaturated 
with statuesque white men, 
“Spider-Verse” follows half-
Latino, half-Black high schooler 
Miles Morales as he slings webs 
across the rooftops of a near-
future New York brimming 
with multiculturalism. Spider-
Man’s new look never feels 
like tokenization, and the film 
is effortlessly modern as it 
weaves hip-hop and R&B into a 
classic orchestral movie score. 
The result is a film that is sleek, 
in-touch and absurdly fun to 
watch.
It’s hard not to look at 
“Into 
the 
Spider-Verse” 
as 
pioneering when it upends so 
many classic superhero film 
conventions. It’s delightfully 
self-aware, 
often 
winking 
at the audience as it pokes 
fun at the superhero genre 
with fourth wall breaks and 
hilarious cameo performances 

from John Mulaney (“Saturday 
Night Live”) and Nicolas Cage 
(“Mandy”). Despite the film’s 
underperformance at the box-
office — more a testament 
to 
the 
stigma 
surrounding 
animated movies than to the 
film’s quality — it has fared well 
through awards season thus far, 
taking home the Golden Globe 
for Best Animated Feature 
Film. With any luck, the film’s 
warm critical reception should 
help to lend legitimacy to 
animation as a medium that 
extends beyond just children’s 
entertainment.

– Max Michalsky, Daily Arts 
Writer

3. BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee, the most veteran 
of directors behind the films in 
our list, returns with a 2018 joint 
that’s on-par with his best work 
to date. “BlacKkKlansman” is 
the dramatic retelling of the 
story of Ron Stallworth, the 
first Black police officer in 
Colorado Springs, who went 
on to lead an operation to 
infiltrate his town’s branch 
of the Ku Klux Klan. The 
real “Ron Stallworth” in the 
film is played by John David 
Washington (son of Denzel), 
though the “Ron Stallworth” in 
the film is really acted out by 
two different people, the police 
department using the white 
Adam Driver as the face of the 
undercover-duo when meeting 
with members of the Klan. 

Lee creates an atmosphere 
of a world on the brink of 
either fire-and-brimstone or a 
moment of empowered change, 
and the film’s surprisingly 
true-to-life premise sets up for 
a harrowing finish, ripe with 
intensity and implication.

– Stephen Satarino, Film 
Editor

4. The Favourite 

The 
prospects 
for 
“2018-in-film” 
were 
greatly 
improved in the month of 
Dec., and a portion of that 
excellence attributed to Yorgos 
Lanthimos’s historical feature 
“The Favourite,” a medieval 
farce starring Olivia Colman as 
a bratty Queen Anne, supported 
by Emma Stone and Rachel 
Weisz as two cabinet cousins. 
Played straight and severe, 
“The Favourite” finds funny in 
a grandly costumed satire about 
interpersonal cabinet relations 
while war rages on across the 

English Channel. Colman is a 
befuddled, blundering queen 
whose 
personal 
absurdities 
Stone and Weisz must dance 
around for the benefit of 
both their country and their 
pocketbooks. 
Beginning 
at 
the bottom as a peasant in the 
movie, Stone grabs the film by 
the neck and puts on a display 
with the same level of talent 
and tact that landed her on the 
top of the mountain in 2016. 
A spectacle of costume and 
character, “The Favourite” is a 
must-watch for anyone aiming 
to see the year’s best.

 – Stephen Satarino, Film 
Editor

5. A Star is Born

The 
only 
imaginable 
explainable for why the A+ 
epic “A Star is Born” might not 
be ranked on your top ten list 
this year is if you haven’t yet 
had the privilege of witnessing 
(and being dazzled by) Cooper 
and Gaga’s on-screen magic. 
If, for some reason, the very 
combination 
of 
pop-legend 
Lady Gaga and dreamboat/
genius Bradley Cooper isn’t 
enough to make you split for 
the theater, let’s review a few of 
the key rationales for why this 
film is a non-negotiable must-
see for awards season (and for 
life in general). 

This list continues on the next 
page ...

Film’s 2018 movie favorites

Ranging from graphic novels to memoirs to 
longform poetry, the Michigan Daily Book Review 
ranks their favorite titles published in 2018.

1. “The Great Believers” by 
Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai’s novel “The Great Believers” 
is a slick, harrowing novel. Alternating between 
Chicago in the 1980s and Paris in 2015, the book 
revolves around a large cast of friends and family 
members, all of whose lives have been devastated 
by the AIDS crisis. In the 1980s, a group of gay 
friends is slowly winnowed as the disease performs 
its heinous magic trick; over and over, the healthy 
become sick and the sick become dead. In 2015, the 
now-middle-aged sister of one of these men travels 
to Paris to find her missing daughter. Tests and 
treatments arrive too late for these characters, and 
their lives are shattered, ended and emptied by the 
disease. As the two stories unfold, it becomes clear 
that each focus is the collateral damage of the other: 
one in actuality, the other in memory. Makkai is 
particularly interested in the micro- and macro-
legacy of AIDS. The disease ravages her characters’ 
interior lives as well as their bodies, and even those 
who survive it are left with wasteland of untethered, 
unconfirmable memory.
Sidestepping simplicity, Makkai deftly maneuvers 
the crossed wires of desire and fear, infidelity and 
devotion. The book is frequently heartrending but 
never sentimental. Near the end of the book, when 
one character tests positive for AIDS, he lists all the 
things he’ll miss when he dies. In another writer’s 
less skillful hands, this could have been mawkish, 
but as is her signature, Makkai lets it be tenderly 
simple. “The brutal wind on the El platform. Fifty 
people huddled under the heating lamp. Pigeons 
crowding their feet,” she writes. “The man at Wax 
Trax! Records with the beautiful eyelashes. The 
man who sat every Saturday at Nookies, reading 
The Economist and eating eggs, his ears always 
strangely red. The ways his own life might have 
intersected with theirs, given enough time, enough 
energy, a better universe.”

— Miriam Francisco, Copy Chief & Daily Arts 
Writer

2. “The Recovering” by 
Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison’s latest combines all the things 
I’ve loved about her since her 2014 release “The 
Empathy Exams” — a careful, insistent prose style, 
a way with words that skips past pretense and 
narrative tricks and a uniquely keen insight into 
the human heart. “The Recovering: Intoxication 
and its Aftermath” is an urgent, insistent read, an 
examination not just of her own alcoholism, but 
also of the nature of addiction itself. She weaves a 
personal narrative through a tapestry of a larger 

interrogation of what it means to want, to be out 
of control. Jamison’s writing has a way of working 
itself directly into the heart and brain of her readers, 
rendering the space between the words she’s using 
and the feeling she’s describing negligible. Reading 
Jamison’s work feels not like an education but more 
like an expansion — an expansion of empathy, 
understanding, of capacity for hope. I trust her 
writing to take me anywhere.

— Asif Becher, Daily Arts Writer

3. “Heavy: An American 
Memoir” by Kiese Laymon

I read, was knocked to the ground by and wrote 
about “Heavy” back in November, but have been 
ruminating on it since. It’s the type of book that 
sinks into your bones, adding some requisite weight 
to every step thereafter, a reckoning I haven’t 
experienced so viscerally since Ta Nehisi Coates’s 
“Between the World and Me.” While Coates 
addresses his book to his son, Laymon writes to 
his mother, allowing room for more complicated 
conversation on the Black body and the (physical, 
verbal, psychological) violence it endures. In 
particular, Laymon writes to identify the violence 
deeply ingrained in his own family: where it began, 
how it became codified and what it does to the 
bodies that give and receive it.

Turning the pen towards oneself is an arduous 
project, and the text is dense with Laymon’s moving 
effort and care. Although difficult, “Heavy” is a 
beautiful read. Laymon’s prose runs with tasteful 
repetition and an eye for detail, allowing the music 
of some moments and dashing imperative severity 
to others. The movement of Laymon’s language 
lends his book a sense of physical activity — one feels 
like they’ve covered some distance at the end, and 
the body is phantom-tired. “Heavy” is exhausting, 
but necessarily so, as if creating the circumstances 
necessary for recovery.

— Verity Sturm, Books Review Editor

4. “Florida” by Lauren Groff

“Florida,” Lauren Groff’s most recent collection of 
short stories, is a menagerie of things made wild by 
their environs. The setting of these stories — Florida, 
of course — is a broken incubator for the extremes 
of weather, emotion and beauty. Her characters 
(wives, mothers, sisters, children) grapple with the 
intrusive presence of their home state, an ambient 
specter that is both gorgeous and grotesque. Groff 
currently lives in Gainesville, Fla., and her intimate 
knowledge of the state’s peculiarities is evident. In 
“Florida,” pain and violence are inextricable from 
the quietly fantastic landscape.

The best books of 2018

Read more at MichiganDaily.
com

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