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| Jan 07, 2021
| Jan 07, 2021
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell. To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind. ...more |
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250786215
| 9781250786210
| 1250786215
| 3.81
| 25,053
| Mar 05, 2024
| Mar 05, 2024
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2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of ang
2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of angry comments. I’d tell you more, but...well, you know.
...more
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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| B0C71Y818L
| 3.41
| 337
| unknown
| Jul 05, 2023
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is a perfectly serviceable if not pedestrian omegaverse tale, by which I mean it takes about a short story's worth of plot and marries it to about half a dozen sex scenes, the whole thing written with a new paragraph break after every single sentence in order to pad out the page count; and while that would usually get three stars from me in any other context, I've decided to start giving these kinds of romance novels four stars instead, because "serviceable" is all anybody wants and expects from these Kindle Unlimited romance novels in the first place, just something to help pleasantly kill about four to six hours of one's life without being too incredibly insulting to one's intelligence. I have to admit, I continue to be obsessed with the omegaverse subgenre in romance, because of its goal to bring together what seems like to me two diametrically different ideas that you would think couldn't work with each other, where fans get all the thrills of a violent rape fantasy but all the teddy bears and pink balloons of a normal romance novel, basically by positing a paranormal universe where humans essentially "go into heat" like animals do, thus allowing you to still have Mister Perfect Nice Guy as the male lead character but who also simply can't help himself from grabbing any woman closer than a few feet from him and aggressively having his way with her. (Remember, if a man ever pushes a woman to the ground and then violently takes her from behind, just to later wash her hair in the bathtub, you know you're reading an omegaverse novel.) When it comes to that, this book delivers the fetish just fine, but doesn't bother or even aim to be the tiniest bit better than simply a fetish delivery vehicle, which is why these kinds of books come and go from the Kindle Store in the blink of an eye like the disposable tissues they are. Read it or not with this understanding before you pick it up. ...more |
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2
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Jan 27, 2024
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Jan 27, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1324006374
| 9781324006374
| 1324006374
| 3.89
| 3,496
| 1926
| May 17, 2022
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2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professio
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "Jack!" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's Karen from Will & Grace). Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it. ...more |
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Jan 18, 2024
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Jan 18, 2024
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| 4.46
| 1,125,261
| Aug 09, 2022
| Aug 09, 2022
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy w
2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy was before reading this; for fellow clueless Gen-Xers, she was on one of those cloying children's shows from Nickelodeon that polluted the airwaves during the early '00s, back when we were too old to watch such shows ourselves but not yet old enough to have kids who watched those shows, where she played not the main character but the Kramer-esque wacky next-door neighbor who became the show's breakout star. This thus made it quite a shock to her former young fans when, a decade later, she wrote a tell-all memoir alleging that the show's creator, Dan Schneider, was a sexual predator who regularly got underaged girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, and that the Nickelodeon executive suite knew this and deliberately chose not to do anything about it since Schneider (who had five different shows on the network at the time) was making such an obscene amount of money for them. Oh yeah, and her mom happened to be completely off-the-rails batshit crazy, an unmedicated schizophrenic who among other things forced an eating disorder on McCurdy at the age of ten (after forcing her into a showbiz career she didn't want in the first place), used to shower her each night and check her genitals for "abnormalities" all the way up to the age of seventeen (while forced to share the tub with her 16-year-old brother who was receiving such an examination at the same time), and who was such an unrepentant and unapologetic hoarder that eventually McCurdy had to sleep on a roll-up exercise mat on the floor at night, because her mom had taken over virtually every inch of her bedroom with random detritus. That's a lot for a single book, especially when you add McCurdy's decade of substance abuse issues after her mother's death from cancer; but the joyfully surprising thing here is that she takes it on with mastery, finesse and aplomb, putting together both a breezy and a devastating read that's easily one of my favorites out of the 100+ books I read this year. That's because McCurdy doesn't have even the slightest bit of hesitation about going warts-and-all here in this shockingly honest look at her life, by which I mean she not only spills the beans about all the abuse she suffered from all these people, but also makes it abundantly clear where she too has failed in life, where she has treated people terribly, where she had such a blinders-hobbled understanding of things like sexuality that she drove pretty much every person around her crazy (especially in most of the romantic relationships she's now been in as an adult, which she admits have almost all been because of either her own behavior or having such a stunted emotional life that she couldn't recognize terrible boyfriends before actually dating them). But what really sells this, though, and what makes it so much different than so many of these other tell-all celebrity abuse memoirs, is that McCurdy maintains an astounding sense of compassion and empathy for the people she talks about, despite the book's salacious title; for example, although she admits that her mother was unambiguously a monster, who understood that she was mentally ill but deliberately chose not to seek treatment but instead inflict her insanity on her entire family, she also easily sees the circumstances that led to her being this way (in a nutshell, her own mother, who got it from her own mother, etc.), and holds a tremendous amount of love and caring for her at the heart of this otherwise always shocking litany of human abuses she details here in her never-not-fascinating trainwreck of a childhood. I'm fairly convinced that this is why this one shines so much brighter than other celebrity tell-alls of this type, and why it's had such staying power (I myself am reading it an entire year after it first came out, because it still continues to pop up in my Goodreads friends' reading lists at least once a week without fail); for while we all love to gawk at the car crash with tawdry Hollywood memoirs, here McCurdy is challenging us readers to a lot more than that, to understand how a person who did a tremendous amount of bad things can still have a good side we can celebrate, namely so that we too can see the good sides of ourselves whenever we also do bad things, as all humans do on a regular basis. That's really what elevates this book here, is McCurdy taking such a hard look at herself at the same time she's chronicling all this abuse, whether from her family or Schneider or the executives of Nickelodeon (who literally offered her a third of a million dollars in hush money to stop writing this book), understanding that to forgive the people who have done us wrong is to ultimately forgive ourselves, for the times we in turn have wronged others. That's a much deeper message, and one a lot more of us can relate to than the usual "look at the living hell these people put me through" record these types of books typically are. That's why I'm not just giving it 5 stars but will be adding to my "Best Reads of 2023" list, soon to be unveiled over at my Mastodon account; for it's not just horrific and entertaining but also teaches us something about the world in general, even better for refusing to come up with a pat happy ending like so many of these mainstream memoirs are forced into. If you haven't yet read this difficult, often infuriating, but nonetheless sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book, I encourage you to do so as soon as you can. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 16, 2023
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ebook
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| 1982168560
| 9781982168568
| B0BVN1M6G2
| 3.77
| 18,330
| Sep 05, 2023
| Sep 05, 2023
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2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for
2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for me, and her habit of delivering her punchlines in a demon-child whisper frequently annoys me -- but I find her funny enough that I wanted to read her new memoir focusing on mental illness issues, the cleverly titled Sure, I'll Join Your Cult. Unfortunately, though, when you take away the need to deliver jokes in a pronounced rhythm and while taking lots of pauses for audience reactions, this self-confessed bipolar OCD sufferer kind of just goes off the rails, giving us prose that's so packed with digressions and bulletpoint lists and jokey-joke joke joke JOOOOKES!!!!! that it eventually all becomes this stream-of-consciousness fog you can barely follow; and while I enjoyed the first chapter of this, even by page 30 I was completely and totally mentally wiped out by Bamford's exhausting Robin Williamsesque patter, and at that point needed to turn the book back in to the public library for the sake of my own mental health. If the idea of listening to a Maria Bamford standup set, while she screams it as fast as she possibly can while not even stopping for a breath, sounds like fun to you, then you should absolutely pick this up, because that's basically what this book is; for all the rest of us, perhaps stick to YouTube clips of her performances, plus of course the best thing she's ever done, the 2010s two-season Netflix absurdist sitcom masterpiece Lady Dynamite.
...more
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not set
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Nov 12, 2023
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Nov 12, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0374211728
| 9780374211721
| 0374211728
| 4.30
| 207
| 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift co
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift copy of his newest book, the absurdist fairytale Farsickness that he co-wrote with his small daughter during the pandemic. That made me remember that I had lost touch with Mohr's career ever since my small press closed in the late 2010s, after being so impressed with his first couple of books on the exquisite small publisher Two Dollar Radio; and after scanning through his bibliography, I realized that what I really wanted to read next of his was a memoir he published just recently in 2021 called Model Citizen, concerning his time as a drug and alcohol addict and general lover of chaos back during his youth in the gentrifying '90s Mission district of San Francisco. I just got done with it this week, and it's as powerful as you would expect from someone who's made an entire career now out of stories about the world's druggies, petty criminals, and other lumpen proletarians; for it turns out that Mohr's real life is very similar to the sometimes desperate lives of his characters, with the hipster scene of the '90s Bay Area being not particularly helpful to this son of an alcoholic who had already started drinking himself by the age of ten, and who by his thirties was now regularly injecting fentanyl and ketamine, and who purposely cultivated chaos-embracing friends who would encourage him to do things like mug drunk guys just for kicks, or have contests over who could shoot more staples into their skin without flinching after getting good and fucked up. This is easily the best part of the book, the unflinching and unsentimental way he approaches his years of darkness, neither condemning the behavior nor Tarantino-glorifying it, but simply acknowledging that this is what his life used to be, and that in some ways it was like this precisely because this is the way the entire Bay Area artistic community was back in those years, a sort of "late-stage Byronism" of doomed romantic artists that Generation X perfected in a way no other generation had, until the next young generation entirely rejected it (like they have with most Generation X things) and now treasure their artistic lives of health, wellness, earnestness and financial security. Of course, this being Mohr, the book is also incredibly insightful as well, which in good MFA style is centered around a compelling framing device that just naturally makes you want to learn more; namely, after being sober for years, now married and with a toddler child, he discovers that the occasional moments of physical numbness he sometimes experienced while an addict were actually a series of strokes he didn't realize he was having, and that doctors have now determined that he has a hole in his heart (talk about MFA symbolism!) that will require surgery to correct, and that they plan on knocking him out using the exact same fentanyl he used to be addicted to. Will this "freelapse" eventually knock him off the wagon again? Will his love for his infant daughter be enough to keep him on the straight and narrow? Mohr uses the event as basically an excuse to do a "plain-language Proust" digression-filled look back at his entire life, examine the crippling self-esteem issues from his damaging childhood that led to the breakup of his first marriage and the constant doubts he has about his second, and pontificate in a clever, knowing way about how actual sobriety stories often don't fit the neat, tidy three-act structure that Hollywood wants them to when making inspirational Oscarbait films about the subject. And indeed, although this book made me laugh out loud sometimes, unnervingly see myself at other points (I was part of Chicago's arts community in these same years, which shared a lot of the same dysfunctions as San Francisco's), and just plain ol' openly weep in the middle of public cafes at yet other moments (prompting all the people around me to check out what book exactly I was reading that had moved me to such an extent -- you're welcome, Josh), what I liked and appreciated the most about this book is that Mohr has the courage to make it a messy story, one that doesn't hit the usual three-act beats and that he refuses to force into that pattern, which I bet he was under an immense pressure to do, since this was his first of his then five books to actually come out on a mainstream press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), after having the usual indie career before this of prestigious but tiny destinations like Two Dollar Radio and Soft Skull. That makes the book much more interesting than usual, which makes it much better than usual, and I was really glad to see Mohr make such a strong commitment to telling the story he knew he needed to tell, even at the expense of the feel-good wrap-up most people are looking for when they read clean-and-sober books like these. As he demonstrates by the end of the book, even the term "clean and sober story" is a misnomer in the first place, one that leads to manipulative memoirs instead of intellectually honest ones, after his freelapse makes him realize with a lot of terror just how close all addicts are all the time to their head sinking below the water's surface yet again; and that makes for a much more interesting and enjoyable read than simply another Lifetime movie told the same exact way for the ten thousandth time again. Unfortunately, the end kind of falters a bit, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 from me; it becomes pretty clear in the last third that Mohr simply ran out of things to say, so he starts glomming on more and more to the typical infuriating MFA tricks at that point, especially his habit of writing very artsy run-on sentences when he doesn't have much of a point to make. Or sometimes single paragraphs that last for two or three pages, which like all three-page single paragraphs you can entirely skip over without missing even the tiniest important thing to the story. (Also, Mohr very badly and very often makes both of the general mistakes about storytelling that almost all humans know, whether or not they're writers themselves -- that no one wants to hear about the dream you had last night, and no one besides you is interested in the randomly adorable thing your kid did yesterday, stories of which start taking up more and more and more and more and more of the book's final third.) That said, these problems weren't enough to stop me from loving the book, just like I've loved everything of Mohr's I've now read (think of my 4 stars here at Goodreads as actually more like 4 and a half stars, if I could award half-stars here); and that's made me realize that I have some backlog reading to do now, in that Mohr has actually put out another three books between my early years as a reviewer and now, and I want to read them all. Next up will be his 2011 Damascus, the novel that first started getting him mainstream notice and that began lifting him out of the indie-lit ghetto, so I hope you'll join me here again in early 2024 for that. For now, though, I can confidently state that this will be making my "2023 best reads of the year" report I'll be sharing on the social network Mastodon at the end of December. If you can stand queasy stories, pick it up with no delay. ...more |
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2
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Oct 24, 2023
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Oct 24, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0316258776
| 9780316258777
| 0316258776
| 4.04
| 225,603
| Jun 13, 2023
| Jun 13, 2023
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #58. It's summer, which means I'm reading a lot of summer books right now; and it doesn't get much more summery than my girl Elin Hilderbr
2023 reads, #58. It's summer, which means I'm reading a lot of summer books right now; and it doesn't get much more summery than my girl Elin Hilderbrand, who longtime friends will remember I first read by accident after mistaking one of her books at the library for a grittier, more indie book of the same name in my reading list, but who I have since come to sincerely love as one of the best "chick lit" authors currently working. This term has become outdated by now, of course -- such books are now most commonly referred to as "bookclub fiction," using that activity as a symbolic catch-all for anything middle-class and suburban, kind of like how this same literary industry took what used to be called "Negro books" and now calls it "urban fiction" -- but I have to admit that I still love this now disgraced term, because it gets at the heart of both what women want out of a genre like this, and why this genre gets so cluttered up with subpar trash that they literally have to keep changing the name of the genre every decade or so and starting over. Especially in the case of Hilderbrand, this genre should perhaps instead be most honestly called "Karen Lit," because they so often deal with the daily ups and downs of middle-class educated straight white women, a group currently vilified in the public imagination more than any other group of human beings in this country. These women are most often told by society these days that they're not allowed to have feelings, because they're straight and white and middle-class and therefore nothing bad could've ever happened to them; but while the frustration about these kinds of women is understandable (there's a reason we call them "Karens," after all), it's simply not true or fair, in that even straight white middle-class women are human beings like all human beings, and as such have highs and lows in their lives like everyone else, things that frustrate them and things that sadden them. And they deserve to have books that explore these constants of the human condition but from their particular slant and setting, just like every other group of people in this country does. The problem, as you can see with these various terms that get assigned to it, is that late-stage capitalism is ready to pounce on anything it can identify and understand about the human condition, and instantly commodify it for the always all-holy purpose of selling more hamburgers; and so a genre like this gets polluted with stupid insulting trash just as soon as it catches on in the first place, books that just lightly skim the surface of what makes this a fascinating and illuminating genre for its fans, and give us just endless references to brand names being worn or eaten by a series of otherwise cardboard-cutout 2D-flat characters, and silly little nonsense conflict over, I don't know, cupcakes at cozy used bookstores housed inside old Victorian mansions along the boardwalk of an impossibly angelic Atlantic Seaboard small town. That's why someone like Hilderbrand has so legitimately risen above most of the other authors in her genre, to now be one of the most famous, rich and loved ones among these Karen Lit fans; because she understands the legitimate darkness and legitimate chaos that comes with these major disruptions in life, the divorces and parent deaths and cancer diagnoses and all the rest, and she takes an unflinching stare into this human darkness even while delivering all the brand names and cupcakes and Atlantic Seaboard mansions this genre demands. I was reminded of all this again while reading her newest, the just released The Five-Star Weekend, which I nicely got to put on reserve really early at the Chicago Public Library (thanks as always, Wowbrary.com), which is why I was one of the first people to get to read it this time. Ostensibly, it's about a very Karen-like event: a late-middle-aged woman who lives on the tony island of Nantucket (as is the case in almost all of Hilderbrand's now 29 novels), and who has become a nationally famous "influencer" recently because of a crazily popular YouTube channel devoted to domestic adventures like cooking and decorating, has heard of this idea from Facebook where you invite someone important from your teens, twenties, thirties and forties to your place for a weekend of the five of you celebrating your long lives and their many twists and turns (the "five-star" weekend, get it?), ideally doing it all in a way as well that makes for perfect Instagram photos and TikTok videos and all the other outlets middle-class women now use to prove to all the other middle-class women that they're better middle-class women than the rest of the middle-class women. Our middle-aged influencer, Hollis Shaw, decides this would be a perfect way to goose engagement at her YouTube channel, and ends up not only bringing everyone together to her impossibly gorgeous cable-show-worthy beach estate, but hiring her college-aged Generation Z film-school daughter to come and shoot all the social-media-ready video she's hoping to get out of it all. But here's where Hilderbrand's kind of a genius, which is that she has the lives of all six of these women turn out to be serious disasters at the specific weekend when Hollis decides she wants to do this: one is fretting over possible breast cancer (she finds out Monday morning); another, a sports agent, recently had a literal Karen moment recently when she yelled at one of her famous young clients in a way that made it look sexist and ableist, then dug her hole further when trying to explain on social media what really happened; a third has a husband who just got fired from his C-level executive job for Harvey Weinstein-like sexually inappropriate workplace behavior; and even the daughter's in the middle of this weird affair at the moment with a famous social-realist documentarian she's apprenticing with, who convinced her to come to this weekend in the first place in order to flip the script and actually make a powerful political documentary examining the lives of Karens from the behind-the-scenes footage of what her mom thinks is a bunch of silly, pretty Instagrammy videos she's shooting. The frisson between these sometimes deeply upsetting things going on in these women's lives, and their evermore desperate attempts to keep up their happy facades whenever the cameras are rolling, leads to things just becoming more and more of a disaster as the weekend continues (with Hollis' twentysomething Woke daughter capturing it all), until everything has slid off the rails and the fastidiously planned schedule is now being ignored, with every new chapter bringing another reveal of yet another disaster. That's really brilliant for Hilderbrand to do, because this is a big huge issue that takes up a lot of time and emotional energy among middle-class suburban women these days, this relentless pressure to always keep up appearances among these infinite ways we've now invented to display our slightly-better-than-youness, even with the background of all the kinds of big disasters and setbacks we humans experience over the course of living a human life. And that's why Hilderbrand sells tens of millions of copies of her books and yours still hasn't broken 400 downloads at Kindle Unlimited even after a year, because she's not afraid to tear back that lid that usually covers all the ugliness underneath, and to let her characters be exactly as bad as they need to be for the situation involved -- that is, no more and no less bad than any other human being, living a human life. That's where most bookclub fiction fails, that the authors want to both have their cake and eat it too; they want to have an interesting book full of conflict, but they want their Mary Sue stand-in characters to never be ultimately that bad, or experience that much hardship, or display too much douchey behavior. But Hilderbrand understands that to tell a complex story about the human condition, you need complex humans, and that this involves them making a lot of mistakes, being the wrong one a surprisingly high number of times, and not always acting their best. Let's not forget, after all, that she's a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, one of the most prestigious literary programs in the entire United States (and the place that virtually invented the concept of getting a Master's degree in creative writing), so it's not a random occurrence that she's known by so many as the Queen Of The Beach Reads, but rather because she writes surprisingly strong, surprisingly complicated stories within this genre that so many others take for granted. I suppose that more than anything else is why I like reading books like these; because even middle-class suburban women deserve to have great artistic projects that appeal specifically to them, and they're instead forced into this pretty big diet of mediocre shit being pumped out at them from the sewage pipes known as basic cable and social media. These people deserve better, and Hilderbrand is that better, someone who (be truthfully warned) engages in the same brand-name Bingo and lusciously detailed food descriptions as any other book in this slippery genre, but also digs deeper and understands the beating wounded heart that lies underneath all the photo filters and Lilly Pulitzer dresses. That makes this not only an easy, often funny read, but something surprisingly thought-provoking and emotionally moving as well; and you can't really ask for anything more than that from a summer read. Although not for everyone, which is why it's only getting 4 stars (you have to already be a fan of bookclub fiction to have any chance of liking this), it does come strongly recommended to those for whom this book was meant. You know who you are. ...more |
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1
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Jul 23, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1400034205
| 9781400034208
| 1400034205
| 4.19
| 49,745
| 1944
| Jan 01, 2003
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2023 reads, #36. DID NOT FINISH. I decided to finally read W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 The Razor's Edge because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing o
2023 reads, #36. DID NOT FINISH. I decided to finally read W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 The Razor's Edge because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing over at Letterboxd (i.e. Goodreads for film nerds), in which one of the tasks will have me watching both the 1946 adaptation with Tyrone Powers and the 1984 adaptation with Bill Murray, and I wanted to read the book first so I'd have a common base to compare them both to. But holey moley, what an unreadable mess this turned out to be, for a book that's now so famous! The problem here lies right in that year mentioned above that this was published; for while the book itself is about a young soul-weary man smack-dab in the middle of the Jazz Age's Lost Generation following World War One, the book itself wasn't written until a good 20 years later, in the middle of World War Two, long after the vitality of the events from that generation and when all involved were already on to their middle-aged child-rearing years. In fact, it's even worse in Maugham's case; born in 1874 and already a published author before even the Victorian Age had ended, he was not only in his forties going into his fifties when the actual events happened that this story is based on, but in his late sixties and heading into his seventies when he wrote this book about those times; and it just badly, badly feels like this, like a 70-year-old grandpa trying to write about a generation he was already too old to understand when they were young and rebellious, and has nothing to say about them now a generation later than what Wikipedia told him about "Age Comma Jazz Slash Lost Generation." So that begs the question -- why? And as far as I can tell, from my limited research into the subject by essentially reading Maugham's Wikipedia page myself, it's because the author in real life started getting into Eastern religions and mysticism himself only in these late-1930s and early-'40s years, and so when naturally wanting to write about the subjects simply thought that a book set among the F. Scott Fitzgerald/Hemingway crowd in the late '10s and early '20s would give him a natural excuse to do so. But yow, 70-year-old Maugham writing about soul-sick globetrotting twentysomething Larry Darrell is exactly the SNL comedy sketch you would expect from that set-up, just endless scenes of two rosy-cheeked Brits in a patter of, "Say, old chum, I hear you're heading off to the subcontinent soon, what what?" "Yes, my good chap, it is indeed true that I head to the mysterious jungles of India next month to consult with the Maharajah of Punjab over their local caves of mystery." "Good show, governor! Another gin and tonic for you?" "Right-ho, I say! Another G&T will just hit the spot before my next adventure!" Whoo, Maugham, really? I valiantly stuck it out for the entire first third of the novel; but once he finally made it to India and I saw that ol' W.S. was going to have our hero continue to talk in his "right right, what what, governor" speech the whole time he was there too, I just really lost my will to go on. I gotta honestly say, I don't understand how this book has become such a well-loved classic by now, other than maybe to understand that Maugham was already in his "revered elderly national treasure" years when this book came out, so an eternally "awwww!"ing audience was giving him a wide berth to be as slow and sentimental as he wanted here, and it was this initial wave of critical fawning that led to the next generation putting it into the canon. I mean, not really -- if not for the two movie versions, both of which are pretty obscure by now themselves, I don't think most people would remember The Razor's Edge at all anymore, since his much more famous book is 1915's British boarding-school drama Of Human Bondage, so I'm not sure if we really have to worry at this point whether this book is getting too much of a free pass from society at large since society at large has largely forgotten it by now. But still, there are much better books to be read about the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation or whatever you want to call it, both from the authors who were young and already writing while they were living through it (but see also Henry Miller, Anais Nin, the entire Dadaist movement, the entire Surrealist movement, etc. etc.) and through modern projects written generations later that look at our own times through this retro filter (I'm thinking specifically of Christina Ricci's Zelda Fitzgerald in Z), so my official recommendation is that you not bother with this one at all, but rather stick to Maugham's earlier Edwardian-era dramas of class if you want to read him at his best. ...more |
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Apr 14, 2023
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Apr 14, 2023
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| 0008272115
| 9780008272111
| 0008272115
| 3.86
| 79,557
| Jan 07, 2019
| Jan 10, 2019
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascis
2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascism meets Hogwarts meets The Game" bizarro emo thriller The Betrayals, which of course I adored (you had me at "1920s fascism bizarro slipstream emo thriller"); but I learned at that point that many of Collins' existing fans actually preferred her debut novel a year previous to that, the Victorian alt-history urban fantasy tale The Binding, so I figured I might as well put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and I just got around to finally reading that this week. But alas, I myself actually considered this a step downward when compared to her newest, although I can understand why people who first became a fan of Collins through the previous book would feel the way they do; for I don't mean "downward" in terms of quality itself, but simply in terms of narrative complexity, and presenting a general conceit with endless depths of complexity. She succeeds in that wildly with her later and more mature novel, by mashing together first an amazingly complicated art form that doesn't actually exist in the real world (a sort of combination of poetry, chamber music, ballet, philosophy, game design, and perhaps a little bit of actual magic); then adding this richly detailed and historic castle-school on a mountainside in the Alps where the art has been taught for millennia; and then imagining this Austria-sounding fictional country at a point in the early 20th century when a totalitarian regime has taken over the local government, but hasn't yet begun its plans for world domination, and want to turn this art form into a kind of nationalist propaganda, very similarly to how Leni Reifenstahl did with athletics in the real world with her Nazi propaganda film Olympia. In The Binding, though, we get a much simpler urban fantasy mythos that's much easier to understand -- that in their alt-universe, what we all know as "novels" actually are a way for people to permanently remove memories from their brain, through the use of a wizard of sorts who can somehow make the memories magically imprint themselves as words on the pages of a blank book. Thus, every novel that's read in their world is actually a form of stealing someone else's memories, and Collins uses this to expand on various kinda obvious social-realist issues and especially ones with a progressive political bent. (The main villain, for example, is basically a One Percenter who sexually abuses his household staff, then forces the girls to have the memories of the events "bound" so they no longer remember the crimes, and then reads the books regularly in his own private library whenever he wants to relive his accountability-free sins, while presumably giving an evil cackle and twisting the tips of his black mustache.) There's nothing wrong with that, and it's easy to see why fans of urban fantasies (especially strikingly original ones with a really unique hook) would go so gaga for this earlier novel, and be a bit disappointed by the follow-up set in such a different world and concerning such a different thing. I myself, though, am primarily attracted to stories by how complex and multifaceted they can be, so I feel the exact opposite about these two books than the "Buffy crowd" (for lack of a better term). The great news here is that both books have their passionate fans, which makes Collins a remarkable writer whose career is worth paying attention to, because I bet she's going to have something even more explosive for all of us with the next one. (She's been spending the last two years participating in anthologies and other short-form opportunities, or at least according to her Goodreads page.) I look forward to that; and in the meantime, I encourage you to check out both of these books, and see which one you might prefer as well. ...more |
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| 0063007606
| 9780063007604
| 4.23
| 32,017
| May 17, 2022
| May 17, 2022
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to
2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to see what the full 300-page version of it is like; because I gotta say, the 15-minute spoken summary I listened to made it sound like one of the most freaking pointless books that's ever existed, and I'm now really curious to read other Goodreads reviews and see if those who tackled the full book came away with this impression too. Turns out co-authors (and conveniently now co-hosts of a podcast about the subject of this book, alluded to endlessly in this book) Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey used to be two unknown young actresses forever auditioning for sitcoms! Until one day they both book one! And then they meet and become friends! And then the show's a huge success! So now they're famous! FAMOUS FRIENDS! Who do things for each other and hang out with each other, oh, and they're just such good friends with each other, and did you know by the way that the entire cast of The Office was like this, no fights or drama on set, just nine straight years of a big giant GROUP OF SUCH GOOD FRIENDS OF ALL OF ONE ANOTHER!!!! Sheesh, really? It's specifically books like these that make me feel not even the tiniest fucking goddamned bit guilty about belonging to a summary service like Blinkist (which, after all, is nothing more than the 21st-century smartphone version of Cliff Notes), because there is just so little intriguing unique content here that I would feel actively ripped off if I had spent $30 and three days of my life getting through it. Blinkist wouldn't exist if there weren't so many writers and publishers willing to put out books that can be so easily summarized in 15 minutes in the first place, so that's a snake-eating-its-own-tail dilemma for a traditional publishing industry currently going through its last spasming throes before death, when it finally gets suffocated for good under the weight of 400 million new novels coming out on Amazon next year that were all written by AI chat programs. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and I'll see in other people's reviews that there was actually a whole bunch of fascinating content in the full book version that got unfairly cut out during the Blinkist synopsis, but I'm willing to bet right now that I'll actually find quite a bit of reviews that agree with my own look at the summary, that this is essentially a cotton-candy-weighing piece of supplemental fluff to support what's an equally cotton-candy-weighing supplemental fluff podcast, one that has the audacity to cash in on retro love for The Office not even ten years since it went off the air, both these projects threatening to fly off into the obscure horizon just the moment a big enough cultural wind comes through and knocks them on their way. In this case, I'm glad to have gotten through it all as quickly as I did. ...more |
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| 4.02
| 894
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| Jul 21, 2020
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liked it
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2023 reads, #16. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #16. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is my latest read from a group of 30 romance novels I downloaded to my Kindle for free last month from one of those promotional websites, featuring a handful of titles in each of around a dozen romance subgenres, such as Western romances, Regency romances, space alien group sex romances, small-town Christian romances, etc. This particular one is firmly within the "cozy mystery" subgenre, in that a crime is committed at the beginning of the book and our characters then spend the book solving the crime, but with them not being traditional crime-solvers but rather the types of people in the types of professions that go over well with middle-aged women who read romance novels. So in this case that's a group of professional bartenders from a Key West-type town in Florida, in New Orleans for a weekend to sling high-end cocktails on behalf of a hipster whiskey company at an industry booze convention, but who witness both a tampering of the whiskey to try to sabotage the company's chances and an attempted murder of one of the founders, then spend the rest of the book running around the streets of New Orleans trying to figure out who did it and why. As such, then, this is as good as any other cozy mystery -- in other words, if you don't like the genre in general, you certainly won't like this particular example of it, but those who do like this genre will find a lot to like here as well. In fact, really my only complaint is that it didn't seem to be a romance story at all -- the one and only time our female lead character even kinda shows an interest in the opposite sex is when she makes an awkward drunken pass at her "boss for the weekend" (she does these gigs for fun -- she's actually a co-owner of a bar back in Florida for a living), and even that goes nowhere because he's too nice a guy. That made it funny to find on a page full of promotional books for traditional romance novels; but that certainly doesn't make it a bad book, albeit not a great one either, but rather exactly the amount of quality I would expect from a free book through a genre promotional website. Let the buyer be warned that that's exactly what you're getting here, no more and no less! ...more |
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Mar 05, 2023
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| B07V7HVND4
| 4.17
| 965
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through
2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them one a day this week just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my third book of the run (see also Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and one that slowed down my streak of a book per day by a few extra days, because this turned out to be the first full-length actual three-act book I've read through this promotion so far, a telling sign of its higher quality in general. And indeed, this is a real textbook example of how to get a quick-reading Kindle Unlimited romance novel right, because it hits all the right tropes at all the right moments but still keeps the fundamentals of genre storytelling at a high level. Set in the Evil King John period of 1200s England (the same setting as the Robin Hood stories), it's the story of a France-loving blacksmith who's secretly also a knight in a Templar-type organization devoted to taking down John from the inside; at his next boss's castle, where he specifically inserted himself in order to gauge the earl's chances of supporting a rebellion, he doesn't expect to fall in love with the earl's beautiful, headstrong, curiously modern and progressive daughter (ah, but who ever does?). The thing that really strikes me here, which I've noticed before and have recently added to the essay of romance advice I'm putting together for an upcoming issue of my free editing newsletter, is how the best romance novels present a male romantic lead who's not this type of guy or that type of guy, but is instead every type of guy for every occasion, with directly competing aspects of his personality that manifest themselves at the exact most perfect time for the female romantic lead to be impressed, attracted or aroused by (depending on the situation), almost as if he can somehow magically read her mind. While this infuriates me as an actual guy who actually exists in the actual world (and goes a long way towards explaining why so many of my exes in my early twenties acted the way they did, as if offended that I couldn't read their minds), I have to admit that this is really effective in a romance novel designed for a fanbase of 95% women, and when done right like is the case here makes it easy to see why fans of the genre can get so sucked in so thoroughly. That makes our hunky hero Lance (or "Sir Lance" if you're Frenchy) really compelling, because he can be a strict follower of traditional gender roles one moment and suddenly a radically progressive supporter of modern women's rights the next, aggressive and territorial about love one moment and suddenly reticent and intimate the next. When you combine this, then, with a main female lead who's deliberately shown as kind of a smart nerd, but not afraid of a little hard work (it's established in the backstory that the earl's daughter, Idalia, was already a fan of visiting the smithing forge even during the last blacksmith's time, which gives her a convenient excuse for she and Lance to spend time together), this provides a really engaging couple to put into a will-they-won't-they situation, fraught with all the subsumed eroticism that comes with the High-Chivalry period of the Medieval years. What seals it all up, though, is author Cecelia Mecca's devotion to period accuracy, authentic-sounding dialogue, and strange and wonderfully odd details to add the whole thing a little color; witness for example the lovingly convoluted story that goes into explaining why their castle has this one lone interior abandoned tower not connected to anything else, which Idalia has used since childhood as her secret little book-reading nerd getaway spot, which adds this nicely concrete visual image that helps flesh out this northern British castle and regional market location where our story takes place. It's nothing spectacular, mind you, but the writing's every bit as good as a random episode of a Medieval-style show on cable TV, whether that's House of Dragons or The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, etc. In fact, that's probably a good litmus test -- if you can write a spec script for your favorite genre television show that sounds like an actual episode of that show, you're skilled enough to churn out quick but above-average novels in that genre for Kindle Unlimited fans. Plus, I have to admit, it's the only romance novel I've ever read in my life so far that made me legitimately interested in reading the rest of the books in the series; and that's a big leap forward for someone who not even ten years ago was still actively making fun of this genre, like a large portion of America continues to do to this day. Coming next, Pearl Tate's sci-fi "fated mates" tale Mate Exposed, so join me again in a few days for that; but in the meanwhile, I give The Blacksmith a ringing endorsement, a solid example of a High Medieval tale (basically Tolkien fantasy without the dragons or hobbits) that will scratch all the itches of the usual romance fan. ...more |
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Dec 28, 2022
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Dec 28, 2022
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| 0192838652
| 9780192838650
| 0192838652
| 3.37
| 6,002
| 1826
| Sep 10, 1998
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatn
2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatnot, and instead turn to a series of very large and intellectually interesting tomes I'll be slowly getting through all the way until next spring and the return of warm weather. Coming later this winter will be my first-ever read of Gone With the Wind, a re-read of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a binge-read of the entire seven-book "Narnia" series in a row, and my first attempt at Gene Wolfe's 950-page The Book of the New Sun; but first for these cold-weather long-form reads, it's the 150,000-word (i.e. Harry Potter-sized) 1826 forgotten "post-apocalyptic" "classic" The Last Man, by Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, long overshadowed by her more famous book but now getting more and more of a serious 21st-century look again, when we take both genre literature and novels by women much more seriously. I purposely put air-quotes around both the terms above, because part of what makes it famous is precisely that it's not considered a classic by any way you measure it; in fact, it was sort of angrily rejected by contemporary audiences in the 1820s when she first published it, a little less than a decade after Frankenstein, as she hit middle-age and her work first started to fall out of favor, along with the other Early Romantics who were dying like flies all around her. And now that I've read it, I'm not sure even if you can properly call it a post-apocalyptic novel, at least not in the genre-thriller way we largely mean it now when we use the term ourselves, which is why that's getting air-quotes too. It's still super-fascinating, though, for what it is instead is Shelley talking about all these Early Romantics she spent so much of her youth around, and who had all recently died in a very short period, leaving Shelley essentially alone in the world -- not only her husband Percy, but her sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, her child William, and the charming asshole George Byron who held their whole circle together, otherwise known as Lord Byron. So in other words, the "last man" of her so-called speculative proto-sci-fi novel is not the lone survivor of the futuristic plague seen in her book; it's Mary herself, and this book is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what it was actually like to live within such a group of people, with just a few showy genre details stitched on to nominally make it a sci-fi story. So in this, it's really important to keep two things in mind about the world as it existed in the 1820s when Shelley wrote this: first, her father-in-law, the politically powerful father of Percy Shelley, had forbidden her from ever writing a memoir about her time with his son; and second, the entire post-apocalyptic "last man" trope of proto-sci-fi had already been around for over 20 years at that point, ever since the unexpected explosive bestseller The Last Man by French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville in 1805, which had suffered so many cheap ripoffs in the decades after that the "last man" trope was actually kind of a joke by the 1820s, even to the point that there were now popular parodies of the genre. That's why contemporary audiences angrily rejected the book when it first came out, because they took it all at face value and rightly concluded that this didn't hold a candle to the other, much more thrilling "last man" post-apocalyptic melodramas that had been published over the last 20 years. But we now 200 years later can clearly see it as yet another proto-example from the literary world, this time the prototype of the modern autobiographical novel, where Shelley is actually trying to record what her time among the tragic, often infuriating Early Romantics was like, and as such uses the "last man" trope only metaphorically to declare her the last among her artistic peers to still live and write new work, one of the only people who actually got to live long enough to approach it through the wiser filter of middle-age, and therefore has more complex and nuanced things to say about it than any of them did when they were in their passionate twenties. It makes sense, after all, once you learn that she had been forbidden by her father-in-law from publishing a "true story" about her time with Percy, Byron and the rest; but this was the early 1800s, after all, not long after even the novel as an art form had even been invented, and when it was still largely considered silly rubbish only good for women and children by the exact sober, older white men like Shelley's father-in-law. Of course Shelley could get away with couching her memoir of these times within a so-called science-fiction melodrama, especially a trope that had already been around and trendily popular for the last 20 years, because readers literally weren't sophisticated enough yet to read something like The Last Man and say, "...Oh, wait, she's actually talking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, isn't she?" But sheesh, what else can you say about a character named "Lord Raymond," who is described as looking exactly like Byron, who in our late 21st-century setting of future England is a charming rogue asshole who wants to see England return to a state of monarchy, after the country fully converts into a secular democracy like the US in Shelley's "past future" timeline. Or what about his complicated, almost sexual relationship with who is supposed to be the current king of England if he hadn't abdicated, one Adrian Windsor who just happens to look exactly like Shelley's real-life husband Percy, who is 100% on the side of the rational Republicanists and has an antagonistic yet almost sensual relationship with Lord Raymond, who's trying to achieve the exact opposite thing and bring back "rule by the righteously ordained?" So if we use all this as proof that what Shelley was truly trying to do here was actually write an autobiographical novel about the Early Romantic inner circle she was a part of, that actually makes this quite the interesting book, and especially in the ultra-complex, ultra-nuanced way she portrays her version of Lord Byron here, very easily the true protagonist of the book even though it's supposed to be a sweeping ensemble drama where the abdicated king is just as important, as is his Shakespearean mother who schemes with Lord Raymond to bring back the monarchy, as is another dozen characters based here and there on actual figures from her real-life circle in those years. Shelley's the only one left alive at this point in real history, after all, so she can say whatever she wants to about these people; and it's clear that, just as we think about him today 200 years later, Shelley clearly found Lord Byron to be the most complex and mesmerizing person of their entire circle, and largely devotes her ensemble drama here to examining the detailed ins and outs of his character in particular. And like we've often been discovering just now in our #MeToo years, one of the things making this book worth revisiting here in the 21st century is that Shelley's post-death brutally honest assessment of Lord Byron is of a real MeTooer type -- charming and seductive in a way you can't tear yourself away from, but that you can easily see right away is damaging and too intense for your well-being, the kind of person to both build up a fervent circle of true believers and eventually resign with disgrace from that circle (if they live long enough, that is, which in the case of both the real Byron and the fictional Raymond was not the case), much more honest and sophisticated an examination of this type of "intelligentsia bro" than the traditional "Byronic Hero" that grew together during the Victorian Age. Unfortunately, though, I find myself once again paraphrasing Homer Simpson talking to Ricky Gervais when it comes to me discussing a novel from the Early Romantic period: "Lady, you take forever to say nothing!!!" And that's another reason you can see why contemporary audiences might've angrily rejected this book when it first came out, because for a post-apocalyptic thriller, it's slow as freakin' molasses, and I have to confess that I didn't make it all the way to the end of this thousand-page book before I had decided that I at least had read enough to write a measured and informed review. That review, as you can see, is that it's well worth your time to take on, at least the slow and extra-long first act which is where most of the character-building of these thinly veiled Early Romantics take place, before a second and third act that crank up the genre tropes considerably. (Also, be aware that Shelley didn't even bother trying to think of cool sci-fi what-ifs; the most cutting-edge thing anyone does in her book is travel long distances by hot air balloon.) In it, you'll get a more refreshingly honest and complicated look at these "world's first whiny hipsters" of Shelley's generation than perhaps you've ever seen an actual member of that generation talk about themselves before; and understand that if any of them had managed to live beyond their mid-thirties, like Shelley turned out to be the only one to do, all of them might have had a quite different attitude about this "age of the tortured romantic artist" that still very much exists to this day, even while seemingly getting snuffed out more and more by our rapid transition into our current Woke times. You may not last the entire book, but even the first couple hundred pages are well worth the time to read, even if you Wikipedia the rest of the plot; and Shelley in general deserves to be remembered as a towering pioneer of her age, and not just a one-hit wonder for Frankenstein in the style of, "Isn't it nice that Percy's wife got to do something too?" These books and others show exactly why, so ahead of their times that we're only catching up to some of them now. ...more |
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| 4.04
| 126,707
| Apr 01, 2004
| Jul 01, 2004
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it was ok
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2022 reads, #46. Longtime friends will remember that a few years ago, I created an Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge for myself so that I could fi
2022 reads, #46. Longtime friends will remember that a few years ago, I created an Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge for myself so that I could finally get up to speed on this genre I know little about, and that I was recently inspired to actually start it after reading my second "Dresden Files" novel by Jim Butcher and being as underwhelmed by it as I was by the first, and deciding I finally wanted to go out there and see what more interesting and expansive things the genre might have to offer besides the usual supernatural private detective dressed in '80s chic who is battling a group of sexy mythological creatures who all look like club kids and hang out in beautifully and perfectly decrepit abandoned subway stations, using mediocre prose that can only be described as "Joss Whedon on a bad day." But wow, Kim Harrison's "The Hollows" series is not the place to find an alternative, but rather is an exact and total duplicate of what I just described, just as was the first book I chose to start out this series, last week's Fated by Benedict Jacka. And that means that out of the 50 books I plan on reading for this series, the first three randomly chosen have all been exactly alike in both theme, mythos and writing quality; and I have to honestly say, I don't know if that's just a coincidence, or a troubling sign of what I'm bound to find in most of these "best loved of the best loved" titles in this genre to serve as a primer for myself. After all, one of the new insights I had here was that all three of these so far I've read (first published in 2000, 2004 and 2012) were written by what had to be slavish fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1997-2003 TV show that first made Whedon a celebrity, and that I've never really thought of before as "urban fantasy" per se but in hindsight makes sense that it would have such a huge cultural impact on this literary genre. Since Buffy was a '90s project too, just like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and the other pioneering projects we've talked about in previous reviews, I guess it's only natural that it would have an outsized influence on the urban fantasy genre as it coalesced for the first time into something big enough for its own name in these same years; and maybe I'm just bound to discover that most of these fan-favorite titles in my canon list are various pastiches, homages and takeoffs of these foundational projects at the genre's birth, because I have to admit, these first three have reflected an ultra-narrow slice of cultural history in a way that's surprised me, that slice being those heady days in the '90s when all the male badasses wore floor-length coats and fingerless racing gloves, and all the female badasses wore sleeveless t-shirts and goth makeup. That's why I'm taking on this challenge, after all, to see how much is out there in this genre besides that; but right now it's been 100 percent sub-Whedon, with this one being unfortunately the worst of the three. (The prose here is just unbearably twee and overly on the nose that at any time I expected to see one of the characters eventually say, "Is that your...FINAL ANSWER, demon?!") I'll keep forging ahead, and as always I encourage you diehards to recommend your own great titles in the comments or perhaps let me know of another Kim Harrison book I should read instead of this one; but for now, it's a permanent goodbye from me to sexy witch and supernatural bounty hunter Rachel Morgan, whose tale reads with all the flattened former charm of a fourth-generation Xerox. ...more |
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Aug 25, 2022
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Aug 25, 2022
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1937007294
| 9781937007294
| 1937007294
| 3.90
| 29,178
| Feb 28, 2012
| Feb 28, 2012
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liked it
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2022 reads, #45. Friends will remember that I recently tackled my second "Dresden Files" urban fantasy novel by Jim Butcher, part of my Great Completi
2022 reads, #45. Friends will remember that I recently tackled my second "Dresden Files" urban fantasy novel by Jim Butcher, part of my Great Completist Challenge, but that my underwhelmed response to it reminded me that several years ago I actually put together an urban fantasy primer challenge for myself as well, and that maybe it was finally time to start throwing myself more into that and less into these mediocre Dresden novels. But alas, by complete coincidence, the first one I could find available at the Chicago Public Library, Benedict Jacka's 2012 Fated (volume 1 of the now 12-volume "Alex Verus" series), basically just outright states in the first chapter that his universe is supposed to exist in the same universe that Dresden's does (by essentially making a reference to Dresden in the first chapter, unnamed for legal reasons but perfectly describing him); and so not only is the mythos exactly the same, but even Jacka's writing style is almost identical to Butcher's (which can both be described as "Joss Whedon on a bad day"), which kind of defeated the point of branching out into other urban fantasy titles besides Butcher's in the first place. Jacka succeeds here at what he's aiming for, so he doesn't deserve a bad score, despite the fact that I personally didn't like it; but that said, I personally didn't like it, and especially the way it seems already dated just ten years after its initial publication (for one good example, his personification of an air elemental here is described as a manic pixie dream girl, a character type that briefly exploded in popularity at the turn of the 21st century but even by the 2020s has been disavowed even by the guy who invented the term), so I can't in good conscience give it a good score either. Instead, I guess let me just perhaps warn you that this is a great example of what kept me away from urban fantasy for so long, because it's so stereotypically known by non-fans as these sort of sub-par adventures about dashing rogue white guys in '80s-chic wardrobes (sigh, all those floor-length coats), battling supernatural creatures who look like club kids and live in beautifully ruinous abandoned subway stations. I'm entering this Urban Fantasy Primer Challenge in the hopes of finding that the genre has expanded and gotten more complex since its 1990s invention by people like Neil Gaiman (who had a hugely outsized effect on this '80s-chic look and feel that became such an early cliche of the genre); but Fated is not it, but rather a deliberate paen to the very tropes I'm hoping to get away from. More power to you if you like this kind of B-level Whedon stuff (which I mean sincerely -- I myself love B-level steampunk novels, and make no apology for it), but this kind of trenchcoats-and-cute-goths material simply isn't for me. ...more |
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Aug 20, 2022
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Aug 20, 2022
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| 1937006727
| 9781937006723
| 1937006727
| 4.16
| 3,172
| 2004
| Aug 01, 2014
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liked it
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2022 reads, #40. This book made me realize that I've actually read a book by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh before, because that book had the same
2022 reads, #40. This book made me realize that I've actually read a book by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh before, because that book had the same problem this one did, that Hanh is really in full-on "delightfully eccentric elderly monk" mode here, not really delivering a nonfiction guide to Zen Buddhism when it comes to preparing and eating meals like I was expecting, but instead turning in a bunch of goofy disconnected mini-thoughts (each exactly the right size for an Instagram post, go figure), the kind of "daily thought to meditate on" that looks, feels and reads suspiciously like those quick knockoffs in the point-of-sale area of bookstores, where someone has haphazardly collected a group of public-domain poems on love or whatever but really the whole point is that the book is adorably small, whimsically decorated, and the perfect generic gift to keep at your house for your next baby shower that catches you short and with no time to go to the store. Far be it from me to suggest that Hanh doesn't know what he's talking about -- this is all fine basic guidance on the subject of Buddhism, don't get me wrong -- but when it's indistinguishable from the cutesy little compilation of love poems next to the cash registers at Barnes & Noble, there's simply something about that that makes the book drop in quality in my eyes, which is why it's getting only a middle-of-the-road score from me despite there not being anything particularly wrong with it. I suppose. I guess? Ugh, I guess I just expected more from a lifelong revered master of Buddhism than a printed-out Instagram account. Buyer beware.
...more
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| 0525522131
| 9780525522133
| 0525522131
| 3.63
| 438,367
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jun 25, 2019
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #31. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the
2022 reads, #31. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the novels by hipster-lit It Girl Ottessa Moshfegh, right in a row until I'm done, because of recently noticing a growing amount of my friends at Goodreads starting to now describe other surreal novels by young female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me having a desire to know exactly what they mean when they use a term like this. As we saw last time, during my read of her 2015 full-length debut Eileen, even with her first novel I got somewhat of an answer to that (namely, it seems to be shorthand for tales about that mousy little dishwater-blonde doormat at your corporate office who no one ever pays attention to, and how those women frequently turn out to be much, much crazier than you ever gave them credit for, a "Moshfeghian" story essentially being the story of the day that woman officially reached her fill of your fucking bullshit once and for all); but this didn't seem to explain why Moshfegh's fans tend to talk about her in the awed, hushed tones of true believers towards their cult leaders, in that Eileen is interesting but no great shakes, a sorta dour morality tale about The Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (aka Saturday Night Live's "Debbie Downer" come to life and played for drama instead of laughs), leaving me sort of shrugging my shoulders at the end and wondering how Moshfegh managed to inspire a cult following with rather pedestrian prose like this. Ah, but then this week I read her 2018 follow-up, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and immediately everything clicked into place; for what this second novel proves is that Moshfegh is actually no less than the arts' newest JG Ballard, and people like Ballard have proven to be historically difficult to define, in that their work is so startlingly unique and difficult to directly compare to others, which is why such artists tend to become one-person genres and are subsequently described as "Ballardian" or "Moshfeghian" or "Cronenbergian" or "Lynchian." Here, for example, we're given the kind of metaphorically surreal premise that fuels such other recent "Moshfeghian" novels as Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (my review) or Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen (my review)—basically, a rather unpleasant young female New Yorker, living the kind of soul-killingly anonymous life that so many of these young urban creative-classers do, decides one day that she's done with it all, and makes elaborate plans to spend a year under the constant effect of surgery-grade sleeping aids, basically waking briefly once every few days to tend to bodily functions like eating and moving her body, but otherwise spending 70 out of every 72 hours in a blissful state of slumber away from all the constant fucking Sex in the City consumer capitalist nonsense being unendingly shoved down the throats of her generation (as best seen in our unnamed narrator's "friend" Reza, who lives in the spiritually empty Upper East Side of Manhattan and 100 percent buys into every self-shaming tactic the consumer capitalist industrial system throws her way, who our narrator treats with open contempt even as Reza perpetually responds in her shallow Kardashian air-kiss kind of gently clueless way). Unlike these other "Moshfeghian" novels, though, which ultimately just tend to be the same ol' MFA character-study drivel as always but just dressed up with a fancy genre premise, here Moshfegh completely and totally commits to the weirdness, pairing up our protagonist with a quack therapist who by all rights should have no business being able to hand out legal drug prescriptions like candy, but who hilariously does anyway. This is where many astute readers will first start explicitly thinking of Ballard while reading Moshfegh's work, because her Dr. Tuttle is just so outrageously over-the-top insane that you can't help but laugh out loud every few pages whenever she appears, much in the same style as Ballard's Dr. Robert Vaughn from Crash or any number of similar figures in his other books, a sort of straw puppet who both he and Moshfegh use to very deliberately make the point, "When society itself is insane, maybe the sanest thing to do is follow the insane person who sees the world for what it really is." In this sense, then, the unnamed narrator of Relaxation is much like the milquetoast narrators of many of Ballard's books as well, a thorough product of modern society's efforts to grind everyone down into a bland paste so to more effortlessly accept whatever worthless nonsense consumer capitalism is selling this time, who one day stands up and says, "You know, I've had just about enough of all this, and if the only alternative is to slavishly follow a clearly insane person so that they'll provide rationalizations for my own insane behavior, then I guess that's how it's going to be." That's another thing to really like about Moshfegh's work, both here and in the previous Eileen; she not only isn't afraid to make her protagonists these unambiguously repulsive characters, she takes great pride in rubbing their awfulness in your face, here doing a particularly insightful job at portraying yet another pretty blonde white girl in New York, the ones being hostesses at all the hipster restaurants and receptionists at all the art galleries, and showing just the seething hatred she has for not only the rest of the human race but really everything in existence, letting us see the Late Stage Capitalism youth culture of her age through the confused, cynical eyes of a space alien who can't understand what's going on and why everyone is acting in the way they do. This is another thing that makes Moshfegh very much like Ballard, in that it's patently clear that she simply doesn't give the tiniest fuck what you think of her or her work; she's unafraid to write these pitch-black looks at the worst of the human condition, not through the hopeful filter of a rootable hero trying to rage against the machine, but through the fatalistic filter of someone who's now been ground through the machine and spit back out, ready now to embrace the dark, chaotic abyss. That's a powerful and unusual thing in any situation, which is why we celebrate artists like Ballard and Cronenberg for the visionaries they are; but that's an especially unique thing here, because of Moshfegh's main fanbase and most passionate readers being the kinds of young mainstream females who have traditionally been shuttled off unthinkingly by the publishing industry into the bright pink, bow-wrapped genre formerly known as "chick lit" and now known as "bookclub fiction" (which is kind of like when this same publishing industry finally stopped calling it "Negro literature" just to instead call it "urban fiction," i.e. it isn't fucking fooling anyone, but that's another comment-filled essay for another day). For these readers to stand up and practically worship Moshfegh for the legitimate literary pioneer she is is a powerful thing indeed, because it gives all women something better and deeper and more cutting to enjoy than just all the endless fluffy tales about cupcake stores and social media influencers and cozy mysteries among used bookstore-owning amateur sleuths, just like recent movies like Sorry to Bother You and Everything Everywhere All at Once are finally making it okay for the first time to be both a person of color and into deeply weird shit. That's something to celebrate, when a writer so profoundly dark and strange as Moshfegh gets embraced by the mainstream as much as she has, because it deepens and widens the arts altogether and gives everyone more choices, especially in the direction of artists who have things that are fascinating, rewarding, and sometimes profoundly challenging to hear. In fact, the only two things stopping me from giving this a full five stars (although to be sure, even with the four stars it will be appearing on my "best reads of the year" list this December) are both instances where I felt that Moshfegh sort of doubted herself and fell back on easy MFA tropes instead; namely, there's this small but unpleasant section two-thirds of the way through when she attends the funeral of Reza's mother and suddenly has all these Vietnam-style flashbacks to her own youth, where the book suddenly backtracks into Eileen territory of "poor little eternal victim was hated by literally every person in her childhood," and just does way too much explaining and Monday-morning retconning about why our unnamed narrator is such a horrible person in her twenties to begin with, which this book doesn't need and quite frankly ruins some of the former mystique; and then, as most people will notice quickly, which is why I don't consider this a spoiler, although written in 2018 the book itself is set in the year preceding 9/11, and Moshfegh makes it a showy point to demonstrate how a bunch of people in our narrator's life are all going to end up in the World Trade Center on 9/11 through things like unrelated jobs, and then at the end she basically finishes everything with a one-page final chapter that's like, "Yep, and then 9/11 happened and they all died! Um, The End!" For the life of me, I can't figure out why Moshfegh decided to do this, given that she has no real point to make or no big metaphor about 9/11 to bring up, just this ostentatious ending that calls all this attention to itself for no particular reason. Then again, although I haven't confirmed this myself, I've heard that Moshfegh can actually be quite contentious in interviews, and like her book's characters doesn't really seem to give much of a shit what anyone thinks of her or her work; for example, I heard people say in their reviews of Eileen that Moshfegh has since confessed in interviews that she entirely wrote that book by dutifully following every step of one of those cheesy Kindle Unlimited "Write A Novel In 90 Days and Get It Really Published!" guides, and did it literally as an expression of contempt for the publishing industry and the torturous path to publishing that all her MFA buddies were telling her she had to go through. I'll probably never look up whether that's actually true, because I so badly want it to be true, and I love the image of a deliberately cantankerous Moshfegh out there in the world, flipping off all the stupids and the NPR nerds, deliberately trolling her audience with endings like, "And then 9/11 happened and everyone died, The End, Honor Our Fallen Heroes, U-S-A U-S-A FUUUCKKKK YOOOOOOOUUUUU CONSUMER CAPITALISM!!!!!1!!" But we'll be examining that side of Moshfegh more, I'm absolutely sure, in my next read of my completist summer, her 2020 out-and-out New Weird thriller Death in Her Hands. I hope you'll be able to join me again in a few weeks for that. ...more |
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| 1594206627
| 9781594206627
| 1594206627
| 3.57
| 105,975
| Aug 18, 2015
| Aug 18, 2015
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it was ok
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2022 reads, #28. I've been noticing in recent years that the work of hipster favorite Ottessa Moshfegh has been steadily gaining in reverence to the p
2022 reads, #28. I've been noticing in recent years that the work of hipster favorite Ottessa Moshfegh has been steadily gaining in reverence to the point of starting to become a one-woman genre unto herself, and I'm now always seeing people at Goodreads describe various books as "Moshfeghian" while assuming that all their friends will know what they're talking about. I, however, have never read Moshfegh, and don't know what they're talking about; so here in early summer 2022, I've decided to go ahead and read all three of her currently existing novels right in a row (2015's Eileen, 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and 2020's Death in her Hands), and to make some space later this year for her newest, the coming Lapvona. This first one of hers, which made an unusual splash for being essentially her full-length debut (sort of coming out of nowhere to make the Booker shortlist, as well as win that year's PEN/Hemingway Award), is...oh, it's fine, I suppose, although it keeps up the strong tradition among MFA Brooklyn NPR hipsters to write exclusively stories about gently miserable creative-classers who suffer from entirely self-made crises that they could easily walk away from anytime they want. And indeed, that's exactly what this book is about -- narrated a full fifty years after the events that take place in the early 1960s, it's basically the ceaselessly dour memoirs of The Most Pathetic Woman In Human History, who decides one day to just completely walk away from her milquetoast life with her abusively alcoholic elderly father and her go-nowhere job to start all over again, just to admit 50 years later that she's such a dishwater-dull nothing of a person that not a single person from her old life ever bothered to track her down in all those decades since. As such, then, from what I can tell so far, "Moshfeghian" in these friends' eyes when they use the term is pretty much synonymous with "stories about how that mousy doormat at your office is actually much, much crazier than any of you ever suspected, and how she's officially had just about enough of your fucking bullshit, thank you very much." And that would've made an interesting "gawk at the trainwreck" book, along the lines of that female astronaut several years ago who made a frenzied cross-country trip to kill her lover's new girlfriend and wore adult diapers so she wouldn't have to stop for any reason but could instead just shit in her pants for the entire 24 hours the drive took (a very Moshfeghian tale indeed), except for two problems: first, this entire book, from the first page to the last, is nothing more than a look at that very last week of her old life before packing up and leaving, and thus has absolutely no plot to speak of besides, "Life is shit, life is shit, life is shit, and then I left;" and second, the life of our story's narrator, the Eileen of the book's title, is just so punishingly and thoroughly awful, just so relentlessly grim and aggressively terrible, that at many points this book stops becoming a drama altogether and turns into a self-parody, as if Moshfegh had been hired by Saturday Night Live halfway through to write a sketch that makes fun of her own book. It aims at what it's trying to achieve, and I'm also willing to admit that a whole lot of people like this book a whole lot more than me, which alone would normally merit a middle-of-the-road score of 2 1/2 stars no matter what I personally thought of it; but I'm rounding down in this case here at the no-half-star Goodreads, since I myself found this book less a pleasurable reading experience and more a punishing exercise in self-abuse. I've heard that her work gets into much stranger and therefore more interesting territory in later novels (indeed, many of the recent books I've heard friends describe as "Moshfeghian," such as Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch and Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen , are essentially magical-realism horror tales), so for now I'm going to stick in there; but I just really didn't like this debut at all, and I do not recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore Moshfegh completist fans out there. My review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is coming next (the book's already here from the library), so keep an eye out for that very soon. ...more |
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May 29, 2022
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May 29, 2022
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| 0679724494
| 4.01
| 19,285
| 1976
| Apr 03, 1991
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liked it
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2022 reads, #24. The recent death of William Hurt has had me thinking about all the astonishing performances he gave in the 1980s when I was a teenage
2022 reads, #24. The recent death of William Hurt has had me thinking about all the astonishing performances he gave in the 1980s when I was a teenager, and that made me have such a huge admiration for him; and one of those highlights is definitely his 1985 portrayal of an especially fey gay expat in Brazil in Kiss of the Spider Woman, arrested for cruising teenage boys and thrown into one of the country's infamously rotting jails, with a Marxist political prisoner (Raul Julia) as his fiery cellmate. I've known for a long time that the movie is actually based on a 1976 novel by respected South American academic author Manuel Puig, but I've never read it because of its reputation as obtusely experimental; but I decided with this most recent rewatch of the '80s adapted movie (here's my review of it at Letterboxd, if you're interested) that I'd go ahead and take on the book too, merely because I've always been interested to see how they compare. And strangely enough, this turns out to be one of those ultra-rare occasions where I can definitively state that the movie is unambiguously better than the book, in that the novel version indeed turns out to be as obtusely experimental as its reputation has it, a story that's just kind of all over the place and could really use the kind of tightening in on storytelling fundamentals that took place during its shrinkage into a screenplay. For one big thing, the gimmick that stands as the story's skeleton off which all the other pieces are hung -- Hurt's Louis (Luis in the novel, and a native Argentinian, where the book is actually set) recounting the plot of an old movie that has always had him transfixed by its beauty and elegance, as a way of helping his cellmate Valentin divert attention away from the pain of the torture he's undergoing daily in jail, just for us to slowly realize that Luis is actually describing an insanely offensive Nazi propaganda melodrama from the 1940s -- is split up in the book itself among five different films he ends up describing to Valentin over the course of the story, diluting the power of the Nazi propaganda one by pairing it with four just normal everyday other old films, and not allowing us to focus in on all the symbolic and metaphorical things that can be discussed through such a film about the relationship between the apolitical Luis and the politics-as-lifestyle Valentin. That's just one problem of what turns out to be a whole series of them here in the book version -- Luis and Valentin don't have a combative enough relationship in the book to be very interesting, one of the film's recountings is not done traditionally but rather in the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce, and Puig made the incredibly annoying decision to include an entire novella's worth of nonfiction information about the current state of homosexuality within the medical community in the mid-1970s, aggressively inserted into the actual text through a series of footnotes that sometimes run ten pages for a single one. So, while the story itself is the same one expressed in the movie as well, Puig does so in the novel in a way that antagonistically dares you to try to like it or get into it, as these kinds of politically active Postmodernist academic authors tended to be; and while that may be other's thing, it's not so for me, and I vastly prefer the movie version which strips out all the Pomo nonsense and leaves us instead with a riveting character study about masculinity and who should be allowed to define it, and promises made versus promises broken. The book version comes tepidly recommended in this spirit, good for you MFAers but inferior to the movie for those who prefer a good ripping yarn. ...more |
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| 4.12
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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| 3.81
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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| 3.41
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2024
not set
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Jan 27, 2024
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| 3.89
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Jan 18, 2024
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Jan 18, 2024
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| 4.46
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it was amazing
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not set
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Nov 16, 2023
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| 3.77
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Nov 12, 2023
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Nov 12, 2023
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| 4.30
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really liked it
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Oct 24, 2023
not set
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Oct 24, 2023
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Jul 23, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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| 4.19
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Apr 14, 2023
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Apr 14, 2023
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Apr 08, 2023
not set
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Apr 08, 2023
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| 4.23
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it was ok
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Mar 30, 2023
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Mar 30, 2023
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Mar 05, 2023
not set
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Mar 05, 2023
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2022
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Dec 28, 2022
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| 3.37
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it was amazing
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Nov 20, 2022
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Nov 20, 2022
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| 4.04
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it was ok
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Aug 25, 2022
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Aug 25, 2022
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Aug 20, 2022
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Aug 20, 2022
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| 4.16
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liked it
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Jul 22, 2022
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Jul 22, 2022
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Jun 19, 2022
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Jun 19, 2022
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| 3.57
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it was ok
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May 29, 2022
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May 29, 2022
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| 4.01
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liked it
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May 17, 2022
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May 17, 2022
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