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| 1638931089
| 9781638931089
| 1638931089
| 3.19
| 887
| May 21, 2024
| May 21, 2024
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2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I pick
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I picked up the book in the first place, once again proving the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can decide what to read next by one.” Then after it arriving from the Chicago Public Library, I learned that it’s the latest title by a new imprint of the small press Zando, in which they asked the delightfully dark and weird Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to hand-pick a series of unknown experimental female authors who deserve more attention, which is an admirable project and one that deserves our support. Then there’s the engaging story concept itself, a subversive coming-of-age tale about a ten-year-old girl who has recently discovered cursing as her new religion, as she develops a fascination for a twenty-something juvenile delinquent who’s been forced by the courts to move into the sort-of co-op, sort-of halfway home where our hero Molly (the “Kittentits” of the book’s title) lives with her zany dad and even zanier housemates, the whole thing set in Chicago where I live, which is always a nice bonus. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a bit of a slipstream alternative history going on here too; in the world of Kittentits, Chicago is about to host a World’s Fair in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the famous one that first put them on the global cultural map, while no such fair took place here in our version of the multiverse. But alas, there were just too many problems in this book for me to be able to get into it in any other way than a purely intellectual, stroking my chin while murmuring, “Hmm, that was clever” way, which perhaps reflects the fact that author Holly Wilson is a professional academe with a PhD in creative writing, which as we were just discussing a few weeks ago tends to be the death knell for the ability to write really engaging fiction anymore. The main problem is that Wilson has written this entire thing in an extremely experimental style, one that omits all quotation marks, is always dropping words you would normally find in real conversations, and really playing up the slang, in order to present this highly stylized prose that’s simply difficult to follow along with; then she marries it to the kind of “quirky unto infinity” milieu that became so big in the popular culture in the early 2000s (think Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.; and let’s not even get started on those fucking Skittles commercials). That’s not bad unto itself, but unfortunately for Wilson, that endlessly quirky style really got played out among audiences by the end of that decade, meaning that she’s not far enough away from those years to present this as a retro-quirky novel but not close enough to those years for readers to be able to enjoy it unironically. Or I suppose I should say “enjoy it in an ironic way unironically,” which is a big part of why this style burned itself out; by the time Postmodernism wheezed out its last gasps before its death, right around Obama’s first Presidential win in 2008 which birthed our current Wokeism artistic movement, it had become so masturbatory and deadpan and self-referential, it was impossible to enjoy it anymore in any kind of simple, unironic way. So, while I applaud Wilson for doing an excellent job at late-period Postmodernism, I have to confess that I simply don’t want to read even a single new book in that style ever again, which made me lose interest in this book quickly despite it actually being well-written (or at least as “well-written” as you can say about a book that’s deliberately trying to challenge readers to put it back down again, one of the biggest problematic side-effects of devoting your entire life to academic scholarly study of creative writing, that the obsessive desire to “out-fancy” your peers results in books that practically scream, “I DARE you to make it to the last page of this novel!”). That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid it, but certainly you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into before you pick it up. ...more |
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Jun 15, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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| 3.84
| 774
| Jul 29, 2013
| Aug 07, 2015
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances, in this case actually a cozy mystery novel instead of the romance novels that usually take up my time with KU titles. I actually got halfway through this the first time I read it, then got distracted by several other books that came up in my library reserve list, then had to go back and read this one again all the way from the beginning, because I had totally forgotten the storyline by then; but this should be interpreted as a big compliment, because normally I wouldn’t go to nearly this much trouble for one of these disposable KU books I download for free from those KU promotional websites (I think Bookspry in this particular case). That’s entirely because of our delightfully trainwrecky, highly rootable protagonist at the center of our story, the perpetually unemployed and underloved actress Madison Cruz, whose self-sabotaging misadventures in her Seattle hometown are a true delight. That’s a real key to enjoying these kinds of stories, I’ve discovered as I read more and more of them; so many Kindle Unlimited authors use these kinds of main characters as basically Mary Sue stand-ins for themselves, presenting perfectly perfect heroes who never do anything wrong and never have a hair out of place, always saving the day with one hand while serving up another plate of yummy homemade scones with the other; but author Lucy Carol understands that these kinds of protagonists are much more interesting when they mess up big and often, which Madison certainly does, taking two hilarious steps back for every step forward she makes in her debut adventure here when it comes to the men competing for her attention, her strained relationship with her mother, and the constant humiliating situations she finds herself in as an actress who can only find work doing singing telegrams and kids’ parties and the like. It’s within such a milieu, then, that Madison stumbles across an honest-to-God international conspiracy involving missing babies, crooked FBI agents and former Soviet dissidents, the details of which are best left a surprise; what I can tell you without fears of spoilers, however, is that somehow Carol actually makes this an organic part of what’s otherwise a cozy domestic story about a bunch of city-going single twentysomethings, and rather than forcing the international intrigue onto a situation that can’t naturally fit it in, comes up with an extremely clever way to make it seem like such developments are the most natural thing in the world to happen in Madison’s plucky life. (Of course, both her mom and her uncle are FBI agents, so this helps quite a lot.) I have to confess, I was a little in love with Madison myself by the time I finished this extremely engaging story, and if I was someone who actually had a Kindle Unlimited account, I would launch right away into the other half-dozen titles that have now been written in this series. If you’re a KU person, I strongly encourage you to do so yourself, or at the very least read this funny, warm, witty start to it all, which can be found for free at multiple promotional websites for these kinds of books. ...more |
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May 09, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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| 1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 88,612
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friends’ parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swiss” (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,” by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. That’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. That’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. That’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Year” list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0345471725
| 9780345471727
| 0345471725
| 4.06
| 11,729
| Sep 01, 1976
| Mar 01, 1995
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liked it
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2024 reads, #7. A freelance client recently reminded me of late newspaper humor columnist Erma Bombeck, who was active between the 1960s and '90s but
2024 reads, #7. A freelance client recently reminded me of late newspaper humor columnist Erma Bombeck, who was active between the 1960s and '90s but hit her popular height in the late '70s and early '80s when I was a kid. I can pretty definitively state that Bombeck was the very first adult writer I ever read on a regular basis, and that I absolutely adored her as a preteen, rightly considering her musings on middle-class suburbia to be the most hilarious stuff I had ever read up to that moment in my life; so when reminded of her again this week, I decided to take a walk down nostalgia lane and pick up one of the two biggest books she had during this period (the other one being 1978's If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, published two years after today's book, both of them massive bestsellers at the time). As I expected, reading it now in my mid-fifties was a disappointing experience, with my fully educated adult mind now able to see that this is mostly just subpar Dave Barry stuff (who himself was a subpar writer to begin with), a lot of easy and obvious observations about subdivisions and station wagons designed specifically for elderly people to cut out and stick on their fridges. What surprised me, though, was how easily I could still see why nine-year-old Jason ate this stuff up with a spoon; and that's because Bombeck was undeniably clever, and this was literally the first time in my entire life I had ever gotten to read any clever writing whatsoever (remember, in my own Gen-X youth of the '70s, the only other stuff for me to read was Encyclopedia Brown books and the Guinness Book of World Records), and so I desperately latched onto it as the only example I'd ever seen up to then of the dark, witty sense of humor I'd been born with. So in this, Bombeck served a hugely important and needed role in my life, essentially being my gateway to more subversive humor columnists like PJ O'Rourke once I was in high school, which then led me down the road to the indie arts where I've now spent the majority of my adult life. So although I doubt I'll ever be revisiting the actual work of Bombeck again, I certainly will keep the flame of my childhood love for her alight and burning, because she was one of the few rare female newspaper columnists of those years who brought anything to her work besides sloppy sentimentality and platitude-riddled moral lessons more appropriate for Sunday School. Although I can't honestly say that you should pick up her old books yourself, I do think she should be continued to be remembered and honored for the legitimate groundbreaking she did in this milieu back at the height of her powers. ...more |
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2
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not set
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Jan 22, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1984881736
| 9781984881731
| B0BWH5YYTR
| 4.06
| 3,577
| Nov 07, 2023
| Nov 07, 2023
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #2. Not nearly as fun a book as I thought it was going to be, and way more tedious a book than I realized it was going to be. It's "intere
2024 reads, #2. Not nearly as fun a book as I thought it was going to be, and way more tedious a book than I realized it was going to be. It's "interesting," but "interesting" in the same way that five straight hours of NPR during a car ride because you have literally nothing better to do is "interesting." Buyer beware.
...more
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Jan 10, 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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ebook
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| 9798702166483
| 4.26
| 54
| unknown
| Feb 25, 2021
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it was amazing
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I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out
I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. Merged review: I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. ...more |
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2
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Mar 09, 2021
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Jan 07, 2024
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| 4.46
| 1,125,311
| 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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Nov 16, 2023
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ebook
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| 1982168560
| 9781982168568
| B0BVN1M6G2
| 3.77
| 18,331
| 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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| 1857984986
| 3.92
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| Dec 1998
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a
2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a favorite among heavily reading insiders in the know, the kind of books difficult to find in mall stores but that the coolest people at the annual Coniconicon were always seeming to rave about. And now, forty years later, I've finally read my first Stainless Steel Rat novel myself, LOL; and I have to confess that I now deeply regret waiting so long to do so, because at least this first book in the series turned out to be quite amazing, not just for the story itself but because it's turned out to have held up way better than most of the other '50s sci-fi being published by his peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. It's essentially a heist story about an intergalactic con man named James "Slippery Jim" Bolivar diGriz, who lives in a Star Trek-like post-scarcity universe where crime has been virtually eliminated; he himself commits crimes simply for fun, and as a subversive act of rebellion against a tediously clean and optimistic universe, just to prove that he has free will and doesn't have to buy into the Starfleet-like goody-two-shoes attitude about the so-called "dignity of all humankind" and all their other garbage-people nonsense if he doesn't want to. As he explains, back before the invention of skyscrapers (keep in mind that this was written in 1957), rats pretty much ran things in the crumbling old wooden and brick buildings companies used to try to run their businesses out of; but if you want to be a rat in an age of all stainless steel buildings, you have to become a stainless steel rat yourself, a poetic way of explaining the book series' main pleasure, of how diGriz takes the exact futuristic implements of this brave new galaxy and uses them against the happy, shiny people who were under the impression that this tech would turn the entire human race into one big hand-holding family of man, where there would finally be no more war and no more crime and everyone will live in complete tech-enhanced harmony. So in this, you can very much see this as a precursor to and informer of the cyberpunk movement that would begin around 25 years later, in that Harrison's main point in this book is that all the utopian ideals of the Mid-Century Modernist era in which he was living at the time were essentially one big smokescreen, and that all the new inventions and gadgets that were being introduced to a stunned, grateful populace every month in these years are actually double-edged swords, easily able to be used for evil no matter what the perpetual Hugo-winning tech utopians like Asimov and Heinlein had to say about the subject. That's one of the two main reasons this reads so much better 70-odd years later than his peers, because Harrison had the attitude about it all that we here in the 21st century much more commonly have too, that the human race is still shit and always will be, no matter how many doodads we invent, so we might as well sit back, have a drink, enjoy ourselves, and not worry too much about the repercussions. And then the other reason this has aged so much better than books by people like Asimov and Heinlein -- and I admit, the aspect of this I found most refreshing and surprising of all -- is that Harrison had a truly progressive attitude about female characters even back then, not only making a woman the main wily villain of this particular book who always seems one step ahead of diGriz's futile attempts to track her down, but then making her a highly complex, often contradictory, always competent and sometimes kind of insane person, such an astoundingly noticeable change from my recent attempts to re-read Asimov and Heinlein in the modern 2020s, and realizing that pretty much every woman in every story by those two in the '50s (when you see any female characters in them at all) is a secretary or a housewife or some other kind of damsel in distress, and that their one and only character trait tends to be a description of how much most men will want to or not want to have sex with them, more often than not based exclusively on their boob size. It's a shame that we need to celebrate the embrace of female complexity so much in 1950s science-fiction when coming across it, because of it having been so rare in genre fiction at the time to be almost non-existent; but that's unfortunately the world we actually live in, which means that if you're someone who's been interested in exploring the origins of this genre but can't stand the insulting ways everyone but straight white males are treated in most of them, these books are absolutely some of the ones from that period that you can safely read without having to worry about being inadvertently offended every few pages. Ultimately what diGriz discovers over the course of this book is that the skills and attitude that make him such an adept criminal are the same exact skills and attitude that would make him an excellent police investigator of other such criminals, eventually getting recruited into basically a sci-fi version of the dirty-tricks wing of the CIA (again, keep in mind the year this was written); so in this, you can see this book on top of everything else as being a precursor and inspiration for Star Trek's dirty-tricks wing of Starfleet, the infamous Section 31, although in this case with the Section 31 agent being the hero of the story instead of the villain. That tells you everything you need to know to understand whether or not you're going to like this book yourself, that the cynical, world-weary, wisecracking con artist with the contemptuously low regard for the human race is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for; and I'm assuming for now that it's this recruitment into Harrison's version of the Mid-Century Modernist-era CIA that ends up providing the framing device for the eleven other books in the series, written slowly over the remainder of the 20th century. (The second-to-last book of the series was published in 1999, with one final victory-lap novel in 2010 right before Harrison's death.) I'll be reading the rest of them in the coming years with great relish; and if you're a fan of my other book reviews and the way I approach literature in general, you'll surely want to jump into this series without delay yourself. ...more |
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| 4.06
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #74. It's summer, which means it's time for another of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books, comedic fantasy novels that have become a beloved institution in Britain where he's from, in the same manner as his peers Monty Python. Of course, the problem was that it'd been so long since I'd read the first two books in the series, I had actually forgotten by now what they were about, so I ended up re-reading both of those as well (1983's The Colour of Magic [my original review] and 1986's The Light Fantastic [my original review]). And that's when I discovered the unsettling truth -- not that there was a bad reason behind why I couldn't remember their storylines (it turns out it was because they don't really have storylines, I had forgotten, but are more like prose versions of cartoons, where no actual plot takes place and nothing anyone does has any consequences, making it easy to see why I had forgotten what they're about), but rather that reading these even a second time tended to be an exhausting exercise in overly frenetic nonsense, like taking the aforementioned Monty Python and then multiplying their absurdist hijinks by ten thousand while screeching all the jokes in an exaggerated falsetto Cockney accent as loud as you can possibly scream them, leading to an unsatisfyingly chaotic experience that simply wore me out long before the books were over. In this third book, then, which features brand-new characters and a brand-new story, the problem is the exact opposite; for while Pratchett obviously meant to write another parody of fantasy novels like the first two books, he ended up writing just a straightforward fantasy novel, and therefore turned in one that's only mediocre at best, for not being satisfying as either a genre story or a satire of a genre story (you know, much like how William Goldman's The Princess Bride started as a Postmodernist parody of fairytales, but then the '80s movie version changed it into just an actual fairytale, making it as unsatisfyingly sappy and sentimental as any other fairytale that's ever been written). That's the biggest problem here, that underneath Pratchett's dark sense of humor, love of puns, and gentle ribbing of genre conventions, there's a kind of unearned gooey sentimentality that wouldn't be out of place in a Lifetime or Hallmark movie, and I have to admit that this book's trite message of "GIRL!!! POWER!!!" just really rubbed me the wrong way, after having spent literally decades listening to people tell me how crazy and subversive and intelligent the Discworld novels are. Three books in, I have found none of these titles so far to be particularly crazy, subversive or intelligent, but rather just one step up in quality from fan fiction passed around as xeroxes in the back hallways of the annual Coniconicon; and so while I'm going to keep this series in my master list of Completist Challenge authors for now, I suspect I won't be returning to this universe for quite some time, and only then with a high sense of skepticism and an eye towards quitting it as soon as I find enough problems to justify doing so. It's a real shame, because I thought these books were going to be right up my alley; but it turns out they're not nearly the kind of brilliant displays of British wit and cleverness that I've been told my whole life they are. Your experience may be different, but I caution you to go into these with low expectations anyway. Terry Pratchett's Discworld books included in this review series: The Colour of Magic (1983) | The Light Fantastic (1986) | Equal Rights (1987) | Mort (1987) | Sourcery (1988) | Wyrd Sisters (1988) | Pyramids (1989) | Guards! Guards! (1989) | Eric (1990) | Moving Pictures (1990) | Reaper Man (1991) | Witches Abroad (1991) | Small Gods (1992) | Lords and Ladies (1992) | Men at Arms (1993) | Soul Music (1994) | Interesting Times (1994) | Maskerade (1995) | Feet of Clay (1996) | Hogfather (1996) | Jingo (1997) | The Last Continent (1998) | Carpe Jugulum (1998) | The Fifth Elephant (1999) | The Truth (2000) | Thief of Time (2001) | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) | Night Watch (2002) | The Wee Free Men (2003) | Monstrous Regiment (2003) | A Hat Full of Sky (2004) | Going Postal (2004) | Thud! (2005) | Wintersmith (2006) | Making Money (2007) | Unseen Academicals (2009) | I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) | Snuff (2011) | Raising Steam (2013) | The Shepherd's Crown (2015) ...more |
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| 3.75
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2023 reads, #49. Like many Generation X males, I was an obsessive fan when it first came out of the 1985 Chevy Chase crime dramedy Fletch, in which a
2023 reads, #49. Like many Generation X males, I was an obsessive fan when it first came out of the 1985 Chevy Chase crime dramedy Fletch, in which a smartass investigative reporter charms, lies and buffoons his way through a slow reveal of corrupt cops in Los Angeles reaching all the way up to the commissioner; and after enjoying even more a new Fletch movie in 2021 starring the absolutely perfect Jon Hamm (sadly lost in the swirl of the pandemic and therefore barely seen), I finally decided to sit down and start reading the eleven novels crime novelist Gregory Mcdonald wrote about this engaging, hilarious, yet world-weary character, starting with the third novel in the series since the first two are the source material for the two films. But alas, what feels like devastatingly witty and sophisticated dialogue in the movies comes across as more twee and annoying in book form, kind of like if Joss Whedon ever decided to write a crime novel, and I am absolutely not a fan of Joss Whedon's writing whatsoever. But then again, this is also a strange Fletch novel that perhaps shouldn't be compared to the first two; set entirely at a journalism convention at a former Southern plantation turned convention hall, none of our characters ever actually leave this hotel resort estate for the entire length of the book, and so lacks the zany side characters and thrilling action that helps break up the clever dialogue of the films. I admit, if you simply stuck Fletch in a hotel room for 90 minutes and had him talk nonstop in the movie versions, they would be severely lacking, which is exactly what Mcdonald does here; so before I pass judgment over the entire series, I'm going to take on at least one more of them, which chronologically means 1981's Fletch and the Widow Bradley, which Wikipedia assures me is a return to the globetrotting, adventure-embracing Fletch of the first two books. I'll see you here again later this summer for that! ...more |
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| 3.94
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2023 reads, #43. DID NOT FINISH. I finally read this Pulitzer winner because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing this month over at Letterboxd (i.e.
2023 reads, #43. DID NOT FINISH. I finally read this Pulitzer winner because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing this month over at Letterboxd (i.e. Goodreads for film nerds), where I plan on watching the two-part Emmy-winning 2005 HBO miniseries adaptation of this, and thought I'd read the book version first so I'd have something to compare it to. But alas, this turned out to be basically like if you looked at Garrison Keillor's famous small town Lake Wobegon but in a post-Industrial age, by which I literally mean that the book has the gently funny, small-town-wisecracking Andy Griffithesque tone of Keillor, but is set within this ultra-dark, ultra-depressing reality of the town's main businesses now having been closed for decades, at a point where most of the young people have run off and the remaining elderly are just sitting around waiting to die in their bleak, hopeless, almost dystopian run-down surroundings. That's a tall order, to mash those two tones together, and I have to admit that I simply didn't care for the results, although can see why it won the Pulitzer since this "wry miserablism" is very much in the MFA literary wheelhouse. I made it about a third of the way through but then fairly quickly gave up after that, upon realizing that it simply wasn't going to get any better than what I had already sampled, and it should be approached or not yourself with this caveat in mind. Interested now to see how the miniseries compares!
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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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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #8. (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, #8. (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 one of a handful now of books I've read in what's called the "fated mate" subgenre; that's when a paranormal creature such as a werewolf or space alien is not only attracted to our story's female lead character (or FLC), but is literally compelled biologically by something in their paranormal makeup to mate with her no matter what they rationally think of the situation, usually explained away with some vague term like "werewolf DNA" or "alien blood." In the case of the "Twilight" books that first made this trope famous (called "imprinting" in those novels), this uncontrollable compulsion to mate falls more on the emotional and romantic side of things, so that werewolves suddenly find themselves with the irresistible urge to buy their girlfriend a teddy bear or wash her hair in the bathtub; but in Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, this compulsion is much more darkly sexual in nature, a story concerning the first human woman to ever visit a planet full of male-exclusive eight-foot-tall blue-skinned devil-looking space aliens, whose compulsion to breed is so strong that even after getting one whiff of her scent from hundreds of feet away, our male lead character (MLC) immediately has a groaning flood of an orgasm that splashes right on the ground in front of him without him ever touching his penis, which should give you a good idea of what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about one of these characters being "biologically compelled to breed." (Don't worry, though -- at one point he does wash her hair in a local pond, now still making it 100% of every romance or women's erotica novel I've ever read that has featured a scene of the MLC washing the FLC's hair in a body of water in one way or another. You ladies and your obsession with having your hair washed by your boyfriend, I swear, I just don't get it.) Essentially this genre provides a cleaned-up, woman-friendly means of engaging in the very dark but surprisingly common fantasy many women have about being gangbang raped, which in fact is so common that there's at least three different subgenres within romance devoted to the subject, not just these "fated mate" stories but also "reverse harem" ones (in which the FLC is more aggressive about the subject and actually loves having all these hunky dumb men at her beck and call), as well as "why choose" stories (in which each of the men actually act like a traditional romantic partner, essentially letting the FLC have three or four or five monogamous boyfriends all at once [well, the men are all monogamous, anyway], with all the guys being remarkably cool about the fact that she has four other boyfriends, justified in a way usually baked right into the book's gimmicky subject). And I have to admit, it's an extremely clever way to tell such a story, because the female readers get to both have their cake and eat it too; for if you wrote a book about just some normal human male who suffered from uncontrollable sexual urges, and who felt compelled to sometimes grab the nearest female, hold her down, then breed with her to completion, that guy would just be some gross rapist Harvey Weinstein creep, and take it from me, ain't no woman out there in existence looking for a romance novel in which Harvey Weinstein is the MLC. By making it a special part of a paranormal character's fictional biology, though, this allows the character himself to still be the kind of boyfriend women fantasize about -- thoughtful, tender, respectful, caring -- who just happens to get overwhelmed by by the "whateverian" in his bloodstream that once every blood moon compels him to insert his horse-sized dick (they're always horse-sized dicks) into his "designated seed receptacle" (the FLC, often in some kind of collar-focused light bondage gear by now) until the deed has been finished, as the puny human mewls and squirms under his rock-hard body, both loving and protesting every moment of it. Then, back to washing her hair in the bathtub! Let's be clear, a big part of what makes Their Human Vessel so enjoyable is that it's simply a great science-fiction novel to begin with, full stop, no matter what other genre might be attached to it, with Bequin clearly having the kind of mastery over SF's tropes that comes with undoubtedly being a con-going fan herself; the universe-building here is solid, expansive, believable and clever, the dialogue Peak TV-level (or, you know, Joss Whedon-level at least), the characters complex and easy to root for. But sister, then add the bright blue horse cocks and the space alien gangbangs, and I luuuuuuuurved it, because this is exactly the kind of dark, outre, go-for-it prurience I myself like in erotic stories, as someone now in his 50s and who has been exploring sexuality in a complex and nuanced way for over 30 years now. What makes this book great is that Bequin simply doesn't hold back here, like so many women's erotica authors do when push finally comes to shove at their manuscript's most graphic moments; here, our FLC is pinned down and fucked before she can even get out a question about what's happening, much less a protest, over and over and over by multiple characters in multiple situations throughout the entire book, in an unending fashion without breaks needed since the unique DNA of the horse-dicked aliens make them ready to go again mere seconds after their previous orgasm, because of course it does, of course. And, in perhaps the most clever detail of all, part of Bequin's mythos here is that small amounts of the aliens' sperm can literally reverse aging and kill cancer in humans (the big secret behind this planet, that a British East India-type private company has enslaved the entire alien population and hooked them up to dick-milking machines, to sell the sperm as a medical pill back on Earth), but large amounts of sperm will literally start turning a human into one of the aliens themselves; so every time our short-haired, small-breasted, nerdy, reader stand-in-feeling FLC takes another massive load from the three remaining non-enslaved space aliens left on the planet, in the unending aggressive gangbangs they perpetrate on her over and over in their Na'vi-looking glowing-plant-filled underground pond cavern oases, the more those loads start changing her body to be more ready to endlessly take on these massive gangbangs over and over, as her bluish skin toughens and her sex drive goes up and she understands how it can be to deeply love three men at the same time with no guilt or shame. Or, er, three eight-foot-tall blue space aliens with horse cocks, I mean. I gotta plainly say, I loved this book, women's erotica done really right, which perfectly treads that invisible line between silly and legitimately hot. I can see that this author also has a whole series in the subgenre known as "omegaverse," which I have a strong interest in exploring (the very first romance manuscript I was ever offered as a freelancer, in fact, was an omegaverse story, which sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole a full six months ago or so, which has made me curious about the genre ever since). So I may actually take that one on next, and if it's good then go straight to the group of other omegaverse novels I recently downloaded to my Kindle, when going to a promotional website recently and downloading 30 titles all at once, split up among such subgenres as Regency, contemporary, Christian, beach, cyberpunk, "knotted" (but whew, more on that another day), cozy mystery, urban fantasy, Irish small town, mafia, and...that's it. No, wait, and Tolkien "high fantasy." That's it -- that covers the 30 romance and women's erotica titles currently on my Kindle. Like, five of those are omegaverse novels, so I may or may not hop straight to those after reading Bequin's Wounded Omega, we'll see. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who needs something rather intense to really "enjoy yourself" as a reader (I think you know what I mean), this'll be just your ticket, a story that needs some disbelief suspended but that by doing so can really suck you in as a good old-fashioned very dirty story. ...With, you know, blue-skinned horse dicks, buyer beware. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0575003499
| 9780575003491
| 0575003499
| 3.81
| 23,791
| Aug 14, 1969
| Jan 01, 1969
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one c
2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one chapter from this collection of long-form journalism pieces by famed New Yorker financial reporter John Brooks; in fact, that's the entire reason I picked it up in the first place, because I recently read in someone else's book that Brooks in this book does one of the best jobs ever at explaining what exactly happened behind one of the most notorious failures in American business history, the release and subsequent tanking of the Ford Edsel in the late 1950s, a story I've always been curious to know more about. And indeed, it turned out to be as fascinating as you would expect, especially now when we've long forgotten what the state of the automobile industry was in the '50s when these events occurred, or for that matter what the state of the modern marketing and advertising industry was in these years as well. Basically, in the '50s there were only three types of cars on the market, known as the "cheap" one, the "middle" one, and the "expensive" one, with the rapidly expanding American middle-class expressing their newfound wealth by officially "trading up" as soon as they could afford it; but while Ford had a good-selling cheap car and expensive car at the beginning of the '50s, they lacked a middle-priced car, which is how the idea for the Edsel first came about. Unfortunately for them, a sort of perfect storm of problems happened on the way to the car's release half a decade later, including a too-long development period that misjudged what the future of cars would be (the Edsel finally got released in 1957, just in time for the big new trend in "compact" cars, including Ford's own Falcon in 1960 which quickly eclipsed the Edsel in sales); a wasteful developmental period as well, which spent way too much money on frivolous details (including having armed guards manning the doors of Ford's drawing rooms as a form of publicity stunt, and hiring famed poet Marianne Moore to suggest names for the car [including such hilarious options as the Utopian Turtletop and the Pastelogram]); what at the time was a brand-new obsessive reliance on public opinion polls and customer psychological profiles (one of the very first examples of a type of marketing that was to eventually become the national norm); too much of an attempt to make the Edsel the everything car for everybody (after discovering that most Americans assigned their own mental beliefs to a car make no matter if the car company wanted them to or not, the Ford marketers decided to get ahead of the game and start aggressively promoting the Edsel as the car for young people and old people and men and women and rich and poor and everyone else, leading to four main lines of the car with 18 varieties apiece, or 72 different kinds of Edsels one could ultimately choose from); heavily overinflated expectations the car itself could never live up to (among other terrible decisions that sounded wise at the time, the company made a national public spectacle out of recruiting 12,000 new Edsel dealerships across the country, keeping the dealers' sneak preview of the car under lock and key, leading a frenzied public to believe that the new vehicle was essentially going to be a futuristic rocket car in the style of The Jetsons); massive overspending in advance of the car's release (today's equivalent of over three billion dollars before a single car had been sold, including an entire million dollars on one single press conference on release day); and simply too much overconfidence on the part of Ford's employees, who in a glorious postwar environment thought they were the business that could do no wrong, assuming as the saying goes that if they simply built it, "they would come." As promised, Brooks does a thorough, plain-spoken, and highly entertaining job covering the entire thing, including such delightfully snotty lines as, "Three days after release, an Edsel was stolen from a north Philadelphia dealership; it can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the car." I imagine he does this in all the other chapters of this book as well, including stories about the meteoric rise of the Xerox Corporation, the Wall Street "mini-crash" of 1962, the history of the federal income tax, GE's Congressional antitrust hearings during the Kennedy years, and other such issues; but I'm so ridiculously behind on my reading at this point that I simply can't justify spending time on these subjects I just barely care about, so I simply finished up this Edsel piece and declared myself done with the book. It therefore comes strongly recommended, but with the understanding that this is based on only reading a small bit of it, with the suspicion but not the confirmed knowledge that the rest of it is as good as well. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 12, 2022
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Dec 12, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0316258679
| 9780316258678
| 0316258679
| 4.06
| 258,694
| Jun 14, 2022
| Jun 14, 2022
|
really liked it
|
2022 reads, #35. ATTENTION, LONGTIME HIPSTER INDIE-LIT FRIENDS -- I WILL HAVE NO BAD-MOUTHING TODAY OF "QUEEN OF THE SUMMER BEACH READ" ELIN HILDERBRA
2022 reads, #35. ATTENTION, LONGTIME HIPSTER INDIE-LIT FRIENDS -- I WILL HAVE NO BAD-MOUTHING TODAY OF "QUEEN OF THE SUMMER BEACH READ" ELIN HILDERBRAND, THANK YOU VERY FREAKING MUCH! Friends will of course remember that I originally became a fan of this notorious "chick lit" author (oops, I mean "bookclub fiction") by accident, when I once stumbled across her book Silver Girl at my local library and mistook it for a book in my TBR list by the same name but in that case by edgy indie author Leslie Pietrzyk. But hey, I'm not immune to the easy charms of a fast, unchallenging summer read, as my very public commitment to at least one Jack Reacher novel every summer as well can attest; and breezy summer reads don't get much better than the intensely loved Hilderbrand, which is what makes her so intensely loved in the first place, an author who really nails the fundamentals of character, plot and the three-act story structure, regardless of what you might think of the details wrapped around these fundamentals. Once again set on the tony New England island of Nantucket, like almost all of Hilderbrand's other 27 (!) books, the gimmick this time is that we're watching the comings and goings at an old dilapidated Victorian-era grand hotel that's been recently given new life by a Richard Branson-type eccentric British billionaire, for mysterious reasons no one can figure out (as far as anyone can tell, he's never even visited Nantucket, so no one knows why he's suddenly so interested in a shuttered-up old hotel even most of the locals had forgotten about); and so as such this has the old-school ensemble flavor of an old Arthur Hailey novel from the 1970s (mostly remembered now as the guy who provided the narrative framework for all those old disaster movies in the '70s), where every character no matter how minor has a hidden past and eventually every hidden past is neatly resolved, if that is you're lucky enough not to be just one of the throwaway supporting characters who are only there to provide a bit of humor and to help the reader further understand the unique "Jay Gatsby meets Key West" rhythm and lifestyle of Nantucket in the summer, the main reason Hilderbrand's fans tune in over and over. (Nearly all of her novels begin on a Memorial Day and have their climax on Labor Day; it's the daily patterns of the parrothead locals between these two tourist holy dates, as they interact with their rich and famous blue-blood visitors, that provides the comforting patina Hilderbrand's fans are showing up for in the first place.) I mean, yes, this is one of those books that thinks that "character development" involves listing the brand names of every piece of clothing a character is wearing (I mean, Christ, the author herself manages to get a brand reference squeezed into her 48-word dust jacket bio); one of those books whose only attempt at addressing racial issues is the argument between Chad and Karen over how much to tip their South American housekeeper; one of those books full of fiftysomething women with leathery skin constantly making awkward references to TikTok influencers and hiphop artists, because the gym and plastic surgery was enough to keep them artificially young during their forties but now even that is no longer working that well; one of those books that announces its goodies and baddies with such a lack of subtlety that there's literally a ghost as one of the main characters here, and that ghost has the magical ability (and I'm not making this up) to psychically understand which exact guests and staff members will eventually have some sort of giant climactic meltdown in exactly the moment in the late third act when it's most useful to the plot. (Sheesh, how do I hire this ghost to be my script doctor?) But none of that matters very much, because like every genre that has genre fans (this can be applied to my beloved science-fiction too, for example), we're here mostly for the atmosphere and mood, to wallow in these genre tropes as the literary comfort food they are. To make fun of the stereotypical turns is to miss the point, that everyone is here precisely for the stereotypical turns, because that's what makes the genre a fun guilty pleasure; so even as one part of me rolls my eyes at the transparent machinations Hilderbrand goes through to make our book's put-upon heroine, plucky general manager Lizbet Keaton, fall in love with the hotel's new hunky celebrity chef personally brought in by the enigmatic Branson tycoon, another part of me totally eats up the freaking ten-page description of every single goddamned bite of food they have at the overpriced restaurant where they share their first meal. (And of course, let's never forget the Chekhov's Gun Rule modified for bookclub fiction: If in the first 20 pages the hotel staffers mention a beloved but tough hotel reviewer whose identity is shrouded in mystery and who has never given five stars in their life, rest assured that in the last 20 pages, said hotel will receive the elusive first five stars from said reviewer, who turned out to be the guest everyone least suspected!) As the TikTokers say, "Haters gonna hate," but I myself love me my annual dose of that sunny, salty, bling-bling Atlantic Seaboard air; and my four-star review here should be filtered with that specifically in mind, that I don't mean it's a great novel for everybody, but rather a great one for all my fellow Nantucketheads (Hilderbrandies?), who like spending a week each summer getting caught up with the latest from this charming, exclusive island that most of us will never experience in this way in real life. As long as the book is well-written, this should be enough to justify reading just about any book, and no one should have to feel particularly required to apologize for that, no matter what the genre. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 05, 2022
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Jul 05, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374603391
| 9780374603397
| 0374603391
| 3.29
| 20,084
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #32. I was a big fan of Sloane Crosley's first book, the hilarious 2008 essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake, although admittedly n
2022 reads, #32. I was a big fan of Sloane Crosley's first book, the hilarious 2008 essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake, although admittedly never heard about the releases of the three books she's published since then; but I did happen to get notice a few weeks ago about her now fifth book, the comedic relationship novel Cult Classic, so jumped on it right away and miraculously managed to be the very first person in Chicago to put the book on reserve at the Chicago Public Library, before checking in a week later and noticing that literally hundreds of other people had had the same idea. Unfortunately, I almost gave up altogether after getting 50 pages in, because it seemed at first that it was just going to be another one of those aimless go-nowhere Brooklyn hipster MFA pieces of drivel, just like all the other aimless go-nowhere Brooklyn hipster MFA pieces of drivel; but I stuck in there in this case, because Crosley has just such an impeccable sense of humor (there's a reason she's a two-time nominee of the prestigious James Thurber Prize), and it's hard for me to turn down a book that makes me literally laugh out loud in public every five to ten minutes. (An example of her acerbic, cynical sense of humor, just to give you fair warning: "At one point, he bought me a notepad with 'You Got This!' printed across each page. 'Thanks,' I said. 'I'll write my suicide note on it.'") And indeed, to give you more fair warning, this never does end up being much more than a "hangout" novel, where nothing much of note happens and the only reason you're even there is to spend some time hanging out with these fascinating, funny, sometimes infuriating characters, a story that will remind many of the classic Postmodernist hangout novels of Philip Roth and others (think Sabbath's Theater but without the whole "pissing on your ex-mistress's grave" part); but where Crosley really gets things different and right is that she comes up with a killer hook to tie this whole minimalist storyline together. See, we're following the adventures of a bitter thirtysomething Manhattanite named Lola (who most certainly does not want to move to hipster dumpster fire Brooklyn, thank you very fucking much), as she uses the freaky coincidence of spying three different ex-boyfriends in three days at the same restaurant in Chinatown as an excuse to ruminate on all her past relationships; but what she eventually discovers is that her former boss, the editor of a traditional paper magazine that has recently gone out of business, has taken up the new profession of cult leader, convincing a series of wacko tech executives to give him a billion dollars to try to prove that "harmonic energies" can be used to psychically manipulate people into doing things without their knowledge, and that he and Lola's other friends have used her as their first unwitting guinea pig (hence all the strange ex-boyfriend coincidences), because she's so terrible at relationships and they all think this is a worthy project for their first major experiment. Essentially it's a big goofy excuse for Crosley to talk very insightfully about love, marriage, divorce, kids, the death of the creative class, the death of Manhattan as a cultural center, and all kinds of other issues that affect the young urban readers that make up her fan base; and she uses this big goofy excuse in the same kind of engaging, entertaining way that other writers like Michael Chabon have used such big goofy excuses so winningly in the past as well (think for example of the Marilyn Monroe jacket in Chabon's Wonder Boys; Lola's ex-boss's cult plays the same kind of diverting yet metaphorically important role here). It's ironic, I suppose, that I ended up loving it so much, because usually I hate these kinds of meandering, plotless, "middle-classer whines about their pampered life" kind of stories; so that says something powerful about the sheer brilliance of Crosley's prose style, that she literally writes her way out of the usual MFA ghetto where most of these stories typically exist, and instead delivers something as hilarious and addictive as a Peak TV sitcom like Arrested Development or the like. It comes strongly and warmly recommended for anyone who enjoys tales of put-upon urban intellectuals but who can't stand all the moping, bratty kids, and upstate summer cottages that usually come along with them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Jun 29, 2022
not set
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Jun 29, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0525522131
| 9780525522133
| 0525522131
| 3.63
| 438,386
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jun 25, 2019
|
really liked it
|
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 |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Jun 19, 2022
not set
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Jun 19, 2022
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385546815
| 9780385546812
| 0385546815
| 3.54
| 47,896
| Jul 20, 2021
| Jul 20, 2021
|
it was ok
|
2022 reads, #20. It occurs to me as I begin this maddening review of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch that for me as a straight male to call it disappointing
2022 reads, #20. It occurs to me as I begin this maddening review of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch that for me as a straight male to call it disappointing, since I had been led to believe that it was going to be a clever and unique darkly surreal horror tale (because of having it algorithmically recommended to me officially one bazillion times while I was reading the similarly darkly surreal horror tales
The Doloriad
and
A Touch of Jen
last month), just to discover that it's merely another mediocre MFA novel about how tough middle-class women have it (no, really, guys, they do), is a lot like that moment in The Simpsons when Mr. Burns says, "I don't know what 'misogynist' means, but no women allowed!" That's because this hugely popular cult novel and soon to be Hollywood feature is pretty much male-critic-proof from the start, in that every single word of its 238 pages is about all the ways life turns to shit for one milquetoast youngish creative classer after finally having a baby, and that it's largely the penis-owners in her life who are the cause of it, including her constantly absent husband and the unrepentant douchebag known as her toddler son. In fact, you could say that a new mother who's not getting enough sleep under such circumstances can turn into A REAL ANIMAL, ha ha, am I right folks, am I right? which feels very suspiciously like where the idea for this entire book came from, by Yoder losing her shit once at three in the morning around her screaming newborn and her husband remarking, "Wow, you turn into a real animal when you haven't gotten enough sleep," and Yoder suddenly stroking her chin and saying, "Wait a minute..." That's a clever concept for a short story, I admit, the idea of the constantly repressed temper of a young frustrated mother eventually manifesting as a literal transformation into a violent, furious dog-creature; but like so many MFA authors from a short-fiction background trying to make the transition into full-length novels, Yoder didn't seem to actually know what to do with these 300 blank pages that were staring at her while she was tinkering around with the story idea, so in typical MFA fashion we just instead have only the original short story's worth of actual storyline, the author trying to make up for the rest with very pretty prose and roughly 75,000 words of minutiae about what the life of a youngish urban creative classer new mother is actually like -- the endless errands and acceding to demands, the never-concluding zombie sessions with other new moms at playgrounds and library storytimes, the trips to the grocery stores that can never just be a simple positive experience but must always, always blow up into tears and an angry crisis. There's nothing wrong with liking books that are about that, and I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm not trying to deny that, that anyone who wants to read a feminist-forward social-realist tale about the true headaches and nightmares that come with trying to simultaneously be a mother, wife, and theoretically earning career worker is more than encouraged by me to find, read and enjoy these books. But goddamnit, I was promised a fucking surreal horror novel, AND I NOW WANT THE FUCKING SURREAL HORROR NOVEL I WAS PROMISED, not some cleverly written "meditation" on how gently miserable all middle-classers are, which a bunch of ivory-tower eggheads are now gushingly calling a "horror novel" to their buddies like me just because it contains about the lightest touch possible of magical-realism elements needed to still be called a magical-realism story. This is always the danger of accepting recommendations for genre novels from indie-lit hipsters, that a certain percentage of them have no idea what they're talking about and are just spouting a bunch of nonsense about genres that's not actually true; and while I found the chances in my favor when it came to people recommending The Doloriad and A Touch of Jen to me, here the peanut gallery simply struck out by recommending so passionately a "well-done horror novel" that was neither horror nor well-done. A disappointment, although certainly I agree with all the things she says about how difficult modern motherhood actually is, and I admire her for at least trying to take a new approach at telling such a story. A big swing here, but unfortunately a big miss in my opinion, although Goodreads is clearly showing that I'm in the minority when it comes to this mindset. ...more |
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not set
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Apr 26, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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| 3.19
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Jun 15, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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May 09, 2024
not set
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May 09, 2024
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Apr 15, 2024
|
Apr 15, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
liked it
|
Jan 22, 2024
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was ok
|
Jan 10, 2024
not set
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 09, 2021
not set
|
Jan 07, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.46
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Nov 16, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
Nov 12, 2023
|
Nov 12, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 4.30
|
really liked it
|
Oct 24, 2023
not set
|
Oct 24, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 22, 2023
not set
|
Oct 22, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was ok
|
Sep 19, 2023
not set
|
Sep 19, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2023
|
May 17, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
Apr 23, 2023
|
Apr 23, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 4.23
|
it was ok
|
Mar 30, 2023
|
Mar 30, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 15, 2023
|
Jan 15, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
really liked it
|
Jul 05, 2022
|
Jul 05, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.29
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 29, 2022
not set
|
Jun 29, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.63
|
really liked it
|
Jun 19, 2022
not set
|
Jun 19, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.54
|
it was ok
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
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