if a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm inif a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm in...more
this is like if ottessa moshfegh wrote a brandon taylor book.
and also shakespeare is somehow involved, i guess. i (like many people who dare to call tthis is like if ottessa moshfegh wrote a brandon taylor book.
and also shakespeare is somehow involved, i guess. i (like many people who dare to call themselves bookworms) have not read any of shakespeare's history monarch-y plays, so much of the henriad retelling was lost on me even though i very bravely read the wikipedia.
like moshfegh (more so than melissa broder), it delights in being crass and gross-out without being cheerful about it. i thought it was very good, if a little shallow in places, which is a critique i have of moshfegh and not at all of taylor.
if anything with taylor it's the opposite. please stop being so deep about everything. i'm haunted by a description of an underenjoyed potluck submission i read 3 years ago.
anyway.
my only other real thought about this is that no one on earth could possibly eat as much lamb as these people do. is that how you have to be rich in britain? maybe i'm ok with being a middle class american after all.
anyway again.
bottom line: i read this 2 months ago but it still stands out for me. even if a lot of that is lamb.
------------------- tbr review
if brandon taylor calls it "one of the finest novels I’ve ever read," i'm reading it
(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
i'm scared of who i'll become when i don't have any more toni morrison to readi'm scared of who i'll become when i don't have any more toni morrison to read...more
horror retelling of snow white focusing on the impossible beauty standards of today as unwillingly passed down from the women that came before us...
thhorror retelling of snow white focusing on the impossible beauty standards of today as unwillingly passed down from the women that came before us...
this was brilliant before i even started reading it.
i wish i hadn't read all's well before this, because the two are sadly very similar (with nearly identical protagonists, writing styles, and meltdown arcs) and this one is much more interesting to me.
instead, i felt pretty irritated by the middle of this book, which was not only a bit repetitive in and of itself but far too reminiscent of that one.
do i feel like it was necessary to make tom cruise and a surfer bro window-washer and a cop character with a romance hero's name major characters? no. but who am i to question whatever was going on here?
mona awad's writing is so, so weird. and if the beauty industry was any less freakish, it wouldn't work. but thankfully we don't have that problem, and the two fit well!
bottom line: in a weird-off, mona wins every time.
i'll read anything written by claire keegan. including hard to find 67-page novellasi'll read anything written by claire keegan. including hard to find 67-page novellas...more
don't mind me, just adding everything claire keegan has ever written to my tbrdon't mind me, just adding everything claire keegan has ever written to my tbr...more
they already found the cure for loneliness. it's called "Reading + An Active Imagination"
...anyway.
like many things, this had a lot of great ideas andthey already found the cure for loneliness. it's called "Reading + An Active Imagination"
...anyway.
like many things, this had a lot of great ideas and fell flat on the execution. it never really works for me when the first 200+ pages of a book are exposition and then the climax hits with 40 pages to go, and this was left feeling sloppy and rushed. this book felt like it had the concept it wanted, and the ending it knew it wanted to get to, and then it just kind of rambled in between.
reading the epilogue and finding our protagonist transformed, (view spoiler)[armed with friendships with barely mentioned characters, a terminated relationship that had showed no signs of being stopped, and a totally different career path (hide spoiler)] with none of the development it would have taken to get there, felt frustrating. also i just don't know why this book felt like it needed a love triangle, or why the roommate had to be constantly eating and made fun of for that, or (and maybe it's just me) why this had to do that sci-fi thing where you just capitalize common phrases to indicate they have taken on some sort of dystopian brand.
oh well.
bottom line: this was really promising, and i really enjoyed moments of it, but its last page and its middle pages threw me off.
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