Book Circle Reads 26

Close to the top of any literature lover's life list of lovely books.

Well, now, upon more than a decade's passing, I can't say I agree with myself here.


Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Description: Geek Loveis the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out–with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes–to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition wort More...

"Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books." - Jack Handey

This is one of the only books I plan never to finish. I thought the writing was beautiful, and I don't even know that I would say it was badly edited (a comment I read in another review), but I hated all of the characters. I loathed them by the time I stopped reading. I even hated Chick a little bit. I skipped some and glanced at the end to More...

Warning: this review contains spoilers. Read or don’t read it accordingly.

I had a schizophrenic reaction to this book. On the one hand, it had a more profound impact on me than books—even some truly great ones—usually do. On the other hand, I thought it was sloppily edited, and Dunn’s prose ran the spectrum from sublime to clunky and ridiculous.

The good:

Geek Love has a handful of the most memorable characters you’ll ever find. Arturo the Aqua Boy is deftly handled, a megalomaniacal little tur More...

WTF?!

On the surface, Geek Love has it all: jealousy, betrayal, sexual objectification, and murderous revenge. It’s got a whole shitload of family drama topped off with a generous helping of physical deformities and possibly, possibly, a side of incest. (That part’s not too clear, though.) The problem is, once you get past the shock value of wanting to fuck your brother who also happens to look like a giant fish, there really isn’t much going on here.

Right before starting this book, I read Middle More...

If the world is a carnival, then we were all born to be its freaks. After all, when each of us arrived on the scene, naked and covered in blood and goo, we were unique specimens. But soon after our births, a member of The Cult of Normalcy gave us a pamphlet and offered us the opportunity to blend in with the rest of society. Most of us accepted the offer. Loneliness is a scary thing, after all. So here we are trying to live our lives like everyone else, constantly checking the mirror to make sur More...

This book is complex, creative, and mind-boggling. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book is trying to grapple with what it's trying to describe into something you can visualize. It's not that Katherine Dunn doesn't do a fine job describing her material...it's just that the imagery is so complex and vivid that it takes a lot out of the brain to envision for oneself.

This book is about the outsider making the insider feel bad because the insider doesn't fit with the outsiders. This book is More...

This book was as good as I heard it would and better. I love weird characters and twisted plot lines, but this went so far that it made me very uncomfortable. And I love the book for that.

The plot is simple and sick enough: Al and Lil Binewski, a young couple madly in love and struggling to save Al's family business, a traveling carnival fabulon, devise a plan to keep themselves from going under. Al, with Lil's eager permission, exposes his wife to radiation, presciptions, and whatever else may More...

What is with Portland? Oregon brews these freakish, fantastical authors - fascinated with the off color beauty of the grotesque. Not to say that both Palahniuk and Dunn are not genius's, but it's weird man. Weirdly coincidental.

So anyway, Geek Love is about this family of carnies (carnival workers - to the less colloquially gifted) that decides to chemically engineer their children. The wife takes arsenic and radioisotopes while pregnant, and the result is a family of freaks. One has fins, one i More...

Don't be misled by the font of the title on the cover. This book has nothing to do with computer techies in love, navigating the hazards of kissing with two sets of glasses and braces to avoid. The actual and original geek in reference is the kind who bites the heads off of chickens for rewards and general entertainment and disgust, often at carnivals and freak shows. I have a general phobia of carnivals and freak shows, however, so when I figured out where this book was leading, I wanted to run More...

This book tugged at every emotion I have. Laughter and tears were in the lead during most of the book, but in the end frustration won. I was so frustrated with how amazing this book could have been. It was on the verge of greatness and fell short. While frustration did win in the long run, I must admit immediately after reading the last page, I curled up in a ball and sobbed, wondering how I could go on in life after what happened to these people that don't exist. It took me a couple of days to More...

Like a collaboration between John Irving and David Lynch, this audaciously conceived, sometimes shocking tale of love and hubris in a carnival family exerts the same mesmeric fascination as the freaks it depicts, despite essential structural flaws. In language as original and fantastic as her story, Dunn (Attic, 1970; Truck, 1971) tells the tale of Binewski's Carnival Fabulon, an unremarkable traveling show until patriarch Aloysius decides to breed his own freaks. Using drugs, insecticides and r More...

A mother and father whom intentionally poison their fetuses so the children can have starring roles in their traveling circus when they're born. An Aqua Boy with a Nietszchean philosophical cant who nominates himself the Jones-esque leader of a cult based on bodily mutilation. Siamese twins who sing and play the piano. An almost wordless yet astoundingly kind younger brother whose mind can manipulate the physical world.

These are the Binewskis, and though Geek Love may not be my favorite book (t More...

This is a book about a traveling carnival family that, mainly through the use of altering chemicals administered during pregnancy, deliberately breeds its own family of sideshow freaks--including a flippered aqua-boy, singing Siamese twins, and a hunchbacked albino dwarf. It is also a book about the perception of normalcy and beauty, and about the joys and sorrows of living as an outcast from the world at large.

By all rights I should have loved this book, but I only really liked it. Dunn's conce More...

I wanted to give this more stars but that fact that is was so foul and some parts were really I almost want to say, trashy? Not dignified, that is for sure. the ending was abrupt (to both the family story and Oly's personal story) which was disappointing because the whole book lead up to these climatic endings (duh).

*****


This is the most disgusting book I've ever encountered. EVER. I was eating lunch today while reading it, and I had to put it down because it made me sick to my stomach.
But it More...

It's been 10 years since I've read this book and it's definitely due for a re-read. Still, it stuck with me this long which is saying a lot. Through a rather peculiar tale about an orchestrated family of circus freaks, Dunn considers social norms, perceptions of beauty and the real source of freedom. The book broaches many taboos and there is a bit of a violent undertone in the sense that characters' paths are often determined by the actions of others, but none of it is gratuitous in my opinion. More...

Okay, first you've GOT to be okay with ugliness. I qualify. Second, for better or worse you maybe have to crave sensation. This book is all newness and surprise. There's nothing expected about the story, and that happens too rarely for me not to be grateful. Finally, I'd argue that the book is good literature. I personally don't agree that Dunn's writing is haphazard or needs editing -- her prose whined through my nerves, her images moving constantly before my eyes.

All in all, I think this book More...

I just realized I never added my favorite book of all time to my GR shelf. Don't expect a review though because my memory for details is shit. Only major plot spoilers stick in my head. I've read it twice and will read it again and review it then. You should read it. That's all I'm saying.

This book isn't about the blossoming romance between two hapless nerds. "Geek" refers to a circus person who rips into live chickens with their bare teeth, killing them by snapping the chickens' necks. It's a good book.

I read this one in 2011, but I decided to do a late review because this was one of the more memorable books I read last year and I think more people should read this.

Geek Love is not about, well, what you might think of as geeks (nerds) falling in love. This is the original definition of geek, which refers to the people in the circus who, as a side show, would bite heads off of chickens and send their headless bodies running (yes I know doesn't sound like a fun show.) However the book is still n More...

The story is straightforward: A carnival couple decides to raise a bunch of 'special children' to boost ticket sales through experimenting with drugs during pregnancy, resulting in five surviving deformed performed. Narrated by Oly, an albino dwarf who is obsessed with her growingly manipulative brother Arturo (genuinely one of the most horrid literary character I've ever read), the story jumps between her childhood and the present where she lives among ordinary 'norms'.

Geek Love is immensely More...

4 ½ stars

Any book that was written in the early ‘80’s and is still worth reading today, is almost by definition, a semi-classic; though cult-horror classic might be closer to the mark for Geek Love. That’s right: this is not your run-of-the-mill beach novel. I will not be placing this book on my list of Best Ten Novels of the 20th Century; but I’m sure there are others who will, and I have no basic argument with them. Geek Love is bizarre, but only on the surface. Fundamentally, this is a solid More...

Wow.

In some ways, I want to erase all trace of this book from my brain, but in other ways it is something I must carry with me forever.

I'm a long way from being able to thoroughly review Geek Love. It's the kind of book that you have to process for days, weeks, months, before you know how you feel about it (and I know I will do just that).

The Freaks are undoubtedly freak-like. Yet almost too painfully human. The things they do, the way they live, while initially appalling, soon make perfect sens More...

I had this book for 8 years and started it 4 times making it to varying points in the book each time. The last time I picked it up a few months ago now I finally made it though and glad-fully so. This is an extremely rewarding book whose characters you grow to fall in love with, feel pain for, and feel frustration for like they have become a part of your own family. I was very moved by this story. I found myself hoping that the characters would make the decisions I would tell them to make, hopin More...

Recommended to me as a more carnival twisted story than Water for Elephants, it is the story of a couple who breeds freak children for the sake of their carnival show. In their twisted minds, it is done with love because deformities make you special, and marketable.

The characters are unusual, interesting, and well-written so initially I was drawn in, but about midway through the story was so way out there, I grew bored of it, annoyed with the distraction of minor characters I kept getting mixed More...

i hated this book and i try not to be offended that so many people i know liked it. basically it was too insanely triggering to me to get any enjoyment out of it whatsoever. i generally don't really enjoy people using metaphors taken from other people's experiences, and this happens a lot around amputation. since amputation is something i have actually experienced, and has impacted my life in ways i can still only begin to understand or describe, there is nowhere for me to go with a book like th More...

I really wanted to love this novel, especially because it was my choice for this month's Book Club. The premise is brilliant: a bald, albino dwarf by the name of Olympia Binewski retells the tragic story of her family of circus freaks. Her parents, Al and Lily, exposed each of Lily's pregnancies to chemicals and poisons, in the hope of landing deformed and freakish children. The idea was to use the children to attract large crowds to their travelling circus. Eldest child Arturo The Aquaman is al More...

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the body. as in the fashioning of. in spades. have you read never let me go? fashioning the body for the purpose of. harvesting (NLMG), performance (GL). dunn turns our culture of bodyBUILDINGplasticSURGERYnipTUCK on its head. genetic engineering turned nightmare. as if it weren't already.

the body: always already monster, always already beautiful. depending on.

what happens when. the bodies -- misshapen -- are perceived as beautiful. by the propriet More...

I loved this book! I read it directly after it was published so I don't really remember why. Perhaps it was because Katherine Dunn wrote for the Willamette week at that time and hung out at the Virginia Cafe. I also hung out there, that was "the day." That was when I was young and hip, went to the right places and knew the right people. Now...I'm not so young...not so hip...and can't even figure out how to work this website (I do know Sarah and Marie however). All that aside, I remember Geek lov More...

I'm going back and forth between 3 and 4 stars for this one. First of all . . . I've hearing about this book from you (Erin) for years, and after reading it: you're a weirdo. Seriously. At the same time, I couldn't put it down. I had it with me at my allergist, and Gary's hospital appointment, etc. Random places. Every time some random person would ask me what it was about, and whether it was good. The reactions on their faces were fantastic. My Mom especially. I thought her head was going to ex More...