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Some Things That Meant the World to Me

by Joshua Mohr (Goodreads Author)

3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 · rating details · 410 ratings · 89 reviews

#8 of 10 Terrific Reads of 2009. "Charles Bukowski will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic rendering of postmodern San Francisco." -O, The Oprah Magazine

A Best Book of the Year -The Nervous Breakdown

"Where Michel Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road." -The Collagist

"Mohr's prose roams with chimerical liquidity. The magic of this b...more

Paperback, 208 pages

Published June 1st 2009 by Two Dollar Radio

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Jan 09, 2009 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Set in San Francisco, so it is a must read, right? I got quite a bit more than I bargained for once I opened the cover though.

A crazy trip into the mind of someone who you alternately cheer for and cringe at. Mentally begging them not to do that thing that you know they will inevitably do. Dealing with some deep and very personal childhood traumas in a manner that is sometimes skirting and occasionally nauseatingly blunt, you are given just enough rope to tie yourself a knot that may be very rem...more

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Apr 17, 2009 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: small-pressy-or-obscurish, weird-lit

This is a pretty crazy book. There's a lead male character named Rhonda, who is lead around by his inner child who wanders around with a coal miner's helmet. His favorite place in the world is a dumpster where he can find a trapdoor to his past and he's in love with a girl who works at the liquor store. Also, his best friend is a sweet old lady, also named Rhonda. Mohr takes all sorts of risks in this dazzling debut (not just weird subplots but also chapters reminiscent of William Burroughs's cu...more

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Jun 04, 2009 Cynthia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2009

"Some Things That Meant the World to Me" is a wonderful book. The writing is spare yet expressive; the happenings are horrific yet believable. The writing is not overtly emotional. It's visceral. I found myself trying to suspend belief, to slip into Mohr's world but it's a place I don't willingly go in the same sense I don't purposely walk Los Angeles' skid row. The people and their lives are (or so I tell myself, then murmur a small prayer) too removed from mine. I've recently read Ginnah Howar...more

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May 25, 2009 R.Joseph rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed reading this book, even though the subject (at times) was very heartbreaking. The story revolves around Rhonda, (a boy) who through no fault of his own has a girl’s name attached to him. The book follows Rhonda and his issues, which stem from his miserable youth. Joshua Mohr (the author) forces both the characters in the book and the reader to recognize Rhonda’s flaws. Mohr offers us a real world based on embracing the circumstances at hand, even if the situation at times is doo...more

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Nov 09, 2008 Tiffany J. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of denis johnson, garcia marquez, & junot diaz

Recommended to Tiffany by: I was given a galley

I had the blissful pleasure of getting an advanced copy of this book, and what a wild ride! I can honestly say I've never read anything like it (in the best sense of the phrase). The plot is wholly unique. The characters are vivid. Mohr's imagination is our new blessing. The book isn't out until June, but do yourself a favor and, like the novel's main character, take the trip down through the dumpster's trapdoor and enjoy the magical trip.

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Jan 16, 2009 g rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book. The heartbreaking prose totally sucked me in. Beautifully written, interesting story.

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Mar 03, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

What a wonderful book this is. Additionally, as a clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist I was very impressed with the clinically accurate portrayal of Rhonda, the protagonist. Rhonda is a 30 year old man who suffers from 'depersonalization' which is one of the more severe symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When someone suffers from depersonalization they can go into what is considered a fugue state or see themselves or parts of their body as 'other'. As part of his di...more What a wonderful book this is. Additionally, as a clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist I was very impressed with the clinically accurate portrayal of Rhonda, the protagonist. Rhonda is a 30 year old man who suffers from 'depersonalization' which is one of the more severe symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When someone suffers from depersonalization they can go into what is considered a fugue state or see themselves or parts of their body as 'other'. As part of his disorder, and also as an homage to his resiliency, Rhonda has an inner child that accompanies him from time to time. He calls this child 'Little Rhonda'. He also has an older Rhonda as a friend, nurturing and loving towards him, who he calls 'Old Lady Rhonda'. Both of these Rhondas help him to come to terms with his present life in relation to the trauma he suffered in the past.

One of the ways that Little Rhonda shows Rhonda his past life, is through a glass-bottomed dumpster with a trap door. Rhonda can climb out of the dumpster into his past and is able to see and question what occurred when he was a child. Little Rhonda also travels with Rhonda back to Arizona where he grew up. Rhonda is searching for his home which he believes is the source of evil. Little Rhonda challenges Rhonda's beliefs and tries to help him with his reality-checking. Old Lady Rhonda doesn't ask questions. She nurtures Rhonda unconditionally. She gives him food, love and money and, together, they relax and watch Wheel of Fortune. She is the nurturing mother he never had.

Rhonda's background is horrendous. His mother is an alcoholic who drinks 'Tcha-bliss' (Chablis) all day when she is at home. However, she often disappears for days or weeks at a time, leaving Rhonda with her horriby abusive boyfriend, Letch. Letch physically and sexually abuses Rhonda in their home and in order to integrate what is happening in his life, Rhonda blames the home for what is occurring. He sees his house as a desert landscape, stretching and filled with animals. In his own words, "I couldn't concentrate on anything except their warfare in our stretched, sandy house, as they screamed throughout the desert that was everywhere: a cactus had sprouted next to the TV, a dove perched on it; animals flying, slithering, crawling, running all around our desert; animals, livid and terrtorial". (p. 85)

The book goes back and forth in time and place, from Rhonda's childhood to adulthood. It starts off in the present with Rhonda saving a hooker who is being beaten in San Francisco. Rhonda spends the night with the hooker and something occurs so that the hooker mocks and humiliates Rhonda rather than being thankful that Rhonda is her savior. The book then takes the reader to Rhonda's childhood in Arizona and to his time as a teen-ager in a psychiatric hospital where he meets with a supportive psychiatrist over time. The psychiatrist does his best to challenge Rhonda's belief that his house is the source of all the bad things that happened to him.

I can't say enough positive things about this gem of writing. It takes the reader on a flight so dark and frightening that it could have been to difficult to make the journey. However, the author puts in just the right amount of humor and enough soothing so that we can take the journey with Rhonda.
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Apr 17, 2011 Brittany M. rated it 3 of 5 stars

The back of this book promised Mohr to be the kin of Bukowski, Lynda Barry, and Haruki Murakami--I did not agree. Bukowski never prepositioned aging vets for blowjobs; Barry's Roberta, though desperate at times and spiritually annihilated in her own ways, never begged to have her arm broken; and though they may be at home in Mohr's metaphysical trapdoor at the bottom of a Mexican restaurant's dumpster, Murakami's lost men never leapt into alcoholism. A giant dissociative episode, Some Things has...more

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Dec 05, 2009 Tyler Mcmahon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Some Things That Meant the World to Me is the unsettling story of a thirty-year-old San Francisco man named Rhonda, who suffers from depersonalization disorder after a childhood of abandonment and abuse. In between cue-stick beatings, Rorschach tattoos, and botched batches of home-brew wine, he discovers a portal to his past in the dumpster behind a local taquería.
It’s often a plot pitfall when storytellers defer to traumatic childhood episodes once the present-tense drama wanes. And this book...more Some Things That Meant the World to Me is the unsettling story of a thirty-year-old San Francisco man named Rhonda, who suffers from depersonalization disorder after a childhood of abandonment and abuse. In between cue-stick beatings, Rorschach tattoos, and botched batches of home-brew wine, he discovers a portal to his past in the dumpster behind a local taquería.
It’s often a plot pitfall when storytellers defer to traumatic childhood episodes once the present-tense drama wanes. And this book does walk that line, spending as many pages in Rhonda’s childhood and adolescence as in his San Francisco here and now. But Mohr somehow manages to make the past convincing as the main event. We want Rhonda to go backwards, through that trapdoor in the dumpster, no matter how traumatic it gets. The story’s structure resembles psychotherapy: a reluctant but fearless inventory of the past in order to piece together some sort of viable future.
If this novel was a boxer and its sentences were punches, it would be all about the jab—that most rapid and relentless of blows, but which is, in fact, a defensive maneuver. Walking another line, Mohr combines the best visceral elements of hard-eyed realism with all the surprises and surreal imagery due a narrator that’s both mentally ill and chronically drunk. Hallucinations and nightmares are present, but sparing. Rhonda’s depersonalization disorder is never a cheap trick. Imagine Fight Club if you were told about the schizophrenia on the first page, none of the personalities were as pretty as Brad Pitt, and the narrator spent the rest of the book with the gun in his mouth.
The energetic prose and the number of scenes in bars will likely draw comparisons to Bright Lights, Big City or perhaps Less Than Zero. Indeed, Mohr’s novel shares traits with the so-called ‘literary brat pack’ of the 1980s: urban aesthetics, self-loathing, an unflinching focus on character which often eclipses narrative. Rhonda, however, is working with a smaller budget, a bigger heart, and deeper scars. Initial reviews of Some Things That Meant the World to Me have brought up Jesus’ Son, which is a sound comparison. However, die-hard Denis Johnson fans will find more common ground with his Resuscitation of a Hanged Man—that underrated benchmark for putting the sick back in quixotic.
Make no mistake: I’m not sad that Mohr’s novel isn’t up there on the lists with the summer bestsellers. I’m hopeful that, as storytelling moves into the twenty-first century, I’ll have more experiences like I had with this book: the discovery of an overlooked voice, which resonates and makes me feel less alone. After all, to borrow one last parallel from music: we wouldn’t buy the same records as our parents, so why should we buy the same novels?
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Jun 09, 2009 Liz rated it 3 of 5 stars

Okay, I am so, so mad at my computer right now. When I finished this book I spent two hours composing a brilliant, insightful review and, as I was rereading it for errata, my Internet went out and the entire thing was forever lost in the ether. I am currently too busy to effectively recreate it, but here, in brief, are some of my thoughts:

1. Again, I wish Goodreads had a half-star option as I feel this book is really more deserving of three and a half stars than merely three.

2. This is a compell...more Okay, I am so, so mad at my computer right now. When I finished this book I spent two hours composing a brilliant, insightful review and, as I was rereading it for errata, my Internet went out and the entire thing was forever lost in the ether. I am currently too busy to effectively recreate it, but here, in brief, are some of my thoughts:

1. Again, I wish Goodreads had a half-star option as I feel this book is really more deserving of three and a half stars than merely three.

2. This is a compelling, creative story of the beautiful-loser, down-and-out-struggle-to-stay-afloat-in-this-cruel-world genre that I am a total sucker for.

3. Criticisms: At times the writing verges on the maudlin and the emotion feels so overblown as to almost seem disingenuous. I found some of the depictions of women lacking (in particular, I didn't really buy the way the two potential love interests blew the main character off in such overblown, melodramatic fashion). Also, some of the author's writerly ticks can become cloying. (One example: The main character's mother is an alcoholic and is constantly drinking Chablis, which she pronounces "tcha-bliss." The first time this is mentioned it is charming and funny, but it becomes less so as the wine is reffered to as "tcha-bliss" every time it comes up in the rest of the book.)

4. Accolades: Mohr is possesed of an incredibly strong, unique voice. His ability to latch onto details and paint the utter strangeness, sadness, and magic of everyday city life in crystal clear strokes is breathtaking. The frenetic energy of the prose was such that I was literally late to appointments because I couldn't bring myself to put this novel down. As someone largely unfamiliar with San Francisco, I got a real and vivid sense of what life is like for the city's misfit, fringe population. The cast of characters -- from the broken and lost protagonist Rhonda (not his real name, but a nickname given him by his mother's abusive boyfriend, Letch -- "as in, 'Are you queer, Rhonda?') to Vern, the belligerent, diaper-sporting, elbow-bender with a recipe for prison wine to Rhonda's beatifically motherly, Wheel-of-Fortune-obsessed upstairs neighbor (also named Rhonda) -- is eclectic and fresh and a joy to encounter.

5. In spite of the flaws mentioned above, I highly recommend the novel. It reminded me of a number of first novels I love, in particular Willy Vlautin's "Motel Life" and Jeff Parker's "Ovenman." I look forward to reading more of Mohr's work! (less)

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Jul 08, 2010 Lolly LKH rated it 5 of 5 stars

I spent an insomniac's night finishing "Some Things That Meant the World to Me". I wanted to crawl into this fictional world and hold tight to Rhonda, man and child! Reading a novel stewed in abuse is never easy for me, or those of us who have hearts, and Rhonda made everything so raw that I was cringing and fearing 'My God, did this author live this abuse and turn it into fiction?' That is how well Mohr expresses the mental scars victims carry for their lives. Mohr conveys the nightmarish strug...more

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Jun 30, 2009 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

When you start a book with a Tom Waits lyric, you've already gone a long way toward winning me over. Joshua Mohr's fantastic work did the rest.

If I hadn't known going in that this was a first novel, I never would have guessed that was the case. I became interested in the book when I saw the blurb Donald Ray Pollack wrote about it. I read Pollack's book "Knockemstiff" last year, and thought it was very good, though very bleak.

And there's where Mohr improves on Pollack's book. He's written a stor...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Bookreaderljh rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2012

Not too thrilled with this book. The story was depressing and sad and I could never really "like" any of the characters - including the narrator. I realize it was written from the view point and in the style of someone with serious emotional challenges (otherwise a bit crazy) but it was just unrelenting with this disturbing story and history and it wore me down before I was even more than just a few chapters in. The writing style of back and forth in time and stream of consciousness for the psyc...more

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Oct 11, 2009 Grace rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, read-in-2009

Joshua Mohr's debut novel, "Some Things That Meant the World to Me," is a startling journey into the life and mind of a young man suffering from a mental disorder. Part humor and part tragedy, you can't help but fall in love with Rhonda and root him on as he navigates through a world that he barely inhabits, let alone understands.

The most compelling part of this debut novel is the use of language. Joshua Mohr certainly has a way with words - the words string into sentences and paragraphs that d...more

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May 30, 2010 Gloria rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was ... interesting. I was really excited about finally picking it up and reading it-- and I did so in less than a day, basically.

I really enjoy Joshua Mohr's style of writing (my English teacher dubbed me The Fragment Queen, but I still maintain that they can deliver a punch).
And, ironically, one of my pet peeves is when writers don't use paragraphs enough-- when the text continues forever until you feel like you're going to lose your place in all the black ink.
However, in this case,...more

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Feb 07, 2010 tee rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to tee by: Oriana Leckhert

Shelves: i-own, oriana-is-my-book-muse

I wanted to like this book. The concept was something I would like. It was weird, it was well written, it had great prose, the characters were fucked up. And yet, I couldn't get into it. I felt like I was reading somebody's dream - and hearing other people's dreams are boring.

I do understand why it's loved but I don't understand why I didn't love it. Did it try and be too weird? Is the author just too weird? If it's the latter, I'd be a lot easier on the book - I can handle too weird people, I...more I wanted to like this book. The concept was something I would like. It was weird, it was well written, it had great prose, the characters were fucked up. And yet, I couldn't get into it. I felt like I was reading somebody's dream - and hearing other people's dreams are boring.

I do understand why it's loved but I don't understand why I didn't love it. Did it try and be too weird? Is the author just too weird? If it's the latter, I'd be a lot easier on the book - I can handle too weird people, I can't handle people who try and write too-weird books. Unless they're a too-weird person writing an autobiography. Not that I'm not flexible. I'm like a gymnast with my reading habits. But it gave me too many what-the-fuck moments. And this is why I stopped doing acid. It probably would have been my favourite book back in the day.

It was certainly well written, sentences such as, "He picked little black smiles out from under his fingernails with a steak knife." Love it! "Clammy humiliation fastened all over me." Even better! The whole thing was written beautifully, it was fast and snappy and there wasn't any bullshit. Well except for all the bullshit, if you know what I mean. No? Nevermind. Never mind me, I'll just go sit in my dumpster with my fists of popcorn and soothe myself with a bag of mouldy orange juice. That I've named.

It's not that I don't even get depersonalisation. I've had depersonalisation. It wasn't anything like this. I think I would have killed myself if it was anything like this. This isn't depersonalisation, this is some dude's bad acid trip and he just never snapped out of it. I think he needs more than Klonopin to sort his shit out.

I didn't feel as if Rhonda was a real person, everything was so far fetched. He seemed to lack emotion. I couldn't get involved. The only person I liked was Old Lady Rhonda and even then, her details were a little vague. It was almost like science fiction, inside somebody's head. And I don't like science fiction, even though I do like being inside people's heads.

It was almost like reading a deranged austistic's dream diary.

And as good as that might sound, well, it didn't win my affections.(less)

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Apr 08, 2013 Vanessa rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was a trip, on par with Lynda Barry's Cruddy. Joshua Mohr does a great job of making you interested and even sympathetic to an otherwise most unlikeable cast of characters and leaves you rooting for someone you might otherwise deem as "trouble." I don't want to give too much away here just know that you're in good hands on this surreal journey that morphs reality with memories masquerading as hallucinations and culminating in the protagonist, Rhonda, confronting his demons in the aisle...more

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Sep 01, 2009 Petra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2009

The beginning of this book was shocked me a little bit. It was like a car wreck that you can't look away from - a part of me felt like "I shouldn't be reading this!" and yet another part of me wanted to read more to find out what happened.

It's a quick read with short, easily disgested chapters. I suppose the overall story could be considered uplifting but I found it to be both sad and humorous. There were a couple things I wish the author had given the reader resolution on but I did enjoy the b...more

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Jul 02, 2010 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: alcoholics with heroic hearts

Shelves: 2010

when a book takes place in san francisco, especially the mission district, it always start in a warm and fuzzy place for me. though this book wasn't what i would call warm and fuzzy. sometimes it is downright difficult. rhonda (guy) lives in san francisco while also telling about his somewhat violent and awkward childhood in AZ. from the start you're rooting for him. he has these soft moments nestled right up next to violent ones. there are multiple rhondas. what i loved... the sidewinders. what...more

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Jun 14, 2009 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: y2009-text, indie-press

Wow, what a book! Mohr pulls off two equally intriguing story lines: How did a boy named Rhonda end up in a mental hospital talking to a psychiatrist fifteen years ago? And will he finally be able to move beyond his past in the here and now? The boy Rhonda seems so full of innocence and resilience (and coping mechanisms), and the grown Rhonda brings some innocence and much chagrin but you find yourself rooting for him anyway. The sessions with the psychiatrist who he calls Angel-Hair resemble Fa...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Lesley rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lesley by: Tiffany

Shelves: 30-for-30

I read 90% of this book while I was in Singapore, but switched over to American Wife when I left because I wanted something less anxious to read on the 22-hour plane ride home. This book reminds me of the beat generation in that it has an undeniable rhythm in its narrative: “Me, Rhonda, ripped up inside like Valencia Street, construction crews chiseling and pounding.” I do eat that stuff up.
It also reminded me of late 90s/early 2000s film (dark, gritty, delusional, etc.). His depersonalized chil...more

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Dec 30, 2011 Lori rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book!! I usually don't finish a book. I can be 3/4 of the way through a novel and still put it down and not finish it. Joshua Mohr was able to keep my interest with his compelling character Rhonda. Equally fascinating is Rhonda's strange entourage of acquaintances and friends, albeit imaginary or real. This is a gritty novel and I found myself loving the disgusting moments coloured with such realism that I couldn't stop thinking about them. I will never be able to walk by a dumpster...more

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Jan 07, 2010 Lori rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010january

What an incredibly strange ride.

Some Things That Meant the World to Me was a very mysterious read (and not only because I don't know why it came in the mail). Rhonda, the 30something male protagonist, slips between reality, the past and some new combination of both.

It's hard to keep track of which is which, but it really doesn't matter. Every one of Rhonda's worlds is so real -- and so painful -- that he's almost hard to watch.

But Mohr's gritty portrayal of not only Rhonda's mental illness but...more

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Nov 09, 2009 Holly Procida rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction

While reading, I learned a lot more than I was expecting (or wanting) to know about the main character. It was extremely dark and disturbing.

I also read it at breakneck speed and couldn't put it down. At first I thought some of the metaphors were forced, but in the context of the whole book, the variety of structure was actually brilliant.

Doesn't the saying go that the first novel is 30 years worth of work .. and what do put into the 2nd novel ?.. I am VERY curious to see what Joshua comes up w...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Dave rated it 3 of 5 stars

Nearly a four star book, but I could not pick a character I truly enjoyed or rooted for (though that is not my usual criteria for book evaluation). In fact, I felt quite sad and often disturbed by Rhonda, the main character and main drag in this story, who incidentally, is a dude who is quite sad and often disturbed. A product of severe dysfunction, the very type our twisted country has come to embrace and oftentimes champion (think Jerry Springer, Jersey Shore, any piece of reality show garbag...more

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Feb 23, 2010 Jason Pettus rated it 5 of 5 stars

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So let me confess that the first thing I did after receiving Joshua Mohr's debut novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me was have a pretty serious eyerolling session, after seeing the back-cover blurb call it not only "gritty" and "beautiful" but also "hypnotic" and "poetic;" these are all essentiall...more (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So let me confess that the first thing I did after receiving Joshua Mohr's debut novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me was have a pretty serious eyerolling session, after seeing the back-cover blurb call it not only "gritty" and "beautiful" but also "hypnotic" and "poetic;" these are all essentially empty buzzwords used by lazy copywriters when trying to describe character-heavy literary stories they don't understand, a bad enough situation when even one is used and nearly unforgivable when spying all four. But damn if it didn't turn out to be true, which serves as a good enough introduction to this title as any; that it's the type of book that inspires people to use words like "gritty," "beautiful," "hypnotic" and "poetic" all in a big one-paragraph rush, the kind of book that its fans don't just like but passionately love, precisely for the mastery over language and style displayed. And that makes it one of the hardest types of books for me as an analytical reviewer to cover, because a big part of why it's so great is simply impossible to describe in analytical terms; and this of course is the main reason we have the arts in the first place, the reason we sometimes read poetry instead of a steady diet of essays and journalism, but is also the reason my write-ups of such books always seem to be lacking by the end, which is why I humbly ask in advance for your forgiveness today.

At its heart, the book is essentially a dark morality tale, not surprising from a man whose day job is as a teacher at a halfway house in San Francisco; set in the Bay area as well, it tells the story of a man called Rhonda, a victim of multiple childhood traumas now barely eking out an existence as an adult, the kind of terminal barfly who will literally drown the pain of a broken arm with liquor in order to avoid a trip to the public clinic, letting it reset as a twisted, unusable deformity instead. The son of a fellow alcoholic, who dated a man throughout his childhood who inflicted all kinds of abuse on him, both sexual and psychological, Rhonda seems to have had the deck stacked against him nearly from birth; and that's really the main point of the simplistic storyline itself, to travel back and forth in time as a way to examine this childhood in depth, and the ways it's made Rhonda a barely functioning trainwreck as an adult, using the framing device of an ineffectual psychologist that he is forced to visit as a teen, after getting caught slipping antifreeze into one of his stepfather's drinks one day (or, it's not actually his stepfather, in that his mom never technically remarries, but you see my point).

But like I said, a look at this book's plot really only scratches the surface of this remarkable manuscript; because if you really want a good if not pithy description of what this novel is about, you can think of it as the love-child of Charles Bukowski and Haruki Murakami. And that's because, much like Murakami, Some Things relies heavily not just on magic realism but sometimes outright magic to make its point, an emotionally dense story that nonetheless has the textual lightness of a well-done haiku; but then like Bukowski, it also relies on deliberately outrageous anecdotes concerning the depths that our lowest level of society can sometimes sink to, events so ridiculously horrible that you can't help but to assume they're true, because who in their right mind could dream up such depravity out of thin air? For example, take the whole running subplot in this book regarding the concoction of a batch of "prison moonshine," otherwise known as "pruno," originally suggested by one of Rhonda's wino friends as a way for him to save money; and how as it ferments day after day in its overstuffed plastic bag, Rhonda ends up forming an emotional attachment to it, eventually sleeping with it at night and treating it as the girlfriend he's never had, just to suffer yet another trauma when it breaks one night from over-squeezing, splashing its foul combination of rotting oranges and ketchup packets all over Rhonda's crappy SRO apartment. And this is brilliant because A) it adds an utterly unique element to what's usually a pretty tired genre; B) it nicely illustrates the kind of dysfunctional loneliness that defines Rhonda as a character; C) it establishes the kind of pitch-black yet absurdist humor that marks this entire book; and D) it creates a violently visceral visual metaphor for Rhonda's relationship with other humans in general.

This book is full of such moments, the kind of multilayered scenes that mark a mature writer in the first place, and that allow such books to be enjoyed in both a surface-level way and in a much deeper one, depending on the desire of the reader in question. It is a world where trapdoors to the human psyche exist in the bottoms of Mexican restaurant dumpsters, where the ring of hairs circling the bellybutton of a teenage Arab girl is the sexiest thing in all of human existence, a world where language desperately matters and nothing can be accepted at face value; and in fact the only reason it's not getting a higher score today is simply because of the harshness of its subject matter, sure to be a turn-off for some audience members and traumatizingly unreadable for others. You'll need a strong stomach for sure to make it through Some Things That Meant the World to Me; but I for one found the effort well worth it, the kind of near-perfect literary construction that makes me fall in love with writing all over again, every time I come across yet another example. It's one of the few books I read each year to remain a true pleasure from start to finish, instead of at least partly a chore, and it comes highly recommended to those who are up for such a challenge.

Out of 10: 9.1, or 10 for fans of dark fiction (less)

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Jun 09, 2009 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of Jesus' Son

Shelves: small-press

Mohr's debut is a fascinating exploration of how the ghosts of one man's childhood trauma haunt him well into his adulthood. Rhonda grew up in a fractured home in the Arizona desert. His father is absent and his mother is an alcoholic prone to untimely disappearances, leaving him alone with his mother's boyfriend who is sadistic, perverted and cruel. Rhonda disappears inside himself and never really comes out. As a result, his actions land him in a hospital for five years and we meet Rhonda as a...more

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Dec 28, 2009 Casey rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is powerful because it causes the reader to consider those people on the fringes of our society - people we think too weird or dirty to really want to remember. The events and the characters in this book are things we don't want to think about and keep swept away in the dark corners of our cities. Even with sparse writing, Mohr brings these characters to life, makes them human, and forces us to recognize those dark places and people in our world.

"Safety" and "home" are not assumed in...more

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May 04, 2010 Madeline rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I have to admit--I liked it. A first chapter that begins with a fist fight and ends with a bedwetting was a good sign. Read the majority of this on an airplane in the wee hours of the morning, and it did a wonderful job keeping me awake. A quick read, but a surreal one that takes a number of interesting risks. I do take issue with the ending; it cleaned up too nicely for me, but then again I am naturally inclined to prefer the tragic.

Let's see what else you've got in that brain of yours, Mohr.

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Jan 25, 2010 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Edgy. Dark. Twisted. Often brutal. And strangely moving. This was not an easy read emotionally and is certainly not for the faint-of-heart. What made it very worthwhile for me was the unmistakable ring of truth that most of the situations and circumstances bear. This author very clearly has lived and experienced much of what is described in the novel and - because of this - the book transcends the maudlin and unseemly and instead reveals a humanity we all can recognize at some level.

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About Joshua Mohr

I am the author of four novels, most recently "Fight Song," about which the LA Times said, "Not many authors can shift from satire to sentiment so easily, but Mohr is a clever enough writer that he manages to pull this off."

"Damascus" was described as "Beat poet cool" by The New York Times.

Also, I wrote "Termite Parade," about which the New York Times Book Review said:

"A wry and unnerving story...more

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4964367-some-things-that-meant-the-world-to-me?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1354208559l/4964367.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4964367-some-things-that-meant-the-world-to-me?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr[/url]

Some Things That Meant the World to Me

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