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May 16, 2011

Megan rated it:

Richard Yates (the author) said somewhere, "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy." Tao Lin has said in multiple interviews that "Richard Yates" is intended to be a non-sequitur, but certain attitudes/ideas/thought patterns I have while reading Richard Yates novels were also activated while reading "Richard Yates."

I read this book in ~2 days, lying in different po More...

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Dec 29, 2011

Nicole rated it:

I hadn't read a book in months, and I first started reading about thirty pages of this and put it down. I've read a few of his other books but had many friends who had read this one. I didn't love it, didn't hate it, but there were parts I both loved and hated. There were also parts that left me feeling nothing. This enabled me to empathize about the characters and think about my own various modes of communication in high school relationships (AIM, not gchat). The whole time I read this, I pictu More...

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Nov 05, 2011

Dave rated it:

From an email to my cousin, Dave Quigg: "I was left cold by the book for the first 50-100 pages, but then realized that part of it was due to the naming. By naming his characters after Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment, I think Lin made it impossible for me to create a mental 'image' of the characters (quotations only because I don't think I ever really 'see' the characters, but certainly have a set of distinct feelings that I associate with them, which is the mental 'image,' if you will More...

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Jul 11, 2011

Jade rated it:

TENSE AND INTRIGUED – I began reading with it with a kind of tense frenzy. There is a sense in the first few pages that something is going to break the tone or emotional stasis of book, but it doesn’t happen. Haley and Dakota chat about things and I felt tossed into their angsty worldview and minute problems. This all felt like exposition, but then after several pages I realized that I wasn’t going to get a “and then, all of a sudden, this weird thing happens!”.

BECOMING BORED – Now, More...

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Jun 28, 2011

Clara rated it:

Tao Lin's style of writing--concrete, repetitive, reporting surface actions and objections only, usually of the most banal sort--disagrees with me violently. I love lush writing, replete with meaning, and this is anything but. If it were simply a matter of aesthetic differences I wouldn't give such a low rating--to each their own, right?--but I also happened to violently dislike the story: 22-year-old "Haley Joel Osment" is a shoplifting, self-destructive degenerate who falls into a m More...

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May 12, 2011

Maja rated it:

'he walked on a string, while looking down and making both feet walk on the string'

yichard yates happened to me.
the book eludes you into the false belief that you're about to embark on an exhillerating journey through ironic cynicism. it does this; to an extent. i don't think i even noticed the transition between waiting for nothing to happen, and nothing happening. the story moves inconspicuously from the imperative urge to brace yourself, and soon wearies off into the inevitable More...

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May 06, 2011

Matt rated it:

This semester, to my great surprise, one of my creative writing students pulled my card to see how much Tao Lin I'd read-- the answer, it turns out, is not enough, despite spending a sullen morning reading a series of what I remembered as language-y fragments that all seemed to blend together in the spring of 2008. So, when I saw this one at my library, I picked it up.

My rating feels a little harsh, even to me. After all, there are interesting things here-- the continued estranging eff More...

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Feb 28, 2011

Casey rated it:

Tao Lin is a polarizing author. People view him as either the future of American literature or a writer more focused on gimmickry than releasing quality work. If you are a proponent of the latter I can safely say that Richard Yates will do nothing to change your mind, it will just make you hate him more. It’s a novel (novella?) that lacks a real plot but still seems to have a lot going on. Richard Yates centers around a relationship between a writer, Haley Joel Osment, who’s a 22 year old NYU gr More...

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Feb 12, 2011

Sharon rated it:

Richard Yates is a really interesting book to say the least. Tao Lin's flat, emotionally vacant tone often made me do a double take when I was reading something rendered that way that would normally carry a lot more weight, like the revelation of an eating disorder or the casual discussion of suicide. At times I also found it really hard to stick with narrative because it felt so repetitive, I felt like I didn't really need to read another paragraph describing neutral or other facial expressions More...

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Jan 31, 2011

Rowena rated it:

when i first started reading this, i thought, absurd. but i thought about why and the only reason i thought that was because of the names. if the characters had been named anything else i would have taken this book differently, which i did when i realized this. subsequently i realized how good this was. it's like an improved cohesive version of Eeeee Eee Eeee (ie written with tao lin's signature deadpan minimalism used in a much better way). the ending <spoiler>was even pretty optimistic i More...

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Jan 06, 2011

Matthew rated it:

I had thought for a while that I would dislike this guy (i.e., Tao Lin) but that was based not on what he’d actually written but that he was like 22 and had four books published already. And that he’d named one of the books Eeeee Eee Eeee and I thought that seemed too cutesy and ironic. But then I somehow ended up reading some stuff on his website and also listened to an interview he did with Michael Silverblatt and thought, huh, this guy seems smart and well-read and hard-working and possibly More...

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Nov 14, 2010

Brad rated it:

I am not sure what to even say about this book. Being a Richard Yates fan, I couldn't help but be intrigued by the title. As you might have guessed, the book has nothing to do with Richard Yates and everything to do with its central protagonists, Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment (people who just happen to have identical names of famous people). The book is essentially and in-person and online chat conversation of a teenage girl and early-twenties boy who fall in love (more or less). People w More...

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Oct 28, 2010

Teri rated it:

There’s so much to say about this book, and I don’t really know if it’s the kind of book that warrants that kind of discussion. Either way, for a book that has elicited polarizing reactions, my overall opinion is fairly middling. I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it. I started off thinking it was a lot funnier than reviews made it out to be, but ultimately it’s a heartbreaking story about an abusive relationship. Tao Lin’s writing style wasn’t distracting for me – it’s consistent, so a satisfying More...

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Oct 06, 2010

Jon rated it:

This book would have been usefully marketed as Young Adult Fiction; and there is an unmistakable quality of 'that which will always be discovered by readers entering the world of fiction for the first time' about this book. RICHARD YATES will function much as certain other age specific classics do: think of ON THE ROAD, think of CATCHER IN THE RYE etc.(I'm not suggesting RICHARD YATES is as good as either of those two books, just that it will eventually become part of the broad general catalog t More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 25, 2010

christa rated it:

I'm feeling pretty generous today, so I'm going to extend to Tao Lin a courtesy I'd ordinarily not. I'm going to humor him. For the duration of this post, I'm not even going to so much as roll a single eyeball over his whole "If you don't get me, you're obvs too old to understand me" bullshit. But please know this will end with my tongue bloody from restraint.

[Deep breath]

In order to do this, I need to consider his novel Richard Yates from the perspective that t More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Sep 13, 2010

Brandon rated it:

Sasha Mitchell (not the guy from Step-by-Step, but a 'clever' device with which to write about myself in third person) read a book by this person whom lots of people say is really something. At first, he hated it -- something about the entity of the author/book struck him as too nihilistic or smarmy. He thought that maybe the book was making the statement "Everybody is depressed or insane. And every emotion and facial expression is tired and inevitable and most likely fake or at least partl More...

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Sep 06, 2010

Lindsey rated it:

I didn't expect to like this much at all, let alone love it as much as I did.

A topic that's revisited a lot in discussions at school is whether or not we as authors "should" utilize brand names, topical trends, etc. in our writing; in these Very Internetty times, that usually translates to things like Facebook, iPods, Twitter, etc. Authors run the risk of dating their work when they mention things like this, which will undoubtedly become obsolete in the next couple years, More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 24, 2010

Mandy rated it:

To read the review in its entirety go to WellReadWife.com
There have been times when I have hated something that it seemed everyone in my world loved. One of those times was in my grad school Film Theory class. I enjoyed/found some artistic value in every movie we watched (Crash, The Driver’s Seat, etc) until we got to the film Breaking The Waves. I hated it. I even thought the ending was kind of funny. I voiced my opinion in the class and the teacher made some big deal about how when the b More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 07, 2011

Bradley rated it:

I read the book in two nights. The first night I was really bored, although it had a lot of good sentences here and there which were often funny. The second night I enjoyed it a lot more. I think it's a difficult book to like if the reader assumes the protagonist is Tao Lin because the protagonist is a total douchebag. It is very likely that the protagonist is entirely based on the author. But if reader does not read the book with this assumption, they will be much more likely to enjoy it.

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2011

Paul rated it:

Good lord what a dirge. Irritating doesn't quite describe it; infuriating may be overstating. This is the story of Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning (no relation to the celebrities), whom Lin insists on referring to with their full names every single damn time. It's really, really cute. Pronouns are used shall we say "infrequently," so about a third of the words in the book are the two characters' names. Very cute. What do the characters do? Not much. They mope around, whining to on More...

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Mar 30, 2011

Dave rated it:

I really, really like this book and I'm not sure why. Days after finishing it I need another Tao Lin fix, but I've already read "Shoplifting at American Apparel" and his other novel isn't easy to find.

Lin's minimalist, literal style is really intoxicating to me. It was what initially drew me to "Shoplifting" and he has really honed it even more with this novel by adding a lot of gchat and email conversations. As other people have written here, it's an easy im More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 04, 2010

Jamie rated it:

I liked this book a lot. I am not sure why people are so upset about the characters, I think that they are as fucked up as any of us are. Relationships are usually "fucked" and sometimes also good and I think that this book depicted the shift of power that often takes place pretty accurately. Maybe the "themes" (cutting, flippant talk of suicide, veganism, eating disorders, belittling and hamsters) of this book are different or "weird" to some people. Maybe people c More...

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Aug 18, 2010

Josh rated it:

Richard Yates by Tao Lin is about 22 year old Haley Joel Osment, a writer and graduate of New York University, and his 16 year old girlfriend Dakota Fanning. Haley Joel Osment lives in Manhattan and meets Dakota fanning on the internet. After hours of gmail chat conversations, emails, and phone conversations Haley travels to New Jersey. They keep their relationship a secret from Dakota’s mother for months. Richard Yates follows Haley and Dakota as they hide the relationship, travelling back and More...

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Jan 22, 2012

Tfitoby rated it:

Toby had read Shoplifting from American Apparel and absolutely loved. He went to Planet Books to find more novels from Tao Lin and they didn't have any. He searched amazon.co.uk and ordered two more novels from Tao Lin. He said to Leah via iMessage "they aren't going to ship until January 23rd. That's crap." Leah replied on iMessage "that is crap, Shoplifting from American Apparel was excellent, I hope the others are good."

Richard Yates arrived in the mail 10 days b More...

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Aug 13, 2011

Kara rated it:

when i finally *received* my copy (seemed to be on backorder for a long time), i couldn't stop reading. actually, i could, and i did (to pee, get water, and search my fridge for "things that would taste good in a smoothie"--namely fresh fruit, which i never keep in stock, but would still expect to see every time i'd wander into my kitchen). i had watched a video of tao lin reading the first few pages of funny dialogue from "richard yates" while he was on mushrooms (surprised More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 22, 2010

Caitlin rated it:

If it were possible to give a book zero stars I would have done it for this one. I cannot think of a time I have hated a book this much. I have read a lot of things that indicate Tao Lin is the future of American creative writing, that say he is one of the most widely imitated writers in MFA programs, etc etc. I would imagine that it's because his writing style, which consists of nothing more than declarative sentences that state action and dialogue as it happens, is very easy to imitate. Wh More...

6 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 30, 2011

Tam rated it:

Tao Lin is pure ambition, narcissism, and self-absorption without any content whatsoever. Not only that, he’s infuriatingly dumb. This was cemented by the interview he did with Ben Lerner for the Believer. Ben Lerner’s “Leaving Atoche Station,” while certainly flawed, is what Tao’s work strives to be but there’s zero intelligence in the vacuum that is Tao. In the interview, he asked no question of substance, showed no curiosity, and seemed more interested in the awards that Lerner attai More...

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Oct 13, 2010

julie rated it:

I guess it's a little unfair for me to write a review on the book when I've read less than 50 pages, but that's all I could really handle.

Even by the first page, I was a bit exasperated, but I decided to stick it out and tried to convince myself otherwise. (There have been books where I changed my mind- for the better- after the first few chapters or even midway through.) I really tried, but the uber-quirky dialogue between the two protagonists was just mind-boggling and seemed real More...

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Oct 27, 2011

Aimeekay rated it:

Richard Yates is about Haley Joel Osment and his minor girlfriend Dakota Fanning. The novel follows their relationship from the first time they meet to well into their slightly deranged relationship. Altogether the age difference is the least of their problems.
I pretty much hated Haley from the beginning. Not only was he taking advantage of an obviously mentally unstable young girl. Which in itself is just slimy. But he is also whiny and self-absorbed. Dakota is naive enough to fall for More...

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Jul 27, 2011

joey rated it:

read this book over the course of two days divided equally in half into two separate 101-page sessions. I was scheduled to work one of the two days. during both sessions I was sitting mostly naked in a dark blue beanbag chair in low lighting, the temperature being between 78-82 degrees Fahrenheit. I ate a grilled cheese sandwich around page 73, drank a smoothie at the beginning of page 102. felt relaxed and pleasant during the first half of the book. the second half quickly becomes twisted and h More...

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