So look, Amazon bought Goodreads so they could turn us all into data and capture the elusive beast "discoverability" (a beast in large part created be...moreSo look, Amazon bought Goodreads so they could turn us all into data and capture the elusive beast "discoverability" (a beast in large part created because all the goddamn bookstores were driven out of business by, um, Amazon). Which makes me kind of want to cloak and deny what brings me to a book, right? Just to at least make them work for it. But then for fuck's sake, I leave these little breadcrumb-reviews of how I heard of a particular book for myself, because I do not go out and buy every book I want the very second I want it (if only!), and I will want to remember, many moons hence when I am scrolling through this list, why I to-read-ed something or another. So refusing to leave myself these notes would be a classic case of cutting off nose to spite face. So no.
And honestly, it's not like the discoverability I will lead great god Amazon to would be such a surprise—I am a product of my demographic, my location, my habits. Obviously I read what Vice tells me to, what Flavorpill tells me to, what the wonderful authors I love and friends I respect tell me to. Isn't everyone like this? Why did goddamn Amazon have to buy Goodreads, presumably signaling the death of its innocence, its neutrality, and its candor, just to fucking find that out?
Gah, it is so sad and stupid. Whatever.
So look, let me just come right out with it: Hey Amazon overlords, guess what! I read about this book in Flavorwire (which I love), wherein Heidi Juliavatis (whom I love) is quoted as saying this (which I love):
Woke Up Lonely is the novel equivalent of a sonic boom — it builds, it explodes, it leaves your ears, mind, and soul ringing for days. Who else writes sentences like this, who else writes sound art prose that transports a heart-killing story of human frailty, susceptibility, loyalty, and isolation? No one.
So what do you know, that's three... what's the opposite of a strike? Unstrike? Fine, that's three unstrikes for Fiona which means I now very very badly want to read this book.
Got that? Now can you please retract your Goodreads purchase since I've gone ahead and solved it for you?
Please?
***
It seems anticlimactic after that whole long thing, but it turns out I really didn't like this book at all. Heidi promised me "sound art prose," and this book features nothing of the kind. It features a sprawling plot, too many unevenly developed characters, some sort of wacky hijinks, international intrigue, and a host of other things that are not what I expected and not what I particularly enjoy. Pretty disappointing.(less)
fin: Oh my god I finished it. I hate it so much. What a bleak, awful, horrible book.
20 pages from the end: I give up. I give up. Okay, yes, I will mos...morefin: Oh my god I finished it. I hate it so much. What a bleak, awful, horrible book.
20 pages from the end: I give up. I give up. Okay, yes, I will most likely trudge through the last 20 pages at some point, but I am just so un-compelled. It's so odd, so intentionally bizarre, with these hints and hints that actually no, it's not bizarre but actually devastating and awful. I hate weird for weird's sake, and I hate bottomless despair without cease, and I hate this dumb book.
before reading: Why haven't I read this yet?? Flavorpill put it as one of their ten most anticipated books of the year, and now here's this from Word Books:
If you're familiar with Jones's first novel, Light Boxes (which was briefly optioned by Spike Jonze), that should be reason enough to check out his latest. This book will also appeal to fans of Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, and any other fiction that lives in that hinterland where reality, imagination, hallucination, and coping with loss swirl around like wind, like the ocean.
Hey, it's my latest (and meanest) review for CCLaP! I also put this on my CCLaP best-of-2011 list—for best total disappointment.
Perhaps Swamplandia! i...moreHey, it's my latest (and meanest) review for CCLaP! I also put this on my CCLaP best-of-2011 list—for best total disappointment.
Perhaps Swamplandia! is a case of being careful what you wish for. Perhaps it was a back-handed slap against wish-fulfillment. Perhaps it should force me to reexamine deeply held prejudices, or at least preferences, which would make me grow as a reader and a person, ultimately making me more open-minded, forgiving, and calm.
Or maybe it’s just a bad book.
Let’s start with this: I hate short stories. They’re such a letdown! Why go to the trouble of setting a scene, peopling it with interesting characters, working up momentum, and then… ending it? Just when things were starting to get good? Come on, lazy author, why'd you stop?! This drives me totally crazy. And Karen Russell’s debut collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was a perfect example. The stories were so great! Her spooky ambiance, her weird haunting language, her creepy ideas and wonderful stories… I was so disappointed that they were over so quickly, just when I was getting enmeshed in her strange worlds.
So I hope you see why I was super excited for Swamplandia!. Here was, finally, what I’d always been so sure I wanted: a writer whose stories I’d loved, not only writing a novel, but taking as its kernel one of the very stories I’d wanted expanded! But it turns out that I was totally wrong. Be careful what you wish for; you could wind up with a big sprawling messy novel, filled with inconsistent characters, a terribly paced plot arc, a horribly disappointing ending, and very little reward for the long slog. Even the atmospherics, which had been so taut and engrossing in her short stories, grew so diffuse and lackluster over a few hundred pages that they lost all their power.
Look, the plot? Pretty original. A family who lives in an amusement park in a swamp, wrestling alligators and entertaining fat tourists—that’s fun. Mom, the star of the show, recently passed away. Ossie, the waifish older sister, is having an affair with a ghost. Dad is pretty delusional about the family’s prospects. Which leaves twelve-year-old Ava and sixteen-year-old Kiwi to try to salvage the bankrupt wreck the family park has become. The plot splits when Kiwi runs away from home, following he and Ava on their own adventures, Kiwi into the “real” world on the mainland, and Ava deep into the swamp in search of her runaway sister, with a Birdman as her guide.
That wasn’t too spoilery, I promise; you’d get most of it on the book’s back cover. So the plot’s not the problem, at least not completely. It did feel unwieldy, and overly meandering. It could have used a lot of tightening. And the language, which in St. Lucy’s Home was so consistently stunning, is here only lovely, and only rarely, and the few times when she nails it only serves to highlight how flat and lifeless everything else is. But generally the big picture wasn’t the issue. It was the myriad little things that got me more. Like Ava and Ossie sitting in the kitchen with bare cupboards, complaining about how hungry they are, and then a few pages later they pack for a trip, stuffing backpacks full of the suddenly plentiful food in the house. Lazy. Or like an emphatically described cloudless sky, which two paragraphs later begins to rain. Lazy. Or conversations that have huge gaps, or other ones where a character thinks something but then the other character responds as if the thought had been spoken. Lazy. Important or even trivial plot points revealed in the wrong order, or tossed haphazardly in the middle of the next scene. Lazy. Bizarre and poorly done accents and patois and (shudder) street slang. Lazy. Banging us over the head with overly obvious truths, rather than letting us infer them. Lazy. Terrible character inconsistencies. Lazy.
Lazy, lazy, lazy. I know that as a copyeditor I’ve become a much closer reader than I used to be, and probably most people wouldn’t notice all these piddling little things, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse. And maybe I’m being petty, but so what? Sure I’m a reviewer, but more importantly I’m a reader, and if a book has so many tiny problems that I am constantly taken out of the reading experience to roll my eyes at them, then that’s a poorly done book. I don’t even blame Karen completely for all of this; there’s a huge team of publishing people who could have caught these things. And this book wasn’t put out by some shoestring indie press that’s stretched too thin to afford a second proofreader; this is Knopf! Arguably the most revered literary press in the world! How could they have failed to rein in this mess? In fact, how could they have failed to notice that this book is simply not up to par with the high level of literary prowess that they represent?
And I haven’t even gotten to the worst part. In fact I kind of can’t, because it’s a big reveal and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s reading experience. But I can’t write this review without commenting on it, so apologies if this is cryptic or weird. Suffice it to say that something very awful and very unexpected happens about 260 pages into a 300-page book. Now first of all, that is way too late, especially in such a slow-moving and long book, to deliver that kind of authorial kick in the nuts. Secondly, it is a pretty horrifying thing, which is dealt with barely at all, and mostly in even more horrifying thoughts and ways. It also signals the beginning of the end of the book, where Karen tries frantically to pull everything together, resulting in lots of dropped threads and unanswered questions, and an overly maudlin and utterly unfulfilling closing scene. It’s just all so fucking lazy.
So what’s the lesson I’ve learned from this? I guess sometimes a short story is its own kind of great. There is an art to the short story, and it’s selfish and short-sighted of me to assume that short stories are short because the author is lazy. Sometimes it’s lazier to write a novel.(less)
book #5 for Jugs & Capes, my all-girl graphic-novel book club!
***
I missed the book-group discussion for this, which is a huge bummer; I would have...morebook #5 for Jugs & Capes, my all-girl graphic-novel book club!
***
I missed the book-group discussion for this, which is a huge bummer; I would have loved to hear what my smart ladyfriends would have said. I had a good excuse though: I went to go see ZZ Top instead. It was bad ass.
In any case, I was really disappointed by this book. It's not just that it's not really my thing; it's not, but I really wanted to like it. It wasn't the violence, or the disjointed story, or the constant feeling that I was missing a lot of really important history, or the hype, or the fame, or the movies, or the kitch, or anything else. It was all of those things, true, but more than that, it just didn't jive at all with the image I've been handed about this book's game-changer-ness. It didn't blow my mind, and I really thought it was supposed to.
I mentioned this to a comics fanboy friend, and he got (unsurprisingly) very indignant. He went off on a long monologue about how, in one scene, Batman is shown wearing a sweatshirt, and how that boggled the brains of everyone in the comics world. According to my friend, before this book, no one had ever thought about what superheroes wear under their costumes. No one had thought about them lounging around at home, what their actual bodies looked like, what their personal styles were. And for Frank Miller to allow Batman to grow older and sit around the house in comfy clothes...well, it was a revelation.
But here's the thing: that's just not true anymore.
I kind of felt the same way about reading this that I felt when I watched Citizen Kane for the first time, which was only a few years ago. (You can see that there are great gaping holes in my pop-culture knowledge.) I know that Kane and Dark Knight are meant to be both pinnacles and ground-breakers of their respective forms. And I could kind of understand how that might have been true then, but now? In 2010, for me to come to Dark Knight with no knowledge of comic-book history and tropes, living in a CGI world, an indie-fabulous world, a YouTube world, a world where everything Frank Miller and Orson Welles did then has now been exponentially permutated and shifted and reconsidered from every possible angle...well, their efforts just aren't that impressive anymore.
Which made me question the whole idea of a "classic", you know? I mean, shouldn't a classic transcend time? If the newness and original-ness can't continue to be impressive and interesting a decade or so later, what are you left with? A relic, it seems to me.(less)
Man, I am striking out lately. This is like the third or fourth bad book in a row -- and not just bad, but really disappointing. A few months ago I re...moreMan, I am striking out lately. This is like the third or fourth bad book in a row -- and not just bad, but really disappointing. A few months ago I read Mil's first book, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and it was fucking fantastically hilarious. I loved his easy writing style, his terrific characters, his dry, British wit... But this one? Feh. Terribly lame. The characters were awful. The plot was woefully transparent. The humor was overdone and mostly uninspired. The writing style was uneven at best; and that's being very charitable. Mil's forte is clearly making funny observations about a slightly fictionalized version of his own life, not creating some kind of action-adventure mystery-caper story with all kinds of brand-new character types and twisty plot-stuffs. Such a disappointment!
The one saving grace, and solely responsible for a full 50% of the paltry two-star rating I bestowed here, was the cursing. Oh, the cursing! Some of the most creative expressions of foul language I've ever come across. Some examples, you say? Gladly.
(Oh, but! When I told my boyfriend about this over dinner, he came up -- in about four seconds flat -- with "double-cunted banshee" and "slithering horse twat," so maybe Mil isn't so original after all. Or maybe I'm just a very lucky girl...?)(less)
after: oh dear. oh Aimee. i love you so, have loved you so, continue to love you so, but i am so sorry to say that this book was a bit of a disappoint...moreafter: oh dear. oh Aimee. i love you so, have loved you so, continue to love you so, but i am so sorry to say that this book was a bit of a disappointment. it felt... unfinished. hinted at. like an early draft, almost. i know how stunning you can be, and it isn't that this is bad or anything... it's just not up to the standard i expected. which is probably partially my fault. probably just like The Ticking Is the Bomb, just like The Learners, just like The Great Perhaps, just like all post-Rant Palahniuk, i'd even set you up for failure with this, because i was so sure it was going to be spectacular. and it was good, Aimee, it was nice, but "nice" when I was expecting "magnificent" is more of a letdown than if it'd just been bad.
during: ooh boy I'm so happy to be reading this!
before: omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod i CANNOT WAIT for this book to be mine.(less)
Bought this at a used book store in Amsterdam because how cool is that? Well, not so cool, actually, when the book is as flimsy and superficial as thi...moreBought this at a used book store in Amsterdam because how cool is that? Well, not so cool, actually, when the book is as flimsy and superficial as this. I imagine it's like a store-brand Gossip Girl (though I've never seen the show, so that's merely speculation). It doesn't matter. This is a book about terribly rich British prep school girls taking ecstasy and playing tricks on their teachers. The characters are absurdly one-dimensional, the plot is formulaic at best, with plot devices that are like being smashed in the head with a signpost that says GUESS WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?!! Oh anyway, whatever. It got me through a couple of hours on the flight home, and saved me from having to watch The Time Traveller's Wife. (less)
I remember being really impressed by Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline, but this book is brutal. It's not even a hundred pages long, but I couldn't br...moreI remember being really impressed by Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline, but this book is brutal. It's not even a hundred pages long, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it. It's just unrelentingly bleak. Dead children, abused prostitutes, homelessness, bitterness, despair despair despair. Fuck. No thank you. (less)
A well-meaning friend gave me this, thinking it was this. It is not. Which kind of sucks. I was hoping for salacity and scandal and all things dirty,...moreA well-meaning friend gave me this, thinking it was this. It is not. Which kind of sucks. I was hoping for salacity and scandal and all things dirty, but this book is pretty much the opposite. It's really dry, and incredibly melodramatic, the kind of book where everything happens internally, in the oh so scared, tortured soul of our poor heroine, Séverine. She is a beautiful, rich, pampered society lass who is married to a gorgeous young surgeon. Her life, you see, is so wonderful, so carefree, so easy, that she finds herself -- practically against her pure, sweet will! -- working as a prostitute in a brothel in the afternoons. The book is full of sentences like "Séverine only realized the strength of her love for Pierre at such moments of emotion or peril; but in those moments she felt it to the point of pain." Or "She bent over Pierre, and in the depths of his eyes she detected a quiver, a trembling flame, a cry, an endless lament." And there's not even any sex! The sex is totally glossed, with masterly understatement like "he took his pleasure from her silently." No fun at all. This was really the basis of a Buñuel film?(less)
Unfortunately, my initial thoughts remained true throughout the rest of the book. I'm sorry, Nick Flynn, that your last book was so fucking good that...more Unfortunately, my initial thoughts remained true throughout the rest of the book. I'm sorry, Nick Flynn, that your last book was so fucking good that anything else you write will (most likely) pale in comparison.
****
I'm still more or less reserving judgment, but as I'm now just over halfway through, I'm sad to say that I am not loving this nearly as much as the brilliantly incredible Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The language here is beautiful, sure, but somehow not quite as beautiful as there. The subject matter is much more nebulous, maybe as much philosophically essay-ish than plangently memoir-y. And there is a distance here that I can't quite describe – a wall, a space, a bubble perhaps, which I am unable to penetrate. This book deals as much with torture and current events as it does with Flynn's life, and when I read passages where he describes interviews with prisoners at Abu Ghirab and the like, I just can't feel the horror, the despair. Perhaps it's a failing in me, perhaps a general failing in humanity, that when faced with images or descriptions of very awful things, we (I) disassociate, step back, refuse to comprehend. I don't know, and I don't mean even to say that there are incredibly graphic passages here, because there aren't, it's much more theoretical, detailing at most "light" torture. I don't know. Perhaps I'll feel differently when I finish, but as yet Ticking has failed to reach in (out) and really grab me the way the raw, riveting, devastating Suck City did from practically the first page. (less)
after: Well poo. I'm sorry that I didn't like this more, honestly I am. But it just didn't, well, touch me, as mushy as that sounds.
I mean, major maj...moreafter: Well poo. I'm sorry that I didn't like this more, honestly I am. But it just didn't, well, touch me, as mushy as that sounds.
I mean, major major props for a wholly original, completely unique premise. A group of ex-junkies and -prostitutes and -fuckups receive a bus ticket to a secret retreat in rural Vermont so that they can become "unlikely scholars"? Whoa. After many months of "researching" things they don't understand, a few of the unlikely scholars have to go out in the field to find one of their own who has defected? Damn. Battles in sewers, some kind of wispy angel/alien creatures, bums dousing themselves in kerosene and blowing up piers? Holy shit.
So what's my problem? Why couldn't I love this? I guess I found it to be emotionally distant. I know that too sounds pretty hokey, but I can't figure any other way to say it. The writing is expansive, inventive, compelling, harsh, intriguing, sprawling, strange... but really never beautiful. And I think I need at least a glancing attention to beauty to truly love a book.
before: Not sure why, but this keeps falling off my radar. But I really want to read it! I just need to happen upon a real cheap copy.
From the City Lights newsletter:
A hybrid of low-lifes and high ideals, Big Machine runs on suicide cults and the voice of God taking you straight to the bowels of The Bay and the monsters that lurk without and within. Hard as a gun-muzzle to the jaw, soft as the caress of an angel's wing, this is the first novel of the coming AfroSurreal age...
(I'm not really sure what the 'AfroSurreal age' is, but I still want to read this.)(less)
**spoiler alert** Oh my god I hated this book. Hated it, hated, it, hated it! Fuck, I just got madder and madder the more I read. But I had to finish...more**spoiler alert** Oh my god I hated this book. Hated it, hated, it, hated it! Fuck, I just got madder and madder the more I read. But I had to finish it, see, because one of my most favorite people, who is a very delinquent, sporadic reader, has been raving about this for like a year. A year!! He loved it! How could that be? This book is ridiculously bad.
Due to the guilt I feel about this, I can't do a long, detailed screed. Instead I will do a concise little list of badness, all the ways this book let me down.
1. It was fucking stupid (more later).
2. It was far too ambitious. See, I really like sci-fi / fantasy that isn't obsessed with its own mechanics, where the author just gently drops you into a new world without over-explaining all its ins and outs and origins &c. But this wasn't that at all; the author was I think just as confused as I remained for four hundred pages about the ins and outs of 'Air' – the super-mega-über-internet thingy that is in everyone's heads all the time, and can connect everything to everything, and somehow also allows for time travel and kind of becoming a ghost and maybe also being present at your own birth and death, and putting other people inside your head and you inside theirs and everything. Oh my god, what?
2a. In addition to the preceding, there were about a trillion tiny subplots that did not serve the story, merely over-complicated things further. The tiny village where the story mostly takes place is kind of in China or maybe Tibet but everyone is mostly Muslim, and there is all this religious weirdness and kind-of-explored identity politics and gender roles and dress codes and such, but none of it is used to make any points; it's just brought up for a while and then abandoned. There was one whole long-running thing about one woman who belongs to this ancient oppressed race, the Eloi, who are grossly misrepresented in the modern world, and so she's on a crusade to bring the truth to the masses (with a kind-of website on the Air thing), but somehow this is illegal and so when she gets found out the whole thing is encryptedly emailed (through Air) to this other tertiary (at best) character and then never discussed again. Gone, poof! Oh hey, what about that talking dog who led our heroine out of prison that one time? Yeah, he never came back or was mentioned again. This book is riddled with dead-end almost-subplots, which at first you try to keep track of, because you (stupidly) assume they will matter later, and then they don't. So by the second half, I kept meeting Mr. Atakoloo and learning about his goat or Young Ms. Boppity-Boo and her armless step-aunt's abusive boyfriend and I just tuned out. And it never mattered!
3. It was horribly written. I am tired of whining about all the shit that is getting put between two covers and published as a "book" these days (and we all wonder why the publishing industry is dying), but holy shit, this book was very, very poorly written. Worst, in fact, than just being consistently of low quality, this book actually had – very few and far between – some nice imagery, or short bursts of believable dialogue, or a backstory anecdote that actually made some kind of sense or built up a character interestingly. But for about thirty pages between every occurrence of semi-decency, there was the worst kinds of purple prose, over-writing, unnecessary asides, and tons and tons and tons of absurd metaphors and similes. All sorts of 'crying, she wrung her face out like a dish rag' and 'behind his eyes, something shifted and flickered like a burgeoning flame'. Hey Geoff Ryman: these things don't make sense. You are a moron.
4. It was rife with type-os. Look, I realize that I've become nuttier and nuttier about this since it is my job, but I am not talking here about a misplaced comma or a split infinitive once or twice. I am saying that about one page in every five had a glaring error, like a dropped word or a forgotten line break or a mis-attributed quote or a misspelling. Hey St. Martin's Griffin: fire your current copyeditor and hire me and I will make your books not suck a big dick.
5. Incredibly stupid things happen constantly. Like in the one sex scene in the whole book, girl is on her period and they do it and then each go down on each other. And then girl finds out she is pregnant, but the baby is in her stomach, not her uterus, because she swallowed, natch, both her juices and his. (I'm going to be honest, that happened on maybe page 150, and that was really when I gave up.)
6. I am sick of this list and sick of thinking about this stupid, shitty book. Fuck you, Air. Now I gotta call Joe and tell him that his taste in books is bafflingly terrible. (less)
Let me start by saying that I opened this book with a totally open mind. Seriously! I too think that blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are doing horrible th...moreLet me start by saying that I opened this book with a totally open mind. Seriously! I too think that blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are doing horrible things to our culture in this country, so I though I was going to be the choir this guy was preaching to.
Not so.
And let me say, too, that the reason this is two stars and not one (and actually was almost three) is that it really made me mad, and really made me think, which is no small feat. Plus it got me into several (loud) arguments with my boyfriend in public places, which is always a plus.
Anyway. The fundamental flaw in this guy's logic (in my perhaps overly optimistic opinion) is that he thinks everyone is really stupid. And I'm not at all saying that there aren't a whole lot of stupid people, but Andrew Keen just takes it too far, postulating a world where, for example, due to the wild proliferation of blogs, no one will be able to tell the difference anymore between what some douche happens to rant about while drunk and a distinguished news article on a particular topic. Seriously? Even the dumbest among us knows the difference between cnn.com and doucheymcdoucherson.blogspot.com. (I hope that's not a real blog.)
See, Keen is really just a crazed alarmist, decrying every aspect of user-generated culture. He is also extremely enamored with his writing skills, and utterly enraptured with dramatics. In the second half of the book, he uses a lot of case-in-point sob-stories which made me cringe and cringe and cringe. Like the Mormon college kid who got so 'addicted' to online gambling that he had to go rob a bank. Dear god.
Below are a few of the incendiary things Keen says, and my incensed reactions:
From the anti-blog chapter: With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye.
Oh my god no!! Truly Andy? Are you telling me that, prior to the internet, you never though any writer of any article or story or book might have a personal bias or agenda that a reader might want to take into account before blindly following? You are a douche.
From the anti–self publishing chapter: Do we really need to wade through the tidal wave of amateurish works of authors who have never been professionally selected for publication?
Um, no. Here is what you do: do not read self-published books if you do not want to contend with amateur writing. Is there a serious book person anywhere who can't tell on sight a self-published book from one put out by a major (or minor) press? If scillions of people want to go to a vanity press and have their inane mumblings made into a 'book', that does not affect you or me. Let them be happy! They will most likely never become a bestselling author, and they wouldn't have anyway.
In a chapter where he talks about Beck releasing that album where people could choose their own cover art, and then equates that with the loss of the musician-as-artist due to the dilution of expertly produced music: Similarly, the Barenaked Ladies recently launched a 'remix' contest, allowing fans to download songs from their latest album and re-mix and re-edit them into new versions, the best of which will eventually be released on CD.... That's like a surgeon who, instead of performing the surgery, leaves the amateur in the operating chamber with some surgical instruments and a brief pep talk.
This is the one where I started shrieking. First of all, buddy, even the most fervent devotee of art would never, never conflate making a record with performing surgery. What is wrong with you? And second of all, how great is that Barenaked Ladies thing? See, that is not actually a case of amateurs diluting artistic output, but of giving amateurs a chance to prove that maybe they also have some talent! No one is saying that we need a CD of thousands of bad remixes, but if out of the thousand submitted, maybe ten are really good, how great would it be for those ten people to be on a CD, an opportunity which it is very unlikely they'd have been afforded otherwise?
This is the last one because I bet no one's reading this anymore since it's so freaking long. But this is from the chapter about how amateurs are ruining advertising too. Take, for example, the competition that Frito-Lay ran to 'discover' an amateur commercial for their Doritos corn chips. According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the average professionally produced thirty-second spot costs $381,000. Yet Frito-Lay paid a mere $10,000 to each of the five finalists in the competition, leaving $331,000 on the table. That's $331,000 that wasn't paid to professional filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors, and marketing companies—$331,000 sucked out of the economy.
Holy fuck that made me so furious. Sucked out of the economy??? Here is what that means: the 'economy' of making commercials (and by extension movies, TV shows, pro sports, and all the rest of it) is BLOATED, CORRUPT, AND TOTALLY ABSURD. If you are going to tell me that we NEED to be paying our movie stars $1 million per picture, or our ad agencies $331,000 per THIRTY-SECOND FUCKING SPOT, you are out of your goddamn mind. The current system is totally fucked, and if 'the cult of the amateur' is what it takes to, if not fix it, then at least force it to make some fucking changes, that is fucking great. Keep sucking, amateur film- and commercial-makers!
There's a lot more, but I really do have better things to do than be mad about this book. And honestly, when I wasn't being made furious, this guy does have some not-so-dumb things to say. I mean, like I said, I think a lot is wrong with "Web 2.0" (what an awful buzzword). But Keen really goes too far, and makes the whole thing preposterous. A lot is good about it, too, and he doesn't really seem interested in talking about any of that. (less)
Sigh. I've been thinking for the last few days about what I should say in this review. I love Chip Kidd's voice, you see, his snappy dialogue and his...moreSigh. I've been thinking for the last few days about what I should say in this review. I love Chip Kidd's voice, you see, his snappy dialogue and his witty little characters and his charming descriptions. There's a lot of clever stuff in this book, too, including smart digressions on form vs. content, design in general, psychology, and clothing from the fifties. But the story... well it didn't really go anywhere. Or, rather, the places that it managed to go were not at all satisfying. To me. In many ways it was just a big letdown, definitely not delivering on the promises I imagined it to be making, coming, as it did, what, five years after The Cheese Monkeys? and calling itself a sequel. Or even promises it could have made within itself, as far as setting up conflict and themes and then doing something with them that made sense and felt right. And also, the ending really, really blew.
So, does the amount that I loved Cheese Monkeys (which was a fucking lot) justify paying $25 for an advance reader's of this one?? I mean no, no, of course not, $25 is just silly. Right?
But that means I'm going to have to wait months for it to come out in pb.
Rrrrgggghhhh. Which is more powerful, my impatience or my cheapness? (less)
before reading I'm presuming that this will be enough of a departure from Against the Day that it will help me remember how to read regular books.
(Als...morebefore reading I'm presuming that this will be enough of a departure from Against the Day that it will help me remember how to read regular books.
(Also noted: the print is really big. Odd.)
after reading Ok I'm really sorry to say this, but this book blew. I suppose that given the subject matter, that's kind of a double entendre, but fuck it. Actually, you know what? That's about as hard as it seems Palahniuk tried to make this book any good. It was like some college student aping Palahniuk for a second-rate writing class. A pale, pale imitation of the things that I know he can do really well. What a fucking letdown.
I guess you could call this a spoiler, but probably everyone who cares already knows that the plot here is that Cassie Wright is setting a porn world record by getting fucked by 600 guys in a row. The story is told in alternating perspectives by three of the men in line (numbers 72, 137, and 600) and by the "talent wrangler" who set the whole thing up. The multiple narrators — which worked so well in Rant — here are stupid and not believable. All three men talk basically the same, with a few halfhearted token phrases thrown in to differentiate them. (For example, #72 constantly says "I don't know." Oh yeah, Chuck, great.) I was hoping and hoping that the last chapter would be by Cassie herself, in order to possible do something trickerish and clever with a reversal of some kind at the end, but oh no. She basically never talks, and Chuck misses a chance to actually say something, make some kind of statement about the kind of woman who would get banged by 600 guys.
The whole book feels like just an excuse to catalogue three things: gross facts about how movie stars keep themselves beautiful & viable (cutting the heel off one shoe to make your ass grind together sexily, drinking crushed eggshells to get a smoky, husky voice); unfunny names for men who jerk off a lot (monkey-milkers, ham-whammers, sock-soakers); and clever fake porn movie names based on books & movies (To Drill a Mockingbird, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, Gropes of Wrath, A Midsummer Night's Ream). And look, I love a good porn pun, but that is not enough, Mr. Palahniuk, to use as the backbone of an entire novel.
Sure there's some twists and a smidge of character development, but I'm telling you, the whole thing was just uninspired, insipid, and boring. Fuck. (less)
Well, I'm sorry, but I really didn't like this book. I feel a bit guilty for this, first because it came recommended by people whose tastes I totally...moreWell, I'm sorry, but I really didn't like this book. I feel a bit guilty for this, first because it came recommended by people whose tastes I totally trust (sorry Amanda! sorry Kira!), and second because, due to my really shamefully busy life, it took me a ludicrously long time to read this (sorry Steve Toltz). So yeah, I mean, it was my fault—not Steve's—that this book has been hanging menacingly over my head for freaking ages. But let's face it, Steve, it's your fault that your book just wasn't very good.
I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a lovely guy. But do you remember the first goddamn rule of every creative writing class ever? It's show, don't tell. Yeah. What that means, see, is that creating a character who's a "philosopher" doesn't give you the right to detail his meandering and only semi-deep thoughts for pages and pages and pages, nor does it make it okay for you to put twisty, overwritten speeches into his mouth, which also happen to last for pages and pages and pages. I'm really not trying to be a dick here, Steve. My guilt is compounded by the fact that you really do have lots of clever ideas, some of the writing was original and funny, and a handful of the episodes were enjoyable. But your two main characters were really just personality-less. Telling me that Martin is an enigma does not excuse you from making him so. Discussing over and over whether Jasper is a mirror-opposite or a polar-opposite of his father does not mean that you don't need make him interesting. The characters just endlessly whine and carry on and circumspect and angst-ify and fret. And while one could make the argument that that is fun to do, it is really really boring to read about. Unless you're talking about Hamlet, but come on, isn't he like the least interesting character in that whole play?(less)
**spoiler alert** There's no doubt that David Mitchell is incredibly talented, and Cloud Atlas is a superior achievement. It was stylistically inventi...more**spoiler alert** There's no doubt that David Mitchell is incredibly talented, and Cloud Atlas is a superior achievement. It was stylistically inventive, intellectually daring, etc etc, just like all the critics and reviewers promised. But ultimately it sort of left me cold, and I found myself wondering (often) what all of that effort was really for.
There are two unfortunate things that at the onset contributed strongly to this book not knocking me on my ass. The first was the insane amount of anticipation I had going into it, as I had been told by countless people that this book was amazing, astonishing, etc., and so I think it was set up to be unable to live up to all that. The second is the impossibility of ignoring comparisons to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I know that it's a little unfair, but Mitchell simply cannot compete with Calvino, and I couldn't stop thinking about Traveller while reading, and so my whole experience of Cloud Atlas was tarnished by that.
Let's go back. This book, like Traveller, is written sort of like a set of interlocking parentheses, with six totally separate storylines beginning one after the other, going for a while, and then breaking off at climactic points. Then, at the end of the sixth storyline, the fifth is brought back, starting at the previous cliffhanger and continuing until its conclusion, then the same with the fourth, the third, etc. Each of these storylines is extremely different in tone, style, and character – we have the travel journal of an American in Australia in like the 1600s (maybe; I'm awful with history); then letters from a British composer in Brussels to his former lover; then a sort of thriller about a young journalist in California in the sixties trying to unravel a dastardly corporate cover-up involving nuclear testing facilities; then a present-day caper story; then a dystopian-future piece told over the course of a long interview with a woman who has been sentenced to death; then a crazy post-apocalyptic oral history.
So two things here: First, let me again stress that Mitchell is extremely skilled. He does each of these drastically different things with aplomb, and is equally imaginative and able to completely immerse the reader in each one. Each has not only its own setting and story type and narrator and characters, but also its own complete language (the latter two using completely different made-up sci-fi speak). That is utterly astonishing, and Mitchell deserves due respect for it. And second: a book of this nature is excellent for helping one crystallize one's preferences, by which I mean that as someone who dislikes post-apocalyptic sci-fi nearly as much as historical fiction, it's no surprise that I liked the British composer and the American caper far more than the rest. (And I did like them, lots; if I could rate those sections alone, they'd get five stars easily.)
And it is true that Mitchell does a bit of work connecting these vastly varied stories – in storyline two, for example, the letter-writer finds half the manuscript of storyline one in an attic, and at the end of the end of his story, he plans to read the second half, which he'd found much later. But here is the crux of the non-external reason I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to: these connections were tenuous at best. It's true that there are feeble attempts to weave things together a bit further, such as a recurring comet-shaped birthmark and some vague hints that a character from one story remembers a piece of music from another story (which even this is meta-ly discredited, actually), but that wasn't nearly enough for me. I just never really understood what made Mitchell stick these specific stories together, other than to be very very clever.
And this is where the comparison to Traveller hurts Cloud Atlas the most, IMO. With Calvino, every story is constantly reinforcing and augmenting (or obfuscating) the others, everything woven tighter and tighter, not to mention threaded throughout and tied firmly with an overarching ur-story. But Mitchell does none, or barely any, of this, and so the whole thing begins to feel just like an intellectual exercise, rather than an emotionally connected whole, and lord knows I need my literary meta-experimentation to be emotional. (less)
You know, I really considered giving up on this about sixty pages in, and I probably should have; it never got any better. It was just so un-compellin...moreYou know, I really considered giving up on this about sixty pages in, and I probably should have; it never got any better. It was just so un-compelling. And the main character was really unlikeable, which drives me nuts. It reminded me of A Confederacy of Dunces, which I don't remember much but definitely remember hating; this had the same kind of bumbling, not-very-smart protagonist who just doesn't seem to get why bad things keep happening to him. He was so whiny and stupid and boring. Why should I go on a three-hundred-page journey with someone I can't stand?
The other thing that drove me absolutely crazy about this book was that the narrative kept doubling over on itself, like in the middle of describing some kind of action or reaction, it would start to discuss broader ideas and concepts, like "For those of us who've lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is." What? That's both convoluted and incredibly insipid. There were all these "realizations" or like comments on the human condition or something, which were uninspired and uninteresting and really just served to distract me from the uninspired and uninteresting plot. It reminded me, strangely, of one of my most favorite books ever, Daniel Handler's Adverbs, where he does a similar kind of thing, but with achingly beautiful metaphors, and with ideas that are thrilling and original and wonderful and sad. Brock Clarke is no Daniel Handler, is what I'm trying to say.
And speaking of the writing? Ugh. Here is a convolutedly stupid metaphor, which happens right after our, uh, "hero" has relieved himself after needing to pee for a long time, and someone has just told him that he doesn't have any money. Says our "hero": "I empathized: his lack of money weighed heavily on him and he needed relief from it, his poverty being to his vessel what my pee had just been to mine." Ew. Idiotic.
Here's one more quote, which combines bad writing with bad allusions with bad ideas: "I know nothing about her, not even her name, although I think about her all the time, the way you do about people and things which change your life forever –- although I doubt she thinks about me, which is the way life works, which is why I'm sure Noah couldn't ever stop thinking about his Flood, but once the water receded, I'm sure it didn't once think about him." What? Monumentally stupid. Just like this whole monumentally stupid book. (less)
Oh man. This book caused in me all sorts of crises. Pretty much I hated it, but not exactly for all the right reasons. I mean, some were the right rea...moreOh man. This book caused in me all sorts of crises. Pretty much I hated it, but not exactly for all the right reasons. I mean, some were the right reasons, like how the characters, while kind of well-developed, were still completely unbelievable in how they related to one another, and how the plot was pretty formulaic & flat. Also, it paints this terrible picture of New Yorkers, especially vis á vis the homeless (except for the "redemption" at the end, which was so corny and again unbelievable that it made my head hurt).
But really I hated it because he does a lot of the same things in his writing that I try to do in mine, and he does them in such a shitty way. I mean, here's this bildungsroman of a young, struggling writer in New York, trying to find "home" and happiness and success and love. Which should be great, right? But no no no. He is alternately wildly compassioinate and then eerily cold to his "love"; he is mystified when, after two straight years of coming in three hours late and not doing any work, he is fired instead of promoted; his New York seems to have about ten people in it, all of whom cross paths in the most "coincidental" ways; his "friends" are all caricatures; and his "change of heart" is so overly extreme as to be totally (again!) unbelievable.
But! The final but! The story actually moves! It skips along, and you kind of find yourself giving a shit what happens next. There are some very creative scenes, and pretty good dialogue, and nice little ideas that come through the murk. Plus he throws in tons of awesome words, in a nice logophilic subplot thingy. Which just made me madder because I couldn't hate it totally, even though I really, really wanted to.
At least he doesn't get the girl at the end. If he had I would have freaked out.(less)
This book was really disappointing for me, because the subject matter is fascinating, but the writing was just shudderingly bad. I am still shocked th...moreThis book was really disappointing for me, because the subject matter is fascinating, but the writing was just shudderingly bad. I am still shocked that I couldn't finish it, because I was really, really amazed by what I was learning, but I just couldn't keep focused. I would love to see this book edited and re-released, in a more engaging, readable version.(less)
I have to be honest, it's been several years since I read this book. But I just remember it being so boring. There was such an insane amount of hype s...moreI have to be honest, it's been several years since I read this book. But I just remember it being so boring. There was such an insane amount of hype surrounding it (which makes me distrust anything), you know, he had it both ways, Oprah's zombie-slaves plus also those who hate her. And I just thought it was such an ordinary story with ordinary people doing rather mundane, everyday things. Plus the writing was unimaginitive, plus didn't the last section of the story suddenly move to like Uzbekistan or somewhere totally out of the blue? Ugh, the whole thing just left such a bad taste in my mouth.(less)
I wish there was a proper way to splutter in written form. I mean, it's not that I didn't like this book, really. I certainly didn't not like it. I ju...moreI wish there was a proper way to splutter in written form. I mean, it's not that I didn't like this book, really. I certainly didn't not like it. I just... just... I dunno, I guess I just didn't get it like everyone else seems to've. As I said somewhere else, given that everyone really lost their shit over this book (I mean, did you see brian's review? Or Andrew's? Or freaking Josh's??), I guess I was really expecting to have my whole brain rearranged by it, like when I first read Cortàzar. And that definitely didn't happen.
I think that part of it was the format. First of all, for those who don't know, this book is told as kind of an oral history of these two poets. Spanning several decades, seemingly everyone who ever knew Ulises Lima or Arturo Belano, even for just a little while, tells a story about his or her own life, usually featuring one of the poets prominently. Which is interesting as a technique, but makes necessarily for a very uneven flow. Some of the passages were incredibly moving, lasting pages and pages and telling terrible or wonderful stories with great emotion, exploring fascinating ideas or just recounting incredible discussions or moments of thought. But others were really short, or really boring, or really confusing, or hard to mesh in with what I thought I was beginning to know about Lima and Belano. There were a lot of names to keep track of, which always gives me trouble (my fault, not Bolaño's, of course), and I may as well mention that I was chewing through this book for an awfully long time, so that also makes it harder to keep a somewhat ragged storyline straight. But the biggest problem with the 'oral history' angle, for me, is that you have a million people talking about our main guys, but you never hear them actually speak. That makes me just incredibly frustrated. They are the protagonists! They have led more or less epic lives! They have done a lot of questionable — and downright stupid — things! And of course amazing things too! I want to hear them speak!! Does this make me crazy? It just seems so unfair to have to always view them through a thick filter, or a million over-layered thin ones. I have said elsewhere that reading, for me, is a matter of getting as close as I can to a story, a character, a feeling. And so keeping me at arm's length for six hundred pages... well, it's just not going to keep me entranced, or (sometimes) even focused.
I also (and this is a much smaller complaint) found the main characters and most of their friends to be kind of a bunch of narcissistic jerks. They all sleep around like crazy and cheat on their spouses and sell or do drugs and let their parents support them and their children get taken care of by someone else, and then they just leave, regardless of who is depending on them for what. Saying that probably makes me sound rather maudlin or conventional (and I'm not saying that it doesn't also describe my friends), but whatev, it's how I felt. Just another way that I was unable to really give myself over to this book.
So that's my main speculation for my reluctance to droolingly adore this book, which so many others have done, and which I am usually so eager to do. So I'm sorry, brian. Sorry Andrew and Josh. Sorry Bolaño. I feel such guilt when I don't like a book that I've really been primed to adore. But it just didn't happen for me this time. Sigh.
(and p.s., since I'm referencing all my GoodReads friends who reviewed this so glowingly, check out Ryan, who reviewed this back in March and basically told my review how stupid it is before I even wrote it.)(less)
Sort of a cool look at how someone totally normal could wind up homeless. I liked it at the start, but this book is horribly erratic, with some smalli...moreSort of a cool look at how someone totally normal could wind up homeless. I liked it at the start, but this book is horribly erratic, with some smallish moments gone over in intense detail, and other, longer, more important sections just stupidly glossed over. The ending is just ridiculously not believable, and it feels like he just woke up one morning and said 'Hmm, I'm tired of writing this book. Uh... ok, I'll just end it like that.' Very disappointing, considering he's supposed to be this cool underground Brooklyn guy.(less)
after reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory — sometimes they just don't live...moreafter reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory — sometimes they just don't live up. I mean, there's really no reason I shouldn't have loved this book. It's filled with philosophical musings and snappy, flirty dialogue; it's pleasantly disjointed, very slice-of-life-y; it's definitely full of verve and probably powerful ideas.... but I just couldn't get into it. I was in fact very impatient throughout. I found Amory Blaine to be a bit of a narcissistic bore, all the female characters thoroughly self-obsessed and false, and most of the other characters either inconsistent, un-memorable, or not believable.
I nearly always feel guilty about not liking a book. In this case my guilt is compounded by the fact that someone who once meant a great deal to me loved the shit out of Fitzgerald, and this book in particular; in fact, it's his copy, full of his underlinings and nearly destroyed due to the number of times it's been caught in in rainstorms, that I still have. But Nick, I'm sorry. F. Scott, I'm sorry. I just couldn't love this like I wanted to.
before reading: I am having a lot of trouble deciding what to read next. I've got this big stack of books here, and none of them really seems right. So maybe something completely different, something that knocked me on my ass when I read it like a decade ago, maybe that'll do the trick.(less)
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