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May 31
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Patrick
read and liked
Jessica's
review of A void.:
"A girl I room with owns this book, and following our talk tonight about it at our local bar, I'm now looking into A Void. I doubt I'll go far in my try, but will admit to a strong curiosity, though his story might not turn out so amazing. No d...more
A girl I room with owns this book, and following our talk tonight about it at our local bar, I'm now looking into A Void. I doubt I'll go far in my try, but will admit to a strong curiosity, though his story might not turn out so amazing. No doubt this was a blast to craft, but, I hazard, not as much fun to look through, sort of similar to studying a crossword you didn't do.... Still, I'll sally forth boldly with a stab at it. Why not?
FYI, I'm now involuntarily thinking within the limits put down by this book, and I must say, doing so is good for a laugh, and I don't find it actually as hard as many might think. You should try! It's actually a lot of fun; okay, if not a lot, a substantial amount.... Anyway, I'll inform you all if this book is worth trying as soon as I find out, but writing in this form, I can say right now, is a good form of procrastination from my vacation packing.... which I should go do right now. My goal is arriving at that old Port Authority prior to noon today to catch my bus, so I should stop right now and go do that....less
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April 27
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Patrick
gave
 
to:
Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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April 24
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Patrick
gave
to:
You Shall Know Our Velocity (Paperback)
by Dave Eggers
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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February 07
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New comment on Patrick's review of
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
(see all 3 comments)
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September 12
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Patrick
gave
to:
Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Paperback)
by Gaby Wood
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in September, 2002
Patrick said:
"The individual chapters are pretty much across-the-board fascinating, and the author's name is "Gaby", which is great, and as long as I'm poking around for more goodwill to offer toward this thing, I'll also say the cover design is beautifu...more
The individual chapters are pretty much across-the-board fascinating, and the author's name is "Gaby", which is great, and as long as I'm poking around for more goodwill to offer toward this thing, I'll also say the cover design is beautiful ("Wait," you ask, "better than Lives of the Monster Dogs?" A: YES.), but the parts are easily greater than the whole, which would not normally be a problem, except the author (whose name, recall, is "Gaby"! and she sort of looks like Natalie from Sports Night: I can admit this much) feels the responsibility to constantly bring up what I take to be an eleventh hour attempt at a thesis tying the whole thing together. Which thesis is something like "an investigation into the point when the recognizably human and the recognizably unhuman intersect, and we look up from what we were doing and sitting to our left is Freud and sitting to our right is Masahiro Mori, and we're all, Fuck this, I'm getting off the train."
Of course: without this thesis, the book would seem just as mismashish, and of course: I totally get the draw of adding a connective throughline to it all, but its sole effect is to bring up avenues unexplored by the author ("Gaby") and make the already tenuous grip some of the chapters have on it more slipperier (while I am far richer for having learned about the Doll Family, if the subtitle is "A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life" then why am I reading about the Doll Family?). And so: as this thesis is brought up so often and at such incongruent moments, I am forced to deduct ONE POINT FIVE STARS for the psychic toll it cost me and then ROUND DOWN because Natalie and Jeremy on Sports Night broke up (note: I am a Jeremy type). Thusly forewarned, you might enjoy this book more than I did and be more forgiving when you read it and want to give this book a greater number of stars. I am powerless to stop you, as I already got off the train....less
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August 29
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Patrick
gave
to:
The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters (Paperback)
by Chip Kidd
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Patrick
gave
to:
Then We Came to the End (Hardcover)
by Joshua Ferris
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: promising debut novelist addicts
read in July, 2007
Patrick said:
"I LIKED:
(1) How funny it was;
(2) The first-person-plural voice, which could have backfired but didn't for me;
(3) The guy who quotes Emerson (it was around here that I started to feel actual warmth for the characters, even when I couldn...more
I LIKED:
(1) How funny it was;
(2) The first-person-plural voice, which could have backfired but didn't for me;
(3) The guy who quotes Emerson (it was around here that I started to feel actual warmth for the characters, even when I couldn't keep them straight);
(4) The Catch-22ishness (though it wasn't slavishly Catch-22esque, which you might initially think);
(5) The very last line, which maybe could be considered gimmicky, but worked for me and which I read with what I guess I would call a "satisfyingly pleasant shock" (that almost never happens to me in a novel -- the last time it came close was Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, where the last line suddenly made me remember the first line of the book (conveniently printed on the cover) and I went back to the first line to make sure I understood the implication of the last line, and I had, and wow, that got me, but then the rest of the book wasn't so consistently great, and so I'm not going to count that one);
(6) The fun promotional website, which I wisely did not look at until after I read the book, not that it gives anything away, but because we all know what happens when you look at a debut novelist's fun promotional website and then read her stupid, sucky book.
(N.B. A clever thing about the website is that only the characters that would have myspace pages do have myspace pages.)
HOWEVER, I LIKED LESS SO, MAYBE, ALTHOUGH THESE WEREN'T THAT BIG A DEAL, I JUST CAN'T ENJOY ANYTHING WITHOUT QUALIFICATION ANYMORE, THE FACTS THAT:
(1) It seems utterly implausible to me that a large percentage of a group of people in a cubefarm would (a) know and (b) embrace a Tom Waits song;
(2) The "end" the title references, which (spoiler?) I take to mean "the end of August and first few weeks of September" thing toward the close of the book, which I read with unpleasant shock (it seemed like a calculatedly throwaway line, and I'm not ready for that to be a throw away line yet -- I felt the same way about DFW's "The Suffering Chanel", and I pretty much love DFW and will grant him all kinds of leeway);
(3) I kind of lost track of some of the characters, which is part of the first-person-plural effect, although that's also a benefit of it and anyway I'm happy to blame myself for this
(4) The resolution to the central maguffin ("Design a funny cancer awareness campaign") wasn't that great, but maybe the point was it couldn't be; but I was looking for it to be like The Cheese Monkeys, where the students get a design challenge and you get a chance to figure out what you would do and then you find out what the students did and you're all like, "Chip Kidd, you madman!"
IN CONCLUSION HERE ARE TWO ANECDOTES
(1) The book is set in and spends a lot of time dealing with the (great) city of Chicago and specifically an ad agency in Chicago, and a week or so ago I happened to spend pretty much a whole day in Austin with someone who works in an ad agency in Chicago (!), and I asked if he had read this book which I had assumed everyone in the world knew about, and if it had taken the Chicago ad agency community by storm and whatnot, and he said he had never heard of it.
(2) From reading the book, you would think "this remarkable debut novelist must live in Chicago!" and when you finish the book and read the author description it says something like, "Ferris currently lives in Brooklyn" and I think that's probably the darkest joke in the whole book.
...less
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Patrick
gave
to:
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Hardcover)
by Marisha Pessl
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: easily impressed high school students
read in September, 2006
Patrick said:
"Reviews of “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” and the Bottle of Açaí Juice I Bought for Lunch Cleverly Masked as SAT Test Questions
Choices:
(a) Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(b) The bottle of açaí juice I bought for...more
Reviews of “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” and the Bottle of Açaí Juice I Bought for Lunch Cleverly Masked as SAT Test Questions
Choices:
(a) Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(b) The bottle of açaí juice I bought for lunch
(c) Both a and b
(d) Neither a nor b
Questions
(1) __ I had heard good things about it
(2) __ I bought it on a whim
(3) __ If feeling extremely charitable, I might call it “frothy”
(4) __ It seemed sort of good in the beginning, but by the end I was like, “Blaahahhgajh. End, end, end.”
(5) __ Contains metaphors that go down like a junebug having lion sex in a bourbon mood
(6) __ Blue things totally dissed
(7) __ Nabokov rolling in his grave
(8) __ Authoritative blurb raises questions about agenda of blurber
(9) __ Handy pronunciation key for difficult-to-pronounce words like “açaí” or “pessl”
(10) __ “I’m confused about what editors, like, do?”
(11) __ “Maybe I don’t need this many antioxidants and/or self-indulgence.”
(12) __ “Post-BBC Office is anyone allowed to be named Gareth? Really? Really?”
[Pencils down.]
Answers:
(1) c
(2) c
(3) c
(4) c
(5) c (“A Cadillac-sized smile drove away with his face as if I’d just agreed to pay him ‘in cayash,’ as Dad would say, for a Sedona Beige Metallic Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded, two grand over sticker price, driving it off the lot right then and there.”; “Stop the radicals! Join the antioxidant revolution!”)
(6) c (~bloods plotline disappear halfway through; ~berries have 61 fewer ORAC units than açaí)
(7) d (This is against policy at Cimitière de Clarens.)
(8) c (Jonathan Franzen: “A masterpiece of sorts.”; Brunswick Laboratories, MA: ORAC Unit analysis, presented as bar chart)
(9) b (“say ‘ah-sci-ee’”)
(10) a
(11) c
(12) a (No, unless a boy is born that can swim faster than a shark.)
...less
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Patrick
gave
to:
Black Swan Green: A Novel (Paperback)
by David Mitchell
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in June, 2006
Patrick said:
"There's some interview from right when this came out where he says something like, "It's the best thing I've written, I'm confident of that." I don't know if that's just selfblurbing marketing nonsense or what, but I was totally buying it w...more
There's some interview from right when this came out where he says something like, "It's the best thing I've written, I'm confident of that." I don't know if that's just selfblurbing marketing nonsense or what, but I was totally buying it with this book. I thought I was done with the first person "unhappy, partially wised-up nine-year-old"* until I started reading this, and I was willing to totally make out with it, even given all of the Big Realizations the Character Comes To Discover About What It Means to Be a Human and that stuff, but Eva Crommelynck showing up finally wrecked it for me.
I loved Cloud Atlas, just like everyone else on Earth, but all the pyrotechnics have caused it to fade a little in my mind as Really Good While You're Reading It But Ultimately Hamstrung By Its Gimmicks (it was frustrating to me to get involved with a narrative only to have it marginalized by the subsequent narrative, e.g.) (and I know that's part of the point), so I thought this really was a breakthrough for him: all the brilliance was actually serving the story, not just there out in the open for you to admire it. So when I read Black Swan Green, I was impressed that he had put all of that in the background: if you wanted to focus on the structural tics, you could, but it was actually there in support of a story that he was telling without for once drawing attention to his own cleverness.
But then when Eva Crommelynck showed up, it placed the book in the same universe as the Frobisher story from CA (which was maybe my favorite, but ultimately just one of several other nested and subjugated stories that were revealed to be fictional constructs by their subsequent narratives. If that makes any sense) and that makes me throw up my hands: I think Mitchell is definitely smarter and more British than I am, and for once all the brilliance seemed to be serving the narrative, but with that reference, it all came crashing down for me: look! It's all a construct! Please pay attention to the man behind the curtain!
I hope it was fun for him to put that in there. I hope he got a kick out of that. I hope he really enjoyed himself with that one.***
*(Updike Safran-Foer Takedown stizz)**
** (thirteen, whatever)
*** (just realized I should have used Jason's attempts to overcome his stutter as a metaphor for Mitchell's attempts to not fall back on his own cleverness, but I guess I'm not that clever. AND THEN A SWAN SHOWED UP, TYING EVERYTHING TOGETHER POINTLESSLY THE END.)...less
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Patrick
gave
to:
The Castle in the Forest: A Novel (Hardcover)
by Norman Mailer
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in January, 2008
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The Sound of Young America
— 22 members
— last activity 01/30/2008 01:26PM
