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February 08
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Kt
is currently reading:
Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic. (Paperback)
by David Nadelberg
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New comment on Kt's review of
The Lovely Bones
(see all 6 comments)
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January 23
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Kt
gave
to:
The Lovely Bones (Mass Market Paperback)
by Alice Sebold
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recommended for: People who subscribe to Readers' Digest without any sense of irony
read in July, 2003
Kt said:
"Haaaaaated it. I am one of those OCD literary nerds who takes on a war bunker mentality with books that I've started and dislike: "I will see this through to the end."
For "The Lovely Bones," I made an exception.
Somewhere, somet...more
Haaaaaated it. I am one of those OCD literary nerds who takes on a war bunker mentality with books that I've started and dislike: "I will see this through to the end."
For "The Lovely Bones," I made an exception.
Somewhere, sometime, someone told Sebold she could write. That person should be made to apologize to me, in person, and to all other poor souls who were duped into buying this shlock.
The literary press also needs to break out the cattails for a serious bout of flogging. Lev Grossman of Time Magazine is at the top of my flogging docket; he called this book "a beautiful, sensitive, melancholy novel" and repeated that claim a year later in a review for a book called "The Dogs of Babel" (a book just as terrible as The Lovely Bones). I can only assume that Mr. Grossman confined his reading to the zeros on the check accompanying the publisher's blurb or else has some sort of vitamin deficiency that causes his brain to process ham-handed tripe as "beautiful" art.
It was Mr. Grossman's review along with the alluring premise of the novel (a young girl posthumously tries to make sense of the events that led to her death) that led me to order "The Lovely Bones" and "The Dogs of Babel," which at the time were only available in hardcover. Financial reasons made this an extremely uncommon practice for me, and my experience reading both of those novels ensured that I would never do so again.
To further illustrate how absolutely wretched this novel is, I'm going to provide a paragraph of background. The "substance" of the novel will be criticized in the subsequent body of this review.
During the summer of 2003, I was occupying space as an intern at a company that accepted me at the last minute and had nothing for me to do. The company was white-collar and behemoth in office space. HR sent me to an deserted floor to file documents that took up, at most, 2 hours of my 8-hour day. Even in this vacuum of monotony, I could not finish this book. I chose to watch paint chip away, and pick up dust bunnies with recycled paper (I didn't have a broom) rather than finish this book.
So with that said, I suppose I should actually mention something specific about the book I hated. My caveat here is that I am unwilling to punish myself by picking through a copy of the book for textual examples. I'm going by memory and online synopses alone.
The narrator and victim is "Susie Salmon." Let me stop there. SUSIE SALMON. That really should have clued me in, but I was too eager to see how the author would represent the afterlife, to catch a glimpse of this beautiful pain of looking a life that goes on without you.
Unfortunately, Sebold managed to bleach out anything remotely interesting out of the plot in spectacular fashion. Heaven is a school, you see, not that Susie spends much time there or learns anything. Her rapist and murderer is a creepy loser while somehow being the dullest of all of Sebold's numerous dull characters. The "reason" for his murderous tendencies could be guessed by anyone who's ever even heard of a pop psychology book.
You'd think her family would at least be interesting in grief, but Sebold reduces them to one note drones.
Everything in The Lovely Bones is a gimmick, played cheaply for sentiment and with no other reward. I'd compare to a Hallmark movie, but Hallmark movies do not adopt the pretension that Sebold belabors with terrible pseudo-post-modernist metaphors.
All of this would be bad enough, but what made me throw this book "aside with great force" is the offensive, and unjustifiable resolution to Susie's laments that she did not get to live. This unfairness, although poorly developed, was at least a cause of sympathy until Susie decides to forcibly correct it at the expense of others. In the hands of someone else, this last turn could've been bleak insight into motivations of the cycle of victimization but Sebold conveys not one iota of ambivalence.
Much of my hatred of this novel results from its inexplicable popularity and commendation from people who have a responsibility to promote reading. I shudder to think who else picked up this novel convinced it was the best that the contemporary literary world had to offer. It is not my intention to slam those who enjoyed this book. If you did, I am glad to hear it. I love books, and I want others to love books. I simply fear that someone who is tempted out of a long vacation from reading might pick up a novel like this and give up the cause for lost....less
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Kt
read and liked
Sarah's
review of The Lovely Bones:
"The Lovely Bones has got to be the most baffling, poorly written, jaw-droppingly bad book that I have ever set my eyes on. It is truly a black, black tragedy that the words in this book were placed in that particular order, published, and distributed...more
The Lovely Bones has got to be the most baffling, poorly written, jaw-droppingly bad book that I have ever set my eyes on. It is truly a black, black tragedy that the words in this book were placed in that particular order, published, and distributed. How could this have ever possibly been popular? Is it for the same reason that the song “My Humps” hit number one? I mean, I don’t technically believe in burning books, but this novel really got me thinking. About burning it.
If it serves any use at all, it might be a perfect guide on how not to write a book. Here are some of my gripes, problems and issues that we can hopefully use to prevent something like this from ever happening again to us, our children, or our children’s children:
It is filled with some of the worst sentence-level writing that I have ever encountered. From bad description to horrible grammar to utterly confusing metaphors, Sebold covered it all. A tell-tale way to spot a weak writer? They can’t stop weirdly describing people’s eyes. Don’t believe me? Try this sentence: “Her eyes were like flint and flower petals.” Or this one: “The tears came like a small relentless army approaching the front lines of her eyes. She asked for coffee and toast in a restaurant and buttered it with her tears.” Really? She buttered the coffee and toast with her tears? Or this one, this time about someone’s heart: “Her heart, like a recipe, was reduced.” What the hell?
And here’s my favorite eye description in the book: “Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.” That’s right. Ferocious olives. I’ve read MadLibs that make more sense than that.
It seems to lack a plot. You know, that thing that books are supposed to have. I’ll never forget my first workshop with Brady Udall, in which he threw my story onto the table and said, “This isn’t a story, Sarah, it’s a situation.” And as much as I despaired when I got home, he was right. Sebold has the same problem: her book is a really long situation. A girl dies and watches her family from heaven. Okay. That’s nice. But what do the characters want? What drives the story forward? Nothing. The characters get older and keep bumping into each other. Things change, and things often do, but there is no forward movement and certainly no building of suspense.
Since there’s no plot, the ending is just a bunch of weird stuff happening. I read the last thirty pages on the train this morning, and couldn’t stop a few outbursts: “Oh, no she didn’t!” I’d say, talking to Alice Sebold and her crazy ways. She is just plain bold when it comes to doing whatever she feels like, and she feels like doing the weirdest stuff ever. It’s not that I don’t want to write spoilers here, it’s that I can’t even explain to you what happened at the end of the book. And I bet she can’t either. I’m not exaggerating.
Her characters never have interesting or complex thoughts. Not even the serial killer or the mother whose daughter was murdered. It seems that Sebold’s characters do one of two things: they laugh (which means they are happy) or cry (to butter their toast, somehow, when they are sad). As you might guess, there is a lot of laughing and crying in this book. When a character is confused, they laugh and cry at the same time. This also happens often.
I feel a little better after venting. But I’m still deeply sad and angry. I feel like my own writing might have been permanently damaged by reading this book… like a couple of… ferocious… olives?
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Kt
gave
to:
Northanger Abbey (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
by Jane Austen
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my rating:
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recommended for: Austen disparagers, girls who only read Pride and Prejudice once Colin Firth entered the picture
read in November, 2007
Kt said:
"My least favorite Austen book, Northanger Abbey's greatest weakness isn't a lack of deftness by the author but Austen's success at rendering a flawed protagonist. Our "heroine" is Catherine Morland, a painfully naïve teenager making her fi...more
My least favorite Austen book, Northanger Abbey's greatest weakness isn't a lack of deftness by the author but Austen's success at rendering a flawed protagonist. Our "heroine" is Catherine Morland, a painfully naïve teenager making her first long trip away from home. She's a bit dim, our Catherine, and so eager for "attachment" that she is easily swayed by the character of her companions.
In the first half of the novel, Austen is rather brutal in conveying Catherine's flaws via a distinctive series of parenthetical asides and wry juxtapositions with more shrewd characters. In comparison with her more famous works, Northanger Abbey is very nearly a straight satire. While Austen has always included a rebuke of societal trends and values she found abhorrent (see the vapid vanity of the father and sister in Persuasion), her protagonists are usually incredibly compelling and likeable despite their flaws.
Austen departs from that formula here in order to more deliciously attack the superficiality and scheming inherent in that era's society. The reader is much more likely to sympathize with Catherine's love interest in Northanger Abbey, a sarcastic yet kind Henry Tilney. But Henry remains a distant and somewhat vague personality throughout the book, and we are chained to Catherine's feelings and thoughts, regardless of our opinions or preferences.
The most enjoyable sections of the novel, for me, were when Austen let loose in depicting Catherine's new companions as terrible and annoying in contrast to Catherine's good opinion of them. I also found the clear undercurrent of Austen's frustration fascinating. As a woman, there was a clear delineation between what kinds of novels she could produce and what was considered more serious efforts by the men in her profession.
The second half of the book, and descent into commentary on Gothic literature, is where I grew disinterested. This seems to be an unpopular opinion. Though some of my former English teachers might be terribly disappointed in me, I had to slog through much of the Abbey descriptions and finished the book by momentum rather than curiosity.
However, I do think the book is worth reading as a contrast to her other works. I recommend Northanger Abbey to those who dismiss her work as Chick Lit, and even more forcefully to those fans that recognize only the romance and dreaminess of Mr. Darcy.
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Kt
gave
to:
The Road (Hardcover)
by Cormac McCarthy
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my rating:
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read in December, 2007
Kt said:
"Man, do I have conflicted feelings about this novel. I haven't read any other works by Cormac McCarthy, which I suspect colored my experience with this story.
The apocalypse he creates is believable and has a beautiful aspect to its bleakness. This...more
Man, do I have conflicted feelings about this novel. I haven't read any other works by Cormac McCarthy, which I suspect colored my experience with this story.
The apocalypse he creates is believable and has a beautiful aspect to its bleakness. This is the kind of book that I wish I could have read as part of a group or class just to survey other people's reactions. Well, that and get a quick and easy theory as to what McCarthy was trying to do here.
I'd say that I was disappointed in the complete dearth of female characters in this book, but from what I've heard and what I saw in "No Country For Old Men" that's pretty much par for the course with McCarthy. I was dissatisfied with the ending (and reminded of a certain Dostoevsky novel), but I saw it coming.
It's worth a read, but I can't say I "enjoyed" it. In fact, no one should ever recommend this book as a fun distraction and not just because it depicts a dystopic world. As an apocalypse aficionado, I've come across a number of end-of-the-world plots that give a thrill. That's not what McCarthy is after. ...less
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Kt
read and liked
Tom's
review of The Road:
"Review for Chimes (May 11, 2007)
“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in t...more
Review for Chimes (May 11, 2007)
“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”
In his new novel “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy portrays the journey of a father and son across a bleak, post-apocalyptic world in stark, muscular prose. The plot, structure, style, characters and dialogue are all barren, echoing the landscape through which the unnamed characters traverse.
McCarthy never explains why or how the world is barren and dead. All we know is that a father and son are pushing their shopping cart of canned food, a map, a tarp and a loaded pistol down empty roads, seeking the coast or a warmer climate for winter. The rest of the world, it seems, has either reverted to cannibalism or died.
The structure of the book reinforces its bleak tone. Its 240 pages (in large font, mind you) are composed not of chapters, but of small narrative or descriptive nuggets that are never more than one page long. The sentences, too, are short, punchy and at times lyrical, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway. This style, like Hemingway’s, is intensely effective for a short story or novella – just read “The Old Man and the Sea” sometime – but halfway through the book, the short sentences lose their impact and become tiresome.
But McCarthy goes beyond Hemingway at times and ends up trying too hard. For example, in the following passage, the son spots a corpse in the road (they seem to appear nearly every other page) and asks his father about it:
Who is it? said the boy.
I don’t know. Who is anybody?
“All horror all the time” seems to be McCarthy’s mantra, and while post-apocalyptic literature certainly requires the theme of hopelessness, it need not dominate the work like it does in “The Road.” For example, Samuel Beckett’s play “Endgame” is equally bleak, yet one laughs at its absurdity through the whole production. Instead, McCarthy over-emphasizes the darkness, making the novel predictable and boring on occasion.
Despite these faults, the general critical response to “The Road” has been positive. In the last three weeks, it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
While the Pulitzers aren’t perfect in their selections (e.g. “Gilead”), their praise of “The Road” is warranted. Digging beneath the structure, style and tone, one finds at the core of the novel the classic father-son story of tension of love, frustration and the inability to communicate.
Another way to see the father-son relationship is as an allegory. The ever-cautious father represents Survival. He frequently threatens, steals from and sometimes even kills other people to save his son and himself. The son, contrarily, represents Compassion. He often pesters his father to assist the ravaged, desperate people they encounter. The novel, then, becomes the inner struggle between serving oneself and serving others.
A final interpretation is to see “The Road” as an attempt to face mortality. An old, accomplished writer at the end of his life, McCarthy faces the mystery that lies beyond the grave. Perhaps the darkness of the post-apocalyptic world is the darkness of death, and the father and son are our wandering souls searching to make sense of the incomprehensible terror of the present and the rapidly fading memories of the past.
In “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy brings his audience into a grim and barren landscape through his (tiringly) stark prose, forcing them to confront the possibility of a dismal future. As a graduating senior, I hope I won’t have to relate....less
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Kt
read and liked
Nick's
review of The Road:
"I wrestled with a final rating for this. "The Road" definitely has merit. The style is purposefully minimalist. As others have noted there are very few apostrophe's, no commas, no quotation marks. The font is dull. The paragraphs carry extr...more
I wrestled with a final rating for this. "The Road" definitely has merit. The style is purposefully minimalist. As others have noted there are very few apostrophe's, no commas, no quotation marks. The font is dull. The paragraphs carry extra spacing. The words are clipped. This all works very well for setting the atmosphere.
As others have offered it is also not the job of the author to explain away all questions. Leaving a sense of mystery can be very good for a story. We should expect that in the end there should be some questions left unanswered. We should expect this all the more when the story is written in a third person form that has a nearly claustrophobic attachment to the characters perspective.
However, we should always expect the story to make sense based on what we know of how the world works. The setting is not just furniture. This is true in all settings, even fantasy and science fiction. In Tolkien's world dragons may breath fire but apples still fall down. As the setting becomes grittier we should expect the rules to be tighter and more menacing.
Unfortunately, rules don't apply in "The Road". We are presented with an apocalyptic world where every meal counts and where people have turned to cannibalism to survive. And here we are presented with our first problem. Cannibalism as a survival technique isn't very efficient. Eating people that are emaciated by hunger doesn't result in a good transfer of calories. Yet the book strongly implies that the cannibalistic cults have been active for years.
Also odd is that they have avoided the bodies. The father and son are constantly coming across corpses. Some of them still smell. More than a few are mummified. Why not boil those down, since they seem to be plentiful, before having to chase and hunt humans "on the hoof"? It isn't that this makes the cults suicidal and stupid, the problem is that there is no reason for them still existing.
There are other logical inconstancies. The father and son eat dried apples from a field in a world were clouds, rain, and snow seem to be constant. How exactly are they dry? The sun can't dry them out and neither can the heat. All of that is gone.
Nothing grows except one instance of fungus. If everything is dead, except the humans, where did the fungus come from? If fungus survived, why not moss? After all of this time why isn't life coming back? Even Chernobyl is virtual a parkland now. There appears to be no radiation in this world yet nothing lives, why? There are fires being set by the cults yet houses, and the author spends some time describing what is wooden frame construction sitting next to the burnt out houses, still stand. Fires are also being set to what, charcoal? The author doesn't have to explain all of these things, but he does have to be consistent.
Since humans, lumbering giants at the tip of the food pyramid, survived he has to show what happened to the mice. And no, canned food doesn't count. Even a survivalist will only pack enough for his family for six months to a few years. The book implies that the son was born at the time of the disaster and he's old enough now to hold a conversation and be useful which implies that he's at least four years old. Why isn't the food all gone? Given that nothing lives, why not avoid the calorie expenditure and sit on any store of food you find rather than tromping through freezing weather to find the shore. Most critical of all, if there is a reason, why not impart this reason to your son?
Since the book never answers these questions it has to rely on style, which is done well, and a questionable emotional appeal. It is, in many ways, the worst of modern decadence. It expects us to not ask any important questions about the setting and instead feel for the horrors that the characters face. It is a very subtle and powerful form of emotional blackmail. It teaches us to be less than human, to fear and not to think about what we fear....less
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January 15
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Kt
gave
to:
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Hardcover)
by Jeffrey Toobin
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my rating:
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read in February, 2008
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