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July 14
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March 26
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Angie
gave
to:
Eeeee Eee Eeee (Paperback)
by Tao Lin (Goodreads author!)
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended to Angie by:
whoever designed the cover
recommended for: people who need people
read in March, 2008
Angie said:
"I read this book in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to a nearby Barnes & Noble. The Barnes & Noble has four floors. On the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in...more
I read this book in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to a nearby Barnes & Noble. The Barnes & Noble has four floors. On the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, I can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything I want. That’s not true; technically, I can’t eat in these places, but no one has ever stopped me. Once I brought in a sandwich and a beer and sat on the small stage in the front of the room, because I liked the way the light was coming in through the window over it. It’s as if by acting with enough confidence and nonchalance, I can persuade the people around me that I know more about the rules than they do.
I have decided that this is the only way to read this book—in erratic and unannounced bursts, alone in a place that is not my home, in flagrant and yet utterly unchecked violation of the rules of social conduct, surrounded by strangers who are having hushed and incredibly serious conversations about things that strike me as wholly meaningless. Really, I think it’s the only way to understand this book.
In eeeee eee eeee’s two hundred or so pages, characters drift in and out, with little or no fuss made over their entrances or exits. Some of them have extensive back stories; some of them seem to have no history whatsoever. Some of them play main roles for a chapter or two, dominating the entire plot, and then vanish and are never mentioned again. Some of them are children. Some of them are bears. Some of them are so unspeakably isolated and untethered that they can’t visualize their own thoughts or desires clearly enough in their own minds to devote an action to them and instead wander numbly from one stationary object to another, looking, turning away, seeing nothing, responding to nothing. This is a lot like the reading room of a popular Greenwich Village book store, and every public space is a microcosm representative of the broader, surrounding population. So eeeee eee eeee is about twenty-something-year-old pizza-deliverymen who have ironic and seemingly purposeless conversations with their friends, and it is about dolphins that live in an underground city and sometimes bludgeon celebrities, and it is about hamsters trying to explain the underground city to strangers in a park. But through these things, through their randomness and disconnectedness and the flatness with which the characters in the novel receive them, it becomes a spot-on telling of the state of society. it may be my generation's catcher in the rye.
We think we’re bored, but maybe we aren’t, and either way we aren’t sure how to fix it. We try things that don’t work, but we think they should have worked, so we don’t admit that they didn’t; then we are bored and depressed, and we can’t admit that either. We don’t know what to say instead, and we aren’t sure who to talk to, but we’re afraid to stop talking. Sometimes we do terrible things and don’t know why; we regret them, we cry about them, and we do them again. Sometimes the only way you can think of to tell your sister that you love her and you’re lonely and you want to be her friend is to sit on her head. Sometimes people die and no one talks about it at all, and it feels incredibly strange, to know that someone has died and no one is talking about it, and you want to ask everyone why they aren’t talking about it, but you know that you will never ask and that no one will ever explain it, and it makes you desperate. It makes you so desperate that you cover a moose’s head with a blanket and punch it in the face, and when it says, “Thank you,” you want to give it a cookie and kill it and drown, you love it and envy it so much.
eeeee eee eeee is about an invisible person in the center of a crowd of millions of people listening to one person nearby saying, “I’m so tired today. Every time I try to think about something, I forget and think about something else,” and wondering, “Am I tired? Is that what’s wrong?” and writing, “I’m so tired today,” and knowing it isn’t the answer, and thinking about someone who isn't there, and moving to a different seat. That person disappears for two weeks and then comes back, and no one mentions it. Someone stands on a chair and throws a bottle, and someone starts to cry, and everyone looks up and thinks, “I wonder if that would make me happy,” and then goes back to their books.
...less
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March 06
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Angie
marked as to-read:
How the Dead Dream (Hardcover)
by Lydia Millet
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Angie said:
"i heard lydia millet read the first chapter of this book in a soho cafe, and when she stopped i wanted to crawl to her and wrap myself around her leg and beg her to read the next one. i don't enjoy touching strangers, or most people i know, and gener...more
i heard lydia millet read the first chapter of this book in a soho cafe, and when she stopped i wanted to crawl to her and wrap myself around her leg and beg her to read the next one. i don't enjoy touching strangers, or most people i know, and generally have no urge to do so. that's how fierce lydia is. ...less
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February 25
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Angie
gave
to:
Toygiants (Hardcover)
by Eugen Blume
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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recommended for: liberals who were once children and who do not have children of their own
read in February, 2008
Angie said:
"i didn't technically read this book, as it is a photo book and contains no (or at least very few) words. i did sit obtrusively and unapologetically in the middle of the shoe section of a west village urban outfitters and look at the book for about tw...more
i didn't technically read this book, as it is a photo book and contains no (or at least very few) words. i did sit obtrusively and unapologetically in the middle of the shoe section of a west village urban outfitters and look at the book for about twenty minutes, and i decided that it was the most attractive thing in the store. if you know me and urban outfitters, you know that that's saying a lot. of course, if you also know me and weird toys, you aren't surprised in the least. if you didn't know me at all before reading this, well, now you do. i like overpriced tunics and curiously lurid objects made of injection-molded plastic. ...less
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February 19
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Angie
marked as to-read:
A Fraction of the Whole (Hardcover)
by Steve Toltz
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Angie
marked as to-read:
Bang Crunch (Hardcover)
by Neil Smith
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Angie
gave
to:
Still Life with Woodpecker (Paperback)
by Tom Robbins
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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recommended for: redheads, people who used to meditate religiously but now feel kind of sheepish about that
read in February, 2008
Angie said:
"Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins, and you like him or you don't; I do. There is something about the stoner-cowboy vernacular of the thirty-something 1970s-era male that I find endlessly endearing. It is this vernacular that I am holding resp...more
Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins, and you like him or you don't; I do. There is something about the stoner-cowboy vernacular of the thirty-something 1970s-era male that I find endlessly endearing. It is this vernacular that I am holding responsible for this book's tendency to remind me, constantly and throughout my entire reading of it, of The Executioner's Song. I thought that maybe it was the fact that the main characters of the two stories shared a lot of similar traits, like bad teeth and criminal tendencies and a not entirely commendable fondness for hot-tempered, barely-adult females. Then I thought that it was the photo of Tom Robbins on the back of the book, because Tom looks almost exactly like Gary Gilmore looked in my imagination. But in the end I decided that it was the tone and rhythm of the narrative, a casual, grinning, shaggy-haired, budweiser-downing, dirt-under-the-fingernails sort of sound that you can imagine enjoying having as a neighbor, until it lost it one night and shot out its girlfriend's windshield after a drunken fight and the cops kept you up until 3 a.m. with their lights and bullhorns. Still Life with Woodpecker reads like a story that Gary Gilmore might have written. This says something about their shared generation, and something (potentially negative) about Tom Robbins, but I think it says the most about Norman Mailer, whom I must genuflect to once more for so flawlessly capturing so many characters in so much three-dimensional detail. Still Life with Woodpecker is not Robbins's best work, and it won't challenge you or linger in your mind after you've finished it. But if you are looking for an easy-going friend to drink a couple of beers and discuss your hazy theories on the grand scheme with on your porch some Saturday night, this is your guy....less
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Angie
gave
to:
No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories (Hardcover)
by Miranda July
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in February, 2008
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January 22
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Angie
gave
to:
Remainder (Paperback)
by Tom McCarthy
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended to Angie by:
a very mean ad in "the new yorker"
recommended for: nihilists, freshman/sophomore philosophy majors
read in October, 2007
Angie said:
"this book caused me pain. honest, physical pain, primarily in my neck and shoulders, but also a little bit in my left eyeball, where i believe some cellular degradation and apoptosis took place, and also diffusely and bilaterally in the temporomandib...more
this book caused me pain. honest, physical pain, primarily in my neck and shoulders, but also a little bit in my left eyeball, where i believe some cellular degradation and apoptosis took place, and also diffusely and bilaterally in the temporomandibular region. it also induced some psychological and existential suffering, and i believe that this was more the author's aim. that being said, mccarthy comes across as the kind of writer who wouldn't be sad to hear that there were negative physical sequelae associated with reading his novel all the way to the end. sometimes the side effects can't be helped. sometimes they are even a necessary part of the reading experience.
sorry, mccarthy, but this was not one of those times. you wounded me for nothing. thanks. jerk.
plot rundown: a presumably average bloke with average friends and average lady troubles is struck by falling debris of unknown (and legally nondisclosable) origin. he lapses into a coma and awakes with some severe motor deficits--specifically, he can't remember how to move. anything. at all. he relearns eventually but is only able to animate his various body parts by thinking very specifically about what and how he would like to move, and he can't escape the feeling that his new motion is somehow less than "actual" motion. having to think about every move before he undertakes it leaves him distanced from his own body, forced to watch it and instruct it and dictate to it like an off-screen director, rather than simply exist within it like he imagines most people do. this necessary scripting and conscious control of all of his actions makes the narrator feel conspicuously "inauthentic," and the more he considers his circumstances, the more certain he is that inauthenticity has been his default state for most of his life. this troubles him immensely, and he devotes himself to pinpointing a time and place in which he was entirely authentic and then synthetically replicating the movement and surroundings, believing that if he can precisely fabricate or mimic authenticity and then prolong the moment of it, he will be able to memorize it and retrain himself to attain it without deliberation.
i assume that we all see how this is a flawed supposition. i imagine that many of you might even roll your eyes a bit at the cartoonish magnitude of the flaw. this is not the thing that causes the pain. the pain is caused by the narrator's manic and escalating pursuit of fabricated authenticity coupled with his and all supporting characters' failure to note the flaw. this is how allegory works, perhaps? only the divine overseer (i.e., tom mccarthy, me, you if you have read the book) has full awareness of the foolishness and futility of the players' desperate little dance, and in that way he or she gets to feel superior while recognizing something that the characters never see?
i don't know. if that were all there was to it, this book could have ended at least a hundred pages before it did. mccarthy was after something bigger. he was trying to do something, to us, really do something. and i thought i knew what, and then i realized that was wrong but thought of something else that might be it, and . . . no, that wasn't it, but it's probably--no. crap. oh, i know! i know, it's--
and then the book ended, and it wasn't that last thing, either, and i was left alone, angry and bewildered, with my pain. my very authentic pain. why have you done this, tom mccarthy? i wondered. why have you written this story full of blatantly misguided actions that no one perceives or corrects, with this ending that teaches me nothing and gives me no hope? all of the sidetracks and seemingly pertinent but ultimately irrelevant details, all of the build-ups that come to naught, why?
and then i knew why. and i thought, oh, aren't you clever, you microcosm-crafting pedant. aren't you precious. can't you follow the trail of knots and pinched nerves in my sad little spine, the one that you've induced with your hypercrafted philosophy seminar, down to its grand conclusion and kiss my authentic ass.
three stars, though. mccarthy knows how to craft a sentence and a scene, and i would never become invested enough in a meritless piece of writing to get this angry about it. i haven't read his short stories, but i probably will, because he does have talent (even if he occasionally inflates or abuses it), and because i am not the sort to hold a grudge. also, i imagine they're better than remainder. the transition from short story to novel can be difficult for the best writer, and ideas aren't always equally suited to both mediums. remainder might have been a blistering short story, and mccarthy's next idea might make for a genius novel. i am not too sore to offer him the benefit of the doubt. but if the next book has the same effect on my jaw, i may not be too magnanimous to send him my dental bill. ...less
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"i used to intern at godine--"
