From the Bookshelf of Ask Gary Shteyngart - Friday, March 7th!…
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What Members Thought
The targets were too big for his satire to sting. Facebook sucks, people are superficial, the rich diss and exploit the poor, nobody reads anymore, people want to live forever but need to accept their own mortality, the culture's too saturated with slick sex, our economy's in shambles...all the pomo satire on late capitalism stuff which we've all come to know and love. Not to play 'gotcha' but M.T. Anderson's Feed is much better at all of this material, I say.
I'm not saying this to hate on Shte ...more
I'm not sure what it says about me that the last two books I've read now were written in diary form (maybe that I'm a snoop?) but I can tell you this- Shteyngart has written a wildly inventive, somewhat jaw dropping novel. It's the way I felt about seeing films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Brazil, or perhaps like reading Ferris' "Then We Came to the End" or Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". The vividness of the writing, the alternating amusement and pathos, a world t
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I've always thought that the more you can envision the scenario in a dystopian novel actually coming to pass, the scarier the novel is. By that standard, Super Sad True Love Story is a terrifying book. The future described takes our current world and extrapolates out what will happen if we keep going in a number of current directions. What if we keep being addicted to electronic media, especially for social interaction? A world where everyone is online all the time and are addicted to being rank
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Oh mr. shteyngart, it's true...i love you! let me count the ways.
I love the adjectives and nouns you couple. how do you even think up some of these combos? I could watch you play abridged madlibs for hours and hours and never get bored.
I love your sentences. Those adjective-nouns add up. and, they add up good. Sometimes i forget about the story and just reread a sentence 2 or 3 times. or 10.
And the obvious. you;re mad funny. you're a bard and a prophet for this century...both warning and inspiri ...more
I love the adjectives and nouns you couple. how do you even think up some of these combos? I could watch you play abridged madlibs for hours and hours and never get bored.
I love your sentences. Those adjective-nouns add up. and, they add up good. Sometimes i forget about the story and just reread a sentence 2 or 3 times. or 10.
And the obvious. you;re mad funny. you're a bard and a prophet for this century...both warning and inspiri ...more
A great book. I experienced a loss of confidence at the beginning, where for the first few chapters I was turned off by what seemed to be a mediocre tale told by a typical self-deprecating, Asian-chick-fetishizing Jewish intellectual male character. I persevered. I'm glad I did. This is no ordinary satire of the future's horrifying possibilities; this is a mirror held up to the present (an entertaining, frightening and emotionally charged mirror).
Incidentally, I enjoyed the compare-and-contrast ...more
Incidentally, I enjoyed the compare-and-contrast ...more
The first book I've read by Shteyngart after seeing it reviewed favorably everywhere. I thought it was very smart and witty and he is clearly very smart. Scary to read a fictionalize sci-fi account of America that is not far from where we are today.
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Easily one of the best books I have read in a while.
Really enjoyable and a great story. Highly recommended reading.
Really enjoyable and a great story. Highly recommended reading.
Technically it's sic-fi of the absurd satire type but the world Shteyngart describes feels creepily plausible and in many instances even familiar.
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If I had to marry a book, it would probably be this one. Sharp, sparkling writing and an incredibly well-hewn story about the intersection of tech, politics, family, the financial crisis, and love (or a close approximation of love, anyway) in a dystopian future. I wish I could write this well. I'm so glad that Shteyngart does.
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Wow, this is an anxiety provoking vision set in the not do distant future. It was very disturbing to read. And yes, I was a little freaked out when a Cobra gunship flew over the Brooklyn bridge while my sons rode the carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It brought the novel into focus at that instant. It is satire folks, but deadly serious in a way...
Like writing style but this story was soooo depressing.
Perfectly frightening.
"American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it."
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Mar 16, 2010
Steve Mac
marked it as to-read
Dec 07, 2010
Anita
marked it as to-read
Aug 24, 2011
Ellen
marked it as considering-reading-these
