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| 059353560X
| 9780593535608
| 059353560X
| 4.00
| 35,007
| Jan 17, 2023
| Jan 17, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but
2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but that I’m just now getting to, that he’s one of the few authors out there I’m a legitimate completist of, meaning I’ve read literally every novel he’s ever written. Technically I suppose that should make him appear in my Great Completist Challenge I regularly add to here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, about two dozen writers strong at this point; the problem, though, is that I’ve read very few of Ellis’s novels since joining Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ way back in 2006, so I didn’t have a reason or an outlet for writing reviews of any of those older ones. My love for Ellis in fact goes all the way back to my freshman year in college, September 1986, the exact same time the paperback version of Less Than Zero was published for the first time, which I picked up on a lark* and was immediately bowled over by. And with Ellis being only five years older than me (he famously started writing Less Than Zero in high school, and got it published by a major press as an undergraduate, because of growing up rich in Los Angeles and so already having footholds in the industry), I deeply connected with his themes of Generation X undergraduate alienation that lay at the heart of his writing, and especially two years later when he published the much more college-focused The Rules of Attraction, when I was now a junior in college myself and had finally had some of the “do too many drugs on a Saturday night, sleep with a stranger, avoid them in the dorm cafeteria Sunday morningâ€� drama fueling that book. *I’ve told this story several times now, but my freshman year in college, I bought every single contemporary novel chosen as a staff recommendation at my university’s bookstore that school year, and every album chosen as a staff recommendation at the hipster Streetside Records, which inundated me with great legitimate indie projects for the first time in my life, all at once at eighteen. In fact, it’s fair to say that Ellis eventually became known precisely for this cool ironic Generation X blase attitude about the world, in fact became somewhat of a spokesperson for it, especially when he published the notorious high point/low point of this Tarantino-esque ironic cool world-weariness, 1991’s American Psycho -- a book that disgusted a lot of people, got initially dropped by its first publisher under pressure from moral crusaders, eventually had its reputation changed by Mary Harron’s sly film adaptation that recasts it as a black comedy about â€�80s white-male Reagan excess, but was never really meant by Ellis to be a comedy, but rather a pinnacle of the cold nihilism Generation X had become known for by this point. So all these years later, that’s what makes The Shards so remarkable for long-time readers like me, even though it’s something that might miss more casual or newer readers of his (we’ll see -- I’m going to start reading everyone else’s reviews right after I post mine); for in his late fifties, Ellis has finally and fully embraced the earnestness and sometimes weepy plain emotions that are now a hallmark of the artistic movement going on right now, the one that started replacing Postmodernism in the early â€�00s (let’s call its start September 11th, and the date it was fully the new force in the arts Obama’s first election in 2008), which you might call Sincereism for lack of a better cultural term. (Susan Sontag, where are you when we need you?) °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s right, Bret Easton Ellis shows sincere emotions in this novel, and the results are in fact quite good indeed, as if you took a novel like Less Than Zero and gave it to someone now to write a contemporary Woke version of, but still set in 1981. °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s the first thing to know here, that it’s yet another one of those slippery novels that have peppered Ellis’s career, where he himself seems to appear in the novel as his true self, but with weird and intense fictional genre things going on in the story too, like vampires or werewolves or serial killers or whatnot. Namely, it’s set in Ellis’s senior year of high school, in the tony areas of 1981 Los Angeles, but framed in the prologue as if real-life 59-year-old Ellis here in the 2020s is thinking back on those days, both telling us the story and analyzing the events from the perspective of the much older, sadder and wiser late-middle-ager he now is. Given that the similarly autobiographical Less Than Zero is set only one year later, during the Christmas break of the Ellis stand-in character’s freshman year of college (and actually written back when the events happened), this is essentially a changed, softer Ellis looking back on roughly the same events covered in his first novel, but now with a much different eye and both a compassion and damnation for these stupid little fucked-up kids he and all his friends were that’s lacking in the earlier novel (indeed, what made the earlier novel famous to begin with). °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s mostly what this novel is about, and I encourage fellow readers to enjoy it at its fullest by essentially accepting all the non-fantastical stuff as probably true, because it probably is, and I personally think that this is why Ellis probably wrote this novel at this point in his life, because he wanted to look back on a rather tumultuous period of his life with clear eyes and a willingness to call out his own bad behavior. Namely, what a huge portion of this novel is about (and what you could argue even the entire novel is about, even the fantastical part, but more on this in a bit) is Ellis’s burgeoning gay sexual identity in his late teen years when hitting the peak of puberty, how he used a lot of subterfuge to hide it in a pre-queer â€�80s, how he deliberately hid it from some of his best friends and ended up causing a lot of hurt and damage, and especially how he hid it from the girlfriend he had at the time, even while physically exploring more and more with the various boys and men in his life who he got “the vibeâ€� from. In this, the issue of what “in the closetâ€� exactly meant in the â€�80s, versus who was willing to have a dick in their mouth or ass, is one of the more complex and therefore interesting parts of this novel, in that Ellis describes a whole series of situations he was in back then (if, that is, you accept that most of what he’s writing about here is based on true stories, of course) -- such as this weed-dealing loner at his high school, for example, essentially living by himself in the guesthouse of his parentsâ€� estate, who Ellis is pretty sure isn’t actually gay, but is just a horny teen boy who will take any sloppy stoned sex that falls into his lap that he can get. Or the friend slowly turned lover who in a post-closet world Ellis probably could’ve had a very nice romantic relationship with, but who instead has a tension-filled and ultimately traumatic time with since they were still living in a world that required them to be in the closet. Or the male best friend who he’s had since childhood, but during puberty he developed a sexual crush on, which turned into a messy threeway Freudian fantasy situation in his head when the guy started dating one of his female childhood friends, one he’s always been close to and who have asked each other over the years why they’ve never tried dating, anyway. It’s the ongoing domestic dramas of the people I just described that takes up 80 percent of this novel (or maybe I’ll say 80 percent of why you should read this novel), and the complex pushes and pulls they all go through as they’re thrown to and fro by hormones, the stress of pre-adulthood, and unwise parental decisions to let them all have easy access to liquor and cocaine. That stuff is very interesting; and while I’ll let the ending remain spoiler-free, I’ll say that it ends in tragedy, and that it’s thoroughly Ellis’s (the character’s) stupid fucking behavior that causes it, which is perhaps the most interesting thing of all. This feels like Ellis really getting a lot off his chest forty years after a bunch of traumatic things happened in real life when he was a teen, especially when he makes it clear in this book that the main reason he ran off to Bennington College all the way across the country was precisely to get away from all these people back in LA he’d deeply hurt, and that the reason Less Than Zero is about the awkward, tension-filled high-school relationships of a college freshman, as he returns to LA for Christmas break, is that this was what his freshman year of college actually was like, including losing the friendship for good of almost everyone involved. Oh yeah, and there’s a serial killer. Did I not mention that? Because of course there is -- this wouldn’t be an Ellis novel without the inclusion of a horror-film staple! Usually, though, these characters are sort of complexly and obliquely woven in to the “realâ€� universe of Ellis’s novels; but here, though, he makes it extremely clear that we’re supposed to see the newly arrived transfer student Robert Mallory as a symbol and not a legitimate part of the story, not the least reason of which is that he has Robert literally say directly to Bret (the character) during an early tense conversation, “Everything bad you see in me, you see in yourself.â€� Although high-school Bret strongly suspects Robert as the secret identity of a “Zodiac Killerâ€�-type murderer on the loose in LA at the time, his friends (all of them growing closer and closer to Robert themselves, including his childhood female friend starting an affair with him) think that it’s Bret who’s actually thinking crazy. And indeed, as the book continues, this becomes more and more of a serious possibility; and in this many will see shades of Ellis’s 1998 conceptual epic Glamorama (which the author has stated before is his personal favorite of his career), from the mysterious beige van that starts following Bret to the freakish encounters he starts having with a Manson Family-type cult in the area, the narrator suddenly turning unreliable with no notice, the difficulty he has understanding anymore what actions he is doing versus him watching one of the other characters do it, starting to obsessively list celebrities at a party, so many and so famous that it can’t possibly be true, etc. But unlike the sorta surreal saga he meant Glamorama as, it’s clear (at least to me) that here Ellis means for Robert to be much more metaphorical, basically the Imp of the Perverse when it comes to the young, stupid teenaged Ellis’s closeted gay status; that is, he’s the external manifestation of all the damage Ellis psychically does to a lot of people around him, by having sex with strange men under strange circumstances while also trying to live a publicly straight life that involves the intimacy and trust of a lot of people. I think this is a very valid way of interpreting this book (and again, I’ll be interested in seeing what other reviewers have to say), that the “serial killerâ€� here is Ellis’s own real-life inability to come out of the closet in these years, throwing himself into a series of stupid sexual opportunities simply because he could and ending up damaging the lives of a whole circle of people around him. All the people who get injured and/or die in this book because of the serial killer, after all, are the same ones who get deeply hurt by Ellis’s behavior as a closeted gay man; that’s a hard thing to misinterpret, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, I’m not coming out of left field here; Ellis has been talking in the last year and a half during interviews and on his podcast about how it’s only now, in his late fifties and after publishing this book, that he feels that he can really come out publicly as fully just a gay man now, versus the rest of his adult life when he’s been pretending to be bisexual (but being very loud about it, and especially the gay parts, because this too fit into this Tarantino-esque “white males behaving badlyâ€� paradigm of â€�90s Gen X arts). He wouldn’t be saying that if he hadn’t worked through something while writing this book (which he began during the pandemic, and originally released as chapters of an audiobook performed himself for his podcast), so I feel like this is all a fair way to interpret this novel, as Ellis really coming to terms with his sexuality for the first time by going through this trial by fire where he had to acknowledge and then forgive himself for a lot of youthful transgressions (which, if we assume to be true, legitimately are pretty horrific in some cases, making it easy to see why Ellis chose a serial killer as his “id monsterâ€� here). °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s a welcome surprise -- one of the architects of the White Male Postmodernist Generation-X Tarantino 1990s Arts Patriarchy, now embracing sincere emotions and Complex Feels for the first time in his career, and turning in an incredibly insightful, entertaining, and sometimes legitimately chilling story because of it, one that superbly examines the infinite drama that comes with being teenage and gay in a setting where they can’t be public about it. It comes strongly recommended to one and all for these reasons, and I can absolutely say that it will be making my annual “Best Reads of the Yearâ€� list coming in another couple of months. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 21, 2024
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Oct 21, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1948830809
| 9781948830805
| 1948830809
| 3.55
| 416
| unknown
| Mar 26, 2024
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2024 reads, #65. DID NOT FINISH. I have to admit, I have a certain amount of perverse admiration for Johan Harstad, for daring to write a naked ripoff
2024 reads, #65. DID NOT FINISH. I have to admit, I have a certain amount of perverse admiration for Johan Harstad, for daring to write a naked ripoff of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (or at least a ripoff of its Postmodernist conceit that “the footnotes actually ARE the novel!â€�), 30 years after the original and 25 years after the death of Postmodernism (which I considered to have been murdered on 9/11, at the same time as the World Trade Center explosions), a showoffy academic parlor trick that was just barely tolerated even during its popular height and that certainly no one will put up with now. That said, for obvious reasons I didn’t actually end up reading very much of this, once it arrived from the Chicago Public Library and I realized its snotty MFA nature for the first time, nor can I recommend it to anyone besides the most hardcore Pomo hangers-on out there, tightly gripping their back issues of ²Ñ³¦³§·É±ð±ð²Ô±ð²â’s and sipping on their PBR in a can while loudly insisting to anyone who will listen that irony isn’t dead, of course irony will never be dead as long as the world still has postgrad students. Buyer beware!
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1
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not set
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Oct 06, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0374602638
| 9780374602635
| 0374602638
| 3.90
| 199,883
| Sep 24, 2024
| Sep 24, 2024
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2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for t
2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for the first time right in a row, so that I could get caught up on why she’s such the big Indie Lit Brooklyn NPR It Girl these days; and while I only loved the first book but disliked the other two, I did vow that I would at least continue to read her next one as well, because I liked the first book so much that I’ve been willing to cut her a lot of slack. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t even make it all the way through that next one now that it’s finally upon us, 2024’s Intermezzo which was just released a week or two before I’m originally posting this, so my willingness to check out any of her new work in the future is now starting to drop precipitously low. I suppose it will be satisfying to those who are looking exactly for this kind of book, but I gotta admit that it’s just not my cup of tea -- rambling, precious domestic dramas about the human condition where almost nothing of note actually happens, in which middle-class intellectuals are gently miserable mostly from their own deliberate behavior, written in an overly pretentious style full of incomplete sentences and no quotation marks around dialogue, exactly like the MFAer both she and the most fervent of her fanbase are. I got through the first ten percent, but found it so tedious that I then did my usual thing in that situation and skipped straight to the last ten percent, to see if there’s anything there so intriguing that it will convince me to change my mind and go back and read the full thing; but there wasn’t. (A little tip: If you read the first ten percent of a book and then skip straight to the last ten percent and you can still make complete, perfect sense out of what’s going on, that’s a book whose inner 80 percent is not worth your time.) So that’s it, Rooney! I got 136 ebooks currently on my Kindle Oasis, so I don’t got time to hang in there with a book I immediately grew tedious of right from the start (ugh, so many incomplete sentences masquerading as “personal style,� right from the very first page), so it’s quickly on to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing beginning tomorrow! Sorry, authors of the world, but that’s just the way it is! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 27, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1638931089
| 9781638931089
| 1638931089
| 3.16
| 1,580
| May 21, 2024
| May 21, 2024
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2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I pick
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I picked up the book in the first place, once again proving the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can decide what to read next by one.â€� Then after it arriving from the Chicago Public Library, I learned that it’s the latest title by , in which they asked the delightfully dark and weird Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to hand-pick a series of unknown experimental female authors who deserve more attention, which is an admirable project and one that deserves our support. Then there’s the engaging story concept itself, a subversive coming-of-age tale about a ten-year-old girl who has recently discovered cursing as her new religion, as she develops a fascination for a twenty-something juvenile delinquent who’s been forced by the courts to move into the sort-of co-op, sort-of halfway home where our hero Molly (the “Kittentitsâ€� of the book’s title) lives with her zany dad and even zanier housemates, the whole thing set in Chicago where I live, which is always a nice bonus. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a bit of a slipstream alternative history going on here too; in the world of Kittentits, Chicago is about to host a World’s Fair in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the famous one that first put them on the global cultural map, while no such fair took place here in our version of the multiverse. But alas, there were just too many problems in this book for me to be able to get into it in any other way than a purely intellectual, stroking my chin while murmuring, “Hmm, that was cleverâ€� way, which perhaps reflects the fact that author Holly Wilson is a professional academe with a PhD in creative writing, which as we were just discussing a few weeks ago tends to be the death knell for the ability to write really engaging fiction anymore. The main problem is that Wilson has written this entire thing in an extremely experimental style, one that omits all quotation marks, is always dropping words you would normally find in real conversations, and really playing up the slang, in order to present this highly stylized prose that’s simply difficult to follow along with; then she marries it to the kind of “quirky unto infinityâ€� milieu that became so big in the popular culture in the early 2000s (think Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.; and let’s not even get started on ). °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s not bad unto itself, but unfortunately for Wilson, that endlessly quirky style really got played out among audiences by the end of that decade, meaning that she’s not far enough away from those years to present this as a retro-quirky novel but not close enough to those years for readers to be able to enjoy it unironically. Or I suppose I should say “enjoy it in an ironic way unironically,â€� which is a big part of why this style burned itself out; by the time Postmodernism wheezed out its last gasps before its death, right around Obama’s first Presidential win in 2008 which birthed our current Wokeism artistic movement, it had become so masturbatory and deadpan and self-referential, it was impossible to enjoy it anymore in any kind of simple, unironic way. So, while I applaud Wilson for doing an excellent job at late-period Postmodernism, I have to confess that I simply don’t want to read even a single new book in that style ever again, which made me lose interest in this book quickly despite it actually being well-written (or at least as “well-writtenâ€� as you can say about a book that’s deliberately trying to challenge readers to put it back down again, one of the biggest problematic side-effects of devoting your entire life to academic scholarly study of creative writing, that the obsessive desire to “out-fancyâ€� your peers results in books that practically scream, “I DARE you to make it to the last page of this novel!â€�). That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid it, but certainly you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into before you pick it up. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 15, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0385549970
| 9780385549974
| 0385549970
| 3.85
| 3,441
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entra
2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “trueâ€� to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokesâ€� are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes. And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not whiteâ€�); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing upâ€� his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?â€�); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself. But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions. And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background. Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away. But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villainâ€� story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-heroâ€� in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel cultureâ€� that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years. It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the yearâ€� list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 117,242
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the â€�70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friendsâ€� parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swissâ€� (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,â€� by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Yearâ€� list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
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2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of ang
2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of angry comments. I’d tell you more, but...well, you know.
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| Feb 13, 2024
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2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie
2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie-rocker with a [rolls eyes] PhD in creative writing, in which he comments in a disappointedly on-the-nose way on the ugliness and darkness of modern life through the filter of a Netflix-style streaming series about plastic dolls come to life, full of cutesy little twee details like all of them talking in the truncated, deliberately silly style of doge memes (“Forget eat lunch. Big hungry. Chicken look wow wowâ€�), and everything in their world having cutesy little twee generic names, like Nuclear Family for the name of this plastic society’s most popular television show. Then if this wasn’t enough hipster tweeness for you, he then tells the story itself not through a regular omniscient narrator but by literally describing every scene out loud, as if he’s watching the show on Netflix and we’re on the other end of a phone and he’s just literally telling us everything that’s happening on the screen as it’s happening. (“And then the next scene opens with the plastic girl driving her car, and then...â€�) Ugh, contemporary literature really is dead, isn’t it? Like always with books I give up on, I went ahead and read everyone else’s reviews before writing mine, just in case something happens later in the book that’s so compelling that it inspires me to pick the book back up again (which, you know, has happened before); but when I did this with Plastic, I was suddenly confronted over and over with what I consider the scourge of online artistic criticism these days, review after review that said, “This made me cry! FIVE STARS!â€� °Õ³ó²¹³Ù’s not a fucking critical review, people; I could punch you in the face and make you cry too, but that doesn’t deserve five stars either. It’s books like these that make me glad I’m entirely out of the indie-lit game now myself, and it’s also books like these that make me realize why I’ve been gravitating more and more in the 21st century towards good solid genre novels like crime, science-fiction and romance; and that’s because the only contemporary human-interest novels that can seemingly even get published anymore is silly little gimmicky easily-marketed MFA/NPR nonsense like this, where the author not only has nothing but a facile and obvious point to make, but then beats you over the head with this facile and obvious point, seemingly all their sins washed away because they wrote it in a cutesy style that makes for good Facebook updates. (“This made me cry! FIVE STARS!!!!!!!1!!!â€�) If you’re a fellow grown-up who weeps for the lack of good, solid contemporary human-interest novels for grown-ups anymore, avoid this one like the plague. ...more |
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Mar 18, 2024
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed
2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed back in my own indie-lit days. Of course, it's been a while since my own indie-lit days, and I learned then that Mohr has actually published an additional three books since I first lost track of him; so after first tackling his equal parts hilarious and harrowing memoir about being a reckless drug addict in 1990s San Francisco, 2021's Model Citizen (my review), I decided to go all the way back to the oldest book of his I missed the first time around, 2011's Damascus, put out by the admirable indie press Two Dollar Radio ("admirable" = "one of the only indie presses of the 2010s to have its shit together enough to still be open in the 2020s"), the first of Mohr's novels to start getting him press and notice from the mainstream world (I believe it's his first book to get reviewed by the New York Times, for example, who called it "Beat-poet cool"), eventually leading to his current position in the roster of the storied mainstream press Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Unfortunately for Mohr, the type of novel he's written here was to fall profoundly out of favor during the rise of the #MeToo movement just a few years after this was originally published; written in the style of Charles Bukowski, it's about a young straight white man who owns a dive bar in the early-2000s Mission District of San Francisco, mostly as an excuse to feed his alcoholism, with Mohr using the milieu to tell a series of interconnecting stories about the lumpen proletarians who count as the bar's barely surviving regulars, giving us moments of sublime poetry that shine through the endless pile of shit, grime and semen that mostly makes up the tales in this book. Of course, as a fellow straight white male who spent a lot of his twenties exactly in these kinds of venues, I loved the book; and I'd also argue that this novel is actually much more similar to Eugene O'Neill than Bukowski, and in fact will strongly remind people who are familiar with it with the former's crowning achievement, 1946's The Iceman Cometh, in that this is not just stories about noble but terminal drunks (Bukowski's forte) but about terminal drunks who aspire for something more than this, but whose own moral cowardice gets in the way of them ever doing the right thing, a topic that O'Neill made an entire Putlizer- and Nobel-winning career out of. That said, I understand why these kinds of "tortured straight white male alcoholic is actually the greatest hero in history" stories have fallen profoundly out of favor in the 13 years since Mohr first wrote this, and so I'm happy to acknowledge that this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and can even partially agree when people react to books like these anymore with an angry sigh and a terse declaration that "that Bukowski shit" isn't for them. I get that, and I'm happy to wait patiently until the Woke Generation's kids are in their twenties, at which point they'll rebel against their own parents and suddenly these kinds of stories will be hot yet again, just in time for me to be a hip and wise grandpa; but until then, if you're ready to go against the grain and actually embrace a story about a bunch of white male assholes who should know better but simply don't, this is a great example of it to pick up, a book that many will find both deeply relatable and horrifically cringe-worthy in equal measures. If that sounds to you like the compliment I mean for it to be, then by all means pick this up; but if it simply sounds like an insult, probably best to stay far away from this short, delightfully nasty book. ...more |
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, , which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
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| 3.89
| 3,641
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| May 17, 2022
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2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professio
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's from Will & Grace). Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it. ...more |
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy w
2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy was before reading this; for fellow clueless Gen-Xers, she was on one of those cloying children's shows from Nickelodeon that polluted the airwaves during the early '00s, back when we were too old to watch such shows ourselves but not yet old enough to have kids who watched those shows, where she played not the main character but the Kramer-esque wacky next-door neighbor who became the show's breakout star. This thus made it quite a shock to her former young fans when, a decade later, she wrote a tell-all memoir alleging that the show's creator, Dan Schneider, was a sexual predator who regularly got underaged girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, and that the Nickelodeon executive suite knew this and deliberately chose not to do anything about it since Schneider (who had five different shows on the network at the time) was making such an obscene amount of money for them. Oh yeah, and her mom happened to be completely off-the-rails batshit crazy, an unmedicated schizophrenic who among other things forced an eating disorder on McCurdy at the age of ten (after forcing her into a showbiz career she didn't want in the first place), used to shower her each night and check her genitals for "abnormalities" all the way up to the age of seventeen (while forced to share the tub with her 16-year-old brother who was receiving such an examination at the same time), and who was such an unrepentant and unapologetic hoarder that eventually McCurdy had to sleep on a roll-up exercise mat on the floor at night, because her mom had taken over virtually every inch of her bedroom with random detritus. That's a lot for a single book, especially when you add McCurdy's decade of substance abuse issues after her mother's death from cancer; but the joyfully surprising thing here is that she takes it on with mastery, finesse and aplomb, putting together both a breezy and a devastating read that's easily one of my favorites out of the 100+ books I read this year. That's because McCurdy doesn't have even the slightest bit of hesitation about going warts-and-all here in this shockingly honest look at her life, by which I mean she not only spills the beans about all the abuse she suffered from all these people, but also makes it abundantly clear where she too has failed in life, where she has treated people terribly, where she had such a blinders-hobbled understanding of things like sexuality that she drove pretty much every person around her crazy (especially in most of the romantic relationships she's now been in as an adult, which she admits have almost all been because of either her own behavior or having such a stunted emotional life that she couldn't recognize terrible boyfriends before actually dating them). But what really sells this, though, and what makes it so much different than so many of these other tell-all celebrity abuse memoirs, is that McCurdy maintains an astounding sense of compassion and empathy for the people she talks about, despite the book's salacious title; for example, although she admits that her mother was unambiguously a monster, who understood that she was mentally ill but deliberately chose not to seek treatment but instead inflict her insanity on her entire family, she also easily sees the circumstances that led to her being this way (in a nutshell, her own mother, who got it from her own mother, etc.), and holds a tremendous amount of love and caring for her at the heart of this otherwise always shocking litany of human abuses she details here in her never-not-fascinating trainwreck of a childhood. I'm fairly convinced that this is why this one shines so much brighter than other celebrity tell-alls of this type, and why it's had such staying power (I myself am reading it an entire year after it first came out, because it still continues to pop up in my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends' reading lists at least once a week without fail); for while we all love to gawk at the car crash with tawdry Hollywood memoirs, here McCurdy is challenging us readers to a lot more than that, to understand how a person who did a tremendous amount of bad things can still have a good side we can celebrate, namely so that we too can see the good sides of ourselves whenever we also do bad things, as all humans do on a regular basis. That's really what elevates this book here, is McCurdy taking such a hard look at herself at the same time she's chronicling all this abuse, whether from her family or Schneider or the executives of Nickelodeon (who literally offered her a third of a million dollars in hush money to stop writing this book), understanding that to forgive the people who have done us wrong is to ultimately forgive ourselves, for the times we in turn have wronged others. That's a much deeper message, and one a lot more of us can relate to than the usual "look at the living hell these people put me through" record these types of books typically are. That's why I'm not just giving it 5 stars but will be adding to my "Best Reads of 2023" list, soon to be unveiled over at ; for it's not just horrific and entertaining but also teaches us something about the world in general, even better for refusing to come up with a pat happy ending like so many of these mainstream memoirs are forced into. If you haven't yet read this difficult, often infuriating, but nonetheless sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book, I encourage you to do so as soon as you can. ...more |
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2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for
2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for me, and her habit of delivering her punchlines in a demon-child whisper frequently annoys me -- but I find her funny enough that I wanted to read her new memoir focusing on mental illness issues, the cleverly titled Sure, I'll Join Your Cult. Unfortunately, though, when you take away the need to deliver jokes in a pronounced rhythm and while taking lots of pauses for audience reactions, this self-confessed bipolar OCD sufferer kind of just goes off the rails, giving us prose that's so packed with digressions and bulletpoint lists and jokey-joke joke joke JOOOOKES!!!!! that it eventually all becomes this stream-of-consciousness fog you can barely follow; and while I enjoyed the first chapter of this, even by page 30 I was completely and totally mentally wiped out by Bamford's exhausting Robin Williamsesque patter, and at that point needed to turn the book back in to the public library for the sake of my own mental health. If the idea of listening to a Maria Bamford standup set, while she screams it as fast as she possibly can while not even stopping for a breath, sounds like fun to you, then you should absolutely pick this up, because that's basically what this book is; for all the rest of us, perhaps stick to YouTube clips of her performances, plus of course the best thing she's ever done, the 2010s two-season Netflix absurdist sitcom masterpiece Lady Dynamite.
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Nov 12, 2023
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| 3.76
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| Jun 08, 2021
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school
2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school graduation gift; for it's not only a very well-done Personal Finance 101 primer, full of practical advice you can start doing right this second even if you have almost no money and no income, but author Anna Jo Beck spends an equal amount of time explaining why you should care about personal finance, even if you're an 18-year-old art major and anti-consumerist social activist, which was exactly what I could've used back in my young "my credit score doesn't matter because I'm never going to buy one of your bougeoise fucking McMansions in the first place" phase. It's best to think of this short, well-written guide in this way, as a gift to the young antifa in your own life, to help explain to them why they should be starting a Roth IRA as soon as possible anyway.
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| 4.22
| 34,394
| May 17, 2022
| May 17, 2022
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to
2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to see what the full 300-page version of it is like; because I gotta say, the 15-minute spoken summary I listened to made it sound like one of the most freaking pointless books that's ever existed, and I'm now really curious to read other Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews and see if those who tackled the full book came away with this impression too. Turns out co-authors (and conveniently now co-hosts of a podcast about the subject of this book, alluded to endlessly in this book) Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey used to be two unknown young actresses forever auditioning for sitcoms! Until one day they both book one! And then they meet and become friends! And then the show's a huge success! So now they're famous! FAMOUS FRIENDS! Who do things for each other and hang out with each other, oh, and they're just such good friends with each other, and did you know by the way that the entire cast of The Office was like this, no fights or drama on set, just nine straight years of a big giant GROUP OF SUCH GOOD FRIENDS OF ALL OF ONE ANOTHER!!!! Sheesh, really? It's specifically books like these that make me feel not even the tiniest fucking goddamned bit guilty about belonging to a summary service like Blinkist (which, after all, is nothing more than the 21st-century smartphone version of Cliff Notes), because there is just so little intriguing unique content here that I would feel actively ripped off if I had spent $30 and three days of my life getting through it. Blinkist wouldn't exist if there weren't so many writers and publishers willing to put out books that can be so easily summarized in 15 minutes in the first place, so that's a snake-eating-its-own-tail dilemma for a traditional publishing industry currently going through its last spasming throes before death, when it finally gets suffocated for good under the weight of 400 million new novels coming out on Amazon next year that were all written by AI chat programs. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and I'll see in other people's reviews that there was actually a whole bunch of fascinating content in the full book version that got unfairly cut out during the Blinkist synopsis, but I'm willing to bet right now that I'll actually find quite a bit of reviews that agree with my own look at the summary, that this is essentially a cotton-candy-weighing piece of supplemental fluff to support what's an equally cotton-candy-weighing supplemental fluff podcast, one that has the audacity to cash in on retro love for The Office not even ten years since it went off the air, both these projects threatening to fly off into the obscure horizon just the moment a big enough cultural wind comes through and knocks them on their way. In this case, I'm glad to have gotten through it all as quickly as I did. ...more |
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #21. As a member of Generation X, I of course obsessively played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons way back in the late '70s right a
2023 reads, #21. As a member of Generation X, I of course obsessively played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons way back in the late '70s right after the game had been invented (I bought my first Basic boxed set in 1978, just one year after they began being sold, then moved to Advanced D&D a year later); but unlike the Gen-X males who went on to be lifelong gamers (of not only RPGs but then tabletop games and then videogames), I gave up on gaming of all kinds for good a few years later as a teen in the early '80s, as my focus shifted much more to things like music and girls. So, I largely missed all the drama at the time when D&D creator Gary Gygax was forced out of his own company in 1985, then with the new executives managing to run the company completely into the ground in just over another decade after that, through a series of decisions so bad it makes the head spin still to this day, eventually going bankrupt and being bought for a pittance by their rivals, the now massive multinational corporation Wizards Of The Coast. That makes me glad for books like the new Slaying the Dragon, a clear and plainly written guide to the ultra-fascinating proceedings, penned by gaming-focused journalist Ben Riggs (who among other bona fides publishes regularly with Felicia Day's "Geek & Sundry" multimedia content company). Under his sure hand (if not dipping a little too often into Joss Whedon-level purple prose), the story he paints is almost ridiculously easy to understand in hindsight: a group of dysfunctional, nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin, who are used to "publishing" their guides as xeroxed booklets and maybe selling in the hundreds if they're lucky, catch lightning in a bottle by inventing the world's first intellectually-based (i.e. doesn't rely on miniatures) roleplaying game, at the exact moment in history the entire general public is hungry for such a game. Suddenly they're selling out left and right, and quickly realize they could be selling in the millions if they can get their shit together enough to actually scale up to that level; but unfortunately, they're all a bunch of dysfunctional nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin and therefore not up to the task, making TSR almost fold not even a decade after they began. That's when Gygax was convinced to invite in the sister of a friend, the now notorious villain Lorraine Williams, which as far as I can tell happened because she was the only person any of them knew who actually had an MBA from a business school; but unfortunately she turned out to be one of those people who was probably at the bottom of her class at that business school, skating by with a D+ average, just barely understanding the basics of how to run a corporation, and not smart enough to understand that big risky decisions can easily blow up in your face. This then seemed to be combined with a thoroughly unpleasant personality, one of those permanently sour fucks who notoriously thought she was morally better than the nerdy artists and writers who produced all of TSR's contents, with the kind of cold sociopathy that lets someone casually commit horribly offensive, dispiriting corporate acts with a bored wave of the hand, and an monomania that Riggs cleverly describes as "speedboat thinking" (as in, if you're a rich asshole who owns a speedboat, then you get to do whatever the fuck you want to do with the speedboat, even crash it into a brick wall if you want, because you're the rich asshole and you own the speedboat, plebes). That led to a series of bad decisions from day 1 of Williams' reign, which began by her sneaking around behind Gygax's back and purchasing a 51% ownership of the company, then immediately firing him without even a two-week notice or a kiss goodbye, then leading to a series of evermore bungling and hole-digging mistakes as the years continued, which instead of humbly fixing caused Williams to react with evermore indignation and defensive posturing. Just to name one example out of hundreds I could (and bear with me for the long story), at a certain point TSR was partnering with DC Comics to put out a line of popular D&D titles, but Williams started insisting that they also do a title about Buck Rogers, because Williams' family just happened to own the rights to Buck Rogers (her grandfather, newspaper executive Frank Lille, was willed it by the character's creator, Philip Francis Nowlan, as a thank-you for helping him get it sold to syndicates in the first place), and so she was constantly shoving the intellectual property down everyone's throats so her family could make another extra buck on top of everything else TSR was making. Problem was, in the '90s Buck Rogers stank from the leftover reek of the cheesy '70s adaptation, before it had become retro and warmly remembered, and before the explosion of big-budget superhero movies, so TSR took a hard pass. Now incensed, Williams impulsively decided to start an entire new comic book division of TSR, despite no one there actually knowing anything about how to write, draw, ink, print, publish or distribute comics, and suddenly threw tens of millions of dollars at it; and DC, rightly pissed, took them to court over the deal they supposed had with them. Williams was then forced to come up with a shaky legal loophole, calling their product "comic modules" that come with both a comic story and a cut-out mini-game in the back of each issue, which was just enough to stop the lawsuit; but DC reacted by canceling all their D&D lines but retaining their exclusive right over it, making TSR not only lose out on missing revenue but double-lose by not being able to actually publish D&D comics through TSR Comics. Now add that their exclusive distributorship at the time with Waldenbooks had the comics stored in the gaming aisle where the comics kids never saw them, that the gamer kids didn't like the games, and that the comics kids weren't about to cut up their collectible comics, and suddenly TSR was gushing money, simply because Williams combined bad business sense with a grating personality. And this is to say nothing of how the company finally ends, where Williams really shows off her D+ in business school by engaging in such ultra-risky behavior as "sectioning" [that is, when a proven profitable company presells that year's profits at an 18% loss to an investment bank, in return for getting all the cash at once at the beginning of the year, so to cook the books and look like they're doing much better than they actually are], and taking advantage of the 150-year-old "gentlemen's agreement" between publishers and brick-and-mortar bookstores, where the stores pay immediately for all books they might order from a publisher, but have the legal right to send back unsold copies a few months or a year later and get a full refund, with TSR in the early '90s shipping millions of extra copies of merchandise to Waldenbooks nationwide to get the cash for them fast, and deciding to worry later about what happens when Waldenbooks returns all that unsold merchandise and demands their money back. Which of course is what they notoriously did a few years later, right when the Great Comics And Gaming Crash Of The Mid-'90s happened and everyone's chits were called in, the company finding themselves now with a whopping $30 million in unpaid debt, which led to mass firings five days before Christmas (because of course it did), then their bankruptcy and acquisition by Wizards Of The Coast six months after that. There's a whole lot more here to discover, so don't let today's extra-long writeup make you think I'm telling you the entire story; we haven't even touched today, for example, on Gary Gygax's insane turn in the early '80s starting up an LA production company for TSR, in which he bought a luxury home in the Hollywood Hills and started having these crazy drug and sex parties, having meetings with people like Orson Welles about being in a big-budget D&D movie, and all kinds of other nutso details about the whole saga over this book's fast-reading 300 pages. But perhaps one of the most fascinating details, and something I'm glad Riggs was able to get in right at the end of the book, was how Wizards founder Peter Adkison is almost like the anti-Williams: he's brutally honest with himself about his strengths and weaknesses (Wizards' first attempt at a product was written by him, but everyone hated it, and he realized he needed to start hiring outside creatives); he saw the writing on the wall early (their first official product was an add-on manual for an RPG, and when it bombed he saw that the industry was about to crash); he understood that great ideas often come from identifying a need (their massive seller -- nay, society changer -- "Magic: The Gathering" was inspired by him going to sci-fi conventions and seeing conventioneers endlessly spending 20-minute periods hanging out in hallways waiting for banquet rooms to open, and realizing they desperately needed a mini-game easy to carry that could provide exactly 20 minutes of legitimately thrilling fun); and he recognized and rewarded talent (his first employee went on to be the world's first female CEO of a gaming company, going all the way back to Parker Brothers and the like). People like to paint Wizards as a giant faceless corporation that swept in and picked up D&D for a song and then blanded it out to its listless state it's now in; but it's good for Riggs to remind us that they started as just another small nerdy gaming company too, but in their case knew how to do everything right, which is how they ended up being such a massive success and a shadow over all of gaming that they now are. So, yes, a lot here to take in, a kind of simply written but conceptually sweeping look at...well, really, the whole of American society from the late-'70s to late-'90s, which is why this will appeal so much to so many middle-agers out there, even if told through this interesting but ultra-niche corner of society dedicated to the rise, fall, then normalizing of this brand-new form of entertainment that suddenly cropped up out of the blue. It comes strongly recommended, and will undoubtedly be making my Best Of The Year list I'll be publishing later in December. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2023
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Mar 24, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1984856049
| 9781984856043
| B0871LKPJ3
| 4.54
| 22,077
| Jan 12, 2021
| Jan 12, 2021
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2023 reads, #15. DID NOT FINISH. The great George Saunders (aka "the best living American writer you've never heard of") apparently teaches a class at
2023 reads, #15. DID NOT FINISH. The great George Saunders (aka "the best living American writer you've never heard of") apparently teaches a class at his long-time home of Syracuse University that shows people how to deeply examine the basics of storytelling through an obsessively fastidious look at seven short stories by Russian authors in the 1800s, and in 2021 he wrote a book version of the course for the general public. I got through the first small introductory essay with no problem, finding everything rather interesting, but then had to force myself to sort of choke my way through the second essay and first full-on examination of one of these stories in order to finish it, because I've simply never had an interest in analyzing literature to this kind of excruciatingly molecular level (you know, the kind of level where the story itself is 20 pages but the analysis is 40 pages), which is one of the main reasons I hated college and haven't been back on a campus since my disastrous years trying to get my BA back in the 1980s and '90s. So, although it's as well-done as anything Saunders has done, I can't in good conscience recommend it, for non-writers will find it terminally tedious while full-time writers will psych themselves right out of ever completing another story again because of books like these, which of course is the main reason 90% of people who get MFA degrees never publish even a single book in their entire life. An interesting experiment to be sure, but leave this stuff back in the ivory tower where it belongs, George.
...more
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Feb 26, 2023
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Feb 26, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B09GW3P1KJ
| 3.54
| 84,348
| Jun 21, 2022
| Jun 21, 2022
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #44. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! Regular friends will remember that I'm reading all four of the novels (so far) by the beguiling
2022 reads, #44. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! Regular friends will remember that I'm reading all four of the novels (so far) by the beguiling Ottessa Moshfegh this summer in a row, after seeing a growing amount of friends start referring to books by other female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me wanting to know what that means. As we've examined in the other three books, that basically boils down to, "Stories about that mousy dishwasher-blonde receptionist at the insurance company whose existence no one pays attention to, who's actually much crazier than anyone has given her credit for, and who today has officially reached her fill of your unending fucking bullshit, thank you very MUCH;" and so that's why other high-profile novels like
Nightbitch
and
A Touch of Jen
have been receiving this "Moshfeghian" label recently, because they too delve generally into the subject of the put-upon overlooked bland mousy women in our society, and how in fact they might actually be much more insane than you thought them capable of. So that's what makes it all the more a surprise to learn that her fourth and newest, the just released Lapvona, is not Moshfeghian in nature whatsoever, and that there isn't a put-upon Moshfeghian Heroine in sight. Instead, this is a straight-up horror story, set in deeply religious Medieval times, the same sort of milieu where Robert Egger's The VVitch takes place. Or perhaps I should say the kind of Medieval milieu where Ben Wheatley's A Field in England takes place, or Aleksai German's Hard to Be a God or perhaps Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon: for Moshfegh's Middle Ages central Europe is a harsh and bizarre place, a land that cuts no one a break among a society that's barely still out of stone tools, where you're lucky to live to 50 without dying violently and painfully in a pool of your own blood and pus. Moshfegh pulls no punches here, and you deserve to know that we get rape, torture and cannibalism all before even the first half is over, to say nothing of the image of a 13-year-old boy greedily sucking on the tit of a naked, shrivelled-up 96-year-old woman who serves as the village's local shaman and sex magic purveyor (i.e. she gives all the young men of the village handjobs using a jar of her own urine that she says is a "magic potion," YOU'RE WELCOME). Moshfegh is deliberately reaching for cartoonish terribleness here, sometimes to the point of absurdity; so like we've talked about before, this is the latest and strongest sign yet that she's a big fan of Postmodernist nightmare creator JG Ballard, in that this book often resembles (especially during the long, surreally violent drought in the middle of the page count) Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels like The Burning World . This is an out-and-out nihilist tale to be sure, in which not a single character is redeemable whether they're presented as a traditional "goodie" or a "baddie;" Moshfegh wants you to feel bad about the human race by the time you're done here, just like Ballard wanted you to do too. And that's why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5, because Moshfegh is more interested in being miserable here than in delivering a satisfying three-act plot; think of this more as her saying, "Humans were shockingly cruel to each other for the entire thousand years of the Medieval Era, and here's a random two-year period where we watch the cruelty in detail." There's not really a satisfying ending to this, other than, "Yep, proof positive that all these people are just going to continue on in this miserable way the entire rest of their lives;" but that misery is expressed in such strange, crisp, disgusting detail here, you can't help but admire it for what it is, and consider the book mostly a satisfying experience until you get to the underwhelming end. I'll take that, given that I've out-and-out hated two of Moshfegh's four novels now; and more importantly, I admire Moshfegh's decision to deliver against "Moshfeghian" hype, and do whatever kind of freaky-ass weirdo cannibalism storytelling she wants without worrying like others do about how it might fit into her "existing canon" of work. This is just in general one of the things I admire about Moshfegh the most, that she seems to give less of a fuck about what the public thinks of her than just about any other commercially successful contemporary fiction writer these days; and I kind of love that right at the moment she's becoming this sort of intellectual feminst hero for writing these books about strangely executed female empowerment, she decides to pivot into left field and deliver a piece of fatalist historical fiction with no female heroes at all, one written in a style I suspect many of her current female fans will find too disgusting to even get through. The book itself is alright, but it's much more enjoyable as a statement of defiance by Moshfegh against both the literary industry and her existing fans' need to put everything they like into these neat little boxes, and then insist that the artist deliver nothing else but that the rest of their career. I look forward in another few years to seeing what newest left turn she'll have for us next. ...more |
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Aug 14, 2022
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Aug 14, 2022
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| 1984879359
| 9781984879356
| 1984879359
| 3.24
| 49,483
| Jun 23, 2020
| Jun 23, 2020
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did not like it
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2022 reads, #37. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the
2022 reads, #37. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the novels by hipster-lit It Girl Ottessa Moshfegh, right in a row until I'm done, because of recently noticing a growing amount of my friends at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ starting to now describe other surreal novels by young female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me having a desire to know exactly what they mean when they use a term like this. I've been through two of her books now, 2015's Eileen which I hated, and then 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I loved; but unfortunately her third novel, 2020's Death in her Hands, is much more like the former than the latter, which means I'm back to hating it again. The problem here, just like Eileen, is that Moshfegh is utterly uninterested in turning in a three-act story, giving us instead a 300-page plotless character study about The Second Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (the aforementioned Eileen of course being the most unpleasant woman in human history), essentially what it would look like if you took and played her for drama instead of laughs, and then slowly revealed through one odd sentence every 10,000 words that she's in fact insane and that you can't trust even a single word coming out of her mouth. That's interesting as a concept, but fucking unbearable as an actual reading experience, just pages and pages and pages and PAGES of tedious minutiae from our put-upon unreliable narrator's daily life (she walks in the woods, she makes some dinner, she pets her dog, she goes to bed, she gets back up, she takes a shower, she walks in the woods...), just for Moshfegh to randomly insert exactly one weird sentence every 30 pages that makes you stop and say, "...Wait, I'm sorry, what was that?" She's definitely on-brand here with what I've come this summer to think of as the typical Moshfeghian Hero (namely, that dishwater-dull mousy doormat who works the receptionist desk at an insurance office and who no one on the planet ever gives a second thought to, just to reveal that she's actually much crazier than anyone ever suspected, and that today is the day she's decided she's had just about enough of your fucking bullshit, thank you very much); but while such an anti-villain is irresistible when paired with a bizarre, hilarious, JG Ballard-like pitch-black surreal storyline like in the case of Relaxation, our Moshfeghian Heroes are just barely tolerable when put in a go-nowhere MFA hipster circle-jerk character study like here or in Eileen, and I have to confess that after absolutely loving the former (Relaxation will definitely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list in December), I detested the latter, and gave a huge sigh of relief when I finally made it to the end of this endlessly droning disaster of a book. That finally brings us to Moshfegh's fourth and latest novel, Lapvona which was just released a couple of months ago; and I've been told that that's actually a historical novel, taking a typical Moshfeghian Hero and plunking her into a Medieval village where strange and possibly evil events are afoot (think The VVitch), so please keep your eye out my review of that in just another week or two. ...more |
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Jul 09, 2022
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Jul 09, 2022
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| 1501144065
| 9781501144066
| 1501144065
| 3.64
| 14,159
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
|
really liked it
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2022 reads, #33. I'm a fan of Tom Perrotta, and have read now almost every novel he's ever written, even though I admit that he's also inconsistent (T
2022 reads, #33. I'm a fan of Tom Perrotta, and have read now almost every novel he's ever written, even though I admit that he's also inconsistent (The Abstinence Teacher and Mrs. Fletcher will almost never be revisited by future readers again, I think), and that it's honest to say that most of the TV and movie adaptations of his work (including Little Children and The Leftovers, among others) are actually better than the books themselves, because Perrotta is great at setting things up but only so-so at knocking them down. So that's why I was excited to hear that he'd recently written a sequel to his 1998 Election, still to this day one of the best books of his career, in which through a perfect storm of dysfunctional adults with hidden agendas and overly ambitious, unlikable teens (including our crafty anti-hero Tracy Flick, who Reese Witherspoon played to such perfection in the movie adaptation), the boring election of a high-school class president in suburban New Jersey blows up into an attention-causing disaster that ruins several people's lives and ends several people's careers. A lot of people don't realize this, but despite the movie version (adapted and directed by the now famous Alexander Payne) being a dark comedy, the novel it's based on is actually a quite serious drama, as are surprisingly almost all of Perrotta's books, despite all the adaptations being known in one way or another for their dry wit; and so should you be prepared as well for this newest, because despite the cutesy title and cover art, this is a sometimes wrist-slashingly depressive look at late middle-age, the first moment of most people's lives when it suddenly dawns on them that it's simply too late to achieve some of their childhood dreams before they likely die, and react in various ways but always with a deep undercurrent of sadness to them all. That's certainly the case with Flick, who's now in her forties in this contemporarily-set sequel, who as people remember from the previous novel had been ambitious as hell all the way through her early twenties, before suddenly her mother got sick and she was forced back home halfway through law school, never to finish her degree but instead getting started at a temp agency when she first arrived back home, which then transitioned into a substitute teacher job, then a full-time job, then her bare rise through the ranks to a soul-beaten perpetual assistant principal now. LIke the previous novel, there's an election going on here too, and in fact not one but two -- not only for a new principal, which Flick is a kinda-sorta-favorite for (no one's forgotten how haughty and ambitious she had been when younger), but then also choosing the first honorees for the high school's brand-new "Hall of Fame" program, the brainchild of a tech-industry millionaire who's also moved back to his hometown (although by "tech industry," I mean on a lark he invented one of those goofy "Angry Birds" type useless phone apps that suddenly becomes a viral hit and is bought by tens of millions of people before then being forgotten again a year later), who is dismayed that the town voted down the latest bond issue to fund their rapidly falling apart local high school, so self-funds this flashy, high-profile Hall of Fame idea to try to get local citizens worked up and excited about getting their school back in order. And why didn't he just fund the actual school's real issues with this Hall of Fame money? Well, you never ask those kinds of questions in a Perrotta novel, because the answer's always the same -- because ultimately this lucky app lottery winner is doing it all for himself and his own personal glory, and wants it to be as showy a personal project as it possibly can, exactly like how the first thing he does when moving back to his hometown is buy a plot of land on the rich side of town and then build a Postmodernist monstrosity of a mansion, three Jenga-like boxes stacked haphazardly on top of each other, the various ways it's reacted to and used by the various characters becoming this lovely central hook off which to hang the plot that spins around it. Not-so-spoiler alert: The two goofiest white bros in town become the favorites for both elections, which is kind of Perrotta's point here, that even in our Woke age it's these buffoons who still largely end up on top in most situations. But that's not the point anyway here, but rather to use this situation to peek behind the curtain of all these forties-to-sixties characters and see the deeply broken spirits behind all of them, the crushing pain of being in these blandly okay places in their lives and having lost all ambition or energy to want more than that anymore. As Flick says to herself at one point, "You failed. You did the best you could. Both those statements were true, and I accepted the mixed verdict. I was an adult; I had no choice. But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed." That's essentially this book in a nutshell, whether that's the star quarterback now humiliatingly revisiting all the people he'd been a dick to while an alcoholic his twenties, or the milquetoast nobody who worked the school's front desk for 30 years, is about to retire, and is asking herself what it was all for, anyway? As in the best of his books, Perrotta asks these kinds of deeply existential questions within these bland environments of quiet suburbs and their long-suffering citizens; so in this, you can think of Perrotta at his best as sorta Updike Lite, easier to digest and not quite as cruel but still in that wheelhouse of Mad Men-esque "5:47 to Ossining" territory, and of course with both the authors owing a big bow of respect to John Cheever who essentially invented the genre. If you're going to like Perrotta, that's the spirit in which to read him, as the logical end game of the arrow begun by Cheever and pushed along by '70s and '80s Postmodernism, understanding that he's not really telling any new stories in any of his agreeable, easy-to-read novels, but doing a great job at telling updated versions of stories you already know. As always with him, today's book comes recommended in that specific spirit. ...more |
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Oct 21, 2024
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Oct 21, 2024
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| 3.55
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Oct 06, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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| 3.90
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Sep 27, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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| 3.16
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Jun 15, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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| 3.85
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it was amazing
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Apr 20, 2024
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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| 3.80
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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| 3.49
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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| 3.98
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2024
not set
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Feb 10, 2024
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| 4.22
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
not set
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 3.89
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Jan 18, 2024
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Jan 18, 2024
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| 4.45
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it was amazing
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not set
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Nov 16, 2023
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| 3.73
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Nov 12, 2023
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Nov 12, 2023
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| 3.76
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it was amazing
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Sep 17, 2023
not set
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Sep 17, 2023
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| 4.22
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it was ok
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Mar 30, 2023
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Mar 30, 2023
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Mar 24, 2023
not set
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Mar 24, 2023
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| 4.54
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Feb 26, 2023
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Feb 26, 2023
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| 3.54
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really liked it
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Aug 14, 2022
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Aug 14, 2022
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| 3.24
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did not like it
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Jul 09, 2022
not set
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Jul 09, 2022
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Jul 03, 2022
not set
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Jul 03, 2022
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