this is going to be a review where i just prattle on and on about meee meee meee, because let's face it - there are a miyup. nerds, now i am among you.
this is going to be a review where i just prattle on and on about meee meee meee, because let's face it - there are a million reviews of this puppy out there so i don't have to worry about doing a disservice to the book. you'll either read the book or you won't. but you should: it's got direwolves.
i wasn't going to read this. after years of watching hordes of desperate sad-eyed nerds coming up to me, asking "any news on the george r.r. martin release??" (like the bn computer knows more, somehow, than the internet. it doesn't) and i would have to tell them (not without some schadenfreude-glee) "nope - it has just been moved back another year!!" it gave me a solid sense of "there but for the grace..." like when you see a very young junkie and you congratulate yourself for dodging that particular bullet.
despite what i kept hearing about how awesome the books were, i just filed it away in the mental RA folder of "stuff nerds like" and figured one day i would read them, you know - for research, but not before they were all out - i wasn't going to get sucked into the trap of so many before me - the waiting game of disappointment and having to reread the older books again and again to keep track of who was even alive at this point. "when you play the game of thrones, you play to become frustrated and impatient."
i have seen it a hundred times.
so when the teevee show came out and people were drooling over how good it was, i paid them no mind. i pushed it two feet past the "someday" pile in my brain. because i am not one of those people who watch a movie before reading the book, am i??
but connor wore me down. he really wanted me to see it and he wanted to talk to me about it and his bearded little face was all lit from within with enthusiasm and i just couldn't say no to him.
so i did it. i watched the teeveee. on demand - several episodes in a row, pissed off if i started to get too sleepy to make it through another episode.
so so good.
so now, i had to read it, right? i owe it to the gods of fine literature and all.
so i did, and god this book is fun.
i am glad they changed a few things for the filmed version - i'm not sure i would have been too comfortable watching a thirteen-year-old actress play daenerys.
in the same line of thought - natalie - i know you have not watched the show yet, but your crush on jon snow?? perfectly understandable to someone watching the show - he has that dark brooding thing i can see a girl going for, but if you have only read the books?? girl, your crush is on a fourteen-year-old boy. i have notified the authorities, you perv.
in the end, i am glad i watched the show first, if only so that i know how to pronounce the characters' names. oh, you crazy high fantasy novels and your names...
alfonso won't read this series because of the incest and because they never tell you where the soldiers pooped. i am not kidding. several people complain that the seasonal imbalance complicates the growing cycle and where is all their food coming from. this point i can understand - fantasy novels are supposed to care about developing a fully-realized world and all, and that is kind of a major detail, but it doesn't bother me at all. i am no connoisseur of fantasy- i am a dilettante at best. so i don't care where people are getting their food - i don't care if the social hierarchy is a realistic one, given the particulars of this realm, i certainly don't care where the soldiers are pooping. nor do i care in any novel where and when the characters poop. i just like this book's quiet intrigues and betrayals. the diplomacy, the lack of hesitation when it is time for a character to be killed off. i love how there aren't any "good guys" or "bad guys," only "effective" and "ineffective" characters. every one of them does at least one thing that'll make a reader go, "oh, bad move." so he dropped a few details when it comes to agriculture - he spent all his energies into creating characters that i love reading about.there are facets to this thing - sides of the argument rarely seen in a straight-ahead rollicking plot-driven novel.
and i'm not really sure where the misogyny accusations come from. is it because women can't really ascend to power except through marriage?? because i don't think that was invented for this book - i am pretty sure that has happened, historically, in other places. and if it's the looting and raping, well - that happens in war, too. wait, is it sansa?? yeah, she's kind of a wash. but the girl wants what the girl wants. she's at least more complicated than bella, right? there are plenty of good characters here that aren't weak or power-mad, or just regular-mad... okay - there are a couple. but sheeeeit - all the characters here are pretty bad, on the moral spectrum, right? littlefinger is my very favorite, but i wouldn't want to know him in my real life. i appreciate his devotion, though.
so i am super excited about clash of kings, both the book i will read and the show i will watch. swords and boobies and direwolves. i don't even know how i am going to make it until then.
oh, because i was talking about boobies and HBO just there, connor was telling me this story about louis ck, and i loved it, and i found this quote. it is relevant!! hbo is nudity-crazy!! but he took care of their lust for flesh:
HBO was asking us why there was no nudity on the show, and what they really meant was, Why wasn’t Pamela Adlon, who played my wife, nude? When I hired Pam, I didn’t tell her she was going to be doing anything like that. It wasn’t supposed to be that kind of show. So I said, “You know what, I’ll do it.� And I did that episode, and they were like, “O.K., we have plenty of nudity, thank you.�
so come with me on a journey through my thought processes regarding this book:
1) (at work, sometime in the past two weeks) "oh shit, matthea harvey haso come with me on a journey through my thought processes regarding this book:
1) (at work, sometime in the past two weeks) "oh shit, matthea harvey has a new book coming out!!" (orders it into the store)
2) "yay, it came in - it is bigger than i thought it would be. (twss) mcsweeney's sure does know how to make nice-looking books"
3) "this is beautifully drawn, but why are her phrasings so clunky sometimes?? this isn't like her!! "lamb thought about trousers, but he was a nonconformist??" don't give me that stoner almost-makes-sense poetry, harvey!! you are better than that!"
4) "i like so much of this, but overall it is too abstract for me to love - it seems to lack focus."
5) "oh, a 'note about the process'. i shall read this."
6) "ohhhhhh. wait. ohhhhh. let me read this again."
7) "oh, okay - you win one more star."
so this book is matthea harvey having a little poetry arts-and-crafts fun. so she went to the strand (or some other bookstore on 12th street that has cheap books outside; i am making assumptions) and said "i will buy the first book i see that costs exactly three dollars" and that book was A Portrait of Charles Lamb. so she bought it and got to work with some white-out. charles lamb, of course, had a sister named mary, and and so what ended up emerging from her whiting out was a dissipated love story version of that nursery rhyme with mary and her little lamb. so this accounts for the occasionally strained lines like "his anxiety a glittering chandelier rustling in his mind" and makes the fortuitously created lines like "he would snap at mary if he did not feel like feeling" more surreal and impressive. so i ended up liking this more after knowing what was what. and reading this with the background-thinking of those other (non-romantically entangled) lambs adds a whole new texture to it.
so a fun experiment, but i would love to read more of her original words. although a series like this would also be fun. i am torn. the artwork is great.
don't make your books look like chick lit if you want people to read 'em.
more free advice from me.
but it's true - not all of us have a sarah montambo don't make your books look like chick lit if you want people to read 'em.
more free advice from me.
but it's true - not all of us have a sarah montambo in our lives to tell us, "no, this is really very good." because it is. and this is not just me groping all the canadian books in the corner of the dancefloor, this book is a sparkly little gem.
at the beginning, it reminded me a lot of weetzie bat. it is a similarly glossy-slick storytelling style, but this one is about a girl with a loving junkie single dad who treats her like a peer (and since he is only 15 years older than her, he's not far off) and they breeze from apartment to apartment in montreal in a daze where there are no consequences and everything will be okay, even if they have no money and there are dangers on the streets and foster homes.
but it doesn't stay rosy.
this one is not teen fiction, but she captures the young teenage character so well, in both thoughts and actions. even though baby is exposed to so much that is unsavory, she is still a little kid with a kid's energy, freaking out pimps with her sudden dancing and yelling, trashing a house and not stealing the jewelry (because of her own kid-logic) but stealing a cute turtle knickknack, avoiding bathing...it's like what greg is always saying when he talks about lolita; that lo is totally gross, the way a little kid is, playing with her gum and being dirty and smelly, and it's not like in the movie at all, or in most may-december films. kids are rarely sexually precocious, even when they are imitating behaviors they have seen or been taught. the gross will always out. and i loved that about this book; the moments of kid-grossery that would pop out unexpectedly.
in the back of the book, where harpercollins slaps all those readers' guides and interviews, there is this wonderful passage in her "making of" feature:
the inability to properly identify danger exists throughout the book. whereas children can be terrified by a puppet of a crocodile or a photograph of a shark in a national geographic magazine, they are unable to get it through their heads to look both ways when they cross the street or that there are strangers that you cannot talk to....
when i was eleven, i used to have a friend whose older brother was a junkie. he and his friends were the coolest kids in the neighborhood. some high points in my childhood were when drug addicts would flip out and come out of their apartments in their underwear with cats on their heads. we kids would dance around them, shouting and laughing with our hands up in the air. i wanted to capture this nonjudgmental attitude a lot of lower-class kids have to drugs. i also wanted to portray the relationships these same kids have with seedy adults. children believe the lies that adults tell them and are dutifully impressed. lowlifes are fantastical creatures who animate the world of children, and, in turn, lowlifes love children who are their most captive and adoring audience.
that's what i was trying to say, about the things i liked about this book. but she is a writer, so she said it much much better.
this book was written five years ago. i am ready for a follow-up, please!!
edit - yayyy!!! i finally got my second book. thanks for listening, heather o'neill!
this is a book that concerns itself with damage and healing. and i think it is a very powerful book filled with Important Lessons. my only problem witthis is a book that concerns itself with damage and healing. and i think it is a very powerful book filled with Important Lessons. my only problem with it is that there are too many voices, too many characters, which i think makes for a strained and disjointed read. there were so many voices, it became hard to care about any one of them individually.this is not always a problem for me in fiction- i love sprawling narratives, but in this book, i think the real strength of perspective was found in the characters of liga and her daughters. and ramstrong. i found the other interludes to be distracting me from what i had anticipated to be the main focus of the narrative: the aftereffects of serial brutalities, and the psychological reserves to which humans resort.
i love the premise of this book. i love the cloaking of real-world atrocities in a fairy-tale shell. i think many of the best fairy-tales do that already. this one did not avoid the difficult or the painful, which is something i have become appreciative of, in australian YA fiction specifically. and i thought that in parts, it was very affecting. the scene at the end between ramstrong and liga, made me sadder than anything that had happened to her before, and it was such a wonderfully strong scene for her.this is the power of excellent women's fiction targeting a younger audience.
i think what i would have liked to have seen is this book just laid out differently. to have the "liga and her daughters" story separate from the story of noer and bullock,etc. maybe as a series of stories that interlocked but didn't necessarily interrupt the others. because while many of the themes are overlapping, in their focus on metamorphosis and the burden of humanity, and the inheritance of pain and all of that, they were not necessarily in dialogue with each other, and i felt that their intrusion lessened the emotional impact of the liga story, which i still feel was the most developed and the most important, as all others were offshoots of her actions.
i think this is a very necessary and ballsy book. and i think the ideas it explores are terrifically important. i just worry that some of it might be getting lost to readers just trying to keep the characters straight, with their relationships to each other and their distinct worlds.
all in all, it is an excellent book. i am probably being stingy with my three stars.
reading the sequel/bumping the first one - READ IT!
like deliverance...with monsters!
CZP is three for three!!
i love this book. i always ask people to rreading the sequel/bumping the first one - READ IT!
like deliverance...with monsters!
CZP is three for three!!
i love this book. i always ask people to recommend me some good horror books because i just can't get scared by books, and i want to feel that lovely shivery feeling of "what's that noise!!??" "what is that shadow doing?? ahhhhhh!!" and while it's true i slept fine after reading this - i wasn't cowering in my bed with the blankets pulled up over my face for protection, there were several scenes where i felt my skin crawling, and i actually leaned forward into the book, the way you would if you were psyching yourself up to poke a sleeping lion with a broomstick.
this man knows how to write creepy and atmospheric scenes. they are great.this is a very literary horror novel, but it still fulfills its role of being effective in its horror-mode, i would not call it cerebral horror, like in a henry james manner, which is intense and foreboding; he is in-the-head-intense, whereas this is the good primeval gut-fear i crave.
it is hard to talk about the plot of this one - i was telling dana about how much i was enjoying it on the subway home last week and i was getting more and more animated, with my hands flailing and saying "and then this and then that and oh! then this and but then" and her eyes just sort of glazed over while she thought about college basketball and M/M fiction... and that's fine - this is definitely not the book for her, and i probably overcomplicated the plot in my excitement. but if you like a narrative that unspools slowly and has great characterization and creepy undertones and then explodes into a scene of ensemble horror in a very traditional or classic way... does this make sense?? because the ending, or the climax anyway, seems like a callback to really great traditional horror or sci-fi films of a certain era. so it is familiar in a way, but not exhausted. it is like the way i can watch certain twilight zone or x-files episodes a million times and still get excited by them.
this begins as a historical piece: 1911; a black doctor experiences a lynching attempt by the KKK during which something very odd and spooky occurs. meanwhile, a young boy outlives everyone in his town, seemingly immune to the plague that has killed everyone else.
dun dun dun....
but then it spirals out to include a million different things: eugenics (hence the clever title), an amazing collection of hill-people, some really gross breeding and birthing situations... i just loved it.
this was his first book with CZP:
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i love this cover and even though i have never read it because i still feel like i am not a fan of short stories even with the written review-proof that i frequently am, i always have it on the table at work because it is eye-catching and for some reason customers like to hold it up over their face as if it was a mask. and they always think they are being very original, like when they, separated from their friends or mate, yell "marco!!" sigh.
but - great story about this book that was told to me by brett, the co-publisher from CZP: apparently, a friend of his was reading it at LAX, and so many people complained to airport security that the cover was "disturbing them", that they made him put it away. hahhaah love it!! book cover - you are a winner!! this book and snow globes are not allowed onboard!!
i feel i have strayed from the matter at hand.
this book = very good.
it will be out in may. write it down so you don't forget.
so this is a story about a fox who falls in love with a married human man, and in order to get his attention, she uses secret ancient fox magic and shso this is a story about a fox who falls in love with a married human man, and in order to get his attention, she uses secret ancient fox magic and she and her family become human, or illusions of humans, and trick the man into falling in love with her and believing that their illusory world is real, as he lives and eats and mates with them and time stands still for a little while.
the setting is ancient japan, and the story is full of details of the expected behavior of men and women in civilized, noble, japan,(read: "restrained") which contrasts sharply with the wild world of the fox, who have no formal standards of "proper" behavior.
it is fine, but not super-fine.
and my lack of ardor has nothing to do with the triple taboo of having incest, bestiality, and gay human sex all in one volume!! but really, save something for the sequel, honey!
i have no problem with mixing species when it comes to the physical act of love. whether it be woman and bear or man and troll or man and angel or man and gourd - but i just don't buy this love. "love at first sight may sound trite but it's true, you know." maybe somewhere, but not so much here. i believe in love, i just don't believe in this fox's love for this man upon first sight. what is it in a human physiognomy that is attractive to a fox?? the other way 'round, i can understand (please do not put me on any watch lists - i am not having sex with animals) but i can understand the desire to be/be with a wild animal more than i can understand a fox's desire to wear clothes and shoes and spend all day in quiet contemplation, waiting for the man to come to her for the sweaty intercourse.
because the female life in feudal (is this feudal? - i am unsure of time periods in the olde east) japan is totally dull.everything is formal and correct and polite and distant and smacks of ritual.i don't see a fox sitting still for long enough to want in on this world, where every emotion seems to be a burden:
"tranquility is best, of course. one strives in one's life for calm acceptance of circumstance, whether good or bad. happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is also the most dangerous. having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve. regret and sadness. one grieves for the dead, but also for friends forgotten, and things lost or mislaid. i lost a writing desk long ago; even now, i remember it on occasion and feel a pang of regret. anger is never acceptable. it is a sort of madness pulled from one's soul by the cruelty or carelessness of others."
jeez louise - what fox is gonna choose to live like that? me, i prefer my propriety undercut with a little merteuil.
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and i could see a fox wanting to live her life - full of sly manipulation and power struggles, not the complete submission and sublimation of this poor wife. plus, better wardrobes.
the juxtaposition of the civilized and the wild is painfully obvious, but gets emphasized to death in scenes like this:
"fleas (and their equivalents, all the tiny harassments of life) are everywhere in this world, an unpleasant reminder that life is not as perfect as we would prefer. but i was travelling to attend the princess; such a reminder at such a time was unwelcome. onaga saw my distress, and using a soft paper that had been tucked in her sleeve, she crushed the tiny animal and dropped it through the window-grille."
some of the details of the ritual of communication, i found quite lovely, where married couples exchange poetry, in which even the paper color choice and its texture have an understood meaning. but overall, i found the pacing too deliberate for me, and the details too precious.
**this is not a float - i have been ordered to edit this review to include something "necessary"
i was watching the runaways last week, and in the bonu**this is not a float - i have been ordered to edit this review to include something "necessary"
i was watching the runaways last week, and in the bonus-feature interviews, dakota fanning was all wide-eyed exclaiming how she was so excited to finally get to act in a period piece.
and i died a little inside.
but so this book, from 1997, predates twilight but somehow it involves a werewolf love story. WHAAAAAT??? (her previous novel, silver kiss, from 1992, is about a vampire - suspicious*) so, to dakota fanning these books are practically vintage, and would be the historico-literary predecessors to the sparkly ones the kids are loving today.
it's all about perspective.
i never considered werewolves to be sexy. the shedding, the dogbreath, the teeth and claws; just not my particular fetish. however, the way this young teenage shewolf describes the changes her body undergoes during the full moon... woah. hot stuff. even when she is in human form, she completely owns her sexuality, and is aggressive and believes herself to be the most beautiful thing on either two or four legs. until her human lover sees her change, and does not agree with her ideas of beauty. (this is like a dude i dated once who wished i would dress "more feminine", when i used to only wear combat boots and assorted badassery.and i didn't change then, but now i only wear dresses,too late for you, guy - but i still say )(i have given up writing on-point reviews. deal.)
but so werewolves...
this book is actually quite good. i may have to give it an extra star because there were a lot of elements i liked in it, and i had to read so many just mediocre books last week, this one is surely one-star better than most of them. she is an excellent stylist, and i was very glad she did not give the expected ending, but was willing to disappoint a whole lot of lovestruck teenie girls with the more "appropriate" ending.
it also has one of the most romantic mid-coital lines, "i want to lay my kill at your feet". this makes me swoon,but makes elizabeth roll her eyes and scoff. maybe you have to read all the surrounding clawing and nipping and rolling around on the bed bits. (science fact learned from this book: when two werewolves bang, they can either be human or wolf or some sort of inbetween. convenient.)
i don't know what else, but any teen fiction book that starts out with quotes from both hesse and kipling has gotta be good, right?? right??? add to that a vicious female protagonist who will literally claw your eyes out if you get in her way, and i think we have a winner.
i have developed a real taste for literature from this region lately. and that might be the problem; why i didn't love this book the way danaaaaa doesi have developed a real taste for literature from this region lately. and that might be the problem; why i didn't love this book the way danaaaaa does. all of the other books i have read (and i am using the term "region" pretty loosely to encompass mostly appalachia, but blurring around the edges of appalachia-proper a little) have followed a pretty consistent speech pattern and tone that this one strays from. am i being sexist to point out that this is the only woman i have read writing this kind of material? and maybe the things i admire - the succinctness of the prose and the very barebones dialogue that masks some huge concepts are a regional idiosyncrasy that female writers value less? i would love some argument to this, because i know this can't be true.
this is her nine-year-old:
But I didn't see bitterness or self-pity or some warped nostalgic wistfulness in his face. What I saw was something like pride but pride without ego, something like acceptance but acceptance without ever being allowed to consider any other options.
this just doesn't ring true as a nine-year-old observation. and - yes - the character is recalling the incident as a nineteen-year-old, but this and some other rather advanced psychological observations are being presented as having been acknowledged by a nine-year-old, and that just doesn't mesh for me.
even as a nineteen-year-old, it wouldn't work, not for this nineteen-year-old. and i am not saying that he needs to be an idiot, but the reality of his situation is that he works two jobs, goes to the shrink in his spare time, and is raising three younger siblings in the wake of his family's tragedy. i just don't buy a boy of his age, background, and situation waxing philosophical about art - from having seen some notecard reproductions - and having such sophisticated epiphanies, all the while experiencing hallucinations and blackouts as well as having his sexual awakening. meditating on the meaning of art is inessential - it is unrealistic to have this character speculating on the divergence of gender roles in a post-lapsarian world - this is an intellectual luxury.
were you ever a nineteen-year-old boy living hand-to-mouth mostly concerned with who would pay the bills and why your mom killed your dad?? is this how you spent time thinking??:
Her eyes turned a sandblasted gray as if she had made them ready for me to carve into them whatever horrible image i chose.
and
A gray mist had settled over everything, absorbing the weak morning light, and giving the air substance. I stuck my bare arm out into it and brought it back covered in shimmer. I breathed it in deeply, letting its feather weight fill my lungs and roll over my tongue. It tasted sweet and empty like purity should.
and i am not saying that poverty should go hand in hand with inarticulate or unsophisticated speech, but this seems indulgent and inappropriate.
you can have something be poetic and still ring true to the dialect of the region. ron rash, cormac mccarthy, castle freedman jr, daniel woodrell all function perfectly well within the confines of terse sentences that explode with meaning and they make sentences that resonate without sounding forced:
"Gun's only good when it's the only gun."
that is one of my favorite sentences ever.
and i could fill the page with mccarthy examples. and even nick cave in and the ass saw the angel - an australian, writing in a dialect that is occasionally sloppy, makes it realistic-sounding because of the biblical nature of the narrator's speeches. they are wildly overblown, but the kid is a) crazy, b) full of a mission of avenging angeldom, c) fucking crazy - so the hifalutin' language works, especially in a character that, being mute, can only express himself in his head, so the contrast works exceptionally well.
daniel woodrell makes such a believable character of ree in winter's bone; in the way she is raising her two younger brothers by herself, in the advice she gives:
"Never ask for what ought to be offered."
or
"Don't fight if you can help it. But if one of you gets whipped by somebody both of you best come home bloody, understand?"
she is tough and matter-of-fact and she never shrinks from what is necessary. but it is all done, not with resignation, never like she is giving something up; she is simply practical and does what needs doing. and she never once talks about art.
but i have strayed from my point.
i can see why oprah likes it. she loves the dysfunctional, depressing families, with a soupçon of incest. and she thinks women will like it too. and she is probably right, only this woman has been spoiled with too many similar books that hit all my personal buttons.
the book is not at all bad - the descriptions of the landscape are wonderful - i love the coal seeping through the ground to blacken the salt licks, and the deer being drawn to them despite their slowly being killed by them. the author is from the region, and she does a really good job of building the scenery, but the people sometimes seem either like caricatures (slutty, looking-for-love-and-comfort amber) or just too flowery in speech.but i was never bored, and even though i could tell where it was going, it was still a good read.
i just realized my "greg gets three" shelf only has one. i am a failure.
greg told me to write a review for this book, and i started to think about it,i just realized my "greg gets three" shelf only has one. i am a failure.
greg told me to write a review for this book, and i started to think about it, and realized this is going to be one of those reviews that will reflect poorly upon me when my enthusiasm for the book is weighed up against the subject matter. so - a warning.
***it is an ungentle book. you can stop reading here if you are not into the rough stuff.***
basically, it is about a man in jail for being humbert humbert with a knife. his lolita was named alice. hence. now, enter a nineteen-year-old girl who is hatching her own plan to consummate her desire for a very young boy. she wants someone to commiserate with about her exploits, and who better to "get" her drive? best pen pals ever.
a.m. homes does not hold back here. and i may sound sexist, but that fact that a woman wrote this book is astonishing to me. not because of the violence or the subject matter - that's just nouns and verbs. but the level of detail, and the tone, and when she writes in the voice of the various male characters,there is a pervasive masculine sensibility that sounds completely authentic. (and,yes, those are also nouns and verbs - don't fight me when you know what i mean)
the book is gross and uncomfortable and is far and away the best thing she has ever written. and i wish i liked her other books as much as i like this one. the others were fine, but to me this was a perfect book. music for torching got outta hand at the end there - just silly. but this has just the right mix of tenderness and danger. she tells a difficult story, and she tells it well. and manages to have a very convincing masculine voice throughout. (even though she is a woman whose actual voice sounds so cute like sara vowell's.)
and of course, the impulse here as a writer of more-literary-than-just-shock-value material would be to humanize the convict and make him all cuddly and sympathetic and make the girl, who is still free and among us, into the real monster. but she doesn't do that, which is such a relief. she gives some backstory, and some explanation, but it never really humanizes him. he remains a monster, although a more overt monster than the girl, with her ponytail babysitting and tennis lessons. with her dirty smelly young boy who saves his scabs to snack on. i am so thankful that i cannot relate to how these kids are supposed to be sex objects.
it's true that in lolita she is also a dirty little kid, not the image of a nymphette that has grown up after her.and, if you are not similarly inclined, you should wonder what the attraction would be. it is even more pronounced in this book, when the object is a young boy. she loves him in his distraction, his stinkiness, his boyishness. it is powerfully realized, if still (again - gratefully) obscure.
so - yeah, a great book about terrible things. and another reviewer claims this book is bad and that zombie by joyce carol oates is a better treatment of the same subject matter, but that is crazy-talk. zombie is bad. really. bad. don't do it.
so about a week ago, on my listserv, they were looking for recommendations for mystery novels that did not involve murder, pre
so about a week ago, on my listserv, they were looking for recommendations for mystery novels that did not involve murder, presumably for older patrons who were turned off by graphic violence. and my mind went right to this book, and i entertained a whole fantasy of giving it out to a little gentle biddy who just wanted a nice cozy domestic mystery about who left the butter out or who tracked crumbs through the pantry...
there would probably be complaints.
we had this in the store years ago, and when i was scanning the section for returns, i idly glanced at the dust jacket to see what it was all about. it is about horse rape. yup. some gentleman is going around and raping the lady horses of a particular community.
who could it be??
i kept it in the store as long as i could until it was clear it would never sell, and the humor it gave me was dwarfed by the stress of not having room for nine hundred janet evanovich hardcovers. so we parted ways, but i thought about it often in my lonely hours—musing, as of an ex-lover, "i wonder what happened to..."
so i made greg buy it for me on the internet. 99 cents. (stupid question—why is there no "cents" symbol on the keyboard?? am i just missing it? how am i just noticing this now??)
some stones are best left unturned.
this is not very good. despite being about the raping of horses, it is pretty dull, with no humor and a pretty unlikable main female character. and not cool-unlikable, either, just someone that you probably are familiar with if you have a job that forces you to be in contact with people who are really crappy and are best avoided or the small talk will smother you. how can you be going through a crippling depression and still come off smug? yuk. and i think the author is doing that thing that unskilled writers do when they want to infuse their own personal beliefs about unrelated things into the character's voice, like the evils of television or real estate developments...speeches of this kind are clunky and unnecessary in a mystery novel. just tell me who is raping the damn horses already.
well, now i know. and you don't.
and that's what i call a book review!
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(this is what you get when you google "that horse was asking for it." keep your eyes out for this one, horse rapists...)
i really wanted my last pre-proust book to be a home run - i figured if i was going to be immersed in one author's work for the entire summer, then i i really wanted my last pre-proust book to be a home run - i figured if i was going to be immersed in one author's work for the entire summer, then i should read something memorable just before it as a springboard to prousting.
didn't happen.
and this review is doubly precious because the Creator may be watching- this is my first review that otis (my new goodreads.com friend - yay!) will be seeing. i imagine this is how the deeply religious feel about their particular deity - the constant scrutiny, the judgment, the pressure to please and impress... here i am, living in your world...
but - book:
when i flipped through and saw that it was written as a series of dated entries, i naturally assumed they were diary entries, fictitiously but historically-plausibly attributed to a member of the party. but they're not. it is broken down like that simply to give a chronology, so you get things like this: May 16 - prairie travel. May 17 - Sunday. Traveled nonetheless. May 18 - Prairie travel. May 23 - prairie travel. May 23 - prairie travel.
i was so bored, that if richard rhodes were here, i would have made a stew out of him.
the whole first part is like that - it reads like a dull nonfiction timeline with no characters to hold on to, and then in the second part, it changes to having some characters given thoughts and dialogues, but by then, i was already pissed at the book, and each dated passage contains three different perspectives of people in three different locations without giving any real transitions, and i kept forgetting who was where, probably because i wasn't given a chance to "know" them in that introductory part - i had to keep stopping and trying to remember how many kids each person had, etc. this book should have pleased me more: it has survivalist elements, man against nature, and cannibalism. so why was it so freaking dull? the thing is, if i want to read nonfiction, i will bloody well read nonfiction, sir. don't trick me into reading it. in fact, richard rhodes, i am going to go out and buy the new nonfiction book about the donner party because it looks like good narrative nonfiction, and not some hodgepodge of the two.
but this is not a complete waste of a book, it just wasn't what i was expecting, so i was disappointed. despite most of the writing being perfunctory, there are a couple of gorgeous passages that just make me angrier because of what could have been:
He watched his wife and the 3 Murphy women and the children eat the stew. The had eaten hurriedly and hungrily before but now they dawdled over their food. Played with it with their spoons as if it was too hot. Toyed with it but not because it was a toy. They toyed with it because it had become precious to them. He felt the urge to do the same. To study each chunk of meat as it floated in his bowl. Look at the way the fibers were arranged. The patterns of the melted fat on the snowwater. The veins that ran like tunnels back into the meat. The smell that made his stomach ache. People shouldn't have to feel that way about food. Food shouldn't be that important.
(that was when they still had some meat - he isn't talking about people-meat there)
two donner-facts i did not know before starting this book: 1) that both of the donner brothers were over 60 when they started their journey. that is some serious balls. i mean, neither of them made it,true, but it is still impressive - their gumption. and 2) at one point there was a real need to eat the dead bodies because there was literally nothing else. but as the snow thawed and released some stockpiles of beef that had been inaccessible before, and the bodies of ponies etc, the survivors chose to continue to eat the human corpses, claiming that beef was "too dry". makes me wonder what i am missing out on, with my boring old beef meats.
so i am not taking it off of table - people can decide for themselves; the "banished from table" shelf is only for books i truly hated - this one just kind of bored me.
this book was very frustrating. i feel like i should love it, but it's like there is a barrier - a chastity belt between us preventing our love, and athis book was very frustrating. i feel like i should love it, but it's like there is a barrier - a chastity belt between us preventing our love, and as much as i want it, it isn't going to happen for us. there is a quality to her writing that reminded me of What I Loved or Housekeeping, books i am also told i am supposed to love, but just can't feel anything for, like distant relations. she is a less antiseptic writer than hustvedt, though. i respect her prose - there are lines in here of amazing beauty and melancholy that make me say - "yes, there you are - come out where i can see you," but the nothing-new-here feel to the plot means these moments are not enough.
and for some reason, i always thought i liked the booker award-winners more than, say, the pulitzers or other prestigious awards. in my mind, i had decided, "no, the bookers are the "good" awards - i usually like those." this idea, deeply rooted as it was, turns out to be like so many of my firmly-held ideas, and based on zero facts. i checked out the former booker winners and i have only actually read 10 of them, and only really liked 4. there are a lot of authors i like on there, but in a lot of cases, the winning book is one i haven't read. so - i give up my idea of the booker as my gold standard and one more ideal topples.
one odd thing of note about her ("her" being author/narrator)- she is endlessly preoccupied with casually describing the genitals of characters: her own, her husband's, the imagined genitals of her grandparents, etc. and they are usually compared to food - poultry etc. it is jarring, at first, then it becomes an accepted quirk, and by the end you can sort of see a psychological reason for it (for the narrator - enright's choice to grossly describe is still a mystery), but still - enough with the genitals.
having finished it, i shrug and i move on, not really feeling i have read anything that will stick with me, but while i was reading it, i did make little bookmark pages that have examples of a beautiful turn of phrase, or a nice original observation, and i would type them out here, but if they are the reason to read the book,in my opinion, i don't want to ruin the experience for any other future reader because they are like the jewels in the quiet night of her story.
i didn't say she inspired glorious prose from other people
floating because the comments in this thread: are killing me. ded.
first of all, i want to thank bill thompson, for sendfloating because the comments in this thread: are killing me. ded.
first of all, i want to thank bill thompson, for sending me this book from canada. i also want to thank him specifically for sending me this cover, because it is totally hot and i got to upload it onto goodreads.com myself.
i am now prepared for the customer/patron question: "do y'all have any books where a bear goes down on a lady??" yes. yes i do. but that's pretty reductive, even though the book is only 167 pages long.
it is on my "icky-sex" shelf only because that is my catch-all shelf for incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality(guess which one this book has! the bear turns out to actually be her brother!! oh, taboo!!) no, but, i'm not censuring the way she writes the sex scenes by calling them icky, is the point. she writes a sex scene better than stephen king, and better than most of the romance novels i had to read for school.
she writes better than a lot of authors in general:
"Yet, when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows, when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that already had a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast".
such marvelous yearning! and shame! such a wonderfully long sentence!so even if, at its core, it is a novel about a woman's love for a bear, and the fulfillment she finds from their union, there is still some killer writing in here, because the canadians find it very difficult to write poorly. come for the animal sex scenes, stay for the commentary on loneliness and communication.
i have very little else to say about this book because it is so short. it is lovely writing, and while the character isn't someone you are going to fall in love with, she is at least not ever boring. to fill our time together, here is a series of images of my earliest crushes, which is relevant because some of them are not human. enjoy!
I probably would have liked this book more if i were a teenager or a pedophile. I mostly just read this for science. it came up in my collection develI probably would have liked this book more if i were a teenager or a pedophile. I mostly just read this for science. it came up in my collection development class when we were talking about challenged books (that doesn't mean that they are handicapped, but that they have been rarrred at by angry parents and other scared concerned types), but when i heard what it was about - i pretty much had to read it to see how an author handled this situation, because it seemed rough stuff for teen fiction. the basic premise - although i hate doing plot summaries - is that "alice" (the first-person narrator)is kidnapped when she is ten and physically and sexually abused for 5 years, but when she starts to develop physically beyond her captor's personal preference, he enlists her help in selecting her own replacement. so -ew. and i don't know anything about psychology, child or otherwise, so i don't know the terminology, but she just completely shuts down, emotionally, into a not-quite-stockholm syndrome - she doesn't align herself with him for anything but self-preservation, but she has just given up fighting and does what he wants, because he has made threats about hurting her family etc. so - she has all this freedom to leave the house and go to the park to find this new-child for him, but she can't do anything to save herself, which is very frustrating for the reader.The author gets 5 stars for balls - for tackling the subject matter to begin with and for the ending which i'm sure had some people up in startled emotional flight mode.and as a cautionary tale, it should also get 5 stars, although a teen audience is a little old for the caution, and any younger readers would be traumatized beyond therapy. do not give this book to your 8-year-old. just tell them to stay away from unmarked vans. i just personally didn't connect to it. the subject matter is horrifying, but in the abstract, and this character's shutdown response didn't make me want to save her so much as walk in, splash some water on her and say "snap out of it". when i was little, these were my literary kidnapping equivalents:
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and they were way more gentle in terms of what the girls went through, wayyyy fewer forced blowjobs, but it gave me a total sense of confidence - if i got my ass kidnapped, i could get out of it with my cleverness. i used to dream about being kidnapped, and the ways i would elude my tormentors. it's probably a really good thing i was never actually kidnapped, because this here book is probably closer to the reality - feisty kids don't always win, but this might have made me a little more of a shut-in, and may have ruined my devil-may-care years, so i would have lost some good adventure-stories. i didn't personally love this book, but there's no reason it shouldn't be in a library. libraries are full of books. you don't like this one, don't write an angry letter, just go read another one. hell, i'm about to.
in brief, because i am nearly starting my first day of readers advisory class (yay!) and i have to prepare mentally for the schoolplace after the longin brief, because i am nearly starting my first day of readers advisory class (yay!) and i have to prepare mentally for the schoolplace after the long break, plus i'm not really in the mood to write this review what with salinger and all casting a pall over my day, but book report compulsion gets the best of me, so.
this book ... whole lotta length, not much depth. and as any lady will tell you...etc etc... i don't have a problem with stephen king. i stopped reading him when i was a teenager not because i felt "better" than him or was too snobby for mass market fiction, but because gerald's game was so so so laughably bad that i could not carry on. oh, god even thinking about it now makes me chuckle a little bit. go, read it - it is dreadful. but the stand i think is a bunch of fun, and i have read that one a number of times. king is also the only author to terrify me to this day with a story i read when i was about 7 or 8 on my way to the fair (yeah, i know, but what better to read trapped in a car on the way to some fair?) and even thinking about it now (the boogeyman) gives me delicious shivers.
this one started off pretty good - engaging plot, fast-paced, numerous characters to keep straight in the head. but then...it just goes nowhere while going everywhere, you know? much of it seems tacked-on, in a way. he attempts to give the characters more dimensions than they deserve and he somehow fails to follow through with this promise. by trying to complicate them, he makes their shallowness stand out even more. bad guys melt in the face of abandoned children, good guys have secret shady pasts... but i'm not buying it.
all the action takes place in about a week, even though this thing is the size of the bible (which is much more willing to sacrifice some details in the interest of economy; learn from god, s.k; we like a little mystery....) i am a huge fan of the "aftermath" novel, but i think i prefer a little more time to have passed before the story begins... when we had the blackout here in nyc, and we allll had to walk home to our respective boroughs, vendors were handing out bottled water along the way and the atmosphere was actually kind of fun. if this had lasted longer than it did, those vendors would probably be huddled in their bodegas, guarding their chips and gum like gold... and that's when it gets interesting. it's true there is some bad behavior in this book. some hugely antisocial behavior. but no one seems panic-stricken, until provoked. come on, maine, act like survivors!! stop making pancakes for everyone and hoard some shit.
there are cool moments - how the dome affects pacemakers is pretty awesome, there is some nice description in places of sunsets, meteors, nightgowns - also a shout-out to librarians (smart stephen king, smart...) and i like it when authors name-drop themselves in their books. if stephen king were on goodreads.com he would be a total votewhore, say these two facts.
the resolution is just awful. truly. i was hoping for something really cool, or at least plausible/comprehensible. it was like the happening in my epic disappointment, only this took longer than 2 hours to get through. ON MY VACATION!
i am scattered right now - i will probably tidy up my thinking on this book later, but i wanted to get a start while it was mostly fresh in my head. it was overlong, and i hated the ending, but fun enough for me to not hate it overall. but i have no desire to reread it ever, the way i did with the stand, several times over. schooltime now!
okay - school is over - i had one other thing to say I AM NOT FLOATING!! but here is the good librarian comment: "who better to recruit than a librarian when you're dealing with a fledgling dictatorship?" yes sir!
but so this is about language, and i might be nitpicking a huge book's tiny problem, but while i love (and will in the future use) king's word "joyshit", it troubles me that he uses "debark" instead of "disembark", which is just more elegant and honestly, i have never heard the word "debark", and i thought he made it up. he hadn't. and also, he should know the difference between "unbelievingly" and "disbelievingly". just things that stuck out in my jerky mind that i felt would be exciting to share. was it?
okay now it is time to actually review the book. and im having an off day so im not sure what form this review will t[image]
look we are best friends!
okay now it is time to actually review the book. and im having an off day so im not sure what form this review will take, but im writing it and thats what is happening. i was trying to remember the other day where i was the first time i encountered nick cave. not in person, - i remember that quite well. before the above picture was taken i had tried, many years ago, to flirt on him and was rebuffed. REBUFFED! but the first time i heard his music. i remember quite well the first time i heard the smiths. or leonard cohen. or oingo boingo. and thats about all the music i know. but i cant remember my first nick cave. fascinating, right?? like i said - its an off day. but so the book. i liked it, but not nearly as much as and the ass saw the angel. which i love enough to maybe review later, if im feeing saucy. this book is very good, and i know a movie is in the works, and i can see how that would be good, maybe. but when he was chatting in the green room, maria mentioned the word antihero. and nick cave seemed genuinely surprised at this word being used in connection with this book. and that, in turn, surprises me. because if you read this, theres nothing really to fall in love with, character-wise. hes a pure, unmitigated asshole. and thats great, really, but he is nothing if not an antihero. and moments later, he tried to make a call on his cell, but was geting poor reception and kept saying "can you hear me now", which makes me cringe, and then said "never mind, ill just text you". to this technogrouch, that was unforgiveable. but still - best friends. i thank this book for making =me realize how close avril lavignes name anagrams to "vaginal". and i love that when i was reading this outside on the back stoop at work, some lady came by and tried to sell me makeup from her little suitcase, which meshed nicely with what i was reading, but not as nicely (or terrifyingly) as when i was reading the plague on the jmz subway platform at like 2 in the morning and no one was around and then a rat ran over my foot. that was pretty awesome. but so thats my review, sortof, and i cant even see what i am typing because goodreads.com is experiencing some kind of annoying glitch that is superimposing "formatting tips" over my little box here. (on my display device) so i dont even care. comment, vote, whatever... this day is annoying all-round. boo....more
i can't believe i just gave this as many stars as i gave proust2, but me and this book have come a long way. for the first few stories, i was unimpresi can't believe i just gave this as many stars as i gave proust2, but me and this book have come a long way. for the first few stories, i was unimpressed. maybe it's just because greg gave it five stars and i wanted to be all cool or whatever, but i found it less mellifluous right after proust. which is totally unfair. but it's pretty clunkily written in parts, and maybe this is just a translation thing, or maybe whatever i read directly after proust was bound to suffer by comparison. but i thought it was repetitious to no great literary end, and some of the endings seemed abrupt, to say the least. but then i got to "in the crowd" and that's where it all came together. i have been wanting someone to suggest something that would terrify me for ages now. and this did. and i'm not even claustrophobic, generally. i would rather not be around...others...but i'm not afraid of crowds. but this story is so disgusting and scary and powerfully written (also the longest in the collection) and then of course i read the introduction only to learn that it is based on actual events. man, these russians are killing me. so after that story (to which i give a wholehearted 5 stars), i started loving the stories more and more. and then i reread some of the ones i was lukewarm about, to find my opinion changed. so - sologub is rescued from obscurity by greg, and if this weren't his library book, i would totally keep it and tell him i lost it -oops-, but i suppose i should give it back to him to return to library. dammit.
i don't know if i am sophisticated enough to understand this play. i hope the novel upon which it is based it more...straightforward, because i just bi don't know if i am sophisticated enough to understand this play. i hope the novel upon which it is based it more...straightforward, because i just bought that from alibris. first first: i have no patience for experimental theater. i knew some experimental theater kids when i went to nyu, and that tisch school, man... nyu wasn't a cheap school when i went there, probably even less cheap now, and it always perplexed me that people would just send their kids out with 35,000 dollars pocket money to roll around on the ground in sweatpants pretending they were chipmunks or whatever. at least i learned something useful in real-world application, like etymology.(koff) here are some stage directions that i thought were indicators of a fun and wacky play: "onde is carrying a rabbit which he kills and puts on his head", "a puppet rapes another puppet as avar and adla stare out in horror", "borne is having sex with a cow. he is standing on a stool" and yet despite all that... pretty dull stuff. that's not fair; it's not dull, just... pointless? unrewarding? yes, we will say unrewarding...
the person who was reading this used, 49 cent, copy of moll flanders before me stopped reading at page 26, judging by the abrupt cessation of circled the person who was reading this used, 49 cent, copy of moll flanders before me stopped reading at page 26, judging by the abrupt cessation of circled words like "prattle", "would you were, sir", "brother fell", and "he would" i like to think about this person, and their busy pen. it's so arbitrary - they are not even words that might be unfamiliar to a moderately-literate reader. i tried to find a code in it: "help, i am being held hostage by a mad librarian", but to no avail. almost every page has at least six circles or underlines and then suddenly - nothing. did the pen run out of ink? did they abandon moll flanders? did they fall out of a tree? it's mysterious. another thing that is mysterious is moll flanders. she swans through this book, dripping babies from her body like a tree sheds leaves, stealing and whoring and manipulating men to keep her head above water and yet i'm not in love with her. how can this be? i mean, it's a fine book, but i can't see falling in love with it or with her character. and honestly, i don't know what to make of the realization that if she had just stayed married to her brother in the first place, she would have avoided a whole lot of trouble and had a lovely son and a fruitful plantation. let this be a lesson to you: choose wisely; incest or a life of crime. there is no in-between.
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