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| 014303961X
| 9780143039617
| 014303961X
| 3.50
| 129,771
| 1928
| Dec 2019
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did not like it
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I honestly think that if this book hadn't been banned for obscene content, no one would have ever read it. Yes, there are lots of sex scenes (omg scan
I honestly think that if this book hadn't been banned for obscene content, no one would have ever read it. Yes, there are lots of sex scenes (omg scandalous) but all the stuff in between is, for the most part, ungodly boring. The book gets points for having some very intellectual discussions of class and the differences between men and women, and Lawrence's characters talk about sex with more honesty than any other book I've ever read, but that's about all it has going for it. I was about fifty pages into the book when I realized that I really didn't like either of the title characters (Lady Chatterley and her Lovah), and it didn't get much better from there. Mellors started to grow on me towards the end, when he discovered sarcasm, but Lady Chatterley (aka Connie) was one of the most boring protagonists ever. She was almost completely personality-deficient, and Lawrence worked hard at the beginning to convince us that she was intelligent, a task at which he fails miserably. Example? At one point in the book, when Connie and Mellors have just finished having hot sex and are in bed together, he starts a rant about the class system. Connie's response? She observes that Mellors' chest hair and pubic hair are different colors. Fascinating. Basically, the book can be summed up like this: Blah blah SEX blah blah class blah SEX SEX blah blah class England's economy SEX SEX SEX SCANDAL arguement arguement SCANDAL Vacation time! blah blah blah SEX arguement SCANDAL blah blah the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2009
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Oct 18, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1250272041
| 9781250272041
| 1250272041
| 3.24
| 7,161
| Feb 18, 2021
| May 18, 2021
|
did not like it
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File under: LOL, you tried. (Although when I decided to read this book, I broke my cardinal rule of "don't read books that claim to be 'for fans of Th File under: LOL, you tried. (Although when I decided to read this book, I broke my cardinal rule of "don't read books that claim to be 'for fans of The Secret History' because that is always, always a lie" so who's the real idiot here?) The true tragedy is that, because this book relies so heavily on The Twist, I can't fully get into all the ways the novel fails on every possible level, because to do so would require spoiling The Twist - yeah, I can write a review and hide it because of spoilers, but come on, nobody reads those if they haven't already read the book and I want to warn as many people as possible. But here's what I can say without giving anything away. It boils down to three main points: 1. I realized pretty early on that this book was Not My Cup of Tea, and the only reason I didn't abandon it halfway through was because I wanted to know what The Twist was. Or, most accurately, I guessed The Twist very early on and wanted to finish the book because I was sure that Wynne had to have something else up her sleeve, and the big reveal had to have more to it than what was blatantly projected from basically the first chapter. But she didn't. There is no startling last-minute reveal, no clever pulling the rug out from under the reader. The blatantly obvious Sinister Secret going on behind the scenes is all Phoebe Wynne has, so the reveal of the The Twist is less of a shocking reveal and more of a confirmation that I guessed right. 2. In a similar vein, there is no payoff to the fact that the story takes place in the mid-90's. I thought maybe we were going to get to see one of the students as an adult in modern day, or maybe we would get a cool flash-forward to see what the school looks like in 2019, but nope. The only reason the book takes place in the 90's is clearly because Phoebe Wynne couldn't figure out how to make her scenario plausible in a world where cell phones and the internet exist, so she had to set it 30 years in the past. And even then, her scenario is barely plausible but again I frustratingly cannot get into details about why. Rest assured, though, that any horror or dread this book manages to conjure up is instantly undercut by the knowledge that Caldonbrae Hall and its Sinister Secret have a shelf life of about ten more years, and then the whole system is going to collapse on itself because it's not sustainable at all. 3. Obviously this novel is not a worthy successor to The Secret History, but the publishers went a step further in their claims that fans of Donna Tartt's book would also enjoy Madam. Putting aside the surface similarities (this one also involves Classics students, but that's literally it), the fucking themes don't even match up. Madam is a ham-fisted wannabe-feminist statement piece that falls flat on its face, a paper-thin fable straight out of the White Feminism school of "it's only sad when it happens to white girls." It isn't feminist. It isn't Gothic. It isn't scary. And it's definitely not anything close to The Secret History. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2022
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Sep 07, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 4.05
| 376,536
| Oct 19, 2011
| Sep 25, 2012
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did not like it
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2022
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Jun 22, 2022
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
| 1419757598
| 9781419757594
| 1419757598
| 3.78
| 32,594
| Aug 21, 2019
| Sep 07, 2021
|
it was ok
|
The best and briefest way I can think of to explain how this novel failed me was by saying that it felt like I just read an extended excerpt from a mu
The best and briefest way I can think of to explain how this novel failed me was by saying that it felt like I just read an extended excerpt from a much longer novel. There's really nothing here - just a quick little 200-page novella that doesn't have the time or space necessary to develop the characters, complicate the plot, or explore any of the multiple interesting potential angles the story could have gone into. The Mad Women's Ball is Victoria Mas's debut novel (and uh, it shows), taking place at an infamous women's asylum in 1800's Paris. Our two main characters are Genevieve, a respected and long-term nurse at the asylum whom the patients call "The Matron"; and Eugenie, a young woman from a bourgeois family who is locked away by her family after she claims she can communicate with spirits. The two women forge an unlikely connection and hatch a plan for Eugenie to escape the asylum on the one night a year when the hospital is open to the public: the famous Lenten ball, when the patients are allowed to dress up and mingle with the Parisian citizens who have come to witness the spectacle. The first and most glaring problem with this novel is that Eugenie's "gift" of speaking to the dead is clearly established as a fact. There is absolutely no doubt or ambiguity surrounding her claim that the dead communicate with her, at any point in the story. The fact that Mas had an opportunity to make Eugenie's spiritualist claims a little more suspicious and give the readers space to wonder if maybe she is struggling with a mental illness that the 19th century doctors don't yet have the vocabulary for, and then decided, no, it's all definitely real, is extremely frustrating. This could have been a cool Alias Grace-style story of a mental health professional trying to figure out if a patient is telling the truth or merely saying what she thinks the doctors want to hear. Add that to the fact that in reality, every single Spiritualist who claimed to speak to the dead was actually a con artist exploiting desperate people...but no, instead Victoria Mas has decided that her story takes place in a universe where characters are given solid evidence of life after death, and then do fuck-all with it. On top of that, the book is just drowning in what I like to call "Disney Feminism" (Eugenie doesn't want to get married? She likes reading and hates wearing corsets? Wow, groundbreaking, what a fresh character, we certainly haven't seen this kind of lazy feminist shorthand characterization before!!!) and tiresome "bUt WhAt If ThE pAtIeNtS aRe ThE rEaL sAnE oNeS?!" themes that show up in every single asylum story you've ever seen before. And Mas makes the classic debut novelist mistake where she overexplains Every. Little. Thing because she's afraid we won't figure it out ourselves. At one point in the story, a patient learns that she's been cleared for release, and promptly slits her wrists. Mas then treats us to an extended paragraph where she explains, see, the patient has no family outside the asylum and she's been here so long and this is the only place she feels safe, so she wasn't actually trying to kill herself, she just wanted to make sure they kept her institutionalized! But we, as the reader, know all of this because it's already been established in the text, and the fact that Mas doesn't trust us to connect the dots is a little insulting. The second major failure of this book is that the story is essentially a prison escape adventure, but Mas doesn't indulge herself in any of the fun tropes of the genre. Look, I hate to reference Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder's weird masturbatory fever dream that I once paid eleven American dollars to see in theaters, but at least he understood that when you have a group of characters planning to escape an evil asylum, you can have some fun with it. Give us a classic "here's how the escape will go down" explanation scene! Give us a last-minute complication! Give us an unexpected betrayal! God, we don't even get a scene where a character studies a set of blueprints or steals a key from a guard and I'm furious about it. Don't give me the plot description "two women plot an escape from an asylum using a formal event as cover" and then do absolutely nothing with it. There's even the potential for a great twist at the end, which of course Mas doesn't take, and I'm gonna hide it as a spoiler even though it obviously doesn't happen in the book, but what if (view spoiler)[the escape gets foiled because we find out that Genevieve isn't a nurse? Like, maybe she used to be a nurse but then she had a breakdown (and maybe tried to free another patient, with disasterous results) so she was committed, but because she was there for so long and was so beloved, the other nurses let her wear her old uniform and humor her by letting her pretend to boss them around, but because Eugenie just arrived at the asylum and has been in solitary confinement the whole time, she doesn't know this. Her only conversations with Genevieve happen when they're alone, and when Genevieve offers to help Eugenie, the younger girl doesn't question it and only finds out when Genevieve's laughably simple escape plan (seriously there was NO WAY it would have worked) fails and the other nurses reveal the truth. Victoria, gimme a call, we can fix this! (hide spoiler)] Let's hope the movie adaptation turned out better. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2021
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Oct 21, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0060846844
| 9780060846848
| 0060846844
| 3.34
| 740
| Jul 03, 2006
| Jul 03, 2006
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it was ok
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The elevator pitch for this book was definitely "trauma, but make it sexy!" Basically if you watched Lost in Translation and thought this is good and
The elevator pitch for this book was definitely "trauma, but make it sexy!" Basically if you watched Lost in Translation and thought this is good and everything, but I wish every single white person was 500% more repulsive, then this is the novel for you. Our heroine is Margaret, who fled to Tokyo in order to escape her traumatic home life back in the United States. By day, she works as an instructor at a school that trains Japanese flight attendants; by night, she does her best to lose herself in drugs, alcohol, and one-night-stands with strangers (oh and also Margaret likes it when guys tie her up during sex, and it's heavily implied that this interest in kink is a byproduct of her mental illness - love it! Definitely not a dangerous myth to perpetuate! No notes!) She's aided in these trysts by Tokyo's "love hotels", which can be found all over Tokyo and offer rooms that can be rented for short periods of time. The biggest disappointment of the book is Hanrahan's inability to handle her subjects of generational trauma and mental illness with anything even vaguely resembling tact and understanding - Margaret's brother suffered from schizophrenia, and her life is spent constantly numbing herself against the fear that she will end up "crazy" like him. And I could have almost gotten over that, if Hanrahan had been willing to commit herself fully to the balls-out hedonism and substance abuse practiced by the heroine and her fellow dirtbag expats. It would have almost been worth it if Lost Girls and Love Hotels was a Bret Easton Ellis-esque drug-fueled fever dream of a novel, where Maraget drifts from one hookup to another and loses herself in Tokyo's underbelly. But unfortunately, that's not the book we get. I'll be perfectly clear: for a book that full of drugs, booze, and kinky anonymous sex, Lost Girls and Love Hotels is pretty fucking tame. Often, it reads like the work of a sheltered high schooler doing her best to imagine what a wild twenty-something alone in Tokyo would do, and all of Margaret's destructive actions feel very performative and not genuine. I mean, for god's sake, she has an affair with a Yakuza gangster and somehow Hanrahan manages to make it boring! The only reason I picked this up at all was because I stumbled across the trailer for the movie adaptation, which I then proceeded to hear nothing about for an entire year. So either the movie suffered because it was released in the middle of the pandemic, or because it failed to improve on the original material. My money is on the latter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Oct 2020
|
Jun 15, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385542232
| 9780385542234
| 0385542232
| 3.95
| 174,565
| May 23, 2017
| May 23, 2017
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did not like it
|
Look, I know what I said. I know that I wrote in my review of China Rich Girlfriend that I wasn’t going to continue with the series. All the fun and n
Look, I know what I said. I know that I wrote in my review of China Rich Girlfriend that I wasn’t going to continue with the series. All the fun and novelty of the first book had worn off, and I realized that I was just reading a story about people who had so much money it had turned them into sociopaths. I said I was done, but I don’t like to leave things unfinished. So here we are. As one can tell from the rating, Kevin Kwan was not able to turn things around for the last book. In fact, this series has taken such a hard nosedive since Book One that I have a hard time believing that I ever enjoyed reading about these people, and don’t think I’ve ever experienced such an extreme change in my feelings towards a series. (well, except maybe Harlots - we’re all pretending that season 3 never happened, right?) The problem is that, frankly, the current state of the world means that I cannot enjoy a story about the problems of spoiled billionaires anymore. The entire drama of this book centers around the impending death of Nick’s grandmother, and which of her heirs will receive Tyersall Park in her will. Will she and Nick be able to mend their relationship in time so our golden boy can claim his birthright as Lord of the Manor? What on earth will happen! I certainly couldn’t guess! We’re supposed to be invested in this, because Nick is the only relative who DESERVES to inherit the estate the size of a fucking national park. But when this novel takes place, Nick hasn’t even spoken to his grandmother in five years, so no matter how many times he insists that Tyersall Park is his beloved childhood home and he has a strong emotional stake in the property, it mostly comes across as Kwan covering his own ass and trying to convince us that he’s done the work to justify these feelings in his characters. (There’s also a lot of flashbacks to Su Yi’s adolescence, and it’s basically Kwan retconning her into a nice person and glossing over the fact that she kicked Nick out of the family for marrying Rachel, because if there’s one thing this series has taught me, it’s that none of the characters in this book have ever met an emotion more complicated than “angry, but also sad.”) There was a tiny hint of the book that this could have been, and it was enough to keep me going until the end. At about the halfway point, Kwan establishes that the bulk of Astrid’s inheritance comes from palm oil. A short time later, we have a character who runs a charity to save orangutans. Okay, now things are getting interesting, I remember thinking. Was Kwan going to have his characters connect the dots, and make sure his readers understand that orangutans are going extinct because their habitats are being destroyed to farm…palm oil? Was Perfect Astrid going to have to confront the fact that her lavish lifestyle is entirely funded by blood money? Would these people, who wouldn’t know a Consequence if it kicked them in their couture-clad ass, have to finally examine how their obscene wealth directly impacts the planet? LOL nope. The connection between the Leongs' money and the gradual destruction of the planet remains tenuous at best, and the only character who points it out is Charlie Wu’s crazy ex-wife (oh, also Charlie has turned into Mr. Rochester for the purposes of the narrative). Speaking of Charlie Wu, what’s the environmental impact of his massive tech company? How much does he pay the factory workers who assemble the microchips or whatever? Speaking of consequences, remember Rachel’s half-brother Carlton, and how in the beginning of the last book he caused a car crash that killed one woman and paralyzed another? He still hasn’t done any atonement whatsoever for that act, and even though he still feels so super bad about what happened, that’s pretty much the end of the discussion. (ugh, and it’s a one sentence fix too! “We’re so impressed with Carlton, he started going to AA and donated a gazillion dollars to some anti-drunk-driving charity” or whatever) And worse, we have Colette Bing, who I guess is just a full-fledged villain now. Okay, yes, she poisoned Rachel in the last book, but Rachel is fine. Again – Carlton killed a girl and paralyzed another, yet when Collette reveals this information to Carlton’s new girlfriend, it’s treated as an act of vindictive, jealous backstabbing. (Kwan is so far up his characters’ asses that the only people in the book who bring up the past sins of his protagonists are the women labeled “crazy.” What a weird coincidence that is!!!) Rachel’s barely in this book, by the way. We’re not quite in “sexy lamp” territory, but her main job in the few scenes where she appears is to make comforting noises while Nick complains about his family drama. There’s a little seed of a plot where Eleanor is obsessed with getting a grandchild, but that goes basically nowhere. It’s clear that Kwan has grown bored of Rachel, and he seems to think that what the people want is more Astrid instead. Kwan is wrong – I’m sorry, but Astrid is fucking insufferable. She has no flaws whatsoever, and what flaws do attempt to poke their heads out are ignored by the text. (True, there’s nothing technically wrong with getting engaged before the ink on your divorce papers is dry, but is it a dick move? Kind of! Does Kwan want to admit this? Nope! Perfect Astrid, who poops rose petals and doesn’t know what a pimple is, will not be questioned!) God, I got so sick of her. There’s this wonderfully tone-deaf line where she reflects that she can’t remember the last time she really took a vacation just for herself, because every time she travels it’s for family stuff or business, and I’m staring at the pages saying, “You. Go. To. Paris. Once. A. Year. To. Buy. A. New. Couture. Wardrobe.” Oh, and also after she reads a line in a gossip magazine claiming she’s always sitting front row at fashion shows, protests that she never does that because “I’m always backstage, helping out.” UUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH. It’s unfair to harp on stuff like this, I know. This is supposed to be a fluffy, fun beach read that keeps you entertained for a few hours with its descriptions of unimaginable wealth and luxury. But it’s not fun for me, anymore, and I can’t just sit back and enjoy a story about a bunch of people who have the power to enact so much change, but instead just dither around buying art and having divorce drama and fighting over a fucking house. Long ago, I wrote a very snotty review of Gossip Girl and how it wasn’t even a real book, and now I find myself taking that all back. Kevin Kwan wishes he were on the same level as Gossip Girl, because say what you will about that series, at least Cecily von Ziegesar had enough interesting characters to maintain her series for a dozen or so installments. We’re only three books into this series, and Kwan’s boredom with his own characters is obvious. Hopefully this is the end of it. (Fuck, am I gonna have to re-read the entire Gossip Girl series? Yeah. Yeah, I think I will. I owe von Ziegesar an apology) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
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Nov 2019
|
Nov 18, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060989157
| 9780060989156
| B007C1S9O4
| 4.14
| 46,218
| 2001
| Jul 09, 2002
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did not like it
|
This was it, dear readers. This was the memoir that broke me. The one that made me decide, definitively, to never read another White Dude Musician Mem
This was it, dear readers. This was the memoir that broke me. The one that made me decide, definitively, to never read another White Dude Musician Memoir ever again. I thought Keith Richards, with his “I’m a man in his goddamn seventies who still insists on calling all women ‘chicks’" act was bad. But at least Keith Richards, for all his faults and positively medieval gender politics, is the real deal. Keith Richards is a rock star, and Keith Richards is cool. The dudes in Motley Cru (I don’t know how to type the accents and I refuse to learn) are not cool. But god, are they trying so hard to live up to the rockstar image that they think they’re required to portray. And in a way, that’s the only interesting thing about this memoir: the sheer, naked desperation that seeps from every page; the intense, embarrassing need these guys have to be considered cool. Everything they do is performative, from the way they insisted on trashing every space they inhabited beyond recognition, to the exhaustive descriptions of all the women they had sex with (including several instances where one of the guys is forced to admit that, yeah, okay, so I realize now that I actually raped this girl? But I feel really bad about it? Twenty years later?), to the repeated and tiring scenes where the band consumes every drug they can get their hands on. They're not behaving this way because they want to (or, god forbid, because they get any joy out of it). They're acting like assholes because they think it makes them cool. It was weirdly fascinating to see how these guys cultivated their image, because in one sense, glam rockers like Motley Cru are almost like drag queens – they wear makeup, over-style their hair, and wear women’s clothes – but unlike, say, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and yeah, Mick Jagger, who embraced and reveled in the feminine sides of their personas (and in the case of Bowie and Mercury, were open about their bisexuality), Motley Cru’s presentation is one long, prolonged shriek of NO HOMO, BRO. These guys can’t go a single goddamn page without reminding us of their blistering masculinity, and giving us every detail of their sex lives which we certainly did not ask for. (One delightful anecdote: after the guys had had sex with their side pieces, they would stop on the way home to buy egg burritos and stick their dicks in the burritos to hide the smell and oh my god I’m gagging just thinking about it.) All the descriptions of rock star riches and excess, much like those poor egg burritos, cannot disguise the fact that these guys are fucking disgusting. The only truly innovative aspect of this memoir is that it’s told in chapter installments, with different band members telling their version of the story – and those different versions don’t always line up with each other. It was almost funny, reading one chapter that went “and then we fired so-and-so because he was a dick who refused to learn the music” and then going to the next chapter and reading “and then I quit the band because those guys suck and I hated the music.” But the men of Motley Cru remain, at best, petty and immature. And I can’t repeat this enough – those guys are all rapists, and also Tommy Lee fucking admits that he beat up Pamela Anderson, so in conclusion, they can all go fuck themselves. But again, the band wants us to believe that all of this – the over-the-top clothes, the drug use, the frankly horrifying treatment of women – was just a product of their fame. Loving a rock star (and, on a broader level, any man with a shred of artistic talent or even artistic ambition) means accepting their garbage behaviors with a smile, because that’s the price you have to pay for the privilege of existing in these guys’ orbits. Even as the Motley Cru guys reflect on their past behavior and admit that maybe they were jerks back then, you can see them shrugging and grinning - ain’t I a stinker? - from behind the page. They have learned nothing, and they regret nothing, because why should they? What ever gave them the idea that they needed to be responsible for their own actions? They’re rock stars, babe! This is just part of the act! I am so goddamn tired of the narrative that excuses asshole behavior in artistic men, as if their creative ability excuses them from basic human decency. The ability to make music does not exempt you from empathy and kindness, and the desperation to fit a rock star image is a pointless and futile endeavor. In a way, it was almost comforting to read this memoir and realize that everyone, even people you might believe are super cool, are just as insecure and desperate to fit in as everyone else. The real lesson that I took from this book, and the lesson I’m going to write here so you don’t have to bother reading The Dirt, is this: no one is truly cool and everyone’s faking it until they make it, so you might as well be nice to people. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Jun 2016
|
Jul 20, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.43
| 222,329
| Oct 08, 2013
| Oct 08, 2013
|
it was ok
|
If I had to come up with a one-sentence summary for this book, it would be this: if you've ever read one of those thinkpieces written by a smug baby b
If I had to come up with a one-sentence summary for this book, it would be this: if you've ever read one of those thinkpieces written by a smug baby boomer explaining why millinials are the worst and thought, man, I wish I had five hundred pages of this, then The Circle is for you! May Holland is a recent college graduate living sometime in the near future, when a company called the Circle has created a monopoly on all technology. The Circle has created TrueYou, a system that links a person's entire online presence - social media, email, bank accounts, etc - under one account and one name. Online anonymity is a thing of the past, and the entire world is connected by the Circle. May's friend is one of the top employees at the Circle, and through her influence, May manages to get a job at one of the world's most influential companies. (sidebar: after Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood series, I was sort of disappointed that TrueYou wasn't spelled TruYoo, and didn't have any clever double meaning, like the companies and products she makes up in her series. Just in case you needed an indication of where Dave Eggers ranks on the list of speculative fiction authors.) Dave Eggers spends a lot - and I mean a lot - of story space just showing us around the Circle campus and telling us all the cool stuff they have, to the point where it feels like the first 2/3 of the book is taking place within May's first week at work. We get introduced to the founders of the company (referred to as the three wise men, because of course they are), and May seems to spend more time going to company parties and increasing her social media presence instead of actually working. Because millennials, amirite guys! Meanwhile, a mysterious guy named Calden pops in and out of the narrative, and he has two purposes: to give us a semi-developed mystery to work on, since no one else at the Circle seems to know who he is and May can't find him anywhere in the company database (and frankly, I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out that he's (view spoiler)[Ty, the third founder of the Circle. Like, good lord, Madeline, we know that there's three founders and you've only met two, law of conservation of characters, etc) (hide spoiler)]. His second purpose is to hook up with May and provide us with some truly uncomfortable sex scenes. May also has a sort-of romance with another programmer, and all I'll say about that is that he secretly films her giving him a handjob (and it's basically this Louie CK bit) and then, when she finds out, refuses to delete it. May is mad at him for about three pages, and then they're back to hanging out like nothing's wrong. I'm four paragraphs into this review and haven't even discussed May as a character. The simple fact is that there's really not much to say about May. She's 100% onboard with everything the Circle does from her first day, and the few objections she offers to their practices are feeble at best. She has a lot of scenes with one of the founders of the Circle, so he can patronizingly dismiss all of her concerns and offer up some of the worst pseudo-intelligent arguments I've ever heard - there's a scene where May goes kayaking and doesn't live-stream it on her social media feed, and the founder finds out about it and basically shames her for not sharing it with all her followers. He tells her that he has a son who's disabled and, I shit you not, tells her that by not sharing a video of her stupid kayaking trip, she's denying his poor wheelchair-bound son the chance to experience what he can never do in real life. May's total acceptance of the Circle's creepy practices is supposed to unnerve us, and it does, but I just couldn't connect with it. I'm a millennial, for god's sake, and even on May's first day at the Circle, she was being shown around and a million alarm bells were going off in my head. But nothing seems off to May, and she hands over her privacy without a second thought. I think Dave Eggers wanted May's total conversion to Circle-think to be gradual, so the audience thinks it's okay at first, and then she slowly gives up more and more until it's too late. He's trying to live up to that line from The Handmaid's Tale, about how in a gradually-heating bathtub you'd boil yourself to death and never notice. In The Circle, May jumps headfirst into a boiling tub and Dave Eggers thinks it's believable. (I realize that this is my second Atwood comparison so far - if you take one thing away from this review, it's that Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction makes The Circle look like a toddler's crayon drawing) But the ending is the most disappointing thing. It felt like the entire book was building to something much bigger and more sinister, and I kept waiting, until the very last page, for the other shoe to drop. But it never really does, and there was never any secret, super-evil motive behind the Circle - just the usual, banal Facebook and Google style of evil, which is too realistic to be interesting. Buried deep within this book is a well-written exploration of how people can be inducted into a cult-like mentality without even realizing it, and at its best, The Circle reads like an origin story for all those teenage dystopia worlds - if you've ever wondered how a society like we see in The Hunger Games or Divergent could ever have happened, The Circle shows you exactly how it could have seemed like a good idea at the beginning. But overall, those good ideas and concepts are just drowned under unlikeable characters, absurd plot points, and endless smug preaching about the evils of technology. (Reviewer's note: I listened to this as an audiobook, and hated the reader for two reasons - first, they have a man doing the reading, even though the book is told from a woman's perspective; and also the multi-cultural staff of the Circle means the reader has to do a lot of accents, and they're...not great. So the poor listening experience might have made me dislike this book a little bit more than it deserved. Only a little bit, though.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2017
|
Jul 04, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1101633530
| 9781101633533
| B00G3L19CI
| 4.14
| 78,765
| Aug 05, 2014
| Aug 05, 2014
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-
**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-building (Grossman is at his best when he is taking genuine joy from creating his own Narnia- or Hogwarts-like world, rather than trying to smugly point out all of their respective flaws), Quentin will stay just on the bearable side of utterly insufferable, there will be at least one character who I wish had an entire book of their own, and the last hundred pages of the novel will be so brutally unrelenting that it'll make me want to go back to bed and re-read the Narnia books to remind myself that fantasy stories that are more pretty than painful still exist. But The Magician's Land is different. The final hundred-ish pages of the book are not good-painful, they're just painful - in short, this book is less thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another, and more like a hundred pages of Lev Grossman smacking me with my own hands while jeering, "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!" The book, as a whole, isn't bad. The world-building is still rock solid and fascinating, and I love that Grossman is still creating new things for me to discovery in Fillory. The story also benefits by moving the timeline forward, and setting this book about six years after the events of The Magician King. So now, instead of dealing with whiny, entitled twenty-somethings, our characters are world-weary almost-thirty-year-olds who are finally, FINALLY figuring out how to be grownups. Quentin, after being kicked out of Fillory at the end of the second book, has mostly spent his time since then just bumming around, until he gets an offer to return to Brakebills - this time as a teacher. While there, two important events happen: Quentin runs into Alice, who we last saw turning into a niffin at the end of Book One; and Quentin is contacted by a group recruiting magicians to steal a mysterious magical objects. Meanwhile, Eliot and Janet are still kicking around Fillory, fully settled into their roles as king and queen, when they receive disturbing news: Fillory is dying. Like I said, most of this book is actually very, very good. I especially loved Eliot and Janet's sections, first because I will never, ever tire of the "modern young adults react to old-school fantasy setting" schtick, and Janet and Eliot are a perfect blend of snarky can-you-believe-this-shit and genuine, unashamed love of Fillory and its magic. I especially loved Janet, who after two books of being little more than a token mean girl and a contrived wedge between Quentin and Alice, finally gets her due. The little bits we learn about what Janet has been doing between the second and third books is fascinating, and I would honestly re-read the entire Magicians series if it was rewritten from Janet's perspective. She's brave, funny, tough as nails, and takes absolutely no shit from anyone - whether they're Quentin "never was there a tale of more woe" Coldwater, or a giant magic snapping turtle. Her best line, when Eliot is trying to brainstorm ways to save Fillory: "We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!" So yeah - lots to like here, if I'm being honest with myself, and plenty of other reviewers have spent time praising these elements. Go read their reviews if you want to hear how The Magician's Land is brilliant; I'll probably agree with most of their points. So without further ado, here's what made me furious about this book. It essentially boils down to three points. One: Grossman is doing a lot of telling and very little showing when it comes to Quentin's development as a character. To hear Grossman tell it, Quentin is a completely different person than he was in Book One. Grossman is correct, to a point: Quentin is no longer an entitled little shit who believes that if one world isn't up to his standards, the universe should oblige by creating another one for him (this is, in fact, exactly what happens at the end of the series, but I guess it doesn't count because Quentin didn't explicitly demand it, or some bullshit like that), and he sees people as they really are, not as characters who must fit into his personal narrative in a specific way. But Grossman is just so insistent about how much Quentin has grown as a person, telling us every few chapters that "Quentin had changed so much" or "Quentin was a different person now" and it felt like he realized that Quentin wasn't actually that different from the kid we met in Book One, and had to overcompensate. Also, certain events in the story are given much more weight than they deserve. The death of Quentin's father is portrayed as a massive, earth-shattering event that permanently changes Quentin, but since his father was never even a real character in the story, his death had no real weight for me, no matter how many times Grossman insists that it did (and oh, does he insist). Also, remember Professor Mayakovsky, of Brakebills South? We revisit him in this book, and he's suddenly recast as a wise father figure for Quentin. Is Quentin merely latching on to the nearest male authority figure as a way to cope with his father's death? Probably, but Grossman isn't interested in exploring this idea, and Mayakovsky remains in the role Quentin has assigned him. How nice. Two: Alice and Julia, the two biggest skeletons in Quentin's emotional closet, are never treated as well as they deserve by Quentin or the narrative. First, Alice. She turned into a niffin at the end of Book One to save Quentin and the others, and when Quentin encounters her again in Book Three, he decides he's going to save her. When he does, newly-human Alice is understandably furious with him - there's a much-quoted passage where she rips him a much-earned new one, but I can't be bothered to find it now. Rest assured that Alice is full of righteous fury, and every ounce of it is absolutely deserved. And then it's all dropped completely, and Quentin and Alice have sex and skip off to save Fillory together. Grossman doesn't go quite so far as to make Alice get back together with Quentin at the end, but it's clear that he believes everything is cool between them now. NO. I love angry Alice most of all, and Grossman robbed her of any real closure in favor of showing Quentin, the once and future king of Fillory, saving the day and (basically) getting the girl once again. Alice's rage, ultimately, doesn't matter, and Grossman kind of makes it seem like this rage is merely a side effect of her experiences as a niffin, rather than her own feelings. Julia isn't treated quite as badly, but like Alice, she deserved more closure with Quentin than she got. Grossman never really stops the explore the fact that both of these women were essentially destroyed as a direct result of Quentin's actions, and he never has to answer for that. Three: Grossman has gotten so caught up in the fun of creating a fantasy adventure, he forgot what he was trying to say in the first place. The Magicians was presented as a response to the Harry Potter and Narnia books - an unflinching, realistic portrayal of how those idealized magical worlds would really function, and reveal the cracks in their perfect facades. Lev Grossman gave an interview once (which of course I can't find now) where he says that one of the points of The Magicians is that nobody actually gets to be the Chosen One - Quentin, ultimately, is just a guy who stumbled into a magical world. He isn't special, because in real life, nobody is special. No one is chosen. So what happens at the end of The Magician's Land? Quentin saves all of Fillory by pulling a sword out of midair, kills not one but two gods, then becomes a god himself and remakes Fillory, and he does such a good job that he eliminates the need for gods in Fillory. He gets rid of the godlike powers once his work is done, because he's just so damn noble, and the day is saved and everyone cheers. So in the end, Lev Grossman has written the exact same kind of book that he tried to debunk: a very special schoolboy travels to a magical land and becomes its king, then its savior, and all is well. What was the point of all that cynicism, all that fucking smugness from Grossman, if this was the book he was writing all along? Like, Jesus, dude, it's okay to say that you genuinely like the Narnia books. Adding darkness and death doesn't make your book smarter, or more mature. And deconstructing tropes and archetypes doesn't mean shit if you're just going to indulge yourself in all of them in the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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May 22, 2016
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 031610969X
| 9780316109697
| 031610969X
| 3.71
| 160,146
| Sep 01, 2005
| Sep 28, 2005
|
did not like it
|
In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected." I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected." I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole (if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving, her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible"), and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia, I skip the Julie parts because even Amy Adams, who is literal human sunshine, cannot make that woman appealing in any sense of the word. Actually, the whole reason I decided to get this book from the library is because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France, which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie, so I decided that it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book. Powell wastes no time letting her readers know exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight (Eight! We're not even into the double-digit pages yet!) we get to see Powell's version of an Oprah "Ah-ha moment." I mentioned this in one of my status updates already, but I feel it's important that I fully explain this scene. Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses: "...a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete directly behind me. ...The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. 'Fuck!' she yelled. 'Fuck! FUCK!' ...The loon placed both palms down on the concrete in front of her and - CRACK! - smacked her forehead hard on the ground. ...It was only once I was in the car, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, the lot of us hanging by one hand from the overhead bar like slaughtered cows on the trundling train, that it came to me - as if some omnipotent God of City Dwellers were whispering the truth in my ear - that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming 'Fuck!' in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy." So in addition to being an asshole, Julie Powell also might be a sociopath, because who does that? How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to become in order to watch what is clearly a mentally ill person having a disturbing episode, and your first response is, "Ugh, same"?! And then you record the scene in your memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for you? Gee, I'm so glad that person had a mental breakdown and seriously injured themselves so you could have an epiphany, Julie Powell. (you may be wondering: how does this experience lead to Powell deciding to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking? I read the damn book and I couldn't even tell you.) So anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook, keeping a blog about her progress. (This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie's like, what the hell is a blog? 2002 was a simpler time.) As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily, with scenes happening out of sequence and a nonsensical structure - Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on, and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter. It's very difficult to follow the progress she's making through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping meant that I never had any clear idea of where I was in the project, unless Powell directly referenced the date. Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is...not a great writer. She's clearly trying to be self-depreciating, and make us think that she's rolling her eyes right along with us whenever we read a scene of her throwing a tantrum about mayonnaise - but the problem is that I wasn't shaking my head and smiling in bemusement, like Powell wants me to. I was just thinking, "you are horrible, and telling me that you know you're being horrible doesn't help." Powell doesn't have the writing skill to redeem herself in the narrative, and on top of that, her prose is often practically unreadable. Try this excerpt on for size, and see if it makes any goddamn sense to you on the first reading: "My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess." Well, now I guess we know what it would sound like if Charlotte Bronte wrote all her books drunk. It made me long for the effortless, evocative writing Julia Child presented in My Life in France - her description of the proper technique for scrambling eggs is practically poetry. And that is what really sets Julie Powell apart from Julia Child: Child loved to cook, and Powell does not. Her project, and every recipe she describes, are never presented as anything other than a chore she has to get through. There is no joy in Powell's book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And frankly, a lot of Powell's book is pretty gross. Her kitchen is always a disaster scene, with dirty surfaces and piles of unwashed dishes. Which, fine - you're working a full-time job and cooking gourmet meals every night, obviously you're going to slack off on cleaning again. But then Powell discovers that there are maggots living under her dish rack, and I was fucking done. With Julie and Julia, Julie Powell has managed to do the unthinkable: she wrote a cooking memoir that didn't make me feel hungry, not once in three hundred pages. I'm pretty sure that's a capital offense in some countries. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 31, 2016
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Apr 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 150018960X
| 9781500189600
| 150018960X
| 3.62
| 873
| Sep 08, 2014
| Sep 08, 2014
|
did not like it
|
The year is AE3, 3 years after the Event. Within the walls of Meritropolis, 50,000 inhabitants live in fear, ruled by the brutal System that assigns e
The year is AE3, 3 years after the Event. Within the walls of Meritropolis, 50,000 inhabitants live in fear, ruled by the brutal System that assigns each citizen a merit score that dictates whether they live or die. Those with the highest scores thrive, while those with the lowest are subject to the most unforgiving punishment--to be thrust outside the city gates, thrown to the terrifying hybrid creatures that exist beyond. But for one High Score, conforming to the System just isn't an option. Seventeen-year-old Charley has a brother to avenge. And nothing--not even a totalitarian military or dangerous science--is going to stop him. Where humankind has pushed nature and morals to the extreme, Charley is amongst the chosen few tasked with exploring the boundaries, forcing him to look deep into his very being to discern right from wrong. But as he and his friends learn more about the frightening forces that threaten destruction both without and within the gates, Meritropolis reveals complexities they couldn't possibly have bargained for... [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2015
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May 2015
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Feb 23, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0451528166
| 9780451528162
| 0451528166
| 3.92
| 38,235
| 1485
| Oct 01, 2001
|
did not like it
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FINALLY finished this last night. No exaggeration: I have been reading this book for six months. Not six continuous months, mind you. I kept the book
FINALLY finished this last night. No exaggeration: I have been reading this book for six months. Not six continuous months, mind you. I kept the book by my bed and would try to read a little bit every night, but I could never manage to read more than twenty pages in a single sitting, and I would usually be reading another book in the meantime and forget about Le Morte d'Arthur for weeks at a time. This thing is a hell of a slog, in other words. Sure, there are knightly adventures and duels aplenty, but once you've read two or three you've pretty much read them all. It's just dudes getting smote off their horses and slicing other dudes in the head and damosels running around being pretty and useless, and wasn't there supposed to be something about a grail quest? (further research tells me that all the stuff about the Holy Grail takes place in Volume Two, which I have absolutely no interest in tracking down) It got to the point where I had to invent games to keep myself invested in the story, like "How Many of the Fight Scenes Can Be Interpreted as Gay Sex Scenes?" The answer, dear reader, is A Lot. "By that Sir Launcelot was come, then he proffered Sir Launcelot to joust; and either made them ready, and they came together so fiercely that either bare down other to the earth, and sore were they bruised. ...and so they rushed together like boars, tracing, raising, and foining to the mountenance of an hour; and Sir Launcelot felt him so big that he marvelled of his strength, for he fought more liker a giant than a knight, and that his fighting was durable and passing perilous. For Sir Launcelot had so much ado with him that he dreaded himself to be shamed, and said, Beaumains, fight not so sore, your quarrel and mine is not so great but that we may leave off. Truly that is truth, said Beaumains, but it doth me good to feel your might, and yet, my lord, I showed not the utterance." "And then they hurled together as wild boars, and thus they fought a great while. For Meliagaunce was a good man and of great might, but Sir Lamorak was hard big for him, and put him always aback, but either had wounded other sore." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2014
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Aug 14, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1590512057
| 9781590512050
| 1590512057
| 3.36
| 1,045
| Sep 01, 1999
| Jun 13, 2006
|
did not like it
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I knew what I was getting into with this one, I really did. Like most people who have reviewed this book, I decided to seek this out because I had just I knew what I was getting into with this one, I really did. Like most people who have reviewed this book, I decided to seek this out because I had just watched the movie version and wanted to know how the two compared. Going into this book, I knew that the movie had taken several huge steps away from Kohler's original story, and based on that knowledge I was pretty sure I wouldn't love the book as much as I loved the movie. And I was positive that the book version of Miss G couldn't come close to Eva Green's charismatic, psychotic portrayal. But "Psychotic Schoolgirls Who Maybe Murdered Somebody" is one of my favorite literary genres, so in I plunged. And wow. I knew the book and the movie were different; I just wasn't prepared for how different. Cracks, the movie, takes place in England in the 1930's, with a diving team that consists of only six girls. Fiamma, the wealthy and beautiful new student, is from Spain and has a tragic, scandalous past. Cracks, the book, takes place in South Africa and alternates between two time periods: flashbacks to when the girls were attending school in the 1960's, and twenty-ish years later when they've returned to the school for a sort of reunion. The swimming team has twelve members (which means twice as many characters to keep track of, and consequently none of them get fleshed out properly), and Fiamma is Italian, and her character is much harder to pin down and define. It's interesting, because although the movie drastically changed the big aspects of the story - setting, time period, character outlines - it kept a surprising amount of small details that appear in Kohler's book. Comparing the two stories is an interesting study in the art of adaptation, and I could easily write an entire review about just that, but I digress. Kohler's book, as I said, takes place primarily in a girls' boarding school in South Africa in the 1960's (those looking for discussions about the political situation in South Africa will be disappointed; the social and racial issues are only hinted at and never addressed directly). The core group of characters are the twelve members of the school swimming team, who get a new member in Fiamma Coronna. Fiamma is an Italian aristocrat, and everyone is immediately fascinated by her - especially Miss G, the swimming teacher, whose fascination with Fiamma turns to obsession as the other girls become increasingly jealous. Sometime during that year, Fiamma disappeared in the countryside around the school, and the book unravels the mystery of what happened to her and why, interspersed with scenes of the girls returning to the school as middle-aged women. I dunno, maybe I would have been more engrossed by the story if I hadn't known what happened to Fiamma already, thanks to the movie (but those who have seen the movie will still be surprised - the circumstances of Fiamma's death differ greatly in the book). Because I wasn't busy trying to figure out how Fiamma disappeared, I was able to focus on other aspects of the story. And some of the narrative choices Kohler made are...interesting. The book is narrated by an omnipresent "we" - which, I think, was a good choice. Instead of focusing on a single main character, Kohler makes the girls into one single group entity, which both reinforces the terrifying groupthink of the girls and emphasizes how they are all collectively responsible for what happened to Fiamma. There is no "I" or "she" to pin the tragedy on; everyone is guilty. That was good; less good is the fact that one of the girls is named Sheila Kohler. Who grows up to be a writer. I have no idea what to make of this. On the one hand, it's an incredibly brave move to put yourself in a story like this, and to tie yourself so directly to the horrors committed in this book. On the other hand, it's weird, because "Sheila Kohler" is not the narrator of the book (the narrator is the mysterious "we"), so we're seeing her actions, as we see all the girls actions, from a removed distance. Is this Kohler's way of keeping herself at a safe distance from the events she recounts? And most importantly, is Kohler doing the Tim O'Brien thing where she makes herself a character in a fictional story to make it more real for the reader, or does this book mean that Sheila Kohler once (view spoiler)[participated in the rape and murder of a classmate when she was fourteen? (hide spoiler)]? I'm going with the first explanation, because that's the only way I'll be able to to sleep at night. Other terrible narrative choices: some chapters are prefaced with a few lines of awful, awful poetry, like this one: "For Fiamma she could skim across the water,/As fast as could be,/For she was a prince's daughter,/And Miss G loved her most passionately." that are so awful I'm pretty sure Kohler wrote them that way intentionally, to mimic the awful poems we all wrote when we were fourteen. Which, fine, but it doesn't make them any more painful to read. And the decision to show scenes of the women as adults returning to the school serves no fucking purpose. The movie adaptation wisely chose to get rid of this aspect, and it was a wise choice: by keeping the story focused on the girls as teenagers, we never have to see them growing up and dealing with what they did (although the movie still includes a scene where the girls start to understand what a terrible thing they've done - another reason the movie is superior). But even Kohler's book refuses to make this happen - what is the point of showing us these girls as adult women if they're not going to deal with what they did when they were teenagers? There's no reflection, no remorse, no discussion of what happened to Fiamma, and I don't understand the point of showing the women returning to the school. This is the main reason I prefer the movie version: although it doesn't absolve the girls of their involvement in what happened to Fiamma, the movie places the majority of the blame where it should be: Miss G. Teenage girls and their psychotic cult-like cliques can be forgiven over time; Miss G was an adult who knew exactly what she was doing when she decided to ruin a teenage girl's life. And Movie Miss G is much more nuanced, revealing insecurities and mental instability beneath her carefully-crafted facade (the movie does a very clever thing where Miss G's hair, makeup, and clothing gradually become more messy and unpolished over the course of the movie as she unravels). Book Miss G is merely a cliche of a predatory older bull dyke who seduces young girls, like the worst nightmare of fundamentalists everywhere. Ugh. Book Miss G never answers for her part in Fiamma's disappearance, whereas Movie Miss G...you know what, just go watch the movie. That's what I want people to take from this review: go watch Cracks. Get your psychotic schoolgirl fix, and give Kohler's book a pass. "'No inhibitions here! I will have no inhibitions here!' she said sternly. 'Repressions of libidinal urges only leads to aggression. Give me your secrets, girls, give me the dark depths of your hearts, and I will give you the light. Search your hearts, for the universe lies therein,' and we searched and searched. 'It is always more grubby than you think,' she added, and we nodded our heads, knowing she was right. She said there were certain subjects we should get out of the way, so that we could go about our business. She knew what we were thinking." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2014
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Jul 29, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1938467671
| 9781938467677
| 1938467671
| 3.67
| 66
| Oct 01, 2013
| Dec 01, 2013
|
did not like it
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Francoise Sagan was seventeen when she wrote Bonjour Tristesse. SE Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was sixteen. At fourteen, Anne Frank's writing
Francoise Sagan was seventeen when she wrote Bonjour Tristesse. SE Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was sixteen. At fourteen, Anne Frank's writing demonstrated an emotional sensitivity and clarity that most adult authors struggle to achieve. So, to dismiss a book simply because it was written by a teenager is unfair - it's been proven over and over that teenagers are capable of great writing. On the other hand...Christopher Paolini wrote a poorly-conceived Star Wars ripoff that succeed mainly due to his parents' connections in the publishing world and the (admittedly strong) blockbuster marketabiltity of his series. We can't all be Francoise Sagan, and unfortunately, Schuyler J. Ebersol belongs in the Paolini camp. I don't know, guys - maybe we should stop letting teenage white boys publish novels. It hasn't worked out too well so far. I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I probably should have known what I was getting myself into right off the bat, because the book was pitched as a novel "for the Harry Potter generation" (which seems a bit premature, really, considering that the Harry Potter books ended like five years ago, so it's not like we're getting all nostalgic for it) and Ebersol explained his reasons for wanting to write The Hidden World thusly: "As a young adult male I wrote what I wanted to read." (Mr. Ebersol, please explain to me in 500 words or less how you, as a young white male, are underrepresented in literature while I sit in the corner and serenade you with my tiny violin) Anyway, our Not-Harry-Potter hero is Nate Williams. When he was six years old, he was found wandering the woods after his family was mysteriously murdered, and he was adopted by a family that apparently owns half of the United States. So right off the bat, we're veering far away from the source material: where Harry spent his childhood being bullied by his classmates and treated like dirt by his adopted family, Nate Williams grows up with a billionaire father, a movie star mother, and generally the most perfect life you could possibly imagine. It's sort of like Ebersol read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and thought, "This is cool and everything, but what if Dudley Dursley got the Hogwarts letter instead?" When Nate is seventeen, he has a massive heart attack and is in a coma for a week. When he comes out of the coma (with no apparent brain damage, yay!) he finds that he can transform into a wolf when he sees moonlight. As one does. In a scene ripped directly from the X-Men movies, Not-Dumbledore shows up at the Williams' house and tells Nate that he is, in fact, even MORE special than previously assumed and gets to go to Not-Hogwarts with all the other shifter kids and learn magic and generally be awesome, and I cannot even begin to explain how much this disappointed me, because by this point in the book I hated Nate Williams. He was a privileged little shit who was perfect at everything he did, worshipped by everyone he knew, given everything he wanted - and then someone shows up and grants him even more privilege. Think I'm exaggerating how much of a Gary Sue Nate is? Here, let Ebersol introduce his protagonist who, I will remind you, we are supposed to like: "Nate Williams was shockingly extraordinary, in addition to having a financially privileged life and striking looks. He struggled with the problems and reveled in the joys that one would expect of someone his age. He had his faults, like anyone else, though it was difficult to see them under the mask of his popularity and confidence." It was at this point that I started to wonder if Ebersol was trolling me, because no one in their right mind could think that an introduction like that would make readers sympathize with the protagonist. It's not possible, right guys? Right? OH! And when Nate gets the invitation to go to Not-Hogwarts (it's called Noble College but that's a dumb name so I'm going to keep calling it Not-Hogwarts) Nate is initially hesitant, saying he doesn't want to leave his school and his friends. I was excited, because maybe Nate would finally have to experience some hardship by being thrown into an unfamiliar environment by himself. But nope! Turns out that Not-Hogwarts has this great rule where every student who gets accepted to this secret, ultra-exclusive magic school is allowed to bring two friends along, who will also be enrolled in the school and taught how to transform into animals! What. The actual. Fuck. In what world does that make any sense? First - no, that is not how colleges work. You don't get to bring a buddy along to ease the transition. This is not summer camp. Second - hang on, so normals can be taught how to be shifters too? Then why are there so few shifters? There's some minor ass-covering later, when Not-Dumbledore explains that Nate's two friends (who, by the way, completely discard their future plans and their families in order to follow their once and future king Nate to Not-Hogwarts, because God forbid something not work out perfectly for Nate fucking Williams) always had the potential to be shifters, which is why they were allowed to come. But that's pretty fucking convenient that Nate is buddies with the two dudes who are also secretly future shifters. And what about everyone else who brings two friends along? And third, with each student bringing two friends along to Not-Hogwarts, wouldn't the Artificials outnumber the Naturals? What would that mean for the student body of Not-Hogwarts? But I'm not supposed to be thinking about that, because Ebersol certainly didn't. So Nate and his loyal sidekicks skip off to Not-Hogwarts, which was apparently designed by Willy Wonka after an acid trip - the walls and floors of the dorms are made out of a different material every day, and the hallway to the Astronomy classroom is a mini solar system that the students have to walk through every day. They start learning magic, and by magic, I mean they start learning how to do literally everything. In Ebersol's world, these people (who I had foolishly assumed could only transform into animals) can control the weather, communicate with animals, cure any illness, transform materials, and control other people's minds (the horrifying consequences of giving teenagers the ability to control others' actions and thoughts is never addressed by Ebersol, and it's treated as a cute joke that students can take over other students' minds and make them fall down). There's never a really concrete explanation of how they're able to do these things, and I don't mean how they can do magic in the first place - I mean the actual mechanics of how the students do all of this awesome stuff is never explained or shown. They don't use wands, they don't learn any incantations, there doesn't seem to be any special hand gestures involved - stuff just happens. The plot resembles Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, because of course the guy who killed Nate's parents escapes from prison and starts murdering people, but he's never much of a threat, because none of his murder victims are established characters, and also the guy (Gray) is forgotten for the majority of the book so we can watch Nate being perfect some more. Gray, unfortunately, is one of those villains who is only villainous because the characters keep assuring us he's super evil, so we never actually have to see him doing evil stuff. Nate's final confrontation with the villain, where we finally learn the Deep Dark Secrets of Nate's past (which are neither deep nor dark, nor very secret because they can be easily guessed by anyone who's read a book before) carries so little weight that it's not even worth discussing. There were so many missed opportunities, though. Ebersol establishes early on that Gray has lots of people working for him, who help him carry out murders across the country. Following the laws of novel writing, this means that one or more of the characters will be revealed as Gray's associates. (view spoiler)[Or not. I was really hoping that Nate's foster father would end up being one of Gray's followers and that he had only adopted Nate in order to keep an eye on him for Gray, because it would mean that the silver spoon shoved up Nate's ass was just a little bit tarnished. But no. The foster father was entirely on the level, and Nate's perfect life (like his Christmas gift - a choice of a new Audi, Aston Martin, Maserati, or Porsche. This was the point where I said out loud to the pages, "Fuck this kid.") was really as perfect as we'd been led to believe. (hide spoiler)] The pacing is terrible - there are numerous pointless diversions, including several trips to Not-Hogsmeade and a lot of Not-Quidditch games (it's called Jeka, is a combination of soccer, football, and rugby, and weirdly involves no magic whatsoever) that take up entire chapters and can be skipped entirely, because nothing important ever happens in them. The characters are one-dimensional at best, and there are too many useless subplots that go nowhere. There's an extended subplot involving Nate and his friends' romantic lives, and it mostly serves to prove that Schuyler Ebersol believes that female characters should exist only in relation to the male characters - every single girl in this book functions only as the mother, sister, or girlfriend of a male character, and it's fucking irritating. The girlfriends are particularly frustrating, because they are virtually interchangeable (seriously - Nate and his friends acquire and swap girlfriends with the ease and emotional detachment of someone picking out a pair of shoes). Also all the female characters are treated with a sort of good-natured condescension and "Women be shopping!"-style humor, as in this sentence: "Emma and Sophia left to dress, taking their time as all girls do." and this one: "He listened to Baako and John arguing about the last hand and to the three girls talking about which actor was the hottest." It's Misogyny Lite, and it's infuriating. The writing is bad. It's not average. It's bad. The dialogue reads like lines from a bad video game ("Everyone here knows of the Williams, and I have been to other parts of the world where your name is known as well.") and the descriptions are weirdly formal and blowhard-y, like they should be spoken by the narrator of an overly-serious documentary ("The landscape had been shaped by time: the greatest sculptor of all.") With time and practice, Ebersol will get better at writing, and eventually be average. But Jesus, this shit is painful. But what disappoints me most is the missed opportunity this book presents. Simply put, Nate is the villain of the story, and Ebersol is too enamored of his protagonist to see it. Nate, it is established throughout the story, is an arrogant, spoiled little shit. A character even calls him out on his arrogance, but instead of using this as an opportunity for reflection, Ebersol just has another character reassure his protagonist in this cringe-inducing exchange: "'You don't think I'm arrogant and self-centered, do you?' 'No, of course not. Jasmine didn't mean it.' 'But I kind of think I am.' 'Well, then that's who you are, and no one would like you any different than who you are.'" It's all like that. Characters are just lining up to suck Nate's dick. Here's another conversation, this time between Nate and Not-Dumbledore: "'Don't let things that have already happened bother you, because there's nothing you can do about them.' 'Damn good reasoning. We don't have teachers as smart as you.' *bangs head on desk repeatedly, laughter turns to tears* I'm now going to discuss the ending, and its wasted potential, so don't click if you are planning to read this and want everything to be a surprise for some reason. (view spoiler)[So at the end, Gray reveals that the reason he tried to kill Nate when he was little was because Nate is "The Natural" - the most special of all the special snowflakes. Basically Nate, this spoiled seventeen-year-old who has grown up surrounded by far too much positive reinforcement, has just been informed that he is the most powerful person on earth. What happens when you take a teenage boy who has grown up being treated like God and tell him that he IS God? He's going to destroy the fucking planet, that's what. Nate Williams isn't Harry Potter - Harry went through hardship, and learned to be humble, and resisted every attempt to be turned into a hero. Nate Willaims is Lex Luthor, and the only reason I would read the second book in this series is if it started with Nate going on a killing spree, and his former friends banding together to put a stop to his madness. (hide spoiler)] This is not a book for the Harry Potter generation. This is a fairy tale for the 1%, a story of a dude born into unimaginable privilege who then acquires even more privilege by virtue of his genetics, where the supporting characters constantly validate the protagonist's belief that he is the greatest person to ever walk the earth. Fuck this book, and fuck every entitled rich white boy who got the world handed to him on a silver platter and then demanded more. I'm going to go re-read Bonjour Tristesse and pretend the world isn't horrible now, but I'll give the last word of this review to a friend of mine, who summed up my feelings on The Hidden World quite succinctly: "No more books by spoiled rich white boys at least until they get some fucking life experience." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2014
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Apr 24, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0312422830
| 9780312422837
| 0312422830
| 3.22
| 202
| Aug 01, 1995
| Sep 01, 2003
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did not like it
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I read Francine Prose's nonfiction Reading Like a Writer in college and loved it, so when I saw this in a used bookstore, I decided to buy it and see
I read Francine Prose's nonfiction Reading Like a Writer in college and loved it, so when I saw this in a used bookstore, I decided to buy it and see what her fiction writing was like. And, okay, the writing is pretty good. It's the central idea behind the book that I had some major problems with. Our heroine is Martha, a lost woman reeling from a breakup and needing to find a place where she is accepted. Walking on a beach one day, she encounters a group of New-Age goddess-worshipping women, and saves their accident-prone leader (her name is Isis Moongarden, if that gives you any indication of where we're going with this) from drowning. Next thing we know, Martha has become a member of the group and is preparing to go on a vision quest with them. This is very much a satirical book, and most of the satire was admittedly funny and pretty on-point - the best part was how well Prose rips apart the concept of white women paying a Native American to take them on a fake vision quest, and I almost wish that the majority of the plot was spent at the retreat. Where we venture into awkward territory, however, is when it comes to the other targets of Prose's satire. Look, hippy-dippy New Agers are a great target for satire. But Prose's main source of humor seems to stem from the fact that a group of women tried to create a peaceful and supportive environment that fell apart because they couldn't stop being catty bitches to each other for longer than five minutes. There's petty relationship drama, middle-school-level jealousies, and also there's a mother-daughter pair in the group that's just a minefield of tired jokes you hear from middle-aged male comedians at an open mic night. The mother is flighty and encourages her daughter's eating disorder, because LADIES BE DIETING, AM I RIGHT GUYS. The problem here is that the women themselves are often the target of Prose's humor, and the level to which she constantly runs them over in the service of her own cruel satire is disheartening. At least two of the women in the group have experienced sexual abuse, and several of them are gay. The fact that the cult is probably the only safe environment available to them is not acknowledged or discussed. And you can't tell me that this is all subtle brilliant satire and Prose is really supporting feminism instead of mocking it, because the book ends with two of the characters literally being rescued by a man. A man who mentions at one point that he hated Thelma and Louise, prompting one of the women to say that she didn't like it either. The whole scene just reeked of "See, I'm not like other girls, I'm a cool girl! Bitches and their drama, hahaha!" and it was (sing along if you know the words) PROBLEMATIC. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2014
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Feb 26, 2014
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Paperback
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| 1484107608
| 9781484107607
| 1484107608
| 3.72
| 255
| Jun 06, 2013
| Jun 06, 2013
|
did not like it
|
Andi Brown sent me a free paperback copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and I will do my best to uphold my part of the deal. Brace you
Andi Brown sent me a free paperback copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and I will do my best to uphold my part of the deal. Brace yourselves. Animal Cracker takes place primarily at the fictional Animal Protection Organization in Boston. Our heroine is Diane, a twenty-four-year-old just starting a job as the communications director of the APO. Her boss, Hal, is a cartoonish nightmare vision of a horrible boss – he’s patronizing, vaguely misogynistic, lazy, and stupid. The book follows Diane and her coworkers as they try to take down their terrible boss. Hijinks and attempts at humor follow, accompanied by unlicensed shelters and dying homeless animals. It’s a weird blend, to say the least. Okay look, the whole thing isn’t terrible. At least, the idea behind it isn’t – a group of women working together to upset the patriarchy and save cute animals! That’s like, four things that I love all rolled together. Where Animal Cracker fails, spectacularly, is in the execution of just about every aspect. Simply put, this needed an editor. A real editor, not just friends of the author who agreed to proofread the novel a few times before it was self-published. A real editor – or hell, someone who knows how to use Google – would have at least been able to catch the numerous and glaring errors littering the text. To name a few: it’s Stephen King, not Steven King; you drink margaritas, not margheritas; and no twenty-four-year-old alive today would ever dial Information when trying to locate a specific bar. (I’M twenty-four, and until I read this book I wasn’t aware that “telephone operator” was a job that still existed in the 21st century) But the biggest suspension-of-disbelief-ruiner happens towards the end of the book, when Diane is trailing Hal to figure out what he’s up to. To make sure she isn’t recognized, Diane disguises herself as a man and follows her boss. To the airport. And onto a plane. Pop quiz, readers: what can you absolutely not do in post-9/11 America, ever? Get through airport security carrying the identification of a person who looks nothing like you, that’s what. I can’t even really remember what happened in the pages immediately after that part, because I was too busy trying to figure out how Diane, dressed as man, managed to pass security by showing a woman’s driver’s license. It threw me out of the story so hard I think I still have whiplash. (At the end of this book, Andi Brown thanks the numerous people who helped her prepare this manuscript, and my question is, how did none of them catch this?) This story is fixable, I want to emphasize that. It needs to go through at least two more drafts, but it can be done. But it’s going to take more than a red editor’s pen, Ms. Brown – someone needs to take a hatchet to this book and cut out all the excess. And there’s a lot of excess to get rid of. Entire scenes can be removed (almost an entire page is wasted describing the time Diane goes to the movies by herself), and the character list could be sliced almost in half. There are two female reporters in this book that could easily be combined into one person, and the APO office staff needs to be downsized to three characters so the author can spend more time making them actual characters and not interchangeable cardboard cutouts. Diane, Katelyn, and Mary Day – that’s all we need (oh, and if Mary Day is really going to be portrayed as a clichéd Southern belle, make sure she doesn’t misuse the word “y’all” or say "fuck" twice in a workplace setting, because trust me, those are two things a Southern belle never, ever does) All romance aspects should be sent to the Graveyard of Unnecessary Subplots – Diane does not need to be dating her boss’s son, and she definitely doesn’t need to be consumed by grief over her last failed relationship, as both subplots add nothing to the story and only pissed me off. Also, it was super weird to me that what eventually brought Hal down was (view spoiler)[the fact that he went hunting, not that he was embezzling millions of dollars from the APO (hide spoiler)]. But these minor issues pale in comparison to the greatest problem, and the reason I cannot in good conscience give this book more than one star: Diane is a complete asshole. First there are the little nuggets of casual racism she drops throughout the book – at one point, her date is describing the Japanese-to-English instructions on a hairdryer, and Diane goes, “I’m picturing a Japanese guy in a cubicle…he’s got his sake in one hand and a dictionary in another.” Ha ha, it’s funny because Japanese people drink sake and aren’t born speaking English! You’re so funny, Diane! Then there’s the way she confides to the reader that she considers herself to be just like Bridget Jones, “minus the poundage and the alcoholism.” But the worst, the absolute worst, is the way she treats her office “friend” Katelyn. Katelyn is poor, you see, and has a son with behavioral problems, and also has an abusive ex, because this is a fucking Lifetime movie. Diane cannot spend longer than five minutes with Katelyn before she starts mentally thanking God that she doesn’t have Katelyn’s life, and condescension seeps from every pore whenever she interacts with her token Down on Her Luck Friend. I kept waiting for Katelyn to smack the snobby bitch upside the head, but sadly this never happens. The best way I can sum up Diane’s hideous personality is by quoting the following passage: “We went upstairs and I plopped into one of her shabby armchairs. Katelyn went into her kitchen and emerged, not with tea, but a bottle of wine that looked cheap, which she poured into a couple of chipped coffee mugs.” Right, because if anyone is going to have high standards for wine, it’s a twenty-four-year-old struggling to pay her student loan bills. Again – Diane and I are the same age, and I (like everyone in my age group) have never paid more than eleven dollars for a bottle of wine in my life. Even if I went over to a friend’s house and she offered me a glass of Two Buck Chuck I wouldn’t think a goddamn thing about it, because I’m twenty-four and also I’m not a bitch. This book could have been a fluffy, fun, hijinks-filled romp about a group of women taking down their horrible boss and saving some cute animals at the same time. Instead, it reads like the first draft of a failed multi-cam sitcom. A few more rounds of revision could have saved Animal Cracker, but instead we’re left with this hot mess instead: a weird hybrid of Nine to Five and The Devil Wears Prada (not the hybrid of The Office and Bridget Jones’ Diary, as the jacket description insists) that completely misses what made those stories enjoyable in the first place. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2014
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Jan 23, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1612183077
| 9781612183077
| 1612183077
| 3.69
| 4,421
| Jan 01, 2012
| Apr 23, 2013
|
it was ok
|
This is the first time I've ever accepted an offer for a free book from a new author - and the only reason I accepted Through the Door was because Jod
This is the first time I've ever accepted an offer for a free book from a new author - and the only reason I accepted Through the Door was because Jodi McIsaac offered to send me a physical ARC instead of an ebook. (I do not own an ereader, because I am eighty) Going into this review, I wondered if I should try to sugar-coat things, focus on the good aspects of the book rather than listing the bad ones, be nice. It seemed like a good course of action, especially given the recent clusterfuck over reviewers apparently targeting poor defenseless authors. But as I've said before, my reviewing philosophy is that, like Lester Bangs, you have to make your reputation on being honest, and unmerciful." So, the story: Cedar McLeod has a seven-year-old daughter, Eden. Cedar's dirtbag baby daddy, Finn (we'll get to him, don't worry), left without warning one day before Cedar could tell him she was pregnant. Now Eden has developed an ability - when she opens a physical door, she can turn that door into a portal that opens anywhere she wants. Then, of course, Eden disappears, and Cedar is forced to attempt to track Finn down in order to get some answers about Eden. She meets Finn's entire family and friend group, who are all Celtic gods, sort of. They're ancient magical beings who were called gods, anyway, and their official name is the Tuatha De Danann, but I'm going to go ahead and refer to them as the Celtic Cullens for brevity's sake. Anyway, Cedar teams up with the Celtic Cullens and her dirtbag ex-boyfriend to find Eden, and we get a nice walking tour through Celtic mythology (mermaids! druids! thousand-league boots! motherfucking leprechauns!) while they look for the kid. Evil is confronted, bonds are forged, magic magic power of a mother's love etc. Also we get to go to Fairyland, which is fun. Look, it's not terrible. It's very clearly a first novel, with clunky exposition dialogue and convoluted similes (my favorite, which unfortunately I forgot to mark so I can't quote it exactly, describes a character's thoughts bouncing around her head like children in a bouncy castle, I shit you not) and the Celtic Cullens spend way too long refusing to explain anything to Cedar in an attempt to draw out the tension, and they also have a very frustrating habit of muscling her out of the action, always telling her to go home or wait here or hide there so they can deal with this themselves. Even Cedar's own mother is constantly dropping hints that she knows way more than she's telling about the magical goings-on, and then she's like, "I have to go right now, I'll explain later!" and running away. But these are all minor issues. On to the big issues. The first issue: McIsaac can't stick to her own rules. So each of the Celtic Cullens has a special ability, like one of them can communicate telepathically with people, and one has the power of persuasion (I told you they were the Celtic Cullens). Simple, right? Nope. Okay, so one of them can persuade people to do whatever she wants. Except some of the Celtic Cullens are immune to her power. And sometimes her power doesn't work. Finn has one power, but then halfway through the book he goes, "Oh, and I can also shapeshift, because I'm the firstborn, and we get two powers!" And the Big Bad, Lorcan, can absorb people's powers after he kills them (man, wasn't Heroes a good show?). Except sometimes he can't. Because reasons. It's like McIsaac kept writing herself into a corner with the rules she had created, so she just starts inventing loopholes to justify her characters sidestepping the established parameters of the story, and it was frustrating as hell. The second issue, a much bigger one, is the god-awful gender politics of this book. As I mentioned before, Finn is a fucking dirtbag who makes the dads on Teen Mom look like stellar human beings. So he and Cedar are dating for like two years, and then one day he just packs up and leaves for no reason. We find out that he was only abandoning Cedar to protect her, of course - because the best way to make sure your significant other won't come looking for you is to move away without explanation. His reasons for leaving weren't even that good - it's like, Jesus, you can't leave a fucking note? We eventually find out that Finn was sort of engaged to one of the other Celtic Cullens at the time, and she was a jealous bitch who wanted to kill Cedar for stealing her man, so Finn abandoned Cedar to protect her. Because bitches be crazy, amirite? To her credit, when they're first reunited Cedar immediately rips him a new one for getting all self-righteous and possessive of the daughter he just learned existed, but that all goes out the window later when she forgives him for everything and they have sex. (I'm not making this up: somebody puts a spell on Cedar that makes her forget Eden exists, and Cedar breaks the spell by making out with her deadbeat baby daddy, and there are so many things wrong with it I can't even talk about it right now) Cedar isn't the only woman to get jerked around by the Celtic Cullens. We learn that another one of the human characters once had an affair with the High King of the Celtic Cullens when she was young, and by "affair" I mean he would show up a few times a year and they'd have sex. Then he shows up and is like, "Hey, you what would be fun? If you abandoned your friends and family and went to live in the middle of nowhere and learned to be a druid! Here, I picked out a teacher and an abandoned cabin for you already! Pack your stuff!" I was in no way joking that these guys are the Celtic Cullens. And then, after this woman has altered the entire course of her life to do what this guy wants, he shows up again and goes, "Hey, so I was actually married this entire time, and I have to go back to my wife because people are super mad at me. But it was real, yo." And THEN (view spoiler)[he shows up years later and tells her that there was this huge battle in his homeland and his wife is dying and he's in danger, so he needs her to raise his baby as her own, because fuck you (hide spoiler)]. And this character is never, ever mad at this raging asshole for what he's done. There's even a line about how "she knew that he owned her" and it made me have a small rage-stroke. All the female characters' actions are influenced or even controlled by the actions of the male characters. Cedar doesn't do anything until one of the male characters acts first, and she's often merely reacting to something Finn does, rather than having agency of her own. Even the female villain is just a subordinate of the Big Bad, a guy we don't meet until the very end of the book (where he has to compensate for his utter absence in the rest of the story by tenting his fingers and delivering Bond-villain-worthy monologues about how THE WORLD WILL BE MINE and it's underwhelming). Cedar's one proactive move comes at the final confrontation with the villain, when she heroically (view spoiler)[dies. That's it. She sacrifices herself to save her daughter, which is cool and everything, but Finn's the one who gets to decapitate the bad guy with a sword. And no, Cedar's not actually dead, because reasons (hide spoiler)] It was disheartening to read a story with a female protagonist and a mostly female cast of characters, and watch every single one of them be overridden by the male characters, fawn over them constantly, and be generally treated like dirt. One last thing, and then I'll put this book out of its misery: Jodi McIsaac, you should probably ask your publishers to remove the bit before this book's plot synopsis where it says the story has "the wondrous imagination of Neil Gaiman" because all that's going to do is make your readers compare your writing to his, and that's not the effect you want. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2013
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Sep 28, 2013
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 140003468X
| 9781400034680
| 140003468X
| 3.94
| 517,555
| Nov 1985
| Oct 05, 2003
|
it was ok
|
LET ME EXPLAIN, GUYS. Okay. I like Marquez. I think his writing is beautiful, his settings are evocative and masterfully portrayed, and yes, his books LET ME EXPLAIN, GUYS. Okay. I like Marquez. I think his writing is beautiful, his settings are evocative and masterfully portrayed, and yes, his books are pretty romantic, and I always enjoy magical realism (this one could have used more of that last bit, though). The last twenty pages of the book even manged to suck me into the romance of the story, and I found myself finally really invested in this love story instead of being vaguely creeped out (we'll get there). Look, I even found a really nice passage to quote: "It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death." See? That's fucking beautiful, and even if I didn't like the story itself, I still liked the writing. So call off the dogs, Marquez apologists, and let's get to the ranting portion of the review. Fair warning to all who proceed past this point: I am preparing to don my Feminist Rage hat and shout about rape culture. Those who plan to leave mean comments calling me an idiot or telling me that I misunderstood the book, remember that you were warned. BEWARE, FOR HERE BE DRAGONS AND ANGRY FEMINISTS. Here's something I learned about myself while reading this: I have absolutely no patience for books about obsession disguised as love. I hated it in Twilight, I hated it in Wuthering Heights, I hated it in The Phantom of the Opera, and I hated it here. It would be one thing, I decided, if Fermina Daza felt as passionately about Florentino Ariza as he felt about her. But she didn't love him. For her, their romance was a brief fling in her teens, and she stopped loving him when she returned from her trip. She continued not loving him, until he wears her down (after writing her letters constantly despite her explicitly telling him to fuck off out of her life) and she basically shrugs her shoulders and says, fine, might as well. The lesson men can take from this book is that if a woman says "no" (as Fermina frequently and clearly says to Florentino), she really means, "make me change my mind." NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. THIS PHILOSOPHY IS NOT OKAY AND IT IS WHY RAPE CULTURE EXISTS. NO MEANS FUCKING NO, EVERYBODY. IF A WOMAN TELLS YOU TO LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE. IT IS NOT ROMANTIC TO OBSESS ABOUT HER FOR FIFTY YEARS, IT IS CREEPY. And OF COURSE Florentino still fucks anything that moves while claiming to be in love with Fermina, because he is a man and that's just how it works. Which leads me to my next ranting point: this book romanticizes rape. (you can still get out, guys - it's only going to get worse from here) First there was the intensely unsettling way Florentino loses his virginity: while traveling on a ship, a woman drags him into her cabin and forces him to have sex with her. Then Florentino falls in love with her. Because of course he does. I was willing to chalk this scene up to the common misconception that men cannot be sexually assaulted because men are horny dogs who are always up for sex no matter what - fine, whatever, I'll let it go. But then later, a minor female character describes the time she got raped, and I'm going to let you guys read this while I do yoga breaths in the corner and count to ten slowly: "When she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so she could die of love in his arms." ... Once more with feeling: NOPE. AND THEN, as the creepy pedophilic cherry on top of this rape sundae, Florentino's last affair is with a child. When he is in his sixties. The best part is that he doesn't even use the classic pedophile's defense of "yes, she's young, but she ACTS like a grown woman!" No, Florentino sees that this child is going to be smoking hot when she grows up, and decides that he can't wait that long. Then this passage happens: "She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse." The hero of Love in the Time of Cholera, ladies and gentlemen. Let's give him a round of applause. If anyone wants to join me in the corner, I will be staying here for the rest of the week. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2013
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Aug 08, 2013
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Paperback
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| 4.09
| 1,227,347
| Oct 30, 1811
| Apr 29, 2003
|
it was ok
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I hate romantic comedies. I hate them for a wide variety of reasons - I hate their formulaic plots, their repeated character tropes that never seem to I hate romantic comedies. I hate them for a wide variety of reasons - I hate their formulaic plots, their repeated character tropes that never seem to change (hmm, will this one have a sassy best friend who only exists to dispense advice?), I hate their consistent failing of the the Bechdel test, and I hate the way they try to make me believe that a skinny and gorgeous woman is incapable of finding a man because she's clumsy or has a job or something. But mostly, I hate them because their plots revolve entirely around what boy likes what girl and vice versa, and nothing else ever happens. Sure, there can be subplots, and yes, brilliant romantic comedies do exist, but I want my movie protagonists to do more than worry about who they're going to marry. Reading Sense and Sensibility made me realize why I don't like Jane Austen's books, and probably never will: she was a brilliant author, and her novels are funny and well-written, but at the end of the day, her characters spend 90% of their time talking about boys. Nothing else happens: they go to a ball, where they worry about which boy isn't dancing with them; they have tea, where they talk about which girls have snagged which boys; and they write letters about which girls have done scandalous things with boys. It's just pages and pages of "I like you but you hate me!" "No, I really love you, you were just misinformed!" "My, what a silly misunderstanding!" "I agree! Let's get married!" and all its variations and it bores me to death. I love the humor, and I love the characters, I just want them to do something interesting. This is probably why Pride and Prejudice and Zombies resonated so well with me - finally, the Bennett sisters got to do something besides sit around and mope about the various boys who weren't talking to them for whatever reason! Sense and Sensibility is one long slog of "I love this boy! But oh no, he's engaged to someone else!" and "This boy acted like he loved me but he really didn't and now I am sad and will ignore the other boy who has clearly been meant to marry me all along!" It's for this reason that, when faced with the prospect of reading the last 70 pages of this book in order to finish it, I was filled with dread and realized that I do not give a single flying fuck who the Dashwood sisters end up marrying. The only thing that would make me want to finish the book is if the story ends with Elinor and Marianne deciding to go off to college or travel to China or fight zombies or do something besides get married. But I know they won't, because this is an Austen novel, and things only end one way here. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with romantic comedies - they're funny, lighthearted entertainment where everyone is beautiful and nothing hurts, and the people who get unhappy endings were mean people and deserved it anyway. I do not begrudge anyone for liking this kind of entertainment - it's just not my taste, and I won't waste any time feeling bad about this. Sorry, Ms. Austen. I gave it my all, but it's just not going to work out. But don't worry: it's not you, it's me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2012
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Mar 13, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0307394999
| 9780307394996
| 0307394999
| 3.19
| 17,970
| Oct 11, 2011
| Oct 04, 2011
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did not like it
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Imagine if someone set out to write a ghost story that was a combination of The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House, with some forgotten-in-ten-yea
Imagine if someone set out to write a ghost story that was a combination of The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House, with some forgotten-in-ten-years current events tied in...and then the movies The Wicker Man and The Craft came along and vomited over everything. The result is Chris Bohjalian's The Night Strangers. I can't even do a The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly-style review, because it's all bad. Instead, I will now present the follow list of reasons this book failed me, in ascending order from minor to major offenses. -False advertising. All the publisher-provided descriptions of this book make a big deal about how this family moves into a ramshackle Victorian house (+5 horror movie points) that has a creepy basement (+10 horror movie points) with a mysterious door that has been bolted shut 39 times (+25 horror movie points), and the house is in an isolated small town with creepy locals (+10 horror movie points), no cell phone reception and frequent power outages (+20 horror movie points). Also the father is a former airline pilot who recently crashed his plane into a lake, killing 39 of the passengers (+30 horror movie points). So with all that in mind, I was expecting a good, cheap haunted house story with some melodramatic family issues thrown in, a la American Horror Story. That's what the book jacket promised me. But instead, I got a load of bullshit about the pilot's PTSD and the creepy locals. The goddamn house wasn't even haunted at all, but I guess it's not Bohjalian's fault that the publishers didn't understand his book, which is why this is a minor offense. -The people who buy the house have ten-year-old twin girls named Hallie and Garnet. What, you wonder, could possess two otherwise-normal people to name a child Garnet? Let the narration explain: "Garnet because her newborn hair had been the deep red it was even now". For Christ's sake. First, garnets are dark, dark red, which is not a hair color that occurs in nature. Second, I get that you want to give your kid a name that references her hair color (which has a good chance of changing before she grows up) so people can make tired jokes about it for the rest of her life, but why Garnet? Was RUBY too mainstream? The point of all of this is that although I was supposed to be rooting for the parents, I immediately hated them because of the stupid name they gave their child. -Bohjalian has no idea how children talk or think. Remember Danny Torrance in The Shining? He was obviously an intelligent and sensitive seven-year-old, but that doesn't mean he talked or thought like an adult. Hallie and Garnet (ugh), on the other hand, talk like forty-year-olds all the time. At one point Hallie says, "Do you hear them? ...You must!" WHAT. And the narration never bothers to explain why these girls talk like no ten-year-olds I've ever heard of. It was an easy fix: "Wow, those girls sure do love reading Dickens novels! No wonder they talk like that!" But no - we are expected to believe that these average children talk and think exactly like the adults. And by "think", I of course mean, "don't think at all", because... -Logic doesn't even make an appearance in this story. The pilot has PTSD, which means he's haunted by three ghosts of the people he killed - two of which are a man and his little girl. The ghost dad wants the pilot to murder his two daughters so his kid can have ghost kids to play with (obviously), and the pilot goes from "I'd never hurt my daughters!" to "Welp, guess it's time to murder my kids!" in the space of a chapter and it made no sense. Similarly, there's a coven of herbalists/Shamans (no, seriously) in the town, and they want to sacrifice the twins for witchcraft (obviously). And no, that does not count as a spoiler because basically the second we meet any of the herbalists they're like, "We looooove your twiiiiins, they're so...special" and their mom is like, "My, our neighbors are friendly! I love how they keep bringing my ten-year-old daughters over to their houses to learn about plants without my supervision, and the way they gave my daughters and me new names! This can't possibly have sinister implications!" and it's like WAKE UP, WOMAN. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. Similarly, at the end of the book (view spoiler)[after the mom and her daughters have survived the plant cult's attempts to sacrifice one of the girls so they can all be immortal (again, not joking), we flash forward ten years and the FAMILY IS STILL HANGING AROUND WITH THE CREEPY HERBALISTS, inviting them over for dinner even though they BOTH SAW THESE PEOPLE KILL ONE OF THEIR KIDS. Bohjalian's explanation for this is literally, "they forgot about it because of MAGIC!" and it. Is. Retarded. (hide spoiler)] -Did I mention that the pilot has PTSD? Because Bohjalian would want me to mention that, judging by how goddamn insistent he is that we never, ever forget that the pilot crashed into a lake and killed a bunch of people. Until about 2/3 into the book, every single section told from the pilot's perspective is just a rehash of the same exact idea: "the plane crashed, people died, and I am sad about it." Nothing new is learned, aside from the fact that the ghosts want him to kill his daughters. It's just repeated over and over and over and over again, like Bohjalian is afraid we're going to forget about the crash. And this might be bearable, except for some reason all of the pilot's sections are narrated in second-person present, while the rest of the book is narrated in third-person past tense, and I cannot stress how annoying this was. It got to the point where I would cringe and consider skipping ahead every time one of the pilot's chapters began. "You pause in your work in the kitchen, replacing the paint roller in the tray and sitting back on your heels as you wonder: Where was He when Flight 1611 crashed?" *facedesk* -The story is frequently ridiculous when it means to be scary. It has lines like "The child is losing blood fast and it's being wasted. Wasted! You're a New Englander, how can you abide that?" that I cannot imagine getting any reaction other than laughter. Towards the end, when everything is going off the rails and the cult is revealing their true crazy, the story becomes much more reminiscent of Hot Fuzz than The Shining. (honestly, towards the end, the herbalists might as well have started chanting "It's for the greater good!" "The greater good" and I would not have blinked an eye. -The two main storylines have nothing in common with each other. So there's the pilot's PTSD-related ghosts, and the creepy herbalists. For almost the entire book, the two plots are kept completely separate, and at the end when they finally do intersect, it's in the most insignificant way possible. I think Bohjalian should have picked one story - either the PTSD or the plant cult - and committed to it wholeheartedly. Instead he tries to do both, and what results is a crazy mess of a book that fails at every opportunity: it fails at creating sympathetic characters, realistic and well-done prose, carefully crafted plot, and a scary atmosphere. On the plus side, with all this evidence in mind, Bohjalian would make an excellent addition to the writers' team over at American Horror Story. He'd better hurry up and jump on that crazy train before it derails halfway through the second season. (yes I am a little addicted to American Horror Story, why do you ask?) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 2011
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Dec 2011
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Dec 08, 2011
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.50
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did not like it
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Jan 2009
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Oct 18, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.24
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did not like it
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Jul 2022
|
Sep 07, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
did not like it
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Jun 2022
|
Jun 22, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
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it was ok
|
Oct 2021
|
Oct 21, 2021
|
|||||
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| 3.34
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it was ok
|
Oct 2020
|
Jun 15, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
did not like it
|
Nov 2019
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Nov 18, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
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did not like it
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Jun 2016
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Jul 20, 2018
|
|||||
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| 3.43
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it was ok
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Apr 2017
|
Jul 04, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.14
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did not like it
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not set
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May 22, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
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did not like it
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Apr 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.62
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did not like it
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May 2015
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Feb 23, 2015
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|||||
|
| 3.92
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did not like it
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Aug 2014
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Aug 14, 2014
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|||||
|
| 3.36
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did not like it
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Jul 2014
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Jul 29, 2014
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|||||
|
| 3.67
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did not like it
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Apr 2014
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Apr 24, 2014
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|||||
|
| 3.22
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did not like it
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Jan 2014
|
Feb 26, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.72
|
did not like it
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Jan 2014
|
Jan 23, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.69
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it was ok
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Sep 2013
|
Sep 28, 2013
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|||||
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| 3.94
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it was ok
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Aug 2013
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Aug 08, 2013
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|||||
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| 4.09
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it was ok
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Mar 2012
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Mar 13, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.19
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did not like it
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Dec 2011
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Dec 08, 2011
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