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| B08RRTT6YL
| 4.14
| 525
| Jan 07, 2021
| Jan 07, 2021
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell. To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0385549970
| 9780385549974
| 0385549970
| 3.96
| 1,611
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entra
2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “true” to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokes” are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes. And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not white”); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing up” his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?”); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself. But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions. And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background. Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. That’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away. But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villain” story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-hero” in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel culture” that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years. It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the year” list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 81,420
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friends’ parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swiss” (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,” by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. That’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. That’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. That’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Year” list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0593316762
| 9780593316764
| 0593316762
| 3.62
| 413
| Feb 13, 2024
| Feb 13, 2024
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2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie
2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie-rocker with a [rolls eyes] PhD in creative writing, in which he comments in a disappointedly on-the-nose way on the ugliness and darkness of modern life through the filter of a Netflix-style streaming series about plastic dolls come to life, full of cutesy little twee details like all of them talking in the truncated, deliberately silly style of doge memes (“Forget eat lunch. Big hungry. Chicken look wow wow”), and everything in their world having cutesy little twee generic names, like Nuclear Family for the name of this plastic society’s most popular television show. Then if this wasn’t enough hipster tweeness for you, he then tells the story itself not through a regular omniscient narrator but by literally describing every scene out loud, as if he’s watching the show on Netflix and we’re on the other end of a phone and he’s just literally telling us everything that’s happening on the screen as it’s happening. (“And then the next scene opens with the plastic girl driving her car, and then...”) Ugh, contemporary literature really is dead, isn’t it? Like always with books I give up on, I went ahead and read everyone else’s reviews before writing mine, just in case something happens later in the book that’s so compelling that it inspires me to pick the book back up again (which, you know, has happened before); but when I did this with Plastic, I was suddenly confronted over and over with what I consider the scourge of online artistic criticism these days, review after review that said, “This made me cry! FIVE STARS!” That’s not a fucking critical review, people; I could punch you in the face and make you cry too, but that doesn’t deserve five stars either. It’s books like these that make me glad I’m entirely out of the indie-lit game now myself, and it’s also books like these that make me realize why I’ve been gravitating more and more in the 21st century towards good solid genre novels like crime, science-fiction and romance; and that’s because the only contemporary human-interest novels that can seemingly even get published anymore is silly little gimmicky easily-marketed MFA/NPR nonsense like this, where the author not only has nothing but a facile and obvious point to make, but then beats you over the head with this facile and obvious point, seemingly all their sins washed away because they wrote it in a cutesy style that makes for good Facebook updates. (“This made me cry! FIVE STARS!!!!!!!1!!!”) If you’re a fellow grown-up who weeps for the lack of good, solid contemporary human-interest novels for grown-ups anymore, avoid this one like the plague. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0300093055
| 9780300093056
| 0300093055
| 4.05
| 41,161
| 1956
| Mar 01, 2002
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Dama
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Damascus (my review), then remembering that I had always meant to sit down and read his most famous plays, after doing so a decade ago with his peer Tennessee Williams after my brother moved to New Orleans and I started making regular visits there myself. Written in 1939 but not publicly premiered until 1956, right after his death (thankfully betraying his original wishes to not have it produced until 25 years after his death, in 1978), I'm simply not going to have as much to say about Long Day's Journey Into Night than I did about his other magnum opus, The Iceman Cometh (my review), because there's simply not as much to say; smaller in scope than the other play, it's the story of a single middle-class family over the course of a single 16-hour working day, as they start the morning with the kind of bland, pleasant interactions you would expect from such a family, but by midnight have turned into a bunch of screaming, irrational monsters clawing at each other's throats, greatly fueled by an entire day and evening of substance abuse (alcohol in the case of the father and two grown sons, morphine in the case of the mother). This makes it much clearer than Iceman why O'Neill is considered one of the three founders of American Modernist drama, along with Williams and their mutual peer Arthur Miller; because much like Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miller's Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey primarily concerns itself with a deeply dysfunctional middle-class family, one which will never be able to solve its problems because the family members are incapable of acknowledging that they have a problem in the first place, and are too much of weak moral cowards to ever be able to directly confront their own dysfunctional behavior and bring a stop to it. And all three of these plays came out right in the middle of the post-war Mid-Century-Modernist period of the 1940s and '50s, when an ascendent American military-industrial complex was attempting to sell the idea to a war-weary, shell-shocked American public that the concept of the bland "nuclear family" was actually the pinnacle of enlightened, civilized society, as most notoriously seen in the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, which represented one of these post-war nuclear families in its perfect ur-form. Now, don't get me wrong, decades of data have now conclusively proved that a society full of bland, happy middle-class families really does prevent the rise of radical politics and its inevitable degradation into violent authoritarianism (either fascism from the far-right or communism from the far-left), as we're unfortunately seeing in our own age, when the rapid disappearance of the middle class has left us with a country with no other choices left but the MAGAs or the Wokes, essentially the Hitler and Stalin of our own times; in fact, business guru Peter Drucker was expressly preaching this message in all his early books from these same 1950s years (but for more, see my review of his classic The End of Economic Man), and he turned out to be exactly right, which is what made him such a hugely influential figure in post-war politics and economics. But there are three big problems with this theory, which not by coincidence are the exact three problems addressed in these plays, which is why they were so passionately loved by 1950s audiences: being a bland middle-classer is a soul-killing experience; such a society tends to turn conformity and a rigid adherence to rules into an all-holy religion; and most importantly, sometimes it simply doesn't work, and you can do all the things society tells you to do in order to be happy and prosperous and still end up a miserable failure, the exact subject of Death of a Salesman, which is why Miller's play is far and away the most powerful and successful of all three of these. As much as a post-Holocaust American society wanted to believe in the power of the bland middle-class, they were smart enough to be able to sniff out the bullshit that often lies underneath this pretty fairytale; and that makes it easy to see why they went so crazy for plays like these when they first came out, because all of them take the unspoken anxiety about post-war promises and makes them explicit, a rightly nagging worry that fixing the world after a planet-destroying war was going to be a lot more complicated than simply giving the Beaver a stern talking-to. Like with the other plays, that makes Long Day's Journey much more interesting now as a historical document than as a contemporary piece of drama to be enjoyed for simple pleasure; but as a historical document, it's a fascinating one, a brilliant record of the exact things the entirety of American society was worrying about in these years, which makes it all the more astounding that it's actually an autobiographical play based on the relationships his real family members had with each other during O'Neill's youth in the 1910s (thus explaining why he didn't want the play produced until long after the death of everyone who knew his family). It should be read with this mindset, that it's no longer exactly a powerful story unto itself (like Williams and Miller, there's an awful lot of stagey melodrama and other "THEATAAHHHH!!!!" moments going on here, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five), but rather a powerful reminder of just how shaky American society was in the years after the war, when everyone agreed that they never wanted another Hitler and Stalin again, but didn't quite yet know what would replace them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Mar 08, 2024
not set
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Mar 08, 2024
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0300117434
| 9780300117431
| 0300117434
| 3.90
| 9,835
| Jan 01, 1946
| Aug 28, 2006
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this. It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room." It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize. But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time. That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then! But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation. It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash." But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence! See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character. And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more |
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2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed
2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed back in my own indie-lit days. Of course, it's been a while since my own indie-lit days, and I learned then that Mohr has actually published an additional three books since I first lost track of him; so after first tackling his equal parts hilarious and harrowing memoir about being a reckless drug addict in 1990s San Francisco, 2021's Model Citizen (my review), I decided to go all the way back to the oldest book of his I missed the first time around, 2011's Damascus, put out by the admirable indie press Two Dollar Radio ("admirable" = "one of the only indie presses of the 2010s to have its shit together enough to still be open in the 2020s"), the first of Mohr's novels to start getting him press and notice from the mainstream world (I believe it's his first book to get reviewed by the New York Times, for example, who called it "Beat-poet cool"), eventually leading to his current position in the roster of the storied mainstream press Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Unfortunately for Mohr, the type of novel he's written here was to fall profoundly out of favor during the rise of the #MeToo movement just a few years after this was originally published; written in the style of Charles Bukowski, it's about a young straight white man who owns a dive bar in the early-2000s Mission District of San Francisco, mostly as an excuse to feed his alcoholism, with Mohr using the milieu to tell a series of interconnecting stories about the lumpen proletarians who count as the bar's barely surviving regulars, giving us moments of sublime poetry that shine through the endless pile of shit, grime and semen that mostly makes up the tales in this book. Of course, as a fellow straight white male who spent a lot of his twenties exactly in these kinds of venues, I loved the book; and I'd also argue that this novel is actually much more similar to Eugene O'Neill than Bukowski, and in fact will strongly remind people who are familiar with it with the former's crowning achievement, 1946's The Iceman Cometh, in that this is not just stories about noble but terminal drunks (Bukowski's forte) but about terminal drunks who aspire for something more than this, but whose own moral cowardice gets in the way of them ever doing the right thing, a topic that O'Neill made an entire Putlizer- and Nobel-winning career out of. That said, I understand why these kinds of "tortured straight white male alcoholic is actually the greatest hero in history" stories have fallen profoundly out of favor in the 13 years since Mohr first wrote this, and so I'm happy to acknowledge that this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and can even partially agree when people react to books like these anymore with an angry sigh and a terse declaration that "that Bukowski shit" isn't for them. I get that, and I'm happy to wait patiently until the Woke Generation's kids are in their twenties, at which point they'll rebel against their own parents and suddenly these kinds of stories will be hot yet again, just in time for me to be a hip and wise grandpa; but until then, if you're ready to go against the grain and actually embrace a story about a bunch of white male assholes who should know better but simply don't, this is a great example of it to pick up, a book that many will find both deeply relatable and horrifically cringe-worthy in equal measures. If that sounds to you like the compliment I mean for it to be, then by all means pick this up; but if it simply sounds like an insult, probably best to stay far away from this short, delightfully nasty book. ...more |
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2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is a perfectly serviceable if not pedestrian omegaverse tale, by which I mean it takes about a short story's worth of plot and marries it to about half a dozen sex scenes, the whole thing written with a new paragraph break after every single sentence in order to pad out the page count; and while that would usually get three stars from me in any other context, I've decided to start giving these kinds of romance novels four stars instead, because "serviceable" is all anybody wants and expects from these Kindle Unlimited romance novels in the first place, just something to help pleasantly kill about four to six hours of one's life without being too incredibly insulting to one's intelligence. I have to admit, I continue to be obsessed with the omegaverse subgenre in romance, because of its goal to bring together what seems like to me two diametrically different ideas that you would think couldn't work with each other, where fans get all the thrills of a violent rape fantasy but all the teddy bears and pink balloons of a normal romance novel, basically by positing a paranormal universe where humans essentially "go into heat" like animals do, thus allowing you to still have Mister Perfect Nice Guy as the male lead character but who also simply can't help himself from grabbing any woman closer than a few feet from him and aggressively having his way with her. (Remember, if a man ever pushes a woman to the ground and then violently takes her from behind, just to later wash her hair in the bathtub, you know you're reading an omegaverse novel.) When it comes to that, this book delivers the fetish just fine, but doesn't bother or even aim to be the tiniest bit better than simply a fetish delivery vehicle, which is why these kinds of books come and go from the Kindle Store in the blink of an eye like the disposable tissues they are. Read it or not with this understanding before you pick it up. ...more |
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #6. The last time I finished one of my annual summer reads of a Jack Reacher book, about six months ago with 2000's Running Blind (my review), I mentioned how that, if I could remember it six months later, I thought I'd also start reading a Reacher book once every winter as well, in that I'm currently 25 books behind in this long-running series (with more continuing to be published every year), and I've been having such an unexpectedly great time reading them that I didn't want to have to wait until all the way in my eighties to complete it. And hey, guess who indeed managed to remember all this six months later? I say an "unexpectedly" great time because I honestly wasn't expecting to enjoy Lee Child's laconic literary creation nearly as much as I've ended up doing so; after all, I only started this series after making the decision a few years ago to embrace my inner child and once again participate in summer easy reading challenges like I used to as a kid through my public library, where the whole point is to burn through a bunch of books during the warm weather by specifically concentrating on "beach and airport reads," for lack of a better term. Along with choices like Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series, the Horatio Hornblower novels of CS Forester, and Ian Fleming's original James Bond books, I thought it'd be cheesy and fun to add these perennial occupants of the library's "new release" shelf, an annual series of crime thrillers centered around the most kickass American who's ever Americaned America, the always drifting, forever rule-breaking, increasingly "damn" muttering former military crime investigator Jack Reacher, who eternally roams the American countryside and is constantly getting caught up in other people's dramas against his will, because he's just too good a guy to turn a blind eye to injustice, damnit. Of course, this has been the problem with the Reacher books too; actually created by a British Americanophile named James Grant who writes under the pen name Lee Child, Reacher is the literal manifestation of every childhood fantasy about the U S of A he ever had as a child, and the first couple books of this series unfortunately reflects that rather literally, presenting a cartoon superhero who blows into outrageously trope-filled small American towns once per book, to be confronted by a series of the most cardboard cutout stereotypes this side of the Nickelodeon Central Casting office. Thankfully, once Child actually moved to America himself in the late '90s, and had a chance to spend several years here actually getting to know the country as a local, he then put out the big breakthrough book for this series, third volume Tripwire from 1999 (my review); and that's when Reacher finally became a real person living in the same real world you and I live in, Child getting rid of the all the eye-rolling moments of the first two books to instead show us that he really knows what he's doing as a writer of crime thrillers, giving us a fast and mean genre exercise that delights in a way that needs no Roger Marin asterisk. That's why I was so wary and disappointed at first with today's novel, book #5 from 2001, because it looks at first like a return to the outrageously awful small-town antics of pre-American Child, as our hero ends up in southern Texas and trying to help an abused Mexican-American wife against a group of surly, drooling good ol' boys who might as well be hooking their thumbs into the suspenders of their white suits while boasting about the latest local lynching. But without revealing spoilers, about halfway through this book one of these cardboard cutouts is revealed to be almost the exact opposite kind of person than the one painted with the giant brush by Lee in the first half, a real Gone Girl kind of moment where literally the entire plot of the story flips upside-down by the revelation and suddenly starts going in directions you would've never guessed beforehand it would. That was exciting and great, a moment of flipping my expectations just like Child did in the previous book in this series, using these later Reacher books partly as a way of commenting on the implausibility of the early Reacher books, to deliberately play with conventions and expectations so to deliver a novel that gives you all the thrills you want from an airport crime quickie, but always in a smart and original way that doesn't take its audience for granted. That's why I call Reacher books an unexpectedly great time, because I wasn't expecting any of these kinds of things when I first started this series several years ago; and I think it's fair to say that it's the continued success of these books in my eyes that's partly led me to become a bigger fan in general here in my fifties of genre fiction, embracing categories like crime, fantasy and romance* in a way I simply didn't when I was younger, and getting rid of most of the precious NPR Brooklyn indie-lit character dramas I used to read when younger to make room for all these new genre titles. [*Well, okay, maybe I wouldn't be reading the romance ones if it wasn't for the fact that I get hired regularly now to edit such books, so read them professionally because I want to keep on top of the latest trends in this genre. But still!] I'm reserving moral judgment on all that, and am simply chalking it up these days to changing interests as I get older and my interests just change in general; but as far as that stuff's concerned, the Reacher novels have been a real highlight of the last several years of my reading life, and I recommend anyone looking for a really cracking actioner to pick any of these up (as long as you stick to volume #3 and later, that is). I look forward to my next Reacher read, 2002's Without Fail (OMFG, he saves the freaking Vice President), coming this summer, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by and join me again then. Lee Child "Jack Reacher" books being reviewed for this series: Killing Floor (1997) | Die Trying (1998) | Tripwire (1999) | Running Blind (2000) | Echo Burning (2001) | Without Fail (2002) | Persuader (2003) | The Enemy (2004) | One Shot (2005) | The Hard Way (2006) | Bad Luck and Trouble (2007) | Nothing to Lose (2008) | Gone Tomorrow (2009) | 61 Hours (2010) | Worth Dying For (2010) | The Affair (2011) | A Wanted Man (2012) | Never Go Back (2013) | Personal (2014) | Make Me (2015) | Night School (2016) | The Midnight Line (2017) | Past Tense (2018) | Blue Moon (2019) | The Sentinel (2020) | Better Off Dead (2021) | No Plan B (2022) | The Secret (2023) | In Too Deep (2024) ...more |
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
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2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy w
2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy was before reading this; for fellow clueless Gen-Xers, she was on one of those cloying children's shows from Nickelodeon that polluted the airwaves during the early '00s, back when we were too old to watch such shows ourselves but not yet old enough to have kids who watched those shows, where she played not the main character but the Kramer-esque wacky next-door neighbor who became the show's breakout star. This thus made it quite a shock to her former young fans when, a decade later, she wrote a tell-all memoir alleging that the show's creator, Dan Schneider, was a sexual predator who regularly got underaged girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, and that the Nickelodeon executive suite knew this and deliberately chose not to do anything about it since Schneider (who had five different shows on the network at the time) was making such an obscene amount of money for them. Oh yeah, and her mom happened to be completely off-the-rails batshit crazy, an unmedicated schizophrenic who among other things forced an eating disorder on McCurdy at the age of ten (after forcing her into a showbiz career she didn't want in the first place), used to shower her each night and check her genitals for "abnormalities" all the way up to the age of seventeen (while forced to share the tub with her 16-year-old brother who was receiving such an examination at the same time), and who was such an unrepentant and unapologetic hoarder that eventually McCurdy had to sleep on a roll-up exercise mat on the floor at night, because her mom had taken over virtually every inch of her bedroom with random detritus. That's a lot for a single book, especially when you add McCurdy's decade of substance abuse issues after her mother's death from cancer; but the joyfully surprising thing here is that she takes it on with mastery, finesse and aplomb, putting together both a breezy and a devastating read that's easily one of my favorites out of the 100+ books I read this year. That's because McCurdy doesn't have even the slightest bit of hesitation about going warts-and-all here in this shockingly honest look at her life, by which I mean she not only spills the beans about all the abuse she suffered from all these people, but also makes it abundantly clear where she too has failed in life, where she has treated people terribly, where she had such a blinders-hobbled understanding of things like sexuality that she drove pretty much every person around her crazy (especially in most of the romantic relationships she's now been in as an adult, which she admits have almost all been because of either her own behavior or having such a stunted emotional life that she couldn't recognize terrible boyfriends before actually dating them). But what really sells this, though, and what makes it so much different than so many of these other tell-all celebrity abuse memoirs, is that McCurdy maintains an astounding sense of compassion and empathy for the people she talks about, despite the book's salacious title; for example, although she admits that her mother was unambiguously a monster, who understood that she was mentally ill but deliberately chose not to seek treatment but instead inflict her insanity on her entire family, she also easily sees the circumstances that led to her being this way (in a nutshell, her own mother, who got it from her own mother, etc.), and holds a tremendous amount of love and caring for her at the heart of this otherwise always shocking litany of human abuses she details here in her never-not-fascinating trainwreck of a childhood. I'm fairly convinced that this is why this one shines so much brighter than other celebrity tell-alls of this type, and why it's had such staying power (I myself am reading it an entire year after it first came out, because it still continues to pop up in my Goodreads friends' reading lists at least once a week without fail); for while we all love to gawk at the car crash with tawdry Hollywood memoirs, here McCurdy is challenging us readers to a lot more than that, to understand how a person who did a tremendous amount of bad things can still have a good side we can celebrate, namely so that we too can see the good sides of ourselves whenever we also do bad things, as all humans do on a regular basis. That's really what elevates this book here, is McCurdy taking such a hard look at herself at the same time she's chronicling all this abuse, whether from her family or Schneider or the executives of Nickelodeon (who literally offered her a third of a million dollars in hush money to stop writing this book), understanding that to forgive the people who have done us wrong is to ultimately forgive ourselves, for the times we in turn have wronged others. That's a much deeper message, and one a lot more of us can relate to than the usual "look at the living hell these people put me through" record these types of books typically are. That's why I'm not just giving it 5 stars but will be adding to my "Best Reads of 2023" list, soon to be unveiled over at my Mastodon account; for it's not just horrific and entertaining but also teaches us something about the world in general, even better for refusing to come up with a pat happy ending like so many of these mainstream memoirs are forced into. If you haven't yet read this difficult, often infuriating, but nonetheless sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book, I encourage you to do so as soon as you can. ...more |
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2023 reads, #88. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen
2023 reads, #88. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen other Prime Reads crime thrillers I've read over the last two years. Usually I spend some time detailing what went wrong in these books, as a way of sharpening my skills as an editor of other people's Kindle Unlimited crime thrillers; but I'm just not feeling it today, so I'm instead just going to post my disappointed score and call it a day.
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2023 reads, #87. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen
2023 reads, #87. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen other Prime Reads crime thrillers I've read over the last two years. Usually I spend some time detailing what went wrong in these books, as a way of sharpening my skills as an editor of other people's Kindle Unlimited crime thrillers; but I'm just not feeling it today, so I'm instead just going to post my disappointed score and call it a day.
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2023 reads, #84. Like a lot of people, I've only recently become a fan of Daphne du Maurier, through modern movie adaptations of her early hits Rebecc
2023 reads, #84. Like a lot of people, I've only recently become a fan of Daphne du Maurier, through modern movie adaptations of her early hits Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel that allow us through 21st-century norms in sex and violence to show just how subversive, dark, and downright modern this literary innovator was, often overshadowed in her prose itself because of so much of her earlier work being written way back in the 1930s, at an age when prose was much fussier and more flowery. Today's book, however, is actually the very last one of her career, way ahead forward to 1972 when du Maurier was in her mid-sixties, and with much more modern prose to match; and although that finally allows us to see "du Maurier Unchained" so to speak, it's unfortunately in service of a much weaker story, so is just sort of a tradeoff at best from her early work, that was so hobbled by the mores of the Edwardian Age but that were so delightfully evil nonetheless. This book in fact has been getting a lot of contemporary notice again recently, because her premise here is that one day in the near future, Europe comes together as a single union of nation-states (don't forget, the European Economic Community was already up and in full force in this book's times, precursor to the modern EU), but that after bad economic times, a far-right group takes power in Parliament and convinces Britain to pull out of this proto-EU; then after their economy continues to tank, the right-wing government blames it on "shadowy outside forces," then in secret makes a deal with the far-right government in place in America at the same time, to join together the US and UK into one political entity (literally now known as the USUK), for the purpose of essentially creating a global police state that rules over much of the English-speaking world and about half the planet's nuclear weapons. That's brilliant of du Maurier to correctly predict way back in the early '70s, getting clues for this coming catastrophe only through events of those times like the Nixon administration, the US's gleeful atrocities committed in Vietnam, the CIA's global reach by then, etc., and this book should be considered special just for that alone. And I also like that du Maurier (an infamously beautiful yet aggressive tomboy-punkgirl-flapper-possibly-bisexual type in her youth) continued to be so fiery all the way to the end of her life, seeing the coming storm earlier than most and refusing to lie still for it. The problem, however, is that she doesn't really have much to say about the subject, or much of a plot to hang off this delicious concept; by around page 50, we're now aware of the far-right union and the fascist US troops that have taken over the small Cornwall town where our story is set, but even by page 350 at the end, really the only thing that's happened is that the same stuff we knew about on page 50 has gotten worse, du Maurier's point seeming here to be, "You can't imagine it could happen here, but here it is, happening here! Hah? HAAAAHHH?" Rebecca-era du Maurier would've had the union announced on page 50, the current end of the book only happening one chapter later, then would be right on to an action-packed, surprise-filled plot that takes us to crazier and crazier places from the original conceit. So that's kind of disappointing, that late-age du Maurier either couldn't or wouldn't do that; but, you know, that's often what happens with artists as they get older, as they get to the point where they've now actually told all the stories they've wanted in their hearts to tell, and a slower lifestyle and slower brain combines with this to put out books that are simply okay, instead of insanely great like at their earlier, more youthful height. That easily explains why this book has largely fallen into obscurity at this point, because it's okay du Maurier but not great du Maurier; and except for a handful of authors over the entire course of history, most writers are fated to be remembered by history (if they're remembered at all) through just a small handful of their greatest books, the other ones' existences largely forgotten like has happened with this one. Unless you're doing a completist look at du Maurier's entire oeuvre, you can safely skip this book despite its prescient forecasting of our times, and stick to her most famous pieces like the ones mentioned, or her Hollywood-friendly short stories like "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now." ...more |
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| 0871404192
| 9780871404190
| 0871404192
| 3.64
| 1,955
| 1979
| May 20, 2013
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did not like it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #83. So, the last time we were discussing my completist read of the entire oeuvre of JG Ballard, after just finishing the most famous book of the author's career, 1975's High-Rise (my review), I mentioned how I would likely be skipping Ballard's next book after this, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, because of it being just so obscure as to almost not even exist anymore; the paper version is long out of print, with no Kindle version ever having been made, no BitTorrented version inside the fairly complete Pirate Bay file on Ballard's works, and most importantly with not even a single copy available through the Chicago Public Library, such an unusual occurrence that it always causes attention to itself the rare times it happens. (For those who don't know, Chicago has the third largest public library system not just in America but the entire world, and so for the most part typically has at least one copy of pretty much every pre-Amazon novel you can even name.) But instead, this lack of accessibility made me even more curious about the book than before -- for what's the point in even doing a completist challenge if you're not going to read the most obscure titles of that author's career, the kind of stuff that pretty much no one else will go to the trouble of tracking down themselves? So, that's exactly what I did, going on eBay and actually purchasing a rare first edition of the book (for more money than I care to admit) so that I could add it to my own rare-book collection afterwards and partly justify the expense, with my copy eventually arriving a little earlier this year. Unfortunately, though, I quickly discovered this week why this book is so obscure, when I finally sat down to read it; for while High-Rise right before it is arguably Ballard firing on all cylinders, perhaps not the absolute best book of his career although with no one denying it's in the top three, the one after it is unambiguously the worst book of his career up to that point, a sloppy and self-indulgent mess that Ballard only seems to have gotten away with because of this coming straight after his unexpected bestseller and instant cultural touchstone, and with him therefore having the power to be as masturbatory as he wanted to be. And sister, believe me when I say that he wanted to be very, very masturbatory. And indeed, I suspect an important thing to remember here is that, far from being a slow-burning cult sleeper, High-Rise was hugely popular from almost its release among a certain hip crowd "in the know," with there having been serious plans to make a Hollywood adaptation starting literally weeks after the book was first published, which would've been directed by famed trippy countercultural filmmaker Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth -- ah, what might've been!). That I expect has a large part to do with why Ballard set this follow-up book in Shepperton, center of England's film industry because of Pinewood Studios (where most of the original "Star Wars" trilogy was filmed, in exactly the same years Ballard first wrote this), because you can sort of squint at this book sideways and kind of see that it's partly about the pressures of an indie artist trying to fit into mainstream respectability (after our book's antisocial, perpetually horny, often physically violent "hero" Blake impulsively steals a small aircraft in London one day for no particular reason, ends up crash-landing it in Shepperton, then seemingly can't escape that town once he's there no matter what he tries, in that the highways all improbably end up leading back to the city when he tries driving down them, etc.). But it's this facile description of the book's plot that's also an example of everything wrong with it, because Ballard seems to have codified his book's themes in such an impenetrably dense and personal way that it often feels like he's describing a dream he once had (among other developments, the entire city's population all turn into birds at one point, Blake spends most of the novel not knowing whether he's alive or dead, and an unsettlingly high amount of the citizenry seem to be convinced that he's the Messiah). And as most people can tell you, being forced to listen to someone describe one of their recent dreams is literally one of the most tedious experiences all of us have on a regular basis, because there's nothing inherently compelling about dream logic -- anything can happen, no actions have any stakes or repercussions, the laws of physics themselves can be conveniently ignored whenever the author wants, and in general it's much like trying to get emotionally invested in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, by which I mean it's not only impossible but a genre designed specifically to make it impossible. That leads to a highly unsatisfying reading experience, one in which just weirdo random things arbitrarily happen on a page-by-page basis, with you never knowing whether Ballard's ever going to come back and reference that turn of events again, whether it's important to our story or not, or even whether it's supposed to have "really" happened within the collective fictional reality of the world this story inhabits. In other words, in a book where dreams are apparently real, this book continues to feature dreams on top of that which aren't supposed to be a "real" part of the "dream world" where this book takes place, which gets so metafictional so quickly that it just left me with a giant headache before I had even gotten 50 pages into it. That's a shame, because after eight books of his now, I've come to realize that Ballard needed a lot of boundaries artificially placed on him for his writing to truly shine, such as when his career first started out and the only people who would publish him were traditional science-fiction presses who wanted traditional Mid-Century Modernist sci-fi tales from him. When the countercultural revolution of the 1970s erased this need for Ballard to deal with artificial limits placed on his unlimited imagination, the results started becoming extremely hit and miss, and for every brilliant book like High-Rise or Concrete Island (my review), he also put out a sloppy, stream-of-consciousness mess like today's book or the similarly frustrating Crash (my review). That's of course the entire point of doing a completist read of a specific author, to get a really deep sense of what made them tick as both a person and an artist, divorced from just the handful of "greatest hits" that will be the only books of theirs read by 99 percent of future audience members after that author's death; but while that's a worthwhile endeavor, it's sometimes not a fun one, as I was reminded of with this book I eventually just had to hold my nose and slog down as quickly as I could, like bitter medicine being force-fed to me by some bitter Ballardian nurse with a cruel streak and a loaded gun pointed straight at me. That's kind of what this book feels like, Ballard essentially punishing you for daring to be a fan of his writing, and it's easy to see why the book quickly died on the vine when it first came out and then was promptly and completely forgotten by society at large. Let's see if things get any better with the next book in the list, 1981's Hello America, whose synopsis at least promises more of the same. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High-Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
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Oct 30, 2023
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374211728
| 9780374211721
| 0374211728
| 4.30
| 202
| 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift co
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift copy of his newest book, the absurdist fairytale Farsickness that he co-wrote with his small daughter during the pandemic. That made me remember that I had lost touch with Mohr's career ever since my small press closed in the late 2010s, after being so impressed with his first couple of books on the exquisite small publisher Two Dollar Radio; and after scanning through his bibliography, I realized that what I really wanted to read next of his was a memoir he published just recently in 2021 called Model Citizen, concerning his time as a drug and alcohol addict and general lover of chaos back during his youth in the gentrifying '90s Mission district of San Francisco. I just got done with it this week, and it's as powerful as you would expect from someone who's made an entire career now out of stories about the world's druggies, petty criminals, and other lumpen proletarians; for it turns out that Mohr's real life is very similar to the sometimes desperate lives of his characters, with the hipster scene of the '90s Bay Area being not particularly helpful to this son of an alcoholic who had already started drinking himself by the age of ten, and who by his thirties was now regularly injecting fentanyl and ketamine, and who purposely cultivated chaos-embracing friends who would encourage him to do things like mug drunk guys just for kicks, or have contests over who could shoot more staples into their skin without flinching after getting good and fucked up. This is easily the best part of the book, the unflinching and unsentimental way he approaches his years of darkness, neither condemning the behavior nor Tarantino-glorifying it, but simply acknowledging that this is what his life used to be, and that in some ways it was like this precisely because this is the way the entire Bay Area artistic community was back in those years, a sort of "late-stage Byronism" of doomed romantic artists that Generation X perfected in a way no other generation had, until the next young generation entirely rejected it (like they have with most Generation X things) and now treasure their artistic lives of health, wellness, earnestness and financial security. Of course, this being Mohr, the book is also incredibly insightful as well, which in good MFA style is centered around a compelling framing device that just naturally makes you want to learn more; namely, after being sober for years, now married and with a toddler child, he discovers that the occasional moments of physical numbness he sometimes experienced while an addict were actually a series of strokes he didn't realize he was having, and that doctors have now determined that he has a hole in his heart (talk about MFA symbolism!) that will require surgery to correct, and that they plan on knocking him out using the exact same fentanyl he used to be addicted to. Will this "freelapse" eventually knock him off the wagon again? Will his love for his infant daughter be enough to keep him on the straight and narrow? Mohr uses the event as basically an excuse to do a "plain-language Proust" digression-filled look back at his entire life, examine the crippling self-esteem issues from his damaging childhood that led to the breakup of his first marriage and the constant doubts he has about his second, and pontificate in a clever, knowing way about how actual sobriety stories often don't fit the neat, tidy three-act structure that Hollywood wants them to when making inspirational Oscarbait films about the subject. And indeed, although this book made me laugh out loud sometimes, unnervingly see myself at other points (I was part of Chicago's arts community in these same years, which shared a lot of the same dysfunctions as San Francisco's), and just plain ol' openly weep in the middle of public cafes at yet other moments (prompting all the people around me to check out what book exactly I was reading that had moved me to such an extent -- you're welcome, Josh), what I liked and appreciated the most about this book is that Mohr has the courage to make it a messy story, one that doesn't hit the usual three-act beats and that he refuses to force into that pattern, which I bet he was under an immense pressure to do, since this was his first of his then five books to actually come out on a mainstream press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), after having the usual indie career before this of prestigious but tiny destinations like Two Dollar Radio and Soft Skull. That makes the book much more interesting than usual, which makes it much better than usual, and I was really glad to see Mohr make such a strong commitment to telling the story he knew he needed to tell, even at the expense of the feel-good wrap-up most people are looking for when they read clean-and-sober books like these. As he demonstrates by the end of the book, even the term "clean and sober story" is a misnomer in the first place, one that leads to manipulative memoirs instead of intellectually honest ones, after his freelapse makes him realize with a lot of terror just how close all addicts are all the time to their head sinking below the water's surface yet again; and that makes for a much more interesting and enjoyable read than simply another Lifetime movie told the same exact way for the ten thousandth time again. Unfortunately, the end kind of falters a bit, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 from me; it becomes pretty clear in the last third that Mohr simply ran out of things to say, so he starts glomming on more and more to the typical infuriating MFA tricks at that point, especially his habit of writing very artsy run-on sentences when he doesn't have much of a point to make. Or sometimes single paragraphs that last for two or three pages, which like all three-page single paragraphs you can entirely skip over without missing even the tiniest important thing to the story. (Also, Mohr very badly and very often makes both of the general mistakes about storytelling that almost all humans know, whether or not they're writers themselves -- that no one wants to hear about the dream you had last night, and no one besides you is interested in the randomly adorable thing your kid did yesterday, stories of which start taking up more and more and more and more and more of the book's final third.) That said, these problems weren't enough to stop me from loving the book, just like I've loved everything of Mohr's I've now read (think of my 4 stars here at Goodreads as actually more like 4 and a half stars, if I could award half-stars here); and that's made me realize that I have some backlog reading to do now, in that Mohr has actually put out another three books between my early years as a reviewer and now, and I want to read them all. Next up will be his 2011 Damascus, the novel that first started getting him mainstream notice and that began lifting him out of the indie-lit ghetto, so I hope you'll join me here again in early 2024 for that. For now, though, I can confidently state that this will be making my "2023 best reads of the year" report I'll be sharing on the social network Mastodon at the end of December. If you can stand queasy stories, pick it up with no delay. ...more |
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| B0CJ8ZNWNP
| 3.90
| 39
| unknown
| Oct 24, 2023
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really liked it
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(Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an
(Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an honest review.) 2023 reads, #78. This was kind of an interesting reading experience, in that it's actually book #3 of the "shapeshifting horny billionaire werewolves" series Swan is publishing these days, but I didn't get to read the first two volumes because of this being her first book since I joined her ARC reading group. So that made my read an exploration of a kind of fascinating question, which is exactly how much do you need to know about a series of romance novels, anyway, in order to understand what's going on in any one volume from the series? For example, I wasn't sure at first whether our female lead character is supposed to be an unhappy member of an Amish community or a religious cult that simply dresses like an Amish community (it's the latter, turns out), or whether this was supposed to be set back in the 1800s or is a contemporary tale (contemporary, I realized after coming across a reference to this cult running a meth lab in order to pay their bills), or whether the big infodump I saw a little later concerning a bunch of other horny werewolves whose names and location are all rattled off with the speed of a TV recap was stuff I needed to actually know for this particular story, or was just a fan-service cameo by the characters of one of the previous novels in the series (which, again, turned out to be the latter). That left just the current storyline itself after that was all figured out, which was not bad from an objective standpoint (that is, it's no worse than any other romance novel), but suffers from the same problem as a whole lot of Kindle Unlimited books in this genre, of simply being a cookie-cutter repeat of a thousand paranormal romance/erotica novels that have already been written; as someone who now edits many of these KU romance novels for a living, it feels sometimes that I've read a thousand of them myself, and I have to confess that it disappoints me anymore when coming across one whose every beat and every detail I can pretty much already guess in advance. That's perhaps a bit unfair, in that I'm someone in the industry and therefore spend a lot of time thinking about the tropes and traditions of the romance genre; but I would offer that the genre's biggest fans actually read way more of these books than even I do, and so are likely even bigger experts at the tropes than me, so I think it's probably ultimately fair to warn heavy fans of the genre that they're likely to experience "trope fatigue" here. That's simply a consequence of the age we live in, where these kinds of books are primarily written with keywords, marketing, and search engine optimization in mind, not in the hopes of ever writing something refreshingly new and original; and while that doesn't necessarily make the book bad, it does make it essentially pornography, by which I mean that its biggest fans will be the people who burn through an entire romance novel every 24 hours because there's a highly specific thing they're fetishistically looking for (in this case, most likely the thrill of erotic rape stories, experienced in a safe way in "fated mate" tales like this one because the rapists in question are always vampires or werewolves or space aliens who are biologically driven to do so and therefore ultimately good guys who simply can't help themselves, and will most assuredly make up for it afterwards by tenderly washing the female lead character's hair), and don't really care what the storyline actually is that delivers the fetish as long as the fetish is ultimately delivered. So in this, rest assured that the "safe rape" fantasy you're looking for is confidently delivered here, although in a story that's as easy to guess beforehand as a 16-year-old boy reading a Penthouse letter about a naughty next-door neighbor. As a romance editor, that disappoints me, but as a fan I admit that it'll do; that would usually get a score of three and a half stars from me, being rounded up to four here at the "no half stars" Goodreads. ...more |
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| 0877281475
| 9780877281474
| 0877281475
| 3.48
| 1,596
| 1917
| Jun 01, 1975
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2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was wh
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was where Mark Frost cribbed the idea of the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge" for use in the "conspiracy of conspiracies" TV show Twin Peaks he co-created with David Lynch. But alas, while Crowley meant for both this and all his other "Simon Iff, Mystic Detective" stories to be easy-to-read pulp thrillers in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, at a time in his life when he was flat-broke and it was suggested that such easy-reading material connected to his famous name would sell like hotcakes, I don't think he really had any idea how to actually write pulp stories that would appeal to a large general audience, turning in a barely readable book here that's a mess both conceptually and mechanically. I must confess, even with this being not even 150 pages, I still barely made it even a quarter of the way through before giving up in confused boredom, not so much a novel as it is a sneaky way to publish an occultism academic textbook, complete with the pages upon pages of impenetrably dense New Age nonsense a term like that implies. Maybe the hardcore Crowley fan will be able to get through this, but for all the rest of us, this book works better as a concept than an actual reading experience.
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 166251087X
| 9781662510878
| B0BQWWY7W9
| 3.62
| 8,280
| Sep 01, 2023
| Sep 01, 2023
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #73. My 22nd Amazon Prime Reads thriller, and the 22nd one in a row I've disliked. Normally here I would tell you exactly why, but I just
2023 reads, #73. My 22nd Amazon Prime Reads thriller, and the 22nd one in a row I've disliked. Normally here I would tell you exactly why, but I just don't have the heart or the energy for it today, so let me instead simply warn you to skip this. Oh, Amazon's in-house publishing imprints, when will you finally publish a book that's actually good?
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| 1662507070
| 9781662507076
| B0BH96MK41
| 3.81
| 26,757
| Jun 01, 2023
| Jun 01, 2023
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #72. Easily the stupidest Prime Reads crime thriller I've ever read; and I've read 21 Prime Reads crime thrillers and have hated them all,
2023 reads, #72. Easily the stupidest Prime Reads crime thriller I've ever read; and I've read 21 Prime Reads crime thrillers and have hated them all, so that's saying quite a bit. One of those gimmicky books that entirely and completely revolves around answering a single high-concept question (why does a bride think during her wedding ceremony that her husband is a complete stranger, even though literally the entire rest of the church insists he is who he says he is?), basically the 300 pages between this opening question and the final answer are nothing but empty filler, until finally getting to the ridiculously silly answer to the question at the end ((view spoiler)[turns out a jilted ex-lover of her fiance has slowly and methodically hypnotized her against her will and without her knowledge, to make her think she's going crazy (hide spoiler)]). One of those books that feels like it started life by the author saying one day, "Hey, you know what a clever ending for a crime thriller would be?" who then forgot that you have to actually write a compelling story to get us to that ending. Avoid.
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| 4.14
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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| 3.96
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it was amazing
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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| 3.62
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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| 4.05
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really liked it
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Mar 08, 2024
not set
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Mar 08, 2024
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Mar 02, 2024
not set
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Mar 02, 2024
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| 3.98
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2024
not set
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Feb 10, 2024
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| 3.42
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2024
not set
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Jan 27, 2024
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| 4.04
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 4.46
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it was amazing
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not set
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Nov 16, 2023
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| 4.36
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it was ok
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Nov 11, 2023
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 4.17
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it was ok
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Nov 11, 2023
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 3.59
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liked it
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Nov 04, 2023
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Nov 04, 2023
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| 3.64
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did not like it
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Oct 30, 2023
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Oct 30, 2023
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| 4.30
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really liked it
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Oct 24, 2023
not set
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Oct 24, 2023
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Oct 22, 2023
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Oct 22, 2023
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| 3.48
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Sep 22, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 3.62
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it was ok
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Sep 19, 2023
not set
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Sep 19, 2023
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| 3.81
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did not like it
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Sep 19, 2023
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Sep 19, 2023
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