Eric

FYI this is a short-story collection, not a novel; the character cameos that bleed through a couple stories are so marginal they don't mean anything.

The first story ("The Feminist") was good, the second ("Pics") was okay but ended a little flat. I will say the texting dialogue in "Pics" is hilarious and pitch-perfect; it's actually the first page I flipped to in the bookstore and made me want to read the full book.

Each successive story in this collection is less impressive and more cringe than the last. The book is obviously supposed to be cringe, but I was cringing at the author's writing choices more than the characters' thoughts and actions.

"Our Dope Future" is a terrible cartoon version of a hustle-culture alpha male. This archetype should be so easy to critique, yet this story is just dumb.

The insane video-request description at the end of "Ahegao" was so long and over the top that it killed any honest reflection about how ruined Kant's sexuality had gotten from porn, instead making him sound like a fake 13 year old edgelord instead of anyone actually in his mid-30s.

And ending with a fake rejection letter from a fake publisher about the book itself is such a silly attempt to be cleverly meta and proactively self-criticizing: "You can't accuse me of sucking, because I'm admitting to it! In fact, maybe I was even trying to suck!" It's a scaredy-cat, have-it-both-ways defense tactic that insecure people deploy.

Starts to feel like a college-level creative writing assignment overall. Weird that this was longlisted for the National Book Award. If this even barely resembles how young people feel about relationships and sexuality in the 2020s, I feel sorry for them, they're doomed.

Really loved the setup of this novel, its incredibly well-imagined setting and its characters (at least all the non-rich ones), and the early depictions of summer camp life. The writing is intentionally suspenseful, with chapters ending on cliffhangers and the next chapter jumping to a different timeline and character’s point of view, making the book compulsive to keep reading. Because of all the timelines and perspectives, the story also feels very deep, lived-in and cinematic.

But once the girl’s disappearance and the (overlong) backstory of Alice and Peter are established across Parts I and II, the story becomes more than anything a police procedural, spending a lot of time with Judyta as she puts together the pieces of both the “current” case, of a missing 13-year-old girl, and the now-cold case of her older brother’s disappearance over a decade earlier.

It is also a stinging critique of “old money” families and how terrible they are in so many ways. On this theme I think the author is a little too heavy-handed (the rich men are, every one of them, emotionless blocks of wood); I think it would be a bit more effective if they weren’t such caricatures.

But I very much enjoyed all the more subtle ways the author gives real, nuanced empowerment to the various women in the story more than the men: Almost all of the book’s shifting perspectives are from women characters, despite plenty of men being part of the story, and the way the author imbues them all with unique examples of strength and unapologetic self-reliance is applaudable.

Takeaway line: ”The Hewitts don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves. / It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.” (453)

It's rare that a book has me actually crying, but this book is just heartbreaking. Layer upon layer of family members quietly neglecting the simplest showings of care and recognition in each other, who are starved for the smallest gesture of empathy. It is lovingly written and worth reading. My heart breaks for Hannah most of all. What guts you is how true it feels to families you've known in life.

Really liked the writing and the suspense the author sets up throughout the first half, but really wish it didn't take the supernatural turn it took in the second half. Keeping the monster on the periphery of the action (like it was the night Alicia choked Jen in her sleep) would've kept the same tense, ominous tone but allowed me to believe the monster was purely metaphoric/imagined by Remy instead of the actual antagonist. Maybe I'm biased because I don't like supernatural/"monster" horror to begin with, but it felt unnecessary to turn the second half into a literal monster story when Remy and Alicia are set up to be plenty monstrous themselves.

Decent story collection as a whole. Full of cringe, awkward, desperate characters and situations because that is what Miranda July is all about. “Majesty,” “Something that Needs Nothing” and the closing “How to Tell Stories to Children” were the standouts for me.

Phenomenal book, I truly loved it. The story shifts and goes a bunch of different directions with a wide cast of characters, but everything (as I can recall) buttons up before the end and collects into a satisfying whole. Highly recommended work of literature.

So-so on this one. A really fun premise and some really yummy awfulness in the first half that kinda flattened out in the second as the author needed to figure out some kind of plot. The narrator's weird psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is delightful and a highlight of the book. Reva is perfectly drawn as a significant/insignificant side character for the narrator. The semi-comatose trip to Reva's family home was great. I wish some inner (or outer) development in the two major conflicts for the narrator - grieving her troubled relationship with her dead parents, and reconciling her terrible years-long relationship with Trevor - were a larger factor in explaining *why* she is able to come out of her Infermiterol bender in a better place, instead of the thinly-wrought blackout relationship with Ping Xi and then magically being okay selling her parent's house and going outside to watch dogs on a park bench. Dunno, seemed kinda convenient that the first 8 months or whatever saw zero character growth and the last stunt was perfectly successful. I really liked how it was set just-enough before September 11, 2001 that you wondered the whole book if that event would be included or not. Overall it was a pretty fun doomer/goblin-mode read.

Feels like this was written with the goal to be adapted into a movie. The premise is cool - a young woman's job is to infiltrate the minds of her company's field agents to help them escape desperate situations, using advanced tech so she can see floor plans and assess risk ratios while controlling their bodies. Something goes wrong on a mission that forces her to flee. She meets a guy who, it turns out, is trying to uncover a conspiracy and bring the woman's company down. All that is good: the plot is exciting, the writing is smooth, and the ideas are interesting.

The biggest surprise (and let-down, for me as an adult man) was the YA enemies-to-lovers romance trope, which is pretty thick throughout the book. Wasn't a dealbreaker and wasn't salacious, just kinda boring/tired. But I know people like that trope, so if you're into sci-fi/tech and romance, this might hit your sweet spot.

Side-note: the repeated use of the phrase Christ-that-was is an obvious attempt by the author to create a "calling card"/in-joke for superfans of the series that made me cringe every time I read it.

Trust isn't a typical novel; it's broken up into 4 mini-books all told from a different perspective and with a different voice. The first one is the longest and written like a (kinda old-fashioned, tedious) biography of a 1920s financial titan. The next three tell that same financial titan's story from different perspectives, filling in a lot of color and calling into question a lot of the claims of the first mini-book.

I'd say the novel starts getting interesting once the 3rd mini-book starts revealing what's really going on in the first two books, and the 4th book provides some satisfying answers and closure to the story as a whole.

With that, I can't say I fully enjoyed reading Trust, however I have thought plenty about the novel since I finished it, both immediately after and as a talking-point to reference for a long while since. It's a great example of how all stories, like each of these mini-books, can be molded to make the truth fit whatever narrative its writer wants to tell (or is capable of telling from their limited, or self-centered, perspective).

By the end of the book you understand a lot more about what kind of person Benjamin Rask/Andrew Bevel really was, and how the people in his life were much different than the original biography (book 1), and Andrew's follow-up autobiography (book 2), suggest.

Over-esteemed. Pretty good, yes. Great premise. Great first half-chapter. But quickly I found the alternating chapters/stories distracting, whole sections boring, and the reunion on the lake greatly unbelievable. Very interesting aspects (the Chief's secret life/job, anything that would explain Osceola's behavior, the arc of Kiwi's story that actually carries him forward) lose out to the overly long dredgeman's story (a throwaway for me), meaningless visits with Sawtooth, the tale of Mama Weeds that's a useless tangent, and other tedium. I should probably read the author's short stories, as her weaknesses for me – deviating story ideas, uneven pacing, character gaps – seem reserved for novel writing while her strengths – unique concepts, sudden shimmering language – seem perfect for shorter bursts.

Nowhere near as interesting as I expected it to be, considering it won the Pulitzer. But a few good scenes.

A travelogue of Turkey that accompanies an inner monologue of self-centered middle-class wife- and motherhood: not a killer of a book, but surely worth its short 225 pages.

This guy is the jam. Graphic stories of freaks and geeks and the crazy world they live in.

Good graphic story, well-drawn and pretty clever symbolism for love coming into and out of one's life.

Decently-written mystery novel that takes place around Coney Island and south Brooklyn. When I first moved to New York a coworker of mine gave me this book; took me two years to get to it and one day of traveling to read it front to back. Pretty anti-climactic ending, but maybe that's a positive for its atypicality.

Another I've had for a long time, and a lot of fun. Gregory is a little baby/kid locked in a cell in an insane asylum, who can't speak and is subjected to a barrage of characters, from snot-noses outside his window to nerve-wracked therapists to a lovable, eloquent rat named Herman.

This book was okay. It's already dated, in that he's writing about technology in 2004, and since then plenty of his worst fears have come true: everyone's walking around with computers in their hands 24/7. And we're not all that bad off for it. Still, it's a decent point the author makes about the physical disconnection that goes hand-in-hand with digital connection, and if you're looking for an armchair camping trip, the week the author spends camping and rafting is a pleasant experience.

p. 265: [Wheels] laughed. “We live in a world of chaos and accident. Politicians think they can tame that chaos. They are fools. Dreamers are the only wise ones. They know that they can take fragments here and there out of the chaos, and gild them with their fancy, until they become shining and beautiful. There is no other beauty. The world itself is hideous. You cannot do anything with it. But you can dream beautiful dreams. You are not a politician. Leave that to the fools. You are a poet. ... You will not go back to the factory. The ironic destinies have other uses for you. Your role will be played up in the sunlight. It is not the intention of the gods to starve you, or maim your body. They want to break your heart, and tear your soul to pieces. And so they will feed you with hope, with success, with power. It is useless for me to tell you not to believe in these things. You will. But from time to time, as the gods afflict you, you will remember what I have said, that beauty exists only in your own dreams. Now forget this, and go off and be happy!”

[Felix] started home. “The ironic destinies!—old Wheels has been reading Thomas Hardy.”

He turned suddenly and went back to the office. “Go off and be happy!—philosophic mush!”

He went in and drew his pay.

“At least I have two weeks more of a clean-shirt existence. That's that much.”

There was in his mind a bitter distaste for the pretended omniscience of old Wheels, and with this was mingled a curious dislike, felt for the first time, of the realistic omniscience of Franz [Vogelsang, the Socialist]. He did not want to go to Central Branch next Friday to share Franz's triumph. That garret Utopia had somehow lost its savour. It was more interesting to live in the real world in which one lost one's job and—yes, by God!—fought to get it back.

“Damn all these people who know everything!” he said.

—

This book does exactly what today's whole memoir-mess-trend doesn't, and for that I love it: it gets off its own ass. Yes, this is one of Floyd Dell's semi-autobiographical novels about growing up and figuring life out, which makes it sound pretty run-of-the-mill. But Dell wrote this in 1921 with a journalist's (read: not a self-congratulator's) sense of truthfulness and purpose.

To date I have not read anything that more completely serves as a guide for self-realization as this was for me. As the book's Felix Fay transitions from self to self to self, always thinking he has Arrived until he sees the next more-informed way of being, he slowly grows into a personal identity that does not merely subscribe, but steps into the reality of society.

The second of Saunders' short story collections. Excellent; even better than the first.

This guy is the jam. Tabloid-sized paperback of freaks and geeks and the insane world they live in.

A beautiful and in-depth imagining of a handful of random Middle Easterners who have each come to the desert for their own reasons and with their own burdens—one of whom just happening to be Jesus, who is cast as an almost psychotic outsider to both the group and the book. Dazzling. For this, John Updike called Crace “a writer of hallucinatory skill.”

Don't recommend at all, felt like a waste of time all the way through. Interconnected stories that don't amount to or culminate in anything. Is this apathetic output what readers like now? Can't figure why else this was recommended to me.

Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek quote, “If you're bored, then you're boring.” This book certainly is both.

A primer for entering a life of going-beyond through drugs and Eastern mysticism instead of American religion. Recommended with a grain of salt, as all spiritual books should be. I know at least one girl who found this majorly eye-opening.

Entertaining vignettes that discuss the the many varieties and approaches we all have to Love. Very underline-able and perceptive, while also very funny and casually conversational.

The first of Saunders' short story collections. Just great.