Trying to visit all 81 branches of the Chicago Public Library (6 down...75 to go...)
Location:Chicago
Like sledding down a hill on a piece of cardboard, hurtling towards a cliff, bailing too late and tumbling, limbs snapping like twigs as you become another piece of debris to careen over the edge. The chaos at the center of Stephen Florida is unrelenting, his drive to wrestle both pitifully insignificant and the only thing that has and will ever matter. To what degree any of what's happening is real or true is irrelevant to the kinetic energy that starts fully built on page one and refuses to decelerate until crashing headfirst into the acknowledgements.
The only comparison I can reach for are Johnny's chapters from House of Leaves, both painting images of isolated, angry men rapidly detaching themselves from reality until all that's left is their own paranoia. If you found Johnny's depraved ramblings hard to stomach I would recommend leaving Stephen Florida off your list (or at least heeding the content warnings because there is a lot of shit sprinkled between lines through these brief 289 pages). I have discovered that few books are more engaging to me than those concerning masculinity's proclivity towards antisocial self destruction. I'm not yet sure what to make of this information.
It's retroactively very impressive Ethan Coen's scripts are not solely preoccupied with shit and dicks.
Wasn't allowed to read these growing up so now doing my own belated book club. Blown away at how good this is right out of the gate. Has a great campy sentai-show setup but pulls no punches with how gruesome this intergalactic war actually is. All of the morph descriptions are straight body horror, and the violence only gets away with being this gory because of Halo rules (it's not blood, it's yellow goo).
Our first POV, Jake, is fully the likeable leader boy archetype, but the character voice is so strong it hardly matters. Particular highlight is dog brain, which is exactly what you'd expect but even more charming. Under the YA nonchalance is a surprisingly affecting tragedy, particularly Jake's distant relationship with his brother (I imagine we'll see even more devastating scenes from the other POVs whose family life seems even more complicated).
Great start to this series. I am sure it goes off the rails over the next 50 (!!) books, but I'm fully bought in right now.
A compulsive and brutally nihalistic romance novel. This is my first Sally Rooney and not at all what I expected, but it's very easy to see why she has become so highly regarded. She writes her characters with such tenderness and empathy, in spite of their confounding decisions and cycles of self alienation. At the same time they possess an acute, almost meticulous physical awareness that nevertheless only makes their pain more acute.
This book is predominantly about an inability to connect to others, of superficial interactions insufficiently standing in for a deeper connection the two protagonists crave. The conclusions they arrive at are frustrating, but so deeply articulated that they make a sort of sense. Nobody is capable of unpacking their adolescent (and ongoing) trauma because it requires a vulnerability that frankly terrifies them. So they dissociate, attempt to mirror each other, cling to the closest approximation of happiness they can find. It is unrelentingly bleak and I admire the willingness to refuse an easy resolution.
The degree to which this articulates an actual worldview of impossible codependency is murkier for me, with a lot of baggage of outdated psychology being inserted as an inherent cause of the isolation everyone feels (rather than, say, the class disparity that is crudely gestured at but far outside the novel's interests). I cannot begrudge it too much as it is well in line with characters who themselves have very little awareness of the reasons they are so unhappy, but I am skeptical about the ways that viewpoint inevitably gets expanded to be some sort of social truth.
Mostly I am surprised by the book's coldness. I devoured it in a few days and came away feeling profoundly empty. I do mean this as a compliment of sorts.
159 Books
See all