Ricky
The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.
I have mixed feelings about this book, truly a love/hate relationship. It's literally taken me years to get through it because for some reason I keep trying to do the audiobook even though the performance is overwrought and off-putting. also the prose is just too much sometimes. I just want to be like girl dial it back. The emperor of tortured metaphors. But here and there there are parts of it that are effective in various ways. There are these little stretches that are compelling, but a lot of the book felt more annoying than anything. It's hard to read a book like this because there's some stuff of real value here, but mostly I was annoyed by the writing. Too precious and too much of what I think of as millennial historionicity.
It makes me think of how when I was young, I thought when I was an adult I would go to poetry readings all the time. Even at various points in my life I thought, oh I don't know maybe it will be something I do all the time. but the problem is there are these things I hate about poetry readings and you experience both of them in large quantity in this book. especially the audiobook. The first is the overwrought performance. there's always this overly dramatic way of performing poetry and it always feels generic. It feels like everybody is doing the same bit and it's alienating because it doesn't feel authentic. It feels histrionic. you're getting all of the sound and fury, but it seems to signify nothing real. and it's the same thing in the writing. It's like a creativity cult in which everyone has been baptized in the same conventions of expression and every human experience is tortured into that stereotyped, historionic mold.
Ultimately this book feels like the kind of book that a very self-serious author in a movie or TV show would do a reading of. Listening to the audiobook, I would sometimes chuckle imagining the movie that would include this performance in a bookstore. And all of the earnest applause that would follow.
The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.
I have mixed feelings about this book, truly a love/hate relationship. It's literally taken me years to get through it because for some reason I keep trying to do the audiobook even though the performance is overwrought and off-putting. also the prose is just too much sometimes. I just want to be like girl dial it back. The emperor of tortured metaphors. But here and there there are parts of it that are effective in various ways. There are these little stretches that are compelling, but a lot of the book felt more annoying than anything. It's hard to read a book like this because there's some stuff of real value here, but mostly I was annoyed by the writing. Too precious and too much of what I think of as millennial historionicity.
It makes me think of how when I was young, I thought when I was an adult I would go to poetry readings all the time. Even at various points in my life I thought, oh I don't know maybe it will be something I do all the time. but the problem is there are these things I hate about poetry readings and you experience both of them in large quantity in this book. especially the audiobook. The first is the overwrought performance. there's always this overly dramatic way of performing poetry and it always feels generic. It feels like everybody is doing the same bit and it's alienating because it doesn't feel authentic. It feels histrionic. you're getting all of the sound and fury, but it seems to signify nothing real. and it's the same thing in the writing. It's like a creativity cult in which everyone has been baptized in the same conventions of expression and every human experience is tortured into that stereotyped, historionic mold.
Ultimately this book feels like the kind of book that a very self-serious author in a movie or TV show would do a reading of. Listening to the audiobook, I would sometimes chuckle imagining the movie that would include this performance in a bookstore. And all of the earnest applause that would follow.