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.
Contains spoilers
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.
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.
Contains spoilers
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.
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.
Contains spoilers
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.
Did not finish. It was okay, but I got up to chapter 7 (of 10) and realized that each successive story was barely different from every story that preceded it (“Stardew Valley” was the only outlier).
The book is more like a collection of unrelated articles, which makes sense since the author was a journalist for Kotaku at the time.
A very satisfying novel about coming of age and male-female friendship, that adds enough nerdy details about video game design and fandom to make the story interesting and believable. I especially liked how grounded it is in its settings of Boston and LA. Some really lovely scenes, and I thought Marx was a beautifully drawn character.
Not bad, but not his best. Some of these stories feel like (inferior, and wearier) variations of similar ideas already used in previous stories. I still feel like CivilWarLand and Pastoralia are his best overall collections – though “CommComm” remains, for me, the pinnacle “just read this one” story to see what a great Saunders story is: inventive and disorienting, wicked and sharply funny, but also deeply empathetic and ultimately profound.
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.
The system is good, this book is okay.
Part I “The Preparation” is your standard throw-away lead-in stuff about why anyone should track/journal and Ryder's origin story.
Part II “The System” is where all the good stuff is, about how to actually bullet journal.
Part III “The Practice” gets pretty life-coachy about goal setting, stoicism, wabi sabi, finding meaning, acknowledging mortality, etc.
Part IV “The Art” offers some tips to non-beginners about how to optimize things.
Overall I'd say if you just want to get a solid grasp on HOW to bullet journal, you don't need this book. Just read a blog post on how to make Tasks, Events, and Notes and use the Daily, Monthly, and Future Logs, and Index. I actually think Rachel Miller's book “Dot Journaling” does a better job explaining it than Ryder himself does here.
If instead you want to read a self-help book that tells you a bunch different ways how starting a bullet journal is the key to a better life, then you'll like this book.
Contains spoilers
Read this during the pandemic but wanted to re-read it after watching the movie, to see if I remembered it right.
For anyone else who's going from movie to book, the movie is more literal than the book is about what the "bad thing" is that's going on. I'm not sure which is better: being clear (in the movie) that it's a multifaceted psychological warfare attack, or being a little unsure if the characters are simply letting their imaginations run wild about what's happening "out there." (The author does rarely allude to bad things happening elsewhere, but one could argue that the narrator is unreliable.)
It's definitely far-fetched, so prepare for things to not be fully explainable. The only explicit things that cause "bad things" to happen to the family are the very loud noises, which the author admits is just American war planes flying (huh?), and the tick bite, which -- is the author telling us that an enemy state released enough poison ticks across Long Island that both Archie and Danny's wife would both be bit and have their teeth fall out?
Really the book is about how unprepared most first-world people are for any broad disruption to their ways of life, and how pathetic they are in the face of it. At this, the author is both effective and proven correct by the COVID years.
"Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that."
"Some people started to realize they'd had a naive faith in the system."
I appreciate that, despite the hacky title, this book is quite literally the opposite of a “get rich quick” scheme. Gives very specific practical advice about all the aspects of personal finance: picking good checking and savings accounts, good credit cards and the importance of paying them off every month, taking full advantage of your company's 401(k), setting up a personal Roth IRA and contributing a hundred or 2 to it every month so later in life its compounded interest will be huge, and how (and why) to diversify your investments and minimize fees, taxes and penalties on them. Definitely recommend to all 20-somethings.
Great primer on the basics of how to write in PHP. This author has released other books that go beyond what's covered in this book, so non-beginners could probably skip this one and go for those. For beginners, this book explains the concepts and applications of PHP in a way that is very clear and well-paced; I came away fully equipped to build basic PHP/MySQL-powered websites.
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.
The book that makes you happy to have gone to college.
It's been a number of years since this book was first published, and I still think it is excellent. Just as relevant now as ever (if not more so), and a very straightforward, sharply written, illuminating (and even very entertaining) first-person essay on trying to live like most Americans do: as unskilled laborers in the lower rungs of America's service industries. A decent amount of research footnotes the story to better inform readers. Most pleasing is that the author avoided writing this book as an anthem or a guilt-trip: she's never self-righteous about her assignment and she claims up front that she's not going “all the way” – in other words, she knows that temporarily acting like she has to live on minimum wage is a far cry from truly having to your whole life. Overall there's a lot to like here, and at about 200 pages, it's a quick, satisfying read.
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.