Jeff
It feels odd to say I enjoyed this book, but I did. Nothing more fun than reading about parental abuse and complex PTSD! Foo starts the thing out with a warning to others who might have complex PTSD, that the first four chapters are mostly a memoir about the abuse she suffered from her parents, and I wonder now what it would have been like to skip those before reading the rest.
The rest weaves her process of recognizing her traumas and various ways she tries to get some healing, and those are a nice mix of memoir and explanations (mostly explanations of how *complex* PTSD comes to be, and how its treatments can differ from other mental health treatments). The first few chapters are difficult to get through, but she layers them in such a way that it was doable. But it's raw, for sure.
I liked the bits and pieces about San Jose, and Oakland.
The best part of the book, for me, is her analysis of how racism (and in particular the model minority bullshit) helps to cause, say, a kid to make it all the way through high school while being verbally and physically abused, with nobody, adult or kid, noticing. Or if noticing, looking the other way.
Ran across this one on recommendation from a cartoonist that I like, and I'm really glad I did. A combination memoir, historiography and a fairly deep-dive into suicidality, I learned a lot. I like Patterson's writing style, and the mix of storytelling, history-examining and personal insights worked for me.
Like many folks, I came to know Hersey from The Nap Ministry (for me, on Instagam). This is definitely a manifesto, though for me it also reads like a sermon, and a polemic (against white supremecy and unbridled capitalism). In some ways, I "shouldn't" like this book--there's a lot of talk about praying and god (not my thing); it's got a structure like a sermon--it meanders and doesn't give the reader a lot of steady handholds. It's repetative. And yet all of these things that would usually be a negative for me work really well for what she's trying to accomplish: A strong, long-term, complex shift in thinking about our world, through the lens of what rest means for human beings. I
I loved it. Highly recommend.
I really enjoyed Polley's movie Women Talking, and when I saw she had a fairly recent memoir, I thought I'd check it out. Enjoyed it more than I thought I would. A lot of it is about parenthood, which is sometimes not so interesting to me, but Polley makes it interesting, and I just like how she writes.
Read this as a follow-up to Otsuka's The Swimmers, which I loved. A buddy gave it to me (thanks Davinder!) and I'm really grateful. It's a poetic meditation in prose form on female Japanese immigrants to various places in California, tracking their lives loosely up to the WWII internment camps (which I didn't learn about until I got to college). It's emotional and beautiful and horrifying all in turn, and I'm not giving it away, not paying it forward, because I want to read it again someday.
Loved this one, and will read it again someday. Definitely a book for book-lovers (I started noting the books/authors she mentions and had to give up, because she talks about *so many*). Reminded me a bit of reading early Winterson--I was lost a good deal of the time in the prose, but lost in a good way.
I am a bit angry that this young person has only written two books, and they are better than most books. Whew.
Felker-Martin does pulp-y action and violence really well. She also does deeply moving, intense feelings about sex (and gender!) well. The shifts between the two things tonally weren't enjoyable for me--though perhaps that was part of the point? It reminded me in a way of Lovecraft Country, mixing real-world horror and pulp-y horror, but I was left wanting a bit more cohesion between the two.
Still, this was a fun and brutal read, alternatively, and I look forward to reading her next book.
I finished this last night and I can't stop thinking about it. It's an odd duck, in some ways--the first third is lyrical and lovely and feels (dare I say) like moving through warm water. The rest of the book is more like going from the hot pool to the cold pool. Whew. Otsuka continues to delight and amaze me.
I loved this book–it reminded me a bit of when I first saw Shortbus: No one person reminded me of me, but I felt like I had found some of my people. Darryl (the person) is by turns endearing, exhausting, a sweet person, kind of an asshole, wonderful, pitiful. Ess really gives voice to the whole “people are complex” thing through Darryl and his friends/lovers.
Ess reminds me here from time to time of Vonnegut in the way that she gives us so much with so few words. There's a bit of philosophy, a bit of the-personal-is-political, some love and critique of changes (and recognitions) of sexuality and gender, but it never gets heavy-handed about any of that: Mostly it's just a book about a guy going through some things.
Can't say enough about this book–I loved it. Almost sparse prose, but it pulled me in quickly, and I haven't read such an un-put-downable book in quite a while. It's amazing how many different kinds of connections (or intimacies) she covers in so few pages, with so few characters. This one is going on my to-be-read-again pile and I'll definitely be picking up her other books.
I picked this up because of the title alone, honestly. It's just a great title. I had no idea about the Hamlet connection until I was about a third of the way in, and then I started picking up on more of that part of it, but I think the book stands on its own, though maybe it's more fun for folks who love Hamlet.
At first I thought I might not be able to get used to the style–it's always a dicey proposition to write in the voice of an 11-year old, but I think Haig pulls it off. It can be an irritating style, but for me that only reminded me that we were all sometimes-irritating kids. The style grew on me, in particular because Haig kind of nailed what it was like to think about the world as a kid–some oversimplification, but some amazing imaginings as well. And he also manages to turn this into something of a thriller, which I suppose Hamlet is on some level. All-around enjoyable, quick read.
Apparently this is also a YA novel? Ok. I think that definition is getting so broad so as to be kind of not particularly useful...
Normally I don't write reviews of books I didn't love, but this one is so very popular, I feel like it can take my lowly critiques with barely a glance...I love that Yuknavitch swung for the bleachers with this, playing with the format, making some of the prose almost purposefully heavy-handed, jumping around in the narration, but in the end it mostly didn't work for me.
Some of the language is wonderful, and that alone is worth the read–but some of it struck me as almost hard-boiled-stylized, which didn't work (for me) because of some of the deep themes being explored (“she felt as empty as bullet shell casings”? really?). I wanted more exploration of those themes without the stylized language.
There's a lot of sexual violence in this book, most of it relatively pointless, though I'm confident that was purposefully done–the consequences of it felt like an afterthought though, and that wasn't as interesting a read for me. Yep, lots of horrible sexual violence is done (mostly) to women by (mostly) men in the world, and there's probably value in not looking away from that. But here it's a plot point, and not explored in any meaningful way. (Again, that may have been her point, as meaningless sexual violence is a fact of life.)
I also didn't feel the different narrators had different voices. Maybe this was also on purpose (a character says early on, “I don't trust narrators”), but it didn't work for me.
One person's “deconstruction” is another person's “just jumbled together” I suppose.
The language in this is playful and fun, the themes sometimes intense and serious. It holds together for me, but just barely–I'd like a bit more structure, even in more experimental stuff like this. If you like to read another person's dream and have it entertain, humor and be interesting to you, this is the book for you.
Picked this up after having watched a young Michael Caine thoroughly amuse me in a movie based on a book by this author (The Ipcress File), and boy was I not disappointed. His writing is so fun. It's an interesting spy story, with lots of laugh-out-loud one-liners, and has a central character that is an easy-to-enjoy persnickety aging spy. A light read with juuuuuust a little bit of literary-ish insight into life. I'm definitely going to read another in this series.
This one is hit-or-miss for me, but whew, when it hits, it really hits.
I think Didion gives ungenerous takes on some things–feminism, for instance–but I still enjoy reading her biting take on things even when I disagree with her. Her style works better for me when she's talking about (or incorporating) personal stuff. If you live/grew up in California in the 70's, there are some nice time capsules here (I can't believe I loved an essay about CalTrans?).
There's also a really fun, if also really unfair, critique of author Doris Lessing here, which is worth the price of the book for me.
