brief book reviews

here are the 3 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek (Soft Skull): i like soft skull and i like short fiction and i like it when stories embed surreality into everyday stuff, or something, so from having read excerpts, and from knowing it's on soft skull, i was excited to read this one. i also like the cover. it's a small collection and i read it over the course of 3-4 'sessions'. some stories are about a half a page, some are maybe 5-6 pages. it's divided into sections that i didn't really take into consideration when reading, except for the Slovak section. however, many of the stories require knowing what the title of the story is to 'get' the story, i think, so maybe this applies to the sections as well. in the 'slovak sceneries', for example, most of the stories emphasize a sort of homage to the 'strangeness' of Eastern European countries in terms of a rich history merging with the modern day as a sort of aesthetic that has been taught to me through American culture and which i think i briefly experienced while visiting Hungary, for example. my personal anecdote is seeing that the airport shuttles in budapest used real leather straps instead of that mute synthetic grey material. so the stories in this section, i feel, focus on that, the old world/new world intersection, eg: a duo of falconers being asked to settle an old family dispute about a green ferrari (or some other fancy sports car). this also helps sort of solidify the kafkaesque feel of the rest of the stories, especially the one about the guy whose clothes get stolen. there's an emphasis on office life, purposelessness, shame/fear, anxiety, etc. Like kafka, nicolette is good at, in my opinion, presenting these strange situations/imagery/events without obvious 'morals' or symbolism, although some of the stories felt like they did have this (like the one about dancing), which surprised me on reading them, because of the rest of the stories seemingly lacking them, which i preferred. i might, also, just be too dumb to understand them, and maybe they are all, secretly (to me) like this. stylistically, she has a tendency to write similes that feel strange and evocative, and i get the sense that she keeps a notebook of interesting images/objects to include when fleshing out a scene, for example, a pink tennis ball, and orange stuck with cloves, and a third thing i forget now all lined up, each of which are/were unique and mysterious. i tasked myself with making up a simile like hers to demonstrate my thoughts on her similes in a twitter DM and i ended up writing "Taylor opened the window and watched three birds alight from a wire. She thought they seemed temporary, like a glass ball, or kindness." After proofreading my previous book review post, this thing that I wrote feels like it could have been from either a Joy Williams story or a Nicolette Polek story, which i think is good, thinking about it. overall i enjoyed this collection a lot and would like to read a novel or collection of longer stories. having this feeling (an interest in longer stories) also made me self-conscious about my own (recent) emphasis on making a collection of very short stories. i think i like the story "Imaginary Museums" the most.

 The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Volume 1 (Lazy Fascist): i've really enjoyed what i've read by scott mcclanahan. i think i started with crapalachia and then hill william and then maybe the sarah book. something like that. then i read stories v! which was pretty good but surprisingly short, as a collection. this collected works is scott's first two story collections, and it's short, which means those collections must have been each very very short. i liked these stories. they're very much in line with everything else i've read by him. aside from the topical similarities, like life in west virginia, interesting/strange characters, poverty, family, etc., there are themes of naiviety and trying to be a good person. i noticed a lot of stories end similarly with a breaking of the fourth wall which i imagine works well in a live reading setting, which is something i read about - scott being a great live reader - but in the collection as written it lost its impact and sort of felt like 'a thing' he did to just end stories, but was still regardless unique and 'bold,' in an unironic, earnest way, in spite of it being sort of artificial. not sure if i'm making sense. i enjoyed how some of the stories flowed together in order, requiring, more or less, than you read the book in order, which is interesting, to me, from a sequencing/'defining what a story is' perspective. this is something that scott does in later works like hill william, which i remember feeling was sort of like a story collection, but sort of like a novel. i feel intimidated by how 'famous' and respected scott mcclanahan is in indie lit and thus don't feel compelled to analyze/comment much on the stories other than that, in fear of looking like an idiot. this edition comes with an intro by blake butler (which seemed like a nonsequiter and i skipped) and an afterword by sam pink, which feels 'rare', and was enjoyable - i felt like he offered a good analysis of scott's style and approach. i do not remember the names of any of the stories. i think it's interesting that the names don't seem important for the stories. i think my favorite was the one about stealing someone's pizza. it made me laugh a few times.

The War on X-Mas by Alan Good (Death of Print/Malarkey Books): alan's a nice guy i know on the internet who tweets about politics a lot and runs a podcast where he interviews authors, including me, once, and he runs/works on various websites/book press things via Malarkey books and others. this book is basically a self-released book which i bought from alan directly. i've enjoyed alan's writing online, on e.g. the neutral spaces blog and back patio, but wasn't sure what this book would be like. it's a story collection, with the last 3 stories revolving around the same character(s), which felt strange, sort of like alan had considered writing an interlinked story collection about this guy but only finished a few stories, or had retrofitted some of the stories to use the same characters, or something. it made me think in terms of what a story collection is, and made me question myself as to why i thought it was strange. overall the stories are similar: very dark satire of contemporary american culture/politics. the satire is often very, very dark, most 'not humorous' and instead simply depressing/bleak/over the top, for example, one story is about an ad exec who orchestrates a terrorist bombing to fulfill a tourism ad campaign contract. but i think in a lot of ways the satire is 'effective' in laying out the issues it wants to explore, which includes classism, gentrification, american-branded country music-style conservatism, small town ignorance, and american gig-economy capitalism. aside from the last three stories, alan's protagonists are incredibly shitty, vulgar, mean, and horny. but many are also poor, working class, depressed, and trapped. plot-wise, i was surprised at the amount of sex, sex jokes, profanity, etc., and how frequently sex, or sexual (mis)adventures play an integral role in the plot of the story. since alan starts the book off with a table listing the number of rejections from magazines he got for each story, i was primed to think of the experience of submitting/reviewing/accepting/rejecting these stories, and felt, by the end, that there is some non-zero chance that alan could be blacklisted by various online magazines because of the unexpectedly extreme sex/violence/sexual violence, based on how the current online lit mag discourse is shaping up. i think the stories are fine, but it was something i thought about, because i didn't expect him to write these kinds of stories going in, and they're so thematically similar to each other, and at times very intense. writing-wise i think alan's voice is effective at what he's trying to do. i think he is prone to digression, and in most stories some sections/subplots felt underworked, with some plot points feeling rushed/arbitrary, while others felt extraneous. sometimes the digressions, which mostly revolve around cultural/political criticism, would be long enough to make me forget what he had digressed from, and i'd have to turn back the page to recenter the plot, in my head.

i'm currently reading:
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
On the Mountain by Thomas Bernhard
Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins
A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness by Kathy Fish, Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith