brief book reviews

after somehow reading a lot of books very quickly a few weeks ago, i have since been slowly reading and rereading things, juggling books, finishing very few. these are the books i've recently finished reading:

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh (penguin): i picked this up used based on being vaguely aware of her/this book from hearing people in indie lit talk about and praise it in spite of it being popular and on a big press; the cover also seemed good and distinct and the conceit seemed like it carried a lot of potential. i listened to her episode of selected prose and felt offput by her business-like approach to writing books and making money from it, then got this book to see what it was like and if this sense i had of her approach to writing was reflected in the book. overall i felt disappointed, but it was a quick read.  i was interested in thinking about it from the perspective of my limited understanding of what women think about other women, how their relationships work, etc., which is a large part of the book, and i've enjoyed asking my wife questions about relationships between women after asking her to read some of it, and speculating with her why it's popular. in terms of the writing, it struck me as very typical of bestsellers, with a lot of confusingly redundant passages, telegraphed and manufactured drama, emphasis on set dressing/time period, and a limited scope of 'jokes' that recur frequently. i also felt aware of what seemed like very artificial, or self-aware, methods of introducing 'literary' content to make the protagonist more complex, like the framing of various childhood traumas/sad things with a cheeky "i am trying to think of things that make me sad; nope, not making me sad" context, but which still accomplishes the same (needless?) thing. the jokes were limited to riffing on and/or shittalking a couple simple supporting characters or easily-critiqued cultural things (hipsters, people who live in new york, creepy professors) and a recurring "ugh aren't i a total bitch lol" narrative. toward the end i found myself skimming passages where nothing really happens, prolonged lists of items in apartments, and vague reflections on the character's personal development. i got the sense that what people like about the book are the open cynicism toward things like, e.g., shallow people and pretentious stuff like contemporary art/music or aspiring to like those people/things, the breadcrumbing melodrama of the looming 9/11 attack, and the 'action' in the last third where she makes a plan with other people involved, sort of like a heist movie or something. i noticed she places a lot of emphasis on reminding us that this is taking place in 2000/early 2001 in awkward and obvious ways all to serve the ending, which i thought was dumb and reminded me of extremely loud and incredibly close, with its emphasis on being obsessed with footage of jumping out of one of the twin towers on 9/11. a small thing that bothered me early on was the confusing timeline of her graduating college (in ~1996) and living in this particular rich person neighborhood ~2000, wherein she makes fun of people who use bluetooth headsets while walking toy poodles, but the first mass-produced bluetooth headset wasn't launched to consumers until ~2002. this is a minor thing, but it really emphasized to me this artificiality of the narrative and setting, a laziness in execution, some kind of attempt at making the things/people she shittalks more relatable for a modern audience (the book was released in 2018). i can't imagine wanting to write a book that centers 9/11 so much in ~2016-2018 but i'm happy she made a lot of money doing it. i did like the emphasis on wanting to be asleep as a central plot element - this felt relatable, especially when i suffer from more extreme periods of depression and anxiety. i also the scenes from her childhood spent sleeping in with her mom, and the recurring bit about her liking whoopi goldberg, which made me smile/laugh almost consistently. i also enjoyed thinking of different, alternative endings or twists that would have been more interesting to me. i have the sense that this book could be a popular movie - it felt written like a movie, with the simple dialogue and characters - but would face complaints of antisemitic and anti-asian sentiments from a wider audience.

bonding by maggie siebert (expat press): purchased this based on reading an excerpt, or a story that wound up in the book. i generally feel mixed about expat books but i enjoy seeing what they put out. the excerpt i read was apparently one of the more 'normal' stories, with the majority actually being gory horror stuff. i am not super familiar with horror writing, but it seems like the most fitting description for this book, in the sense that most of the stories consist of a relatively intriguing, literary fiction set up that then pivots to some kind of spooky/violent ending. other stories, though, fully start and end in the horror-space, with some more humor, like the one about people living in a mansion and being attacked by spooky things, and the one about the alumni association, although the humor in that one is more or less just the premise of it. some stories are also more sci-fi horror, like a relationship drama played out via advanced virtual reality, and some are more understated/mysterious, like the one about a guy running over himself or something via time loop (this is the excerpt i had read and thought was pretty good). most stories emphasize or center body horror, gore/violence stuff as a key plot element. in general i was usually pretty interested in the first half of a given story (the normal part) and pretty uninterested in the horror half. the former is usually compellingly written and interesting in terms of character and setting, to me, with good prose, while the latter i feel usually revolve around some kind of horror movie trope like psychosexual gore, murder, religious imagery, and spooky blob monster things, and the writing seems a bit more clunky with passive constructions and descriptions. i noticed that 3+ stories reference: the word 'guts' or 'gut', eyeballs being popped/ripped out/open, internal organs being ripped apart, and 'facial bones' being 'shattered'. since i don't really consume much horror media, i don't have much background in knowing whether these are, like, unique spins on horror tropes or just kind of normal for the genre, or normal for the seemingly popular indie lit horror stuff; as an outsider to this genre, the images seem familiar, like the 'kid making spooky drawings' thing - feeling like this is in a lot of movies, etc. i would probably really enjoy a collection of vaguely strange/subversive stories by siebert that don't all pivot to or focus on a horror sequence - i thought her setups were really engaging, the dialogue was natural, and the characters/setting were mostly interesting and believable in a unique and impressive way. i liked seeing certain things acting as a throughline, like sort of setting multiple stories in the same 'universe', connected by a child abduction (i may be wrong about thinking all three child abductions referenced in the book are the same child - i didn't go back to verify names/details). i liked that most of the protagonists were 'down-and-out' people with shitty jobs looking for purpose/happiness in unique or small ways. the humor-forwarded pieces seem sort of out of place relative to the more broody/serious stories, so i felt unsure 'how to read' some of the stories/scenes in the context of the collection. basically i just don't have much familiarity with the genre - this might be 'great' or something, relative to things these books strive for. i liked that the acknowledgements section was earnest, long, detailed, and generous, and didn't just list first names. this is also the second expat book i've read where "retch" is misspelled as "wretch", which is funny to me - seems like retching seems common in expat books, something something about the books involving lots of wretched people retching. looked at the blurbs for this book - feeling like BR Yaeger's blurb does a good job communicating what the book is actually like, and most of the other blurbs seem like people just saying stuff. feeling like i'd disagree with the john samuel brown blurb, in that i don't get the vibe that bonding is specifically about some absence of sexual desire. trying to think...maybe the first and last stories center a disinterest in sex in their specific arcs, but i wouldn't say it's a theme in the book. feeling interested in writing more about blurbs when i write reviews.

pee on water by rachel b. glaser (publishing genius): saw this recommended places, i think by giacomo specifically, and got it when i bought a bunch of pubgen books during a sale. short stories with a strong emphasis on things being 'hard to grasp' temporally or in terms of viewpoint, shifts in memory, some dream-like sequences and vague action. lots of poetic language and turns of phrases mixed up with for deadpan/'vulgar' things, e.g the title of the book referencing pee (there's a person on twitter who edits a mag who likes to tweet about men writing about pee too much, which this reminded me of - seems good for more women and nonbinary people to write about pee). focus on interpersonal/relationship dramas, femininity, family, being in love with hard-to-love people/situations. in many ways the emphasis on 'hazy' narratives with this focus on language and themes reminds me a lot of joy williams, but these are also generally more playful and some involve science fiction stuff, like the one about astronauts. a specific thing that reminds me of joy williams is the use of exclamation points in a sort of sad or naively-coded way when talking about people from the perspective of someone else, something like (making this up) "Charles was always looking for dogs, on their walks. Charles and his love of dogs! What fun!" i felt like in general i enjoyed reading each story in terms of wording/phrasing but few stories really stuck with me in terms of the content or dramatic arcs. some seemed repetitive, like the one about the teenagers having a baby seemed to say the same thing over and over again. for this reason it took me a very long time to read it - i never felt really compelled to pick it up. i skimmed the last two stories, which seemed long and redundantly written, kind of melodramatic - the titular story does that broad sweeping "Things swam in the ocean. They crawled on the sand. Wind blew clouds around" thing for like 6 pages straight. the book feels to me, in my head, like it's a certain kind of candy, and often i'm not in the mood for that kind of candy. thinking about skittles hard candies for some reason. do you remember those? this book reminds me of skittles hard candies. DM'd giacomo about skimming/skipping the last two stories and he confesses to probably not having finished it.

a partial list of music other writers have recommended to me

Troy James Weaver
troy DMd me through the back patio account at some point when i wasn't on twitter to ask for my phone number so he could ask me for music recommendations, and to just talk. we've only texted a few times - i'm really bad at texting (have ignored all texts from my family group chat for ~2 months). i recommended fiction by pope to him and he recommended deserve by weed to me. i like that we recommended each other single-word albums by single-word bands. the weed album is very good. i like the emphasis on good melodies and guitar noise. this album, like fiction by pope, feels like a very good post-shoegaze, riff-based album. troy and i also share am affinity for shoegaze and sparklehorse.

Benjamin DeVos

i interviewed ben in 2018 about his books and asked whether lord of the game was named after the death grips song, and he said that it was, and also that the bar is low was named after a song by pissed jeans. i listened to and enjoyed why love now by pissed jeans, but in particular a few songs, including "the bar is low", the video for which i would often send coworkers on my 'team' while shittalking other 'teams'.

Mike Andrelczyk

has recommended both extensive beat poet reading lists and phish playlists to me but i have, embarrassingly, never done anything with this information. i love you, mike.

 

Bud Smith

at some point in 2017 or early 2018 Bud Smith and I DMd on twitter briefly because, i think, he had tweeted about some music production documentaries/interviews, and i wanted to learn more. we mostly talked about music during this exchange. i told him i was holding my sleeping toddler and listening to turn on the bright lights by interpol. bud recommended like 4 artists or albums but i only really bothered checking out one, Light Information by Chad VanGaalen. i ended up listening to this album frequently, mostly during my morning/evening commute, while driving, and sometimes at home while cooking or doing other things. i really like it as an album. i think i described it, to bud, as something like if BAND had gotten into talking heads instead of OTHER BAND. i have since forgotten which bands i had thought of at the time. will come back to this. I don't think bud likes me. I can't remember the bands.

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

cavin has almost exclusively recommended music by mac miller to me. I've listened to a playlist he sent me of mac miller songs. i enjoyed how depressing they all seemed but i had a hard time paying attention to the lyrics, as is typically the case for me.

Graham Irvin

graham and i have been emailing for a while, and 2000s indie rock has been a central discussion point for us, i think starting with talking about wolf parade. graham has recommended a lot of music to me because of this. i have been most excited about rozwell kid, who have a song about putting identifying information/clothing into a Wendy's trash can. rozwell kid feels to me like if weezer was still good and paid the guy from the mountain goats for lyrics. i keep intending to listen to more rozwell kid but my headphones don't work with my phone right now, for some reason, so i have been unable to 'listen closely' like I'd prefer. update: spent 30min driving around dark county roads at night with windows down while listening to precious art by rozwell kid. it smelled like rain and i got emotional while thinking about graham. gunned it through a thickly wooded road with my brights on, laughed at how it seemed like I was driving through a fantasy world tunnel of trees. update 2: i think too shabby is the best rozwell kid album, and i recently purchased it on vinyl.

Crow Jonah Norlander

crow and i both like some of the same bands, like early modest mouse, and for this reason crow will occasionally ask me if i am familiar with some B-tier indie band from the 90s. i am familiar with many such bands but somehow never any of the specific bands that crow messages me about. for example, he told me he's been getting into you're living all over me by dinosaur jr., which is an album i owned on vinyl but for some reason never actually listened to. i listened to it via streaming the day he recommended it and enjoyed it but felt distracted. i remember liking how apathetically the guy sings. i told crow a minor story about how j mascis is relatively active in the massachusetts shoegaze community.

 

Sebastian Castillo

late addition to the list bc i was trying to remember recommendations after i published originally. sebastian and i have emailed a few times and we talked about music a little bit. he recommended this bad Lilys, whose first album happened to be on Slumberland records (1992) while I recommended Henry's Dress, whose only albums happened to be on Slumberland records (1993-94). i like that we independently recommended each other music from the same label and time period. when i listened to the Lilys album, i realized i had already heard it, or parts of it, from back when i was really into shoegaze, and it was nice to listen to again. we talked breifly about how in many ways it's better than MBV's isn't anything while doing similar things, sonically.

i think i'm forgetting many other people, hence the partiality of this list

brief book reviews

i remembered some more books i read a few months ago, and then recently for whatever reason tore through like 3 books in the past week:

the hole by hiroko yomada (new directions) - i bought her first book, the factory, on a whim in richmond virginia based on the cover (a photograph of a smoking trash bin in a pastel pink room) and ended up really enjoying it, reading it mostly straight through during a plane trip. the hole is different but still explores, i think, this sort of existential ennui about societal expectations and 'work'. while the factory was generally ambiguous, awkward, and evocative, the hole is a little more straoightforward and transparent, i think, in its 'moral', especially at the end, with a small sort of reveal. i felt intrigued by the ending but then thought about it later and i think i 'got' it. i have only read a few japanese authors so it probably sounds dumb for me to refer to this as an 'i-novel' but it's the vibe i get, similar to banana yoshimoto and haruki murakami, where the first-person protagonist conveys internal thoughts in a sort of rambling, casual, "this is who i am" fashion, conveying opinions and little anxieties throughout various scenes. early on i had a sort of 'worry' that it would be a kind of psychological horror book but it ended up not being like this. there are a few particular scenes, basically all the scenes with the brother-in-law, that i enjoyed immensely, and found a very unexpected and fun absurd humor in how she lets certain scenes 'escalate.' in particular, there's a prolonged scene with a lot of children running around playing, and it slowly amps up what the scene is like by including little details, slowly going from kids swimming to collecting bugs to throwing fireworks at each other to a bunch of kids cheering on a kid who's taking a shit in the middle of a field. little things like this, and how they were written, excited me and made me laugh. the overall vibe is strong and consistent, mysterious, confusing, frustrating, and interesting, and i like how certain characters that seem important are actually just set dressing and don't do anything or change, while the actually interesting characters are very interesting and complex in unexpected ways. it starts kind of slow, i feel - i didn't feel super enamored until maybe halfway through. then everything up until then felt worth it. i enjoyed thinking about the book after i read it.

potted meat by steven dunn (taurpalin sky): this had been recommended to me before but i never got around to reading it, i think because the description makes it sound exceptionally bleak and like misery porn, but the reality is that it isn't so bleak, and that it's a fantastic book, i think, and unique in its (continually unexpected) emphasis on tender moments and positive experiences. i think for every two vignettes about being beaten as a child or something similar, there's a vignette about a positive experience with a friend or family member. this is what stood out to me most and made it more endearing and interesting to me. structurally, it's a first-person autofiction 'novel' consisting of very short, 1-2 page vignettes in chronological order, from childhood to graduating high school. based on listening to a part of dunn's otherppl interview, it seems like more elements were invented or fictionalized than i would have expected. i'm generally curious about how people approach writing this kind of novel for these reasons. i think toward the end the vignettes got a little unfocused, or it seemed like some were kind of like b-sides that were added back in toward the end to try and 'tie up loose ends' but i didn't think they were super necessary and it weighed down the pacing a little bit. i liked some of the stylistic typos and spelling, noticed a lot of missing apostrophes, for example, which i think were 'effective'. while trying to convey my excitement for this book to giacomo by sending him pictures of some of the stories, he responded saying he didn't quite get it, maybe because of it being very american, and i felt compelled to describe the perspective as something like a Black scott mcclanahan book, but i don't think that's a very accurate or useful description, because the only real similarity is the setting - rural, poverty-stricken west virginia in the 90s. i'm curious about dunn's next novel, which seems like a sort of fragmented, 'experimental' hybrid novel about the military - feeling like it won't be as good as this one.

i don't know i said by matthew savoca (publishing genius): bought this and some other pubgen books during some kind of sale a long time ago - this one bc i remember seeing it listed in some old article or list about the best alt lit books, and felt curious. ended up feeling very disappointed - very often, after reading a chapter, felt compelled to put it down and do something else. feeling like people who include this in some kind of alt lit canon are doing a disservice to alt lit. coming off more aggressive than i mean to - it's a fine but mostly boring book. it's about two unemployed people (one is 'officially' depressed) doing nothing, going on a boring road trip, trying to think of what to do, and almost breaking up a few times. it's written very plainly with a lot of emphasis on little details, scenery, and what they did/ate/drank, in a hemingwayesque way, and then later the protagonist is reading a hemingway story collection, and then later thinks about how much he loves hemingway's stories. i think this makes what the author is 'trying to do' obvious and makes the book disappointing. hemingway's minimalism is interesting, to me at least, in the context of the actual events and relationship drama (the bull fights, the traveling, the exotic food/experiences, the love triangle), but this book has none of that, or at least it's not centered, so there's no, like, 'vicariously traveling' aspect of this book, just bored 20 somethings eating nondescript vegetarian food and complaining. unlike other 'good' alt lit books, there's no kmart realism or real details about the world/time period, and the narrator keeps vaguely pontificating about vaguely political ideas. it all feels very overly serious in spite of its baseline uninteresting scope and style. also, neither of the characters are particularly likeable, and i found myself secretly getting really hopeful/excited whenever it seemed like they would be breaking up so that the main character could finally seemingly feel happy and/or something interesting would happen. there were a few lines that i remember thinking were funny of clever, but they're pretty rare. also felt disappointed by the ending.

briefer reviews of books i read a few months ago:

pets: an anthology edited by jordan castro (tyrant): most of the pieces are pretty short and many were very similar - i feel like 2-3+ were about a woman with a dying cat. i think i liked yuka's the most, then tao's, then prescious's, then blake's, then sam pink's, and the rest are kind of vague to me now. i remember feeling a little surprised or let down at how short most of them are. felt like the selection of authors/styles was kind of random or unpredictable. seems like a fine book, good for what anthologies are supposed to be. jordan's intro was good, too

chilly scenes of winter by ann beattie: was surprised by this in a lot of ways. enjoyed seeing how similar it is in scope and tone to a lot of alt lit books, makes sense that it is often cited/influential. i enjoyed a lot of the little scenes and the internal monologue/anxiety of the protagonist and the associated dialogue of feeling fucked and unsure what to do, ever. felt 'impressed' by the 'boldness' of beattie to write a whole novel from the perspective of a guy, and to very accurately, i think, explore differences in thought/communication between men and women, based on how we are socialized, maybe, from my experience.

$50,000 by andrew weatherhead (publishing genius): bought bc of the hype and having read some of his poems online before. felt like it was pretty good. i enjoyed not using a bookmark and sort of randomly rereading/skipping/then reading again various lines over a few days. felt like some of the lines were a little overwrought/'philosophical', like things you'd read in a reddit comment or something. laughing about how it's triple-spaced, and how its triple-spacing was a key talking/publicity point during the promotional cycle, etc., is what encouraged giacomo and i to write two million shirts - i think our (deleted) first line was a riff about triple spacing.

horror vacui by shy watson (house of vlad): hadn't read anything by shy before aside from some random stuff online. giacomo highly recommended her first book but i haven't read it. in this she consistently does the same couple of 'tricks', like juxtaposing certain types of ideas very brusquely - like a small trivial thing to a very big existential thing - but i don't think i really like the effect it has, so i generally felt underwhelmed by the book, because that's sort of a cornerstone of most of the poems. also lots of discussion of astrology shit and things she tweets about normally so it felt like it wasn't a particularly exciting/unique experience to read. hard to really articulate this right. i guess it's just 'not for me', which is fine. i feel like the book has value regardless but i felt disappointed.

fun camp by gabe durham (publishing genius): looking up now three books on pubgen to confirm how to spell the author's name, i've noticed that the book descriptions on pubgen's website don't actually mention the author at all, and i had to look at the cover image to discern the author - seems like a bad design/usability issue, bad for author SEO, etc. bought this randomly during the sale. enjoyed the idea of it and several of the pieces but overall it felt overly long and repetitive. mostly dave eggers/mvcsweeneys-style character-voice/absurd humor driven vignettes about summer camp. seems like durham uses the same joke structure over and over - would have been a good chapbook, maybe, or the book could have been expanded in different ways than repeating the same kind of set up and structure throughout. some scenes include a reflexive, self-conscious self-reference to 'comment on' or diffuse 'problematic' ideas in a way that is intended to make the author look good in spite of the book still seeming 'problematic' for other reasons in another 10 years, or something. an interesting book that got kind of boring, basically. but i enjoyed thinking about summer camps because of it. felt surprised by how much press this book seemed to garner back in 2013.