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.