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.