holy cow by david duchovny (farrar, strauss, and giroux): a really stupid (derogatory), short novel by the guy from x-files. checked it out from the library partially because i liked the cover and partially because i was curious to see if it was any good. this is a brief, 'comedic' adventure story about a few farm animals trying to travel to different countries to escape being eaten (the cow wants to go to india, the pig to israel, the turkey to...turkey). full of bad farm puns, dated slang to make fun of teen girls (the cows say "amazeballs" at some point), and weird jewish stereotypes (although the most interesting scene is when the pig decides to get circumcised). feels comically "un-politically correct" in an old-fashioned, "hollywood humor" sort of way (e.g. unfunny, relies on tropes/stereotypes, generally mean-spirited, lazy). felt bothered by the internal logic inconsistencies (the cow doesn't know what tv is, calling tvs "box gods", but also makes frequent references to pop culture, including tv and movies) and by the core plot being a lazy, childlike premise (they don't eat cows in india so the cow wants to go to india). relies heavily on the post-modern affect of referencing the writing and editing of the novel for long passages and several barely-motivated decisions to move through the plot. not very good, but mercifully short and relatively snappy. thinking on it now, i'm unsure what the 'purpose' of a book like this is. i liked the ~4 drawings by natalya balnova a lot, though. wouldn't recommend.
woman world by aminder dhaliwal (drawn and quarterly): saw this on the staff recs shelf at the library and wanted to 'expand my horizons'. this is series of mostly disconnected 1-2 page comic strips set in a near future where there are no men. there is a slight subplot about a character pining after someone who is already in a relationship and a child being obsessed with a dvd copy of paul blart: mall cop. the humor felt blisteringly dated and bad (cf. paul blart jokes), and sometimes the attempt at a pun is so brutally stretched that the result is nearly nonsensical (e.g. the sperm bank is 'maxed out', meaning they are 'out of sperm from people named max'). also felt like the attempts at pro-trans messaging is weirdly crammed in/lipservicey and inconsistent with the world building/other aspects of the story (only female sexed babies are born, but also there are still trans women, but also the semen supply is limited from the reserves when men were still around). enjoyed making my wife read various pages to upset her with how bad it was. would not recommend.
house of hunger by uzodinma okehi (self-released): uzo manically messaged me about several things, including asking to trade books, and has since accused back patio press of being run by a racist cabal of nyc writers or something because he convinced himself some shitpost tweets were about him (many people have believed this to varying degrees with varying results); i feel like he enjoys being annoying and mischaracterizing what people say to him because of some sort of victim complex or to stoke engagement, which i don't respect. anyway, this is a very short narrative about a guy going to college in iowa city and feeling horny and alienated. the style is very heavy on comma-heavy list-like descriptions and flashes/snatches of action/conversation to propel the brief narrative, i think to intentionally evoke a sort of graphic novel/action movie flow, since the protagonist is an illustrator who wants to make an action movie. enjoyed the characters that are more fleshed out, like the movie auteur who gets addicted to mario 64, but most of the characters are zero dimensional, existing only to deliver one line of dialogue or entertain one single thought. the impression i got is that there is a lot of story in the author's head that didn't make it to the page, making the female characters confusingly interchangeable and more or less nonexistent, and some of the long impressionistic sketches of scenery/buildings unengaging/unclear. thought it was interesting that, while presumably autofiction, the most direct exploration of the racist manipulation of men by women in the text comes from a sort of monologue from a random south asian guy over the phone who we know nothing about, and not from the protagonist's own specific experience, which is stated as the fulcrum of the story despite only being alluded to a couple of times. enjoyed the culminating scene being a terrible blowjob. enjoyed the pointlessness of each chapter being titled "house of hunger". overall felt confusingly short and underdeveloped despite what i thought was an interesting/promising premise and setting. felt mixed on the style/presentation. felt impressed by the poor-quality printing, seemingly worse than print on demand books. slightly curious to read his other, longer book, but not that curious. would recommend if you get it for a good deal; seemed fine. would not recommend interacting with him on twitter.
diaries of an oxygen thief by anonymous (simon and schuster): bought this used because i had read a publisher's weekly article about how it was an 'indie hit,' which actually ascribed its success to 1) the author receiving 1,000 free copies of the book from his friend, 2) the author being a marketing executive able to quit his job to focus on selling the book in new york city for over a year, and 3) the alluring cover; it went on to sell 10s of thousands of copies and was rereleased by simon and schuster. this is a short, repetitive, annoying, protracted, frustrating novel about a rich loser guy who breaks women's hearts and then later has his heart broken, kind of, barely, not really, by a woman. lots of space is spent hyping up its own narrative and culminating event which was, ultimately, severely underwhelming, uninteresting, and confusingly written; the 'comeuppance' the book hinges on appears to be that the woman tells her friend that the protagonist has a small penis in a public setting, and they try to photograph him looking upset in a bar. overall a very poorly balanced, poorly edited, poorly executed story. severely would not recommend.
the lone ranger and tonto fist fight in heaven by sherman alexie:
a collection of interlinked short stories that sort of read like a novel in that
they mostly follow the same characters (though sometimes from different
perspectives) through different stages in life. focused on family,
native american identity, alcoholism, and life on the reservation vs. the big city.
really enjoyed it in general - the dialogue, the setting, the themes,
and characters - but laughed at some
of the heavy handed similes/metaphors used to evoke/emphasis native
americanness, e.g. things like (i'm making this up) "his smile felt like
a promise, an occupation, a treaty." enjoyed the moments where absurd
irreality is simply stated for interesting effect (e.g. (making this up) "i slept for 400 years"), not quite in a
dramatic metaphorical way, but a sort of wry, defeated way. enjoyed the
emphasis on basketball as a throughline. felt mixed emotions about how
some of the stories are written with "MFA"-style attempts at different
voices/affects, and disliked when the prose veered into the more
melodramatic framing. checked wikipedia and saw that the screenplay for the movie smoke signals,
which i like, was very, very, very loosely based on the characters in
this collection (and written by alexie). would recommend both the book and the movie.
molly by blake butler (archway editions): never read/enjoyed much by blake aside from his chicken essay in the pets anthology; i remember starting 300,000,000 and feeling disinterested in the writing style. this is a memoir about his first wife, the poet molly brodak (i have only read a few poems by her), committing suicide, and as such has been the topic of prolonged literary discourse. in terms of the actual content, i found it to read overall moderately self-aggrandizing and thoroughly, consistently critical of/angry toward molly in an off-putting way. felt like it reads like a slow mystery thriller about an evil, lying wife who sucks and you should hate. i think it's fine he wrote the book, and support him in writing it however he wants (enjoyed the inclusion of the suicide note and other details), but i was surprised by how aggressively anti-molly it reads almost from the beginning and how uncharitable it is toward her despite frequently proclaiming love and admiration for her (or her work ethic, mainly). this is expecially contrasted with how quick he is to only performatively slap himself of the wrist when it comes to examining his end of their relationship. for example, his own infidelity early on is addressed in a short passage or two and he emphasizes that he had already resolved to be better before he was found out, and he glibly claims to not have a gambling problem despite admitting to frequently screaming and breaking things in a blind rage whenever he loses a bet, etc. meanwhile he spends a long time slowly examining the minutiae of any given time molly possibly lied to him and what it says about how terrible of a person she was. it feels difficult to critique these aspects of the book without the criticism being viewed as a moral or personal judgement but i do feel like it affects the narrative and structure of the book in a negative way; considered that if this were a novel written entirely about made-up people, it would feel like a very obvious attempt at writing an unreliable narrator. my most common complaint about autoficition(/memoir) is a lack of introspective honesty despite in-text and/or metatextual claims otherwise, which i feel applies here as well. however, my real complaint is that the book is simply written in a style i don't really find engaging, and that it is very poorly edited, in terms of its often redundant and awkward syntax and also in terms of plain copy editing, e.g. the same exact needlessly complex multi-line simile is copy and pasted, verbatim, twice, in the span of a page and half (including in the 2nd edition). i relatedly found the dependence on showy but generally meaningless and clunky similes distracting, and found myself becoming overly critical of the writing the more i encountered them, e.g. getting mad that he describes a feeling as if he had a "black stone in [his] stomach" and dismissively asking myself "what does the color of the stone impart to this feeling? what if it was a blue stone?" i was also surprised by the number of awkwardly artless cliches and expressions (such as 'spill the beans'), primarily because of how overwrought the similes and vocabulary tend to be otherwise (blake rarely "says" anything but frequently "iterates" things, etc.; my father in law read most of the book while visiting and once frustratedly moaned "i get it, you got a degree in writing!"); i found the resulting style confusing, frustrating, and unstimulating. i also want to note that i have found people oppose my off-handed critiques of the writing/editing by saying they would consider it understandably difficult to write, let alone line edit, a long, personal narrative of loss like this, ie. "imagine being put in the position of giving editorial feedback on someone's description of finding their wife's corpse, of course you wouldn't suggest a lot of changes." i understand this feeling but also don't think it holds any merit if we're trying to make good, worthy books, which i otherwise assume blake would argue in favor of. ultimately i would classify the book as the kind that depends on its premise/idea more than its execution, which is a kind of book i don't like much, and so the book's draw for me simply becomes one of bleak voyeurism. wouldn't recommend.
my first book by honor levy (penguin randomhouse): i vaguely remember reading (and not being gripped by) her story on tyrant, and have mostly only been aware of her due to discourse about/reviews of this book and its emphasis on 'terminally online' internet culture; wanted to read the book to see what all the hubbub was about (assumed it would be better than people were saying). aside from the first and last stories, however, which i assume is intentionally sequenced to bookend with the aforementioned 'online' effect, the book felt relatively straightforward, grounded in mostly irl scenes or relatively older internet experiences (e.g. 'internet girl' discusses using the internet in like 2004), and only casually references memes and contemporary pop culture/internet stuff -- instagram is mentioned a couple times, a story talks about a lot of people being 'cancelled,' caitlyn jenner is mentioned a few times, there's a brief critical discussion of facetuning, etc. i disliked how the bulk of the stories read like mid 2010s personal essays (note: on 1storypod, honor mentions being very excited when she learned about 'creative nonfiction', so this makes sense), with nearly every story relying on quoting a definition of some term from a website or providing a shallow survey of a topic in a very plain, essayistic format that i do not care for; i angrily laughed out loud when reading some later story that actually reads like a near-future scifi short story for 3 pages before it launches into a multipage history of an aztec god to reaffirm the fragmented essay conceit. the other stories mostly revolve around a few recurring (i assume) autobiographical themes (e.g. problematic college boys who go to greece and are mean to/impregnate college girls) or exploring the aforementioned ideas related to using the internet but with a very straightforward criticality (which helps reinforce the feeling of a personal essay in almost every story) instead of exploring any social/moral/narrative ambiguity or subverting much of anything style- or narrative-wise; i found little of the internet stuff to be truly insightful or accomplish much, aside from the first story (a sort of twitter snapshot slang-forward fairytale) and the final story, "pillow girls", which i consider a great, well-executed piece of ambiguous and subversive social commentary (despite illogically taking place in a dystopian near future yet, also, somehow, the year 2016)). i also didn't like the reliance on frequent slam poetry-style free word association, like (making this up) "we broke up, we broke down, we broke everything we touched", which to me feels lazy and melodramatic. enjoyed the stories that seem to go off on a narrative tangent by the end and never resolve the main plot and would have enjoyed more of this (could be billed as a comment on something something attention span and the internet). felt confused by the sequencing and composition of the collection in general. felt vaguely convinced that this would have become a NYT bestseller if it had been edited/promoted as a collection of experimental-ish essays instead of stories. would recommend.
the exploding tree by kevin richard white (anxiety press): kevin is a curmodgeony short story writer from philly who used to host the no edit podcast, which i enjoyed (and was on 1-2 times). these stories seem to be deeply in the vein of carver/cheever/yates/other 'serious'/bleak mid-century writers; most of the stories revolve around alcoholism and domestic problems, often consisting almost entirely of stilted dialogue between two unhappy characters (usually a romantic couple). enjoyed some of the exotically dark/bleak ideas, such as the story about the amputee and the one about the alcoholic parents driving to the horse races, but some of the others kind of blur together. the dialogue-heavy presentation made it sometimes difficult to understand the context for a given scene and i found some of the phrasing hard to parse due to their reliance on (i assume) certain vocal inflection or emphasis that isn't easily included in a written story. enjoyed the articulation of some of the bleak observations/ideas that the characters entertain but didn't enjoy some of the prose itself, which leans toward a little dramatic and serious, which makes sense given the subject matter, but feels like it's trying to emulate a style more than innovate. enjoyed some brief passages for their sense of dark whimsy, which was unexpected and promising. noted that all of these stories have been published online before, which i don't like, but can't really articulate why. also disliked that the cover image seems ai-generated. would recommend.
the satanic verses by salman rushdie: listened to an interview with rushdie on a podcast and he said something about how the fatwah against him due to this book has unfairly given it an air of austerity and religious seriousness despite being whimsical and humorous, so i checked it out from the library. a very long, wordy, post-modern, whimsical novel about two indian men who survive a plane crash and one sort of becomes a devil and the other an angel, or something (i don't really know the full plot, having only read 1/5 of the book). definitely a 'humorous' book with an emphasis on post-modern narrative play, mixed up vocabulary/register, pop culture/political references/satire, and extensive wordplay. felt unable to really get into it due to how long and self-indulgent everything is, with every scene/dialogue spanning pages and pages. i did laugh out loud at one joke, but otherwise felt like it was trying too hard to be clever and witty. felt like it seems 'good' in its execution and is probably worth finishing, but i didn't have the stamina for it. would recommend.
septology by jon fosse: have read and enjoyed several books by fosse before and started a ~15 person book club online to read this book. i think maybe 6 people finished it very quickly, 6 people didn't read a single page, and 3 people gave up toward the end (i am one of the 3). enjoyed the book club twitter groupchat while it was active but felt disappointed in myself for not being a better host or being able to finish the book (my life had fallen apart, generally, at this time). generally enjoyed the book but found the (infamous, intentional) repetition to eventually wear me down. enjoyed the moments where he is able to capture/create a sense of anxiety about something going wrong without things going wrong (usually). enjoyed the descriptions of foods and various humorous scenes (the dog shitting, the guys talking about delirium tremens, the name of the cafe). didn't enjoy some of the reliance on various 'traumas' to create tension. enjoyed some of the religious rambling and discussions of art. enjoyed reading it at the beginning knowing that it uses a very limited vocabulary -- felt excited every time a good word (like 'shit' or 'piss') was used. felt like i was able to enjoy it despite not finishing it in the way you can enjoy a piece of ambient music. would recommend.
awful people by scott mitchell may (death of print): traded books with scott based on reading praise of this book by people whose opinion i value. this is a novel told mostly in interview format about some kind of government agency investigating some kind of supernatural incident involving a woman in the center of some kind of love triangle thing. very reminiscent of david foster wallace with its conspiracy/government agency plot, intentionally mixed registers, rambling dialogue, and wordplay (lots of instances of characters breaking apart/riffing on common expressions). read about half of it and got distracted, didn't finish. not very excited by dfw-styled novels like this, but i understand their appeal when writing them. seemed fine if that's what you're looking for.
the rainbow by yasunari kawabata: have enjoyed several novels by kawabata. this one wasn't translated until last year for some reason. overall enjoyed it, similar in many regards to his other novels: lots of scenes of aristocratic people quietly suffering family drama, walking through fancy gardens, and talking about flowers. enjoyed the moments of soap opera-level dramatic reveals mixed in with insanely dark and cutting observations/meditations on death. enjoyed the 'light touch' he brings to certain themes and narrative arcs, where the 'point' is clear but not overwrought. felt like the structure/focus was a little inconsistent, in that the book sort of changes 'main characters' 2/3rds of the way in. felt like there was some needless, distracting repetition that i assume is related to the novel having been serialized originally - would have enjoyed a snappier, better-edited version. not my favorite by him but has some good moments. enjoyed that the first line is about the eponymous rainbow.
