Between the Bridge and OH GOD KILL ME PLEASE KILL ME NOW

CBR10Bingo: CannonBookClub

(Or should I say CBR10BINGOBINGOBINGO, because that’s a triple for me!)

AlabamaPink may be our warrior queen, but she must also have been a damn saint for all of the sins she overlooked in her review of this book. She was (obviously) a far better person than I, because I just couldn’t get past all of the awfulness to say anything constructive.

The good: 

I stopped caring after page 21 when he makes a very distasteful joke about suicide, so I skimmed through the rest pretty quickly, not really caring about how much I absorbed.

The bad:

The punctuation and sentence fragments drove me crazy, and the whole thing needed to be edited and rewritten into maybe a few short stories but definitely not a novel. It’s as if he dictated the whole thing in one coke-fueled session, and then some poor editorial assistant had three hours to transcribe it into something printable. 

The ugly:

Hoo boy, where do I even begin? Here’s a rich, straight, white man making endless jokes at the expense of women and gay men, making endless references to erections and “wet” panties and prostitutes, using needlessly racist stereotypes, all for nothing since none of the “jokes” are actually funny. If you’re going to be raw and offensive, at least be funny. Otherwise, you’re just punching down, pandering to the lowest common denominator.

The stupid:

The plot. I just can’t. And I don’t care.

The lazy:

Everything about this book. There are some faint glimmers of humanity and truth here, and there’s even a rather brief yet touching moment where one of the characters has his terminal cancer diagnosis confirmed, particularly poignant given the whole reason we’re doing this. But everything else — the terrible writing, the complete lack of editing, the sophomoric humor — is so lazy, so half-assed, that those few good moments have no impact whatsoever.

The consolation prize:

As bad as this book is, it’s not even the worst book I’ve read this year. Although there are far too many stupid, tasteless, degrading jokes about women, he managed to avoid having any of them rape paralyzed men, and he didn’t ramble on for 1100 pages, so he’s still one-up on Murakami. So congrats, I guess?