Play in Traffic, Run with Scissors, Set Yourself on Fire…

There are many, many, many other things you can do other than read this book.  I suggest all of them.  Yes, even the ones that may end in death and dismemberment.  I feel bad for shitting on this book, just after reviewing Station Eleven and all its “ars gratia artis” and to art is to human feel good messages.  But…  This book is not good.

I mean, I’m not the sole decider of what is and is not art.  I went to MoMA last year for my birthday and one of the exhibits is a weird, acid trip, straight from the 70s, video that plays on a loop.  It’s ridiculous and not-the-good-kind-of-weird and incredibly dated, which makes it almost seem like a joke exhibit.  What I’m trying to say is that that shit is in MoMA and nothing I ever did is, so what do I know about anything?  Maybe Pussy, King of Pirates is the Starry Night of the modern literary world.

I would love to tell you what this book is about.  But I’m pretty much as clueless after reading it as I was before.  The selected blurbs on the back say things like “transgressive” and “provocative” and “sophisticated” and “raygun”.  (I’m cheating on raygun, that was a name of the place that reviewed it.  I think raygun is possibly the most exciting thing in [well, on] the whole book, to be honest.)  And those are words that are also adjectives.  And this book has words, some of which are adjectives!  So…synergy!

I just peeled a sticker off of the back of the book and apparently, there was an aural component to the book that I missed out on.  I hope it was a recording of someone telling the reader what the book was about.  Because that’s really not information you are going to get by actually reading the book.

Okay, I still need to take up words with this review.  Umm…  According to someone on goodreads, who is on some HELLA good drugs and/or is missing key pieces of their brain cortex, this book is a modern retelling of Treasure Island.  I guess the last fifty pages or so MAY be slightly Treasure Island adjacent.  But the rest of the pages are filled with “dream logic”.  Listen, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no one, in the history of ever, unless Miss Cleo also had a dream interpretation service for 99 cents a minute, has ever cared about another person’s dreams.  (Actual REM dreams, not, like, hopes and aspirations, because those are actually important things to have and to share.)  Ever.  No one really cares that you had a reoccurring dream from ages 8 to 10 about a leprechaun that melted after swimming in an indoor pool.  I speak from experience, folks.  Dreams are not good conversation generators.