Fuck this book. And it started out so well! The writing is actually gorgeous. I can see why many, many people like this book. Really, Hanya Yanagihara knows how to use language. Unfortunately, the story she told was not worthy of it. The longer I read this book, the more I dreaded reading it, the worse my feelings got as I read, and the more I hated it for existing. Then I read a bunch of interviews by her and hated the book even more. […]
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson was last years National Book Award winner for fiction. I try, each year, to read a couple of award winners just to appease my hoity toity lit sensibilities and see where the snooty think I “should be reading”. Often these are some of the most rewarding reads of my year (Redeployment or Brown Girl Dreaming last year as examples), but not so this time. Fortune Smiles is a collection of short stories that aren’t related in any way, and I […]
Well, I can safely say this is the best book I’ve ever read about time-traveling historians and deadly diseases that kill a shit ton of people. And no, it’s not the only book I’ve read about that! I read Timeline about ten years ago, although I barely remember it. Anyway, I love Michael Crichton books, but Connie Willis’s writing is on a whole other level. Although they both write science fiction, Crichton was first and foremost a thriller writer, and judging by Doomsday Book, Willis is […]
I think this is one of those times where if you mistake the subject of a story for its purpose, you might come away disliking it. Also, your patience with highly unreliable and stylistically experimental narrators may have a lot do with it as well. Spoilers for the first third or so of the book to follow, because what I have to say can’t be said without spoiling stuff (for what it’s worth, I had this bit spoiled for me as well and it didn’t […]
