I guess it’s impossible not to mention Nabokov on this one. For an obvious reason in terms of a review, and a less obvious one in terms of something I won’t share. But if you read this one, you’ll see. It’s Nabokov, but specifically Pale Fire. By way of Paul Theroux. In this book, we have the main narrative written and narrated by a brilliant research doctor, Norton, at the end of his career. According to the primary material of the text, he is renowned for […]
Slow your roll, Nicholas Sparks
Lit fic as a category is pretty up its own ass, and many reviews for these books are also up their own asses, in a phlegmy, colonic matryoshka of sycophancy and intellectual pre-ejaculate. I don’t really care to participate in this shitfest, so instead, here’s a bulleted list of what worked and didn’t work about A Little Life. There be spoilers. This was fine * Yanagihara: “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better.” […]
No.
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. […]
This Might Be My Book of the Year
Yesterday I got home from work around 4:30. I was about 300-pages deep into A Little Life and wanted to keep going. Just before midnight, I closed the book. This is a 736 page novel and it was then, amidst the crumpled tissues and empty whiskey glass, that I realized I never even ate dinner. This book had captured me so completely that I sat on my couch for five and a half hours just to finish it. So if you want to know what kind […]