There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
Read MoreIf it is a story of the failures of capitalism, the collapse of the promise of an attainable American Dream for the generation reading it, then it is a clunky one. The book is called Pizza Girl, a job that delineates, without defining, the narrator. It is what pushes the plot forward, what serves as a call-and-response from the catalyst-character of Jenny Hauser, who eventually drops the, “Hey, Pizza Girl” detachment and perhaps sees her as we see her, as a someone who is both less and more than her occupation:
Read MoreThere was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to.
When something is slippery, when you can’t quite hold it in your mind exactly the way you believe you ought to be able, that is how something burrows in. Weirdness holds you askance; interpolated meanings wrap your mind like so much fallen foliage covering the dead earth. To understand something completely—or believe that you can—leaves nothing to puzzle over.
Read MoreIt doesn’t matter, you can know Le Morte D’arthur en français or Indiana Jones and Monty Python from their Comedy Central broadcast edits, you’ll end up at the same place in Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. I appreciate the lack of judgement. Honestly, you really don’t even need to know more than their titles: Last Crusade, Holy Grail, bing bang boom you’re good to go.
Speaking of titular, Tuesday is a lady, and the type of protagonist we all love: misanthropic but actually super thoughtful; clever in a way people usually can only be when they’re going over what they should have said on the way home.
Read MoreI finally solved a mystery before a mystery book ended! It only took knowing the exact reference—and having that exact reference mentioned by name—for me to get there.
Read MoreFor Drive Your Plow, I didn’t know the genre. I knew I was going to read it, so I didn’t look at the book jacket. I didn’t read someone else’s thoughts first. If you’re looking at reviews to decide if a piece of media is worth your time, you’re not going to be surprised in the same way. You cannot be, simply as a function of how time and/or brains work. You already know stuff, at the minimum the stuff I have told you. Which I don’t think is bad: your free time is limited, maybe, or you already have a lot of books and you can’t read everything! But I just want to point out that I think it is weird not to care if you know whether a book is about fantasy warriors or cowboys or Victorian-era ghosts, but do care to know that Rey’s lineage comes up in The Rise of Skywalker.
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