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Rated Made for Love 8/10
Weird, sad and funny. In the very near future, a woman leaves the domineering tech CEO she married and moves in with her widowed father and his life-sized doll. The humor is pretty dark, and you need a high tolerance for odd, particularly in a parallel b-plot that takes some getting used to. But I ended up really enjoying it, and it's a quick read. It mostly succeeds at being clever/dirty/creepy/touching in the way that [b:Super Sad True Love Story|7334201|Super Sad True Love Story|Gary Shteyngart|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320540909s/7334201.jpg|8996782] tries to but doesn't.
Rated Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 10/10
These books are so good. It's really all one big story and I don't think this one really stands alone, but it's excellent, a sharply observed look at the narrator (the one who left her hometown of Naples) and her friend Lila (the one who stayed) as they go through their 20s and 30s, navigating careers, family, romance and the political turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s. Beautifully illustrates enduring, freshly relevant truths like "violent fascism operates to the benefit of the capital-owning class" and "men love to hear themselves talk and expect women to listen." I am looking forward to the final installment; while #2 is still the best of the individual books, as I've said, it's really one lifelong story and all together it's a masterpiece.
Rated White Teeth 10/10
A sprawling, insightful story of immigrant and first-generation families in London. Lots of rich characters all with idiosyncratic perspectives, coming together and clashing across class and generational and racial and cultural lines. Well-put-together and lived-in and more relevant than ever given the turn towards xenophobia in Britain.
Rated Gone Girl 6/10
I very much understand what the big deal is about this book and also very very much understand why it bothers so many people. It is very compelling and clever and well-built; there is a twist about halfway through that I sort of saw ahead of time, and then some counter-twists that I did not expect. I can kind of recommend it if you like that sort of thing, but....<br/><br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS <br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>-<br/>...it hinges on two unpleasant archetypes of women. One, which is directly critiqued, is "Cool Girl," who is down for whatever and never asks for anything and defies "girliness." The other, which is not really critiqued, is "Jealous Vindictive Crazy Girl Who Lies to Punish People," which is presented waaaay too earnestly. There's a sourness about the whole book that makes it much less fun to read than it should be, even as you really want to find out how all the pieces fit together. <br/>
Rated The Idiot 8/10
One of the most spot-on depictions I've read of what it's like to be a freshman in college, where your personal life and life-of-the-mind are scaling up and getting tangled up in each other in the process. A Turkish-American girl goes to Harvard and falls in with an Eastern European crowd. Really sharp, manages to be breezy and thoughtful at the same time.
Rated Eileen 8/10
A brief, nasty and compelling story about a sad young woman living in a grim New England town, working at a boys’ juvenile prison and living with her severely alcoholic father. More fun than it sounds, but you’ll need a reasonably high threshold for misery - it’s richly detailed. Without spoilers, I’ll just say it manages to be about 90% foreshadowing but still works.
Rated All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers 8/10
clever, heartfelt essays about "troublesome" famous women like Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Lil' Kim and Princess Diana, shot through with personal details about the author's life. you'll need a tolerance for a confessional, heart-on-sleeve style but it's a quick read and rewarding.
Rated The Wallcreeper 6/10
I had a hard time getting my head around this book. It's sort of less than the sum of its parts, though many of its parts are quite good and I'm definitely glad I read it. There are some beautiful images and clever, devastating turns of phrase, but it's also kind of a bummer - the narrator is very frustrating and the story she tells ends up being wishy-washy in a way I think is intended but doesn't quite work. I compare it unfavorably to After Birth, which is also about a brief slice of the life of a woman who feels very isolated and lonely, but manages to cohere and sell it even though it has less "plot" than the Wallcreeper.
Finished reading Elementary Number Theory and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen
Rated The Age of Innocence 10/10
Wharton, man.<br/><br/>She just perfectly conveys all these little nuances of these elaborate, obsolete rules and conventions of society and the informal ways they're enforced and how crazy they end up making people.
Rated Dept. of Speculation 6/10
Very prose-poemy and MFAish, really pretty and compelling story of a marriage undergoing a crisis. Brief and affecting.
Rated The Girls 8/10
Creepy, lyrical, intense story of a woman who was caught up in a Manson-esque cult as a teenager. Really remarkable, especially for how well it conveys an adolescent-girl's-eye-view of the world, tragic and dreamy and emotionally rich and unsettled.
Rated The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks 6/10
Light and breezy yet encyclopedic. Kinda like getting cornered at the party by the foodie who wants to tell you all about the appetizers. You can skip around at your leisure rather than trying to read it straight through, but it's full of fun factoids.
Rated The Age of Miracles 8/10
really liked this - i ended up reading it all in a few sittings over about a day and a half. fascinating, creepy, sad. <br/><br/>not quite as cripplingly depressing as [b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165592008s/6334.jpg|1499998], but has that same kind of otherworldly, calm sadness. the sci-fi concept isn't over-analyzed; really it's a slice of life of the concept as seen through a teenage girl's experiences.<br/><br/>very affecting.
Rated Life After Life 8/10
Terrific. It's no spoiler to note that the protagonist dies right away; the book could be called "There Are A Lot Of Ways To Die In The 20th Century." It's like watching somebody carry out a choose-your-own-adventure, but it rarely gets frustrating and never seems cutesy; the characters are so real and well-drawn and the world is so lived-in that it stays compelling throughout. It is, I will note, so extremely British that I had to look up the Briticisms.
Rated One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large 10/10
<div>Reading this shortly after two different trips to Missoula (during one of which I purchased the book) almost certainly colors my immense fondness for it, but so what? It's great all the same. It's got a lot of Montana nature, but said nature is not made exotic. Maybe I am just similarly-concerned, but-not-THAT-concerned-about-bears, but sometimes it's nice to read about a place you're deeply familiar with that is written by someone who is also deeply familiar, but no one is here to romanticize it. For every beautiful expanse of sky and leaves and running rivers, there are also the days where your socks keep getting wet and you're in a fight with the wind.<br><br>The bits about Missoula are also good because, yes, we do actually have civilization here, even if it's on a smaller scale. Written from the point of view of a local who lives at the edge of a small city, this snapshot of a year and a mixture of other thoughts inspire a desire to slow down, to really look at where you are, to find a good story to tell later. I'm glad I finally read it.</div>
Rated Sorcerer to the Crown 8/10
A real delight. Zen Cho manages to a bunch of things really well - build a convincing, coherent world with clever magical rules and norms, a plot with a lot of surprises and a lot of threads that lock together, some really sharp analysis of how race/gender/class operate - and also makes it a fun, quick read. Imagine the Ministry of Magic as told by Edith Wharton - adventure and wordplay and a dark creepy underside.
Wants to read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: On Rock Music