Usually around this time of the year, I write about five books that I loved. But this year, my reading was dominated by award jury duty, about which I'll have a little bit more to say in April. So instead here are three books, all new, I managed to squeeze in, only to be disappointed by.
The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld: this was a satire of the near-future, positing comically the end result of Republican Party rule after the 2008 crisis. So bands of homeless people in SUVs are performing migrant labor, the zillionaire Pepper Sisters and a televangelist control the media and the economy, whales are washing up on shores, and schools are still strangled by PC culture. And yet the whole thing is less than the sum of its parts. It's really hampered by an enigmatic character who ends up able to raise the dead—of course she is also the perfect person who leads a fairly undemocratic commune based on a disused housing development. A big 270-page meh.
Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Erwin. Another funny one with a media critique—an ad exec obsessed with George Orwell uses anti-SUV propaganda to sell SUVs, then after his marriage crumbles hauls off to distant Jura (where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four) to drink himself to death. Naturally, the locals aren't too fond of this American, except perhaps for one young woman... Anyway, though a cliche that didn't bother me as much as this: despite supposedly being obsessed with Orwell, the ad exec makes zero reference to Keep the Aspidistra Flying—which is Orwell's novel about a would-be author who really just has a talent for ad copy. It just struck me as patently impossible that the protagonist would never think about this book while waxing poetic about Orwell.
The Way We Weren't by Jill Talbot. A memoir of, supposedly, an adjunct who finds herself the member of the intellectual precariat, the book is actually mostly about how much she misses the dude who knocked her up and treated her like shit, without a scintilla of self-awareness or reconsideration. There are a few shocking moments of poverty/desperation porn: Talbot drinks a jug of wine a night, and while in rehab tells her young daughter that she is teaching composition in a special residential school and can't come home. The dude is no prize—when the daughter was an infant he'd refuse to change a diaper or hold her, explaining that he didn't want to get too attached to the girl in case he feels like leaving the author. This, for no particular stated reason, did not lead to either his instantly being thrown out, or a frying pan upside his head. He did get a whiny whiny book that basically promises she'll fuck him again the second he shows up at her door. There are thin lines between sympathy and pity and pity and contempt, and this book hopscotched right over to contempt for me.
The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld: this was a satire of the near-future, positing comically the end result of Republican Party rule after the 2008 crisis. So bands of homeless people in SUVs are performing migrant labor, the zillionaire Pepper Sisters and a televangelist control the media and the economy, whales are washing up on shores, and schools are still strangled by PC culture. And yet the whole thing is less than the sum of its parts. It's really hampered by an enigmatic character who ends up able to raise the dead—of course she is also the perfect person who leads a fairly undemocratic commune based on a disused housing development. A big 270-page meh.
Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Erwin. Another funny one with a media critique—an ad exec obsessed with George Orwell uses anti-SUV propaganda to sell SUVs, then after his marriage crumbles hauls off to distant Jura (where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four) to drink himself to death. Naturally, the locals aren't too fond of this American, except perhaps for one young woman... Anyway, though a cliche that didn't bother me as much as this: despite supposedly being obsessed with Orwell, the ad exec makes zero reference to Keep the Aspidistra Flying—which is Orwell's novel about a would-be author who really just has a talent for ad copy. It just struck me as patently impossible that the protagonist would never think about this book while waxing poetic about Orwell.
The Way We Weren't by Jill Talbot. A memoir of, supposedly, an adjunct who finds herself the member of the intellectual precariat, the book is actually mostly about how much she misses the dude who knocked her up and treated her like shit, without a scintilla of self-awareness or reconsideration. There are a few shocking moments of poverty/desperation porn: Talbot drinks a jug of wine a night, and while in rehab tells her young daughter that she is teaching composition in a special residential school and can't come home. The dude is no prize—when the daughter was an infant he'd refuse to change a diaper or hold her, explaining that he didn't want to get too attached to the girl in case he feels like leaving the author. This, for no particular stated reason, did not lead to either his instantly being thrown out, or a frying pan upside his head. He did get a whiny whiny book that basically promises she'll fuck him again the second he shows up at her door. There are thin lines between sympathy and pity and pity and contempt, and this book hopscotched right over to contempt for me.