SWA Recommended HS Summer Reading

I guess I can now write this review since I've settled down from doing a victory lap around my house as a result of completing this steaming pile of hot garbage. Maybe before I totally slam the book, I should say what I did like but to be honest there was very little to like.

Conrad told me that Jonathan Franzen has been quoted as saying he deliberately rips off influential late-century American authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth, but tries to make the prose less difficult, more easily consumed. Leaving aside for a moment the irony of that statement in light of his outrage over the Oprah thing, that is retarded.

Um, this is just BAAAAAAD. Bold-face, capital-letters BAD. Absolutely awful! What.....were.....they.....thinking????? Oh, I forgot, they weren't!When did the Pulitzer become the Puke-litzer? I'll never again trust that prize designation except with books from a long time ago. Don't be fooled by the first chapter, which is not too bad.

There are books that affect me and then there are books that kill me. This falls in the latter. I cried on the couch, I cried on the bus, I cried at stoplights, I cried at work.. I cried more over this book than I did on the actual September 11th.

Perhaps a new term needs to be used for short stories such as these. Each one is jam-packed with details that never bog down; each one is as dense and rich as a novel. The writing never falters; it is always smooth, flowing and self-assured.

This came highly recommended... and I hate that. It usually means that I'm either going to love it or it will be, eh... okay. Yep, it was okay. This is my problem with hype. I read and I read and I keep thinking, it will wow me soon, it will, it has to.

Read for the Second Time on March 18, 2012 Rating: 3 stars! (After 3 years, I still liked it!) Six hundred books... 3 years... in between. Me not being really a sci-fi fan. But, yes...I still liked this book! Resistance is useless! says the outer space alien who first apprehended Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect.

I have not been into Stephen King since I was 11 years old. I read The Shining in one day after swiping it from a friend's mom's bookcase (I did this a LOT as a kid. Hello, The Executioner's Song and The Book of Lists!).

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theory, offering hope to no one.

I read this in about a 4 hour span, from 12 am - 4 am. It freaked me out and I slept with the lights on. But on with the review. So I've read things about psychopaths previously. How their brains are actually wired differently and they are unable to feel empathy, etcetc.