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Alvin’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Alvin’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Alvin Orloff’s Followers (142)
1,714 books
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346 friends
1,602 books
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1,478 friends
4,966 books
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56 friends
782 books
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1,497 friends
305 books
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53 friends
159 books
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4,168 friends
6,468 books
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281 friends
3,990 books
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93 friends
More friends…
Alvin Orloff
Goodreads Author
Born
in Los Angeles, The United States
Website
Twitter
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Member Since
April 2007
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Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person
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published
2004
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3 editions
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Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
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published
2019
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2 editions
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The Unsinkable Bambi Lake
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published
1996
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4 editions
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Vulgarian Rhapsody
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I Married An Earthling: A Novel
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published
2000
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2 editions
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Gutterboys
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published
2004
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2 editions
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Why Aren't You Smiling?
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published
2011
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6 editions
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![[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [...](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/nophoto/book/111x148._SX50_.png)
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[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [By: Orloff, Alvin] [October, 2011]
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I was not prepared for the weirdness!
The English eccentric, Quentin Crisp, once said that, "Only a lie is boring," and I believe that truer words were ne'er spoke. I wanted my memoir, "Disasterama!" to be exciting, so I told the truth about my louche and feckless youth as a club kid, hustler, and somewhat delusional cultural activist. When, after 56 rejections, it was accepted by Three Rooms Press for publication in the fall of '19,
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Alvin’s Recent Updates
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| Lin weaves together a charmingly candid personal love story with a pithy, erudite history of gay marriage. Even if you're not a fan of other people's love stories or gay marriage (and I'm sort of not!) the book is unputdownable because Lin is an amaz ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| This treasure trove of bite-sized reviews of bizarre products, movies, and (alas) poetry is an unending delight. It's full of sly wit, pop culture erudition, and cogent critical analysis. I read selections as a mental palate cleanser between every bo ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book really liked it
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| KHG is an engaging read for fans of Golden Age cinema, full of movie star anecdotes and studio gossip with a heaping helping of stylized wit and amusingly arched opinions. And there are some surprise guest appearances by a few literary lights of the ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book liked it
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| This random collection of tame gossip and showbiz anecdotes becomes mildly diverting if one reads it with the inimitable voice of Thurston Howell III (late of Gilligan's Island) in the mind's ear. ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| What fun! Having spent my youth in alterna-queer San Francisco during the early 1990s, I found Tradowsky's spot-on and meticulous description of that era almost miraculous. He must have been taking notes! It's not just that he name checks so many clu ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book liked it
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| Lucid and undemanding infotainment. The bit about colas weirdly fails to mention that they're nutritional nightmares. And one can't help but wonder why milk, or soy and nut milks, didn't get a chapter. ...more | |
“America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.”
Anaïs Nin |
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| This is a story to make you laugh, cry, quite eating pork, and sympathize with the plight of the odd and downtrodden. | |
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Alvin
rated a book it was ok
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| This reads like a bunch of material that wasn't quite good enough to make it into Wishful Drinking (which I loved!) and it's hellaciously repetitious to boot. There's a bit of fun celebrity gossip concerning her family, Liz Taylor, and Michael Jackso ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| As many disappointed reviewers have pointed out, this book is tightly focused on neither the sex cult nor the crime mentioned in the subtitle. If you're willing to accept this as a diverting romp through the insanity of mid-19th century America, thou ...more | |
“Reagan's going to mess everything up, cutting taxes for the wealthy and getting rid of the safety net and all that. The rich and the poor won't be able to mix socially. The rich will be afraid of getting ripped off or asked for money and the poor won't be able to afford to hang out in the same places anyway. Society's going to be divided by class and instead of expressing themselves, people are going to spend all their time advertising their status. It'll be shallow, like the Eisenhower era. Parties will suck.”
― Gutterboys
― Gutterboys
“Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul--bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror--is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.”
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
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“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
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Hi Alvin, thanks for the add. I had no idea you wrote "Why Aren't You Smiling?," it's already on my TBR list!
Wow, great to meet you!
Alvin