Neven > Recent Status Updates

Bruuuutal

A beautiful book, full of empathy and poetry and truth. It’s also horrifying and sad—but told with such love for its subjects, it’s hard to believe it came from the piss and vinegar pen of Harry Crews.

This is about southern Georgia in the middle of the 20th century; I grew up in eastern Croatia towards the end of the century, but I recognize a lot of what’s in it. Hard times and places are hard.

A winding, shaggy-dog book about American hippies and archaeologists looking for a special something in Mexico in the style of Erich von Däniken of Chariots of The Gods fame. It’s a loose book full of lively characters that gather with befuddling speed, and it doesn’t quite flow or add up into something super cohesive. But Portis is always a good writer from graf to graf, so it’s a fun little read.

I loved Schweblin’s novel ‘Fever Dream’ and this book hit me just as hard—the writing captures everything I love about the work of Kafka, Diane Cook, and Stephen Crane. It’s primally upsetting, deceptively simple, uncomfortable in a way that feels like a neat trick, like a sleight of hand.

Down to the last chapter!

Go me! Go me!

Halfway!

See you all in six months, I guess.

This… is my book. I wrote it. I'm re-reading it now for the hundredth time to make some kind of final assessment of it for myself. Why don't you give it a shot, too!

A "big" book, covering several complex lives, inside and out. Yet all the angle shifts and unexpected plot jumps make the overall structure a bit frustrating, like opening up a random shoebox of keepsakes.

Two thirds in, and I'm freaking out about this book so bad. God damn it's good.

Ok fine, if I'm going to go on a Ballard tear, I might as well just read them all.

It took a while for my brain to start processing the stories here less individually, more as a single unit, and now that it's happened, I'm having a friggin blast.

Exactly half way though this, and I can't decide whether to drop it. I'm afraid I'm just not the target audience here.

I'm afraid I'm probably going to abandon this. I knew it wouldn't be as good as A Canticle for Leibowitz, but this is worse than that—it's overflowing with precisely my least favorite aspect of sci-if/fantasy writing: endless encyclopediac world-building via ponderous genealogy. The core story barely breaks through this at about 1/3 of the way in.

Everything I'd read about this collection inspired confidence—the comparisons to Bradbury, the mixed story styles, the opening lines—but it's currently walking the wrong side of the florid/fantastical track for me. I'll give it one more story and see if I get into it.

I'm not even a third into this book and I love it to death already.

So far I'm finding this as gratingly overresearched and wannabe-cool as Inherent Vice. Can the prose relax for just a goddamn second and try not to out-hip me so much.

Page 40 out of 750, and so far, about 4 novels' worth of plot has happened.

In actually enjoying this book so far, but I'm also fearing that I won't live long enough to read the whole enormous thing.

If the rest of the book is anything like the prologue, this is going to be fun.

I almost don't care where Nunn's stories will go, I just like reading his words.