Naomi > Recent Status Updates

Had to return this to the library before I could finish it because I’m moving to another city tomorrow. I MUST buy a copy.

“‘I paint to interrogate the paradigms,’ the first line read, and Cricket had to look away.’” LMAO. This made me ugly laugh.

“And these theories are oddly nihilistic. They’re fueled by hatred and removal, and favored by a certain small but powerful cohort within the artist ranks. They’re not content to coexist with other forms and ideas. They must burn everything else to the ground. I understand art evolving, but why does one movement seek to negate all that came before it? Isn’t that an odd thing for art to want to do?”

“The talented have talent. The untalented have theories.”

This is actually my first time ever reading Eggers and it’s love at first sight. I will read all his books now.

It took me a while to get into this, but now I can’t put it down. Just like with Marlena.

“Our whole culture values the potential of life more than the existence of it, and women as vessels for that life more than as sentient beings.”

These stories are feeling very one-note for me, and I’m struggling to finish this collection.

“They all laugh” “They laugh” “They all laugh”—Lord! All the dialogue is utterly unfunny, yet we get told how supposedly funny every other line of it is, because these characters are just laughing their heads off.

I’m enjoying this somewhat, but it feels like chic lit to me. It’s definitely not what i thought it was.

So excited to be reading this again! I bought it in the early 00’s, and made the mistake of loaning it to someone who never returned it. Entire passages of it have never left my memory, but I’ve changed so much since then. It’s exciting to read it from a fresh perspective.

The first book I checked out at the library with my new library card in a new city, and it’s so compulsively readable. The most gripping thing I’ve read in ages.

I genuinely hate Anne Carson’s writing. I think it’s the most pretentious shit I’ve ever read in my life. I’m posting this here where people I know can’t see it, because I’ve had several writer friends share with me the past few weeks how much they love books of hers they just read. 😩

The story “Mother” is such purple prose it feels like satire, or the author trolling us, just pages and pages of adjectives for the contents of the narrator’s refrigerator and the seasons that take place outside her home. This after a half-assed dystopian story told through brief descriptions of nameless lovers. One of the shittiest books I’ve ever encountered.

“Inventory” is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read in my life.

Wow, a sex scene that is actually hot. I’m so tired of the secondhand embarrassment I get from most author’s attempts to write sex.

I’ve been having laugh out loud moments on every other page. This author’s humor matches mine.

This is really, really good.

I’m enjoying aspects of this novel, but the pacing is off. I’m about halfway through, and time is really flying. I just realized he has already been in college for three years because a sentence said so, even though it seems like he just started school. And it seems that way because literally nothing has happened. I’m still waiting for things to start off.

“He made no sound and took no notice of me—I knew of his completion only through the ripples against my mons.” LOL fuck this book. I quit. Again. A DNF x2.

Trying to reread this, and disliking it even more than the first time. “Whatever is in me that makes decisions is now full of an accretion of plaque, the chalky consequence of, paradoxically, so many hollow moments.” Fucking stupid sentence. I have no respect for people who think this is acceptable writing.

“Not imagination but memory is the agent but language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?”

“And more upsetting than this ugliness and nastiness there’s the paradox of chronology which arises when you try to record events of historical veracity; the problem of transcribing a document like this notebook is that it’s a memoir or a confession where you have not the power to invent episodes, people, places, “plot,” etc. but must set everything fine as it occurred.”

This book is an absolute joy to read. It reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, but without the isolation and loneliness. This is like if Eileen was in a girl gang of supportive misfits.

“Through the large window behind her was a view of the freeway in the distance. She stared out at its gray morass. Growing up on the East Coast, Jane had imagined California as mysterious, glamorous, sunbaked. She had not predicted this Los Angeles—antiseptic, asphalt, glitterless, and hard. Or how much of Hollywood felt like an enormous ad agency.”

“Film and television people had more generosity in their hearts than novelists, especially more than poets. Poets were like red pandas; from afar they seemed cute and gentle, but if they sensed a threat or competition, they would rip your hand off. Novelists were like bearded dragons. They had to be raised alone in terrariums, away from other bearded dragons, or they would eat one another.”

“Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.”

“Jane’s father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn’t want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That’s what white people didn’t understand.”

This book is fucking hilarious! I cannot stop laughing.

Well, there it is. I thought this book was reasonable, but it has descended into the far left propaganda it criticizes with some Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’m not sure if this is a setup for a redemption arc and return to sanity, or if the author truly feels this way.