Amy K > Recent Status Updates

I shouldn't have started this right after finishing "If Beale Street Could Talk." To say Baldwin is a better writer is a huge understatement. His characters are also so much more nuanced.

I know this is a classic but it's ... not good.

The descriptions and corresponding history of Japan are really interesting, but he loses me when he tries to sound deep and attempts to connect everything to his childhood decades ago in the U.S. The writing in these parts is overwrought and the connections are stretched really thin. He ends up saying nothing much at all.

I was worried this book might be a bit dry, but I'm really enjoying it. Highly recommend.

This book has some real bangers:

"Suppose that even though we follow the above advice, someone succeeds in annoying us. In such cases, we should remind ourselves that 'this mortal life endures but a moment,' meaning that we will soon be dead."

"Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny...In his famous dictionary, Samuel Johnson includes a term for these individuals: a seeksorrow"

This is actually much, much better than I thought it would be and covers way more ground than I expected.

This should be shorter. It would help with the pacing. Let's get to it, already!

To make a short story long...

Folks, this is bad and I doubt I'll make it much further in this book. This extremely average white woman thinks she is very special and boy are we gonna hear about it. Fire her editor immediately because there is no way this book needed to be 344 pages. Most of what I read so far should have been cut in the first draft.

Life is too short. I can't spend any more time with this mediocre white man.

I've read Klosterman in the past but honestly couldn't tell you what he wrote about or if I liked it. I think it's because he's...bad. Is he bad? I think he might be bad, guys.

This would be so much easier to read if there weren't so many typos in it, yeesh. How did this get to print in this condition???

SO GOOD. SO DEPRESSING. I read a lot about this kind of thing but I think I need to take a break after I'm done with this.

The hyperbole is strong in this one, making it almost unreadable. Every single paragraph is so chock full of it that it almost reads like a parody. It's exhausting, to be honest

It's odd that this book is so highly rated and a National Book Award winner. It's very repetitive and the writing is verbose and bizarre. It really could've used a better editor.

It's odd that this book is so highly rated and a National Book Award winner because it's so repetitive and the writing is bizarre. It could really, really have used a better editor.

This book is excellent, but since it's mid-pandemic (IRL) right now, it's messing with my head and making me so anxious that I might not finish it 😖

I like this, but it's repetitive, like each chapter was an essay written for a different publication, and so he keeps introducing and explaining how he got into debt over and over again.

The story is good; the font choice and the tightness of the hardback binding make it unpleasant to read. I understand why they chose the font and layout, but I can still hate it.

Gilbert is a really good writer, no doubt, but I'm 40 pages into this and she hasn't said anything useful yet.

Everyone seems to love this book, but it hasn't grabbed me yet. I'm getting a very textbook-y vibe from it so far.

Very interesting and super funny.

“I do not want to read about men’s fascinations with guns or stock car racing, or long walks in the woods. I do not want to listen to stories about Lake Wobegon or the mild humor of white suburban interpersonal politics. None of these things appeal to me.” 😆

"[The poet] was wearing a jacket of a sort of faux zebra, trimmed in leatherette with tassels on the buttons.

'Where,' my mother asked, quite loudly, 'did that jacket come from?' I cringed, as Betty glared at me with an expression with which I am very familiar. It seems to suggest that I am personally responsible for every particle of bullshit loose in the world."

The religious stuff continues, but there's more of other texts, too. Some I had no background on and honestly just skipped. Am I not well-read enough for this book? Perhaps! I like the trans stuff the most and Daniel does a great job describing what it's like to feel confused about your gender. I'm not trans but it was all extremely relatable and easy to understand. Some of that stuff is being repeated though.

The writing is great and funny and poignant BUT there is so much religious stuff in here, not just casual mentions but long quotes from the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. I'm only just starting the third chapter and I'm already weary of it. As an atheist, this part of the book is not working for me.

Apparently I follow David Sedaris's career quite closely, because I'm halfway through this essay collection and only a couple of the pieces were new to me. The others I must have read in The New Yorker over the past year or two. They're still good, but I was hoping this would all be new.