Scott > Recent Status Updates

Book 2 of "Scott Re-reads a book he didn't like by an author he does to see if he likes it now. Does he Learn Things? What Things does he Learn? Let's Find Out"

2/3rds into my revisit, post-year-or-so-of-becoming-a-Saunders-Fanboy. Do I “like” this book now? I definitely appreciate the dreamlike artistry more than I did the first time, though the question of “why Abraham Lincoln, specifically, as the centerpiece of a meandering Godot-style look at grief and denial” remains (I have never particularly cared about Abraham Lincoln the man.) I guess some do?

I’m glad this book was free

From the top make it drop for these Weird Ass Pages, bring a bucket and a mop for these Weird Ass Pages

Damn

Still a very good book despite the side quests into mom-aganda. She’s objectively terrible, but you must understand, she didn’t get the life she waaaaaants you guys, so enjoy spending half the book in her angry, self-pitying POV. Probably an intentional critique and I’m just pre-weary of mom-aganda because of my own mommy issues. Cuz buddy, I got ‘em.

Still very promising at the halfway mark. Mixed race teen goes on a road trip with his shitty black mom and her shitty white friend to pick up his shitty white dad from prison. SBM is maybe redeemable because women are in touch with plants or something. Subtle nods to Homer and Faulkner make you feel smart for catching them. Also a ghost.

Promising.

Starts fine. Good, even. Then it gets just the tiniest shade of worse with each page. I’ve never seen a book do that so consistently. Every page just a fraction of a smidgen worse than the last until like old frog-in the-boiling-water routine, you’re suddenly 90 pages from finishing the blandest, most repetitive book you can remember and you can’t pinpoint exactly when it got this bad, just that it did.

Groan

A conveyer belt of tech-panic tropes that Futurama, Black Mirror, and even South Park already did, with a groan-induing twist that Severance did a lot better, all grafted onto a premise the blurb calls "utterly original" and probably was when it was first published as Phillip K. Dick's The Minority Report. Bleah and I are enjoying our "couple's critique" of this at least.