Chris > Recent Status Updates

3.5/5 Engaging, well written, good dialogue, and well developed characters, but the story is pretty slow paced and anticlimactic overall.

This reads like Palahniuk doing some weird magical realism rendition of Memento. I really struggled through most of it. I don’t necessarily hate it, but I hated every character and didn’t enjoy almost any of it. Very confusing. 6/10, weird.

The narrative voice reminds me of Peter Heller’s The Painter and The Dog Stars

“Every cock fights best on his own dunghill.”

Dan Carlin reminded me this has been on my list for several years

Didn’t finish. Not for me.

This is so good when I have the time to sit and focus. I’m taking little nibbles. Perhaps someday I will have the time to take bites.

“While I was laying there trying not to think, I heard old Stradlater come back from the can and go in our room. You could hear him putting away his crummy toilet articles and all and opening the window. He was a fresh air fiend.”

I am begging for something interesting to happen in this fucking book.

Jesus god have mercy this is slow. I’ve made it this far so I’m going to power through, but this feels like an overwritten MFA essay so far.

Wasn’t expecting Yakub to show up in this 😂

“Flying and drinking and drinking and driving.” Hell yes. Raise hell praise Dale

“With no sign of significant relief on the economic horizon, Edward Lansdale’s aspiration of becoming a writer, playwright, or cartoonist would be interred without even a marker in the mass grave that collectively buried the dreams of a generation of young Americans.”

I wish I could write sentences like that.

Christ this is excruciating. It’s like George Lucas writing Jack Ryan. Flat nothing characters over a backdrop of barely interesting geopolitical maneuvering.

This is Gran Torino married to Hartigan's storyline in Sin City.

This reminds me of John Dies At The End

"I’m like you. I come down here for a fat woman and that’s what I’m havin. I’m goin to tell you right now cousin, when the mood comes on you for a fat woman they just wont nothin else satisfy."

Absolute king

Putting on hold for a couple months.

So far this is the first non-fiction I've read in awhile that I would say I "can't put down."

Continuing my "last person to read this book" series. At least this one is only 6 years old rather than 95.

"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow[...] What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?"

"Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."

"Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone."

"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world."

"We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk."

Good lord, so many condoms in the Tennessee river c.1950's.

Well. That is a downright poetic passage about a man fornicating with watermelons.