This was one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century? This? Friends, I loathed this book. 160 pages was probably 150 pages too many. There were few if any likeable characters, no one had a unique voice, and the crassness wasn’t shocking in an absurdist way, it was just unpleasant.
I picked this up because of the New York Times list and because it fit one of this year’s PopSugar Reading Challenge prompts: a book with a one-word title you had to look up. I thought, perfect! This is supposed to be a collection of hilarious short stories, let’s go! But when I started reading I didn’t find it funny, I just found it off-putting and eventually boring. When every internal monologue sounds the same it ceases to be an incisive look at humanity and simply becomes a cynical one-trick pony. Is everyone so racist? Is everyone so hate-filled and constantly filled with derogatory thoughts towards others? Or this just what George Saunders assumes we’re all like?
I really cannot put into words how badly I disliked this book. I read it on my Kindle each turned page was a slog. Each update to the page count meant that the ending wasn’t coming quickly enough. And each awful character was something else that just made my day worse. Honestly, if this didn’t fill a prompt for my reading challenge I would have DNF’d it, that’s how much I did not like this. Sorry to Saunders’ fans and those who liked this book, but if Goodreads let me give this zero stars I would. Now I’m wishing I’d read Eleutheria instead.
