I hate books like this. Ones that start out so promising, and then crap out halfway through. Like they get lost in the swirl of it all and then just flush themselves down the toilet in despair. At it’s most basic, The Patron Saint of Liars is about leaving. The blurb on the back cover of the novel is misleading. It makes it seem like Rose is the main character, when in fact, we lose touch with her halfway through, when she becomes a shadow […]
A Hundred Years of Secrets
Goodreads summary: “Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the […]
Nowhere Story
I truthfully don’t know how to write a review about a book like this. On the one hand, I feel compelled to defend my intellectual capacity to analyze literature, but on the other hand, I kind of just want to admit that I don’t get it. On the surface, there’s not that much to “get.” Nowhere Man is comprised of several stories at different times from different viewpoints that all describe the life of Josef Pronek, a Bosnian ex-pat who moves to Chicago in his third or […]
The melting snowball effect.
After reading the prologue of this book, I was 100% sure I was going to love it. That is not exactly what ended up happening. Let me tell you what happens in the prologue, as a sort of illustration: The book opens with this kid on the roof. He’s pretty much an outcast, and he’s been chased up there by his schoolmates. He’s wearing a uniform, so this is a private school, and there are statues of Saints decorating the roof, so it’s Catholic. This kid […]
If you’re looking for a totally immersive reading experience, here you go, but be prepared to work for it.
The first thing to know about S. — J.J. Abrams’ and Doug Dorst’s literary experiment slash ode to the written word — is that you get out of it what you want to get out of it. If you want to get all crazy conspiracy theory and puzzle out a bunch of mysteries, you can. If you just want to sit back and be immersed in the story, with a little brain power, you can. If you want to engage somewhere in between those two levels, […]
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