I’m not sure how to feel about it. I’ve read little snippets and bits of it before. I have had the entire plot spoiled for me by the Internet, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s not one of those books that relies strictly on a twist.
I really wanted to hate it, but I couldn’t, at least at first. The flow of the book is very good—I can’t think of another word for it. It’s that feeling that a book is comfortable to inhabit; that I can suspend my disbelief and settle into it without always thinking how I’m going to word the review.
I liked the first couple of chapters best, because they chronicled the protagonist’s out-of-placeness in a new setting and that’s a feeling I understand well. There’s duct tape and a lake and his crush on Alaska and all of this is great; I was going, man, they’re right: maybe this thing is a classic.
Then he ended up rooming with a clever, funny dude who liked him and fell in immediately with the cigarette-smoking Smart Kids, which seemed almost too easy. Drinks and Kurt Vonnegut in a field; it almost makes you wonder if John Green has ever read Kurt Vonnegut or if he thought, “college thing, gotta have it”. He has his characters archly fling the word “pretentious” around, as if to keep critics from using that word in reviews.
It’s all a part of that tendency—a trademark of John Green novels—for every single character to be so darn clever that it’s almost precious. His writing is always flow-y enough that it’s just barely believable, but the sharp edges of unrealism poke through the fabric. It echoes the epigrammic nature of certain passages of Oscar Wilde; quit it with the fortune cookies already, Oscar.
John Green is a genuinely intelligent guy and it bugs me that he’s putting all his intelligence into the promotion of this kind of coffee-shop philosophy the characters talk, which caffeinates but does not satisfy, which falls just short of the real thing. I like to talk that kind of shop myself because it’s fun to do, but there’s no viable alternative presented in Looking For Alaska, and I guess we’re expected to think that that’s the end of it: that what we read on our Starbucks sleeve or emblazon at the top of a Tumblr blog is just as good as what we’ve learned from history, religion or experience.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Monday, June 17, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Current Reads: All You Need Is Blood
"Ringo, what are you up to?"
"Page 5."
- A Hard Day's Night
Inspired in part by the Simultaneous Reads blog over at Tumblr, I've decided to start posting a bit of what I'm reading. I believe that stacking up all the books a person is reading at the moment often tells a lot about his personal psychology.
...or at least, I used to believe that, until I realized I was reading three Beatle-themed books plus two tales of gore and childhood trauma.
Dear friends, I am not a gore person. Even watching that deliberately cheesy Shakespearean-themed thriller Theater of Blood (you know, with Vincent Price as an actor killing off his critics) set my teeth kinda on edge. It just sort of...fell out this way.
Technically I'm not even a nonfiction person, but random Beatles obsessions strike the best of us.
(And, fyi, I'd have three horror novels to balance out the Beatle books if Amazon hadn't suddenly raised the price on Blood Man.)
So, without further adieu!
John Lennon: A Biography by Jacqueline Edmonson
Possibly the most bare-bones Lennon bio on the market, this book was an electronic resource from my college library, presumably for kids with papers due in the morning. It's written in the style of Wikipedia, with all its vast understatements and iffy grammar, and I've already picked up several mistakes (no, Paul and Pete didn't get deported from Hamburg for accidentally knocking over a candle in a venue; I seem to recall that they started a fire on purpose, cheeky young thugs that they were), but I'm actually enjoying it for its comprehensiveness and lack of pretension, the latter of which makes it far brisker reading than, say, Larry Kane's Ticket to Ride.
Also, the author dedicated it to three kids, presumably hers, which reassured me that the text was written by a human being and didn't spontaneously generate.
The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard Di Lello
A fine example of what I'm pretty sure constitutes New Journalism, all about working at Apple Records toward the end of the 60's. Formatted in short dialogue-loaded chapters like sketches in The New Yorker, some black-and-white photo inserts. It's the kind of thing that could only have been published in the 70's. Like the liner notes in a 1960's vinyl, it's informative, conversational, amusing and often too clever by half.
Blackbird Fly by Lise McClendon
Okay, calling it "Beatle-themed" just because of the title is a stretch worthy of Rose Mary Woods, but it's a low-key, observant and, so far, quite beautiful work. A woman's emotionally distant workaholic of a husband dies, and she finds out he's left her a house in France that she didn't know he even owned, so naturally she goes to check it out. If you're thinking of The Shack or something I must tell you that this won't be on the "inspirational" shelf anytime soon; while far from heartless, it's refreshingly unsentimental. It's one of those books that's content simply to live and breathe, and breathe it does.
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
It's about time I cracked open a Gillian Flynn, and I must say I'm surprised. I was expecting a cerebral, poetic mystery in the vein of Tana French. It's more like a rusty razor in the vein of the reader. That's not to say it isn't witty and well-thought out, but good grief, the woman doesn't stray from messy murder and equally wince-worthy satire. So far we've got the surviving children of slaughtered families competing for donation money like a bunch of washed-up beauty pageant queens. No wonder Stephen King gave it a blurb. And speaking of Stephen...
The Shining by Stephen King
Despite the fact that his paperbacks are a staple at my local grocery store, I've never gotten into Stephen King, because any mystery of his worth reading has been spoiled for me by movies I haven't even seen. I mean, how am I supposed to take the foreshadowing in the first three chapters seriously when I've got this mental image of Jack Nicholson smashing through a door with an axe? Nice going, Hollywood.
"Page 5."
- A Hard Day's Night
Inspired in part by the Simultaneous Reads blog over at Tumblr, I've decided to start posting a bit of what I'm reading. I believe that stacking up all the books a person is reading at the moment often tells a lot about his personal psychology.
...or at least, I used to believe that, until I realized I was reading three Beatle-themed books plus two tales of gore and childhood trauma.
Dear friends, I am not a gore person. Even watching that deliberately cheesy Shakespearean-themed thriller Theater of Blood (you know, with Vincent Price as an actor killing off his critics) set my teeth kinda on edge. It just sort of...fell out this way.
Technically I'm not even a nonfiction person, but random Beatles obsessions strike the best of us.
(And, fyi, I'd have three horror novels to balance out the Beatle books if Amazon hadn't suddenly raised the price on Blood Man.)
So, without further adieu!
John Lennon: A Biography by Jacqueline Edmonson
Possibly the most bare-bones Lennon bio on the market, this book was an electronic resource from my college library, presumably for kids with papers due in the morning. It's written in the style of Wikipedia, with all its vast understatements and iffy grammar, and I've already picked up several mistakes (no, Paul and Pete didn't get deported from Hamburg for accidentally knocking over a candle in a venue; I seem to recall that they started a fire on purpose, cheeky young thugs that they were), but I'm actually enjoying it for its comprehensiveness and lack of pretension, the latter of which makes it far brisker reading than, say, Larry Kane's Ticket to Ride.
Also, the author dedicated it to three kids, presumably hers, which reassured me that the text was written by a human being and didn't spontaneously generate.
The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard Di Lello
A fine example of what I'm pretty sure constitutes New Journalism, all about working at Apple Records toward the end of the 60's. Formatted in short dialogue-loaded chapters like sketches in The New Yorker, some black-and-white photo inserts. It's the kind of thing that could only have been published in the 70's. Like the liner notes in a 1960's vinyl, it's informative, conversational, amusing and often too clever by half.
Blackbird Fly by Lise McClendon
Okay, calling it "Beatle-themed" just because of the title is a stretch worthy of Rose Mary Woods, but it's a low-key, observant and, so far, quite beautiful work. A woman's emotionally distant workaholic of a husband dies, and she finds out he's left her a house in France that she didn't know he even owned, so naturally she goes to check it out. If you're thinking of The Shack or something I must tell you that this won't be on the "inspirational" shelf anytime soon; while far from heartless, it's refreshingly unsentimental. It's one of those books that's content simply to live and breathe, and breathe it does.
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
It's about time I cracked open a Gillian Flynn, and I must say I'm surprised. I was expecting a cerebral, poetic mystery in the vein of Tana French. It's more like a rusty razor in the vein of the reader. That's not to say it isn't witty and well-thought out, but good grief, the woman doesn't stray from messy murder and equally wince-worthy satire. So far we've got the surviving children of slaughtered families competing for donation money like a bunch of washed-up beauty pageant queens. No wonder Stephen King gave it a blurb. And speaking of Stephen...
The Shining by Stephen King
Despite the fact that his paperbacks are a staple at my local grocery store, I've never gotten into Stephen King, because any mystery of his worth reading has been spoiled for me by movies I haven't even seen. I mean, how am I supposed to take the foreshadowing in the first three chapters seriously when I've got this mental image of Jack Nicholson smashing through a door with an axe? Nice going, Hollywood.
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