Tag: USA

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz

This book was shortlisted for the Booker, which made me hesitant. Typically the Booker indicates a book I will hate. But I decided to give it a go, because I loved the pitch: a man goes to drop his daughter off at college, and then just keeps driving.

It’s turns out to be a book about how weirdly free you are in the second half of your life; probably free-er than you were when you were young, and were burdened by having to make money and be a success and get married and oh god I feel stressed just thinking about it.

There was tons of stuff I really liked about this book. Here’s the daughter, arriving in her college town for her first day:

The city she had visited once before was about to become a permanent four-year landmark in her life story, and in the face of that fact you’re kind of helplessly the person you were beforehand.

And here is the dad, meeting a friend who he hasn’t seen in years:

If I looked hard I could see, under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through

And here was one that made me really laugh, about what happened to be on the TV:

. . . Friends seemed to be on back to back. It’s like the weather these days, always going on in the background.

I’m sorry to tell you that he does actually escape SPOILER ALERT because he gets weird chest pains and it turns out he has a heart issue so his wife flies out to get him. And then the book abruptly ends. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it’s been haunting me.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Here is a classic American novel set in a small town in Ohio. It follows two married couples across a few decades. I was enjoying it, until I wasn’t. I got to page 382 and then abruptly decided to quit. It’s hard to explain why. It was well written, it had a plot, but somehow it just seemed very ordinary, and like my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. Can’t think when else I’ve quite a book this late on this slender a reasoning.

NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

I thought it was sad that I knew so much about Epstein but so little about his survivors. So I decided to read this memoir. I don’t know what I expected. I knew it was going to be bad, but it was really, really bad. This lady’s courage is just incredible.

It starts off terrible, with her being sexually abused by her father. I’m sorry to say she is seven. He then ‘shares’ her with his friend. Based on the similarity in the abuse, she thinks they were comparing notes. She attempts to run away, and is put in some kind of terrible ‘tough love’ type place. She runs away from there by hitch-hiking, and one of the men who picks her up rapes her at gunpoint. She manages to escape when he stops to answer his phone (!) and the very next person who offers her a ride turns out to be a trafficker. She is the only American underage girl he has, all the others are trafficked from Eastern Europe. By the time we get to Epstein, you fully understand how incapable she was of escape.

Epstein is particularly stomach-churning. He helpfully explains to her that he prefers it if girls ‘pretend to enjoy it’. He trafficks her to other men, one of whom leaves her bleeding from the mouth, vagina, and anus. He tells her ‘it’s going to be like that sometimes’. I don’t know why – it’s not so bad as the other stuff – but one detail that particularly stuck with me is that he often had her rubbing his feet for two hours straight during flights.

The book follows how she got away from him, and about how much energy it took for her to come forward. I had not realized the extent to which she really was the figurehead for getting this story out into the world. It had a huge cost on her, forcing her to relive the abuse many times.

It’s hard to read, and what makes it even sadder is that Virginia seems to understand how hard it is for us to read, and often takes breaks, flashing forward to her current happy life with her husband and three kids in Perth. I’m sorry to say that here it also gets worse. The book begins with a note from her co-author. Virginia had written to the co-author, emphasizing how important it was to her that the book be published, no matter what might happen to her. This sounds ominous, because it is. She unfortunately killed herself once she was sure the book was in its final draft. It turns out that her husband was allegedly violent towards her. I can kind of get that, just from reading the book. He does not seem a great guy (‘he said I could only take 3 of my 6 suitcases’ etc).

She sacrificed a lot to get her story out. She’s an amazing woman, and I am glad I got the opportunity to hear her story and learn from her.

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

I read this in on one long and sleepless night. I really enjoyed it. It tells about a woman’s long relationship with her university boyfriend. Let me give you a taste. Here is the boyfriend, talking about his mother:

“We are not the same species, Yash said once. I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross. She wants things from me I cannot give.”

At the end, SPOILER ALERT, she spends a few days with him in hospital as he dies of lung cancer. I cried myself silly.

The next day was very strange. I felt like I was living in two realities, my own, and the one in the book. I guess these days it’s rare I read a novel straight through.

FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan

This was a charming romcom about a woman, Alex, who falls in love with a werewolf. It’s fun and genre-y, and also a pretty clever metaphor for learning to live with things you can’t control. 

Alex was obsessed as a teenager by a TV show about a werewolf, and was the moderator of the show’s main wiki.  I actually found this part of the book deeply reassuring.  I always wonder if I am too online, and this made me realize that really I’m not – other people are way, way, way more online than I am.  I could barely understand some of the references.  Hurray!

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott

Here is a book about writing that is very famous and I can see why. It is not at all a technical book, but more about the actual emotional experience of sitting down to write.

Mostly what I enjoyed was her chapter SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS, which is about shitty first drafts. She encourages mess:

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what. . . Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. . . . Perfectionism will keep your cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

And she encourages risk, telling about how she told her student, who was very hung up on mistakes that “. . . when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, “God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!”

I also liked this part:

“Don’t be afraid of your material of your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

I found much of her advice helpful beyond writing. I thought about this suggestion a lot:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbour’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen.”

It was also somewhat hilarious. Please enjoy this:

“Now Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”

DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis

Prepare yourself to hear that there is an author who has won more major SF awards than Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov COMBINED, despite having written fewer books than any of them.  Yep.  It’s this Connie Willis. I have never heard of her and will be amazed if you have.  In the introduction, they say that she has ‘one thing’ that makes her different from those other writers, and that one thing is her ‘ability to make you care,’ and I would say, yes, I hope so, because my assumption is that is the existence of a ‘vagina.’  However let us not get bogged down in all that.

This book raises the interesting question of what would happen to the careers of historians if time travel were invented. It tells of an ambitious young historian that volunteers to go back to what they consider one of the most dangerous centuries, the 14th.  And then boom, suddenly it’s a novel SPOILER ALERT of the black death.  It’s just a straight up story of what it must have been like to be there then.  Interestingly, they called it ‘the blue sickness.’  I had never considered how awful it must have been to go through the plague without even paracetamol or disinfectant.  It’s stomach churningly terrible.

The people in the future (which looks a lot like the 1950s) try and rescue the young historian, but they can’t get back into the past initially, and what I was struck by was how incredibly inefficient phoning people used to be.  They spend absolute ages waiting by the phone and taking messages and trying to catch people at home. It’s guess I had underestimated how much the group chat alone has improved human efficiency.

ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood


Here is a memoir about working at the sketchiest end of what is already a sketchy industry, i.e, PR.  The author has spent a career shilling for dictators.  He was a big debater in high school, and it shows.  He thinks he is just so terribly clever.  The book was kind of interesting e.g., I learnt the horrifying fact that there are 300K publicists vs only 40K journalists in the US, and that a PR firm exists who took $18.8M from Saudia Arabia to try and spin the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.  But it was also kind of boring, because its just a litany of ways he tried to spin stuff that he thinks is very clever. I’m not sure they are that clever, I just think the list of people willing to do this stuff is not very long so the competition is not very steep. 

One part I did find interesting was the weekend he spent in Vegas trying to make sure that Gaddafi’s son, Muatsaem, did not do anything newsworthy.  It was wild to see how completely unhingedly entitled this guy was, down to beating hotel maids for trying to clean.  And how wildly unhappy.  I also enjoyed his visit to Nigeria, where he goes to try and massage the kidnapping of the Chibok girls.  Try this:

” “The whole world just found out where Nigeria is on a map because of these kidnappings,” I say.  “Everyone is watching you. You need to do something about this problem.”

“Problem?” an official asks.”

Everything about this is hilarious.  As if Nigeria was unknown to the world because this PR guy didn’t know about it.  And I just love the profoundly Nigerian reply, as if a few hundred more kidnappings is not that big deal, which, to be fair, it is not, in the larger scheme of the security situation in the North.  Also of interest to me was that he stayed in the Abuja Hilton, a place I have myself stayed for many months, and also noted the oil men, prostitutes, etc.  Strangely he was very stressed out by it.  I guess if you’ve never even heard of Nigeria before the Abuja Hilton is quite an introduction.

I also learnt something we should all recall, which is that in PR you should never state a negative. Apparently the first phrase that Americans think of when they think of Richard Nixon is ‘I am not a crook,’ which is something he said.  This is a classic example of accepting the wrong framing. You should always say ‘I am a good man,’ or ‘I love America’ and etc. 

One last thing, the writing is often sharp and funny.  He has a friend who is very Republican.  Here’s the friend explaining:

“Nobody who doesn’t have a generator and two years’ worth of food in their garage outflanks me on the right.”  Says the author: “I describe him as ‘authoritarian-curious’”

I love that phrase!  Perfectly describes these decadent rich people who don’t understand what democracy has given them.

THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom.  I just read a genre rocmcom by the same author two days ago, as I am on a long beach vacation, and what was weird was this: it was basically the same plot –  couple are blissfully in love, but girl has an illness that means she must break up with him instead of talking to him (?).  Like I appreciate that genre is genre, but damn, it was literally the same story.  However I was three beers in by this stage and the sun was hot.