jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

# That Wolfdogg will probably have his suggestion rights for Rock and Roll Bookclub revoked again. His rights were revoked sometime in June of 07 because he suggested A Boy Called Freebird, a book so heinous and unreadable that I didn’t make it past page 40.

# Just because someone writes something funny for TV (Will Forte, Stephen Colbert, Andy Richter, et. al.) does not mean they can write a funny, fresh, uncliched essay about dating or relationships.

# I really don’t like Neal Pollack’s writing.

# You don’t need to know the difference between losing/loosing or couldn’t care less and could care less to get an essay published in this book.

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After abandoning Watchmen and muddling through V for Vendetta I’ve come to the conclusion that Alan Moore is just not for me. I feel a little bad about this. Many people whose opinion I respect hold him up as one of the greats and while I believe they’re right, it doesn’t mean that I enjoy Moore’s work.

V for Vendetta is one of those dystopian future type tales ala 1984 or Brave New World. Only this future is 1997 (which was decade away when Moore first wrote this as a series of comics), and as is to be expected things aren’t going well. After a nuclear war England has fallen into the hands of a fascist regime that has killed off homosexuals and anyone of any non-white ethnicity. English citizens are closely monitored with cameras everywhere, and fed a steady line of propaganda by both Fate, the government’s computer system and the Church, which is also controlled by the government.

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Can we all agree before I start that Kevin Brockmeier is a beautiful and inventive writer? His novel The Brief History of the Dead still haunts me even thought it’s been years since I’ve read it. And his short story “The Ceiling” (which you can read online right here, how rad is that?) gives me goosebumps every single time I read it, and I’ve read it a lot. Can we agree to that? Good.

So now imagine my surprise to read his latest book, The Illumination and find myself not just disappointed but kind of bored at times. It’s crushing, I tell you.

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I don’t often read genre fiction (mysteries, horror, sci-fi, fantasy). It’s just not my thing. I prefer fiction where the story is moved forward by characters and character development. Genre fiction, in my experience, is often more plot-driven where characters are there to service the plot rather than the plot being driven by the characters.

So when my Rock & Roll Bookclub suggested we read Dimiter by William Peter Blatty I immediately started protesting via farty noises and gagging. Once that subsided I began working through the five stages of reading genre fiction.

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I’m a proud and vocal book abandoner. If, after giving it the official John Irving try (reading 100 pages in hopes the story gets going named after Irving because A Prayer for Owen Meany takes forever to get going), I’m not enjoying a book I set it aside without a second thought. This is why I don’t often write negative book reviews. Sometimes, though, I will struggle through a book because of some other obligation. Usually that means Rock & Roll Bookclub, and still even then I’ve been known to abandon books that are too bad to read (*cough*A Boy Called Freebird*cough*).

This is why I finished Antonya Nelson’s Bound even though I really didn’t want to.

Right from page one, I had my reservations. The book opens in the point of view of a dog who has just survived a car crash that’s killed its owner. We spend a lot of time with the dog, meeting characters who don’t seem to have any impact on the story. When we finally get to the humans the third-person point of view is so far removed, the book feels cold.

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For March, the Rock and Roll Bookclub picked Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl, a memoir about her year as a stripper/professional masturbator/phone sex operator.

You know how when you buy a bag of those little gold-foil wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and the first one tastes so good that you eat about thirty-two more right in a row and while it’s all hunky dory while you’re chewing and unwrapping, once you stop your gut aches?

That’s how I feel about Candy Girl. It’s entirely too much of a good thing, ultimately making it a bad thing that pains you.

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At some point while Christa was reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles she said (and I can’t find it now) that trying to talk about the book without doing an interpretive dance was nearly impossible.

This perfectly sums up how I feel about Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. It’s hard to talk about this story of the five tragic Lisbon sisters and the neighborhood boys who grew to be obsessed with them without using your hands and your face and the rest of your body.

Told from the first person plural point of view, which works in a way that amazes me, The Virgin Suicides is about a neighborhood’s coming of age in the suburban 70s and centers around the suicides of the mysterious Lisbon sisters.

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Even before he’s born, Junior is told exactly when the world is gonna end. He’s told, in utero that the world will end June 15, 2010 when he is just 36 years old after a giant comet smashes into Earth and obliterates life on the planet.

Heavy.

That’s how Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. opens and it just gets better from there. It starts with this unknown, omniscient “we” telling Junior all about the future and his family. Then we jump into sections narrated by Junior’s mom, dad, and older brother. Here we learn of the mom’s horrific childhood and how anxiety-ridden she is, the dad’s time in Vietnam and how he gave up playing pro-baseball to fight eventually losing part of his finger to prostitute; and his older brother who becomes an adolescent cokehead because he can’t cope with the birth of Junior.

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