Seething

This was a tough and slow read. Not sure why it didn't quite click for me, but I was relieved to finish it. The stories are interesting and droning in the way that gothic literature often does, and I wonder if I bounced off of this because of the translation? If you like classical gothic literature, you'll love the prose in this.

The writing style of this is usually a style I like. I usually like books written in a short, clipped, frantic, in-media-res tone that makes you continue flipping pages. This was just not it for me. I liked Jones' The Only Good Indians and yet I found this awkward and hurried in a first-draft way, and beyond having a very busy December, I just don't feel compelled to finish it.
Just read the inside cover again. It's a sequel and I didn't read the first book. I see now why I found it so confusing. LMAO.

This is embarrassing. I don't mean in terms of content- that's true, but we all know that. That's why we read it.
I mean this is written like it went through a first draft and was never touched again. Awful pacing, terrible prose, extremely short and blunt to the point of being confusing because important context and events happening around Elon's life are not elaborated on or are only elaborated on by chance (like Larry David's casual mention of Uvalde which contextualized why the fuck he confronted Musk, instead of Isaacson doing his job and describing what event and tweet might have caused David to say something in the first place). This reads like a Twitter thread, which is fitting. It reads like a bullet point list of stories that were fleshed out into sentences because the publisher wouldn't publish it as-is. It neither reads like journalism or biography. There are no actual themes examined outside of some weak 11th-grade level of creative writing posturing at the end. The timelines are confusing because they're neither chronological nor sorted by topic. On g-d who edited this? Who let this make it to the presses in this condition?
I'm embarrassed that I read this.
Great stories to tell over the phone, especially from his childhood, so no one I know has to read it so that's why it's not .25. Blow by blow incoming, spoilered to be safe I guess:

Isaacson, if you fucking agree with Musk, just say that. Don't play the game of being “impartial” or “objective” and then switch to just [REDACTED]ing off Elon. It's confusing! Are you saying these extremely opinionated and rightwing things because ELON thinks those things and you're writing in his voice, or are you saying them because you're trying to portray “facts” and you agree with Elon's interpretation, or a secret third thing? Also, why misgender and deadname Jenna so many times? You already told us her deadname if you were concerned people wouldn't know who the fuck you're talking about! It's obviously fucked up and it doesn't even read well even if you're a transphobe you absolute excuse for a journalist. Why do you take everything Elon says at face-value, and only occasionally interrogate him or anyone around him, particularly about work conditions? Why no investigation into the financial matters around his work? You really expect me to believe people stayed because of Elon's vision and not because of the pay or benefits? That wasn't worth mentioning one time? Those are basic facts brother, same as the insane quotes about “oh well you know demon mode isn't that serious” or whatever. On that note, why so little thought into Twitter's working conditions and no comment/interview with any former engineers that were dropped in that first round? I mean damn bro I get you're embarrassingly sympathetic to the man but grow a spine.Why mention some tweets that dropped Tesla stock, some tweets that had legal implications, and some tweets that had intrapersonal implications, and not all? Why did we waste so much ink on some random dumb tweets and not, say, his Twitter feud with Grimes about pronouns where she was like “I know that's not you”? She had nothing to say to you about that? At all? Or about what was going on with Jenna besides the constant assertion you repeat that she knows he has beef with Jenna's politics? Why would you waste ink telling us what we already know over and over instead of like, digging deeper? Did Jenna refuse to speak with you, also? Why not mention that? At least tell me you tried, I was left wondering if you even bothered to reach out the way you clearly were trying to build a theme around Errol and Elon despite their silence- why not interrogate the silence between Elon and Jenna?Why bring up that random alleged thing about him harassing that one celebrity to explain the Gates' feud and not the alleged Grimes Reddit post? ESPECIALLY if Elon didn't have to approve the book? The Grimes Reddit post went super viral and was WAY more visible in the cultural zeitgeist than that dumbass allegation! On that note, why breeze past Elon's insane affairs without doing ANY digging into how people felt about that? He brought a girlfriend with him, Grimes, and their kids to meet Errol and when Grimes bailed with the kids to see the grandparents, and Errol said something mad weird about the girlfriend, why the fuck did you not explain why he even brought a girlfriend WITH HIS BABY MAMA!! Why do we just breeze past major intrapersonal things like that without even a whisper of a comment from at least GRIMES? Or anyone around him? Are you being serious?Why so few (and pithy) comments on the animal experimentation at Neurolink?Not ONE interrogation into the insane assertion that the Cybertruck needed to be bulletproof? Did that not come up before this had to be published?

I'm glad I'm done with this so the library will stop harassing me to get it back to the other 10 million people in line and I can actually read the good books in my TBR. This was not worth the time I put into it.

Fantastic work of horror here. Truly fantastic. Stomach-churning, thematically tight, chilling, and you'll cry too. The thing keeping this from 5 for me is I got lost during the basketball parts. I'm stupid. I don't know what the hell is sportsballing and where. If you struggle with sports, I recommend reading up on basketball rules and lingo real fast. I should have done that.
But it's so GOOD!!!!!!!! I gasped so much. I screamed! I cried. I had to physically walk away to read because I wanted to tell my girlfriend SO BAD about what was going on but she needs to READ IT!!! So I didn't want to spoil it. Incredible.
This is a story about Indigenous (Blackfeet) identity and modernity, Reservation life versus diasporic life, a story about intercultural relationships, about cultural expectations and cultural realities, a story about generational trauma and generational cycle-breaking. It's good. READ IT !!!

I struggle with how to review this when it's so compelling and emotional as a narrative, but the research and the framing is so shallow and driven by an agenda (and I mean that neutrally, not in “g-ddamn wokies again” way). Granata went through something unbearably traumatic and has come out the other side with a worldview that I find grating and poorly-thought-out, as someone with folks in my life who have been severely harmed by institutionalization. 
Tread carefully if you have any ADAB-style takes about mental hospitals, as Granata is only sympathetic to them and not to the bodily autonomy of those with psychosis struggles.

Powerful collection of stories, weaving in and out of time and families living on the Penobscot Nation's reservation. I found the nonlinearity compelling, one that added a lot of intrigue and emotional depth, but for some reason I wasn't as drawn into this set of stories as I felt I should have been. I'm not sure where the disconnect was, other than the prose was great but not the most beautiful prose I'd ever read. 

Compelling all the same.

Strong first novel here from Kristen Arnett. On occasion it dragged, but even when it dragged the prose kept me hooked. This is great- if you don't do well with animal death and gore, you may need to skip it, though I found the meditations on intimacy and love what I struggled with the most (just a tad heavyhanded for me).

-I just finished this and I am at a loss for words. 
I think I liked this. I think that Rumfitt wrote something extremely strong, and the read is nauseating- at no point was I comfortable with what was happening to anyone or anything. I would read pages and need to put the book down and just think, and that does not happen to me very often. 
this starts as a horror story about two very broken people who had something terrible happen to them in a place where terrible things happen all the time, and it's also about fascism explicitly but despite that explicit almost manifesto-like theming rumfitt does not make you feel like you are just reading a manifesto with characters in it (and i don't think that kind of writing is bad, necessarily- and as someone who shares a lot of identities with some of the folks most hurt in this novel and who shares the political feelings, i'm not saying this from a place of “wah politics”) until the last two to three chapters. it becomes more explicitly a manifesto then, though certainly not fully.
and i don't know how i feel about it, or how i feel about the ending. i just simply do not know.
this is hard to read, emotionally. as someone who likes to read gore and body horror and fucked up shit (like Haunted by chuck palahniuk), i struggled with this. i think you should read it despite that, or maybe because of that. 
the chapter that turns into two separate stories told at once was super interesting, and i loved the change of format. the chapter before that where what happens to hannah is revealed toed very close to the line of “oh my g-d, okay, i get it,” but the writing is so... it's just so visceral i never quite got there. is that a good thing? who's to say.
i don't even know how i feel. i think i will have to come back to this.

Fantastic memoir here, and I don't really fuck with memoirs. McCurdy has a great voice for reading books, and this is paced super well while making me feel insane for watching iCarly + not watching the spinoff, and just generally making me really rethink my relationship to live-action shows from my youth. The fact that this came out before/around the time that all those things about Schneider came out (and that limited series) is interesting- does it take away McCurdy's agency in being careful what she said about Schneider, or does it give her more power?

This is brazy because Palahniuk clearly came up with a “voice”, a “style”, and had to ram it down your throat in the first half of this novel. Just unbearably overbearing about the theming and the slang and the convoluted prose. Then at the halfway mark he's like hold on, I've overdone it and now the reader has no idea what is meaningfully happening because of it so let me strip the prose of any voice and go into pure omniscient description. And then in the last third he's sort of figured out a good balance, but most folks aren't going to get that far.
The first part of this was an exhausting and edgy slog, the middle half didn't have enough edge to carry me through it but I was too committed, and the last bits were pretty alright. 
C'mon Palahniuk, let's get it together.
Also, we title-dropped way too much in the last third.