I don’t really know how to rate this. Not because it’s a bad book. It’s a really good book. It feels weird to rate it.
It’s kind of like this: My brother taught some English classes at some colleges, and he made a rule that in the beginning classes he didn’t want anyone to write essays about two things: Marijuana legalization and personal rape stories. The first because he’d just read too many that covered the same ground. The second sounds a little cold-hearted, but I can get behind his reasoning. He said that it was impossible to grade them. Imagine someone pouring her heart out regarding a terrible personal violation, but looking at it honestly and finding that it was rife with grammatical errors and misspellings. Grading the story of someone’s rape just seemed methodical and bizarre, and it made it very difficult for him to ever assign a bad grade, which in some cases may have been an honest grade.
That’s kind of how I feel about this book. It’s a good book, but it’s so deeply personal that it’s hard to grade it without feeling like I missed the point entirely.
To do a quick summary, the book starts off with the writer as a young man. He’s driving, hits a girl who swerves in front of his car on her bike, and the girl dies. To make matters more complicated, the girl is a student at his high school.
What sets this book apart, to me, is that the author is so honest about everything. He’s honest about some of the posturing he did right after the event because he was 17 and didn’t really know how one would handle this sort of thing. He’s honest about how he sabotaged some of his own relationships in life. He’s really very honest about everything, and that’s what makes the work book. You can tell he was ready to accept the things he had done and how he had handled it.
Things get a little strange when you start asking yourself why you’re reading it. The thing is so personal it feels a little like something that you’d only hear from a close friend, and only after he just couldn’t stay quiet about it anymore.
I’d like to think I didn’t read it as a gawker, a rubbernecker on the roadside of the guy’s life. I honestly don’t think of myself as that kind of person.
I’d also like to think that I don’t really get any pleasure or relief when reading about the misfortunes of others. It doesn’t do a lot for me to watch someone else go through something bad and think, “At least I don’t have it that bad.”
Honestly, I think that I read it because it’s almost like an It’s a Wonderful Life kind of thing. We’ve all been there. Not as far down the road as the author went, but we’ve been on some kind of precipice. Mostly it comes and goes. You almost hit someone in a crosswalk, or maybe you take a fall and get up shocked that you can still stand under your own power, but we’ve all been to those places that make you say, “Holy shit. Someone could have died.”
It’s a good thing to find out what happens, in a way. In a very realistic way. It mostly confirms your worst fears, but like anything that reinforces fear, it’s good to know that you’re not alone in doing something that you regret or thinking about one life event changing everything afterwards, even if it wasn’t your fault or if you don’t really want things to be that way. Whether that life event be something this big or something much smaller, it’s probably a really good message, especially for young men, to let people know that you might have feelings that you don’t understand, don’t know how to deal with, and really never go away.
The author himself, in the book, talks about how important the therapeutic act of writing something like this can be. There are proven effects, and a lot of it has to do with subject being able to hold the event in their hands. To have a stack of paper and say, Here it is. Here’s that thing that kind of ruined my life. At least you feel some kind of power over it. That you can put it in a container, put some kind of a wall around it at least.
That’s why it’s so hard to rate this book. It seems like the author was successful on that count. He started the process of containing it, of putting it in a package that might lead to helping him understand everything better.
And it was a good read. He’s a talented writer. I just feel strongly that there’s no way to read this book without asking yourself why you’re reading it and whether you should read it or not.
But how do you rate it? As a book? Or whether it accomplished what I would argue it’s main purpose to be, organizing what could be a life-ruining event?
I guess maybe it’s like a certain kind of pen. Let’s say a Sharpie. I wouldn’t want to write with one all the time. And there are a lot of applications where one COULD use it but I wouldn’t advise it. However, when you come across a situation where you need a Sharpie, nothing works better.
This book is like that. If you need it, if you’re in the right place for the book, it’ll be great in it’s own very tragic way. If you’re not, you’ll probably be disappointed and find it to be a completely inappropriate tool.
A lot like his last book, this one left me feeling a bit confused, but also kind of awed.
Charles Yu is an awesome writer, and he has awesome ideas. He’s a great science-fiction writer because he uses technology and science as an avenue to talking about human emotion instead of using it to talk about big spaceships, haunted spaceships, or really, extra big spaceships.
Does anyone write books about small, humble spaceships anymore?
I also appreciate that he’s not afraid to experiment. He’s not afraid to write a collection of very different stories, to write some that are very short, or to play around with different formats.
Some of it goes over my head, though. When things get theoretical, or when reading a story about a guy writing letters to an alternate dimension version of himself, I’m lost. And I don’t know what the threshold is, but after being lost there is a certain number of words I can read before needing to be anchored again.
So a great Charles Yu story is great. A not-as-great Charles Yu story is a little like being in a science class that’s above your level. You’re marveling at some big stuff one minute, and then in the next you’re lost. It’s good to take classes that make you feel like that. But I’ve always preferred great stories to good classes.
I read this for a middle school book club. It’s worth noting that they loved it.
For a grown-up…I don’t know.
There’s a scene towards the end where the main character foils the main bad guy’s escape attempt by precision shooting basketballs through the roof of some sort of helicopter. Somehow this keeps the bad guy so off balance that she can’t fly a helicopter. Imagine, if you will, that Pop-a-Shot game from Chuck E. Cheese, but set to Michael Bay music and Michael Bay visuals of helicopters taking off from a roof.
This is always an awkward part of media for younger audiences. A boy of 15 has to physically stop a woman criminal from escaping, but nobody’s about to write a scene where he stabs her in the jugular with a box cutter. They always have to figure out a way for the kid to stop her using a Nerf gun or fart powder or some such nonsense.
Sort of like Home Alone. Which was always baffling because given the option between being shot or crushed by a massive rolling tool chest, I might have to opt for the shooting. Or climbing a rope and being suspended three stories in the air as the bottom end of the rope is lit on fire? Screw that. Home Alone is an early predecessor to Saw, no doubt.
Also, sometimes these kids are a little overly nice to their parents. In this book, if your parents overspend the government stops by and takes you to a work house, basically an office version of a labor camp. So not all that different from what most adults do now, but I digress.
So this kid gets taken to the labor camp, and meanwhile his idiot parents continue to spend money and go deeper into debt? What the hell!? And, AND, near the end of the book the mom is really hounding for an Attaboy when she says how she managed to not buy a new dress. WOW! THANKS, MOM! A few more weeks of this and I might be able to leave the forced labor camp where they may or may not be doing weird experiments on my brain. Swell!
Enjoyed this one well enough, but the ending was really into wrapping up all the events. Which was cool, but the number of characters and their stories was confusing enough that I had to keep reminding myself which character was which and that one of the characters did not have a baby with her brother. That’s the level of confusion for me here.
There was a lot of explaining the past. It’s kind of a problem because the reader doesn’t get to experience them first-hand and they lose a little emotional resonance.
Also, it was a book with a lot of pictures, yet it felt like it was doing a lot more “telling” at the end than “showing” which felt very odd for a book with such a key visual component
Not my favorite Rucka book, but not a bad read either.
This does contain one of my absolute favorite action movie moments, which is the part where two dudes in an office have this argument regarding embedded agents (paraphrased):
“If those men make a move, the terrorists will start shooting! The hostages won’t have a chance!
“Those men are the only chance those hostages have!”
I feel that, as a society, we should make a decision regarding this situation now, in the sober light of day, before our friends or daughters or whoever are revealed to be one of the kidnapped people. It comes up often enough in books and movies that we’re going to feel like real assholes if we don’t think it through ahead of time here.
I’m putting my vote in the Let’s Go For It camp. If these pieces of entertainment have taught me anything, it’s that there’s always one hotshot guy on the team who can’t hold back and is going to start shooting anyway. Or there’s one terrorist on THAT team who feels the need to continue doing his terrorist stuff, but also feels like this would be a good time to try and cop a feel off one of the hostages or something. That’s always bizarre too. Isn’t launching a nuclear missile enough? Do you really need to also grab someone’s ass? And then the ass grabber always gets very incensed when the terrorist leader says something like, “Hey, what the hell man? Let’s focus on this whole nuclear missile situation.” Seriously, the ass grabber acts offended, like the leader guy was telling him that he wasn’t going to be allowed to have a gun anymore, or that his menacing glare was now forbidden.
Anyway, this had almost nothing to do with Alpha. I’d recommend one of the Atticus Kodiak books first. But if you’re into those, Alpha will do you just fine.
What’s to say?
The author is great, and he’s written a lot of great stuff. This one just didn’t do much for me. It was a book where I found myself marking the page, closing the whole thing, and watching the bookmark’s slow march towards the back cover.
It does bring up a larger point that I’d like to think about a bit, however.
My brother started reading this before I did, and when I asked what he thought of it he said that it was a little “overwritten” which may be true, maybe not. I didn’t even ask for elaboration, but once that cat was out of its gilded bag, it was out big time.
The problem with going in after hearing this is that I was looking for it. Either seeing it and thinking, “My brother was totally right!” or seeing what I THOUGHT were the parts that were deemed overwritten and thinking “My brother is an asshole and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
The point, however, is that it made the book very difficult to enjoy on its own merits as I spent most of the time very aware of what I was looking for.
To make a comparison, it’s the same reason I really try to avoid movie trailers for movies that I want to see. New Batman? I’ll skip the trailers, thanks. Because I know I’m headed there anyway, so what’s the point in spoiling bits and pieces for myself? I’ll just be waiting for those parts to happen, and the whole movie becomes about waiting for the fulfillment I’m expecting rather than enjoying the ride.
Previews, trailers, and reviews all leave me feeling this way, and in general I try to avoid them.
With books it’s a little tougher. It’s a time commitment, and there’s so much out there that one can’t reasonably expect to hear about the next great book by word of mouth alone. I do think, and this isn’t another case of The Book v. The Movie, but I do think that a book has to be more attuned to a reader’s taste than a movie because it’s just plain a bigger time commitment and because I can’t read a book in the background while I’m folding laundry. Okay, more like while I’m calculating how long it would take to read all of Amazing Spider-Man, but same principle.
One could argue that audiobooks are an option here, but I find that I can only listen to certain kinds of books on audio. They have to be fast, keep my attention, and also written in such a way that I can zone out for 30 second stretches and then come back in. I rarely sit and just listen to an audiobook while doing nothing else.
So moving forward, learning something from this experience, I think my new plan is to avoid reviews and previews of books that I will probably read anyway. I picked up this book on my own and sort of stumbled into someone else’s review in conversation, which isn’t something I have to avoid too often. But from now on, when something comes out and I am interested based on the author, premise, or book jacket alone, I think that perhaps the best thing is to just give the damn thing a shot and see what happens.
It’s hard to give a book like this a bad review because my feelings about the author and my personal feelings about this whole situation definitely come into play. It’s a hard thing. You might want to give a book a two-star rating, but somehow differentiate that from giving a person or his life a two-star rating. The guy clearly went through some very rough things, and I don’t want to armchair quarterback his life.
The book feels, to me, like it was written too soon. In the thick of the whole thing. I don’t even mean too soon chronologically, but too soon psychologically. That’s the blanket feeling I’m tucking this one in with.
I DID, however, want to talk about the back of this book, the expectations it set up, and how it kind of spoiled the book for me.
I would preface this review with “spoiler alert” except for the fact that the only spoiler in here is one that’s on the back of the book.
“The only thing that kept him from the brink: his friendship with a girl named Laura, a classmate-an enigmatic crush- who walked Eric back to “normal.” Then, in a tragic twist of fate, Laura became a ghost herself.”
This is a prime example of what I like to call the Iron Man Setup.
Most people have seen the movie Iron Man, so I’m not going to explain the whole thing, but as in most super hero movies we go through a painfully slow origin process. Check out most super hero movies. It takes around 45 minutes before the first shield is thrown, web is slung, and flame is on’ed.
In the preview for Iron Man you see Tony Stark emerge from a cave in a primitive version of the Iron Man suit, at which point he promptly starts blowing up terrorists. Rad.
In the movie, Tony Stark is captured and made to work on some weird missile or some bullshit, and the whole time you’re supposed to be wondering how he’s going to get out of this pickle. EXCEPT THAT YOU SAW IN THE FUCKING PREVIEW THAT HE BUILDS AN IRON MAN SUIT AND BLOWS EVERYONE UP. Not to mention that you are 100% aware that you’re seeing Iron Man. It came up in huge letters on the screen, it’s printed on your ticket, there is a sign above the theater you entered. We are very prepared to see an Iron Man.
So, if I hadn’t seen that preview, and furthermore if I didn’t already know that the movie I was watching was Iron Man, this double-cross while he was supposed to be constructing a missile would probably be an awesome reveal. It would be a Welcome to the Matrix moment of pure fanboy glee. But it’s not. We already have every expectation that it’s coming. In fact, we as the audience know more about it than everyone in the goddamn movie. And two minutes into wondering if he’s really making the missile thingy, I’m squirming in my seat and thinking, Jesus Christ, get in the damn Iron Man suit already.
Alright, so the back of this book tells us that this key person dies. So you expect, and and honestly I thought, the book would have a lot more to do with the aftermath of this death than the death itself. At what point does our hero learn about this death? Page 259 of 305. Almost 85% of the way into the book. Moreover, he learns about it in a strange, revelatory sort of way. If the narrator is experiencing this as a surprise, if shock and surprise is part of the emotional equation, I need to experience that shock and surprise on some level too, and that’s just not possible for me as I’ve already known for 259 pages that it’s coming.
A celebrity among classics, I just read this for the first time at the age of 29. I don’t know how I ducked it up until now, although my memories of school and reading are sort of like that part in Lethal Weapon where they compare scars.
“Yeah, check this out. Scarlet Letter, O’brien’s class.”
“That’s nothing. Taming of the Shrew. Ellis, 8 AM block.”
“Oh yeah? Boom. Tale of Two Cities. Johnston. Right. After. Lunch. And, AND, we’re reading it out loud.”
So I guess you’ll have to excuse me for not making sure I hit all the classics.
There are two things that come up a lot when reading this book, other than the phrase, “Do you have to read it for a class?”
One is that this seems to be well-regarded as a good read, at least as classics go.
I think it’s warranted. I had a couple laughs, mostly because the main character hates school so much that she tries various schemes to get out of it, sort of like the wacky neighbor on a sitcom who’s always concocting a new way to make a million bucks. My favorite scheme was experimenting with swearing. That one hit home. Hit it real fucking shit ass hard.
It also was more relatable than a lot of classics. It had a neighborhood I could recognize, a court where the judge wasn’t dressed like some kind of weird king. There’s a school pageant. There’s the weird haunted house that all the kids are afraid of. All stuff that I could understand, probably due to the fact that it was published in 1960, which is shockingly contemporary for a classic. Seriously, check out this list: http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/c…
400 years old is bad enough. Then you get to the Odyssey. Jesus Christ.
The Canterbury Tales is purportedly hilarious. Or bawdy, rather. Bawdy seems to be the word people use when they mean something is funny in a sex way that’s too old-timey for me to understand. It means that they’ll use weird terms for things, like “picking up the old bridle while wearing white gloves, if you get me.”
And seriously, all I can think of when I read stuff that old is going back in time with a machine gun. I wonder if you went back to Odyssey days if you would just be unstoppable. Maybe an arrow would get you eventually? Then I start thinking about bringing kevlar and night vision and things get real nuts. It’s hard for me to focus on the narrative is what I’m saying here.
Anyway, I’m sure a lot of this older stuff was probably good, but it’s too old for me to really appreciate. Mockingbird is pretty good now, but it just seems foolish to ignore the fact that this book is really on the contemporary end of the classics spectrum and to miss attributing some of my enjoyment to that fact.
The other thing I hear a lot is questioning about why Harper Lee only wrote this one book. If it’s so great, and if she did this one right out of the gate, why stop?
I can’t really speculate on her motivations. But I can say why I’m down with it.
Every band, almost without exception, puts out at least one more album than they should. One is a low number. One if they’re lucky.
Any number of theories go into it. There’s the common wisdom that you have your whole life to write the first album and about 9 months to write the second one. There’s the idea that people become famous and lose touch with what made them great artists. There’s the idea that you wrote what you knew, and now you have to either learn something else or write something you don’t know. Any one or any combination of these could be true.
It would be pretty killer if a band put out their one great album and called it a life. I can respect that. I can respect someone who walks away when they’ve done what they wanted to do.
Maybe Harper Lee had something even better in her. Maybe not. It’s impossible to say. In fact, even if she published something else it would be impossible to say as no matter what she did, it would be relentlessly compared to Mockingbird. There’s no escape from legacy, and it doesn’t matter if the legacy is good or bad.
The only thing I can really say definitively is that we should be fine with it. Let’s not demand more and more and more from people who create stuff. You know who probably knows best whether she has another good book in her? Harper Lee. If she doesn’t feel like it, or doesn’t want to, or is certain her next book isn’t very good, that’s her prerogative, and we’d do ourselves a service if we started respecting that kind of decision. Yeah, she might be wrong. But it’s her choice to make.
I thought it would be really interesting to see what a bunch of different people would put on their bookshelves. And it was. Sort of. Sometimes.
This book is a fun idea, but there were two big disappoints for me.
The first was that, as with any collection where multiple writers contribute, the writing was really uneven and the reading experience suffers.
Half way through this book, it hit me: Is this why people are always telling me that they don’t get into short stories? Is part of the problem that most people are reading collections based around a theme or distinction (Best Southern Women with Yankee Husbands Written Exclusively in October Short Stories) as opposed to a collection by one author?
If you do that:
No. Bad! Bad reader!
I’m not one to say how one should read all that often, but trust me on this, almost every collection by different authors is going to delight and frustrate you in equal measure.
This book, having one page by all different people, was like reading one of these collections.
If you haven’t done it, pick a collection by a short story author. One voice comes through, and you’ll probably feel differently. I can highly recommend Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and the Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard.
Okay, back to the bookshelves.
The biggest surprise? The part I probably enjoyed most?
James Patterson.
Yep, old Mr. Ampersand himself.
I know he gets a mound of shit because he writes what many of us consider garbage. When he even writes it himself. However, given one page and talking about books, the man was entertaining, made me laugh a little, and impressed me. If the assignment was, “Here’s a couple hundred words. Use them to convince someone to pursue your work” he would have made the top of my list.
Now, I’m not going to go read any of his stuff because I’m confident that I wouldn’t enjoy it much because thrillers don’t do a lot for me, and I’m already reading Modelland by Tyra Banks. I can only read one book that I’m hating at a time. But if I hadn’t heard of any of these people, I might have considered him near the top.
The other thing is, the other problem I had with the contributors to this book? They basically convinced me that anyone who considers him or herself a designer is kind of a shithead. Oh, and chefs.
Maybe Shitheads is a bit strong. What I mean to say is, their perspective on books is very boring.
What kind of books did most of the designers have? Books about design. What kind of books did the chefs have? Cookbooks. Instructional materials related to their trades.
Now, this sort of makes sense, but what did writers have on their shelves?
Novels. Books that exist as books as opposed to a means of communicating information.
For the most part, the writers didn’t seem to feel that instructional, how-to books belonged on their ideal shelves. That made a lot of sense to me. You get good at writing books not by reading about books, but by reading books.
A fun game I played was to flip through this book and see, without looking at the author name, if you could determine whether the person was a writer or not. I went about 90% accuracy. A few editors threw me off, and a couple other creative types were also very impressive in their reading.
The designers were the worst. A lot of them would point out a book and then talk about what an inspiration this or that Swiss guy was. Boring. Then they would expound on their own design philosophy. Double Boring.
It was disappointing, really. To go the other way, me being a book person, if you asked me about my favorite design work, I don’t think I would point to book covers right off just because that’s the world I’m in. If you asked me about my favorite movies, they wouldn’t be ones that are about books just because I deal in books all the time.
I would think that designers would want to draw inspiration from a variety of sources, but instead it seemed like they only wanted to talk about design.
And I’m sure that some of the designers in this book are highly respected and classy and all that horseshit. But I’d probably still take James Patterson’s ideal bookshelf over most of theirs.