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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
I really wish I had read this book before I saw the movie. Unfortunately, not having done so, I feel like it spoiled the book for me a bit. It also wasn't tied up as neatly as in the movie, which I usually prefer in books, but instead found unfulfilling. I enjoyed the fucked-up writer neurosis, if a little over the top at times. Chabon is really good with character quirks, and so I felt as though I could see all characters incredibly well. He managed to make Grady an epic douche, yet leave enough there to be somewhat endearing. I felt as though Grady was on some sort of wayward odyssey, but nothing noble or heroic. If nothing else, Grady's journey only sees him to the point of a new beginning, though I suppose at times we all should find ourselves so lucky. It felt decidedly male, had a strong sense of randomness... a lack of clear direction, but I enjoyed it. It reminds me that life is messy, particularly the life of a writer. It's something worth recognizing.
adventurous
medium-paced
I had a great time reading this. I almost wish there had been more of it to enjoy, but I also think it was pretty much perfect as it was. Now I'd like to see the movie again -- I'm surprised by how little of it I could recall as I read the book.
emotional
funny
lighthearted
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I mostly enjoyed this. I think its treatment of race was pretty disastrous, it tried to be trans-inclusive but was transphobic, and its women characters were barely fleshed out, but as far as books go about stoner English professors going on lil adventures with their bros go, it went down pretty easy. I remember liking the movie when I saw it a million years ago, I may check it out again.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug abuse, Racism, Alcohol
While I had a hard time getting started, once I sat down for a couple of focused reading sessions, I was hooked once again by the beautiful craftsmanship of Michael Chabon. The story was engaging, but I mostly enjoyed reading it just for the sake of the writing.
I almost gave this four stars. Chabon is a pretty great writer, which admittedly doesn't mean he's a great novelist, but does definitely help things. Some of the sentences and passages here had me violently amused or intensely awed. Some I had to share with others, anyone who would listen.
I found this to be overall a pretty flawed novel, though. Crabtree and Grady are great characters, and so is James Leer. Hannah Green is not a great character, or even a good one. The same description basically applies to every character in the book outside the main trio, who are the only characters in the book that aren't cardboard. Some of the quirk and weirdness is just there for itself, serving no purpose and telling no truths, sort of like the extraneous bits in Grady's novel. This is possibly intentional, but still annoying. The Passover stuff in the middle of the novel goes on far too long. I can't say the novel has much of any real interest to say about writers or writing. It's just a good comic adventure novel tinged with a real sadness.
I think what bugged me most was that Chabon's writerly weaknesses reminded me of my own. Except that I think I'm probably not anywhere near as good as he is. This thought depressed me, and soured the experience of reading the last fifty or so pages of the book.
It's good. Read it. Just don't go in with great expectations, or come out praising it as a literary masterpiece. That would annoy me.
I found this to be overall a pretty flawed novel, though. Crabtree and Grady are great characters, and so is James Leer. Hannah Green is not a great character, or even a good one. The same description basically applies to every character in the book outside the main trio, who are the only characters in the book that aren't cardboard. Some of the quirk and weirdness is just there for itself, serving no purpose and telling no truths, sort of like the extraneous bits in Grady's novel. This is possibly intentional, but still annoying. The Passover stuff in the middle of the novel goes on far too long. I can't say the novel has much of any real interest to say about writers or writing. It's just a good comic adventure novel tinged with a real sadness.
I think what bugged me most was that Chabon's writerly weaknesses reminded me of my own. Except that I think I'm probably not anywhere near as good as he is. This thought depressed me, and soured the experience of reading the last fifty or so pages of the book.
It's good. Read it. Just don't go in with great expectations, or come out praising it as a literary masterpiece. That would annoy me.
Honestly, I rarely give up on books, but I just felt like I was wasting my time with this one. Didn’t feel like spending my free time listening to the internal monologue of some pretentious, self-absorbed dude as he fucks up his life, and while others seem to love Chabon’s prose, it didn’t draw me in nearly enough to make up for how uninteresting I found the plot and characters.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
Moderate: Transphobia
So I read this book because a) there's a movie, and Downey Jr.'s in it, and that's always a good reason to watch a movie, b) it's by Michael Chabon, who wrote The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, c) this review from Goodreads which had the following quote:
By the end of that brilliantly written paragraph I'd fallen in love with Sara (because you know, she totally understands that awful sinking feeling you get when you're on a bus and there's another hour to go but you've finished the book in your hand and you don't have another one in your bag and oh no what is there to do for an hour?).
But then I did read the book, and I hated the main character, and also the entire supporting cast, which was awful, because how much I like a book often has a lot to do with how much I like the characters (see [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340163129s/4671.jpg|245494], another fine example of a book with a whole crew of characters that I had the uncontrollable urge to kill with fire) and so despite Chabon's flaw-free writing, I strong disliked Wonders Boys, too. If Chabon wasn't so excellent at stringing words together I'd probably have given up on the book really early on.
Bonus! Other stuff I highlighted in the book:
"Sara would read anything you handed her--Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet--at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house--reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania--and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine."
By the end of that brilliantly written paragraph I'd fallen in love with Sara (because you know, she totally understands that awful sinking feeling you get when you're on a bus and there's another hour to go but you've finished the book in your hand and you don't have another one in your bag and oh no what is there to do for an hour?).
But then I did read the book, and I hated the main character, and also the entire supporting cast, which was awful, because how much I like a book often has a lot to do with how much I like the characters (see [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340163129s/4671.jpg|245494], another fine example of a book with a whole crew of characters that I had the uncontrollable urge to kill with fire) and so despite Chabon's flaw-free writing, I strong disliked Wonders Boys, too. If Chabon wasn't so excellent at stringing words together I'd probably have given up on the book really early on.
Bonus! Other stuff I highlighted in the book:
"She was a natural blonde, with delicare hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives."
"I had known plenty of movie lovers in my life, from imaginary drag queens who idolized the great female faces to nostalgia addicts who climbed into a movie as into a time machine or a bottle of whiskey and set the dial for "never come back"; and to one degree or another the obsession, like all obsessions, implied a certain windy emptiness within.
I read The Wonder Boys because it was mentioned in a footnote in a qualitative research book, and I’m sat here not really knowing what to say about it. I enjoyed it and it was surprisingly immersive (it felt like I blinked and 50 pages had flown by!) but I wasn’t overwhelmed with any particular feeling because of it. It has a very Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque energy to it, just from the perspective of a middle-aged man, and it evoked a similar sense of ‘Well, I’ve read it and it was good’. Worth a read but it didn’t blow my mind as it has done for others.
adventurous
funny
medium-paced