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andipants 's review for:
Imagine Wanting Only This
by Kristen Radtke
I can't honestly decide how I feel about this book. There were several bits of it that really resonated with me individually, and some of the writing was downright gorgeous, but a lot of it felt distant and kind of pointless. There were a lot of narrative threads, but they never really came together for any kind of meaningful discussion or conclusion; the whole thing seemed to end up being a meditation on the meaninglessness of life, which did not feel particularly original or worthwhile.
Other reviewers here have commented on the author's privilege and insulated worldview, and I definitely get a bit of that. I went to college in a town of 40,000 people in rural western Illinois. The student population featured a high percentage of Chicagoland natives, and I would often hear them make patronizing little remarks about it being such a "small town", which sounded ridiculous to me, having grown up in the country surrounded by isolated towns in the one-to-two-thousand range. Early on in the book, when she refers to Gary, IN, a city of 80,000 souls, as "almost completely abandoned", my eyes about rolled out of my head.
And despite all her contemplation, the narrator strikes me as almost incurious; she travels extensively and sees amazing things, and then she bends and trims them to fit them into her viewpoint, rather than altering or expanding her viewpoint to take in new perspectives. The title strikes me as an interesting choice, because it seems like the author can't imagine another's perspective and doesn't really try. It's all navel-gazing and no exploration. Despite all her wanderings and gathering of facts, she seems to learn and grow surprisingly little.
Other reviewers here have commented on the author's privilege and insulated worldview, and I definitely get a bit of that. I went to college in a town of 40,000 people in rural western Illinois. The student population featured a high percentage of Chicagoland natives, and I would often hear them make patronizing little remarks about it being such a "small town", which sounded ridiculous to me, having grown up in the country surrounded by isolated towns in the one-to-two-thousand range. Early on in the book, when she refers to Gary, IN, a city of 80,000 souls, as "almost completely abandoned", my eyes about rolled out of my head.
And despite all her contemplation, the narrator strikes me as almost incurious; she travels extensively and sees amazing things, and then she bends and trims them to fit them into her viewpoint, rather than altering or expanding her viewpoint to take in new perspectives. The title strikes me as an interesting choice, because it seems like the author can't imagine another's perspective and doesn't really try. It's all navel-gazing and no exploration. Despite all her wanderings and gathering of facts, she seems to learn and grow surprisingly little.