jentang's reviews
80 reviews

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

3.0

In one of his movies, Woody Allen described himself as being boyish despite his age due to everlasting immaturity. This book reflects that accurately - not in a bad sense; it just happens to read overwhelmingly like the product of a high schooler who, priding themselves on possessing intellectual wit superior to that of their peers, is a little too outspoken in their AP Literature course for even their teacher's taste. From a different angle, Allen's collection of silly short stories is reminiscent of a book of fables or folktales, but if they were [largely] all about inferior shmucks caught in barrages of snark. Its serving size could probably generously be quantified as a short story a day. Read too many of them in one uninterrupted session, and they begin to seem like they're meant for a middle school reading level. The

"and as for me? Well..."

way in which he ends pretty much every story becomes uninspired and inexplicably irksome. I favored the stories that were even a touch different: Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut; The Rejection; Above the Law Below the Box Spring (Amarillo, TX shoutout here..). This book is a testament to Allen's wit, yes, but it also demonstrates Allen's clear stronger ability to pull off stylistic repetition in his films over his non-visual media works. I would say, skip this book and just watch four Woody Allen films in a row for a much more satisfying time. 

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

2.5

Disgusting, nonsensical, utterly pointless - that's Naked Lunch. If you gave A Clockwork Orange a hard time for having its own language, just wait until you crack open this sucker! The words in this book are strung together in an entirely seizure-like manner; you may almost begin to understand, but you will lose all comprehension mid-sentence, albeit to no fault of your own. While Burroughs certainly used a great deal of drug-fueled creativity to write in such a scrambled, fractured manner, it was wholly disappointing to see there was no extension of this originality into the topics themselves which he wrote about. Of what was intelligible from the taboo matters Burroughs touched on, I felt most were written in a quite juvenile fashion. Ideas were repeated excessively; one squirm-inducing subject having to do with bodily functions would sprawl irritatingly on for multiple consecutive pages on top of being woven through the entire book. I almost quit a fourth of the way through, failing to see how revolutionary this novel was (there was only one brief section almost 200 pages in IIRC that I actually found amusing and pertinent to culture + society), and I don't believe that my feelings would have been generally different if I had. I was fond of the author's notes and whatnot that came at the very end of the restored text; while swiftly running readers through something akin to a drug index, Burroughs demonstrated actual normalcy, and a flair that I recognize in Infinite Jest as well. Had this flair been recognizable within the book itself, I suspect I may have joined the literary critics in calling this a masterpiece. A pity

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

5.0

This is, without a doubt, my favorite of Murakami's works that I've read to date. This book is true to the core of Murakami's stylistic essence, and yet it possesses almost none of the self sabotage usually exhibited within his works that causes me to grit my teeth; what little it does have falls away in the grand scheme of the haunting, blurred-borders world contained within this novel. The pure imaginative skill it took to weave together so many parallel characters, each with their own mystique, into one connected sphere with origins from decades past is fantastic to even just imagine. I can't help but gush over this book - it reminds me of a completed version of Kafka's "The Castle", of which I have been mourning the missing ending since I read it in the summer of 2022. Anywho, Murakami's mystery permeated my reality ever so naturally and subtly; how could it not, with the (typically) indirect poised questions on the powers of fate and self on every page? This deeply gripping existential fodder is passed along to readers through women who are more powerful and purposeful than they are sex objects and men who have well established identities not tied to the opposite sex - this excited me greatly, given Murakami's reputation. I found myself identifying heavily with Kumiko, and was delighted that she never met crippling destruction to her character's spirit at Murakami's hand despite being the most probable woman to do so in the novel. I'm not sure how Murakami understands how a young woman might be impacted by long-term, self-imposed isolation within the mind and a damaged sense of self derived from complex family dynamics, down to the way she behaves in her relationships and what love she might have for cats, but I suppose it's in the same way that Woody Allen seems to understand his younger lovers in his films. On top of the neat exploration into control and chance that it already is, this book is (I'm assuming) also a political and historical commentary on Japan's state of affairs. It is my deep regret that I have no historical knowledge or interest, disallowing me from speaking further on this matter, but I was not any the less dissuaded from gobbling up even the paragraphs focusing strictly on setting historical context for a scene with ties to Japan's presence in Manchuria, which must say something on its own. I truly wish I could dissect this book from start to finish, or even summarize some of Murakami's techniques and most unique elements of creative flair, but it's genuinely so unique that doing so would be an impossible feat for me. In a much less showy way of imploring you to read this: the book started with

cooking spaghetti

, and ended with

the moon and duckpeople

. I'm not sure a book has ever spoken to me on such a personal level more.

Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim

2.75

The one thing I didn't expect to feel from this book was an uncanny connection with Brian over our remarkably similar childhood "UFO" experiences. Unfortunately, this was one of the only positive things I felt the entire latter half of the read. (Perhaps I am just riding on that aforementioned nutcase connection here, but I thought the book was fine, and even quite engaging, up until Brian and Neil reached adolescence) The writing in this wasn't bad at all; while I would hesitate to call it immersive in any way, it had a languid flow that made reading honestly pleasant. This was counteracted nicely by the tension being drummed up in Neil's parts - before his storyline was soured by an irritating emphasis on how edgy and rebellious he became into his teen years and beyond. I understand the purpose of this choice, but the effects of molestation could have been displayed in a much more tasteful manner, as crude as that sounds. The unnecessary dips into things like the genuinely awful and irrelevant snippets of poetry Neil's friend wrote not only made me question whether or not I really did have a legitimate paperback in my hands in place of a computer with a compilation of TikTok comment section writing open; they also took away from space that could have been better utilized for actual plot development, the lack of which made the entire premise of the book's storyline - which started off quite interesting - unreasonable and nonsensical. I am quite inexplicably mad at myself for reading this all the way through.

The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski

2.75

the things book #2 for my urban planning course did for me:
1) allowed me to write possibly the most underwhelming, impersonal essay i've written to date on the broad definition of architecture
2) made me feel like i had the inside scoop on what goes on in the studies of my dear busy bee architect friend, who once texted me: "i thought of you this morning when we were going over how dirt expands and contracts with weather and we have to consider that when deciding the depth of the foundation"

My Twisted World by Elliot Rodger
Did not finish book.

um. duh. don't have the energy to bully him today but i could endlessly. his life started going downhill when he started playing world of warcraft and i don't think that's a coincidence.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher

i really don't feel knowledgeable enough on any political or economical affair to leave a rating for this book, but i want to applaud Fisher for the digestibility of his writing. he serves as prime evidence that you don't need to litter your work with jargon and words used most commonly in a thesaurus in order to be credible, that you need not be afraid your arguments will actually be understood by someone who has never attended Cambridge with a political concentration. of Fisher's remarks on the implications of capitalist realism on our world that i felt i wholly grasped, it's unfortunately commendable just how right he has continued to be into today. we are still living through the death of culture here and now, just as we were when fisher wrote this book. merely an hour ago, i read a thread posted about how the accessibility of therapy is essentially eroding the resilience of children (their child had been offered a trauma counselor after a kid on their sports team was accidentally elbowed in the eye by another child, therefore needing stitches). i think it's safe to say that this would never have been a thought crossing anyone's mind seventy years ago, much less one that inspired over 200 comments of discussion in the span of a few hours today, and one Fisher already had broken down fourteen years ago. anyways, don't give me another work of political and philosophical commentary unless it also imagines "the Marxist Supernanny". 

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

2.75

i shoved this book down my throat in two days flat so i could churn out a 2000 word book review. (highly don't recommend doing so! oops!) as i actually start my review i'll be revisiting this a lot more, and might even include an excerpt of some of my thoughts once they've been transcribed digitally. for now, though: i'm a complete novice to city planning. my suburban ass has not thought about how baltimore has been developed and maintained throughout the years!!!! nonetheless, i felt that jacobs' work was a good, digestible introduction to the field. especially in the beginning, her psychological-related concepts registered quite easily in my mind. there is no doubt that she's a pioneer in her field, and i'm as close to excited as i can be to read the ideas of her opponent, robert moses, sometime in the future. i do wish that she had been less repetitive, wordy, and thoroughly contradictory in her own writing. it's hard to understand the ideal course for city planning when one page says that old buildings are necessary in cities, the next says that they're useless in others, and yet another says that they don't matter whatsoever. jacobs has sufficiently cemented in my mind the true complexities of city planning, both through what she wrote and the way in which she wrote it. (it's true that i said just a few sentences ago that her writing was digestible; i suppose this is the effect of inhaling 472 pages of her style)

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

4.25

In a shocking turn of events, I watched Michael Haneke's adaptation of this book before I ever touched a page of it (although, I did only watch the first and second-to-last scene with

Erika pulling out her mother's hair

and

Erika's r@pe

, respectively). I would cite the emphasis on the tangibility of the three characters' humanity as the main difference between the movie and this book. In the movie, I got the impression that Erika was thoroughly resolute and stone-cold, while Klemmer was so much more ingrained in normalcy, a boy - not a man - so afflicted by his infatuation with his so nearly unattainable teacher that he cracked and did the unthinkable to have her. On paper, the roles seem to have been reversed. Jelinek reveals Klemmer's sinister internal workings, his crude and uncaring predatory gaze. Erika, on the other hand, fully sinks over the course of the novel into the role of child inflicted upon her by her mother for all of her life, one that she had only ever temporarily escaped from whenever she was instructing pupils like Klemmer. As soon as her barricaded heart is touched by another unwavering source of psychotic attention, the only thing she knows as love, a repressed side of her comes out, sexual on a surface level but driven heavily by her desperate need for the rest of her person that her mother had kept under lock and key for so long that Klemmer was fighting to reach (or so she believed). Her mother is so much more deranged than even the movie lets on, seeing her daughter as entirely a commodity even in the most troubling of times when you would think some semblance of a true motherly instinct would appear. In this book, Erika's sealed away heart is actually bared, leaving her as the least unfathomable character. For any reader following any normal moral code, this is a challenging book to get through; this is the case for reasons more trivial than its disturbing plot, even. Its level of induced captivation waxes and wanes. The writing has a tendency to drawl and repeat itself. Nevertheless, when things get going, I find the conveyance at certain times to be quite impressive. (One of the most stand-out parts of the story for me was when Klemmer read Erika's letter. There, a literary cacophony took place. It was overwhelming, perturbing, and ensnaring all at once.) All in all, I don't believe I've ever read anything like this before, and while I think I'll be just fine without reading anything like this again for quite some time, this book is utterly something else.

The Wild Truth: A Memoir by Carine McCandless

3.25

it feels strange assigning a numerical rating to this book, and i want to preface my review by saying that the number of stars i've chosen to give it are absolutely not meant to speak on the quality of the book, but rather quantitatively measure my subjective feelings coming away from it - a lot of my opinions were formed with full acknowledgment of the connection i felt to the mccandless siblings due to the remarkable similarities between their relationship with their parents and mine with my own. it's not surprising that this book garners most of its reads as it did mine: through capitalizing, for lack of a better word, off the public's interest in carine's brother chris. this is an important book to pick up for anyone who wants to learn more about the true chris as opposed to the version of him sensationalized in death. it cements him as a very real person, not the untouchable man who belonged to the wild he often gets portrayed as, and shatters the hurtful narrative spun through various forms of media and the mccandless siblings' parents themselves that he came from a loving home that he discarded spitefully. nonetheless, this is carine's memoir, and chris is not the central focus. reading this was almost cathartic for me, as i, for a long period of my life, was in more or less the same position as carine, and as a child had a mindset that aligned closely with both siblings'. with our identical family dynamics, in a weird way, i felt somewhat spoken for as well whenever carine would explain the nuances of walter and billie's places in her and her brother's lives. with all that aside, i didn't find this to be a must-read. this was the story of a woman's (absolutely far from finished) life centered around her ebb-and-flow relationship with her parents. beyond room for self-identification, which admittedly can feel nice, i don't know what i was supposed to gain from this speed-run of carine's life endeavors and her seemingly never-ending relapse-type concessions with her parents. there's no shortage of people who come from dysfunctional families and who, for the rest of their lives, are forced to make it on their own all the while trying to figure out where they fall individually on the moral spectrum of tolerance towards family. i'm happy that carine had the opportunity to publish a memoir speaking on her personal experiences; she truly has dealt with a lot more than most, and i felt legitimate sorrow for her. if publishing this brought her peace, if only for speaking out against lies damaging to her brother's memory, then that's really all that matters. i suppose at the end of the day, my rating comes from my own deeply suppressed, twisted bitterness that in my lifetime i'll never accomplish what chris did, and i'll never be heard like carine; so, take it with a grain of salt.