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torchlab's Reviews (135)
I liked this a lot while I was reading it and then like never thought about it again once I was done.
Pretty decent collection—not the best Didion book, but then Didion at her not-best is better than most essayists at their best. I liked the one about why she writes.
Alexander Chee is one of the greatest essayists alive. This collection would be worth it purely for the one about gardening and the one about writing his first novel. The fact that there are several other uniformly excellent essays in here too is just astounding. If you want to write nonfiction, or anything really, these are essays to, like, study.
Like, it was fine. Farcical, and unrealistic, and only sometimes 100% on the mark in its satire, but fine.
I didn't buy into this fully until the main character got her agent but from that point on I was ALL IN. Last chapter or so I just raced towards the end with tears in my eyes to see if she would get everything she wanted. As a young and somewhat broke writer working on my first novel while holding down a full-time job I derived a lot of hope from this book.
my first time reading a Zambreno after wanting to for a while, so expectations were high. A lot of lovely language in here, great sentences, crisp and heady detail. Nothing of much substance happens though—which can be very true to life! Just not what I usually go in for when reading fiction. I did make a list of all the books and writers referenced in this book so I could look them up later lol
A fast, snappy, weird read. Main character is really on some straight girl bullshit but it's written so well that I was nevertheless down. If you read an edition that has the author interview in the back you'll find that Melissa Broder wrote this in large part via dictation while she was driving around Los Angeles, and once I read that I was like ohhhhhh that makes sense. The prose feels very.... speakable, in a way.
Wah holy shit this book is perfect. I cried like twice. There are so many things to love about this book so I'll just single out one I particularly admired: it is so good at capturing Houston, so lovingly attentive to the texture and the air of it, that I felt by the end that I'd just spent a week's time there despite never having been to Texas in my life.
Soooooo funny and so memorable even though it took me forever to get through for some reason. One of the highest perfect-sentence densities of any book I've read. I've never encountered a narrative voice quite like Cassandra's and I don't think I ever will