torchlab's reviews
129 reviews

Drifts by Kate Zambreno

3.0

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  

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

3.5

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.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

5.0

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.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

4.0

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

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

4.5

I mean it's David Graeber. It's gonna be a serve no matter what. There were parts of this book—mainly in the section on labor and U.S. history—where I thought Graeber could've attended more directly to the racialized dimensions of labor and capital. Other than that though this was a deeply researched masterfully written SERVE of a book. 

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

4.0

A quick, interesting read. I am not a huge poetry reader so I picked this book up in part to understand why I'm turned off by poetry. Its central argument—that all poems are an attempt to imagine a perfect ideal form of Poetry and thus all poems necessarily fail to fulfill this ideal—is one of those great counterintuitive literary criticism theses that just animates a whole text.

Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

2.0

I wish I'd liked this book more. The premise was great and I was all in for the first 50 pages or so. Then it started to fall apart. Felt pretty boring and almost procedurally written in places: the characters didn't talk or act like real people but rather like representations of whatever lesson they were in the story to teach the protagonist. The ending felt rushed and far too neat. I think this book could've benefited from less textual or authorial desire to fit into a tidy narrative arc, with a concrete beginning, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion, etc... It just maybe would've worked better with less plot lol that sounds weird w/e

Appropriate: A Provocation by Paisley Rekdal

3.5

This book was full of well-articulated and prescient insights about the nature and ethics of appropriation in literature, but I thought it was a little too long and as a result felt redundant in parts. Still, Rekdal is an excellent writer who's clearly devoted a lot of deep and serious thought to this topic, and the examples she writes about are fascinating and wisely chosen. Well worth a read.

Problems by Jade Sharma

4.5

mannnn this book was so fucking good. My main emotion after finishing this is a deep sadness that this is the only jade sharma book that will ever exist. My other main emotion is gratitude that it exists in the first place. I feel like this is a story that very well could have been ignored forever but i'm so glad it wasn't / isn't. And I mean with a writer like sharma, whose prose and details are so good that they are impossible to look away from, that just adds a whole other layer of "FUCKING READ THIS" to this book.