jodiwilldare's reviews
1520 reviews

I picked up Totally Killer by Greg Olear because of the cassette on the cover, which I spied on his Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay. There’s something in my genetic makeup that makes it nearly impossible for me to pass up any book with a cassette tape on the cover. Somewhere buried deep in my subconscious is the girl who spend all Sunday taping her favorite songs off America’s Top 40 countdown, and apparently she’s the on in charge of book selections.

I stuck with the book despite my extreme annoyance because it’s the November pick for Rock & Roll Bookclub.

As a reader, I rarely question an author’s Point of View (POV) choices. I figure it’s their story they can tell it how they want to. However, this is not the case with Totally Killer. In fact, I spent the first half of the book so annoyed by Olear’s POV choice that I nearly abandoned it. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t.

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Kundera would have done a better service to his readers had he made a decision about whether he was writing a book of personal essays or a novel.

Since The Umbrella Academy Volume 1: Apocalypse Suite was written by Gerard Way of the band My Chemical Romance (whose music I am not familiar with at all), I decided it totally counts as part of the Rock & Roll June project. For the uninitiated, Rock & Roll June is where I spend the month reading Rock & Roll books.

Since I’m knee deep in a few other Rock & Roll books, and since I wanted to start the month off right, I decided to squeeze in this delectable graphic novel in quick. It was a solid choice.

If Preludes & Nocturnes was the Goth Family Robinson, The Umbrella Academy is the Emo Family Robinson, which is not a complaint.

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What an unusual book. Even for a graphic novel, Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is unlike anything I ever read before. I picked it up because Shapton mentioned Big Star’s song “Thirteen” in her Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay. Yes, that’s really all it takes. Anyway, this graphic novel is presented as an auction catalog, and chronicles the rise and fall of Lenore and Harold’s relationship through their stuff.

Stuff. Huh.

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Near as I can tell, I stopped reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sometime around Tuesday, May 8, 2007. I know this because when I cracked open the book a few weeks ago, a ticket stub for an Elvis Costello concert fell out.

I stopped reading because the buzz for Diaz’s much-anticipated first novel was exploding all over the place. See, it’d been ten years since the publication of his short story collection Drown which is nothing short of fan-fucking-tastic. The buzz for Oscar Wao was big, and buzz scares the shit out of me.

Generally you can’t win with a buzz book. Either you’re a contrarian naysayer who doesn’t like anything “popular” or you’re just another pathetic hipster following the heard. As a reader the buzz paralyzes me because while I’m trying to read the book I continue to have an internal debate with the buzzmakers. It’s a mess, so I just generally avoid the buzz book until all has died down (this explains why I have yet to get past page nine of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs).

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Hank Meyerson is that friend who takes a really, really long time to tell a story. Sure once you reach the end where the awesome is you’ve kind of forgiven him for taking the slow, meandering route, but still . . .

In Scott Muskin’s novel The Annunciations of Hank Meyerson, Mama’s Boy and Scholar, Hank tells us his entire life’s story. Much like most people’s lives, Hank’s life has a lot of really interesting and a hell of a lot of not so interesting. Unfortunately, we get a great deal of both in this book.

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I’ve grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in English 101 if I Hadn’t Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me. The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred for life.

Then I kept reading about Love is a Four-Letter Word, subtitled True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, edited by Michael Taeckens. It worried me and then I saw that the introduction was by Neal Pollack, and made me even more worried. But ultimately I was won over by the author list — Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Dan Kennedy, and Said Saytafiezadeh.

Thank god I put my fears aside and dove in. This was fun.

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