Isadore Ducasse

Snoozer

Revisado: 02-07-21

I appreciate this book's spirit of redemption at such a time in our miserable history. McBride really works to show the positive potential in everyone in this book.

That said, this book bored me to tears. Something about its tone reminded me of a ghetto version of that 90s dramady Northern Exposure, which always made me feel like I was just doing time with a cast of flawed but lovable characters with nothing important to tell me.

Several of the situations and plot twists seemed forced and implausible, and many of the dialogue scenes seemed to drag on needlessly to the point of empty repetition, like he was filling a word quota.

The narrator, meanwhile, was just awful, like he too was bored with the book. So plodding, and the worst Italian and Irish and hispanic accents I've ever heard.

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Wasted Opportunity

Revisado: 11-05-18

While this book did help me to understand the suffering of rape victims and the morbidly obese, it reads more like a therapy session than a memoir. All tell, no show, and the telling alternates between resentful and self-pitying, “over and over and over again” (one of her favorite phrases, in fact). While I can imagine being gang raped at twelve could result in a morbid relationship with food, her claim that being raped made her consciously decide to get as fat as possible to avoid being raped again rings more like a rationalization than a direct cause. And what about morbidly obese people who don’t have the excuse of having been raped? Do they deserve to suffer the shame Gay resents society for saddling her with, or are our addictions and our bodies much more complicated than that and simply nobody else’s damn business? And her claim to have gone through so many (seemingly countless by her count) “long” and unsatisfying relationships while most of us can count the relationships we’ve had, both satisfying and not, on our ten digits by her age, doesn’t jibe with her claim that society shuns fat bodies. She claims this book was “the hardest thing” she’s ever written, but I think she should have had to work much, much harder to make it a story to enthrall readers instead of an angry and defensive confession to an imaginary therapist. Literary stars get to publish anything they want, seemingly without editors’ input, these days. I’d say beware of all the five-star adulation on this one, and go read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings if you want a truly great memoir by a black woman who was raped as a young girl and turned her suffering into art.

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Great Hmong history, lousy literature

Revisado: 10-12-18

I liked learning about Hmong history and culture, but this book’s relentlessly over-the-top sentimentality was too much for me. Especially the third act: just because you really really loved your grandma and felt really really sad that she died does not make it a good story worth telling every trivial detail about. And her one-note narrative voice, that seemed always to be begging for sympathy instead of creating it with a plot that does more than enumerate all the things that happened, made listening all the more difficult. I got the feeling the story was too close to her, that she was doing therapy rather than creating art.

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S*It

Revisado: 02-25-18

Any additional comments?

I liked the character development for awhile, but the writing became more and more sentimental, bloated, and corny the more King's absurd cosmology came into view. I guess no one dared try to edit him at this point. Nor was I ever the slightest bit frightened. Want a really scary book? Check out House of Leaves. It's way more intelligent too.

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Loved it at first, and then...

Revisado: 08-24-14

Any additional comments?

The first 2/3 of this book are fantastic on every level, but then it begins to read like an unexciting list, information flying faster and faster at the reader as, somehow, less and less seems to happen. I think this book could have been Pulitzer material if Sacochis had taken another year or two make the final third comparable to the first two thirds.

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What a Loss!

Revisado: 08-24-14

Any additional comments?

Great writing, great story. I learned and was entertained, and never felt like the writing was sub-par.

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Great History, Lousy Narrative

Revisado: 08-24-14

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For history buffs, this book is invaluable, but it reads like a long list of names, dates, and events (and then....and then....and then....), and it's impossible to keep track of all the names (and multiple variations on all the names). I mistakenly thought Young Stalin was a fictionalization of real events and would read more like a novel. I wish I'd been right.

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Liked it better than The Zero

Revisado: 01-05-13

Any additional comments?

Thanks to Ballerini's virtuoso performance, this is a book I'd advise everyone to "ear read" instead of "eye read." His Richard Burton is especially perfect, and he seems to be channeling Lauren Bacall for Dee as well. The book was well wrought, never dull or superficial, but the attempts at final profundity at the end felt a bit forced to me.

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No way to locate individual stories!!!

Revisado: 11-16-12

What disappointed you about Girl with Curious Hair?

Why on earth didn't you set the tabs at the beginning of each individual story? Do you imagine that listeners are so bovine as to have no opinions about which stories they want to hear, that they'd just as soon listen to all of them with no way of returning to a specific story? Other story collections are set up so you can click forward and go to the next story, so why not this one?? Not a single story begins at the beginning of a tab!! So stupid!!

What was one of the most memorable moments of Girl with Curious Hair?

When I realized they didn't even think that I might want to locate a specific story!!

Any additional comments?

Think about these things from the consumer's point of view, for God's sake. It's like with Infinite Jest, how you decided readers wouldn't care to hear the invaluable footnotes. But at least there was an argument for that boner. There's no excuse for this.

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Not DFW's voice

Revisado: 09-10-12

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Only to a fellow fan of DFW.

How could the performance have been better?

Find someone who can actually imitate DFW. This actor reads well, but it's not the same persona, he sounds like someone imitating a description of the way Wallace talked and not the way Wallace actually talked, which was much more subtle, a little more reedy and gentler. This guy sounds like a football player and not a writer.

Was Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself worth the listening time?

For me, yes.

Any additional comments?

The endless talk about fame got tedious. This book would be better to "eye read," in my opinion, because there were parts I would have liked to skim in order to get to the parts I was interested in.

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