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Blame it on Capitalism

Revisado: 09-25-24

Let me start with the admission that I am not the audience for Sally Rooney books.
This is well-written, closely observed, and I have no doubt quite reflective of people like these characters-- young and educated and self-conscious. VERY self-conscious. It's just that nothing really happens, and it takes a long time for nothing to happen.

Young people fall in and out of love, while eternally doubting that love exists. No one seems to have a job, but they can fly to France to spend weeks in some rich friend's villa. And they're very unhappy. Every now and then someone speaks a few harsh lines about capitalism and Israel like that is an answer to some personal question. Everyone is so... incapable. The main character literally can't hold a bouquet of flowers without cutting herself. Couples come together and then uncouple and destroy each other, and then everyone ends up back where they started.

Thing is, this feels very real and true, but still so "self". Self-conscious, self-referential, self-obsessed. It's hard to understand how these people think so perpetually about themselves and still are so baffled about themselves, so unable to understand what they've done or predict what they will do next. "But that's the point!" I hear the main character declaring. "No matter what, we are unknowable!"

Okay. As I said, I'm not the audience. If you are, you'll love this book.

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Somehow it's both tedious and grueling

Revisado: 11-16-23

Not for me. The frame is overly complex-- some biographer (?) is researching some once-famous psychologist, and someone gives him the journals of some woman who'd been the psych's client while pretending to be someone else. Then there are long passages from the autobiography of the psychologist. I found it hard to put together all these parts, and what's there isn't really as "mind-bending" as it's billed. I'm not sure what it's supposed to add up to.

The voices are fun to listen to-- Scottish accents-- and the milieu of the 60s and 70s is done well.

I think maybe this trend towards broken-up narratives that the reader is supposed to mentally assemble in some coherent form isn't for me. Too much work, especially in audio form!

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James and Juliet are terrific together.... again.

Revisado: 10-16-23

I loved this. I thought it was a good story to pick up a decade after the end of the Angel series, updating some of the original themes (like the "virgin sacrifice" of slayers) and giving continuing characters more room to develop.

Spike fan here-- I loved the way James Marsters kept his recognizable Spike voice, but went more cockney, more bad-boy, so that his good/bad dynamic could be further mined for fun. His voice-overs and Indira's "fan girl" commentary also updated the old story and gave it a sharper contemporary edge.

James and Juliet (Spike and Dru) just effortlessly slid back into their high-intensity romance, and Dru was charismatic enough that it was believable that Spike might betray his cause for love of her.

Of course the other returning characters were also compelling, especially (for me) Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and Anthony Head as Giles. Oh, and of course James Leary as Clem with the guilty conscience!

A couple criticisms, more my problem than the story-- the Anya/Anyanka/Tara subplot was a bit confusing to me, as Anyanka and Tara's storylines seemed too similar. And the climactic action episode was also confusing to me because there was so much physical action (hard to render in dialogue) and there were several different venues. But it was all great fun even if I wasn't sure who was doing what to whom.

I hope there are other episodes. Time to ship Spordy!

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Kinda like Tina Fey/Harry Styles fan-fiction

Revisado: 06-11-23

This is what you get, I guess, when you base a book around a one-liner by a lame comic.... "So how come Pete Davidson gets to date Ariana Grande, huh? imagine the reverse!"
it was pretty trite. The narrator kept regorging the same couple events to different listeners (like the one date she did online dating, must have heard that three times). Something would happen, then narrator would tell her friends about it, and then discuss it with another friend, and finally with the high school star quarterback, I mean the pop star, and then later the popular guy would repeat this back to narrator as a reason why he loved her so.

The reader did a good job of keeping it breezy, as befits a middle school romance fan fiction.

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excellent explanation of this cognitive disaster

Revisado: 02-25-23

This Qanon phenomenon ia hard to understand, but this book does a good job of explaining how so many have lost touch with reality while believing that they are the ones in the know.

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An Ethan Frome for the 21st C. or an Anna Karenina

Revisado: 06-24-22

The protagonist is an older woman English professor in lust with a younger male professor. I actually liked the glimpses of their leafy professional life in that leafy college, and her observations about teaching and editing. the object of her lust is appropriately Vronskyish in his handsome vapidity.
I was interested throughout and enjoyed the echoes of earlier novels of frustrating passion.

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not as revolutionary as reviewers claimed

Revisado: 06-13-22

But it's well-written and well-performed. And I loved the Edith Wharton milieu of rich Manhattanites.

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Nighy, Burden, Glover. always delightful.

Revisado: 10-05-21

I always love these BBC performances of the Charles Paris series. This one with Charles becoming Dave the Cockney remodeller is especially clever.

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I did finish reading it...

Revisado: 08-25-21

So it was somewhat intriguing. But I didn't like the experience. The protagonist was really unsympathetic-- not just a kind of creepy, but also boring in that obsessive way.
The beginning was pretty entertaining, but the middle, it got really repetitive, and she just got more annoying. Obsessives just aren't very interesting people as they just have the one interest. She's pretty shallow, and the constant anger gets wearing.

Narrator is good, and the prose writing isn't that bad. The story, however, lacks any real suspense or drive, and it's more confusing than suspenseful.

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Trying too hard to be clever

Revisado: 04-20-21

Great premise, and the story reinforces my subversive view that editors do want to rewrite our books! :)
I thought this sounded interesting, but the enclosed mystery stories were, for me, rather tedious, and they're repeated. Two of the stories are (and acknowledged as) homages to Agatha Christie stories, but not as well-plotted. At every point, the plot and characters seemed like "stretches"-- not actually as deep or tricky as promised.


I just didn't find the overall stories and the 'inside' stories very thrilling or mysterious. There were some technical glitches, mostly in point of view, that detracted from the coherence of the scenes.

But I love books about writers and editors, so that part was fun. And the narrator was very good.

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