I don’t quite know what to make of this. This felt like a mix of Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay-like ramblings (where each chapter doesn’t follow from the one before and they consist more of societal comments/musings than prose/plot) oddly with such a similar plot to No One Is Talking about This, which was completely randomly timed but I loved NOITAT sooooo much that this fell flat in comparison. I did like the narrator’s voice and chuckled to myself about how real it is to be so depressed but just keep on going (“at twenty-three, it’s too late for everything”), reading books (“yes, I sat on the sofa all day, but I was reading”), and being gay (“some women make me feel wholly lesbian”). You can tell Eva Baltazar is a poet because the sentences are so weighty (“there’s nothing more blinding than blood”; “imminence is just the carrot dangled by the future to keep us present”). In a word: atmospheric. Hard to pin down, not quite any one thing (gay coming of age? Family musings? Millennial drifting through European cities trying to figure it out? Suicidal ideation?). I think I liked it, but I’m not sure? (Perhaps that was the end result she was going for)

This book kinda sucks I fear?? Chock full of millennial gay coming of age and moving to the Big City tropes that never do anything. Not that I’m always looking for original, but I am looking for compelling at least. I kept picking this up to give it a chance to get better but I can’t be 60+ pages in and still not care

This was super odd. Maybe I need to have read Magic Mountain in order to get what this book is trying to ~ do ~ but it just felt like a lot of walking around and observing pompous male discussions that don’t quite follow from one another. We only got to the titular “horror” bit like 90% of the way through the book, and that made things more interesting, but it just felt like a whole lot of nothing for just a little something at the end. Glad I read this on Kindle and didn’t buy it cuz I fear I felt that this kinda sucked. Sorry Olga I will try something else of yours! 

Flop! So formulaic and so much showing-not-telling (

eg. “That’s me, Mr Predictable!” And the doctor randomly just bringing up the test??

). Literally unbearable prose to read 

Yuck. Reading this book did not make me feel good (and I don’t even mind a weird book). We start out with incest and then make our way to

pedophilia, plans of rape, and finally to cannibalism

. I couldn’t stand the infantile dialogue between supposed 30 year olds (and it was already grating when Natsuki was supposed to be 11 in the first place), and the plot circled and cycled without direction or motivation. The only reason I finished this was because it was so short and I had read to the halfway point out of sheer horror

This is a modern millennial classic. Tenderly and empathetically rendered; Latronico doesn’t make fun, he understands and takes part. It would be a much easier book to write if this were simply satirizing the international ~nomad~ class of Europe’s ~hot new cities~. What it does instead is break apart each of the highly self-consciously curated parts of the increasingly internet-bound lives we lead in the post-2010s. Even our reading of this book is part of the performance act (selected for its Fitzcorraldo Editions translation for an eventual place on the coffee table next to a pile of New Yorkers), and Latronico knows and embraces this. Super timely. I also liked that Anna and Tom were sort of non-characters in this story: emblematic perhaps of the cut-and-paste “unique” but not so unique lifestyle we all curate. This did mean that I didn’t feel attached to them/wasn’t “rooting for them” to propel me through this book, but I understand that that’s the not the point. Forecast: I think this is gonna be really hot over the next year 

Lots to dig through here and it feels kinda crazy to read Freud cover to cover like this without a class assignment LOL and I only needed a taste for my Political Myth class.  Enjoyed the  “Dream Work” chapter section on Condensation tho. Shout out manifest vs. latent content 

God this writing was just so clunky. No characterization/personal motivations to speak of, unnatural and ellipse-filled dialogue, and a poor set up. Suddenly we just arrive at this school? Idk it just all felt so middle-grade, like exactly what you would write if you were 14 and told to write a spooky magic model (

“Go complete the ritual or else something bad will happen to your mom” “Good job now go to this special school”

Hello??). Unclear how much of this is reading in translation but I don’t want to attribute poor characterization and flat motives to simply the Russian language cuz I don’t think that’s what’s going on here…

Sorry to Esohe </3

Oh genderqueer mountain lion who learns to love, how I love you. This was delicious, and I scarfed it down in a matter of hours. Heard that Jackson Howard edited this book at FSG from my editing podcast and I was hooked from the mere mention of the premise. This was laugh out loud funny, and so tender and empathetic with such poignant moments that I could’ve shed a tear.

This only veered into the cringey trap (which is always there with a non-human-learns-to-love-type book) with the “heckit” scene and the lion living in the house with the edgy girl, but I’ll allow it.

I want to read this over and over again. NEW FAV ALERT!!!! 

Henry Miller is extremely icky I fear. I can’t believe this little weirdo wrote such PORN! Anyway. This wasn’t really a manifesto of how important sex is to life so much as a humble brag about his writing career and how women throw themselves at him (highly suspect). Am once again foiled in my attempts to appreciate Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin’s Paris era and erotic writings