A quintessential white, young, plugged-in woman moves to Berlin in a faux journey of self-discovery when her ex-boyfriend dies, shortly after she finds out he runs a very successful fake account as a conspiracy theorist.

This was inevitably polarizing, as people who are like this person are going to feel more singled out than able to laugh, and people of colour probably have no time for this kind of satire, even if it is poking fun at the average almost hot-girl 24/7 Twitter user, middle class, performatively educated, who acts really, really white.

For me, I both recognized the narrator as relatable as she was a great lens to critique a lot of unique factors about internet culture and the generations growing up with it. The tone self-mocks and elides in-jokes people who are also plugged-in would recognize, acknowledging how engaging how superficiality is—especially when embodied as a person, such as the narrator, as well as online presence crafted that way—while also providing a pretty on-point, gut-wrenchingly witty and hilarious satire of our cultivated interests with these alternate online personas.

It wouldn’t have worked if the joke wasn’t on her, and by proxy “us”. It’s not too close to home for me and there is a lot of humanity to be found in an acerbic 20-something going through the same identity crisis, code switching, and new difficulties found in a humanity that, post-social media especially, does not actually have that much in common with other generations, and fundamentally function as an almost different species. Only exacerbated by the fact that performativism and schismatic, axiomatic interactions with people also plugged in do nothing to help identify or alleviate these baffling and unique problems to brains on the internet.

To me, it’s worth laughing about, even if it’s really quite sad. We obviously do find it interesting, as a collective, since social media is a inescapable, all-consuming drug—even if we also judge and shun people participating, but failing, in the same competition for social currency. Which, more or less, is ineffectual anyway. It really is a joke. That’s what’s kind of brilliant about this book: It can approximate ourselves, and humanize us, by proxy.

This is casually transgressive of nearly everything. Unconventional in nearly every way, insulting to nearly everyone, but no one more so than the 20 something “liberals” on Twitter, found to be mostly white upper middle class in an echo chamber. There is a literalized greek chorus as her ex boyfriends, meta post modern techniques used to communicate to the reader in multiple layers of the author, who is an author working on a book who wrote articles. The new kind of faux meta fiction trend is, to me, really engaging and fun to read. It’s also really breathless and self referential, such as when she talks about nothing and then mentions how sometimes nothing can be 40 pages long.

Oh, and the most comical description of a blow job I’ve ever read, which had me in stitches for ages. The audiobook only augments the experience. I was flying through pages but hearing the cadence of the prose enlivened them and made them even more funny; I highly recommend it on audio. Just phenomenal. I’ve rarely laughed so much, nodded along, and cared about someone not all that worth caring about, tbh.

I can sum this up simply: These peasants are insufferable.

I’m not sure aimlessness does all that much, beyond propelling the fiction forward. The prose work similarly makes it an easier read. But there isn’t that much substance in Medieval this satirical bent. From time to time it does strike a millennial chord, particularly when trolling the stupidity and arrogance of men in power. It felt like it meandered a little too much from such instances, constantly reiterating things already established, constantly compounding the travesty—that it becomes almost nihilistic. Almost, because there isn’t quite enough craft for that to be the buttressing. So, is this simply non-entertaining chaos, then?

An oppressed man living in a future where women are the dominant gender is sent back in time to prevent the birth of the catalyst for the future, in hopes of asserting the patriarchy once more.

Social satire paired with an unusual time travel conceit sounds about half my jam, and that’s pretty much the hit rate for this one, in the end. Humour usually doesn’t land on me, unless it’s macro and substantive. We follow F-10 as he is sent back to an estate that’s in a tough neighbourhood. As he attempts to locate and kill Haley, the mother of the woman who births the male oppressed future, we encounter the butterfly effect. Although a variant of it I haven’t personally seen in fiction. F-10 essentially fails forward, advancing the story, or else it rewinds to the mistake, and he tries again. There’s a really effective motif paralleling this of a reclusive Rastafarian DJ plugged into the CCTVs choosing music to suit circumstances, but also the needle tracking the current groove. It’s the song fitting what’s happening, but also the track of time we are currently in. It’s a pretty brilliant device, I think, that helps the reader catch onto what’s happening, but expands the worlds in an evocative manner.

Rather than a run-and-gun, find and kill kill kill narrative evocative of the oft mentioned Terminator movie (a kind of ur text for the oppressed men, which depicts a now erased masculinity), we instead find him sheepishly inverted in gender roles. While he venerates “Arnie”, he can’t ape the patriarchy, having no lived experience. So, it rather becomes a meet-cute, where he attempts to attract her and negotiate a way to get her alone. It’s an effective way to show the gender norms and unique ways in which men have been oppressed, where typically lots of sci-fi just simply mirror the oppression from men to women in a rather one-size-fits-all manner that doesn’t really hold up. Nash has clearly put some thought into how men are oppressed differently, such as not being allowed to gain muscle mass unless they’re gay, and gyms being shut down. It always has a satirical bent because it’s clear that the joke is still on the men. Even though they’re somehow smart enough to make a time machine that functions, their methods of establishing primacy—even over one another—are literally laughable.

Indeed, it becomes a bit easy to tell how the story would play it because of those elements introduced. But there is a satisfying and symmetrical ending that had just a small caveat that really drove home the themes and the satire, even when coupled with the inevitable ending.

This preceding Nash’s latest works, at a craft level I did find the prose work less precise. There are some confusing elements occurring in rooms where choreography would have really helped. Most of the dialogue is in dialect, a stylistic choice that’s just not my favourite. I’m not sure why, but lots of sci-fi from that generation, such as Neuromancer, all have Rastafarians in them, and all have them in dialect. There’s a neat inversion of circumstances and the bringing together of all the characters that was conducive to a good ending as well. But, yeah, I imagine Bob Marley, or perhaps that music just really influenced people of that age. I think with dialogue, I wasn’t fully convinced the characters would be deploying the kind of vocabulary they were, and it’s just not as honed as to when to deploy more complex diction, whereas Three Dreams in the Key of G is perfect with it. There are some themes here that clearly have interested and inform, I imagine, his later novels as well, which is just fun. It’s neat seeing the development of a fantastic writer.

Overall, it’s literary in terms of intersecting with sci-fi in a manner I think is exceptional. Most of the time my gripe with literary intersections with genre, but especially sci-fi, is people having a central conceit that is there as a plot device and nothing more. It doesn’t affect the world in usually any significant way, they just like That Thing and want it, so they insert it. They don’t know how to, or decline to, interrogate it. Time After Time’s conceit is fully married to the concept. From the satirical elements to the social to the play on the Terminator concept, it’s clear that everything is thought out. It also doesn’t conform to sci-fi tropes, plot, or characterization. It’s character driven, withholds catharsis, doesn’t have a typical character arc, isn’t interested in gratuitous, bombastic set pieces. It is doing what it wants, and does it well, imo. Had I been a reader who particularly liked humour saturating prose, it would have been a five star read, I think.

Jeez, how to pin down something that takes pride in being undefinable in its pages? I think going in knowing the voice is along the lines of playful, satirical, and that most of it is not concerned with the concrete, but operates on the symbolic and meta levels predominantly—would be a really helpful litmus test. It also is non-western centric and unconcerned with form and structure that is typical; rather it follows an oral tradition that makes it a bit of a chimaera, and often quite slippery.

It centres an old woman and has 3 very distinct parts. There is a plot, but there are a lot of digressions and it is not motivated by plot. It is somewhat character driven, but uses each to sketch social constructs around - well, pretty much everything. Borders and transitions in life are most predominate. Gender roles, familial expectations, how obligations are foisted into certain parties. All of which then again center the old woman protagonist as her story unfolds.

Particularly biting, in terms of questioning how society functions, the purpose of art and said social constructs, and how those play a role in dictating how a story is told and what information is “valid” when crafting one. It pretty much spits in the face of all conventions, and then demonstrates through practice how fun and meaningful it can be to transgress and infringe in liminal spaces; even if it comes with at a really high cost. I don’t I understood everything, since it has quite a bit of cultural touchstones and references you need to google, but even from what I was able to grip onto, I found it excellent. I don’t typically like satirical voices and this vacillated for me because the tone does change quite often. I think I’d have loved it even more if I was on board with the narrator’s personality.

Plus, I read this with a group and it was incredibly - incredibly - helpful to do so. I would have missed out on a lot more impactful symbolism, I’ve no doubt. So, I can see why it’s slightly polarizing. It is undoubtedly a fantastic book though. The question is whether it will be to your taste or not, imo.

Booker Longlist re read: yeah, no. I can’t handle it. Maybe if it wasn’t satirical, but satire just doesn’t work for me, especially absurdist comedy, then coupled with the zoomorphism or whatever this is, which, at 50 pages in, sure isn’t doing anything of interest to me. Gave it another go, but nope.

I just can’t accept the central conceit so I’m not going to rate this, though I’m DNFing it. Animals dressed up and anthropomorphized to the extent of eating stuff they wouldn’t and wearing stuff they wouldn’t, conjoined with what is going to be something about colonialism, when anthropomorphizing is replicating colonialism, I just can’t process. I would hope that the story becomes About that, at some point. In the meantime, though, I just can’t help but picture this in my head as the most absurd cartoon and am constantly pulled out of the fiction as my brain encounters dissonance.

Matriarch of a white family in South Africa promises a black woman, long-term caretaker, the property she owns, on her death bear, in front of witnesses. After passing this does not happen, and the family all but conspires to make sure it doesn’t occur. We get a narrator who flits in and out of the family, showing the state of the country before and after apartheid—the result of which is the intention to show the family as a microcosm, which is condemned for their casual racism and other traits.

Reread on audio: 2.5 rounded up. I think this maybe barely gets by in its intent, of which I’m not sure was entirely successful. The narrator shifts often, very playfully, in a way that didn’t work for me on the page but the narrator helped me with it greatly. And because of the way the plot unfolds, together with the narration, it feels quite toothless, in the end, and throughout. But I also pretty notoriously think satire is almost always flaccid and facile; which is this, to a tee. I’m happy when proven wrong but it’s my rule, and it serves me well.

This does land some blows, however. And the writing, though a character in of itself - and annoying one at that - is otherwise quite good, at the sentence and paragraph level. When it’s not annoying it’s lively and engaging. So, this is certainly just down to my taste. But it being constantly distracting while flourishing the shit show family, selling me on the notion of a racist family I didn’t need to be sold on, just took away the enjoyment almost entirely.

Objectively, I can see why people like it, but it’s lofty intentions feel like they barely string together a fairly meandering and predictable plot. While comprehensive in its character work, and resolution beside the point, I found myself asking if it DID actually ask of me something interesting? Is it surprising white people would be racist and deny a claim, or act how they are, to their own detriment, often? No. I suppose there’s something to putting substance to anxiety of what the future of South Africa will look like? But this liminal state is already answered for with the present.

So, perhaps just like the voice, this is simply not for me. Technically it does tell a story, and the perspective and narrative voice I think are different, which means, though it didn’t work completely for me, I think it completed the expectations the story had for me from its first pages. Which isn’t nothing. But I had hoped for more, given how well regarded it is.



Gave it 50 pages and bailed. My brain does not like this perspective or style. It’s like water off a duck’s back. Nothing sticks with the infodump right off the bat. Too much of the wrong kind of information and the prose is interested in everything about a scene or person or situation that I am not. It’s certainly different, so I can see why people were engaged by it. But, for me, it made everything feel less rendered and sketchy.

On one hand, this quarantine of friends isn’t all that novel—apart from the conceit that they’re doing it for COVID 19 reasons—and it is also, a hair too self-indulgent at times with length and parallels between a character and author, perhaps. On the other, I think it is peopled very well, the character work absolutely showcase, and houses numerous empathetic, genuinely moving moments, that many books haven’t pulled off a one of, let alone a few. It is also actually quite funny, I found. Which will come down to taste, since there’s quite a few things in the sights, so to speak. What is targeted felt like a natural extension of the characters, though, so I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

The audiobook may be the superior way to consume this. A bunch of other reviewers don’t seem to like the tone all that much, so I wonder if being a bit removed, with the excellent, excellent narration by Shapiro (an Armie Hammer lite, in a fantastic way). It feels like something that would jump off the page, based on the narration. If not, well, more props to Shapiro, then.

Ha, ha, and Ha, for good measure. This is very fun and playful and boy, did I have some trepidation going in. Mental health is generally handled pretty poorly. In this, a fictional author, who has come across a salacious book on psychiatry by an enigmatic (again, fictional) author, finds himself in a position of using a story that is unverifiable and tied to the psychiatrist in question: Collins Braithwaite. Conjoining this windfall of a novel with the authors own research into the figure, this novel creates a liminal space where the voracity of the author writing it is in question, as well as the fictional characters in the novel and the biography on Braithwaite (which references further fictional accolades, of course).

If you’re thinking Borges-esk, you wouldn’t be wrong. There are some references in both that are real-world and correct. Things like movies and random books. Also, some characters, such as Braithwaite’s lover, Zelda, seem pretty “inspired” by writers. Hedonistic party romps in the 60s have the couple more than a little reminiscent of the writer(s) of The Great Gatsby.

Primarily, the text is concerned with positing the idea of the self constantly evolving or shifting, kind of like code switching, or roles actors play. And that there is a kind of “madness” in everyone, if that’s the case. At what point is someone’s persona a reality? and what happens when we acknowledge these alternate personas for what they are? Rather than go into an actual diagnostic of the protagonist in the novel, it’s much more concerned about the themes, which then cascade into the alternate components of the narrative in a very playful intertextuality.

Prose work took a bit to get used to, then became absolutely captivating. It’s the write level of pretension for me; both with the character herself, as well as the concept of the novel. It even has some meta humour that lands with me, such as an epilogue where people write into the author of the novel compiled as a second printing note, where they complain about the inaccuracies in the fiction to the physicality of London itself.

When and if this gets its hooks in you, I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did. Wonderful.

Two members of the MBI—the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation—are called to a very unusual crime scene down in Money, MS. A man has been strangled with barbed wire, with greater force than a single person could muster, and counterpart to him, lays a dead black man. Both looks like they’ve gone through a heavy altercation and the black man is holding the testicles of the white man. Then, as the examiner goes to do an autopsy, the black man appears to have vanished. Things only get stranger from here.

This is one sneaky book. It moves from a fairly straight forward contemporary crime novel leaning into realism, but shifts gears as it goes. What you ought to know going in: This is not typical genre fiction. It’s no police procedural nor is it buddy cop, though the dialogue does sway that way from time to time. Best way I can explain so the reader doesn’t feel robbed of expectations is probably surrealistic crime with both dark humour and a heavy political overtones. It’s frenetically paced and the dialogue in particular is outstanding.

Racism is The subject of this book and it tackles it on many fronts and, in my opinion, to great effect. The surrealism is dialled up slowly. But what this book is About starts with a bang and doesn’t let up. The detectives are more than acclimated to dealing with the outright racist citizenry down in these parts and they get a big dose of it from everyone, all the time. The N-word is liberally applied.

Quickly, it becomes apparent that Everett is critiquing white supremacy directly in the portrayal of white folk here. They have no qualms and wouldn’t know what was morale if it struck them in the head. They’re incompetent, unrepentant, and hate is hereditary. In short, they exemplify what we’ve come to know about Nazis. Counter to the popular belief that they were exceptional and ran on Swiss time and were exceptional tacticians, and this is the case with all white supremacist organizations, yes, even the organized ones—there is generally an tremendous amount of incompetence in the rank and file, with few exceptions. When ideas and beliefs held by these organizations are interrogated, they fall apart. Hell, they invent pseudo science and misinformation to make themselves feel creditable, but it’s unsubstantiated hogwash. And Everett is having none of it from these people.

As more and more deaths occur, the surrealism goes up, and we begin to get the larger picture of these events.

A 105 year old black woman has been documenting every lynching that’s been happening. Bodies are disappearing. The victims seem to have ties to past hate crimes—not against black people, but seemingly every marginalized identity. It examines, by literalizing, the ingrained fear white people have about minorities, but also satirizes the supposed response of such a threat the alt-right presupposes will happen all of the time as a fear mongering tactic. If “race wars” did break out, what would that actually look like? What would spark such a thing?

By exposing and putting such fears under a stark light, they become both ugly and laughable at the same time. A tight rope dance the novel pulls off brilliantly, while also having an even more overt political statement waiting in the wings, and the surrealism reaches a fever pitch. Absolutely fantastic bit of writing. Only downside I had was expecting a straight forward gritty crime novel. What I got instead was well worth the zig-zag, though. As you can tell.

Gorgeously written and complex thematically, a group of boys narrate the story of sisters, some of whom take their own lives—leaving an indelible mark on their lives and memory, as well as the town and community.

The prose work is phenomenal, conjuring visceral imagery usually tied to nature and the girls, who, I am convinced embody nature fundamentally at odds with the authoritative parents who can’t help but replicate, and therefor similarly embody, societal conditions that don’t nourish people; forever in service to capitalism and perpetuating itself while destroying all things natural on earth.

The boys narrating the story are indicted by virtue of their own story. Projecting their adolescent desires and lusts onto creatures they neither understand nor seek to really nourish, only possess. And they grew up static, it appears, forever obsessed with the unknowable and never owning up to their deplorable ability to do nothing for the girls but project their literal male gaze.