saint_eleanor's Reviews (295)

Ok so TLDR: really great book, will really piss you off, super gorey (lots of torture), wonderfully written, anti-capitalist anti-yuppie, really hard to get thru so don't let any ppl tell you its 'essential reading'.

I'll start off by saying this book gets 5 stars bc it deserves nothing less but that doesn't mean I enjoyed reading it 100% of the time, in fact i actively hated reading a lot of it lmao. 
There are like 2 main camps when it comes to American Psycho: one camp says it should be banned bc its misogynistic, horrible, far-right, etc. The other camp says that it's the alpha male handbook, and that patrick bateman is peak male performance. Both are really off-mark imo. 

In the first place, misogynistic characters do not make a misogynistic book. Pretending misogynists don't exist in our writing is completely counter productive. Additionally, this is literally the most anti-masculine, anti-capitalist, anti-yuppie, anti-1% book I have read in a long time. The author paints Patrick Bateman as the most pathetic, bootlicking, bandwagoning, whiny, narcissistic P.O.S. and I really don't understand how you could come away with any other impression. 

Ellis repeatedly makes the point that Bateman is in love with Donald Trump and will do/say anything Trump does/says (80's NYC remember), including switching up arbitrary opinions. He is a self-proclaimed pedophile, rapist, racist, and necrophiliac.  Additionally he is completely materialistic, lost in a Kafka-esque nightmare ruled by sound systems and skincare products and is totally obsessed with 'having the best thing'. Not to mention his obsession with every single person's outfits throughout the whole book.  I hated him so much i was actually seething half the time. This book is especially terrifying because Bateman is as real as any real-life wall street psychopath, there are so many men like him IRL. 

Some of this book was hilarious actually, the monkey TV thing, the 'kill all yuppies' napkin that struck fear into the heart of poor pathetic patrick, and the 5-men-choosing-where-to-eat thing was hilarious. Additionally, Patrick keeps telling everyone over and over that he's homocidal (if we believe his narration, not sure i do) , but his handsomeness and his wealth overshadow his obvious lack of a soul and social skills. He is the opposite of charming, he is actively unsettling, and yet the environment that he's in completely pushes men like him to the top of social circles. When people tell you who they are, LISTEN!!  Also I personally think that his absolute hatred of women paired with his love of men is evidence of internalized homophobia and that Bateman is in fact, gay. I think is is especially plausible due to the fact that Ellis has said that he based parts of Bateman on himself when he was in a really bad place (Ellis is gay & talked about how he used to sleep with women and hated it, which would translate well to this point in Patrick's character), which seems like a really complex and maybe overlooked aspect of this that the Sigma Males don't want to acknowledge.  Additionally the only character in the whole book that really freaks him out is

Luis, who comes onto him, yet is one of the only characters that escapes his wrath.

Anyway, loved this book. I really couldn't put it down even when the gore was almost too much for me and I wanted to rip Patrick's head off. You can also tell it's good bc of how long this review is. Fuck Patrick, fuck wall street, fuck yuppies, and fuck the guys co-opting Christian Bale's photo for their dumbass Alpha Male grindcore instagram accounts, yall did not pay attention. 

Classic

This was way more fascinating than i expected. I loved the poetic voice of Sun Tzu and particularly the section about the shuai-jan snakes.

This book is incredibly beautiful. It's really a magical picture of feral girlhood that was so heartbreaking while somehow like making almost zero sense. Highly metaphorical and reliant on symbolic literary devices instead of reality. I think my favorite was a child's description of a cement mixer as "a giant gray wasp grinding up larvae and secreting jelly, thats how sidewalk is made". It unsettled me so much because I felt like it was actually written from the perspective of a child. The nonsensical-ness and the logic was so realistically child-like. A lovely book about women and our bodies, ghosts, and ownership. 

So bizarre and delicious
It almost reminded me of Mother! (The movie) 

This is one of the best books ive ever read by far. It is so complex on every level, to the point where you’re questioning the author’s involvement in said “fictional” story. “Truth” eludes the whole thing. I don’t think i can even go into all of it but it just took over my whole reading schedule until i finished it lol, it’s about a group of friends from the states on a heritage trip to Ghana and the two different Ghanaians who are showing them around (and their conflicting personalities) and its really like a fever dream i was so unnerved the whole time. It would make an incredible horror movie or thriller. It definitely became a little confusing at the end but nothing that you can’t figure out if you concentrate. Read this book!!

Good story but i was hella confused  the whole time and also in the first half the art looked weird but then got better? I love anno tho

Broke my damn heart 

Got bored.
The first story hit so close to home tho

so fucking good!! I have a lot of theories about this book and feel like I will mull it over for a long time. It's the perfect length, it's really unsettling and disturbing and tbh like to me more horrific than most horror novels bc it's all about like existential dread and being and nothingness (horrifying.). I lowkey want to read it again because it's one of those non-linear books that is more of a circle, each section can be explained by other sections in relation to eachother.

I liked how it was a story that Jake wrote about the girl he never had the courage to speak to, but I also played around with the idea that they actually were on Venus lol, or he was. Idk, i felt like the venus stuff was cool to include and not insignificant but maybe there's another piece.

I also liked the movie, but DO NOT watch it w ur partner for the love of god. I'm also curious how they chose to do the screenplay and stuff bc it was pretty different from the book but conveyed the story really well.