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January 06
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Erin
made a comment on
Erin's review of
Waiting
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January 05
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Erin
made a comment on Caris's profile:
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Jan 05, 2010 08:00PM
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Erin
read and liked
Danimal's review of Waiting:
"I am not sure why this book won anything - a relay race, a pie-eating contest, let alone a National Book Award. It's got a good theme to it - how the communist Chinese government's totalitarian ways caused great unhappiness - but the writing was so d...more
I am not sure why this book won anything - a relay race, a pie-eating contest, let alone a National Book Award. It's got a good theme to it - how the communist Chinese government's totalitarian ways caused great unhappiness - but the writing was so dull that I couldn't deal. I was just Waiting for it to end. It went something like this:
"I had only 12 more years before I could divorce my wife and marry Manna."
A bird flew by the window. A leaf fell from a tree. The clouds were grey.
Snore.(less)
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Erin
read and liked
Ernest's review of Waiting:
"The onslaught of awards and critical acclaim this book has garnered (including the biggie, The National Book Award of 1999) epitomizes the most lamentable trend in such current practices: pandering political correctness.
Despite featuring ...more
The onslaught of awards and critical acclaim this book has garnered (including the biggie, The National Book Award of 1999) epitomizes the most lamentable trend in such current practices: pandering political correctness.
Despite featuring wooden dialogue spoken by boring characters I could care less about and descriptions that rival phone book listings in their vividness, Waiting DOES conform to pre-existing, fetishized Western notions of Chinese culture. Thus, delighted progressive (probably white, perhaps guilt-ridden) tastemakers were all too eager to reward such an "exotic" tale of unrequited love even though the surface originality of an actual Chinese romance (!) from an actual Chinese guy (!!) written in English (!!!), barely conceals the amateurish, mundane disposability that is the book's true nature.
To its supporters, the spare minimalism of the writing matches generalized perceptions of the Asian aesthetic forging a sort of modern, Eastern Hemingway in which his level of economical depth and insight is matched or, dare I say, even exceeded. And while it is true that sometimes "less is more" (as with Hemingway or, say, William Carlos Williams), sometimes "less is simply less". Waiting is, quite simply, hackneyed drivel that underscores the immutable fact that whether it resides in the sewers of New York City or the fields of a rural Chinese village, crap is still crap.(less)
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Erin
added:
Waiting (Paperback)
by
Ha Jin
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my rating:
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Erin said:
"ok, so here's how i got rabies. true story.
i'm in thailand. thailand is pretty much awesome, i like going there a lot, as long as you stay away from touristy places like phuket and don't go to bangkok. people get sucked into bangkok an...more
ok, so here's how i got rabies. true story.
i'm in thailand. thailand is pretty much awesome, i like going there a lot, as long as you stay away from touristy places like phuket and don't go to bangkok. people get sucked into bangkok and never return.
so, i'm in bangkok (of course) and it's hard not to get sucked into a place like that, you know? fifty bajillion people stacked on top of each other like sardines, zipping around on highly unsafe wheeled vehicles that would never pass california safety emissions test, and not just because their mufflers are made of duct tape. it's fascinating. and scary. you can't survive there long without help. i'm guessing that's why they made khao san road.
khao san road is like... it's like... well, it's "civilization". at least that's what an australian kid once told me over a beer on the street. i think he got it pretty right. it's like a mecca for weary travelers in southeast asia, smack dab in the middle of the city, with hostels every two feet, nice old women offering to do your laundry for ridiculously cheap prices, massage parlors, restaurants with food you can pronounce in your native tongue (they try so hard, but still, what's with the corn on my pizza? no one eats corn on their pizza, guys). it's like "safe bangkok". when you stumble into khao san road after 2 weeks off the map in cambodia, you could almost weep for joy. "civilization", you see? everyone there is on their way to somewhere or recovering from somewhere. khao san isn't a place you go just to visit, it's a place you go after visiting somewhere else.
and it's crazy. especially when things get dark.
black market goods. fake watches. hair braiding. ping pong ball shows? street performers. i mean, you can get all this in other places in asia, probably with more variety and less chance of being kidnapped into slavery. but there's something about the relief in being back in "civilization" that makes people go crazy. it might have something to do with the children running around in the streets, offering to sell you cocktails mixed in beach buckets. no actually it probably has a lot to do with the beach buckets.
see after traveling in crazy places, keeping your guard up, trying not to get malaria, or lost, or eaten by wild animals, it's nice to have a safe zone filled with other tourists. logically, the first thing you do when you get to this zone is find a beer and try to one up someone else with a story of how you almost got malaria, or lost, or eaten by wild animals.
this was my plan, anyway. so i settle down with a pad thai and a watermelon shake, under the glow of the chelsea game (thanks satellite) at a nice little pub. the bar opens out into the street. it's a hot night, but the fans are going. a stream of humanity trickles by me in slow motion. and that's when, out of nowhere, a wild animal actually tried to eat me. yes, at the bar.
it was large and growly, with terrifying eyes that glistened under the table. kind of. i mean it hadn't been cuddled in awhile, so it's hair was kind of tufty. and it WAS on the larger side, for most kittens. i totally made up the part about the eyes.
it thought i was offering it some shrimp. which, i wasn't. i was going to throw the shrimp across the floor of the bar so it could run after it. and stop sitting on my flip flop. unfortunately, the kitty was faster than my puny human reflexes, and whilst nabbing the shrimp from my hand, it also kind of bit me.
when you get bit by a loner cat in thailand, nobody cares. which is cool. turns out, when you get bit by a cat in thailand and then casually mention it to your travel physician in an email, ya know, because you want to make sure the tetanus shot kicked in before you left, well... people go crazy. important people. like county department of health people. they want you to come home so you can do boring stuff like be safe, and get a post-exposure rabies vaccine. blaaaaah. boring.
which is exactly what i was expecting the 16 hour plane flights back home to be. hella boring. so i found this book, "waiting" (you were just WAITING to see what this review had to do with it, huh?! huh?? haha puns!) and tucked it into my bag to stave off the craziness. (not the rabies-crazy, that doesn't kick in for 2 weeks. the "i can't stand to watch another korean soap opera on this 3x3 inch screen while a small japanese child throws hello kitty jelly beans at me for the next 12 hours" crazy).
well, it sucked. the book that is. about three dozen people have said this already, and way more succinctly than me... you spend this book waiting for it to get good. and then it doesn't. i don't need my literature to have a point, an ending, or even, sometimes, a plot. but i do like it to have interesting characters and at least one satisfying moment of decent prose. this novel, i can honestly say, had none.
so i thought, if all these people came to this page on goodreads to read a review of the book, angry that they had wasted their time with such a long and unfufilling narrative like "waiting"... i might as well give them a story that at least TRIES to be 1/10th as good as "waiting". since none of us can get our money back. or the fake silver watch we traded for it. ya know, whatever.
ps. did you know you have to get FOUR freaking shots to stave off the rabies? srsly. i'm not even going to tell you where either.(less)
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October 12, 2009
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Oct 12, 2009 08:04PM
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October 08, 2009
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Erin
read and liked
Caris's review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories:
"A convenience store at the mouth of hell? A uterus on display at a museum? An afterlife for suicides that is just a little suckier than this one?
Etgar Keret is awesome. These stories grab you by the throat and don't let up. Although they ...more
A convenience store at the mouth of hell? A uterus on display at a museum? An afterlife for suicides that is just a little suckier than this one?
Etgar Keret is awesome. These stories grab you by the throat and don't let up. Although they seldom exceed five tiny pages, they are memorable and powerful. His style is unlike anything I've read before.
I originally heard about Keret when I saw a trailer for "Wristcutters: A Love Story." This fine film starred a man based on Eugene Hutz (Jonfren's endearing tour guide in the film adaptation of "Everything is Illuminated" and lead singer of Gogol Bordello) and had a soundtrack heavily dominated by Gogol Bordello. The movie was pretty good, so I decided to read the novella it was based on. Kneller's Happy Campers is the story about the afterlife for the suicides. Kneller, played beautifully in the movie by Tom Waits, runs a camp of sorts where insignificant miracles are a common occurrence. Totally original and unbelievably fun.
I'm going to read the rest of Keret's work as soon as I can get my hands on it. I feel sorry for the guy though. On the back of the book jacket, Keret is described as being "Isreal's Hippest Young Writer." That seems embarassing to me and I hope he never learns to read English so he never knows how his publisher has classified him overseas.(less)
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October 05, 2009
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Erin
said "yes" to attending the event: NANOWRIMO!!!!!.
date: November 01, 2009 01:00AM
location: ze internets, Office of Letters and Light, San Fran!, CA, The United States
description:
ohhhh friends. hi! ohhh people that i added as friends because you had cool pictures and we had at least 2 books in commnon... HI!!!
listen, i hate mass invites just as much as the next one, but this is important. dear friend... or, friend-like-internet-associate-with-a-cool-picture...i'm just writing to ask...you're doing nanowrimo, right?
you don't know what nanowrimo is, do you?
it's NAtional NOvel WRiting MOnth! And no, I did not just capitalize the first ...more
ohhhh friends. hi! ohhh people that i added as friends because you had cool pictures and we had at least 2 books in commnon... HI!!!
listen, i hate mass invites just as much as the next one, but this is important. dear friend... or, friend-like-internet-associate-with-a-cool-picture...i'm just writing to ask...you're doing nanowrimo, right?
you don't know what nanowrimo is, do you?
it's NAtional NOvel WRiting MOnth! And no, I did not just capitalize the first two letters of each word for pronunciation's sake.
listen, you are probably on goodreads because A) you love reading or B) the cute girl from remedial algebra spends all her time there and you're kind of stalking her. either way, how long have you thought to yourself... i have a great story to tell? or "i could write better than danielle steele"? that great story that's always rattling around in the back of your head, that you've always thought about but never had time to put on paper.
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE! as of right now, 16-THOUSAND other people just like you are pledging that for the month of november, they will attempt to crank out 50,000 semi-related words to form a semblance of a novel that might just be the next great piece of american literature. or at least many many pages of scrap paper which you can then ball up for the amusement of the resident cat.
i'm not associated with this event in any way, i don't moderate or volunteer or run it at all. i've just done it for years. by "done", i mean i write about 3 lines and then spend the rest of my time laughing at people in the "i hate my characters and want to kill them" forum. (nanowrimo truly is a glorious place... trust me)
i just thought i would spread the love... if you need me for the rest of november, i'll be hanging out in the "nanowrimo ate my soul and OH GOD IT'S 2 AM I NEED MORE COFFEE" forum.
check it out at nanowrimo.org
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Oct 05, 2009 06:21PM
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