Nothing happened this week.
The Golden State is one of the most frustrating books I’ve ever read. It doesn’t help that my expectations for this one were sky high. This one has some serious hype going for it. I loved the story and the characters, but the writing style was so irritating. This sort of constant, stream of consciousness run on sentences that went on forever. I was always hyper aware of it, and it felt so calculated, like she was somehow both showing off and slumming at the same time. I managed to roll with it eventually, but then there is kind of a dramatic climax, and the run on stuff is ramped up, and it feels like this breathless teenage account, and it really ruined it for me. I kind of hated it, but it also got to me and will stick with me more than other books I liked much better. But I can’t say I’d recommend it.
My slump continued with Mr Fox. Man, I just did not get this book at all. I was so excited about this one too, because I love the concept: an author is confronted in real life by one of his characters, chaos ensues. Yes, I am all in for that! But the execution is so murky and convoluted; I felt like this was so hard to pay attention to, and the writing just kept getting in its own way. I’m glad that there are people who get something out of this one but it didn’t do anything for me.
So I needed something easy after those two, and luckily I got a timely email from Goodreads reminding me that I’d won a copy of The Swing of Things, which I had totally forgotten about. This is light contemporary fiction about a couple who makes some new friends and finds out they are swingers. (Do people really still say swingers though? I didn’t think that’s still the term but that’s what they say in the book.) Anyway, I love stuff like this. This was kind of all over the place, because sometimes it’s pretty insightful about marriage, and sometimes it’s kind of porny, and it’s not especially well written but it’s always weirdly compelling. I had mixed feelings about this, and the ending practically felt like a morality play, but it was also just what I needed and I couldn’t put it down.
That was definitely the high point of the week. Now I’m back to being disappointed yet again. I had high hopes for Confessions of the Fox, but I am more than halfway through and it’s torture. I was excited about this because it’s historical fiction featuring trans characters, and you never see that, but that is literally the only interesting thing about this. This is more boring than Heather Chandler’s afterlife! I’m not sure I’m even going to finish this, or maybe I’ll read something else and come back to it. Reality is bad enough right now, please let me get out of my fiction slump!
