a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. dave eggers. (208)

i have discussed this before but i do have hipster tendencies.  so when the huffington post listed the most hipster books of all time, and i had only read a handful of them, i decided to check them out.  i started with dave eggers' a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

i feel horrible for saying this, especially considering it's premise, a memoir about raising a younger sibling after both parents passing away, but i hated this book.  it took everything i had to actually finish it.  ironically, i should have listened to the rules and suggestions for enjoyment of this book (which is listed at the beginning) it suggested that "the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with.  that gets you to page 109 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length."  i thought eggers was being cheeky when in fact he was just being honest, he knew the second half wasnt' worth it. 

 

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius covers eggers' early twenties and what he encountered raising his little brother, tophe, after having lost both their parents within three months of each other.  they lost their mother to stomach cancer, and the father to what i am assumed was a heart condition  (i feel eggers really didn't share what happen to him, other than his sister finding him kneeling in the driveway one night), since he was a heavy drinker and smoker.  due to the title and the premise, i imagined myself having an emotional connection to the book having just lost my grandmother.  i was actually very hesitant about reading, worried that it would stir up too many memories and thoughts that i was not ready to revisit.  i will admit that reading about their mother is icu was difficult to read, i did cry, reminded of being in icu with my grandmother. and later in the book when eggers discussed his speaking at this mother's memorial service (their parents donated their bodies to science so there wasn't a formal burial), i understood what he went through.  i do recall when my grandmother first entered icu, i thought about what i would say at her funeral.  one feels bad for thinking such thoughts but its something that needs to be considered.  i also identified with egger's uncertainity when it came to speaking at the service.  i was the same way, wanting to share but not wanting too.  though i will add, i didn't want pity like he did but to honor my grandmother.  but that was as far as my identification and enjoyment of the book went.

my enjoyment, seriously only went up until page 109, because that is the only part that truly discussed tophe.  the rest was pretty much about the magazine, he and his friends started, which i did not find interesting at all.  to be completely honest, the only real take away i had from the remainder of the book, was that eggers wasn't casted on mtv's real world: san francisco and that puck came to do a photo shoot for them.  well not for a feature on puck but he was a model, they needed nude models for a piece about humans being the same.  but yeah that is all i really remember.  oh and i would have appreciated the innovativeness of the real world "interview" being a means of eggers discussing his childhood, but then when he had to let the cat out of the bag, recognizing that it was a made up interview to allow for this exploration, so i started to lose interest.

i really hated it.  it was seriously just about the magazine.  it could have been a work of staggering genius if he focused on the issues that he confronted while raising his brother more than whether or not he could still get laid. 

i also think that i may have missed the mark on this book.  had i read it 2000 (though i was in high school, i maybe have been to young) this would have been revolutionary.  maybe if i read it fresh out of college, i would have enjoyed it more.  i don't know what its right, i just know that it bored me.

i also want to add that i see how the book is hipstery.  i mean this is the publishing page!

its very tongue-in-cheek and clever and i would have praised it if i loved the book.  but since i did not enjoy it, i find it excessive and annoying. 

furthermore, there is the "rules" for enjoying the book that i mentioned earlier.  in addition to that there is a preface, contents page, acknowledgements (which runs for like 10 pages and includes diagrams and a random drawing of  a stapler, seriously?!?!?!) all of which i did not read because i did not want to give this book, any more time in my life.  though i will add that in the acknowledgement section, eggers says that the first 200 people that take a picture of a book and your receipt can receive a $5 check from him.  i wonder if people really did that, i would have done that and still felt robbed because the book was horrible.  you can also send it for a fictionalized version of the book on floppy disk, i might look into purchasing that if i still can.  but yeah, i can see the coolness in this, but like anything hipster, if it sucks, one does become annoyed but it.

if a heartbreaking work of staggering genius is on your to-read list, just read up to page 109.  i can tell you the story about real world and puck so you don't have to read the rest.

a wrinkle in time: the graphic novel. madeline l'engle and hope larson.

when i posted my old copy of a wrinkle in time on instagram, my friend joann informed me that a graphic novel version existed.  and of course, i had my mom and brother get it for me for christmas.  it sat on my bookshelf but after reading, when you reach me, which referenced it, i decided to give this a read in honor of children's book week.

a wrinkle in time is brillant and if you are trying to adapt it and make it into a graphic novel, your illustrations should be just as brillant.  i'm sorry hope larson, but i was very disappointed with the illustrations of the novel.  the illustrations were boring and unimaginative.  larson could have let her imagination run wild but sadly she didn't.  nothing was more incredible then what i imagined in my head as a fifth grader when i first read it.  the illustrations were really bad.  at one point, mr. murray didn't even look like a person but some weird octopus head, but not like cool pirates of the caribbean octopus head.  i wanted to see some crazy sci-fi illustrations but nothing.  it was really disappointing. 

also the book lacked meg's heart.  meg was really two-dimensional, literary and figuratively.  she just seemed awkwardly angry all the time.  i mean i know she was but there was more explanation in the novel that made you understand why she was the way she was.

i hate to be such a downer, but i wouldn't recommend this book, especially to someone that has never read it.  it frightens me that this book is out there because i see how kids love graphic novels nowadays (they are always the go-to book when the class i am subbing for goes to the library).  and it saddens me to think that these images will be what the kid sees as they read instead of what their imagination would conger on it's own.  the greatness of a wrinkle in time is that the reader is travels to other dimensions and planets, which allows their imagination a fun adventure, sadly this novel does away with that fun and takes away from the greatness of the novel.  i hate to be so harsh but with illustrations that boring, a child needs to read it the novel and create their own planet and dimensions!

map of tulsa. benjamin lytal. (133)

"a map of tulsa" was a flavorpill recommend and proved that no website is perfect.  "a map of tulsa" is an example that i should not always read what flavorpill says i must. 

though i will add that flavorpill was quoting publisher weekly when they said:

Publisher’s Weekly recently dubbed this elegiac love letter — to Tulsa, to a girl, to the late-’90s art scene — as the coming-of-age novel to replace Catcher in the Rye for “recent generations of Internet-suckled American youth.” And it’s never too late to come of age again.

i of course read this book because of the "catcher" allusion.  and shame on publisher weekly for ever attempting to put this book in the same league let alone sentence as "catcher".  and i know i am not its target audience but my dislike of this book doesn't have to do with my age.  whereas i loved holden, i had no real connection with jim (which is proven by the fact that right now i had to google to find his name).  he is what we in the late-90s would have called a poser and a user.  he was this pseudo intellectual that would never truly be a poet because he lacked a very important characteristic of a poet, a heart.  lytal would write these poetic lines to demonstrate jim's gift of poetry but all it did was make both of them look pretentious and silly.  

"a map of tulsa" is the story of jim returning home to tulsa for summer break after his first year at college.  while back home, he fell in "love" with an artsy girl named adrienne (also had to google her name).  doesn't everyone fall in love with eccentric artsy girl?!?!? adrienne was a heiress to an oil empire, a high school drop-out turned artist/musician, so a 90s slacker (the predessor to the hipster cos i mean only rich kids can afford to slack

like that).  but what jim feels for adrienne really isn't love but more like lust and desperation to be associated with greatness.  she is a local legend and jim was in love with the idea of adrienne than adrienne.  lytal tells us that jim loves her but there is no real indication of that, just words one can read versus emotional one can feel.  i mean he bought her a gun as a token of his affection.  to be honest, jim pretty much just used her for her coolness and money. he had this whole plan to live with her and then one day up and leaves.  

jim returned to school and grows up in new york.  he and adrienne never communicated after all those years.  then out of nowhere adrienne has a bad motorcycle accident and jim flies home.  he hangs around the hospital with adrienne's family and friends but is more concerned with how others perceive his connection to adrienne other than adrienne's recovery.  jim has a lot of regret but with adrienne in a coma, nothing is resolved.  then *spoiler alert*

adrienne dies.  jim attempted to have  some deep life lesson but again he is a user and a poser so he has it though it doesn't seem genuine.

this book was bad there was no depth to his characters. it felt like lytal thought he was going to write this profoundly beautiful book but it seriously fell short.  it's almost like he wrote this to impress a girl, probably the adrienne, of his life but he definitively tried too hard and if i was that girl i would be insulted his love resulted in something so boring and shallow.