My recent devourings

Here are the last four of my book devourings with short comments.


Bharati Mukherjee

This book is interesting because of the way she chastizes and dissects the old hippies left in Berkeley, where she now teaches. She puts their materialism, their fake joie de vie, desperate sensualism and shallow deepness under the electron microscope of a teenage daughter seeking redemption in her birth parents. The ultimate irony of the book is that the daughter, rejecting her adoptive parents, wants to embrace them, and ends up despising them and their shallow lives. It’s all done from the daughter’s either very skewed perspective or else the daughter’s accurate perspective of some very skewed individuals.

I have read a lot of Mukherjee’s works. I think she’s one of the few novelists who approach the modern immigrant story with neither nostalgia nor self-pity.


Chuck Palahniuk

Not really worth reading. I expect Fight Club was a lot better. This seems to be a very watered down version of the same story with an equally happy ending.


Jeanette Winterson

This is a wonderful book. Very sexy, very enjoyable. She writes about women with great clarity, however her descriptions of men are a bit more stereotyped and sometimes altogether forgetable. (I forgot a character from the beginning that turns out to be important at the end and had to re-read the beginning to remember who he was.) Her style of writing is beautiful. It’s something I’d re-read before writing. The link is to her blog. She’s great.






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