(groan)

by firsty

Posted to What Are You Reading? on 2004-01-24 06:25:00

Parent message is 588162
listen, i like dave eggers for a bit. i enjoyed some of AHBOSG, but mostly just the first part. it totally fell off the tracks in the second half, even tho i mostly continued to enjoy it.

i read a chapter of YSKOV when it was published in the new yorker before the book came out and i could barely make it thru the thing. he writes well, but he’s so damn full of his own cuteness that i just couldnt take it. similarly, i used to read his website, mcsweeneys.net, and sort of enjoyed it, but after a short while it just sort of started making me want to slap people. specifically, the people doing the writing. it’s just so one-note, and that note is this: semi-urban flippant keep-a-distance meta-fiction sarcasm, and while it’s nice to talk like that with your friends at a bar, i personally think it’s lowering the overall standards of fiction as comment on life’s truths, unless you consider life’s truth to be that nothing really matters except for how clever you can spin it, and i think there is more to it than that.

just my opinion, obviously. but i think he could have done more with his inherited wealthy laziness than that.

i do have to check out his collections of other writers, tho…mostly because michael chabon guest edited one of them.