Caustic Cover Critic
@causticcovercritic
Uncharismatic megafauna. Too fat to ride a horse, too poor to own a carriage. Buy my book, keep me off the streets:
Just came across some fossilised PR for the late, unlamented "flipbacks", the stupid sideways paperbacks that were somehow supposed to appeal to people because they like phones(?) and which failed to sell to anybody because they were a crap idea. I remember being very angry when I first saw them.
Funny 2-hander play about two friends whose relationship starts to fissure (over their different experiences as Black women) when one of them goes on a Twitter tirade about Kylie Jenner and her appropriation of Black culture, and becomes social media's Main Character of the Day.
~4000-year-old mythic poems from Babylon, some of the absolute oldest surviving human literature, which have you whiplashing between 'ancient people were just like us!' and 'ancient people were absolute weirdo alien freaks!'. Often vividly visual, frequently obscure, and constantly fascinating.
The distant sound you hear is my floorboards slowly giving way under the weight of more books (including two by Hungarian geniuses, one dead (Gyula Krúdy) and one very much alive (Krisztina Tóth)).
Set in Quebec, 1697, as the town loses contact with the rest of the world for 8 months of cold weather; about the relationship between a 12yo girl and her father. Vivid but quiet, oddly free of incident for the most part. Not the Cather to start with unless you want something wildly unrepresentative
Chilly, claustrophobic and compelling portrait of 3 cowards (tyrant bully father, mother scraped paper-thing by abuse, the appeaser/narrator son) and how the last of them finally escapes from the other two. Elegantly written but troubling. Édouard Louis is the obvious comparison.
Another excellent death-haunted Tasmanian novel. 1832: ex-convict Jørgen Jørgensen (whose real life was astonishingly complicated) is sent to investigate the suicide of a noted naturalist/explorer at a desolate corporate outpost. Subtle, sad, and does not hide the colony's incredibly brutal history.
Fascinating autobiographical novel about being a young Nigerian woman in '60s 'No Coloureds' England, ending up with 5 kids to a brutal sadist of a husband, and trying to become independent and a writer. It accelerates weirdly at the end, skimming through major developments oddly, but still powerful
I think this might just be the first book I have read that contains literally zero subtext.
♪♫ bought more books, now I'm going to the poorhouse bought more books, now I'm going to the poorhouse ohhhh, bought more books, now I'm going to the poorhouse someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this ♪♫
Tries to be a proto-climate change novel and a proto-disaster novel, but ultimately it's actually only interested in the political careers of two of its many characters. Much of it is written in an appealingly wry style, but also ignores most of what would make it a better book.
So this is what they're giving the International Booker to these days? Huh. It's congenial enough, and interesting in places, but also very boring in a lot of other places. The narrator, a middling, old-fashioned travel writer, is convincingly written, but that doesn't make for actual good prose.
I remember quite enjoying Nassar's 'A Cup of Rage', but this novel about a young man being summoned back to his family by his brother is so overwritten, so full of clotted, endless, run-on descriptions, that the amount of poetic detail actually destroys its clarity. Very underwhelming.
Dark, sometimes funny, more often disturbing, about the parallel lives of two women who come into tangential contact. Remorselessly perceptive on the corrosiveness of loneliness. Some great fun had at the expense of the ludicrous Ayn Rand and her dipshit cultists.
The maddening thing about this line of argument is that if it's true, you literally have no choice about whether you "accept it" or not. THAT WOULD BE FREE WILL, MOTHERFUCKERS
Brief, bleak, cinematic: probably facile to draw attention to the author's screenwriting background, but it shows (and not in a bad this-was-written-to-be-a-movie way). Justice as a self-perpetuating machine, eating everyone who falls in; Brazil's brutal history; men with guns and nothing to lose.
Hard SF from 1989, dated in some weird ways (ie explanation of what a computer mouse is, etc) and but not in its speculative science, the discovery and exploration of which is very well written. The rest of it is sadly not quite so convincing. Promising 1st novel from someone who only wrote 1 more.
Karel, a bored Dutch teenager is desperate for ANYTHING to happen. Then Hitler invades, Karel falls in love with his uncle's mistress's daughter, and the whole country collapses. Funny, alarming, and completely convincing. It might be teen angst, but sometimes the world really is ending. From 1950.
Well, if it helps, I'm now reading a Dutch SECOND World War novel that's very very good.
A surgeon contemplates an appendectomy: (from 'A Shadow of Myself' by Peter Flamm, trans. Simon Pare, 1926)
Slippery 100yo German modernist novella: a man returns from the trenches after stealing a dead man's identity, but everyone in that man's life recognises him as the other man. Hallucinatory PTSD, a dog as an erratic agent of justice, and his former life invading his new life... a small masterpiece.
just resiliconed the shower in what was one of the worst hours of my life so far