charbck's reviews
120 reviews

oh morrissey… so much to answer for…

i LOVE the smiths. i’d force my family to read their lyrics at my funeral. but god morrissey is so verbose, obviously. the first 250 pgs are quite good. he is a terrific writer and is great at painting a picture, but everything post smiths break up (which happens pg 200 btw) is so boring. frustratingly he does not discuss marr & his writing process, nor much of smiths life in general. he’s more focused on the press hating him. i did enjoy him discussing his literature and bands he loved. but when he’s in his solo era he describes EVERY. show. somehow he is so egotistical but so self-loathing at the same time. and you can’t take anything he says as fact either (i absolutely do not believe he was asked to be in friends, or any acting gig for that matter, which he apparently all “declined.”) it was an exhausting read. that being said when i was in to it, his style was very entertaining! i lolled many times. i would suggest moz take up being a novelist, but i guess he is too self-important for that. 

my first time delving into ee cummings!! i really enjoyed. i love how his poetry reads as if he is spewing select magnet phrases onto a refrigerator and rearranging them. i loved his fucked up syntax and his lowercase. i LOVED his love poems. his earlier work touched me more, but thats probably because he was young like me. $4 from the thrift lfg, great find and great collection

what if my personal legend is to bang ur mama

whatever this book is so whatever. the moral is listen to god or some shit. blindly follow god and dont trust ur intuition but instead keep going w what that priest told you to do 6 months ago. whatever. my favorite part was when he kept saying “i have no idea how to turn into the wind”

omg and the misogyny. only women characters are his love interests that dont have an arc or a backstory or anything. why couldnt fatima come with him. whatever is was a stupid detail he shouldve just cut the women if he wasnt gonna give them any depth bc ofc hes not

give this book to an 8 year old and change their life foreverrrr

bought it for the cover (beautiful) and the price tag ($10). wonderful style and the vignettes are nice. but im not invested in the character and the chapters are too long and the type is too small for me to keep reading

rip lux lisbon you would’ve loved tumblr

this book is like a boyfriend. he’s quirky, he’s talented, he says the right things that keep replaying in your head. but he has huge red flags that you keep ruining your dates, maybe he’s mean to the waitress or he’s obtusely out of touch. in the books case, its the male gaze (which somehow works but is also distracting), as well as the random, unnecessary racism. a paragraph will be winding and illustrating the echoing high school hallway, and then all of a sudden n word drop. like what?????

the prose was BRILLIANT. the gothic suburbia painting is beautiful. and parsing through the male gaze, we can see the lisbon girls as flushed out, real teenagers, not some barbie that the men are projecting on. speaking of the men, the ‘we’ narration blew me away. i’ve never read a piece that uses a we point of view, and i loved how it brought the reader in with the men, investigating and questioning and obsessing along with them. 

the ending is frustrating. i hate when ppl call suicide victims selfish. and i hate “but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling.” in my interpretation, the lisbons girls dont give a FUCK about these boys. the 1 thing that DOESNT matter is that they “loved” them. they didn’t love them, they loved the mysterious, melancholy air of their perfume. and they DIDNT CALL. they DIDNT ask them how they were coping after cecelia, they DIDNT ask if they needed help, and they DIDNT try to rescue the girls from their parents and that house. and i dont think they have to have done that for the story, its a book and they r teen boys and its the 60s/70s, like how would they have. but DONTTTT say “they hadn’t heard us calling.” u didnt try!!!!!! just cut that whole last monologue.

i also wish they investigated/discussed the girls killing themselves all on the same day more, and dragging the boys into it. like thats fucking crazy.

also the title upsets me. it centers their sexuality the whole story which is NOT at all the point.

also the narration goes into great detail about how lux ISNT a virgin! so if its not even accurate then wtf!!!

i guess “the sister suicides” wouldnt sell as well. needed to be double taboo. i wish it had a more thoughtful title

i will be reading academia on this, and viewing some youtube essays perhaps. excited to watch the movie.

im glad i didnt read this book when i was 15, i think it wouldve made me kms. keep this book away from high schoolers.

oh… this book. the book that made me end and restart my life. gillian flynn WHAT is going on in your head. i didnt love the ending so -.25, though i guess it is right for them. i’ll probably watch the movie and hate it

finally finished!! so so so good. it is a bit of a doomer read but its the truth. humans are fucking EVIL and i hope we go extinct soon

another installment of finishing books i bought as a child and never finished 👍🏻 shout out to dodie, she made me realize i was queer, and im sure many other ppl feel the same. this book was pretty well written! like the connor franta book, it is mostly morals for 15 year old girls, and i should have just read it then when i needed it! though some chapters resonated with 21 y/o me. DEF better written then the connor franta book, noah fence. her lyrics are like fine but some of those songs r catchy!!! i would turn to a lyric page and suddenly all of the music was in my head again!! sad to know she was extremely depressed and not eating when i met her, but we’ve all #beenthere

 the illustrations were DORBS but the FONT SIZE OH MY GOD. body copy size (and tracking😭😭😭😭) would change ON THE SAME PAGE. seems like the typesetter did NOT like white space but girl figure out another solution, add in another doodle. it drove me crazy.

there is no denying moody’s talent, as the back of the book suggests. title track was definitely the best story. but i have personal gripes

first, his style. moody loves to italicize things that have no reason to be italicized. often times its the joke of the whole story which is innumerably repeated. or a funny detail and all of it would be much funnier if it was unitalicized. calling moody verbose is an understatement. his sentences were so long and winding that you’d think to yourself, surely this next comma will be a period, but it isn’t, and you get bored of his thesaurus words that you begin to count each comma before the period, but get lost in the integers the same way you lose the integers in the sleepy sheep leaping across your soon to be dreamscape, and then you’re reminded of the lamb you ate at last week’s family dinner, and of your cousin’s college courses she shared over spaghetti, that you dont even realize when he does finally stop. and the sentence bleeds into the next. this happened to me often.

second, men. i am biased against all cis male authors. often times i dont care what they have to say overall. but i am especially critical of their woman characters. moody’s women unfortunately do not have depth outside of their relationships to the men around them, or outside of their motherhood. i was especially excited to read M.J.’s point of view in “A Carnival Tradition,” a bulimic ballerina studying at NYU organizing a gallery. but of course we get little of that in what is probably 40 pages of M.J., outside of her relationship with her flop boyfriend gerry. and then we get 50 pages of teenage gerry’s innermost thoughts and nuances, though he is just a teenage boy on a quest to kiss girls. i hate it here. 

that being said this book is probably an objective 5⭐️, but im not objective!  i do appreciate moody’s exploration of narrative form, and though i was considering swapping this book out for another in a little library, i’ve decided to keep it for inspiration. the last few pgs won me over. whatever

I LOVE NANA!!!! so so glad i bought the manga today!!! hopefully i can find the 2nd volume soon. -.5 stars bc shoji has such a temper and it pisses me off. nana and ren r THEE power couple i love them!! and the illustration style is GORGINAAAAA

love that this is the beginning of my manga arc and also i hope to score some more ai yazawa stories soon!!