I keep having mixed success with Francine Prose. Blue Angel? Awesome. Household Saints? Eh. Bigfoot Dreams? Pretty good. And now this… I got about halfway through it, but then realized that I didn’t care and thus there was no reason to keep reading. Based on reviews of it on Amazon, I’m not the only one.

One of my favorite novels; a romantic view of Berkeley, and good writing about online discourse.

I keep talking about this book; it has a novel view of what privacy is and why people want it.

Before reading the other entry, I was just going to say that this book was quite similar to much more recent “chick lit” books, but not nearly as good as the best ones from that genre. It just feels very dated and thus it’s impossible to empathize with the protagonist. (The cover art also bothered me since it shows a thin, pretty girl and the whole point of the book is the protagonist’s unhappiness with her weight and appearance.) I’m just glad that it’s not the ‘70s anymore and that not being married by 21 is no longer considered a good reason for suicide.

It’s books like this that make me wish AllConsuming had a “worth it worth it OH MY GHOD so worth it” rating.

It’s possible to write an interesting novel about the college admissions process. This book is not it. It combines two-dimensional characters with silly jokes, the net result being something you’ll breeze through but forget hours after finishing it.

I’d heard a lot about this book and thought it might not be worth it to actually read, but I was wrong; it’s an insightful read although it might make you want to throw the book against the wall (because of the truths it points out, not because it’s a bad book).

The best book I’ve read this year, I think. Delany’s straightforward openness about subjects most people consider to be the privatest of the private is refreshing at first, then wrenching.

...or re-read it, if you’ve already read it. The movie was okay but didn’t convey nearly the amount of humor the book did. It was a strange choice of book to turn into a movie, anyway, since so much of the humor was from dialogue and it couldn’t really be improved much by hearing, rather than reading, it. The best parts of the movie were the ones that were lifted straight from the book; unfortunately, they seemed to feel the need to turn it into some sort of sappy father/son story, which wasn’t present nearly to the same extent in the original book.

It didn’t really help that I was watching this movie in Berkeley with an audience of people who thought everything was sidesplittingly funny (I guess they hadn’t read the book, or they would have found it mostly disappointing in its lack of funny) and who kept saying things, loudly, like “That was awesome” and “He’s going to get in trouble for saying that” and - afterwards - “That was a great movie, they should nominate it for an Emmy or something.”

Also, it was weird that nobody smoked in the movie; maybe it had something to do with the plot point about bribing Hollywood execs to get actors in current movies to smoke, but in the scene where Nick’s in the hospital room and the doctor’s telling him he can never smoke again, it’s weird to see Nick upset about it when we haven’t even seen him smoking BEFORE!

I was worried that this was going to embody all the well-meaning-liberal ideas about what trans people are, and it kind of did, but it was clear to me that this was meant to be a portrayal of one particular character who is trans. unfortunately, I’m afraid some people will generalize from the movie to “all transwomen see vaginoplasty as the end-all and be-all of achieving womanhood”. Then again, moreso than the main character’s prissiness and preoccupation with getting the all-important vagina is that she’s a human, with human strengths and weaknesses, and that’s a good thing. But then again, transphobic people probably won’t see this movie anyway. Who knows? Politics aside, it was fun, and made me want to go on a road trip.

But, what’s up with the dialogue spouted by the therapist character? Awful. And maybe the one worst thing about the movie was that it wasn’t quite explained how a character who works as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant and part-time telemarketer can afford to pay for SRS.

It’s interesting how near the very beginning, the main character says to a doctor something like “once I have The Surgery, I will be a real woman,” and near the end, she says to her mom, “you never had a son”. Maybe that’s supposed to imply that she learned something in between. But maybe not.