Off The Shelf

Review:

I don’t have anything particularly negative to say about this book (except for the kinda big thing I’m going to say later), which is a bit of a departure from my last few reviews. It’s a pretty great story – exciting, gripping (is that the same thing?), complex, and well-conceived. The characters are compelling, well-developed, complicated, and gritty. The setting is beautifully drawn and you get plunked down right in it. Now finish each of those three sentences with “in no small part because it’s true.” So much of what’s here is Ripped from the Headlines (of 1935) but done with amazing craft, language, and art, making for a beautiful collage of a novel. When I was done reading the book, I enjoyed reading up on all the “characters” on Wikipedia. The star of the show though is definitely the language. Written entirely in first person, it takes a minute to get used to a street urchin saying things like “a strong ethic prevailed, all the normal umbrages… all the outraged sensibilities… once you accepted the first pure inverted premise.” But then again it made me pretty sure that Billy was going to survive past his youth to learn how to talk like that.

Okay, so here’s the thing that I need to address. What is it about so many books on my shelf written by men in the 1990’s with crappy portrayals of women? I’m getting a little worn out by the dearth of substantial female characters. Most of them apparently existing only to be taken care of or to have sex with. I’m reasonably well-practiced at ignoring that for an otherwise good book from time to time, but so many in a row? In the last five books (one I’m still finishing up) the least egregious has been 2001: A Space Odyssey and only because there were basically no women in it at all. I wish now that I hadn’t started this project with Cat’s Eye. It would have been a breath of fresh air at this point, and I probably would have written a very different review of it than I did. Might need to go back… (Finished book December 9, 2025 – then wrote and sat on this review until after the holidays)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

323/3 = 107 2/3 pages of reading for every star sounds about right for this book even though I enjoyed it.

(Still trying out other metrics for the mathy among us, and will take suggestions):

• Awards to Stars: 4 to 3

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Enjoying all the classic gangster stuff like running numbers and sleeping with the fishes: 4
• Concerns about watching Dustin Hoffman starring in the movie: 0

Bechdel Test: Extra Big Fail! (Only four more books to go until I get to another woman writer)

Review:

In the end David Lurie, the main character, decides he is “Not a bad man but not good either” and that works for the book as well. Except for being sexist, racist, ageist, colonialist, and having a deeply unlikeable protagonist, it’s not an entirely bad book. Except for being complex and well-written, tackling difficult themes and times, developing a variety of interesting if somewhat impenetrable characters, and showing evidence at the end that Lurie might just be learning something (hinted at in the last sentence) and that the female and the Black South African characters might just be actual people, it’s not a good book either. It’s hard not to think that the limited, self-absorbed, abusive, smug, frustrating, do-not-invite-this-guy-to-Thanksgiving character he is for 99.99% of the book is the one that the author is the most invested in. And maybe sees himself in? I didn’t like him (as you may have guessed) and I didn’t understand him, and I also wonder now how I would feel about the author. Why are some characters so hard to disentangle from the author? I spent the whole book thinking “Is this what the author thinks or what he thinks this guy thinks?” (I don’t have these issues with the Thursday Murder Club books, but then again I like those characters!) Made my brain hurt.

One more thing in the well-done category: the viewpoint is so strongly written that I often struggled to see outside of Lurie’s perspective. His deeply flawed arguments and choices, as maddening as they felt, came across somehow as the best ones for him in the moment. Like him, I regularly found the other characters’ perspectives impenetrable (Oops – used that before) and his logic sound enough. At one point quite near the end when he is clearly on his journey of understanding and is wondering how he could live with himself if anything were to happen to his daughter, he is asked, “Is that the question (you should be asking yourself), David?” He doesn’t know and I wasn’t entirely sure either which was driving me crazy. With a little distance and some of my irritation waning with time, I’m beginning to see the light at the end of that patriarchal tunnel. Lurie is a rolling stone slowing down a little by the end of the book and finally beginning to gather some useful moss (that is, perspective if not exactly empathy). Okay, after writing this review I appreciate much better what this author was doing – but I still don’t like the main character. (Finished book December 7, 2025)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

220/4 = only 55 pages of reading for each star. What is it about these short books that I don’t enjoy reading but are so well crafted? (I really need a new/another metric!)

(Still trying out other metrics for the mathy among us, and will take suggestions):

• Frustration index: Number of pages over Number of times I wanted to throw this book down and step on it: (220/50): 4.4

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• How much I wanted to punch this guy most of the time: 4
• How much you should read this if you like dogs (or people): 0
• Concerns about watching John Malkovich starring in the movie: 5

Bechdel Test: Big Fail! (more on this later)

Movie Review:

Okay, wow, do I have thoughts and feelings about this! I’m one of those people who almost always feels that the book is better than the movie (I’ll try to think of an exception and come back and change this sentence when I think of one. (E – Do Not say Pride and Prejudice 2005!)). I absolutely must insist that this is 100% true here. The book is so good and the movie is slow, boring, and just lacking (but okay, pretty)! I understand what Kubrick was trying to do: convey the vast emptiness of space, build tension, highlight the incredible evolution and also insignificance of humans, caution against technology, showcase his innovations and the beautiful craft available to him at the time, but couldn’t he have done that in under 2.5 hours? Or at least worked in more from the (quite short) book? He cuts out plot points and backstories and replaces those with long minutes of a (granted very well lit) spaceship (model) creeping across empty space, and pod bay doors excruciatingly opening and closing All The Way every single time. Where is the spookily prescient description of what Jupiter might look like inside all the gas? Where was the internal turmoil of HAL? And then most unforgivingly, where was the huge missing plot point to end the movie!?! Sure we got a cute space-baby, but did Kubrick think audiences couldn’t take the dark and stormy ending and so chose ambiguity for a safe way out? If I was Clarke, I’d be pissed. (Big husband points because he really did let me talk through the whole movie all the way to my freak out in the end!) (Finished Nov. 1, 2025)

Payoff (minutes per stars): 

149 minutes/2 stars = that’s sitting through 74.5 minutes of movie for each star!

Movie Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Meeting expectations (second half of the movie): 0
• Regrets about not finishing the movie before now: 0
• Pissed: 5
• Clarke fan: 5
• Kubrick fan: 2
• Surprised that Clarke had nice things to say about him in the forward of my copy of the book: 4 (How mad can you be at a guy who probably made you a fortune?)
• Special effects considering the year: 5
• Still mad: 4

Bechdel test: Fail

Review:

So I’m gonna mix up talking about the book and the movie here together even though I’ve only seen half of the movie so far. So you know the “I’m sorry, Dave” part of the movie? Well, I always thought that was the end of the movie, until someone recently mentioned a floating baby head and I had no idea what that was about. Guess I probably fell asleep halfway through the movie. Now that I know what the baby head thing is about, I’m so excited to see the rest of the movie. The book is amazing as a read and even more remarkable since it was written (even co-written by Clarke and Kubrick) specifically to make into the movie. It reads like the best novelization ever, which in a way it is, just beforehand instead of after. It’s fast paced and plot forward, but still plenty detailed and with complex, if somewhat stilted, characters. Even more incredible are Clarke’s vision and his descriptions of planets not yet explored and space travel that hadn’t happened yet. (How did he know what he knew so he could imagine what he imagined?)

Obviously the book is more than the movie. The part in the very beginning of the movie with the apes that lasts about 5 minutes (I was awake for that part), is the whole Part One of the book and is riveting. I loved the dynamic of knowing some things about the first part of this book and contrasting as I went along, and then being so surprised by the ending. Kind of like watching Making Of segments to get the behind the scenes perspective. I’m guessing that going in knowing what’s what will help me follow the craziness people describe of the ending of the movie. The husband says I can narrate over the movie for him a la Mystery Science Theater 3000! (Finished book Oct 27, 2025)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

236/4 = only 59 pages of reading for each star. Sounds pretty good, but then again Short Cuts had a smaller number and I definitely didn’t enjoy reading those 51 pages per star more than this book.

(Trying out other metrics for the mathy among us, and will take suggestions):

• Time: Days spent reading per star: 6/4 = 1.5
• Aging: Years since publications per star: (2025 – 1968)/4 = 57/4 = 14.25

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Surpassing expectations: 5
• Cultural longevity: 4
• Excitement about the movie: 4
• Regrets about not finishing the movie before now: 0

Current distractions (books not off the shelf):

Next up:

1. 80 or so pages into the (alphabetically by author’s last name) next book but it’s going to take a while since I only have a hard copy and it’s small type and 500 pages. (Good news: I figured out how to read it while on the exercycle – it involves holding a stick to keep the pages from flopping over.)
2. Additionally, starting the book after that one which is considerably shorter.

Review:

Where do I even begin? (Does anything good ever follow that opening?) This book was a lot! It was of its time, that’s for sure, and a time that thankfully at least some folks have tried to move on from. It is sexist, racist, classist, etc. in a special 80’s casual way. Many of us of a certain age remember those years so fondly that it’s somewhat shocking to be confronted with genuine ugly artifacts of it. OR, am I missing something, and was Carver a master of subtlety and guile unmatched in ours or any time? The people in these stories are all so deeply, deeply flawed. Who am I rooting for here? Any one? (Finished Sept 27, 2025)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

154/3 = 51.333 (note to self: this metric is apparently biased towards short books)

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Meeting expectations: Unrateable since I had no expectations of the book, and I barely remembered the movie.
• Shock and Awe: 4
• Questioning my own perceptions: 4

P.S. Here’s something weird: I went to Goodreads to post my review of this book and I found it there already. Apparently on November 29, 2014, I posted that I had finished reading it. Zero memory of having read this before, so I’m either a liar on Goodreads (lying so the husband thinks I’m reading his gifts?) or my memory is going (my kids would say the latter for sure). Hard to know which option reflects better on me.

P.P.S (Movie Review) Oof!

Review:

I really wanted to love this book. I love baseball, fantasy, and the islands of Puget Sound, so this book should be right up my alley. The overall concept is good, and I did finish it, so that’s something. But this book is trying to do way too much and much of it not well. There are so many words, backstories, lore-explaining, descriptions of places, and not enough interesting action or compelling characters to make it worth-while. Is this a book for kids? I’m not sure I know many kids that would sit through all these pages of grown-up-talking-at them. Kavalier and Clay is one of my all time favorite books. What happened? (Finished Sept 18, 2025)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

500/2 = 250 (Reading this book was a slog)

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Meeting expectations: 0
• Questioning who this book is for: 5
• Feeling guilty saying all this about an author I adore: 5 (wait, is 5 good here or bad? It’s unclear, but you know what I mean)

Review

I’m not planning on speaking of the personal actions of this or any author. I have been reading up on the lives of each of the authors as I read their books, especially with books that are from a while back, in order to get a better understanding of what they were going through and trying to do. My intention is to read these books as they were intended – of and for the time they are from. This is my first Alexie book. I have read some of his essays, and at least one of my kids read Diary of a Part Time Indian for school. Even though the stories have many narrators and situations, Alexie’s voice and experience comes through loud and clear. I’ve tried to write more about the characters and their stories, but it all comes out sounding trite and condescending, so I give up. (Finished Sept 18, 2025)

Payoff (pages per stars): 

223/4 = 55.75 pages per star. (Is this a metric I want to stick with?)

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):

• Voice: 5
• Meeting expectations: 5
• Plans to read anything else by him: 0

Review:

Her first book after Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve read enough of her books that I was expecting a twist or a turn or something more dark or fantastical. The turn never came and so I found it a little disappointing. With this novel, however, she shouts volumes about the many twist and turns of experiencing life as a girl and a woman, so that’s something. When people talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, Margaret Atwood is one of those giants. (Finished Sept 4, 2025)

Payoff (a pages per stars metric): 

Misc Ratings (Out of 5):