"Commie Girl in the O.C."

Commie Girl in the O.C. (Rebecca Schoenkopf)

Commie Girl in the O.C. begs many questions: Why am I reading Commie Girl in the O.C.? Why do I own Commie Girl in the O.C.? I wish I could answer these questions, but I can't. The mystery surrounding Commie Girl in the O.C. is, I'm afraid, more interesting than the book itself, which mostly reads like a series of newspaper columns or short blog posts from somewhere in the 2000s, and which I quickly found myself putting down to read The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America (review possibly forthcoming). I don't recommend Commie Girl in the O.C.; even at under $7 from Amazon, it's just not worth the extensional crisis.

Grade: D

"Glass House 51"

Glass House 51 (John Hampel)

I don't really know what to make of this book; it kind of reads like a boring fever dream, if such a thing is even possible. I'll freely admit I didn't make it very far, giving up after the author introduced 15 characters in 10 pages over the span of a confusing, painful exposition dump about a company called AlphaBanc that's getting ready to become the world's most powerful E-bank, but this serial killer nerd called the Gnome and I'm sorry, I seem to have slam-dunked this book into the donation pile and picked up something else to read. Might be worth seeking out if you want to read something bonkers, but not for me, I'm afraid.

Grade: D-

"Snow Crash"

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

I really hated this book; it has the William Kennedy style of writing where it sounds like an annoying person at a party you can't escape yammering nonsensically at you, with Stephenson's twist being that it sounds like you've been cornered by a 10 year old boy who can't shut up. Here's a quote from the first ten pages, talking about the hero's car, which goes, like, a billion miles an hour:

The Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a pesta.

I made it through maybe 15 pages of this crap before it was hurled into the donation pile with great malice. I don't know that I have much to add beyond that horrible quote. I guess I would say - do not buy this book; do not check out this book; do not recommend this book; do not read this book.

Grade: F-

"Lincoln at Gettysburg"

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Garry Wills)

I'm surprised at how little I liked this book. Honestly, I don't know how this won the Pulitzer; it's about a fifth very technical dissection of the Gettysburg Address itself, and the rest is a wandering hodgepodge (I found myself flipping page after page of information about then-contemporary cemetery design philosophy). Some of this is interesting - the author's rundown of the two hour long preceding Gettysburg Oration went into a lot of detail about public speaking in the mid 1800s that was surprisingly interesting.
But this is the exception - most of the non-Address material is both boring and puzzling in that I'm not sure why it was included. I almost muddled through the whole book, but then I started running into this (from pages 116-117):

Psychobiographers, as we have seen, claim that this demonstrates Lincoln's oedipal compulsion to "kill" Douglas as a sibling rival.

I don't really think I need to say any more than that. Don't bother with this book.

Grade: F

"The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990 - 1990"

The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990 - 1990 (Miriam & Ezra Elia)

I guess I didn't get this book; it's about a sad hamster who (spoiler alert? I can't even tell, it's in the title) dies at the end. It's not funny or entertaining; it's puzzling and depressing. The whole book I was like "Is this supposed to be funny?" and then I got to the end and went "What?" and then "Was this supposed to be funny?"
Don't even bother getting this one of the library.

Grade: F