by Vanessa Veselka
Undeniably bittersweet reaction to this book. A number of reviewers here have said what a hard time they had getting into it, but after a while they were completely sucked in. For me, it was the opposite. I thought the first 50 pages absolutely brilliant and it kept making me want to cry. Somewhere ...
"Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn’t care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can’t have it." I read this book because of the amazing review Kris wrote, and she truly has an impeccable taste in books. The memory of her praise of this slim volume w...
I went to work and a guy I wait on said he was leaving. He said everyone he knew was pulling out.“Canada is just not far enough. Mostly Mexico. A bunch to Thailand. Some to Bali.”He always orders a Tofu Scramble and makes me write a fucking essay to the cook. No soy sauce in the oil mix, no garlic, ...
Well I can tell how much this book was marketed to me by the sheer number of my categories I think it fits. Also by the sheer number of people telling me for like a year how amazing it was. So I finally got it together to read ZAZEN and it actually held up to the hype. Exceeded, even. I want to gath...
Manjula Martin rec
I think this is the type of book that people will either love or hate. It has the distinction of being the only book I can think of that involves twenty-something angst, domestic terrorism, hipper-than-thou vegans with names like Mirror and Devadatta, BDSM sex parties, paleontology, and a papier-mâc...
A fantastic debut that makes me less worried about the future of fiction. This is a book like no other, and Vaselka's prose is raw, poetic, gritty, and tapped in to social anxieties and political unrest in almost prophetic ways. nthword's review is well worth reading.
The author is from Portland; this novel and that city are filled with quirky characters. I enjoyed the story, the turnabout when harmless pranks became harmful, but after that point the author lost me. The main character ponged between angst and apathy with too high a frequency for me, until some of...
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