author: Sheila Heti

name: Steev

average rating: 3.22

book published: 2010

rating: 4

read at: 2013/08/21

date added: 2013/08/21

shelves: fun, novels, own-it, spirit-self, art

review:
An odd book. A novel that reads a lot like a memoir and probably partially is one, in which the narrator blunders around her life as a young white privileged playwright in Toronto, making friends and enemies and vaguely struggling to reach some vague profundity. It reads a little bit like something I wish were a female version of Sam Lipsyte's "Homeland" - or maybe it is, but I'm just too male to get it. It doesn't have a clear narrative arc and character development resolution that I kind of instinctively want, and would expect from somebody like Lipsyte or Franzen or the author of How I Became a Famous Novelist, whose name I forget.

In other words, it has that flavor of the modernday creative outcast bumbling around gradually learning stuff, and it's weird and sorta funny, but it doesn't ever... gel as much as I wanted it to.

Probably should be 3.5 stars but I'm generously rounding up.

author: Thomas Frank

name: Steev

average rating: 4.27

book published: 2009

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2013/09/01

shelves:

review:

author: John Summers

name: Steev

average rating: 4.17

book published: 2012

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2013/09/01

shelves:

review:

author: Jon Klassen

name: Steev

average rating: 4.39

book published: 2011

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2013/09/03

shelves: children, crime, fun, own-it

review:

author: Marshall Berman

name: Steev

average rating: 4.27

book published: 1982

rating: 4

read at: 1999/01/01

date added: 2013/09/08

shelves: politics

review:
This book really blew my mind and influenced my thinking for a while when I read it, and I got into a big argument about it with a friend who is sort of too capitalist, over exactly what I don't remember what. I remembering thinking the book really explains a lot about why the U.S. is the way it is. I remember thinking I should go read Max Weber, whose work Berman refers to a lot.

author: Alejandro Zambra

name: Steev

average rating: 3.82

book published: 2006

rating: 4

read at: 2013/09/09

date added: 2013/09/09

shelves: fun, novels

review:
Kind of like a latino Tao Lin, only not as good. That same sort of opaque narrative voice where you don't get any, or very little, inner monologue of the characters, just kind of a ghostly relation of events from the outside. Somehow Tao Lin makes this work and often be hilarious and profound, but Zambra can't pull this off as well.

author: John Summers

name: Steev

average rating: 4.16

book published: 2013

rating: 5

read at: 2013/09/20

date added: 2013/09/20

shelves: fun, own-it, politics

review:

author: Jonathan Franzen

name: Steev

average rating: 3.60

book published: 2002

rating: 5

read at: 2013/10/20

date added: 2013/10/21

shelves: spirit-self, own-it, art

review:
A variety of essays from the mid-90s up through 2002, some of these are kind of too outdated to be of very much use, but others are timeless, and of those many ring eerily and still painfully true even though Franzen was talking about an earlier, less extreme version of an issue we're still facing today (the plight of the publishing industry, the dismal state of literature and reading, the polarization of politics, to name a few). All in all these non-fiction pieces create a picture of a writer and a person who is just as skilled as in his fiction with depicting a personality afflicted with depression, anger, conflicting and contradictory feelings, sadness and grief, and frustration with current trends and establishments. In other words, this book not only teaches how to be alone, but also shows me that I'm not, in that I share a lot of the above with him and the interior of my head as I think about those things looks a lot like the picture he's painted of himself. And this is one of the best functions of literature, whether fiction or non, that anyone could hope for.

author: Frederick W. Daily

name: Steev

average rating: 3.20

book published: 1992

rating: 4

read at: 2011/04/01

date added: 2013/11/02

shelves:

review:
I'm as done with this as I think I'll get. Not the kind of thing to read cover-to-cover, it's a practical manual for a variety of situations. I used it to learn how to send an Offer In Compromise to the IRS upon deciding to stop being a war tax resister after 10 years. I'm still waiting to hear back from them, but this book definitely gave me a lot more confidence, although it also helped to talk to a good tax CPA.

author: Frank Schaeffer

name: Steev

average rating: 3.62

book published: 2007

rating: 4

read at: 2013/11/09

date added: 2013/11/09

shelves: spirit-self, own-it, politics

review: