Reviews: Books – Gangs, Voidoids, Dykes, Master, Grotesque

Since the last time I wrote a review for a book, I’ve had several reading disasters.

Gangs of New York was okay, if a little (a lot) xenophobic, but it just generally wasn’t interesting enough to read all at once. Although when I caught the movie on TV a few months later, it was interesting to see what the set designers and script writers had taken from the book to create their vision of the Five Points. Lots of interesting details in the background that I recognized from the book.

From the Velvets to the Voidoids is another unfinished book. I desperately wanted it to be as awesome as Please Kill Me, which I should have known would be impossible, being that Please Kill Me is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. Sadly, Velvets wasn’t even a pale shadow of Please Kill Me. It was full of pretentious music analysis and out of touch hipster crap. Instead of an honest vision of the actions of real people, it was just a load of the same old bullshit about the otherworldly genius of Lou Reed and how Nico was just a starfucking attention whore with no actual talent and how Patti Smith’s songs only existed because of the men she was sleeping with at the time. GIVE ME A BREAK! Also, half the text was just detailed (boring) discographies and bragging comments about how one cannot truly understand the Stooges unless you’ve heard some obscure b-side to a six inch. Blurgh. Maybe I’ll pick it up again when I’m feeling more charitable…?

Let’s see… then I went through the entirety of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For in a hot minute and was sad when it was over.

After that came Master & Commander, which was pretty excellent, despite the fact that I needed to buy a dictionary to explain all the words and I still wasn’t sure what was going on half the time. But the picture of life spent on a ship in Nelson’s Navy coupled with the incredibly gay relationship of Maturin and Aubrey made it worthwhile. I would love to read the next books in the series. I have no real complaint about it besides the portrayal of women. While I accept that men of the time would have thought a certain way of women, I felt that the book itself was often equally insulting. But then most of the book was spent away from women and full of gay subtext so…

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino was very aptly named. It was the story of two Japanese women who had attended a prestigious private school, but ended up as cheap street whores. The first half of the book was narrated by the sister of one of the girls, a woman best described as grotesque. The book was an interesting commentary on the treatment of women in Japan, but it was a bit trying to read about them from the perspective of such a terrible person. I heard it had an alternate ending in Japan but couldn’t find anyone to confirm it for me.