[book post] Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

I read this book with a mixture of bafflement and annoyance. The scheming, conniving housewives were incredibly unfunny, despite the relentless kookiness and sitcom-TV-style setpieces that seemed to scream "THIS IS FUNNY! THIS IS SO FUNNY! INSERT LAUGH TRACK HERE!" Yawn.

Moreover, this book is desperate to be a book About Seattle ^TM, and so, it's namedropping stuff left and right: they get Beecher's cheese and Molly Moon's ice cream and there's Chihuly sculptures and they have dinner at the Washington Athletic Club and later at a Tom Douglas restaurant (are you annoyed yet). But despite all that name-dropping, the Seattle they depict is utterly unrecognizable (to me, at least; ymmv I guess). At one point a random Microsoft admin is starstruck when she finds out her boss is from a "prominent Philadelphia family" and went to Exeter. The fuck? Get that east coast status shit out of here; most people I know here have never heard of Exeter. Status in Seattle is more of a passive-aggressive humblebrag sort of thing, and also, more about dropping out of schools than attending them. Also, tech company admins are the most take-no-shit people I know. As a profession, like, they literally do not give a shit how fancy your family was in a city they've never been to (particularly at a workplace that's stacked with fancy school graduates), they just want to know what time they can schedule a fucking meeting... what even.

To be clear: I'd be happy to read a book with a good skewering of the Pacific Northwest and its elite! I don't even think it's that hard to do; I watched Portlandia before I ever visited the city, and when I finally did, I was full-bodied by how much that show turned out to be a damn documentary. Rich people in Seattle are ridiculous; it's just a different kind of ridiculous than in Manhattan.

And I'd be into conniving housewives being petty busybody bitches if it was actually funny/fun. It's not my usual fare, but I like an occasional over-the-top suburban backstabfest as much as the next gal. But that fell flat here, too.

There's some heart at the book's center—the author clearly wants to tell a story about a woman who's desperately unhappy and stuck in life and trying to figure out how to create art again. And I really wanted to like that, since that's a story I could be invested in without reservation. But here, the format of the book (epistolary) undermines its impact—since we never quite get under Bernadette's skin, and crucially, we never really understand her husband (if a dude wakes up after fifteen years of marriage and suddenly realizes, Oh Fuck, My Wife's Really Messed Up And Has Been For A Long Time, there's gotta be a story there, right?), Bernadette ends up feeling a bit hollow, and a bit too pushed around by the plot.

Anyway. So I finished reading it, and then I called up my mom, because she was reading this for book club, and the first thing she said was, "Have you finished Bernadette yet? It is SO FUNNY. I was laughing so hard at the joke about the Chichuly sculpture!"

Whelp.

So, yeah, I think this book is just targeted at a completely different person than me, the kind of person who, idk, watches Big Bang Theory and finds that style of humor funny, I guess. Which is fine, like, there are also people I love who loved The Name of the Wind; it's just so aggressively not to my taste that I think I'll take a break from swiping mom's book club's picks for a bit :P

[book post] The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

Tremendously promising, as far as debut novels go, but also I've got like zero interest in reading the rest of the trilogy?

It's a weird book, in that the first half feels like stilted YA, so much so I almost put it down—Rin is so smart and works so hard and everyone at the big fancy school is so mean and snobby even though she is so talented, etc—but uh, then it flips a switch like whoa and suddenly there's a fucking war on and everyone is drafted to fight and shit gets extremely real.

This Locus review probably captures most my thoughts from there on out. It's a fine page-turner and a fine romp; I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the druggie-magic stuff; and it really could go in a few wildly different directions for the rest of the trilogy, depending on what the author chooses. (I'm told Rin's overall arc is modeled on Mao's life story, which is a really interesting choice!) But—ultimately it felt a little too familiar and tropey for me to want to pick up the next one.

I believe the author's now working on a new trilogy, though, something set at Oxbridge and going for a dark academia vibe and some kind of critique of the colonialist-education-complex? and I'll be very eager to read that, when it comes out—Kuang's got a very deft touch, prosewise, and knows how to keep a story moving; I'd love to see those talents applied to something more quiet and broody and such.