Whaddya know? I actually did it.

This book is that friend you had in high school that one day you said Seriously, dude, not everything has to be funny as he tries to make an inappropriate joke about the Holocaust and then after that, you don’t hang out that much anymore and you know what, you don’t even mind that much.

***

I don’t understand being in love with someone based solely on their looks. I guess, since I am not beautiful, it’s an alien concept to me. But it’s also boring. In the back pages, in the notes by the author section to make the book book-clubbable, author goes on about how he’s subverting tropes and the girls in the book have depth. Firstly, he describes them as girls. Then what is their depth? We know that one is poor, one is the daughter of a sleazy lawyer, one is fat. That’s not depth. Depth is what is your favourite piece of classical music and why? How much one weighs hardly counts as depth.

***

This is a book for geeky boys who wanted hot girls.

I am a geeky girl.

I never had much interest in hot girls.

Ergo….

I feel the following should be put in list format:

1. I have read four books by Roberto Bolaño;
2. Roberto Bolaño is one of my favourite authors;
3. I could not tell you, with any accuracy, anything that occurs in any of the four novels I have read.

Well, that was grim.

And the last Canadian novel I read was grim too.

I thought it would be funny. The blurbs on the front said it would be funny. Maybe it is for those who don’t view their bodies as an insidious enemy, whose goal, as far as they can tell, is type 2 diabetes and heart disease, who didn’t have relatives growing up taking them to task for how big they were, who didn’t, when they lost a bunch of weight in their last year of high school through a combination of not eating and an untreated lung infection, feel that their mothers loved them more now that there was less to love, maybe for people like that, this book was funny.

I am fat. I have a daughter, and with her I use the word fat not as an insult but just as a word, and tell her again and again that size means nothing because good people come in all shapes and sizes, but she is not fat, and secretly (and now now so secretly because here I am typing it aloud) I think her life will be easier because she is thin. I think specific slices of my life would be easier if I lost weight too.

I write grim too. But after the last list of grim novels I’ve been reading, I don’t know whether I can handle any more grim at all.

Otherwise known as a neuro-linguist rewrites The Handmaid’s Tale, which, considering how similar the premises are, is interesting is not mentioned anywhere on the cover blurbs.

The epub of this and The Rotter’s Club, which I paid $14 for each, were both riddled with OCR errors (double f’s missing especially) and improper page breaking and no section breaks and I love these books and why would you put some of my favourite books in such shoddy packaging? I don’t care if the person to whom I recommended them thought they were trash; they didn’t deserve such treatment by kobo.

I got very little sleep last night. I struggle with my work. I am trying to clean as well. Nothing, however, is done and I am on the verge of exhausted tears.