Books completed in July

1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
2. Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone: Poems by Annelyse Gelman
3. Drink by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Books Still in Progress at the End of the Month: The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma and I’ve started listening to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke on audio book, which is a reread after watching the recently released mini-series.

REVIEWS:

1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Patrick Bateman is a terrible human being — superficial, elitist, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and a serial killer. His days and nights are filled with lounging around the office, working out to maintain the perfect image, buying expensive clothing, technology and other objects, eating and drinking at the hippest clubs and restaurants, getting high on cocaine (this is set in the ’80s), and periodically torturing and murdering animals, women, and the homeless.

The novel switches from being mind numbingly mundane to being gratuitously graphic in both sex and violence. There are pages and page on what people ate, what people are wearing, what the decor was like, how much Patrick worked out that day, his skin care routine, and so on. All of these are things Patrick is obsessed with and gets anxiety over, so it makes sense that he would describe them in minutia — however, as a reader, I found it very tedious and by the time he was describing someone’s outfit in detail for the upteenth time I was starting to get annoyed, because I just didn’t give a crap about who designed some guy’s tie. Meanwhile, the sex and violence are described with the same level of minute detail to the point where it’s almost overwhelming toward the end (though, if the point of horror is to disturb, then it succeeded, because I was disturbed).

Patrick is able to get away with these horrifying acts because everyone in the story is vile. Everyone is the same superficial elitist he is, so self focused that they don’t even notice or pay attention to the blood stains on his clothing. Sometimes he even says, flat out in the middle of a conversation, that he likes to torture and kill women and not one person notices or seems to care, either too wrapped up in their own little obsessions or believing it to be a joke. The author’s point seems to be that it’s a mad, vapid world, one in which a psychopath fits right in.

I know a lot of people who love this book. And I recognize a certain amount of technical skill in the writing and a layer of satire and cultural criticism, however, I didn’t actually enjoy the experience of reading this book. I was either half bored or entirely overwhelmed with the level of women focused violence. Let’s just say, it’s not for me and leave it at that.

2. Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone: Poems by Annelyse Gelman

Discussed elsewhere.

3. Drink by Laura Madeline Wiseman

The short version, I LOVED THESE POEMS. The long version will come later, because I’m doing something I’ve never done before, which is try to get a book review professionally published. I’ll post a link to the review once it’s released.