People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. I don’t want this book to leave an impression on me but I can feel it. I can feel that it has. I feel it in the way that I remember the first lines of the book, the way Bret just has to repeat those lines through the book « the merge ». I don’t like it.
I use the word « don’t » instead of « didn’t” because no one goes into a book thinking « Oh, you know, I really hope this doesn’t leave an impression on me. » We all want to be impressed upon in some ways I suppose, especially by art forms like literature. Or, maybe I should say, we all would like to be impressed: with kindness, fulfilled potential, equality, love, epic prose. I went into this book wanting it to stick with me, wanting it to be good. After all, the back cover synopsis had called it a “cult classic” of LA youth and since some of my formative youth years were spent in the seedy after-hours, bars and not-so glamorous clubs of LAs finest (subject to rebuttal) I was surprised to have come across this in a bookshop in London rather than when I was living in LA. This book defies being good. There’s nothing particularly good about it. It’s a story that feels real, though is listed as fiction (?) and is a work that took a very long time for me to get through. Nearly a month — actually, I went back and counted; it was only 13 days but man did it feel like I was trapped in this book for a lot longer than less than two weeks — to read 192 pages, much to my eternal dismay. If I could sum up the experience of reading this book it would be this, legit: I got sloughed down. I would flip a page and get stuck in the page, sink down to my ankles, heave my legs up and out of the page, take a step, and sink back down to my ankles again.
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Hi There,This page is dedicated to all the books I read and all the things I write. Archives
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