Okay, this is a bit overdue because as I mentioned in my day log I actually finished this book a few days ago. But it took me a while to start this because every time I thought about it I just didn't know where to start, there was so much, and even now I still don't know. But let me try LOL.

This book was fucking bananas. The narrator, who is Bret Easton Ellis himself, is just so damn interesting. I love his writing style, or perhaps that's just his personality, or maybe it's both, but reading it is so easy because of how fascinating he is. Every time I picked up this book I went into a trance. The writing is kind of cut-and-dry, not really emotional in the typical sense (I've heard this is pretty much Ellis' modus operandi), but somehow it still teemed with character because of how much we were inside Bret's head. It's very intimate, perhaps is the best way to describe it. Even though Bret is such an unreliable narrator it makes you feel like you know every detail of his thoughts.


It wasn't just the characterization though, it was also just the way the writing was on a sentence level. The vocabulary, the flow of the words, the way every sentence was formatted, it all felt so natural when it had to be natural and jarring and exciting when it had to be jarring and exciting. Again, it makes it so easy to read, you just fly through it because of how well it all flows. Maybe it's more of a personal taste thing? But I loved it. I'll even say that it kind of made me crazy jealous because I knew I would never be able to write like that no matter how hard I try.

Back to Bret though, he was a very frustrating and upsetting protagonist at times, but in other times he was also relatable. His vastly different identities—the tortured artist, the writer, versus the tangible participant—is pretty much what the story is about. His paranoia in relation to the killings and Robert Mallory and his paranoia in being discovered as gay are not separate things, they are linked, symbiotic even, and it's painful but also seriously fun to read how this paranoia takes over him and his life.


And there is so much atmosphere in this book. Like sooo much it almost suffocates you. I thought I'd read atmospheric books before, it's nothing compared to this. Of course this is due in part to the book's tendency to name every single thing and constantly reference. Songs, artists, brands, street names, by God there are a lot of street names. And I definitely understand why people find this annoying, but at the same time I kind of enjoyed it. Especially as someone who a) is Gen-Z and b) has never been to America before, it was fun to see into this completely unfamiliar world with such intensity. I felt plunged into this book's setting.

Another part of the atmosphere-building were of course the characters and their relationships to each other. They are so terrible and interesting and I love them. Again people say this novel is too long but I don't agree, I think all the scenes, even the "useless" ones, just add more depth and more tension to this fucked-up friend group.

This novel is so good at making every conversation feel like I'm about to get murdered. The characters are almost never talking about what they're talking about; there's always some double-meaning, or something they're trying to say subliminally, skirting around the issue pretending everything is normal. And it rounds out the whole theme of the book, the pretense. The overwhelming fear that crushes Bret at all times makes every conversation feel high-stakes even when on the surface it's about nothing.








And the horror bits are appropriately horrific. There were moments where I felt genuinely sick and moments where my jaw was just gaping, but at the same time, they're not so overwhelming as to feel gratuitous or unnecessary. (I know this is one of Ellis' least violent books.) I couldn't look away, it pulled me in, I just kept reading and reading and reading even when I was terribly grossed out. I think it adds so much to put you in Bret's head and experience the fear and dread he's experiencing.

The ending is not necessarily open, it's technically wrapped up, but the events of the story itself are so ambiguous. I'll admit, at first, it left me feeling a little empty. There was no one moment where it clicked and I had an epiphany about everything in the novel. If I wrote this post just an hour after finishing I might have rated it a bit lower because the ending didn't feel so neatly tied in a bow like I had expected it to be.

But the more I think about it, the more I love it. I love going back to certain scenes and thinking about how absolutely nuts Bret is being, how paranoid he is, how sometimes he seems so correct but maybe his friends are right, maybe it's just his writerly instincts to embellish situations and see things that aren't there. He is such a well written unreliable narrator because he makes so much sense all the time and I believed him too, but he's also. Insufferable. My misgivings were all erased once I stopped thinking even subconsciously of this novel as a mystery, it's not a mystery, it's not even really about the killings. It's a character study and it's a really good one!


If there's one thing I could complain about in this novel, it's that I wish there had been more Susan. She is such a central character, and Bret is so enamored with her, and yet I felt like I didn't get my fill of her. I know that this is likely on purpose because Susan is the embodiment of the numbness that Bret strives for, she becomes increasingly colder and more distant as if she lives on an entirely different plane, but I really think I would've liked it if she had more scenes. In the present of the story yes, but I also would've liked to see moments between her and Bret pre-1981. You know, just sweet stuff of them together. I feel like it would've made the fate of their relationship in the end hit so much harder. As it is, their connection didn't feel as overwhelmingly present in the story as I would've liked.

That's pretty much my only nitpick. Other than that, I loved the Shards. It was a rollercoaster, it was nauseating, it was funny, it was relatable, it was sad and shocking and horny and weird and fun. Everything I want out of a book really! The themes of obsession, of homophobia and hiding who you are, the inherent performance of being a person. All to set the tableau of two mentally ill guys slashing the shit out of each other. Beautiful.

I hesitate to give books I just read a 10/10 right away; I'll wait until my next reading log to decide for sure what I think. But this is definitely as close as it gets!

I read this story a long time ago, I reckon when my brain had hardly been formed. Ten years old? Eleven? I retained the general plot, but forgot all about the rest. So when I failed to find Hamlet at the bookstore, I thought I'd pick up a Kafka collection and experience this for the first time again.

What I wasn't ready for is how extremely, heartachingly sad this story is. There were so many parts where I got close to crying, and so many parts where I actually did shed a few tears. The third person narration of Gregor rends your heart apart. His love for his family radiates through every single word and to see it met with callousness, cruelty, and fear is awful. This is an awful awful book in the best way possible.





It's through this sadness that we properly glean what the story is unsubtly trying to say about capitalism. In his family where he is the sole provider and the rest of his family is content to take from him (and which he is content to provide because he loves them so much), Gregor is only seen as their means of survival, their cash cow. He worked day in and day out, a corporate slave while his healthy father and mother did nothing. And the very first time he was late to work, all they cared about was getting him there, because to them that was all he was and all he lived to do. Which is also a view shared by Gregor himself, no doubt shaped by the world they lived in. He turned into a literal insect (I know the original simply used the word 'vermin', but my copy straight up translates it as 'cockroach') and his first thought was "How am I going to get to work?" How visceral and terrible.

There are just so many things about this. The way his sister initially wanted to take away his furniture because she saw he enjoyed crawling over the walls; but as time passed and she started caring less and less, she was fine with everyone shoving unwanted furniture and junk into his room. Every act of kindness from her is bittersweet in the way that she is trying to care, but she can't even bring herself to look at him or come close to him, her brother, her brother who had loved her so much he was going to pay to send her to the conservatory. Because he was the only one who cared about her music passion. Her parents don't, the later tenants don't, but after so long in isolation Gregor came out just to hear her play. Grete is not hateable like her parents or the other characters, especially considering she's a child, but she too lapses into hating Gregor by the end. Their relationship stabbed me all throughout this book.

Not to mention his father, throwing apples at him, and one of it literally embedding itself into his flesh. He can't move around freely or crawl anymore, one of his few pleasures taken away from him. And later on his father gets angry at his lumbering movements when it was his violence that had caused it in the first place. He laments saying that Gregor can't understand them, even though he very much can, and it's the family that never attempted to understand him.

All this embeds itself in Gregor just like the apple. The descriptions of his self-hatred were so real. He had done no crime, had never intended to hurt anyone, and yet everyone including himself hated him like he had. When his father was a useless financial burden, the rest of the family was quick to love him and be affectionate over him. But when it was Gregor's turn to be taken care of unconditionally, he was turned away, and he thinks it's his fault for the sin of existing.

And the end where he dies and his family practically rejoices, moves away, starts a new life that's better and warmer, as if the universe itself is celebrating Gregor's death. They're so much happier without him, and it's horrible. I genuinely had a pit in my stomach by the end of this story. You just don't stop feeling for Gregor. He worked and when he stopped working, he was unloved and died.

The writing style is great. Easy to understand, but no less detailed for it. Some of the descriptions of Gregor's new body were very vivid. It's dry, which fits Gregor's characterization as a man who had dedicated his life to working and providing. But despite its unfeeling style of prose, you can feel the emotion very clearly. Just like how Gregor, despite now being mostly unable to show it in a way his family can understand, still felt very strongly. He was in a cockroach's body, but his human emotions are overwhelming in the narrative.

This is short, around 60 pages. But in those 60 pages this story makes you feel for and understand Gregor, the dynamics of his family, and how capitalism indelibly ruins our lives and our human connections. 9.5/10, maybe just straight-up a 10.

My first foray into Sylvia Plath! I've heard good things about The Bell Jar (though I never particularly felt the desire to read it myself), so when I saw her name at the library and that pretty red and blue cover I thought I'd try this story out.

And I'm grateful I did! It was a great story, and wonderfully concise especially after the behemoth that was Anna Karenina. Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom perfectly builds characters, creates an atmosphere, and conveys a plot all in the span of 40 pages.

Train stories are always a pleasure, and this one builds the vibe of it so well, even if in this case the train isn't just a setting but also an essential and core element of the story. The whole story reads like a dream, very surreal and absurd but no less gripping for it.

Initially I thought the ninth kingdom was a metaphor for death in general. But as I continued reading and neared the ending the picture that formed in my head was that the train and its ticket were suicide, that all of its passengers had killed themselves; and that the ninth kingdom was hell. The world that Mary emerges into at the end isn't the living world but rather heaven, or just another more ideal plane of existence, having successfully escaped the damnation of hell.

The train could also be, inversely, life. Considering it's Mary's parents who set her on the trip to the ninth kingdom to begin with, one could say it's more about deciding your own path in life... that instead of going to someone else's desired destination, Mary chooses for herself to escape, and she comes out of it on the other side happier.

Of course the book is very much up to interpretation though. It trusts its reader to make something out of it, which is something I enjoy. The writing style is lovely, so descriptive and atmospheric. The part leading up to Mary's escape, and her back-and-forth with the old lady, was very tense and well-written. Fast-paced as it is, it feels well built up to and appropriately exciting.

I do wish it was a bit more in-depth. If it had 10 or so more pages, I would've loved to read what Plath could've cooked up, perhaps more details that would lend itself to the picture in her head. Because while I did compliment its vagueness and how open to interpretation it was, I would have appreciated just a little more to chew on.

Regardless, what a brilliant story that gets an 8.5/10 from me.