snow white

Borrowed from C. Loved it, what a playful genius Barthelme was. His writing reminds me of action painting, in the sense that it looks easy but was (1) surely not easy in practice and (2) in fact never done until somebody came along and thought, "Why don't I try this?"

Now C and I are on indefinite hiatus and I am very sad. Weight on (in) my chest. At least I gave her the book back first. She still has a couple of mine. 

one of us

A page-turner. Gripping, horrifying. At the end of the day, an extraordinary report: Seierstad is a journalist and so she refrains from overt analysis. That's fine but I found myself wanting a little more -- I guess that's for a different book. Without saying so explicitly, she comes down on the side of those who don't think Breivik is/was psychotic. I followed the story a little at the time and so there were not a lot of surprises -- Breivik's early life was not happy, but there's no shocking revelation in there. The victims and their families that Seierstad highlights were also pretty normal in their context. One thing did take me aback, though: just how unbelievably incompetent the Norwegian police and military response to the bomb blast and then the shootings was. Seierstad clearly shares the anger of some of the victims' families that the response was botched so badly at so many points. 

good omens

Pretty funny, sweethearted. This is obviously impossible to prove but I think I'd have known it was written by two people even if the authors' names hadn't been on the cover. It feels like a collaboration, like two people enjoying themselves by going back and forth to create a book that makes them laugh. Which is, in fact, what it is.

bad feminist

Meh. Couple of interesting essays, including one about 12 Years a Slave. The rest, well, it reads like a lightly-edited collection of an intelligent and moderately funny person's blog posts. Lot of juxtaposition-as-analysis, not a lot of actual deep thinking or close observation about anything. That's fine, I just had higher expectations given the praise Gay and the book have gotten.