Book Thoughts: Talking, Orange, Hearts
No Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
Man this person is internet poisoned, in the exact (ish) same way I am internet poisoned. It is horrible and amazing to see someone rendering our affliction so brilliantly on the page; I do think in some tiny way it will help me waste less time online, having seen how awful it looks from the outside, like noticing another smoker's yellow-stained teeth and yellow-stained curtains and understanding with horror that you have them too. This is your brain on Twitter, says Lockwood, and fries me. I just need another 9999 of these nudges to get me the rest of the way.
I've talked before about meta-spoilers, and how even someone telling you that there are spoilers for a book is in some sense a spoiler. I'm really not sure how to deal with this book specifically. But take this meta-commentary about meta-spoilers as a clue, and be ready to put this book down if you don't like where it's going.
The Orange And Other Poems, by Wendy Cope (Audiobook)
So my general take on poetry collections is that even an amazing collection is mostly bad; you should judge a collection by its peak experience, and even three (or two, or one) incredible poems can make a whole collection worthwhile.
This audiobook – admittedly a Collected Poems – is unusual in that I really enjoyed a large share of the poems. Not all of them are mind-blowing but a good half are good, which is great. They are read by the author in a delightfully personal way, she does not do The Poetry Voice and her reading is all the better for it.
The Heart Principle, by Helen Hoang
Romance novel. It's ok but I think not as good as her first, Kiss Quotient. Conceptual (but not plot) spoilers below.
This one is a bit didactic for my tastes, and while I appreciate the thing it's didachē-ing, it got a bit heavy handed for me. It also suffers from one of the great issues of romance novelling, which is: if the characters are perfect for each other, why don't they just get together? But if you make them not-perfect for each other, why is it such a perfect romance? So the writers often have to come up with increasingly contrived justifications for why the perfect-for-each-other couple don't just live happily ever after from chapter 1, but which doesn't make either of the partners less-perfect, and it all feels very strained.
The other issue I have with this book is is that I think the ML is an emotionally-stable pixie dreamboy.