Reviews and Comments

It’s a strange mix of South African, social history across generations, William Gibson style speculative fiction, coming-of-age novel, and deep exploration of mental health.

But it works. Very well. I could not stop reading.

This book, ostensibly a philosophy of craft as art, it’s also a polemic for understanding and hat craft is a tool for discovering one’s inner truths. It has so many interesting ideas but is written so poorly that it’s easy to lose them in the mess of dangling clauses and mixed metaphors. When I did catch what she was trying to say, I didn’t know his agree with her, but it made me think.

I found large parts of the history of college radio, and its intersection with NPR and increasing wattage, and why it’s always to the left of the dial fascinating. But every chapter seems to repeat a bunch of ideas and context in a way that got a little bit repetitive. Might’ve been better if it was half as long, more to the point more Ramones punk and less variations on a theme.

Fascinating mixture of art criticism and psychology and memoir. I’m not sure I’m always 100% on board with her analysis, but the through line of the book, of loneliness being a driver and shaper of lives rings true.

I was so excited for this collection of stories. Her previous collection was one of my all time favorites; weird, dark, twisted but fun, always unexpected. The book unfortunately was a major regression. Every story felt like it followed a trope I already knew. There were a few stories near the end of the collection that had that same feeling of surprise and innovation, but nothing like in Cursed Bunny. :(

I cannot overstate how much I loved this book. Babitz is such a sharp writer, and hilarious. She writes about the LA that the world imagines it to be, glamorous and sexy, hedonistic and privileged, and yet she imbues it all with an existential reflection that makes you realize just how frail and flawed and human all these people are. Their skin may glow in the golden sun, but the hard shadows cast from it create an abyss into which they cannot help but stare.

A really remarkable book. Haunting tale about how one little girl builds the narrative of her life through tragedy, and what it means when we are an unreliable narrator of our own inner monologue. Full of beautiful, strange, poetic moments driven by characters that still feel deeply human.

A lot of ideas crammed into a story about post AI apocalypse. Would have been better if some were left out. I liked some of the characters some of the time.