Wafflings of a Cozmonaught

So I started blogging again. Yay! I think. I've always had the knack for tearing people down, but I've never had to drive to consolidate that ability.  I took the first step back when I began writing reviews for media in high school. I would post it to my Facebook at the time and get half a dozen Likes and a few comments from friends and family. Those posts fizzled out after a few years. It would take a pandemic before I finally decided to grab some of my old writing and create this blog. Something where the souls unfortunate to stumble upon my chicken scratch could get a good laugh or two. I plucked a handful from my abundance of terrible takes (the vast majority of which I still haven't posted) to slap on this blog and call it a day. But then I got a swanky new job and the pandemic anxiety dwindled. Thus this blog fizzled out too. Last year I made a New Years resolution to read more, and I did. I read 50 books and many more short stories. More than that, I put my writing ...

Orbiting Jupiter   (2015) written by Gary D. Schmidt An absolutely heart-wrenching story that didn't stick the landing. We follow Jack. Generic hippy boy in his middle school years that has been raised by his now crusty anti-Vietnam War activist parents on an organic farm with all the soy and good energies his fat face can handle. But one day, Jack's parents take their savoir complex to the next level by offering to foster a 14-year-old prick-to-be named Joseph.  As luck would have it, ol' Joseph's got a bit of a rap sheet. These include getting blazed on a unique mixture of amphetamines and ritalin and trying to kill one of his former teachers. Also he's a baby daddy. Oof. Boy's speed running all the bad decisions in life. I don't condone it. But I respect it. What follows is all the struggles you would expect after inviting a teen edgelord to your local Greenpeace meeting.  And the result is so damn good. The conversations Joseph has with his adopted famil...

Water for Elephants  (2006) written by Sara Gruen Oh, man. There are so many things this book does right. But let's start with the basics. Water for Elephants revolves around the story of one Jacob Jankowski. A more Polish American name there never was. Anywho, our local dude is an old man in the present day, and he is reminiscing on that one time that he had a mental breakdown and dropped out of Ivy League college to join a hobo circus. Yanno. As you do. What follows is our young man's introduction to the carny world as he is spirited around the country as the show's animal veterinarian. A historical bildungsroman, Jacob sees poverty, sex, and all the other good things in life firsthand amongst the backdrop of a world reeling from the fallout of the Great Depression.  Between these historical snippets, old man Jacob cuts back to the present. His crotchety self struggling to harmonize those memories of adventure and thrill with his current life of living in a sterile retire...

So Long, See You Tomorrow  (1980) written by William Maxwell This is a hard one to rate. First, Maxwell commits a writing cardinal sin by starting with the climax and then rewinding. He justifies this by having a memoir-ish structure. Bold, I grant you. Not sure if it was all that effective or necessary though. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So Long, See You Tomorrow follows the story of a regretful old man looking back on his life in rural Illinois. Specifically, he recalls the murder of a local man and the fallout this had on his boyhood relationship with Cletus, the son of the murderer. The narrator then spins a story about love and loss that he believes led up to the unfortunate event at the start of the novel. Is it true? Probably not. Does it have a kernel of truth in it? We don't know.  Indeed, even the author admits that people have a habit of lying. So we're stuck in a kind of limbo bimbo state as we traverse the novel not knowing who to trust. What to trust. Wh...

Thirteen Reasons Why  (2007) written by Jay Asher I couldn't give two hoots whether a book "romanticizes suicide" or "gives a voice to teens in need". I just care about if a story is good or not, and this book most certainly is not. Before we get to far into this whole spiel, let's quickly go over what this book is about. Thirteen Reasons Why revolves around a high schooler named Clay Jensen. One day Clay receives a number of record tapes from a girl in his class that committed suicide, Hannah Baker. On playing the first tape, Clay is treated to the voice of the deceased as she explains that each of the tapes contains a "reason why" she killed herself. Spooky. Should've been a horror. Like some Sadako Yamamura shit. Would have been all over that. Unfortunately, though, we aren't that lucky. So bear with me, dear reader, and allow me to give you my own reasons why this book was horrible. Apologies for not making thirteen to fit the theme. Le...