BookFiendUSA: I see that you’ve been reading Super Sad True Love Story. Cute title, big hype. What’s it about?SandyBanks1971: It’s about this guy, Lenny Abramov, second-generation Russian Jewish-American, who is in his “very late thirties” and very bothered about it. He thinks that’s he’s a RAG who can’t get the girl anymore, and a failure in his job to get HNWIs to buy his company’s “life extension” programs.BookFiendUSA: I know that HNWI is High Net Worth Individual --- but what the hell is a

Oh, did I read this book at the exact wrong time of my life.It's about a thirty-nine year old guy who is quickly losing what small traces of cool he ever had to middle-age as he is relentlessly mocked by a youth culture that finds him old, disgusting and out of touch. I’m forty, very nearly forty-one. I don‘t like Twitter. I don’t know who half the celebrities referenced in the news are any more. (What the hell is a Snooki??) I got a painful case of bursitis seconds after turning forty that last...

Updated August 2, 2013 - see cool extra links at bottomBy reading this review you are denying its existence and implying your agreement with its contents. Gary Shteyngart takes a peek twenty minutes into the future. No shades required. His alter-ego, Lenny Abramov, is a 39-year-old slacker busily wasting his employer’s time and money attempting (or not) to sell to rich Europeans a life-lengthening process that is two parts nanotechnology and three parts bullshit. While hardly at it in Rome, he m...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/Holy shitsnacks! What a snoozefest! Super Sad True Love Story is not a book I’d normally choose to read, but since I needed a final selection in order to complete my library’s Winter Reading Challenge I picked it up. Dear Library Winter Reading Challenge: I should cut you! I WASTED THREE DAYS OF MY LIFE THAT I WILL NEVER GET BACK ON THIS BOOK. I’M GOING TO SPOIL THE SHIT OUT OF THIS MOTHERF*&^%R!!!!!I’m fairly certain I’ll be accuse...

My current best friend in the office is a half-Chinese lady. She, just like most Chinese in the Philippines, is proud of her Chinese blood. I cannot blame her. Chinese businessmen rule the economy of the country. Even the sitting president has Chinese blood in his veins. In short, pure Filipinos accept the fact that having to exist, or even to work for, with their fellow Filipinos with Chinese blood is a non-issue. In most cases, those Chinese-Filipinos are even better in mathematics and in runn...

Gary Shteyngart has failed me. True, he probably wasn't aware that he had a responsibility to me, personally, but (in most cultures) ignorance of the law is seldom sufficient cause to dismiss the crime. Shteyngart's crime is that he has written what appears to be an awful book. (I say 'what appears to be' because I didn't have the heart to finish it.*) Yes, as you well know, countless other writers have committed the same crime -- some even more gruesomely -- but most of these capital offenses w...

wow WoW WOW!!Am mightily impressed with this modern classic. Finally, someone with the guts to paint our beloved NYC in a perpetually negative, apocalyptic light. (Is Gary Shteyngart the only one to do this, um, ever?) Romance in war in an alternative reality of modern(ish) day America--so hard to pull off and yet it is done masterfully. Astute prose, the PERFECT details that are needed in a posh novel of the 2010's, leaves the sophisticated reader breathless, more--fully flabbergasted. You cann...

This is speculative fiction that is completely on target when it comes to current feelings about the Internet, economics, politics AND youth culture. It’s like Shteyngart took Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget,” all your worst nightmares about the Tea Party, your yuppie friends who keep their faces buried in their iPhones at the bar, your recent revelation that Facebooking is the loneliest part of your day, and your strict immigrant parents, and wrote a love story. The part that tickles me th...

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || PinterestDNF @ p.22This came out when I was in my early 20s. I think I even got an ARC of it. Possibly this was during my "dystopian phase" where I could not get enough of the world going to shit. This is the way the world ends, folks. Not with a bang, but a whimper.When I first read it, I remember liking it a lot and being SO surprised and outraged on this book's behalf that all the "haters" were slamming it in their reviews (as one does). But t

This book only gets a star because the fact that I like words coincides with the fact that it contained words.It is a poorly imagined vision of the near future (one from which Shteyngart apparently already feels alienated, but not in an existential Orwellian way). Essentially, he just observes the virtual, consumer-driven culture we live in now and replaces the word Blackberry/iPhone/mobile with "äppärät" - which is also apparently Russian for "the machinery of state authority" (see what he did

I don't think I've ever been so happy to finish a book.It's not that Super Sad True Love Story is a bad or boring book. It's quite intelligent and it's often funny (perhaps 'witty' would be a better adjective for a New York Times darling like Shteyngart). However, this book is just super sad. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the working title was "super, super, sad story."Shteyngart has created a "dystopian" America, but readers won't have to try very hard to find the targets of this satire.

03/10/17 - Seven years later, my review is apparently still very popular. Take THAT, people who thought they left their marks via important, world-changing accomplishments!Re: my feelings on his portrayal of immigrants and how they write - I'm descended from a million generations of hill folk white people who have been in America for over 300 years, and my closest immigrant experience relates to my Irish grandparents who died before I was born and spoke English. I know nothing about how immigran...

My favorite quote was "In short I felt paternal and aroused, which is not a good combination."I wish I could meet Gary Shteyngart just to tell him to stay the fuck away from my daughter.Short version: it's unrelatable. Don't read it.I found this book through a blog post where the author used quotes from SSTLS to describe how he felt he was less and less creative every year since graduating college, a feeling with which I could sympathize, but the main character and story are unrelatable. There a...

Here's my favorite passage from this novel:"The elephant knows there is nothing after this life and very little in it... he who will eventually trample his way through bush and scrub to lie down and die where his mother once trembled at her haunches to give him life."Wonderful, moving.But now it's time to be real...Let me preface my criticism with a cliche I believe to be mostly true: When you judge someone or something, you're really revealing something about yourself.So, here goes: This novel

This was darn near a 5 star for me, so I'll round it up and give it its due. I was hesitant about this book, based on reviews on here - how many times have I read NYTimes-praised books only to read them and think "wow, that sucked." This book WAS worth the hype and deserving of higher ratings. Biting wit and well-developed. The satire was rich and lovely - come on, a bar named Cervix? JuicyP&%%y clothing line? A$$luxury shopping? Too funny as the obvious references to the stupidity and absurdity...

Well, Uh, JeezThis isn't really "four stars" at all -- it's more like a superposition between one star and five stars. Yesterday I said this book was "33% clever, funny and accomplished, 17% moving and possibly profound, 25% banal and lazy, 25% creepy, onanistic and self-congratulatory." That is still roughly true, though I might jiggle the percentages a bit now. So I think my attitude can only be expressed in some good/bad dialectic:The Good: Well, to start out, it's really funny. My favorite b...

Cannot finish. Super gross whiny execution of pretty good idea (observations of a society obsessed with illiterate twenty-somethings who can't put down their smart-phonish "apparats" long enough to make eye contact). Gross middle-aged guy pursuing 86 pound teenager and seems only to engage in oral sex with the kind of detail I can live without. At least for the first 100 pages or so. I quit. One of those truly weird experiences...every paragraph, every page so blisteringly achingly funny and obs...

Worst Book Ever! Hated Lenny and his old hipster pals so much that I didn't enjoy, an otherwise good read. It seems Gary Shetyngat, wrote this book for smug "New York Times" reading intellectuals who are ashamed of thier own farts, don't own a T.V., tell people at cocktail parties how they would never eat Funyuns,refuse to shop at Wal-Mart but shop at Target, who are always the first to buy the new iphone 5 whatever the fuck it is now. This was overrated and a waste because while the idea of th

edit: downgrading this to one star, because I was thinking about this book today and all I can really remember is how much I hated it.I doubt I would have finished this if it wasn't required reading for a class.It was a bizarre mashup of American consumerism, societal decay, obsession with technology, the search for immortality, and depressing relationships that I wasn't able to get into.My main issue with this novel was really the main characters, though. I just couldn't bring myself to care ab...

I'm distressed to even be writing a review on one of the many social networking sites that consume us now given the bleak future such activity is leading us towards. If you ask people to friend you or if you use text as a verb, you should skip this book. If you ponder which designer to wear or carry will make the best impression to others, skip this book. If you find "joy" in "communicating" via something you typed by thumb or via some shallow site like Facebook, then there probably just isn't a...