The Chronicle of Heloise & Grimple by Sean Gibson What I drank prior: I had a pretty long day of drinking. First we had Beer Olympics. WE came in 3rd, but that.... fine.... Then we all went out for a friend's birthday and drank/dance the night away. Currently in an Uberpool on the way home with a couple 21 year old swho think I'm 23. Which is really really really flattering. I'm hammert. Spoiler-free Overview:
How does one begin to explain this story. Sean was kind enough to send me a copy for review through Goodreads. He is a fellow DC public transportation survivor and active goodreads reviewer. We like him i guess (winky face).
This story was written in a unique way. From what i gather it was written on long commutes as a serial choose-your-own type thing. After each chapter Sean says "what'll happen next? x/y/z?" and then i guess people-of-the-internet decided.
Heloise & Grimple are on an epic adventure to make Grimple not ugly anymore. APparently Grimple has been cursed by... something... idk what... and they can't make his ugliness go away. They set off to set it straight. In hysterical fashion. Spoiler-free Thoughts:
This was probably the funniest story I've read in a long ass time. I'm not going to do my normal breakdown for this book, because this book is so not like anything else. Like, it's not super long, but it is FULLY action-packed, and unpredictable, and filled with laughs.
From hillgiants that don't look like hill giants to trolls (i think the one obsessed with Heloise was a troll... i can't look it up because i'm in a car) to evil, wizard... sorry Kevil, THE wizard, you get everytrhing. All the laughs, all the adventure, and it was exactly what I was looking for at the time.
You can get The Chronicles of Heloise & Grimple(according to GRs on Kindle Unlimited or on Amazin).
PS. Sean is awesome. The end.
PPS. I hear we get more soon?? I am pumped (and hammered, also hammered). Rating: 4.5/5 Shots What to pair it with: Tequila and Juice. I've been leaning more twoards that lately because I can down 'em in 2.8 seconds.
Until next time, I remain forever drunkenly yours,
Sam
Will Read for Booze has decided to pull together a 24-hour BoozieBookathon. We're a bunch of drunks (obviously) and we love reading (double-obviously) so we've decided to combine the two into a marathon!
Here's the deal - on July 22nd-23rd from 8am-8am EST we're going to be reading, and drinking, and posting, and tweeting. And its gonna be awesome.
Our hosts
ME,
The outrageous, notorious, and infamous Parker,
The lovely Miss Virginia,
and several of our bookclubbin' friends
If you're interested in joining us, please sign up HERE and use #booziebookathon on Twitter! We'll be following all day, hosting power hours (AKA reading sprints), and chatting all day.
We've come up with a couple challenges. You CAN double up on challenges, this is meant to be fun, not get the highest number of books. Also note that you don’t have to actually drink while your reading, nor do you have to actually drink the substance your challenge is for.
We are so excited to do this you guys and hope that you can join us in our boozie book adventure!
What I drank. A frew (9?) brews, and about 20 mins ago I chugged half a bottle of wine so, who I’ll probably have to hurl in a few seconds. Buckle up. (Editor's Note: he did not, in fact, hurl)
Spoiler free plot overview: ya girl ifem is a Nigerian who moves to the states for a *scarequotes* “better life”, and as she does so, she interacts with the many contradictions that americanness entails. When we meet her, she’s a wildy successful blogger movingfrom her job at Princeton, back home to Nigeria, after spending about a decade in the US. Throughout the course of the novel, She encounters racism, sexism, and classism from a perspective that is colored by her perspective as an African immigrant. Even this is fraught; some of her contemporaries are “scammers”, some are idealogeus, some are college professors. Ifem has a kind of second coming of age in East Coast Liberal America, which is interesting as fuck. She watches the Obama campaign and presidential election from a unique perspective that is hella interesante.
Spoiler free thoughts: I’m having a great convo with my good friend about what it means to comment on a fictional story that isn’t about you. For her, writing about a novel like Americanah or Homegoing or The Hate U Give felt like an overstepping of bounds, like the story wasn’t for you and even though you learned from it it, in talking about it, you’d be retelling it uglily, bastardizing it.
Now, she and I agree: that sometimes a story that isn’t “for you”, that your reading is tangential, and while not inconsequential, is irrelevant. Oh you read it? Sweet. Good for you.
We also disagreed, to this end: a story that isn’t yours can still affect you, can still spread its energies through your eyes to your friends’ eyes and thus into their lives. Americanah is where I found that ground, because it’s a story that is in so many ways “for” me but not about me. but anyway the...
...Plot is kind of stationary, not a lot “happens”, but that’s not what drives the novel. It’s all about Ifem and her experiences, and whereas they are informative, they do not necessarily drive the action, far more compelling are the...
...Characters. Our cast is wildly diverse, and intentionally so. This is not a novel where one can pontificate about the symbolism of one certain character bc all have a value here. Ifem’s first love Obinze, her aunt and fellow American expatriate, Uju, and Uju’s son Dike, Hot White Boyfriend Kurt, and a whole host of (intentionally) forgettable Americans help to compose a tapestry of identity and (be)longing that is made tactile by the...
...Writing syle: ifem’s blog posts are interwoven with the third person narrator. The narrator’s limitations highlight Ifem’s shortcomings and fears, and the blogposts that intersperse the novel highlight the identity crises that the protagonist undergoes. They are rarely topical, that is, they rarely “fit” the chapter that they go in, but the light that they shed is illuminating, all redundancy intended. They are witty and irreverent, to boot.
Separately and crucially to me, she writes about the 2008 Obama campaign, and holy fucking shit, I wept on a plane three separate times during that one chapter. I’m literally crying over my favorite episode of Dr Who rn because I’m reflecting on the thoughts I had those nights, nights I had forgotten about, or contextualized before she brought them back to the surface. It’s just powerful, powerful stuff.
Spoilers, honey:
She OBVIOUSLY ends up back with obinze. Thtats ostensibly WHY she goes back home in the first place. I’m not NOT annoyed, because Adichie writes the shit out of it. It’s complicated and has a lot to do with the flawed humanness that this novel is allabout I think, but I feel like I saw it comin, and wasn’t happy asbout it, even tho Ifem and Obinze were. He has a wife and kid but they still carve time out (of) for eachother. I mean its beautiful or whatever.
Rating (in brews) uhhhhhhhhhh 4.3/5 all-day ipa’s (Founder’s) because it took a while to build momentum, but then I realized I was largo sauced.
Pairing: tequila, triple sec and mango, because this feels like a summer, tropical novel, and especially at the end, there’s a complicated and inevitable pull of two lovers together that can only be recreated by tequila or, perhaps, a comet.
What I Drank Prior: Tequila. A lot of tequila. I wish i knew how much, but i don't cause Parker poured. Not my fault.
Spoiler-free Overview:
Hokay, so this book is about a boy named Bo who thinks he's a super hero. He thinks he has the ability to travel in time. He thinks he's at a school for kids who also have super powers. Obvioulsy by all of the "thinks" you understand that he's not actually an x-man.
This story is in the POV of both Bo and his sister. According to Bo, the love of his life, Sofia, is trapped in time, and everyone else seems to think she's dead. Bo is determined to save her. Thingsssss happpennnn
Spoiler-free Thoughts:
Let's just say I finished this book in one sitting. This book isn't defined as "short" it's just really really engrossing. I was taken in very quickly. Like, I thought that MAYBE it wasn't mental illness. That it could possibly be something esle. Be cause the main POV, Bo, is SO unreliable. I am a sucker for unreliable narrators.
Characters: Alright, so look. Patrick (my brother) if you're reading this, please don't take this the wrong way. I read this book, and the sibling relationship in it was so fucking relatable. Like, my brother and i are fine, we're not like, lovey-dovey or whatever, but we're fine. If you take it one step forward, and you get the characters in this novel. A paraphrase is like "we're to separate people living our own separate lives and just happen to have the same genetic code." Now, Pat and I aren't like that, Bo and his sister are. But if my brother and I had one wrong move sometime in the past, it would have led us there. I related SO hard to these characters.
Side note: I really appreciated how it showed how a whole family is effected when one is mentally ill.
Plot: The plot to me wasn't the biggest part of this book. Like it was there, and it was important, and some things happened but like, it was so character driven that i just... yeah
Writing Style: tbh, like to be COMPLETELY honest, it wasn't the best. It wasn't beautiful, it wasn't metephorical or whatever, it was just fine. To me, the characters are really what made this story.
I'm not going to write a spoiler-y section because I don't have much to say, but what I do have opinions is with the message this book addresses. See. Below.
Message: Look. THis book is about mental illness. And I had the pleasure of reading the annotated version from the Quarterly Co. box. As someone who has a degree in Psychology, i think it was an excellent portrayal of how mental illness can effect a family. It was very interesting to see into the mind of someone who is mentally ill. Now, I thought maybe I was gonna be all like "i loved seeing how they think."
No one knows how the folks diagnosed with mental illness think. Let me repeat myself: no one knows how the folks diagnosed with mental illness think. EXCEPT those who are mentally ill. So, I can't be like "its so great to see into their minds!!!!" cause this portrayal isn't true. BUT it is close. It does help us healthy folk understand how delusions work. It helps us understand how things can get exacerbated by stress. YOU GUYS i just wrote 'exacerbated' super drunk and didn't misspell it. BE PROUD!
Just read it, ok? Like, it's good for everyone.
Rating: 4/5 Shots.
What to pair it with: Tequila. Because tequila makes us all a little mentally ill right? We never really know what's true or false.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope is by Claire North, who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
At this point I think I need to say that I technically got this at an ARC copy at BookCon this year, (which was awesome, I highly suggest going). But this book came out, I think, in late May 2016. This is an honest and unsolicited review.
But I loved this book even if I don't think I'm quite smart enough for it.
Hope is forgotten by everyone. She is picked up by camera's and electronics, but nobody can remember her, even if they know they'll forget her. That plot enough would be enough to interest me, but Hope decides to fight against an app called "perfection" which tries to make people "perfect" through a point systems that offers discounts at high end retailers and the like. She's helped out by someone who goes by Byron and is being chased by someone named Gaugin.
That alone is enough to make me think that I wasn't quite smart enough for this book. There's a number of references to classic literature and more, that I picked up on but wouldn't have known otherwise. I read plenty, but it doesn't change the fact that I don't remember philosophers. A lot of this book was people talking about the nature of humanity and whether or not someone was a person if they didn't have a past outside of what they rememberred as there was no culutureal reason for morality... Basically there was a lot going on here.
That being said, Hope changes a lot over the course of the book. At the beginning she's a theif, becuase who better to rob someone than someone who can't be remembered. She can actually grab something away from someone and they won't remember a minute later. Which is kind of awesome. Throughout the book she'll be having conversations with people and the next day she'll have the same conversation, which is one of the best ways to track tHope's changes. She has the same conversation, but each conversation is slightly different. It's amazing how sublte the changes are. Seriously, this book was deeper than I am.
I think I'm going to manage not to need to put a spoiler warning in this. Excpet now that I say that I mgiht need to. the end of this book was wonderfully open-ended, not that the plot wasn't completely wrapped up, but that there were a number of characters wehre I wanted to know what happened. And fuck it.
There's a police officer who has been following her for a really long time, since she was young and inexperienced with thieving. As time goes on, she develops a one-sided relationship with him.
At the end of the book, he's there for the climax, but he is sent home. After years of one-off nights/dates and other things, it seemed a little strange that the character would be written off in such a normal way. He just goes on with his life, not remembering Hope outside of knowing he was hunting someone for a number of years. In a way it fits, because Hope's entire existence is existing where no one remembers her, but he seemed so important so it was a little difficult to know that he wasn't important in the end.
This gets 4.5 shots out of 5. The only reason this didn't get 5 shots is that I have a personal grudge against the one thing under the spoiler cut. Othersie, I frigging loved this book. I might think I wasn't smart enough to get everything in it, but the writing was great, I loved the consistent characterization and how Hope grew as a character, and ... well I lost my train of thought.
AS for what kind of alcohol to drink with this I think technically anything would work, you just have to drink enough not to remember what you read! So, probably tequila.
