"Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison" - CBR13 #3 - Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

 Thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer--the chubby,  precocious, pampered daughter of two of Hollywood's brightest stars--discovers one day that she has died (of a marijuana overdose, of all things!) and is now in Hell. Hell, as it turns out, is just as gross as one would expect but significantly more boring. Determined to make the best of it, Madison finds some equally damned friends and begins her quest for something that perhaps resembles meaning?

As with all Chuck Palahniuk books, I'm not entirely sure whether I liked it. It was super weird, obviously. The premise started out weird and definitely spiraled out from there. However, that's really to be expected with any of his books. There are some sections with sexual content that actively squicked me out, so be warned.

I liked the character of Madison a lot. Her voice was strong, though I sometimes struggled to remember that she's supposed to be 13 (she comments a lot on her own vocabulary use, reminding the reader often that she is THIRTEEN not STUPID). While I enjoyed her pop culture references, there was a certain part of me who found the whole thing a bit unbelievable for someone her age. 

All of Palahniuk's usual quirks were present: repetition, gross-outs, unexpected twists, playing with familiar tropes, an unreliable narrator--and I liked them just as much as I usually do. I'm pretty sure that Chuck Palahniuk is one of those authors whom readers either REALLY LIKE or REALLY DON'T and there's not a whole lot of grey area in between.

While on the whole there was nothing particularly "new" here, there were some sections that really spoke to me, especially a chapter in which Madison deals with the collapse of her own image of herself. Her musings on what to do when it turns out the persona you've built and invested in over the course of years is suddenly shown to be inaccurate were super relevant to me.

I also love The Breakfast Club more than is reasonable, so when she collects a princess, a nerd, an athlete, and a criminal I may have cheered just a little bit.

On the whole, I'd say that this is probably not a book I'd recommend to someone who doesn't know already whether they like Palahniuk (for that, I'd probably point them toward Survivor or perhaps Fight Club) but I definitely would say I'm glad I read it.

CBR13 #2 - A Book of Luminous Things - Edited by Czesław Miłosz

 I don't think I've read a poetry anthology since college -- and even then, I mostly just read the poems we were studying and ignored both the commentary and all the other poems. A Norton Anthology of Poetry can be a very intimidating book, after all.

I didn't actually intend to read one this time, either. However, I happened to come across a poem by Eastern European poet Czesław Miłosz which I liked, and when I googled him I discovered he'd edited this anthology. I figured it might be nice to branch out and experience some new poets, so I picked it up.

When I started reading, I really appreciated what Miłosz had to say about the poems, why he'd included them, and how they related to each section of the anthology. He had some really great stuff to say about how poets over the centuries relate to nature, and why he like and had selected each poem. The selection leaned pretty heavily on Eastern European and ancient Chinese poets, but since I really like EE poetry and don't have a lot of experience with ancient Chinese poetry, I figured that would be a nice broadening experience.

After a while, I began to wonder if maybe Miłosz should have just done an anthology of Chinese poetry instead.

Still, I read on.

Then there came the chapter entitled "Women's Skin" which was ostensibly about women. 

Except only maybe a third of the poems were BY women. And of those that were, Miłosz was...somewhat uncomplimentary? As I read, I began to get a very distinct feeling that Miłosz was not super fond of women, or very interested in their work. His little descriptions and notes about the poems felt almost snide in their dismissiveness. 

After that, while I finished the book, I no longer trusted or appreciated Miłosz's observations.

It's a shame because I really did enjoy some of the poems. I probably would still even enjoy Miłosz's poems, but there are other places to find those. 

I would not recommend this book -- if you're interested in Chinese poetry from the 700s, you could probably find an anthology by a Chinese author that would be better, same with the modern Eastern European poets.