because i’m really quite afriad that the new John Irving book will suck ass, i decided to read the obviously shitty Snakes and Earrings. this book was just awful, even more awful than the boring Upstate i read last week. perhaps it’s just me, but stories about apathetic, murdering, pierced and tattooed Japanese teens just doesn’t float my boat. i keep telling myself that the novel, which won some prestigious award in Japan, lost a lot in translation. the sentences read like something out of an 8th grader’s journal for English class. “Until yesterday, I’d thought that all I needed to know about Ama was what I saw with my own eyes. But now I realized I was blind because that’s all I looked for.” and theres this brilliant moment, “This person who was mine, tortured and killed by a total stranger. I’d never experienced so much pain and despair as I did at that moment right then.” gee, with such insight i can totally see what it’s like to be a Japanese teenager whose boyfriend was just murdered. this tells me so much coming from a narrator who has a sadistic bent and talks about how pain kind of gets her off. what the hell?

in other news, my dad’s being released from the hospital.