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Letters to Wendy's

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Letters to Wendy’s is an outrageous, tragic, genre-bending novel written over the course of a year on comment cards from the fast-food chain restaurant Wendy’s. Through the letters, the book traces a year in the life and thoughts of an unnamed narrator obsessed not only by Biggies and Frosties, but also by consumerism, pornography, and mortality.

296 pages, Paperback

First published November 27, 2000

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About the author

Joe Wenderoth

14 books28 followers
Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore. He is the author of No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007), The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self (Verse Press 2005) and Letters to Wendy's (Verse Press 2000). Wesleyan University Press published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995) and It Is If I Speak (2000). He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/46-...

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5 stars
472 (43%)
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312 (28%)
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186 (17%)
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65 (6%)
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48 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 154 reviews
Profile Image for Melki.
6,375 reviews2,438 followers
July 9, 2018
description

TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT


JULY 1, 1996

I had such a wonderful meal, in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. It asserts an altogether proper dominance. And how do you manage to hire such attractive people! Often I visit Wendy's just to take a gander at your employees. Thank you! (for being there.)


It's starts out innocently enough - a few kind words on a comment card, BUT just days later, things take a darker turn.

JULY 4, 1996

I'd like to spank Wendy's white ass and fuck her hard.


description
(The author is not alone in his lust for Wendy. A google image search for "Sexy Wendy" brings up quite a number of perky and/or disturbing photos.)

And things kind of go downhill from there.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1996

Naturally I think about smashing the skulls and rib-cages of the other customers.


NOVEMBER 17, 1996

I eavesdrop on people at Wendy's. I notice they never talk about their assholes.


Some of the entries are quite funny.

NOVEMBER 27, 1996

The Virgin Mother appeared to me today. She was holding two baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. "They're delicious," she said, and she smiled, emanating a great white light. I took one from her. It was warm and inviting. I cut into it with my plastic fork and plastic knife and I took a bite. It was, as usual, very dry. She held out the other potato to me. "You try it," I said, "it's dry as fuck."



And I could certainly get where he's coming from with this one:

DECEMBER 3, 1996

Today I had fifteen dollars worth of coffees. I got them one at a time, and dined in. The first five were leisurely, but the the leisure disintegrated. I went through the last five in about five minutes. After awhile the register girl looked at her manager as if to say: "Is there something we should do?" The manager said nothing. I said nothing. We understood one another perfectly.



This is a strange, strange book, and though I LOVE strange - this one may be too over-the-top even for me. There are many laughs here; I particularly enjoyed the pornographic entries. (Okay, I'm easily amused, and sex makes me giggle.) But, it gets old very quickly. The author's desires, fantasies, and philosophical musings all tend to blur together. Many of the letters seem like nothing more than jumbled word salad. (Damn! I do love Wendy's Apple-Pecan Chicken Salad!) I suspect this book would have limited appeal to most readers. And, though I loved parts of it, I can't really recommend it - except to my deli-manager son who has a degree in philosophy.

Maybe he can explain it to me.


JUNE 3, 1997

I took my Frosty into the bathroom and sat it on the floor. I pulled my pants down, got down on all fours, and buried the tip of my cock in the cold brown swirl. Then I forced my cock and balls into the cup. Frosty spilling on to the floor. Then I thought sexy thoughts. My erection slowly forced more Frosty on to the floor. This is the real test of a drink's thickness.



description
Profile Image for Greg B.
155 reviews28 followers
February 5, 2013
A brilliant, hilarious, poignant novel. A 365-day desk calendar designed by Charles Bukowski. I'm actually going to do something I don't normally do and just let the book speak for itself here:


July 31st, 1996: Your employees are beautiful - they do not have authority. Even the manager has no authority - if pushed, he will just call someone, who also has no ultimate authority. It's extremely pleasing to recognize this fact - one feels so fairly situated in the teeming absence of authors. At Wendy's, one writes not from an author, but to an author, a sleeping owner who will never wake.

August 19, 1996: Today I was thinking that it might be nice to be able, in one’s last days, to move into a Wendy’s. Perhaps a Wendy’s life-support system could even be created and given a Wendy’s slant; liquid fries, for instance, and burgers and Frosties continually dripped into one’s vegetable dream locus. It would intensify the visits of the well, too, to see such a care is being taken for their destiny.

December 27, 1996: I can say without hesitation that if Wendy’s ever started to “deliver” i would end my life. And in a way, my suicide would mimic Wendy’s decision to “deliver.” That is, I would decide that my blood, which, in my body, made sense, should flow out in to the dust, where it makes just more dust. Our homes are dust? you ask. Yes, our homes are dust. Don’t pretend you are surprised.

January 7th, 1997: I’ve been sort of hesitant to mention this, but i believe that one of your employees- you must know the one I speak of - is a beaver. It’s impossible to look into her face, to hear the sounds she makes, and to see the way she moves, the way she carries bits of wood, and to not feel that this is a beaver. I’ve not mentioned this before because, obviously, beavers are powerful creatures.


You should know by now if you're the sort of person who needs to read Letters to Wendy's. And if you aren't sure, the answer is yes. Fuck yes.
Profile Image for Bud Smith.
Author 17 books431 followers
September 13, 2022
I’ve got a used copy somebody marked “Sexual” and “Vulgar” up in the corners of some random pages that aren’t particularly the sexual or vulgar ones. The book also fell in some water it appears, long ago, or somebody cried a lot on it. Maybe the person who wrote “existential much?” on the bottom of the page that was just regular psycho, and not existential at all. This is a beautiful book.
Profile Image for Jennifer.
255 reviews47 followers
March 2, 2013
Sometimes a Frostie is just a Frostie. I don't think I'm man enough to like this content. And I could never get high enough to like it either. Seems like just the ticket for a 23 year-old, porn addicted, cheap hamburger munching male though. When it wasn't total stoner humor it was about writing deep/twisted thoughts while stoned and horny for red-headed Wendy. I was not amused. It's just...ew/gross.
41 reviews1 follower
July 21, 2018
If I could give this book six stars I would. It’s not for everyone - those who can’t deal with toilet humor feel free to find another book - but I think it’s fantastic. I give copies to people as gifts.
Profile Image for Michael.
100 reviews15 followers
October 30, 2007
i didn't want to think that this book was great. it's too conceptual, it all sort of seems like a joke, or maybe an intellectual masturbation, too much postmodern critical language trained on meat, too many graphic sexual fantasies about Wendy. i wanted to say, ok, that was fun, now let's move on to something serious. but i decided to actually read it front to back (which is not even necessarily the natural way to read it) and it got inside me and changed me.

wenderoth, from an interview:

""'Disfortune' is a word I've used to describe my own attempt to gather and bear witness to the various recurring irreducibilities of scene within which I am mortal, and most able to hear. 'Fortune,' in the sense I am concerned with, is the mute history of everyday events proceeding contentedly toward the ultimate security they continually promise. No poetic speech is naive enough to arise from fortune; poetic speech arises from the sudden seeming of misfortune. Disfortune, then, is meant to call to mind the somewhat unavoidable, sorrowful history of one who is given to the need for speech. Disfortune is a direction in being: it is the history of my turning toward the disabling of fortune, and it attempts to bear witness to the essence of this disabling scene.

"In our time, fortune has been increasingly promised and believed in. In America, materialism has come to be able to offer a level of comfort and pleasant distraction that few cultures, and few persons, can resist. To persistently embrace the inevitable disabling of fortune seems largely discouraging to almost everyone within our present society, a society which insists on (almost mandating, at times) strong faith in the dumb comforts of an increasingly vague and uninhabited technological fortune. Poetic speech, where it exists, betrays this country more deeply than any country in history. It is even discouraging to many of our poets, and to a considerable part of the small community of poetry readers. It is, therefore, increasingly difficult to resist settling for a poetry that arises from near, or after, the painful moment of its origin.

"Resistance is called for: reality itself is at stake. My own poems embody the natural impulse to avoid being suffocated by a given scene's meaninglessness, to which I think we, as moderns, are increasingly exposed. Disfortune means to capture and keep a glimpse of this direction, this tenuous want of life (or whatever it is) in its real painful potentialities."
Profile Image for Alan.
Author 2 books34 followers
February 28, 2009
Enjoyment of this book hinges upon whether or not its reader shares tastes with teenage boys and monkeys. If, for better or worse, you never tire of watching smart people fling well-aimed doo-doo at things that should really just be annihilated, you might be popular with middle-school football teams. See you at the game.

Add to this scatological contrarianism a helping of vintage absurdism, the impotence, remove, and boredom-death inspired by mass-replication, and some incredibly lucid theory—-well, it’s some very edifying toilet reading. But it is the deep hilarity of Letters to Wendy’s that really locates it beyond the prospectus of art-porn and makes it explosive.

If the Situationists had been more interested in impaling themselves upon the old world, instead of evading it, re-imagining it with fancy walks, their books would manifest a very similar line of sedition. But they weren’t, and so, as far as I know, this appears to actually have been something new. It happens.

The book is a series of letters written on the comment-cards provided at Wendy’s restaurants. The letters transcribe acts of theory, lunacy, depravity, sedition, and despair.

Inasmuch as the conceit of the book is epistolary, the book is performance-art as prose. This fact makes the book more, or less than a book, and functionally, something akin to the epistolary novel. The entries, the letters, are illocutionary—-words as actions; they are the implements of actions not limited by their status as words.

The book has a rather obstinate genre-listing: “fiction.” The author insists that this description applies. He does not clarify whether the book itself is a facsimile of fictions written upon nonfictional Wendy’s comment-cards or if the cards themselves are fictions also. In the end it doesn’t matter, they succeed as fiction should and as nonfiction should. They establish a heartbreakingly specific reality.

Sartre wrote of Bataille, that his "… exhibitionism aims at destroying all literature . . . His tone recalls the scornful aggression of the Surrealist." The aggressive, depraved, analytical male sadness in Letters to Wendy’s is quite similar to Georges Bataille's. Wenderoth is like a sexual suicide bomber inside Wendy's. To prove the great emptiness of the experience, to voice his disgust, he debases himself, immolates himself, by wedding himself to the place and by subjecting himself to it again and again, by plastering it with himself.

He assaults Wendy's, and thereby the principle of mass-replication itself, with an indiscriminate weapon-—sexual aberrance—-a weapon which, inevitably, explodes is user with equal force. Deviance is used here in the same way a drag queen might use it to assault a straight man—-by hitting on him—-or the way Indian Hijras use it to extort alms from shopkeepers. The victory is always pyrrhic; the victory is always founded upon the aggressor's ispo facto defeat (marginality), and she accomplishes it through use of her marginality as contaminant. You have to go into the outhouse if you want to empty it onto someone’s head.

But what is remarkable about this strategy in the book is that in the throes of completely denuded, almost ecstatic abjection, Wenderoth is able to make the most devastatingly precise and heartfelt analyses of the place—-even as he, simultaneously, defiles it with his self-defilement. It is like a woman mastectomizing her breast implants in the middle of the church that has excommunicated her for getting them, while at the same time, delivering the most cogent, dispassionate analyses of why the excommunication had been flawed in the first place.

The act legitimates the original punishment of excommunication (mass-replication), even as—-by means of a more extreme crime, murderous, suicidal martyrdom—-it irreversibly contaminates the punisher with the original crime, with the frail human hunger for bigger tits (for Biggies at all).

Both parties end up disfigured or destroyed in such scenarios—-Wenderoth and Wendy's, the Cafe and the Palestinian suicide bomber, the immolated Buddhist monk and the war he protests. Wenderoth’s discursive blood is all over the walls in attempt to ruin the joint. And if the damage accruing to Wendy's is only symbolic, it is because the book itself is a symbolic entity. Hence the persistence of feelings of impotence and alienation-—hence the book itself. There is no other option.

Using poetry as a weapon. A liminally criminal act. Writing pornographic comment cards. He's doing this, presumably, because there is nothing else to do, he is out of options. Again, the metaphor. In the face of overwhelming mechanized boredom, in the face of the sanctimony and sanity and sanitation of the imbecile functionality of mass-replicated environments, there is nothing else to do but to write these self-destroying comment cards-—to jump like an insane gawker into the progress of the car wreck. This accomplishes nothing, therefore it is impotent, but the spectacle of that tragedy is moving-—'such tender, intelligent death . . .' No war was ever won in this manner. If anyone was ever murdered by a Kamikaze pilot, his death was subordinate to the deader death, multiplied in semiosis, of the pilot. Suicide is always more about communication (symbolic power) than biological death (hard power). But the defilement and termination of all speech, the celebration of its uselessness: to watch someone choke himself to death on the burger, in protest of the fact the that there is nothing else to eat-—it is an eloquence in defeat.
Profile Image for Christopher Litsinger.
747 reviews8 followers
July 10, 2019
This book just solidly works for me -- the format of the book is limiting in many ways, but that's the whole point. While I can see that parts of this would be entirely offensive to many people I think they're true to the character that Wenderoth is painting here.
Profile Image for KB Brookins.
Author 0 books19 followers
October 2, 2022
made me feel uncomfortable, and not in a good way! the section that is just AAVE especially didn’t age well
Profile Image for Wes Hazard.
Author 1 book14 followers
May 16, 2013
I first got wind of this collection from the amazing selections included in Great American Prose Poems the anthology edited by David Lehman. Those pieces were hilarious, insightful, and disturbing. A fair amount of the work in this, the full book (consisting of about a year's worth of prose poems composed on Wendy's comment cards) exhibits those same qualities…Much of it does not. The voice in these poems is a self who spends a lot of time questioning what "self" is and what others can mean to it, investigating the nature of desire, musing on the limits of language, and detailing baroque sexual fantasies involving Wendy's staff/patrons/menu items. At times the pieces are lucid, scathing, and very very funny. But overall, having all of these comment card entries in a single volume dilutes (at least for me) the effect. Too many entries lapse into rambling non-sequitur. That's probably a function of Wenderoth trying to paint the portrait of a man disturbed enough to anchor his entire psyche to the daily ups & downs of a fast-food chain, but I found the result to be long boring stretches that at times seemed to only exist to fulfill the overall project of getting 300+ prose poems about Wendy's down in comment card length. I'd say read it, and enjoy what you find enjoyable, but if you're like me that that will be an unfortunately small amount of the work. The best here though…well the best is really something.
Profile Image for Kevin.
Author 34 books35.5k followers
October 30, 2007
A simply astounding and unpredictable book. Though it sounds simple in premise--each page a comment card sized commentary on one man's state of mind--it explodes into various visceral and hilarious directions.
Profile Image for Mike.
110 reviews243 followers
April 23, 2016
Guy goes to Wendy's every day for about a year, eats/worships/fucks their food, and writes a prayer on a comment card. Hilarious, soul-searing, necessary book.
Profile Image for Lee.
Author 14 books127 followers
Read
January 26, 2010
Why am I only now reading "Letters to Wendy's"? This is an awesome, hilarious, creepy book. Joe Wenderoth is the Professor Steak Sandwich of the U.S. consumer imagination.
19 reviews2 followers
November 28, 2022
However horrendous they may be, I don't believe rape, wife beating, and absurd bodily secretions should be off-limits to a writer. However, Wenderoth relies heavily on the shock-factor of these words and themes to do all the work for him, and then asks us readers to derive some deeper meaning beneath all the mess.

Or maybe we're supposed to marvel at his complete disavowal of the notion of deeper meanings? But the language is not strong enough on its face to be an end onto itself. His sentences can be long, filled with unnecessary connective tissue, and I found myself reading the words to get through them, rather than to take them in.

Something can be said about the book's ability to get down to the bone of that ever-present male psychosis. But it feels like it is indulging and enjoying all the grotesque corners of masculinity, rather than really commenting on it. And I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the positive reviews here are from men.

The book is written like a diary, taking us through almost every day of the 365 day year. At times, I felt like I could feel the writer trying to fill the space, such as the page that merely read: "HELP! (this helmet is fusing to my skull)."

Towards the end, Wenderoth begins skipping more and more days. Maybe this says something about the character and his journey. Or maybe he too was getting a little tired of all the buttfucking, cumming, and frosty drinks filled with cum.
Profile Image for Connor.
9 reviews
March 7, 2023
“You people aren’t satisfied watching—you want to be the show, and to make this happen you’re willing to give up the only thing in the world of any value: free time.”

Finally one for the fast food freaks (me)
Profile Image for D.
141 reviews
Read
July 24, 2023
This was a deranged ride. I laughed a lot, mainly at the sexy bits, and mostly had no clue what was happening.
4 reviews1 follower
February 17, 2011
aside from thinking a little too hard about the meaning behind me greedily shoving this shit down my throat like harry potter (it was addictive) i felt pretty good when I finished. There were a lot of good lines (I've found that at least at this point in my poetry readings 'good lines' are my favorite thing) and many good conversations following my passing by people and having them read whatever disgusting or brilliant letter I just finished. for some reason every person's reaction being 'what the fuck' made me feel toughened or something which was funny.
'like a man who out of anger explodes into a sound he will never know the meaning of'

'theres so little I have to tell you – how can I even begin?'

'I feel like getting fucked up and watching tv forever'

'like a bowl of fresh fruit suddenly alone in the Arctic night, like a killer under arrest for an unrelated misdeamnor, like a flightless bird thrown up into the air by a cruel child, like an abandoned car in the middle of a huge, empty parking lot, like a juggler dreaming of being tied down, like a young priest watching porn in the early morning, I sit in my booth and decide nothing.'

'As I eat I like to lok into the sun glaring on the big windows. I look until there is a large black spot in my eye. I believe this spot is God.'

this was more enjoyable when I was reading it only a dozen or so letters at a time - I read the second half straight through and found my attention buzzing - the best part of this book was how different it was from the rest of my day.
I'd like to read some of his other stuff
as we were saying with zero readership - a book length poem or anything long like this leaves room for some not so great stuff that kind of hides in the background and goes unnoticed yet flows nicely - this is impressive in itself
Profile Image for Dan.
406 reviews16 followers
September 20, 2014
OK, I read the book. Now what? Well I could write a review, but in this case it would be a total waste of my time. I will say this though: the book's title is misleading. There are no letters per se, unless you count the letters of the alphabet, then the title is correct.
OK, I'll write a review, but just for you, don't tell anyone, it'll be our little secret. The narrator (who's name is never mentioned) talks about going to the Wendy's restaurant, but not in the conventional way. It reads like a journal with passages that make no sense and are written day-to-day. I'm obviously not the target audience, for I didn't understand most of the book. I did catch however, that the writer of the journal has an obsession with the picture of Wendy on the Wendy's sign, and he also obsesses with the male and female sexual organs. Oh, and he obsesses with porn.
If all that I just said makes you want to read this load of trash, then by all means, I'm not going to stop you. Maybe YOU will understand it. Then you can tell me. 1 star
Profile Image for Ian Rogers.
Author 1 book14 followers
April 5, 2022
Weird, offbeat, and at times hilarious, Letters to Wendy's centers around the brilliant concept that its depraved narrator is writing short verse on Wendy's "Tell Us About Your Visit" cards to mail to a company who seemingly cares. The dichotomy between experimental verse that explores human sexuality and consumerism merged with fast food imagery is nothing short of brilliant, and this book is at its best when balancing imagery of hamburgers, restaurant booths, and Biggies with its more introspective (and often just plain weird) musings.

That being said, I would have enjoyed this book far more if it were shorter, and if many of the weirder, non-fast food-related pieces (which toward the end start to feel plucked out off Wenderoth's general short verse experiments) had been cut. Still, when these pieces are on-point, they're brilliant, and this is surely worth a read.
Profile Image for Kyle Muntz.
Author 7 books116 followers
May 1, 2013
I've considered Joe Wenderoth a favorite for a while, but this is maybe the best book of poetry I've ever read. Interestingly, this is the one I read last, whereas I think when most people read him they start here and then never move onto his other stuff. It's got all the strength of his conceptual anti-poetry plus a persona and a (somewhat) unifying theme, and the thing as a whole is almost impossibly dynamic. Also: completely clear, even when it's elliptical or opaque; with a profound sense of the unreal, the pornographic, the grotesque. I'm not sure contemporary poetry can be much better than this.
Profile Image for Andrew.
57 reviews
July 18, 2018
Looking back on this 2000 masterwork, it seems both backward-looking to slacker music & culture and prescient to the drug-addled, corporate-enslaved, obtunded troglydytes some of us Americans have become. {Chanting: U-S-A! U-S-A!} There's a prankster / culture-jamming / whatever ethic to it as well, as the prompt for creativity apparently comes in the form of a consumer satisfaction survey at a fast food restaurant.

I think of the more despairing and high songs of Pavement, as well as MTV stars Sifl and Olly, who seem constantly awkward (former) and angry (latter) at their corporeal existence as sock puppets.

One of the bestest Late America had to offer.
Profile Image for Michael.
515 reviews1 follower
August 13, 2012
My roommate had this on the shelf above the toilet, and I finally picked it up when I couldn't sleep last night. Back to the toilet it'll go, because it's a piece of crap--not insightful, not funny or witty, not enjoyable--the product of an author with nothing to say. The world is stupider for every copy.
Profile Image for Andy.
672 reviews28 followers
May 20, 2019
When a gimmick becomes transcendent
Profile Image for Kyle.
16 reviews1 follower
January 6, 2022
Combative Dark Lustful
Honest Deceptive Intimate.

This is a collection of thoughts, poems, ideas, rants, hopes, dreams, assertions, misguided feelings, depressive episodes, observations transcribed into comment cards at a Wendy’s for Over a year. In the realm of a bukowski or a homeless man on a bender after scraping up a few bucks either speaking from the heart, or in a angry tangent complaining about the universe, god or screaming children.

This novel is not only a authentic take on a new narrative form, but something about it is absolutely honest. Each page was uncharted territory. Topical, assertive and masterfully crafted. The prose are almost a collage of empathy and apathy. Emotive and expressionless. A conundrum of complete disassociated impractical thought through the lens of introspection and outside observer.

January 27 1997
There’s no stink of death, there’s just a warmish wacky-woo, a shining shimmy shoo. Hunt the ice if it comes to that, my honorable Antarctic brethren. Let the sun make of this hole a wordy caskets! Our sun shall preen down its wacky-woo, shimmy shoo, and as the feasts melts, an educated guess shall never fail to leap and snort at the stink of death.
March 7, 2018
I got this book at the B&N on Union Square in NYC ... on a table of books labeled ‘Blind Date with’ ... each book was individually wrapped in brown paper and tied with a bow ... and like a classified ad, each wrapped book had a description handwritten on the brown paper of who the Blind Date would be with (MOST WONDERFUL IDEA) ... and this what was said about my mystery date:

BLIND DATE WITH: TRAGICOMIC IMPRESSIONS

Collection of outrageous notes
and situational confessions

A love story, a cultural critique,
a comical look at consumerism
with little regard to social norms

Explosive humor meets
brainy surrealism
profoundly unreal and grotesque

ANYWAY, I did judge my book by it’s cover (even though it was wrapped in brown paper) BUT as you can tell by my STAR RATING (just one) ... I won’t be going out with this book (or author) again!!

BUT also not one to give up (on this concept) so easily ... I will be choosing another Blind Date next time I pass the store ... the descriptions alone are very enticing ... and as a married woman, I might even add, a little ‘scandalous’ ...
600 reviews1 follower
July 31, 2020
Not for everybody, but too much fun for readers like me. There are about six entries that are pure comedic genius. My favorite is probably the one about the two dwarves named Munley and Leffage that inquire endlessly about the writer's philosophy. But then the suggestion of adding a "hell-garden" adjacent to the Wendy's dining room where burger-stuffed patrons would lay themselves out on boulders as if to be picked apart by dogs and birds is hard to top. Or calling dogs "a chicken" or "the chicken." Some of it reads like over-educated gibberish. Others are creepy. But for me, the device of all the entries being customer suggestions mailed in to the corporate hq makes it all amusing. I don't know if we are to conclude the writer had a serious illness or took his own life or if it was all submitted in mocking irony. Either way, I enjoyed reading it and expect I could enjoy it again.
Profile Image for Ethan Ksiazek.
109 reviews13 followers
June 8, 2022
Pollution worship, self-laceration, fast food reverie. Definitely a rare addition to the sensibilities, and I'm glad I bought it so I can refer back to it. I wouldn't say reading it was revelatory, which of course is what we all want (basic), but at the same time, I felt that if I overdosed on Ambien and stripped all formalities then maybe it would speak to me unlike all other books have. Will come back to it. Some stellar lines, stellar imagery. Read slowly, think deliberately. Thanks to @Paperbird on Youtube for the recommendation.

"My life is not a story. I'd like to apologize for that. I know what a nuisance it is for you. I've tried to make my life into a story--you know I have--but every time I've been returned to the heart of the city of chains. I accept this as the fated role I am to play. I wait here, in chains, for you to pass by. For you to look out of the story and into me, into the way I'm bound, unsheltered, guilty of nothing."
Profile Image for Lily.
30 reviews
July 29, 2023
The TLDR: I read this book for my book club, and it's not a book I normally would have read and it is a book I would find difficult to recommend, but I am glad to have read it.

The hook of this book is essentially a kind of year 2000 edge-lord humor. I'm not interested in that aspect, which regrettably suffuses the entire book. As such, the narrator is of course some kind of deranged pedophile.

However, underneath the pitch of the book is an interesting commentary on our modern society--what is it to so heavily identify with a brand? What does it mean to exist in this space where all public spaces are now privately owned, but all of our private thoughts are now transmitted publicly (regardless of if others want them)? What does it mean for us if everything is sufficient, and nothing aspires to be more or less than that?

To borrow a phrase from Wenderoth... the book itself is an insufficient meal, and nothing tastes as sweet.
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