Book #32 - REVISIT - Just Kids

Just Kids is Patti Smith's memoir about her early adulthood, and particularly, her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

I really didn't like it.  
I thought I would.
I should have liked it.  Art!  Punk Rock!  Theatre!  What's not to like?

The narrative read as an emotionless chronicle of (what should have been?) a passionate time and series of experiences.  Smith relentlessly catalogs the personalities she encountered (lists of 5-10 names were common):

"Through [Bobby Neuwirth] I had met Todd [Rundgren], the artist Bruce Marden and Larry Poons, and the musicians Billy Swann, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, Roger McGuinn, and Kris Kristofferson."

I know that for some, that list could read like a series of explosions.  "You met who!?  When!?  All at once??!"  To me, it looked like name dropping, and not in service of the narrative. I found Smith's writing, when it wasn't downright awkward ("It was within that atmosphere that I seethed.") then uncomfortably remote and passionless (as when she explains her numerous breakups, including with Mapplethorpe).  

My favorite college professor (and, lucky for me, my current book group compatriot) talks about (possibly invented the term???) the Apostolary Narrative.  It's meant to be a play on the Epistolary Narrative (books through letters), and it describes the kind of book where the Apostles get to tell the story, and the story isn't theirs. The New Testament, obviously, is one.  The Great Gatsby is one (Nick is the Apostle, Jay Gatsby gets to be the Christ).  I'd throw Brideshead Revisited and My Antonía into the mix.  Hopefully my prof will weigh in with a better list.

When I got to the end of Just Kids, and read the epilogue explaining that Smith was responding to Mapplethorpe's dying request that she "tell their story," I realized that was the problem.  The book was posing as an apostolary narrative, but was actually written as a memoir, and so succeeded at neither.

Book #32 - Just Kids

For my book group, we read Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids.

I really did NOT like it, much to my surprise. I'm going to wait to post a real review until after book group, but this is the record showing that I read another book!

Books #29-31 - a very lame post

I have been reading, but have not been writing about what I've read.  If I don't get something down here, I will be permanently mired in the It-Will-Take-Too-Long-So-Why-Bother swamp.  So this is lame, but hopefully it means I can approach book #32 freshly.

Book #29 -One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper.  Loved the book.  Wish I had bought a paper version instead of a Kindle version so that I could loan it out.

Book #30 - Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness.  Second in the All Souls trilogy (the first was A Discovery of Witches).  Total slog for me.  Uninspired to read the third in the series, whenever it comes out.

Book #31 - The Litigators by John Grisham.  It's been a zillion years since I read a Grisham lawyer book.  How does he do it?  How does he come up with all these iterations of the same story, and keep making them eminently readable?

OK.  Caught up.

Also, I'm noticing that it's the middle of November, which means ~6 weeks left of the year, and I have nine books to read if I'm going to get to 40.  Hmmm.  Fascinating.