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Milkfred E. Moore
Aug 27, 2006

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'
The Rage of Achilles -- Terrence Hawkins' "gritty" retelling of the Iliad sometimes felt like it was getting almost parodic with how anachronistic some of the dialogue is, but it is generally entertaining. However, what is really interesting is his usage of the Bicameral Mind theory: the hallucinations of the gods speaking to the various characters are great, Odysseus as the first man to realize he's capable of hearing himself think is a highlight, as is Achilles' journey from one to the other. You just need to look past the sex, dicks, whores, etc. "grittiness."

Ready, Okay! -- I only recently got around to reading Adam Cadre's debut and only novel. It is, unfortunately, sluggish and over-long. That said, it is also an interesting clockwork mechanism where everything has a deliberate point to it. Problem is, you spend about 90% of the book sifting gems out of dirt and waiting to get to the fireworks factory that was promised on the very first page, but when you do and everything comes together, it is great.

What blows my mind about Ready, Okay! is that it feels like a pointed "deconstruction" of John Green's reified sadboy YA genre by way of Bowling for Columbine... years before either thing existed. Like, that is how you'd pitch this beast: Looking for Alaska meets Bowling for Columbine. Did Adam Cadre send this book back in time? Was the biggest mistake he made releasing this book like a decade early? I don't know if I can call it a good book or even one I enjoyed reading, but it's certainly unique and audacious. Think of a John Green novel with all the usual tropes and the quippy introvert nice guy protagonist but where the protagonist's zany family is the result of unsupported mental illnesses and generational trauma, you spend 400 pages getting to know a wide cast of teenagers with issues and varying degrees of sympathy, good and bad, and then every single one of them dies in a school shooting that is the explicit result of them being failed by every authority figure and institution that was supposed to protect them.

It's absolutely wild. It's one of those five stars for ambition and ideas, two stars for execution books. You can easily see why it flopped when it was released by HarperCollins back in the day, but you kind of wish it was a hit bigger than it was.

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