"Tenth of December" by George Saunders. A collection of short stories with different writing styles, and I happened to like none of them. It's not like the author was an amateur and the writings were unpolished, but in fact the writings were deliberately minimalist and fragmented. At the same time, the plot for all stories were fairly unpredictable, but here it did not feel like they were deliberately written this way, more like the endings were not planned and simply "happened" when the text ran out. I suspect the main problem is due to misguided optimizations for minimalism, explained in this talk:
George Saunders, "Tenth of December", Talks at Google
The relevant part starts at 26:57, where he explains how to go from a "perfectly functional sentence" to "we don't have much, but what we have doesn't suck." The actual result of that process (Semplica Girl Diaries) is text filled with bad syntax and little flavor. It was quite awful.
Even assuming that I can swallow this writing style, and that I filled in all the blanks that were optimized away, I still can't identify with any of the characters in these stories. It's a real shame, the author seems like an interesting guy, and there are bits of humor and interesting concepts in some stories, but ultimately the intended audience for this book must have been someone with the exact opposite senses as me.
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