2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
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2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
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Book Review: The Postmortal

Today’s book review is another conducted for LuxuryReading.com.  A review copy ofThe Postmortal was provided courtesy of LuxuryReading, and the original, condensed, review, which was posted November 17, is available here.
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The Postmortal

I have been very excited about reviewing The Postmortal.  Normally I review non-fiction for LuxuryReading.  But I saw this one on the “books to be reviewed” list and it sounded so clever and intriguing that I asked if an exception could be made and I could do a spot o’ fiction.  When the book came in the mail I wanted to start it right away, but had another non-fiction piece due first – then figured I should probably get the other non-fiction book I had in the queue reviewed next, since that is what I actually agreed to review in the first place.  Finally this was the only other book I owed a review on, so I could turn to it guilt-free

I started it on the honeymoon (teehee).  I loved the premise – in our world in the not-so-distant future, a cure for aging has been discovered.  The President has banned it in the U.S., but it is available on the black market.  John Farrell, a bit of an Everyman who happens to be a divorce lawyer, has a connection and decides to take The Cure.

Initially, mayhem and madness ensue, in the best possible ways.  John’s future world is one of snarkiness, dark gallows humor, Shocking Revelations, and more than a few unexpected twists and turns.  At least, it is in the first handful of chapters.  After that, well, it becomes a lot darker and the gallows humor becomes more gallows and less humor.  Random acts of violence, bitterness, resentment, ennui, and the decline of all forms of faith, hope and love are apparently the name of the game in the future.  If we really are in for that kind of future, I am in no rush to sign up – let alone to extend my stay with a late check-out.

In other words, eek, she said.

The book started out terrifically, laugh-out-loud funny.  And then shifted, on a dime, to horrifically, cry-out-loud depressing.

The subject matter is heavy – I get it.  Issues of resource management, over-population, who “deserves” to be kept alive, and our obligations to one another in society are weighty topics.  So is the concept of death.  They deserve to be treated with respect – although I’m also fairly certain that they deserve to be treated with mockery and sarcasm because we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, now do we?

There are a lot of take-home platitudinous messages in the book because of the weight of the topics covered.  “Be careful what you wish for” is, obviously, prime among them.  But “nothing good lasts forever,” “to everything there is a season,” and “only the good die young” have their places in the sun too.  And for the most part, Magary uses them well – they serve to demonstrate the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of many characters and situations, and to provide a nice reminder every now and then about the dangers of over-thinking and under-feeling.

There are also a lot of great lines and darkly funny situations.  That’s how the book was billed, and the author (Drew Magary) did deliver.  This is what I expected the major focus of the book to be, actually, given Magary’s other writing credits.  I mean, hello, how can you not expect great things from a man whose other book is titled “Men With Balls: The Professional Athlete’s Handbook” and who also writes for Deadspin, Maxim, and has contributed to Comedy Central, Playboy, and Penthouse?  So humor – dark, odd, random, man-focused humor I expected – especially after reading Magary’s own take on his book on Deadspin.

But then he went off on a dystopian “the future is scary!” tangent or two (or six or twelve).  And that I found a tad wearing after a while…

Again, I get it.  The book is a combo entertainment/cautionary tale.  But the existential angst surrounding John Farrell and his family/friends was entertaining for a while, then it got a little heavy-handed to my tastes.  Personally, I don’t know that I see all that much appeal in a cure for aging.  From the beginning, I rather fell in line with the pro-death traditionalists (and John’s father) when they pointed out that everything good must come to an end – and that this is not necessarily a bad thing or something to avoid, but just a necessary part of life and the appreciation of what we have.  This is, ultimately, the message Magary sends us away with – and it’s a good one.  But frankly, I think he could have delivered it without quite as many participants in the parade of horribles that poor John Farrell had to deal with along the way…

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