Thought Train to Pusan

Filthy Animals is a novel composed of a group of short stories and characters that all link together in some form or another. The first story deals with an emotional young man named Lionel as he begins embarking on strange and perilous encounters with a man in an open relationship. From there, we also meet a babysitter who has exploded her life, a group of teenagers that engage in a night of emotional and physical violence against one another, dancers at an academy, and a young woman facing down her family as terminal cancer rages through her. The main throughline of this novel centers on Lionel (and his story is returned to a number of times), while the surrounding tales act more or less to flesh out the greater world. It is as if to say, here is what one person is dealing with, but if you look past them you will see so many other lives being lived. And all of them feel connected by an invisible thread of longing and searching for something (or someone) to connect to. Beyond this the...

The amount of times while listening to this audiobook where I just thought to myself, “I really don’t care” was astounding. I hate to say that, because it’s sad when things that once interested you suddenly don’t anymore, but to be honest I didn’t even know that this book (the 3rd and final of the Simon Snow series) was out in the series until I noticed it on a library list. The whole thing just fell from my head and I never felt the absence.  And that’s not to say that these books aren’t enjoyable (I really did like the first one! The second was… fine, but sort of went in one ear and out the other), but I guess I’m just having a hard time caring about a lot of things these days. And I for real have noticed that I am not enjoying series (when it comes to books) in the least. Or franchises of movies. Or when a tv series feels like it’s just going to meander with as many seasons as it gets versus having a solid plan and story to be completely told in 1-2 seasons and then calling it d...