Monday

 

Book 2

Never Mind the Pollacks, Neal Pollack. The book, is among other things, a parody of music criticism which simultaneously recaps the history Rock and Roll. It does this by tracing the life of the fictional music critic Neal Pollack. It's rather hard to write a review of it, since the main character shares the name as the author and is a music critic. For instance, the phrase, "Neal Pollack writes..." is ambiguous between the main character having written something and the author having written something. When the book is funny, it's very funny, but at least for me, the laughs were a little more spaced out than I would have liked. And while incessant name-dropping of semi-obscure bands is certainly a characteristic of musical criticism that does deserve to be parodied, it's also sort of a shout-out to people who read lots of music criticsm and are therefore familar with all these bands. I'm not, so the book lost me at certain points. One of the high points of the book was the series of lies Bob Dylan tells Joan Baez to break up her relationship with Pollack, another is the repeated theme of being hit by cars, and his version of how Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love got together is just hysterical. As far the version of Bruce Springsteen presented in the book goes, I'll just say that I hope Bruce has a good sense of humor.



I'm reading a couple of books of short stories now, so it's not clear what the next book I'll finish for the challenge will be.

Also, I discovered after reading this book that Neal Pollack a) has a his own blog and b) is also taking part in the 50 Book Challenge. If I were him, I would think it's very cool that someone is reading my stuff for a challenge I'm also taking part in.

# posted by washerdreyer @ 1/17/2005 08:11:00 PM
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