If you liked the
witty, intricately plotted, offbeat yet heartfelt Where’d You Go, Bernadette
(and who wouldn’t?), take a gander at The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,
the fast-paced yet sprawling 2002 debut novel by Gary Shteyngart.
This hilarious coming-of-age novel follows Vladimir
Girshkin, the slacker son of ambitious Russian émigré professionals, who is
wasting his elite education by clerking at the Emma Lazarus Immigrant
Absorption Society by day and dallying with Challah, his zaftig dominatrix each
night. In picaresque fashion, through a
series of chance encounters he relocates to a trendy Eastern European City (a
thinly disguised Prague) and discovers that he’s become a mini-mobster and
heavily indebted to the local kingpin, the Groundhog.
The desperately self-inventing
characters and ridiculous situations are detailed in sparkling prose, and the
whole is a sublime social satire of amoral twenty-first century decay.
(posted to Sharyn Y.'s GoodRead comments page [and "recommendation", by accident])
I’m so pleased that this week’s assignment brought me back
to Goodreads and forced me to dig
into it far more that I was able to back in November.
I am not, by nature, a “joiner,” but I’m pleased with GR for
the myriad of options it offers for seeing and being seen by Friends. I can spy on the bookshelves of those with
similar tastes/sensibilities without having to bug them for recommendations. I think, too, that I will finally move from
logging my reads in little memo books that I’ve kept since 2000 and finally
move to web-based GR; I like that I can create my own specific bookshelves with
future recommendations to customers in mind—and that I don’t have to try to
remember the content of what I read (getting more difficult every day); that
will be linked from the website. Hooray!!
“Listopia” blew my mind: testing “immigrant,” I found dozens
of subcategorized lists—same with “Magical Fiction.” What a great resource for providing readers’
services and creating displays in the branch! And many other features hold
great personal appeal: links to author interviews, recent book lists of notable reads,
and many more….
