Week 4: Building Base Knowledge (GoodReads)

 

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….