Guest Review (4); A Bucket of Ice for O'Rourke

Gracing our screens today is the second review by Chantal Lyons who is steadily making her way through the long list. Her stark and honest reviews, especially in the below, bring light to our epic quest as she interweaves her own humor and opinions of the books relating them to mainstream crazes and media "sensations."

Guest Reviewer; Chantal Lyons

Ultimately, I can only give this book 2.5 stars out of 5... or maybe a 3 – but only because my reading of it has coincided so harmoniously with a recent internet phenomenon.

I really, really struggled to get through the first third. I could not stand its smarminess; the way that it constantly digressesed to obsess over its own cleverness. When I was not wading through those sections, I was scanning quickly over the long baseball ones. It really didn’t help that the blurb didn’t match up, which left me confused and suspicious about how much care was put into the book’s production. But, like pushing something heavy on wheels and finding it gets easier as the momentum builds, I eventually started to slide through the story as a reader should. There were even flashes of brilliance amongst the tacky prose, like “the enduring silence of undiscovered caves”, or the occasional resonating quip about humanity.

Paul, the main character, isn’t likeable in the slightest, and that doesn’t work here. He was so jagged that I didn’t care what happened to him, and his opinion-change on page 204 because he saw a particular name on a dusty pack of old beer in a store seemed to completely disregard all the sharp scepticism he’d displayed before. However. In the week gone by, I did find myself able to finally connect with Paul, thanks to the ice bucket challenge. Paul rants frequently about his alienation from and rejection of the internet and the world in communion with it. This I dully regarded until my Facebook feed began to fill with automatically-playing videos of ice bucket challenges, and nominations for me to participate next. And, with the same determination of Paul, I have ignored them, my hackles rising at being told to “make a donation to ALS if you can’t do the challenge” (I say what charities I donate to, thanks very much). I bet Paul would have a good rant about it.

But back to the book itself. I was fairly relieved to have finished it, and I can’t imagine I’ll think much about it after this full stop.