#to be extra clear I'm not offended. It's...just...the way it's written...is bad for me specifically. The rhetoric and style not the content

[zoobus]

hey question, if you didn't read the book/ couldn't finish it then how do you know what other works it inspired? i mean like how exactly do you know?

I meant I didn't read past the first dozen pages. It's totally possible I'm wrong, but reading the first few pages of American Psycho made me realize I've read quite a few books that were probably trying to be American Psycho.

And to be clear, I'm not criticizing the book or saying the writing is bad. It's a particular type of writing that is nails on a chalkboard to me, that makes me go, I get it, I get the point you're making, please murder someone already. Here's two excerpts that might encourage others to pick it up but didn't work for me:

~~~

Evelyn stands by a blond wood counter wearing a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and the same pair of silk-satin d’Orsay pumps Courtney has on. Her long blond hair is pinned back into a rather severe-looking bun and she acknowledges me without looking up from the oval Wilton stainless-steel platter on which she has artfully arranged the sushi. “Oh honey, I’m sorry. I wanted to go to this darling little new Salvadorian bistro on the Lower East Side—”

Price groans audibly.

“—but we couldn’t get reservations. Timothy, don’t groan.” She picks up a piece of the yellowtail and places it cautiously near the top of the platter, completing what looks like a capital T. She stands back from the platter and inspects it. “I don’t know. Oh, I’m so unsure.”

“I told you to keep Finlandia in this place,” Tim mutters, looking through the bottles—most of them magnums—at the bar. “She never has Finlandia,” he says to no one, to all of us.

“Oh god, Timothy. Can’t handle Absolut?” Evelyn asks and then contemplatively to Courtney, “The California roll should circle the rim of the plate, no?”

“Bateman. Drink?” Price sighs.

“J&B rocks,” I tell him, suddenly thinking it’s strange that Meredith wasn’t invited.

“Oh god. It’s a mess,” Evelyn gasps. “I swear I’m going to cry.”

“The sushi looks marvelous,” I tell her soothingly.

“Oh it’s a mess,” she wails. “It’s a mess.”

~~~

“But then, when you’ve just come to the point when your reaction to the times is one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned into the insanity and you reach that point where it all makes sense, when it clicks, we get some crazy fucking homeless nigger who actually wants—listen to me, Bateman—wants to be out on the streets, this, those streets, see, those”—he points—“and we have a mayor who won’t listen to her, a mayor who won’t let the bitch have her way—Holy Christ—let the fucking bitch freeze to death, put her out of her own goddamn self-made misery, and look, you’re back where you started, confused, fucked … Number twenty-four, nope, twenty-five … Who’s going to be at Evelyn’s? Wait, let me guess.” He holds up a hand attached to an impeccable manicure. “Ashley, Courtney, Muldwyn, Marina, Charles—am I right so far? Maybe one of Evelyn’s ‘artiste’ friends from ohmygod the ‘East’ Village. You know the type—the ones who ask Evelyn if she has a nice dry white chardonnay—” He slaps a hand over his forehead and shuts his eyes and now he mutters, jaw clenched, “I’m leaving. I’m dumping Meredith. She’s essentially daring me to like her. I’m gone. Why did it take me so long to realize that she has all the personality of a goddamn game-show host? … Twenty-six, twenty-seven … I mean I tell her I’m sensitive. I told her I was freaked out by the Challenger accident—what more does she want? I’m ethical, tolerant, I mean I’m extremely satisfied with my life, I’m optimistic about the future—I mean, aren’t you?”