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Charles Bukowski – The Roominghouse Madrigals | Review

Title: The Roominghouse Madrigals

Author: Charles Bukowski

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 264

Rating: 3.5*/5

Charles Bukowski – The Roominghouse Madrigals

This collection brings together Bukowski’s earliest selected poems from 1946–1966, which is interesting in itself because according to his author bio, he didn’t even start writing poetry until 1955. You can tell that they’re his early poems, too. He’s still finding his voice as a writer, and it’s his voice which made his work so distinct. Because of that, while this is a reasonable enough collection of poetry, it’s nowhere near Bukowski’s best. I don’t think I’d recommend it unless you’re already familiar with his later work and you want to see how it all started out.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly some standout poems here that really stuck in my mind, and I had no problem finding enough that I enjoy to fill a YouTube video. But while you could feel that Bukowski was in there somewhere, you could also feel that he was trying to distill other people’s influences into what he was writing instead of going balls-to-the-wall and writing from his heart, instead of his head.

On the plus side, you do get plenty of his usual topics (women, races, alcohol), and you get to see them through a younger set of eyes. It’s interesting to see that he was just as obsessed with death in his younger years as he was when he reached his seventies, and that gives me some hope for myself. So I’m glad that I read this, I just wouldn’t recommend it to a newbie.

Charles Bukowski

Click here to buy The Roominghouse Madrigals.

Becky Albertalli – Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda | Review

Title: Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda

Author: Becky Albertalli

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 312

Rating: 3.75*/5

Becky Albertalli – Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda

I feel a little let down by this one, because I was expecting to absolutely love it and I ended up thinking it was just okay. The core story line was pretty good and everything I expected it would be, but I found it difficult to relate to the characters because the whole thing felt so American. Simon’s school and the culture inside it is nothing like the school I went to when I grew up, and there were a bunch of cultural references that I didn’t get and that made me feel more like an outsider.

Still, there was plenty of stuff that I did like as well, and I saw Simon very much as a flawed character. Not because he’s homosexual, of course, but because of some of the decisions that he makes and the ways that he acts. He complained about his teachers for following the syllabus and about his parents when he got in trouble for getting drunk. I was also confused by a scene at a gay restaurant that was pumping bass and freely serving alcohol to what appeared to be an entire room full of underage people.

All in all, this book made me feel kind of old. I related to the grownups more than the kids and couldn’t really tie it back to when I was a kid. But then, an ex-pupil burned down my school and I remember watching someone else get hit in the eye with a metal pole by another kid who didn’t like them. But it does have a positive message and I can see why you might find it relatable if you were born after the turn of the century somewhere in America.