“People are very strange these days.” -Greg Sestero, The Room Throughout the process of listening to this audiobook with my family, I frequently wondered whether or not Sestero was an actually good author or if the story itself was just so good that even if he was a terrible author the book would still be enjoyable. The more I think about it, the more I realize he’s not a great author, but he IS a great storyteller. Of course, the facts and stories of The Room itself, Greg being a reluctant lead role, him telling about the constant calamities on set, these things are all entertaining. However, it’s the fact he’s good at just the pacing and timing of the story that makes it clear the book is not just good because it’s about an already interesting thing. The quips, the random fun facts about Tommy Wiseau (I’ve never stopped thinking about his Aladdin bathroom poster), the Wiseau quotes, even the rare emotional bits are really well paced and organized. The Room, without this context, is an infinitely rewatchable and uniquely bad movie, maybe the best bad movie ever. Trust me, I know a thing about horrible b-movies. Back in middle school, I was obsessed with these sorts of terrible films, my dad and I every other week would watch one: Clifford, Reuben and Ed, Cabin Boy, Problem Child. These movies were all laughably bad but in no way actually enjoyable in a way quite like The Room. With The Disaster Artist in mind, The Room is genuinely a fantastic work of “outsider film” as it were. Unlike movies like Problem Child, it’s not a stupid bonkers comedy movie made by some lame forty year olds to appeal to kids, instead it’s a dreamy, avant-garde masterpiece of an accidental black comedy made without even a wink of self awareness, hence why it’s better than the rest of these horrible movies. The Disaster Artist is a tribute to one of the greatest movies of all time, and is a pretty great book that really makes you think about all the other strange outsider films by wannabe actors who slipped through the cracks you’ve never heard of. In other words, good job Sestero and Bissell.

I mainly picked this one up because I mainly just wanted a break from both generally pretty difficult books and also downer books that end with "everything sucks." And I guess in regards to the difficulty thing, I made a good choice! Sedaris is an incredibly talented writer as shown by how easy-to-read his style is. It also doesn't help that I had to stop myself from cackling to this in the middle of study halls. Anyway, great book. A modern classic for sure.

The Catcher in the Rye is the greatest book ever written. Basic take, I know. I feel, in a sense, this is one of those books that receives a lot of praise and also a lot of criticism- however, and I’m not saying this to every hater of the book, I feel it is a book some people don’t get. One of my least favorite tropes of literary critique in the Goodreads age is saying “This character is morally ambiguous/not entirely likeable, therefore they are poorly written and the book is bad.” You think Salinger accidentally made Holden an unlikeable hypocrite? Holden, in my opinion, is arguably one of the greatest characters of all time. It, of course, helps that he really is written like a teenager and not just what an adult thinks a teenager is like. However, that’s not what makes him a great protagonist. Like Tartt’s Richard Papen, Plath’s Esther Greenwood, or Wallace’s Don Gately, I don’t like him because he’s a good person or because I related to him, rather because I understand him. The Catcher in the Rye takes place, for the most part, in a singular night. This book truly embodies the feeling of staying up too late and losing all meaning and ambition in life, realizing everything’s terrible. It’s a ridiculously small scope, but I could see myself in his shoes. I went to a scout camp over my 8th grade summer, and on the last night, I got diarrhea, a fever, and hardly had the energy to move because I had eaten so little (I have a small stomach!). This book felt EXACTLY like me staying up all night, unable to sleep in my hammock for reasons I don’t remember. I spent a lot of the night walking around in circles, and eventually slept until 4 am in the backseat of my dad’s car, which fortunately was unlocked. It was really cold and took a long time to get settled into. I was tossing and turning for about an hour and a half. My point is, this book is excellent. The craft is miraculous, the writing style is flawless, and the story is deeply fascinating and, like The Bell Jar, a perfect portrayal of depression and despondence.

yeah this is by far the most challenging read on this list thus far. To tell the truth, after Mahound, I ended up printing out a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book so I could read it in more than just chapter chunks while intermittently reading a brief summary just to make sure I was processing everything right. I've read that for anyone who's not particularly well-versed in Muslim or South Asian history and culture (myself included), a lot of the book will fly over your head. Fortunately, I did pick up on a couple of references just because I'd occasionally remember something from my AP world history class's unit on Dar-Al Islam (the bit about Billy Battuta owning a business called "Battuta's Travels" did get a chuckle out of me), but yeah, let's be real, probably a fair bit of this went over my head. Despite that, though, this book is amazing. This is maybe one of the most insane things ever written, it's like if Thomas Pynchon wrote Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens and then the book was edited and vandalized by Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse, and Milan Kundera. It's a book full of ridiculous plots and stories revolving around Gibreel and Saladin featuring an incredibly expansive cast of characters including a guy named Jumpy Joshi rest in peace Jumpy Joshi. Really my only complaint is that I just didn't care that much about the dream sequences that riddle a copious amount of this book. Like I get it's thematically important but if anything convinced me to print a chapter-by-chapter summary it was definitely that. anyway good book

Ayn Rand, while, rightfully, a very controversial political figure, was very much a great storyteller. Of course, it's not a good sign when your political ideology is so weird it can be the entire personality of a character in a story, however, Rand's best skill is the skill of persuasion. She could convince you through her writing that the sky is green, milk goes before cereal, and that objectivism is a perfectly normal political ideology that isn't controversial or ill-thought-out in the slightest. In terms of this being a melodramatic political soap opera, it works absolute wonders. The rivalry (and will-they-won't-they romance) between Keating and Roark is incredibly compelling to read about as well, seeing them both go completely opposite ways in life. Also, poor Dominique really got the short end of the stick this entire book.