Locally, the sentences are incisive and tumbling. Taylor writes sex wonderfully well…. Justin Taylor writes with fierce precision and perfect balance: Seven Days in May by Kim Izzo. Black Hour by Lori Rader-Day. Heathcliffs I Have Known: Year Year X Tell us more about what you like to read so we can send you the best offers and opportunities. What kind of books do you like to read?
Book review: 'The Gospel of Anarchy' by Justin Taylor
Scene of the Crime mystery fans. From the Heart romance readers. Book Club Girl book clubs. HarperCollins Children's Books books for young readers. Harper Perennial literary fiction and nonfiction. I should have quit as soon as it switched to the hippie three-way with the two hippie girls [they are NOT punks. Blah blah she was worshipping her between her legs blah blah but Katy only had attention for David blah blah the wonderful special amazing thing about David is blah blah blah the twelve year old girls writing bad poetry in their bedrooms would be embarrassed to read this.
Like I didn't just read the f I quit. Like I didn't just read the first part of the book from David's perspective? He had no personality. I don't give a shit that he dropped out of college. So he doesn't feel he belongs to society any more? Well, it didn't seem like he really did. It's the same vague as hell generalizations about everything.
See a Problem?
It's magazine pictorial depth. David gives one description of what everyone looks like and that is it. I can't do that. Also, what the fuck? The paragraph about the roads of Gainesville? I've lived in this town on and off since That was all he could come up with? Not only that, the background story was wrong anyway.
Gainesville was called Hogtowne first. I should have quit when the two girls made out in each other's laps. Ohmigod two girls making out! Aren't they punk and dangerous? I should've quit during the long technological know-how part about uploading porn on the internet and getting porn from the internet. This could've been a boring commune story set in the '60s or '70s. You know, people talking at you about their ideals because they don't know what else to do?
Or those aging bar sluts that tell you about how they found God just because they can't get laid any more? Also, I started rereading Franny and Zooey during my work lunchbreaks. I can't read this shit. If that's all you can see This is a fanfic of something I don't give a shit about. I just shouldn't have bothered. I guess if being punk is only about wearing a t-shirt I don't want to get together to fill the void with yet more void. I don't know why I wrote those idiotic contest bids.
I'd delete it but I don't think it is good for me to pretend that I don't do these idiotic contest bids. And this book is about a loser in the town where I live! It had better not make me cry like this movie about a loser in Gainesville. Did anyone else see that? It's the equivalent of watching a story about an abuser with flashbacks of their experiences with abuse.
He's trapped in life And Michael Pitt plays a retard who is abused in life. I just felt bad. No one would believe I was a punk. In I was probably reading Salinger alone in my bedroom and listening to The Cure. Hey, John Lennon wasn't a Teddy Boy! View all 14 comments.
THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY // 02-08-11
Nov 17, Oriana rated it really liked it Recommended to Oriana by: This was written by my friend's boyfriend, so. This is a very strange, surprising book. I thought it should be longer, not in plot, but in development. Which is odd, because it is mostly a very internal-development kind of thing, where characters are given pages and pages of something like interior monologue, reacting to things happening now or reflecting on their past or meditating on the future. But yet, some aspects of the book, some aspects of the characters, and some charac Full disclosure: But yet, some aspects of the book, some aspects of the characters, and some characters altogether, still seemed Let me approach this another way.
This is a book you can tell by the title about anarchy and God. It's often very cerebral, and is shot through with conviction and belief and faith. Now, I wish I could fully commit to anarchism nearly as much as I wish I could commit to agnosticism, but I can't. I like a degree of order, I have a fundamental cynicism at my core that shakes my faith in people, and God? I just can't buy into it, and haven't since I was young. My sister is an anarchist, and I am always shocked by how optimistic and idealistic and just plain nice her anarchist friends are, and I think that's wonderful, and I love spending time with them, and talking politics and philosophy with them, and I let myself get caught up in it, usually, in visions of utopian equality and each unto his needs and no ownership and no money and peace and peace and peace.
But then I leave and someone shoves me out of the way when I'm trying to get out of the subway, or a homeless dude is screaming to himself on the street as everyone averts their eyes, or I read the newspaper or even just look around me at all the shit and misery, and the glow leaves and the spell is broken. I guess the characters in The Gospel of Anarchy are able to keep right on living without losing the glow.
And in fact it goes one step further, by combining the idealism of anarchy with the rapture of faith in God, of discipleship, of the absolute conviction that what they are doing and working toward is completely right. I don't want to give the impression that this is some hippie love-fest or angry-punk screed or densely philosophized treatise.
It's not any of those, really, but it's also sort of all of them. There are some really smart and interesting ideas here, and the writing is extremely evocative and gentle -- almost too gentle, really; the few scenes which should have involved real fights, either physical or verbal, are completely glossed over, their outcomes revealed later through backward glances rather than being violently smashed through while they were happening.
But it's a lovely book, if maybe a little too fanciful for me. The time and place Gainesville, are made beautifully real, the characters especially Katy and Liz are believable and familiar. I'm sure I should have taken my time and read this more slowly to have gotten full benefit of the ideas, because there really is a lot to meditate on and digest.
But I'm too impatient for that. View all 9 comments. Apr 11, Anina rated it it was ok Shelves: I am giving this two stars because I think the author has talent but I honestly hated this book and really feel like. It's a novel but really it's just a corny ode to CrimeThink publications and other punk rock propaganda of the 90's. So just like that stuff, it's negative and exclusionary. Also, the dialog and plot to me were completely unbelievable.
I read to the end because it only took a day and I was hoping it would get realistic, but I am giving this two stars because I think the author has talent but I honestly hated this book and really feel like. I read to the end because it only took a day and I was hoping it would get realistic, but it just got sillier and sillier.
By the time they got to the part where they wrote their own bible I nearly lost it.
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- Persönlichkeit und Menschenführung: Vom Umgang mit sich selbst und anderen (German Edition).
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- The Gospel of Anarchy.
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According to the reviews I can see there's a younger generation for whom exposure to this type of thing is still a novelty, but make no mistake. In the real life version of this book, Katy ends up getting the clap, and David taking a "not job" getting cancer drugs trial tested on him at the university.
How else did you guys think Fishgut has electricity to share via extension cords with those hippies?
Oct 20, Amanda rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: David Meiklejohn, Oriana Leckert. To be fair, I am not exactly an unbiased audience; at the same time, as much as I can be, I believe I am. I didn't fully realize how much this book kicked my ass until, later on the day I finished it, I got on a plane and for five hours was unable to do anything but stare out the window.
These things all mean that this is a good book -- breathtaking in a stab-you-in-the-heart way. View all 6 comments. Apr 05, Caitlin Constantine rated it liked it. Maybe the word I would best use to describe this book is "ambitious.
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Even if he didn't quite succeed, I apprecia Maybe the word I would best use to describe this book is "ambitious. Even if he didn't quite succeed, I appreciate that he tried. The plot of the book rotates around this group of fanatical Christian anarchists in lates Gainesville who live in a shabby punk house and spend their time dumpster-diving, partying, conducting orgies and engaged in philosophical conversation.
Eventually they start calling themselves "anarchristians," the idea being that if Christ-like love is the theory then anarchy is the practice. I love to read about religion and religious theory but I kept bumping into one niggling little thought, which is that Jesus may have been a barefoot homeless socialist hippie with long hair, but dude was NOT an anarchist. Remember that whole "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" scripture aka "pay your fucking taxes, you damn teabaggers"?
Yeah, that doesn't really go with the whole theme of anarchism. Well, it's a big nit that rubbed me so raw I had no choice but to pick it. I did like quite a bit of the language Taylor used, and I got a kick out of the way he critiqued organized religion even as he explored the mystical side of it. I didn't come away from this book thinking, my god, those crust punks have it all figured out! Rather I thought Taylor had done a good job of showing how these people, in their attempts to keep that encroaching sense of oblivion at bay, threw themselves into anything that could make them feel SOMETHING, anything that could make them feel alive, even if that thing ultimately led them to the path of self-destruction.
The characters who saw this and distanced themselves in pursuit of something more moderate, who found ways to pick and choose what worked for them This would have been a solid four-star book, though, were it not for the aforementioned theological fail and the philosophical ramblings that veered right into the nonsensical at times. Or perhaps, as I alluded to in the last paragraph, that was the whole point?
Dec 24, Tuck rated it it was ok Shelves: View all 3 comments. Feb 08, Josh rated it really liked it. From the back cover: In landlocked Gainesville, Florida, in the hot, fraught summer of , a college dropout named David sleepwalks through his life — a dull haze of office work and Internet porn — until a run in with a lost friend jolts him from his torpor.
The Gospel of Anarchy - Justin Taylor - Paperback
He is drawn into the vibrant but grimy world of Fishgut, a rundown house where a loose collective of anarchists, burnouts, and libtertines practice utopia outside society and the law. Some even see their lifestyle as a spiritual calling. Th From the back cover: They watch for the return of a mysterious hobo who will — they hope — transform their punk oasis into the Bethlehem of a zealous, strange new creed.
The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor is one of my favorites of so far. It opens with David, a college dropout working at a call center in Gainesville who is addicted to Internet porn, jerking off and throwing his laptop into a bathtub. At home there was no conversation. No back and forth. No feigned ease, no modulated voice. The world opened up to me through a small bright window, my personal laptop computer, which was of course too heavy and ran too hot to actually keep on my lap, not that I wanted it there.
The laptop was barely a year old, still more or less state-of-the-art, and had pride of place on the desk in my living room, where I sat and surfed a wave that never crested, climbed a mountain that never peaked. Curved, oiled, chesty, slick, spread; sometimes I imagined the girls in a kind of march, and endless parade celebrating — what?
Themselves, I guess, or me. When he meets the punk anarchists, he falls in love with their carefree lifestyle. The residents of Fishgut are punks, hippies, anarchists, and anarchristians. After David quits his job, moves out of his apartment, and becomes a resident of Fishgut, the book begins to ramble in an amazing way.
What can the gilded crucifix, and the Man hung thereon, mean to the boy who buys sweatshop-produced Nikes at the mall by the highway? To the girl with the sorority pin, or anyone behind the wheel of an SUV? How can it be that the crucified Christ means so many different things to so many different people all at once? How can He contain it all? He lost his girlfriend, dropped out of college, and was working at a job he hated just to pay the bills.
When he finds Fishgut, his life suddenly has meaning. Truly transcendent moments seem to lose something in the re-telling—they tend to be fleeting, and rooted in some feeling of extreme presence: Art is not a religion, but the making of it and the reception of it can both qualify as devotional acts. His short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, was good, but it could have been better. You could tell that he had so much more to say, that he had all this potential, but it was wasted on short stories. Taylor finds his voice in The Gospel of Anarchy. Jan 31, Tim rated it did not like it Shelves: Taylor builds greatly but also laughs at the greatness he's built.
It's brave because it is honest. Taylor's noble goal is to remind those of us long past our own difficult youths of the grace and beauty to be found even in a 'bunch of drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida. Harper Perennial's only mistake here is not including a soundtrack with your purchase. Point of view shifts, while frequent, are not dizzying. The depiction of Gainesville is spot-on; Taylor expertly captures the city and its environs.
As for the sex scenes, they are realistic and arousing. Decency standards prohibit me from giving an example. But the orgy scene may inspire a 'protracted round of chafing succor,' as one of Fishgut's cohabitants would say. There's degradation and transcendence in equal measure: Brooklyn "I've always thought that there was some really interesting narrative terrain in that weird intersection between freeganism and fundamentalism, and I'm glad to see Taylor got there before some schmuck wrecked it. Bethany at Subtle Melodrama is the kind of reader every writer lives for- "The story lover in me really enjoyed this book--every character was deliciously described, and Taylor is very clever in his dipping in and out of their minds.
The narrative is seamless in its free indirect discourse, so the movement is never jarring. It all just seems so simple! On the other hand, the philosopher in me loved this book. The Gospel of Anarchy even flows like a philosophical argument; an introduction, the pros, the cons, and a weighing up of each, a dilemma, and a final conclusion. It's amazing when my MA in philosophy comes in handy! The Gospel of Anarchy is a fantastic little package--authentic characters, intriguing relationships, thought-provoking, reflective, and amusing.
It's a great read!