Book Notes - Kyle Minor "Praying Drunk"
by David Gutowski
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Compared to some of Gutowski's previous "Book Notes" posts, his paragraph-long review of Kyle Minor's Praying Drunk in this week's post is short and vague, which conveys either an unfortunate disinterest in the collection of stories or an absence of knowledge of the material (meaning that he hasn't personally read it). Truthfully, it is easy to skip over Gutowski's words in most of his posts because they usually don't add anything interesting to the content that follows. Skipping straight into the portion where Minor describes his own work and selects a few songs to pair with it, a reader feels much more engaged simply because Minor doesn't express his thoughts clearly, forcing you to pick apart his writing. A complete one-eighty from Mary Miller's summarization of Last Days of California, Minor deliberately chooses not to reveal the plot of Praying Drunk. Personally, however, I hated this decision. It seems as though he's talking more about how writing the book made him feel than how the story itself influences him, which doesn't fit with the theme of the "Book Notes" segment. This makes it difficult for me to understand his music choices. Frankly, I am not interested in this book at all. I hope that future posts on Gutowski's blog are clearer, more developed than this one, or else I'll have to change my columnist.
Gutowski, David. "Book Notes - Kyle Minor "Praying Drunk"." largehearted boy. N.p., 4 February 2014. Web. 4 February 2014.
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