{"id":1615,"date":"2011-06-09T22:59:51","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T22:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1615"},"modified":"2011-06-10T02:57:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-10T02:57:00","slug":"book-log-the-russian-debutantes-handbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1615","title":{"rendered":"Book Log &#8211; The Russian Debutante&#8217;s Handbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Russian Debutante&#8217;s Handbook<\/em> by Gary Shteyngart<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve now read 2\/3 of Mr. Shteyngart&#8217;s works, the other being\u00a0<em>Super Sad True Love Story<\/em>, and can say he is consistently good.<\/p>\n<p>His main characters are similar, hapless, awkward men thrown into unusual situations.<\/p>\n<p>In this one, our protagonist is a youngish, low level, immigrant clerk in NYC\u00a0 who gets embroiled in a series of worlds outside his own, from his low-rent slum apartment to high society New York City to a Russian Mafia outpost.\u00a0 The writing is amusing and smooth.<\/p>\n<p>My only complaint is that I don&#8217;t particularly relate to his main characters, so in the end I am left with a bit of &#8220;so what?&#8221;,\u00a0 but the ride is enjoyable.\u00a0 I believe I&#8217;ll tackle his third (<em>Absurdistan<\/em>) when next I venture into a bookstore with cash in hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Russian Debutante&#8217;s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart I&#8217;ve now read 2\/3 of Mr. Shteyngart&#8217;s works, the other being\u00a0Super Sad True Love Story, and can say he is consistently good. His main characters are similar, hapless, awkward men thrown into unusual &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1615\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[481],"tags":[466],"class_list":["post-1615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-log","tag-book-log-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1615"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1622,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions\/1622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}