{"id":1717,"date":"2011-11-29T15:17:26","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T15:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1717"},"modified":"2011-11-29T15:18:17","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T15:18:17","slug":"book-log-absurdistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1717","title":{"rendered":"Book Log &#8211; Absurdistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Absurdistan<\/em> by Gary Shteyngart<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, Shteyngart is a good writer.<\/p>\n<p>He succeeds in making a fat, entitled, child of a Russian gangster sort-of sympathetic.\u00a0 The book is vaguely reminiscent of <em>A Confederacy of Dunces<\/em> in that respect.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also some sort of satire going on here in the fictional country of Absurdistan, with the very real characters of Halliburton and oil and &#8220;rebuilding&#8221; and government contracts and oh who knows what else.<\/p>\n<p>This story is both amusing and disturbing and often gross (seriously&#8230; I don&#8217;t need to ever read again such detailed and vivid descriptions of the body of an enormously fat man ever again).<\/p>\n<p>But really&#8230; the man is a good writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart To be sure, Shteyngart is a good writer. He succeeds in making a fat, entitled, child of a Russian gangster sort-of sympathetic.\u00a0 The book is vaguely reminiscent of A Confederacy of Dunces in that respect. There&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=1717\">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-1717","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\/1717","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=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1720,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions\/1720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}