Vintage Contemporaries Edition, June 2002. Cover Design by Chip Kidd
BOOKS READ 31: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
When I first heard of this book, I thought it would be the book for me. I thought it would be a high school romance and that it would be about geeks (the kind with glasses, the the kind that is really into something semi-obscure and that predictably, gets hotter when they grow up with their newfound confidence that stems from their realization that high school is only a phase and no one cares) - falling in love. The kind of thing I would love to read.
Ellen you’re a loser.
This book is about a different kind of geek. The kind that you find in a circus, that bites the heads off of live chickens. And the love that this book talks about is family love.
Eh.
On first instinct, I prefer my earlier and only notion of a geek.
But it is such a good story, and so well told. Although I had actually started reading it once before, and I just couldn’t get past the first five pages because the character was talking in this weird foreign old time-y language, but I think it was just more of my prejudice…against circuses and how they always seem to be speaking in some slightly archaic way, and yah, turns out the character was talking totally normally, I was just being close minded.
Or just wanting something different and then letting it go and getting something good anyways.
