{"id":200236,"date":"2021-06-02T17:37:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T22:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/02\/best-first-paragraph-of-a-book-review-ever\/"},"modified":"2021-06-02T17:37:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-02T22:37:00","slug":"best-first-paragraph-of-a-book-review-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/02\/best-first-paragraph-of-a-book-review-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Best First Paragraph of a Book Review Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When you read this, you <b>know<\/b> that you are in for one hell of a ride:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">I was hired as an assassin. You don\u2019t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you\u2019re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. \u2018Absolutely not,\u2019 I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man\u2019s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are. <\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2014Patricia Lockwood in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v41\/n19\/patricia-lockwood\/malfunctioning-sex-robot\"><i>London Review of Books<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Just in case you are wondering, while many admire the author&#8217;s prose, it also considered to be extremely misogynistic by many.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/2021\/06\/200pm-water-cooler-6-2-2021.html?unapproved=3555640&amp;moderation-hash=9ce71fe579514045d3e43066f8b0ebb0#comment-3555640\">Naked Capitalism<\/a> for finding this 2019 gem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you read this, you know that you are in for one hell of a ride: I was hired as an assassin. You don\u2019t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you\u2019re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. \u2018Absolutely not,\u2019 I said when first &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1002,1175,1189,1050],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-writing","category-literature","category-reviews","category-snark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}