I'm not sure how I feel about this book. In terms of reading enjoyment, I'd rate it ~3 stars, but because of how insightful and poetic I found many of the passages to be, I'm going to give it 4. This is definitely an experimental book that isn't for everyone. However, I really enjoy books that tackle existentialism and the meaning of life, so that worked out for me. There were some weird moments about the main character marrying her father (??) and multiple unnecessary crude references, which did take me out of the experience a bit. Overall though, I think this book is going to stick with me.

Some favorite moments:
* we lived suspended in a soup, a depression so narrow and so deep we didn’t even recognize we were feeling it. there was a horrible stasis in the air and our lives. we stood still in the stillness of time. it was like being in a plane that was slowly twirling to the ground. did you look at the other people, or did you not look? did you hold someone’s hand and tell them, I love you, even if you’d only just met? or did you squeeze your eyes shut and think of your loved ones, or think about your past, or pray? we were scuttling between these strategies like little bugs— sometimes praying, sometimes squeezing our eyes shut, sometimes thinking about the past, and sometimes saying I love you to a person we’d only just met— as civilization twirled all the way down. and apparently all the water had plastic in it, even the safe water that came in plastic bottles. (73%)
* in the middle years of life, you no longer have access to culture the same way you did before. you are mostly shut out… it’s not that the young people have shut you out, so don’t go envying the young people, who aren’t even having that good a time of it. just because they look great, doesn’t mean they feel great. God doesn’t want the criticisms of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life, so the heart of culture is made invisible to you. but when God blinds your eyes to culture, he opens your eyes to everything else. But what else is there? seasons, birds, the wind in the trees. so don’t go chasing your old forms of sight. instead, learn to see newly. right now it may feel like a loss of sight, or like you don’t understand the thing you do see, but there is still a lot to see here. God doesn’t care what you think about a band. God has put a hole in your head so things like that fall out of it. yet you keep trying to put things like that into it! there is not a hole in your head for no reason at all. there is a hole in your head for certain things, and not for certain other things. find the things that don’t leak out and fill your head with those ones. (76%)

beautiful :')