Peptastic is standing still

I'm positive that I've missed something with The Changeling. It read like a different novel each day I picked it up to continue reading it.

I've read different reviews that suggested the island was a cult, which never crossed my mind. It was this possibility that made the whole situation that much sadder.

I took Pearl as a free spirit who was a victim of her parent’s suicides when she was younger. She muses to herself she doesn't do much other than having sex with her husband of five days, but then that was only five days. Who knows what would have happened to her had she stayed with the gym teacher.

It is to Pearl's great misfortune she is carried off by Walker. First he has sex with her at a motel, which she is resigned to as her fate. I suppose this was the part feminists despised the book for back in the '70s. Pearl isn't a character to act heroically for others benefit.

To the End of the Land is about an Israeli mother Ora, whose son has volunteered to extend his duty in the IDF. They had planned on hiking around the Gailee together but he bails on her. She decides to go with the boy's father, in a bargain with herself, that if she shares her son's memory with him he'll be kept alive.

She believes if she isn't there to here he's been killed, he won't be.

This book is like getting a punch in the gut. I have a feeling the answer to relationships, family or romantic, lies somewhere deep within the pages of this book. The power of the mind isn't in magical thinking to prevent death [but who hasn't made a bargain in their mind for something they really don't want to happen] but in destroying relationships or deceiving ourselves.

This collection was just the thing to take my mind off the horrid stress in my life. My sister says it works that if you start rereading them after you are finished it is like reading new stories. I needed to take my mind off the ugliness of life therefore, the possibilities of living and breathing stories was welcoming.
Some of the stories I have a firmer ground of certainty that I knew what happened while other stories in this collection are a fog over my mind. I realize some of the stories I read very liberally with my own personal sympathies and at other times quite possibly too literally.

This book was described as humourous, which it had funny moments, but I found the book to be deeply depressing.
I wasn't turned off so much by the toilet humour [but why have a note for 'cutting the cheese'?] but the socio-aspects of the "loser" protagonist, homeless characters, knocking physical appearances of other characters, etc. was very shallow without exploring what made these people "losers". The drug use and depression issue being waived away by sterotypes when this archetype <i>is</i> your narrator is a cop-out.
If he truly thought of himself as a loser we'd get it by his actions other than "Hey so I'm a 35 year old who lives in his mom basement" as way of explanation.
This book is not Catcher in the Rye or The Bell-Jar and really I was asking too much of it.
The attitude irked me and I wasn't feeling the "Soo hilarious" reviews.
You can laugh with a character or laugh at a character and I wasn't in the mood to laugh at cliches of homeless people and aging bar sluts.
The TV show Arrested Development managed both tasks but this book didn't do it for me.

I can't stand these cliches of basing people's attributes on their jobs. My mistake for reading the kindle store description that the book was about a dog's roadtrip to Florida.
This story had some funny discussions between the characters but viewing women as strictly vaginas was too much of a turn-off for me. I'm not the target audience for this book.