Self Care by Leigh Stein

 

DNF @ 26%

One of my goals for 2022 is to clean out my Kindle. I have over a thousand books on there right now, which is the product of over half a decade of ebook hoarding, and I'm desperately trying to read as much as I can and delete everything that I don't like/don't want to reread. I don't remember how SELF CARE came across my radar. I probably saw an article about it somewhere because that's typically how I end up finding "hip" books like these. As someone who works in tech, I'm always a little amused by books that parody start-up culture because even though I think it's fun, there are definite flaws in the structure.

SELF CARE is a tough book to rate because I did find parts of it really funny and spot on... there just isn't a point? There's two ways of doing satire. There's satire with a point (some sort of end goal: a message, a funny story, an unexpected twist) and then there's the Antiques Roadshow sort of satire, where you just point at it, maybe laugh, and then you call it out and just move on to repeat steps 1-3.

This book is the Antiques Roadshow version of satire. It doesn't really do anything except do the literary equivalent of pointing its finger and going "ha ha!" After getting through a quarter of this book where all of the punchlines seemed to boil down to "MILLENNIALS, THEY'RE SO RIDICULOUS, AMMIRITE?" I started to get bored. I kind of feel like Self Care is for people who publicly brag about leaving Facebook and are also subscribed to The New Yorker. You know who you are.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars