Book Review: Aug 9- Fog by Kathryn Scanlan

Title: Aug 9- Fog

Author: Kathryn Scanlan

Genre: Experimental Non-Fiction (?)

Number of Pages: 128

Rating: F

Recommended?: No

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What the fuck is the point of this stupid book? And more importantly, why the hell did I spend $10 to download it onto my Kindle? The premise of Aug 9- Fog sounds fascinating, but it’s really… not. It’s comprised of bits and pieces of some beat-to-crap journal the author came across, written by a ordinary woman who lived on a farm with her family and regularly jotted down notes about her day-to-day life. This book retains only a little of what was presumably in that journal and the author strings it into sort-of poetry.

 

I honestly loved this idea of giving you a glimpse into the inner life of a working class woman who is probably dead, but left some of her experiences behind. Unfortunately, this book is pretty much incomprehensible. I don’t know if this woman’s writing was like this originally but not only does she come of as insanely uneducated, she sounds like she has a developmental disability.

 

Most of it has no context and she keeps bringing up different people in her life, but I couldn’t figure out who they actually were. I didn’t learn anything about this woman or what she might have actually been like, there’s nothing deeper than milking cows and canning fruit described in a really scattershot confusing way. The only good thing about this book is that it’s mercifully short; I probably spent less than ten minutes on it and it felt like ten minutes too long.