Another monthly challenge to myself: read a book, and report on it here (to keep me honest.) These will not be terribly in depth or insightful reviews. Here’s February’s.

We Need to Talk About Kevin was rough to read on many levels. On the technical side, it was so damn long. For those of you who have ever attended a film with me, you are unfortunately aware of the fact that I cannot take long movies. Cannot take them. Same applies to books. I will make the occasional exception, but not in this case. Another technical issue is the format of the book; it’s written as a series of letters from a woman to her husband, which doesn’t work for me. I understand the intent, but who would write letters in incredibly verbose, chapter-size chunks? And the dialog is so so clunky. I have no idea if it’s a stylistic choice or not, but there’s a false, flat, David Lynchian quality to everything everyone says.

Apart from these issues, this is an insane, horrifying book of vast scope. It centers around this woman’s son, who commits a Columbine-style school massacre. I found the son and woman absolutely hateful in their own ways — which is the point, I guess, but page after page of horrible and unsympathetic descriptions and behavior just wore me down. There’s also underlying mysteries and detailed descriptions of atrocities that recall the murder/horror books of my youth, like The Other.

Both main characters do have an absurd and sardonic sense of humor that occasionally I can get behind (I’ll bet the author could be fun at a dinner party), but I felt nothing but relief when I finally finished this beast tome — which I only could force myself to do last night, because I left my laptop at work.

Okay, all that said, this is a major opus. The author threw everything she had into this book, and I acknowledge that. And the subject matter is very ballsy; she really goes in-depth into the hows and whys our American society (and genes) can create monsters. I would’ve considered a more glowing review if this book were half as long, which may be my own failing. But this story was just much too much for me.