And in your man-made dark, the light inside you died

Last night I stopped at the library to pay a fine and pick up some holds, one of which was All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman. It was a lot shorter than I thought it'd be - 108 pages, I think? - so it only took me an hour or so to start and finish it. It's an interesting book, though the main story itself is equal parts confusing and bland. (Uh, I say 'main story' because there are sections where Kaufman gives little blurbs about the side characters he mentions and what their powers are and how they got them, just to illustrate how that all works in this world.) I'd say I was 90% bored and 10% blown away by bits here and there.

I mean, I get what Kaufman was going for, I really do, but I could barely follow the main character's train of thought most of the time. I don't think subtracting any of the details would make it better, but maybe if he'd structured the story differently, it would've been a lot clearer? Regardless, there's some pretty cool stuff going on, so it's not completely terrible.

Two pieces I especially liked:

‘I don’t remember a single monster before I met you,’ he’d told the Amphibian. ‘Now they seem to be all over the place.’
‘You mean there wasn’t anything you were afraid of?’ the Amphibian had asked him.
‘Lots.’
‘What did they look like?’
It was a funny question.
‘They didn’t look like anything. They were ideas,’ Tom told him. ‘Like not being able to pay rent, or being lonely.’
‘That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard,’ the Amphibian replied.

and

The final stage of finding your superhero name is accepting how little difference it really makes. Okay, there’s this thing you can do, a thing you can do like no other person on the planet. That makes you special, but being special really doesn’t mean anything. You still have to get dressed in the morning. Your shoelaces still break. Your lover will still leave you if you don’t treat her right.

I gave up on Forbidden completely - it's been renewed 4 times, and I thought I should just admit that I'm never getting back to it. I cannot for the life of me figure out how this author managed to make a topic like incest so BORING. Ugh, whatever, it's going back to the library ASAP. Trying to decide whether I want to start Room next, or if I should tackle The Deed of Paksenarrion. Lit fiction, or fantasy with a (supposedly) asexual main character? Decisions, decisions.

Oh, I also borrowed Tropic Thunder while I was there yesterday. Has anyone here seen it? Am I going to hate or love it?