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Robin Surtees robinb004 — Sometimes you come across a book online (in this case while looking up books similar to In the Land of Invisible Women, although I was hoping for better writing) and it looks really interesting. A great cover -- in this case the blue one -- and a story about a culture you're curious about. Sometimes it is easy to find a copy of that book, so your curiosity is quickly sated. Sometimes you can't find a copy anywhere -- neither of the library systems in your town have it; it's not available on the bookswap site you use; the bookstore doesn't have it (and you view Amazon as cheating). So you put it on your "to-read" list anyway and hope that sooner or later it'll become available on the bookswap site. And then -- and then. You're going through your to-read list in preparation for a library run, checking to see which books both appeal at the moment and are available at the library, and this book is one of them. Shock. Happiness. It has such a great cover, after all, and even though you know better than to judge a book by its cover, you are lulled into a false sense of security because you're happy that you'll actually be able to move this one from the "to-read" list to the "read" list. So you check the book out. And then you start reading it. Oh dear. This is not what you expected. This is, first of all, very clearly self-published. (You could have figured this out before you got it from the library, of course, but shhhhh, you haven't learned this lesson yet and probably won't anytime soon.) It is immediately clear that the author desperately needed an editor, and a proofreader, and somebody who could remind him to stop switching tenses mid-paragraph, dammit, you're going to break some poor reader's brain. The book is written in a chatty, conversational style, which sometimes is fine and sometimes makes you want to bash your head against the wall, because in addition to needing an editor and a proofreader and so on, the author would have benefited from a fact checker. There is no continuity to the stories, no recurring characters, and numerous threads left hanging. Every other statement is presented as a truth universal to Saudi Arabia, with little or no nuance. On the more minor end of things, the author talks about earning and saving a ton of money in Saudi Arabia, then going back to the States, getting accepted into a low-tier law school (he doesn't say "low-tier", of course, but you have Google on your side), and then not having the $11,000 to pay for a year of schooling (which confuses you on two levels -- first because one would think that if he'd saved up a ton of money he could at least make it through a year of school on his savings, second because the school's website and Wikipedia put annual tuition at $9,000 and $7,500, respectively, and you wouldn't expect it to have decreased since the author's admission). It doesn't matter, anyway; he goes back to Saudi Arabia to save up the money for law school and then never mentions law school again. When the author is not talking about how much money he's saving, his stories can be divided into two categories: crazy shit that Saudis do because they are so unqualified for any job ever, and crazy shit that Saudis have because they spend money like it is going out of style. It is memoir, of course, so you expected some degree of bias, but you had naively assumed that the author would at least try to be evenhanded rather than throwing out every shocking or funny story he can think of (except for those times when he tells half a story, says that he'll tell the rest later, and then never gets around to it). He's not stupid. He recognises inequalities and inconsistencies in Saudi Arabia, but also in other countries. He's just not interested in exploring them in any depth beyond shock value, nor in covering any part of the culture As an American, he has certain advantages not available to many other foreign workers or many classes in Saudi Arabia -- he recognises this, but doesn't question it -- just uses those advantages to the best of his ability. The role of women is noted, but again, only as shock value -- you don't actually count, but if you did you'd probably find that he spends more time talking about cars (ones he's had, ones the Saudis gave away because they weren't modern enough, ones that got scraped) than about women. There's little insight, just extremes. The book definitely does not pass the Bechdel test. But you finish the book. Not that you expect it to get better. Possibly you are a masochist, or possibly you just still have an irrational hope that somewhere in here there is one gem -- just one -- that would make the book worth it. At least now the book can come off your "to-read" list.