This book wasn't what I thought it would be. I expected more discussion of film, and less analysis of parenting, teenage boy-dom, and skanky girls. Plus, I get irritated reading books where men are devastated by women, because in my world, it's the men who are absolutely manipulative and cowardly. So 230 pages of women-bashing got a little old.

The link between providing his son with an alternate education via film was flimsy. Skip this one. ( )

Adult nonfiction. Another unique selection from the one-per-month publisher Twelve. ( )

Absolutely horrible. The author is ridiculously self-indulgent and boring, his parenting skills: questionable. I hated pretty much every minute of it. ( )

The book deserves a lot of the criticism I'm seeing on Goodreads. People who like it seem less compelled to say why than those who don't.

I'll take a minute to tell you why I like it. It's an examination of a desperate father having a second (or in this author's case, maybe a 4th or 5th) mid-life crisis. He's overly involved in his son's post-adolescent coming of age, and clinging to it in an unhealthy way - in fact, he's likely making it much harder on his son... all while seemingly, genuinely, seeking to be a good dad. He comes across as a sort of youth and masculinity vampire. It's desperate and a thing to behold. This is a man with some serious difficulty with women and feeling comfortable in his own skin... but you know what? That's a LOT of men - and he's at least willing to examine it and confess to the trouble (to some degree - a lot of his failings are only under examination when you read between the lines). It's a struggle that kills guys all the time - we should look at it more closely, or we'll continue seeing guys kill themselves mid-life, like salmon who have finished spawning.

While David congratulates himself for leaving certain interaction to Jesse and his peers... he does so while fostering the most iron clad dependence I've ever seen described between a parent and child. Dependence that the son only succeeds in escaping from when he abandons the entire experiment the book is describing (without abandoning his gains - namely, specialist knowledge to be an informed critic, a job his father is grooming him for in a transparent attempt to hijack his son's interests and imprint himself on the boy as hard as possible in the last remaining years of the son's reliance on his parents).

But I like the book.

You don't have to like characters to like a book. You can learn a lot from someone who's living very differently than yourself, and who has glaring flaws (this author has a troubling view of women, beyond understandably taking his son's side when things go wrong with his relationships).

When you confess to the fact that your boy turns to you, fearful that his feelings emasculate him - and you dispel that fear while reinforcing it with everything else you do... it paints a picture of the condition of masculinity in our culture, and the microcosm of the family. A framework that is fraught with hypocrisy and ugliness. A propping up of male ego at the expense of women.

Career, education, and aspiration are all described pejoratively against women, while these attributes are being sought for his son. Everything he wants for his son, he rejects in his son's female peers. It's stark. That doesn't make the examination invalid.

I hope David and Jesse can escape the prisons they've inherited. They're said to almost kill the kid repeatedly through the book... and yet are never recognized (by the characters) as hazardous constructions of their own making. An honest look at a tragic state of being.

edit to add:
I'm downgrading the book to 3 stars (from 4). Much of the work's value as layered revelation about the faults of it's author are too subtle to accurately characterize him - and I don't want to imply that the book's virtue is in the face-value content of the book itself.

( )

As the mother of a 20 something that is lurching her way to growing up, I can sympathize with the author. Although he didn't realize it at the time, it was a wonderful gift to be mininally employed and able to "home school" his son through his HS years via 3 films/week. I have to admit, just like I haven't read most of the 1001 book list, I haven't seen most of the films (which he lists in the back). But the conversations about a few of them caught my interest, so maybe I should dip into the Amazon Prime movies a bit more often. Now this one is off in the "F" title bookring. ( )