Nicotine audiobook

"Maybe women go for your dick because your mouth is full of tobacco".....I kinda wonder about a female author who grew up in rural Virginia-- now lives near Berlin, Germany....and writes sentences like the above excerpt.This is my first experience reading Nell Zink. The New York Times review was given to me by a friend when I was gifted this hardcopy book. Much of their review I completely agree with. But my first thoughts about this book - was "why in the hell would I read this"? I don't smoke - ( I think the book cover is kinda cool) - but really??? "Nicotine"???Here's - ( a part) of what the New York Times wrote: I agree and couldn't say it better if I tried:"Nell Zink is a deadpan comedian, her sentences funny yet plump with existential dread. "Her new one is called "Nicotine", and like her previous books, it's a mess: anarchic in its plot machinations, scrambled in its themes, mostly shallow in its emotions. You want her novels to be so much finer than they are. They're like meals someone fussed over but forgot to put in the oven. I haven't read previous books - but agree that this book is a mess ---BUT---I ALSO agree with this next part of the New York Times:"The strange thing is that you're never tempted to put Ms. Zink's novels aside. They contain so much backspin and topspin that you're alert by the leaping motion". So... plot doesn't seem to be especially important in this novel. It's shallow - it's funny - it's sexy -and Nell Zink is talented in an odd way. So -- here is a little more about this 'story'. Yes... haha... there 'is' a story. Penny Baker is the most conventional member of her weird family. Their lifestyle was chewing coca. That's all they did.... munched it like goats... but that was just the men. Women cooked and cleaned between totemic clans. That's when Penny's mother blew out of there. When her mother, Amalia, met her dad, ( a Jewish shamanistic),he was working on building up his clinic for indigenous herbal therapies in Manaus, in Brazil on the Amazon. With her dad's jungle vine, people would trip their brains out - heals nothing -but would puke like there was no tomorrow. Basically he was jump starting people's immune system- called ayahuasca. He would purge people -much like chemo. Her dad's specialty was cancer patients. Penny's parents met in Cartagena. Her mother made it from the Kogi countryfrom the coast, and her dad found her mother taking care of pigs at the dump.Amalia was only 13 years old at the time. ( about the same age as Penny's brother Patrick). The father -much older - took Penny's mother in because she was homeless. Amalia then fell in love with her dad, and her dad made Amalia wait five years. ( which pissed her off)..... perhaps a little like Soon-Yi Previn. By the time Penny is born, ---(skipping ahead about 20 years), the family is living - hippie style - in a commune on the Hudson River. The year is present day 2016. When Penny's father, Norm, dies at age 85, (he died a slow death and it was Penny that was at his side daily), she is unemployed...and unmoored by his death...she decides to move into his childhood home in New Jersey and fix it up. To her surprise a group of friendly anarchist squatters are living in the home which they have named "Nicotine". ( united in defense of smokers rights). "People walk around fucked/up on illegal drugs, on prescription drugs, on anything they want--nobody cares. But smoke a cigarette, and you're on everybody's shit list". "You're a baby killer. Same baby who second on a nipple full of phthalates, eatingantibiotic chicken, breathing PCB's, playing in dirt made of tetraethyl lead and drinking straight vodka while it rides a fucking skateboard--when that baby dies at age 86 instead of 90, it's going to be because you lit a cigarette in a public park". OUCH! Point is the smokers are sick and tired of being ostracized for smoking. There 'are' characters who believe in second hand smoke as a hazard to ones health - but they are closet smokers. Penny doesn't have the heart to kick the smoking residence out of her dads house. She moves into a nearby residence.... and then becomes involved with the smoking community at the Nicotine house. The rest of her family - her mother and half brother want to evict the squatters. The way this story comes to and end-- a surprise --is very satisfying.The characters and dialogue are what kept me reading this book. Penny falls for Rob- the asexual man who lives in the house.....Matt her older half brother designs garbage trucks....Smoking jokes, sex, crass, and quirky....This is a social satire --which was actually more 'wacky-enjoyable' than I thought it was going to be!

This is a fun, fast read. More suited for 20-somethings than settled-in folks, but it's cute (if your definition of cute can include lots of graphic scenes and language. Mine can.) I didn't think the ending was as satisfying as the BOTM judge seemed to think, but it wasn't a bad ending.

When a book opens with mysticism in the jungle, followed by a slow institutionalized death, and then things get weird, well, that gets my attention. I’ve read a lot about Nell Zink, including her correspondence with a certain bestselling literary author, but NICOTINE is the first of her three books I’ve read. Her voice snuck up on me. Funny and often flat, descriptive but deceptive, so that the world she built in my head is real and unreal simultaneously. Her story veers towards satirically easy targets, such as the activist squatters who take up the bulk of the novel, yet is always surprising. I can’t say what the book is about, though I guess if I push myself I could give you a couple themes to play with, because the book feels like a 300-page injection into the vein of these characters lives and that’s a messy mix of everything. To boil it down to a few serviceable topics would be a disservice to its pleasure. Fiction isn’t life, of course, but it can be as unruly and is better for it.

I would have given this five stars if the ending hadn't been so abrupt. As someone who's been steepedIn the far left this election cycle, this rang so funny and true. She manages to be both respectful and make fun of activism/anarchists in today's world.

Nell Zink has a dedicated fan base because she has a wry sense of humor and a very sexy way of writing about human relationships. Still, I was going to give Nicotine a middling review 100 pages in for a very direct reason. I'm starting to get easily bored with descriptions of dissolute life in adult group homes where substance abuse and musical beds are involved. This holds true for Gaddis and Manhattan cocktail parties in the 1940s, Kerouac's beats in the 1950s, Tom Wolfe's acidheads in the 1960s, the brat-pack literary alcohol binges in the 1980s, and yes, Zink's anarchist squatters of the 21st century. It's true she has a wicked ability to parody anarchist and general-lefty self-justification, in a way that recalls David Rovics' song, "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You." But a book cheering on a squatter house defending tobacco smokers' rights? Hmmmm.By the book's halfway point, I found that her focus on a couple key relationships, particularly that between Penny's evil half-brother Matt and the mercurial Jazz, had given the book a fascinating story line that moved beyond the squatter urban politics. Zink might like the primary suspense of the book to involve Penny's slow awareness of what happened to her odd family in the years following her birth. That was OK, but the contemporary interactions of Penny and Rob, and Matt and Jazz, were far more interesting. Funniest of all was the pompous radical posturing of Sunshine and others in the book. If you're a conservative, you probably think that all anarchist squatters resemble these "special snowflakes." If you're a radical yourself, this may be tough going, but it may be liberating for you to admit that many of your comrades are as silly as the people Zink describes.The climax and the denouement of the book is satisfying, if maybe a little too pat. The laughs certainly continue to the last page. This is a joyful, light-touch book about urban radicalism, one that is perfect for a summer beach read. For a serious look at squatting and homelessness in a sci-fi backdrop, a reader would be better off with something like Cory Doctorow's Walkaway. But if you don't mind a humorous little tome about the silly self-posturing of urban radical movements, Nicotine is certainly a lot of fun.

Weird AF but I liked it

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway and was thrilled as Nell Zink has been on my radar for a while as an author I would like to read. I loved the cover art but from reading the blurb I wasn't dying to read it.The first few parts of the book (there aren't chapters but it's surprising how quickly you get used to this) were a little strange and I wasn't sure I was going to be gripped by it at all; it certainly wasn't as I expected. The time then leaps forward to when Penny's father is dying and again, I didn't find this part gripping but I was intrigued enough to read on.Once Penny goes to investigate a property owned by her father as a potential house for her to live in, I was hooked. The characters portrayed in the activist group are mesmerising and I felt like I wanted to get to know all of them, flaws and all. This is when Penny comes into her own as well and expands into a character with a lot of depth and layers which inspires empathy. Nicotine is thrilling and a strong contender for my title of book of the year. Read it, tell all your friends about it and fall in love with all the messed up people who inhabit this novel of loss, friendship and culture.

Nell Zink makes me laugh. Especially when pointing out the absurdity of the anarchy lifestyle. Other reviewers have pointed out the difference between the novel's first 50 pages, which contain a heartbreaking portrayal of a daughter dealing with her father's slow agonizing death, with the rest, which can best be described as unemployed idealistic too old to be doing this shit people having lots of weird sex while failing to make any significant changes to an unchangeable system despite their best efforts.I agree that I probably would have liked the rest of the book to have been like the first 50 pages. But... the rest is a pretty funny ride. Zink's humor is so dry, and so delicious.

I'm not entirely sure what I thought of this book! It's certainly not my usual literary fare, being both satirical and relentlessly 21st century in its content and attitudes. However, having said that, I must admit, I could not stop reading it, as the storyline kept my attention throughout- even though, at the end of the day, I didn't care enormously about the characters, most of whom seemed very shallow- apart from Matt Baker, the "villain" of the piece, who had an intriguing complexity- but the satirical tone and humorous set pieces kept me smiling and, at the end, I was rather glad I'd read it, though I doubt it'll be the most memorable of reads- but who knows?

Nell Zink’s debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was short, succinct, and aware of contemporary gender politics. In other words, the opposite of a Jonathan Franzen novel. Franzen helped thrust The Wallcreeper into the world and encouraged Zink to publish during a correspondence about songbirds. Zink’s third novel, Nicotine, feels much more Franzian—meandering, expansive, and centered around the dramas of a wealthy family while overlooking opportunities for critical introspection....More at The Rumpus http://therumpus.net/2016/10/nicotine...

I like Nell Zink! A lot!

A ton of fun. A current-day setting that actually incorporates things like SnapChat, WhatsApp, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter... and so many links to Franzen's Purity... where to begin?

Nicotine by Nell Zink was definitely a surprise for me. I bought it right when it came out, only because it was a Book of the Month option, and none of them sounded great to me, so I spontaneously decided to give this one a shot. I got about 6 pages into it and thought, "no way can I read this."Fast forward to now, it's the book that has sat unread on my shelf for the longest, and I decided now was the moment to give it a try. There are a lot of things in this novel that can turn a reader off. There are a couple truly repulsive parts, the characters are all incredibly flawed, most are difficult to love and all the others are just despicable. There are complex and off putting relationships, questionable life choices, and nontraditional representations of sexuality. I can very easily see why this book wouldn't be for everyone. Zink's writing is masterful though. Within the first 20 pages she depicts a man's gradual death precisely, without being clinical. She doesn't shy away from the gruesome parts, but instead of forcing me to quickly move past it, I found that it was an expert tool for helping me to understand and feel for his daughter. I rarely needed hints to know who was speaking, because each character was so well thought out and their personalities (or lack of personalities in some cases) dominated the page. I didn't like a lot of them, but they were written perfectly. Penny's (the main character) family's dynamic was very complex, and many would be very quick to judge, but Zink leaves no room for judgment in her novel. She swiftly moves us past taboo admissions, and focuses on the character's reactions to such occurrences. These are just a few examples, but I have rarely seen such expertise from an author. Ultimately my complaints for this novel are few, but they did keep me from dishing out that last star. Overall the narrative just wasn't for me. It wasn't bad, at all, it just wasn't something that hooked me. It is very character driven, but because I wasn't enamored by any of the characters, I didn't know if I should root for them or not. Second, there were no chapters. Which is a petty complaint, I know, but I like structure in my novels.