Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

By Durga Chew-Bose

**A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year**

From one of Canada’s most distinctive and intelligent emerging voices, a heartfelt collection of essays in Durga Chew-Bose’s captivating and truly inimitable style.

 

In Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose flings us headlong into her most intimate philosophical, and occasionally brooding, thoughts. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture.

 

Reflective and highly astute, Chew-Bose invites readers to join in her search for a clearer understanding of who we are and the world we live in. This is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a young first-generation writer today, shutting out the din in order to find her own voice.

 

Exhibiting the confidence of Lena Dunham, the honesty of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the extraordinary vision of Zadie Smith, Too Much and Not the Mood is a stunning debut from an author who is sure to become one of this generation’s most esteemed voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781443449113

Durga Chew-Bose

Durga Chew-Bose’s writing frequently appears on websites such as Hazlitt, The Hairpin, BuzzFeed, Grantland and Papermag. She has contributed articles to The Guardian and The Globe and Mail, and to the magazines GQ, Interview, n+1 and Adult. Born in Montreal, Chew-Bose now lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Reviews for Too Much and Not the Mood

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How to write deliciously

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brisk read with keen observations and insights in this essay collection. Even though I read the intended audience as millenials, the well juxtaposed cultural references are familiar.

[kaylaraeintheway · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I LOVED this essay collection. Durga Chew-Bose writes like you think; starting with one idea then flowing seamlessly into something (or several things) that, at first, seem unrelated but then all come together at the end. I found myself underlining several sentences and passages as I read. Whether she's deconstructing an emoji, recalling a childhood fishing trip, or describing herself and a girl who doesn't exist, Chew-Bose, so eloquently and with beautiful clarity, puts into words what I (and I'm sure many other women my age) have been thinking and feeling.

[rmckeown_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Because I have to read so many subpar college essays, I enjoy an occasional collection to restore my faith in young writers. I leaned of an interesting collection by Durga Chew-Bose with an even more intriguing title, <9>Too Much and Not the Mood. I learned of this book on a frequent segment of the PBS News Hour. I almost ditched Durga while trying to plow through the first essay of 95 pages. As I read, I kept glancing at the page number while trying to decide thumb up or down. But as I read, I decided to keep going. When I began to read the second essay, I was immediately determined to go all the way. The first essay, “Heart Museum” turned out to be an interesting stream of consciousness memoir of her life so far. Durga writes, “I’m certain, if I wanted, I could walk home from West Forty-seventh, across the bridge and back to Brooklyn. That spiked measure of awe—of oof—feels like a general a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening. The sheer ensconcelled panic of feeling moved. Infirmed by what switches me on but also awake and unexpectedly cured. Similar to how sniffing a lemon when I am carsick heals” (11-12). This essay requires a bit of extra attention, but well worth the thoughts she loaded into my consciousness. Further into “Heart Museum,” she writes, “My quick-summoned first life—how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty—is, I’m afraid, just like writing. That is to say, what can transpire if writing becomes a reason for living outside the real without prying it open. How, like first love writing can be foiling, agitated, totally addictive. Sweet, insistent, jeweled. Consuming though rarely nourishing. A new tactility” (19-20). This passage led me to continue. Was I becoming accustomed to her style? Several of the essays are a bit more conventional and down-right interesting. In “Since Living Alone, Durga writes, “I learned last summer that if you place a banana and an unripe avocado inside a paper bag, the avocado will—as if spooned to sleep by the crescent-laid banana—ripen overnight. By morning, that sickly shade of green had turned near-neon and velvety, and I, having done nothing but paired the two fruits, experienced a false sense of accomplishment similar to returning a library book or listening to voice mail” (167). As an avid eater of bananas—with almost no ability to tell a ripe avocado from all the others—I look forward to my next shopping trip. And finally, “Summer Pictures” touched a corner of my memory of summer days. She writes, “Because going to the movies still feels like playing hooky, or what I imagine playing hooky felt like: the unburdened act of avoiding my many orbits of responsibility. Of pretending that adulthood is no match for summer’s precedent, set years ago when we were kids and teenagers governed only by the autonomy of no-school, the distance our bikes could take us, an unlit park or basketball court at night, the weekend my crush returned from camp. Going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. Or, the most secretive way to experience the public” (191).My “Rule of 50” is not infallible, and in the case of Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose, I am glad I stuck to it. It is a wonderful collection to stimulate the mind, the memory, and all the while tickling the fancy. 5 stars--Jim, 7/11/17