By far the worst book we've read at Reading Through It, the current-events book club that the Seattle Review of Books hosts at Third Place Books Seward Park, is the first book we covered: JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. The book was passed from liberal hand to hand in the days after Trump's election as some sort of a Rosetta Stone for the red states.

But the truth is that Hillbilly Elegy is just another con job — a fantasia used to promote the same sharklike conservative agenda of 'personal responsibility' that's been the Republican Party's stock in trade since at least the Reagan administration.

So of course Hollywood fell for it. Netflix is paying forty five million dollars (!) for a Ron Howard-helmed (!!) film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (!!!). We're doomed to hear about this shitty book in some form or another for the rest of our lives, people.