Anna

Audiobooks are not my thing but this one narrated by Laurence Fishbourne is a really amazing listen. Just perfect delivery, especially of the more problematic parts that haven't aged too well.

Got this book because of all the hype and have to admit that all the hype was 100% justified. It's been a long time since I'd neglected everything to this extent, ignored so many text messages and cancelled so many plans because I was so engrossed in a book and just wanted to find out what happened next.

I'd deliberately steered away from reading any news about this book so I can only imagine the bidding war for the film rights that surely must've happened by now. But it feels destined to be a Jordan Peele movie - the dread and slow-burning tension, the interracial suspicion and awkwardness, but most of all the uncanny microinteractions all made me think of the man.

Alam's writing is admirably confident. He goes for self-assured and unexpected turns of phrase of varying accuracy, and I admired his bravery at times. His narration is super smooth and moves from one pov to another and back to the (very present) narrator in a really pleasant way.

It's all really silly.

Not sure if I liked SST for the writing or if I was just so titillated by Broder's exhibitionism, but I devoured it in one sitting while thinking wow her poor husband and wow her poor parents what if they read this and WOW OK, cycling between feeling ashamed for her and really envious of her obvious balls. In the end though SST achieves its ostensible objective of making you feel less weird and alone.

Really good Halloween read.

This was a blind library loan as part of my “Marseille-based novels to read in Marseille” book stack, but it turned out unexpectedly great. The plot is at times very melodramatic but the author handles it with great skill.

I've always been very curious about the lives of sailors, having grown up in a coastal town and among friends whose dads spent 6 months of each year on the sea. This was a great peak into their minds and lives, and it matched my own observations about the more problematic parts of that lifestyle.

The author is obviously in love with his city but he also really gets the reasons why Marseille is so easy to fall in love with for a visitor and why certain types of people feel so immediately at home there.

Spoilery trigger warning: the ending made me extremely sad.

I was super on board with the story but the last part really threw me off, way too cheesy for my sensitivity. Cool concept though.

I really really loved the main story (love/ghost story), as well as the fact that the fictional narrative is set in the author's real bookstore (she even makes an entertaining and revealing cameo) and the characters are all connected to it.

The only thing that felt a bit odd for me was the inclusion of covid and the George Floyd protests - I'm not really sure why, maybe it's too soon? It already felt quite dated because of this (I know, it's crazy considering that the pandemic is not over at all yet, but the emotions of the early covid era make me feel nostalgic now which was definitely not author's intention).

Interesting perspective on the collective guilt of German draftees and grunts. Not sure how much of it is based on true events but it felt true to me as it matches a lot of the war stories I'd heard from the Polish veterans growing up.
Props to whoever left a copy at a Vancouver Airbnb where I picked it up.

I imagine this translation took a lot of work and it's no doubt an important historical document, but it's not the most ravishing read. I'd have loved more detail and more interiority, but I also don't want to judge Osman by 21st century storytelling standards.
Would make amazing base material for a tv show adaptation though, I hope someone out there is already working on it.

5/2017
On second read this book is still my perfect 10.

***
I guess Patrick White is relatively obscure (?) despite his Nobel win — a baffling fact, unless it's just me who'd hardly heard of him despite being what you'd call a ‘serious' (though non-academic/civilian) reader.

This is easily one of my favourite books of all time so far. Every sentence of ‘Voss' is hyper-polished, often delightfully surprising and hilarious in an OH, BURN! way — he shows his characters no mercy, always finding something rotten in even the most outwardly noble figures. It would have been quite nasty if it wasn't so on point (the book is about Victorians after all), and anyway, who doesn't love a magnificent, vivisecting jerk of a narrator? (If you don't secretly love arrogance, don't read White, I guess)

‘Voss' is refreshingly homoerotic — it's all about dudes trying to be close with other dudes, admiring each other's teeth and manes, touching each other's knees, huddling close by campfire. At the same time, what we'd today call ‘fragile masculinity' is a major source of humour in ‘Voss' — not surprisingly, considering White's struggle with his contemporaries' attitudes towards his homosexuality (according to the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition, White felt hounded into an outsider status because of it, and as tragic as that is, it definitely gave a wonderful, bitter dimension to his observations on society).

I'm not sure how ‘out' he was in his lifetime, but it's interesting that despite the book's obvious homoeroticism he decided to make the protagonist's love interest a woman — but in that choice, he created a deeply convincing, complicated female character (and if, as I suspect, she was initially written as a man, ‘Voss' proves definitely just how effective the method of giving male characters female names can be for a male writer who struggles to identify with the female perspective — all other female characters in the book are quite weak and stereotypically ‘female').

So much more melodramatic than what I usually read. Great pace though and really nicely written.

At some point close to the end of the book, the hapless protagonist of Satin Island finds himself the centre of attention at an industry conference where he's not a speaker. The audience and the speakers alike fist-bump him and pat him on the back and congratulate him on a job well done, despite the preceding 170-odd pages of him doing and saying nothing of any substance - just musing about his childhood, having illusions of greatness, obsessing over random news stories and imagining himself smarter than everybody else. Such is the life of a straight white dude with a corporate job. That is all.


An extra star for the quality of the prose, and another for how disturbingly easy it was for me to relate to the protagonist (I don't expect anyone else to share this affinity).

Cheesy like an action movie with Bruce Willis. Loved it!!

Just wonderful. Safina really delves deep into the ‘who' of animals; there are so many animal anecdotes here that are just jaw-dropping (my favourite one involved a tiger stalking his human enemy for months; I'm also very unlikely to ever kill another wasp because SOME OF THEM CAN RECOGNISE YOUR FACE : ). Although he might be taking things a little bit too far sometimes (for example when arguing that wolves' fear of humans could be the outcome of a cost-benefit calculation and not say, an evolutionary repulsion to our smell) his main point is fair and important: that it's just as scientifically wrong to anthropomorphise animals as it is to do the opposite (objectify?).Safina definitely has a huge beef with animal scientists who seek the ‘theory of mind' in animals, then proceed to hail it as proof of their lack of sentience when the animals invariably fail their terribly designed experiments. He spends several incisive (and highly amusing) chapters on discrediting their efforts. It makes for an entertaining read but I felt like he never really gets to the definition of the ToM that actually matters – of it being the opposite of solipsism, so: not just of recognising that others have minds, but acknowledging that those minds have the capacity to feel that is similar to one's own (this surely takes years to develop even in humans, if it develops at all). These are all minor (and possibly entirely my own) issues in a deeply satisfying whole.A word of warning though: this book will leave you in a world of sadness. The author is a conservationist and conservationists, like climatologists, don't have much to be optimistic about. Large parts of the book are heart-breakingly sad and a proof that humanity truly is the cartoonish villain of the natural world. Though the book ends on a positive note, it's a very brief and forced-sounding positive note that is the opposite of reassuring.

The core of this book makes for a genuinely revelatory and clear way of thinking about addiction (and how to avoid it). I am not sure about some of the research the author quotes though - a lot of it sounds quite dated (at one point she literally quotes a paper from the Soviet Union) and the fact that the vast majority of drug users don't end up addicted is not directly addressed - probably because it complicates the book's thesis about the inevitability of addiction given conditions a b and c, which are then explained to be rare and unpredictable and complicated, and yet somehow inevitable. It's a mess. The author's total abstinence following years of addiction biases this book quite strongly and the author is very, very open about that bias, which makes this book less scientific than it purports to be.

I really enjoy Kathryn Davis' specific weirdness but I struggled to make sense of this one until the very end. She can write one hell of a sentence but sometimes they just don't connect for me at all. I have no idea what The Silk Road was even about.

This strange and convoluted novel might be the closest that you can get to understanding how expat Israelis feel about Israel – it forces you into a vantage point from which multiple points of view, truths and realities cohere.

As an immigrant myself, I really liked the idea of forgetting the details of previous your life once you've crossed the border between worlds, and comfortably making home in a different reality, complete with an alternative history and geopolitics.

I'm still not quite sure why the author made some of the decisions he made. While I get why each character's POV would be written in a different person, I struggle to see why the inspector character, the only one written in first person, would have access to other characters' feelings and perspective – it was a bit jarring and made the story that much harder to follow, and in the end wasn't explained (unless I missed something).

Excellent. Highly rewarding if you enjoy works by authors who take the reader's ambition as a given. Full of eccentric aristocrats and slow-developing delicious scandals. Good reminder that nation-states are a new and unnatural construct in Europe. Brush up your French!

The author's playwright chops are clearly visible in this novel: though the story ostensibly takes place over a single work day of a single restaurant, the backstory of each character in the ensemble is laid out beautifully and tied to their state of mind on the day, resulting in a lot of drama - possibly maybe a bit too much?

Either way, it was a mesmerising read with some great insights into the psychology of casual cruelties that people inflict on each other.

Giving up on this one. I can't manage yet another Ocampo story.

There are a couple of early gems here but I'm now halfway through and I feel like I've been reading randomly generated placeholder text for the last 150 pages. Was Ocampo drunk? There's a struggle with continuity and cohesion. And while I do want to be surprised and shocked as a reader, Ocampo's surprises are just not interesting. They're not weird and quirky, they're annoying and draining.

My bad for picking up a book that has two things I believe are impossible to make interesting: a walking journal and adult diagnosing herself with an ASD.

I'm sure this book is objectively fine.

Someday soon AI will get really good at generating fiction and it will be a lot like this book. I'm just not convinced that Little Children wasn't written by a robot. The characters try really hard to pass as real people but they're like fairly decent CGI at best.

time very entertainingly killed.

I'm really not sure what to make of it. It's very strange and confusing, but also beautifully written and somewhat Gothic. I just haven't yet figured out what it's about, I guess. Might revise this rating later.