Eduardo Santiago
Moving, sensitive, thoughtful, and pretty badass. Although it starts off with a YA feel, it’s not: this is (mostly but not always) emotionally complex. Tough moral questions and decisions. Strong themes of personal responsibility, betrayal, forgiveness. And feminist AF.
Impossible not to be reminded of The Book of Longings: mythologically-inspired fanfic from a female POV. That’s a really tough genre. The constraints are absolutely rigid, so the author has to be careful to work within the gaps. I know nothing of Hindu mythology, so it was reassuring to read the Author’s Note at the beginning in which she describes her familiarity with the canon and the care she took to remain within it. She also has a remarkable postscript in the Goodreads reviews. Read both. I think they show her to be a person of admirable intelligence and ethics. (Despite those, I see some religiofanatic GR reviewers have gotten their “feelings hurt.” I see that as an added bonus.)
The (not a spoiler) Binding Threads gimmick was intriguing. Patel used it a little more than I cared for, and often uncomfortably, but overall effectively. Any power lends itself to abuse, and I see that as part of the author’s point. I really, really loved the relationship dynamics, the first-person narrator’s imperfections, her recognitions of kindness in others. There is a good deal of evil in this book (*cough* “pious sages” *cough) but much more decency and nobility.
Not what I was expecting or hoping for, but in many ways I think I've gained valuable insights. Knott touches only lightly on the religious aspects of Hinduism, focusing almost entirely on the cultural values of misogyny, classism, and oppression. And in many ways I get it: if one were to write an intro to Christianity, the “father and son but they're the same person oh and there's a ghost too and also Mary is a demigod but not really” parts would, and should, be secondary to the Christian cultural values (misogyny, classism, and oppression. Also guns).
Anyhow. Won't help me understand a book I'm reading, but may help me better understand more about a billion or so people. Seems fair.
Well edited. I especially liked the focus, in the intro and in analyses, on transitions. These are where the screwup factor can be highest and where we all need frequent reminders to slow down and take time to reframe our minds.
Accidents comprise a combination of factors: inexperience, poor judgment, inadequate preparation, and bad luck. The first three are, for the most part, within our control and that's why we read this. Each year I try to learn something that will make me a better climber and person.
A risky gamble: repackage twenty-plus years of articles written for NatGeo, add a one-or-two-page intro and followup to each, and publish ... but without photos. I think it mostly worked. It kept the focus on conservation, fascinatingly bracketed by its two siblings, exploration and restoration.
Quammen writes about the boundaries. Where humans and nonhumans interact, it tends not to go well for the latter. It doesn't have to be that way. When possible, he writes about exploration: learning about little-known wildernesses while they still exist. At the other extreme, he includes a few examples of restoration: through education and unimaginable devotion, some near-catastrophes can be averted. Maybe. “It's late, but it's not too late,” he writes in his Afterword. I like to think so too, and am moved by his cautious and honest optimism. I intend to give a copies of this book to someone or someones young.
What a horrible book. Shlock, I can handle—we all need mindless action fluff sometimes—but not this. The villains were cartoonishly evil. The main character a spineless, unprincipled buffoon; worse, he seems to be a proxy for the author, which reflects quite poorly on Wheeler. Overuse of handwavey Maya Magic™ to move the action along when convenient. Every person who helps the heroes is left to die or suffer, with barely an afterthought. Then, at the end, the author repeatedly plugs a (real-world) violently homophobic chicken fast food franchise I will not name. The only two main characters with any moral sense—both women—remain in the background. One of them, the adult, the only one with any hope of resolving the crisis, is written away into a coma halfway through.
There is nothing worthwhile about this book.
Don't bother. Or at least, put it on your soporific pile. It's long-winded, full of semantic games, and a bit simpleminded. It reads as if some guy had a great acid trip, figured out all the world's problems in a flash of insight, came down, and tried to make sense of his trip.
That's what I wrote to a friend back in 2005, years before I even heard of Goodreads. Also years before I tried psychedelics, and now that I have a few trips under my belt I retract that last sentence: yes, I've had moments of understanding but ugh, I've never been pretentious enough to play condescending word games with it. If you're in the mood for Deeply Profound Insights, go visit the New Age Bullshit Generator instead.
An unexpected pleasure which I might've appreciated more with a little preparation, so I'm targeting this review toward people who know nothing about this book series.
The most important thing to know ahead of time is: whatever expectations you might have, let them go because this will be both more and less. Yeah, there's a murder mystery, and an interesting (VERY CONVOLUTED) side plot, but those feel incidental. The bulk of the story, as I saw it, is just a pretty decent fella living a fairly ordinary life, treating people with respect and kindness and compassion, and for the most part surrounding himself with similarly caring loved ones. As other reviewers have noted, what makes this book is the relationships. And they're lovely. Mature. Strong. Low-drama. Some people might find a book like this boring; I found it refreshing even with the pages-long digressions into college scheduling conflicts. It felt like life.
Proofreading was appalling, worst I've seen in years. The occasional mystery elements required Golden Gate-level suspension of disbelief. Tangents galore, little side stories that get abandoned—again, much like life. And the Edith Warner snippets felt like afterthoughts, tacked on in postproduction because oops we should probably connect somehow to the book title. Even so I really enjoyed it, am glad to have read it. Would love to pick up another one in the series, but (sigh) I first need to become more tolerant of misprints.
Remarkable. Emotionally powerful on many levels. Larsen writes with a bold directness that I found both refreshing and uncomfortable. Narration is third person but entirely from the POV of one character, Irene, almost as if it were first-person disassociated: the reader has constant awareness of her emotional state but only indirect awareness, via her inferences, of the minds of others. Unusual but effective. Even more unusual, there's only one sympathetic character in the book and it's not Irene: it's her husband, who we realize she does not know at all, and her imaginings of who he is are a tragedy of their own. This is a complex, layered book.
Larsen must've been a fascinating person. Insightful, sensitive, witty. The main themes for me were choices, consequences, loss, loneliness, and the crushing of our hopes as we commit to paths in life. There is more than one character living a lie, and we see a lot of the costs involved. Larsen adds in religious intolerance, sex ed, responsible parenting, with enlightened positions on each. Absolutely delightful to find in a 1929 book. (Depressing, too, since the problems she rails against persist today).
4.5 stars, rounding down because the language was often more tell than show. But, no, rounding up because this was just too impressive.
This is YA. Why isn't it classified as such on Goodreads? It would've been nice to know ahead of time, to set my expectations.Anyhow, it was fun at times, even sweet. Lots of complex mental states. Interesting side threads on the nature of consciousness, but nothing as sophisticated or thought-provoking as [b:Ancillary Justice 17333324 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) Ann Leckie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397215917l/17333324.SY75.jpg 24064628]. And, Leckie has been reading [b:Murderbot 32758901 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1) Martha Wells https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1631585309l/32758901.SY75.jpg 53349516], and those bits of influence worked really well here.The pronouns were irritating beyond belief: a complete U-turn from the wonderful pronouns of her first books. But I get it, it's YA, and as I predicted we get to learn Very Important Lessons later in the book. (And it was okay. The book is infused with well-done kindness). YA isn't my thing, but this is a book I would totally recommend to any teenager.
Five stars for important content, but the presentation, ugh! Impenetrable prose, confusing metaphors (“the parking industry's white whale”?!), weird nonsequiturs. Overlong jargony sentences. Overlong book. I ended up just skimming after the first third: actually reading was too painful.
The material is crucial, I just wish it had been better edited. Am looking forward to someone writing a shorter, more approachable version.
Side note: I came to this book as a convert already; I don't mind that it's an unbalanced diatribe. I kind of enjoyed that. It's the writing that I couldn't take.
“Five senses,” they told me. How chauvinistic that seems now. Understandably so, but still.Remember [b:Flatland 433567 Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions Edwin A. Abbott https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435435775l/433567.SY75.jpg 4243538]? (I like to think everyone read that in grade school but am now wondering if it was only us math geeks?) Anyhow, Immense World brought back those feelings of wonder; of imagining what we know is out there but can never, ever fully understand. A dog navigating the world through smell. The countless ways of arranging color receptors, giving some animals a visual experience we can barely even describe. Touch. Vibration, through air (sound) and through ground. Sensing electrical fields. Magnetic fields! How little we know! And of course, [b:bats 197189543 What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png 40899183]. All creatures taking their senses for granted, just like we do, but we have that amazing ability to study and learn and devise instruments that help us see-hear-sense farther. And to imagine.“[...] we can try to step into their worlds. We must choose to do so, and to have that choice is a gift. It is not a blessing we have earned, but it is one we must cherish.” Yong, more than anyone else I've ever encountered or heard of, has made me recognize that gift. Has let me glimpse those worlds of sensation. He does so with compassion and humility.
Five stars for research! The authors did their homework; the presentation was accurate down to the minutest details I'm aware of. I even learned a few more.
Unfortunately, too many flaws that I couldn't overlook. First is the narration gimmick: first-person from the perspective of ... self-aware Uranium? It's unclear if it's a particular lump of it, or just one atom, or maybe just the gestalt of all Uranium? I found it annoying. Second, the characters were drawn almost indistinguishably; perhaps unavoidable given the heavy-stroke artwork, but I found it hard to keep track of the dramatis personae.
Third and most painful was the expository dialogue. “Yes, you are a renowned chemist and you are an excellent engineer, as well as being the indispensable president of...”; and “Oh no! Another flat! It's the third one this week!”; and (Groves to Oppenheimer, December 1943): “But do you realize, only a few years ago, the greatest scientific minds in the world thought it would be impossible to isolate Uranium-235 from Uranium-238 without turning the entire country into a gigantic factory...?” Cringeworthy and continuous; not every page, but almost.
Then again, consciousness and communication are particularly strong interests of mine so I may be overly sensitive.
You're almost certainly familiar with Kahneman's and Fredrickson's wonderful ice-water experiment (“When More Pain is Preferred to Less”, also called the peak-end rule), the one where victisubjects opted for a longer (90s vs 60s) painful experience if the last few seconds were less painful. I love that result. I've found it invaluable for reframing life situations.
This is a 436-page book, of which the first 220 or so pages are excruciating. Oh, how I wanted to toss it away! But I was encouraged to stick with it. I did. And I'm glad.
Halfway through, it took an interesting twist, and yes it was foreshadowed but no, not the directions it took after the midpoint. That was thoughtful, creative, nuanced, suspenseful, engaging, and even sweet; and it just kept getting better. A whole lot of Did Not See That Coming, even when you think you see what's coming, and damn, I really loved it. Solid 4.5 stars, but rounding down because even with all that praise it was still objectively heavyhanded (I know, it's YA, I should be more forgiving); because of the eyeroll-worthy dei ex machina and other wildly convenient coincidences; and finally because I can't objectively be sure if the last half was truly-actually good or if I was swayed by the peak-end rule. What I can say is, I'm really glad to have read this and can highly, highly recommend it but only to those who promise to persevere through the first half. Tesh took a big risk in writing the book that way, and I'm sure it cost her sales and readers. If she decides to go for the adult reader market, I'm looking forward to seeing her future work.
Haunting. A powerful beginning; so good that the first thing I did upon finishing the book was reread the first few chapters. Effective first-person narration, ostensibly epistolary but inobtrusively so. Dual timelines worked beautifully: about 80% was 1973, tense, dramatic, distinctly uncomfortable; the rest, in 2016, tempered the heat with mature reflection. Getting to know the narrator like that—first as an interesting, conflicted adult, then as the hotheaded but caring young person she was— ... well, I found myself crushing hard on her. The book is much more than about her, of course, but it's so enjoyable to have the author devote care to every aspect. That's why we read.
The story is fiction, the events behind it are not, and near the one-third mark I felt compelled to read up on the historical basis. Waiting that long worked well for me, and I recommend it. Or perhaps even waiting until after finishing the book. This is history I never knew (yes, that bothers me!) but I think that, had I read up about it beforehand, the book's effect would've been lessened.
In the first few pages a twelve-year-old girl leaves her home to marry, by arrangement, a forty-something widower. Seriously? Do I really need to keep reading this?? (I did. Grudgingly. Would you believe that, just a few pages after that, my reluctance transformed into eagerness?)
This. Was. Beautiful. Okay, a bit over the top, but goddamn what a heart Verghese has! Compassion, insight, humor; an eye for the unbearable lightnesses and despairs of life. I was reminded over and over of a soap opera. One where the characters are kind, gentle, smart, talented, noble. I've never actually watched a soap, so all I have is the cartoon cultural idea of what they're like: drama, plot twists, suffering, redemption, characters larger than life; this had them all but entirely infused with tenderness.
Plus, culturally educational. Verghese writes with (what reads like) good rhythm for local customs and language. He packs in a good amount of background, all of which I found enjoyable and fascinating.
The last hundred or so pages ramped up the drama a notch, which forces me to drop my rating from six stars to five.
Abandoned, p.57. Then again, p.162, and again p.200, and so on. Lost track of the number of times I abandoned it. Caught up on New Yorkers. Gazed at New Mexico skies. And each time, went back to reading, because so many people I respect & trust speak so highly of this book.
The gimmick was clever, and well done: each chapter is a completely different voice, tone, perspective, style; like it was a writing exercise. Okay, Egan is a talented writer. I'm impressed. If you appreciate fine writing, this is your thing.
It's just not my thing. It might've been, if the story worked for me, but it didn't. Far too much That's-Not-How-It-Works, and too few relatable characters. I realize that wanting to care about characters is a defect in both my personality and intelligence; it is not a flaw I am able to fix. I also realize that my T-N-H-I-W quirk is inconsistent and even hypocritical, since I happily read about hyperintelligent spiders and TV-devouring Murderbots and magical unicorns. Why did I dwell on it so much in this book? Three aspects, I think.
First, that's not how memory works. Seriously, this is kindergarten neuroscience. Memory is not a recorder, you can't simply hoover up forgotten memories. The book gets this so fundamentally wrong, and it's such an important part of the plot, that I could not suspend disbelief. (Also, human behavior and relationships are quantifiable—an important subplot—but not without involving astronomical, ridiculously-impossible numbers of variables.)
Second, okay, let's pretend it were possible to upload memories to the cloud: who would do so? Who among us has no secrets? No truly private memories, fantasies, desires, misdeeds, embarrassments, or even quiet personal/ prides? Egan draws parallels to privacy loss in the social media age, trading your surf habits for free music, but that's not even close to comparable.
Finally... fine, let's go with it all. You can retrieve and net-share all your memories, and you do. Egan doesn't even follow through with the really interesting ramifications of such a development. Like, all the asymmetries! What do megacorporations and governments do with all that? How will it be used to further oppress disadvantaged peoples? How will banks authenticate now that the entire world knows your password, favorite pet's name, and Dream Vacation? Everyone you meet, for the rest of your life, you now need to wonder: what do they know about me? And, beautiful people: even if they themselves haven't uploaded their memories, some of their circle will have. Are there no stalkers in this world? What are the unexpected consequences? What are the right questions to ponder? That's what makes good SF.
On the positive side, though, we could learn what happened to our favorite Van Halen concert t-shirt. So it really is a difficult trade-off.
Bah. Enough. You get my point. But back to the characters: the vast majority were shallow, self-absorbed, banal. The penultimate chapter, that was good: depth, complexity. A few other snippets of light throughout the book: again, Egan is clearly very smart and compassionate, so I assume that she deliberately chose to write about vapid people. Which, again, is not my thing.
I kept finding so many little problems with the book, yet I kept reading and liking it. Perhaps my expectations (based on his interview on the Ezra Klein podcast) were too high. But the human characters were hard to relate to, the relationships between them flat and mechanical. It's like he spent more time developing the spiders than the humans. Twenty-year-old me would've been a-okay with that, today's me felt a little disappointed but is still planning to read the next book.
The science was ... inadequate. He tried really hard, though! A+ for effort, B- for accuracy. B- overall, that is: Some aspects – mind uploading; technology adaptation/innovation/maintenance on a millennial starship – were D-worthy at best, and there were countless “sigh... it Does Not Work That Way” moments, but the vast majority of the science is plausible and intriguing. I tamed my eyeroll response and feel that, taken all together, this was worth it. Tchaikovsky's heart is absolutely in the right place: he explores Big Questions worth exploring, and has developed a really promising, clever, sciencefiction-y universe.
Que gran placer descubrir la obra anterior de Luiselli, y aún mejor en español. Sus poderes de observación, su talento con la palabra escrita, exquisitos. Me tomó tiempo leer este libro corto, pues me estaba saboreando cada palabra: pausando para considerar, a veces para traducir y compartir uno o dos párrafos con alguien quien pensé los apreciaría.
Son ensayos, sin un gran tema unificador pero muchos ecos resonantes: varias formas de nostalgia, de soledad, tambien de descubrimiento y tanta, tanta curiosidad. Luiselli tiene un vocabulario extenso y hermoso.
Half of the book was impenetrable; half was a masterpiece. Half of me wanted to start it over the moment I finished, the other half wanted to move on. (We compromised: I flipped back and reread maybe a tenth.) This was a library copy; I've ordered my own so I can mark it up.
Thom gets it. She gets power structures and distractions and ambiguity. Responsibility, consent, nuance, storytelling. Asking the right questions. Aspects of life I know well, so her thoughtful perspective lends absolute credibility to her writings on what I don't know as well or at all: it's one thing to be peripherally aware of violence against trans women, a whole different thing to read Thom's first-person experiences. Same with coming out, or mentoring/being mentored. How Thom navigates the world is quite different from anything I've ever experienced, and I can't say that I understood her every message... but to be a better ally I will keep trying.
I get that it was meant to be sweet and thoughtful, but it just didn't work for me. It felt stiff and heavyhanded; the characters flat and unrelatable, shoehorned to fit into the narrative. All of them are “troubled” in some way, and the author made sure to reiterate their one woe (“felt guilty because XYZ”) in case we missed it the first or second time. The time-travel rules are arbitrary to the point of being annoying, and often interfered with the flow.
TRUST! Wells is a remarkable human being. I love how her work depicts the exquisite complexity of human relationships. Witch King is Wells at her finest (yet). A completely new direction for her, no trace whatsoever of Murderbot or its universe, no snark either, but still recognizably Wells.
This time she tackles trust: the burdens of being trustworthy, the difficulty of figuring out the trustworthiness of others. The costs of betrayal. The comfort of gaining a genuinely trusted circle, of working together toward higher goals. For a responsibility geek like me, this was almost pornographic (in the good sense; the Cindy Gallop sense). Add in strong, independent, self-aware, well-written characters; plenty of reflection and brooding; a generous helping of gendernonconformity; and tragic losses; ... and you've got me swooning.
Great story. Great world-building. Powerful, believable dialogue. Such beautiful relationships. My one quibble was that the bad guys were a little too unbelievable: grand-scale torture, genocide, enslavement, cruelty. Then I remembered the rpblcn party platform and all of a sudden the story isn't so far-fetched.
Complex, rich, convoluted, exquisite. Inconsistent. Often irritating. Am I talking about the book or about humanity? Maybe both: Rushdie has an impressive talent for showing us our reflections. And wow, can he write. Some books you can relax into, this one I felt slightly on edge the entire time. Not in a bad way; I just had to pay attention, and after finishing I can confirm that the energy cost was worth it. This is a memorable book that rewards careful reading.
The first surprise was the narrative gimmick: purportedly a distillation of a “long-lost history,” like a Cliff's Notes version of Gilgamesh, but told first person in an oddly subjective voice: warm and personal. Biased pretty heavily in favor of the main character. It's an intriguing device, new to me, and effective: it lent the book an overall tone of closeness, of caring, that I find hard to describe.
Irritations: wishy-washy sex positivity, which I know partly reflected regime and epoch changes but it felt wedged in. Overly handwavy treatment of war and violence. Blatant lookism, sheesh, does he really need to remind us every other page of how “beautiful” or “handsome” the favorite characters are? (Very) infrequent deep dives into boring religious crap, which I skipped and assume were not important. And, grumble, “goats slathered in chilies.” In the Fourteenth century. O Editors, Where Art Thou? (Okay, that last one is just a pet peeve. The others did, to me, genuinely detract from the story. A little.)
Anyhow... not a spoiler, but DAE raise an eyebrow when they first read how many years Pampa would live? Did you do some quick mental arithmetic, subtract it from the book's year of publication, then double-check it? Maybe wonder if all that cruelty, the empire born from seeds, the colonizing and war-in-the-name-of-peace, the tremendous extremes of good and evil and prosperity and neglect, the theocratic tendencies, might be Rushdie's allegory for a different decaying empire? Yeah, me either. Just coincidence.
