Eduardo Santiago
Somewhat inconsistent. Part memoir, part history of climbing. Some (most) sections were fascinating, a few I found dry. Often jumpy wrt times and places, requiring effort to reorient myself. And, surprisingly, not as much female perspective as I had expected. I started following Reych some years ago because of their thoughtful, empowering writing; this book was quite different from what I had expected but it still delivered solidly on the thoughtful and empowering fronts.
A remarkable woman, one who deserves to be better known. I hope someone writes a shorter, more readable biography of her one day but this one, sadly, was a slog. Its rambling, declarative storytelling form might work well as an audiobook but was painful in print. I'm glad to have learned about her personal and tribal history. I'm also glad the book is over.
Unrated because I don't have the right to drag down the GR rating.
An intriguing premise that unfortunately didn't deliver (for me). Too many underdeveloped threads, too disjointed overall. It wasn't clear who his audience is: mostly scholarly in tone and content, but his authorial snark and jargon (“dope”, “stan”) feel out of place. His sportsball and pop-culture chapters make little sense to those of us immune to those vices – I ended up just skipping whole sections because I had no idea who any of those people are, or (more importantly) what their cultural/ethnic identity is: paragraphs about Famous-So-And-So doing such-or-such a cultural appropriation make no sense if I don't know whether So-And-So is Black, Indian, White, Other.
The early U.S. history chapters were the best: informative, thoughtful (Mays is a genuinely moral person who cares about nuance and complexity). Enough to bump 3.2 stars to 4. I'm glad to have read much of it, just not all of it, if that makes sense.
What a beautiful, unique voice. And soul. I found myself in a turmoil for the first third or so: loving the descriptions of his experiences, rolling my eyes at the heavyhanded Significance Junkie writing (I could feel my own new birth stirring within myself, the birth of some new wisdom and awareness [...] an awareness that here, intertwined, were perhaps the two most sacred strands of life. There's a lot of that. No orchestral string crescendos due to technical limitations of the printed page, but I had little trouble imagining them.) Loving his ethics and vision, scoffing at the occasional intrusion of woo-woo. Then my brain shifted: I have my own forms of woo-woo; and, okay, I too marvel daily over a sunrise or a leaf or just a moment of wonder—I just don't TALK about it, so let's keep this confession between ourselves, okay? Once I made that mental shift, I just felt humility and awe.
Mbatha is a small fish in a small pond; promoting healing and, okay, wisdom; and now getting some press. Good. This book evoked Rilke: I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. From all the way across the planet, his circle has reached me, and I'm infinitely grateful.
Wowwwwwww ... this is a whole 'nother level for Roanhorse. Those insipid characters from the first book are now nuanced, feeling, conflicted creatures. (Minor spoiler) The Annoying Prophecy having been (partially) foiled in the first book, events are now free to take very interesting new courses, and oh, they do. It's like seeing cardboard cutouts suddenly spring to life.This is Book Two Of N: I came in expecting development, not resolution, and got much more than I dared hope for. The Meridian world feels much more real. The intrigues are better defined. And the characters... I'm in love with half of them. They now show gumption, fears, feelings, self-reflection, uncertainty, grit. New relationships are forged here, with all the stages of grudging and developing trust. Relationships begun in the first book are clarified and better defined. What surprised me most is the quiet competence that the principal characters now exhibit, and how Roanhorse depicts it. (I'm a sucker for smart competent people). This is a more mature work than anything I've read by her. Rewarding, filled with promise.Friendly hint: re-skim [b:Black Sun 50892360 Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1) Rebecca Roanhorse https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601212809l/50892360.SY75.jpg 61321587] if it's been more than a few months since you read it. Roanhorse wastes few words filling in backstory. (Don't even THINK of reading this without having read Black Sun first. It will make very little sense.)Another Friendly Hint: If you're the kind of person who needs a tidy wrap-up, don't read this yet. Wait for the next, or possibly next-next: this has the feeling of a long-game saga. And pray to whatever gods you pray to that Roanhorse will not abandon this series.
Unputdownable once you get past the difficult start. Wang is a genuinely gifted writer, her words flow with a grace that remind me of Fred Astaire's dancing: the truly, truly talented make their art look effortless and sweep you along in their arms. I felt transported.
Difficult first: for the first forty pages, how I longed for a glossary! Wang introduces terms and names once, and expects you to keep up. Expect a lot of flipping-back until your brain catches up; and don't be discouraged, because it gets so worth it, so beautiful. Difficult also in content: the undocumented immigrant's appalling life of hunger, need, fear, and loneliness; the horrific sweatshop jobs; the bullying and abuse on the streets. And difficult in personal experience: the trauma of growing up with self-absorbed needy parents. Wang herself writes with exquisite self-awareness and I found myself certain, near the end, that she could only be writing this after years of therapy. (Yep: she thanks two therapists in her final Acknowledgments).
Oh so worth it, though, for the vividness of Wang's worlds, the China she left behind and the New York City she has to learn. Her observations feel a little too crisp to be believable as the recollections of a seven-to-nine-year-old, but I really can't be sure: even if a little of it is artistic license, the bulk of it feels real because Wang clearly learned at a very early age to be a caretaker, to listen and observe. A writer can't fake that kind of awareness. And again, her writing is just wonderful: Hardship is dimly lit, and its darkness shielded us. Swoon.
I had such high hopes. Maybe if I was thirty or forty years younger I would've loved it, but as a way-over-thirty adult I found it insipid, principally because there was no life. No connection between the characters, no chemistry other than what was deemed necessary for the narrative. (Edit: okay, one, the friendship between Elizabeth and loser-boy felt real. But that was a minor part). All throughout the book, characters meet and develop bonds for no discernible reason whatsoever. Real people just don't behave like that; it just made me think the author must be terribly young.
Marcellus the octopus was the most interesting character, of course. But... wtf was his angle? He was depicted as a storyteller, with himself as narrator, conversational in tone, but who is his audience? The author seemed to be trying to crack the fourth wall, but I didn't find it effective. The frequent “but what about this, you ask?” interjections didn't help; I also felt disappointed that there were fewer and fewer Marcellus chapters as the book went on.
Lots of promise unfulfilled. There could've been a really great relationship between Tova and Marcellus, but it was totally flat. There could've been interesting dynamics between the humans, but nope, just people being shoehorned into liking or disliking each other. So sad. Feel free to skip this one.
This is another trigger warning: everything novel. I'm not given to spoilers, but I wish I'd been prepared for this because it caught me by surprise at well past halfway. So: TW: Violent rape. Violent murders. Violent trauma and tragedy and horrors of war. Caveat lector, biggus tempus.
Think hard: can you make it through that? If you can, I think you'll be rewarded. This is a beautiful, rich, graceful and highly intelligent work. Deeply moral, too, and frighteningly relevant to present-day (2022) USA: Munaweera paints a complex picture of a society where misogyny and racial intolerances are manipulated into hatreds, into a self-perpetuating cycle of radicalizing and violence in a way that has eerie parallels to much that we're living today. She also, minor spoiler, shows good people overcoming it despite trauma that is unimaginable to you or me.
The writing is lovely. Poetic in a way that even I, a total poetroglodyte, adored. Munaweera dances with words, with descriptions that take a half-second to click, and when they do they make me smile. Every time.
(Side note: is there a thing going on where writers are playing with first-person narrative in new interesting ways? Or have I just been noticing it more lately? Anyhow, it worked quite well here.)
Promising idea; disappointing execution. The villains were cartoonish, full-on evil with no depth or nuance whatsoever; I kept hoping for a mustachio twirl, it would've made them more believable. Going with the Lovecraft mythos—not just inspired-by, but literal straight-out-of-his-books stuff—annoyed me; it brings attention, indirect validation even, to someone who doesn't deserve it. And, far too many convenient little miracles: even with the handwavey “the city takes care of its own” rationalization, the improbabilities were too much for me. So were the plot inconsistencies.
Possibly fun for a resident of New York, especially someone with tribalistic attachment to one of the subdivisions (Brooklyn, Bronx, whatever). Probably a lot of insider references that they can enjoy and relate to. For the rest of us, fun light reading with interesting, likable, strong female characters and passable tension. Just don't expect anything as rich and complex as Jemisin's earlier work.
She had me, not quite at hello, but certainly by the second page, and she kept me hooked the entire way through. So many of my favorite subjects! Linguistics. Etymology. Culture, anthropology, listening, communicating. Snark. Ideas. Smart, strong, sexy women working together to smash the patriarchy. I want to read it again. I want to buy a dozen copies to give away.
Not all of it was entirely comprehensible, but that's my fault: I'm too old and unhip. I still don't really know what “vocal fry” is, despite friend A. spending 20 minutes with me on it. (Or, I guess I now know more about it, but I've never noticed it and don't understand why it's such a huge deal to some people). And there are terms like “yas” and ”werk” that completely whooshed over my head. But that's cool — I mean hip — or groovy — or phat? Whatever. By far the majority of the book is informative, thoughtful, relevant, and a joy to read: Montell writes beautifully and with gusto.
I wanted to DNF it by page 60. I wish I had. This just wasn't a book for me: I found it irritating and depressing, chock full o' superstition, violence (physical and emotional), ignorance, toxic masculinity, abuse, trauma. The so-and-so-is-this-animal comparisons felt forced. The story was annoying in other ways: not exactly an unreliable narrator, but (minor more a case of oh, I neglected to mention this super-important detail that happened a few chapters ago and completely changes the reader's understanding of the situation). That was jarring and felt gimmicky. For me, a good storyteller will take themself out of the story so it's the action and feelings that the reader focus on. This felt more like, look at me!
Headline: Grumpy Late-Fifties Male Grouses About Novel Depicting Grumpy Late-Fifties Male.
No, I didn't like it. Serious cognitive disconnect. Nothing makes sense: not the timelines, nor the relationships, nor the motivations. Ove is not a Grouchy Old Man With A Secret Heart Of Gold; he is, I think, a not-very-kind person's idea of what one would look like. Nasty, spiteful, shallow, with serious anger issues. His barbs and petty acts of revenge aren't funny, they're just mean. OK, so he's just a fictional character, but the more I read, the more I felt that his words and actions were a reflection of the author, like those people who blurt out “you're fat, ha ha, j/k.” I hope I'm wrong. I know nothing about Backman, and dearly hope I'm mistaken, but this first impression was a sour one. I have no desire to read his work again.
The relationships make no sense either; they come off more as wishful thinking than real human interactions. (I'm speaking solely of humans here. The cat, that's completely off-the-wall bizarre, let's just ignore that.) I have to assume that Backman was going for heartwarming, but for me it went straight into bathetic. Then again I'm just a grumpy, often-unkind, late-fifties male.
So, yeah, definitely Lovecraftian in many ways: in magnitude (this is end-of-the-world horror, not pedestrian handful-of-teens-in-the-woods); in intention (no impersonal asteroids or supernovae, we're talking pure directed malevolence); in complexity; and, most importantly, in creativity—the ideas developed here are really clever.
Unfortunately, I've never cared for Lovecraft. Even as a teen, before I learned what a racist PoS he was, I found his stories tedious. Like, okay, I've got this great idea for a concept, let's see if I can completely kill it in development. This book was (unlike Lovecraft) actually quite good, well written, thought-provoking, enjoyable... it just tried too hard to work with ideas that can't pan out. (I won't go into details or spoilers. It just doesn't add up. Not the motivations, nor the background, and least of all the science.) There are just some ideas, like impromptu hitchhiking to South America or coating your lover in whipped cream, that are better just left to the imagination.
Mixed feelings. The material is important and well researched. The personal stories are moving. But too often the tone is more diatribe than presentation, and that detracts from the content.
Gómez explores four demonstrable ways in which the post-1942 world has harmed New Mexicans: the Los Alamos land grab; the treatment of Hispanic workers as expendable; downwind effects of the Trinity test; and long-term storage of nuclear waste. (There's a middle chapter about racism in a TV show; I choose to ignore that for being neither pertinent nor actionable). She documents each with oral testimony from those involved and with external sources when possible – and, unfortunately, the latter is often limited. That's how classism works. Gómez is not building a legal case, though—that has been pursued elsewhere, with discouraging results. What she's doing here is building awareness of a topic too few of us are informed of. So, breathe through the polemic, skip the TV chapter, and take some time learning. Maybe even acting.
I don't usually care for YA. A few pages into it I had to go to Goodreads and double-check the categories... okay, confirmed, solidly tagged as “Adult Fiction”... but it's not. It's distinctly YA utopian magical fantasy. Still, as YA utopian magical fantasy goes, it was pretty darn good: strong characters, great tensions between them, original setting, creative story arc and side plots. This was my second try after abandoning it some months ago, and I'm glad to have picked it up again. It was worthwhile, I just had to be in a more forgiving mood, acknowledging and forgiving the everpresent dei ex machina and convenient handwaving. (After all, “Then a miracle occurs” worked for Sidney Harris).
Unexpectedly powerful. Fu paints with broad and fine strokes; she's much better at fine, but the broad is necessary in an epic like this. Her eye for everyday detail makes scenes vivid and believable. Her sensitivity to emotion makes the story compelling, although, to be honest, her characters felt a little too pat at times. Just a tad too noble. But I'm ok with it.There's a lot of pain all throughout: the suffering of nonstop war, that of paranoia and suspicion, the loneliness of hiding inside oneself. Of being unable to connect. I kept flashing back to [b:Fukuyama 57980 Trust The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity Francis Fukuyama https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409522132l/57980.SY75.jpg 56475] and his exploration of high- and low-trust societies; here we see the human cost of low trust and how it can—but does not have to—ripple across and down over time. Fu admits in an afterword that the story has parallels to hers and her family's: I felt that while reading, but it was never blatant or uncomfortable. Kudos to Fu for transforming life experience into a memorable story.For me the theme that kept hitting hardest was the heaviness of living with ourselves after hard choices. Most of the characters carried that burden, each in different ways. It hurt to read. I don't expect insights like these from so young a writer, and feel crushed that she's able to describe that so effectively. And right now, what I feel most strongly is the need to reread [b:Kundera 9717 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1265401884l/9717.SY75.jpg 4489585].
I always feel somewhat lost when reading Harjo; as if I skipped over a key paragraph or like the key to understanding is dancing just out of the corner of my eye. It's not, and I've stopped trying to wrap my head around it, because it's like night vision: stare directly at the object, and you'll never see it. Only by gazing obliquely do you have any chance of seeing its outline.
Side glances are not my thing. I'm left-brained, analytical. Give me bright direct sunlight, not shimmery reflections. I'm also trying to grow, in whatever few days are left to me, and that's why I keep reading Harjo. We speak different languages, even inhabit slightly overlapping realities, but hers is a reality I can and want to learn from: one of forgiveness, compassion, strength, respect. I will never fully understand her works, but I want to be someone who keeps trying.
Did anyone else find themselves thinking, this book was obviously written by a woman? The insight, compassion, awareness of and caring about others' mental states; the continental-scale sense of tragic loss... presented as first-person narrative by a sixteenth-century former merchant? I couldn't buy it, and the incongruity kept jarring me out of my reading experience, and I'm 100% OK with that because damn, what a story and what a writer.
What struck me most is Lalami's gift for negative space: expressing a complex swirl of feeling without a single term of emotion or often without even a direct reference. Much of the writing is declarative—it would be easy to dismiss as a simpleminded journal—but the depth is in the context, in what she doesn't say but the reader's heart nonetheless aches in knowing the rest of the story:
[The Zuni elder] fell silent. He leaned back against the wall, thinking about everything I had said, but his face darkened as he reached his conclusions. Let the white men come if they wish, he said. We have fought intruders before, we can do it again. At these words, his deputies nodded in agreement. The town of Hawikuh was not a settlement that could be taken without a fight, and they were prepared for it.
A difficult start: be prepared to feel lost for the first thirty-forty pages, to flip back and reread a few times. Stick with it: it grows ever more moving and graceful. (Also a little clumsy at times, a tad heavyhanded and preachy. Again, persevere, you'll be rewarded.)The story nominally centers around Rosalie Iron Wing, an adult Dakhóta woman in present-day Minnesota, but I can't say for sure that she was the main character. Do you remember that 1982 film, [b:Koyaanisqatsi 58439784 Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance Philip Glass https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1624812296l/58439784.SX50.jpg 91710952], the one with the haunting Philip Glass soundtrack? I think Koyaanisqatsi—Hopi for “life out of balance”—is the main character; everyone else, Rosalie included, is a minor (but not powerless!) player trapped in its orbit. Some aware of it and fighting for balance; others helping to tip the scales. Like in the film, the pace is slow and unrelenting. Unlike the film, the book is filled with determination, resilience, and growth.Most of you won't know the film. It's not important. What matters is that Wilson has crafted a powerful tale blending grief, strength, wisdom, and hope. Exquisitely written, filled with breathtaking sentences. I can't quite justify five stars, and I'm deeply sorry for that, but please consider adding this to your must-read list.[ Let's see if Goodreads allows me to link to the film: https://watchdocumentaries.com/koyaanisqatsi/ ]
Choppy, clumsy, preachy. Narrated in multiple voices and styles, all of which felt discordant: sometimes third-person, sometimes first (including a few weird short chapters told from the POV of a photon or carbon atom, often in the form of riddles). Platonic dialogs; lectures on economics; utopian manifestos; historical-ish chronicles; all of them totally failing at exposition and context. Today—the day I finished the book—happens to be 11 September 2022, so an analogy seems apt: his chronicling feels as if someone in 2022 were to write “The world of 2001 was different. Everyone was going about their business, then one day three or four airplanes got hijacked and deliberately flown into civilian targets. That really shook people up.” Nobody writes that way: you don't interject universally-known background. I know it's hard to bring a reader up to speed, but this isn't how you do it: as a reader, I want to be treated as a participant in a journey, not speeched at like a visitor on a McFactory tour. Most of the book was like that, and it always jarred me out of the story.
I think the world of Robinson. In interviews he comes off as a remarkable human. I love what he tried to do here, love many of his ideas (technological, geoengineering, geopolitical, cultural, economic). I would love to imagine the world of 2040 as he describes it, with only tens of millions of climate deaths, with societies coming together and working toward minimizing the damage. Maybe this book will reach a few young people who will then make that happen? I can hope. But I also hedge my bets, and remain infinitely thankful that my children will never have to suffer through the coming years.
Ambitious. Gonzalez packs a lot into her first novel: parental abandonment, U.S. colonialism, revolutionary politics, minority & women's & LGBTQ rights, corruption, shallowness, economic inequality, love, forgiveness. It didn't always work for me but it was a hell of a ride, and kudos to her for aiming high.
The story was compelling, even though there is little I find as shallow as elaborate weddings or people whose day can be ruined by the wrong napkins or colors. Somehow, here, I cared. (About the people. Not about the napkins.) The timeline progression was effective: JULY 2017 on the opening page, and every Puertorican reader starts getting chills: we know what's coming. Then August, then September, everyone acting all normal, because what could they know then of Hurricane María, and that somehow makes the tension more painful.
The maternal epistles, though, interspersed throughout, they felt clumsy, like a quick tool to get some exposition out of the way. Nobody writes like that. Nobody talks like that, either, in the infrequent preachy revolutionary-radical-speech parts. The characters are... how about one-and-three-quarter dimensional? Simple and predictable for the most part, smart and sassy and well-intentioned with periodic attempts—some more successful than others—at nuance and complexity. The relationships between them didn't always make sense, especially some of the attractions, but I guess attractions don't always make sense IRL either.
Sometimes five-star material, sometimes three. Mostly sweet, loving, with important (albeit unsubtle) messages. As you know, I'm OK with all of those. I enjoyed it, and am curious what non-Puertoricans will think of it. (Katie, we're due for lunch!)
Published 2019. I read it today, March 2022, knowing that Ukrainians were being murdered while I read... but I could not hear them. Knowing also that somewhere in the U.S. today a white cop is murdering a Black soul, and I won't hear that, either.
We can't escape war; our choice is in how we respond to it. Active resistance? Nonviolent resistance? Kaminsky demonstrates, bleakly, a third option, one we in the U.S. might find familiar.
Breve e informativo. Principalmente recuenta los hechos históricos, sin color de opinión... bueno, menos una pequeña nota sardónica tratando con excepciones a jus sanguinis.
Le da a uno mucho por pensar. Son siete los territorios de EEUU fuera del continente; de ellas, tres lograron graduarse, las otras cuatro permanecen colonias. ¿Qué tienen en común las ex-colonias? ¿Qué podemos aprender de ellas, y cómo podemos forjar un mundo sin estas relaciones exploitativas? Formando consciencia es el primer paso.
Turns out this was a research paper before Valdez Quade expanded it into a novel: Poor Life Choices: a Pan-generational and Cross-sectional Case Study, published in Depressing Neuropsychology News du Jour. Or maybe it was Prefrontal Cortex: Is One Really Necessary for Species Survival? in Proceedings of the Our World Is Fucked Society.
Damn, this was brutal. A slow-motion train wreck: all the reader can do is watch helplessly as events unfold. Except these are humans, not necessarily stuck on a fixed track, so you sometimes wonder, will they use reason and insight and agency to change their fate? Read for yourself to find out how they do.
Most impressive: Valdez Quade's ability to make me feel for her characters. Only one, the matriarch, is worth anything; the rest are irresponsible, self-absorbed, ignorant, yet we see them trying to do their best with what they've got. (Not-much-of-a-spoiler alert: it's a pretty low bar for “best”). Valdez Quade loves every one of them, though. She shows their struggles and their occasional brief moments of awareness. They're all trapped, they know they're trapped, but when one is deep in a hole it's just impossible to see a way out. One needs a hand... but sometimes there just isn't one.
Most painful: the constant realization that there-but-for-go-I. Without going into details, these are people and attitudes that surrounded me in my formative years. Some of them are still present in the lives of people I love. I escaped, but how close did I come to becoming one of those? Thank you, Fortuna.
I still don't really understand why I (avidly!) read the whole thing. Best I can say is, the environment is toxic, the characters (mostly) ranging from unlikable to contemptible, but the author cares so much and so deeply that I somehow ended up caring too.
An exercise in mindfulness, to wit, in observing my emotional state and breathing through my anger. I felt angry, to varying degrees, from start to finish: at the horrid parents; at the perverse incentives in the U.S. healthcare system; at religion and at humans and at our so-broken societies that prevent us from moving forward. I truly know deep down that all of us are doing the best we can... but dammit, so often that “best” is just so unspeakably evil.Anger is probably not the reaction the author intended. It probably won't be yours either. The book is thoughtfully written; warmly, even. The interweaving of biography with scientific history is effective in many ways: it's really what made the book so fascinating, informative, and even gripping. (Yes, really. My anger notwithstanding, I enjoyed the process of reading.) But in the end, this is a book I could've gladly lived my life without reading. If you're fascinated by mental health, or know anyone affected by schizophrenia, this is a book for you. If you're angered by irresponsible negligent self-absorbed overpopulators, skip it.UPDATE, few days later: HVR inspired me to reread [b:Angels of the Universe 462680 Angels of the Universe Einar Már Guðmundsson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266182662l/462680.SY75.jpg 451140]. I strongly encourage you to do the same: AotU offers a haunting first-person (semifictional, obviously) perspective into schizophrenia, possibly the closest you and I can come to understanding what it must feel like. With that understanding comes a complex form of compassion, for those who suffer and for those around them.