Laura
I wasn't sure if I should give this 3 or 2...mystery books are rarely as good as I want them to be, but this was fun/enjoyable to read. Definitely a lot of plot holes but most of them are ignorable if you want to ignore them. The ending also felt like it wrapped up a bit suddenly compared with the drawn out suspense of the rest of the book. But overall it was a good suspenseful book to read on my bus rides to work.
I learned:
- don't be greedy (unless you are in Jack and the Beanstalk and then you can be a little greedy I guess)
- don't say thank you to fairies or they will go away
The stories were good but I think a little more explanation of where each story came from and/or connection between the plants and the stories would have helped. Some felt way too short and others too long.
I wish this book had been written by someone who could actually write...
The story itself is powerful and important: a survivor's memories. But it is watered down and cheapened by clunky, awkward, bad writing. I wish I could have just watched a recording of this man telling his story, or read a transcript of their interviews. I am certain that would have been more compelling.
A 2016-themed tired-sad-girl book with a few really beautiful lines that I forgot to write down.
Picked this up with very specific goals...looking for a fun mystery audiobook—ideally set in the UK/Europe as I find uk mysteries feel less police-y than American ones, even when the main characters are technically still the police—as an easy escapist thing to listen to on my walks to and from work this week. This exactly fit the bill. The characters were genuinely enjoyable. I often find the endings of mystery novels to be real let downs and this one thankfully did not have that problem for me at least. The ending is slightly contrived, but it did feel like you could have figured it out as the reader, which is a step above many (it wasn't completely out of left field, but it was still surprising enough to be fun). The narrator of the audiobook, Aoife McMahon, is excellent.
It has been a long time since I read a book that I actively disliked as much as this one. I found this book infuriating. It had a few nice moments and good insights, but overall I found it arrogant, repetitive, oversimplified, and honestly frustrating. This review is based on point form notes I made while reading, so it is not the most organized. I was so frustrated while reading it so I wanted to share my notes in case anyone resonates.
Throughout the book Heti (or the narrator based on her) is so arrogant, constantly acting like other people's choices to have children are against her. She says “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living,” As if having children is not the most living thing one can do.
She continuously portrays her partner as such an asshole (he is constantly discounting her feelings), and yet describes their relationship as this amazing thing, mostly because he is hot? It seems that there is a hidden layer - maybe she likes him because he discounts her feelings, since she is so mired in self-indulgence of her own feelings, maybe he is refreshing to her? But since this is not ever stated, it sort of seems like she thinks he is an asshole.
Her ideas of gender roles feel like they are out of the 1950s. She mentions I think one time the possibility that a woman can be an artist and have a child, and that is not actually a specific example of a real women, it is hypothetical. The only real women examples she gives are either woman with children that she describes throughout most of the book with intense condescension (towards the end she briefly seems to consider the possibility that all her friends with children are not just animalistic idiots), or by contrast her own mother, who entirely abdicated emotional and practical responsibility for her children in favour of her job. Like what the fuck? Have you literally never met a mother who had a job/a happy life that wasn't entirely child-centric? Maybe I'm crazy but I'm 10 years younger than she was when she started writing this book and I can easily think of several mothers I know personally who had fulfilling careers or were artists while their children were young (including my own mother), without neglecting their children. And even if you don't personally know anyone like that, have some imagination!? She talks constantly in this book about imagining possible futures for her life, and yet her imagination seems so limited (EITHER you have a child, stop writing and become essentially a milk-producing animal; OR you don't have children and are a Writer, a Romantic Heroic Figure, so Important).
To the point above, at the VERY END of the book she says “I realized that when I was a little girl I had made up a story: that a woman who works or cares deeply about her work can't also be a loving and attentive mother; that it was not possible to be both - that in order to explain my mother to myself, and to justify why she kept so much distance from me, it had to be because existentially one couldn't care about both one's work and one's child. So it wasn't my mother's fault. And it wasn't my fault either.” (p. 247). If this insight had been a little earlier in the book than the last 20 pages I probably wouldn't have hated the book so much!?!? Did she literally not have an editor??
Re: not having an editor, this book is SO REPETITIVE, and also does not do what it promises to do, at all. It is purportedly about her decision whether or not to become a mother, yet throughout the book she gives about a million reasons (rational, instinctive, emotional, etc) why she does not want to be one, and only a series of oversimplified ideas about why one might want to be one. And she repeats these same arguments on both sides over and over, sometimes in almost the exact same words. She seems to have a lot of friends with children and yet she makes almost no use of these people as resources to understand the thought processes of people who choose to have children.
The book also promises to be about, or to discuss “Motherhood.” Maybe this is pedantic but this book is not about her grappling with motherhood (except in the few moments she talks about her mother/grandmother, which are some of the best parts of the book). Instead, it is about her decision whether to get pregnant. She mentions adoption ONCE, on page 168, in an offhanded way, and barely touches on other ways in which people can have nurturing roles without making the choice to have a child.
After her earlier book Women in Clothes, I would have thought that Heti would have made more use of the insights of others to write this book. That would have added SO MUCH. Instead, she frequently mentions other people who have children but rarely does more than project her own opinions onto them. She does not seem to care AT ALL about these other women, not even making any effort to develop them as 3-dimensional figures in her book. For example the character of Libby is first introduced as having accidentally become pregnant and feeling miserable about it. Then at the end of the book she says of Libby “it feels as natural for her to enter motherhood as it feels for me to entertain doubts” - wouldn't it have added an interesting dimension to the central issue of the book if we got to see and hear how Libby went from one state of mind to the other, what she grappled with? But no...as with many interesting subjects, Heti touches on this and brushes past, in favour of more petulant whining about her own really-quite-minor doubts about whether she wants to have a child (spoiler: she doesn't want to. This is not really a spoiler, she says this from moment one and NOTHING CHANGES).
She also treats these friends and their decisions to have children with so much derision, suggesting they are just doing it “reflexively” (p. 239).
Ecofascist-adjacent ideas (with no interrogation): “Nothing harms the earth more than another person–and nothing harms a person more than being born” (p. 178). Previously she talks at some length about how having children is old-fashioned. I honestly hate this Western-centric, utilitarian, eco-fascist bullshit, which she expresses without even having the guts to mention the environment, just assuming everyone knows what she means by this sentiment and will agree with her.
She loves to fall back on super tired gender roles, she twice says she is “jealous” of gay men (once because they get to come out, something she would like to do, and once because people don't judge them for not having children), she makes fun of men with small penises, for no real reason she just decides that's an important subject to randomly bring up in order to make a pseudo-philosophical point which AGAIN relies on the idea that women's lives end at 40 (see page 194 if you want to read this lovely passage).
On page 177 she admits for the first time that mothers, people with children, can have complex internal lives unrelated to children. This is the first time she has expressed any awareness of this fact.
I don't think this even encompasses all my frustrations, but I am tired of thinking about this book.
*
There were a few things I liked: I liked when she puts in brief paragraph-long interludes to describe vivid, surreal dreams she's had. I liked the really quite lovely parts towards the end of the book where she reconnects with her mother, and where she goes to the sea with her partner and his daughter and his daughter's mother. Now and then there is a nice or insightful comment, but they are hard to pick apart from the repetitive and frustrating stuff.
I think if this book had had a better editor, and was less like reading someone's literal unedited diary, it would have the potential to be an actually good book.
If you read this far, hi, thank you for coming to my TED Talk about why I disliked this book. If you liked it because it spoke to you, I am happy for you! You probably had a better experience reading it than I did and I am not judging. These were just my feelings, informed by my life.
Rereading because I am teaching it this coming year.
Honestly didn't expect it to hold up as well as it did since when I first read it I was a teenager and that's the target audience. But the characterization is so well done, and the themes and main issues in the book are well developed. And even as an adult, many of Holden's observations about the world are sharp and accurate (if you are looking at things from a certain cynical perspective). It's a short and good read. Perhaps it feels darker from an adult perspective than it did as a teen.
3.5⭐️ I liked the story and the characters, but really disliked the writing style. It's rare that the story and characters are strong enough to hold up against a very awkward-feeling writing style, but it worked well enough here that I finished the book and enjoyed it. The writing just felt very stilted and over-explainy a lot of the time, and took me out of the story. You could never really forget that this was an adult writing from the pov of teens.
This was a fun audiobook to listen to on a train ride. I enjoyed it but I wished for more world-building. This felt more like a character study, or the prequel to another story.
Notes on this book:
This was a quick read but...pretty disappointing, especially considering how many rave reviews I've seen. I just didn't find the writing and characters convincing at all. The writing felt awkward, and the dialogue felt like a children's book a lot of the time, for example exchanges like this extremely mild ending to a supposedly heated discussion:
“OK,” Celia said. “If you're sure that's the way we can do the most good”
“It is,” Harry said. “I'm sure of it.”
Major problems and issues were often solved by half page conversations. I felt like I was supposed to be invested in the narrator/journalist's life but her characterization was so minimal. Also none of the news stories throughout, including the narrator's article at the end, were written at all like real news stories (in terms of tone and writing style).
There is also a lot of “telling” rather than “showing,” like referring to “the past few years I'd watched Harry lose friend after friend, former lovers, to AIDS” when the “past few years” were...part of the plot. Why wasn't that mentioned then? Like why not include that while we are in those years rather than add it as an afterthought (this happened with a few different things).
- I could be wrong but don't know how often people in real life say stuff like “and also, we are gay” to each each other when talking to their lover in private. Just a lot of really awkward writing.
- Kept using the word “bedded” to mean slept with (“he must have bedded a number of women” “he liked to bed every woman he met” type of thing) which I guess was supposed to make Evelyn Hugo sound old/old fashioned but since it was one of the only notably “old fashioned” phrases and used so many times it was really awkward.
Spoilers:
The plot is reasonably entertaining and well structured with no major plot-holes, so I guess as a plot-driven book it works somewhat. The twist was built up WAY too much for how underwhelming it was, and I also saw it coming as soon as the car crash scene happened.
I enjoyed this book - but the 4 star review is largely thanks to the audiobook read by Cathleen McCarron. There are some elements of the book which I think I may have found less captivating without the excellent narration. The ending of the book was a little bit disappointing/felt rushed and a bit reliant on tropes, but I would still recommend this book if you want something fun and heartwarming. I did appreciate the main character as being fairly unique and compelling: quirky and often even annoying, and yet still very likeable.
Melodramatic and emo, feels like reading a manga...but 3.5⭐️ because it was a lot of fun....
4.5 stars
I think if I had read this in print it would have been a 4 star book but the audiobook pushed it to a 4.5/5 as Trevor Noah reads it so well.
The disjointed sense of time in this book serves to make it more of a macro story about racism/relations between different racial used identities in South Africa, and life under Apartheid...as opposed to a very specific personal story as it might have read if it had been in chronological order. While in general I didn't mind the jumping around in time, there were a few moments where it suffered from the same issue I've seen in other memoirs; it felt like it was originally written as separate essays, and not enough was done to tie them together. Sometimes characters or places were introduced as if we had never heard about them before, when we had just been reading about them in the previous chapter. The choices of where to put chapter breaks also felt kind of odd, as often an idea was introduced at the end of one chapter and only became relevant two thirds of the way through the following chapter. I got the hang of this partway through reading but it felt unusual.
As the story goes on it becomes clearer that this story is truly about his relationship with his mother above all else, and she is a fantastic character. He does an excellent job of portraying her as a whole person, both romanticized through a child's eyes, respected/feared through a child's eyes, and loved in different ways at different ages. Looking back at his mother from an older point of view he is able to understand her and her choices with more sympathy than he did as a child, but even as a child their relationship is clearly so mutually loving and respectful (shown through teasing, laughing, teamwork) even when it is tense or strained.
He did a fantastic job of interweaving history/politics, personal anecdotes, scary stories, lights stories, stories that should be scary but are told as though they are light, and humour.
Sometimes the relevance of the anecdotes felt slightly inconsistent, as did the level with which he analyzed them. Sometimes the gravity of what was going on felt shocking, and I would wonder why his character didn't feel more deeply about it, and then he would remind the reader that he was 5, or 6, or 7 years old when that anecdote occurred and it would make his lack of understanding of severity make sense. For that reason a chronological narrative might have been interesting as it would have allowed more insight into his changing understanding/character overtime.
I'm not typically a celebrity memoir reader but I suspect most are not this open and frank.
A lot of fascinating info in this book, and I recommend it - but it gets kind of tedious to read by the end, as a lot of information is repeated from one chapter to the next. I think there is a lack of organizational structure so it feels almost stream of consciousness in certain parts - not what I generally want from a science or ecology book. I didn't mind the anthropomorphising of trees as some reviewers do - it's poetic and shows Wohlleben's care and tenderness for them - but I wish that anthropomorphism had been accompanied by more in depth scientific explanations of what is actually happening. Sometimes they were there, but other times we were left only with a metaphor and no actual explanation of the mechanism behind what was happening.
I definitely learned things I didn't know before though! And I love that. But in terms of popular science/environment/ecology books I have read, this was good but not my favourite.
A very weird book. I enjoyed it, but would probably not have rated it so high if it weren't for how original the world building is - I can honestly say I don't think I've read a book with a similar premise or similar fantasy world building before. And that's unusual!
Some thoughts:
- the tone shifts dramatically between chapters. This makes sense as they are told with different narrators, except it's not just the narrator's voice which changes but the whole tone of the story. Like from fantasy-drama to irreverent-humour-cop-show to comedy etc.
- this book is very gory and graphic, bordering on gross at times. I hadn't seen that mentioned in any reviews. It works, and adds the feeling that you are just being tumbled along in this crazy plot line where everything is kind of over the top, but if you don't like hearing about people's intestines being pulled out and people poking their fingers into open wounds and a guy who walks around covered in caked dried blood...you won't like this.
- the reading experience of this book is odd, partly because of the tone shifts and random charges in POV to a new character you've never heard of halfway through - you have to be willing to let it take you for a ride.
- I love the idea of a mythological entity named Barry O'Shea, especially amidst others with more typical magical sounding names. That's hilarious.
2.5/3
Wrote a whole long review but Goodreads crashed and I lost it. Notes:
- sad, scary, yellow wallpaper vibes - isolation, gaslighting, a terrible/controlling man
- both characters are unreliable narrators which is fun
- starts slow but builds to something intense
- not sure I would have got as much out of it, ESPECIALLY out of Part 3, if I hadn't read Jane Eyre.
- Antoinette's narration was compelling and wonderful
- the husband's narration was scary but something missing...his transition from confused to deliberately evil (on purpose planning to make her believe she was crazy) felt sudden and a bit out of character. I think I would have liked it more if he had thought he was doing the right thing but just really not understood her. Could have been the same end result and in some ways scarier. Not controlling her out of anger but out of “care” but still his power (financially, socially, etc) creating a situation she can't get out of.
Just finished re-reading Pond. I feel like it has more to give every time. It makes you long for loneliness, and ask questions about yourself that you might never have otherwise asked...
This book feels very 90's cynical ironic in a way that was kind of boring, and the plot was also kind of boring.
2.5-3 stars...
Fun and definitely fast-paced enough to make me want to keep reading....but not sure I actually liked it that much?
Parts of this book feel like “lol so random” which sometimes feels too tumblr-era-internet-brained, but also kinda feels like a nod to other quirky and satirical sci-fi like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (although this was less adventurous and more of a contemporary fiction book with some sci-fi elements)... the tone and the way the internet is used/discussed in this book almost feels like a cross between an earlier extremely-online vernacular and a current extremely-online actual life (jokes about pop-tarts, randomness etc, but then the internet mainly being about social media apps rather than websites).
The main character is annoying but the writer wants us to be very aware that this is on purpose and that both he and she (the character) know she is flawed/sucks. I actually liked this aspect of the book as it was interesting...but it might have been even more interesting if it was just allowed to be, and not commented on so much. If it was left to the reader to form an opinion rather than being constantly told by the character “I know I suck, you must hate me as you read this” (not a direct quote) right before she does something bad/acts like a jerk/etc.
This book really feels like it was written by Hank Green. It feels deeply connected to his general internet persona (complete with occasionally throwing in a random science fact that there is no reason the character would have known/mentioned, like describing a siren with reference to the Doppler effect). I like his internet persona a lot more than I liked this book.
Also did not love that it ended on a cliffhanger!! I didn't hate this, it was a fun read, but I probably would not read the sequel...but now I want to know what happens!