alice

A totally repetitive grief-inducing book with a lot of factual and superfluous data to support its own irrational way of thinking, that is totally irrationally rational.

Ah, how could one name a book like this. First or two chapters were fine, standard courses to introduce the event of the writer's husband's death and were actually pretty captivating (and that's why I bought the book).

And the rest were...insufferable.

That self-absorbance was not quite the big reason. More of that was due to it's repetitive account of the events. Grandma's whines, again insufferable to me. Or let's assume I'm just a heartless person, anyway.

Alright, might do this book some justice. It would be better if Joan wrote the entire book wholly focused on her own writing and her personal experience, like honestly do I really need to know the causes of heart attack when I'm a biology student? Thank you, next.

Anyway, I might just drop it in the darkest corner of my home. You might rest well there.

the major takeaway would be the last chapter filling fully of quotes about photography and ways of seeing. i think some of the arguments overlap themselves, just retelling the same main ideas with regard to different photographers and “schools” of photography. this might not be a good introduction into aesthetic criticism, but informative enough.

Would it be rather some cliché to talk about relationship in a book? Honestly, shift that position of Connell and Marianne onto other types of relationships you have in life. Well, then you will end up finding some resemblance between yours and theirs.
In a modern society, on-and-off relationships are never any rare scenes. However, being centred as mostly sexual, yet friendly kind of relationship, it would be rather difficult to define its nature, and conventionalists might call this inappropriate and certainly, unadvised.
If all of the above is exactly what this chart-topping, bestselling book want to tell us, I would hardly give it a go. But now, on the second ride, I feel like there is something prominent enough for it to enter that position. It is not my Rooney favourite, obviously, but there is resonance of the relationship itself, happy mixing with unhappy moments, silent treatment and negligence with fervid conversations, misunderstanding with understanding, replaceability with irreplaceablility... This obfuscating sort of relationship is nothing abnormal or too fictional to get personal. Rather, I would think this is a perfect rendition of the modern definition of relationships.
So Normal People, is perfectly normal.

Perhaps it was a bit too flat and too patched up with melancholy. Yet the melancholy was not in a flat but perturbing manner that got through the soul. That is in such way, I found the novel not sufficing my expectation or any kind of sadness that would feed me well.

To be frank, the story itself was fine, and there were obviously layers to the rendition of the world that the novel was based on. The basic settings and social backgrounds were revealed in a natural manner with the utmost simplicity in language, to which throughout the book was the narration of it. Yet it could not be so relatable, this sadness, in itself was in disguise but notable, just as paradoxical as the ugly truth of what the students' lives were set out to be, and how they were “sheltered” to be in Hailsham. It was fine, it really was, perhaps I was all too young to understand the magic of it. But again I could not relate to or feel the emotions as much as the characters did.

The ending rounded up a little better than the rest of the book. Not really the kind of teenage angst vibing book that's not some cliche.