jean

Definitely suffered through this one. Will probably hit up The Taming of the Shrew next, but i feel like i need a good tragic palette cleanser after this.

Interesting and strange story. So strange, in fact, I'm not sure what to really think or say. I did like it enough to want to read something of greater length from Márquez, so maybe 100 Years of Solitude is up next.

Picked up after reading [b:Overcoming Poor Posture: A Systematic Approach to Refining Your Posture for Health and Performance 37487315 Overcoming Poor Posture A Systematic Approach to Refining Your Posture for Health and Performance Steven Low https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513155186l/37487315.SY75.jpg 59098644], since I heard it was more thorough. I'd say either is a good read if you're interested.This book starts from the ground up and gives reasoning, tips, and pretty thorough explanations of how the Starretts think the optimal workstation should be, and their ideas of mobility standards plus some info on how to get there. Way more content here than in OPP, but i didn't find most of it necessary personally, and I think I generally like what OPP offers in terms of movement ‘prescriptions' a little better, though it obviously doesn't target how to change your workstation like this book does.Something I wish the book discussed: balance/wobble boards and ‘active' standing versus static standing or leaning. I'm personally buying a board to let me move around while standing, rather than just staying static, as well as an active stool for sitting/leaning better.I appreciated the guidelines, and the way that they give some info on ways of sitting that are better (though I don't believe they discuss ‘active sitting' either).

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”

Oh, fine, Aciman. Just go ahead and murder me. I love being killed. Nevermind that I have to drive my mother to the airport in the morning.

Good book. Aciman packs some practically transgressive intimacy into the relationship. ‘B.' and all the details, and the plot are solid and don't feel like they're just props. Elio's experience, and what we see of Oliver's, is real and honest. When they're together everything is beautiful and nothing everything hurts. for me: 3 stars = good, tasty book. 4 stars = jesus, it was amazing. 5 stars = i don't deserve to have read it, my life has been altered, etc.

Not sure what to say about this one. I forced myself to a little over the halfway mark, then stepped away from it for about half a year. After that it was okay. It's hard to tell if I just started to enjoy it more after being more familiar with Dostoevsky when I picked it up again, or if it just got better. Either way, this novella left me feeling like it could have been half its already short length. Wading through Mr. Goliadkin's thought and speech was my greatest difficulty, even in light of trying to evaluate what Dostoevsky was doing with the story. Really, say, that aspect was, if you please, truly nightmarish, sir or madam. It was difficult, but definitely had a cool interplay of ideas. Self, society, perception, guilt, and I'm sure many more things–I won't pretend to understand it–are explored through our hero, Mr. Goliadkin, and his friend in The Double. If nothing else its strange composition and plot makes the reader think.

Somewhere between three and four stars(Don't really want to give it the 4 because two big aspects of it were a bit weak). Pretty prose and a tightly woven story, backed by themes of life, art, time, and relationships. Some prose seemed a little recycled or overused, but that's a small fault in a well written novel. The biggest problem Station Eleven has is that it has maybe one character that I actually cared about, and several that I only had to pay attention to because they were vehicles for elements of the story. It was Miranda. Overalll the book was creative in a lot of ways, especially considering the post apocalyptic setting that's so stale nowadays. Even so, that aspect of the novel was still kind of weak. I adored the parallel between the comics and life.

It was ok. It was a decently interesting story, with well written action, but most of the value of the book for me is in the connection to Mad Men. I thought there was a bit too much deliberation on the whole situation as well(the repetitive testimony mostly).

one of my favorite stories as a young'un

I almost feel like the 5+ years it would take to be able to read this book in Japanese would be worth it.

My favorite thing about this book is that it doesn't get better. Dazai relentlessly builds on the inborn suffering the narrator holds–the locus of which seems to be his existence itself. Of course, the irony of this man that builds a mask and rots away internally–until even his façade crumbles–is that his struggles are human through and through.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki was enjoyable but admittedly somewhat stale. This book is somewhere between “I liked it” and “it was ok,” so 2-2.5 stars I guess. Its similarities to [b:Norwegian Wood 11297 Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386924361s/11297.jpg 2956680] and [b:South of the Border, West of the Sun 17799 South of the Border, West of the Sun Haruki Murakami https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1443685506s/17799.jpg 1739145] factor into the enjoyment of the book if you make reading Murakami a habit(which I have), so I imagine it's a better experience if it's your first time with him. If it's not, I do feel that this book is pretty much worth the quick read despite its issues and ironic empty/flat feeling.Colorless is good in that Murakami weaves a web of themes and symbols and emotions that are easy to identify with in it(at least personally)–loneliness, torrid yet fickle human relationships, insecurity, the experience of reality and time. However, Murakami kind of pushes the envelope with the indecipherable happenings and the circular, somewhat useless path of Tsukuru in Colorless. Some parts of the “web,” unfortunately, simply seem meaningless when I think they're supposed to be another “ball of mysterious symbolism.”Let me explain more of the similarities between Colorless, [b:Norwegian Wood 11297 Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386924361s/11297.jpg 2956680] and [b:South of the Border, West of the Sun 17799 South of the Border, West of the Sun Haruki Murakami https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1443685506s/17799.jpg 1739145]. Spoiler alert? I tried to be vague. I don't know how much similarity to other works should count against a book, but here are some major ones that I noticed. If I went into the protagonists themselves, there'd be a lot more. (NW = Norwegian Wood, SBWS = South of the Border, West of the Sun, CTT = Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki)- NW: ambiguous ending involving a phone call from a girl that the protagonist desires a relationship(to the end of marriage, presumably) with.- NW/SBWS: music ‘theme' song that is ridiculously present in the novel - NW/SBWS: “special person” strongly linked to “special song” (“Norwegian Wood” in NW; “South of the Border” and “The Star-Crossed Lovers” in SBWS; “Le Mal du Pays” in CTT)- NW: older protagonist flashbacks to life as a lonely student in Tokyo with like one friend- NW: loss of friend circle due to traumatic event- NW/SBWS: protagonist seems to connect with women on an especially deep level, even if he has close male friends. Tsukuru mentions this himself. - NW: freaky story from friends, involving piano(mysterious piano player in CTT, lesbian pedophilic incident in NW)- NW: mentally unstable piano teachers- NW: remote retreat-like location- NW: sexual, sleep-interrupting, night ‘apparition' from close friend- NW: friend that protagonist is living with disappearsBonus: I just picked up [b:The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327872639s/11275.jpg 2531376] and I swear, I've seen this one line in every novel I've read so far: “I lifted my cup and took a sip of my now lukewarm coffee”.

A succinct, masterfully written novella true to its title. Tolstoy brings so much humanity into the story and characters, revealing all the things people notice and think but never speak about. Reminds me of Our Town a bit. Both are slightly removed from our time, but remain completely relevant. Ivan Ilych begs the reader to look at themselves and their world, what they care about and the consequences of their choices. The selfish perspectives we all seem to be stuck with are exposed, and their fruit is as ugly as you'd expect.

I really enjoyed it, so much that I'm eager to start a longer work of his. Gotta ease my way into War and Peace with Revelations or something.

The Martian is a fine idea. It is a pretty massive failure of a literary work though. The only good part is the science–and even that gets dry after a while.

This is another book that did not live up to its potential. Here we have a man alone on a planet, but the only time he openly acknowledges this is in passing compared to how much talk of water reclaimers there is in the book. Mark doesn't have any more depth than the paper his journals have been printed on–unfortunately that is the case with every other character as well.

The overarching themes are supposed to be resilience and humans-looking-out-for-each-other and hope. Weir literally spells it out on the last page, opting to flood the preceding pages with tiring jokes and nary a hint of artful prose. He misses a lot, and opened up about his weak writing online when the book became decently popular.

The Martian was an opportunity for Weir to explore the loneliness and despair vs. hope in Mark. He could have put Mark in some real danger, threaded tension into the work. Instead, everything goes jolly well(pretty much) and the man has ONE episode of slight hopelessness. None of the other characters really matter and could have been robots. All that being said, the science did keep me reading earnestly for some time, it was just impossible to keep up. The more I read, the more I realized it was going to stay 99% shallow and repetitive throughout the whole book.

To be fair to Weir, he did self-publish this and probably didn't expect to be scrutinized. Better luck next time.

decided to actually read it. ive been vegan for a few years so i've heard about it a ton, but still learned some things (like the fact that a lot of what i remember is actually people misquoting/misunderstanding).

One of my first favorite not-child books.

Baldwin's honesty and smarts on full display here. Can be exhaustingly verbose at times, but everything I read in here was worth it. His analyses of America are absolutely cutting and struck a chord in me that I wasn't even really aware of.

I would like to make it known that the notes(they're not even footnotes, which I guess is a Library of America thing) for this edition are honestly not great, which is surprising, as it was edited by Toni Morrison. Not sure what happened there.

The funniest Shakespeare I've read, I think–several lines had me cracking up. The reading was easier than say, Hamlet, but really enjoyable and fun with all the rhyming(Bard's got bars). The poetry really added to the atmosphere and magic in the story. I've happened upon some accidental quest to read all of Shakespeare's plays, and this was definitely a worthwhile stop on the way. I love the juxtaposition of all the elements of the play; as usual there's a lot of great insight into humans and their relationships to be found within.

I'm not sure what to say. For a long time I've avoided works on war, especially World War II. As a student in middle school, I read [b:Number the Stars 47281 Number the Stars Lois Lowry https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1370917812s/47281.jpg 2677305], [b:A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier 43015 A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Ishmael Beah https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1436596718s/43015.jpg 825414], [b:The Hiding Place 561909 The Hiding Place Corrie ten Boom https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1320418824s/561909.jpg 878114], and a few other books of that ilk. They always got to me, especially A Long Way Gone, but then I just stopped reading them. So I haven't gotten to Night until now.That was a mistake. Wiesel's account of the nightmare he went through gripped me painfully. The whole thing was honest and raw. Certain sections evoked a darkness and weight that I truly can't imagine. Night was an unforgettable read.

I mostly lost interest about halfway through, as that's around where Linux is released. There's some explanation of the way Linux really came into the market after that, but if you're just in it for the story of Linux development (and not so much Torvalds's biography) and tech-industry happenings, it might be better to look up some articles on the subjects.

strangely heavy-handed. the flurry of fanaticism and abuse recounted is convincing but...that's about it.

First piece of Hindu/Indian literature I've ever read, very interesting.

the style is intermittently interesting or pretty, to me, but on the whole feels forcefully simplified and gets repetitive. Jurek's an amazing runner, obviously, and it's nice to pick up some advice on what vegan runners eat when i'm trying to be a runner again, and i'm vegan too. he does frequently come off as self-aggrandizing and haughty about his diet and accomplishments compared to his peers. i won't judge his personal life, but there are some odd aspects about the way he decided to talk about particular parts of it (his ex-wife and Dusty).

it's one of those books where once you've read 10% of it you've encountered all the author will do, really, and the rest is just repeating whatever their formula is. if you're interested enough and can get through i quickly enough, it's worth a beach/bed read.

Desdemona: unlucky

Again, can't give much of a review because I'm blazing through these books for class lol. That and I think the level of analysis for a class and the mode of reading is different from what I'd think and feel if it was not assigned work. Still, I thought this was really good, with masterful, stunning lines from Shakespeare as usual. Iago was fantastic. What stood out and made Othello a play that shot to the top of my favorites list(for Shakespeare, anyway) is the intimacy in the relationships between characters. It's realistic, yet unreal. Many other plays seem to have unnecessary parts or sprawl all over the place, but Othello is probably the smallest-scale Shakespeare I've read yet.

Extraordinarily powerful, even for Shakespeare. Wish I didn't rush through most of it.

Funny, as it's supposed to be. Was a really pleasant gift from the reddit gift exchange.

Need to think, re-read, and go over this a bunch before reviewing(and write a paper), but I thought it was fantastic. Why are Irish writers so good?