bianca
“This not be the world you think it to be.”“Then what world is it?”“Don't you know? 'Tis a world of laughter, a world of tears. But mostly, it's a world of tears.”
— I wanted to give this a 5, because it was a really good portrayal of mental illness. It's very insightful and you'd know that the author really put a lot of thought in writing it. My only problem is it wasn't that engaging, so it made me somewhat disinterested.
It was her scream which kept me up. The sound of it spoke of everything no one dared to talk about: what the soldiers were doing; young and afraid and separated from their families. It spoke of the things everyone was to keep silent about all through the three and a half years we belonged to the Japanese, and of the decades after.
A historical fiction set around the Japanese occupation, depicting the horrors women forced into sexual slavery had to go through. It's cruel enough what they endured during the war, but to suffer from scars and discrimination after is even more heartbreaking.
2019 Popsugar Reading Challenge
01. A book becoming a movie in 2019
The truth is complicated. There's no way one person can ever know everything about another person.
Guilt is a burden, so forgive yourself for the mistakes.
A book about going home and what it means to be a family. Just when I thought I wouldn't love this book as much, my beloved author proves me wrong. How does she write about families, friendships, and love so simply & yet so affecting? I can never get enough
“How can I be happy?” she asks with anguish. “To get this baby, my brother had to die. Do you understand?”“And to get this family, my best friend had to die,” he says gruffly. “So aren't we both a sorry pair?”
✨ reread ✨
About a family trapped in their grief and how the people around them are also affected by it.
I think I loved reading this even more the second time around. The lines and dialogues are just so plainly beautiful.
There could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? She had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
What a rich and absorbing multigenerational family saga about the immigration experience of Koreans in Japan spanning decades starting from the Japanese occupation. The discrimination and rootlessness they felt living in a country that would never accept them... my heart hurt.
Can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?
My favorite stories: Drive My Car, Yesterday, Kino
I know that, sometimes, you wish someone would just say the words you needed to hear because, sometimes, you don't even know what those words are.
“I was born seventeen years ago. Do you think people have noticed that I'm around?”“I notice when you're not. Does that count?”
✨ reread ✨
Sometimes the only way we can save ourselves is by allowing ourselves to be who we truly are instead of what we think we should be.
I forgot how funny yet sad this was. My heart was broken and put together again all in less than 300 pages.
Dreams died, but the nightmare of reality went on.
A murder mystery thriller that's neither mysterious nor thrilling. It started out good though.
They may be complete strangers, with different lives and different problems, but there in that examination room they are measuring sadness the same way. They are measuring it in loss.
How does Gayle Forman write stories set in one day so well?
Perhaps it's time to make some new friends.
A mystery thriller about a group of friends on holiday where one of them winds up dead, but these people didn't feel like friends at all, which I guess is the point
It never happens the way we want. Never.
Like Shelter, this is also about a Korean immigrant family and the domestic abuse that ensues in their struggle to fit in. I liked the writing in this one more especially the way the narrator's voice has evolved from age 4 up until her teen years. Good read.
There was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.
Aptly titled as such to both mean the place in the novel and also the theme of inferiority/insecurity in oneself, in particular, from being a woman wanting to be free and to be seen, and thinking that the only way for that is through the eyes of men, sets out to do so only to find out that she does not have a place in that world at all. An exploration of art, truth, self, womanhood, male privilege, and more. Short but impressively dense in what it is able to say and not say. This is as literary as literary fiction can get.
It was reassuring, the people coming home, the dull white noise, the sparkle of stars that may have already died, while their light was still on its way to Earth. Listening and breathing it all in, I thought how inconsequential I was in the design.
I liked the beginning but then it turned into just another cancer book and about two people “saving” each other. And just as there was instalove, the ending was rushed as well
I know you would have liked for things to be different, for me to say the words that would have reassured you, but I could not, and I never knew how to talk anyway. In the end, I tell myself that you understood. It was love, of course.
Of a love kept in secret for fear of shame and more. I think the original French title translates to “stop with your lies,” but I like how the English title can both mean lie as in be untrue with me and also mean to lie down together, which fits the book's theme.
The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn't actually changed at all.
What a harrowing book. I don't know whether I am sadder or angrier at how unfair this world we live in is towards women, especially in certain countries like Korea. The film adaptation of this was good, but this book hits even harder. That there was a point when “checking the sex of the fetus and aborting females was common practice, as if ‘daughter' was a medical problem.” .........really sickening.
When we want something badly enough, do we not convince ourselves that it is meant for us? When we fall in love, do we not think it inevitable that the other person must return the feeling?
What a lovely collection of short stories, with the stories revolving around the life and experiences of the protagonist. My favorites: Patriciang Payatot, The Magic Glasses, Sweets for the Sweet
But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or, worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out girls or ladies. The endless, echoing use of she and her, miss and ma'am. Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning.
— A magical story with beautiful prose and a powerful message about claiming your gender, name and identity. 5 out of 5 moons and roses!
People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.
— While I liked the central story, I wasn't really fond of the way it was executed, what with the fairy tale story mirroring the real events in the book and all. I just couldn't get into it.
Ten little Indian boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.Nine little Indian boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight.Eight little Indian boys travelling in Devon; One said he'd stay there and then there were seven.Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.Six little Indian boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.Five little Indian boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four.Four little Indian boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.Three little Indian boys walking in the Zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two.Two little Indian boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one.One little Indian boy left all alone; He went and hanged himself and then there were none.
— Brilliant and compelling murder mystery!
The crown is not the prize—I am.
— What an awesome badass bitch! Never rooted for a mean girl this much before! I need a sequel!