Eva
The gradual awakening of a housewife and mother in a very patriarchal mindset of 1940s Italy triggered through the reflective act of writing a diary. Her husband calls her ‘mamma', her son affectionally receives all the favors he asks for, while her daughter despairs her with her modern attitudes. Their small apartment has no space she can call her own, only in her diary she finds a refuge for her thoughts, as she slowly starts to question her role in her values and her relationships. Working in an office to contribute to the slim household income, she takes pleasure in feeling appreciated for her contributions. That, and her children starting adult lives of their own, contribute to her burgeoning desire for a self that's more than just wife and mother.
I'd say this book is a perfect execution. It shows how small transformative steps are, and how there's a constant push and pull between the old and the new, her internalized misogyny and her new sense of independence. Which is especially present in the way she treats her own children and their love stories.
Wonderful audiobook narration.
Of guilt and atonement, or the lack thereof if there's a war propaganda industry that prevents it. Same as in [b:Das achte Leben 22896424 Das achte Leben (Für Brilka) Nino Haratischwili https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407775304l/22896424.SY75.jpg 42466516] we meet characters spread across several timelines and between Russia (this time the focus is on Chechnya) and Germany. A dark secret from the Chechen War in the 1990s is haunting a Russian General, and as he meets “Katze”, who shares an uncanny similarity with a ghost of his past, he decides the time has come for a last reckoning. My second Nino Haratischwili, and it's again easy to fall into her stories, but I have to admit I would have preferred a shorter, more focused version of this particular tale. The characters are less likeable, which adds a lot more pressure on the plot, but it ultimately ends slightly lackluster. I was really disappointed when it was revealed that Nura *chose* her death. Making it seem the General had done her a favor. Together with Ada's suicide, there was a lack of female independence in this book.
Perfect audiobook narration. I had to laugh out loud multiple times in public.
Wenzel and Killer, best friends forever!
Despite this not being my kind of novel - I usually don't get drawn to quirky fun novels, let alone travelogues - I actually enjoyed this. It's warm without being cheesy, witty and occasionally very heartfelt. The part about the couple splitting up after 20 years, and those 20 years representing a success, and not a failure, was fantastic.
Tim O'Reilly draws us a map of a future where finally everyone realises that the evil is not technology itself, but the people in power who use technology for greed only, lacking any altruistic motives.
The book sits on the intersection of tech and economy, it talks about new technology-enhanced markets (uber, lyft, airbnb), but more importantly it draws a roadmap for how governments could learn from these new platforms. Become a platform itself, open up its data, speed up it's upgrades. Same as a software that's out on the market is constantly finetuned and debugged, government and its rules should constantly be finetuned and debugged. To fight those who are trying to game its system (like Google fighting the hackers).
I especially enjoyed the parts where O'Reilly focuses on the rottenness of the financial markets and how it leads to income inequality. He calls out the financial market with it's drive for constant shareholder value creation as the evil master algorithm. And criticises how big companies cash out on “thin value” (term coined by Umair Hague) which is any profit extracted through harm to others (tobacco industry, oil companies, unhealthy food, ..).
For anyone who fears that automation is going to eliminate most jobs, O'Reilly points towards all the challenges we are facing that could lead to the creation of so many new tech-supported work opportunities in the medical field, or combating climate control and it's effects.
I wish for a lot of CEOs to read this book and to have that soul-searching moment.
A novel based on the real lives of French surrealists and lovers Lucie Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who defied conventions and gender and recreated themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. We follow their lives from their first meeting and immediate attraction in adolescence, to the art scene Paris - including encounters with Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, and all the other surrealists I am ignorant of - to their resistance movement and subsequent incarceration during WWII, up until their last days. Their life is challenging, occasionally dark, but their bond is strong and never really in question. I enjoyed the unafraid intimacy and openness they shared, and I liked that the book stayed with them until old age.
What I'd like now, is a website that shows all the original photographs they took, and that Thomson wove into the narrative.
I enjoyed it, but I was never really swept up in it. Apart from Suzanne's touching quiet last years maybe. Therefore 3.5
About a shapeshifting little girl and heroes and villains and the roles they play. Super funny, smart and original. Blackheart and Goldenloin's nemesis/love was adorable.
Our everyday lives are more and more steered and regulated by technologies that are ultimately driven by a desire for profit, control and power. Greenfield's book stresses the need for a better understanding and more critical thought on these technologies surrounding us. He chooses today's most pervasive and innovative fields (smartphone, internet of things, augmented reality, digital fabrication, cryptocurrency, blockchain, automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence) and dedicates a chapter to each, analysing their impact on society. He extrapolates their trajectories into the future and picks apart how even the most idealistic designs would end up in thrall to political power-dynamics. His outlooks are mostly (but not exclusively) pessimistic, which makes sense considering the whole book is meant to be a big warning sign.
Basically - no technology will provide us a magic solution for creating a fair, nondiscriminatory, clean, conflict-free future, and we should all learn to be more critical when new tech innovations appear promising us these utopian futures.
Definitely an important and smart book. 4.5
Chinese writer Yu Hua reflects on Chinese culture and history in chapters grouped around 10 themes. He combines personal memories with public history and reflective thoughts. Published in 2010/2011 this is a fantastic portrait of the country's transformations over the last century.
We learn about the importance of big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution, and the starving for stories in a world that's limited to texts by Mao and Lu Xun. We learn about denunciation and self-criticism sessions in a culture where losing face is of substantial value, and 9-year olds send their teachers to the hospital as misbehavior and violence is legitimized by the revolution. We learn about the symoblism and open fights over official seals, and how the country's recent economic gains are produced by a government that shows no concern for individual lives. Since the Tiananmensquare massacre has supressed all internal voices for human rights, China seems to be driven only by making money. According to Hua, this economical progress and democratic regress has led to a breakdown of social morality. Modern China is a world where everything is pirated, everyone cons everyone, and fake news and scams are so common that they are socially accepted.
This book was first published in a French translation in 2010 and then published in Chinese in Taiwan in 2011. Naturally, this book is banned in China.
Incredibly propulsive and masterfully crafted, always puts you right into the moment, right into the heads of three people in modern-day India, whose lives are loosely tied together around a tragedy, and who resemble each other in their quest and passion to escape their socioeconomical and cultural circumstances.
A very scary portrait of India with its caste-system, religious discrimination, political corruption, exploitation of dreams, and yet we encounter in it people full of hope. This worked really well as an audiobook.
Slim, precise and haunting. Two narrations that focus on elements of the Israel/Palestina conflict. The past features an Israeli officer tasked with clearing a desert area from “intruders” (the resident bedouins), which culminates in the rape and murder of a young bedouin woman. The present features an Palestinian woman, who tries to learn more about this incident, while having to navigate the heavily restricted and dangerous zone. Both characters's narrations are detail oriented, detached and have a repetitive nature. The soldier's life is filled with a repetition of mundane tasks, while the other protagonist is slightly on the autism spectrum and pursuits her quest in a slightly obsessive way. Yet, despite this setup, this is not a true-crime investigation, instead the story meanders, and then barely perceptibly ties the two stories together with ephemeral moments, sensations, unfortunes.
This worked really well. But had it been any longer, it probably would have dragged.
The Arctic terns are the birds with the longest migratory routes. Each year they fly all the way from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again. In this novel we're in a not-too-distant future that lost most of its wildlife. Our protagonist Franny is an ornithologist who wants to follow one of the last flocks of arctic terns on their arduous journey from pole to pole. Alongside birds and land creatures, most fish have gone extinct as well. Franny manages to secure herself a passage on one of the few leftover fishing boats. While strictly opposing all fishing like the rest of the nature-minded world, the promise of discovering rare fish swarms along the birds feeding route, is her ticket onto the boat.
Of people driven by a cause, an inner wilderness, that they can't shake. A very topical tale juxtaposing the people trying to save the planet, and those that get told they need to completely uproot their life and everything they know. I would have liked a bit more about the birds, and less about Franny's mysterious past and inner demons, but nevertheless, this was a wonderful read.
The fishing boat crew was fun, but felt forced like a perfectly diverse and interesting crew of characters selected for a TV show. Not real.
We live in a world where ‘man' is the default - the default body, the default gender, the default occupation - while half of the population count as exception or minority. The resulting discrimination is either deeply ingrained in culture or happens without awareness because of the gender data gap. We simply don't know how policy decisions in general favor men over women, because we don't gender-segregate the data.
- Women die more often in hospitals because procedures and medication are primarily tested on men.
- Equally sized bathrooms forget about the fact that women are generally the ones taking care of children and elders.
- Women receives more injuries in car accidents, because their bodies are NOT scaled-down versions of male crash test dummies.
- Clearing the roads before pavements on snow-days, helps ‘men' drive to work, while interrupting unpaid female work and leading to higher numbers of female injuries.
Some of these might be obvious, other might only lead to a 10% advantage of men over women. But these percentages are steady and never tip the other way.
Criado-Perez does a phenomenal job at showing us a variety of examples from all fields of life, supported with substantial data and references, while also keeping the book an engaging read.
Carlo Rovelli first takes apart our Newtonian and instinctual concept of time, and then builds it back up based on quantum and thermal time. He shows us how time is not (necessarily) a variable in our world, but how time -and space- emerge from the relations between quantum events. There are some hard to grasp metaphysical leaps once in a while, but mostly the book is beautifully written, philosophical and lyrical exploration of time.
There's a special kind of magical state one enters when listening to a metaphysical book on audio on headphones, while walking through our world full people and objects and all its mundanities. Especially when the audiobook is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch with a beautiful voice and much grace.
I did listen to the audio book twice, attempting to pay better attention to the details on the 2nd time around, but all the metaphysical talk really invites me to get distracted with daydreaming. I was very intrigued with thermal time but won't even attempt to describe it here. I might have to get a hardcopy to be able to fully dig my teeth into that.
Apparently Mailhot started parts of this as fiction, and then later turned it into a memoir. Which could be intriguing, but for me just read as an overly-poetic sometimes-incoherent stream of consciousness. She deals with important heavy subjects, so I feel bad for not liking the style more.
2.5
We spent an evening with Peri, who has an eventful night in modern-day Istanbul, from getting mugged in the streets to attending a fancy dinner party with the business elite. She's slowly unravelling as an incident triggers her to remember her past. We learn about her upbringing of being confused and torn between her mother's unquestioning Muslim faith and her father's cynical secularism. And we learn about her experiences as a student at Oxford, where she meets the two other “daughters of Eve” - Shirin and Mona - who are also Muslim, but represent polar opposites. They are drawn together by a controversial yet charismatic Professor, who's seminar on God challenges students of different faiths to engage in a dialogue beyond religion, by focusing on the elemental question of God.
I really enjoyed some of Shafak's writing about the dynamics, the violence, the wealth, the hypocrisies .. of modern day Turkey/Istanbul. But then it maybe got too plot focused, and fell a bit apart towards the end. It built so much towards a reveal at the end, but then didn't spend enough time in Oxford to really convince us of the professor's allure, or the bond between the three girls. Some elements also felt unnecessarily dramatic (the brother, the ending). And the praise of uncertainty, of being in the middle, and confused, felt a bit too over-designed.
The protagonist of this novel becomes addicted to reading books while lacking the intelligence to properly understand them. This novel itself is foremost wild, incredibly smart, imaginative, hilarious and overall constructed on so many layers, that I no doubt missed a lot of meaning as well :)
It's a dystopia set in a Russia after a blast, where society progressed backwards into superstituion-driven poverty that runs on trading and eating of mice, and more resembles a pre-industrial age than a future.
There's brilliance in this novel, and yet it felt hard to read it in that ‘enlightened' state. I felt like drifting in and out of appreciating all the wondrous things it does.
What to do if you're having a hard time getting over your ex, while also being stuck with your PhD thesis on Sappho? You move to L.A., join a support group for love-obsessed women, try Tinder sex, and eventually fall in love with a merman. This book is a wild mix of fun and weird, mixed with darkness, depression and magical realism. Tonally and arc-wise it reminded me a lot of Ottessa Moshfegh's [b: My Year of Rest and Relaxation 36203391 My Year of Rest and Relaxation Ottessa Moshfegh https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1513259517s/36203391.jpg 55508660]. How it perfectly captures an aspect of modern life by taking it to an extreme. And yes, there's lots of merman sex. Not just the erotic kind. Also, everything is very female, and fishy, and wet, and ocean and vagina related. Really, there are UTIs and period sex and yeast infections. Without being too gross. The good kind of gross!
Two young Austrian punks sneak across the border to experience the Italy of the 80ies without a cent in the pocket. Live every day like it's your last. Sex, drugs and punk. Italian restaurants feeding the poor, and Italian men incapable of understanding ‘no'. There's a LOT of darkness in there, but somehow Lust manages to leave you with a love for independence and adventure.
This was a fascinating read. It's scifi, by a woman, and originally written in (Quebecois) French, so it's ticking a lot of my reading interest boxes. It has a dreamy not-from-this-era vibe (originally published in 1981), I kept hearing cheesy scifi synth sounds while reading it, and felt similarities with the mysticism of Dune. It's all the inner monologues, the philosophizing, the interest in emotions and abstract myths. The novel has feminism, cyborgs, complicated incestuous relationships, and is tackling subjects like gender transformations, genetic manipulation, and how to secure the future of humanity without falling into the traps of societal engineering or continuous propagation of violence.
I might try to find the sequel in French.
There's a kinship between this book and Elif Batuman's [b:The Idiot 30962053 The Idiot Elif Batuman https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474782288s/30962053.jpg 51577226]. Both have young female protagonists who just entered adulthood, and both built heavily on conversations (the face-to-face and the email/messenger kind) to show the frail and complex dynamics in human communication. While Conversations with Friends lacks Batuman's wit and somewhat the likeability of its heroine, it does add a very seductive dose of sexy. Despite the characters not being the easiest to like due to their slightly pretentious vibe, I quickly warmed up to them and was pulled in (3-day read!). A lot of the story deals with the facades they (we) built to hide true emotions and when to let down those shields to let others in. The core relationships in focus are Frances and Nick, who start an affair based on attraction and sex and then very slowly transform it into something more, and Frances and Bobbi, who are long-time-friends (exes? friends? something completely new?) and share a deep love and co-dependency. I also thought the dynamic between Frances and her parents was particularly touching (I loved her mom). I was intrigued by where the story took Nick, it felt like a novel kind of character. One that is somewhat condemned for his passivity (Melissa's angry email!!) yet also showed a self-awareness and acknowledgement that seems to allow for every sort of character. I am still slightly perplexed but also charmed by that last phone conversation and it's outcome. Another surprising detail that I very much appreciated was how Rooney wove endometriosis into the plot.
A sceptic sets out to tell the story of transhumanism by meeting all the dedicated and odd front runners of the movement. We meet Max More who owns 1 of only 4 cryogenics facilities in the world, neuroscientist Randal Koene who ‘s working towards brain uploading techniques, Nick Bostrom who's worried about [b:Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies 20527133 Superintelligence Paths, Dangers, Strategies Nick Bostrom https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400884046s/20527133.jpg 37286000], Tim Cannon of Grindhouse Wetware who hacks technology into his own body, gerontologist Aubrey De Grey who is researching ways to keep our bodies from aging, and Zoltan Istvan who ran for president in 2016 to raise awareness for Transhumanism. In between there are short primers on the singularity and robots, and a detour to a DARPA Robotics Challenge. The whole book is an outsider's look in, and you never get the feeling that O'Connell truly wants to understand the perspectives of the people he meets. It definitely is a very different book to the usual overviews of technological/futuristic movements, and I doubt many of the people featured in it, enjoy it, as he doesn't shy away from cheekily insulting the oddballs. Despite that the book still gives a great overview of the movement, and the subtle jokes combined with his own musings on death and immortality add up to a very entertaining read.