Eva
Okay I might hit upon my guilty pleasure lit. Workplace stories of women in men-dominated fields. Of the slight chicklit flavor where they end somewhat happy and are not too depressing.
There's something so alluring and revolting about the simplicity of a competitive world that only cares about money, power and prestige. This one's a particular downward spiral as it not only eats up the protagonist's private life and sense of decency, but there's also drugs, adultery and violence against women.
What a unique style of writing, it pulls you along, like a travel log, quick-paced and pragmatic, in little vignettes full of dialogue. Flying over years and decades, and an Italy in transformation. The family emerges as idiosyncratic characters with their ticks and charms. The amount of footnoted characters and events shows how woven into Italian politics and culture the author's family was.
In 1972 the West Bank has been under Israeli occupation for 5 years. A son returns home with the intention to help liberate his country. Yet what he encounters are family and friends, who have learned to live under the occupation out of necessity. Their only option for making a living is to work in factories in Israel. Which is seen as a great shame to the youth, who idolizes imprisoned freedom fighters.
A portrait of the struggles of conscience and survival, for a nation under occupation. Written nearly 5 decades ago. While, almost nothing has changed since then.
A book that's hard to stay focused on while your mind flits to your own real-life working experience upon reading the many ways system thinking can improve the way we strategize and work together. A bunch of this isn't new if you've read about cybernetics or system theory before, but I really enjoyed the segments on personal mastery and on shared vision. Both are such hard problems in this nonlinear world. It might not seem intuitive how to extrapolate from the more straightforward industry examples mentioned in the book, but what I take from this is, that it takes continuous analysis and reflection, and a long-term attitude. Inspiring!
Senge's five disciplines of learning organizations:
* Personal Mastery
* Mental Models
* Shared Vision
* Team learning
* Systems Thinking
I really enjoyed this novel from a Dagestani writer about the clash of modern-day and tradition in the dusty landscape of rural Dagestan. Djinns are exorcised and curses cast at wedding banquets, while in the presence of smart phones and office jobs waiting back for you in Moscow. We follow along through the eyes of the two protagonists who have escaped their home village, and only indulge and participate in all the customs for their family's sake.
There seem to be multiple layers to how one can read and interpret this story. There is the levity of the marriage plot, the meeting of the maybe-lovers, the amusing bickering and meddling parents, the hilarious old customs. But at the same time there are the misogynistic views of most of the young rural men, the quite scary threat of the stalker, and so many stories devaluing women.
And then there's the political and the religious, the constant rumor mill, the encroaching fundamentalism, the dueling mosques, the corrupt politicians. There's defamations and murders, and everyone's supposed to pick a side. Tied into this, with a hint of magical realism, is the mysticism of Sufism and the Islamic figure of Khidr.
All in all this novel feels carefully crafted, with hints sprinkled throughout.
Yes, the ending felt abrupt. But, I also don't know what else would have been a fitting ending for this story.
A roadtrip from Bosnia to Austria reunites old best friends that had a falling out ages ago. Sara and Lejla had the popular literary girl friendship: they met as kids, spent all waking time together, developed a codependency where one is the leader, the other the follower, which leads to jealousy, toxicity and broken feelings. Add to that the cultural and political tensions of the Bosnian war. Now, after years apart, all those pent-up memories and feelings come out again.
I was all game for this, and loved the setup in the first half, but then so much was actually left unspoken, and the novel went down a rabbit hole which felt like a style exercise? I wanted to shake Sara to be a bit more insistent on getting truths, and all the pieces of Lejla presented to us, didn't feel like a cohesive whole. I also wanted more historical context. But nevertheless, I enjoyed a lot about this.
So, all she wanted, was for Sara to write a book about her?
A masterful novella about a rotten marriage, that questions how complicit you are if you do nothing to combat evil in order to keep up the appearances. Didn't produce the magic for me other Haushofer novels managed to in the past ([b:Die Wand 1132217 Die Wand Marlen Haushofer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597578944l/1132217.SY75.jpg 573687], [b:Himmel, der nirgendwo endet 586855 Himmel, der nirgendwo endet Marlen Haushofer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1176052585l/586855.SY75.jpg 573690]), but it clearly is a very well executed character study.
A tapestry of Brazilian lives. In the midst of them is Euridice, an ambitious woman full of initiative and talent, born into the wrong place and time. Women in Brazil's 1950ies are meant to stay at home and take care of the kids. They're not meant to develop passions and start companies from their living room. Meanwhile her sister Guida falls in love with a deadbeat, and needs to claw her way out of poverty through sheer resilience and an unwavering spirit.
A playful and joyous novel full of charm, as it ever expands from one character to include the fates and family tragedies of others. I like the rather neat way it opened doors into all the character stories. Even if in the end there felt like too many side characters and I just wanted to return to Euridice.
Un histoire tragique et un crime de passion dans la neige au Quebec au 19e siecle. La protagoniste est dans un mariage malhereux avec un mari violent et infidele. Elle tombe amoureuse d'un autre and finit par conspirer pour assassiner son mari. Il ya beaucoup de desespoir, de long voyages a travers les tempetes de neige en caleche, et du sang dans la neige.
Tout cela est raconte a la premiere personne comme des souvenirs de fievre pendant que la femme veille sur le lit de mort de son deuxieme mari. Au debut du livre j'ai eu du mal a comprendre quelle partie est la memorie, quelle hallucination, et out et quand tout s'est passe. C'est devenu plus structuré plus tard.
Singapore has a fascinating evolution, and this book feels like a teaser for that complicated history from colonisation to land reclamation to capitalist utopia and surveillance state. The book is set across the mid of the last century and follows a young boy who grows up in a fishing village, dabbles with left-leaning student unions, and then becomes a government worker involved with the land reclamation projects. At first look you think this is a nostalgic story about what you leave behind when you destroy your past, but thankfully the book is more complicated than that. Transformations are always good and bad. And childhood dreams and childhood loves are not always meant to become reality.
I enjoyed this, and yet I always wanted the book to give me more historic and political details.
A fantastic look at what it's like to be an allophone immigrant in a Quebec that is continuously occupied with language infights between its francophone and anglophone communities. That conflict is so rooted in its population, that anything language related becomes a hot button issue. And while Canada likes to praise itself for its multicultural values and welcoming attitude towards immigrants, recent political turns has Quebec closing up its borders even more.
Drimonis makes a wonderful case that multicultural histories, values, traditions ultimately enrich a society instead of diluting it. All one's different identities are layers and not fractions, contributing to a multi-lingual, more diverse and therefore richer community.
Canada is quite a new country, founded on immigration (and conveniently likes to forget the indigenous languages its British and French colonizers drowned out). Learning how to integrate and empathize with immigrants, how to avoid to ‘other' them, is a important challenge for many other older nations as well.
Fantastic book, very Montreal. Let me go out and buy my own copy now.
Big tech gives the illusion that everything can be accomplished with the power of computation. And yet no labor sector seems to have grown more in the last couple of years than the hidden away gig economy. Humans doing the tasks that code can't. Through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and similar platforms, they type, label, categorize, moderate, proofread, translate, flag and tag. They are the hidden power that helps span the gap across A.I.'s “last mile” problem. There's a big variety to gig work, with low-skills-required micro tasks on one end, and highly specialized freelance projects on the other end. What they have in common is, that worker and employer are connected through an API. Simplifying and dehumanizing the hiring process. Which comes with pros (no discrimination based on gender/religion/ethnicity) and cons (no security net). I love how working on these platforms seems to give a lot of women in patriarchal societies a way to achieve a level of independence. And women who are primarily caregivers, also can join the work force, due to gig work's flexibility in scheduling. This is a very well researched book based on lots of interviews and data surveys (luckily gig workers love filling out surveys AND getting paid for doing so). There are estimates that the on-demand gig-economy will employ 65% of the total workforce by 2055. I kept thinking of the portrayal of that in S.B. Divya's [b:Machinehood 54655515 Machinehood S.B. Divya https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595569254l/54655515.SY75.jpg 84737359].
Rich kid boarding schools of the late aughts means facebook stalking, vodka in vitamin bottles, mean girls, bisexual insecurities, secret blogspot diaries, the pleasures of English lit, spending way too much time worrying, drowning out worries with various drugs, kissing the right girl, but at the wrong moment, getting bullied, causing a huge scandal, expulsions, death.
Love me a good boarding school novel, so I enjoyed this. But the narrative level above the actual story - the journalist's voice - really took me out of the story, because of its borderline pretentious tone (you had to slow down your reading every time to adjust to grasp all the pompous sentences), and because it made you question what's real and what's made up.
Lock your doors, lock your blogs, don't do drugs, kids!
Looking at the today's economics of private prisons and the continuous escalation of media sensationalism, the book's premise of prisoner death matches, feels like a not-too-improbable future. It's Hunger Games meets American Gladiators meets Big Brother meets Battle Royal. Told through a kaleidoscope of maybe too many eyes.
There were a few instances where I wanted the book to just SPELL IT OUT instead of characters or the narration keeping things vague.
I also wanted more numbers! If every week or so almost half of the chain gangs die, there needs to be an intense supply chain of new fighters.
3.5 rounded down
A look at the high-risk high-reward world of investment banking, where clients are taken to strip clubs, and female coworkers are harassed, belittled and rarely promoted. And while the women take home millions, they take home fewer millions than their male counterparts. Time to start a club - the GCC - glass ceiling club. The rebels are clearly those in the lower ranks, while those women who managed to rise to the top, learned to avert her eyes and shut her mouth.
I could have done without the romance subplot, but at least appreciated that it chose a new path.
Could the financial crisis of 2008 be avoided by including more women into the (mortgage) risk-assessment teams?
I quite liked this, but it also leaves a slight sour feeling because you're supposed to root for this woman who takes home a year end bonuses of 3 million dollars and still stresses about how she can sustain the lifestyle she chose for her family.
After reading Cecilia Rabess' [b:Everything's Fine 62919844 Everything's Fine Cecilia Rabess https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1686091956l/62919844.SY75.jpg 89668943] I was curious about more fiction books about women in finance. Both Rabess and Henry have worked at Goldman Sachs, and ended up damning the money-obsessed world of investment banking in their writing. This one is bit more goofy, the villain becomes almost comical at the end, but it also made me laugh out loud a bunch (Tripp).
This book about a clumsy and neurotic 40 year old Swiss woman - winner of the Austrian book prize - was a bit of a struggle for me. At first the humour made me chuckle, but as the book is a lot chunkier than it should be, I soon got rather annoyed at the chaos magnet woman and her endless quirky thoughts. But by the end - with the end finally in sight - i made peace with it, and then enjoyed the anticipated wholesome messy-family reunion.
What I did enjoy about this book, is how it made me want to listen to the songs it mentioned.
Un recit sinueux d'observations et de reflexions, tandis que l'autrice voyage en sac a dos dans la France de 1951. Comme ce livre etait un cadeau, je l'ai fait jusqu'au bout, mais ce fut une corvee. Il y n'a pas beaucoup d'intrigues auxquelles s'interesser, evidemment. De Temps en temps, elle rencontre et reste dans un episode avec plusieur paysans, puis l'histoire devient soudainement plus qu'un journal intime. Mais, la plupart de temps, c'est juste un carnet de voyage plutot fastidieux.
1970ies Northern Ireland, violence between Protestants and Catholics is everywhere. If you're existing between the lines, you need to be careful. While fathers are beaten up and children being radicalized, a young school teacher falls for the wrong man.
This was straightforward and atmospheric, giving a good feel for the times, but at the same time it never really made me care about Cushla's and Michael's relationship. Davy and Tommy though, yes.
An absolutely magnificent portrait of a continent, a nation; a lament for the glory of the times gone by, the innocence lost, and a compassionate study of the drastic changes the two world wars brought onto the spirits of Europeans. Zweig writes a biography of Austria and Europe, from his youth in Vienna which was at the pinnacle of culture at the end of the 19th century, to his life in exile during WWII while his books were banned in his home country. With nostalgia he describes the end of the Habsburg empire, pictures how the whole continent was rich on progress, blind optimism and delusions of grandeur. And how nothing could be more contrasted than the reaction of the masses to the onset of two world wars. The first one, welcomed with enthusiasm and innocence. The second, feared with despair and grit, built on memories of the devastation of the last decades.
In between, Zweig chronicles his ascent to one of the most translated and famous writers of the time. His passion is a European community, he is a pacifist. He travels regularly, and spends time living in France, Germany and England. He adores and worships his fellow artists, seeks their friendship, collaborates and helps to promote and translate their works. Nothing in this book is more compassionate than his descriptions of his (all male) artist friends. I find it hard to believe one can find any one else today write such tender words about other men's physical and behavioral characteristics.
The coda to this biography is what's the saddest. Because Zweig and his wife committed suicide after he finished this manuscript. In 1942, in Brazil. Discouraged and broken from years of living in exile, fleeing a Europe anew in flames, nationless, witnessing the horrors of WWII, the horrors inflicted onto his fellow Jews.
A brilliant book, brilliantly written.