Hannah
a very fun read/listen!! dan stevens doing a million different accents made me so happy.
the book aged surprisingly well for being almost 100 years old(!) and im excited to read more of her work!
4.5/5
i couldn't put it down!! really enjoyed, maybe cause I'm a sucker for stories about angry women in greek mythology. all the characters felt really fleshed out and well written.
minus 0.5 stars, cause even tho i understand why the book ended where it did, i would've liked to see a bit more reasoning behind why her children decide to do what they do later.
also i looked up the author and she's younger than me
all of this feels so familiar to how i spent my own university days—reading derrida and watching la jetee and generally trying desperately to be cool and nonchalant at the same time—which is probably how i finished this in a day.
the book meandered sometimes but in a way that felt paralleled his journey with grief, and i didn't mind it so much. also felt a deep appreciation and envy for the fax exchanges hua had with his dad. all in all a really tender and thoughtful read.
i grew up with kate beaton's comics and had no idea she was canadian. i also had no idea how sad this book was going to be.
as a second-gen korean and ex-english major who was obsessed with folk tales and greek mythology growing up, i really appreciated how the author wrote about both, often simultaneously. 대장금 and 제비 were not things i expected to see mentioned going in, but they touched such a deep part of my identity that i honestly think this book would've changed my life if i had read it when i was younger.
also really liked the nuanced cultural representation that addressed the racism and discrimination dealt BY asian americans in addition to the racism they experienced, specifically in regards to class inequality and economic exploitation.
there's a couple points in the book that meander but in the end it pulls itself together into a really strong unique collection. would recommend!!!
really liked this one! reads like a smarter Normal People, albeit a little reductive and preachy in some of its cultural observations (specifically about appropriation).
minus .5 stars because the Korean hanafuda game is “go-stop”, not “stop-go”, and “bong cha” isn't actually a feasible korean name—both a quick google fact-check away.
i didn't know this book was about time travel so i spent the first part being very confused
really enjoyed throughout the whole 550-page affair (and that's saying something because i cannot concentrate!!). refreshing pov on the dark academia genre, and a nice gateway read for someone who needs a crash course on colonialism 101. sometimes a bit heavy handed on the ragebait (the explanatory footnotes often read like a buzzfeed listicle—‘These 10 Outrageously Racist Things 19th Century Britain Has Done Will Have You Reeling!' and letty as a character was at times such a caricature of White Woman that it took me out) but I'm glad books like this exist. especially nowadays.
Has a rocky start and picks up decently at the halfway point until the end, where it fizzles back out.
The writing is sometimes poetic, mostly flowery, but overall does well to distract away from the flaws of time travel narratives (and from the fact that you have no empathy for these characters). Some parts are actively bad and really cringe—you can almost feel how active on 2009 tumblr the authors were.
2.75/5
quaint, if a bit saccharine. For such a short book I kept thinking it could've been shorter. I didn't really feel much attachment to the characters (it feels like no one has a set personality and I didn't really understand the motivation for the protagonist) and the last part felt like a weird lecture in existential nihilism more than anything. maybe a helpful book for some, but I didn't feel much for it.
[murakami describing a woman]
me: I swear to god if he talks about her nipples
murakami: —and her perfect nipples reminded me of the 4th aria from mozart's concerto no 9 and i had the biggest hard on of my li—
