Jules
Constant motion - slow at first, little worlds moving down Bond Street, reflecting and refracting parts of each other as the torch of narration passes between them. At the center of it all Mrs. Dalloway, both very young and very old (indeed every age) in the middle of her life; hands and feet, sensing and moving and doing. And the interactions, with Lucy or Peter Walsh... I can't even begin to take that apart, look under the hood to understand how it beats with life.
Started as a library loan and knew within 20 pages i would have to own a copy. I'll spare everyone (primarily myself) and try not to Say Something; I can only recommend.
Marketing copy aside, this book is 100% about how to memorize lists of things. Within that there are some useful nuggets, like the Major System, but nothing I couldn't find through Google for free. Also, who has time to invent and remember little stories about their shopping list when you can just write it down? So yeah, you're not gonna be able to learn French in 48 hours, no shit, but you can memorize a bunch of French phrases. That's how they get away with the title and unfortunately there's no more to this book than that.
Thoreau's skill in writing on full display, without much of the bullshit that drags down Walden. highly recommend reading this before that.
Well, it's very insightful. I can see why it's considered a classic and that there is a lot to dig into here, but it's not one of those classics that really pulled me in on its own terms. I'd read a section and be like, “Huh, neat” or “Cool” and then walk away. There's something to be said for a book you can meditate on in pieces. Lots of it is elegant, even moving. “Desires are already memories.” “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past.” “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it.”
But I find that concentrated doses of postmodern philosophization can have an, um, soporific effect. This is not a “morning commute” book, which is unfortunately how I read it. There's a time and place for listening to a sage speak in riddles. Also I don't care to devote the necessary brain power to figure out if the rich orientalist fantasy here is subversive or just an indulgent setting for the philosophical games. So, I fold.
read it in 4 hours and will not try to review yet (it's 1am) but this book is very very very good and you should probably read it
great world-building, but god, i wish his characters would stop trying to be funny. i gave up because the dialogue was just.... so bad.....
Picked this up as a reader of poetry, not a writer, and found it enriching. Some of it was familiar or intuitive but all of it was worth reading. Something to understand my response to poetry, which is all gelatinous feeling at the edge of the mind. Oh I knew the literary devices, but it starts to feel like taxidermy after a bit. Mary Oliver has something to say about how a poem breathes. I needed that.
Not as insightful as it wants to be. Most of its successes come from synthesis of and reference to better works - Blake, Borges, Bowie - and from good imagery, and good prose. Good enough that less than 3 stars feels dishonest, as I did keep reading. But it's skin-deep. The well-read wrappings give it a sense of intellectualism, but the actual story is shallow and under-realized, somewhere between a soap opera and angsty fan fiction, plagued by plot holes and random racist asides. There's a really infuriating tendency to code morality with looks, where we're always hearing how the good guys are hot and smart and don't wear makeup while evil Mercedes is bald and looks like an animal. Also, love how indigenous practices of magic are constantly invoked but we don't get any characters who are even dark skinned til the very end, and that character is abandoned.
The main characters sucked. I love it when characters are assholes, but these particular assholes read like a teenager's diary. Rosario is a blatant self-insert and her perspective felt like reading someone's Pinterest board of 1960s London. And everything about Juan and Gaspar felt so childish and repetitive. No build up, no payoff, no change or even a clear refusal to change, no poetry in the repetition, just... whining? Forever? Occasionally there was an interesting side character - Vicky, Pablo, Betty, Laura – or a moment of narration that felt almost intelligent, like the start of Part 4. But we were always dragged back to the miserably stupid plot driving this thing, which speaks so eloquently about resistance and cycles of abuse but cannot really evoke them in any meaningful way. The ending is not worth spoiling but it is a total dud.
I'd say there's promise here, but honestly, I walked away feeling like the author had nothing to say. Would not recommend, unless you don't care about substance and just like gothic vibes, in which case, go right ahead. But comparing this to Bolano or Garcia Marquez is a joke.
(Also, stupid nitpick: At one point she writes “Frankenstein's monster could say the same thing, if [it was capable of thought.” Uh... he literally was? That was kind of the whole point?? Did you not read the book???)
4.5/5. Finished in a few hours of steady reading. First off this one is funny as hell, Pratchett can always make me do that and I needed it last night. It's also brutally accurate satire, almost hard to read, sidestepping cliches to make some canny observations about human nature, specifically why people are drawn in to supporting cynical schemers like the Supreme Grand Master, how those people will turn around and justify snivelling subservience to just about any evil to keep a position of relative power. I won't unpack the politics but you get the drift.
At any rate I'm keeping one star out for honesty about the fact that the writing style is sort of conversational and indirect. If you've read a Pratchett book you know how it is and it's part of the fun, but I can see some people not vibing with it. Also, Lady Ramkin's portrayal might come across as problematic at first but she's not written off as gag, she's got a clear character beyond “big intimidating man-lady” and it's surprisingly nuanced.
I came for a fun, dark queer romp about a violent she-ape and got half an okay book that devolved into smug nonsense with a weirdly ecofascist undertone. The writing is choppy, less than half the jokes land, every beat gets dragged out too long, and looking back it feels stapled together. The moralizing logic of the 80s slasher is alive and well here. As a gross hairy queer myself I thought I'd like Patricia but she gets so little development compared to her kills that by the end I was like, they should've shot that god damn ape.
Two stars for the concept and for the heart it showed in about the first half - and in some very sweet love letters - before its mean streak took over. And because it was quick.
Also: don't be led astray by reviewers acting like this is super zany. There's one crazy surreal thing in here and it's on the cover. Which is cool, but like, I was expecting a lot weirder from the reviews.
“The skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures.”
“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
Dream-reading. Words that waltz off the page, spin you around, words that make you sit up straight. Anarchy, not disorder. At one point read while walking down the street. I don't like to overexpose these things. It's very good.
I've changed my mind on 1984 substantially since I read it in high school, which was about 2013. At the time I was turned off by the blunt messaging and allegorical nature, which at that point I tended to interpret as flat or one-dimensional. In an old review from years ago I wrote; "There's little 1984 says that hasn't been said better since. Most of its insight boils down to catchphrases that you can apply to any political agenda you see fit. It's a weird mix of blatant, artless messaging and a Promethean moral that even right wingers can take to say 'hurr durr government bad' - which I know Orwell wouldn't have wanted."
In the intervening years I've soured a lot on the idea of nuance for its own sake and all that liberal New School nonsense about Writing and Good Novels, which is in fact often a guise for political inaction. That sort of thing has a place, but not everywhere. What nuance is there to be had in authoritarian rule? There is none. And a portrait of authoritarianism does not require nuance or both sides-ism, in fact would suffer from it. Now that I've lived it, I know it. And 1984 is exactly the kind of polemic you need to lay bare its cruelty, twist the knife.
Over the years, the part that sicks with me the most comes at the very end, where it's implied that only hope for revolution lies with the common people - the uneducated, belligerent poor, who are too wrapped up i. the struggles of their daily lives to give half a shit about Big Brother, and who are too large and unruly to be individually brainwashed, as the privileged few like Winston and Julia can be. Free thought lives with them, who are too numerous to control - except through deprivation. The common people are suffering, ignorant, deprived of material stability and support from the upper classes among whom independent thought is, again, thoroughly extinguished. So the chances of a revolution are very slim. But if it lies anywhere, it is with them. That's the politic I missed when I read this as a kid, and I think a lot of people miss it, which is a shame. Orwell was not broadly anti-government: he was explicitly antifascist and, prior to my initial interpretation, that does come across here for anyone willing to see it.
really more of a 3.5/5 - some were bad, most forgettable, a few very good, and all of it about what you'd expect for a between-games book in a well written series of video games.
DNF at 50% - the writing is solid enough but it feels more like a collection of essays than a book, and the content doesn't really hold me. might revisit someday but I'm months overdue (heh) at the library & should really get it back to someone who'll enjoy it more
ive read this in english and in french and while i'm pretty sure it's a good book i also remember nothing about it
prophetic and, like all prophecy, challenging - but elegant, and very much worth your time
A hypnotic read, if a little repetitive. It's giving American Psycho for depressed women. Very slick, powerful satire. The first few chapters describe my life for the last year or so minus the drugs, and I appreciated the lack of sentiment. I hovered around 3 stars for most of the read but brought it up to 4 by the end for a tight structure and appropriate length.
Also, I know this is controversial but I thought the ending was good - last line of the book is a real gut-punch. Without spoiling anything, I thought the message was pretty clear and a certain “gotcha” moment (the last page) doesn't feel like a gotcha at all, in context. Free yourself or die.
I expected to love more of this than I did, but I am glad I read it. Some were too abstract or impressionistic for me to form a connection, not that they have to do that in order to succeed, but it is what it is. Most are great by any standard and some are among the best short stories I have ever read. “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “Pierre Menard” and “The Library of Babel” were my favorites.
3.5. Very fun popcorn read with an engaging world and characters, if a bit trope-y. The fact that the magic system is basically vibe-based didn't bug me because I'm an idiot but I could see that disappointing some. Loved the humor at first, especially in the muddy first section where not much happens, but it did get to be a bit repetitive and at times disrupted the flow of some scenes. MCU-style quips are fun every now snd then but when shit is hitting the fan you gotta be secure enough in the story you're telling to focus on it. On the other hand, the ending is fantastic, as are many (if not all) of the character beats. I literally couldn't put it down for the last 40% and I'm seriously considering buying the second one to cut the line at the library, which I never do. So while my review sounds negative I have to acknowledge that most of this worked for me. I just wouldn't recommend it for everyone. If you want a queer pulpy read with some cool ideas, I recommend. If you want serious worldbuilding without a constant parade of winking puns and pop culture references, maybe look elsewhere.
The first half was riveting - the rest, not so much. I think the idiosyncratic writing style - equal parts noirish grit and thinkpiece therapy-speak - started as a strength and became a weakness as it floundered around the threadbare plot. The central romance here is a hole, like she forgot to write it. Cara talks about how great Dell is but we don't see much of the woman. Mostly we spend time with her gravitating around powerful, abusive men in a way that feels more pulpy and romanticized (“y/n” came to mind, if you know you know) than mature. I really think there was potential here, and there are some strong moments, but for the most part the characters feel like good ideas on paper and don't come to life. The worldbuilding is there and not bad, if nothing new (Mad Max goes Black and Chicano on one side, generic Euro-corporate socialism paradise on the other). The ending is awful, just really, really bad, not even worth spoiling - washes out to mediocre centrism. If nothing else I finished it in six hours so I suppose it's no harm, no foul, but no love either.