Kate
Sure, it's nice to look on the bright side...it's also nice to do it in a way that's not trite or condescending, but maybe that's too much to ask. The bright side of “doing badly, really badly” is that now you truly know that those other people who were doing badly aren't just lazy, like you'd previously thought! Because, YOU aren't lazy. But you still get to keep your sanctimoniousness, thank goodness. Don't have a trust fund? It's a good thing, because you won't be lazy sitting around waiting for your next cheque! Because every person with a trust fund is a lazy bum. This book is probably really nice if you want to still feel better than other people when you're down on your luck.
Plus there are ads for this book everywhere on the TTC and I can't escape it.
So, I liked it. I can second all the poor reviews that rag on the lack of passion/conflict though. The whole thing seemed kind of dark and ethereal to me, like you're watching her through a sheer fabric, so you get what's physically happening but not quite as much of the motivation comes through. It's still beautiful though, and the story is sweet. I liked all the fairy stories that the characters told each other better than Ash and Sidhean's, because I couldn't tell what either of them were doing with each other.
I liked that the hunt is always traditionally run by women, and that being queer is apparently a non-issue in this world. Though Ash and the Huntress didn't have a courtship per se, at least not one that was described in much detail, I thought that Ash's feelings came through pretty well. The Huntress seemed sufficiently charming.
To all the “it's not homophobic to not like a book” reviewers: “Ew, Cinderella is a lesbian”, “I love re-tellings of fairy tales but Cinderella is not allowed to be gay”, “I WOULD NEVER HAD READ THIS BOOK IF I KNEW IT CONTAINED HOMOSEXUALITY”, “not enough man love”, “I thought this would be great for my teen but there's GAY IN IT don't give it to your teens!”, etc....it's not cool to think that gay people/being gay is gross, re-tellings are allowed to be whatever they want and I promise that none of them negate any of the others, there is enough hetero courtship in every other fairy tale (and non-fairy tale) ever told in the history of the world so it's not like you have to go far, your teen is using the internet and already knows allllll about teh gayz.
“‘What is the matter, Miss Wolf?' asked the little librarian. ‘Something very sad happened in my story and I can't read it anymore,' replied the wolf.”
I feel you, miss wolf.
The best part of this book is the stubborn tortoise who gets his library book tied to his shell with ribbon by two library owls.
This is such a lovely book. A wordless story of a young child's experience immigrating to a new country where they don't know the language or the culture. I used gender-neutral pronouns because when I read through the book I imagined the child was a girl, but the blurb in the back uses male pronouns, so clearly this kid can be whoever is reading!
I liked it! It was sciency and entertaining. And that cover...I want a print of the cover to put on my wall. Just gorgeous.
I feel like my review is just going to be responses to other people's reviews. I understand why the negative reviewers don't like this book - there is a particular writing style that you either like or don't like. And, I'm not going to say that Andy Weir is a good writer...I don't really think he is. A lot of this book is Mark's log, which is blog-style...anyone can have a blog. All of his other characters sound the same though. They all have what I assume is Weir's sense of humour and timing. Some reviewers have blamed this on the fact that Weir can't interact with people, or using it as evidence that he's on the autism spectrum somewhere? I find this pretty ridiculous. I feel like I'm pretty high-functioning in my level of social interaction, but all the conversations I've written have been stilted and terrible. Because I'm a bad writer. I don't know whether or not Weir has autism, I'm just saying that the fact that he can't write people having conversations is not proof.
Something else that has come up in other people's reviews is that Mark's style of writing doesn't make sense because he's a NASA scientist and astronaut. Because people with that much education don't say “lol” or make jokes about pirate-ninjas. Because...who knows? Because getting lots of education in science makes you immune to internet memes? Because working for a space agency makes you irreparably professional? Remember that a scientist with the European Space Agency wore a shirt for a televised interview that had half-naked women holding guns on it. Which, regardless of whether or not you think it's sexist (it kind of is though), is decidedly not professional. So obviously you can like or not like the writing style, you can think it's embarrassing and unprofessional, but to say that it makes the book unbelievable because an astronaut could never talk like that is not very realistic. Personally, I would like more people in STEM fields to talk like “normal” people...I think that part of the reason that it's hard to get minority groups into STEM and especially professions like ASTRONAUT or ROCKET SCIENTIST is because people in those professions are assumed to have been abnormally smart for their whole lives. If average people don't feel like they could have a conversation with a rocket scientist, they won't feel like they could be one.
So anyway I liked it. Recommended!
This review contains spoilers!
Cory Doctorow is so optimistic. As a white cis male, he's more likely to have his voice heard and not be attacked for his gender or race. He does pretty well when he's fighting for women in gaming, and this book really shows that - the protagonist is a young girl and many of the other characters are women gamers. They're part of an all-female guild, in order to raise awareness of women gamers and help other women to stop being afraid of using female avatars. So this is a story set in a similarly sexist world to our own, and the protagonists are women making things better for women. Awesome. Unfortunately, Doctorow is apparently still totally cool with the white saviour narrative. The main character Anda meets a gold farmer in the game, a Chinese kid named Raymond who has health problems and no insurance, and is treated poorly by his employer. Anda does a bunch of research to find clinics near him (which for some reason he was unable to do himself?) and encourages him to start a union. Which he tries, and is fired for. Anda feels terrible (I'm sure Raymond feels pretty shitty too but we're not really looking at his story, are we?) and doesn't know what to do. There's a good scene when Anda finds out that Raymond was fired from a different gold farmer. He yells at her about how you (Americans) think you know everything about us because you read about us on the internet, but you don't know anything about what our lives are really like. At which point I was like, yeah, exactly, I hope this goes somewhere good, but then Anda was like, I don't know what it's like for you but I do know what it's like to be a kid who loves games! and then it went downhill from there. Anda and her American buddies passed around a note from Raymond to the other gold farmers about unions, and for SOME REASON NEVER EXPLAINED, NOW everyone is willing to approach their employer about health insurance. So, yes, the second note was a call to arms from a fellow (ex-)worker, but without American influence, they all would have just sat around ignorant of unions and dying without health insurance? Anyway, Anda is vindicated, especially when Raymond shows up back in the game with a fancy new avatar blah blah blah.
The art is lovely and the story is nice until it's problematic. I'd probably have given it 3 stars if I hadn't been looking forward to it.
I love Gene Yang's art style. It's so simple and evocative. And I liked this story a lot. There's an interview with him on Racebending where he said that his one regret is not exaggerating Chin-Kee enough, because he still will get people telling him that they think that character is cute. Gene Yang, this is not because you didn't exaggerate the character enough. Honestly, I can't even think of how you could have created a worse Chinese stereotype. This is a problem with people who think that racist stereotypes are cute, because they don't see how they hurt people and they really didn't get the message of your book.
It makes sense to compare this book to [b:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War 8908 World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War Max Brooks https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386328204s/8908.jpg 817]; they are similar, in that they both use testimonials to slowly paint a picture of an event.I just loved the concept of The Silent History - all of a sudden children are being born without the ability to comprehend or create speech. I do love a good psychological sci-fi that posits a situation and then just goes with it. It was fascinating how different characters interpreted being Silent in such different ways (as a disease or disability, as just a new variation, as a message, as a return to “real humanity”, etc.).The Silent community has many strong parallels with the Deaf community, especially when it comes to the fight between seeing it as a disorder and trying to fix it with medical technology, and not seeing it as a personal problem but as one with a society that tries to “fix” everyone to make us all the same instead of changing the environment around us to allow everyone to participate equally. It was interesting to read about the range of parental reactions to having Silent children, where some would immediately embrace it and attempt to learn the “face talking” language that Silents use with each other, some would hold hope that their child would be able to learn language someday and would spend all their money and time on speech therapy, some would encourage their children to make other Silent friends while others would prevent their children from seeing any other Silents, some immediately jumped on a new medical “cure” while others were horrified that they should be expected to change their children at all...etc.I didn't love all the characters, but I didn't really hate any of them either. I liked seeing the same event from different perspectives, it helped to empathize with each person. Everyone is trying to deal with this sudden and confusing situation as best they can, and we all have different coping mechanisms.So, I really liked this book. And it's cool that it's an app too, but I don't think I really missed out on anything by not owning any apple products. If you want, you can just read a chapter a day and you'll have the same experience, pretty much.
I liked the writing style, and the cool, dark, dreamy feel of the prose. I liked that the main character compares the colours of things to Pantone Matching System numbers. The non-linear narration confused me sometimes, where I couldn't tell if she was doing something in the past or the present. The ending was fine. I didn't see it coming necessarily, but I wasn't blown away by it.
Though there were a few times while reading that I wanted to put it down, I came away from this book feeling glad I read it. I didn't like the protagonist, and wanted to hear some of the story from someone else's perspective. Or I would have liked it from a third person perspective. The black German experience during WWII is something I'd like to read more about.
I really liked Chipo's voice in this book. She was an easy protagonist to follow and I was interested in where she would end up after struggling to survive in South Africa. The backdrop of the xenophobia that surrounded the 2010 World Cup was frightening - Vandermerwe did such a great job painting a story until the last quarter of the book where it kind of fell apart. There was such a struggle - against xenophobia, homophobia, albino-phobia, and how each character dealt with and perpetrated these different hatreds - and then it just ended. I wasn't hoping for or expecting a happy ending, or even a wrap-up, but I was hoping for a better exploration of these themes.
This is a book that begs for comparison to [b:Einstein's Dreams 14376 Einstein's Dreams Alan Lightman https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386925066s/14376.jpg 1820798]. It's got the same sort of dreamy, poetic prose, and the same short vignettes comparing multiple possibilities. Sum collects very short, usually 2-3 pages, conceptions of what the afterlife may look like. It's an interesting exploration of religion, god(s), myth, consciousness, reality, and origin. In some, there is a creator, while some have no creator. Sometimes there is no afterlife. Sometimes we are the afterlife. Maybe we never existed at all. I especially liked the one where God puts Mary Shelley (literally) on a pedestal because after reading Frankenstein He knows that she is only person who can understand how He feels after both creating life, and losing control of that creation.This book is adorable and beautifully written, and very quick to get through. I was impressed at how every story felt different.
An interesting look at the methods we use to resuscitate people whose hearts have stopped and how we can make those methods more effective. Not sure I'm entirely a fan of Casarett's writing style but it was easy to read and pretty informative! While it's nice to look at the “miracles” that can happen in bringing someone back from the dead, and it's great that there's much research into how to do that better, it's important to think about the morality of such decisions. As Casarett says at the end of the book, no one is going to prevent EMTs from trying to resuscitate a loved one in an emergency, even if you know they don't want to be resuscitated. When there's even a slight possibility that they will come through and have some more good years, it's hard to think about the greater possibility (especially among the elderly) that they'll just have a few more painful months or weeks.
Also there's a lot of animal testing in this research area so if you're not cool with reading about that, maybe skip this one!
I will say that this book was compelling, in that I for some reason wanted to keep reading it until I was finished. Which I did. And then it ended, and I learned that I have to now read another one to find out where the story is going and as it turns out I don't really want to, so I'll probably just find a synopsis of it somewhere on the internet and read that instead.
I found this book boring (though compelling...it makes sense!). The main character is good at everything. Nothing particularly surprising happened - at no point did I feel like I'd just read something really cool or new or interesting. Though this isn't necessarily a criticism of this book, I personally am entirely bored by fantasy set in the faux-middle ages, and particularly fantasy set in the faux-middle ages that maintains middle ages gender roles. Yes, there were strong female protagonists, but they were few and far between and there was also a line that went something like “call a spade a spade but always call a whore a lady”. Because it's polite. Anyway, none of the characters impressed me too much as standing out, though I'd probably read a spin-off about Bast and the fae.
All in all, I read the whole book and it was fine. I'm vaguely interested to find out what happens in the next book, but not enough to read it.
I've been waiting to read this book for a long time, after reading [b:Pump Six and Other Stories 2819368 Pump Six and Other Stories Paolo Bacigalupi https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1391343246s/2819368.jpg 2845301], his book of short stories. Which was SO GOOD. This book takes place in the same universe as some of the Pump Six stories, and it's a really interesting and sad, poverty-stricken world. I read this one on my phone so it was in between other books I was reading. I found it hard to follow the politics and loyalties, but it was still really great.