Kate
The illustrations in this book are so cute. Earl sounds like an awesome friend, though I don't love stories where animals get in trouble because humans don't understand their language. It makes me sad! Because for sure Buddy and Earl are going to get into lots more trouble, and Buddy is going to be reprimanded because the humans won't think that Earl could make such a mess, and even though Earl's going to try to explain it, the humans won't understand!! But I still want to follow their adventures!
I don't remember why I got this book. I must have seen it somewhere and thought the plot was intriguing, and maybe I just wanted to continue reading through the pattern of books with the same starry cover:
The cover was my favourite part of this book. Throughout, I kept thinking about how great the plot was and how much I would have really liked it if it had been written by somebody else. When I looked up the author, I found that he only writes historical westerns/romances so this must be his first foray into sci-fi, so I'm willing to be lenient but maybe just say stick with what you know.
The science in this book, as mentioned by many of the other low-star reviews, was pretty lacking. If the impact was going to be devastating enough to destroy all traces of life and civilization, then there's no possible way that the results of the genetic seeding or the sphinx could have survived. This is an ancient civilization with nuclear capabilities, they've built buildings and cities that presumably rival or at least match our own, there's no way all of that was destroyed with no trace and yet one stone sculpture manages to weather the millennia. I was really irked by the continuous mentions of “the three races” as if it's been proven and all of society accepts that there are three races only and that's that. They are white, black, and Asian, by the way, if you were wondering. Even disregarding the idea that race is a social construct and not a biological organization, do South Asian people fall under Asian? What about Hispanic people? What about Indigenous peoples? And especially the idea that you can do a DNA test on some embryos to find that they're all exactly 33.3% white, black, and Asian is laughable. I am willing to suspend SOME disbelief when it comes to The Before Time because who knows how they evolved but we're also supposed to accept that they and we are the same type of human so I guess I'm not that willing after all. ALSO it blows my mind that this one dude could've come up with this method of accelerated aging in what, a few weeks? He didn't even test it, he just built it in hoping it would work!! It could have killed the surrogate mothers! The children could have ended up braindead or had multiple physical and mental disabilities!
I'm not totally down with the stereotypical characters either. The whip-smart, handsome college professor and the gorgeous, hard-hitting reporter have a romance both inevitable and boring as heck. They're that couple that you're like, okay, WE GET IT you love each other just please have a fight or something already. The conversations between all characters are written so stilted and unlike any person has ever spoken. I've never in my life heard anyone say “One would think so, wouldn't one?” And it's not even just one character with a quirky way of speaking. Also if I have to read “Ava laughed”, “The others laughed”, “Everyone laughed” one more time I'm going to never laugh again. There are better ways to get across someone's charm.
A bunch of stuff about The Before Time really chafed, like all the made-up names and the way that some words were different - like using the word "stel" for "star" because that's the The Before Time word for "star" but we can safely assume that everything we're reading has been translated into English for our benefit so why not just say STAR? I did like that hubris and one man's greed took down the ancient civilization. One last thing that really irked me was just one line when our heroes were talking to the owner of the restaurant about providing their "biological contribution" to re-seed the Earth and they asked if he'd done it: "'I did...My mother-in-law thinks she has as well, but I took care of that. Whatever future life is spawned upon this planet will be spared any rebirth of Lazina Coroway. And if they had ever known her, they would thank me for it.' Both Zorlok and Vilna laughed as Gnonloma left their table." HAHAHA HOW HILARIOUS that he took away this woman's agency regarding the most important thing of everyone's lives right now??? I imagine that this is very important to many people, facing the death of their entire civilization and everyone and everything they've ever known, to be able to leave some part of themselves behind, to believe that maybe their existence wasn't just for nothing and that they can hope that something of them will continue on into the future. That's got to be a pretty profound thought and sounds extremely moving. And this woman apparently put her trust in her son-in-law to carry out this process and he betrayed her. PLUS the GREAT PUNISHMENT for the man who condemned everyone to this fate in the first place because of his greed and assholery is that he is not allowed to leave his genetic material behind! And here are these folks just laughing about a mean ol' mother-in-law being denied the chance to, in some sense, live again after the destruction of her entire world.
So. I don't know much about Robert Vaughan's historical novels but I'll likely stay away from any future sci-fi that he writes.
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.
As the author warns, this book is pretty gnarly. This isn't surprising to me though, as most fairy/folk tales are quite scary or gory, in order to prevent people (usually children) from doing something dangerous or wrong. This one is probably an admonition against wandering off on your own and going into random caves.
I love how creepy Inuit monsters are (especially the Qallupilluq), and I image they're so scary to me because a) I'm more used to western/European monsters and b) the things that the Inuit people need to warn their children of are just more terrifying to me. Being trapped under the ice sounds really really horrible.
This book definitely puts you in the creepy mood right from the start though - the endpapers are covered with the variously decomposing heads of children who have been kidnapped and decapitated by the Mangittatuarjuk:
I like the details about Mangittatuarjuk's viscera being so strong, and the way she is finally dispatched is pretty great/gory. Good for folks who are into body horror and folk tales!
Excellent. Even more tense and affecting than the first volume.
There are a lot of images of men and women staring straight ahead with sweat running down their faces. There's a terrifying scene in which the freedom riders, sleeping in a bus station, look outside and see dozens of ghostly eyes staring at them from underneath white hoods. There is such senseless violence, otherwise normal-looking men and women and children, committing terrible acts seemingly out of nowhere, it's impossible to fathom. Again, until you remember the stories of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Eric Harris, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, and those are only the ones off the top of my head, but I urge you to read more. Just in case you think things are better in Canada, read this too.
There are strands of hope pulled through these books, with John Lewis's civil rights fights set against the inauguration of Barack Obama - but it's hard to put down this book to read the news and still hold on to that hope.
Cute. You'll probably like it if you liked the Sing-Along Blog, but aren't expecting too much character development...it's pretty much just cute and funny.
I should have listened to the warning at the beginning - this book is not suitable for adults. I did laugh out loud at many of the butt puns (univarse...haha) but they started to blend together after a few pages. Plus I didn't care for the story. I'm sure 12-year-old me would have been into it more, and I will definitely recommend this one to children who like to giggle uncontrollably. It could be good for playing the [b:The Eye of Argon 2129518 The Eye of Argon Jim Theis https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347758875s/2129518.jpg 2134961] game for kids (try to read it out loud for as long as possible without laughing).
Blah blah blah I love this series. I can't really say anything new except that it's still good and I hate waiting for the next volume.
Lying Cat is the best.
How have I gone so long without reading Toni Morrison? This book was so beautiful and ugly at the same time. The structure was all over the place and the writing so deep that it was hard to keep up sometimes, but it was worth it.
Hm.
So, I really liked this book. I love how abrasive Calamity is. She's mighty flawed, and it's really great to follow the narrative from her perspective. That is, until she gets all homophobic. And she doesn't appear to be on her way to learning a lesson by the end either. While I love that there's more than one queer person in this book (and a bisexual man! rare in media!), and their portrayal is nothing but positive, we only see them through Calamity's eyes, and she's NOT into it. I keep wavering about this...I might have given this 4 stars if not for the the homophobia, and I keep thinking that it's just the character who is homophobic because the queer people were happy and proud and lovely and fed right up with Calamity, and that tension did add something to the story and the character development...but it also took away from that by being too much of a focal point.
Other than that, Calamity is a fabulous character. I know a lot of reviewers didn't like her style, but I thought she was great. Vain, self-centered, yet caring and regretful. She's been hurt and has hurt and she feels shitty about all of it, but she doesn't necessarily deal with it well.
I love all the subtle magic as well. I love the Caribbean selkie fairy tale, and Calamity's menopause magic that I suppose she gets from her water-mom!. I look forward to reading more from Nalo Hopkinson!
When I saw the title I was hoping this book would be more about math. Tadeo's search for the perfect circle was kind of baffling to me because I assumed by “perfect” he meant “perfectly round” but actually he was just talking about human connection. Tadeo travels around the world with his rope, seeing circles he thinks might be perfect but actually aren't...but he never actually says what makes them less than perfect and it's unclear why his mom's hug is the perfect circle other than just being a nice thing to have after exploring the world and not seeing her for a while. It's a nice tale of a kid going off on a magically real/imagined adventure and being happy to come home at the end of the night, but it being couched in terms of perfect circles kind of threw me. The narrative was kind of clunky for me.
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 one has an Inuit illustrator! Yay! The qallupiluk looks scary, but seems more harmless in this tale than in others. They just want to hang out on the ice and not get hunted by humans.
This book was as cute as the others in the series. I think the more I read of them the less I like the series as a whole though, for some reason. Cloud, Wind, and Sun were adorable. They had to teach Flare that it's ok to cry because his tears have healing abilities but they don't tell him until he actually heals somebody with his tears. It seemed weird to me that they wouldn't lead with that? Especially since they think that tears must come from pain or sadness (because Sun is too happy to teach Flare how to cry), you'd think it would make him more willing to try it if he knew there were benefits. Anyway! Cute illustrations, the story is ok but nice in the end.
This book was better than I was expecting...even though I don't know what I was expecting, considering it's a book in which a woman has sex with a bear that was pushed to publication by Robertson Davies and then won the Governor General's award. There's a lot of conflicting information there. But, as I was reading it, I could not judge Lou for her choices. I mean, I would not have made the same choices as her, but I can't really blame her. Especially considering the bear is a smybol of...men? or her life? or something? I'm sorry, it's hard to read past the text to the subtext when the text includes a woman fondling a bear's testicles.
So Lou is an independent young woman, unattached, with a career that she kind of likes but is starting to bore her, she's in a rut, she can't make connections with men on any meaningful level, so she jumps at the chance to live on an island in the middle of nowhere for a summer cataloguing books. Only there's a bear who lives on the island with her, a pet of the previous owner of the house, and she's expected to feed the bear but not much else. She enjoys the solitude of the wilderness, and soon develops a bond with the bear, and one night, in a fit of passionate loneliness, allows the bear to, y'know, help her out. She didn't seek out the bear, she just...didn't stop him. Can you blame her? I mean there are plenty of ways for a woman to react to that which don't look like bestiality but whatever floats your boat. It was consensual anyway. Lou falls in love with the bear over the summer, because he doesn't judge her or make her feel empty. She's fully aware of the fact that he's a bear and doesn't have feelings, but love is love! In the end, while attempting to actually consummate their relationship, the bear rips her back open with his claws ('cause he's a bear, we all saw that coming) and decides that she's actually not really in love the bear anymore, and maybe she should just look for a new job to get herself out of her life rut. If it takes a bear going down on you/mauling you to figure that out, I kind of feel like you need to take a look up outside of your own self once in a while.
I actually liked this book quite a bit. The writing is good, and I think when I read it again one day I'll be able to look past the sensational bits and hear the message of the book a bit better, but I do recommend it! Unless you don't like swear words. Or bear testicles. On the other hand it is reallllly Canadian!
I'm going to pretend that [b:The Prophet of Yonwood 207034 The Prophet of Yonwood (Book of Ember, #3) Jeanne DuPrau https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320636285s/207034.jpg 969] doesn't exist, and also that the last chapter/epilogue of this book doesn't exist because I thought it was dumb, but otherwise, I liked this book. It follows from the second book, after the people of Ember join the people of Sparks. Doon has the idea to go back to Ember to collect whatever supplies were left there so they can get through the winter and Lina goes with him and they don't tell anyone where they're going because I guess it's kind of their MO. Trouble ensues, bit characters have one or two lines which exemplify their one-dimensional personalities (distrustful leader says “he's probably lying!”, nice leader says “listen to the boy!”), and then everyone is happy and good. Apparently human nature has changed since the apocalypse and the NEW grand cities and civilizations are going to be amazing and wonderful...or maybe I'm just a cynic. What are you gonna do.
I should have just stuck with [b:Baby Be-Bop 71331 Baby Be-Bop (Weetzie Bat, #5) Francesca Lia Block https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390274115s/71331.jpg 1506] and my useless memory of reading this book in high school. This was much too precious for me. Only My Secret Agent Lover Man had any sense whatsoever. Plus, holy cultural appropriation! Weetzie Bat and her friends are the most oblivious hipsters of all time, and I can totally see why I would have liked this book when I was 13...everyone is an idiot except me, no one understands these amazing things that I understand...This precious group of kids has looked outside their gingerbread house and seen bad things, so they live in their tiny happy bubble that no one understands, and when they do happen to get a whiff of something real, they can't handle it. Duck's friend has AIDS...that's awful. Instead of being there for him, because we learn that Duck never went to the hospital, he decides to run away to San Francisco and drink because it made him realize that we can kill each other by loving each other. Dirk drives off to find him while Weetzie and MSALM stay at home with their creepy babies and when D&D come back they all just hug each other and gaze lovingly into each other's eyes and I guess who cares that Bam Bam is still in the hospital? His illness is such a nice plot point for our main characters.Plus there's this crap:“‘That's a great outfit,' Dirk said. Weetzie was wearing her feathered headdress and her moccasins and a pink fringed mini dress. ‘Thanks. I made it,' she said, snapping her strawberry bubble gum. ‘I'm into Indians,' she said. ‘They were here first and we treated them like shit.' ‘Yeah,' Dirk said, touching his Mohawk.”They named their baby Cherokee.“Cherokee looked like a three-dad baby, like a peach, like a tiny moccasin, like a girl love-warrior who would grow up to wear feathers and run swift and silent through the L.A. canyons.”I think it's worth noting that none of the characters are Native.
This book was really interesting. Throughout I was struck with the difficulties of using the correct pronouns and currently accepted terminology when writing about one of the first documented trans man who underwent hormone treatment as well as surgery to pass. In the western world, at least, I don't know much about the history of trans people in other areas of the world! An interesting biography of an interesting man.
I was planning on reviewing each book separately, but because I read them all back to back on my phone I couldn't remember what happened in each book so I'm just going to review the omnibus edition.
This review might get a bit ranty.
You may remember my review of the 1st book in which I was annoyed that it was so compelling. This feeling continues into the rest of the books. They are messy and confusing and unrealistic (we'll skip the part where someone tries to tell me that stories about alternate universes are all unrealistic and settle on good stories being internally and logically consistent and these not being that) and I wish I wasn't so interested in Audie's life. I wanted to know that she would be okay at the end, and that her and Daniel would stay together, because I liked her!
So in the first book I had assumed for a second that the parallel universes had split off after Audie/Halli were born which would then make sense why they were identical, but then learned that their parents and grandparents were very different so that couldn't be true. In the next books, we learn that the universes actually split just after WWII, where in Halli's universe, a bunch of scientists all around the world signed a “peace pact” saying that they would not pursue research that could lead to the development of weapons. Which seems a little hand-wavey to me because technically anything could be used as a weapon, which they mention in the book but don't follow up on so I have no idea how this pact worked out in that universe...except that they don't have space travel because all of the rocket research could lead to bombs. But they have amazing horticulture because I guess nothing to do with biology could ever lead to a weapon (except for biological weapons but we ignore those I suppose). And that universe obviously decided to err further on the side of safety over personal freedom since everyone has a tracking device implanted in their bodies (which everyone can access before you're an adult, after you turn 18 you can remove people from the list of who can track you but presumably the police/government could access anyone's information whenever). Despite these HUGE CHANGES from Audie's universe, Audi and Halli's grandparents (with wholly different personalities) managed to get together and have genetically identical children born at exactly the same time, who then developed their own wholly different personalities and managed to get together to again have genetically identical children born at the same time. It's IMPLAUSIBLE.
So Audie tried to save Halli from death once, and in doing so she ended up in Halli's body with Halli ending up in Audie's body in their respective universes. This is never explained. It just happened because Audie was distraught at seeing Halli die so she panicked and this ended up happening. So Audie is trying to get back to her old body while also trying not to mess up Halli's life too much, and Halli is terrible at waiting so she just starts making plans to ditch all of Audie's family and friends and live in the wilderness. I hate Halli in these books. She's so self-centered it's painful. Her grandmother taught her to be that way...basically, everyone needs to look out for themselves and if they can't then they deserve whatever comes to them. There are a couple stories that even demonstrate how Halli's empathy was stamped out by her grandmother, for example, there's a guide they know who is a terrible guide and many people have died under his watch. This makes Halli upset, she wonders why her grandma wouldn't warn the people who keep paying him to guide them, and she basically says that people only change when they want to change and the people who signed up to be guided should have done their research. So instead of, say, reporting him to some oversight organization or the police or something (this universe seems like they'd care even more about stuff like that than ours), Ginny is like, whatevs, they're not you or me, so fuck ‘em. And Halli internalizes this attitude and therefore only cares about people she likes. Which means that when she's in Audie's life, she's rude to all her friends and makes plans to leave them all as soon as possible. She hates anyone who tries to impose rules on her, which she did in her own universe too, but doesn't take into account the completely new circumstances which may involve a little bit of tolerance and thinking about other people for once. It's been ONE WEEK since Halli has been in Audie's body and she's already like, Audie can't do anything for me I must make this life my own. Man, you SWITCHED BODIES AND UNIVERSES. Give it some time, this can't be an easy problem to fix! So I basically don't give a shit about Halli. She's not even dealing with anything important, she just needs to go to school and try her best to act like Audie.
Meanwhile, Audie in Halli's body is trying to fix the universe mix-up while dealing with the fact that her parents want to buy back the 49% of their company's shares that Audie has before she turns 18 and can make that decision herself, so Audie is trying to prevent Halli from losing her fortune at the same time trying to avoid her overbearing parents at the same time trying to figure out how to get back to their own universes...AT THE SAME TIME dealing with some relationship bullshit that I was 100% not into. Will is the dude she's been in love her for blah blah blah I don't give a shit, and his counterpart in Halli's universe is super into Halli and Audie is pretending to be Halli but she's into Daniel, but alterna-Will is just soooo good-looking or whatever and Audie keeps being like, I tried to not make out with alterna-Will because I'm into Daniel but then he looked at me and I just had to make out with him! No, girl. Have some self-restraint.
Anyway Audie ends up dying because she tried to stuff her consciousness into her old body with Halli already in there and that makes you die. Because. So she dies and as she's dying I guess she reaches out her mind into blah blah and wakes up again as Halli back in time so she can do it all over again. And THIS time she doesn't make out with alterna-Will, and she realizes that this universe is slightly different from the last one because she stayed with someone different and her dog doesn't like alterna-Will and as it turns out all of these things are true because Audie somehow changed the past from the future without knowing it. And they go through all this ridiculousness to try and get everything back to normal, and in the end, she just had to think about switching her mind with Halli's and then IT WORKED. I mean, they needed to have access to a universe-bending machine (or whatever) that a professor built and used to switch universes back in the 40's but really it seemed so obvious that Audie should have tried it before. So anywhere they're like, oh yeah, everything is fine now. Except no one is thinking about the other universes that they created...like the universe where Audie died in Halli's body?!? THAT HAPPENED. That didn't just disappear, that is a universe in which Daniel (and the entire world) is in mourning, and then another universe in which Halli is trapped in Audie's body forever and has betrayed all her family and friends and I guess is living happily by herself as an adventure guide or whatever. Which, I mean, Audie's current consciousness isn't living that universe, but she also visited a universe in which Halli's grandmother didn't die but Halli did, so Ginny is living sadly without her granddaughter. So I'm just saying, Audie could totally visit the universe in which she died in Halli's body and see how sad everyone was. Not that she should have done that in the book, but it seems weird that she didn't even acknowledge it. Really, she has a get-out-of-jail-free card now because if anything goes wrong she can just slip into a different universe where it didn't go wrong anymore. It's just strange that the fact that she actually did die isn't mentioned again. Audie seems like the kind of person who would think about that and be a bit sad for the fact that she caused that to happen, basically. And it seems like an obvious consequence of there being multiple universes.
So I found all of the alternate universe and travel between universes stuff to be really sloppy. This is supposed to be a science fiction series, and the first book at least tried to explain things using science, but it sort of just broke into a series of increasingly ridiculous reasons that seemed invented either to increase the tension in the book or to explain away a plot hole. It was overly complicated and didn't seem very consistent. I started reading it because that seemed cool but it turned me so completely off that I started skimming through a lot of the explanations of alternate universe travel. I just wanted to know that Audie would be happy. It was an easy series to read, and written well, I just don't like hand-wavey “science” explanations for things. Either make things actually scientifically plausible (alternate universes are fine, just make things internally consistent!) or don't try to explain things using science.
The illustrations are just gorgeous in this book. I stopped on every page to admire what was going on. I really couldn't get behind the story, though. There wasn't any context, it just felt like someone describing a generic fairy tale: the prince was captured while the king and queen were gone, but with the help of his people, managed to get back home. That's basically it, who knows where the king and queen went or why, who came to capture the city and the prince and why it was so dang easy, if the people could have easily risen up against their captors like they did at the end, why didn't they do it first to not let themselves be captured, or anytime in the 4 days that the prince was imprisoned? ANYWAY the pictures are great.
I like that the protagonist is an Orthodox Jewish girl who wants to slay dragons. I also like that knitting was involved. I don't love the art style, and I didn't really connect with Mirka. Also, there's something about this book that made me think about how sometimes heroes do a lot of slaying, and that just doesn't strike me as something to value. I mean, it's nice if you can save a village or whatever from being eaten, but slaying dragons for the heck of it actually seems like it might be a red flag for psychopathy. I don't support breaking through the glass ceiling by climbing the corpses of mythical creatures!
Some of those thoughts may be somewhat tangential to the novel itself. Which just tells me that I wasn't really into it.
This book is really awesome. The bold colours kill me, and the fact that we don't even know why or how this war started - and the one lizard who dared to ask was squished. He became a martyr, presumably, causing the war to escalate, until only a few pages later when peace is brokered. Would peace have happened anyway? Did that one lizard give his life to speed up the end of the war, or was it a senseless death?
After all these thoughts, I noticed the back endpapers included a lizard with a bandage on...and it turns out, this is the same squashed lizard who appears on every page after the squashing sporting a bandage. So, no one had to die! That's good. Also, the endpaper shows a budding romance between this lizard and a lucky red rectangle, so obviously whatever prejudices they were harboring during the war were quickly forgotten after the peace treaty. Unless this is a long-term romance that they are only now allowed to pursue publicly! Maybe this is how the war started in the first place, and the lizard's cry of “What are we fighting for?” is actually a plea for lenience and understanding.
There are a lot of layers to this book.