Kelly
It's not cool to read self-help books and I'm generally averse to the genre, but this is a helpful book that was recommended to me before I start grad school. It has some nice insights and tips for people who have, for whatever reason, learned to approach even basic tasks by spiraling into perfectionism-induced self-flagellation and paralysis. You know, those other people, those lame self-help book-reading types.
I've started and stopped this book a number of times before finally following through. I don't know whether it is particularly complex, or if it is just hard for me to follow the sci-fi subplot, or if I am just dumb. But now that I've finished it I really really liked it, and Atwood is a master of prose, etc.
“Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.”
Some unevenness amongst the stories in this collection, but this is well worth reading.
Someone asked Mark Vonnegut how he is different from someone without mental illness. He responded, “I'm just like someone without mental illness, only more so.” Instantly, I have a new favorite book title of all time. I found myself unable to approach this book with a neutral stance. Nothing wrong with that; it just makes my star rating idiosyncratic, influenced as it is by shared moreness/excess/whatever you want to call it.
In this memoir, Mark Vonnegut broadly details the psychotic breaks that resulted in a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which was later amended to a diagnosis of manic depression, which is now termed bipolar disorder in a bid to reduce stigma. (His response to that effort: “Good luck.” I loled.)
He also includes meditations on being a doctor, the role of art, being Kurt Vonnegut's son (which does not seem easy), and America's broken medical system. Comparisons to his father must be frustrating, but there are moments of undeniable symmetry in their sardonicism and they brought me true joy.
Some choice quotes:
On the indignity of not getting admitted to the good mental hospital:
Without prelude or explanation, I'm in four-point restraints in my boxer shorts on a gourney of the hospital where I once trained and currently still work. I'm [a Harvard Medical School] alum, HMS faculty. . . and I didn't even get into McLean's?
On the cruelty of his illness:
I was so quickly in tatters, what was the good of all that overachievement? It should have taken longer for my proud crust of wellness to be so utterly gone.
On art:
Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think it is.
If this book were one hundred pages shorter and contained twenty fewer characters, I could have been down. As it stands – woof. There were so many (needless!) references to the names of different characters and locations that at times, I felt I was in the word problem section of the Swedish SATs.
Elena Ferrante writes circles around 99.999% of all humans, living and dead, seemingly without breaking a sweat.
I just could not get into this. I blame it on my disinterest in countrified settings replete with intense accents. This is definitely a case of understanding a work's technical merits without having any emotional and/or intellectual stake whatsoever in it.
[slight spoiler] I almost didn't continue reading this book after the first few pages because the writing is . . . uneven. But this book is well worth reading; it is unrelenting and holds no punches. I never thought a YA book would follow one of its protagonist's journeys into political extremism and terrorism, but here we are.
Jerome can't bear the sight of his own reflection, he once confessed after drinking a bottle of cheap sherry, and he's never owned a mirror. I asked him why. He told me that whenever he looks into one he sees a man inside it, and thinks, “Who in God's name are you?”
The fact that this is a debut novel is wild. How the fuck is this a debut novel?! The ambition, breadth, and scope is bananas. I am a sucker for intersecting storylines, which is the crux of this novel, as it threads together individuals' experiences throughout history, from a doomsday cult member in Japan, to an Irish genius whose work in quantum physics threatens to engender nuclear war, to an all-night radio host in Manhattan, and so on.
I am certain I missed a great deal and will benefit from researching it a bit. Highly recommend.
I have no idea how to rate this book because:
- CON: I could die happily before reading another novel about a young white man abusing substances while having Thoughts and Feelings about women and the nature of art
- PRO: it's beautifully and uniquely written; I learned like eight new words while reading it (e.g., duende: the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm)
- CON: there's plenty of navel-gazing digressions
- PRO: it's pretty funny at points
- CON: the thinly veiled roman a clef reveals many pathetic traits of the author
- PRO: we're all pathetic so we may as well be honest about it
Three stars it is.
Interesting look at the artistic and societal elite who have stayed in America's most famous mental hospital (James Taylor, Ray Charles, Susana Kaysen, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton), as well as the history of the institution itself. (Anne Sexton is actually the one who used the term “Gracefully Insane” for McLean residents).
Refugee, exile, immigrant – whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backwards in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.
Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity.... the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.
We might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process.
I will bow down forever at the altar of Emily St. John Mandel's increasingly dense and interconnected worlds. Many of which contain pandemics. And always art.
Two favorite pieces:
Cool unspoken plot point: In this stimulation, with the glitches wrought by interventionism in time travel, Jonathan Alkaitis does not spend the rest of his days in a minimum security prison; he escapes to Dubai as he dreamt of doing in The Glass Hotel.I didn't expect to be haunted by Edwin in 1912 because I found the beginning of the book a bit slow. But man he got me.
Jesus. This gets five stars, for sure, with the caveat that it's not without fault; there comes a point where the series of traumas and degradations that befall Jude lose their potency as tools for character development and simply become wearying. But this book is beautiful, and full of characters that will rip your heart out.
We are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we're forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.
I took a whole seminar on schizophrenia in college and still think about it often, as an example of how profound and insidious mental illness is, and how little we truly know about it. Kolker quotes a scientist in this book who states that schizophrenia is arguably the most devastating disease in the world. I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. This book illustrates the unbelievable terror and trauma of family in which six out of twelve children develop schizophrenia, one by one. It is beautifully and sensitively handled and I know I will think about it as often as I do that seminar.
The State controls the amount of food we eat, our electricity, our transportation, the information we receive. But with philosophy, we control our own minds. What if the internal landscape was ours to build and paint?
A powerful read. While the writing style was not always for me (e.g., dramatic line breaks), the tone, setting, and realism were on point. Reading Sepetys' postscript, it is eminently clear she researched the hell out of this book and pulled no punches in conveying the truth. It inspired me to learn more about a chapter of history I knew very little about.
A book that asks the audacious question “What if a story-within-a-story structure had no purpose or payoff at all?”
(Its side question is “What if we went out of our way to assert things like ‘Americans don't use the word beanie' or ‘Americans never call it a phone, they call it a cell phone'?” The errors were so obvious and unforced that I thought they would comprise some kind of plot point. Incorrect!)
Really a 2.5 - it was a fine enough read, but it was also full of some crazy-ass coincidences and a villain that expositorily revealed themselves to be cartoonishly evil. I will admit I was also probably expecting more given the hype.
This is a masterful book, an unflinching and comprehensive critical analysis of a complex event that lent itself to so much misunderstanding and simplifying. There's a human tendency to find a master narrative that can categorize the impulses behind horrific events – it was jocks vs. nerds; it was a cry for help; it was Marilyn Manson; it was a weak family life; it was video games; it was our disaffected and disconnected modern way of life – and I admire Cullen for his willingness to accept the ambiguity and unease that arises when you're no longer left with a simple explanation. It's a hard book to read, but it's worth it.
A series of interviews with the leader of Treblinka, one of five extermination camps during the Holocaust. Incredible.
Ridiculous and delightful. The photo demonstrations of Rees preparing his workstations and body for the rigors of sharpening were often sublime. Don't read this book in public, unless you are comfortable being seen laughing out loud at sketches of pencils.