Mara

I enjoyed some of the short stories, but others were just...boring? Maybe I don't understand surrealism.

Interesting topic, made me think, clearly well researched, became a bit of a slog by the end.

I like Cheryl Strayed's writing and advice, but I just do not connect with the quote collection format of book. Removed from their context, most of the quotes read as cheesy, judgmental or snooty.

There were many parts of this book that had me considering tactics for playing Civilization. Some of the text gets a touch dry and it's a bit outdated (I would love to see someone write an update on the current day issues she discusses!) but there are some fascinating concepts about how prosperity and success ebb and flow in different places across time.

The beginning dragged a little, but when events finally started happening, it picked up. I didn't find the main character especially likeable, which hurt my opinion of the story some. It had that feeling you find in some books of reading like a movie script, like the author already had a movie in mind while writing the book, which tends to lead to a lot of dumbing down of internal narratives in favor of action that would be visual, which I found to be a shame.

A fun little adventure tale. It felt light and simple to breeze through without being shallow. I happened to have seen the movie before reading the book in this case, but it's been a few years so I don't think it clouded my judgment. The two felt fairly different, and I liked both very much in their own respects.

Good series of supernatural shenanigans.

This is a great little offshoot story to One Hundred Years of Solitude, sometimes tribute to it and sometimes commentary on how specific works move people in unexpected ways. There is that feeling of magical realism, fully believable in a modern context.

This was a fun memoir with important larger social points. It skewed a bit religious for my taste, just a fact of the author's identity, but I do think that will make it more relatable for a lot of people.

The atmosphere of the book and description of place is lovely, I really enjoy that aspect of it. The plot was a bit of a snooze for me. Maybe I'm too old for a bildungsroman, particularly one about a young boy that focuses around religious questions.

One of those “this is important to read” books, but an enjoyable ones. Beautiful artwork and a very personal feeling story.

My ability to read about the trials of young white men out to find themselves seems to hover close to zero these days. Full disclosure, this review is based on only a portion of the book, I could not finish it. It does contain some beautiful descriptions of the desert, and if someone felt like creating an edited version that is only those parts I think it would be a worthwhile read. Unfortunately they're spread out between sections of eye rolling bildungsroman and rants against such offenders as old people, young people, women who are prostitutes, women who are not prostitutes, gardeners, and Native Americans. No thanks.

Oh Ursula, forever the best.

This book is a mixed bag. I found some valid points on architecture and how we view it, but I had to dig through an awful lot of pretentious drivel to get it. I have very little patience for philosophy, so that might be part of why I found sections of this tiresome. It's probably something important for anyone in the architectural field to read because it makes you think about your area of study/work, but it needs to be taken with several grains of salt.

I wanted to like this book, and liked the parts of it that got to the point - the actual story of Julia Staab and the rest of her family, even the exploration of her ghost as a phenomenon. But that was not very much of the book, most of it was wild speculation that felt based on absolutely nothing, and long sections talking to mediums which led nowhere. The writing is atrocious.

More fun easy fluff.

Listened to this as an audiobook.

Fantastic pseudo-anthropological story. Aside from the actual story line, the descriptions of prehistoric neanderthal life and activities are fascinating. I of course didn't take it as an actual scientific account, though it does seem quite well researched, but as an excellent example of world building.

Just to get it out of the way at the beginning: I found the way this was written to be dreadful, trying too hard to be hip and conversational, which just came off as strained. The tone would drift in to more neutral territory some of the time and when it did, it was great.

This book in an insightful analysis of a lot of data and anecdata from the author's work. I think it's a useful way to frame the relationship to one's own body in a healthy, productive manner. Even the parts that weren't exactly new information for me were framed in ways I hadn't necessarily thought of. There is a lot of science grounding this but also a lot of reminders that the cultural messages that make us second guess our bodies for doing completely innocuous things or looking the way a body looks are not worth listening to, we're basically all normal and fine.

Clearly well researched, engaging read, but not my favorite Larson book.

In general I find apocalypse scenarios in media to be wildly boring and unimaginative. This story addressed some (but certainly not all) of the standard tropes of the genre that make it feel unrealistic and dull to me. I appreciated that it went far enough into the future to be outside the panic of a pivotal moment and into the time when the “new” reality has settled in, without going full Walking Dead with making that panic level of existence last forever. The narrative managed the jumping back and forth in time well. I found most of the “twists” to be predictable but I don't usually read specifically for gotcha moments so that's fine with me.

This book led to about as many chuckles as one would expect from this duo - that is to say, plenty. While the story did end up coming to one neat end, there were parts that felt a little disjointed, probably because two people wrote it. All in all, I don't think that Pratchett+Gaiman > just Pratchett or just Gaiman, but it's a fun little book.

I liked how very in her voice this was, and disarmingly direct.

This was...weird. I enjoyed a lot of the stories. Some are very familiar, some are vaguely familiar but a little altered, and some I don't know at all. Usually the unfamiliar ones are the more batshit ones, guess it's harder to make the truly nutty ones palatable to the masses. I feel like I would have gotten more out of this if I'd been reading it with an accompanying class or set of notes on the symbolism and meanings of the stories. There are a lot of repeated themes, to the point that I'd call them tropes, and some of those left me very confused. There are also many that read like morality tales, which isn't surprising because that's actually what a lot of storytelling is intended for, but that moral is lost on me. Sometimes I think I'm getting the moral, but it seems like such a ridiculous lesson that I must be misunderstanding. Either that or times truly have changed (which is quite probable, I'm sure my modern ethical code varies greatly from that of the Grimms' time). The material is presented very raw, which is interesting in light of having read later editions with their additional polish, but still, difficult to digest.

My rating may be higher than is reasonable for nostalgia reasons. This was quite solid in the continuum of Vampire Chronicles books. Definitely not a standalone, and full of all the usual Anne Rice camp - as delightful and ridiculous as that is.

Beautiful memoir that weaves back and forth between indigenous knowledge and “conventional” science seamlessly.