Kat

I tried, I really tried. It's so long and full of petty cruelty, from a person shooting a monkey with a BB gun to bullying to wars and culture loss via colonization. The narrative is convoluted and there are multiple frame stories and some super annoying fourth-wall-breaking commentary. I was constantly confused about why anyone was doing anything, because there's not a lot about what the characters are thinking/feeling and they just randomly do things that kind of suck? And at best people are kind of indifferent to each other? Plus I could not keep track of everything that happened and all the different characters and none of it really seemed to matter.

I truly did not like anyone in this entire book. The main characters in particular are so unlikeable and also their actions and choices are totally inconsistent throughout the book. The story gives the impression of constantly setting up something and then just shifts away, leaving you wondering what happened to that guy anyway, did anything ever come of that sub-plot, why did you spend all this time telling me this stuff and then it just fades into the background? It's as if the author wasn't even interested in his own stories or characters, just in the act of storytelling, and in proselytizing about the act of storytelling itself, which doesn't really work if you don't have a good story to tie it together. It's a Peer Gynt onion that turns out to contain nothing at all beneath all the layers of trapping, and hopes you won't notice.

There's some magical realism elements but it's mainly gods showing up to talk to people and then a few other random events that seem essentially meaningless. I don't know, the whole thing was just exhausting. It's like an Indian version of 100 Years of Solitude where a bunch of people with confusingly-similar names make opaque choices for incoherent reasons and tragedy follows everything.

This is a strong collection of stories that I find more enjoyable than most of Heinlein's full-length novels. “The Year of the Jackpot” is probably my favorite Heinlein story, and “By His Bootstraps” is a classic, and very satisfying, time travel story. The eponymous story is memorable for its smart, tomboy main character and scenes of low-gravity flying as a sport on the moon. “Project Nightmare” and “Water Is for Washing” are also quite good.

I randomly picked this up somehow as a teenager, probably from a library sale. Like many of the 60s era memoirs or works of semi-autobiographical fiction I stumbled into, it left a strong impression on me: for its unflinching honesty about female sexuality; for the vision of permissiveness and adult freedom I took from the talk of sex, drug use and cross-country moves; for its portrayal of a man as physically beautiful, emotionally connected, cherished – in short, allowing him to have a role as an object of love, in a way that most literary canon I'd been exposed to only spoke of women.

This was also pre-internet days, and any glimpse, however doomed or tawdry, of certain subjects was more precious to me than gold. Robinson's sexual encounters with women intrigued me, and so did her allusion (never elaborated upon) of other characters in her head.

I remembered this book, essentially, as a beautiful love story – one in which the love and connection between two people conquers the odds.

Re-reading it as an adult, I find myself more struck by the dysfunctional and codependent qualities of their relationship. I find myself angry at Jill for allowing him to treat her the way that he did, for continually forgiving his absences and abuses, for essentially becoming a caretaker for an adult man at the expense of her own two children. I wanted her to take more agency over her own life, to set boundaries. I saw the encounter with Laurie and his ex-wife, and her subsequent adoration of Nadia, in a very different light.

And on the whole I'm far less likely to see it as “romantic” when two people mistreat each other, even unintentionally, even when the people they really intend to mistreat are themselves.

But I think I got more out of this as a historical document and as an insight into a woman's life in the 60s, as I now have a lot more context for things like Esalen.

I can't find anything online about what happened to Laurie; he's conspicuously absent from her online bios. [Update: Laurie's real name was Jeremiah, and they divorced in 1977.] The book was published in 1974, and according to Wikipedia, she married someone else in 1980. It sounds as if their relationship itself did not survive sobriety or its conversion into memoir, or both.

I found this a very interesting re-read, in the end, if only because it showed the vast difference in experience and understanding between myself-then and myself-now.

Really loved most of this book – the worldbuilding, the characters, the writing – but IMO it really went to pieces at the end.

Incredibly, unbelievably, ridiculously, offensively bad.Made all the worse because of the ways it's reminiscent of [b:Winter's Tale 12967 Winter's Tale Mark Helprin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1399135618s/12967.jpg 1965767].The protagonists are fundamentally unlikeable; their “struggles” comically unrelatable (oh, the burden of wealth! gosh it must be hard to be perfect in every single way but have a momentarily hard time achieving recognition! wow life is rough when you have a problem you could easily solve with your wealthy wife's money but refuse to accept it!); the overarching themes are anger-inducing (mainly glorification of war and incredibly sexist idealization of women); the writing is tiresome, repetitive and full of pointless tangents.The ending hinted that there was possibly a good book in here somewhere (as, for the first time, we get some insight into the effect the war had on Harry)... but it was not this one.I think from now on I will just pretend that any non-Winter's Tale Helprin books do not exist.

(i love u Gillian and i'm sorry but) this was such a hot mess of copy-pasted self-help tips and the few personal stories from GA's life are extremely generic.

i can't be bothered to write anything more about this but please enjoy the dippy acronyms i highlighted:

Fear = False Evidence Appearing Real
Trust = To Rely Upon Spiritual Truth
Ego = Edging Goodness Out
Act = Action Changes Things

Okay so a historical/magical realist YA book about teenage Edgar Allen Poe, itself written in the style of a Poe story, by an author I really like should have been the perfect Halloween read. And it did have its moments! I mean I didn't hate it! It just fell kind of flat.. maybe because the literalization of Lenore as Poe's muse just felt kind of, well, overly literal. And the repeated refrain of different passages that scanned like The Raven, which was soooo clever and cute but maybe a little... strained? I dunno this was clearly a labor of love and I really felt like I should've liked it more but it just didn't have the emotional resonance of e.g. [b:In the Shadow of Blackbirds 13112915 In the Shadow of Blackbirds Cat Winters https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348721608l/13112915.SY75.jpg 18286614].

ok have to dock a few points because it is borderline culturally appropriative BUT at its core it's about what happens when the things that help you transform yourself become the same things that haunt you because you have invested them with too much power

Witch Baby is the protagonist and she goes to NYC so obviously this was my favorite one so far

An interesting read that sparked a lot of thoughts for me about community.

Practical, grounded, contains a good variety of exercises (journaling prompts, meditation – with audio guides available online, mindfulness reminders, etc.).

i kind of see what he is trying to do here but i hated most of this book, and the bits i didn't hate, i resented for not being good enough to counterbalance the hours i spent reading some of the worst things i have ever read. huge swaths of it are gross and much of the rest of it is sad, and if there are a few exquisite paragraphs amongst the morass, i'm here to tell you that you can find equally good paragraphs in other books. well-written, interestingly-structured, unique, yes; but in the service of nothing i cared to experience.

i thought i would finish it out of a desire to see if the payoff would make it all worthwhile (it didn't) but in the end, what really got me over the finish line was a combination of morbid curiosity and sheer bloody-mindedness. a merely bad book could be left unfinished; a book that i am going to describe henceforth as one of the worst i've ever read deserves me to at least not walk out at intermission.

more than anything else, the book reminded me of insufferable boyfriends i had in college, the sort who would not close the bathroom door while doing their business because “we should be completely comfortable with each other's bodies” and then imply that if i preferred some privacy i was somehow prudish or close-minded or sexually repressed.

anyway, don't read this.

Dated and depressing.

This book is phenomenal. It's basically perfect.

Miéville constructs the world of the two cities around one operative metaphor, one fantastic element – one that is utterly unbelievable, yet so deeply-ingrained in the fabric of the two cities that you begin to take it for granted yourself. He illustrates how the divide between the two cities plays itself out, in small ways and large, skillfully exploring the consequences and building up the reader's understanding, bit by bit. By the time Miéville's finished with you, you've internalized the taboo, almost as if you've in fact become an inhabitant of Besźel or Ul Qoma.

This is vital because the ending, the way it all plays out, only makes sense from within the metaphor, even as it illustrates the tenuousness of it all.

This is one of those books that will make you see the world differently, in a way that cannot be unseen.

Okay, so first off: here's Mitchell, a white British guy, writing a book set in Japan, intentionally as homage, or in dialog with, or riffing off of, Murakami and especially Norwegian Wood. I think he got most of the details right, and I didn't know he lived there for awhile! But still. It's not exactly appropriative and it's not exactly derivative, but it does feel a little bit like he's trying to prove that he can out-Murakami Murakami (or perhaps criticize him by taking his tropes into the territory of the absurd?), and then bombard you with clever references and in-jokes. So that felt a bit weird. Especially coming to this book having read all of his later works, and knowing that he has plenty of original ideas and is a very talented writer.

I liked the first half or so a lot. It was especially fun to run into Mitchell “multiverse” references that also showed up in Utopia Avenue (the black and white movie and the weird cinema! whoa!). But, as the book progressed it really went off the rails. I found the last couple of chapters aggravatingly incoherent and the ending deeply dissatisfying.

There were also gory bits that I did not, personally, enjoy.

So many interesting plotlines were set up throughout the novel, and none of them had any payoff whatsoever. Instead, the book ends with the creation of a bunch of new, unresolved questions. Are we supposed to take some kind of meaning away from that? Like everything is essentially meaningless? Was this all a dream? Do I need to go reread Norwegian Wood in order to figure out what it is you're trying to prove here, Mitchell? Am I just too dumb to understand whatever meta-commentary is happening here?

A segment from the Guardian review, which I enjoyed, and which gets at why I still count Mitchell as one of my favorite authors:

Far more successful, because less overt, are the enjoyably arrogant dabs of intertextuality: one character and one secret facility from Ghostwritten wink tangentially into life here too, and contribute a pianissimo counterpoint to Mitchell's leitmotif. His guiding thesis is a comfortingly simple one: everything is somehow interconnected, even if we don't know why. This theme is most obviously celebrated in the novel's obsessive numerology. As though it were intended as a cyborg updating of the medieval dream poem Pearl , number9dream is everywhere infected with viral nines. Partly because of this suspicious arithmetic, it becomes possible to suppose that the entire action of the novel may have been a dream; Mitchell's greatest feat is to suggest this without making the reader feel cheated.

Still good but didn't really stun me the way the first one did! I am still super here for the further adventures of Danielle Cain and her merry crew of genderqueer anarchist punk magicians

Valente does Douglas Adams meets glamrock and it's amazing <3

side note: i read this when i needed something fun to get me through the days of inconsolable sadness while my cat was dying (and it helped!), and when i got to the acknowledgments at the end, i was stunned to learn that Valente wrote it while HER cat was dying. i find this synchronicity oddly comforting.

It was okay but didn't blow my mind! I found the Adventures in Near Future Patent Law tedious and the ending unsatisfying. I thought it was setting itself up for some deeper exploration of the notion of autonomy (among other things), but it didn't ultimately follow through.

The writing style betrays the author's background in science journalism, with little immersiveness or emotional connection to the characters. On the whole it takes itself far too seriously and almost feels like even the author wasn't all that interested in her own characters or story.

There's also some LGBT(?) stuff that didn't sit at all right with me, which is confusing since I know the author is part of the queer community, but like... I don't really see how to read it in a way that doesn't reinforce some pretty bad homophobic/transphobic stereotypes.

What most disappointed me, in the end, was that the questionable ethics of many of the characters remained unexamined (or even rewarded), and while the characters ultimately saved themselves, they didn't seem to grow or change, and failed to make any impact on the larger problems that the book spent so long illustrating. Which maybe was the point, but if so, it was depressing.

Definitely an “eclectic” collection. A wide variety of genres, formats, themes, etc. I didn't love all of them, but it's an interesting selection.

OMG. These books continue to get better. I may have to go back and down-rate some of the earlier ones in order to reflect how amazing the later books in the series are. >_>

This is literally one of the most boring books I have ever read. It wasn't even bad in an amusing way, just really really dull.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and normally a book about economics would sound to me like the kind of the thing to reach for to treat insomnia. But... this book blew me away. Everyone in the first world should read it. Seriously.

Whether or not his plan would work, it really puts things in perspective, and gives a very lucid and accessible overview of world economics – no trivial task. It's a call to action, and a necessary one, but also a refreshing voice of hope amongst the cynics. Maybe he's wrong that we could eradicate extreme poverty by 2025 – but damned if I don't now think we ought to try.

Exquisite. Quick to read, but vast and full of possibility. A love poem to an infinite number of cities, or perhaps just to one: a city defined by the superposition of all the stories – or by the things left unsaid, when all the stories are told. Echoes of [a:Jorge Luis Borges 500 Jorge Luis Borges http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1306036027p2/500.jpg].

Maybe I just had low expectations but this was weirdly good. I couldn't put it down.

A solid work of speculative near-future sci fi, but somehow I had a hard time staying interested in it. It's somewhat dated now and the environmentalism feels heavy-handed. I found the number of different characters and narrative threads annoying, even though they were skillfully written and came together satisfyingly at the end.