Poppy L
If Sarton had actually been the persona she pretends to in her journal, I would still have not liked her very much. Her writing is beautiful, and the words stand notwithstanding several issues that stick out for me. There are several quotes that do, in fact, describe me - “How Unconscious we are, often, that giving may actually be asking, asking at the very least for attention”, her long discussions on the difficulty women, particularly married women, face in bring their creative self to the world (“It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive” - history supports her here), and “I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience.“
However, I am put off by her temper - early in the book, she throws a screaming tantrum at a friend over a casual comment about the flowers in her house not being perfect. At 58. She confesses that this is typical of her temper.
I am also put off by her treatment of the stray cat on her property. Midway into the book, she tempts the cat in the house... and then seemingly forgets about her, and some months later, mentions that the cat is again outside and in heat. Drove me nuts. I even went back through to see if she'd mentioned letting the cat back OUT of the house somewhere, but no. The cat did not rate enough notice or comment until she began producing kittens.
All in all, it was an interesting read. I admire her phrasing, but she fails in the chief task of any character - tell me why I should care. Make me like you enough to want to know what's going to happen to you.
Abandoned. There's a ton of backstop here about the history of medical science in the US, and I don't have time for it right now. Just wanted to see enough for a comparison between pandemics.
I got this book in an unexpected book trade with someone, and enjoyed the read. It's subtly amusing - if you're not looking for the humor, you probably won't find it, but also a fun story.
One of the early fantasy novels to be written after Tolkein defined the genre, and it shows. A young and whiny protagonist, saddled with a great responsibility, shepherded by a tall, mysterious wizard, must save the world with his trusty sidekick.
Luckily, this was a short book and a quick read, or I wouldn't have finished it.
I am disappointed in Tyler for this book - although I haven't read any of her other books to compare her research methods. In the author's interview which was printed in the back of my edition, she loftily says she didn't feel the need to talk to anyone who had either adopted a child or who had been adopted into a different culture. Indeed, although she starts her book following the lives of the adopted children, it quickly becomes apparent that she's much more interested in the nonexistant love lives of their grandparents - and could easily have skipped the entire international adoption for all it mattered to the second half of the book.
I was disappointed in this book. It felt, in the end, like a much longer novel that hadn't been completed.
Love, love, love this series. I picked them up initially after hearing that Sanderson was to finish the Wheel of Time saga, to find out what his writing style is like. In this book, #2, we return to our characters after they have overthrown the dictator who ruled their land... only to find out that some of the oppressive laws he had instituted had been for a reason, he had been keeping their people safe from an even greater threat. Which is now their problem.
Love the way Sanderson takes a traditional fantasy theme - overthrowing the bad leader and instituting a better one - on its head by showing that the bad leader wasn't as bad as he appeared to be, and that the new leaders are now up a creek with no paddle trying to learn what they need to know and FAST to protect their people from the larger threat.
Also fascinated by Sanderson's ability to play with magical systems... in Elantris, he's got a system based on geography and sigils. In Warbreaker, he's got a system completely based on colors. And in the Mistborn series, it's metals. Very inventive, and I look forward to reading more from Sanderson.
I could not put this book down and shorted myself a few hours of sleep as a result. I don't honestly know why. Perhaps I just wanted to know how they were going to get themselves out of the predicament.
The next morning, though, some inconsistencies about the plot woke me up by staring me in the face and muttering at me.
- Why does the father suddenly show up? He's drawn as a character with slight Asperger's himself, which should preclude him from feeling particularly responsible for being there - at least in Picoult's book. (I'll make a note here to mention that I am not up on current knowledge of AS disorders and cannot verify most of the symptoms that Picoult has written about. However, she has written a father who might or might not have Aspergers Syndrome, but failed to choose one way or another.) It seems to me that his entire purpose in arriving for the trial is to conveniently make the mother feel guilty for sleeping with her son's lawyer.
- That said - what kind of worried and stressed parent hops into bed with the lawyer representing her ASD child in court for murder? During the case? Did someone think that women wouldn't read this book if there wasn't a romance of some sort in it?
- How come no-one bothered listening to the younger kid? Again, he tried to say something several times, but got overlooked or ignored, and again, like the above two points, it feels more like something that the author needed in order to drive the plot, not something that the characters needed.
- And finally, when a 15 year old runs away from home, why does he run to the father he's seen only a couple of times in his life? Would he even have recognized his father in the airport if his mother hadn't arrived on an earlier flight? And hey, for someone so tense about money, why didn't she just call California and ask her ex to put the boy on the next flight home instead of flying out there herself?
I received this book as a gift. It's not one I would have picked out for myself.
The character, Phedre, is identified as a child as a scion of the goddess Kushiel. This means she is a natural submissive and thus she is raised to be a submissive, BDSM-loving, Mata Hari spy. The book is built around political entrigue, but Phedre does very little to get herself into and out of dangerous situations - her role is to be helpless, gather information for her aristocratic master/pimp, and let the men she entices save her when the going gets rough.
Phedre is not a character I want to be in any way. I could not imagine myself in her place. It took until book 3 before she finally got up the nerve to take action to save herself from danger - and by then, she'd been kidnapped, sold into slavery as a concubine for a primitive warlord, and under threat of death daily.
The book started out with a drumroll of flair and drama - OH NOES! THE NARCISSISTS ARE COMING! - but settled down in the second chapter with some research references and scientific evidence. I am cautiously swayed by the evidence - I'd need a second opinion of the evidence to be more certain. I appreciate that the authors are honest both about the research used and their own biases - in several places, they admit to times and places where they have fallen to the competitive standard in homes or childcare, as well as admitting that research done using only college students as subjects cannot in all fairness be expanded to assume it applies to the population as a whole, particularly when the subject is something tied to age or cohort.
Worth reading if you're interested in psychology or in modern culture. Even more worth reading if you've ever rolled your eyes at the celebrity magazines lining checkout stands all around the US or wondered why the incredibly unreal “reality tv” shows are so popular.
Fascinating read, but my head started hurting somewhere around Kant. Looking forward to reviewing the later sections and maybe watching the movie, too.
Highly readable, much talked about. Larsson set out to show men who hated women getting their comeuppance, so there's some very gratuitous scenes of violence to make his point. However, it disturbs me greatly that his idea of the opposite of “hating women” is Blomkvist, a serial womanizer with trouble keeping his pants on. I would have much preferred someone who appreciated the women in his life, respected them, and didn't see them as sex toys first.