zilver
this took me SO long to finish. i think this is a “it's not you, it's me” but oh boy did i have a rough time with this one. and not even because it's pretty gruesome, but mostly because the narrative keeps you at such a distance. it made it really hard to feel invested at all for the longest time, combined with the fact that despite the characters moving all the time, the story has very little forward momentum. i think it probably didn't help my experience that i didn't have time to really sit with it for longer periods.
despite not really doing it for me, mccarthy's style did really strike me as very distinctive and remarkable. will definitely read something else from him to see how that lands.
ahahaha noooo don???t hit a little bit too hard and get a little bit too real ur a romance novel???.
i generally really like metafiction as a technique and this is a great example of it. it feels like a fantastic book to teach young people about unreliable narration, ethics in journalism and critical reading. what is okay to write about? what is okay to read about? because of its fiction-framed-as-non-fiction identity, the book allows for a relatively easier engagement with heavy and complicated subject matter, which in turn gives easy entrance to questions related to those subjects. it doesn???t spell out too much or gives the reader any easy answers
my main (and possibly only) gripe with the book as a whole then also comes from the last couple of pages, because it felt like they (unnecessarily) took away some of the ambiguity that the novel plays with (and to be completely honest i felt that the interview it describes was some poor and unrealistic writing in an overall strong book).
very interested to read eliza clark???s debut now!
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW (but also this doesn't feel like a book that can be spoiled, really, so read on at your own risk)
i have very complicated feelings about this book. i was just talking about it with my mum and i think what i told her is the easiest way to say it: i liked parts of this book (quite dearly) but i don't think i like this book as a whole - hence the slightly ambivalent and careful three stars.
i don't think i can deny that sally rooney's writing style is really up my alley - i love the way her characters are allowed to think on the page, explicitly, complexly, full of contradictions and feelings and logic and inconsistencies. it's clean, in a lot of ways, without beating around bushes. that's refreshing, to me at least. i liked the ways in which connell and marianne were allowed to struggle with their identities and their feelings and their surroundings - things that are common and important and intense while you're growing up. mostly during the first half of the book i really liked seeing marianne's individuality come out during scenes with other people, such as during this one:
???nothing would feel more exhilarating to her at this moment than to say: they???ll be on their way shortly. how much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive???
???You think you???re so special, do you? said Denice. Marianne let her eyes close. No, she said. I don???t.???
???He???s explained it, or tried to explain it, in his emails to Marianne. For her the scholarship was a self-esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what she has always believed about herself anyway: that she???s special.???
“Would she ever be happy? And what kind of happiness would it be? ... But in the end she has done something for him, she's made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that ... [For] her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once.”
REALLY enjoyed this. exactly what i wanted when i decided i wanted to get into a big, all-enveloping fantasy series. the first half is pretty slow going but sets the tone so well and gives you so much insight into the world and characters, so when we get to the second half it just gets to be a rollercoaster. ily fitz ily fool ily nosy. can???t wait to get to the next one
a BEHEMOTH of a book. truly felt like i was swallowed whole by a whale.
this one is both less emotional but much more sad than the previous books. fitz has lost so much and loses more and more buckkeep, patience, molly, burrich, verity, all he puts in girl-on-a-dragon, his dream for a kind of a life, his drive and his ease. he is also verrrry buffy s6-coded in both a good and painful way.
nighteyes remains a star. may he live forever. and the fool!!!!! the fool<3 they are pack!!!
3.5 took about 300 pages too long to arrive at some plot but when it gets going it gets going!
second read - october 2019
despite there being a number of things in this book that i don???t super enjoy parts of it also leave me reeling. adam???s first reading with persephone? the sequence at the barns? the last couple of chapters in general? those are the words that magic is made out of.
first read - march 2016
4.5 “actually, several of us who???d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you???re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.”i finished this yesterday afternoon and i think i'm going to be processing it for a long time. the glass hotel feels like the kind of book you immediately want to read again because you know there is so much in there that you haven't gotten out of it yet. and there's a Lot in this book. it's about wilderness vs stylised life, about private vs public, about what ifs, about the restriction of poverty and the restriction of richness, it's about what we imagine our lives to be like and how things never turn out the way we thought, it's about invisible barriers between people and places and classes, it's about where you belong and what you long for, it's about illusion and delusion, it's about the ambiguity of humanity. it's about looking at the world from a distance, and looking from up close, and figuring out what the difference is. i don't know how to review this book, really. it was good. really good. i love emily st. john mandel's writing style. it's so clean, and economic, and yet so rich. i like that she likes to write about disaster as if it's not disastrous. the disaster in this book is, it's true, disaster on a relatively smaller scale than in station eleven, but it's disaster nonetheless. it's destructive in many ways. it makes for a before and after. but it's like st. john mandel can process all of that, and stay calm at the same time. it's almost gentle, the way she leads you through it. she knows not everything needs to be spelled out. it leaves you with a very open world to explore and interpret. last thing: i kinda love subtle references to characters from other novels like this. it's really only there if you've read other work, and it's fine if you miss it, but i think it's just a nice touch to give some readers that glimpse of recognition.
4.5 ???the children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. to stay tender, the weight of life cannot lean on your bones.???
felt a very sudden and inexplicable urge to reread this yesterday. had a little cry upon finishing it today. it???s a very small book and it made me feel a lot of feelings.
ngl this was really fun (& thinking about costa mcclure saying “it's VERY intense, VERY homo-erotic” in lolilo made it even more fun)
a list of fun times with faustus: (lowkey spoilers below)
??? when faustus conjures up a devil and immediately sends him away because the devil is too ugly
??? faustus contemplating how one words the handing over of one's soul to the devil
??? when he asks mephastophiles where hell is and just. does not believe anything he says.
??? mephastophiles: but faustus. i'm literally a devil from hell.
faustus: sounds fake but ok
??? faustus asking for a wife and mephastopheles being a troll giving him another devil dressed up as a woman instead
??? faustus being a suck up (“sweet mephastophiles”) and mephastophiles not giving a single shit
??? faustus: you look ugly
lucifer: this bitch ,,,
faustus: ??_(???)_/??
??? faustus literally telling gluttony to choke
??? “the first letter of my name begins with lechery”
??? lechery is that kid that's like “the word i'm thinking of starts with sl and ends with eep”
??? all the devils keep saying “tut”
??? robin: i have stolen this book and now i will read its magic words
rafe: you actually can't read idiot
??? faustus using his invisibility to snatch pieces of meat away from the pope
??? when i misread a word and thought one of the lines was “great potatoes do kneel with awful fear”
??? robin and rafe totally digging the fact that they're going to be turned into an ape and a dog respectively
??? faustus and mephastophiles pulling a prank on a random guy making it seem as if the guy literally pulls faustus leg off
??? faustus: i sold my soul to the devil
his buddies: god forbid!!
faustus: ..... yeah he did
3.5 this book is jonathan swift???s ???a modest proposal??? level of satire and is completely upfront about that. it makes clear pretty early on what it sets out to do, and then just does that! the message is so extremely in your face, but also, it???s a good message, so why not? very enjoyable overall
i might give it 3.5 and a surprisingly long review for a 3-3.5 star book.
it took me a long time to really get into this book. i didn't specifically like the main character, adelina (it's probably not a good sign that i just had to look up how to spell it oops). she was interesting in all her darkness and vengeance but somehow she didn't really.. do anything for me.
the other malfettos were awesome though, i want about 200% more of rafaelle and gemma and lucent.
the ending caught me somewhat off guard, i was pleasantly surprised by how it was handled and how the daggers dealt with.. all that. i was certainly v happy that a lot happened - i'd feared a little that it was going to be dragged out a lot and it wasn't so. good for you book.
that instalove tho......... like literally get it out of my line of sight and put it through a shredder. it felt so “we need that Romance??? that's the only deep connection we can give these people” but then it just.. happened. hardly any build up. they spent like a couple of hours??? in a room together sometimes and then. poof. tru love.
3.5 my first gibson, and a difficult one to review. i think it's necessary to divvy up my rating, because it's a 5-star read in terms of concept and world building, which deserves to be said. it fell short for me both in terms of actual story and character (would give it 3 stars for both of those, maybe). my dad - a real gibson aficionado - tells me this way of building a strange and new and only (very) partially recognisable world, and dropping you into it without a warning or an explanation is a very gibson-y thing to do. i can't confirm or deny that, of course, it being my first gibson, but i can tell it's something he does well. both the world he crafts are fascinating and vast and distinct and both clearly a result of our world, and entirely strange from it. it's hard work, reading this book and trying to keep up with it. i think that's why i enjoyed the middle part the most - i'd worked through the first chunk and finally gotten to a place where i felt a bit more settled in the story and the characters. where i could read a page and was able to place every weird concept without too much trouble (only to be uprooted again during the last chunk, of course). i'm a very character-focused reader. if the characters and their relationships and development are good and interesting, i'll forgive a lot of things. on the other hand, however, if i feel like those things aren't that well developed, i'll always feel there's something distinct lacking in this story. i felt not real connection to any of the characters. i didn't feel like any of them had a real arc throughout the book. i really liked the parts where we got descriptions of wilf and lowbeer and ash's complicated relationship with their future - how they hated it and appreciated it, how they wanted it to be different, how they longed for the past. but in the end, those things we learned about them and their thinking never really seemed to be developed further than those surface feelings. and the story... just left me confused, to be honest. maybe because i wasn't invested in it at all. very possible that that's entirely on me, but i had to read the wikipedia page to get a grasp of why half the story was happening and even that didn't really clear it up for me. again - may be me lacking the braincells, may be gibson dedicating so much to the world that he's missing some of the rest of what the book needed. in the end i'm left feeling like i put a lot of hard work into understanding a book and didn't really end up getting enough out of it to make that hard work feel entirely worth it. and i think now i need something that doesn't make my brain feel like my laptop's cpu when i'm playing sims with all the packs installed
dracula daily was lowkey an insane way to read this book. will have to read the proper thing one day but that day is NOT today. mina harker is my best friend
???Sometimes you weren???t yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do.???
3.5
This is a whale of a book, that's for sure. It's 900 pages of character explorations, the city of New York being a character in and of itself. Or, that's what it was supposed to be. It surely is an intriguing piece of non-linear narrative but despite having spent over 900 pages with these characters, I had a difficult time really caring about any of them. Or caring enough, at least.
The underlying story felt a little too wobbly to keep the entire thing afloat. It felt just a little too set up for me to go along with it (though maybe I should have expected that set up, given the supposed but slightly unrealistic interconnectedness of all the characters). A girl gets shot on New Year's Eve and A Lot of Things Happen.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this was a good book. It was told in an interesting way (I really liked the way the interludes functioned as quick glimpses of sides of the story), surrounded a set of big events (the murder, the blackout of ‘77) and featured a wide range of characters (that still didn't really seem to be able to find their own voices) but it kept me too much at a distance to really get invested.
3.5 feels like i should've taken a physics course before i started this. really a case where i had to try and stay concentrated on every single sentence (hard) or try to dodge and weave myself through technical explanations to see if i could understand without understanding (also hard). with my dad sitting next to me to explain in terms that even zilvers can understand it becomes a lot easier. feels like actually a great book club book, if your book club enjoys hard-hitting historical books about the technical revolution. there's a lot here and dyson is very good at finding clever metaphors that help the reader grasp the enormity, almost other worldliness of some of the concepts and ideas he's getting across here. but without some pretty solid prior knowledge it's still a tough nut to crack. personally i would've liked a bit more hand holding throughout. the parts i could get through on vibes alone were my favourite, specifically the middle section which ties in dyson's own parents, his own growing up at princeton (!!), and the years that followed where he lived in a TREEHOUSE (what kind of boyish dream) and built kayaks. these chapters feel really grounded in their more personal nature, and because dyson's own history is so closely tied to the subject he's writing about throughout this book, it doesn't feel disconnected but more like a nice reprieve. i also love a book with pictures, especially if those pictures include both interior and exterior shots of tree houses.
???In??? is about detachment. Nick walks through life, past millennial-y named coffee/tea/lifestyle shops feeling??? or rather, not feeling at all. He has a sister who, when he asks her how she is, tells him not to bother. A mother who he calls to help with leaks. Seemingly meaningful relationships of any sort. I know ??? so far this has the incredible potential of being an extremely self-indulgent story about an emotionally constipated 20-something-year-old where boy who goes through life not understanding why no one likes him. But then... it???s not that. At all.
One of ???In??????s strong points is the fact that it doesn???t try to hang its main character???s issues on anything. Considering he???s supposed to be a millennial, the potential for making social media and phone-to-hand connection the Big Bad seems imminent. But it???s not. Nick longs for solitude. No, that???s not entirely true. He longs to be unobserved. To feel without necessarily having that feeling be seen and approved by others. He uses an example from his childhood, the experience of being in a water park and going through the tunnels alone. He feels great there, feels the desire to share that feeling with his friends. And as soon as they???re there, it???s not the same anymore.
A ripple effect, then, and Nick is 20-something and doesn???t know how to share anymore, because what will that lead to? What???s that invisible barrier that stops him from talking to family, and to anyone, really? For us as readers the barrier is manifested literally, each frame bordered by a dark, solid line. That is, until Nick - fragmentarily - starts to open up, and the lines of not only the border, but also his own person start to blur, and we as readers start to actually learn more about him and his family. And he/we learn(s) that even if you try, it still might not be easy. In a conversation I think most children will have, whether internally or in real life, as they grow up and learn to start to see their parents, Nick says to his mother, ???I???m trying to talk about you.??? She says, ???You weren???t asking about me.??? He says he was, and she says, ???I???m not just who I am to you, Nick.??? And his world opens up.
There are stories that work when they are made into graphic novels. Then there are stories that are made to be told as graphic novels. This is definitely the latter. The art style, the use of framing and colour, the layout are all meaningful and intentional at every turn of the page. The feeling of emptiness and then space that are created when Nick shifts between not-feeling and feeling become tangible. I love graphic novels that are this purposeful.
And on top of that this book is just really funny. The coffee shop jokes got me every time. It teased millennial culture without being an asshole about the things that matter. I laughed out loud multiple times. A bit cheeky, a bit tongue-in-cheek. It really worked for me.
I think the concept as a whole could???ve been driven further, deeper. I???d maybe have liked it to hollow me out a tad more than it did. But it was really good nonetheless. Not to go full circle here, but now that I think about it, maybe ???In??? isn???t about detachment. It???s about what happens when that detachment ends (because something does).
I received a free ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
this is not a good review i???m just writing down some things to clear my head. there were def also good parts of this book, i???m unfortunately just not left with those thoughts upon finishing it.
for its length this novel lacked specificity for me - i think i really missed learning more about the relationship between the sisters before the tragedies started. learning more about iris and her life after everything. the back of the book seems to imply that this will be a story of neglected sisters trying to find their independence in a world that makes it hard for them, it felt like it remained very surface level on its conclusions (marriage bad + men bad = women die).
it doesn???t help that there???s very little progression in the events. while their circumstances differ slightly almost every sister dies a similar way, the people around her react a similar way, and nothing changes. statement? maybe. but also quite tedious to read for 350 pages. i didn???t expect to have an explanation for the mystery when i started the book and was quite content with that, but as it went on i started craving learning something> that would give me something to cling to. and it feels like there are all these hooks - the particularity of the death of each sister, the way they all match. tell me more!! what does it mean!! there???s a supposed plot line of a character being haunted by the ghosts of people that were killed with guns from the family???s gun empire - so creepy, so interesting! why do we never hear of it again!!! also not sure i agree with the blurbs of this being a ???witty, delicious, demented joyride??? genuinely don???t see how it???s supposed to be witty- it doesn???t try to be as far as i understood (but maybe i have a bad sense of humour). and demented HOW. i was expecting some jane eyre shit but found it lacking in ladies in the attic. idk what i???m saying i don???t think i???m explaining myself very well. just felt a little disappointed by this because i def saw the potential. anyway! moving on.