Awescape
This is a beautiful book. One review I read described it as "clear running water", and that is accurate. In this book, not much happens but it is never boring. The mystery engrosses you, but the mystery isn't the point. Satisfying, painful. About loneliness, and the will to live, and the value of the future, and humanity.
I feel bad giving this a two star review because it's not a badly written book. The book is about a small Mexican town where all the men have gone north to the USA for work, leaving the women behind. Concerned about the lack of protection from bandits and weirdos coming to bother them, a young group of girls travel across the border to bring their family or at least "soldiers" back to protect their town. The prose was funny although in a way that didn't always click with me, and wove a lot of Mexican culture and turns of phrase into the book which was cool, and the pictures of life in their hometown were vivid. That said, the story felt like there wasn't much to it- all the plot points were fantastical and unrealistic in a way that removed all stakes and drama because it was so patently unrealistic. The towns elders and grown women sends a group of teenage girls in a dangerous area alone across the country and across the border? With no contacts to help them except a phone number from decade ago to someone who used to live in Tijuana who no one has talked to in decades or bothered to call and verify they are still there and willing to help the girls before they send them, risking their lives? This book was written by a man and I understand its a bit of a fairy tale but it just felt like stupid things happened to make the plot work. Living as a woman, the idea of young girls being sent to represent their town with no worldly knowledge and hardly any resources where they could be disappeared, sex trafficked, raped, or worse, is just so ridiculous. They would send some older men or at least the old women. It would NEVER happen, and the book refuses to acknowledge who serious the stakes are- the girls seem very unaware how much danger they're in or have any plan which I understand teenagers are dumb but I doubt most are this clueless. At times there are creeps or bad people, but then it's undercut by good luck, jokes, or an almost cartoony turn of events. At one point a character pole vaults over the border. A kind border guard decides to drive them across after they get caught and returned. And then the major plot resolution, if they manage to bring people back to protect he town, isn't even shown- the last couple pages is they make it across the border and then a quick scene of them coming back to town with an "army". So how did they find these "soldiers", how did they get back across, how did they establish order? Wasn't for me.
A clear theme in Ferrante's work is "becoming" like someone else- be it children becoming their parents, someone's narrative or personal magnetism getting inside you and changing from the inside, or escaping or failing to escape our fate. The fact we can never tell if this a fear or paranoia of the narrator, or a reality, makes it even better.
This mysterious power that warps you without your will, changing your nature before you even realize it, is a palpable sticky energy in the book. Do we have our own essence or are we just shaped by the forces that touch us? Can a fate be rejected, can we choose who we are?
This book is about a child becoming an adult. A young girl hears her parents compare her to the aunt they hate, and she becomes with obsessed with what is so bad in her that her parents see her like this, to the point of seeking a closeness with the aunt. The child begin to learn more about the adults her parents are, and over time begins to readjust the simplistic perceptions she has of everyone she knows, including herself.
When I read this book, it took me a little bit, maybe 20-30 pages, to really sink into it. I had already read The Neopolitan novels and The Days of Abandonment by Ferrante and I think I assumed this book would be derivative of those or could not possible be as good. Soon I was hooked though, after which I read through the book very fast. It picked up density, meaning, and as with all Ferrante's work, the meanings added onto and subverted each-other, creating a self-contained world with a richness that rivals reality. My favorite aspect of Ferrante is the moment is plays with the narrator's reliability by giving them an alternative information and perspective that casts the entire narrative into doubt- we could spend chapters building an idea only to have it subverted, but never answered, only leaving us with questions on all sides- these are books that border omniscience but come from a first person point of view, leaving us to doubt not the narrator as unreliable but the world as unreliable, that it may be fundamentally impossible to arrive at truth, and the characters themselves are aware of this feeling of moving through murky and changeable water. It's through the tension created by the contrasting of opposites the feeling of doubt and beauty comes in, and an entire world in all its contradictions in one person.
One of my favorite books. I read this when I was young and it was very important to me.
The book is a bildungsroman that is somewhat autobiographical to the author, Somerset Maugham. The protagonist, Philip, was born with a club foot and after being orphaned grows up under the care of a somewhat cold religious relatives. He grows up shy and self-conscious, seeking belonging and a refuge from his loneliness in books and fantasies. As he grows he tries on various professions, falls in love with a girl who rejects him, gains and loses friends, finds his own self-definitions, and struggles with accepting himself and the world. The book introduces some concepts that I found really impactful, including some existentialist themes, the meaning of art and artistic fulfillment, romantic obsession, self-deception and self awareness . It's a beautiful book that is told from the point of a hungry soul trying to find peace. The prose is beautiful, elegant, and easy to read, but honest, direct, and evocative.
This book of essays is mostly about consent, body image, and complicated feelings towards sexuality. Dunham is really funny, wry, self-aware, and outrageous. She also is obsessed with and allergic to shame, and I love that about her.
Lena Dunham is really good at putting a voice to experiences people don't normally talk about. Like the shame of ending up in unhealthy relationships or nonconsensual situations in part because you were seeking something there, or being unable to name when something happened was wrong. The shame of deeply needing to be desired and important, shame of our interest in our bodies, and other people's. What makes her such a good artist is her relationship to artifice and self-revelation. Being an artist is an act of artifice, of curating aspects of your existence to be shared, and so is being a person. There is something so beautiful and ridiculous about that. In Dunham there is this desire to reveal everything ugly and make it beautiful by sharing it, like the light of human mutual understanding will cleanse it. I really love that about her, even if at times it repels people because it swings into self-indulgent narcissism. There is something so innocent about that impulse, and also deeply brave.
Contains spoilers
This book is about descending into a dark place and wanting to stay there, needing to stay there. Hibernation, isolation, break-down depression. That said, it's a funny, mean, moving book, that is above all very honest. Maybe it will be more easily understood by those who have experienced depression and can find humor in it. On top of being funny, it's a quick and effortless read.
The main character is a good looking girl who appears to have all the advantages of being blonde, pretty, and from a wealthy family. But inside she is emotionally dead and incredibly isolated. After a series of disappointments leads her to major depression, the main character begins to earnestly seek to spend a year locked away in her apartment asleep as much as possible, floating away on prescription medication and transforming into her future self. Just not yet.
Her best friend is also lost, but copes with in the complete opposite way: frenetic superficial self improvement plans and an obsession with appearances. Best friend dismisses the main character's depression because she envies her beauty. In return, the protagonist treats her friend like crap, a bond of mutual sadomasochistic loneliness.
Her psychiatrist is the unhinged and ready to prescribe Dr. Tuttle, my favorite character. Bless you, Dr. Tuttle. You made me laugh out loud so many times.
I loved many things about this book. The descriptions of disassociation and fugue states. The terrible men. The superficial art world. The frank analysis women have of their own appearances and the treatment it affords them, and the frank discussion of eating disorders. How mean the main best friends were to each-other, and how they tried to love each-other as well. The flashbacks that got us to this point. The way depression makes us brittle and mean. How when you shrink your world down to a tiny stage, the mundane becomes a delight, like your favorite brand of ice cream or the deli coffee from around the corner. The rewatching of Harrison Ford and Whoopie Goldberg videotapes by the protagonist while locked in her depression apartment. When I experienced an episode of major depression, at one point all I could cope with was re-watching various VHSs. It's just so real.
I could not get past the writing style. I totally believe some people were into this, I was just not one of them. There was almost no plot. Instead the whole book was setting the mood of a scene, sometimes for pages and pages. At one point it took a character a chapter to walk around a room and forget what they were looking for, at another point 5 pages to walk a few steps down some stairs, with endless asides to describe the light hitting an object evoking at least three metaphors. My eyes glazed over. After describing something tiny with such momentous detail you think that would be significant to the plot in some way, but nope, nothing follows, just more description of something equally irrelevant. The characters did not grow or change or even have personalities. The book was basically a a few vaguely connected scenes stretched as far as they could go, drowned in some wordy but arresting visual imagery.
One of the most brutal and raw books in the world, one of my favorites. Some of the imagery feels so visceral years after reading it, it still filters into my brain. Ferrante's writing style is my favorite writing in the world. It both deeply submerses you in the emotion and reality of another human being, it's like being in your own head. It moves as effortlessly as though it's unfolding in your own unconscious. The movement of emotions and rationalizations as one moves through heartbreak, the dissolution and reconstitution of reality, it's so beautiful and painful. Ferrante is so good at saying things that I have never heard named
I read this multiple times! After I read it, I got the audiobook and listened to it multiple times while doing other things. Her narration really brings the humor across in the book and is darkly ironic and detached from a serious subject matter. Jennette is a brave person and a great writer who is able to articulate the parts of our psyche we normally struggle to name, which scratched a weird itch in my brain.
This book relays the issues of covert emotional abuse, unhealthy family relationships, a fractured sense of self, people pleasing, and eating disorders, in a way that is somehow both enraging, entertaining, and easy to understand. The codependence we form with unhealthy relationships and how we twist ourselves to fit them is described, but also the freedom of breaking those bonds.
These books light my brain on fire. The beauty at times was so unbearable I had to put the books down, overcome by a dizzying energy and joy, before I could start again.
Kind of fun but also cheesy. Its basically med-high quality fanfiction. Feyre is the self insert MC who is shy but brave, beautiful but doesn't know it and desired by everyone. The hot faerie love interests are part beast part man but change forms and also have masks so they are impossible to imagine, when I try to visualize them I see a blur. The world building is interesting although the plot beats are often forced or cliched. Cool things about the series: the female main character is never punished by the plot for being sexual. Entertaining, but not that deep and not that sexy either.
This book has some beautiful scenes, a lot to say about guilt, grief, and love, but it also tended to be a bit wordy and self congratulatory to me. The author occasionally seemed high on her own supply. I did like it but I wouldn't re read it.
Simultaneously an excellently written historical romance, and a piece of racist propaganda by an author who believed the “southern lost cause” myth, that being that the civil war was not over slavery and romanticized the plantation-era south, including downplaying slavery as “benevolent”- not remotely historically accurate. Unfortunately it was used by post reconstruction southerners as a piece of political propaganda to support their the romanticization of the antebellum south. Enjoy it but enjoy it critically.