Eduardo Santiago
Yikes. I had hoped that Hoff would grow in the ten years after [b:Tao of Pooh 48757 The Tao Of Pooh (The Wisdom Of Pooh) Benjamin Hoff http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg 55188]. He did: he grew batshit.Hoff starts with a good-old-days rant about Man living in Harmony with Nature and Spirits and whatnot before a Great Separation which caused deserts to form and violence and Confucianism. Tin foil hat territory. I had to reread parts of it to see if he really meant all that... and as best I can tell, he does. Maybe in the second half of the book he goes ha-ha just kidding. I don't plan to find out.Piglet and his mafioso bodyguard wander through periodically. Then some ravings about news media and about the American educational system. I give up. I don't want my experience of Winnie-the-Pooh soiled by paranoid ramblings.
Abandoned @ p.90. There's much good in it... but it's just too preachy and long-winded for me right now. I'm not learning anything from it, and other books beckon.
Abandoned, 15% or so (Kindle edition).
Some people like Wuthering Heights and/or The Great Gatsby. I wonder, are they the same ones who like Post Office? The characters in both have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They're nasty, brutish, unthinking, unkind. It is a torture to experience a world with them in it. I finished WH and TGG because I was young, foolish, and hopeful. This one, nope, life's too short.
It's an homage to [a:Borges 500 Jorge Luis Borges https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1389336941p2/500.jpg]! And quite well done, too (at least up to p.50). I'd love to continue reading it but only with the attention and time that it deserves... and I have none of either right now. So, time to create a new bookshelf: deferred. Like to-read but for a future day with fewer time constraints.
Abandoned ~p.100. The main protagonist is flat, dreary, and unlikely to get interesting. The alternate-chapter Whirling Dervish stuff is treacly and religiony. Absent a recommendation from a trusted source, this goes in the slush pile. For any friends who trust my tastes: not recommended.
Abandoned, p. 125. It's unreadable: tedious, pompous, flat. I tried, but every page is painful.
I feel such a heartwrenching sense of loss right now. For Sir Terry. How he must've felt, having known genius and feeling it gone. I am so sorry.
The whole anthropomorphic-pet thing has never worked for me: pretending that an animal without a prefrontal cortex is just a tiny-human-who-can't-speak is absurd—and not in the enjoyable sense of the word. Add to that some silliness about reincarnation, toss in some pointless car racing, a dash of maudlin, ... and thanks but no thanks.
(Audio CD edition; abandoned partway into 2nd disc.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/PsychedelicTherapy/comments/ca1cl9/recommended_new_book_consciousness_medicine/
tweet from Michael Pollan
n the other hand¹ sometimes it becomes clear that a book is not going to get much better. I found the writing painful, the organization resembling a sequence of case studies more than a unified work. It was Sias's voice that got to me: his contempt for patients and coworkers is undisguisable. Abandoned at p.81, which is far more than I should've given it.
[1] reference to yesterday's review of Queenie
Abandoned, p.166. I tried, and I kept going well past where I would've given up on anything else because this was a recommendation from Mira Jacob. But it just doesn't work for me and was becoming painful. I'd call the writing poetic but in a murky way, not florid: it was like Mengiste avoided saying anything directly, preferring instead to hint and dance around even the most mundane actions. This, and the trendy Cormac McCarthyesque lack of quotation marks anywhere, made it too hard for me to follow the story; the characters themselves made it hard for me to care. They're (so far) all unlikable, barbarians trapped in roles imposed upon them by idiotic cultures: beatings, contempt, absence of listening or empathy or basic awareness. Not a shred of connection anywhere.
Sigh. I keep trying to read Watts; it just never works out for me. Abandoned at 32%. I already know, deep down, that my “I” is an artificial construct. (It just happens to be a pretty convincing one, also a useful one for getting around in the world). I've felt connection and unity, I will probably always remember that, it kind of guides me sometimes. And that makes no sense to you, dear reader, and that's OK, in fact it's my entire point: I can't convey to you what it's like, and Watts can't convey it to me. Our language is not yet good enough, especially not across fifty years. To me he comes off as pompous, one of these debate-club people who argues a point by defining terms and using a lot of “well this, therefore that” but just ramrodding, not giving the reader/listener a chance to object. And the way I work – the way logic works – is, if your premises are faulty or you use questionable steps to build a conclusion, that's it, stop now. No point in going forward.
I keep trying; and just can't read him. He comes off as condescending and maybe trying-too-hard. I get what he's trying to say, but honestly, I'd recommend taking a good safe mushroom trip (with proper set and setting). Don't read about it, do it. You'll learn so much more.
No pude con el tono: ensimismado, hasta buscabulla. No hay relación ninguna entre los caracteres, por lo menos en los cuentos que leí, y no me interesa continuar.
Abandoned, p.40. Didn't even make it to a-hundred-minus-my-age. What I love about Fforde's previous books is the gradual discovery of new worlds: Fforde gives us a quirky twist on reality but writes from the perspective of an insider, one who takes that world for granted. The reader has time to wonder about this universe, and the author gradually fills in details, often just out of the corner of the eye so more questions remain.
Constant Rabbit — at least up to page 40 — has none of that. We are spoon-fed the quirk (“Something handwavy happened. Rabbits are now human-sized, can speak English and otherwise fully participate in human society”) and the plot (“Do they deserve any rights?”) and a heavyhanded story comprising a lot of bullies and one spineless milquetoast narrator. The reader (at least this reader) feels no curiosity about the details of this mean-spirited world, about what interesting discoveries await. My sense so far is that Fforde disapproves of xenophobia and wants to make sure the reader is aware of it... On. Every. Page. I kind of get it: there's an increasing number of people who might need to be reminded that nazis are bad, but unfortunately (1) those people don't read, and (2) the rest of us don't need to be conked on the head quite so much.
Wankers and poofters and dick jokes. Not for me. Moore can do better (and has).
Abandoned, p.90. Stories of disasters bringing out the best in us. Cherrypicked anecdotes demonstrating how wonderful and kumbaya it is when disasters happen and survivors organically unite to provide mutual assistance, rejecting payment, everyone acting out of pure unselfish love; then how horrible it is when authorities come in and ruin everything. This was reading more like a utopian manifesto than anything nuanced, informative, or thoughtful. I flipped ahead, got the same vibe, am moving on to my next book.
Abandoned, p.82. It's not funny. I can forgive that. It's not kind—and that, I can't. The essays so far have all consisted of her poking mean-spirited fun at: Americans, for not knowing much about Iran; Americans, for not wanting to learn about her culture; Americans, for wanting to learn about her culture, because those are just wannabe hipsters; her husband, for not mind-reading her precise fantasy honeymoon; and mostly her mother and father, over and over, for not learning English well enough, for not adapting “the right way” to U.S. culture, for being goofy yokels. It's like a surly thirteen-year-old: everything and everyone sucks.