Joey

The other day I was chatting with some friends about re-reading books, something I rarely do. it seemed it might be nice to revisit some old friends and i had good, though vague memories of this one.. something about siberia. i always like Amy Bloom's stories for feeling romantically sad.

anyway, this book has some pretty good scenes in the yiddish theatre world of 1920s New York, lots of people doing what they can to get by (ie much sex), one too many pogrom trauma nightmares and a fair few other colourful cliches too. but i enjoyed it.

this was a pretty rollicking great tale of Chabon's grandparents, Nazi hunting, space travel and responses to trauma. mostly what moved me is the tender love given to the protagonists, at all ages and in all circumstances.

shitt this was brutal.

grief, grief, literary name dropping, grief grief, references to literature that went over my head, grief.

i wanted to stop reading a number of times because it's confronting to read about so many unrelenting bad feelings. i guess I'm glad i didn't.

This has been a good week for reading. I think what I like about Yoshimoto is the listlessness, the way mystery is not too mysterious, and her interior view of being a young woman. Goodbye Tsugimi is also really perked up by the bratty “unbearable” Tsugimi. And cute dogs.

“Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames.”

i thought i would just love this, because teen diaries are totally my thing. but this is so sad and messed up it's hard to enjoy in a straightforward way. i guess it is some kind of genius truth though.

this felt nearly perfect for the mood i was in. romance about loving someone broken but with that gentle Banana touch.

Well this was highly satisfying. Romance where the relationship with the best-friends is the most important one is always the best.

Written in a style so matter-of-fact it borders on dull, but with just enough interesting content about Kenya in the colonial era, and the weird educational philosophies of the English to keep me engaged.

I kinda struggled to get interested in this, but I guess I did learn some things about how to prepare for the apocalypse, zombie or otherwise.

Holy shit this was brutal, relentless, eye-opening.. I guess everything you'd hope for from a book on escaping slavery.

It's pretty remarkable how the writing mirrors the experience of the protagonist Cora... as readers we keep feeling like we have arrived somewhere safe, somewhere we can rest until...

Oh I love me some Ali Smith. This collection of stories is interspersed with stories from readers about their attachments to public libraries. As always some of the stories push a little far into po-mo experimentation to fully succeed but some of them work so fucking well at capturing everything that's too hard to convey in traditional forms. Think: life under late-capitalism, war, love and fandom.

As break-up reading I rate this one B+ .. will lead to some sobbing but might also prompt helpful reflection on how hard getting along with other people is.

Hmmmm I was soooo into this book at the start, I felt like it was doing all sorts of interesting things while writing about the hardest thing: how to understand how good people do bad things. But now I'm not so sure... Did it jump the shark?

If you're into reading about the Holocaust, or repression under the Soviet government (NKVD) stuff then this is a really interesting and different take on those stories to what I've seen before.

Oops turned out this was a YA novel. Now I see why there wasn't much going on.

Beautiful and sad and not as wanky as it seems.

I should have trusted my gut and refused this recommendation. But some parts were worth it I guess.

I liked this book just fine. There was a lot of plot.

Also I learned that teenagers in Nigeria were pretty into Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in the 90s. Well at least the family in this book were.

This book felt more like a crime story with some mystical events thrown in than other Murakami's I've read. The creepy lurking feeling is still there but the pace is quite different.

At times I was a bit sick of all the Oedipal drama but I felt too close to the characters to really turn away. I mean, who doesn't like old men who talk to cats?

Well this was quite a ride.

1st Third: pretty great read. Early days in Collingwood/Richmond, the tote shop.. Lots of good characters and West is still vaguely relatable.

2nd Third: alright, well it's slowing down with all the details of his many scams but the stuff about the start of the Labour Party is pretty good.

Last third: argh need to finish this book. Do I need to know all the corrupt scams that ever happened in racing or boxing or cycling? Ooh this stuff about the Catholic Church driving the communists out of the unions is pretty good.

For historical detail and political info I give this book an A+. Especially given what Hardy went through to get this printed.

There is so much feminist genius compressed into this tiny book. Language is put to so many uses, but mostly that of conveying emotion and experience in a way that feels more moving and real than most things I've read.

Not my favourite Tony Birch - a bit too plot driven for my tastes but definitely compelling and moving.

I'm grieving for the companionship of these women, and the world these books let me live in. Everything you've heard is true.

Ok so I got the version that starts with the contemporary story and as usual Smith is great at writing from inside a young girl's head. I loved how pretentious about language she was because that was probably me. By the time I got to the second half I was hooked so I persisted through the first few confusing pages and loved the historical stuff too. It's a bit of a cheesy feminist fairy tale and the stuff about screens and our modern addiction seemed overdone (though probably isn't) BUT I really was happy reading this book.

This volume confused me.. the settings are grounded in hard reality. The sausage factory, the political strife in the universities, the beginnings of second wave feminism. But the characters seem to become more fantastical.

It's more gripping than #2, though I kind of resent Nino redeeming himself. If he has....

Now I just really want a yellow room.