Liz Rapp

This is a rare instance where I like the movie better that the book. Mainly because Tom Cruise as Lestat is amazing, but also, the costumes, the hair, the Louis being the archetypal brooding vampire while Lestat joyfully eats half of New Orleans....



I rewatched the movie the same day I finished the audiobook, and the two are very similar. They change Louis' back story a bit, in the movie his catalyst is his wife dying in childbirth, which the book has a disturbing story about his fifteen year old brother suffering religious delusions and then falling down the stairs, I understand why they went with the more succinct backstory for the movie. Also Babette is cut, and Louis' relationship with Armand ends a bit differently. The most surprising thing is that in the book Lestat goes to Paris, and tells they vampires there that Claudia and Louis tried to kill him, which explains why they try to kill Louis and Claudia. It was kind of strange that they cut that from the movie.

The novel feels like it was engineered for book club discussions - with topics from adoption, whether a white family should be raising a Chinese American child, infertility, abortion, child custody, poverty, insular rich suburban life... The setting is in the 90s in a suburban Cleveland neighborhood, but it also feels outdated, like I'm reading a book that I've read before, twenty years ago. Nothing really surprising happens, the characters are either boring or unlikable.

The second that the adopted baby controversy was introduced I lost all interest. Mainly because I thought it was unrealistic for Bebe to have any legal claim to her child. She was neglectful to the point of abuse, and then abandoned her child at a fire station. Every state has safe haven laws, which have provisions to handle if a birth parent wants to regain custody later. In most cases “You also have the right to be informed by safe haven staff that by surrendering the child, you are releasing the child for adoption and that you have the right to petition the court in your state (within a set time period, like 28 days) to regain custody.” In that case, she would have had no legal grounds, and a large part of the book was unnecessary. The court scenes where the lawyer asks the adopted parents how they were going to raise the baby with Chinese culture was cringe worthy.

I did enjoy the descriptions of photography and Mia's artistic eccentricities. However, there is a bizarre paragraph mentions how she was the only freshman who didn't blush at nude life drawing because she helped her mother, an RN, with patients at the hospital. Just - what? It would be wildly inappropriate for a nurse to bring a child to work, much less to have an untrained person assist with patients in any way - much less see them in the nude.

Not for me.

It has the feel of a memoir. But as a work of fiction it was sort of puzzling. I kept waiting for Hassan to revisit the Indian cuisine of his youth, to revitalize old fashioned French styles with new flavors. The whole book feels like a lead up to this - from Hassan's apprenticeship to Madam Mallory, to his close friendship with Verdun, the master of traditional French styles. But instead Hassan fully assimilates into French cooking and culture, deciding to cook food simply in their natural juices, whatever that means. (It kind of sounded like spa cooking - steamed vegetables and fish with a sprinkling of herbs?) The book ends with winning a coveted third Michelin star. The award feels empty - we've already seen Mallory driven to grief and rage in search of it, and Verdun to suicide at it's loss. What is the point? For the book to close in celebration of Hassan's restaurant award just felt sad.

Also, the book has some really gross and pointless passages that overshadow the rest of the book, like “Papa was cursed, ever since he was a teenager, with an unattractive rash of blackheads, pimples, and boils across the broad expanse of his hairy back, and while Mummy was alive, the duty of popping the worst offenders fell on her. “Squeeze,” he yelled at Mehtab. “Squeeze.” Pap scrunched his face, Mehtab pinching the boil hard between her painted nails, the two of them yelping in surprise when the offending item suddenly exploded.” This is disturbing and gross.

I am struggling to get through this. People are dying left and right, there is no shock value to it anymore. When the Commandant ‘dramatically' kills a whole bunch of people right in front of Helene, when Elias is forced to witness the prison warden torture some random kid, it's not shocking, it's only a couple of examples in a long line of brutality from the Empire's forces. In the first book of this trilogy Lila's grandparents are casually murdered in front of her, and the violence continues unabated, to the point that I am increasing the speed of my audiobook to just get through it, and hopefully get back to the narrative. It's like Game of Thrones levels of violence.

This one is not for me.

The narration is excellent, though the accents chosen for different characters was perplexing.

This was fun! I would highly recommend it, especially to anyone interested in programming, robots, and especially baking / bread / food in general. It will make you hungry. So many great quotes and engaging characters. “Here's a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.” Ha!

One small thing that bugged me - there are a couple of points where they make fun of radiation - as in the location of their market is located in an old military facility that previously housed nuclear weapons, and at one point Lois is offered honey supposedly from “Chernobyl,” and eats it without batting an eye. The characters reactions to this are along the lines of “Eh, mutation is good for you...” Which was so weird, considering that unless this book was in a superhero universe, radiation would actually poison and kill you. Super minor, especially considering this book is basically about magical bacteria cultures.

Interesting read. What starts as a travel log detailing the efforts to explore ancient cultures buried in the jungles of Honduras, takes a harrowing turn when half of the expedition party is stricken with a rare parasite that can cause disfigurement and death. Both subjects are fascinating, but it was not exactly what I was expecting. The descriptions of LIDAR technology were incredibly fascinating, something I'm vaguely familiar with in it's use to quickly build 3d models of real world objects. In the book they use it scan and map vast areas of dense jungle, uncovering sites that have been lost to the trees for centuries. The author also covers Honduran culture and history, helping to explain why traveling and exploring the country can be so dangerous and difficult - from officials seeking bribes, to venomous snakes, to drug traffickers hijacking trucks of jet fuel.

While I thought it was a good read, it got kind of slow in the middle, and the ending kind of meandered away from the heart of the story. The author comes to the conclusion that the civilization of the city of the Jaguar was wiped out by Europeans bringing disease, while at the same time acknowledging that the city has been so newly re-discovered that there has been hardly any research yet. While it is not a bad hypothesis, as many thousands of people died horribly of disease after contact with encroaching Europeans, there is no evidence as to why the culture of this ancient city may have collapsed.

Also, this book has one of the most depressing, fatalistic endings I have ever seen- with a discussion of how global warming is causing the spread of disease and parasites, and ending with a statement that all cultures collapse eventually. “Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.” It was a wild turn from the adventurous love of travel and discovery in the earlier parts of the book.

Parts of this I really liked. The family dynamics were great. Lots of quippy dialog and great writing. Dante and Aristotle are incredibly likable.

There is a lot of teenage angst along the lines of “No one understands me. I don't understand anyone. My parents are weird,” that the protagonists thankfully grows past. They go through a phase of reading intense manly literature (Heart of Darkness, War and Peace, etc.) I feel like it needed either a longer ending, or an epilogue. There is a long lead up to Aristotle and Dante becoming a couple, but then they kiss, and the story ends rapidly. There's also a pretty strong characterization of Aristotle being asexual - the way he hesitates to describe his feelings toward Dante as romantic, the way he talks about kissing and masturabtion, how he feels alienated from other boys who have seemingly bizarre feelings towards girls and sex. It would have made a great addition to further explore that and how it would affect their relationship, but instead Ari's parents literally tell him that he is in love with Dante, and then there is a tidy kiss scene that closes the book. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Over all I enjoyed it, it is also an excellent audio book narration.

The plot is fine, if a little boring. However the protagonist was very unlikable. Flighty, unfaithful, and apparently so indecisive she can be persuaded to move to another country or get married with little effort, as she appears to have no opinion on either matter. The peripheral characters are much more interesting, while Eilis appears to just float through the book with little consequence.

I liked it, but I feel like I would have gotten more out of it if I had read the Dark Materials series more recently. As is, it felt like it referenced a lot of exposition in the series without really building up the universe in the same way. In fact there were even times when I was wondering “Where is Malcolm's daemon?” In some sections is almost felt like Asta was forgotten.

Malcolm and Alice are great characters, I would love to see more of their story. I loved infant Lyra and seeing what baby daemons are like.

However, the second half of the novel is a long canoe ride through a dreamy flooded British landscape, all while being chased by a lunatic and his increasingly maimed and tortured daemon. They find a witch, a faerie and some sort of weird purgatory party. It felt like it dragged on, and then the ending when they are finally rescued felt incredibly rushed. We never see Malcolm reunited with his family or Dr. Relf for example, instead we just have Lord Asriel telling them to go back to the Trout, as he drops Lyra off at the University.

Interesting, and surprisingly easy to read for such a dense topic. Chapters take a meandering path through the Spanish flu epidemic, and while many fascinating topics are covered it felt kind of rambling towards the end. Later chapters on modern genetic research, and the pandemic's effects on art and literature felt kind of tacked on as opposed to part of the larger story.

This is such a great audiobook!

Disappointing. I love the earlier, Matt Fraction Hawkeyes. And I enjoyed this one until the end. Am I wrong, or did Hawkeye just give the rescued mutant children back to Hydra? It seemed wildly out of character. And then it cuts to decades later-eh, I'm not interested in seeing where the series is going.

Not for me. While I find the subject matter fascinating, this was a tedious read.

I loved the start of this book. From Baru's childhood home, to the descriptions of the Masquerade's increasingly rigid and terrifying social structures, I was hooked.

Unfortunately, I found the rest of the book to be convoluted. Baru's character is assigned as the tax accountant to an unstable land called Aurdwynn, where we are very quickly introduced to dozens of dukes and duchesses who I read as being practically interchangeable with each other, and considering how most of them are slaughtered by Baru's plans or die in battle, there is little incentive to become invested in any of them. There seemed to be little to distinguish their voices from one another. Baru's take on rebellion through loans seemed weird to me - supposedly the population rises up for her, the Fairer Hand, because over a period of a few years she allowed them to take out loans of gold that had a note inscribed on them saying they were from her. I honestly don't think the common people would have noticed - when was the last time you looked at your money and thought about thanking the Treasurer of the United States, whose name and signature are on there. Since she is directly representing the Masquerade's interests, it seemed more likely that the local population would thank the Masquerade, instead of rebelling, if indeed these loans are to be believed to be some sort of driving force.

But most of all, I had a problem with the way the plot is handled. You find out at the end, that the entire time Baru has early on made a deal with the Masquerade's shady under government, so that while it appears from the outside she is leading a rebellion she is in fact neatly delivering the land, sans the ruling class, into the hands of the Masquerade. But since the narrative is largely told from Baru's perspective, it seemed like a weird shift to have a sudden reveal of something our character has been aware of the entire time, thus we as the readers should also have been aware. It seemed inconsistent. It was also hardly a twist - Baru says repeatedly that her entire goal is to get to Falcrest so she can change from within the leadership, which is exactly what she ends up doing.

I thought Baru was interesting, and overall the Masquerade society was chilling, and it left with a sense of oppression similar to 1984 or the Handmaid's Tale. I would be interested in a sequel, but the oppressive set up leads to feel any outcome would be just as bleak.

I should also say that this is one where the audiobook really fell flat - I read the first half and listened to the second, and the narrator was not a good choice for handling so many characters. They all sounded the same.

Yeah, it's a heist book. Imagine Ocean's Eleven, but on the moon. And with more welding and less casinos. It will probably be a fun movie, but the book was just ok.

It's fun, but I found the main character to be annoying and hard to relate to, every time she said “I have a plan,” it just kept spiraling into worse and worse problems until the dramatic finale of the novel.

I enjoyed it. It's an intriguing, and often violent backstory of Peter Pan and Captain Hook where Pan is described as a psychopath. I wish it was longer, there's a long bloody path to Jamie breaking away from Pan, but you're left without a satisfying resolution. I would be interested to know how exactly Jamie and his other rescued Lost Boys actually manage to become leaders of the Pirates. And of course, a truly satisfying ending would result in Jamie finally taking revenge on Pan.

Eh. I decided to give this a try because I heard the audiobook was amazing, and I started it around Halloween so I was looking for something spooky. I had just finished Misery which I thought was great, and revitalized my interest in Stephen King novels.

On the plus side, the narrator is great! But also, the audiobook is 40 hours long! So you really have to be committed, or like me, scale the speed to 1.75. There was a lot I enjoyed about the novel, the main characters are wonderful. I enjoyed the way the adult and child perspectives coincided throughout the novel, as opposed to parts one and two of the movie where they are separate. The themes of friendship and banding together against adversary were wonderful.

IT's many personifications were appropriately terrifying, but gets a little repetitive. Here's another reference to a giant bird, or eyeballs, or leprotic hobos. Henry Bowers, budding psychopath, was terrifying. But by far the award for the scariest thing in the book goes to Eddie's mother. The one who tells him he's frail and has asthma even though his aspirator is full of water. The way the narrator does her voice is chilling.

And yeah, the notorious child orgy scene was weird, unnecessary and gross.

Also, does Stephen King really think women are hyper aware of their nipples at all times? You shouldn't described Beverly's emotional state by describing what her nipples are doing.

This one kind of fizzled out for me. I was really into it until just past halfway, then I had to force myself to keep reading. I love the characters, the setting, the differing philosophies between those who love the naturals sciences and those who love faith. There is so much to like in this story - Francis is so weird yet charming, Stella in her blue bower, Cora and Will meeting over freeing a sheep from the bog. But past a certain point it just seemed like repetitions of things already talked about, with no strong finish.

I enjoyed the author's writing style for the most part, though occasionally she would try to create metaphors while picking a word that didn't make sense, like someone who's first language isn't English. Like using broody here “Creeping along the hallway like a specter in shortie pajamas, their polyester slickness stuck in the broody stretch between princess costumes and lingerie,” or bellow here “like when I smelled the bellow of iron in the bathroom and knew she had her period. “ She's basically saying that Evie smelled a sound - it doesn't really work.

I found Evie, the main character, to be profoundly unlikable. I couldn't connect with her on any level. The author writes about women and girls in the light of the apparent sexism of the era, but without any sort of redemption for either the men or women of the story. She writes Evie thinking things like “I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board,” as if they were universal truths and not just Evie and her cult girlfriends messed up perspectives. The book is entirely from Evie's point of view, and the view is incredibly narrow and self centered.

When I got to Part Four, the brief coda of Evie arriving at boarding school, I thought back on all the preceding chapters and wished that the book had started at where the author chose to wrap things up. There was no suspense leading up to the murders, the reader already knows what happens before the first page, since the story of Charles Manson is very well known. So the slow integration of a bored and narcissistic 14 year old into their cult is kind of sad and dull. The aftermath is where I really started to get interested, but the book ends shortly after.

Also, we're supposed to be left wondering if Evie was indeed capable of murder. But I didn't have any doubts, she would have done anything Suzanne wanted her to do.

It was ok, I'd recommend if you are very interested in North Korea and enjoy travel books. It is very short and contains a lot of pictures, so should be a fast read. Lots of interesting tidbits about North Korean life, like people aren't allowed to own cars, that they have to bow at every statues of the great Kims.

I wish she had gone into why she wanted to vacation there, and the details of how she went about setting up the trip. I'm assuming you can't just get on Expedia and book a tour, but who knows, maybe it's that easy. She does go into why she enjoys traveling in general, and her comparisons to other trips and North Korea were heartfelt, she writes about how hard it was to connect with anyone when both parties are so carefully watching their words. I wish she had written more about herself personally too. I know she lives in New York, is a vegetarian, likes to travel, that's about it.

It also reads like she assumes the reader knows a whole bunch about North Korea, she could have added a lot more to the books by providing more historical context, similar to how Bill Bryson covers the history of the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, instead of just writing about his long walk.

One of the main problems is that it seems like the author was bored a lot during her trip, which bleeds into her narrative. Mentions of lack of toilet paper, and the eternal search for bathrooms, reads as filler in a trip where not much happened. There were also some inconsistencies that were strange - she's a vegetarian, and has a section about how she doesn't want to hurt living things to the point that she rescues a fly from an enclosed vehicle, where in a previous chapter she describes eating a bunch of clams at a clambake? She mentions electricity rationing and how rarely lights were turned on, but also how most places she went were air conditioned ice boxes?

Also, reading this not long after Otto Warmbier's was return to the US in a fatal coma, the sort of sarcastic tone of the book can be a bit off putting. At one point the author mentions another tourist who was imprisoned for leaving a bible behind, and jokes about Bill Clinton having to rescue her for doing something similar, but the actual threat of terror the North Koreans live with doesn't really come through.

Also, the overused quotes from Lewis Carroll drove me crazy. I read the first one and then skipped the many that followed. I do like that the book included her photographs, but captioning a lot of them with whimsical quotes from Alice in Wonderland was annoying, I would have appreciated a description of what was actually in the photo.

I was excited to read this, based off the reviews I thought I would love it. Unfortunately, I don't think it lives up to the hype. The second half is much better than the first, where the story is bogged down by the pettiness and idiocy of the characters. Vianne's central motivation seems to be do nothing and wait until her husband comes home, while Isabelle wants to flagrantly antagonize the Nazis at every turn. I am surprised she wasn't arrested or shot in the first few days of the occupation, her attitude was maddening. Opposing the Nazis is noble, but doing it by spitting in their faces is just going to get you killed. Add in the fact that the two sisters have a history of guilt and abandonment between the two, meaning they are at odds every step of the way, and the beginning of the novel was very frustrating.

“Why do we have to give them our radio, Maman?” Sophie asked. “It belongs to Papa.”
“We don't,” Isabelle said, coming up beside them. “We will hide it.”
“We will not hide it,” Vianne said sharply. “We will do as we are told and keep quiet and soon Antoine will be home and he will know what to do.” This basically sums up the first half.

Now imagine if the author has wrote a book where the two sisters patched things up early in the story, and skipped all of this antagonism. They could have worked together. I don't think it would have lessened the ending, but it would have made a much better book.

Also, did it bother anyone else that Isabelle's her codename is literally her name? Nightingale = Rossignol. She goes to all this trouble of getting a fake name and papers, but then uses her own surname as her cover. That was maddening. When you look at conversations like this, but replace Nightingale with it's French translation, it seems very strange.
“The Germans are looking for the Rossignol, Isabelle.” “That's old news, Ian.” “They're trying to infiltrate your escape route. Nazis are out there, pretending to be downed airmen. If you pick up one of them...” “We're careful, Ian. You know that. I interrogate every man myself. And the network in Paris is tireless.” “They're looking for the Rossignol. If they find you...” “They won't.” She got to her feet. He stood, too, and faced her. “Be careful, Isabelle.”

Overall, I felt like the second half is much stronger than the first, very moving and sad. But I felt like I kept getting tripped up by weird passages. Like “I am trussed up like a chicken for roasting. I know these modern seat belts are a good thing, but they make me feel claustrophobic. I belong to a generation that didn't expect to be protected from every danger.” This is a ridiculous parallel to make, not dying in a car crash is something you should definitely make an effort to protect yourself from.

I'd recommend All the Light You Cannot See or City of Thieves over this hands down.

It was ok, it reads like a better than average Lifetime movie. This is not my favorite genre, and I cannot for the life of me remember where I got a recommendation to read this. The best part is probably the the author's end note, which was very personal and helped explain why she wrote the book.

I did love Lily's teenage journals. She writes them in a letter format to Ellen Degeneres, which sounds kind of bananas but was very touching. The revelations of the level of abuse in her household was hard to read, the part where sees her dad trying to rape her mom, and then she loses it and goes for a kitchen knife, was so chilling.

However the book had some problems. The character's names were eye roll inducing, and they all had conveniently dreamy jobs - Ryle Kincade (the neurosurgeon), Atlas Corrigan (the Marine turned successful chef/restaurateur.) Lily Bloom owns a successful flower shop.

However, Lily's concept for her flower shop sounds so terrible. This is how she describes it-

“Brave and bold. We put out displays of darker flowers wrapped in things like leather or silver chains. And rather than put them in crystal vases, we'll stick them in black onyx or . . . I don't know . . . purple velvet vases lined with silver studs. The ideas are endless...There are floral shops on every corner for people who love flowers. But what floral shop caters to all the people who hate flowers?” Allysa shakes her head. “None of them,” she whispers.”

That's right, because that is a stupid idea. Later there's a scene where she's making a ‘steampunk' bouquet and using an old boot as a vase. Just...that is awful.

Ryle was immediately threatening and scary, I don't know if him being abusive was supposed to be a twist, but from the moment Lily meets him on the roof I just wanted her to get out of there. If you say no, a guy should not progressively try to manipulate you into having sex. Showing up at your house after knocking on every door in the building is grounds for calling the police, not inviting someone in to sleep in your bed. That's not cute, that's crazy behavior. A lot was excused because he had nice arms and Lily thought scrubs were hot.

Alyssa's response when she finds out that Ryle had hurt Lily was weird, instead of being angry at him she begs him to tell Lily some dark secret in his past - which turns out to be the accidental death of his older brother by an unsecured firearm, that Ryle has felt guilt over his entire life. That's horrible, but also has absolutely zero to do with him being an abusive asshole, I could not believe how Lily heard this story, felt terrible for him, and then that was somehow grounds for ignoring being pushed down the stairs.

It also bothered me that it is mentioned that Atlas had joined the Marines and done two tours - I'm assuming meaning a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, which would be hugely life changing, but when Lily meets up with him again it's like he's the exactly same, gentle person she knew as a 15 year old.

At one point he tells her he came back, after four years in the Marines, to come find her, but then decided that he wasn't good enough to be with her and signed up for another tour. If nothing else, the Marine Corp should have instilled some self confidence, should have given him some savings and connections - I could not understand his self sabotage here. It's like the author is using the Marines as a convenient way to get a character out of the story for 8 years without giving any thought to what that actually means.

There's also a random plug for Rodan and Fields that came out of nowhere?

I did love this line “For better, for worse? Fuck. That. Shit. —Lily”

It was alright. The beginning was excellent but then it lost steam around the start of the trial. No real interesting revelations, resolutions or twists.

I heard great things about this book, and was excited to see the final book released in English so I thought I would finally read it.

Overall I found it to be a frustrating read. The dialog between characters felt very unnatural, with long paragraphs of pseudo scientific exposition. The overall premise is great, with a rogue scientist inviting an unknown alien civilization to colonize our planet, in the naive hope that they will curb humanity's destructive tendencies. But the increasingly bizarre, practically magical explanations for the alien's scientific discoveries really lost me. Near the end they describe making some sort of artificial intelligent, impossibly small supercomputer, by unfolding a photon, and then launching it to Earth to wreck havok. “Oh no, we accidentally unfolded it into 4D space, oh no, if we unfold it into nondimensional space we will create a black hole and could destroy our planet.” I was fast forwarding my audiobook at this point desperate to get to the end.

I did really the description of the Three Body VR video game that Wang briefly play, it was a wonderful way to explain the alien culture to the characters, and to the reader. I was disappointed that it played such a small role in the book. There's also a throw away comment about how Wang is surprised that a grown woman, his colleague, owns her own video game set up, which was such a weird and outdated mindset.

Some parts I really liked. But overall I thought it was weird and hard to follow. About half way through I almost quit and gave up on it. I understand it's supposed to be sort of fairy tale -esque but it did not work for me. Some of the author's choices were just too nonsensical.

Why does Pearl disappear? Stasha and Pearl are literally standing next to each other but then Pearl is just gone, it was such a weird choice when there are any number of ways the girls could be separated if that is what the author wants.

Why does Stasha follow bloody tracks into a salt mine to the hands of the Nazis- this was so idiotic as to be bizarre. She wakes up to her stolen horse missing, the horse is apparently bleeding for some unexplained reason so she follows the blood. But instead of the author having her stumble upon a camp, she has the characters descend into a mine where they clearly have the opportunity to see the Nazis and run away at any time, instead they just stand there and get stripped and shot at.

And then near the end Stasha, a twelve year old traumatized girl, gives an impromptu cesarean section to a woman she finds in an abandoned house. What. Why. And well the woman dies but miraculously the baby survives. I know this is supposed to reference Mengele's insane surgeries and tortures, maybe even have Stasha learn something good from what she witnessed, but having her be able to perform a successful cesarean after glimpsing her torturer perform the same operation is just insane.

And how does Pearl get back to Poland, and why does she come? One minute she is being carted off to Palestine and then her cart driver is shot and the scene fades to black.