altlovesbooks

"Snowy mountain, why do you not weep? Is your heart too cold?

Snowy mountain, why do you weep? Is your heart too sore?"

This was a really moving tale about a woman who spends thirty years(!!!) in Tibet looking for her husband she had been married to for less than a month after he went missing during his time in the military. Everyone told her he was presumed dead, but she refused to believe them and went to go find him for herself. If that’s not dedication, I’m not sure what is.

I’ve come to realize during the many translated books I’ve read that translations come in two varieties: ones that attempt to capture not just the individual words but also the feeling of the phrases that may not carry over, and ones that take the shortest route between two points and just translate the words without regard for emotional impact. This book falls into the latter category, with everything feeling dry, emotionless, and clinical, which made it a struggle to get through despite its short length. I didn’t get a huge sense about what sort of person Wen was beyond her loyalty to her husband because of the emotionless writing (translating?), which was a bit of a letdown in something billed as a love story.

Which is another thing: there’s very little person-to-person love in this love story. While their marriage is the driving factor for Wen being in Tibet in the first place, it’s actually not brought up all that much. We get a staggering amount of really interesting information about Tibet, but this is more of a travelogue than a quest to be reunited with her husband (ending spoiler alert: they don’t get reunited anyway, and if you're aware of what a Sky Burial is before reading this, you'll probably have guessed that).

Another point I should mention is that while this is billed as a memoir/nonfiction story, the copyright page labels this as historical fiction, which I think is closer to the truth. A lot of fantastical things happens to Wen, and it’s hard for me to believe all of it was true.

A quick read, and one I learned a lot about Tibet from, but kind of a thin/weak story overall.

"As far as interplanetary warfare was concerned, this was up close and personal."

Holy hell this took me forever to get through. I'm not sure why, the series is actually pretty great, but somewhere after the first third I just stopped reading it for the longest time.

In any case, this book was the galactic conclusion to the trilogy, where everyone we've met along the way comes together to have a final showdown against the curators. Like the other two books, this one's split amongst the different POV characters we've been following the entire time, and we follow their perspectives as we ride the buildup and climax of the entire trilogy. There's some subverted deaths, some actual deaths, and plenty of character development and romance(!) along the way.

I actually felt like this final book had too much character development, as it sort of took away from any sort of final battle I was expecting. While I love the care and dedication to these characters, their personal stories basically took the spotlight and the actual curator fight/confrontation was just a footnote at the end of the whole thing. Kind of disappointing after the buildup to this point.

Still, this was a really entertaining series, with obvious parallels to Mass Effect (the waystations, the curators), Star Wars (the Idran Var and a number of other things), and a few other sci-fi tropes along the way. Highly recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing.

I enjoyed this, but I think the summary does this book a disservice. It's not really about hope, it's more one man's struggle to provide adequate healthcare in a system designed to fight you the entire way. Unless you find bureaucracy hopeful, I guess.

There's not really much to summarize here. Henry Marsh was a neurosurgeon within the NHS, and while I'm not familiar with the name, I gather he was a pretty good one too. This book is him looking back on his career, highlighting some of the more notable cases along the way, while also providing insight and philosophizing about the many rules and regulations set up ostensibly to improve care, but really were just to cut costs and make things more difficult. He does quite a bit of ruminating on the cases that didn't go so well, and it's refreshing to see someone confront and admit their mistakes, especially when they're as impactful as these were. Nobody's perfect.

I guess the only thing that bothered me a little about this book is that it hops around so much, even within chapters. It isn't told sequentially/chronologically, but rather case-by-case, and even within the case he sometimes goes back and forth in time discussing various related points/stories. I didn't mind so much because I enjoyed what he had to say on whatever he was talking about, but someone else who better appreciates a linear story might have problems.

All in all, a very readable, enjoyable book.

"The fact that someone was now paying for us to complete our adventure and that the story was starting to be picked up by major newspapers and TV stations showed that we were doing something remarkable, even if it was really just an excuse to go travelling and party on an overextended road trip with our best buddies."

I said this in one of my Goodreads updates while reading this, but this book is like if 90s Ashton Kutcher wrote a factual account of traveling the world. That either does it for you, or it doesn't, there isn't a whole lot of inbetween. I fell on the "doesn't" part of the spectrum, but there were some redeeming qualities about these guys' trip that kept me reading.

The back-of-the-book summary is what's inside - three friends, in an attempt to put off being an adult post-college decide to take a London cab on a worldwide tour to break a Guinness world record and circumnavigate the world. Along the way they meet a host of friendly people, make their way through miles of bureaucracy, become expert roadside mechanics, and just overall have a good time with their buds.

They really do just party their way through the first part of the book, to get it out of the way early. Lots of drinking, partying, and couchsurfing, before waking up, driving all day, and doing it again in another location. I'm not a huge drinker or partyer, so they do come off as being a bit insufferable in the beginning to me.

But you can see a tonal change right around when they start trekking through the Middle East. I feel like we get a bit more introspection out of them about the world they're just now starting to see and about the people around them. There's less about how they're drinking their way to liver failure, and more about the scenery, the journey itself, and how much of a struggle it is to keep their cab running on a day-to-day basis. It's these little nuggets of introspection that were the most interesting to me.

But I mean, at the end of the day they do come off as being insufferable dudes who haven't really grown up yet circumnavigating the world on someone else's dime to put off having to make adult decisions. Which, fair, they're up front about that in multiple places in the book, but it's still a little tedious to read about.