Eva
This book is a disturbing powerhouse! A highly cynic, dystopic social study of a near future where xenophobia, misogyny, decision fatigue and algorithms have transformed society into a bigoted, lethargic, and addicted mass twiddling on their mobile phones. The world got simultaneously better (yes, less people live now in poverty!) and worse (but no one really cares anymore!). We follow 4 teenagers in England - Don, Karen, Hanna and Peter - who all are outcasts and grew up in violent family backgrounds. Kids who have never known what it means to feel happy and safe, and therefore don't know what to search for. They form a little supportive unit, move to London together, and start to form a plan to payback everyone who's ever hurt them. But this is no simple revenge plot, and this won't be easy or rewarding. The world Berg paints, is not far from our current reality. But her words are damning and unforgiving, and there are no silver linings. It's a harsh read, but there are also layers of dark humour, that take off some of the blow. Also, it's amazingly researched and grounded in all the sociopolitical and technological developments of today. Smart homes, 24/7 surveillance, gamification of everything, citizen ratings, algorithmic political parties, deep fakes, virtual reality saloons, Musk on mars. All tinted with heavy doses of sexism, racism and bigotry. I did this on audio (in German), and it turned out to be a good choice, as the narrative has a conversational quality to it. I'm gonna be very curious how the bigger world will welcome this book. In my mind it has all the qualities to become a classic. And I've seen some people mention it before, but yes, it's totally the book that [a:Michel Houellebecq 32878 Michel Houellebecq https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1405511632p2/32878.jpg] has been attempting to write for a while. 4.5
This was a slug of a book, and I can't quite understand why it's such a classic. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol .. are all heavy reading, but you can appreciate the quality of their writing and plotting. But this one just fell apart into disjointed segments of people's lives, their hardships during and after of the Russian revolution, told in different voices and styles. Sometimes going into heavy unnecessary detail with mundane conversations, sometimes glossing over life-changing events with spare sentences. And all that never made me care one bit about the characters.
Or maybe I did like them a bit at the beginning. But then the book become such a bore, that I simply got angrier at it, than it deserves?
This almost-novella by Zeh was intriguing. A young family is on holiday on Lanzarote. The father, Henning, has recently been plagued by unexplained panic attacks. A bicycle trip on New Year's day, turns into a trip into his head and then a trip down memory lane. The book is half psychological study of the modern family, and half childhood mystery thriller. The second half definitely picked up the pace and rounded this up to 4 stars. My second Juli Zeh, and I liked this more than [b:Leere Herzen 36110970 Leere Herzen Juli Zeh https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503504329l/36110970.SY75.jpg 57699438]. I think the shorter format works well for the author.
The simple life on a tiny island on the Norwegian coast, at the beginning of the last century. A father, a mother, a sister, a grandfather and a daughter. The catching and drying of fish, the tying of fishing nets, the tending to the various vegetable gardens, the occasional boat trips to the mainland, to shop and trade essentials. Life on the island is pretty self-sustaining, there's a clean math as to how much work everyone needs to do, in order for all of them to have enough to survive. Yet life also evolves, and one has dreams to either improve the island, or to get off the island.
I am a fan for books that focus on the beauty of the simple life, and this one did a great job.
I thought this was delightful. A portrait of a small community of recluses living on a wind-swept Polish plateau. Our heroine is an elderly part-time teacher, and full time astrology junkie, who is regarded as a madwoman by the nearby community, because of her conspiracy theories and preference of animals over people. Then the parish is hit by a string of mysterious deaths...
The writing is exquisite, and I especially like how this book doesn't seem to fit any clear label.
We live in a world where ‘man' is the default - the default body, the default gender, the default occupation - while half of the population count as exception or minority. The resulting discrimination is either deeply ingrained in culture or happens without awareness because of the gender data gap. We simply don't know how policy decisions in general favor men over women, because we don't gender-segregate the data.
- Women die more often in hospitals because procedures and medication are primarily tested on men.
- Equally sized bathrooms forget about the fact that women are generally the ones taking care of children and elders.
- Women receives more injuries in car accidents, because their bodies are NOT scaled-down versions of male crash test dummies.
- Clearing the roads before pavements on snow-days, helps ‘men' drive to work, while interrupting unpaid female work and leading to higher numbers of female injuries.
Some of these might be obvious, other might only lead to a 10% advantage of men over women. But these percentages are steady and never tip the other way.
Criado-Perez does a phenomenal job at showing us a variety of examples from all fields of life, supported with substantial data and references, while also keeping the book an engaging read.
Mira works in the diplomatic corp of the United Nations. From a first person perspective we peek into her head while she travels through her memories of past missions. From Genf to Burundi, to Den Haag, to New York and the Kongo. There are no clear plot lines, what we get is more of a understanding for the complexities and frustrations of working in the aftermath of political atrocities. The pool-side life of expats in their bubbles in war-ridden African countries. The detachment one needs to develop when you need to negotiate with suave political players, who might or might not have been involved in genocides. From former child soldiers to human rights experts, almost everyone we meet has developed a cynical or disenchanted attitude. It's the Schutzzone they need in order to survive or to be able to even engage.
Doing this in audio was probably a good decision. The long sentence structures that a few reviewers criticized, dissolved into a hypnotic stream of consciousness in the audiobook. And Constanze Becker did a great job in the narration. Still, I would have preferred a stricter plot line, to give the intriguing content a bit more structure.
First time audiobook experience of a live reading with audience. Meyerhoff is obviously a great performer and his autobiographical stories are very funny, so this sometimes feels like a stand-up comedy set instead of a book reading. Potentially it was created as hybrid, I don't know. So I can't quite tell if I liked this one less than [b:Wann wird es endlich wieder so, wie es nie war 17403555 Wann wird es endlich wieder so, wie es nie war Joachim Meyerhoff https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1370940078l/17403555.SY75.jpg 24239880] because of my different consumption medium, or because it didn't just feel but was indeed tailored more towards making an audience laugh. Nevertheless, this made me laugh out loud in public a lot, and he's still masterfully dancing between dry comedy and darker emotional beats. But I'll probably switch back to a printed book version, for the next iteration.
A little SFF twist enables this novel to actively contrast early 19th century slavery, with one African-American woman's perspective of the here and now. The here and now is California in the 1970ies, and Dana is a young writer who mysteriously gets transported across time and space onto a farm in Maryland in 1815. She discovers her ancestral ties to the farm, and due to her inability to return to her own time by free will, she is forced to settle in with the household. She witnesses and experiences first hand the brutal and unjust treatments slaves experience at the hand of their masters. Dana has a hard time suppressing her modern day impulses at the sigh of these injustices, yet must learn to do so in order to stay alive and protect others.
What I thought started as rather simplistic writing, quickly turns into a suspenseful tale and an interesting perspective at a dark time of American history. Butler teases interesting questions by giving the reader occasional temptations of empathy for the slave owners. How much are we all products of our time, and how quickly would we succumb to the role our skin-color imposes on us?
The allure and romance of two young hippies, wannabe artists, starving, struggling, united in their adoration of all things mystical, falling in love, forging a bond to help each other develop their creative voices, to support each other through artistic explorations, money struggles, sexual awakenings, their demons. All enveloped by the desire to become famous while staying true to their art and themselves.
Set in the wild days of rock'n'roll at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies. The setting is New York and the infamous Chelsea Hotel. The cast are Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Bob Neuwirth, Jim Carroll, Candy Darling, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg...
Their partnership, sexual and platonic, was definitely made for the books. I excessively googled images of them while reading this.
The beauty of the wide prairies, the simple life, the challenges and the potential that lie within the earth. Alexandra, the heroine of this Nebraskan novel is the daughter of Swedish settlers. She's level-headed and visionary, and despite being a girl, takes over the running of her father's farm, while her brothers provide the labour. She is in perfect harmony with the land around her, and Cather's writing instils the same wholesomeness and adoration for nature in the reader. Alexandra even succeeds with her farm, yet the novel is slim, so we jump over all the nitty-gritty details, which disappointed me. I expected more struggles against nature and the conventions of the time. But after the initial setup, the book seems more interested in romantic setups. 3.5, rounded down. This was entertaining, but I had too high expectations. I am mainly reminded of the superiority of [b:Kristin Lavransdatter 6217 Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1-3) Sigrid Undset https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388289230l/6217.SY75.jpg 1370150].
Barbeau-Lavalette reconstitue la vie de sa grand-mere Suzanne Meloche.
Suzanne est une femme qui a grand besoin d'une existence expressive et stimulante, pleine d'ardeur et de defis. Elle veut plus, plus que d'etre mere de deux enfants, qui existe pour soutenir les ambitions des son mari artiste. A fuir cette vie, elle doit fair une coupe dure.
The field of causality explains how one can quantify direct and indirect effects of causes with the help of formulas and path diagrams. Previously science shied away from naming direct causal relationships, because it was too hard to unpick all the biasing effects that influence studies and data collections. All patterns were named correlations, nothing was causation.
Only random-controlled trials (double-blind, with a control group, careful selection of participants..) are a clean way of experimenting. But RCT studies are expensive and time-consuming, and sometimes would be unethical. And now we live in a world of so much observational (big) data. It would be terrible, if we'd continue to make mistakes based on wrong assumptions about that data. The book explains the methods of causal inference, that help to rid data of hidden distortions (by controlling for confounders).
The reading experience of this book was rather fluctuating. There is a certain arrogance that bleeds through when the author squabbles about this new field that he so clearly helped establish. Then in some sections in the middle the book just drifts too far into jargon, giving up all attempts at stringing the casual popsci reader along (in my opinion). But occasionally the book is very descriptive, explains examples clearly, then it is a delight, and super informative to read. Absolutely a fascinating field.
Complex systems strive on the edge of chaos. The more randomness you're exposed to, the stronger you get. Systems (people, ideas, institutions, states..) that become too comfortable in their patterns, that have too many safety nets to ever learn from failures, that are too over-optimized and lack redundancies, will fail in the event of unexpected emergencies. It's the cruel lesson of survival of the fittest, of nature always being one strike ahead of us.
That's what I'd see at the basis of this book. Taleb tells it with his arrogance, and probably too many words and sample applications. What sticks with me is the question, if we'll be able to get ahead of nature at some point.
The memory police deletes objects from common knowledge. One day it's roses, the next day it's photographs. Everyone has to get rid of these objects and the police will hunt for any remains. And then people simply forget these objects every existed. But if you're special and you still remember, the memory police is out to get you too. The book reads like a big allegory. For the rituals and identities we lose, for the mindwashing culture and authority can execute, for how we accommodate around what harms us. And I still don't know what it really wanted to say. Because the book only stays on the surface, never gets into the nitty-gritty, of the how and why. Which is a fair style choice, but there is a neatness about Ogawa's writing, that I also ran up against when reading [b:The Housekeeper and the Professor 3181564 The Housekeeper and the Professor Yōko Ogawa https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344313042l/3181564.SX50.jpg 3214322]. It's beautiful and calm, with attention to detail, like Japanese design. Ripples in a lake, never a storm.
The dark tale of Europe's Thirty Years' War alongside the tale of famous cruel court jester Tyll Ulenspiegel, all told in Kehlmann's sly and humorous prose. The chapters are out of order chronologically, and feature different protagonists - from fallen monarchs, alchemists and scholars, vagrants, acrobats, melancholy executioners, to Origenes the talking donkey - but all parts are tied together by Tyll's appearance. We learn of his youth and the scars that marked him, the guilt and grudge remaining from his father's court case, the apprenticeship with the abusive juggler, the assault in a dark forest (!). Besides balancing on ropes, singing and dancing, Tyll also learns to read people and to use that skill to ridicule and expose them. His performances are highly entertaining and joyful until they take an evil turn. And yet he's only cruel to those who deserve it. The narration expertly shies away from revealing Tyll's feelings, but they are there under the surface, wonderfully nuanced.
Debating between 4 and 5 stars. This is a very grand, elegant and entertaining book. If I had to criticise something, it would be that everything becomes more lucid and dazzling once Tyll appears on the scene. Besides Athanasius Kircher there aren't that many 17th century personas I recognised, I imagine I could have appreciated some of them more.
A sequel that didn't need to exist, and in my opinion turned out rather uneven and disappointing. Sami's love-at-first-sight May-December romance felt almost unbearable. Elio's May-December romance was better. And Oliver's story felt like a filler to get to the inevitable ending. Aciman riffs on his usual memory/music/repetitions themes, but this time everything just felt off. Still love [b:Call Me By Your Name 36336078 Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1) André Aciman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519203520l/36336078.SY75.jpg 1363157] and [b:Enigma Variations 29875935 Enigma Variations André Aciman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1465643290l/29875935.SY75.jpg 50248706] though.
In sparse words Things Fall Apart tells the story of strong warrior Okonkwo and the cultural and societal customs in his village at the end of the 1800s in Nigeria. Okonkwo believes in his gods and the norms he's grown up to adhere. He strives for power and wealth and the old ways. He believes in evil spirits that return as children only to die again and again. He believes in the inferiority of women, beats his wives and uses “woman” as an insult. He believes in the laws that send him and his family into exile, despite the accidental nature of the act that triggered them. While other members of their village seem to develop doubts about the unnecessary cruelty of their gods and traditions (the “throwing out of twins”), Okonkwo stays strong, sheds a few tears when he has to kill a boy, but never wavers.
When the white men appear with their religion, claiming superiority over local gods, the village little by little falls apart.
The ending really took me by surprise and made me reevaluate the tale. It contrasts one man's inability to change with the sudden and harsh changes forced upon the natives by European colonialism. Adaptation vs tradition, monotheism vs polytheism, the masculine vs the feminine. I might even want to read the next one.
First foray into (mild) gothic horror, which is not my typical genre. Though you could say this is foremost a multi-generational southern family story, with sprinkles of swamp monster shape shifters. And the monster is not necessarily the villain, which was great. The first few books were atmospheric and intriguing, very enjoyable as a yarn. Later on, everything slowed down and focused a little too much on old people getting cranky and withering away. Also did the family have to end on clan in-breeding and a money-obsession that just kept building without leading to any moral twist? Yet still, it was entertaining. 4 stars for the first three books, 3 stars for the last three books. For a more wholesome women-succeeding-in-building-empires story I'd recommend [b:A Town Like Alice 107301 A Town Like Alice Nevil Shute https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327957610l/107301.SY75.jpg 276591].
Stanišić explores his “Herkunft” (origin) in this autobiographical novel. In non-chronological segments he tells us of his relationship to his Serbian grandma, who may or may not have been head of the local mafia, of his family's escape from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Germany during the Yugoslav war, of the challenges of integrating into the new country, discovering a love of language and his later visits to reconnect with his roots and leftover family members in Bosnia. His stories are quirky and dry, amusing and touching, riffing on topics like family, memories and belonging.
Stanišić narrates the audiobook himself, and his accented German and skillful intonations make this a very entertaining experience. I realized after that this actually is an abridged version, and that part of the printed book would have been hard to adapt for audio. Which gives me extra reason to maybe purchase a hardcopy after all.