Eva
A memoir, told in letters, of a Colombian girl's impoverished, yet adventurous and imaginative childhood. Even though most of the stories picture a very desolate life, she manages to create funny and magical little vignettes experienced through the eyes of the naive and quirky little girl.
I'm not usually one for reading the book introduction, but this is one that shouldn't be skipped.
You could say there's a style to the big Russian classics, and The Big Green Tent definitely has that same style and grandeur. It's family, tradition, revolutions, politics, love, tragedy and the relations between a rich cast of characters, that weave in and out of each other's lives, spanning decades. Ulitskaya's book pulls us into the life of artists, academics and political dissidents during the 1950ies to 1970ies in Moscow. And like all Russian epics, at its essence it's a book about the soul of Russia and the love&hate relationship Russians have with their country. At the center are three childhood friends - Ilya, Mikha and Sanya - who bond over being outsiders, and who are thirsty for knowledge and art. They develop a love for literature, music and photography, but when they grow up and have to confront their motherland's oppressive political reality, their passions lead some of them towards the dissident movement. The love of literature that's present in all the pages - treasured books are handed from person to person, forbidden books are copied onto onion skin paper, early manuscripts are received from local writers - is very infectious. I think it's time I finally read [b:Doctor Zhivago 130440 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385508725l/130440.SY75.jpg 3288400], maybe this winter... I thought it was very interesting that Ulitskaya started the prologue of the book with 3 girls, 3 friends, and their individual experiences of hearing the announcements of Stalin's looming demise. We do meet these girls again later, as they become part of the tapestry of interconnected fates. But their presence in the prologue makes you question if there maybe could have been a version of this book that has female protagonists at the center, and that maybe the featured period of time wasn't the right time yet.
J'aime beaucoup Le Plongeur. C'est un trip energetique et captivant dans le monde de travailleurs de cuisine dans l'an 2002 a Montreal. Accompagne d'un son de heavy metal, nous suivons avec le protagoniste de 19 an, qui tente d'echapper a sa dependance au jeu et a sa dette envers des amis en commencant un traveil comme plongeur dans un restaurant chic. Nous rencontrons un groupe de personnages animes qui travaillent dur et font la fete. Il y a trahison et crime, mais aussi la vraie amitie. En partie Bildungsroman et en partie spirale descendante hypnotique. Je pense que me souviendrai le plus de la figure tragique et puissante de Bebert.
Because make no mistake, this was his story... Briseis says this line somewhere towards the end of the book, and it comes a little too late. The Silence of the Girls starts out great, presenting The Iliad to us from the perspective of Briseis, the young Trojan wife who becomes Achilles' sex slave after seeing her family slaughtered by the Greek hero. Briseis is our eye on the fate of the many girls and women who don't get acknowledged as more than just war prices or objects by the Greeks, and likewise by the men who wrote and propagated this story. Yet halfway in, after having been 95% Briseis' POV, Achilles and Patroclus receive more and more chapters until suddenly it feels Briseis is only there to be a fly on the wall of their story. The disappointing thing is that this happens at half-way point and rather surprisingly, as if the author had a change of heart. So, what I thought was a fascinating idea at the beginning, falls a bit apart towards the end. Besides, anyone who was read [b:The Song of Achilles 11250317 The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1331154660l/11250317.SX50.jpg 16176791] and [b:Circe 35959740 Circe Madeline Miller https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1508879575l/35959740.SY75.jpg 53043399] will have a hard time judging this book for itself, without comparing it to these (and possible other) recent Greek myth retellings. My recommendation would be, read those two instead. The Song of Achilles gives you the Achilles and Patroclus story, and Circe gives you the feminist take on Greek myths.
This is a book of violence, based on a true story, told in sparse poetic lines. We follow Filiz, a Turkish girl, who grows up in a large poor peasant family. At a too young age she falls in love and marries Yunus, against her family's wishes. Yet her dreams of love and escape into a better world shatter, and she finds herself slaving away at her mother-in-law's property, while receiving the same “blue jewellery” most women in her homeland receive from their husbands.
This story is brutal, it tells of women as properties and domestic violence. So I admire how Winkler found this prose that's quiet and direct and hurts, while also allowing for Filiz' dreams and hopes to shine through. It helps to know that there's a happy ending at the end.
A character-driven space opera with the highest priority on creating the found-family vibe for the multi-species crew of a patched-up spaceship tasked with building hyperspace tunnels. There isn't much plot or action, as we're spending most of our time getting to know the characters and the cultural and biological differences between the species (and about inter-species coupling). Which in principal I wouldn't mind, but it's a bit too simplified, exposition-heavy and hunky-dory for my taste. Nevertheless, this was sweet. I guess I like my scifi to be a bit colder and brainier.
This book is full of interesting thoughts and tidbits, but ultimately lacking structure and a clear focus. Yes, we have many blindspots, but biological blindspots are very different to willful or forced-upon blindspots. Our senses and brains create a very specific umwelt for us that hides many aspects of reality that science now can reveal. But the realities that a capitalist society chooses to obscure (the meat industry, plumbing, finance, climate..) are created, and we are mostly happy to ignore them.
This book reads like snippets of many other books I've recently read, and I can't blame it for that, because these are all good topics to attack. But it absolutely didn't need those two chapters on the history of measuring time and space.
I am a big fan of Cixin's skill of blending the small and personal with the philosophical and the big-picture humanity- and centuries-spanning arcs. The wallfacer challenge was intriguing and the final reveal of what the “dark forest” stands for, was fascinating. And darkly devastating.
Yet his depiction of women in this installment absolutely tainted my reading experience. His main protagonist dreams up his personal perfect woman (educated, but not too educated) and then absolutely creepily proceeds to use international funds to find a close double of this woman, and ultimately ends up starting a family with her. The woman turns out quite inconsequential and uninteresting, and the narration never condemns the act in any way. This fairy-tale style misogyny might fit into a more magical whimsical novel, but it was really off-putting and cringe-worthy here. I kept waiting for it to explode into consequences, but those never came. And henceforth, I kept noticing more and more how low in numbers and inconsequential women were to his plot. My enjoyment of the second half of the book lessened considerably. Even though I could still admire its brilliance.
Now I am not that eager to continue to the last book of the trilogy. I will probably get there eventually. To see how it all ends.
3.5
My second Ann Leckie (after [b:Ancillary Justice 17333324 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) Ann Leckie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397215917l/17333324.SY75.jpg 24064628]) and I really enjoyed the first half of this - getting to know the new world with its cultural conventions, and following along the adventure and mystery of our heroine retrieving a stranger from prison - but then it all fizzled out into the mechanics of diplomacy and left me a bit unsatisfied. And what was up with the narration being so enamoured with the Geck mech transformation abilities, making it a plot device several times in a way that dumbed down the reader. Too bad, considering this started so strong.
In the scientific light of men's destructive impact on nature, there are two visions on how to counter it: environmentalism wants to scale back and find a natural balance with nature (the prophet) and techno-optimism wants humans to prosper by overcoming nature's natural limits (the wizzard). Mann describes these two perspectives by portraying two men that were instrumental in the development of these two stances: William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. In between their biographies he looks at the two camps' strategies when it comes to famines, GMOs, clean water, fossil fuels, and the climate crisis.
The book doesn't pick a side and simply presents the facts, demonstrating how both visions can start with good intentions but can lead to setbacks. My vote goes to cautious techno-optimism with enhanced systems-thinking about the consequences new innovations bring along. Fascinating read!
This was a wonderfully immersive reading experience, or maybe I was just in the right frame of mind to be swept up by a story. Zuleikha is old-school linear storytelling, and there is something grand and epic about it. It has grueling hardship, formative guilt, a slow building love story, haunting ghosts and desperate fights for survival. We encounter the Russian peasant experience, a journey across the country, the coldness of the Siberian Taiga alongside with memorable characters that experience memorable transformations.
The story spans about 2 decades (~1930-1948) and follows Tatar women Zuleikha, who's life gets uprooted when her abusive husband is killed for hiding grain from the state. Swept up in the Soviet campaign of dekulakization, she and other political dissidents are sent to Sibiria, to start a new labour camp, a gulag. The life conditions are punishing and most perish during their first winter. Yet strict and aloof commandant Ignatov, who's battling his demons of guilt, drives them to establish shelter and to set up a strict food and firewood regime. Slowly the settlement takes shape, and they find their way of living, in this harsh isolated environment.
I love that the original Russian title for the novel translates to “Zuleikha opens her eyes”, which is also the first line of the book. And when the line returns towards the end of the story, it speaks to the slow transformation she has undergone. How she found her freedom and worth in the hardships she had to undergo.
A inspirational toolkit for social-justice movement organizers. I don't count myself as one of those, and the book's flow and structure is very loose and free-spirited, so this naturally wasn't my favorite book experience. This is a book for EPs (and I am only pulling out the mbti because the author herself included a letter that singled out TJs) with an organization theory that's all emotional and organic and spiritual.
The “emergent” part of the strategy is that movements should learn from nature. How to grow, how to adapt to change, how to become resilient. Systems thinking and a framework - like nature - that allows and learns from failure. Which is good advice. It gets a bit diluted by the many quotes and interviews that are distributed throughout the book. I gave myself permission to skip them towards the end, as they didn't add much to my experience.
Lots of good ideas to distill from this, even if the editing of the book wasn't to my taste. I was intrigued by the tie-in to Octavia Butler's fiction. Something to remember when I finally get around to reading my second Butler.
I barely remembered anything from the movie besides Clive Owen in a grey rubble world, so I had an open mind going into this. The book world is similar, a near future that is ridden with infertility. The dystopian premises is very interesting, what does it do to a society, a generation, when they learn they will be the last of humankind? When you're unable to bear children, destined to grow old without caregivers, destined to know that all your contributions to this world will ultimately be useless. While the world building is intriguing, the main plot and the main protagonist are less so. It depicts the transformation of a middle-aged snobbish Brit from resigned detachment to newborn hopefulness. Yet the narrative moves along sluggishly and gets lost in too many details most of the time. Spoiler alert: the last scene and last line of the book is quite similar to the ending of [b:Brideshead Revisited 30933 Brideshead Revisited The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder Evelyn Waugh https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438579340s/30933.jpg 2952196].
After having read [b:Girls of Riyadh 1476261 Girls of Riyadh Rajaa Alsanea https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1184005681s/1476261.jpg 1570261] I thought I check out another female voice from the Arabian Peninsula. Gargash is definitely the more skilled writer. She offers us a portrait of 3 members of an established yet secretly scandal-ridden Emirati family: the chauvinistic old patriarch of the family, his illegitimate daughter, and his niece. The novel is set in the 90ies and shows the struggle of the two girls to escape a deeply misogynistic culture. We witness the lack of respect and violence shown towards women when we go into the head of the hateful family head, and we also see how these patriarchal values trickle down to the new generation of young Arabic men. The writing is feminist yet nuanced and quite engaging in weaving together the storylines by switching between the three characters. And for a change I actually didn't mind the different POVs. Another great window into a different world.
This book is a look at coders and coding culture and every coder and system-thinker will probably love reading it. Because who doesn't love to hear about being INTJs and the joy of efficiency and the frustrations and patience required when chasing bugs. It definitely gave me the itch to go and automate something. All the analogies were spot on, that for example coders have to build and juggle houses of cards in their head while programming, tracking at all times the complex interdependencies, and therefore hate all interruptions that make those houses collapse.
In interesting point made is that coding is a discipline where self-taught people work alongside computer-science graduates. Some examples are brought up that show that anyone with an aptitude for problem-solving and optimization can learn those skills, even later in life. Yet the culture that hypes the ubernerds and mastercoders (10X) is not that welcoming to women/minorities and anyone who sees coding just as a dayjob. Still miles to go, but at least worldwide statistics show that culture is to blame, and that white North American men are not the genetically chosen masters of the discipline.
A female friendship in 1930ies Brazil, that is based on a common passion of music and the drive to escape their upbringing. One of them is made to create the music, the other is made for the lamplight. The jealousy and co-dependency between the two friends brings conflict but also fuels their musical creativity. The novel is engaging, who doesn't love to read about feisty orphans escaping their poor surroundings to follow the call of music and to become successful recording artists. The underground music scene in Brazil, the lush nightclubs, the origins of Samba, all of this was atmospheric and fun to follow along with. The push and pull between Graça and Dores (and Vinicius) was compelling, but never reached that irresistible mystique that Lena and Lila had (I'd say that's a fair comparisons here, as I've seen [a:Elena Ferrante 44085 Elena Ferrante https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] mentioned in some of the blurbs). Especially Graça never fully took shape for me, therefore the climax of the story fell a bit flat. This book applies the same technique as [b:Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Daisy Jones & The Six Taylor Jenkins Reid https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1551887263s/40597810.jpg 61127102] in showing song lyrics that clearly stand in for the feelings of the song writers, and therefore become important parts of the narration. 3.5
The love adventures of 4 young upper-class Saudi women in a very strict and traditional culture that favors men in every aspect. The four girls still honor their religion, they are not rebels, they feel like good representations on the scale of traditional to more open-minded. The story follows their various flirtations and relationships over the course of a few years.
Any book that gets banned in its home country, it's worth a look. Even if the writing isn't especially good, the plot is engaging, and the novel is very insightful into a world and culture so far from mine. It was definitely interesting to learn about all customs that feel so antiquated in how they separate the genders and suppress the women, while also embracing the allure of Western movies, shopping addictions and Burger King whopper meals. Women are meant to marry young, the more naive and less educated they are the better their chances. Young guys “number” girls by basically stalking them and forcing their phone numbers on them. And should you fall in love, love is no guarantee that tradition won't break.
I enjoyed this. It's been a while since I've read a good nerdy punk scifi/dystopia. We're in the near future full of data and algorithms and everyone's rocking smart glasses. But there's also techno-terrorism and after setting off some EMPs the whole power and network grids are knocked offline. The second timeline is 10 years after the fact and humanity's slow at reestablishing order. Most people still cling to the past, the data and the personal connections they lost. And maybe revolutions shouldn't be jumpstarted without a clear vision and how-to action-plan for how to rebuild.
It's titled infinite detail, but I would have liked more detail on some of the plot and the characters.
Part nerd memoir, part overview of different ways of encoding/modelling humanity. We love to taxonomize and label our characteristics and behaviours, and have found in computers and algorithms ideal collaborators to analyze and monetize our every distinctions. For sorters, systemizers and lovers of data.
I enjoyed sections (the early messenger code wars, that mandatory mbti obsession, seeing your kids evolution in terms of software upgrades, ..) but in total this lacked some cohesiveness and couldn't quite settle on what it wanted to be. And it definitely had too much D&D talk.
Fantastic portrait of Berlin at the height of the Weimar Republic in graphic novel format. At 550 pages it goes into detail, we follow several characters through tumultuous years of hardship, communist revolts, increasing antisemitism and the rise of the Nazi party. Families torn apart by politics, a pacifist journalist, an art student trying to find herself, a woman in men clothes, their fates interspersed with thought bubbles of everyday people, giving the pulse of the time.
Obviously this gives off strong Babylon Berlin vibes.
4.5
