Eva
This reads more like the sequel to [b:The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection 20821373 The End of Absence Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Michael Harris https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398033271s/20821373.jpg 40167211] - how we are hooked on our devices and their pings - than a book on solitude. It's a solitude for the modern age full of people who can't remember if they ever spent 24 hours without meeting/talking/texting/emailing/reblogging someone. For a truer read on solitude (the one that existed before this digital age of constant connectivity) I suggest Storr's [b:Solitude: A Return to the Self 120586 Solitude A Return to the Self Anthony Storr https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441429959s/120586.jpg 440448].
A novel that speaks very much of our times. In a middle-eastern country of conflict, two young people fall in love. Magical portals open across the globe, allowing passage from one to another, leading to a new sort of mass migration. Yet nothing is simple, and there's chaos and policing, refugee camps, xenophobia and shortages wherever you go. Despite it all the book is very hopeful. The writing is simple and gentle and poetic. A fast read. Hamid uses the device of magical realism - the doors - way better than Whitehead has done with the railroad in [b:The Underground Railroad 30555488 The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493178362s/30555488.jpg 48287641]. (Still peeved the railroad qualified that one as contender to win scifi prizes).
Oh the privileged and their artsy and enigmatic friends. The book follows a group of friends from summercamp to middle-age, through crushes, heartbreaks, career choices, health crisis and wealth envies. The storytelling pulled me in, it was an easy listen, but all in all its not good enough to make up for the fact that the story and setting felt formulaic and familiar. It feels like The Secret History, spanning also the lives after they left college. The outsider (here Jules, there Richard) that joins a group of oh-such-interesting and dazzling young people, all well-read and talented, full of vigor and beauty. I think I am past my quota on such books.
3.5
The story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (it took 70 years!!!) that is curiously entwined with the fate of William Minor, who suffered from delusions - later to be diagnosed with schizophrenia - which caused him to kill a man. The murder led to his arrest and confinement to a mental asylum for the following 40-50years of his life. As he was a man of high education, he found some solace and therapy in dedicating himself to supporting editor James Murray and the team of the OED, by meticulously supplying quotes for the creation of the dictionary. This intellectual stimulation kept him sane during the day, while the delusions came back to haunt him at night.
Good story, elegantly executed, i just wish there would have been more material to dig deeper into Minor and Murray, as I find educated Victorian men, lover of words, driven to systematise and capture each word's true history and meaning, very fascinating.
Part medical mystery, part fear-and-loathing-in-Las-Vegas. Susannah Cahalan tells the story of how she went from a completely normal 24 year old to someone afflicted with paranoia, psychosis and finally catatonia within just a few weeks/months. She has epileptic seizures, hears voices, partially loses her abilities of speech and movement all the while a variety of doctors try to figure out what is attacking her brain. She pieces together the story of her month of madness - of which she herself has no recollection - with the help of her family and friends, hospital surveillance tapes and diagnosis reports.
This is scary - how some brain condition suddenly could out of nowhere completely change who you are - and touching - in her parents and friends devotion to her, and in hearing how her story has helped other patients to be correctly diagnosed.
This intriguing dystopian fiction of inverted gender dynamics is the 2017's winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Women suddenly develop the power to produce and discharge electricity and suddenly they are the gender in power. The oppressed become the oppressors. Shocking fictional tales of treatment of men become the more shocking when you remember that the exact thing happens to some women in our world today. The story is told from several perspectives and spans 10 years - from the discovery of the new powers to the inevitable culmination that such a shocking disruption of culture can bring. What the book is trying to do (and achieves) is stronger than the actual story. I want to like it more than I actually do, as I was intrigued by the characters yet never fully warmed up to them.
An autobiographical graphic novel by Alison Bechdel (yes, of the test) about growing up and discovering her own sexuality in a house that is dominated by her idiosyncratic closeted father. About the bonds and the damages their father-daughter relationship brought forth, and the legacy she's trying to escape/untangle.
The Young-Adult novel for the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gotten a lot of hype. YA isn't usually my thing, but I was curious, and this did not disappoint. Engaging and perfect as audiobook, because you're in the head of a 16 year old girl, that witnesses the police shooting of one of her best childhood friends. White cop, black kid. Grief and sadness, anger and rage, gangs and drugs, stereotyping and prejudices, black neighbourhoods and race riots.
This started out really intriguing but then got rather boring and predictable. All the world building was great, the future of 2043, with genediting, a neverending refugee crisis, biohacking, etc but all this fades away when the plot becomes pure action-driven. Suddenly there are stereotypical baddies and our hero's path is conveniently filled with helpful allies. He doesn't even have to do much thinking, as all the solutions (and so much money and equipment) are pretty much just handed to him. The psychological troubles he experiences on 2 pages during this adventure feel uninspired and like a forced add-on. Also, what sexist future is this with this less than exciting men-women ratio.
2.5, but I gotta go with 2, because it just went downhill, which means it disappointed me more.
So, Women are more emphatic and men are better at systematising? Turns out what we think of as gender differences can all be blamed on neuroplasticity. Our culture nurtures our minds into different genders, and our minds reinforce our culture with its gender differences. It's a chicken and egg problem, that must have started somewhere. And by now it's everywhere, in children books, movies, books, baby clothes, all our conscious and subconscious behavior, ...
With a dry humor, but also a mix of bitterness and glee, Fine picks apart a century of gender studies and gender experiments, debunks misconceptions that first clearly are based on sexism (women's smaller brains explain their cognitive inferiority) then later based on faults and inaccuracy in the testing setup (priming, p, focus on differences over similarities, .. )
For example: The simple fact of ticking a [ ] male or [ ] female checkbox on the top of a test results in significant performances differences for females and males. When women are reminded of their apparent “inferiority” in all “male” subjects (math, science, ...) their results drop.
We're clearly on an upwards curve to actual gender equality, but it might take a few generations to fully reinvent our cultural norms.
The story of the unique connection between Magda and her housekeeper Emerence. A story of shame and dependency, trust and pride, stubbornness and age, and how one is set in their ways. Of how you can only truly be hurt by the ones you love, even if its a love that is hard to proclaim. This was quite a haunting meaty story.
Fantastic! A candid, behind-the-scenes report on Glidden's journey to Turkey, Syria and Iraq together with a team of journalists. The graphic novels depicts their day-to-day on the trip, the interviews they do with locals and refugees, they explore the legacy of the Iraq war while Glidden also explores the nature of journalism. She pictures all the doubts and insecurities of the reporters, their challenges, their ambitions. And while the journalists think they fail in their story of the returning war-veteran, the graphic novel succeeds in telling that part of the story, with all its subtleties and awkward silences.
Two stories, one in the Arctic, the other in Space, both dealing with the fallout of an explained catastrophe that cuts off all communication to civilization. Both stories are simultaneously about solitude and human connection, without downgrading one for the other. They also share a yearning for knowledge, the urge to explore, about coming to peace with the potential end of the world, and about coming to peace with oneself.
The book is a beautiful mix of sadness and stillness and euphoria. I especially liked how it connected the two stories without making it explicit to the protagonists.
News of the World is a Western set around 1870 in the south of the US. It tells the absolutely charming adventures of old grizzly veteran Captain Kidd, who makes his living by reading newspaper articles of far-away places to his audience, and wild 10 year old Johanna, who had spent the last 4 years living with the Kiowa tribe after they had violently slaughtered her family and kept her to raise her as their own.
Their journey together is engaging and adventurous and ultimately successful (and obviously they are already planning the movie) while also balanced with the right amount of heartfelt sadness about the distressing and curious fate of children whose life was uprooted and reprogrammed multiple times within their childhood.
Very much enjoyed Jiles' flow of storytelling, of seamlessly and fluidly weaving narration and dialogue and thoughts together. And you simply can't not love the at first reluctant yet then more and more attached heroic duo of the novel.
A mix of [b:Special Topics in Calamity Physics 3483 Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442699779s/3483.jpg 910619] with some [b:Galatea 2.2 23001 Galatea 2.2 Richard Powers https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442696557s/23001.jpg 1682428]. A young girl grows up homeschooled and inside her Dad's natural-language-processing lab at Boston University. It's her coming-of-age story as this young shy nerd who suddenly needs to navigate same-aged kids, awkwardness and high school, when suddenly her father - her only family - is diagnosed with Alzheimer and slowly fades away, while also revealing a big secret about his mysterious past. Engaging read, well written, the emotional parts between Ada and her dad are touching. The reveal of the mystery is not as rewarding as expected. And the techy future she ends up in, not as exciting, but that might just be due to my own aversion of all things VR :)3.5
La tristesse était la forme, et le bonheur le contenu.
Je pense que mon amour pour ce livre quand j'ai lu il y a plusieur annees c'etait toujours melange avec mon amour pour le film. La relire maintenant etait tres interessant. L'analyse de Kundera de cet trois/quatre vie est parfois poetique et parfois fastidieuse.
I really liked this book, while all the while wishing it was double the length, filled with more details, and possibly written by someone like W. Somerset Maugham, just so I could love it more. It's the story of 3 anthropologists, re-imaging the time of Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in New Guinea in the early 1930ies. Part love story, part anthropology adventures.
The basis is all there - charming interesting characters, united in their passion for anthropology, pulling the reader into their fascination for uncovering unknown cultures... and then there's the jungle and its humidity and bugs and dangers, plus a love triangle to spice it all up. All of these things are great, I just needed more of it. So I would know the characters better and could appreciate all the emotional moments deeper. Hear more of Nell's methods for getting the tribes to trust her, understand more of Fen's charm and jealousy, and spend more time with Bankson despair and longing. Dig deeper into those polyamorous notes that emerged mid-way and then disappeared.
Read this within a day, because I had the time and because it absolutely captivated me. The story is told in 3 segments, one incredibly intriguing, one incredibly sexy and one incredibly terrifying. From different points of view they tell the story of a woman who follows a dream and converts to radical vegetarianism, which is only the first step in her transformation.
Part Kafka's Die Verwandlung, part Greenaway'sThe Pillow Book, part Sartre's Nauseau.
A charming satire and re-imagined biography of two German giants of science, mathematician Gauss and explorer Humboldt. They are not only united in their desire to understand and measure the world, but also in their dislike of and inability to navigate everyday society and its norms.
A wonderful and entertaining book. Plus early 19th century measuring devices and stories of geniuses forgetting the world with their heads stuck in abstract calculations. Which is definitely my sort of thing.