Eva
Partial coming-of-age story, partial report of the minute details of climbing the Mount Everest. The protagonist Jonas grows up with a twin brother and a best friend, young boys getting into all sorts of trouble. They get adopted by a grandfather with Mafiosi connections and endless funds, who enables and supports all their crazy wishes and dangerous adventures. Yet their lives are filled with tragedies. There's a mysterious strong connection between the two friends, that pays off beautifully in the last pages of the book. Jonas goes into adulthood searching for meaning, a sense in life, in love and solitude, chasing risks and insights all across the world.
I really enjoyed this. Especially the climb, learning about the crazy effects of high altitude, and the strategies on how you adjust your body and mind to these extreme conditions. Also Jonas' sense of humor, continuously cracking bad jokes, felt very Austrian to me and made me chuckle occasionally. I would have preferred if the book hadn't tried to become a love story in it's last third. Also some of the protagonist's idiosyncratic ways of spending money bugged me. As did his stubborn ways, right up to the last line uttered in the novel (i get it, but Jonas, but why couldn't you just give Hadan the satisfaction!?) But definitely an intriguing piece of fiction.
A collection of essays dealing with wide-spread misogyny. They track the slippery slope of lacking respect, so ingrained in our culture, that spans from “mansplaining” to rape and femicide. It's a saddening and maddening wake-up call when Solnit names numbers of how many documented and undocumented rapes happen on a daily basis. And how the typical response is to tell women how not to behave, what not to wear, when not to go out - instead of teaching men not to rape. Equally eye-opening is her pointing out that, without a few exceptions, most massmurderers and terrorists are men. A fact easy to overlooked, when all everyone cries about is nationalities and religion.
Solnit's voice is sharp and witty and I like her writing a lot. I can only imagine what essays she would have added in the last 2-3 years (since this edition was published). My only critique would be that some of the essays fit more while others fit less. And that there are slights repeats in content.
Really quite marvellous. Somewhere halfway I was ready to only give it four stars, but the ending was really touching. Also, the depiction of the ambisexual race, and how lack of sexual drive effects society, culture and politics was so nuanced and well developed, that I imagine it'll stay with me for a while. Definitely a book that demands to be reread, as it only slowly reveals itself and its characters' true nature to us.
An apocalypse story that doesn't focus on the apocalypse itself but rather checks in with a group of loosely intertwined characters before and ~20 years after a virus kills about 99.9% of the population. We get interesting glimpses into how people would deal with a world in which everything they'd known had collapsed, all infrastructure, all amenities. There's violence and there are cults, yet there is also hope. Personified in a rag-tag team of musicians and actors who bonded together to form a travelling theatre group, performing under the slogan of “Survival Is Insufficient”.
I quite enjoyed the stillness and inward-focus of most of the character portraits. A good audiobook to listen to, though I wonder now if the printed version does not include the graphic novel panels of Station Eleven :)
A faux-Victorian novel full of life - of the dirty, the canny, the manic, the erotic, the repulsive and mostly the human kind. Full of fascinating dynamic characters, centered around Sugar, a young prostitute aiming to escape her surroundings. All the way up to the end you don't know if you're reading a heroic tale of a tragedy.
Story about a girl who falls into a cult at age 14. I liked the split of the storytelling into the past and present. The present almost being more interesting, with grownup Evie, still dealing with the aftermath of her youthful adventures. An ok book, not more. Slightly disappointing, because it feels it could have gone deeper. I liked the writing though.
Audiobooks make me go through books too fast and I rarely pick a winner it seems. Which might be due to the lacking selection, but also the lower commitment with which I consume them (easy to get distracted while multitasking).
I really could not get into this, even though a lot of people seem to enjoy it. His narrative voice is entertaining, and I really quite liked the mixing-in of Spanish language. But somehow I didn't connect to the characters, and also felt the whole idea of the curse didn't pay off, as this is truly more the tragic story of victims of fascist dictator Trujillo and the violence and corruptions left behind in the Dominican Republic. Besides that it's a lot about getting people laid and avoiding getting laid.
Houellebecq toujours veut provoquer. Il toujours parle de sex, mais cet fois il ajoute religion et politique, et sexism. Le France dans la proche future va etre pris par une parti politique musulman. Le protagonist - un homme a age moyen, tres isole, chercher une nouvel objectif pour vivre - lentement succumbe a le changements.
Amalgam of interesting examples that teach you to not too easily fall for seemingly convincing numbers and data representations. We are wired to make logical mistakes and misunderstand statistics. But we won't all be dead by 2050 despite there being a seemingly straight line going up on that graph. And even the most unpredictable event will be predicted, if there are enough people making predictions.
I quite liked the concept of calculating your life based on utility - how many wasted hours spent on airports arriving early are worth 1 missed plane? And in the light of recent political events it was interesting to read about how the same votes could lead to 3 different outcomes, depending on voting method used (traditional vs instant-runoff vs head-to-head matchup).
All in all a good book, yet I am debating btw 3 and 4 stars, because the 2nd half of the book got partially very abstract - discussing geometry - and therefore harder to read.
Debating between 3 and 4 stars. The novel about a married couple - full of glamour and sex and intrigue and parties and family mysteries and dark pasts and deception and lies - is narrated in an interesting style, but it's main fault is that even though the characters seem fascinating, you never really start to like them, let alone care for them. If I hadn't listened to it on audiobook, I might not have made it all the way through, though I can say, the second half - narrated from the perspective of the wife - definitely invigorated my interest in the story a lot.
A quiet and rather uneventful life of an English professor at a small university in the midwestern USA, during the first half of the 20th century. The language is light-weight and straight-forward; the events are simple and ordinary, and all together there's immense beauty in Williams' prose and story.
Stoner's life is a life lived quite passively, he stoically accepts the misfortunes life presents him. He is happiest when consumed by his passion for learning and teaching. Yet even this passion is not consistent and he never rises above mediocrity. He's not a hero, as he passively takes every work-related attack and even doesn't react when his wife estranges his daughter from him. Yet you cheer for him when life gives him a few wins.
A couple of paragraphs I had to reread because their quiet beauty resonated.
Part letter, part sermon, part stream-of-consciousness, part autobiography. On the history of America's deep ingrained racism, and what it means to grow up with, live with it, learn to understand it, and find ways to not pass on all the anger yet still the knowledge of what-has-been to your son.
I feel conflicted for not handing out more stars. But while being very engaging, the voice never really reached me, probably as I'm neither American nor very familiar with its history. Also, he told small personal stories and generalised outwards, and sometimes I wished to hear a wider range of voices instead.
Very interesting dystopian concept: earth has become uninhabitable and humanity lives under earth, in a huge silo. Recreating society and class division on it's 144 levels. But there are mysteries and too many rules that seem to keep people from asking questions.
The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, which worked well for the sheriff, the mayor and Juliette, but then felt flat for Lucas and the rest. Also, there is a really good twist at the end of the first segment (Sheriff), that then needs to be rediscovered by another character later on, that repetition being rather boring for the reader. But, I understand that the first segment had been released as a standalone story beforehand, so changing it for the sake of longer sustained mysteries wouldn't have worked.
All in all, I loved the concept and the potential of the world, but while the book started strong it continuously lost steam along the way. Don't feel compelled to read more of the series.
The family dynamic of three siblings torn apart by the death of their parents, a very angsty love story, and how you deal with loss and loneliness. It's a tender story and an easy-to-read book, but I feel it also pretends to be more than it truly is. Somehow all the early childhood stories too neatly come full-circle by being mentioned again at the end. And the narrator's voice - or the author in general - sounds too young for the age of the protagonist.
Gritty cyberpunk noir crime story set in a future where your consciousness can be downloaded to different bodies. The wealthy live forever and wear different bodies as if they are clothes. Your changing body image and a new bodies' chemistry create patchworks of identities. I enjoyed the hard scifi of it, the identity speculations, and would have preferred more of that instead of the focus on the action-laden crime investigation.
This was quite the fun read. Beauty and fame-obsessed starlets, trying to climb the ladder to the showbiz top. Popping pills, sleeping their way up, back-stabbing, growing old and not being any wiser. I really appreciated that not even nice-girl Anne, the main protagonist, got her happy ending. The homophobic and fat-shaming slurs are cringe-worthy, but most likely a true portrait of that era and industry.
Last of the Neapolitan Novels! Great tetralogy, but truly one long epic. That's a goodbye to Elena and Lila. I've been pingponging between preferring one girl over the other, while reading their life stories. Both of them are flawed and admirable, strong and annoying. Just as fascinating literary characters should be. They'll definitely stay in my head for a bit.
3rd part of what should be one colossal epic novel. And actually, Ferrante says herself, they are “a single novel”. This one deals with early marriage, motherhood, Elena's writing career, politics, unions and burgeoning feminism. Elena and Lila are further apart than before, in space and mind. Haven't been pulled into a book as much as into the Neapolitan novels in quite a while.
Similar to The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi writes his dystopian futures so gritty and realistic, full of minor details and visceral descriptions, that you're easily pulled into this scorching heat of a dried up mad-max-esque hell where crime flourishes and everyone fights about the hottest commodity: water. The higher-ups send their killers after suddenly surfaced water-rights claims, while regular people need to work/fight/sell to receive the few cups of water for their everyday survival.
Book 2. Late adolescence for the two girls. A friendship that's loving yet also toxic. How competition between friends is what drives them to success yet also provides so much ugliness and pain. Some of the scenes surprised me, how they seemed to rise above the else rather impartial narration. When Lina and Nino spend day+night together and Elena is tormented by it and her use of explicit language demonstrates her pain. Her recount of what happens on the beach with Nino's father, heartbreaking as in the moment she does not grasp it yet the shame hits her months/years later. And one of the most beautiful and touching moments, put into a sentence: “I was I, I, I.”
Okay I am hooked. Two girls growing up in the poor neighboorhood of Naples. They push and pull, they support each other, they compete and hurt each other, and always always influence each other. My only complaint: Why couldn't Ferrante publish all 4 books all at once, make one giant 1400 page mammoth with tiny fonts and super-thin translucent pages. It would feel more like the epic I am sure it's going to be.
Really quite excellent. Language shapes reality. A race that is genetically built to speak the truth, learns to lie. When communication demands the training of brain-link twins that act as ambassadors and translators of a two-tongue language.
I admire how Miéville takes you into this complex new world full of new terms and concepts without hand-holding. Same way you're supposed to learn a new language: By immersing yourself into it. No dictionaries :)