Eva
Took me a while to finish. Even though I enjoyed it. But not as much as other Gleick books. Why? Possibly some of the physics went over my head. Despite the book balancing Feynman's work and more personal stories quite well. Or possibly because Feynman did so damn much in his carreer that it felt hard to hold on to a narrative thread.
This really turned out to be the epic novel I expected it to be. Fantastic summer read. Full of complex and fallible and endearing heroes, led by the most selfish and most insensitive and most ignorant heroine of them all - Scarlett O'Hara. Yet despite all her bad traits, you still love her. And of course Scarlett and Rhett's dynamic is highly entertaining to read, and their dance - which is set up for failure all along - leads to one of the most satisfying unhappy endings.
Battle suits, space travel, intergalactic war between humans and the Tauran race. Very space opera with a quite liberal view on sexuality mixed into it (plus a not-so-healthy dose of homophobia). What does it mean to return to earth after 20, after 100, after 300 years when speed-of-light travel kept you young while everyone else aged and culture underwent radical changes. The story has our protagonist rising through the ranks, we observe him in several battles, detailing battle and survival strategies, dealing with dissent among troops, having to make decisions that likely cause casualties. Decent. Not mind-bending.
A woman's journey through 3 marriages and simultaneously a portrait of African-American culture, end of 19th century, shortly after slavery was abolished. I could not care for any of the characters, the written dialect was hard to read, and Hurston's mix of writing styles was interesting yet slightly off-putting.
As always, happy when I actually can give a book a low star-rating on here, because it doesn't happen often enough and my average is way too high.
A very personal memoir, the author deals with the loss of her father by escaping the world with the solitary experience of training a goshawk. She dedicates all her time to the hawk, a being driven by the urge to kill and eat and sleep, and finds solace in the bond that forms between them.
This feels as if Rebecca Solnit had written Walden. It's all about nature and the wild, written with beautiful language, a narrative that intermingles present and past, thoughts and stories.
Battling magicians, a touring circus and a love story. It was an easy read and quite entertaining, but in the end it felt too insubstantial, somehow too “glossy” - like the book cover. Even though the characters were varied and colorful they never felt human. They all seemed like pretty pictures with potential, but in the end they were just plot-devices. Which could be fine - just, the plot fell apart in the last half of the book. Making it hard to follow/reason why this or that happened.
The wild woman in the attic is given her story. The prose is lyrical, the narrative weaves in and out, unexpected swaps of POV. All characters are mysterious and problematic. You don't quite know who to root for, which is interesting. I liked her voice when she tells us about her upbringing, I liked how the couple is brought together, finds this one moment of sensuality in the mix of all the chaos. The second half lost me a bit, made it hard to follow the character reasoning as madness takes over.
Great concept, great world building. Loved how the reader slowly learns why its protagonist is so special. Which, as I now discover, is even mentioned on the jacket sleeve. Still. The characters are mysterious and complex, hard to read, no one is to trust. And even once our POV is cleared up and alliances are uncovered, nothing becomes simple. If I had to criticize something, then it would be the existence of that unbeatable weapon.
What if you grow up in a tiny universe, a tiny room and that's all you know? What if you're trapped in a tiny room and you raise a child in there? How would you build your child's world? How would you describe it?
Plot and writing were just ok. Still, it was at times very heartfelt and touching. And I did have an aha moment later on, that I appreciated.
A not-so-distant dystopian future about a couple living alone in the wild, trying to create some sort of normalcy, after everyday life blew apart in terrorist attacks, war etc leading to destruction of infrastructure, making cities uninhabitable and unsafe. The woman gets pregnant and fears of being able to raise a child in the wild makes them go look for others.
The setup has potential, first focusing on the peace but also negative effect of 2 people living isolated, only having each other. There are small beautiful character moments. Then the couple, reaching a settlement that is clouded in mystery and strict rules to ensure survival, bit for bit drifts apart through the stress of secrecy.
The novel has a lot of psychologically interesting aspects, what would happen with humanity after an apocalypse, the lord-of-the-flies vibe, going feral, what rules do you abide by to pay for safety, falling back into a strict men/women division, etc. it's all there in bits and pieces, but ...
... but the execution is lacking. I felt a lot like I wanted to read a better version of this book.
When you finish this you feel like you need to restart it again. This time paying closer attention, trying to pick apart the strands of voices you are encountering. While the novel starts in a linear fashion it quickly dissolves into a feverish dream, a collection of whispers of different POV, mixing the past and the present. Sometimes becomes clear and focused, sometimes leaving you in the dark. Telling stories of love and death and cruelty, in a simple and beautiful prose. I might need to let this sink in a bit more.
Love futuristic novels that actually tell stories about people instead of focusing on the technological novelties of the future. (Not that it lacks technological novelties!) Byrne paints a future where India and Africa are the new hotspots of culture, development and conflict. Gender, sexuality, language, culture, realities merge and clash. And women, there are women everywhere! The story is fascinating and intriguing, yet never reaches the level I wished it would. The journey on the bridge itself almost has “Inverted World” and “Woman In The Dunes” mind-messing qualities. The ending is intentionally left ambiguous by the author.
I've laughed so much and then I cried so much as never before, reading this book. I mean it. An epic tale of two aged cowboys, one stoic and emotionless, the other loud and living life to the fullest. The lure of adventure, the melancholy and peacefulness of the wide open country, the cruelness of the wild west and at the core this deep bond between these two stubborn, battered, faulty yet loyal and uncompromising men. Augustus McCrae and Captain Call forever.
Good and quite basic overview of all things neuroscience mixed with Artificial Intelligence research, Quantum Consciousness and some physics. Kaku lightens reports on state-of-the-art research with mentions of popular scifi books and movies. He ends with detailed speculation and extrapolation of some of today's research ideas into the future.
Steven Johnson, now taking his emergence / good ideas knowledge and projecting it into the future. Here he looks at the success of more recent crowd self-organization phenomena like Kickstarter or websites where amateurs solve medical mysteries. He talks about how good ideas usually emerge from the fringe of a network instead of the centre. He presents in quite convincing examples how this “Peer progressivism” could revolutionize economics, politics, health, education ...
One day in the heads of Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, and the people surrounding them. Woven together with inner monologues: the past and the present, some regret, some doubt, and the minute details of the every day that produce joy and distraction.
At part I felt lost in the monologues, lost track of narrator and/or if we were currently in the past or the present (blame the audio-book for making multitasking possible). But Woolf's melodic, very British, simple yet dazzling prose creates a tapestry of the complexities of human feelings and human relations, and you just go with the flow, get pulled into the life of characters that at the beginning may have seemed dull.
This was quite a fascinating book. I loved it at the beginning and then had a really hard time getting through the second half. Brontë's language is beautiful, her narrative voice did some magic on me. There was a scene where the protagonist of the book, Lucy Snowe, catches and secretly watches her employer, Madame Beck, slowly and very very meticulously go through her belongings. Reading this nearly gave me an ASMR experience!
The novel partially feels like an experiment to Brontë. Her narrator is unreliable, omitting or concealing details, mainly about her own feelings. It takes a while for you to figure this out, but once you do, you got to admire it. What made it then hard to plough through is that the narrator meanders quite a bit in the second half, dropping characters and story lines or goes off on tangents about church and human nature.
What I also loved was the mixing of French dialogue into the English. Not enough to annoy a non-French speaker, but more than you would think. The life-like and intimate portrayal of the characters was also quite perfect. Brontë has a good eye and gave Lucy a good eye too. I especially felt the characterization and the teasing relationship between Lucy and Ginevra Fanshawe highly entertaining.
Herzog's journal of the 2-3 years it took to film Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle. His vision to tow a steam ship across a hill is a mad endeavour and at occasion he's the only one still believing in it. The jungle and it's inhabitants seem to fight them at every occasion with unpredictability and ferocity. There's culture shock, political upheavals, murder, sickness, floods, destruction, frustration, failure. But through Herzog's eyes we get to see the beauty of all that cruelty, in his elaborate and poetic descriptions of the jungle's animals and nature.
Part fever dream, part film chronicle, this is an entrancing insight into an artistic mind that doesn't compromise and fights against all odds to realize his vision. Plus his tales of the raging Klaus Kinski are highly entertaining.
Cette fois, j'ai choisi un auteur quebecois pour mes petits exercices quotidiens de français. Deux enfants qui on grandi dans un isolement cree par leur pere, doivent rencontrer la realite et leurs voisins apres la mort de leur pere. La langage poetique et realite deformee du narrateur cache presque a la fin les sombres secrets caches dans l'histoire de la famille. Le livre etait plutot difficile a lire, aevc le melange de vocabulaire et le langage poetique, mais les pieces que je comprenais m'a garde engagee.
Quite a thick book, full of marvellously crafted characters bound together by a compelling mystery storyline. I wonder though, if it would have been a bit of a drag to keep track of all the plot if I wouldn't have had the luxury and time to devour it all in 4 days on the beach.
Definitely left me aching for a Deadwood rewatch.