Katie
This was quite a book. It was hard to read at times–there were a few pages I skipped completely because they looked to be too disturbing. It was also hard to read because of all the politics to attempt to keep track of, foreign vocabulary, and unfamiliar names. But if you can read past all that without worrying too much about the details (or if you have background knowledge of all of that–lucky you!), it's a great, moving, lovely story about what a life is worth.
This was...not great. Like, the main character's personality didn't make much sense to me. There was a lack of continuity–from small things like never knowing if the next paragraph was going to take place at the same time as the one before, or that night, or the next day, or three months from the paragraph before; or the time when the main character was sitting in the driver's seat of the car but then another character got in the car and sat in...the driver's seat. For much of the book it was one of those painful stories where you have to watch the main character make stupid decision after stupid decision. And there was really no sensible way to wrap the whole thing up, though the author did her best.
Rebecca Makkai is such a perfect author. This book did an amazing job of bringing attention to important issues while never feeling preachy or like an essay. It was also an enjoyable, suspenseful story. It did have that flaw I've been finding in a lot of books lately where the characters just drink too much, but they did work to keep it under control, which is more than I can say for the other books' characters.
Wow, reading this right after reading Loveless by Alice Oseman was, well, sort of painful, definitely eye-opening, and sort of sad, too. I was glad I had Would You Rather in my hands to pick up right where this one left off, but with lots more insight. (I bought everything I could by Katie Heaney after reading The Year I Stopped Trying). Anyway, this was funny but also full of plenty of opportunities to cringe. I appreciated how Katie stayed strongly herself through everything in the book.
This book was so honest and so interesting. I love reading about people working on their stuff, and this book had it all–therapy, group sessions, friendship conversations, and, most of all, a woman fully admitting each time she screwed up and talking about how she tried–and sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded–to fix things.
I listened to this, and the audiobook was very well done. I found this to be a genuine, realistic depiction of what it might be like to discover you are aero/ace. I felt like all the characters acted in ways you'd really expect them to in real life–even though we as the reader knew when they were making mistakes, etc., it wasn't as annoying as that can be in books because you could feel exactly why they were behaving the way they did.
I don't get the hype around this book. Is it because he's a moderately self-aware white guy? So we don't care if he says things like, “Growth is hard. Growth takes effort.” Earth shattering! He seems like a nice guy and the stories are moderately interesting, but there's no overall theme binding them together r giving the book a larger meaning or lesson, except maybe “drinking is fun.” If you want to read a truly meaningful memoir, read A Place Called Home and skip this self-indulgent essay collection.
Objectively I know this was a good book. But reading it made me so anxious and unhappy. I kept waiting for the next disaster to happen. I cringed at the constant drinking, the bad choices, the terrible situations people found themselves in. So, a good book but definitely not a relaxing reading experience.
I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the topic is incredibly important (and terrifying). I was really interested in and horrified by the many stories of journalists being persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in the pursuit of the truth. Why are they doing the work that should by rights be done by government authorities? Well, obviously because governments are corrupt. But it was still amazing to read about these people putting their literal lives on the line to expose evil doing.
As for the journalists writing the book and their compatriots, the work they were doing, while incredibly important, just wasn't as fascinating. If I had to read about one more time they matched someone's phone number or scanned someone's phone and found it was infected...well, I'm sure it was much more exciting at the time. As a reader, it just feels preordained–of course that phone is going to be infected, too!
Overall, an important read, even if there were parts I could have done without.
I love Aviv's writing, and this book brings up so many interesting points about mental illness. Unlike most books by white authors, she doesn't just give a token nod to “experiences are different for people of color” but actually dives deeply into how those experiences are different. And discussions thoughtfully how white women are medicated and what that might mean.
I'm not sure how this ended up on my list. Probably a 3.5 for me. It's pretty rambling, but the rambles are mostly interesting. The author honestly seems kind of like an arrogant jerk, which he acknowledges a bit but also doesn't seem to fully see. Anyway, I'm not sorry I read it, especially since it was short.
This was okay. I wasn't 100% on board with the meta gimmick, and the characters seemed a little flimsy, especially the way they all fell in love right away. It sort of felt like the plot and the characters were just there to serve the plot device, which was clever but not overwhelmingly clever enough to make up for the other weaknesses.
Eh. It was mildly entertaining, but the characters were all annoying. They drank too much and made stupid decisions. The men all seemed like some kind of random boy toy and the women like their matching Barbies–at least the Americans. And I'm getting a little tired of coincidences driving fiction plots.
This book says many, many things that need to be said–and to be listened to by those in power and by all of us. I got a little lost during the parts about mom influencers (I'm too old, luckily, to have been caught up in that when my kids were little) and pandemic parenting (very, very lucky I didn't have to go through that). But I think the point is well made that even without those stressors, American motherhood truly is unsustainable.
This book was honestly kind of a slog for me. I kept putting it down and going to other books. I think partly because there wasn't all that much new information and advice in it, partly because it was written at a very, very basic level (ie, the text spelled out what the x-axis and y-axis of a graph in the picture were, even though the axes were clearly labeled). But the information and advice is all very good, very useful, and very meaningful.
