Katie
Okay, this was a little sappy. But, I was there for it. Zaleski's life was certainly a hard and inspiring one, and the animal stories were great.
This was funny, interesting, and entertaining. No big secrets revealed–the main message was, don't be a jerk.
I love the way Louise Erdrich writes. Something about her straightforward yet thoughtful style really speaks to me. I always have a little trouble with an adult woman writing a first-person teenaged boy character, so that's why this wasn't 5 stars for me.
Whelp, if someone had told me this was a ghost story I wouldn't have read it. The parallels or interwovenness between the stories seemed manufactured instead of clever. Not sure why I finished this.
This was such an important, all-encompassing, fascinating and heartbreaking book. This whole region is such a mess, in large part thanks to us. There are no good answers as to how to fix anything, but it's clear from this book how much damage has been done.
I tried on this book. I got about 1/4 of the way through and I just couldn't do it anymore. Every sentence felt like a cliche. Did AI help him write it?
I really wanted to love this because it came to me so highly recommended. But I never felt like I could hang my hat on any of the characters. I got 400 out of 600 pages in and just gave up.
I enjoyed this a lot. Some of the essays were straightforward, others were more like poems (which makes sense, because Lawson is a poet). She's obviously extremely smart. I appreciate being let into her thoughts and life. It always feels like a gift when an author is completely honest about what it's like to be them.
I enjoyed this. Honestly, I find her characters look similar enough that I sometimes have trouble telling them apart, which makes it harder for me to follow all nuances of her story. I loved the world building in this book.
This book made some really good points–most notably that mental health and physical health need to be seen as equally important, that they impact each other, and that services for both should be provided in the same place at the same time. It was also interesting (and depressing) to get an inside look at how many doctors view patients with substance use disorders, or older patients, and to get an inside look at how doctors think in general. Probably a 3.5 for me overall.
Wow. This was an amazing collection of pseudoscience, correlation as causation, new-age mumbo-jumbo, etc. I think there were actually some good tidbits in here, which I managed to glean as I turned the pages as fast as I possibly could. I occasionally slowed down out of disbelief, as in “did he actually make that claim??”
This was alternately terrifying and boring, at least for someone who is not interested in the military. Still, the information was interesting and gave great insight into what is being done now and what must be done in the future to prepare for climate change and all of its coming effects.
A fascinating story, but the interspersed tidbits about brain tea search read like a sixth grader's plagiarized paper.
At some point in this book, which I read almost straight through, I just started crying and I didn't stop till a while after I was done. This book is intensely moving, both in hopeful and hopeless ways. I'm so glad there's a movie that will bring more attention to the book and to the incredible work of the Equal Justice Initiative.
This book was just such huge fun. I love the meta way she writes and the characters and the stories within a story and just everything about Jane Pek's books!
Maybe this wasn't the best introduction to Audre Lorde, but I wanted to read her directly after seeing her quoted so many times by so many people. This collection had some writing that was so dependent on context that it was hard to understand now, but other writing that was really just brilliant.
This book seems to be written for... non readers? Skimmers? There are BIG BOLD PARAGRAPH HEADERS every few paragraphs, plus a bullet point list summary every few pages. I agree that our taxes are messed up, but I had to stop when he claimed the high cost of college was due to government subsidies. Actually, what about the government slashing funding for higher education?
I'm always a little suspicious of female characters written by men, and this lived down to my expectations. She's naked all the time? Men are always falling in love with her? The prostitutes are the bad guys and also they should be ashamed of their jobs? Besides all this, the plot was clunky, with multiple time skips that were jarring when combined with some intense world-building. There were more and more twists/betrayals, that just felt exhausting instead of thrilling. Gave up after 140 pages.
I love David Mitchell's straightforward, interesting writing style, but I could do without the fantasy aspects of his books. Still, I keep coming back, knowing that's going to be a part of the read.
I love M. T. Anderson. He was having a little too much fun with vocabulary in this book, and since I wasn't reading it with an internet connection, I probably missed out by not being able to look up every word I didn't know. That said, it was a super fun heist story, and the characters were wonderful.
