sarah🪼
florence's music is an absolute gem and putting all of her lyrics together along with poems and sermons in a book is genius. this book is gorgeous and the images enhance florence's vision so well and add something of their own. each different “chapter” of this book has its unique essence just like her albums. it's a very quick read that feels like a dive into florence's mind. it's intimate and emotional. her poems are breathtaking and so personal. just like her lyrics, they are raw, dark, mysterious, and funny. she has a talent for putting so much emotions into her songs and it's the same with her poetry and sermons. i love florence welch so much and there's so many other things that i would love to say about her but i'm at loss for words.
ya fantasy isn't the genre i usually go to but i wanted to give this book a try because of all the praise i was reading and hearing. but what a disappointment. i knew i was stepping out of my comfort zone and i really tried to get into the atmosphere of the book but i couldn't. i have been reading to book for a month and getting through it was honestly pretty hard. objectively, it's engaging and it can be addictive but personally, i just couldn't get into it. i hated most the characters even the ones we are supposed to appreciate. i found the main character pretty boring and even annoying at times, and while a flawed character isn't inherently a bad-written one (obviously), i just couldn't like her despite her flaws. i wasn't rooting for jude and her motivations were pretty unclear to me. overall, my reading experience was boring. i get why people like it and i thought i would love the ennemies to lovers trope in this but it was not convincing enough for me. i wasn't expecting to love this but i wasn't expecting to hate this neither... i feel bad saying all of this because i've read worst novels and if i'm being objective it's not terrible. however, i'm not giving up on ya fantasy because i used to love this genre earlier in my teenage years.
i'm absolutely obsessed with this book. it's so interesting and fascinating! i really love madeline miller's writing style, it's poetic and unique and it fits the story perfectly.
madeline miller's story telling is absolutely exceptional. i love how she introduces those super famous characters as if we had never heard of them before. i particularly loved the passage about medea.
if you love or just appreciate greek mythology i would 100% recommend reading circe. i learned so many new things about greek mythology and it made me see stories that i already knew a through a completely different vision which was such an interesting experience.
it's so refreshing to see retellings of myths through the eyes of a woman who has been portrayed so pathetically in original writings. madeline miller did justice to circe's character.
i also really loved the commentary on mortality and immortality and circe's connection to those concepts. the ending was perfect and it made me cry because of how touched i felt.
anyways, read this book!! now!!
this book is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. most of it was boring and nothing really happened but i couldn't stop reading it. the characters are unlikable but somehow donna tartt made me sad for them in the end even if i wanted to hate them so bad. i seriously think that donna tartt put crack in this book, because i can't believe i managed to read 629 pages of almost nothing in less than a month.
[3.5] i really loved the prose, i thought it was beautifully written and all the symbolism was very interesting. however i struggled a lot to really get into the story and i only really got invested towards the middle of the book. i don't know why i wasn't that interested at the beginning, but it definitely made me like the book less despite the fact that's it's objectively amazing. it's one of the best book i've read and i would recommend it to anyone. i would've loved to give it 4 stars but the truth is that i didn't enjoy it as much as i thought i would, probably because my expectations were too high.
again, i would recommend it to anyone because it's a classic (duh) and also because it deals with pretty interesting topics, and it's one of those books that everyone has to read at least once in their life.
i couldn't stop thinking about fleetwood mac while reading this book and it almost disturbed me, but not in a bad way. then i did my research and i found out that one of taylor jenkins reid's biggest inspiration for the book was fleetwood mac and i wasn't even surprised because well, we can tell.
it almost disturbed me but i didn't know why until i really started to think about it more. i realized that it was hard for me to imagine my favorite bands and artists like that, because i knew deep inside of me that the book, though it is pure fiction, depicts a reality that we tend to ignore.
it's so hard for me (and for all of us i guess) to imagine celebrities like that, because we idealize them, and when it comes to bands, we idealize their relationships with each other, we think that reality is what they show us when most of the time what happens backstage is completely different compared to what happens in front of the cameras.
maybe i'm going too far and i'm over analyzing but i really think that taylor jenkins reid had that in mind. and maybe i'm wrong but at least reading this amazing book made me realize something which is that we idolize and idealize celebrities too much, so much that we become completely delusional and it becomes unhealthy.
apart from that, this book was amazing, taylor jenkins reid is a genius just because of all the research she might have done for this book. she did it for all the 70's music lovers because of the many references which made me enjoy this book so so much, and also because of the atmosphere that felt so real i mean wow not a lot of authors can do that.
“what they have now they can never have back again. but for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. he brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. they've done a lot of good for each other. really, she thinks, really. people can really change one another.”
honestly i don't think i'll ever recover from this, i'm devastated. this book was so emotionally intense. it's almost indescribable how i felt reading this book. i was so invested in marianne and connell's relationship that sometimes i had to remind myself that they were fictional characters.
marianne and connell are so well-written that it's easy to relate to them both and impossible to prefer one over another. sally rooney's writing is very simple yet she's a genius at writing complex characters, which is the best quality a writer can have. she made marianne and connell feel real. i first wanted to rate this book 4 stars but then i decided that it fully deserves 5 stars for the reasons i mentioned and also because it's probably one of the best books i've ever read.
i'm done with forcing myself to finish books even when i have no interest in them. this just did not do it for me. my expectations weren't particularly high but i didn't think it would bore me like that. i think the concept is just not for me. i couldn't get attached to the character like i guess i was supposed to. i tend to think that when i start a book i have to finish it but i realised that reading should be fun first of all and i shouldn't force myself to continue reading something i don't like! so here are my reasons.