Matthew McVickar
Enthralling and challenging. I could barely put this down—I stayed up until 1am finishing it, in fact! It moves quickly, reveals come unexpectedly, and everything feels unstable because it's hard to trust the narrator or understand what's really happening. The ending feels earned, satisfying, even restorative.
I loved this for the first hundred pages, but the rest was a bit of a slog. And I have some issues with the way things wrapped up.
Philosophically, I absolutely resonate with the messages in this book: human progress is killing us all and the world in which we live. But:
To have Neelay's plot end with the shining hope of machine learning being humanity's way of understanding our world is boring at best, and downright irresponsible at worst. Silicon Valley and its techno-fascism is one of the most destructive forces in our world. It is not the way to a better future.
And to have some Magical Native Americans appear in the last few pages to help some white dude with his art project is eye-rollingly exploitative, especially after reading an entire book about coexisting with nature that never mentions the indigenous people who better understood and lived that existence before their genocide began centuries ago.
Also! There was a hint that Neelay might be queer, and Mimi was theoretically too, I guess, but these tiny bits of representation in an otherwise very white, straight book felt cheap.
n.b.: I attended K–12 with Nicole and I fav all of her photos of her dog on Instagram.
I had a blast reading this. I think this is the first time I've read a thriller, and I was pulled in completely. ‘The Hollow' is relentless, tense, and inventive.
‘The Hollow' succeeds as a thriller: the mystery is woven well, the reveals are surprising, and the climax is white-knuckling. The writing is claustrophobic and manic, centering the narrator's perspective in a way that heightens the tension. Limited to her scattered, anxious thoughts and memories and the trouble of working through them, the story is always on edge. The red herrings are slick and the time-jumps (enabled by the clever structural device of regular therapy appointments) are great cliffhangers.
The book also succeeds as a fearless document of the endless and horrifying ways that women are oppressed and abused by patriarchy and rape culture and how that trauma, large and small, affects them over the course of their lives. Beyond the obvious evil of the book's villain, we see rampant victim-blaming and dismissal of women's voices; we see Ellie's boss sexually harassing her and retaining a position for which he's completely unfit; we see Maureen's social work leave her exhausted, underpaid, and in an impossible bind. ‘The Hollow' demonstrates over and over again the systematic inequality and hardship faced by women, the poor, and those suffering from drug addiction by centering its women characters and weaving their stories into the narrative.
This is great work, and I can't wait for Nicole's next book.
A biological detective story differs from others in that the more you find out, the more you know you don't know.
—Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter
A fascinating look at the extended, devoted study of raven feeding behavior in the New England woods. At times I found myself drawn away from this book by more exciting novels, but I had to return to it because the investigation was interesting and Heinrich's approach was inspiring in its tenacity. He is incredibly scientific without being pedantic (for the most part), and his palpable love of nature keeps the recounting of experiments from being too dry.
Read this because my parents kept asking me to. Not bad! The history of the National Parks Service and America in general was super interesting, the hiking story less so. Coincidentally I'm staying in Crater Lake Lodge this weekend (Oregon's only national park!) and it's the centennial of the National Park Service being formed.
Illuminating and insightful. I have dozens of highlights I've been re-reading. This book has made me hear and examine music differently. I think my understanding suffered from a lack of academic/philosophical context/knowledge, but it pointed me in new directions and provided new lenses, and I'm grateful. Into the death with MRWaSP!
I have been thinking about re-reading this for a few years but the paper copy is at my parents' house. I just finished Renee Gladman's ‘Event Factory' and that kept reminding me of this book so I went and got the Kindle version and read it while lying on the couch and petting my dog.
I love Kevin's work, and this is maybe my favorite. I'm no good at explaining why I like anything, which is why I so seldom leave reviews here, but I'll try.
I like how desolate ‘Location Scout' feels. From the descriptions of landscapes and locations to the almost complete lack of human interaction (the one real conversation in the book even suggests the one on the other end of the call may not be human), the focus is on a place or person at a time and how vast and lonely the world is and how there's beauty in that.
There is also a love of travel in this book, or maybe more accurately a love of transportation, because I think in the magic of the protagonist and their childhood desire for car rides to not end there is a love of the going more than the going-to (or at least, with the scouting, an assurance that the destination will soon be left for another), which is really about decisions, I think, and I very much identify with this.
I love Chapter 5's series of thought experiments, and I love the mysterious explanation in Chapter 4 (“It's just a scene in a movie”).
This book reads like what the world feels like.
Shirley Jackson is wonderful. Every one of these short stories is so masterfully written, small and medium-sized portraits of big-city and small-town incivility and anxiety and interpersonal slight so mundane but so universal. And a perfectly dark sense of humor. A lot of these stories focus on what life was like for women in the middle of the century, but don't seem at all foreign for it. I've read ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle' and ‘The Haunting of Hill House' and this and I have enjoyed all three a lot. I'm going to read everything of hers I can.
