Matt E
Am I too old to read books as medicine, to read or reread something just to connect to the inner world it makes in me? No, not at all.
I read this book the day after Christmas because I wanted to escape into the story of these two men, both afraid of each other in different ways for their own reasons, trying to find strength in each other. It's a quiet and cozy book, and I wouldn't recommend it to just anybody. But if this is what you need, it will scratch your itch.
I loved this biography. Swaffords style is slightly arch and witty, while also being generous to his subject. He's a very genial guide to Beethoven's extraordinary life, and the insights he brings as a composer made me hear things in a different way.
It's a very strange thing to fall into a deeply human agape love with someone long dead.
It kills me when good ideas are killed by shoddy construction. Meta fictional elements are so inconsistent that it's confusing and kills the pacing of the plot. Cardboard characters.
I really liked the first couple books in this series. But this needed a lot of editing, and it really seems like Weeks has lost control of his story.
The experience of reading this book was both completely enlightening and completely maddening.
Let's talk about the good first. I've never learned much about classical rhetoric, so it was kind of a revelation to get such a quick introduction to some of the analytical vocabulary of phrasing. I'd never really understood why the study of music was part of rhetoric in classical education, and this book opened up the similarities between some speech devices and the small details of melodies and progressions.
The bad is that Forsyth uses an extremely regular structure, where a hybrid phrase is used as both the last example in a chapter and the first example of the next. This is clever the first time, and increasingly monotonous as the book goes on.
The ugly...ugly? Maybe that's too harsh. A warning: Forsyth adopts a tone that is somewhat playful and irreverent, part mockingly self serious. I appreciate the attempts to include a fairly catholic assortment of examples from both high and low culture. This hipness by being too cool to care about being hip backfires as often as it lands, giving the impression of, as a New Yorker writer said of Malcolm Gladwell, “a young person's idea of an old person.”
If you love language, and aren't turned off by ironic mansplaining, I highly recommend it.
This is, like, a very important and beautiful book to me. Tara Brach takes clear aim at the voices in our heads that tell us that we don't deserve happiness, that keep us stuck in our wounds, and try and keep us disconnected from our true feelings because we worry that if we open ourselves up to them they might drown us, like one more passenger on a lifeboat that's barely above water.
Writing about self-help is vulnerable to me because it's like shouting Hi! I have all these problems. And they are also easy to make fun of, and not even in a mean-spirited way. There is something a little goofy about looking to Buddhism for answers (as an American, given the cultural history of “looking to the East” for enlightenment) or taking in meditations with exercises like saying hello to your pain. There's a real and sad truth to texts like these: I turn to them when I need to hear them. I allow them in when trying to muddle through endless grey days without compassion for myself is worse than trying to do something about it.
Self-help/growth books are one of those things where some work for some folks and others work for other folks, so I wouldn't just blanket recommend it to everyone. The most I can say is that if it seems like it might contain something you're trying to find, you owe it to yourself to open it up and see if it is.
Full disclosure: this book was written for me. Academic setting + comedy of manners + a healthy serving of perversion + biting wit + earthy/salacious/weirdly yeasty sex scenes = the exact type of highbrow trash that I love. Think Pedro Almodovar without a murder or plastic surgery.
At the end of the day, it's a shaggy dog story that ends in the oldest punchline in the book, the...
(I don't want to do all the work for you)
What a sweet little book! I devoured it in almost one sitting. It's similar in tone to John Green's YA romances, but with a little more backbone and a little bit less...operatic emotion.
I read this as a little palate cleanser after a string of nonfiction/biography. I often find myself frustrated by Neil Gaiman. I love the ideas he plays with and returns to, but his execution and endings usually leave me wanting more.
I was so blown away by how good this little book is.
It shares DNA with David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and even a little more with Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series. The protagonist of the book is seven years old, and I was shocked and moved by his ability to draw me back into that time when I was so small and had so little power and so little control and anything and anyone could become dangerous. I highly recommend.
This is a very Michael Pollan book (how auspicious that someone that writes so well about plants has such a homophone for a last name!). He can't help but write in his own voice, as if he would want to. What that means is that he will charm you with his passion for interweaving natural and human history, often to great effect. For example, he has sections on the Judeo-Christian suppression of psychoactive plants and herbal medicines that works itself into a righteous outrage. There are little gems like that sprinkled through: wild apples in Central Asia, the contrast between bright saturated tulips and monochromatic grey Calvinist Netherlands.
On the other hand, it means that you're in for a lot of mellow Northern-California patrician baby boomer...uh...insight. If that's something that turns you off, you're going to hate this book. Me? I kind of like the boomer duo of counterculture hangover and unselfsonsciously narrow points of reference, so I enjoyed his genial narration.
The parts add up to slightly less than its sum...this is more like a collection of essays on four plants, but if you're interested in natural history, foodways, botany, or interdisciplinary environmental science, have at it. Anyone else can give it a skip.
Building Stories contains in its large cardboard box (260 pages and 14 easy to misplace accessories, as the Library of Congress catalog entry describes it) a reading experience that is so unique that even formulating a response requires some extra thinking.
If you're not familiar, Building Stories consists of a stiff food out cardboard diagram, like a game board, and 14 story elements ranging in size from a simple paper comic strip to a newspaper broadsheet, and ranging in concept from a straightforward graphic novel to a strange beehive daily newspaper. There is no prescribed order to the experience, which spans over 200 years of time and principally concerns the residents of an apartment building in Chicago.
In high school, I was browsing our school library's (pathetic, and even more so in hindsight) fiction section, and came across Julio Córtazar's Hopscotch. Unfortunately, at that time I barely knew how to read and didn't know anything. I remember reading a section or two, completely baffled, and giving up. That seed planted a love of text and story games in me forever.
As with a well constructed chance story, the sequence I chose to read Building Stories in was perfect. The story probes time, serendipity, loneliness, and most especially the way that humans almost never know what kind of story they are in while they are living it. If I have any criticism of the story, I did think that the emotional tone of the stories was too unremittingly bleak. Maybe that's the criticism of an optimist or a romantic (I'm afraid that I might be both) but it also took away surprise as every story ended in a moment of alienation and loneliness.
Read it! I want to meet the other 87 billion versions of me that chose to read it differently. Chris Ware has created something remarkable.
Reading Habibi is like watching Craig Thompson juggle with chainsaws. The huge ideas he works with: the intractable divisions of gender, sex, ecology, religion, and colorism, are live and dangerous and complicated. He chose to set this story in a dreamlike world outside of time and concrete geography, and it frees him to explore these divisions as aspects of the human condition.
There are no easy answers found in this story, grey area is everywhere and anyone looking for relief or prescriptions is bound to be disappointed. Except maybe in the values of story and art. Story, art, words and ink are intwined, and I have to note as well that I cannot think of a more beautiful object than the book that is and contains this story.