Kat

I've pretty much forgotten this already but it was fine, all of these books are kind of the same but enjoyable enough reads

this is Emily St. John Mandel writing pandemic autofiction that is also an homage to Cloud Atlas and as far as i'm concerned it's perfect

it is definitely a puzzle box and it has a LOT of metatextual references to Station Eleven and the rest of her oeuvre (mainly The Glass Hotel but it's clear this all takes place in the same universe) sooooooo if that sounds unbearably pretentious you probably won't like it, but for me, after these last few years, it touched me to the core and was beautiful and thought-provoking and very meaningful <3

there was a lot i found charming about this but i don't think it's his best book by any stretch, and i felt like the plot got really incomprehensible in the last third or so

i think the success of a political intrigue book hinges on the reader being able to figure out the overarching story and motives of the main players, and maybe it's just not my preferred genre but it felt like the information wasn't there. protagonist unlikable and not very bright. too many words in italics. no real depth of character although the world-building was somewhat interesting. wanted to be a Culture book but didn't really get there.

I liked (by which I mean “enjoyed”) this better than The Sparrow, because it provided more answers. Because it allowed me to believe that there was a meaning to what happened in The Sparrow. Because it was more hopeful. I have an uneasy feeling that very fact somewhat dilutes the impact of the first book, which drew its rawness at least in part from a refusal to pull punches, to let you take refuge in platitudes. It was a very different book, trading The Sparrow's tight focus on individual suffering for a broader view of politics, history, societal change. It was equally good but hard to compare; not so much a sequel as a different philosophical lens.

Intense, compelling, a cleverly-constructed gut-punch of a book that will leave you thinking about it for days afterward. I'm debating between four and five stars because while everything about the book is five-star, the feelings I experienced while reading it, and afterward, were mostly things like sadness and hopelessness. And I do think that was also the point, and the ambiguity around the ending was the point, but: oof. (Maybe this says more about my own faith than the book, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.)

A really readable and funny and adorable explanation of how AI works, for me personally a little too much explanation (since I already know how AI works) and I was basically just here for the laugh-out-loud AI generated knock-knock jokes and cake(?) recipes but it was still great.

Short but important philosophy and has helpful tips too.

I'm not really sure how to review this except to jokingly say that “poets should not write books” but I do think it gets a bit overly-invested in the HOW of every sentence rather than the overall WHAT it is trying to get across, and yes the individual sentences are quite good, but on the whole I didn't connect with the story and it made me feel kind of sad and anxious. A lot of the content is emotionally rough (animal cruelty, rape, cancer, death, parental abuse, homophobia, war). It's a deeply autobiographical novel so it feels Important and like I am supposed to be Learning Something from it about the immigrant experience and I don't know it just made me tired.

I'm certainly too young for this book, but read it hoping to gain some insight into how to support aging parents and elderly grandparents. I bought it after the author was interviewed on Kate Bowler's fantastic podcast. However, I found it to be a real downer. It tries so hard to be upbeat and have a message of hope, but mostly falls back on saccharine platitudes and interminable pointless vignettes about the lives of specific women. It's also pretty gender-essentialist, which isn't a surprise given the title and framing, but it's annoying to read how “we” are a certain way over and over again (for instance: good at listening, good at friendships, etc.). I would not recommend this to an aging parent, fearing it would simply make her more depressed about the ways she's not living up to the women whose stories are featured in the book.

Really loved most of this book – the worldbuilding, the characters, the writing – but IMO it really went to pieces at the end.

It's absolutely eerie that people can still vanish without a trace in this day and age. The subject matter makes for a riveting read, but that is sometimes despite the writing – the book jumps disorientingly between different missing persons cases and different time periods, with occasional digressions (descriptions of other missing people) that seem included at random, with no connection to the main narrative.

The author is careful not to draw any conclusions (and in fact casts some shade at more sensationalized coverage such as Missing 411) but at the same time tends to bury information such as a person having a short-term memory disability or a history of depression – in some cases these facts are mentioned in passing on the next page, as if they bear little relevance to a hiker vanishing, rather than providing, as they more likely do, some vital context that complicates the “vanished into thin air” explanation. Even the person around whom the main narrative revolves, though presented at first as an ordinary cyclist – well, some reading between the lines again complicates that narrative. The spin that this was a well-prepared touring cyclist falls apart the further into the story you go, learning that he had been acting erratically, that he left without much warning in a rainstorm, that he was more of a surfer than an experienced cyclist, that it apparently wasn't the first time he'd “gone walkabout” without letting anyone know his whereabouts.

It's undeniably tragic, but it felt to me like the author was leaning hard on the strange and mysterious aspects of all the cases he discussed, while sweeping the more mundane explanations under the rug.

Still, it was a very interesting read, and one likely to make me think twice about walking even ten feet away from my gear in the woods. It's surprising and sobering how many people have vanished and are never found, or only found years later. Even if the explanations are depressingly mundane, it underscores that there is still enough wilderness in the world to deserve caution and respect.

Recommended by Tracking Nana: https://trackingnana.com/2021/05/21/the-cold-vanish/

I picked this up after hearing a segment about it on This American Life. I was expecting a weird/funny story like the one about the goat guy who tried to digest grass. This is similar, but also very different. It's really an extended meditation on qualia, on to what extent it is possible to truly understand the subjective life experience of any other. It's absolutely one of the strangest things I've read, but it was also charming and very engagingly written.

A well-written zombie apocalypse novel that is almost perfectly-crafted, but also kind of unmemorable, with few original things to add to the genre. It ends so abruptly and with so many plot points left unresolved that I had to look up whether there was a sequel. Also, and maybe this is just me, but like so many stories in this genre, I found it very depressing overall. The author seems to work hard to construct an utterly gray and hopeless world and make you feel that nothing will ever be redeemed. It was a very compelling airplane read, and I stayed up late to finish it, but the ending left me feeling very deflated.

I don't know, now that I've listened to all of the podcast, and the first two books, I really am not sold on the possibility of Night Vale as a long-form story. The first WTNV book was uneven but had its charming moments (and Easter eggs / references for the podcast audience) as it struggled to impose some kind of narrative and causality on Night Vale. This second book seems to have over-corrected by trying overly hard to be accessible to people who know nothing about WTNV, thus excising most of what made the first novel bearable.

Also, there are weird continuity errors between this and the podcast (most notably in Carlos' personality and memories of the otherworld, and the nature of the Smiling God). The characters don't have much interiority or personal arcs and a lot of the book just dragggggggggs and is really repetitive. Entire chapters could have been removed without affecting the story at all. Honestly this would have made a better WTNV podcast episode. I truly love a lot of Joseph Fink's shorter writing, but I think he's floundering trying to translate that into a long-form medium. [Spouse and I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by Cecil, which worked well for the first novel but I think made this one wear out its welcome.]

Okay so. I came at this from a weird direction. I never read it when it first came out, partially because it was over-hyped, and partially because I have only recently acquired the taste for memoirs (let alone a tolerance for spiritual memoirs, which required some distance from my own history with organized religion).

Anyway, fast-forward to 15 years later, and I'm talking about creativity with a personal development coach and she recommends Gilbert's book Big Magic to me, and when my response is like “The Eat, Pray, Love lady??” she proceeds to fill me in on how Gilbert, since this book happened, wound up ending the marriage that was begun in Eat, Pray, Love and committing to a relationship with a woman after her best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

(As a side note, this dovetails in some kind of way with my love for Glennon Doyle, another memoirist who went through a very similar transformation, in fact falling in love with her now-wife when actually on the book tour for the book about saving her former marriage. I'm interested to hear about any other authors in the very specific genre of “women who wrote best-selling books about their heterosexual love stories and later ended those relationships and are partnered with women”.)

So I listened to Gilbert's Big Magic podcast, a series of interviews with creators of various sorts, and liked it. I bought Big Magic on Kindle, but somehow I've resisted reading it, and I finally realized it's because I wanted to read Eat, Pray, Love first – just to have that context.

All of that being said: I was prepared to read this ironically, to roll my eyes at the middle-aged-white-woman privilege on display, to breeze through some kind of nonsense fluff or perhaps sigh through some tedious declamations about God.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find a well-written, vulnerable memoir. I probably would not have enjoyed it in my 20s, and to be fair, I am equally a privileged asshole with First World Problems (I spent six weeks in Japan to study the language; she spent a month in Italy; I have been on a meditation retreat, though not in India; etc.). But I found it to be an interesting read, evocative of travel to exotic places in a year when I have been unable to travel, and surprisingly self-aware.

wistful, emotionally complex, thoughtful. quite a bit similar to Never Let Me Go in that the world-building is done primarily via allusion and rough sketches while the protagonist's inner world takes center stage. i felt it didn't carry the same “oomph” as Never Let Me Go but at the same time was a very satisfying story.

this was quite good even though it gave me existential anxiety

Interesting ideas, evocative writing and characters, I was so intrigued to see what it all meant and how it was all going to wrap up... but there was no real meaning or wrap-up. It didn't end so much as stop. Still it was an enjoyable ride, a thoughtful alternate history, and very successful at evoking the American experience ca. 2021 – from roadtrips, roadside attractions and mixtapes to 9/11, racial tensions, jingoism and the overall sense of not sharing a reality with many of your fellow citizens.

I tried, I really tried. It's so long and full of petty cruelty, from a person shooting a monkey with a BB gun to bullying to wars and culture loss via colonization. The narrative is convoluted and there are multiple frame stories and some super annoying fourth-wall-breaking commentary. I was constantly confused about why anyone was doing anything, because there's not a lot about what the characters are thinking/feeling and they just randomly do things that kind of suck? And at best people are kind of indifferent to each other? Plus I could not keep track of everything that happened and all the different characters and none of it really seemed to matter.

I truly did not like anyone in this entire book. The main characters in particular are so unlikeable and also their actions and choices are totally inconsistent throughout the book. The story gives the impression of constantly setting up something and then just shifts away, leaving you wondering what happened to that guy anyway, did anything ever come of that sub-plot, why did you spend all this time telling me this stuff and then it just fades into the background? It's as if the author wasn't even interested in his own stories or characters, just in the act of storytelling, and in proselytizing about the act of storytelling itself, which doesn't really work if you don't have a good story to tie it together. It's a Peer Gynt onion that turns out to contain nothing at all beneath all the layers of trapping, and hopes you won't notice.

There's some magical realism elements but it's mainly gods showing up to talk to people and then a few other random events that seem essentially meaningless. I don't know, the whole thing was just exhausting. It's like an Indian version of 100 Years of Solitude where a bunch of people with confusingly-similar names make opaque choices for incoherent reasons and tragedy follows everything.

A thoughtful memoir about burnout and learning to slow down, to live fully in our limitations and imperfections. If you have a low tolerance for God talk, it may turn you off, but I found it pretty accessible even as someone who's non-religious.

I knew that I needed to work less. That's absolutely true. That's the first step. But it's trickier than that: the internal voice that tells me to hustle can find a to-do list in my living room as easily as it can in an office. It's not about paid employment. It's about trusting that the hustle will never make you feel the way you want to feel. In that way, it's a drug, and I fall for the initial rush every time: if I push enough, I will feel whole. I will feel proud, I will feel happy. What I feel, though, is exhausted and resentful, but with well-organized closets.

This isn't about working less or more, necessarily. This isn't about homemade or takeout, or full time or part time, or the specific ways we choose to live out our days. It's about rejecting the myth that every day is a new opportunity to prove our worth, and about the truth that our worth is inherent, given by God, not earned by our hustling. It's about learning to show up and let ourselves be seen just as we are, massively imperfect and weak and wild and flawed in a thousand ways, but still worth loving. It's about realizing that what makes our lives meaningful is not what we accomplish, but how deeply and honestly we connect with the people in our lives, how wholly we give ourselves to the making of a better world, through kindness and courage.

Practical, grounded, contains a good variety of exercises (journaling prompts, meditation – with audio guides available online, mindfulness reminders, etc.).

I picked this up because Kate's podcast is extraordinary (and extraordinarily moving). I love her empathy and humor and grace. That being said, I actually think the podcast is more powerful somehow.

Be warned that there is a bit of a gut-punch in the early middle. It's really nice to see Allie Brosh back again, I was sorry to read about how rough the past few years have been for her, and I hope she's doing well. There was nothing in this that really blew me away on the same level as her description of depression, BUT it was still enjoyable.

This was a lot more engaging and readable than I remembered or expected. I guess the last time I tried to read it, I was too young for it (I was probably a teenager). Anyway I was prepared to slog through it, and I guess it did take me a YEAR because I would read one of the sections and then go read something else, but I am glad I finally read this, and I have a lot of Tolkien nerd thoughts about it.

Misc (I may add more later):

* Turin and Beleg: Tragic, epic, extremely gay love story which someone should 100% make into a movie
* “Doomed to die” - Mortals were gifted with the “doom”, i.e. fate, of mortality. I always read this line as the nine rings killed the Ringwraiths, but rather, “mortal men doomed to die” is a description of the race of Men (and what sets them apart from the Elves); Sauron in fact tempted the Ringwraiths by saying they WOULDN'T die, and with the rings, they did not – they wasted away until they became wraiths and thralls of Sauron