Ninett
This was my first Agatha Christie novel as an adult - I read one when I was a teenager as part of a book club, but don't remember it. The genre itself is foreign terrirory to me, so I wasn't sure if I would be able to ‘solve' the murder myself as I read through. There were definitely some clues that I didn't link together as they came, but there were also some that I intuited the meaning of before they were explicitly spelled out in the book. I enjoyed the read and the puzzle!
Good introductory chapters, and a lot of great information packed in there. It is hard to know how to proceed from here, as I don't fully understand how I can bring about opportunities for me to implement the things that I ahve learned from this book - the perfect opportunity never crops up in my games. I found the list of moves format that came in the later sections to be less useful, even though the notation was described and was clear to understand, I just couldn't keep several moves worth in my head to try to imagine how those instructive games progressed.
Good reading to slot in between heavier books. I enjoyed the angle showing the lives of women and how they fared in ancient times as men fought their wars. The picture is not at all pretty, and the novel shows that unflinchingly. For me, I found Briseis to be very complacent and accepting of her fate. Perhaps I don't understand what it was like at the time, but for me this was disappointing.
One of the best fantasy books I've read in a while. The storytelling was captivating in an emotionally charged way, without intentionally tugging heartstrings or emotional manipulation on the author's part. I thought that the cast of characters was well fleshed out, though I had hope for Holland to undergo a redemtion arc, but alas... Perhaps finding a way to break the soul seal would have been anathema to the worldbuilding.
All in all really entertaining and nicely told.
Jade City was a unique magic system coupled with some really fun political intrigue and mafia overtones. I really enjoyed the characters as well: each one had a clear personality that was unique to them, and their feelings and responses to the situations they were in felt real and correct for them. Even the enemy characters have dimensionality and well-developed personaThe plot was woven together well, but for me the pacing was off in some places. There were longish sections of the book that had me bordering on boredom, and it shows in that it took me nearly a month to finish this book. Lastly, I nearly stopped and DNF'd the book when Lan died. For me his was a premature and pointless death in the sense that a good character was killed off before he made any noticable impact on the story at all, and his existance and death served only to catalise the other two main characters. I felt that he should have been worth more.
My book rating rubric told me to rate this 3.75 based on component scores, but I can't conscionably do that because there is a fundamental clash of values between myself and Peter Thiel. I don't think that business gains above all else are any good for a fair and just society, or that corporate profits are the (only) etalon by which we should judge the success of a capitalist organisation. There was generally some very sound and good advice in here about entrepeneurship itself, as well as some of the pressures that startups face, both from inside (culture) and outside (the market and funding), but on the whole the mindset that Thiel advocates for is not my cup of tea. I do agree on giving 100% and aiming to become the best from the start, though.
I really wanted to read this book, but unfortunately I often found my mind wandering while reading, and didn't process that much in the end - not invested enough to re-read either. I am sad for that because I did want to like it, and the pre-historic angle is so up my alley normally.
It's not to say that I didn't get anything out of it, since I did end up with a few pages of notes by the end, but I didn't enjoy it all that much.
I acknowledge that the prose is unusually elegant for a popular science book, and I always approve of people who aren't afraid to shed the conventions of their genres.
My first finished audiobook! I listened to it to give me something to focus on while out walking my dog. I really struggle to focus on audio and tend to become bored and let my mind wander away almost immediately when I put anything on.
The topic of this book for me is easy and familiar, but some of the specifics were just novel enough for me to be able to dip my mind in and out of it and not really miss anything that would sever the thread of understanding, but also keep me interested.
I don't think audiobooks will ever become a big part of my daily life, since for me it is doing things by halves (due to inability to focus), and I find that less of a good use of my time than just being lost in my own thoughts in the end.
The rating is more for the combination of the book and the audiobook-ness of it. Maybe if I had actually read it I'd have rated it differently .
Really captivating characters. I went into this without having read up on the premise or the blurb, so I didn't know what to expect, other than having a faint memory of it being described as dystopian. Everything about the narrative supports and underlines the personhood and unique soul of the narrator and other main characters, who are clones created for organ donation - thought by some in their world not to possess a soul.
The voice is authentic, and every single character is beautifully written into existance as an incredibly complex, multi-faceted person, with truely amazing realism when it comes to their motivations and desires. Ruth in particular for me was a very unsympathetic, I found her to have quite a mean character, and was frustrated when Kathy was repeatedly allowing blatant viciousness to pass. However, in the end, I think the dynamic was very realistic, in fact probably one of the best literary interpretations of this kind of ‘friendship' I've ever read.
I wish we had found out more about some of the elements of this other England, like for example how ordinary people think and feel about the system that they are complicit in upholding, and whether all clones/donors complete, or if some get away or rebel.
The reason I still knocked a bit off the rating is that at times the book seemed a bit slow and I wished it would develop more quickly rather than reminiscing quite so much.
Am I the only person who was repulsed by this? I did finish it, but only so I didn't have to try to find another book for my around the world reading challenge. The blurb made it out like there was going to be a pivotal shift in the main character's life, and while he did get removed from the filthy squalor by child protective services, his character seems abhorrent even in adulthood.
Everyone was vile in this and no one got less vile. The two stars are because the writing itself was good.
I blitzed through this. It was entertaining and suprisingly emotionally deep. I found the point of view to be interesting, there was something unique about an artificial intelligence being the narrator of its own experience and struggles to connect with its human collaborators and to other machines. In particular, I enjoyed the second novella, in which there was a longish section that did not even feature any biological humans at all, just two robots interacting. It was good fun to read, but I did think that the novella format left a little to be desired - the plotline was well-formed, but for me just lacking detail somewhat on both novellas.
I feel bad for this rating because I did find this unique and interesting, but I don't think I clicked with this book at all. For me it didn't have a message, and had quite a bit of garbled storytelling. There were some scenes I found gross, which I didn't see the point of having for the storyline. Having read the version with Marquez's introduction at the front, I did think that it would be cool to read something that had such profound effect on such an important writer... then, reading it I thought that if I hadn't known that this novel came first, then I would definitely have thought it was some kind of parallel plotline to hundred years of solitude or something (which I DNF'd...). If you loved 100 years, then you will love this I reckon!
PS: I wasn't confused by the structure or the writing, I just didn't vibe with it :D
I'd like to start by saying that I really feel for Fang Fang. She got a lot of strife out of writing this diary in China, where she was seen by many to be against the national spirit, and therefore hounded online and ostracised from the publishing community there. I hope that she is alright.
Wuhan diary is an interesting look at the mundane elements of the Covid lockdown era in Wuhan, when Covid was just classed as an epidemic, and set before the worldwide rolling lockdowns. Fang Fang has a lot to say about censorship in China, and holds a bit of anger towards the officials that she thinks have failed Wuhan and cost many lives. She chronicles the epidemic how she sees it, and the memoir seems very genuine and honest to me. Fang Fang really cares about her people and her country, and this is obvious from her writing - it's a bit baffling to me why she was harassed so severely by nationalists.
I did find that sometimes the narrative was slow or somewhat off topic (I realise it is a bit of a rogue criticism of a diary), there were simply too many passages about the weather... though I think this is symptomatic of the fact that everyone is locked inside. I found it hard going reading it sometimes, but other times it was fascinating to get a totally different perspective of something I, too, lived through in the West.
One of my favourites this year. The short story format is a perfect palate cleanser to read one between other books (if you are that way inclined). I found that the majority of these stories tickled me intellectually, each in different ways, and I deeply appreciate that. It's hard to find new ideas in sci-fi these days, let alone ones that are also worthwhile and that have something to say about humanity as a whole, too. Some of these stories affected my thinking quite a bit for a few days afterwards, and I've found myself bringing them up in conversation with others weeks after having read them. For me this doesn't usually happen, and by this fact alone I rate the collection very highly. The premises and themes vary widely from story to story, so you can't possibly get bored.
Obligatory gripe: one of the stories had a nonending >:(
I couldn't wait to finish this. The premise had so much potential, the blurb really grabbed me. I imagined a story of survival, or a critique of modern travel culture.
Instead, I got a hollow, unbelieveable story with boring characters and a ridiculously shallow emotional depth. The translation was clunky, and I hope that part of the horrible antipathy I felt was due to a bad translation rather than that someone wrote such an insipid book...
The main character, Yona, in particular, was devoid of a personality. Nothing about her characterisation was believable. She is repeatedly sexually assaulted by her boss, and her reaction is one of nonreaction. It takes no emotional toll on her and changes her intentions and motivations not at all. The whole section is written as if the writer were an alien observing humans from a far away planet, lacking complete understanding or empathy for the victim, neglecting to consider the toll this kind of thing does take on a real person.
The storyline itself is also offensive, in the sense that the author makes no effort to make her characters do things that join up. Yona witnesses a murder and doesn't think much of it. Then she readily agrees to take part in a scheme to kill hundreds of people with no moral stance shown, unconvincingly under the pretext of being promoted at work. This would be farcial if it weren't written under the guise of a serious plotline. I could be on board with this if the character were written to be insufferable or malicious on purpose, but Yona is supposed to be at most apathetic. Again, I feel that the writer wanted a character to do a thing, and made her do it, without bothering to consider at all what real people are like.
Lastly, the romance with Luck is also just a weird piece of plot that fits nowhere.
I am not fond of nth-degree lyricism, which this has an enormous helping of. I have nothing against intricate prose, by the way, but there is a point (in my opinion) when we fall into the nothing means anything anymore zone, and in this book, we fell into that.
The love story was cute, the setting fresh, the world compelling. I got through it rapidly, the pacing was excellent. On the whole not bad, but not for me.
The sheer hungarianness of it... It just drips off the page, in humor, in style, in the abstractions, in the relationships, in the absurdities. After living away from there for so long it was refreshing to read something so clearly of my culture.
I am interested to know how well this comes across in translation and my yet buy an English copy as well.
My only gripe is the pacing - of course a book so monotonically located within the psyche of a crumbling man would have to have protracted ‘doing-nothing' sections to give him space to unravel into, so I get it... But I still avoided picking it back up sometimes.
A children's book at heart, but one with a soul. This was one of those rare translations that didn't feel like you were peering at the story through milky glass. Kudos to the translator!
The story and themes are fairly simple, with the hero embarking on a huge (if somewhat improbable at times) quest to get from point A to point B. There are some chosen one story elements to it, but that is not a huge turn-off for me. I was pleased to see that there was some depth to the plotline about the knights who were hunting the hero at the start, as they do not stay antagonistic to the end. I did find the pure evil characterisation of the enemies to be a bit of a spoil point, but that might just be the simplistic style of the era in which it was written.
I am not a spiritually inclined person by nature, and I'm always very sceptical of material such as that written in this book. Nevertheless I did get a fair bit from it.
Reading this book took me a really long time, simply because there were SO MANY personal anecdotes packed in there, and because some of it was dead boring for me. I subscribe more to the ‘strike hard and fast' philosophy of life rather than the slow reflection philosophy, so I guess there is a mismatch between the author and I on a very basic level. That didn't stop me from learning a lot from her gentle way of thinking, most specifically how to handle life and emotions with more kindness towards myself, and, by extension, to others, as well as WHY these attitudes have merit. Like the author, I have a judgemental heart, and like the author, I battle it every day. She's given me a nice framework for that. Worth the read, especially if you're a bitch at heart but don't want to be.
If you can get through a book this long and still want to read the next 237 books in the set then you can probably safely say it's a great book. I didn't like all the strands, and I am starting to understand Robin Hobbs's style enough to feel familiar with the intentional incitement of frustration in readers to force them to become emotionally invested in the story, so I knocked off a star for emotional manipulation. I don't like to feel frustrated, but I do like a satisfying comeuppance.
As usual, the emotional depth of the characters and the feeling of realess to them is a powerful conduit for empathy with the trials and tribulations of all the characters - inclluding ones you kind of hate as well.
I just didn't click with it that much. I was very upset reading some of the horrifically graphic scenes of animal abuse near the first third of the book, I wish I had warning about those because I would not have read the book if I had known. The pacing was excellent and the ending was interesting: In-hye's quiet realisation of Yeong-hye's complete and utter freedom feels real and human. I found the choice of narrative perspectives and structuring of the novel to be very suitable for the themes that it explores (men dominating women). Seeing Yeong-hye consistently described as an object from her loathsome husband's point of view is compelling and powerful.
My rating rubric suggests I should rate this 3 stars because it is thematically very strong, and the prose and pacing are also good, but I personally just couldn't get over the violent scenes at the start, hence the lower rating.
I loved the concepts in this book. The inconclusive ending kind of adds to it for me, I am still not really sure what actually happened here, but for once I'm not mad because the story is so character focused. The interminable library research sequences did derail me a bit and I ended up glazing over the very in-depth descriptions of the history of the Solarists. It was interesting to me that the author extrapolated science to gravity manipulation technology and gavity-waves-as-a-medium communications, but also writes of magnetic tape as a data storage device, the valves of a comms device heating up, paper print-outs as a means of interfacing with a computer, and writes a space base in which there is an extensive paper-format library. I had to check when it was originally published to get my bearings. No shade from me, just an observation on how much the world can change in a short space of time.
One of my few forays into short-form fiction. I can never get into these enough to care too much about the characters before the story comes to an end. While this was well written, with characters that have a lot of potential to be developed, it did fall somewhat flat for me. Of course, the story is sad, and the emotional distress is clearly and vividly recounted, but I didn't sense any real tension in the writing.
The illustrations are next level in this. The colours, the character expressions, the mood, the scenery, and the stylistic elements all conspire to create a really beautiful, atmospheric work. The story portrayed is not new if you have read the mainline books in the Grishaverse world, though, and I expected to read new elements of backstory for the Darkling. I can't fault it for not being what I expected, and this slice of origin story is quite good on the grand scheme of things.