Nithou
This was a perfect ending for this trilogy. While I had my doubt on the first volume, I've been totally captivated by the second and this last one. The characters evolution was absolutely wonderful (even if I wanted to smack some of them in the head especially the main one sometimes) and the way their friendships grew stronger with every step wonderful. I shouted in happiness when **that kiss** happened of course, and the romance was perfectly written in respect to the two characters history. I didn't think I'd like a story centered around a sport (albeit fictional) but I was taken by surprise and really happy with it!
The cliffhanger at the end of the first volume made me want to tackle this one immediately and I wasn't deceived! Things escalated at a quick pace now that the characters were set and the story took me to new heights. The relationships between the Foxes was great with their bonds tightening and the rivalry with the Ravens was suffocating. The end of this second book made me shed a tear for Neil and I just can't wait to read the final tome
Had some troubles getting into it because there's a lot of characters and it took me some time to get to know everyone and not mix them, but once this was set up the story was really captivating. This first book is hard, by its introduction of all the characters but also by how Neil comes to be included in the Foxes team (really not pleasant). However, by the end you start to grow fond of all of them and really curious about what will happen next, so I'm really looking forward to discover more about this story in the next volumes!
Absolutely stunning, akin to the Empire Trilogy written by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts, but make it gay! The amount of intrigues, court plays, war tactics and table turning was absolutely fantastic. And I adored the relationship between Laurent and Damen and never knowing exactly what Laurent was thinking or what he'll do. This is a great ending for this trilogy and an excellent trilogy overall!
Liked the first one but this second part was absolutely stunning, the intrigues went ten notch higher and the power plays were just crazy. Absolutely love how the story takes its depth and how the character evolve. And my god this ending was absolutely stunning and kept me on my nerves for the last 10% of the book.
What I needed to read to change my mind from the news. Totally gay, with a lot of intrigues and court play and an interesting universe. This first book starts quite slow and there's a lot of tension building up between the two characters but it mainly sets the world, so I'm really looking forward to things moving up more faster due to everything happening in the last part of this book!
Started this book because it appeared on banned book lists, and what better award? I was totally surprised by the rawness of it, its description of the turmoil and cruelty of adolescence and the sadistic part of some school as well as teacher-student relationships. It reminded me a lot of the Dead Poets Society, by its settings and characters, but by including a raw violence that is mostly rampant in the Dead Poets Society. This is a great book with quite an array of character that demonstrates a brutal but quite true view of adolescence and harassment.
A nice anthology of queer Arab writers talking about their experience, their culture, encounters with white saviors, ... Most of them were really interesting, giving great cultural insights on Arab queer lives and perceptions. I learned quite a lot and saw several faults I did myself when interacting with queer Arab previously so this will help me be better.
Un des premiers roman à attaquer la dystopie, bien avant 1984 et Le Meilleur des Mondes. "Nous" présente un monde entier modelé sur les principes du Taylorisme poussé à l'extrême, et une critique acerbe du stalinisme naissant de l'époque. L'auteur dilue l'individu dans le groupe, poussant cette idée de s'effacer face au groupe jusqu'à son paroxysme. On y retrouve beaucoup de l'inspiration de 1984 dans la construction du récit et des personnages y intervenant, mais j'ai trouvé que "Nous" offrait finalement une vision mieux construite et très bien écrite, qui résonne parfois tristement juste à notre époque.
Il nous appartient de soumettre au joug bienfaisant de la raison tous les êtres inconnus, habitants d'autres planètes, qui se trouvent peut-être encore à l'état sauvage de la liberté. S'ils ne comprennent pas que nous leur apportons le bonheur mathématique et exact, notre devoir est de les forcer à être heureux.
Wonderfully written dystopia, packed to the brim with action, I'd really like to see it adapted into a movie. The universe in itself is enthralling, very cyberpunk in its essence. The drawings are wonderful, not all to my taste, but there's quite a variety of them, which makes the story even more interesting as the style keeps on changing.
Une très belle histoire d'amour en Palestine, pleine de poésie et tout en justesse, montrant à la fois la beauté du monde et de l'amour et la cruauté gratuite des hommes. Magnifiquement écrit de bout en bout, laissant le lecteur rêveur accablé.
Mange toutes les miettes de moi que je reste toujours avec toi.
Should have paid more attention when I added this book to my reading list. I think I was expecting something more sociological but this ended being a lot about semiotics and dialectic which are two things that totally bore me. Some excerpts are interesting but I couldn’t get at all where the author wanted to go (as most of the cases when approaching dialectic).
Très beau livre de Abdellah Taïa à nouveau, j'aime vraiment cet auteur. Je l'ai trouvé plus apaisé et moins violent que les précédents. Un beau retour sur le passé et l'enfance à nouveau, sur les trajectoires qui fait qu'on évolue, sur cette vie passée au Maroc et l'actuelle à Paris, le gouffre entre les deux cultures et les liens et reproches familiaux.
Ils ont kidnappé Allah. Ils le tiennent en otage. Quand il leur arrive de nous croiser, toi et moi, ils invoquent ce même Allah pour nous condamner, nous exiler, nous exploiter, nous violer. Même morts, nous violer.
Je n'ai vraiment pas trop accroché à ce livre. J'ai trouvé que le récit de cette expérience d'un "premier crush" était somme toute assez commune et manquait d'éléments la rendant particulière ou vraiment intéressante. Plusieurs fois j'ai eu l'impression que l'auteur avait volontairement rajouté des éléments pour "choquer" et donner une impression de profondeur au texte qui n'y est pas.
Le rythme du livre est assez décousu, alternant des souvenirs parfois sans rapport, laissant beaucoup de choses dans l'inconnu et se terminant d'une manière à la fois frustrante et peu claire.
I was curious to learn more about Tennessee Williams after (finally) seeing A Streetcar Named Desire. There was something in this movie that talked to me and I wanted to know more, so I started with this one, The Glass Menagerie, that made him famous.
Being a theater piece, it's much shorter than I expected, but also very easy to read. I found a lot of the relationships I encountered in life in the relationship depicted in this piece between Laura and her mother, the same fears, expectations and all the wrong ways to handle it. Tom being the narrator was somewhat more distant and a harder character to understand.
I'm not sure it will leave me a lasting memory, but I must say I really want to see this one in real life (especially given the setting the author imagined for the stage).
"I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
A soothing read, one of those books that projects beautiful images in your mind as you read it. Did me a lot of good, it’s quite rare to see some optimist science fiction in a sea of dystopias and this one provides a really beautiful vision of a future.
You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.
Un beau retracage de l’histoire de l’homophobie depuis « l’apparition du terme » jusqu’à nos jours. Je pense qu’on aurait pu aller plus loin que se borner au moment temporel du terme et creuser plus à travers l’histoire où des exemples ne manquent pas, mais l’auteur semble souscrire à la même vision temporelle bornée pour l’homosexualité. Reste une bonne analyse des dernières décades et de la bascule de la répression étatique de l’homosexualité vers celle de l’homophobie.
L’essai de terminé par une réflexion contre le système carcéral, après avoir démontré le peu d’impact du juridique punitif, mais reste chiche sur de véritables possibles. Une bonne base de réflexion toutefois trop limitée et frustrante sur plusieurs points.
Mais ce n'est pas « à cause du capitalisme» que des individus en viennent à attenter à la vie de personnes qu'ils identifient comme homosexuelles, c'est plutôt le résultat de rapports de force induits par un système économique qui prend son ancrage dans une hiérarchisation des formes de masculinités, entre celles qu'on idéalise, celles qu'on sacrifie, celles qu'on contrôle et celles qu'on fantasme.
Un essai très intéressant sur la place qu'a pris l'Extrême Droite dans le paysage médiatique et sur Internet, ainsi que son influence grandissante sur les esprits, aidé par les algorithmes et les médias bolloréens. On y découvre aussi l'évolution de ces influenceurs acquis à la cause de l'extrême droite, entre union et désamour. Extrêmement intéressant, mais aurait sans doute bénéficié d'une petit travail d'élagage, certains passages revenant en boucle (on évoque ainsi la même vidéo de Papacito pas moins de 7 fois à 7 différents endroits de l'essai) qui tendent un peu à légèrement déforcer le propos. Mais extrêmement intéressant et montre comment l'extrême droite a réussi à investir le champ culturel sur Internet et l'utiliser comme tremplin pour sa propagation.
Récit d’une enfance et d’un cadre familial compliqué, des petits chapitres courts et une écriture très fluide. On suit le narrateur dans son cadre familial dysfonctionnel jusqu’à la découverte de son homosexualité (comme souvent plus vite découverte par les bourreaux que par soi même, tristement). Assez poétique et touchant.
Regardez-nous, regardez notre dernière nuit ensemble, quand on était encore frères.
Not so surprisingly this was pretty mad, I think I expected something a bit more clever regarding the aura pop culture set around Unabomber.
This was published in 1995 and while it might look like the ravings of a madman, this contains all the moral panic the right / far right and republicans have been playing on during the last few years:
- A will to return to the "good old past" and natural selection
- Society created deviants "looks those damn homosexuals and transsexuals!"
- Society makes men weak
- "We can't even spank our children anymore"
- "The government is trying to edit your genes to make you comply"
- Sex Education shouldn't be taught in school!
- Schools have become terrible places
It's filled with a deep hate of the left, while trying to present a malformed "ecological" society (based on the most violent natural selection), with all the fears you could imagine around AI, gene editing, mass control, ... While it might have looked crazy in 1995, this is the exact same discourse that is going on in the Trump & consorts circles nowadays.
Sure there are some (very) rare observations about the impact of work on our well being, but those small observations are drowned inside a maelstrom of unfinished thoughts tackling society as a whole without really any understanding. This book has the pretense of intellectualism but doesn't hold in the details.
I think I'll close by one of the rare quote that hit me as containing a semblance of truth:
"It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently."
Written in the wake of the (sadly) first Trump election, this book gives keys on how to resist in an age of rising tyranny. When the far right is rising a bit everywhere, I feel such books are vital into not giving up, and while it might be hard to keep hope, it also give some paths to explore on how to resist and face those rising dangers for our democracies.
Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.
Contains spoilers
J'hésite beaucoup sur ce livre (lu dans le cadre d'un book club). Je crois que je m'attendais plus à une histoire qu'à une fresque familiale dans un premier temps. J'ai eu un peu de mal arrivé au dernier tiers, rattrapé par contre par une fin magnifique. J'y ai trouvé de très beaux moments plein de poésie, j'ai eu beaucoup de mal avec certains moments comme l'inceste et la pédophilie dans certaines relations.
L'atmosphère était si humide que les poissons auraient pu entrer par les portes et sortir par les fenêtres, naviguant dans les airs d'une pièce à l'autre.
