Imi
3.5 stars? The beginning to this was utterly fantastic, such an emotional gut punch, but unfortunately I found myself losing interest later on. The shifts in time felt kind of choppy and Francis' chapters in particular felt off kilter from the rest of the book. Still there are some really poignant scenes that'll definitely stay with me... I think I could have loved this book if it was all from Barbara's perspective (after the beginning of course).
Great! Exactly what I was after! I actually want to re-read [b:Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future 29675406 Chernobyl Prayer A Chronicle of the Future Svetlana Alexievich https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459250416l/29675406.SY75.jpg 1103107] straight away after finishing this, despite only having read that in June. I think the context from Midnight in Chernobyl would have helped hugely if I'd read it first. This book had an incredible amount of information but was still very readable. From the context of the global movement towards nuclear energy, the construction of the Chernobyl reactors, to the accident itself, the consequences (personal, national and global), and the cleanup.
I really enjoyed Part I, but after that was a bit disappointed with what the book turned into. Maybe this was a problem of expectations, as I was expecting it to be closer to Magical Realism than Fantasy. I was also surprised by how YAish it all started to feel. The world building seemed too convenient for many different plot points, and there was even 2 conflicting romantic interests. I got tired of it pretty quickly in the middle, but I was still interested enough in how it would end.
A certain pattern descends when you come as an adult to disability. You have a problem, you learn how to manage it. For as long as things proceed on an even keel, that's fine. You become a little complacent and relax a bit. Then more things go wrong, only in a different way, and you're forced to raise your game and learn from scratch how to handle them as well.
Deep breath. This is the memoir of Melanie Reid, who was thrown from her horse and broke her neck, leaving her paralysed. The book follows the events of the fall herself, to the year she spent at a spinal-unit in a hospital in Glasgow, and the long process afterwards of trying to reintegrate with life at home, outside of the hospital.
I really could not have predicted how relatable I would find so much of this book. I now, after many, many years of constant denial, identify as disabled. My disability has entirely different practicalities to Reid's, but many chapters are devoted to the mental difficulties in coping with “becoming” disabled, as it actually requires a complete shift in identity and how you perceive yourself, and that's something that I deeply related to. I think this is something that able-bodied people completely fail to understand (even when they try), and it was honestly a relief to read Reid's words. I have absolutely failed to express these kind of feelings over the years, so I really appreciate Reid just sharing her writing and thoughts in this way.
One example is the fact I've tried myself to explain to my family before how strange it can feel sometimes, as a wheelchair user, to be, as Reid beautifully puts it, “crotch-height”. Now, I am no where near as tall as Reid, so I can see how “loss” of height would hurt her sense of self even more, but even I as a much shorter person found using a wheelchair at first really surreal for this very reason. It completely changes how you feel in a space (in terms of safety, confidence and much more) when you are suddenly so much lower down than other adults. I now love my wheelchair, and can see how much freedom it gives me (so no I do not like the term “wheelchair-bound”), but it was definitely a huge shift and required a lot to cope with internally.
On the physical side, Reid is surprised again and again how a linear recovery and much hoped for return to “normality” feels more and more out of reach. Despite surprising her doctors and nurses with her progress, she feels increasingly depressed at not being able to achieve the unrealistically high goals she set for her recovery. She just can't stop hoping:
I felt the weight of that moral duty to recover, but paralysis was not recoverable from. It was a dead end. A no return. What was I to do? Even though I knew - and science knows; Christ, everyone knows - there is no existing cure for broken and crushed spines, not to try to get better at the very least seemed improper. Hence the need to resist disability, the failure to accept.
Hmm. This started off great and I was really invested in Christina's story in the opening chapters, but the rest of the book didn't live up to that. There is very little structure, and although it's personal and contains a lot of Christina's own thoughts, it was more her asking her small group of friends what bad things have happened to them and how they dealt with it. So it's personal, but not at the same time. And as her friendship is a very small demographic (artists and writers etc, who are definitely not complete failures...ironically considering one of the main themes is failure), it was really difficult for me to feel properly invested and interested in all these stories. I also had some problems with a few of Christina's opinions, especially surrounding chronic illness. In the end, not my cup of tea.
I feel like I “shouldn't” rate this 5 stars simply because it's not perfect. Some of the plot twists in the second half were a little silly. But I really don't care. My emotional reaction to the whole novel says it's 5 stars so that's what I'm going with. I have read 4 books by Elif Shafak since only June last year and I can't get enough of it. She's one of those reliable writers you can simply trust you're going to enjoy.
I did find this mildly entertaining, but honestly I didn't find it that convincing. The relationships between the 3 main characters barely made sense. Peter and Frances were dull beyond belief, and Cara was either ridiculous or just felt completely fake. I also didn't think the time or setting made much sense. Not really for me.
Elif Shafak is fast becoming one of my favourite writers of all time. How she writes characters and the intricate relationships between both friends or family is incredible. The tension in this book between each of the characters was intense, and I also loved how most of the players were women. There was also a lot of sadness and painful secrets. The best word I can use to describe this book is it feels alive. Istanbul is vibrant and bustling, of course, like it always is in Shafak's novels, but I also loved how she presented the United States, Arizona and San Francisco. At the end of the book, there is a fascinating afterword where Shafak explains why she wrote this book first in English, before later translating into Turkish, and how she had been facing jail time due to how freely she wrote about Turkey in her books. I'm excited to keep reading all of her work.
Deeply depressing (and graphic), but I'm glad I pushed myself to continue reading. It's horrible to see all this misogyny collected and listed page after page, and I cannot imagine how Bates was able to cope with immersing herself in all this. I feel exhausted just from reading this book, I cannot imagine how she felt doing the research. The book is very up to date, so it's good I read it right now, and I learnt much more about things I had heard of (especially on the internet), but didn't really have a detailed understanding of. This book really helped put it all in context. I think it would be clear and informative even for someone who has never heard of the terms incel, MRA etc. I can't believe that is problem has been dismissed so often and left to fester, while other, far less prevalent issues are built up and exaggerated. It's catastrophic, and is harming both people of all genders and backgrounds. When will it end?
I am very unimpressed. Such a disappointment after hearing so many good things about it, but I got nothing from this. Maybe this would be a useful book if you knew literally nothing about what it's currently taking place on a planet (but then would you ever pick up this book), but I found it patronising, strangely self-congratulatory in tone (we've done nothing, yet, NOTHING), and extremely light on the substance. The two chapters on our possible futures (one the bad, one the good) were just bizarre. How is imagining a black and white, good or bad scenario at all helpful? The world doesn't work like that. And the list of “things you can do” was, again, patronising, and painfully obvious. So all in all not at all motivating in the way I was hoping. It's so hard to stay positive sometimes... :(
This is one very long book. As is often the case, when I'm reading on my Kindle, I had no idea quite what I was in for when I started this. Now, I love multi-generational epics, but this felt entirely unique, unlike any other novel I have read. The novel spans more than a century, from the Zambia's colonial history under the British empire to the near future. I think what was most impressive to me was the constant switching of genres. Yes, there is historical fiction here, anchored in a specific time and place, but later Serpell plays with magical realism, and (the biggest surprise to me) even speculative sci-fi towards the end. It's interesting that all the stories still managed to feel entwined and linked, despite all the differences, and I think the great characters really played a big part that. Despite there being quite so many, I still managed to separate them and see them all as unique. What an accomplishment, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I gave lectures about universal basic income and made a case for it on Dutch television. Enthusiastic emails poured in. Not long ago, I even heard someone refer to me as “Mr. Basic Income.” Slowly but surely, my opinion has come to define my personal and professional identity. I do earnestly believe that a universal basic income is an idea whose time has come. I've researched the issue extensively, and that's the direction the evidence points in. But, if I'm being honest, I sometimes wonder if I'd even let myself notice if the evidence were pointing another way. Would I be observant enough – or brave enough – to have a change of heart?
This book was a breath of a fresh air, and managed to make me feel both hopeful and even excited for the possibilities of the future. That's got to be a pretty big achievement in a year where we all seem to drowning in doom, gloom and pessimism. I can't put it any better than Bergman himself:
For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.
“I could do that, if I wanted, you know? I could train a camera on a man and look at him like a man looks at a woman; boys, too, could be objects of desire.”
I....am actually really squeamish, so this book very nearly broke me. Wow, Irina is a piece of work. Utterly horrifying. I'm going to tag this horror, because parts of this were incredibly explicit and gorey and bloody and I wanted to stop but absolutely couldn't. It also made me glad that I've never been much of a party-goer. The ending was utterly fantastic, how Irina seems to have completely dissociated with reality, like an hallucination, with the image of glass bringing the book to a close in the best possible way. I think this was so right about so much of modern Britain... Too right, painfully right.
I cannot recommend this book + the free mp3s from the TTMIK website highly enough! For beginners, it's really fantastic and probably the sole reason that I am no longer struggling with several very basic but very tricky aspects of the Korean language; how a basic sentence is structured (very different word order to any other language I know): pronunciation/sound change rules (this was not clear to me even after learning Hanguel without using this book to actually see/hear it working in practice): several very common expressions that I now hear everywhere and have become second nature to me (요즘에는 is just one example of this - after hearing it multiple times here, I don't have to even think about it anymore, when at first I kept mishearing it). You just don't get this kind of reading and listening practice from pure textbooks, but any other source is way too difficult when you're just starting out.
Each story has an audio track, where the story is read by 2 different voices, then repeated again slowly with 1 voice repeating the hard to pronounce words (clearly marked in the book), and then finally the vocabulary list is read out by voice 3. The audio tracks are available for free online, but I think the book is well worth buying for the transcripts and the really good focus on correct pronunciation. It's so well thought out and organised!
On top of that, the topics in these 30 “stories” (really short texts, really) are really charming and fun, not boring at all, which I think it amazing when you think how they needed to keep the language simple. Can't really complain about anything here, and I'm very excited to keep using TTMIK's books and materials for quality practice.
‘...And if we really can't find someone to look after the child, worst-case scenario, don't worry about quitting your job. I'll take care of us. I won't ask you to go out and make money.'‘And what will you be giving up, Oppa?' ‘What?' ‘You said don't just think about what I'll be giving up. I'm putting my youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans and future on the line. No wonder all I can think about are the things I'm giving up. But what about you? What do you lose by gaining a child?'
Wow!
I first read about this novel in a couple of a different articles in The Guardian article (for example, this book review) and I heard about how its publication had triggered a wave of controversy and debate about sexism and gender inequality, so of course I was very excited to read it myself.
By coincidence, immediately before picking up this novel, I had read Invisible Women, a non-fiction book focused on the same injustices that women face day-to-day. While I'd been immensely looking forward to Invisible Women, it left me feeling more overwhelmed and down, than educated and informed, by its deluge of statistics and miserable facts. Ironically, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 makes much greater use of statistics and facts than you'd expect from a work of fiction. It feels strange to have just criticised a book for using too many statistics, to then immediately praise another for using them in such a clever, unexpected and powerful way.
Cho Nam-Joo inserts these facts and statistics, throughout a narrative retelling of Kim Jiyoung's life, whose name suggests that Jiyoung is a Korean everywoman. You learn about historical events, such as changes in South Korean society relating to women's rights, the gender imbalance at birth (116.5 boys born to 100 girls in 1990) and the cold, harsh numbers of the number of women able to succeed in the job market. Sadly, Jiyoung's story can feel remarkably familiar for any woman across the globe. Yes, there are cultural differences and parts that are specific to the context in South Korea, but, sadly, this a tale as old as time.
In comparison to Invisible Women (I feel bad for picking on this book, but I can't help compare the two!), I found this novel much more rage-inducing, gripping and impactful. I can certainly understand why it has caused such an outrage in Korea! I would certainly hand this novel to someone who was unable to believe that gender inequality is still an endemic problem. This books lays it out in a way, that (to me) feels impossible to argue with. Unfortunately, I know that some of my fellow Brits would read this and say, “Oh wow, this is awful! I'm so glad we don't have this problem in the greatest of Great Britain!” ...Ahem.
In terms of characterisation, I was worried going into this that Jiyoung was come across as bland and uninteresting, but while the intriguing framing device definitely strips her of her agency and gives a chilling, claustrophobic edge to these observations (I don't want to give anything more away there), she still comes across as utterly authentic and relatable. I also really loved the portrayal of her mother and sister, and their small rebellions and attempts to carve out their own identities in this unequal society.
Above all, this book tells us we still have so much more to do. In South Korea, as everywhere, things have changed across the decades; new laws have been created and conversations on inequality are now present when before there was only silence. But it's not enough. As Jiyoung herself muses, “Do laws and institutions change values, or do values drive laws and institutions?”. Have these deep-rooted values really changed? We still have so much more to do.
Sadly, this felt more like reading a long article than an actual book. It was mainly a long collection of statistics, listed one after the other. If you need the facts and proof that male bias exists, then here you are. But for me, I was hoping for a bit more analysis. Maybe, because I already know this is the reality, this is the male-default society we live in. It's depressing and overwhelming to see it so clearly laid out, however.
I'm so pissed off right now. You think you know a news story, and then realise you really, really don't. And now I've just read that apparently, Hachette (the American publisher for this book) decided to publish Woody Allen's memoir after releasing (and making a ton of money off) this book. Ronan Farrow, of course, immediately left them, but just... It's a never ending cycle of hypocrisy, cover ups, and oppression, isn't it?
3 5-star novels in a row! That never happens!This is an epic satire written in the 90s, but mainly an attack on Thatcher's Britain of the 80s. It covers far too many painful truths to list here (corruption in finance, the arms trade, the art world, and the shock tactics employed so dangerously in tabloid journalism...), still awfully relevant today. Genuinely, parts were difficult to read. Dorothy's chapter has scarred me for life, and I don't think I'll ever forget the chapters relating to the NHS...And there was the ending! Brilliance! I really don't want to give too much away, but this ending reminded me of [b:Night Film 18770398 Night Film Marisha Pessl https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397425352l/18770398.SY75.jpg 15182838]...Is this simply a book with a very clear political agenda? Is it a murder mystery? A parody of cheesy British horror movies? It's all of the above and more.
I'm enjoying this series so much. In this book, the grammar concepts introduced are getting much more complex and unfamiliar (at least from a native English speaker's perspective), and I am no where near feeling completely comfortable with any of it yet. I really appreciated the long(er) form reading practice included at the end of this book. My minor complaints from book 1, [b:Korean Made Simple: A beginner's guide to learning the Korean language 21865542 Korean Made Simple A beginner's guide to learning the Korean language Billy Go https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397031556l/21865542.SX50.jpg 41156632], still apply, but as I said in my previous review they really are very, very minor. I would certainly recommend this series to anyone else interested in Korean. I've just bought book 3, but not sure when I'll start it yet, as I'm taking a break from learning new grammar to try and consolidate what I've got so far. I now have enough that I'm no longer coming across completely unfamiliar grammar in my beginner reading/listening material.