Poppy L
This was a fabulous read. I tried to postpone reading it until I'd finished Montaigne's essays, and I'm very glad that I didn't. Bakewell provides a lot of backstory and history and context - things that a contemporary Montaigne reader would know, but we, 400 years later, don't have access to off the tops of our heads. Now I'm ready to jump in and start Montaigne over with a better understanding of the world he lived in.
I bought this book for the second half - on social media and its effects on human relationships - and so skipped the section on sociable robots. Perhaps I will go back and read this section later.
I was a little hesitant after reading the introduction - Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, and I was afraid that her writing would be focused on completely unprovable psychoanalytic theories. However, her area of expertise only comes out in her insistence that it is human relationships that create growth - and while unprovable, this is not an extreme stand.
I appreciated the discussions with teens regarding the ubiquitousness of cell phones and the changes it has caused in their lives as compared to mine at a similar age. This is the first writing I have seen that admits that etiquette has changed such that a phone call is now considered the kind of intrusion that an unannounced visit once might have been. And I am intrigued and plan to do some thinking myself on Facebook as a performance medium - are we sharing our lives with our friends, or are we performing them?
This was a quick read. Follows the coming of age of a set of friends in and near Dublin in the late 1950s. Overall, a character driven book, which I enjoy - it was the personalities of the people that pulled the story forward, not the circumstances they found themselves in. However, I did have some problesm with the believability of the characters and their motivations - in particular, I'm left scratching my head and wondering what exactly drew Simon to Nan - he's characterized as 30-ish, she's not quite 20. Sure, she's beautiful and dresses like an heiress, but it didn't really seem to be enough to drive their relationship forward.
I was disappointed with Jack's character at the end of the book - I really wanted Binchy to leave him a better person with more hope of improvement than she did.
Lots of information, lots of examples. Gives me a lot to think about, and I'm still processing what I have learned.
This will give me a good foundation in understanding similar books, written for a lay audience, and the underpinnings of some of the primary conflicts in our culture.
American politics is a struggle between people who believe that an 8th grade education should be sufficient to understand the issues facing us, and people who understand that it is not so.
American religion is a dichotomy between people who believe that understanding not only the Bible, but historical writings in religion and philosophy are important to understanding the word of God. And people who believe that faith and spirit are all you need to understand God's will, and in fact, that any study intended to instruct one in historical context will actually detract from faith and spirit.
American education has been, and continues to be, plagued by a misunderstanding of “democracy” - having high-achievers and low-achievers does not make a school undemocratic - as well as a very practical “preparation for life” curriculum which considers theory irrelevant in comparison to practice. Learning physiology, for example, has at times been considered less useful than learning how to exercise, although the latter is an extension of the former. It's not even so much that schools at varying points in the last 100 years have failed to teach students to think for themselves, it's that schools have at varying points assumed that the average student cannot think for him or herself.
It's a bit unusual for a coming-of-age story set at a boarding school to be about one of the teachers.
The mystery was good - too slow, but good. The coming of age story, not so much. Almost as if she really should have written it as two separate books. I found it hard to care what happened to Charu and much preferred Nandita as a character. The “two stories in one” also made it difficult for Ms. Currimbhoy to give either story its proper due, and the mystery lacks for it. She spent so much time on the class differences in Charu's coming-of-age story that she failed to properly write the generation gap that drove the denuement of the mystery. As a result, understanding the ending is overly subtle - there, but only for those readers who can fill in what is not said regarding the generations.
There's an atmosphere to this story that feels like the air just before the monsoon hits - heavy, damp, and oppressive. It put me off, and it was a struggle to read the first half of the book. I had virtually no investment in the mystery of what happened to Moira - I had assumed from the start that she had jumped - until the revelation about Miss Nelson appeared.
Interesting and thought-provoking read, as all of Gladwell's books have been so far.
Unfortunately, the thoughts they have come to provoke are wondering how provable his theses are and how I would go about fact-checking them. There's a fine balance between too much proof, causing tedium, and not enough, causing disbelief. What he says about success rings true - but is it?
Dark and creepy mysteries. Family secrets. Brooding mansions. Dusty libraries. Crazy Bertha locked up in the opposite tower. Setterfield has pulled off a classic romantic mystery, although the worst her heroine Margaret suffers is a nasty cold from having wandered the gardens at night with no wrap. No knife-wielding crazy people chasing her, no suspicious young men befriending her, just an old lady who may or may not be telling her the truth.
Heavily influenced by the Bronte sisters and Yorkshire landscapes. If you thought Jane Eyre was stuffy or Wuthering Heights was creepy, you won't like this book.
I could not put this book down and shorted myself a few hours of sleep as a result. I don't honestly know why. Perhaps I just wanted to know how they were going to get themselves out of the predicament.
The next morning, though, some inconsistencies about the plot woke me up by staring me in the face and muttering at me.
- Why does the father suddenly show up? He's drawn as a character with slight Asperger's himself, which should preclude him from feeling particularly responsible for being there - at least in Picoult's book. (I'll make a note here to mention that I am not up on current knowledge of AS disorders and cannot verify most of the symptoms that Picoult has written about. However, she has written a father who might or might not have Aspergers Syndrome, but failed to choose one way or another.) It seems to me that his entire purpose in arriving for the trial is to conveniently make the mother feel guilty for sleeping with her son's lawyer.
- That said - what kind of worried and stressed parent hops into bed with the lawyer representing her ASD child in court for murder? During the case? Did someone think that women wouldn't read this book if there wasn't a romance of some sort in it?
- How come no-one bothered listening to the younger kid? Again, he tried to say something several times, but got overlooked or ignored, and again, like the above two points, it feels more like something that the author needed in order to drive the plot, not something that the characters needed.
- And finally, when a 15 year old runs away from home, why does he run to the father he's seen only a couple of times in his life? Would he even have recognized his father in the airport if his mother hadn't arrived on an earlier flight? And hey, for someone so tense about money, why didn't she just call California and ask her ex to put the boy on the next flight home instead of flying out there herself?
I am very glad that this was a short book, so that it did not take too much time to read. He could easily have cut out about half of the book and not changed the story.
Aaron was a whiny character, who mostly just needed someone to smack him upside the head and explain that the world really isn't about him and maybe he should stuff his ego.
The last couple of chapters validated my dislike of Aaron, because evidently, the author didn't like any of his characters any better than I did.
Which is really too bad. I would have liked to know who actually killed Declan and why. And why on earth no-one had dug him up sooner, seeing as how he'd been buried in a GARDEN. And why both Kitty and Lolly were evidently completely insane.
I respectfully submit that the next time the author is tired of his own characters and story and wishes the quickest exit possible from his own creation, instead of rewriting it to make it more enjoyable, he try one of these plot devices:
“Suddenly, an out of control lorry crashed into the living room, killing all four of them instantly. Declan sat in the corner and grinned. The End”
“Suddenly, pirates landed on the beach and sacked the town. The End.”
Or “Suddenly, Vikings landed on the beach and sacked the town. The End.”
Interesting read. I read most of the book, but skipped Schopenhauer because I'm not brokenhearted and don't need his advice. Really appreciated the grounding in the ancient philosophers - Socrates and Epicurus in particular, as I've not read much of the Western Canon yet. However, the quotations aren't sourced in the book, which makes me suspicious that they've been cherry-picked to death. Obviously, they are cherry-picked, but without being sure what translation they're from or having a way to verify the context, I feel less trusting overall. And I'm uncomfortable with that, because I've developed some respect for de Botton after reading this book, his website, and the School of Life in London with which he is affiliated.
If Sarton had actually been the persona she pretends to in her journal, I would still have not liked her very much. Her writing is beautiful, and the words stand notwithstanding several issues that stick out for me. There are several quotes that do, in fact, describe me - “How Unconscious we are, often, that giving may actually be asking, asking at the very least for attention”, her long discussions on the difficulty women, particularly married women, face in bring their creative self to the world (“It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive” - history supports her here), and “I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience.“
However, I am put off by her temper - early in the book, she throws a screaming tantrum at a friend over a casual comment about the flowers in her house not being perfect. At 58. She confesses that this is typical of her temper.
I am also put off by her treatment of the stray cat on her property. Midway into the book, she tempts the cat in the house... and then seemingly forgets about her, and some months later, mentions that the cat is again outside and in heat. Drove me nuts. I even went back through to see if she'd mentioned letting the cat back OUT of the house somewhere, but no. The cat did not rate enough notice or comment until she began producing kittens.
All in all, it was an interesting read. I admire her phrasing, but she fails in the chief task of any character - tell me why I should care. Make me like you enough to want to know what's going to happen to you.
The book started out with a drumroll of flair and drama - OH NOES! THE NARCISSISTS ARE COMING! - but settled down in the second chapter with some research references and scientific evidence. I am cautiously swayed by the evidence - I'd need a second opinion of the evidence to be more certain. I appreciate that the authors are honest both about the research used and their own biases - in several places, they admit to times and places where they have fallen to the competitive standard in homes or childcare, as well as admitting that research done using only college students as subjects cannot in all fairness be expanded to assume it applies to the population as a whole, particularly when the subject is something tied to age or cohort.
Worth reading if you're interested in psychology or in modern culture. Even more worth reading if you've ever rolled your eyes at the celebrity magazines lining checkout stands all around the US or wondered why the incredibly unreal “reality tv” shows are so popular.
I've been pretty accepting of my introversion since I was young, but in recent years, juggling family, work, friends, etc., has made it difficult for me to set aside the time I need to process my experience.
Helgoe's book provided some useful things to consider, some good suggestions, and some emotional support. Sure, I needed to take a week off of as many activities as I could schedule myself out of to make space to think about her exercises, but any introvert reading this will understand what a blessing it was to have an excuse to do that.
Luckily, this was a short book and a quick read, or I wouldn't have finished it.
I am disappointed in Tyler for this book - although I haven't read any of her other books to compare her research methods. In the author's interview which was printed in the back of my edition, she loftily says she didn't feel the need to talk to anyone who had either adopted a child or who had been adopted into a different culture. Indeed, although she starts her book following the lives of the adopted children, it quickly becomes apparent that she's much more interested in the nonexistant love lives of their grandparents - and could easily have skipped the entire international adoption for all it mattered to the second half of the book.
I didn't expect to enjoy this book at all, but it has a subtle charm. Violet is an intriguing character, and I really felt for her situation most of the way through. She had very little hopes for her life, and what she did have, she lost, but managed to pick up and find her path through anyway. I felt the end was a little unrealistic, but don't mind it so much.
I received this book as a gift. It's not one I would have picked out for myself.
The character, Phedre, is identified as a child as a scion of the goddess Kushiel. This means she is a natural submissive and thus she is raised to be a submissive, BDSM-loving, Mata Hari spy. The book is built around political entrigue, but Phedre does very little to get herself into and out of dangerous situations - her role is to be helpless, gather information for her aristocratic master/pimp, and let the men she entices save her when the going gets rough.
Phedre is not a character I want to be in any way. I could not imagine myself in her place. It took until book 3 before she finally got up the nerve to take action to save herself from danger - and by then, she'd been kidnapped, sold into slavery as a concubine for a primitive warlord, and under threat of death daily.
Highly readable, much talked about. Larsson set out to show men who hated women getting their comeuppance, so there's some very gratuitous scenes of violence to make his point. However, it disturbs me greatly that his idea of the opposite of “hating women” is Blomkvist, a serial womanizer with trouble keeping his pants on. I would have much preferred someone who appreciated the women in his life, respected them, and didn't see them as sex toys first.
This book and the author's lack of research irritated me. A simple Google search instructed me in the anthropological and historical background of Coyote as a Trickster character - and he's not from the Cherokee nations. I'm disgusted that the author couldn't have bothered putting even that much research into this book - this is the type of bad research that gives non-Native Americans a bad name. To be true to her character's background, she should have had Rabbit or Fox appear in Joanne's dreams to coach her through learning to become a Shaman.
Love, love, love this series. I picked them up initially after hearing that Sanderson was to finish the Wheel of Time saga, to find out what his writing style is like. In this book, #2, we return to our characters after they have overthrown the dictator who ruled their land... only to find out that some of the oppressive laws he had instituted had been for a reason, he had been keeping their people safe from an even greater threat. Which is now their problem.
Love the way Sanderson takes a traditional fantasy theme - overthrowing the bad leader and instituting a better one - on its head by showing that the bad leader wasn't as bad as he appeared to be, and that the new leaders are now up a creek with no paddle trying to learn what they need to know and FAST to protect their people from the larger threat.
Also fascinated by Sanderson's ability to play with magical systems... in Elantris, he's got a system based on geography and sigils. In Warbreaker, he's got a system completely based on colors. And in the Mistborn series, it's metals. Very inventive, and I look forward to reading more from Sanderson.
