Tyler Kieft
I'm not a huge fan of Stephen King's writing I guess...so mediocre. And I didn't like the style of the book, with all the constant random thoughts, although I appreciate what he was trying to do. Still, the concept is ambitious, even if it wasn't handled super skillfully. And there are some great lines in here. But the movie was far better.
I did not expect to like this book QUITE this much. Although very firmly a Victorian novel, with all the morals, customs, religiosity, language, and tone that comes along with that, it reads shockingly modern and progressive. Don't get me wrong - I love the overwrought descriptions and emotions, sometimes bordering on ridiculousness, that come with the genre, I was just surprised that we could also have something that felt so fresh.
I loved Jane's character - you're never really quite sure what she is going to do or how she is going to show up in a scene - whether she will be meek and humble, or fiery and sarcastic. And the plot was quite a ride! At the end, I found myself tearing up at Charlotte Brontë's description of love....she really was quite a talented writer. I also feel like this book spoke to me with where I'm at in my life right now. For much of the novel, Jane doesn't really know what she wants - torn between many possible outcomes, just trying to live according to her morals and make herself useful. The novel really makes us care for these characters, flawed as they all are.
It was good, especially the first part of the book. If I hadn't worked at Facebook, I'd probably have rated it four or five stars, but so much of this I've already learned. And what I was hoping to get out of the book, which was the sections about senior management, she didn't really cover the layers of positions in upper management at large companies (because she's writing about smaller companies and she doesn't have the experience). It went from managing managers straight to CTO. Also, some parts of the book felt like a collection of experiences, rather than a coherent narrative, it kinda jumped around.
What an ending! A cliffhanger for the next installment, without being too dramatic or cheesy.
I liked this book more and more as it went on, but I still had trouble understanding why it got the praise that it did. The writing was so clinical and detached, I felt almost nothing while reading and I thought the translation was awkward and poor. Secondary and tertiary characters failed to become real to me, they were all just a procession of names, very few who retained any uniqueness to their personalities in my mind. The lack of large-scale structure to the book made it feel like it was just the same story over and over, conflict, then reuniting, and the different scenes all blended together.
I think I liked the last 100 pages or so because the plot (if you could call it that) became more linear, but also because it was so easy to identify the flawed adolescent reasoning behind many of Elena's bad decisions, whereas I found it tougher to understand and criticize the narrator's younger self, as it was more abstract to me.
I also wonder how much of this I didn't identify with because I'm a man? Wish I had gotten to go to the book club for this to hear everyone's thoughts :/
Tough book to read - very dense, lots of characters. I only got into this once I started allotting much more time to my reading sessions. I liked it by the end, but didn't love it. The writing style was problematic for me, I never really got used to Cromwell being “He” and would constantly need to re-read passages realizing I had interpreted them as coming from the wrong character. I also wish I had been a little bit more familiar with this period of British history before reading. I've heard that the next book in the series is better; I guess the fact that I want to read it is a sign that this captured my interest somewhat.
This may be the most intimate, the most personal novel I've ever read in my life. Emotional intimacy, literary intimacy. I cannot begin to describe how much I connect with this book, this story, these characters, the writing - almost everything here feels like it was drawn straight from the tapestry of my deepest memories, feelings, desires. Things I didn't even think it was possible to write in words.
Above all, this is a book about time and how precious it is, how you will never get it back and it should never be squandered. And time's non-linearity: a few months, a week, or just one moment can define and capture a life. In that sense, it is universal.
I wonder what it would have been like to read this before watching the movie. I'm not sad I experienced the movie first, just curious. I was worried the book would ruin the movie for me, but they complement each other. I've never seen a movie capture the essence of a book so well. The acting was tremendous - in that looks and facial expressions were able to communicate the rich inner monologue of the novel. If anything, I actually think the movie was stronger than the book. They diverge at the end; and the movie is a tighter story. The only part of the novel I didn't love was the Rome scene, but I appreciated the epilogue that wasn't in the movie.
Many things became more apparent, but the most meaningful to me is the title “Call Me By Your Name”, becomes so much deeper when you read the book. It's not just about a name, Elio describes himself and Oliver becoming so close, sharing everything, that they literally became each other.
The ending is so cutting - the pain, the regret, that never really went away. Regret that life that is not endless and that decisions matter. “If not later, when?”
A courageous memoir, but deeply flawed. The jumbled structure, which in Part I was a back and forth, and in Part II started to move in circles, made the book seem both longer than necessary and unnecessarily confusing. And his writing style, so overly descriptive, so much useless prose obscuring the words that actually matter.
Most memoirs are rich in events and scenes, this one took place in the author's head more than anywhere else. He ruminates constantly on his relationship with God, and the clash between his upbringing and the way he felt as a young adult. While sometimes this was moving, and actually described feelings I could identify with, at other times it felt repetitive and overwrought. I wish the whole book had been written more in the plain style of the epilogue.
The movie (which wasn't perfect either) was actually much better than the book, I felt, with all these jumbled events (diary entries?) coalesced into a narrative that was easier to follow.
My favorite part was perhaps the passages where he described coming to terms with himself, loving himself. Worried that if he were to change, he would lose the parts of himself he actually realized he loved. Not wanting ex-gay therapy to “erase” his personality. That was such a powerful message.
Thanks to the author for his courage in writing down and trying to make sense of such painful memories. I hope he was able to eventually work through them with his parents.
I appreciate what Zadie Smith was trying to do here, but it just didn't work for me. It's her first novel, and it shows. The first section is too long, the ending feels contrived and unsatisfying, and there are a lot of threads left dangling.
I hated the tone of the narration. It seems like many modern authors are trying their hardest to be “clever” and it's really annoying to me. Sometimes it was funny, but most of the time
My biggest issue, though, is with the characters. They're so one-dimensional! Chess pieces that she maneuvers into position. Caricatures. Megaphones for the author's views. Especially Joyce Chalfens. The liberal self-loathing was a little bit much for me here. I'd like to see the characters treated much more sympathetically, don't just make us laugh at them and feel superior, help us understand where they're coming from.
The best part of this book was understanding how different immigrant generations are pulled in different directions by all the forces in their lives.
A friend at book club mentioned that this was like a lesser version of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
One of the best books I've ever read in my life. Reading this was transformational; I doubt I'll ever look at the world the same way ever again. I'm already feeling slightly less affinity for liberals and understanding traditional conservative thinking quite a bit more (i.e. I'm feeling less partisan). Thinking about today's political issues from the lens of moral matrices is a new, and rewarding experience. I would recommend this to anyone trying to make sense of today's America.
I can't believe I finished this. Around page 200 or so I thought I was going to quit. But after that I got into it and it was rolling along for a while. Finished the last 60% or so in 5 days. Tough book. Lots to think about here. Didn't especially love it. But I can kinda see why it's such a masterpiece, the more factual descriptions of whaling were so well presented! Sometimes they got a bit much though, I was always glad to return to the narrative section.
I found myself thinking about my own mortality, my own smallness, a lot while reading this book. Not while reading it, but going to bed at night and such. At first I thought it was unconnected with the book, but then I realized it wasn't: this book made me feel a deep sense of existential foreboding, dread, and mortality. One that won't go away for a while. And I suppose any book that can do that is quite an achievement.
I can't believe so much of the book was about the search for Moby Dick, only a small portion at the end devoted to what happened when Ahab found him. Very different than I thought it was going to go.
Conquered the white whale!
So proud to have made it through book 2 of this epic, and now I can definitively say that I want to keep going until the end. Proust has such broad insights into universal, yet mostly unarticulated aspects of the human condition – as in Swann's way, so many small things he wrote about triggered my own memories of past relationships.
Perhaps the theme I identified with the most is Marcel's “search for truth/ beauty” - the reason he goes to see La Berma, the cathedral at Balbec, etc. and is always disappointed once he gets there. It seems that nothing ever lives up to the way someone else describes it. Yet even after seeing it and being disappointed, if someone explains what he was supposed to have experienced, he is able to reappraise and reappreciate what he saw. I've felt this way many, many times in my life and I often wonder how many of my pastimes - travel, arts, entertainment - can be attributed to searching for pure truth?
Hopefully I'll remember what happened here when I go on to read [b:The Guermantes Way 18798 The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3) Marcel Proust https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386923257s/18798.jpg 40790576]. There are two parts here: At Mme Swann's, and Place-Names: The Place. I want to make some notes here to refresh my memory once the time comes.
The novel starts with a dinner w/ the Marquis de Norpois, and the visit to see La Berma, afterward spending the majority of the time describing the narrator falling into and out of love (childishly, naively) with Gilberte. He chooses to access her through her parents, who he idolizes, each in different ways, which brings about the downfall of the relationship. Much of this part is lived in Marcel's head, over-analyzing and creating stories of what she must be thinking about him, etc.
He then scoots off to Balbec for the summer, where we get more description of travel's effect on the mind, develops relationships with Mme de Villeparisis and Robert de Saint Loup, and then ignores them once he has met the “little gang” of girls (via the painter Elstir's introduction). He understands much more about love at this point, how to show interest by feigning disinterest, rather than going straight at it.
Important new characters: Elstir (the painter), the gay M de Charlus (well, he was in Swann's Way but just briefly), Albertine, Mme de Villeparisis (a member of the Guermantes clan), and the charming, lovable Robert de Saint Loup.
Four stars because it just didn't feel quite as tight and memorable as Swann's Way. Onward!
Hrm, this was good, another really quick read (blasted through all 500 pages while on my vacation in Norway). But, having just finished “The Silkworm”, I would rate this slightly lower, maybe 3.5 stars. Whereas the last book focused mostly on the case, this one focused mostly on Robin and Strike, their back stories and their relationship. I'm not sure if that was a good thing or not. While I liked learning more about them, I thought it came at the expense of the interestingness of the case. Plus, the writing felt really forced. The characters kept alluding to their supposed feelings for each other as asides, which didn't fit in with the rest of the storyline, it felt abrupt like it was shoved in there after the fact.
Also, I felt the “case” (if you can call it that) was less interesting in this novel. We didn't get to meet any of the suspects in person until halfway through the book or more, which really weakened the impact. Also, because of the nature of the case and the plot, all three of the suspects were similar in build and personality, which made it hard to keep them apart in my mind.
The novel ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, excited to see where the next one heads! It's been a while since I've read two books of a series back to back, it felt good!
After how much I liked the first book in this series, I expected this to be a slam dunk, and I was disappointed that it wasn't. I think this may have been because I never really got into the book - every time I picked it up for a (short) reading session, I felt like I was starting over from zero. Why was this? The characters were completely, totally unmemorable for me. Except for Magnifico, the clown, I had trouble remembering who was who. Many reviews also called this out, but said it was better than the first book, since there were only two major episodes here, vs. five for the first book, but I actually felt that made it worse. Whereas for the first book I was able to plow through the tighter narrative of the shorter stories quicker, this book dragged on, and I would often jump back into the middle of the book having no clue where I was. Surprisingly, after a long slog, the end was good (although I sorta guessed the twist) and I felt that I wanted to continue on in the series, so I'll try to be better about really immersing myself when I read the next installment.
