zilver
???and the earth felt soft and i was above us, could see all of us from above, like i was dead and shattered about the sky with the stars looking down and i saw the way we fanned out to make a moving rope pushing itself through the grey grass???
had a bit of a hard time getting into this. most of the characters except mush didn???t speak to me basically at all until this picked up pace 30-40%. really missed some depth for some of the characters as well, most importantly titular kala, but also for aiofe, joe, aidan. i usually love a book where you???re dropped into a story without much context, which is sort of how the early part of this book feels, but it also felt like it was trying too hard to keep me at a distance?
but i will say! there were also a lot of parts that spoke to me and stuck with me that could have been pretentious but edged enough towards heartfelt.
???you knew then, in the face to face, that it had been wrong to think of aidan as a lost cause, that no one is the simple playing card you reduce them to, (???) that there???s this whole animal being to everyone and that in this animal being there???s a point where you and everyone else in the world can meet???
a BEHEMOTH of a book. truly felt like i was swallowed whole by a whale.
this one is both less emotional but much more sad than the previous books. fitz has lost so much and loses more and more buckkeep, patience, molly, burrich, verity, all he puts in girl-on-a-dragon, his dream for a kind of a life, his drive and his ease. he is also verrrry buffy s6-coded in both a good and painful way.
nighteyes remains a star. may he live forever. and the fool!!!!! the fool<3 they are pack!!!
hard to explain what kind of special crack is in these books. it???s like there???s a sleeper agent in my brain that is triggered when i see the word exy.
jean lacks rage, luckily i have it in abundance (when i catch coach moriyama they will not find his body etc etc). but i also have so much love for all the trojans and our little catlailajeremyjean squad most of all. jean giving out his first hug oh i???ll cry.
ways in which jean moreau is neil josten-coded: says yes anytime anyone asks him if he???s all right (he???s not), throws fits at fall banquets, communicates with people by watching exy games
other tidbits: jean calls andrew a fair-haired rat in narration. kevin makes a chess joke while drunk. agent browning 2/2 failed wpp attempts and OVER it. everyone on team ???get jean a hobby??? like this man is a sims expansion pack.
ALSO i cannot believe that the ravens just tried to straight up MURDER at least 3 foxes ON LIVE TV within FIVE minutes of starting their first game of the season. they are insane. okay that???s it i???m done
nighteyes ????????????????
i was always fond of kettricken and verity and burrich but this book made me even more so. it???s so lovely to read a slow paced book (and it really is quite slow) that still feels so intentional. as the story expands and i grow more familiar with it, it feels like a warm (painful) blanket
REALLY enjoyed this. exactly what i wanted when i decided i wanted to get into a big, all-enveloping fantasy series. the first half is pretty slow going but sets the tone so well and gives you so much insight into the world and characters, so when we get to the second half it just gets to be a rollercoaster. ily fitz ily fool ily nosy. can???t wait to get to the next one
second read 5 made me cryfirst read 4.5 the cold. the small town. the community. their values. it???s all so nebulous and strangely tangible at the same time. incredibly well written little novella. should???ve probably read this while it was snowing closer to christmas, but i did the next best thing and read it this afternoon as it was pouring outside.
i love this little book. i'd say it's a big expansion on her short time travel story mr. thursday (fun one to read ahead of this! it introduces a bit of the world and there's a cute little reference to it in the novel) and a small extension of the glass hotel, in the sense that it feels like this one is working through some things that maybe didn't fit into that novel. this book is like... one counterlife frame away from that world.
it's all very emily, which is to say that i think it's lovely.
this one's for my dad because “five stars needs an explanation” and maybe he's right sometimes and this book at least deserves one.
this book is very [trying to find a word that isn't beautiful or chilling or sad or harrowing or wondrous but somehow all those words together]. it's somehow detached and also extremely humanised. i think you can feel the empathy the author has for her characters, for the world that they are made to live in, even if the narrator has a hard time verbalising that empathy herself. even has a hard time understanding that what she feels is empathy, and understanding.
and then at the end, it wraps up inevitably, in a way that makes you want to restart it immediately to re-read the beginning with an understanding you didn't have before.
my issues with this book were i think mostly my issues and to do with my enjoyment, not the quality of the book itself.
i was actually recommended this book because of the particular narrative structure, which is so real! i love strange story structures. and the idea of one of the points of view in the story being from the sickness within a body is so! fascinating! but for some reason the idea of the cancer being an actively and “consciously” malicious entity - deriving joy from destroying someone from the inside out and seeing the body's attempts to stop it - didn't vibe with me. i can see how it might hit for other people, but i think it would've actually hit me more emotionally if it had been a neutral entity that is just... happening to the body.
first page of this is a masterclass in storytelling, so compelling. i'll have to chew more on the final takeaway but i really liked the way the book feels like an extended thought experiment. to me it doesn't feel like a matter of “agreeing” with the premise or not. i don't know if ballard does and it doesn't matter to me. i really liked the exploration aspect of it.
ballard's language is very dense - there's a lot packed in every sentence. for a barely 200-page book it's not a particularly fast read, but that's okay because you want to spend time with the words. i see people's complaints about there not being enough motivation for the characters but in such a “concept-book” i actually don't mind it and might prefer just fully going along with the restrained narration. in a way it feels fitting, that there is very little motivation except a drive that the characters themselves don't really understand (or just think they do). same goes for the “lack of realism”. feel like if you're going into this expecting it to be fully realistic you won't have a good time indeed. but if you're willing to enter the world of the high-rise and understand that it is the only world there is for the time being this is very captivating read.
listen. i LOVED the kingdoms. but this was a train wreck i couldn't look away from. i finished it but i had to keep stopping and looking into the distance and saying “what” to myself.
i simply do not understand why natasha pulley and the multitudes of people who must have read this before it was published never sat down and thought: if this is a book that is extremely reliant on one specific analogy and it is a pretty all-encompassing, essential one, maybe... the analogy... should be good... and not, in fact, terrible.
feel kinda speechless. read the top reviews of this for people who have valiantly put into detail why so much of the execution of this book is SO messy. but wow. just wow.
arton daghev im sorry for thinking you were named anton for most of the book.
both more philosophical and more tangible (to me) than the spider book (n??e children of time). the narration felt so vibrant and urgent and alive. though honestly, the whole thing felt urgent and a lot more present than we maybe would like to believe. i think part of the cleverness actually lies in the way tchaikovsky never goes into detail about the mandate, and instead elects to tell us about the effects it has on the people opposing it. and how opposing it affects them. clever and apt and really empathetic.
not my fav emily henry, but still good! i liked the last 25% the most. the evil awful exes were honestly a bit comical but not in a good way. and up until that last 25% and i found daphne just not very compelling as a protagonist. or maybe im just still heart achey about happy place which is my fav emily henry so far, and nothing has quite compared.
lost me for a bit halfway through when the things i expected to happen kept not happening - which, while also a good, interesting things, also meant things i really WANTED to read about weren???t happening either. but it got me back at the end. ily spiders (not in my house though. only when you???re cat-sized and intelligent and don???t want to eat me)
this took me SO long to finish. i think this is a “it's not you, it's me” but oh boy did i have a rough time with this one. and not even because it's pretty gruesome, but mostly because the narrative keeps you at such a distance. it made it really hard to feel invested at all for the longest time, combined with the fact that despite the characters moving all the time, the story has very little forward momentum. i think it probably didn't help my experience that i didn't have time to really sit with it for longer periods.
despite not really doing it for me, mccarthy's style did really strike me as very distinctive and remarkable. will definitely read something else from him to see how that lands.