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1476746583
| 9781476746586
| 1476746583
| 4.31
| 1,908,816
| May 06, 2014
| May 06, 2014
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really liked it
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I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajam
I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajamascough*) or they’re an excuse to sugar-coat the United States military as a bunch of good-hearted Captain Americas heroically defeating the Nazis and saving the world from evil (whenever you read an overly-sentimental portrayal of the Allies in WWII, just remember that as this was occurring, the United States was imprisoning their own citizens in internment camps and the French government was selling out its Jewish citizens to the Nazis. I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis were not the absolute personification of evil, I’m just pointing out that nobody’s hands are clean. Remember Tim O’Brien’s words: there is no such thing as a moral war story.) But at the same time, I also hate stuff like The Reader, where authors try to be like bUt WhAt iF tHe NaZis WeRe VicTiMs ToO? (if you ever feel like absolutely ruining your afternoon, look up the “concentration camp prisoner falls in love with a guard” romance subgenre) Basically, I think WWII was a real shitty period of history and is too fraught with moral minefields to be the setting for whatever Deeper Point an author is trying to make. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I first started hearing about All the Light We Cannot See and how great it was, I was wary for all of the above reasons, and I put off reading the book for a long time. But then I finally decided to look it up, and see what everyone was talking about. Doerr’s first good move was narrowing the scope of his book, and focusing on a small group of people – All the Light We Cannot See is definitely character-driven, not plot-driven. We have Marie-Laure, who develops blindness at a young age; and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Then we have Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany who’s recruited at a young age by the Nazi party for his mechanical and mathematical talents; and Volkheimer, a Nazi official hunting a rare gemstone held in the museum where Marie-Laure’s father works. The structure of the book is great, starting a few years into the German occupation of France, in the town of St. Malo right after the Allies have bombed it – and Marie-Laure, Werner, and Volkheimer are all in different parts of the city, each on their own separate mission. Then Doerr takes us back, giving us the backstories of each main character and working towards the moment when all of their paths will cross in the bombed-out city. Doerr still falls into a few of the traps that authors writing in the WWII genre tend to fall into – the bad people are very bad, the good people are very good, and sometimes Marie-Laure’s blindness strays a little too close to “It’s a metaphor for society’s blindness territory. But All the Light We Cannot See sneaks up on you. For most of the book, you’re enjoying a detailed, well-written, but ultimately run-of-the-mill WWII historical fiction. But then, around the time the separate characters are drawing closer to each other and the tension is ramping up, it becomes impossible to tear yourself away, and suddenly you’re submerged in the beauty and the tragedy of these characters and their stories. I’m still not a fan of WWII fiction, but this book is a good argument in its favor. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2017
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not set
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Nov 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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3.57
| 58,435
| Apr 30, 2009
| May 04, 2010
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it was ok
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My main problem with this book was that I went into it thinking it was going to be another kind of story. I was hoping for something more along the li
My main problem with this book was that I went into it thinking it was going to be another kind of story. I was hoping for something more along the lines of The Haunting of Hill House, where you start out with that atmospheric creepiness and weird events that you can kind of rationalize, and then the tension slowly amps up until you realize that something is very, very wrong with the house. The Little Stranger has a lot of the first part, but too little of the second. My other problem is that the only other Sarah Waters book I’ve read is Fingersmith, which features approximately a thousand plot twists. So as I read The Little Stranger, I keep waiting breathlessly for The Twist, only to be deeply let down. It’s definitely suspenseful, and Waters keeps you guessing until the end about the exact nature of what’s going on at Hundreds Hall, but if you go into this expecting the kind of twists and revelations we got in Fingersmith, you’re going to be disappointed. I know that this book fails as a haunted house story because the most upsetting part, for me, didn’t involve haunting-related events at all. It was the part where (no spoilers) a dog has to be put down, and I actually had to skip ahead in the audiobook because I didn’t want to cry on the train. It’s well-written and definitely brings out the emotions, but it has nothing to do with the ghosts that might or might not be wandering around Hundreds Hall. (To be fair, this is probably more of a Me Problem. This is the kind of psycho I am: I can listen to a scene where a dog literally(view spoiler)[ rips a child’s face off (hide spoiler)] and I’m still like NOBODY BETTER HURT THAT DOG) If you like very, very, VERY subtle ghost stories (so subtle, in fact, that you can convincingly argue that this is a ghost story without a ghost), then The Little Stranger is for you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2018
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Nov 06, 2018
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Paperback
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0007119305
| 9780007119301
| 0007119305
| 4.02
| 79,674
| Feb 1932
| 2001
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did not like it
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Bless my library and its sporadically reliable audiobook collection. I might be in the third month of waiting for my turn to download The Glass Castle
Bless my library and its sporadically reliable audiobook collection. I might be in the third month of waiting for my turn to download The Glass Castle, but at least I can always count on there being at least one Agatha Christie mystery to tide me over while I wait. I chose Peril at End House because its premise sounded the most promising: while on vacation on the coast of England, Hercule Poirot meets Magdala “Nick” Buckly, an heiress who’s had a handful of miraculous and suspicious brushes with death. Poirot suspects that someone is trying to kill Nick, and agrees to take her case. Along for the ride is the closest thing to a Watson Poirot will ever have (Poirot’s ridiculous ego would never allow him to fully share cases and credit the way Sherlock does with Watson), Hastings. Having read a few mysteries like this one, where Poirot has a sort-of assistant on the case, I think I prefer them over the solo Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie sometimes falls into the bad mystery novel trap of having her detective withhold information from other characters (and, therefore, the reader) in order to draw out the suspense for a few more chapters. Poirot doesn’t like to explain his thought process during an investigation, preferring to do the usual theatrical Accusations in the Parlor routine at the end of the book, so it’s helpful that he has Hastings following him around and occasionally asking clarifying questions about his process. I like mystery stories where the reader can feel like they’re solving the case alongside the detective, and even though Poirot does save some big bombshells for the final reveal, there’s at least a little transparency here. That being said, the mystery definitely isn’t as satisfying as some of Christie’s greatest hits. There’s a subplot involving an Australian couple renting a house on Nick’s land, and it honestly felt more like padding than anything else. (Also Christie does a very clumsy and very un-Christie-like thing early in the novel where she has Poirot remark that, hmm, that couple sure seems suspicious. So then I was suspicious of them for the rest of the book, and it turned out that (view spoiler)[yes, they were indeed Up To Something the whole time, which I never would have noticed if Christie hadn’t drawn my attention to it in the first place (hide spoiler)]). Also there’s a cocaine subplot, because no story of rich bored Bright Young Things would be complete without some cocaine floating around. The subplot doesn’t amount to much, which was frustrating for me – like, jeez Agatha, if you’re gonna do a cocaine smuggling subplot, do a cocaine smuggling subplot. Go big or go home. Basically, everything in this book was half-assed. There’s cocaine, abusive husbands, con artists, sketchy servants, poisonings – and none of these plots really get the attention they deserve. The whole book, ultimately, felt very rushed, like Christie was in a hurry to just get to the end and cash her check. Also, Poirot strays just a little too far into Pompous Asshole territory in this one, and I did not care for that. It’s been a while since I read a Hercule Poirot mystery (I re-read Murder on the Orient Express recently, but that was mainly to get the taste of that god-awful Kenneth Brannaugh version out of my memory), and I knew, going into this, that I’d always preferred Poirot over Miss Marple. But, having finished Peril at End House, I’m having a hard time remembering why. Poirot is pretty downright insufferable in this one, and also shows an unpleasantly cruel streak that I don’t remember seeing before. Hastings mentions to another character at one point that actually, Poirot has had plenty of failed case, including one involving a box of chocolates, and he tells the other character that Poirot has told him that if his ego ever gets too big, all Hastings has to do is say “chocolate box” and Poirot will remember to be humble. So honestly, it’s a wonder that Hastings isn’t shouting CHOCOLATE BOX at Poirot every other page, because his ego is out of control in this one. Like, at one point he decides that Nick, who has survived multiple attempts on her life, is perfectly safe thanks to the precautions that Poirot has set up, and he and Hastings are free to hop off to London for a few days to take a break. So of course while they’re gone, someone tries to poison Nick, and Poirot is like, “Oh la la, Hastings, why did I leave? Why did I leave?” like someone else convinced him to do it. Chocolate box, Hercule. And in possibly his worst moment in any Christie book I’ve read so far, Poirot allows the culprit (view spoiler)[to commit suicide after being caught. So the person gets caught and leaves the room (they killed somebody but whatevs, nobody needs to like restrain them or call the police or anything, this is England and we don’t make a fuss about murder, dammit) and then another character is like, my god! They have enough cocaine with them to overdose! And Poirot basically shrugs and does nothing to stop it. (hide spoiler)] All I could think about was the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, when the criminal that Peter Wimsey caught is scheduled to be hanged. The culprit did it, stood trial, and is being appropriately punished, but Peter is still so upset by the role he played in sending this person to their death that he has to be consoled by his wife. I loved that scene, because it brought up an element of detective fiction that often gets glossed over – at the end of the day, a detective’s job is to send someone to jail, and sometimes to their execution. This takes an emotional toll on the detective, as it should. Anyway, Hercule is like the polar opposite of that – solving mysteries has no human element whatsoever to him; they’re purely logic puzzles that he does first and foremost for his own amusement. And I don’t find that nearly as charming as I used to. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2018
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Oct 31, 2018
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Paperback
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0316467065
| 9780316403436
| 0316403431
| 3.16
| 70,620
| Oct 04, 2016
| Oct 04, 2016
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it was ok
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“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board ga
“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.” Today Will be Different is, I think, an improvement on Maria Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We have to same type of lead character – a Portland housewife with some form of anxiety/manic-depressive/bipolar disorder who is doing the best she can in strange and stressful circumstances. But where Bernadette started to tear at the seams thanks to its unsustainable format of “everything in the book is a letter or email written by one of the characters”, Today Will Be Different has a much more straightforward narration – in this one, we’re simply following the title character through one very strange, very stressful day in her life. The action starts when Eleanor visits her husband’s office and learns two things: first, her husband has not been to work in over a week; and the office staff thinks that she’s already aware of this. From then on, Eleanor has one mission: find her husband, and find out what he’s been doing while she assumed he was at work. Along the way she gets into what I’ll refer to as sidequests, involving her son, their dog, Eleanor’s poetry teacher, and a former friend. The action clips along at a quick and engaging pace, and Eleanor’s particular brand of manic, forced cheeriness despite an impending breakdown makes her a delightful and very relatable narrator. (Bonus points to the audiobook reader, who delivers Eleanor’s narration in a cadence that reminded me a lot of Maria Bamford’s standup. Less awesome is the way she voices Eleanor’s son, giving the kid an adnoid-stuffed whine of a voice that made me wonder why Eleanor doesn’t just scream at him to shut up every time he bleats out another petulant MOOOOOOOMMMMMM.) The only reason this book loses points is, I freely admit, a stupid and petty reason. But I maintain that it’s justified. Semi spoilers (in that they describe what happens at the end of the book but won’t ruin the central mystery of the story) to follow: (view spoiler)[ So for most of Eleanor’s trek across the city, she’s accompanied by her son and their dog. Towards the end, as the action is ramping up and Eleanor is becoming more frantic in her search, she has to duck into a Home Depot, and leaves the dog tied up outside. She completes her errand, leaves the store, and the story continues. Here’s the problem: she never collects the dog. At first, as the story just kept going with no mention of the dog, I wondered if it had been an honest mistake. Had Semple’s narration just skipped the bit where Eleanor gets the dog outside the store, I wondered? Is that something an editor let slip, or did Semple just assume that we’d understand that Eleanor has the dog and it doesn’t need to be spelled out? But the story barreled on, and I realized: yep, that dog is definitely still tied up outside Home Depot, and I think Maria Semple was counting on me being so wrapped up in the story that I wouldn’t remember the dog until the moment the characters realize that he’d been forgotten at the store. LOL, Semple, you underestimate me and my weird infantile relationship with animals in fiction. I always notice the dog, and am hyper-attuned to any danger the dog might be in. So for the last couple chapters of the book, when I should have been paying attention to the story and its conclusion, I was unable to focus. I distinctly remember listening to the audiobook in my car and not even being able to process the narration because I was shouting out loud like a lunatic YOU FORGOT THE DOG SOMEBODY GO BACK AND GET THE GODDAMN DOG. (Don’t worry, they do eventually remember the dog, and when they go back to the store, he’s sitting right where they left him. Because he’s a good boy. But it’s literally the last line in the book and was NOT WORTH all the stress it put me through.) (hide spoiler)] Anyway, my point is that the entire ending of the book was completely ruined by what I thought was an accidentally dropped plot point, and it was such a distraction that I can’t really tell you exactly what happens at the end of Today Will Be Different. Four stars for the main story, one star for that terribly-executed conclusion. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2017
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Oct 31, 2018
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Hardcover
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1416553649
| 9781416553649
| 1416553649
| 3.88
| 105,735
| Nov 20, 2007
| Nov 20, 2007
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really liked it
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Is it an endorsement to say that this is the most unfunny comedy memoir I’ve ever read? In my (otherwise glowing) review for Amy Poehler’s Yes Please,
Is it an endorsement to say that this is the most unfunny comedy memoir I’ve ever read? In my (otherwise glowing) review for Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, I wrote about how the book is not really about comedy, in that Poehler never spent much time getting into the nitty-gritty of how she plans her characters, and all the work that goes into each one. This seems to be a common theme in the comedy memoirs I’ve read so far – everyone seems reluctant to discuss the work that goes into being funny, or to even acknowledge that being funny takes effort. It’s fine for comedians to spend hefty amounts of space in their memoirs talking about how hard they worked to become successful – all the years of working crappy clubs, having no money, and otherwise working long, thankless hours to eventually get where they are – but when it comes to discussing how they planned and reworked a set, there seems to be a reluctance to get into too much technical detail. Being a professional comedian is kind of like being a professional magician: it’s considered against the rules to show how the tricks are really done. And maybe another reason this isn’t done – talking about the work that goes into being funny is, inherently, not funny at all. So it’s actually very refreshing to read Born Standing Up, a deeply impersonal, deeply straight-faced comedy memoir that shows us exactly how much work and conscious effort went into creating the persona of “Steve Martin, comedian.” It’s like no other memoir I’ve ever read. At first, Martin adheres to the established memoir formula by taking us through his childhood. But the purpose of this is mainly to show how he got an early start as a performer by working as a salesman at Disney World, and also that he wasn’t originally interested in comedy and wanted instead to be a magician. He gives us some stories of an unhappy home life, and then reveals his real reasons for briefly getting so personal: after telling a story of how his father would fly into unexpected, violent rages, Martin writes (quote will not be exact, as I listened to this as an audiobook), “I’ve heard it said that a chaotic childhood prepares one for a life in comedy. I tell you this story about my father so you know that I am very qualified to be a comedian.” Read aloud by Martin in his soft-spoken, matter-of-face voice, the line is a verbal gut-punch. That’s about as close as we get to learning anything about Martin’s personal life until the very end, when he talks about his mother’s death. Other than that, Born Standing Up is entirely about the work. Everything that Martin writes about his standup career was completely new to me, since I only know him from his movies (pretty sure my first exposure to Steve Martin was when he played the waiter in The Muppet Movie, and even back then I could recognize something genius about him). So it was fascinating to me to read about the progression from magician to comedian – back when Martin was starting out, there weren’t places solely for performing comedy acts, so he was doing his magic act alongside comedians and musicians, allowing him to incorporate comedy into his routine, and eventually become a comedian who did magic, instead of the other way around. And he thoroughly details how we went about developing his standup persona, eventually settling on playing a guy who is totally unfunny but is convinced that he’s killing it, and how he would push to see how long he could keep a bit going until the audience was laughing but didn’t even know what was funny. It’s very interesting (and almost intimate) how Martin isn’t afraid to show how he thoughtfully and deliberately worked at his comedy, rather than letting us believe that being funny is effortless. And good for him, because that’s a dangerous myth that’s in dire need of dispelling. (I have a friend who occasionally does open-mic nights at comedy clubs, and having seen a few of those shows, let me tell you: the number of mediocre white boys who think they can get a little tipsy and then go up onstage and just, like, wing it, is too damn many.) One of the best details is when he tells us how he reworked his routine of observational comedy to make himself the focus of the stories – instead of “a guy walks into a bar” it became “I walked into a bar.” Martin says he did this because “I didn’t want audiences to think other people were crazy. I wanted them to think I was crazy.” It’s a short book – Martin admits that he’s a very private person, so of course he’s not going to bare everything to us. But the little bit of Martin’s psyche that he’s allowed us to look at is fascinating and honest, and reveals Steve Martin as a deeply thoughtful, hardworking, and brilliant artist. (Shopgirl still sucks, but nobody’s perfect.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
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Oct 2018
|
Oct 23, 2018
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0399532870
| 9780399532870
| 0399532870
| 4.16
| 1,997
| 2007
| Nov 06, 2007
|
really liked it
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“Anyone who has spent any time pondering the origins of the Cocktail – be it for the months or years it takes to write a book or the minutes or second
“Anyone who has spent any time pondering the origins of the Cocktail – be it for the months or years it takes to write a book or the minutes or seconds it takes to internalize a Dry Martini – will agree that it’s a quintessentially American contraption. How could it be anything but? It’s quick, direct, and vigorous. It’s flashy and a little bit vulgar. It induces an unreflective overconfidence. It’s democratic, forcing the finest liquors to rub elbows with ingredients of far more humble stamp. It’s profligate with natural resources (think of all the electricity generated to make the ice that gets used for ten seconds and then discarded). In short, it rocks.” Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent was the first in-depth exploration of that time period that I ever read, and it showed me how passing one simple law created a ripple effect that extended much further than I’d ever imagined (to give just one example, Prohibition and women’s suffrage are way more closely linked than you might expect, and we probably couldn’t have had one without the other). Drinking culture throughout history is history, and it’s really interesting for me to learn how and why people drank the way they did at certain points in time. Add that to the fact that the former manager at my job kept a reprint of a 1917 bartender’s manual behind the bar for the staff to look through, and I was itching to read some more cocktail history. Jim Meehan’s Meehan’s Bartender Manual discussed David Wondrich’s book at length, so I decided that I needed to read that next. Trying to tackle the history of the cocktail in America is a tall order, to say the least, so Wondrich centers his book on one historicial, almost legendary bartender named Jerry Thomas, and uses his journey across the bars of America as the focal point to explore the history of drinking in America, from the colonies in the 18th century to Prohibition. If nothing else, you have to appreciate the amount of research that went into this book, and how difficult it must have been. Many, many drink recipes are lost to history because they were never written down, or the recipes have disappeared, or the formula went through so many different rewrites that we have no idea what the original looked like. So much of what went on in the saloons and hotel bars of early America was not being recorded in any way, so there are huge gaps in our knowledge. (Apparently old-timey bartenders had a way of mixing drinks where they would rapidly throw the liquor back and forth between two glasses, and even though it was such common practice that it’s documented in multiple sources, modern bartenders can’t figure out how it was done). Also, bartenders have always and will always be professional bullshitters, so any story about the origin of a particular drink is almost certainly a total fabrication. (True story: a bartender once tried to tell me that the Bloody Mary is named for Queen Mary I of England, because vodka and tomato juice was her favorite drink, and it would take me another review just to unpack all the things wrong with that statement). To research the history of a cocktail, Wondrich would try to find the first written account of the drink – usually in a newspaper article or cocktail manual – and then search other newspaper and magazine articles to see if the drink had been mentioned anywhere else, and when. He also had to do a lot of fact-checking when it came to bar manuals, because a lot of them were thrown together quickly to make an easy buck, and used recipes that were modified or straight-up copied from other books. Professional bullshitters, remember. That being said, the book is so in-depth and the research is so thorough that it gets repetitive, fast. My eyes started to glaze over by the time I was reading the recipe for the fifth historical variation of a Manhattan, and I still could not tell you the difference between a daisy and a sling. What saves the book from being a total slog is, first, the stories Wondrich tells are just plain great – bartenders are, by and large, very interesting people, and this has been true since humans first discovered that drinking fermented grain water made parties way more fun. And Wondrich’s writing is clear and engaging, full of great lines like this that just sing: “One must assume that Thomas took up his proper station behind the bar and set to doling out horns of panther sweat to the begrimed and hairy multitudes.” And, talking about the Floradora cocktail: “If ever there was a show that demanded to be commemorated with a drink, and preferably a fragrant, slightly silly one that hits like a roll of quarters in a clutch purse, it was this one.” Definitely recommended for cocktail geeks, professional and aspiring mixologists, or just anyone who wants to learn how to mix some really good old-school drinks. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2018
|
Oct 10, 2018
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0316126063
| 9780316126069
| 0316126063
| 4.25
| 20,562
| Oct 03, 2017
| Oct 03, 2017
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liked it
|
I had kind of a weird experience with this one. I went into Before the Devil Breaks You assuming that it was the final installment in the series, and
I had kind of a weird experience with this one. I went into Before the Devil Breaks You assuming that it was the final installment in the series, and so I spent most of the book expecting everything to be wrapped up neatly by the end, or at least for all the stories to be brought to a satisfying conclusion. So imagine my horror when I got to the end of the book and realized, nope, it’s not over, and now I have to wait for the next one to find out what happens to everyone (as of the posting of this review, the release date for so-far-unnamed Book 4 is spring 2020. Which frankly feels like a million years away.) Anyway, this is all a long-winded way to say that Before the Devil Breaks You is primarily concerned with setting up the action for Book 4. Looking back on it, I realize with some disappointment that nothing really happens in this one. Obviously there are lots of ghost battles and confrontations and revelations, but there’s something insubstantial about all of it when you know that everything that happens is just killing time until the next book. Yes, we get more answers about Project Buffalo and the Man in the Stovepipe Hat, but ultimately, Before the Devil Breaks You is just 550 pages of setup for the finale. Not that it isn’t enjoyable – all of the Diviners remain charming and delightful, and I even found myself getting just a tiny bit invested in Jericho’s story. (That interest didn’t last long, and apparently it didn’t for Bray, either – about two-thirds into the book, Jericho virtually disappears from the story, and after a few pages none of the characters seem to notice or care that he’s gone) Another good thing about this book: without giving away spoilers, I will tell you that people BONE in this one, and I mostly mention it because any acknowledgement of sex in a Young Adult series is always a good thing. (JK Rowling employed awkward metaphors about “chest dragons” to indicate that Harry Potter was horny; Libba Bray just writes that someone got a boner. Bless.) And, as always, it remains creepy as hell in all the best ways. We get a new kind of ghost in this one, brought over by the Man in the Stovepipe Hat, and the Diviners figure out how to fight them as a group. And oh man, I know I’ve said it before, but Libba Bray is so good at creepy: “At the end of the hall, the mist thickened into a dense bank of living fog, shadows among shadows. Vague forms emerged, indistinct from one another. The same pallid skin peeling off in ribbons of rotting flesh. Diseased mouths dripping with oily black drool. Rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. Their eyes were the gray-white of pond ice and seemed to see nothing. Instead, the ghosts swept their heads left and right, sniffing in the way an animal hunting prey would.” But even as I admit that this book is kind of a giant stalling tactic, I have to acknowledge that there’s something much bigger brewing under the surface of this series. Libba Bray, in addition to casually throwing all kinds of diversity into her books like it’s not even that hard (I really didn’t intend for this review to turn into a JK Rowling callout post, but there it is), is using a silly ghost hunting story to teach her readers something much more serious and important. I’ve mentioned before that Bray isn’t afraid to talk about the less-fun aspects of the Jazz Age, like the Immigration Act and the eugenics movement, and she goes all in on this one. She is not for one second pulling her punches when it comes to showing the dark underbelly of America, and the rotten foundations the country is built on. “The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with the snap of a rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: a theft of land. A theft of witness.” Oh I’m sorry, did you think you were signing up for Ghost Hunting Flapper antics? Too bad. Sit down and shut up, kids, because class is in session. Just in case we had any misconceptions about the level of fucking around that Bray is doing here (answer: none) she gives us an afterword to assure us that yes, this was all very much intentional: “As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions of who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us Americans, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic ‘’great’ past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of ‘We the People.’ We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and our present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 20, 2018
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Oct 2018
|
Sep 20, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0316206849
| 9780316206846
| 0316206849
| 3.89
| 614,540
| Apr 18, 2013
| Apr 30, 2013
|
really liked it
|
Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when li Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples’ dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying. - A Dirge by Christina Rossetti The Cuckoo’s Calling is one of JK Rowling’s (alias Robert Galbraith) first forays into non-magical literature, and I don’t know how anyone else reacted when they heard that she was writing detective novels now, but my first thought was, "well obviously that would be her next move." Even as a small child, I recognized that the first four Harry Potter books had clear detective novel foundations, so it only makes sense that Rowling would want to eventually try writing a contemporary mystery. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in particular, is basically a closed-house murder mystery straight out of Agatha Christie.) This is all a roundabout way of saying that JK Rowling has clearly been itching to write some detective stories, and if The Cuckoo’s Calling is any indication of the rest of the series, I’m very glad that she was finally able to give it a shot. Rowling*, understanding that the keystone of a great mystery series is a memorable detective, has given us Cormorant Strike.( I hate the name, but I’ll get over it.) Strike, a disable veteran turned private eye, is introduced to the reader at the same time he’s meeting his Girl Friday, a temp worker named Robin. Soon enough, a client comes into the office with a case, and Robin goes from “this job is weird and this guy is weird and I can’t wait to get out of here” to “I get to assist with a murder mystery oh HELL yes lemme get my magnifying glass” in the span of about five seconds. I loved her immediately. The client is John Bristow, brother of recently-deceased supermodel Lula Landry. Landry fell to her death from her apartment balcony, and even though it was ruled a suicide, Bristow insists, in true detective story tradition, that it was muuuurder. And with that, Strike and Robin are on the case. As mysteries go, I have to admit that this one is far from seamless. Some aspects of the case didn’t get enough attention (Lula’s on-again off-again boyfriend technically has an alibi for the time of the murder, but because he was going around in a wolf’s mask – don’t ask, it’s dumb – we don’t really know for sure that he was fully accounted for) while other things get over-emphasized, like Rowling’s afraid we’re going to forget about them (there’s a big vase of flowers at the scene of the crime, and it gets mentioned so often that by the time we learn why they’re significant, I no longer cared and was just happy that I didn’t have to hear about the flowers for the hundredth time). Also the text requires Strike to take some huge leaps in logic in order to solve certain parts of the case, and no one ever points out that there are actually many other possible explanations for the different plot points. And Rowling probably thought she was being very, very clever when it turns out that the culprit is (view spoiler)[Lula’s brother – that’s right, the guy who hired Strike to solve the case is the murderer! What a creative and unexpected solution! I was mostly meh on this development, especially because I was this close to guessing the culprit correctly, which I never, ever do. (As soon as I realized that Charlie and Lula died the same way, I knew that whoever killed Charlie also killed Lula – if I had taken that just one step further, I would have realized that a) that meant the killer had to be someone from Lula’s family, and b) since the uncle was being telegraphed as the bad guy in a painfully obvious misdirect, that left Lula’s brother as the killer by pure process of elimination) (hide spoiler)] Minor issues aside, I had a lot of fun with this book. Strike and Robin are a delightful team, to the point where I honestly don’t care if they eventually bang or not, because I like their detective partner dynamic just as much as I like the hints of romantic tension. I do hope that, if getting Strike and Robin together is Rowling’s endgame, she’s gotten better at slow-burning romance since her Harry Potter days. And I like Strike as a detective - Strike isn’t a cop and therefore doesn’t have the authority to question suspects or inspect crime scenes, and it was fun to see how Rowling had him work around those constraints in various clever ways. If this is Rowling’s first attempt at a full-fledged detective novel, I can’t wait to see how her skills develop as the Strike series progresses. *Yeah, I know, I should be writing about “Galbraith” in this review, but c’mon. We all know who it is. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2017
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Sep 10, 2018
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1101875100
| 9781101875100
| 1101875100
| 4.02
| 48,957
| Oct 06, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
|
really liked it
|
I’ve been staring at a blank review box for like ten minutes, trying to figure out how to summarize Patti Smith’s M Train, and I still have no idea wh
I’ve been staring at a blank review box for like ten minutes, trying to figure out how to summarize Patti Smith’s M Train, and I still have no idea what to say. For one thing, there’s not really a plot. It’s just Patti Smith, talking about authors who have influenced her and describing the trips she took to visit their past homes, or their workspaces, but most often their graves. She also tells you about coffee shops she’s visited and worked in. Also she buys a house on Rockaway Beach that’s destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. She does not talk about her music, and barely discusses her writing or her poetry. It’s a hard sell, is what I’m saying, especially because it seems to be the embodiment of the advice that, “Nobody wants to hear about your vacation.” Are you intrigued by Patti Smith’s stories about the two times she visited Sylvia Plath’s grave? If not, this isn’t the book for you. But if there’s something about that idea that appeals to you, this might be worth your time. It was certainly worth mine, even though I can’t articulate why. It’s a comforting book, in a way – like you’re in a mostly-empty coffee shop, sitting across from Patti Smith at a tiny table while you wait out the rainstorm, looking at her snapshots of Mexico and Japan and Russia, listening to her stories. The fact that there’s no real purpose or resolution to the stories doesn’t really matter – it’s enough just to listen to Smith tell them. Honestly, the best I can do is give you an overly-long excerpt and let you decide from there: “I had a black coat. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his – an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garcons overcoat that I secretly coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me. -I don’t need a gift, I said. -But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for. -Then I would like your black coat, I said. And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I pulled it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café. I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this relatively short span it disappeared. My black coat gone, vanished like the precious league ring that disappeared from the finger of the faulty believer in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light. Then, ashamedly, within my childish mourning, I think of Bruno Schulz, trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland, furtively handing over the one precious thing he had left to give to mankind: the manuscript of The Messiah. The last work of Bruno Schulz drawn into the swill of World War II, beyond all grasp. Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble into helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2018
|
Aug 14, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0192835505
| 9780192835505
| 0192835505
| 3.56
| 13,902
| 1887
| Oct 22, 1998
|
really liked it
|
“Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind into the blackness of unborn time, and wondering in what shape and form the great drama
“Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind into the blackness of unborn time, and wondering in what shape and form the great drama will be finally developed, and where the scene of its next act will be laid.” I first heard about this book when it was discussed in Margaret Atwood’s science fiction anthology, In Other Worlds. She goes into the history of demonic women in literature, and H. Rider Haggard’s adventure She gets mentioned frequently. When I saw a copy in the bookstore, I was curious enough to buy it. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: yes, this book is very much a product of its time. It concerns a group of British men exploring Africa, so you can imagine that the racial politics are…not ideal. Also the central “She” of the book, the goddess/demon ruler of a lost civilization, is described as impossibly beautiful, which means she has to also be white, logic be damned. In short, this is an adventure story written by old white dudes, for old white dudes, so buyer beware. (I will also add that Haggard seems hilariously unaware of the subtext of some of his scenes. Our group of adventurers includes a young man named Leo, and Haggard’s narrator spends a very hefty amount of page space describing how goddamn beautiful this guy is, in loving and fawning detail, and we’re supposed to just interpret this as one totally straight guy admiring the supreme bangability of another totally straight guy. Anyway, this is mostly because there aren’t any women in this book until like page 100, so Haggard had to make do with the characters available.) But god damn, this book was fun. It’s an old school adventure yarn in all the best ways, with swashbuckling and daring escapes and terrifying rituals (and, okay, scary natives). The set pieces are stunningly described, and you can imagine yourself as a kid in the 19th century, sitting by the fire and listening in rapt horror as someone reads this book out loud to you: “…from every point we saw dark forms rushing up, each bearing with him what we at first took to be an enormous flaming torch. Whatever they were they were burning furiously, for the flames stood out a yard or more behind each bearer. On they came, fifty or more of them, carrying their flaming burdens and looking like so many devils from hell. Leo was the first to discover what these burdens were. ‘Great heaven!’ he said, ‘they are corpses on fire!’ I stared and stared again – he was perfectly right – the torches that were to light our entertainment were human mummies from the caves! On rushed the bearers of the flaming corpses, and, meeting at a spot about twenty paces in front of us, built their ghastly burdens crossways into a huge bonfire. Heavens! How they roared and flared! No tar barrel could have burnt as those mummies did. Nor was this all. Suddenly I saw one great fellow seize a flaming human arm that had fallen from its parent frame, and rush off into the darkness. Presently he stopped, and a tall streak of fire shot up into the air, illuminating the gloom, and also the lamp from which it sprang. The lamp was the mummy of a woman tied to a stout stake let into the rock, and he had fired her hair. On he went a few paces and touched a second, then a third, and a fourth, till at last we were surrounded on all three sides by a great ring of bodies flaring furiously, the material with which they were preserved having rendered them so inflammable that the flames would literally spout of of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in length.” I’m like 99% sure that’s not how mummies work, but I don’t even care because holy shit flaming mummies! This book has everything! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Sep 2017
|
Aug 06, 2018
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0525953809
| 9780525953807
| 0525953809
| 3.57
| 1,959
| Jan 31, 2013
| Jan 31, 2013
|
it was ok
|
This is definitely not the kind of book I usually read. If I’m reading nonfiction, it’s history or an essay collection by a writer that I’m either fam
This is definitely not the kind of book I usually read. If I’m reading nonfiction, it’s history or an essay collection by a writer that I’m either familiar with, or who came highly recommended by a friend. “Navel-gazing memoir by someone who didn’t do anything notable” is rarely my cup of tea; even less so is the “navel gazing memoir of a very brief time in someone's life stretched out to standard paperback length” subgenre. But this book was lent to me by a friend during one of my experiments in online dating, so at least it was relevant to my interests at the time. The purpose of this book is clear and straightforward: Amy Webb documents her experiences on several online dating services, which were initially unsuccessful until she started thinking about how the various sites “match” people, and decided to see if she could "game" the algorithm to get the best possible match. Published in 2013 and documenting events around 2008, the book already feels incredibly dated. Although Webb is writing about a time when online dating was becoming more common, the sites that she used (JDate and Match.com) were still in their infancy, and I don’t think OkCupid even existed yet (although Webb, who only used paid dating sites, may have excluded that one from her data pool, since it’s a free service. At any rate, it’s never mentioned). There was also some disconnect between the Webb’s experiences in online dating and my own, which made the book harder for me to connect with – Webb states plainly at the beginning of the book that her goal was to find a husband, and not waste her time on dates with incompatible men, thus her need to “hack” Match.com and find the best match as fast as possible. Are you getting the sense that Amy Webb is a methodical, mathematically-minded, and unromantic individual? She is indeed, and most of the fun of this book (what little fun there is, really) is watching an utterly pragmatic, unsentimental person try to find love in a businesslike, research-backed manner. It was almost charming how Amy Webb behaves like the antithesis of a rom com heroine. One of John Green's teen protagonists once claimed, "Love is graphable!" Amy Webb would concur. Less fun is reading about how Webb behaved on her dates, because she acts less like someone trying to form a personal connection with another human being, and more like Jane Goodall observing the apes. Early in her experiments, Webb would haul her laptop along with her on dates, and then bring the laptop into the bathroom with herso she could take notes on how things were going. Also, she emails recaps of every date to a group of her friends and family, which...oof. It was at this point that I texted the friend who lent me the book: “This woman is UNHINGED.” Once Webb throws herself fully into researching the algorithms used on matchmaking sites, the book practically grinds to a halt as she bogs us down in math and statistics and graphs and uuuuggghhhh I’m already falling asleep. If you love that kind of thing, this will probably be fascinating to you. I was mostly impressed at the level of focus present - when Webb first gets her research idea, she spends a solid six hours working on it. I can’t get through a twenty-minute episode of TV without checking my phone five times. I was impressed at the research and the sheer amount of work that went into this experiment (an experiment that was, by all accounts, purely for the author’s own benefit and not for any greater academic purpose), even if Webb's methods are, to say the least, a little questionable. At one point, Webb decides that she needs to figure out how her own profile is being presented on the site, and to whom. So she makes a fake profile posing as the kind of man she’s hoping to find, to see what kind of women she gets matched with. Okay, fine, but then she actually interacts with real women on the site, responding to messages while posing as a man. She had a rule, she assures us, that after three messages she broke off the conversations, to avoid leading the women on and creating an awkward situation. So, good for her for not wanting to catfish anyone, but still, the ethics of this part of the experiment seem…iffy. But in the end , none of this work matters. How, you may be asking, does Amy Webb finally attract the man of her dreams? Does she deliver on the promise her book makes, that she’ll teach you to game the system and find your perfect match through the magic of statistical analysis? (spoiler alert?) Short answer: No. Not even a little bit. Amy Webb finds her current (I assume) husband by doing the following: going to the gym regularly, eating better, and having styled photos as her profile pictures. That’s it. That’s the book. If you’re a statistics/computer geek, you might be amused by the research that went into this experiment. Or just come for the joy of reading the anti-rom com. Just don’t expect to learn anything you don’t already know. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Sep 2017
|
Jul 27, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0060989157
| 9780060989156
| B007C1S9O4
| 4.14
| 48,207
| 2001
| Jul 09, 2002
|
did not like it
|
This was it, dear readers. This was the memoir that broke me. The one that made me decide, definitively, to never read another White Dude Musician Mem
This was it, dear readers. This was the memoir that broke me. The one that made me decide, definitively, to never read another White Dude Musician Memoir ever again. I thought Keith Richards, with his “I’m a man in his goddamn seventies who still insists on calling all women ‘chicks’" act was bad. But at least Keith Richards, for all his faults and positively medieval gender politics, is the real deal. Keith Richards is a rock star, and Keith Richards is cool. The dudes in Motley Cru (I don’t know how to type the accents and I refuse to learn) are not cool. But god, are they trying so hard to live up to the rockstar image that they think they’re required to portray. And in a way, that’s the only interesting thing about this memoir: the sheer, naked desperation that seeps from every page; the intense, embarrassing need these guys have to be considered cool. Everything they do is performative, from the way they insisted on trashing every space they inhabited beyond recognition, to the exhaustive descriptions of all the women they had sex with (including several instances where one of the guys is forced to admit that, yeah, okay, so I realize now that I actually raped this girl? But I feel really bad about it? Twenty years later?), to the repeated and tiring scenes where the band consumes every drug they can get their hands on. They're not behaving this way because they want to (or, god forbid, because they get any joy out of it). They're acting like assholes because they think it makes them cool. It was weirdly fascinating to see how these guys cultivated their image, because in one sense, glam rockers like Motley Cru are almost like drag queens – they wear makeup, over-style their hair, and wear women’s clothes – but unlike, say, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and yeah, Mick Jagger, who embraced and reveled in the feminine sides of their personas (and in the case of Bowie and Mercury, were open about their bisexuality), Motley Cru’s presentation is one long, prolonged shriek of NO HOMO, BRO. These guys can’t go a single goddamn page without reminding us of their blistering masculinity, and giving us every detail of their sex lives which we certainly did not ask for. (One delightful anecdote: after the guys had had sex with their side pieces, they would stop on the way home to buy egg burritos and stick their dicks in the burritos to hide the smell and oh my god I’m gagging just thinking about it.) All the descriptions of rock star riches and excess, much like those poor egg burritos, cannot disguise the fact that these guys are fucking disgusting. The only truly innovative aspect of this memoir is that it’s told in chapter installments, with different band members telling their version of the story – and those different versions don’t always line up with each other. It was almost funny, reading one chapter that went “and then we fired so-and-so because he was a dick who refused to learn the music” and then going to the next chapter and reading “and then I quit the band because those guys suck and I hated the music.” But the men of Motley Cru remain, at best, petty and immature. And I can’t repeat this enough – those guys are all rapists, and also Tommy Lee fucking admits that he beat up Pamela Anderson, so in conclusion, they can all go fuck themselves. But again, the band wants us to believe that all of this – the over-the-top clothes, the drug use, the frankly horrifying treatment of women – was just a product of their fame. Loving a rock star (and, on a broader level, any man with a shred of artistic talent or even artistic ambition) means accepting their garbage behaviors with a smile, because that’s the price you have to pay for the privilege of existing in these guys’ orbits. Even as the Motley Cru guys reflect on their past behavior and admit that maybe they were jerks back then, you can see them shrugging and grinning - ain’t I a stinker? - from behind the page. They have learned nothing, and they regret nothing, because why should they? What ever gave them the idea that they needed to be responsible for their own actions? They’re rock stars, babe! This is just part of the act! I am so goddamn tired of the narrative that excuses asshole behavior in artistic men, as if their creative ability excuses them from basic human decency. The ability to make music does not exempt you from empathy and kindness, and the desperation to fit a rock star image is a pointless and futile endeavor. In a way, it was almost comforting to read this memoir and realize that everyone, even people you might believe are super cool, are just as insecure and desperate to fit in as everyone else. The real lesson that I took from this book, and the lesson I’m going to write here so you don’t have to bother reading The Dirt, is this: no one is truly cool and everyone’s faking it until they make it, so you might as well be nice to people. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Jun 2016
|
Jul 20, 2018
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0988480425
| 9780988480421
| 0988480425
| 3.88
| 16,863
| Sep 09, 2013
| Sep 10, 2013
|
really liked it
|
Samantha Irby’s first book was given to me by my best friend, who is a legit writer who performs her nonfiction essays in front of people like some ki
Samantha Irby’s first book was given to me by my best friend, who is a legit writer who performs her nonfiction essays in front of people like some kind of professional and is my go-to expert on which essay collections to read. I wasn’t familiar with Irby, or her blog, before this book was given to me, but I’m officially a convert now. Her essays are personal and heartfelt and really, really funny, and her voice is so strong that it practically leaps off the page – I have never met Samantha Irby, but reading her essays felt like I was sitting across from her at brunch, snorting my mimosa out my nose while I listened to her telling me about her dating life: “If I never get banged on a king-sized bed with NO SHEETS and ONE LUMPY PILLOW ever again in my fucking life it would be too goddamn soon. Dudes always want to try to fuck you in the abandoned warehouse in which they’re squatting. Or at least that’s what the shit fucking looks like, all bare walls and “furniture” procured from alleys and shit. Would it kill you motherfuckers to put a mat in the bathroom? To buy soap with a moisturizing agent? …Why do you dudes only own one towel? And a hand towel at that? Why do you have no paper towels? Why is all your shit in garbage bags even though you moved in two years ago? Why does it smell like gym shoes and testicles in your apartment? Why do you refuse to purchase a fitted sheet at the very least? Do I really have to SLEEP IN MY GODDAMNED CLOTHES TO STAY WARM UP IN HERE?” Or hearing about her meeting with her accountant: “So it’s tax time, and my homeboy was over the other night badgering me about filing a return, asking me about all my receipts and bank statements and whether or not I saved the checks I used to pay for that class I took. Um…yeah, right. I’m sure I either burned that shit or flushed it down the toilet or used it to line Helen Keller’s litterbox. Save my receipts, for what? To prove to the government how many times I purchased the same exact black sweater at the Gap? Hold on to my bank statements, for whom? To prove how many times I stopped and started and stopped and RE-started paying for eHarmony, or whatever? YEAH, RIGHT. Is there some sort of loneliness deduction I don’t know about? Some alcoholic tax credit? No? Then get the fuck out of my face with that.” Amid the humor, Irby also shares frank, unsentimental stories about her childhood and her chronic health problems, and they’re never presented as misery porn or “let me get all philosophical about my struggles and how they made me who I am.” Instead, Irby recounts everything with a clear-eyed, “so get this shit” tone that never gets maudlin or flippant. Meaty is definitely one of the most fun and entertaining essay collections I’ve read in a long time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Oct 2017
|
Jun 20, 2018
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0064471837
| 9780064471831
| 0064471837
| 4.17
| 216,110
| May 1995
| Sep 30, 1996
|
really liked it
|
"Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?" I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and re "Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?" I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and read all the YA adventure series that I was supposed to read when I was in middle school (instead, I spent those years re-reading the Prydain series, and also every single one of those Royal Diaries books – no regrets!). Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix, checks off another box on that list, although I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even aware of these books until very recently. But I’m sure that they would have been right up thirteen-year-old Madeline’s alley – I can’t speak for the rest of the series, but Sabriel is sort of like a blend of Tamora Pierce and Lloyd Alexander, with a heavy dash of Goth elements. In short, a fun, coming-of-age adventure, featuring zombies! The world of Sabriel reminded me a little of George RR Martin’s Westeros, because we have a country (here called Ancelstierre) that’s kept separate from the Old Kingdom – a land of magic and danger. Sabriel spent the first few years of her life in the Old Kingdom with her father, a necromancer known as “the Abhorsen”, but has lived in Ancelstierre for her entire adolescence. When Sabriel is eighteen, she receives a distress message from her father. He’s trapped somewhere in Death, and Sabriel has to use the skills she learned from him to travel back to the Old Kingdom and rescue him. Along for the ride are a cat that’s not a cat, and a man who was trapped as a wooden statue for two hundred years. Oh, and evil zombies who serve an undead demon are also tracking Sabriel. As you can probably guess from the above description, there’s a lot of action and creepy elements in this book, as well as magic, sassy sidekicks, ghosts, and (my favorite) totally frank depictions of sexuality aimed at preteen audiences! (At one point, Sabriel considers all the implications of pursuing a sexual relationship with another character, and her mental list of Things to Deal With includes contraception! Hooray for you, Garth Nix!) Speaking of fantastic moments, I knew that Sabriel and I would get along as soon as Nix’s narration shared this tidbit with the readers: when Sabriel got her first period, she used her necromancer abilities to summon her mother’s ghost for advice. Which, frankly, why wouldn’t you? Even though this is part of a multiple-book series, Sabriel doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and it can easily be read as a standalone novel. However, if you’re like me, you’re going to want to continue with the series, if only to find out how Sabriel continues to explore her role as a necromancer, and what other adventures Nix has planned for his heroine. (one more note: I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, which had two distinct advantages: first, I learned that Sabriel does not rhyme with “Gabriel”, like I assumed, but is pronounced “Sah-briel.” And second, the audiobook I found is narrated by Tim Curry. He’s not the best candidate for voicing an eighteen-year-old girl’s dialogue, but I didn’t even mind because his villain voices are on point. Voice like buttah, I’m telling you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Jun 2018
|
Jun 16, 2018
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0345534522
| 9780345534521
| 0345534522
| 3.80
| 39,250
| Sep 10, 2013
| Sep 10, 2013
|
liked it
|
Empty Mansions is the kind of journalistic-style nonfiction book that started in the best way: a writer starts with a simple question, and it leads th
Empty Mansions is the kind of journalistic-style nonfiction book that started in the best way: a writer starts with a simple question, and it leads them down a rabbit hole of sordid family history, scandal, and decades of buried secrets. In this case, the writer is Bill Dedman, and the question is this: what was the story behind a California mansion, never occupied, that was put up for sale in 2009. Who built the house, why did they never live there, and why was it being sold now? These questions eventually led Dedman to the legal owner of the house, a 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark who, despite being worth millions, secluded herself in a hospital room and was so reclusive that she hadn't been photographed in decades. Dedman's book traces the history of Huguette and her family, who were once counted among the Rockefellers and Astors, and investigated how such a powerful and wealthy dynasty could have ended with one woman in a tiny hospital room. The most interesting aspect of Empty Mansions was the history of the Clark family and their glory days, with Huguette and her family going on lavish vacations (and narrowly missing traveling on the Titanic), hanging out with famous historical figures, and building lavish homes that they barely lived in. Dedman traces the family's rise and fall, as the family starts to diminish and their fortunes can't keep up with the modern era. He investigates Huguette's estate and the people responsible for it, and essentially tries to figure out how the Clark family, and Huguette herself, managed to disappear from history so thoroughly. At its best, Empty Mansions is an intriguing inside look at one of the forgotten richest families in history. But once the glory days are over, we're left with a frankly depressing story of a lonely old woman sitting on a fortune she'll never use, waiting to die alone. And there's probably some undiagnosed mental health issues on top of that - Huguette's total disinterest in romantic relationships, insistence on being essentially hospitalized despite apparent good health, and her lifelong obsession with fairy tales and other childlike interests suggest, at the very least, some pretty serious arrested development. Dedman, to his credit, doesn't get bogged down in armchair diagnoses, and that's for the best - at the end of the day, you just sort of feel sorry for Huguette, and I have to give credit to the way Dedman investigates her and her life in a way that's still respectful. If you can, try getting this as an audiobook. In addition to some recorded phone calls with Huguette's living relatives, Dedman also includes recordings of his conversations with Huguette, which are as fascinating as they are frustrating - Huguette is literally a woman out of time, seemingly trapped in the turn of the century, and listening to her describe her incredible life is quite the experience. But at the same time, girlfriend is over a hundred years old, so understanding what she's saying is...a struggle. But still, it's worth tracking down the audiobook just so you can listen to her talk about her life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Sep 2017
|
May 01, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0062073168
| 9780062073167
| 0062073168
| 4.18
| 36,281
| Jul 16, 2013
| Jul 16, 2013
|
it was ok
|
Despite not really loving the previous Daniel Silva thriller I'd read (The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The En
Despite not really loving the previous Daniel Silva thriller I'd read (The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The English Girl seems to be one of Silva's most acclaimed thrillers, so it had the best chance of being good; and because when I was browsing audiobooks on my phone, this one popped up. I was immediately at a disadvantage when I started this book, because The Heist takes place after the events of The English Girl. Even though there weren't any serious spoilers for The English Girl, there are plenty of references to the case in The Heist, so right from the beginning I had a vague idea of where the plot was headed. But Silva still manages to throw in some twists that I didn't see coming, so if you're reading the Gabriel Allon books out of sequence, you can still enjoy this one. The plot here was definitely more coherent than The Heist, which started out as a fun art caper and then turned into a dreary political thriller two-thirds of the way in. The English Girl, luckily, has enough of a plot for Silva to stay focused for the book's considerable page count. The story starts when Madeline Hart, a minor-level employee in the British government, is kidnapped while on vacation in Corsica. A ransom video is delivered to the Prime Minister: "Seven days, then the girl dies." A possible justification for Madeline's kidnapping soon becomes clear: she and the Prime Minister were having an affair. Desperate to keep the kidnapping, and the reasons behind it, out of the news, the British government recruits Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon to find Madeline and get her back. With the help of his Israeli team, a former British soldier turned assassin, and a Corsican mafia don, Allon has six days to find the missing English girl. And of course, finding her is only the beginning. This was a fast-paced, well written thriller, with good characters and good twists. Overall, I liked it. I liked how Silva lets us enjoy the long, careful planning that goes into even the simplest operations, and it's a nice blend of exciting shoot-em-up action scenes and more subdued passages about the bureaucratic side of espionage. Also this book features more appearances from Allon's super cool wife, Chiara, who is probably my favorite character in the series. Because Chiara is also a spy, she and Gabriel get to talk about his work honestly, instead of doing the tiresome bit where the husband has to protect his sweet innocent wife from his dangerous work by never telling her the truth about anything. I do wish that Chiara had actually gotten to do something in this book - her job in The English Girl is mainly to act as a sounding board for Gabriel, and then cook dinner for everyone and have lots of sex with her husband. Also she really wants to have a baby, and has an eye-rolling line where she describes being on a flight with a crying baby and says that the mother was "the luckiest woman in the world." Ugh. Another unfortunate thing I noticed in this book: Gabriel Allon is not as great as Silva thinks he is. Gabriel has a lot of conversations with the assassin Christopher Keller where Silva tries, desperately and repeatedly, to show the reader that Allon somehow has the moral high ground over Keller. Look, buddy - at the end of the day, they're both hired guns. It doesn't make much difference that one works for the Israeli government and one works for criminals. All cats are grey, etc. (speaking of uncomfortable moments, Silva's politics are definitely showing in this book. First there are the subtle and frequent anti-Muslim lines that Silva has his characters recite, and then there's a bit at the end where Allon is trying to convince a defecting spy to come to Israel and work for him because "that's what we do in Israel. We give people a home." Cue me, yelling from the balcony: "Unless you're Palestinian!") Also there's an oh-so-charming scene where Allon is searching a female criminal for weapons and uses the opportunity to grope her, and then makes a joke about it. Jesus, say what you will about James Bond, but at least he knows he's an amoral asshole. Allon's holier-than-thou attitude and characterization really started to grate on me by the end of this book. But the most annoying aspect of the book is the title character. Madeline Hart is set up as this brilliant, ambitious, resourceful character (who is also smokin' hot, because we can't possibly be expected to care about the kidnapping of someone who is not young, thin, and beautiful), who has so much promise and potential that she's been tapped to be groomed as a future Prime Minister. And then, after that great introduction, Madeline gets kidnapped and disappears from the narrative. Characters spend a lot of time talking about Madeline; she herself has maybe two scenes where she gets actual dialogue. (the rest of this review will discuss the ending of The English Girl, so click only if you're okay with major spoilers) (view spoiler)[I spent most of this book with a sense of dread, because Silva telegraphs early and frequently that Madeline will not make it out of this book alive. First there's the reference to the "wrath of God" mission, which a character says was about "vengeance, not justice" - ie, it didn't do any good to the Israelis who were already dead. Then we have Gabriel restoring a painting of Susannah and the elders. And of fucking course we have an old lady who tells fortunes and says that Madeline will die, and of fucking course all of her predictions come true, because this is a book, and in books the psychics are always 100% real and never just con artists exploiting desperate people for money. So I was sure that Madeline was going to die, and I was sure that, ultimately, it wouldn't even be about her death, but about how her death made Gabriel Allon feel bad. Luckily, Silva pulls a fast one on us and actually lets Madeline make it out of this book alive, but it still felt deeply unsatisfying. Silva doesn't fridge Madeline, but he might as well have - he presents us with this brilliant character who, it turns out, was a Russian spy all along, and then doesn't let her do jack shit. When Allon tracks Madeline down in St. Petersburg and confronts her, all she has to do is make doe eyes and claim that she never wanted to hurt anyone and the mean bad men made her do it, and she totally wants to defect to England. This is Allon's cue to reply bitch, you were part of an international conspiracy to undermine the British government, hell no you don't get sanctuary in England, and then he tortures her for information because that's exactly how the male spies get treated in this book. But of course, none of that happens. Allon gets the whole team together and spirits her out of Russia on Israel's dime and convinces the British government to let her defect and gets her a lovely cottage in Cornwall as a safe house. I was waiting until the very last page to find out that Madeline had played him like a fiddle and Allon had put the entire British government at risk because he was stupid enough to fall for her damsel in distress act. But no. Madeline is, at the end of the day, nothing more than a princess in a tower, needing to be rescued by Flawless Hero Gabriel Allon, who tortures people and commits murder and conspires with criminals but for totally noble reasons so it's all okay. Independent assassins are evil, and government spies are good noble people who have your best interests at heart and should be able to do whatever they want, as far as Silva is concerned. How's that for a bedtime story, kids? (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2018
|
Apr 28, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1484798570
| 9781484798577
| 1484798570
| 4.62
| 28,004
| Sep 12, 2017
| Sep 12, 2017
|
liked it
|
**spoiler alert** When I sat down to write this review, I initially wanted to give the book four stars, but ended up settling on three instead. I stan
**spoiler alert** When I sat down to write this review, I initially wanted to give the book four stars, but ended up settling on three instead. I stand by that rating, but be aware going into this that I was leaning really, really close to four stars. This is, overall, a perfectly serviceable and satisfying conclusion to the Lockwood & Co series - plot lines are resolved, questions are answered, characters are given suitable endings, and everything is wrapped up in a nice little bow. But there were plenty of things that irritated me - just irritated, nothing worse than that - so I can't give this the full four stars. For one thing, I think the Marissa/Penelope twist was introduced way too late in the series, so we never really got to settle in with her as an antagonist. I wish Stroud had established her as the Big Bad right from the beginning (while still saving the big bombshell about her identity for a later book) so we could enjoy the characters grappling with her throughout the series instead of wasting time on lesser villains (Stroud half-heartedly tries to keep the Winkmans relevant as villains in at least three books, and I would forget who they were every single time) Ultimately, the Marissa storyline felt very rushed, with everything getting crammed into the last book before we could adjust to the new information. Especially frustrating was Marissa's...ghost advisor? I think? Anyway, Ezekiel felt like a wasted opportunity, because he gets destroyed like ten pages after he's introduced, and ultimately his presence in the story created more questions than it answered. Was he supposed to be some kind of angel? Why was Marissa able to see and speak to him, even though it's been established that adults can't do that with ghosts? What, exactly, was going on with the ectoplasm? (also the second the characters discovered that Marissa used a ghost named Ezekiel for research when she was starting out, I thought, "oh, that's the skull's forgotten identity" and was honestly so disappointed when it turned out I was wrong) And Stroud, for what I cannot believe is the third goddamn time in this series, appears to kill off a character and then loses his nerve at the last minute. Seriously, there was no reason Quill Kipps should have miraculously survived. He's not one of the core group, so even though his death would carry emotional weight it wouldn't totally upset the dynamic of Lockwood & Co, and it would have been nice, in a series where the characters are constantly battling ghosts, to see Lucy and the others dealing with the death of someone they actually knew and cared about. I really don't know why Stroud didn't just pull the trigger and finally, finally let one of his main characters actually face mortal consequences. He's like the anti George RR Martin. One of the most satisfying aspects of this book, even though it's a little thing, was that we finally got some answers about Holly Munro and what her Whole Deal is, in this little scene with her and Lucy: "She pushed her hair back from her face. 'I'm sure I was an utter pain as well. Anyway, it must have been odd, having me show up.' 'It was a bit, but-' 'But you needn't have worried.' She smiled at me. 'Funnily enough, Lockwood isn't actually my type. ...Don't look so shocked, Lucy,' she said. 'I know how you feel about him. But, if anything, I had my eye on someone else.' 'Good god, you don't mean George?' Holly laughed again; her eyes sparkled as she glanced at me sidelong. 'You must know there are other possibilities in this world.'" On the one hand, this delights me, because at least now I know that Stroud intended for us to interpret Holly as gay, and wasn't just doing it by accident. But this is where Stroud's confusingly unspecified time period comes back to bite him, because I don't know if there are in-world consequences for the reveal of Holly's sexuality. We have seen exactly zero other gay characters in the series, and at the end of the book Lockwood mentions that Holly has a female "roommate," and seems completely unaware that she's gay. So my question is, what is life like for gay people in this alternate-universe London? Is there a reason Holly's been keeping her sexuality vague? Is it dangerous for her to come out to the rest of the team? Again, if we had seen literally any other gay characters in this book, it might have given me a better idea of how this society views homosexuality, but Holly is where that representation begins and ends. It's a moot point anyway, since Lucy remains totally oblivious to the fact that Holly is flirting with her. So no, we never get ghost-hunting Odd Couple girlfriends, and we don't even get much for the Lucy/Lockwood shippers. Spoiler alert, nobody gets to make out with anybody in this entire goddamn series. Which I get - the target audience for this series is, like, sixth graders, and when I was that age, the last thing I wanted was for my adventure stories to get slowed down by dumb kissing. But these are all nitpicks. Overall, this is such a fun, scary series, and I loved getting to read new Jonathan Stroud stories and find that he's just as good as I remember him. The characters are great, the plotting is quick and tightly constructed, and he keeps you invested with twists and revelations. Also, Stroud continues to absolutely kill it with the big climactic setpieces - the best sequence in this book is an extended journey into the world of the dead, and it's filled with such creepy, nightmare-logic images and sequences that I almost wish we could have had more of it. All in all, a fun and exciting series that, despite it's minor flaws, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
Apr 2018
|
not set
|
Apr 25, 2018
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
1484709675
| 9781484709672
| 1484709675
| 4.52
| 30,137
| Sep 13, 2016
| Sep 13, 2016
|
really liked it
|
The fourth installment in the five-book Lockwood & Co series picks up a few months after the last one left off - Lucy Carlyle, having left the Lockwoo
The fourth installment in the five-book Lockwood & Co series picks up a few months after the last one left off - Lucy Carlyle, having left the Lockwood agency after realizing that her experiments with her psychic abilities were putting the rest of the team in danger, has been working as a kind independent contractor, teaming up with other agencies for one-time jobs. It's only a matter of time, of course, before Anthony Lockwood shows up and asks Lucy to help her former agency with a job. Honestly, I almost wish that Stroud had devoted more story space to explore Lucy's new role as an independent ghost hunter - her time as a freelancer is over so quickly, and she goes back to Lockwood & Co so easily, that I don't know why Stroud even bothered having her leave the agency in the first place. Honestly, it just feels like he needed a way to end Book Three on a cliffhanger and "Lucy leaves Lockwood & Co" was the best he could come up with. But at the same time, I'm glad he realized that it was a bad idea, and put her back with the agency as soon as possible - Lucy is best when she's interacting with the whole team (talking skull in a jar included) and even though I think Stroud missed an opportunity when he decided not to give Lucy more time to function solo in the story, I think this series is at its best when we're seeing the whole ensemble cast working together on a job. With only one more book to go in the Lockwood & Co series, it finally feels like things are picking up steam - just in terms of plot and resolution, this is the best in the series so far, because Jonathan Stroud is finally giving us some concrete answers to the central mystery that's been brewing in the background since Book One. This book follows the basic formula that Stroud has established for the series: we start with a ghostt-busting mission right at the beginning, then there's a second minor mission, and one final big setpiece for the climax. But, as in the best installments in this series, all of the cases are connected, and trace back to the central question of the series - how did the Problem start? Like I said, Stroud gives away a few things here (like more answers about what the Orpheus Society is up to) but he's still saving the biggest bombshells for Book Five, and I'm excited to see how he's going to wrap up the series. Honestly, I really enjoyed this book, but had one major issue - Holly Munro's characterization continues to baffle me, specifically her interactions with Lucy. In my review of the previous book, I joked that Lucy's dislike of Holly seemed to stem more from a subconscious crush, rather than actual animosity. And then in this book, we get stuff like this, where Lucy is trying to make the reader understand why she doesn't like Holly: "It was her skin that always got to me. It was darkly buttery, with not a pimple to be seen. And her features, too - everything was in the right place. There'd been a time when her easy perfection drove me mad, and I knew that in my disheveled, wildly imperfect way, I'd done the same to her." Like, seriously. How else am I supposed to interpret that? It's profoundly confusing, because I honestly can't tell if Stroud is genuinely intending for us to think that Lucy has a crush on Holly. I want to believe that society has advanced far enough for him to casually include a same-sex flirtation subplot in his YA ghost-hunting adventure, but is that really what's going on? If Stroud is doing it intentionally, he's probably just queer-baiting us, since Lucy/Lockwood is pretty obviously his endgame. And if he doesn't realize that he's writing the Holly/Lucy scenes with a romantic undercurrent, that's even worse, because it just means that Stroud thinks the only reason girls wouldn't get along is because one is jealous of how pretty the other is, which...sucks. And it's also confusing, because Lucy/Lockwood shipping seems pretty common among the readers of this series, and I haven't seen any other reviews that mention the Holly/Lucy stuff. So maybe it's all in my head. But on the other hand, Jonathan Stroud wrote this conversation between Holly and Lucy: "She gave a laugh. Oh, joy - it was the special tinkling one that set my teeth on edge. 'Someone at Portland Row really missed you, you know,' she said. I kept my voice light. 'Well, I missed everyone, too, of course. ...Er, who was that?' 'Who missed you most particularly?' Her laugh again; her big dark eyes smiled at me sidelong. 'Can't you guess?' It was hot in that cafe. I did something with the sleeves of my sweater. 'No.' 'Me.' 'Oh. What-? Did you?'" Okay. I get that Lucy is uncomfortable because she's thinking of Lockwood, and this bit of conversation is Stroud trying to reinforce the idea that Lucy and Lockwood have romantic potential (I remain firmly on the fence about this, but whatever). But if that's the case, then what the hell is Holly doing with this conversation? Because it really reads like she's flirting with Lucy, and Lucy doesn't notice. I'm frankly a lot more interested in the idea of an Odd Couple-style romance between Holly and Lucy than a straightforward Lockwood/Lucy romance, and I have a feeling that Stroud is going to let me down in Book Five. But seriously, I really want to know what he's intending with these characters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
Apr 2018
|
not set
|
Apr 12, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1501139886
| 9781501139888
| 1501139886
| 3.72
| 129,236
| Jul 25, 2016
| Aug 16, 2016
|
liked it
|
I went into this book with very low expectations, and I was neither disappointed, or pleasantly surprised. I like Amy Schumer's comedy, generally. Her I went into this book with very low expectations, and I was neither disappointed, or pleasantly surprised. I like Amy Schumer's comedy, generally. Her show had some very, very funny sketches, and while she's certainly not my favorite female comedian, I don't have any strong feelings about her either way. Her memoir gave me a similarly lukewarm reaction - it's no Yes Please by Amy Poehler or Bossypants by Tina Fey, and I wouldn't even rank it alongside Why Not Me by Mindy Kaling. It's...fine. Not good, not bad. Fine. In fact, if I were asked to provide the quintessential middle-of-the-road comedian memoir, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo would be the perfect example. It's got everything that can be found in every other book in its genre: there's the overly-long section about the comedian's childhood and family influences, the stories about being a starving artist and working badly-paid and demeaning jobs to try to make it, the hard work needed to become successful, and the reflections on a career that has spanned all of one single decade. I'm probably being too critical - no one is asking Amy Schumer to craft a Pulitzer-winning memoir, and she's under no obligation to do so. Her book gets some extra points for me because she really drives home just how damn hard she's had to work to get where she is (and honestly, one senses a little defensiveness behind her stories of spending months on the road doing sets in shitty clubs for terrible money - as if Schumer knows she has to push back extra hard against the "hurr, women aren't funny" crowd). Before I read this, I didn't even know that Schumer became famous after she won a season of Last Comic Standing, and her insights into the behind-the-scenes of the show and how she was able to win are interesting and illuminating. Again, there's a whiff of defensiveness when she explains how and why she won - despite how often she returns to the old "haha, look at me being all fat and boozy and sex-positive I said look at me" well, Schumer has to be aware that the show's producers might have been more inclined to give the win to the cute blond white girl, and seems like she's trying to overcome that and convince us that she's earned her success. And she definitely has - I don't want to take that away from her, and honestly the biggest takeaway you'll get from this book is that Amy Schumer works her ass off for everything she has, and that her success is completely earned. Her memoir is serviceable, but not particularly memorable or impactful. Honestly? Save yourself some time and just call up your funniest friend and take her out for a boozy brunch. It'll basically be the same experience as reading this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2017
|
not set
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Mar 20, 2018
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0735211205
| 9780735211209
| 0735211205
| 3.59
| 413,507
| May 02, 2017
| May 02, 2017
|
it was ok
|
**spoiler alert** (a quick warning: I tried to write a spoiler-free review, I really did. But I can't talk about all the stuff I want to cover without
**spoiler alert** (a quick warning: I tried to write a spoiler-free review, I really did. But I can't talk about all the stuff I want to cover without giving away the ending, so if you clicked this review thinking that "well, maybe the spoilers won't be too extensive," be warned that I am going to spoil basically everything about the ending. So unless you've already read the book or have no intention of ever reading it, continue at your own risk) Julia "Jules" Abbott is called back to her childhood town of Beckford, England, after receiving disturbing news: her older sister Nell is dead, from an apparent suicide, and Julia is now the legal guardian of Nel's teenage daughter, Lena. But there are questions surrounding Nell's death, beginning with the place where she apparently killed herself. Nell died in a place known as the Drowning Pool, a section of the river where, historically, women have drowned themselves or been drowned - including Lena's best friend, who killed herself a few months before Nell's death. Nell was in the process of writing a book about the Drowning Pool, and the stories of the women who died there, and as Julia and the police investigate Nell's death, they begin to suspect that all of these deaths are connected, and that Nell had uncovered secrets dangerous enough to make Julia question if her death was really a suicide at all. My first mistake was listening to this as an audiobook, instead of getting a physical copy from the library. There are a lot of characters who narrate different chapters (to the point where I was two-thirds into the novel and still had trouble keeping everyone straight) and also the timeline skips around - we have the current-day chapters, the flashbacks to Julia's childhood, and the sections from Nel's book on the Drowning Pool. Listening to the novel, instead of reading it, meant that I couldn't flip back to remind myself what time period we were in, or remember how a certain narrator fit into the main plot. And Paula Hawkins apparently decided that she needed to complicate things even more, because not only do characters get chapters written from their personal perspectives, but some chapters are in first person, and some are in third person. Julia's chapters are written as if she's addressing Nell directly, always calling her "you." I kind of get why Hawkins does this - Julia, we realize pretty quickly, has some serious Issues to work out, and other characters often notice her talking to herself, so I can see why Hawkins would want to make it seem like all of Julia's chapters are conversations that she's having with her dead sister. But it was still jarring and obnoxious. Also some of Julia's chapters are titled "Julia" while other are titled "Jules" and if anyone can explain the logic for this choice, please explain it to me because it was confounding. Speaking of confounding, many of the characters are infuriatingly inconsistent, especially Julia and her niece, Lena. In addition to her confusingly-written chapters, Julia also does that thing that only characters in badly-written thrillers do, where she gets a desperate voicemail from her sister telling her to call her back because she has something really important to tell her (why not just tell her on the voicemail, you might be asking? shhhhhh), and Julia just rolls her eyes and is like, ugh my sister is so dramatic, and never calls her back. And then next thing you know, Nell is dead and Julia can't figure out why the cops are so annoyed with her. Julia is especially frustrating because she acts like she's in one novel, and all the other characters are in another. At the end, when Lena is missing and Julia is trying to find her, she goes to see Lena's father (who, in a disappointing lack of twist, turns out to just be Nell's ex-boyfriend. My money was on Mr. Henderson, for the record). This is a good instinct, but once Julia establishes that Lena's not there, she gets sidetracked and decides that now, in the middle of her search for her missing teenage ward, is a good time to resolve her own trauma and confront her childhood rapist. And then she goes home and walks into the river and has to be rescued by emergency services, and by the way, Lena is still missing. And then when Lena gets home safely, Julia looks at this teenage girl, who has gone through a) the suicide of her best friend b) the death/possible murder of her mother and c) a kidnapping by a child molester and possible murderer, all in a matter of months, and Julia decides that this is a great time to sit Lena down and say, hey, want to hear the story of how your mom's boyfriend raped me when I was twelve, and I lived my entire life hating your mom because I thought she knew about it? Julia. Jesus. Read the room. She even admits that this is just for her benefit, and that "I couldn't tell you [Nell], so I told her." No one else's trauma matters except Julia's. Lena is significantly less frustrating, but she basically functions as a misdirection machine: first she insists that her mother jumped, and then later is convinced that she was murdered. She protects the identity of the adult man who had sex with her friend, even though she hated him and wanted to see him punished, because she had promised her friend to keep the secret. Fine, whatever, just as long as it keeps the plot going for a few more chapters, right Hawkins? And then there are the multiple plot points that get introduced and then dropped without resolution, like the diet pills and Katie's mother's weird alibi and the missing camera card and that weird incest-y vibe between Helen and Patrick, and they read less like red herrings and more like plots that Hawkins got bored with and abandoned. And, most frustrating of all, the fact that we never find out, definitively, what happened to Mr. Henderson was a weird choice, to say the least. We have chapters where we're in Lena's head - there's no reason for her to keep that information from the readers unless Hawkins was planning some kind of payoff at the end, which she obviously wasn't. Maybe Hawkins figured that the readers were smart enough to put the pieces together themselves, but that doesn't exactly work. This novel, and also The Girl on the Train, spend a significant amount of time teaching the reader that nothing should be taken for granted, whether it be the accuracy of a character's memories or the meaning behind a conversation. So for Hawkins to just leave that thread dangling and let us make assumptions about what happened without confirming it seemed sloppy and lazy, and not what I expected from her. *breathes* Man, that turned into way more of a rant than I intended. But apparently I was way more frustrated with this book than I realized. Anyway, long story short: frustrating, with inconsistent characterization and sloppy plotting. Give it a pass - there are better, juicier thrillers out there. (also, I figured out that Sean did it as soon as I read the scene with him getting angry at Erin in the car, so the last few chapters were robbed of any kind of tension, and the ending line was more like a relief than a twist, because finally Hawkins came out and said it) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2018
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Apr 2018
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Mar 19, 2018
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Hardcover
|
|
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|
|
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|
my rating |
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|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.31
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 27, 2018
|
||||||
3.57
|
it was ok
|
Aug 2018
|
Nov 06, 2018
|
||||||
4.02
|
did not like it
|
Oct 2018
|
Oct 31, 2018
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||||||
3.16
|
it was ok
|
Nov 2017
|
Oct 31, 2018
|
||||||
3.88
|
really liked it
|
Oct 2018
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Oct 23, 2018
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||||||
4.16
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really liked it
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Sep 2018
|
Oct 10, 2018
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||||||
4.25
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liked it
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Oct 2018
|
Sep 20, 2018
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||||||
3.89
|
really liked it
|
Dec 2017
|
Sep 10, 2018
|
||||||
4.02
|
really liked it
|
Jul 2018
|
Aug 14, 2018
|
||||||
3.56
|
really liked it
|
Sep 2017
|
Aug 06, 2018
|
||||||
3.57
|
it was ok
|
Sep 2017
|
Jul 27, 2018
|
||||||
4.14
|
did not like it
|
Jun 2016
|
Jul 20, 2018
|
||||||
3.88
|
really liked it
|
Oct 2017
|
Jun 20, 2018
|
||||||
4.17
|
really liked it
|
Jun 2018
|
Jun 16, 2018
|
||||||
3.80
|
liked it
|
Sep 2017
|
May 01, 2018
|
||||||
4.18
|
it was ok
|
Apr 2018
|
Apr 28, 2018
|
||||||
4.62
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Apr 25, 2018
|
||||||
4.52
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Apr 12, 2018
|
||||||
3.72
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Mar 20, 2018
|
||||||
3.59
|
it was ok
|
Apr 2018
|
Mar 19, 2018
|