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1101633530
| 9781101633533
| B00G3L19CI
| 4.14
| 78,906
| Aug 05, 2014
| Aug 05, 2014
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did not like it
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**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-
**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-building (Grossman is at his best when he is taking genuine joy from creating his own Narnia- or Hogwarts-like world, rather than trying to smugly point out all of their respective flaws), Quentin will stay just on the bearable side of utterly insufferable, there will be at least one character who I wish had an entire book of their own, and the last hundred pages of the novel will be so brutally unrelenting that it'll make me want to go back to bed and re-read the Narnia books to remind myself that fantasy stories that are more pretty than painful still exist. But The Magician's Land is different. The final hundred-ish pages of the book are not good-painful, they're just painful - in short, this book is less thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another, and more like a hundred pages of Lev Grossman smacking me with my own hands while jeering, "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!" The book, as a whole, isn't bad. The world-building is still rock solid and fascinating, and I love that Grossman is still creating new things for me to discovery in Fillory. The story also benefits by moving the timeline forward, and setting this book about six years after the events of The Magician King. So now, instead of dealing with whiny, entitled twenty-somethings, our characters are world-weary almost-thirty-year-olds who are finally, FINALLY figuring out how to be grownups. Quentin, after being kicked out of Fillory at the end of the second book, has mostly spent his time since then just bumming around, until he gets an offer to return to Brakebills - this time as a teacher. While there, two important events happen: Quentin runs into Alice, who we last saw turning into a niffin at the end of Book One; and Quentin is contacted by a group recruiting magicians to steal a mysterious magical objects. Meanwhile, Eliot and Janet are still kicking around Fillory, fully settled into their roles as king and queen, when they receive disturbing news: Fillory is dying. Like I said, most of this book is actually very, very good. I especially loved Eliot and Janet's sections, first because I will never, ever tire of the "modern young adults react to old-school fantasy setting" schtick, and Janet and Eliot are a perfect blend of snarky can-you-believe-this-shit and genuine, unashamed love of Fillory and its magic. I especially loved Janet, who after two books of being little more than a token mean girl and a contrived wedge between Quentin and Alice, finally gets her due. The little bits we learn about what Janet has been doing between the second and third books is fascinating, and I would honestly re-read the entire Magicians series if it was rewritten from Janet's perspective. She's brave, funny, tough as nails, and takes absolutely no shit from anyone - whether they're Quentin "never was there a tale of more woe" Coldwater, or a giant magic snapping turtle. Her best line, when Eliot is trying to brainstorm ways to save Fillory: "We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!" So yeah - lots to like here, if I'm being honest with myself, and plenty of other reviewers have spent time praising these elements. Go read their reviews if you want to hear how The Magician's Land is brilliant; I'll probably agree with most of their points. So without further ado, here's what made me furious about this book. It essentially boils down to three points. One: Grossman is doing a lot of telling and very little showing when it comes to Quentin's development as a character. To hear Grossman tell it, Quentin is a completely different person than he was in Book One. Grossman is correct, to a point: Quentin is no longer an entitled little shit who believes that if one world isn't up to his standards, the universe should oblige by creating another one for him (this is, in fact, exactly what happens at the end of the series, but I guess it doesn't count because Quentin didn't explicitly demand it, or some bullshit like that), and he sees people as they really are, not as characters who must fit into his personal narrative in a specific way. But Grossman is just so insistent about how much Quentin has grown as a person, telling us every few chapters that "Quentin had changed so much" or "Quentin was a different person now" and it felt like he realized that Quentin wasn't actually that different from the kid we met in Book One, and had to overcompensate. Also, certain events in the story are given much more weight than they deserve. The death of Quentin's father is portrayed as a massive, earth-shattering event that permanently changes Quentin, but since his father was never even a real character in the story, his death had no real weight for me, no matter how many times Grossman insists that it did (and oh, does he insist). Also, remember Professor Mayakovsky, of Brakebills South? We revisit him in this book, and he's suddenly recast as a wise father figure for Quentin. Is Quentin merely latching on to the nearest male authority figure as a way to cope with his father's death? Probably, but Grossman isn't interested in exploring this idea, and Mayakovsky remains in the role Quentin has assigned him. How nice. Two: Alice and Julia, the two biggest skeletons in Quentin's emotional closet, are never treated as well as they deserve by Quentin or the narrative. First, Alice. She turned into a niffin at the end of Book One to save Quentin and the others, and when Quentin encounters her again in Book Three, he decides he's going to save her. When he does, newly-human Alice is understandably furious with him - there's a much-quoted passage where she rips him a much-earned new one, but I can't be bothered to find it now. Rest assured that Alice is full of righteous fury, and every ounce of it is absolutely deserved. And then it's all dropped completely, and Quentin and Alice have sex and skip off to save Fillory together. Grossman doesn't go quite so far as to make Alice get back together with Quentin at the end, but it's clear that he believes everything is cool between them now. NO. I love angry Alice most of all, and Grossman robbed her of any real closure in favor of showing Quentin, the once and future king of Fillory, saving the day and (basically) getting the girl once again. Alice's rage, ultimately, doesn't matter, and Grossman kind of makes it seem like this rage is merely a side effect of her experiences as a niffin, rather than her own feelings. Julia isn't treated quite as badly, but like Alice, she deserved more closure with Quentin than she got. Grossman never really stops the explore the fact that both of these women were essentially destroyed as a direct result of Quentin's actions, and he never has to answer for that. Three: Grossman has gotten so caught up in the fun of creating a fantasy adventure, he forgot what he was trying to say in the first place. The Magicians was presented as a response to the Harry Potter and Narnia books - an unflinching, realistic portrayal of how those idealized magical worlds would really function, and reveal the cracks in their perfect facades. Lev Grossman gave an interview once (which of course I can't find now) where he says that one of the points of The Magicians is that nobody actually gets to be the Chosen One - Quentin, ultimately, is just a guy who stumbled into a magical world. He isn't special, because in real life, nobody is special. No one is chosen. So what happens at the end of The Magician's Land? Quentin saves all of Fillory by pulling a sword out of midair, kills not one but two gods, then becomes a god himself and remakes Fillory, and he does such a good job that he eliminates the need for gods in Fillory. He gets rid of the godlike powers once his work is done, because he's just so damn noble, and the day is saved and everyone cheers. So in the end, Lev Grossman has written the exact same kind of book that he tried to debunk: a very special schoolboy travels to a magical land and becomes its king, then its savior, and all is well. What was the point of all that cynicism, all that fucking smugness from Grossman, if this was the book he was writing all along? Like, Jesus, dude, it's okay to say that you genuinely like the Narnia books. Adding darkness and death doesn't make your book smarter, or more mature. And deconstructing tropes and archetypes doesn't mean shit if you're just going to indulge yourself in all of them in the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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May 22, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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142316492X
| 9781423164920
| 142316492X
| 4.33
| 38,769
| Sep 16, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
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liked it
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I read the first book in the Lockwood & Co series over a year ago, mainly out of nostalgia - I was a huge fan of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series w
I read the first book in the Lockwood & Co series over a year ago, mainly out of nostalgia - I was a huge fan of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series when I was younger, and it was fun to discover Stroud's newer series. It had everything I expected from a Stroud book: scary paranormal stuff, sassy banter, fast-paced action, and a setting that I still cannot stop imagining as Victorian England. (I think it's the fact that the kids use rapiers as weapons that's throwing me off, but there's honestly no reason for me to get the time period so wrong, except for the fact that this series feels so much like a Victorian Gothic-style ghost story.) The first book in the series was purely a nostalgia-driven delight for me, so I was excited to dive back into the story. Maybe this was just a weaker story - other reviews seem to agree that it wasn't as strong as the first book - or maybe the joy at finding a new Stroud series had worn off. Either way, I found a lot more things to nitpick about this one, and even though it was a solid, fun ghost story, I didn't enjoy it as much. The story picks up six months after the events of The Screaming Staircase. Lockwood & Co, the ragtag agency consisting of teenage ghost hunters Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins, are still struggling to compete with the larger ghost-hunting agencies. Their latest case concerns the recently-excavated body of Edmund Bickerstaff, a Victorian doctor who was obsessed with trying to contact spirits. A powerful object was buried with him, and is quickly stolen. Lucy and the others have to track down the object and destroy it, while also trying to figure out the exact circumstances of Bickerstaff's death. Meanwhile, the skull in a jar that they acquired in The Screaming Staircase is communicating with Lucy, and getting more involved in her life. It's all good, scary fun - there's a talking skull that's kept in a jar, for Christ's sake! But it's not as tightly constructed as the first book, and I kept finding issues. For one thing, Stroud has a lot of plot points to juggle, and some of them get forgotten for too long. At the beginning of the book, Lockwood makes a bet with a rival agency that will pit his agency against theirs, and the loser will have to publicly admit defeat. By the time they get around to actually doing this (the two agencies fighting ghosts together) the bet just seems unnecessary and stupid. There's no central haunted setpiece, like the haunted house in The Screaming Staircase, so the final ghost-hunting adventure feels a little less impressive. And, as I noted in my review of The Screaming Staircase, the murder-mystery subplot is pretty weak - once again, the kids are trying to figure out how someone died, and once again, the solution is pretty simple and anti-climactic, and I didn't even care anymore. There was just a lot of stuff that felt like it was dashed off in a hurry, and Stroud didn't bother to spend the time making it better. At one point, the kids have to steal an object from the bad guy, and their plan is so insultingly simple and never should have worked, but it goes off without a hitch. Similarly, the ending felt way too easy. (view spoiler)[So the cursed object they're trying to track down is a mirror that kills anyone who looks into it. Such a powerful, deadly object must be pretty hard to destroy, right? Nope. The kids just smash it, and the day is saved. I almost expected one of the characters to say, "Wow, that was easy." (hide spoiler)] But the biggest issue was the central three characters. Lucy is the strongest, but she's also the narrator, which means we get to be inside her head the whole time, so obviously she's going to be the most fleshed-out. Lockwood remains mysterious, or at least Lucy keeps telling us that he is, but the problem is that whatever Lockwood's deep dark secrets might be, Stroud isn't revealing anything, and the total lack of information just makes me not care. Oh, Lockwood has a secret room in the house that no one is allowed to go into? Look Stroud, we're kind of busy with the ghost investigation right now, can we put a pin in that? And then there's George. Poor, forgotten George. After leaving him out of almost all the action in The Screaming Staircase, Stroud apparently decided to fix the problem by giving us an overdose of George. But it doesn't work, because George is always either a non-entity, or he's wildly inconsistent. Apparently George's primary personality trait is his intellectual curiosity (did we see that in The Screaming Staircase? I can't even remember), and in The Whispering Skull we learn that he got fired from his previous job for asking too many questions about the agency. Okay, so George is curious, and that curiosity provides a major plot point. Here's the problem: remember Lockwood's mysterious Room of Secrets? George, based on everything Stroud has established about him, should be going crazy trying to figure out what's in there. But does he? When he and Lucy are discussing what might be in the room, George is just like, nope, not curious at all, that's Lockwood's business and I don't need to know. What the hell? It's pretty clear that Stroud doesn't really have a clear idea of George as a character, which is not a problem that we should be having in the second book of a series. So overall, not nearly as fun or well-done as the first book. But I'm still going to read the third one, because of course this one ends on the world's biggest cliffhanger. Because Jonathan Stroud is a jerk. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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May 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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0312181965
| 9780312181963
| 0312181965
| 3.96
| 7,890
| 1998
| Feb 01, 1998
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liked it
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I actually finished reading this book over a month ago, and even though I meant to write a review immediately, I obviously kind of forgot about that.
I actually finished reading this book over a month ago, and even though I meant to write a review immediately, I obviously kind of forgot about that. So I apologize in advance, because I'm going to be a little fuzzy on the details. First, background: Dorothy Sayers left this book unfinished, having abandoned it in 1936. She left some fragments of the novel behind, and Jill Paton Walsh was recruited to finish the book in 1998. It's not clear how much of the book is Sayers and how much is Walsh, but it feels primarily the latter, and I'm try to articulate why I felt this way. So when this novel starts, Peter and Harriet have returned from their honeymoon (which we saw in Busman's Honeymoon) and are settled into married life. In true Sayers fashion, a lot of time is spent leisurely exploring their new life as a couple - we get a lot of stuff about the new Wimsey/Vane household, the pressure on Harriet and Peter to have babies and provide backup Wimsey heirs, and (somewhat weirdly) occasional diary entries from Peter's mother intrude on the narrative. Sure, whatever. As I said in my review of Busman's Honeymoon, I would only recommend this book to people who are already head-over-heels in love with Peter and Harriet's dynamic, because anyone else will be confused and annoyed that we're spending so many pages not solving a mystery. I, of course, was delighted, because I would read a novel that's just Harriet and Peter having tea in real time, because it would mean lots of lovely banter like this, when the Wimseys are discussing a dinner party with the in-laws: "'There is an argument for getting on with it,' said his lordship. 'While we can still sit together.' 'I thought husbands and wives were always placed apart,' said Harriet. 'No; for the first six months after marriage we are allowed to sit together.' 'Are we allowed to hold hands under the table?' 'Best not, I should think,' said Peter. 'Unless about to go down with the ship. But we are allowed to talk to each other for the duration of one course of the dinner.'" I loved all of the Peter/Harriet banter, because these two are never not delightful (a fun addition in this book, that I'm sure was Walsh's idea because we never see it in any other Sayers mystery, is Peter's habit of addressing Harriet as "Domina." Swoon) Another wonderful choice made in this novel - Harriet gets her own Bunter! Walsh is clearly just as in love with Peter and his manservant, Bunter, as I am. In this novel, Harriet gets a lady's maid named Miss Mango, who is recruited into the mystery solving and throws herself into the work with professional gusto, and it is wonderful. I feel like this was Walsh's idea instead of Sayers', because giving each of the Wimsey's a mystery-assisting servant gives the story almost too much symmetry, and feels like something a fan would write, rather than the author. I also thought that naming the character "Miss Mango" wasn't something Sayers would do, but then I remembered the man named Waffles, so who knows. Either way, Miss Mango is a fantastic addition to the team. That's about where my love of this book ends, however. The mystery is pretty straightforward, as they usually are in Sayers novels - basically, we have a dead wife, a suspicious husband, and some potential lovers. Plus a faked break-in, so that's fun! But the solution to the mystery was not what I was expecting, and not in a good way. (view spoiler)[So the dead wife's face is really battered, and in most mysteries, wrecking the corpse's face means that you're trying to disguise the identity of said corpse. It's discovered later that the husband has a mistress who, like his wife, has red hair. So I was thinking, okay, maybe the dead body is actually the mistress, and the wife ran off? I figured there had to be a reason that the wife and the mistress looked similar, but there really isn't - it felt sloppy, and very un-Sayers, so I'm going to blame it on Walsh (hide spoiler)] Also, since the book takes place in the 1930's but was (mostly) written in the 1990's, it unfortunately suffers the curse of bad historic fiction: excessive, distracting foreshadowing. The events of this book take place right around the time Edward VIII was trying to marry Wallis Simpson, so there's a lot of very obvious "Gee, hope this won't have any long-reaching consequences for the monarchy!" and it was tiring. The diary entries written by Peter's mother are the worst source of obnoxious foreshadowing - they're all "oh, the king would never marry a divorced woman!" and "man, what's up with Germany lately?" It was distracting and stupid, because it was so clearly written by someone living decades after the original draft, who had the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. It was lazy and cheap, and took me out of the story completely because it was obviously not written by Sayers. Sayers abandoned this story in 1936, but she didn't abandon Harriet and Peter - she went on to write several short stories that took place after the events of this novel (which means one of the central conflicts of this book - will Harriet and Peter have kids? - has already been resolved by later stories). I dunno, I think it's a sign that Sayers continued writing about Harriet and Peter, but never went back to try to make this book work. Maybe they should have just left it alone. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2016
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Apr 07, 2016
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Hardcover
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031610969X
| 9780316109697
| 031610969X
| 3.71
| 160,119
| Sep 01, 2005
| Sep 28, 2005
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did not like it
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In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected." I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected." I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole (if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving, her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible"), and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia, I skip the Julie parts because even Amy Adams, who is literal human sunshine, cannot make that woman appealing in any sense of the word. Actually, the whole reason I decided to get this book from the library is because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France, which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie, so I decided that it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book. Powell wastes no time letting her readers know exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight (Eight! We're not even into the double-digit pages yet!) we get to see Powell's version of an Oprah "Ah-ha moment." I mentioned this in one of my status updates already, but I feel it's important that I fully explain this scene. Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses: "...a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete directly behind me. ...The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. 'Fuck!' she yelled. 'Fuck! FUCK!' ...The loon placed both palms down on the concrete in front of her and - CRACK! - smacked her forehead hard on the ground. ...It was only once I was in the car, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, the lot of us hanging by one hand from the overhead bar like slaughtered cows on the trundling train, that it came to me - as if some omnipotent God of City Dwellers were whispering the truth in my ear - that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming 'Fuck!' in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy." So in addition to being an asshole, Julie Powell also might be a sociopath, because who does that? How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to become in order to watch what is clearly a mentally ill person having a disturbing episode, and your first response is, "Ugh, same"?! And then you record the scene in your memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for you? Gee, I'm so glad that person had a mental breakdown and seriously injured themselves so you could have an epiphany, Julie Powell. (you may be wondering: how does this experience lead to Powell deciding to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking? I read the damn book and I couldn't even tell you.) So anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook, keeping a blog about her progress. (This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie's like, what the hell is a blog? 2002 was a simpler time.) As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily, with scenes happening out of sequence and a nonsensical structure - Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on, and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter. It's very difficult to follow the progress she's making through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping meant that I never had any clear idea of where I was in the project, unless Powell directly referenced the date. Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is...not a great writer. She's clearly trying to be self-depreciating, and make us think that she's rolling her eyes right along with us whenever we read a scene of her throwing a tantrum about mayonnaise - but the problem is that I wasn't shaking my head and smiling in bemusement, like Powell wants me to. I was just thinking, "you are horrible, and telling me that you know you're being horrible doesn't help." Powell doesn't have the writing skill to redeem herself in the narrative, and on top of that, her prose is often practically unreadable. Try this excerpt on for size, and see if it makes any goddamn sense to you on the first reading: "My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess." Well, now I guess we know what it would sound like if Charlotte Bronte wrote all her books drunk. It made me long for the effortless, evocative writing Julia Child presented in My Life in France - her description of the proper technique for scrambling eggs is practically poetry. And that is what really sets Julie Powell apart from Julia Child: Child loved to cook, and Powell does not. Her project, and every recipe she describes, are never presented as anything other than a chore she has to get through. There is no joy in Powell's book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And frankly, a lot of Powell's book is pretty gross. Her kitchen is always a disaster scene, with dirty surfaces and piles of unwashed dishes. Which, fine - you're working a full-time job and cooking gourmet meals every night, obviously you're going to slack off on cleaning again. But then Powell discovers that there are maggots living under her dish rack, and I was fucking done. With Julie and Julia, Julie Powell has managed to do the unthinkable: she wrote a cooking memoir that didn't make me feel hungry, not once in three hundred pages. I'm pretty sure that's a capital offense in some countries. ...more |
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1
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Mar 31, 2016
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Apr 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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1416903445
| 9781416903444
| 1416903445
| 4.21
| 59,546
| Apr 01, 1993
| Jun 01, 2005
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liked it
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It's been over a year since I read the first book in Tamora Pierce's Immortals quartet, Wild Magic. I remember enjoying it almost more than Pierce's A
It's been over a year since I read the first book in Tamora Pierce's Immortals quartet, Wild Magic. I remember enjoying it almost more than Pierce's Alanna books (which will always be first in my heart, of course) but other than that, I started this book with only vague memories of the plot and characters of the previous installment. Luckily, there's not much to catch up on - Pierce's novels are characterized by fast-paced action, a relatively small and memorable cast of characters, and fairly simple conflicts and plots. And Pierce does a good job of giving the reader enough backstory and reminders from the first book, so even if you're like me and are resuming this series after a long absence, you should be fine. As is also the case with Pierce's books, there is almost no setup - Wolf-Speaker starts practically in the middle of the action, with a wolf pack (the same pack who Daine briefly ran with after her mother's death, when she nearly lost her own sense of humanity) contacting our heroine and asking for help. The pack's habitat is being threatened by human development, and they want her to intercede for them. Meanwhile, the rulers who control the land where the wolves live are also plotting against the king of Tortall, and let's not forget that the Immortals (powerful ancient monsters/gods who recently got released into the world) are quietly and not-so-quietly moving around the country. Reading this book gave me strong flashbacks to The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, the third book in the Alanna series. I still consider it the weakest of the series, because after the absolutely breakneck pace of the previous books, this one seemed to move at a snail's pace while we watch Alanna hanging around in the desert and helping a local tribe. Wolf-Speaker suffers from the same problem - despite the fact that there's plenty of conflict, everything feels so slow. There's also a lot of repetition, because this book has Daine experimenting with her powers and learning to enter animals' minds, and it means that we have to read essentially the same scene over and over as she practices this skill on various animals. This repetition works for younger readers, but I was pretty bored for most of the book. The conflict itself - rebellion against the king, aided by Immortals - isn't very interesting either, mainly because we're meeting the antagonists for the first time in this book, and the fact that Daine spends most of her time with the wolf pack means that the bad guys never get to do much. Failing to properly develop the villains, and removing Daine from the action for the majority of the book, means that the stakes never feel as high as they should. Not that I disliked the book, overall. The fact that most of the characters are animals, each with their own personalities and conflicts, would have delighted me if I'd read this book as a child. Pierce is particularly good at coming up with animal names, and if you manage to get through this entire story without falling head-over-heels in love with Quickmunch the marmot, then I don't know what to do with you. I liked the wolf pack, and child readers will have more fun reading about them than I did - it's hard to get too invested in these characters when you know they're just a detour on the way to the main action. Although the Alanna and the Daine stories have a lot in common, the series are trying to accomplish very different things, which becomes clear in Wolf-Speaker. Alanna's adventures were all about teaching girls that their gender doesn't stop them from being whatever they want to be, and that they can accomplish anything through determination and hard work. Daine's books teach children that the world isn't black and white, and that you can't make judgements about people (or in this case, creatures) based on what they are or where they come from. In the Alanna books, the villains are not complex, and everyone pretty much adheres to their assigned roles - if someone is a bad guy in Book One, they're going to be a bad guy in Book Four - and the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Daine's journey, it seems, is shaping up to be a little more complex than that. In the first book, we established that many of the Immortals, like the Stormwings, are evil and scary. In the second book, Daine and the reader are forced to reconsider that idea, and realize that all Immortals are not alike. Just because they're a Stormwing, Daine learns, you can't assume they're evil. Here's a scene where Iakoju, an ogre, lays it out clearly for the readers: "Maura frowned. 'I don't understand. If you're peaceful - if you really only like to farm - how come you're called "ogres"? Ogres are monsters, aren't they? And how come your people are always fighting with ours?' 'We are big,' replied Iajoku quietly. 'Ugly. Our color different from men color. No all ogres are same, either. Some take what they want. Some fight with men. My people, kin clans, we only like farming, not fighting. Some ogres only like fighting. Are all men the same?'" This is a suprisingly complex concept for a kids' series, especially since fantasy audiences are trained to think of all evil-inclined creatures as one singular hive-mind (Tolkien, bless him, assured us that orcs are pure evil and that's that, and I think it set an unfortunate precedent in fantasy), and it's really the only thing that saved this book for me - I'm looking forward to continuing this series, just to see how Pierce continues to develop this idea. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Feb 2016
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Mar 01, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
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2253002844
| 9782253002840
| 2253002844
| 3.63
| 2,146
| 1942
| unknown
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** Darling, so good to see you! How was Monte Carlo? Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so **spoiler alert** Darling, so good to see you! How was Monte Carlo? Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so I got to watch people have fun. It was great. So what did I miss while I was gone? Oh my god, I have to tell you the news. You know Gaston Lachaille? The sugar heir? I'd like him to give me some sugar, if you know what I mean. No, shut up, I have the best worst news ever. He's getting married. Married? So his mistress finally locked that down. Good for her. It's even better than that. Okay, so apparently Gaston's been hanging around this poor family for like, ever-- Ew, why? I'm not totally clear on that, but I'm like 99% sure that Gaston's dad used to bang the mom and the aunt - they used to be courtesans. Gaston Lachaille is friends with a family of former hookers? Yeah, he goes over there and has tea and coos over how adorable their poverty is, it sounds awesome. Anyway, so there's a daughter... Holy shit, NO. I'M NOT EVEN AT THE BEST PART. So apparently the mom and the aunt have been training this girl to be a courtesan for Gaston-- How sweet. If this wine wasn't so expensive I'd throw it up. Right? Anyway, Gaston was like, "yes thanks, wrap her up, I'll take her to go" and the girl was like, "um, I'm not cool with this" and so he proposed instead. Huh. That is like the opposite of "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free." So now Gaston Lachaille is marrying the girl who was supposed to be his mistress. Me and the other girls have a betting pool going - I've given them six months. Is that the best part? No, this is: guess how old she is? Oh Jesus. Okay, he's...what, thirty? Thirty-three. She's fifteen. Holy shit. Did I mention he's known her since she was a baby, and considered her a little kid until like, two days ago when he suddenly noticed she got boobs? And she calls him "Tonton"? Wow. So what are the odds she's had any kind of sex ed? Hard to say. I mean, her entire family is courtesans, so I can't imagine they're shy about discussing the facts of life. But on the other hand, when they pitched the idea of her being Gaston's mistress, she used the phrase "I'd sleep in your bed" to describe the situation. So it's equally likely she'll have a heart attack the first time he takes his pants off. Well, mazel tov, I guess. You said you had six months in the betting pool? Yep. Put me down for three. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2016
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Feb 26, 2016
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Paperback
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0316216852
| 9780316216852
| 0316216852
| 3.54
| 52,582
| Apr 15, 2013
| Jun 04, 2013
|
really liked it
|
It's not easy to sell people on the concept of The Shining Girls, because every time I try to describe the plot, I can't do it without making this sou
It's not easy to sell people on the concept of The Shining Girls, because every time I try to describe the plot, I can't do it without making this sound like the dumbest possible idea for a book. This is a story about a time-traveling serial killer. See? It sounds so dumb and so bad. And if you read it and came to the same conclusion, I would not blame you at all. But, much like the cranked-to-eleven lunacy of The Girl on the Train, this book just worked for me. In essence, this is a very, very dumb idea for a story that has been executed very, very well (which is also how I describe Pacific Rim, a movie where humans build giant robots to fight giant aliens and it's actually one of the best movies I've ever seen). Our killer is Harper Curtis, and while on the run from gangsters in 1930's Chicago, he discovers that he can time-travel. Specifically, he finds a house that acts as a sort of portal to other time periods - and only Harper Curtis has the key. The specifics and the logic of how and why Curtis decides to use this power to hunt and kill women across time does not matter - the point is that he does, and one of his victims manages to survive. Kirby Mazrachi is in college in 1989 when Harper Curtis attacks her and leaves her for dead. She makes a physical recovery, but becomes obsessed with finding the man who tried to kill her. To do this, she applies for an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times with a sports writer who used to cover homicides, and enlists his help tracking down her attempted murderer. The chapters move back and forth across time, showing us the various murders that Curtis commits while, in the present, Kirby attempts to find a pattern of unsolved murders that will lead her to the man who tried to kill her. Curtis, we realize, does not kill at random. Each of his victims is, in his mind, a girl who "shines" across time, enabling him to locate her. It's not made totally clear what he means by "shining" but each woman is doing something revolutionary or noteworthy when Curtis cuts her life short. (this is the point in the review where I'm very tempted to say that Kirby is in "a race against time" or something like that. I'll let you know that I resisted that impulse, but not happily) Look, I'll come right out and say that book is not for everyone. The violence is detailed and gruesome, particularly the scene where Curtis first attacks Kirby and we see every horrible action. The deaths and brutalization of women and animals alike are described, and it's exactly as upsetting as it should be. Other reviewers have pointed out, and I agree, that all of Curtis's victims besides Kirby never get to be anything other than victims - each is introduced to the reader and given a backstory just to make sure that we understand how upsetting and sad her death is, and that's all we see of them. Also Kirby has a romance subplot that really didn't work for me, first because it was a distraction from the central plot, and also because I have a sneaking suspicion that Beukes included it to show us that Kirby is recovering from her trauma, as if the best way to "fix" a woman is to give her a man. But May-December romances have never been my particular thing, so maybe that's why it didn't work for me. This is honestly more of a three-star book, but I'm giving it an extra star because Beukes made two very, very good choices in her storytelling and I have to give her credit for them. First, she sets parameters for Curtis's time travel abilities - he cannot travel further back in time than 1929, and this means that we don't have to go through some idiotic revelation that Curtis was actually Jack the Ripper or something (or, considering the Chicago location, HH Holmes). And the second very, very good thing Beukes does is a spoiler, so I'm going to hide it. (view spoiler)[So Kirby is raised by a single mom, and doesn't know who her father is. About halfway through the book, a terrible thought occurred to me: oh Jesus, are we going to find out that Curtis had sex with Kirby's mother during one of his time-travel jaunts, and he's Kirby's father and that's why they have this connection oh god no no no nooooo. It would have been an awful twist, and Beukes could have easily gone that route, and thank god she didn't, because otherwise I would have had to explain to the nice people at the library that I couldn't return The Shining Girls because I had thrown it into a river (hide spoiler)] There are some plot twists that are better left unwritten, and I'm glad Beukes resisted the impulse to write that one. One-sentence review summary: The Shining Girls is definitely an acquired taste, and I was just lucky that it happened to be mine. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2016
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Feb 19, 2016
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Hardcover
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0385720254
| 9780385720250
| 0385720254
| 4.20
| 29,404
| Apr 01, 2000
| Oct 17, 2000
|
liked it
|
"So it all moves in a pageant towards the ending, it's own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And ther
"So it all moves in a pageant towards the ending, it's own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatevere dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You've only got so long to live. You're getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it's hot." Jesus. My college diaries don't sound like that, let me tell you. But of course, Sylvia Plath has always operated on another level entirely, and her journals prove nothing else, it's that Plath was in a category by herself. The newly-unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath are a fascinating and intimate look into her life and her mind - and at the same time, the reader is kept mostly at arm's length. For every page where we see Plath grappling with her depression, or her anxieties about writing, or her complex relationship with Ted Hughes, we have to wade through hundreds of pages that are nothing but Plath describing who she spent the afternoon with and what they wore and what the room looked like (As a writing exercise, she would record everyone's outfits and physical details of the places she visited - I'm sure it helped her as a writer, but for a reader, it's a maddening slog). And even though this book contains hundreds of pages' worth of journal entries that were previously kept out of the public eye (thanks, Ted), this is far from a no-holds-barred tell-all. Many of Plath's journals have been destroyed, and Plath went through long periods where she didn't do any diary-keeping at all. So we get to read her college journals up until July 1953, and then there's nothing until 1955 - so anyone going into this book expecting raw, emotional entries written after Plath's suicide attempt in August 1953, and her last year at Smith following her hospitalization, will be disappointed. (I freely admit that I'm one of these ghouls - the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank in elementary school, I was genuinely disappointed that the final entry wasn't written as the Gestapo were raiding the attic) At over seven hundred pages, this book requires a lot of commitment. Even die-hard Plath fans will find themselves struggling to stay invested - the downside of reading real diaries is that there's never anything resembling a plot to keep the reader interested, unless that plot is "we're hiding from the Nazis" or something like that. But if you stick with it, there's a lot to discover. I identified very strongly with the college entries, because it's a lot of "what am I supposed to do with my life/am I actually talented/when am I going to get a boyfriend" that will be very, very familiar to anyone who remembers that period of their lives. Plath also writes frankly about what it's really like to make a living as a writer - once she and Ted are married, they're both constantly sending stories to magazines, working on their books, and applying for writing fellowships. Plath is always reminding herself to write more in her entries, setting goals for herself like "write for two hours every day" or "finish ten poems and send them to publishers." It's a very realistic depiction of what it actually means to be a writer. The most interesting part, for many people, will be after Plath marries Ted Hughes. I didn't know much about their married life, aside from the fact that Ted was responsible for fucking up a lot of Plath's poetry collections after her death, and the way Plath writes about their marriage is really interesting. She fucking adored Hughes, and she seemed to really love her role as a housewife - she's always baking cakes and throwing dinner parties, and at times it seems like she enjoyed being an author's wife more than being an author herself. She believed that Ted was the real talent, and seemed very happy to play second fiddle to him (so it's a delightful irony that Plath is now the more famous name, while Ted Hughes is known primarily as "Sylvia Plath's jealous husband"). As I said earlier, their relationship was complex. Plath freely acknowledges in her diaries that Ted is a surrogate father figure for her, and there's a section where she realizes Ted is cheating on her and is devastated. Throughout the book, you can see Plath struggling with her own personal demons, and trying to push back at the depression and anxiety that eventually killed her. In a way, I appreciated how long this volume is, because it allows you to see that Sylvia Plath was more than just a writer who killed herself. She had good days and bad days, she was complicated, she was happy and sad and scared and angry, and she was alive. "I must reject the grovelling image of the fearful beast in myself, which is an elaborate escape image, and face, force, days into line. I have an inner fight that won't be conquered by a motto or one night's resolution. My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I'll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save: each day will have something to recommend it...Minute by minute to fight upward. Out from under that black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not of what I am, but of what I am not. I am what I am, and have written, lived, and travelled: I have been worth what I have won, but must work to be worth more. I shall not be more by wishful thinking." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2016
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Feb 11, 2016
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0385539126
| 9780385539128
| 0385539126
| 3.89
| 25,702
| Aug 28, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
Here's an interesting thing I noticed: on the cover photo that Goodreads attaches to this review, the full title is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. But my
Here's an interesting thing I noticed: on the cover photo that Goodreads attaches to this review, the full title is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. But my copy (the paperback version, with the bright yellow cover) reads Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales. I'm not sure why there's a difference in the titles, but I'm glad I have the wicked version. Fuck, I love Atwood. She just gets better and better as the years go on, and I'm especially in the love with the way she's happily embracing her love of pulpy, B-movie tropes and plots that Serious Authors are supposed to shun. First she wrote a nonfiction anthology of science fiction, then she wrote a post-apocalyptic future series, and now we have Nine Tales. It's not all fantasy and sci-fi, but the influences are clear. The first three stories revolve around an aging author named Constance, who wrote a sprawling high-fantasy series about a magical world called Alphinland, and words cannot describe how badly I want Atwood to write a good old fashioned swords-and-dragons epic, for real. Just the little glimpses she gives us of Alphinland made me wish that it was a real series. Like this description, where we see Constance inserting people from her real life into her fantasy world, and doling out the appropriate punishments and rewards: "[Alphinland] was a dangerous place, and - granted - preposterous in some ways, but it was not sordid. The denizens of it had standards. They understood gallantry, and courage, and also revenge. Therefore Marjorie is not stored in the deserted winery where Gavin has been parked. Instead she's immobilized by runic spells inside a stone beehive belonging to Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae. This demigoddess is eight feet tall and covered with tiny golden hairs, and has compound eyes. Luckily she's a close friend of Constance and is thus happy to assist in her plans and devices in return for the insect-related charms that Constance has the ability to bestow. So every day at twelve noon sharp, Marjorie is stung by a hundred emerald and indigo bees. Their stings are like white hot needles combined with red-hot chili sauce, and the pain is beyond excruciating." Gavin and Marjorie are people from Constance's past - Gavin is her old boyfriend, and Marjorie is the woman he left Constance for. They each get their own sections after Constance, so you can see the relationship from three difference perspectives, and honestly I could have read an entire book about just those three characters. But Atwood promised us nine wicked tales, and she delivers. I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth revisits the characters from The Robber Bride, The Dead Hand Loves You is a delightfully meta story of a horror writer striking an unfortunate deal, and in The Freeze-Dried Groom, a man purchases a storage unit at an auction and discovers it filled with the remnants of a wedding - including the groom. But my favorite (after Constance & Co) was Stone Mattress. In this story, a woman traveling solo on an Alaskan cruise realizes that one of her fellow passengers is the man who raped her in high school, and she decides to murder him. And now, in addition to a high-fantasy series (ten books minimum, please) I also want Atwood to write a murder mystery novel. It's brief, and you can get through the whole book in a couple of days, but every page is gold. Or, more accurately, every page is Atwood. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0393064727
| 9780393064728
| 0393064727
| 3.79
| 935
| 2008
| Jan 17, 2008
|
liked it
|
It took me a very long time to finish this book. I would stick with it for a few weeks, and then take a break from the book to read a novel or somethi
It took me a very long time to finish this book. I would stick with it for a few weeks, and then take a break from the book to read a novel or something. All together, I think I read five or six other books while trying to get through God's Crucible. The problem wasn't that the material was boring - I've been wanting to read a good, detailed history of pre-Crusades Islam for a long time, so I was really excited to find this - but it's dense. Important historical figures appear and disappear from the narrative with very little notice, and Lewis expects you to keep up with the scores of characters and locations contained in this history. I don't recommend trying to read this book on your morning train ride, is what I'm saying. A quick note before getting into the meat of this review: prior to reading this book, I knew almost nothing about Islam or the history of the Muslim empire except what I was able to glean from biographies of white Christian conquerors like Isabella of Castille or Gertrude Bell. So I'm not in a position to evaluate how well Lewis presents this history; I can only give you my impressions of the book from the perspective of someone who was getting most of this information for the first time. Lewis starts his book with a quick history of the origins of Islam, and this was fascinating to me - coming from a childhood of Catholic catechism classes, it was amazing that so much is known about Muhammad (I'm spelling the name as Lewis does in his book) as a historical figure, and I was excited and fascinated by all the information Lewis provides about the founder of Islam. His first wife was an older widow who owned her own business, and was one of Muhammad's strongest supporters! The schism between Sunnis and Shiites first arose out from the question of who would succeed Muhammad after he died! One of Muhammad's later wives was once involved in a scandal involving a necklace, and it reminded me so much of Marie Antoinette's affaire du collier that I wondered if the former story really happened at all! Once Muhammad dies, Lewis has to widen the scope of his book considerably, especially after the Muslim empire starts extending into what would eventually become Spain and France. This is where things start to get dense, but it still kept me interested. The most fascinating part of this section is when Lewis is discussing how the Muslim invasion prompted the Franks to make uneasy alliances with other scattered tribes, leading to the entire concept of a single, unified European identity. He focuses on one battle in particular, the battle of Poitiers, which for a long time was described by historians as The Battle that decided Europe's future forever. Not exactly true, says Lewis, but he spends some time discussing what would have happened if the Muslims had been able to maintain their stronghold in Europe. What would it have meant for the future if the Frankish king, Charles Martel, hadn't been able to beat back the Muslim invaders? Spoiler alert: we might have been better off. "Had 'Abd Al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize - one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Devoisse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267 years,' according to their calculation. 'We might have been spared the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy." Lewis's book is at it's best when he's discussing how much more advanced the Muslim world was in comparison to early Europe, and how a continuation of the Muslim empire (but to be fair, they were pretty powerful for a good long while) might have advanced Europe by decades, if not centuries. Sure, this is mostly opinion and speculation on the part of historians, but you can't deny that the Muslim empire was lightyears ahead of Europe in almost every aspect, and then the Pope was like, "Yes, but they don't like Jesus, so let's go set everything on fire." Ugh. Although it took me a long time, and I don't feel like I fully absorbed all of the information Lewis was presenting, I'm ultimately glad that I read this. Even though a lot of what was presented went over my head, I learned so much from this book. It gave me good background information on the history of Islam and the founding of Europe, as well as insight into the current political climate. Long, occasionally tedious and overwrought, but important, and an interesting exploration into what could have been. "But al-Andalus, notwithstanding its fractious mixture of Arabs, Berbers, Goths, Hispanics, and Jews, and the splintering cordilleras, was an intact creation by the end of the tenth century. By contrast, the seams of Charlemagne's Europe - once it was deprived of its animating, aging genius - began to loosen badly. The center failed to hold and the avaricious parts turned on one another while even more fierce Scandinavian and Slavic intruders tested their defenses and ravaged the countryside. If anything, the situation in 976 portended a long, antipodal continuity of the two Europes - one secure in its defensesm religiously tolerant, and maturing in cultural and scientific sophistication; the other an arena of unceasing warfare in which superstition passed for religion and the flame of knowledge sputtered weakly." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
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Jan 08, 2016
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0356500152
| 9780356500157
| 0356500152
| 3.95
| 234,803
| Jan 14, 2014
| Jun 19, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
"Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not such a g
"Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don't get to choose. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list; new children get the top name on the boys' list or the top name on the girls' list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that. There haven't been any new children for a long time now. Melanie doesn't know why that it. There used to be lots; every week, or every couple of weeks, voices in the night. Muttered orders, complaints, the occasional curse. A cell door slamming. Then, after a while, usually a month or two, a new face in the classroom - a new boy or girl who hadn't even learned to talk yet. But they got it fast. Melanie was new herself, once, but that's hard to remember because it was a long time ago. It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don't stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they're gone." It's time to admit, as a society, that the zombie craze is finally on its last legs - if it's not over already. And honestly, I think we're way overdue anyway. I was tired of hearing about the damn things around the time I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Going into this book and knowing that it dealt with zombies (as will anyone who reads even three pages, so for anyone preparing to charge into the comments and accuse me of spoiling the entire book: shut up), I was pretty sure that I knew what I was going to get. There are only so many ways to tell a zombie apocalypse story, and I had seen/read enough variations to be able to guess what was coming. So I'm delighted and grateful to report that yes, MR Carey has managed to tell a zombie apocalypse story in a new way. It's not just his unconventional choice of narrator - he knows better than to let his entire novel rest on a single gimmick. The Girl With All the Gifts rexamines and reinvents several staples of the zombie genre, and does something new with them. Considering how oversaturated the market has become, it's pretty astonishing that he manages to take so many familiar tropes and do something new with them. I won't go into more detail, because the less you know about the circumstances of the story going into it, the better. Start with the premise everyone knows - this is a book about zombies - and let yourself discover everything alongside the characters. And there's plenty to discover. Carey is apparently most well-known for his work writing comic books, and it shows - the book is over four hundred pages long, and he keeps the action zipping along at a consistently maintained clip. Even when the characters aren't running from one (very well staged and described) action setpiece to another, there's no real downtime. Even when characters are just standing around and talking, their conversation addresses hidden drama or results in a tense confrontation, and there's no time for the reader to get bored. Like me, you'll probably tear through this in a matter of days, because every time a chapter ends you'll have to read the next one. Carey made the wise decision to let multiple people narrate his story, so we aren't just confined to Melanie's extremely limited knowledge base. By letting us into the heads of people who know way more than Melanie does about the circumstances of the zombie plague, Carey lets his readers get all the information they need, while still maintaining suspense. And the ending (again, no spoilers) was possibly the best ending to a zombie apocalypse novel I've ever found, not counting Shaun of the Dead. Carey's ending acknowledges the true hopelessness of a zombie apocalypse, but manages to resolve his story in a satisfying way. It's impressive, to say the least. I had a very cheesy line worked out about how MR Carey has managed to reanimate the dead zombie genre (haha, see what I did there?) but I came up with a better one: the zombie genre is Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, MR Carey is John Travolta, and The Girl With All the Gifts is the syringe of adrenaline, sending a jolt of life back into a tired and dying genre. The zombie craze is on its way out, but The Girl With All the Gifts makes a great final encore. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
|
Dec 20, 2015
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0804138141
| 9780804138147
| 0804138141
| 3.91
| 221,006
| Sep 15, 2015
| Sep 15, 2015
|
really liked it
|
I read Mindy Kaling's first memoir/essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) about four years ago, but I just realized
I read Mindy Kaling's first memoir/essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) about four years ago, but I just realized that I never actually wrote a review for it - I also just realized that I never made a "memoir" shelf, so that's been corrected. I'll go back and write a review of Kaling's first book at some point, I promise. The cliff notes version of my thoughts on Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me is that I enjoyed it, but Kaling was very clearly being selective with what she wanted to share and what she wanted to leave out, and the whole thing felt slightly incomplete. Overall, it was funny but ultimately unsatisfying. I'm happy to report, therefore, that Why Not Me? is a much more focused and tightly-constructed memoir. Kaling's first book was a mishmash of funny essays and stories about her childhood and time spent working in Hollywood; Why Not Me? has a much clearly defined thesis: how Mindy Kaling achieved her success as a writer/actor/producer, what contributed to this and what didn't help, and how she grapples with that success. There are still a few funny essays thrown in - "Things to Bring to My Dinner Party", "4am Worries", and my favorite, "A Perfect Courtship in My Alternate Life" where Kaling imagines an alternate-universe Mindy who teaches Latin at a private school in New York and has a sparring flirtation with the history teacher. She has a whole chapter of the emails exchanged by this fictional version of herself and the history teacher, and I would absolutely watch that movie - especially because I imagined Chris Messina as the history teacher. Kaling probably did too, because when she's introducing the section she writes, "I will have a stern man in anything I ever write; I just love a gruff guy with a heart of gold. I guess what I'm saying is Walter Matthau is the man of my dreams." But for the most part, the book deals with Kaling's work. She has a chapter titled "A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling" and guys, Mindy Kaling's life is exhausting. On days when she's shooting her show, she gets up at 5 am and goes to bed at 12:30 am. In between is nothing except work, meal breaks, and a nap. "About 50 percent of the time," Kaling writes, "I have enough energy to remove my clothes and put on pajamas when I go to bed. Otherwise I just fall asleep in the clothes I went to work in, which I like to think of as a sexy, ongoing walk of shame." For me, the message that comes across most clearly in Why Not Me? (and to a lesser extent, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is this: Mindy Kaling is not successful because of luck or good connections. Mindy Kaling is successful because she works so, so hard for everything she has. She might not be your favorite comedian, her show might not be your favorite show, she might not understand that no one really cares that much about her relationship with BJ Novak (seriously girl: you dated, you broke up, you're still friends. We've all heard the song; stop releasing remixes and pretending they're new), but you can't deny that Kaling has earned everything she has. The title of the book addresses this plainly - like a lot of women in comedy (especially minority women in comedy) Kaling frequently encounters people who act like she is doing something radical and presumptuous by appearing on TV. "The conversation about me and my show is so frequently linked to the way I look that people who are deciding whether or not to watch my show must think subconsciously, Oh, that's that show about body acceptance in chubby women, because that's all they seem to hear about it. And my show is about so much more than that! It's about the struggles of a delusional Indian thirtysomething trying to scam on white dudes!" In its best moments, this book is a response to all the people who ever looked at Mindy Kaling and sneered, "Why should you be on TV?" Kaling's response: "Because I work really hard and also, why not?" At the end of the book, Kaling addresses the concept of confidence. It's something she gets asked about a lot, and she cites a Q&A she did once where a young Indian girl asked her where she gets her confidence. "Context is so important. If this question had been asked by a white man, I might actually have been offended, because the subtext of it would have been completely different. When an adult white man asks me, 'Where do you get your confidence?' the tacit assumption behind it is: because you don't look like a person who should have any confidence. You're not white, you're not a man, and you're not thin or conventionally attractive. How were you able to overlook these obvious shortcomings to feel confident?' ...Confidence is just entitlement. Entitlement has gotten a bad rap because it's used almost exclusively for the useless children of the rich, reality TV stars, and Conrad Hilton Jr., who gets kicked off an airplane for smoking pot in the lavatory and calling people peasants or whatever. But entitlement in and of itself isn't so bad. Entitlement is simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you'd better make sure you deserve it. ...Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
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Dec 16, 2015
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Hardcover
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1594633665
| 9781594633669
| 1594633665
| 3.96
| 3,064,001
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 13, 2015
|
really liked it
|
When I started this, knowing that it was one of the big It Books of the year, I was pretty sure I knew what to expect. I had read the publisher-provid
When I started this, knowing that it was one of the big It Books of the year, I was pretty sure I knew what to expect. I had read the publisher-provided description, which goes like this: "Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?" Based on that, I was sure that I could make some pretty safe assumptions about what would happen in the story. A girl, bored on her daily commute, notices a particular couple every day when the train pauses behind their house, and she amuses herself by making up stories about their life. And then she sees, I don't know, the husband strangling the wife or something like that, and gets drawn into the investigation surrounding two strangers. Sounds right, doesn't it? Just a normal story with lots of opportunities for reflection on perception vs. reality and how we never really know what goes on behind closed doors. The Girl on the Train sounded, in short, like a perfectly nice and very literary exploration of these themes. I am delighted to report, therefore, that The Girl on the Train is nothing like this. It is melodramatic to the point of hysteria, it is convoluted, it is absurd, it is consistently cranked to eleven. The Girl on the Train is the best worst Lifetime Original Movie ever made. (mild spoiler warning: I'm going to describe exactly what Rachel saw, and the circumstances that set off the action. Normally I wouldn't really view this as a spoiler, especially since it all gets revealed in the first few chapters, but since all the descriptions and reviews I've read have kept this information super vague, I thought it was better to be cautious. So, if you want to be completely surprised by the events that start the plot, don't continue!) Rachel, the main character of The Girl on the Train, has joined Mary Katherine Blackwood in my unofficial Unreliable Narrators Hall of Fame. Rachel, we quickly learn, is not just some bored commuter picking a random couple and making up stories about them. The couple, who Rachel calls Jason and Jess (but are actually named Scott and Megan) live a few blocks away from Rachel's old house - the layout is the same, even. Rachel's former home is now occupied by her ex-husband, Tom, and his new wife (and former mistress), Anna. Rachel, frankly, is a mess. She takes the train into London everyday, but actually lost her job months ago because her drinking was out of control. She still drinks excessively, and is unable to stop visiting her old neighborhood and watching what goes on in her old house. For her, the fantasy she's created for "Jason" and "Jess" is a way for her to deal with her failed marriage - because Jason and Jess seem so happy, and their life seems so perfect, Rachel can console herself with the knowledge that someone, at least, managed to get it right. And then one day, the train pauses by the house, and Rachel sees "Jess" in the garden, kissing another man. Rachel is shocked, and feels personally betrayed. The next day, she learns that the woman she calls Jess has disappeared. And, because this isn't dramatic enough, Rachel was in the neighborhood on the night of the disappearance, but because she was blackout drunk, she can't remember if she saw anything. (are you excited yet? Strap in, because this crazy train is just leaving the station) Rachel is one of three narrators - the other two are Megan (aka Jess) and Anna, the woman who had an affair with Rachel's husband and then married him. Each woman is unhappy in her current circumstances, and each is her own variety of unreliable and vaguely repellent. The time frame skips around, with the majority of Megan's chapters taking place months before the main action occurs while the other two women's chapters take place at mostly the same time. This was my one big complaint with the story, and it's really more of a warning: each chapter is labeled with a date, and you need to pay attention to them. I didn't, and was really confused when I read about Megan's disappearance in one chapter, and then the next one opened with her at home. Look, this book is ridiculous. But it's fun ridiculous, like when you're wine-drunk at 1 am and decide to watch William and Kate in its entirety. Not that that's ever happened to me. It's not a mistake that this book is being advertised as the next Gone Girl, and how you felt about Gillian Flynn's rollercoaster of screaming insanity will be a good way to gauge how you'll feel about this one. Look, even I started rolling my eyes once I got to the ending and everything went fully off the rails (seriously, it is the most Lifetime ending you've ever read in your life, and that is a compliment), but the fact is that I tore through this book in two days. The rights have already been purchased by some major film studio, which is a real shame, because this book was meant to be brought to life by Tori Spelling and filmed in a shitty backlot at Lifetime Studios. It would be called Next Stop: Danger, (or, if they wanted to go subtle, The Wife) and it would be amazing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2015
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Dec 06, 2015
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0385521065
| 9780385521062
| 0385521065
| 3.08
| 4,182
| May 08, 2007
| May 08, 2007
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** Well, that was different. In theory, this book should have been my jam. The story opens with Elizabeth Vogelsang being found dead in **spoiler alert** Well, that was different. In theory, this book should have been my jam. The story opens with Elizabeth Vogelsang being found dead in a river near her Cambridge home, clutching a glass prism in her hand. Elizabeth is a 17th-century scholar who specializes in Isaac Newton, and her death interrupts her work on a book exploring Newton's interest in alchemy. Elizabeth's son, Cameron, recruits Lydia Brooke (a writer, friend of Elizabeth, and Cameron's former lover) to ghost-write the rest of Elizabeth's book. Along the way, Lydia tries to unravel the secrets in Elizabeth's research - secrets that might have led to her death. I'm going to go ahead and get the most absurd thing about this book out of the way first, so we can acknowledge it and move on. Okay, so you want to know who killed Elizabeth, right? The book is set up like a murder mystery/historic fiction/supernatural mashup, so you know the solution to the murder is going to be good. Ready? A ghost did it. The murderer is literally a ghost. Don't worry, we'll get back to that. I just wanted to give everyone a vague idea of where this crazy train is headed, because that's more than Rebecca Stott did for me. (quick note: I purchased this book secondhand; however, it's still an ARC, so all quoted passages may be different in the final published version) I started to sense that something was wrong by the first chapter. After a prologue where we see Elizabeth's body being found by her son, Chapter One begins from Lydia's perspective. She describes the days after Elizabeth's death, and then suddenly we're in a police interrogation room, and Lydia's narration informs us that "Elizabeth Vogelsang drowned in September, 2002, the first of three deaths that would become the subject of a police investigation four months later." Okay, let's take a minute to sort that out, because there's a lot of information there. So the book isn't going to focus just on Elizabeth's death, but also two other people. Presumably we will meet these people at some point in the narrative and grow to care about them, and their deaths will be appropriately placed in the narrative to maintain suspense (yes to the first, sort of to the second, nope to the third). Also, since the police investigation happens four months after Elizabeth's death, we've got a relatively short time frame to work with. And Lydia will be very close to these deaths. Okay, cool. But then, only a few paragraphs later, Stott drops this on us: "...I would have to be careful and alert here at the Parkside Police Station. Very alert. They had arrested Lily Ridler." That line comes seven pages into the novel. It is the first time that Lily Ridler is mentioned, and it will be way, way too long before she's mentioned again (in fact, until I flipped back to the beginning of the book to look for quotes, I had completely forgotten that they mention this character by name so early). By the time we figure out who this character is and why we should care, I had already stopped caring. Suspense novels are tricky, because you have to keep your audience invested without showing too many of your cards at once. Rebecca Stottt has the entire story of Ghostwalk mapped out in her head already, but she forgets that her reader doesn't. She goes so overboard with the exposition and the "but little did I know..." foreshadowing that the reader gets overwhelmed, and can't figure out what they should be paying attention to for later. Lydia keeps giving us these descriptions from the police station and the courtroom, but it's so disconnected from everything else that's happening in the story that by the time I had put together all the important details from the investigation, I no longer cared. Stott thinks she's prolonging the tension, but by so insistently teasing the ending, all she's doing is frustrating the reader and distracting from the real-time events in the story. If I had to pinpoint the central issue in this book, it's that Stott is trying to do too many things at once. There's the murder mystery, and then there's a pretty heavy supernatural element - I think Stott was going for a Gothic ghost story kind of thing, but the first instance of it is clumsy and jarring: Lydia goes to Elizabeth's funeral and meets a woman with one blind eye who says things like "Oh, but [Elizabeth] is still here. I haven't seen her yet, but she's here all right. The others are here too. Don't you feel them?" Maybe it was my fault, for not knowing what kind of book this was going to be when I started, but I could never get into the Gothic mindset that Stott is trying so hard to create. I can't really put my finger on why the supernatural element didn't work for me - it was either taken too seriously, or not seriously enough. On the one hand, if you're going to write a book about a ghost who murders people, why not have some fun with it? Indulge in the overblown melodramatic creepiness of your story and go for gold, like The Shadow of the Wind. At the same time, no one in the book seems at all bothered by the fact that they're clearly being haunted. Lydia, who is staying in Elizabeth's house while she finishes her book, notices weird light patterns, like reflecting water, on the walls of the house. And one morning, after spending the night with her on-again boyfriend Cameron (we'll get there, don't worry), she wakes up and sees that he has blood all over his face. And both of their reactions don't go any farther than "Huh, that's weird." And later, after Lydia washes the pillowcase, the bloodstain comes back. She burns the pillowcase, but there's no other discernable reaction, as if shit like this happens all the time in this universe and it's not something to get worked up over. The characters, most of whom are scientists and scholars, accept the reality of psychics and ghosts with no reservation whatsoever, and I was not having it. Maybe I would have been more receptive to the Ghost Murderers From History angle if it were the main plotline in the book, but alas, the ghost murders have to fight for space alongside another plotline that is somehow even more ridiculous. Ready? Okay, so Cameron (mother of Elizabeth, recall) is a scientist at a pharmaceutical company. The company tests on animals, and there's a radical animal rights group that is so radical they attack another scientist, and also have a habit of murdering scientists' pets. QUICK BREAK FOR AN ANGRY TANGENT: Yeah, the animal rights group steals people's pets and kills them. I thought Stott was letting me off easy when Cameron tells Lydia that his daughters' pet guinea pigs were killed, so his wife is taking the girls out of Cambridge to get away from things. That's fine, I thought - we've established that this activist group is dangerous, and it also gets Cameron's family out of the picture so he and Lydia can bang. But I had forgotten, dear reader, that Elizabeth also has a cat. A cat that Lydia is now responsible for. Guess what shows up dead on her doorstep one day? Guess what injuries get described in detail? Guess who spends a hefty amount of text speculating on the cat's terrifying last moments? It was gratuitous and unnecessary, and I kind of hate Rebecca Stott for making me read it. I am not the sort of person to put trigger warnings on things, but I would warn anyone planning to read this book that the cat's death is detailed, upsetting, and utterly pointless. Anyway, back to the plot overload: We've got the animal activists, and at the end of the book, we find out that there's this shady government group called, I shit you not, the Syndicate, and they are actually the ones who created the activist group, to discredit the real activists. And guess who's in charge of this evil corporation? Cameron, obviously! Hey, remember how the ghost of a 17th century alchemist murdered someone in the 21st century? What does that have to do with creepy government agencies? Absolutely fucking nothing, but someone let Rebecca Stott believe that trying to cram these two huge plotlines into one novel was a good idea. I have a feeling that the Syndicate was a later addition, after some well-intentioned idiot was like, "Hey, Rebecca, I think you need to up the stakes in this story. Have you read The Da Vinci Code? Well..." I didn't even get a chance to mention that whenever Lydia's narration mentions Cameron, she refers to him as "you." Like the whole book is a really long letter Lydia is writing to him. It's horrible and utterly pointless and I don't know why no one caught it before letting this book be published. That, and the dialogue. Here's a sample conversation between Lydia and Will, Elizabeth's former research assistant (it is important to know that at this point in the book, there has been absolutely no hint that the Syndicate will be a plotline, so this conversation was absolute fucking gibberish to me when I first read it): "'Look,' [Will] said. 'I'm going to have to go away for a while. I came to say goodbye.' 'You'll be back?' 'Oh yes, I hope so. Depends on what happens over the next few weeks.' 'How long?' 'Could be a week or a month. Probably not any longer. And I've arranged for someone to keep an eye out for you.' 'An eye on me? Why?' 'Because you're caught up in something complicated and it might be dangerous. I can't explain because I'm not allowed to and because I can't just give you bits - I'd have to explain it all.' 'To do with Elizabeth's manuscript?' 'No, absolutely nothing to do with all of that. Something very un-seventeenth century. Now go to bed and don't think about it. I'll be back as soon as I can.'" For fuck's sake, human beings don't talk like that. The only people who talk like that are characters in a bad novel written by an author who doesn't know how to create genuine suspense! Utter fiasco. If you're looking for a creepy October read, this is not it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2015
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Oct 08, 2015
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Hardcover
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4.08
| 816,061
| Aug 20, 2010
| Sep 2010
|
really liked it
|
I meant to read this right after it came out, and then I kept putting it off for...holy shit, five years? This came out five years ago? My bad, guys.
I meant to read this right after it came out, and then I kept putting it off for...holy shit, five years? This came out five years ago? My bad, guys. What finally convinced me to get this from the library, as usual, was the trailer for the movie version. It's coming out this fall and Brie Larson is playing Ma, which I am all about. Check it out. Odds are good that everyone reading this already knows the plot, but once more for the people in the back: the book opens with Jack telling us that today is his fifth birthday. Jack lives with his mother, known only as Ma, in a place called Room. Jack has never been outside Room. He knows that there's an outside world (he and Ma have a TV) but as far as he knows, there is no reason to ever leave Room. Donoghue doesn't waste time establishing the truth behind Jack and his mother's circumstances: when she was ninteen, Ma was kidnapped (the man is known only as Old Nick) and kept in a shed in his backyard. When the story starts, Ma has been held captive for seven years. It's not really a spoiler to say that Ma and Jack manage to escape Room, because their captivity was only the beginning of the story. What happens after, and how Jack adjusts to living Outside, is just as important and compelling as everything that happens in Room. And good god, is it compelling. I'm going to use the majority of this review to go through all the issues I had with Room (so I totally understand why some people didn't love this one), but the fact remains that I read 160 pages of this in one day. Regardless of its faults, Room is one of those books that you race through because the whole time you're furiously flipping the pages and thinking what is going to HAPPEN to these people?! Even with all the plot details I already knew, I couldn't put this down until Ma and Jack got out. And then I was sucked in all over again, because after the escape is when you learn all the terrifying history of Room. Okay, now onto the problems. First, as many reviewers have pointed out, Jack has his own unique vocabulary and speech patterns (as many five-year-olds do), illustrated in this part where he describes watching TV in Room: "The cartoon planet's not in the evenings, maybe because it's dark and they don't have lamps there. I choose a cooking tonight, it's not like real food, they don't have any cans. The she and the he smile at each other and do a meat with a pie on top and green things around other green things in bunches. Then I switch over to the fitness planet where persons in underwear with all machines have to keep doing things over and over, I think they're locked in. That's over soon and it's the knockerdowners, they make houses into different shapes and also millions of colors with paint, not just on a picture but all over everything. Houses are like lots of Rooms stuck together. TV persons stay in them mostly but sometimes they go in their outsides and weather happens to them." As you can probably guess, this style of narration is in danger of becoming annoying, but luckily it never quite goes that far, and Jack stays on the safe side of Irritatingly Precocious. From a purely technical standpoint, Room is a masterpiece - the work that must have gone into planning out Jack's unique vocabulary and speaking style, and then maintaining it for an entire novel's worth of narration and dialogue, is daunting. That being said, I have some questions. Namely, why does Jack talk like this? Ma speaks with perfectly normal grammar, and Jack also has everyone on TV to listen to, so where exactly does he get his weird syntax? He has a very advanced vocabulary and he and Ma even play a game where he listens to what people on TV are saying and then repeats it verbatim, so obviously he's more than capable of learning and demonstrating normal speech patterns. Jack's dialogue and narration are mostly an excuse for Emma Donogue to flex her technical muscles as a writer, but she pulls it off, so I guess I can let her have that. I have some other issues with the dialogue in general, though. Emma Donoghue is British, and maybe it was because I knew that going into the book, but for whatever reason, I was convinced that this book takes place in England until someone mentioned a "Navajo Street." There are clear differences between British and American speakers besides the accents, and Donoghue hasn't really gotten the hang of it. Her characters' speech patterns are very, very British - they say things like "I must get my license renewed" and "Let's start all the neighbors wondering why I'm cooking up something spicy in my workshop" and it's legitimately distracting. Also, this is how the news anchors in Room talk: "...bachelor loner converted the garden shed into an impregnable twenty-first century dungeon. The despot's victims have an eerie pallor and appear to be in a borderline catatonic state after the long nightmare of their incarceration." Does Donogue seriously think that American local news anchors would use the word "despot" in a broadcast? Or describe an abductor as a "bachelor loner"? One more thing about the dialogue and then I'll let it go: Jack still breastfeeds at age five, which considering their circumstances is not totally unexpected (also I could point you to several hippie mom blogs that would be happy to inform you that breastfeeding at that age is TOTALLY NORMAL and HOW DARE YOU try to separate them from their beautiful star babies, but I digress). However, Jack does not refer to it that way. Whenever he describes breastfeeding in the narration, he says simply "I have some" and it had to happen a few times before I realized what he was talking about. Jack talks plainly about his penis and his Ma's vagina, so obviously he has not been raised to be squeamish about bodies - why doesn't he call breastfeeding what it is? Why the vague description? The only explanation I can think of is that the activity is so normal to Jack that he never bothered to ask what it was called - maybe Ma would always get him to breastfeed by saying "have some" and that's just how he thinks of it? Anyway, it was odd and distracting. There's very little of the man responsible for Room, and that's as it should be - this was never a story about Old Nick, and we shouldn't really give a shit about his side of the story (because seriously, fuck that guy). But I still wanted to know! At one point he tells Ma, "I don't think you appreciate how good you've got it here. ...Plenty girls would thank their lucky stars for a setup like this, safe as houses." Realistically, that's probably about all we need to hear from Old Nick as far as justification for the kidnapping goes, but I thought it was fascinating, and I really, really wanted a scene from Old Nick's trial where we got to see more of his thought process. But it's a very deliberate choice by Donoghue to shut Old Nick out of the story. This was never his story - it was always Jack and Ma's. Yes, Room has its faults. Yes, I totally understand if you found it gimmicky and irritating. But if nothing else, you have to appreciate the sheer amount of work that must have gone into this book. The mechanics of Room, the psychological and physical results of being raised in an environment like that, and the long-term effects, are all explored in sensitive and thorough detail. Sure, I had lots of issues with Room, but I still loved it, and think it deserves all the attention it's gotten. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2015
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Sep 24, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||||
0307341542
| 9780307341549
| 0307341542
| 4.01
| 1,110,952
| Sep 26, 2006
| Sep 26, 2006
|
it was amazing
|
This book was so stupid and hysterical and I loved every second of it.
|
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
|
Aug 30, 2015
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0224061631
| 9780224061636
| 0224061631
| 3.61
| 19,043
| 2008
| 2008
|
did not like it
|
I'm a little over halfway through this and so far almost every single female character is a prostitute or a slave. Three women have committed suicide
I'm a little over halfway through this and so far almost every single female character is a prostitute or a slave. Three women have committed suicide because of a man. Also there's a female character who is literally a figment of a male character's imagination and she's more dynamic than any of the (few) real women in this fucking book. [image] Ugh. Most likely will not finish. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2015
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not set
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Jul 29, 2015
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0804139024
| 9780804139021
| 0804139024
| 4.42
| 1,174,683
| Sep 27, 2011
| Feb 11, 2014
|
really liked it
|
All right, let's get something out of the way right now: yes, I know that this was the big "It Book" a couple of years ago and I should have gotten on
All right, let's get something out of the way right now: yes, I know that this was the big "It Book" a couple of years ago and I should have gotten on the bandwagon then. But what convinced me to put this on hold at the library was the trailer for the movie version, which looks awesome. I decided to read a book only because there's going to be a movie, and it's not the first time that's happened. Fight me. Mark Watney is one of six astronauts on a Mars mission. While he and the rest of the crew are on the planet, there's a massive storm and the crew evacuates. In the confusion, Watney is separated from the group and injured, and they are forced to leave without him. When he wakes up, Watney finds himself alone on Mars, with no way of contacting NASA and only a years' worth of supplies in his shelter. Because he knows it'll take years for a potential rescue to arrive, he has to figure out a way to survive by himself on, as he might phrase it, a planet that wants to kill him. In other reviews, I frequently see this book pitched as Robinson Crusoe in space. Which is very accurate, but I think that this xkcd comic explains it even better: "You know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says 'We have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die? ...The Martian is for people who wish the whole movie had just been more of that scene." It feels weird to praise the worldbuilding of a speculative fiction book, but that's exactly what Weir is doing with The Martian that's so impressive. He didn't just have to think of all the potential problems a person stranded on Mars might encounter, he also had to come up with solutions to those problems. And this isn't like Daniel Defoe, who could at least do research on other people who had survived after being stranded on deserted islands - no human has ever been on Mars, ever, much less been stuck there for several years. Let's pause and appreciate how much thought and work went into thinking through every aspect of Watney's situation. The book is structured primarily as log entries, with Watney updating us on the day's problems and events. And just when this becomes in danger of being repetitive, we cut to the ground crew at NASA. And we also get scenes of Watney's crew, who are still in the satellite station. This is a smart move - if we only had Watney's voice, the book would have felt claustrophobic and boring, and adding additional characters to the mix helps keep the book from becoming a monotonous slog. It has to be said, though, that all the characters who are not Mark Watney are not particularly interesting. Granted, I probably could have read an entire book from Commander Lewis's perspective, but she's the exception to the rule. The people at NASA, in particular, are essentially interchangeable. There's the dude who's like "We have to do this incredibly risky thing" and the dude who's like "No, it's too risky!" and the lady who's like "The computer is doing this thing!" and that's pretty much everyone. Also there are two characters named Mitch and Rich, and fuck me if I could tell you anything about either of them. But the other characters aren't really in this book to function as fully-fleshed people - they exist as exposition mouthpieces, talking the reader through whatever problem has just come up, and reminding us occasionally of the stakes. Because of this, Watney has to do all of the heaving lifting in terms of three-dimensional characterization, and luckily he's up to the challenge. Mark Watney, plainly stated, is a delight. He's equal parts relentless optimism and "well this fucking sucks." Even when he's stating plainly to the reader that everything is terrible and that he will probably die, he remains unable to lie down and give up. Every single day is a struggle to continue fighting, and at its core, The Martian is a story about humanity's absolute refusal to give up hope. The fear of death is a powerful motivator. And it doesn't hurt that Watney's narrative voice is so great. Even in the midst of all the science shop-talk (which I did not understand a word of, naturally) he maintains a matter-of-fact tone and will usually break things down into layman's terms. And he's just fun: "I need to ask myself, 'What would an Apollo astronaut do?' He'd drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool." And now I have to talk about the ending and my conspiracy theory idea about what actually happened. MAJOR MEGA SPOILERS HIDDEN BELOW, OBVIOUSLY. (view spoiler)[Okay, so did anyone else feel like the ending was kind of a letdown? It was just "We rescued him, yay, THE END." Even at the last page, I kept thinking, that can't be it, something else has to go wrong! Because the entire book is Watney going, "Okay, I fixed this problem! Oh shit, something else happened" and that's what I was used to. So, ready for my super-depressing theory? The book ends so abruptly, and there's no follow-up log entry by Watney after he gets back to the ship. I understand why this is: Watney has been rescued. The central conflict of the book has been resolved. It's over. There's no real need for a follow-up log entry when the astronauts get back to Earth. But then I started thinking...what if the last log entry is the last log entry? The astronauts still have to get back to Earth, and they did just sort of blow up part of their ship when they were getting Watney. So my theory is this: they never made it back. After the rescue, something went wrong with the ship, they couldn't fix it, and they all died. That's why there's no "hooray, we made it back!" entry. Because they never did. Anyway, have a good week, everybody! (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2015
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Jul 27, 2015
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
4.21
| 305,413
| Jan 19, 2010
| Jan 19, 2010
|
really liked it
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"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never t
"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortes. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in that folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo." (watch this and then read) Reading this was an interesting experience for me. Lately I've had a weird but insatiable urge to read memoirs by 1970's musicians. Why? Not really sure - maybe I just need to re-watch Almost Famous. But for whatever reason, I had a particular literary itch to scratch, and only Patti Smith's memoir would do. I had heard Gloria before reading this book, and I knew that Patti Smith was a musician. I had never heard of her lifetime friend and partner Robert Mapplethorpe, and most of the artists who get name-dropped in this book flew right over my head. For this reason, this memoir might as well have been pure fiction to me, since I had almost no frame of reference for anyone except the biggest names. But I think that, ultimately, this worked in my favor: instead of spending every other page thinking, "oh my god, she totally knew [famous person] before they were famous!" I was just focusing on the story. And it's quite a story. People who go into this book expecting to learn about Smtih's songwriting/performance career will be disappointed; her retelling of how she became a famous musician is basically "someone suggested that I try putting my poems to music and people seemed to really like it, so that's cool I guess." There's not much about her actual writing process, even. She talks a lot about Rimbaud, and tries very hard to write like him. Occasionally you find yourself rolling your eyes at her prose, but for the most part, her writing is quite lovely. This is, first and last, the story of a lifelong friendship. This is the story of people who sacrificed everything - home, family, comfort, security - in order to become artists. What makes it lovely is that you get the sense that becoming famous - at least, famous in the sense that most people would recognize - never even crossed Smith's mind. She wanted, purely and simply, to devote her life to art. She was poor and homeless and miserable, but she was happy. A true starving-artist story, occasionally overwrought, but always compelling. Patti Smith is cooler than everyone you will ever meet. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jul 2015
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Jul 09, 2015
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Hardcover
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1556525893
| 9781556525896
| 1556525893
| 3.70
| 20,341
| Jun 1987
| Oct 28, 2005
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liked it
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Pamela Des Barres grew up living a comfortable middle-class life in Reseda California. She had loving parents and a stable home life, and all signs po
Pamela Des Barres grew up living a comfortable middle-class life in Reseda California. She had loving parents and a stable home life, and all signs pointed to her leading a perfectly ordinary life. But somewhere along the line, Pamela Miller became Pamela Des Barres, one of the most legendary groupies who had a front-row seat (or, more accurately, a backstage pass) to the greatest era in rock and roll history. I'm With the Band is her story. If you've ever watched Almost Famous and found yourself wishing that Penny Lane had written a memoir (or better yet, Sapphire - "Does anyone remember laughter?!"), here it is. Des Barres takes us through her life, beginning with her as a teenager, trying to sneak into the Beatles' hotel with her friends; ending with her reflecting on a lifetime spent among musical legends. It's a well-documented memoir, with photos, diary entries, and letters giving the reader plenty of detail into this period of Des Barres life. (It helps, too, that Des Barres was never hugely into drugs and alcohol, enabling her both to survive long enough to write this memoir and to remember everything clearly) Under the tutelage of Frank Zappa, she and four other girls formed the GTOs, the “music group” (sarcastic quotations because they really never had much of a music career) that became the most legendary groupies of their time. Think of a musician from the 60's or 70's. Which one? Doesn't matter - Pamela Des Barres has seen him naked, or at least knows someone who has. I started out HATING this book, and it's almost entirely due to a laughably misguided introduction by Dave Navarro. Before you read the following quote, please do yourself a favor and look up a picture of Dave Navarro. Seriously, I'll wait. I want you to picture his face saying the following, and suffer as I have suffered. ...did you do it? I'm serious guys, you're not going to want to miss out. Anyway, now that we all have that mental image in our heads, here's how Dave Navarro decided to end his introduction to I'm With the Band: “My personal advice to the readers: Men, keep a box of tissue handy while reading this book. Women, try to keep your deep feelings of jealousy and hostility at bay...you know you wish this was your story.” WOW. Actually, Dave Navarro, I DON'T wish this was my story. Because unlike you, I don't think it's a compliment to have my life story reduced to future spank-bank material for some dude who looks like Dracula's gay hairdresser. But thanks for playing, and fuck you very much. After that noxious excuse for an intro, Des Barres throws us right into the hedonistic drug-fueled world of rock and roll in the 1960s. Throughout all of her adventures, Des Barres is constantly surrounded and supported by her fellow groupies, and frankly that was refreshing and surprising. Even the women who are fighting Des Barres for some rock star's attention eventually become Des Barres' friends, rather than becoming the villains. Even when a girl steals a man's attention from her, Des Barres has nothing but nice things to say, and the way these women (who, you'll recall, were all in their teens or early twenties at the time) support each other is fucking inspiring. What Des Barres seems to be saying, without having to come out and state it plainly, is that she and the other groupies bonded out of necessity - they had to love and support each other, because they knew that the men they were sleeping with would not. Considering that she's writing about a time when ugly sexism in the music industry was not only tolerated but encouraged, it's a surprise and a relief that I'm With the Band contains absolutely no internalized misogyny from the author. Des Barres, for all her faults, seems to have flatly rejected the mentality that other women are competition - a mentality that Dave Navarro oh-so-subtly tries to instill in the readers with his 'try to contain your raging jealousy, ladies.' Once more with feeling: fuck you, Dave Navarro) The writing itself is...not great. When I was starting this book, someone warned me about it by telling me that Des Barres wrote "like a toddler with a head injury" and unfortunately that description isn't far off. The worst bits come from Des Barres's diary, which is quoted at eye-rolling length. But at the same time, I have to give credit where credit is due: let them who would allow their teenage diaries to be published in a best-selling book cast the first stone. Speaking of the writing, remember how Dave Navarro pitched this as some kind of literary porn (that only dudes are allowed to masturbate to, because Dave Navarro sucks)? His criteria for erotica must be pretty fucking wide, because the sex scenes in this book are almost the opposite of sexy. Take this excerpt from Des Barres's diary, when she recounts the time she banged Noel Redding: “October 2...I CAME! How do you like that? ...Lovely romance, we played around for awhile and then he made love to me. AMAZING! I was totally under his control. He put me in a hundred positions and did such stupendous things! It's doubtful that anyone could surpass his proism. It was like being caught in a web, unable to free myself – wanting to get more tangled.” Oof. Look, Pamela, just because you write openly about your sex life doesn't make you Anais Nin. Granted, that excerpt is from a diary entry she wrote when she was nineteen, but sadly her writing doesn't seem to have improved with age. Although apparently the grownup Des Barres makes her living as a journalist, so what the hell do I know. Des Barres also seems aware of how ridiculous she comes off sometimes in her diaries and letters, and you can almost see her rolling her eyes behind the page as she quotes some passage where her teenage self gushed shamelessly over some rock star. That's about as far as the self-reflection goes, however. The closest we get to any sense of disillusionment with her chosen lifestyle is when Des Barres describes being snubbed by the new, younger groupies: “The rock and roll girls were getting younger, and I was no good at competing. They hated me because I had been there first, and they called me awful names at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, 'old' being the most popular odious declaration of loathing. I let them get to me; they told me I was over the hill, and I looked in the mirror, inspecting my twenty-five-year-old face for early stages of decrepitness. ...I believed the GTO's had paved the way for these infant upstarts, and I thought they should show me some kind of respect, or at least recognition for my groundbreaking Strip-walking efforts. Needless to say, they didn't show me jack-shit.” Of course right after this she makes sure to quote some rock star saying essentially the same thing in Rolling Stone, because God forbid the readers dismiss her as some jealous hag without knowing that a famous man felt the same way, which makes her feelings legitimate. It's also a little strange that, for a memoir focused entirely on the music scene in the 60s and 70s, there's almost no actual music. I was waiting for some description of how Teenage Pamela felt the first time she heard a Beatles song, or what it was like seeing Jimmy Page play in person. But there's not really any discussion of the actual music these guys were making, and you get the sense that the Rolling Stones could have been a barbershop quartet and Des Barres wouldn't have cared, as long as they were the most famous barbershop quartet in the world. But where Des Barres fails to encapsulate what was so interesting about the music these guys were playing, she succeeds in painting detailed, intimate portraits of some of the greatest names in rock and roll. And it makes sense – after all, Des Barres had affairs with all of these men, and saw them at their most vulnerable. Sometimes it's funny, like when she's describing the bedroom preferences of a certain Led Zepplin frontman; sometimes it's disturbing, like when she shrugs off the fact that one of them (I forget which, but it doesn't really matter) liked to slap her around in bed and she wasn't really into that; and sometimes it's just tragic, like her description of Keith Moon: “He was happy being anybody but himself. At night he would wake up ten times, bathed in medicine-smelling sweat, jabbering about running over his roadie and burning for eternity. He couldn't wait to pay for that horrible mistake. We took handfuls of pills, and he drank vodka like he was dying of thirst.” I got frustrated with Des Barres because there was no second-act realization, no turnaround in her wide-eyed adoration of rock stars. Where is her anger? I thought as I read through yet another breezy description of being used and tossed away by some famous dick with a guitar. I wanted her to rage at these men who had treated her like shit. Where was the regret? Where was the condemnation, the rage at these adult men who fucked thirteen-year-old girls and got away with it? Doesn't she realize that she's getting all her self-worth from other people? Doesn't she know that these guys view her as completely disposable? And here's what I realized: Pamela Des Barres knows that none of these men really loved her, or ever saw her as anything more than a piece of ass. Pamela Des Barres knows, and she does not care, because Pamela Des Barres is too busy having fun. And that, readers, is her great secret: no one, not even the biggest rock stars in the world, can make you feel used and used up if you are having a good time. So what if these guys were just using her for sex? Teenage Des Barres once wrote a list of life goals, and one of the items was “have sex with Mick Jagger.” She might have been just a notch in these dudes' belts, but baby, that road goes both ways. It was a fascinating roller coaster, watching Des Barres go from Feminist Nightmare to Feminist Hero? in my mind as I read. And then, to my complete surprise, at about the two-thirds mark, I found myself sympathizing with Des Barres. I felt sorry for her, and not in the “oh god why did no one teach this child self-esteem?” way that I had originally felt. I began to sympathize with Des Barres because I realized how badly the men in her life actually treated her, and how badly readers will react to her book. Pamela Des Barres's book is, at its core, the story of a teenage girl who was so insanely passionate about something that she made it the sole purpose of her life. She was obsessed with the Beatles in high school, and that paved the way for her obsession with rock stars, and her need to be part of the inner circle. And if there is one thing society cannot abide, it's teenage girls getting really interested in things. Pamela Des Barres is not a musician, she is a groupie. And that word, in most people's minds, automatically makes her an object of ridicule. I was supposed to hate Des Barres, and that made me love her. We sneer at the women (or, more accurately, girls, since most of the groupies in this book are only teenagers) who devote themselves slavishly to their rock idols, but we never have any disdain left over for the men who were the cause of this. We criticize and mock the star-struck teenagers, but not the grown men who used these girls and tossed them aside and played songs like "Under My Thumb" and wrote memoirs gleefully documenting how many chicks they banged in a night. It's easier, after all, to mock the results of a toxic culture rather than examining its origins. Unfortunately, Des Barres doesn't seem too interested in examining the misogynistic culture she idolized, or circumstances that led to her belief that sleeping with a famous person is just as good as being famous yourself. That was what I wanted from this memoir. I wanted Des Barres to end with this simple lesson: creativity is not acquired through proximity. Surrounding yourself with artists is great, but it doesn't make you an artist yourself. It's not enough to sit back and applaud while you watch other people create; you have to create something of your own. Pamela Des Barres spent her life sitting on amps and watching famous men play music; I wanted her book to end with her learning to make her own music, if only metaphorically. But, as some dick with a guitar once said, you can't always get what you want. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 26, 2015
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4.14
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May 22, 2016
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4.33
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May 10, 2016
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3.96
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Mar 2016
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Apr 07, 2016
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3.71
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did not like it
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Mar 31, 2016
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4.21
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Feb 2016
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Mar 01, 2016
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3.63
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liked it
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Feb 2016
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Feb 26, 2016
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3.54
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really liked it
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Feb 2016
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Feb 19, 2016
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4.20
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liked it
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Feb 2016
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Feb 11, 2016
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3.89
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it was amazing
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Jan 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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3.79
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liked it
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Dec 2015
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Jan 08, 2016
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3.95
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it was amazing
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Dec 2015
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Dec 20, 2015
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3.91
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really liked it
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Dec 2015
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Dec 16, 2015
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3.96
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really liked it
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Nov 2015
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Dec 06, 2015
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3.08
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did not like it
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Sep 2015
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Oct 08, 2015
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4.08
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really liked it
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Sep 2015
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Sep 24, 2015
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4.01
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it was amazing
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Aug 2015
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Aug 30, 2015
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3.61
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did not like it
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Jul 29, 2015
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4.42
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really liked it
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Jul 2015
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Jul 27, 2015
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4.21
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really liked it
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Jul 2015
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Jul 09, 2015
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3.70
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liked it
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Jul 2015
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Jun 26, 2015
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