Absolutely epic. So utterly nasty and disgusting that it's actually really fragile and beautiful. Couldn't put it down.Absolutely epic. So utterly nasty and disgusting that it's actually really fragile and beautiful. Couldn't put it down....more
Genuinely a life-changing book. Everything I knew in my heart about animals, Safina backed up with science, philosophy, humor, research, and love. AllGenuinely a life-changing book. Everything I knew in my heart about animals, Safina backed up with science, philosophy, humor, research, and love. All life is one.
Did you know chimps sometimes watch the sunset together? Or that dolphins announce themselves with signature whistles?? Or that tigers hold grudges and bonobos have orgies and young elephants suck on their trunks like babies to a thumb???
Creatures are endlessly beautiful and talented and precious and we kill them because we don’t take time to know them!!!!
“Our species best understands the world yet has the worst relationship with it. We see the whole universe through a human lens. The harder step is to get outside ourselves, look back at where and how we live.”
We were all thinking that, Carl Safina. Thank u for writing a whole book about it…...more
Life is about fleeting moments: a look in someone’s eye, a swing of a scythe, a cloud passing by, a touch that lasts a second too long. Tolstoy undersLife is about fleeting moments: a look in someone’s eye, a swing of a scythe, a cloud passing by, a touch that lasts a second too long. Tolstoy understands all of that and then some. Society, mortality, morality, philosophy, politics, gender, love, pain, power, the meaning of life. It’s a book about everything and everyone. Everyone lives just as complexly as their neighbors and their strangers, and Tolstoy shows that. He fleshes out the thoughts, actions, and perspectives of each character so strongly that I couldn't even properly dislike anyone.
And I loved Levin way too much. Silly Levin in his silly haystack.
SOME QUOTES I CHOSE RANDOMLY
“I am a criminal woman, I am a bad woman, but I am the same as I said I was then, and I’ve come to tell you that I cannot change anything.”
“But I know all the interesting things: I know prune soup, I know pea sausages. I know it all.”
“It’s true that it’s time to die. And that everything is nonsense. I’ll tell you truly; I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They’re all grains of sand.”...more
"The sea swallows everything. It is impossible to plant a flag on water." - the captain in Clay Walls
Might go down as one of my favorite books of all "The sea swallows everything. It is impossible to plant a flag on water." - the captain in Clay Walls
Might go down as one of my favorite books of all time. It's giving journal collage womanhood ephemeral kinship ties open mouth body as universe mitski witness watcher audience echo nature captivation muteness compulsion space inhabited personal as political blood ink water incredible.
I just have way too much to say about it and I already need to read it again. I've never written so many margins in a book, and it almost felt ironic to fill up her intentional gutter space with my own voyeur-performer nonsenses. The book IN ITSELF is us bearing witness to her. It's just so complex and beautiful and tragic and smart AND I felt so deeply understood even though I couldn't even really understand half of it. Cha's elusiveness is very intentional though: "she hid all essential words words link subject verb she writes hidden the essential words must be pretended invented she try on different images essential invisible"
This book is forest-like — dense, incredible, and easy to get very literally lost in. All of the detailed literary analysis might have been more usefuThis book is forest-like — dense, incredible, and easy to get very literally lost in. All of the detailed literary analysis might have been more useful if I had read even one of the pieces of literature mentioned beforehand. But it’s a book about Asian American women and I am one so I felt like I already had a head start.
It’s also about subversion and the woman-nation relationship and generational transmissions of self and a million other things. I loved it. It hit home. And hit my mother’s home. 5 stars....more
house of leaves has taught me that you can discover something from just about anything… and also from nothing. learning and analysis are limitless andhouse of leaves has taught me that you can discover something from just about anything… and also from nothing. learning and analysis are limitless and when applied to the self, almost dangerous....more
In its contorted essence, Lisey’s Story is a self-aggrandizing novel King has concocted of a late world-famous author (wonder who this represents) whoIn its contorted essence, Lisey’s Story is a self-aggrandizing novel King has concocted of a late world-famous author (wonder who this represents) who is simply so prolific that his wife is literally haunted by his impossibly creative demons, in and out of the real world. I dislike men a great deal, and even more despise men who think they are the center of any woman’s world. But the thing is, King actually pulls this off.
It’s a love story. It’s about this pervasive grief and the process of learning how to holler yourself home when you don’t have your own voice. It’s about love longer than life itself and sitting under the yum-yum tree and having this smucking language that you’re not going to speak with anyone else. It’s about the weight of time and the pool where you go down to drink being a person.
But it’s also fucking fantastic. It is hard to combine time travel and universe travel, horribly insane men and wonderfully insane women, flashbacks and snapbacks, stalkers and sisters, devils on Earth and lovers on Boo’ya Moon, and still tell one of the most honest love stories ever written. But it’s all there.
“You’ve got a yard of guts, little Lisey–I’ll tell the world that. Hold on and let’s see what happens.” ...more