"The next morning, he brought me a snowdrop in a glass tumbler and set it on my desk. "First of the season," he said. "From the garden." I touched
"The next morning, he brought me a snowdrop in a glass tumbler and set it on my desk. "First of the season," he said. "From the garden." I touched its sad white head. "You've been here for nearly a year, then," I said. "Yes." "I'm glad you'll get to see this garden in the spring before you move." He touched the place on the snowdrop where I'd laid my fingers. "Yes," he said, and there was, as there so often was, nothing in his voice."
google, how to write five star review without sounding insane
It's been a while since a book has found its way into my "a-place-for-you-to-love-me"-shelf. I'm not one to gush about books, in fact, people in my life will tell you that I don't actually enjoy reading as I hate nearly everything I read. Which is true, the second part at least. And I stand by my opinion that most books are bad. So it does feel special to find one that isn't. And it feels extra special to find one that makes every other book I have ever liked pale in comparison.
The Ministry of Time is a story about time travel. It's a story about personal mistakes. A story about humanities doom. A story about friendship. About what it means to feel lost and alone. A slow but pressing love story at its core. Surprisingly, or maybe not, a discussion of race and culture.
"You can't trauma proof your life, and you can't hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It's the same with oppression. You don't gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You'll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in."
It's rare to find a book with a premise so unique. Even rarer for it to also have an author with the writing ability to pull it off in such a heart-wrenchingly beautiful way.
The sadness in The Ministry of Time is quiet but all-encompassing. It is there from the first page to the last. It is there in the plot, but especially in the author's writing style. Sentences that at first glance mean nothing, will creep into your subconsciousness and slowly fester until you're overwhelmed with emotions. Many, many times, I have found myself turning multiple pages back because I was desperate to re-read a paragraph. I looked at my annotations to write this review and I read all my highlighted quotes multiple times. Even now, I feel desperate to go back and read them again.
"All this unfolded in what I now know to call our last weeks. Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you'll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life."
In an overly simplified way, there's two types of books I tend to give five stars: those that I couldn't put down and those that I had to put down way too many times because the emotions invoked were about to give me a panic attack. This is definitely one of the latter ones. Did I cry after every single chapter? Who's to say. Did my boyfriend suggest reading something happier instead cause I kept saying how sad I was after every paragraph? Once again, there is no proof nor witnesses for that, if certain people keep their mouth shut.
Unfortunately for everyone, I will be ordering a physical copy and re-reading this soon, I'm afraid. You cannot stop me; I am the architect of my own life and as always I am choosing violence against my poor fragile mental health. Maybe I will order multiple copies, one for every room in this house. I do live in a one-bedroom apartment though. Maybe I will move to a house with one hundred rooms first.
What I will do now, is leave you with this end quote:
"When you study a person, as I studied Graham, you enter a pornographic fugue state. All the things that should be intimate become molecular. Their body, which you have never touched, lies against the back of your eyelids every night. You begin to know them, except time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future, and you need to have it, 360 degrees of what they see and feel and sense, or else your file is incomplete. Who did they love, before you? What hurt them the most? What will cause the most useful harm? I was obsessed with him. I see that now. I was doing my job, and I loved my job. Do you understand what I mean?"
TL;DR: I find it very funny that I always get obsessed with books that have a lower-than-usual average rating on Goodreads. And it's once again one written in second-person POV as well, like what's my issue with those??? Also, if you see me reading multiple books about the Franklin expedition in the weeks to come, mind your own business....more