getting a little scared at how many recent releases take place in a flooded dystopian future...what do you guys know.
besides that, this did have a tougetting a little scared at how many recent releases take place in a flooded dystopian future...what do you guys know.
besides that, this did have a touching concept: a caregiver, bo, and her final patient, mia, building a relationship as their city clears of people and fills with water.
the problem is that it's 320 pages long.
while touching initially, this book drags. bo makes the same decision and reverses it four times. her slowly progressing memorial artwork and mia's slowly regressing health take up hundreds of pages. dialogue feels redundant and so do even climactic moments, because they feel so interchangeable.
i liked a lot about this, which is why it was such a bummer to be so frustrated by the end.
bottom line: this is not a long book, but it is too long.
these days it's like, oh, a near future in which people are thrown in prison basedi'm ready to check in!
update: never mind. please do not check me in.
these days it's like, oh, a near future in which people are thrown in prison based on being determined close to committing a crime by a deeply flawed and capitalist algorithm created by a creep with political ambitions? who could imagine.
in spite of feeling about a week and a half away from our current reality, this is an intense, oppressive book. i felt so surveilled and so restricted, just by virtue of the depth of both on-page.
was this a perfect read? no. there is an unnecessary POV switch that lasts exactly one chapter. there are more loose ends than there are concluded plotlines. there is a lot of redundancy, and not only of the variety that adds to the experience.
but i think it's timely and terrifying.
bottom line: i can't imagine the next time i'll be in the mood for dystopian fiction, but if you are, this one'll do.
our generation's tragic backstory is these books. this level of devastation should be kept away from 14 year olds.
even withi'm ready to be hurt again.
our generation's tragic backstory is these books. this level of devastation should be kept away from 14 year olds.
even with this one, i know exactly where it's going! i know haymitch is alive with 25 years of alcoholism-fueled depression and loss under his belt in the future. and yet i'm sitting there like :) surely happy stuff will happen too :)
i hated the last book — who ever wanted more snow? — and this one did bring all the annoying-ass songs (suzanne collins for all your talents lyrics are not one. and that includes the radio edit of the hanging tree as performed by jennifer lawrence, why am i in the club being asked about a man who murdered three) and some of the annoying ass character energy.
but i am a haymitch girl till i die.
and this, i'm pleased to share, had traces of that catching fire magic.
bottom line: however many hunger games books are released, i'll be reading them....more
and true to my personal female experience, something just felt off here — i don't know if this was strangely translated, or just lacjust girly things!
and true to my personal female experience, something just felt off here — i don't know if this was strangely translated, or just lacking in plot and answers, but this felt very concerned with building a slow-moving and confusing dystopian world and not much else.
the perspective, which switched between past and present and future, sometimes within one sentence; and the language, which alternated between very simple and very purple; and the structure, featuring chapters of somewhat unpredictable timeline mixed in with lines of what might've been poetry, all contributed to a very slow, unfortunately annoying, generally confusing reading experience.
if it had been done with more style, i probably would've liked it. as is...
"this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction"
so...a utopia?
reading this in our current political clim"this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction"
so...a utopia?
reading this in our current political climate was unbelievably peaceful. even temporary immersion in a world where humans barely cling to survival and can hardly form communities, let alone societies destined to devolve into fascist government, was like a cool shower.
this book is a challenge. it almost veers into a collection of interconnected short stories: chapters vary wildly in plot, style, perspective. your brain strains a bit to hold and place each new piece of information in the world you're growing an understanding of, which reminded me of the book of love, a book only i liked.
i think in some moments it felt like a bit more trouble than it was worth (it didn't always coalesce well), but i liked it.
even better since it stuck the landing.
bottom line: i love you, confusing vaguely fantastical very literary books.
groundbreaking feminist literary classics is like my family.
i expected more of an Anarchist Feminist vibe from this one, and instead what i got was kigroundbreaking feminist literary classics is like my family.
i expected more of an Anarchist Feminist vibe from this one, and instead what i got was kind of a grown-up version of the kind of island of the blue dolphins / boxcar children type kiddie survivalist classics i used to buy three for a dollar from my library booksale with, like, quarters i'd scrounged up from couch cushions.
who knows where kids acquire money, is what i'm saying.
that was a fun ride in and of itself, minus the fact that it had the kind of devastating ending that should make it infamous everywhere around the world. i'm not even of the opinion that animals in books are all that great, or that their deaths are the most upsetting of any character type.
until now, i guess.
sorry for the spoiler? but i'm actually sparing you unexpected suffering. so never mind. you're welcome. welcome to my version of does the dog die dot com.
anyway. in addition to all that, this is a pretty striking exploration of the role of humans in the world, and it made me wish all of us were dead except for maybe one lady who can help the cows and pet cats.
that's my new political perspective. also i'm calling not it.
this book is the most surreal and the most gory, and at the same time its dystopian world is so lifelike, so painful to read because it so coh my god.
this book is the most surreal and the most gory, and at the same time its dystopian world is so lifelike, so painful to read because it so closely mirrors the one we live in. one of injustice, one of violence. one of innocent people locked up and one of people who do bad and change. a world where punishments are not intended to reform, but to ignore.
reading about the criminal justice system in america is opening yourself to an injustice you will ever un-know.
i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would ii'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.
this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.
more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.
beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?
add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.
there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.
there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.
in other words...a lot of unearned style here.
and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior.
not to mention that goofy ending.
anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.
it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.
this is a creepy sci-fi book and also an intense allegory for emotionally abusive relationships and alsothe future is scarier than any horror movie <3
this is a creepy sci-fi book and also an intense allegory for emotionally abusive relationships and also a damning exploration of misogyny all in one.
it's a book about a dystopian future in which men see women as only good for sex, homemaking, or parenting. in other words, our present day reality. (buh dum ch.)
reading this unrelentingly icked me out and made me feel grateful for my sentience and freedom, like when you have a cold and your nose is stuffed and you're like "i'll never forget to appreciate clear nasal passageways ever again."
i enjoyed the fact that this book did not pander or condescend to its audience in its themes, and granted the reader the ability to pick up on what was going on most of the time on their own. (although i did not enjoy the moments when it had our protagonist provide a neat summary of something that had been going on for hundreds of pages. or understand why there was a moment when a random woman was outed (?) as trans.)
it pulled its punches sometimes and felt overzealous at others, but overall this book was cool and impressive and skin crawly.
i've owned this book for 7 years and it wasn't even on my to read list. which gives an indication of how excited i am to read it
update: even anthony bi've owned this book for 7 years and it wasn't even on my to read list. which gives an indication of how excited i am to read it
update: even anthony burgess doesn't get the appeal of this one.
this is one of those books that i can see why it'd be great to assign as school required reading, but...pretty meh in adult life!
bottom line: the nicest thing i can say about this is that i'm pretty sure i would have liked it more if i was discussing it at 7:45 am with 20 miserable adolescents....more
update: it has come to my attention that my original review of this sucks and is poorly phrased. i meant to say that i found this book to be trying toupdate: it has come to my attention that my original review of this sucks and is poorly phrased. i meant to say that i found this book to be trying too hard to be edgy, and that i think the point it's trying to make about factory farming is heavy handed, and that i think humans are more good than bad.
but i didn't succeed in conveying any of that, so i deleted it.
sorry!
---------------- currently-reading updates
quick word of advice:
i picked this one up to start during my lunch break today.
don't do that.
---------------- tbr review
don't mind me, just adding another hot girl book to my to-read list...more
In an ideal world, I wear a monocle, and I have a pocket watch on a chain, and all of my sweaters have elbow patcheI would like to be an intellectual.
In an ideal world, I wear a monocle, and I have a pocket watch on a chain, and all of my sweaters have elbow patches. In this world, I consume exclusively classics at a very slow pace (so as to examine every word), but somehow simultaneously I have read everything that's ever been called worth reading by any person who's ever been called pretentious.
But that is not this world.
To be fair, I AM trying. I read literary fiction the most of any genre. I used to have a quest where I would have to read at least one classic every month, but I retired it because I typically read more than that. (Last year, for example, I read 46. And granted I have a loose definition of "classic," but still.) I tend to rate books from those two categories higher than others.
But still, we find ourselves here.
I didn't like this book. I can say there are a lot of reasons, and I can even tell the truth: I can say that the depiction of women in this was so offensive it turned around and became funny and absurd, or that this dystopian world is not nearly as prescient as 1984's, or the Handmaid's Tale's, or even goddamn The Hunger Games', and both of those would be fairly respectable criticisms that I do have.
But that isn't completely accurate.
I didn't like this because it felt silly and boring.
That's really all.
Bottom line: I'll try to be smart next time.
------------------ pre-review
either i did not care for this or i was being intellectually stimulated.
i'll figure it out later.
review to come / 2.5 stars
------------------ tbr review
personally being very brave by adding classics to my to read list
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collecmy becoming-a-genius project, part 17!
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
i have strayed far away from my intentions by binge reading one book and reading several more that don't even pretend to meet this project's standards, so we're getting back to business.
DAY 1: BEYOND LIES THE WUB is this a pun or am i stupid? still not sure if it's a pun but i'll tell you what's not stupid - this kickass story! rating: 4.5
DAY 2: ROOG two days, two stories including talking animals and species names i hate the sound of. but also...two days with really fun and clever stories that make me :). so wins and losses. rating: 4
DAY 3: PAYCHECK i already skipped a day...slumping so hard i can't even read short stories if they're on the longer side. just take me out back at this point. hot damn the way PKD's mind works! rating: 4
DAY 4: SECOND VARIETY playing catch-up! okay damn it's another long one. the moral of this story is girls rule, boys drool. rating: 4
DAY 5: IMPOSTER i mean, the title kind of spoils the whole thing. rating: 3.5
DAY 6: THE KING OF THE ELVES you really do have to respect the fact that i have never once managed to read a story on a saturday. seemingly in the whole of this project. everyone thinks they want to be king of the elves but then they become it and it's all, oh no, my gas station, oh no, the quirky characters about town think i'm crazy, nooo, my best friend is a troll. enough already. rating: 3
DAY 7: ADJUSTMENT TEAM caught up on a sunday only to skip a monday and a tuesday. folks, we are falling apart. this is a whole ride, but the BEST part of the whole thing is the idea that dogs aren't barking at people coming - they bark to summon the event that IS a person's arrival. lit. rating: 4
DAY 8: FOSTER, YOU'RE DEAD feels like we'll be living this future within a year. we kind of already are. not a fun read, for that reason. rating: 4.5
DAY 9: UPON THE DULL EARTH PKD's sci-fi stories are like "we are in eternal war. technology is an alien force that will drive us apart and ruin the world around us." and his fantasy stories are like "what's the weirdest thing you can think of? is it this?" rating: 3.5
DAY 10: AUTOFAC sounds both robotic and inappropriate. knowing that a story is objectively interesting but still not being able to get into it...it's a weird feeling. rating: 3
DAY 11: MINORITY REPORT so while i've never seen the movie minority report, per se, i have seen the title approximately 1,000 times, and every single one of those times i assumed it was like, a business drama. because of the word report, i guess. file under no reason to be mind-blowing but still is that the movie is actually presumably based on a PKD story, which is actually presumably sci-fi-adjacent. even wilder that it's only thirty-eight pages long. also also, this continually refers to the army as "Army" and every time i think: [image] other than that i didn't actually like this much. rating: 3.5
DAY 12: THE DAYS OF PERKY PAT once again missed a saturday. baby, i'm nothing if not consistent. if you've ever wondered, "what if adults played dolls and took it so seriously it ruined their lives?" this is the story for you. rating: 3
DAY 13: PRECIOUS ARTIFACT nevertheless we persist. either i am getting tired of these or they're getting less fun or both. but maybe spending day after day reading about the inevitable apocalyptic ruin and dystopian future bearing down upon us wasn't my best idea. rating: 3.5
DAY 14: A GAME OF UNCHANCE it's honestly believable to me that all of human civilization could be taken down by an inability to resist a carnival. rating: 3.5
DAY 15: WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE according to the dust jacket, this story is the basis for the film Total Recall. PKD was the master at writing stories that inspire well-known movies i've never seen. this was cool, but i couldn't shake picturing tom cruise, that creepy little elf. and he's not even in Total Recall. rating: 3.5
DAY 16: FAITH OF OUR FATHERS feeling a little and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past rn. speaking of gatsby, to be honest i'm not typically a reader who really cares about how classic white male writers write women, but it is getting REALLY hard to ignore in this one. rating: 3
DAY 17: THE ELECTRIC ANT ok...adorable? oh. never mind. electric ant is a term for "organic robot," and i am disappointed beyond human comprehension. at least the idea of a currency called frogs is still cute. rating: 3
DAY 18: A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS the singular female character in this story is simultaneously the most interesting one by a country mile AND a sex object who changes her appearance based on her boyfriend's request and drives him around while commentating on her own inability to drive as a woman. it is with grave disappointment that i say i'm looking forward to this being over. rating: 3
DAY 19: THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN well, it's a saturday, and i'm actually doing this project. if that doesn't reflect my eagerness to finish this i don't know what does. this does contain the sentence "It was hell living in the twenty-first century." PKD, you don't know the half of it. this one finally broke the structure, which i appreciate. rating: 3.5
DAY 20: RAUTAVAARA'S CASE alien spaceship cannibal jesus!!! rating: 4
DAY 21: I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON the final day! i've been thinking both more fondly about this book (i saw an amazon commercial yesterday in which a man was paid to claim it was actually nice to work there and got to thinking about propaganda) and less fondly (i read PKD's wikipedia page and turns out all that on-page misogyny has a real-life counterpart!) so we'll see how this goes. i do think this is a great name for a last story, though. but that's more credit to the editor than PKD. solid closer. take me out before the human life span is ever 200 years. rating: 4
OVERALL another case where i can't tell if this starts out strong and gets less interesting, or if i just got sick of it. either way it's safe to say i care for PKD's novels over his stories - and that reading them one after the other gets you about sick to death of flat pretty love interest women and normal men thrust into sci-fi heroism and the same very present style. the rare case in which something is LESS than the sum of its parts. sheesh. rating: 3...more
reading this felt like settling into eat a big ol' brownie and then discovering it has, like, a bunch of zucchini in it, like one of those mommy bloggreading this felt like settling into eat a big ol' brownie and then discovering it has, like, a bunch of zucchini in it, like one of those mommy blogger recipes.
so a mildly unpleasant surprise, but still a brownie.
i signed up for a capitalist revenge arc, but by page count this was more a poly romance? the best thing i can compare it to is if katniss dated both gale AND peeta, and also wasn't spending all that much time on the hunger games part.
it was just odd, pacing-wise - the actual climax happened in the last 25 pages, and this is a pretty long book!!!
and i LIKED the hunger games parts of the hunger games!!
bottom line: teen violence over teen romance any day.
---------------- currently-reading updates
reading an ARC a million years after the release date again. what can i say, i live my life on the edge
---------------- tbr review
an "#ownvoices near-future revenge thriller that tackles capitalism, queerness, and revolution"??? say less
do you know how hard it is to finish a book this long without enjoying it for even a second?
i do.
it is roughly as hard as the following things: - havindo you know how hard it is to finish a book this long without enjoying it for even a second?
i do.
it is roughly as hard as the following things: - having just one cookie - pretending to listen to people who are telling you in detail about their dreams - engaging in something called "exercise" - writing a review under 478239478923 words.
and yet here we are. i did it.
AND FOR WHAT.
i'm kind of uninterested, as a rule, in engaging with what authors deem to be The Purpose of their books. i don't believe in separating the art from the artist (it's altogether impossible), but i am a firm disciple of the concept that your average reader's opinion on the meaning of a work is not only as valuable as its creator's, but in fact both more significant and typically more interesting.
that's a long-winded way of saying that all of hanya's bullsh*t-spewing about why she keeps writing about gay men and doesn't believe in therapy and generally sounds like every globally minded mindfulness expert's specific nemesis has nothing to do with her work to me.
so in a sense, i forgive her for it, because it doesn't matter in my reading experience.
what i can't forgive her for is being long-winded, self-indulgent, pointless and meandering, and above all, DULL.
i wanted to believe that the people in the trees, in all its thoroughly-tread exploration of cliché, was the outlier, but it appears that a little life, which, for all its issues and red flags, is a stunning achievement, was a total one off for our dear ms yanagihara.
this is as different from that as an oatmeal creme pie is from a twinkie. both are disturbing crimes against humanity, but one is addictive and impressive and the other is just unholy.
i read this in the midst of a truly insane reading month, one in which i was typically reading half a dozen books at a time and alternating chapters because i physically could not stop reading.
i did not care about a single character in the first section, and in fact hated them so much i prayed on their respective downfalls, a phenomenon that continued into the second story and only relented a bit in the third because i was so relieved at the unexpected treat of a female character that i almost had to be grateful by default.
that didn't last long, either.
it was almost comical how snooze-worthy this was, and in fact i would have had a good laugh if it didn't take me a week and an undue amount of suffering to finish. maybe if i had a moment's relief, but this book had no plot, no memorable characters, no striking writing, nothing new to add to the idea of the pandemic novel, no real backbone to hold up its experimental structure or playfulness with perspective, and ultimately, it felt to me, no meaning.
that's a lot of nothing.
bottom line: if you don't have anything nice to say, you're not supposed to say anything at all...but i already wrote this whole review, so i'll just drop this to one star instead.
How do you write a post-apocalyptic novel when the world is on fire?
Everybody else had it easy. Philip K. Dick could write books about authoritarian gHow do you write a post-apocalyptic novel when the world is on fire?
Everybody else had it easy. Philip K. Dick could write books about authoritarian governments and robots taking over and have them still be fun because his audience didn't have little rectangles with human names in their homes, CONSTANTLY LISTENING. George Orwell could write about...also authoritarian governments because Edward Snowden was not yet a twinkle in his parents' eye, and the NSA (or whatever its British equivalent) was not yet a twinkle in an evil gross bureuacrat's.
And also, none of them were writing about climate change.
I'll read about crazy governments making children kill each other for national entertainment, because that's obviously cool and interesting. I'll read about crazy governments making children join castes based on a singular personality trait, because that's relatively cool and interesting. I'll read PKD and Orwell, because even when they aren't cool and interesting I'm a sucker for someone saying something is a must read.
But I'm at a point where I don't want to read about global pandemics from flu-like illnesses, and I DEFINITELY don't want to read about global warming. Because both are real and both are everyone's day to day life and no one can forget about them for a second anyway.
There's something escapist about reading about POST-apocalyptic books. We're in the apocalypse now (I haven't seen that movie or else I'd make a cool reference), so reading about things being worse casts things into a kind of sharp relief sometimes.
But this was not escapist, because I was reading it when it was 100 degrees outside and wildfire smoke was making everything fuzzy, and now I'm reviewing it days after flooding shut my city down.
If I'm going to read about climate change, it turns out, I don't want to read a fictionalized look at how everything is terrible and it will never get better, only worse. I want to read long essays in esteemed publications, or I want to read books like Sally Rooney's latest, which fill me with even a little bit of hope.
This was well done, and everything. I just hated every second of reading it.
Bottom line: Everything is terrible! I don't read to be reminded of that.
----------------- pre-review
no thoughts head empty just "pretty girls on cover"
update: probably no book could live up to that cover. but this one certainly did not.
Ling Ma served us a whole meal. A feast. A buffet. A week’s worth of Thanksgiving dinners made up of gorgeously subtle metaphor and allegory and motifLing Ma served us a whole meal. A feast. A buffet. A week’s worth of Thanksgiving dinners made up of gorgeously subtle metaphor and allegory and motif, if you will.
And I will personally be stuffing myself my dear boy.
This is the kind of book that makes me wish I was still a student and I was assigned this book in an English class, and could spend a week's worth of hour-long lectures deep in discussion with 20 other people (but reasonably only four who had actually read it).
It's the kind of book I could have reread immediately after reading for the first time, and then a million times after that.
It's the kind of book that makes you think about that terrible movie with Bradley Cooper where he takes the pill that opens his brain up to full functioning, because that's the only way I can reasonably imagine being able to fully appreciate this.
The themes in this, man, the f*cking themes: The immigrant parent’s journey versus Candace’s pregnant journey in a new world. The fevered mindlessly going through tasks versus the pre-pandemic office workers doing the same. The idea of a “colony” and what that means. So, so many more.
I need to reread this immediately, is what I'm saying.
Bottom line: I want to eat this with a spoon.
--------------- book club update
reading this pandemic novel during a pandemic for a) the self-destructive vibes and b) the book club. in that order
do you remember those weird toys from childhood that were like little heart-shaped doodads with cartoon characters on them, and when you soaked them in water they turned into branded dish towels?
this book made me feel like one of those. but in reverse.
review to come / at least 4.5 stars but maybe 5
--------------- currently-reading updates
taking a mental health test by reading a post-apocalyptic book in which the apocalypse was a pandemic featuring a virus that first appears like a cold
--------------- tbr review
my face when i hear the words "anti-capitalist dystopian literary fiction": ...more
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