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3.69
| 292,725
| Jul 27, 2016
| Jul 05, 2018
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it was ok
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Keiko has worked at the convenience store her entire adult life. But as she nears 40, the pressure to find a “real” job or get married is mounting – w
Keiko has worked at the convenience store her entire adult life. But as she nears 40, the pressure to find a “real” job or get married is mounting – what sort of life awaits Keiko outside the comfort zone of the store and will she step out to meet it? I feel like there’s a good novel somewhere in Convenience Store Woman but Sayaka Murata didn’t realise it. Her commentary on conformist society and the individual is inane and unoriginal though far worse is her muddled placement of the main character within that commentary. It’s never explicitly stated but Keiko is obviously autistic. She doesn’t understand human behaviour, talks repeatedly about the mask/disguise she wears and takes her cues from her peers, mimicking their body language, speech patterns and dress to pass as “normal” – not that she cares all that much about being “normal” but she feels life is easier if that’s how people perceive her. She comes off as robotic and unemotional. She has no interest in sex or relationships in general. She works, thinks and lives mechanically. She even has her sister come up with lines for her to repeat in social situations to seem like a “normal” person. She’s practical to a fault. An anecdote from her childhood (which also shows that her behaviour is not the result of working in a convenience store): two boys are fighting in the schoolyard, someone calls to break them up, so Keiko grabs a shovel and smacks one of the boys on the head, nearly killing him. She doesn’t understand – she broke up the fight didn’t she? Later on, her sister’s baby is crying and she briefly thinks that she knows a way to permanently stop it making noise and stressing her sister out. There’s no malice behind the thought of killing a baby, she’s just thinking practically without understanding appropriate social behaviour (though she knows enough not to act on it). So I would definitely say that Keiko’s autistic, or at the very least somewhere on the spectrum. Not that anything’s wrong with that of course - but then what’s the novel’s point? Murata seems to be critical of a conformist society where certain jobs relegate people to cogs within a machine – dehumanised, essentially – in a society with far too rigidly-defined roles with no room for individual expression, leading to unsatisfied lives. Except Keiko is happy to be a cog in a machine because of the way her brain is wired. And it wasn’t society that did this to her, she was simply born this way. She fully embraces the role of convenience store worker, as it’s clearly defined and therefore understandable. She could do without societal rules with its grounding in complex human behaviour, which she’s never understood. Her character arc is non-existent. She knows her place in the world and she’s satisfied with it. She starts and ends as a convenience store worker. Something happens – which was completely arbitrary and never explained - along the way that takes her out of that setting but it only confirms her contentment with her lot in life and puts her back where she started. Is the point then that society should accept that some people are fine with/don’t care about “low” status? Or that the rules should be different for someone who’s autistic/on the spectrum, who clearly can’t handle/doesn’t want the complexities that come with more traditional ideas of success – high paying jobs, lots of material possessions, families, etc.? I found Convenience Store Woman underwhelming as its ultimate message – you’ve got one life to live, it’s yours, don’t waste any time worrying about what other people think and live it the way you want – isn’t just a mundane, obvious observation but is something I took to heart years ago and I think is how most people live anyway. At least that’s what I took the meaning to be seeing as Keiko affirms her place in the world, regardless of what people think, and is more than ok with it. Unless it’s meant to be tragic as she tried and failed to “climb the social ladder” by getting a new job? But if she’s autistic, then she probably wouldn’t be able to handle anything else so isn’t she already doing the best that she can? And that’s why I don’t think the conformity critique – if that was what Murata was going for – works well alongside an autistic character. Because conformity, regularity, mindless, repetitive labour, etc. actually fits an autistic person who can’t handle change. Maybe that message would’ve been more effective if Keiko had started out as a girl with hopes and dreams for a fulfilling career, a nice house, a husband and kids, and ended up a single convenience store worker. Except the novel is actually about how someone found their place in life right out of high school and has continued to be happy with it; it’s everyone else who has a problem with that. So the novel is about a character who doesn’t change, a society that doesn’t change, and how both have found comfort in conformity, and the author’s conclusion to all this is… who knows? At any rate it doesn’t add up to much! People seem to really dig autistic fictional characters these days – like the gay professor in that wildly successful yet desperately unfunny sitcom, and Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s bestselling The Rosie Project – so I can see why this would be popular. And Japanese convenience stores really are incredible. Their food culture is light years ahead of what we have in the west. Convenience store food is delicious and the selections are many and mind-bending – if you ever visit, you’ll be blown away with the treasures inside these ubiquitous shops. Still, it’s generally a well-written book that’s easy to read and, for a novel mostly set in somewhere as ordinary as a convenience store and its day-to-day machinations, it’s never boring so credit to Sayaka Murata for that. Maybe it’s messaging is more relevant to close-buttoned Japanese society but I wasn’t impressed with it and found it left a confused impression. If it had been clearer and more focused, this would be a decent novel; as it is, it’s a jumbled mess. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 03, 2018
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Aug 03, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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1473545994
| 9781473545991
| 1473545994
| 3.53
| 189,186
| Jun 15, 2017
| Jun 15, 2017
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did not like it
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Four high school friends now in their thirties reunite after a terrible shared secret threatens to emerge and shatter their peaceful lives. But what t
Four high school friends now in their thirties reunite after a terrible shared secret threatens to emerge and shatter their peaceful lives. But what they thought was a shared secret turns out to be a lie - one of them isn’t telling the truth. I really enjoyed Ruth Ware’s debut novel, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and was disappointed with the poor follow-up, last year’s The Woman in Cabin 10, so I hoped The Lying Game would be a return to form; it’s not. The Lying Game is awful - looks like Ruth Ware is a one-hit wonder! This non-thriller horribly takes its time, ambling towards the reveal of the mystery at the novel’s core, along the way introducing us to its cast of uninteresting nobodies in a small, dreary coastal town. The “dark secret” is underwhelming to say the least, particularly as it’s built up to be something utterly shocking. I guess what they did is morally questionable but I thought it was going to be much, much worse than it was. Things don’t improve in the second half of the book. Ware wastes more time on the impossibly mundane life of Isa, our narrator, who has boring quarrels with her husband - this, like too many passages clogging the narrative (what did having a baby add exactly?), has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING, I just kept thinking GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT! - as the pathetic “plot” shuffles towards a dull final twist that I couldn’t have cared less about at that point, and then the whole disaster is wrapped up. It’s never really clear what exactly the point was. The four friends gather and talk about what they did but don’t really do anything further - it’s not just a lack of any character’s discernible motivation, it’s a total absence of direction which only accentuates the turgid pacing of the book. A menacing figure, Luc, is introduced but other than wondering whether or not he killed a sheep (another go-nowhere subplot), it’s not clear at all what his purpose is - his presence only makes sense with the final twist so up til then he feels like another superfluous addition to this overlong novel. The mystery itself is flimsy at best. It was only a mystery to us because the details are slowly parcelled out - if it was revealed at once you’d be able to poke holes in its flawed construction, as the main character does once she begins to think about it. But why wouldn’t she have thought about it at the time or at any time in the 16 or so years since it happened!? It’s such contrived drivel. No aspect of The Lying Game was interesting or worth reading. It was a supremely tedious, unremarkable and unsatisfying novel that’s put me off of picking up anything by Ruth Ware in the future. I highly recommend her only good novel, In a Dark, Dark Wood, which is exciting and fun, though I’d steer well clear of her other books. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Aug 06, 2017
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Aug 06, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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1509898204
| 9781509898206
| 1509898204
| 3.86
| 58,748
| Jan 28, 2012
| Apr 16, 2020
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it was ok
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Like a lot of novels I started reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs not knowing much about it but hoping it would be a good ‘un. And I was pleasa
Like a lot of novels I started reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs not knowing much about it but hoping it would be a good ‘un. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually really good - up to a point. That point would be after the episode where the main character’s older sister and her daughter come to visit. All that stuff after - about the main character Natsu trying to get pregnant artificially - was ass! The novel felt so much like two different stories stuck together that I looked into the background a little more and found out that, yup, the first story - let’s call it Breasts, because it’s about Natsu’s older sister wanting to get a boob job - was originally a standalone novella, and the second part - let’s call it Eggs because it’s about Natsu trying to get pregnant artificially - was written later. They’re combined here as Breasts and Eggs. If this book was just Breasts I would giving it four out of five stars. It’s a really interesting portrait of a 30 year-old single woman working dead-end jobs and trying to be a writer while her equally impoverished older sister struggles to make a living as an aging hostess and maintaining a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter. Both sisters have been poor their whole lives and still can’t make any decent money. It’s a fascinating portrait of the underside of Japanese society that you rarely see and reminds me of the superb 2018 Japanese movie Shoplifters. Natsu, Makiko and Midoriko are fully-realised, believable and sympathetic characters whose ability to keep going despite seemingly never-ending hardship was inspiring. I was fully onboard and couldn’t wait to see where this novel was going. And then there’s the time jump, both in the novel and in real life, because Kawakami wrote Eggs after Breasts and also set it ten years later. Natsu’s a successful novelist now and feels the desire to become a mother - except she hates sex and can’t have a relationship with a man. This went on and on and on for two-thirds of the book - Eggs is twice as long as Breasts and isn’t even half as interesting; this section is what really drags down the rating to two stars. Natsu looks into her options for artificial insemination, gets involved with a strange support network of people who were born artificially, and things happen for no real reason to no effect (characters dying, relationships ending and starting) before closing on a trite, feel-good ending. Makiko and Midoriko appear briefly in Eggs but they didn’t seem like the same characters as before and it felt like their inclusion was an attempt to connect the two disparate pieces into fooling the reader that they were reading a complete novel. Even Natsu doesn’t seem like the same person she was in Eggs. I mean, sure, people change over time, but it just felt arbitrary that she would suddenly want to become a mother. Especially since a large part of Breasts was about how bad her and Makiko’s childhood was and how providing for kids had killed their single mother at an early age. I suppose the novel is vaguely about being a woman, or something, but I didn’t think Kawakami had anything substantial to say about that, if it was. The first section alone would’ve been a great standalone piece about the struggles and relationships of working-class women in modern-day Japan but paired with the meandering, dull, utterly boring second and final piece about getting pregnant without having sex, that unfortunately makes up the bulk of this book, the novel turns into a slow and tedious slog to the final page. I doubt anyone would stop reading after the first section, which is the only part of the book I’d say is worth reading, but, for anyone struggling beyond that point, I’d say to give up as it doesn’t get any better after it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 15, 2020
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Jun 15, 2020
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Paperback
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1846554055
| 9781846554056
| 1846554055
| 3.92
| 42,931
| 2010
| Oct 25, 2011
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it was ok
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SPOILERS My first response to finishing the book was "Thank God that's over", my second was "how could Murakami have screwed it up so badly?". The seco SPOILERS My first response to finishing the book was "Thank God that's over", my second was "how could Murakami have screwed it up so badly?". The second book ended dramatically and, maybe even artistically, with Aomame standing before the portal that took her to 1Q84 with a gun in her mouth and Tengo beside the comatose body of his abusive father awaiting anything. Well, Book 3 begins with Aomame taking the gun out of her mouth and going home and Tengo continuing his solitary vigil over his father. Here's the biggest problem from then on - nothing happens! Aomame stays in her safe house, doing exercises and reading, all the while looking out of her window towards the playground where she had seen Tengo sit atop a slide (and for some reason didn't react to it) for most of the book. Tengo hangs around the nursing home for ages, returns home, then doesn't do anything either. There is a new addition in the chapters, a minor character from the previous books, Ushikawa, is given his own storyline but even this does nothing to make the book interesting as all he does is go over the events of the first two books. Once the reader is reminded of every tiny event that happened previously via Ushikawa, the character is killed off! His entire storyline is so contrived and irrelevant it beggars belief. The lack of anything happening wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the tantalising storylines Murakami had set up in the last two books. Why oh why didn't he write about any of the following: the Little People - who are they, what are they, why do they exist, what is their meaning; what's the significance of the second, smaller, green moon; what happens with the mysterious cult Sakigake - does it collapse without Leader, what happens to it, does Fuka-Eri destroy it; what is the meaning of air chrysalises and the maza/dohta; Tengo and Aomame's relationship - this is the driving force behind the two main characters' actions throughout the 1000 page story but the reader knows next to nothing about why they are so obsessed with each other - why not develop this to explain why? And what do we get instead? Pages and pages of banal thoughts, banal actions, and a literary kind of treading water. Murakami completely fails to live up to the storylines he's spent hundreds of pages establishing, choosing instead to not bother writing something interesting when something empty and dull will suffice. I will say that the NHK Collector was an interesting character, especially creepy, and added a much needed element of mystery/horror as a disembodied voice, never seen and only heard (is he really Tengo's father's ghost?). But this was a very small positive compared to the overwhelming sense of boredom perpetuated throughout the novel. There was potentially a great novel here but Murakami totally flubs it through inaction and stasis. My main complaint of the first two books still stands in this third - the love between Tengo and Aomame is so unbelievable as they barely met once when they were 10 and now twenty years later they are still madly in love with each other even though they don't say their first words to each other until the final 20 pages of the book? 20 pages out of nearly 1000! I don't understand how either of them could find this perceived connection as such a driving force behind all of their actions, behind this entire novel (or series of novels). I suspend disbelief on most things in this book but not this romance, it's too far-fetched to believe, mostly because Murakami didn't put any effort into creating it. This is the longest victory lap any novelist has indulged in, ever, I think. It's a book that didn't need to be written and spends most of its 364 pages underlining its own irrelevance. To anyone wondering whether or not to read this after the effort taken to read the first two books, I would say read the final 25 pages of Book 3 and you've basically got it - everything that precedes it isn't worth noting. It took me a month to read the first two books, just over a month to finish the third and it's half the length of the first two - save the time and effort needed to wade through this unedited, uninteresting novel and finish this "saga" with the end of book two. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 18, 2011
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Dec 19, 2011
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Nov 18, 2011
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Hardcover
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1789098572
| 9781789098570
| 1789098572
| 2.66
| 41,670
| Oct 19, 2021
| Oct 21, 2021
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did not like it
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Five friends rent out a haunted old Japanese house for a spooky wedding - but turns out them advertised ghosts is real and ghosty is getting revengey!
Five friends rent out a haunted old Japanese house for a spooky wedding - but turns out them advertised ghosts is real and ghosty is getting revengey! Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth appealed to me because it’s a haunted house story, which I love, and it’s set in an old Japanese house, which I’ve never seen before, so it’s disappointing to say the book is actually a stinky pile of ectoplasm. Horror in general is hard to write and really good haunted house stories are few and far between, but Nothing But Blackened Teeth fails especially badly at both attempts. All that happens is that the group run around the old house at night while the ghost possesses one of them and smiles, showing off its blackened teeth. It’s such unimaginative storytelling. The cast are an unlikeable group of moronic upper-class twonks. Why they’re friends at all in the first place is a mystery as they seem to loathe each other from the beginning. Almost all of the book is these five idiots bickering about their past relationships and vapid love triangles with one another. I didn’t care about any of it or what was going to happen to them. Khaw seems to think it’s clever to have some of the characters break the fourth wall by talking about “this is the part in the movie/story where this character dies/this thing happens, har har”, which isn’t smart, it’s annoyingly twee and irrelevant. She also throws in Japanese terms to describe the ghost’s appearance - like ohaguro-bettari and shiromuku - without explaining what they are, so you can’t picture what on earth she’s talking about. Lazy cliches abound - the house happens to have a library that happens to have a book explaining the ghostly situation and how to fight the evil spirit (how convenient!) - and the backstory of the haunting couldn’t be less creative. The ending is contrived rubbish and the “emotional” finale is painfully forced. This book reads like an amateurish first draft. Thoroughly underwhelming and boring garbage through and through, don’t bother with Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Bad Writing! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 05, 2021
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Oct 05, 2021
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Hardcover
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0804137250
| 9780804137256
| 0804137250
| 3.55
| 121,419
| Jul 14, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
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did not like it
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Teenager Zack Lightman is the 6th best Armada player in the world, a sci-fi shoot ‘em up where you pilot a ship blasting away alien invaders. And then
Teenager Zack Lightman is the 6th best Armada player in the world, a sci-fi shoot ‘em up where you pilot a ship blasting away alien invaders. And then he discovers the game was really designed to find the best pilots in the world and he’s been drafted in a real-life war against aliens! Computer games used to find skilled players - kids, usually - to fight aliens in an intergalactic war? Yeah, it’s been done already in The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game. In fact the derivative nature of Ernest Cline’s Armada is emblematic of the novel as a whole which isn’t so much a story as it is a collection of quotes and references from other, actually original works of pop culture sprinkled liberally atop an adolescent wish-fulfilment fantasy. The story is told in Zack’s first person. By far the most irritating aspect of the novel is the way Cline writes Zack’s internal monologue – note that Zack is a mega-fan of pop culture. Every simile – and I mean. Every. Single. One. – is a reference to something. A movie, book, game, whatever. For example: “I’d felt like a young Clark Kent, preparing to finally learn the truth about his origins from the holographic ghost of his own long-dead father.” and “What if they’re using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars - he was training him and he didn’t even realize it! Wax on, wax off - but on a global scale!” This isn’t just lazy, sloppy writing but it’s detrimental to how the book will read to some people. Not only do we not know what Zack is supposed to be feeling because he’s not telling us, he’s describing how another character in a similar situation would feel but only describing the situation. But if you’re unfamiliar with the reference, you won’t know what Zack/the reader is supposed to be feeling. Or you’ll have to jump on Google to find out yourself which isn’t exactly what anyone sitting down with a book is hoping to end up doing! The simile references aren’t just every now and then, they’re on nearly every page which becomes enormously tiresome. Zack cannot describe anything, or have a single conversation, without name-dropping at least one pop culture reference. And while I got most of the references, I didn’t enjoy them so much as I grew to hate Cline’s shockingly inept storytelling style. The story itself isn’t much better. Yes it’s ripping off The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game but beyond that there isn’t much else to the book. The “gamers save the world” storyline is extremely self-indulgent and tedious, while the pervasive worship of nostalgia is simply boring. But at least Zack has a semblance of character as opposed to no-one else in the book. His glaringly obvious love interest, Lex, isn’t so much a character as an extension of Cline’s fantasy. She’s drop-dead gorgeous and as steeped in pop culture as Zack so the two get to make repeated obnoxious references to one another in the least funny, most annoying meet cute ever. Not only that but she is hot hot hot for nerds, especially gamers who’re super-good at Armada. Lex might be Cline’s most pitiful moment in the whole novel. Zack’s friends, Nerdle-dee and Nerdle-dum (I don’t recall their names but that’ll do), are just funnels for every fanboy message board, arguing about what superhero could beat some other superhero or what movie’s better than another. Describing these “characters” as one-dimensional is generous. When he’s not making references, Cline’s describing the supposedly-exciting battle scenes in space between Earth’s forces and the aliens’. Except describing a space battle is not nearly as exciting as seeing one in a film, TV show or game and there are dozens of pages devoted solely to this. My eyes glazed over every time Cline was describing some super-awesome dogfight Zack was in. But it isn’t just Cline’s inability to bring any real drama to the proceedings – just how exciting is it to see two drones fight one another? Because, for most of the fights, the people operating the machines are safely tucked far away from the action while two unmanned drones shoot at one another. Two lifeless robots shooting lasers at one another is as exciting to read as it sounds. Things happen too quickly – one minute Zack’s a high school student making Lord of the Rings references with his Say Anything-obsessed mother in their living room, the next he’s in space preparing to fight a war that’ll save humanity. There’s no real build-up to the war against the aliens, no real sense of fear that this is “mankind’s final hour”. Everything’s too rushed to have any impact on the reader. As unconvincing as the characters are, once these teens get drafted and are given titles like “Captain” and “Lieutenant”, it took all I could muster not to say “oh fuck YOU!” every time we saw some dweeb suddenly being saluted by self-appointed “Generals” and “Admirals”. It’s like watching little kids play dress-up or seeing a Scientology ceremony except you know they’re just idiots while Cline is asking us to take these teenage “Captains” seriously like everyone else in his story is for some stupid reason. It’s too much – I could suspend my disbelief for an alien invasion but not for some dickhead gamers being called actual military ranks and treated like actual ranking officers. There’s not enough vomit in the world to express how I felt during those scenes. And really – we’re meant to believe that teenage gamers was the best strategy the brilliant minds of the world could come up with to fight the aliens? Socially dysfunctional, emotionally-damaged, undisciplined crybabies who’ve never know responsibility beyond a part-time job or an essay deadline are suddenly entrusted with billions of dollars’ worth of equipment to SAVE THE WORLD?! But then again we’re dealing with Ernest Cline’s fantasy specific to gamers so it makes (non)sense. Armada is pure fan service to gamers. It pats them on the head, confirming their ridiculous beliefs that they are the most amazing people in the world and that nobody understands the true importance of gaming. The book is also for people who like seeing things they’re familiar with who’ll go “oh I remember that therefore this is great!” ie. mindless fanboys who only react to brands rather than substance and who enjoy feeling part of an asinine club because they “get” certain references others don’t. The real failing of Armada is that for all Cline’s knowledge of pop culture, he’s unable to contribute anything original to it with his book. That’s the point isn’t it – to create something new and start a whole new set of references rather than simply quote endlessly from others ad nauseam? But Cline opts for the latter and produces a book of completely insubstantial drivel. Armada is tedious sci-fluff that renders itself near-unreadable due to an over-reliance on cultural reference shorthand to communicate key moments of its feeble story and the savvy-ness of the reader to pick up on them. When picking what to read, shoot for something higher, something original, challenging, ambitious and fresh - in other words, anything but Armada! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 14, 2015
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Jul 15, 2015
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Hardcover
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055341884X
| 9780553418842
| 055341884X
| 3.66
| 31,740
| Oct 06, 2014
| Oct 28, 2014
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it was ok
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Sometime in the future, humanity has discovered they are not alone in the universe: on a distant planet named Oasis dwells a race of supremely ugly al
Sometime in the future, humanity has discovered they are not alone in the universe: on a distant planet named Oasis dwells a race of supremely ugly aliens (their faces are described as two foetuses fused together!) - and they LOVE Jeebus. So much so that they’re withholding food from the handful of human colonists on their planet until they get a replacement missionary. Enter Peter Leigh, a former homeless junkie thief turned born-again Christian minister selected by the USIC Corporation to be sent to Oasis and preach from the Bible, which the Oasans refer to as The Book of Strange New Things. But why are the Oasans so enamoured with Christianity? And what happened to their last minister…? That’s the setup for Michel Faber’s latest doorstopper-sized novel, and it’s actually quite enticing and original-seeming at first. Except that summary is misleading because this book is actually about how long distance relationships don’t work. I know – pick your jaw up off the floor because that’s revelatory information, right? But that is essentially the whole book which wouldn’t be so bad if I cared a bit about either Peter or his wife Bea but I didn’t. Peter heads to Oasis while Bea remains on Earth. Things go well for Peter – the Oasans are receptive and he enjoys his time on the planet; things for badly for Bea as the world around her falls apart – China invades the Middle East and ends up controlling their oil supply, global supermarket chains go bankrupt, freak weather decimates countries, wars erupt, governments topple, it’s the complete and total collapse of Western civilisation. Make no mistake though: The Book of Strange New Things is an utterly tedious read. Beyond the novelty of meeting the Oasans, there’s nothing much to them. They’re around five feet tall, they’re ugly, they’re a very simple, agrarian-based culture, and many of them believe the word of God completely. Little is added to this knowledge as the novel progresses. The only “conflict” Peter encounters is trying to make the Bible stories work for his new flock as they have trouble pronouncing “s” and “t” in their tongue as well as understanding some of the imagery (they don’t have sheep or fish so wouldn’t know what stories involving them would mean), so he rewrites them to make it easier for them to speak and grasp. He doesn’t have to try to convert them as a large number are already devout Christians and he doesn’t encounter the ones who aren’t. Easier and easier. He gets on with his fellow humans on the USIC base for the most part. They’re a gentle but soulless bunch consumed with work – they are the best in the professions: engineering, geology, biology, medicine, etc. A giant (read: “evil”) corporation behind this space endeavour? Never seen that in a sci-fi alien story! The only thing missing was the meat-head soldier archetype but there are no weapons or fighting in the book so they’re absent. Wondering where the drama/story here is? There isn’t any! Maybe you’re thinking Oasis is some wonderful vista paradise like Pandora in Avatar? Think again! It’s a completely flat landscape with no discernible features. The Oasans are completely isolated besides some weird duck creatures who appear a couple times (so how did they evolve exactly?), their simple huts, and their fields of whiteflower which they grow to trade for medicine with the humans. I don’t need the landscape to be extraordinary I just wish Faber would give me something, anything, than nothing! This is barely genre writing. Because it’s set on an alien planet doesn’t make it sci-fi, or at least it’s not a good representation of that genre’s heights (despite the way some readers look down upon sci-fi as a “lesser” genre). Good sci-fi is imaginative – The Book of Strange Things is not. Peter’s wife Bea, though extremely whiny and annoying, tells Peter and the reader through her emails (sent via the Shoot – why did they rename a computer, a Shoot? What was wrong with “computer”?) of troubles on Earth, which I mentioned earlier. These emails are the only real conflict in the book by the way. It seems that her story would’ve been much more interesting to read than Peter’s. Instead we’re subjected to the most monotonous non-story ever: Peter telling the Oasans some Bible stories. Peter helping them harvest the whiteflower crop. Peter trying to learn their language. Peter having trouble sleeping and looking at the stars. Peter walking across a flat landscape drinking melon-flavoured water. Peter staring blankly at nothing. This book is nearly 600 pages long!! Cut out the tedious crap and you’ll have a mediocre 100-150 page novel instead of an awful 600 page one. And speaking of Bea’s increasingly difficult life on doomed Earth, USIC do their best to censor their off-world staff from news of Earth’s collapse by ripping out pages of magazines/newspapers arriving at the base - but they don’t censor Bea’s emails even though they have the capability to do so? Her emails contain the most damning information! I will say that Faber’s prose is for the most part clear and accessible. He may not be able to tell a tight, fast-moving story anymore, but he can still write quite well. And I did like some scenes in the book, particularly with the former minister who went native, and Grainger, the USIC pharmacist, as she fell apart on Oasis. I had her and Peter pegged to have a rushed, embarrassing affair though Faber thankfully steered clear of that – though he did everything he could to hint at its possibility! And I liked how many of the USIC characters were named after Marvel Comics writers from the Silver Age, in particular Jakob Kurtzberg, the missing former minister, who mirrors the real name of Jack Kirby (technically a Golden Age creator). Who was Jack Kirby, non-comics reader? Creator of much of the Marvel Universe: Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Fantastic Four and the X-Men to name a few - and a preacher of a kind himself who lived in the stars! Faber’s look at Christianity is just not insightful. What do we learn? That Bea converted Peter when he was a troubled criminal. He bought into the religion and became a personable minister. Away from his wife, her troubles overwhelm her and she loses her faith. And? Also, how easy is it to write a devout Christian character? “Jesus saves. God has a plan for everything. Trust in the Bible and our Lord – he shall provide” etc. This isn’t great writing or characterisation. The Christian overtones to the story were too on the nose and weren’t enough to redeem it. The book has 28 chapters like the Gospel of Matthew (which is repeatedly referenced), Peter is bitten by an animal, seeming to die (in the eyes of the Oasans) and return a la Christ after the crucifixion (not really but to the Oasans perhaps), the walking through the wilderness with Grainger (temptation). Does Peter become like Christ to them? Is this how Christ was to us – an alien? Is this how religions start? Maybe some people will be blown away by these aspects of the book but I could not care less – I was beaten into apathy at this point by the slug-like pacing. As there’s no real story the book doesn’t build to a big finish, or any kind of finish at all really, and simply ends. It couldn’t be more dissatisfying or anticlimactic. Faber’s Strange New Things is a deeply unimaginative novel. The sci-fi element is poorly conceived and uninteresting – Oasis and the Oasans could not be more dull. The book drags on for hundreds of pages without a plot, with barely any character development, and with hardly a thing happening to break up the boredom. The whole “Earth’s collapse” felt forced, done because Bea’s life needed to get worse so that she and Peter could fight via email, not because it was convincing on any level. I mean, China invading the Middle East – what?! I’ve enjoyed Faber’s work over the years from Under the Skin to The Fire Gospel to his short stories in Some Rain Must Fall, but The Book of Strange New Things is gimmicky and horribly boring. It’s far too long with much too little substance. Arguably this is his worst novel – I can see why he’s saying he’s giving up on writing any more of them seeing how uninspired this one turned out! Unlike the Oasans and the Bible, most people will have more than enough of this book long before its end. It was a real struggle to get there and not really worth it. (Side note: there’s some question among some reviewers as to why the Oasans would so readily accept Christianity though Faber does explain this in the book. Here’s why, and it’s actually one of the few parts of the novel I liked: (view spoiler)[If humans are cut, the wound stops bleeding, scabs over, the platelets in our blood do their work, maybe some pus follows, but we soon heal. If an Oasan is cut, and the cut becomes infected, they die. Their bodies are completely defenceless. Christianity preaches healing and rebirth. The Oasans are a race who cannot heal naturally and take everything literally so they would embrace Christianity’s message of healing as a solution to their plight.) (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 10, 2014
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Dec 11, 2014
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Hardcover
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1474600840
| 9781474600842
| 1474600840
| 4.19
| 120,811
| Feb 05, 1983
| Apr 14, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
Blimey o’reilly, The Queen’s Gambit was an absolutely stonking good novel – the best I’ve read in ages! Why hasn’t anyone ever told me to read Walter
Blimey o’reilly, The Queen’s Gambit was an absolutely stonking good novel – the best I’ve read in ages! Why hasn’t anyone ever told me to read Walter Tevis before?! He’s an utterly fantabulous writer! Set in 1950s/60s America, Beth Harmon is an orphaned chess prodigy who rises up through the ranks to become the American No.1 and heads across the Iron Curtain to take on the World Champion: the intimidating Russian Borgov! The story is a bildungsroman but also about genius and addiction. In the orphanage Beth becomes addicted to tranquillisers, then later on discovers alcohol and uses both to get her through the increasingly challenging tournaments. Which only adds to the fascinating nature of Beth’s character: rare, incomprehensible talent coupled with a very relatable human frailty. Tevis shows us his idea of how a chess prodigy might operate – partly through mental visualisation, partly through an unspoken instinct manifesting without clear articulation – which is convincing if probably not wholly accurate. I’ve played chess but I’m by no means a chess player – I wouldn’t even call myself an amateur, I’m that unskilled! – and yet I found it riveting to read a book filled with chess matches! The matches are genuinely tense and thrilling to read even without understanding the moves as they’re being described - that’s how accessible and interesting Tevis makes chess. He really was an enormously gifted writer. Beth’s relationships were all awkward but touching in their way. From learning chess from the orphanage’s janitor Mr Shaibel, to her cheerful but fragile foster mom Mrs Wheatley, to her first couple of boyfriends, and her best friend Jolene – they were all compelling, though ultimately we see Beth as she always felt: isolated and alone. Partly through her intellect, partly through unfortunate circumstances, though it makes her subsequent addictions more understandable. Tevis’ prose is mesmerising and the pages flew by. It’s such a smooth and effortlessly gripping read – I’ve read thrillers that were less exciting than this novel about CHESS of all things! There really isn’t a single thing I can think of to critique in the slightest. I loved The Queen’s Gambit totally and obviously I’m recommending it to everyone – and now I’m off to check out all of Tevis’ other novels that I’ve been missing! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 26, 2019
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Jun 26, 2019
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Paperback
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B00J9038CO
| 3.63
| 134,267
| Sep 24, 2014
| Sep 25, 2014
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** After the success of The Rosie Project last year, it was inevitable that we’d get a sequel, though so soon was surprising. In The Ro
**spoiler alert** After the success of The Rosie Project last year, it was inevitable that we’d get a sequel, though so soon was surprising. In The Rosie Project we followed the adventures of Don Tillman, a genetics professor (with probable Aspergers) who went looking for a wife and found one in Rosie, who drew him into her own quest to find her unknown biological father. In The Rosie Effect, Rosie is pregnant and Don is going to be a father. I’m going to stop there because this relates to my biggest problem with the book. There are numerous problems with this novel - in fact, I can’t name a single positive about it - and everything about it totally stinks but my biggest issue with this novel is the total lack of a plot. See how I summarised The Rosie Project - it sounds like a real novel right, with a story? Then see how I tried to summarise The Rosie Effect - one line about Rosie being pregnant - and stopped. Because there is no plot to this book and that’s why it’s such a tedious read. Don and Rosie are in New York, Rosie’s pursuing her degree, Don’s doing his genetics stuff, Gene, Don’s philandering colleague, joins them because his wife kicked him out. This isn’t plot, it’s just setup. Don’s friends with a guy who installs refrigeration systems and happens to have done a big job for an old rock drummer called George. And this brings me to the next problem with the book - zero conflict. There is never a single problem in the “story” that Don doesn’t deal with easily, or Simsion magically solves for Don. Don and Rosie need a place to stay? Well, Don happens to know a guy who knows a rock drummer who is obsessed with beer and has an entire apartment below his attached to his beer cellar - they could stay in the spacious new apartment for free and Don could monitor the temperature of the beer for him! Well isn’t that convenient! Simsion contrives numerous “obstacles” for Don to overcome that essentially end with “and the person realised it was a stupid novelistic contrivance designed to eat up pages before waving Don on”. For instance, a social worker - based on nothing more than Don’s unknowing ordering of an unecological dish - sets out to cause problems for him, threatening to deport him being as he is an Aussie living in America. This allows Simsion to insert a well-used sitcom trope of having someone impersonating someone else, in this case one of Don’s friends pretending to be Rosie because Don doesn’t want to cause Rosie any extra stress that might harm the baby. How does that storyline end? Eh, turns out it doesn’t really matter. Social worker admits to behaving irrationally, falls for Gene, the end. Arguably the worst offender out of these contrivances is the fact that, in the third act, Simsion realised he didn’t have any dramatic way of building to the finale because he hadn’t bothered with any story up to that point. So he invents some nonsense about Rosie suddenly thinking that Don won’t make a good husband, so she decides to leave him and go back to Australia. It’s so awkward and out of the blue, it’s staggering - really? We’re supposed to believe this crap out of nowhere?! This leads to another “really?” moment when Don runs to the airport to profess his love for Rosie. I couldn’t believe the cheesiest of all cheeseball scenes was this book’s finale, but it was. The guy running to the airport at the last minute to tell the girl he loved her. Absolutely horrendous. And then what happens? Rosie realises that oh yeah, suddenly leaving Don didn’t really make sense and she still loved him and it was all for nothing. Then there are the character problems of this book. Don, for example, is never explicitly said to have Aspergers or Autism, even if he sounds like Data from Star Trek all of the time (“Greetings!”). He can’t identify facial features, he doesn’t understand human emotions, most of the time doesn’t even seem to possess them, he looks at people and instantly calculates their BMIs, he doesn’t even understand certain social situations as being inappropriate, such as a man with a camera on his own sitting on a park bench taking pictures of children in the playground - but he’s definitely not autistic!! This is another example of Simsion’s shoddy writing. Don is autistic and/or has Aspergers - he’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum anyway - but he also reacts like a human when he needs to. In other words, Simsion wants to have his cake and eat it. But at least Don seems like a character and perhaps Gene too. The rest of the cast? There’s a trio of scientists Don labels B1, B2, and B3 because they all have names beginning with B, but also because he can’t identify faces (he’s definitely not autistic or anything!!) - and that’s how I feel all of the characters should’ve been labelled, rather than given names, because they don’t seem like characters at all. Most damningly, Rosie herself is a two-dimensional placeholder character - she’s the stock pregnant woman. She doesn’t seem like a real person, or distinctively her own person, she’s merely The Pregnant Woman in the book. That is, when she’s not behaving like a total bitch in total contrast to her character in the first book but maybe that’s the hormones or something? Those are the main problems with The Rosie Effect though really there are too many faults all the way through this to list. And it’s labelled a romantic comedy? I suppose the romance is there, generic though it may be (airport scene!), but comedy? I never laughed once, nor did it seem that there was anything to laugh at. Was the fact that Don was photographing kids in the park, unaware that this made him look like a pedo, meant to be hilarious? Because to me it just underlined the fact that this guy needed a carer more than anything (but he’s definitely not autistic!!). And it’s boring - my god, this book is boring! All of the problems - the lack of story, the dull characters, the absence of humour, the contrivances and cliches - compound massively on the book, one after the other, until it’s near unbearable to read! It’s so poorly written with zero imagination or skill that it reads like a first draft than the final finished product. In the end, it’s very clear that The Rosie Effect was rushed out because everyone involved wanted to capitalise on the financial success of The Rosie Project. Except the sequel is a charmless, humourless chore to struggle through - an unending, uninteresting slog through totally artless, unengaging garbage. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 26, 2014
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Sep 27, 2014
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
0618982507
| 9780618982509
| 0618982507
| 3.71
| 33,887
| May 01, 2012
| May 01, 2012
|
it was ok
|
I was a big fan of Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” when it came out 6 years ago, it was an interesting and insightful memoir about her growing up in a fun
I was a big fan of Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” when it came out 6 years ago, it was an interesting and insightful memoir about her growing up in a funeral home with a father who was secretly homosexual and would later commit suicide, and then discovering that she was gay as well. It was an excellent book that I would recommend to all comics fans but also readers in general, so I was looking forward to this follow-up, this time the focus supposedly being on her mother. What more revelations could there be? Not many as it turns out, and neither is the book particularly about Bechdel’s mum. The book gets off to an uneasy and rambling start with Bechdel bewailing a lack of clarity when writing this book. It begins with a kind of dream, then segues into the then-present (most of the mum-stuff in the “now” is set circa 2009) before going off on a tangent to Virginia Woolf and then back to her mum in the present. I waited for the book to settle down and expected Bechdel to begin telling her mother’s story which she does, in part, in between scenes where she visits a series of therapists talking about her own neuroses, and talking – and quoting at length – psychoanalysts she’s been reading. This isn’t really a memoir about her mum, it’s only one part of the book. And if we were to look only at that, we wouldn’t find much. Her mum went through spells of depression, and it can’t have been easy married to a closet-homosexual with a horrible temper, but she just isn’t as interesting a person to read about as Bechdel’s dad was. The rest of the book is mostly a mish-mash of anecdotes about psychology. Bechdel writes about various psychologists whose work has had an impact on her life, trying to get a better relationship with her mum and helping her through her tangled web of relationships with other lesbians and this part of the book, repeatedly returned to, is by far the most tedious to read. She doesn’t write about them as much as she copies out entire passages from their books, highlighting sentences here and there. Unless you have an interest in psychology – and I don’t – this part of the book is just dully academic to read. She also writes about Virginia Woolf at length, quoting “To The Lighthouse” frequently, and I have to say after reading “Mrs Dalloway” a couple of years ago, I’m no fan of Woolf. I found when Bechdel began quoting Woolf at length, coupled with the psychology textbook copy and pasting, that I was becoming even more uninterested in this book. So besides the psychobabble textbook quoting, the Woolf stuff, more psychobabble in the therapist scenes, and a look at her mother’s fairly ordinary life, what’s left? Not much I’m afraid. The structure is very wobbly, the scenes merging strangely with no real idea of what the whole is supposed to be. It’s not much fun to read and boy is it long at nearly 300 pages, made longer with the extensive psychology passages. By the end I was just glad to get it over with. Bechdel’s art is great, but the writing needed some serious editing as it’s meandering, tangential narrative is too unclear as to what it's supposed to be. It started out as a look at her mum’s life and wound up being about Bechdel’s own, frankly overblown (as Chris Rock calls them “white people problems”) neurotic sensibilities and it’s not much fun to read about her figuring them out. It doesn’t feel like it’s worth an entire book and “Are You My Mother?” is, in the end, a very weak follow-up to “Fun Home” containing far too much intellectual posturing and not enough substance. Not a great read though I'm sure psychology students will probably love it to bits. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 20, 2012
|
Jun 21, 2012
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0571334644
| 9780571334643
| 0571334644
| 3.81
| 1,450,897
| Aug 28, 2018
| Aug 28, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
Oooof. Alright - a disclaimer before I start. Normal People by Sally Rooney is superb. I’m gonna gush about this one (warning to those in the splash z
Oooof. Alright - a disclaimer before I start. Normal People by Sally Rooney is superb. I’m gonna gush about this one (warning to those in the splash zone!) and I honestly feel that the less you know about it, the better the experience will be for you. So, to those of you who’re thinking of reading it, don’t bother with any reviews about the book - just read it. It’s a contemporary story about a boy and a girl who fall in love. That’s all you need to know. And when you’re done, come back and we can hi-five each other in joy over its excellence! … Why did I begin with “Oooof”? Because I genuinely feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. Repeatedly. This is such an emotionally exhausting and draining read! Sally Rooney’s created a remarkably compelling pair of characters in Marianne and Connell and I felt their love so intensely it was like I was experiencing it with them. Which makes it sound like a romance, and it has some of those elements, but if it’s anything it’s a classic Bildungsroman (just a fancy word for “coming of age” story). Marianne is the awkward loner in high school, brainy but socially isolated. Connell is the good-looking popular boy, inexplicably drawn to Marianne - star football player falls for nerdy girl. The two begin seeing each other secretly - god, it sounds sooo fucking cheesy doesn’t it? I promise you it’s anything but. From there it’s a rollercoaster of emotions as the characters grow and develop. I loved it pure and simple. Here are some critiques to anyone who didn’t enjoy the book: Marianne’s brother Alan is a laughably one-dimensional villain. There’s no plot (which is very typical of this type of story) - the story just starts and then ends. The occasional phrase feels hammy and clichéd (stuff like “so few people have what we have”). Connell is written as this genius but he does some super-dumb things - and if he is so brilliant, would he care so much what others thought of him? Also, given how unbelievably connected Connell and Marianne are on every conceivable level, the number of times they misunderstand one another seemingly purely for dramatic purposes could be seen as contrived as fuuuuck. And, though I know almost nothing about Rooney, it feels like a very autobiographical novel - most young writers tend to write about themselves to start with, after all. She’s a young Irish woman who went to Trinity College, Dublin, on a scholarship, like Marianne, and the novel ends with the characters in their mid-20s, which is the same age I suspect Rooney was when she stopped writing this (she’s now 27 years old). In that regard you could say it’s somewhat unimaginative. Listen: none of that matters. I noticed those things and I didn’t care. Because it’s so well-written, so damn compelling, so enthralling and honest and… real. If I gave this anything less than the highest possible rating, I’d be lying about how much I enjoyed this book. It’s also impressive that she didn’t shy away from writing the sex scenes given how tricky they are to write with most writers publicly embarrassing themselves. She’s such a confident and skilful writer – already, at such a young age! - that she pulls them off admirably and, yes, sensuously. If you’ve ever heard someone trying to convince someone else to start reading books, one of the points they’ll make is that you get to live lives you never would. Most books do this on a superficial level but Normal People actually achieves this viscerally. This is one of those books that effortlessly draws you into it and lets you experience the intensity of Marianne and Connell’s heart-achingly, tender, complex relationship in a totally believable way - it’s powerful stuff. Truly, I felt more and more anxious as the book went on until I was actually dreading the end - this novel turned me into a wreck! The Guardian review, which drew me to this book in the first place, mentioned something like “this is a novel for and about the Millennial generation” but it’s not really. In a literal sense the characters and author are Millennials but besides that there’s nothing about this book that makes it distinct for this specific time - it could easily be set at any point in the last 50 years and still work perfectly. I’m not really sure what the book was trying to say - if anything - but it’s left a deep impression regardless. Maybe that’s it - the whole labelling of generations is a fruitless exercise in misnomers, we’re all the same and love is a complicated, weird thing for all of us? Maybe it’s trying to define what “normal” is for this generation but isn’t that something every generation goes through? And I’m not exactly sure what conclusions Rooney comes up with could be uniquely ascribed to Millennials. I’ll leave it with this because I’m spent: Normal People isn’t just the best novel of the year, or even the best novel of the last few years, but it’s one of the best I’ve ever read in my life. Maybe I’m just a sucker for coming of age stories? W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage told a similar type of story that left me just as devastated - but in a good way (sort of). A beautiful powerhouse of quiet, extraordinarily potent sensations that indelibly captures an important part of the human experience, Normal People has made me an instant fan of Sally Rooney’s - and thank you for writing it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 19, 2018
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Sep 19, 2018
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Hardcover
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0812997174
| 9780812997170
| 0812997174
| 3.39
| 19,856
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 02, 2016
|
it was ok
|
Yann Martel’s latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, is crap. It’s split into three sections set at different points of the twentieth century: Yann Martel’s latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, is crap. It’s split into three sections set at different points of the twentieth century: 1904, 1938, and sometime in the early 1980s. Each section is set in rural Portugal and features a chimp at crucial points of the three stories. Also, I have no idea what the point of this novel is! So I went back to the blurb and re-read that this is a novel about faith and love and loss. I get the feeling that the reason why this book is described in this broad, wishy-washy way is because neither the publisher nor the author knows what the hell it’s about either! Let’s look at each of the three sections - they’re loosely connected but they don’t add up to anything by the end. The first section is the most trying by far - I can see why some readers would abandon the novel during this part as it is interminable. A grief-stricken man called Tomas discovers the journal of a 17th century priest who observed the slave trade in Africa and goes on a road trip to a remote Portuguese mountain village to find a special religious artifact. What follows is roughly 100 pages of description on how a fucking car works. I know contextually this would be an alien contraption to most people back then (1904) but do today’s audience need to suffer - and you will SUFFER - page after page of mind-numbingly tedious descriptions of how a car operates? The answer is no but that’s what you get anyway. The story is quickly finished off with a baffling and flat finale. Thank goodness then that that go-nowhere plotline is abandoned entirely! The bad news is that the rest of the book only marginally improves from here on out. The second section is set on New Year’s Eve 1938 and features a pathologist and his wife talking in the pathologist’s office. His wife has a really well-thought out speech comparing Agatha Christie’s novels to Jesus Christ that was genuinely fascinating (though the reason why she came up with it is completely stupid). She leaves, the pathologist conducts an autopsy, there’s some bonkers magical realist stuff, and then it’s over. Not great but better than the nothing that was the first section. The third and final part of the novel is set in the 1980s and features a Canadian senator whose wife has recently passed away. Through some contrivances he winds up with a chimp called Odo and decides to visit the rural Portuguese mountain village his ancestors were from. This part of the novel was the best if only for the adorable descriptions of Odo’s behaviour - so cute! Some tenuous links are made to connect the three sections and the book’s over. It’s so underwhelming. What bothered me by far was the goddamn Literary-ness of the whole enterprise. Tomas decides to walk backwards from now on. He decides to go on this strange quest with even stranger goals. The pathologist’s wife has a lengthy speech contrasting Agatha Christie and Jesus Christ. The pathologist autopsies a corpse and finds extraordinary things contained within the body. The senator - apropos of nothing - throws away his career, buys a chimp, goes to Portugal, and spends his days hiking with the chimp. The ending of the senator’s story in particular - that image (you’ll see if you read this). Why to any of that? Because it’s Literary and Quirky. What twee garbage. I’ve honestly spent time trying to figure out what this novel is about and I’ve gotten nowhere. Maybe it’s about how animals, particularly primates, embody a purity that is the ideal of Christianity better than human believers and we should aspire to something like that? Maybe animals are more holy/spiritual than humans could ever be or civilisation dilutes belief? I don’t want to say love and loss make us do weird things because that’s too banal, though both themes feature prominently throughout to no effect. The repeated imagery of chimps went right past me. I have no idea what relevance - if any - chimps have in Portugal. All I can say is that this book left no impression on me besides a certainty that, though I may have enjoyed Life of Pi years ago, it’ll be a long, long time before I pick up another Yann Martel novel again. The Agatha Christie speech and some of the Odo passages were good but those are a small part of this extremely precious, insubstantial book full of ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. Boring and empty of ideas, let alone possessing a compelling story or interesting characters, The High Mountains of Portugal is utter rubbish. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 11, 2016
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1529029589
| 9781529029581
| 1529029589
| 3.69
| 444,935
| Dec 06, 2015
| Sep 19, 2019
|
did not like it
|
Who wouldn’t want to time travel? Well, you probably wouldn’t if you had to follow these very precise, arbitrary and convoluted rules - yes, even more
Who wouldn’t want to time travel? Well, you probably wouldn’t if you had to follow these very precise, arbitrary and convoluted rules - yes, even more so than the usual! So the characters in this story can time travel but only to the relatively recent past and they have to sit in a specific seat at a specific table - which they can’t leave once they time travel, which means they can’t leave the cafe - and only for the duration it takes for a coffee to cool, after which you have to drink it down or else risk turning into a ghost forever burdened to haunt the cafe. Also nothing you do in the past can alter the present/future. Yay, so much whimsical fun… I loathed Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It is amongst the sappiest drivel I’ve ever had the displeasure to read. It’s basically four short stories that happen to share the same setting and plot device. A businesswoman wants a second chance to tell her boyfriend that she loves him; a wife wants to talk to her husband about a letter he wrote pre-Alzheimer’s; a woman wants to see her kid sister again before a car accident takes her life; and, in a shocking turn of events, a woman wants to meet her unborn child in the future, which is apparently possible because why not, this is all contrived garbage anyway. It is so, so sickeningly sentimental, it’s almost unbearable. Every storyline is designed to hit you in the “feels” except Kawaguchi’s prose is so weak and inept, and his characters so shallow and unemotional, that each fails one after the other. Look, I have a heart ok - it’s in a jar in a wardrobe somewhere - but even if I was wearing it I’d still find the storylines about as moving as a rock with half the emotion. The characters - Kei, Kazu, Nagare - all seemed like the same person and were basically interchangeable because their personalities were that indistinct and irrelevant. The Alzheimer’s storyline felt especially pointless - the wife wants to talk to her husband about the letter he wrote, that was handed to her in the present, that she refused to read, but she wants him to tell her about it in the past? Just read it in the present! And the future storyline - what, she just “knows” that she’s going to die in childbirth? Gimme a break. Unless you want to read the equivalent of a novel-length Hallmark greeting card, spare yourself the tedium and don’t bother with Before the Coffee Gets Cold. If you want emotion, slam your finger in a door - you’ll feel more and it’s quicker than reading this rubbish. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 20, 2020
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Apr 20, 2020
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Paperback
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0718178130
| 9780718178130
| 0718178130
| 4.02
| 562,205
| Jan 30, 2013
| Apr 11, 2013
|
it was ok
|
**spoiler alert** Don Tillman is an Associate Professor of Genetics with (probably) Asperger’s Syndrome who has decided that, as he is nearing 40, he
**spoiler alert** Don Tillman is an Associate Professor of Genetics with (probably) Asperger’s Syndrome who has decided that, as he is nearing 40, he will solve “the wife problem” (ie. not being married) by creating a questionnaire that will ascertain, for him, the perfect wife and then marry her. That is until he meets Rosie, a grad student working part-time in a gay bar who’s looking for her biological father, and slowly Don’s “Wife Project” becomes “The Rosie Project” as he realises he’s falling in love with her. I say that Don probably has Aspergers because it’s never explicitly stated but as he narrates the book in the first person, the reader is immediately aware that he sees the world differently than the rest of us. It’s kind of like having Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory” talking to you - Don is a genius with no social skills who’s unable to read facial expressions and has a highly regimented lifestyle and peculiar way of speaking. Couple that with the opening scene where he gives a talk on Aspergers and it’s highly suggested that he has it. Not knowing anyone with Aspergers, I can’t tell whether he sounds convincingly like someone with it but what little I know of the condition suggests that his personality is unlikely to change as dramatically as Don’s does throughout the book. It’s almost like his meeting Rosie reverses the condition. I mean, he’s unable to feel love - but he can? He’s unable to read facial expressions or understand social conventions - but then he can? Nevertheless I thought the first 200 pages of the book were charming. Don is a likeable guy whose eccentric lifestyle makes a change of pace to the usual rom-com formula and the different angle it gives to the genre made me interested in it even though romantic comedies aren’t usually my thing. There were also some excellent scenes that stuck out memorably like Don and Rosie’s first date, from using aikido on the waiters to altering time and having dinner on a whiteboard (not as surreal as it sounds but nice touches anyway), and Don and Rosie’s moonlighting as cocktail waiters and Don using his remarkable memory (eidetic?) to take complex drink orders for dozens of people at a time. I read the first two-thirds of the book in a couple days, smiling a lot throughout. And then I got to the final third which took me over a week and ruined the book for me. The first 200 pages had been unique to the rom-com genre and felt highly original which is why I responded so well to it - it wasn’t going over the same ground countless other stories had gone over before. The final third is all about convention and it opens with a scene in New York. The story is set in Australia but because Don and Rosie are hell bent on finding Rosie’s biological father, their search takes them to two possible fathers in NY. This 50 page section felt completely contrived and could’ve been cut from the book entirely. This book was originally a screenplay and these scenes felt very cinematic and included so that film backers would have recognisable locations for their film to make it easier to sell, rather than serving the story. Yes, the finding Rosie’s real dad storyline is in play but if you took those two people away from NY and cut it entirely, the book would’ve been snappier. As such it feels really contrived and dull, like the scene in the movie where the two romantic leads get to do a kind of montage sequence of things. It also constantly references other romantic comedy movies the entire time too, adding to the feeling that this is a homage to the genre and included because that’s what’s expected when you do something like this. Then the final 70 or so pages are about Don winning Rosie back and it’s done in such a conventionally rom-com way that I totally lost interest. Worse, Don’s character didn’t seem consistent in this part either (see the criticisms in the Aspergers section above). I’ve used the label “romantic-comedy” throughout because that’s what the marketing says it is but it’s not. It’s romantic, sure, but it’s not funny. I didn’t laugh once and didn’t think Don’s numerous social faux pas to be particularly funny either. Worse still are the scenes which are clumsily designed to be funny and feel very forced, like when Don is learning sexual positions from a book and uses a skeleton (he’s at the university for this scene so it’s not a Dahmer moment or anything) and the Dean walks in on him. It feels like the kind of scene in a sitcom where the canned laughter goes on and on as the camera switches from Don’s face to the Dean’s and back again while the audience begins to clap and laugh at the same time. It might as well be labelled “funny scene”. And it’s not. Despite my criticisms, I was quite happy to give this book 3 stars - until I read the end. Now I know the ending shouldn’t have more importance over any other aspect of the story, whatever the genre, but the ending to this book is especially bad. So Rosie, at the very start when she’s introduced to Don, tells him about her dad Phil, a man who raised her alone after her mum died when Rosie was 12, who’s a person whom she doesn’t particularly get along with (largely because of a minor quibble which she’s unreasonably held against him for her entire life) - but no more so than any other person who doesn’t get along with their mum or dad for whatever reason. Except she’s convinced herself he can’t possibly be her real dad and that her real dad must be out there somewhere. This is basically the motivation for everything Don and Rosie do in this entire book and right off, I thought “I bet it turns out Phil IS her real dad after all”. Well... I won’t give it away but you can kind of guess what happens in the end. And I really, really hated that. Don all but says what I was feeling in the second-to-final sentence of the book and I immediately dropped the book down another star. This book definitely has some good moments and Don is a memorable and oftentimes delightful character, but the final third of the book really frustrated me. If the book had been more tightly edited with the NY sequence thrown out and had had a less predictable ending, I would be enthusiastically recommending this novel. As it is, it is a flawed debut novel that’s well written but severely lacking in crucial parts of the story reducing it from a charmingly quirky romance story to yet another rom-com with no surprises and a sloppily rushed final act. Graeme Simsion can write and he might one day write a brilliant novel but sadly “The Rosie Project” is not that book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 27, 2013
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Jan 27, 2013
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Paperback
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1783785675
| 9781783785674
| 1783785675
| 3.60
| 69,233
| Aug 31, 2018
| Oct 01, 2020
|
did not like it
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**spoiler alert** Sayaka Murata’s back with another story of a social outsider - and it’s even worse than Convenience Store Woman! Natsuki is a little **spoiler alert** Sayaka Murata’s back with another story of a social outsider - and it’s even worse than Convenience Store Woman! Natsuki is a little girl that gets physically and verbally abused by her horrible mother, sexually abused by her teacher and, after a bout of incest, attempts suicide - guys, you’ll never believe it but somehow she turns out to be a complete mess of an adult! Yeah I didn’t like Earthlings at all. A lot of the gross scenes felt gratuitously described to little or no effect (beyond the obvious shock factor) and the message Murata seemed to be going for felt trite and immature. Conformism is brainwashing, maaan, society is like a factory, etc. This kind of banal commentary isn’t new or clever - rejecting societal norms doesn’t make you a radical, it makes you an average teenager. I get that Japanese society is more restrictive than most western societies. There’s a strong emphasis on family, living outside of the norm is discouraged, it’s patriarchal (though this is slowly changing), and the focus is much more on the group than the individual. Perhaps something like this would seem more transgressive in that context. But not to this reader in the UK - this was just childish silliness. Natsuki was an annoying character for the most part even though I felt sorry for her. Her inner dialogue was irritating - as a kid she’s either banging on about survival or wittering on about being an alien or a witch with her imaginary friend Piyyut, and as an adult she’s talking idiotically about rationalism. Yuu and Tomoya were equally stupid - they all deserved each other. Three morons exchanging stilted comments about nothing to highlight… what? That this is what a buttoned-down society reduces people to when they don’t fall in line? I’m not impressed if it is. I found Earthlings unpleasant for large portions of the novel, the characters all absurd, the point obvious and simple, and the story always really, really boring. After this and Convenience Store Woman, I don’t think Sayaka Murata’s books are for me. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 13, 2020
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Apr 13, 2020
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Hardcover
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1846558905
| 9781846558900
| 1846558905
| 3.73
| 635,779
| Jun 30, 2016
| Aug 23, 2016
|
it was ok
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Laura Blacklock is a travel journalist given a career-boosting opportunity to cover the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise liner headed to see the North
Laura Blacklock is a travel journalist given a career-boosting opportunity to cover the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise liner headed to see the Northern Lights. On her first night there she meets a mysterious woman in the cabin next to hers, cabin 10, and then later hears a scream and the sounds of a body being dumped into the sea, seeing what she thinks is blood on the neighbouring railing. Except the cabin is empty and no-one on the ship matches the woman’s description. A heavy drinker and using prescription pills for anxiety and depression, as well as dealing with the trauma of a recent home-invasion, is Laura imagining things – or is there a murderer on board? I really enjoyed Ruth Ware’s debut novel In a Dark, Dark Wood, so I was excited to read her latest, The Woman in Cabin 10; unfortunately it’s a disappointing let-down and quite a boring read. My biggest problem is with how quickly exciting events are dealt with and how looooong the dreary aftermath is dwelt on. For example, the book opens with Laura being burgled while also being in her London flat: exciting. Then there’s page after page after page of seeing her shaken up, having trouble sleeping, drinking, worrying, traumatised: dull. Dull, static, ordinary, and predictable to read but we still have to plod through the pages while Ware underlines to the reader that Laura is unnerved. Duh. Then we get on the boat, and, following too many pages of Laura schmoozing with vapid guests, we get to the murder in the night: exciting. And then we have to endure page after page of Laura explaining what she’s seen (and what the reader has also just seen) to the ship’s security officer in detail – it’s so repetitive! How about throwing in a line like “I explained what I had seen to the ship’s security officer but he didn’t believe me, even insinuating doubt by mentioning the booze I’d had that night and looking toward the pills by the sink” to skip over it all? Then we have to sit through page after page of Laura and the security officer meeting the staff to see if the woman in cabin 10 isn’t one of them – even though the reader knows it’s not going to be that easy and nothing interesting happens during the interviews to make doing so worthwhile anyway. A simple line like “I spent the morning meeting the staff but the woman in cabin 10 wasn’t among them” could’ve been dropped in and we could move on! But I guess Ware had to meet a certain page count. Ware is then content to tread water while Laura continues to question herself, wondering who she can trust, (ie. doing nothing) with the occasional cheap cornball thrill scare tossed in – for example, the writing on the steamed-up mirror. Reading this increasingly threadbare story as it painfully progresses is like wading through sludge! What little tension there is all but disappears once the reader finds out what’s going on but still we’ve got to go through the motions of Laura escaping, etc. to get to the end some 70-ish pages later. Awful stuff. It doesn’t help that Laura isn’t an engaging protagonist at all. What the book really needed was a compelling Poirot-type who could wring the drama and tension out of the situation. But no, we got plain, dull old Laura bumbling about uselessly instead. I can see Ruth Ware aiming for a cross between Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith with this novel but she falls far short of both and instead creates a slow-moving and far from thrilling novel with a stereotypical murderer/motive as the reader’s unsatisfying reward. The setup has potential but Ware fails to realise it – The Woman in Cabin 10 is an immensely tedious chore to slog through. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 13, 2016
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Jul 14, 2016
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Hardcover
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4.27
| 470,054
| Jan 28, 2014
| Jan 28, 2014
|
did not like it
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Brain dead? Want to be? Here’s Red Rising! Pierce Brown: I’m a hack writer. Buy my copy of The Hunger Games on Mars, I mean, Red Roses! Red Riding Hood Brain dead? Want to be? Here’s Red Rising! Pierce Brown: I’m a hack writer. Buy my copy of The Hunger Games on Mars, I mean, Red Roses! Red Riding Hood! Red Rising? Whatever. Here’s what I wrote during my shifts at McDonald’s. Fuck originality, I’m in this for the Benjamins - four picture movie deal here I come!! (Mars. The future. Generic. Yes. Comforting generic crap. Checklist for writing an American bestseller: hot jailbait ass; crap romance; “dystopian future”; tell, never show – most readers can’t tell the difference anyway; plastic surgery; YA label so no-one is intimidated with scary big words or ideas; one-dimensional goodies and baddies because complex characterisation is complex; Christian imagery; info-dump like crazy and call it “world building” instead of “crap writing”; down-home hero – you’ll project onto him, right?!; working classes = good, rich people = bad, because “relatable”; working class hero fighting for equality and idealism – AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!) Darrow: I just wanna mine, I mean “helldive”, and bone you, Eo, my beautiful teen bride. Eo: No, Darrow, my hunky teen hubby, you’ve gotta be like the saviour of Mars or something. Darrow: I think Disney did a movie like that recently and it didn’t do well. Eo: This’ll play better because it’s about love but not really. I’ll die, giving you a contrived reason to go through with this revolution that you don’t give a shit about but I do and it’ll be like romantic. Darrow: Fucking hell. So even in death you’re making me do shit I don’t want to? So I’ve, what, gotta kill some evil dude? Eo: Who knows? Certainly not the writer, Pierce “So Shitty Even My Surname Is Smeared” Brown! But here’s what you’re going to do that doesn’t really inform how you’ll change the world: I’m gonna die as a martyr even though the ruling classes kill people all the time for no reason and nobody bats an eyelid. But my death is special because YOU are Neo, I mean the Chosen One, I mean, whatever your name is, “arbitrary hero guy”. You’ll undergo risky plastic surgery to look like a Gold – they’re the ruling classes because Pierce Brown read a Green Lantern comic recently and coloured divisions made sense to his infantile brain. All Golds are ridiculously intelligent and built like crazy. Darrow: Aren’t I already shredded? I barely eat and I’m mining all fucking day. Eo: Yeah but you’re not blonde. Get blonde! Oh, that reminds me: readers – get stupider so you’ll enjoy this shit more! And Darrow, we’re gonna pass on just giving you the dye job and rip up your body for shits and giggles. Darrow: So far it sounds like a lazy version of Spartacus crossed with extreme My Fair Lady under the banner that this is some Hunger Games knockoff. Eo: There’s also fights to the death. Darrow: Right, so it’s The Hunger Games too. It also sounds like I’m getting through all of these large life changes extremely easily. Isn’t conflict the essence of drama? This sounds terrible. Eo: It’s worse! You know in yet another better book, A Clockwork Orange, where the narrator creates his own futuristic lexicon that’s original but also brilliant because the reader starts to understand what the unfamiliar words mean even though they’re not directly explained? Darrow: That sounds vaguely intellectual. Pierce Brown and his publishers are against that on any level because intellectuals are elitist and this book is about reaching as many semi-literate readers as possible. Eo: Well, Pierce Shit is gonna try the same thing here with laughable results. “Gumbubble”, “brotherman”, “bloodydamn” are just a few unimaginative examples of his laughable “futuristic jargon” that takes two regular words and puts them together. Ingenious? No? You’re right! Darrow: That’s retardedfucking! Eo: It gets better! Then you’ll fight other Golds because that’s how they’re trained to rule over the stupid Reds and we need some Hunger Games stuff here because that’s what readers are expecting. Darrow: Eo – what is the point of all this? So in the future there’s a Roman-esque dictatorship of humans who’ve colonised Mars and Venus and other planets? Why has civilisation become so similar to the Ancient Romans? What purpose does it serve to tell the Reds that they’re colonising Mars when it doesn’t matter either way? The Reds can’t fight back. Tell them they’re slaves, tell them they’re colonists, they’re still under your thumb! This sounds like complete horsetwaddle! I suppose it might be saved if the writing was halfway competent and I cared about the story or characters. Eo: None of those things apply to “YA Book on Mars” aka Red Poo Flying. Darrow: Then this stinks. Eo: Wait a second - you’re THINKING! That’s not good. I better get this crapfest started so I’m gonna run off, get hanged and you’ll have to do all that boring drivel I said. Darrow: How about you reader? You gonna sit there and take this? Me: Fuck no! I’m gonna read nearly half of you to try and understand why you won the 2014 Goodreads Choice Award and then delete you from my Kindle forever – fuck Red Bile Rising and fuck the Goodreads Awards! ...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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Jan 23, 2015
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Hardcover
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0099458209
| 9780099458203
| 0099458209
| 3.92
| 48,382
| 1956
| Oct 06, 2004
|
did not like it
|
Have you ever had to be the designated driver while your buddies got wasted? Watching them laugh at nothing and behave like asses while you’re (unfort
Have you ever had to be the designated driver while your buddies got wasted? Watching them laugh at nothing and behave like asses while you’re (unfortunately) stone cold sober is a pretty miserable experience as your mind hasn’t been altered by chemicals. Reading “The Doors of Perception” is like this - Aldous Huxley does mescaline and then describes it extensively to the bored reader who is probably not on mescaline. And it’s not nearly as fascinating as Huxley believes it to be - because we’re probably not on mescaline (I know I wasn’t when reading this crap). “The Doors of Perception” is a 50 page essay and it’s sequel, “Heaven and Hell”, a 33 page essay, read like far longer works because they’re so unreadable. The point of the essays is that Huxley believes there is more to human nature than the base level of survival and that it’s because of how our species has developed that has made us forget ways in which we can perceive things beyond the ordinary. He wants to allow people to experience mescaline in order to see things he believes are there but beyond our reach without the help of hallucinogenics. And here’s the big problem I have with this view - it’s that assuming that what you experience while high is worth more and is more real than what you experience everyday. I mean, what you’re experiencing is simulated with the aid of chemicals - why would it be more “real” than reality? A problem endemic to this book is that Huxley is talking about experiences that are purely visceral and “beyond man-made constructs” such as language and are therefore indescribable - yet he’s trying to describe them with language. Which is why you get drivel like this: “I spent several minutes - or was it several centuries? - not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them - or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for “I” was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were “they”) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.” p.10 “Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement - or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair - I found myself all at once on the brink of panic.” p.33 Good lord, this crap goes on and on for nearly a 100 pages and it doesn’t help that he’s not a very good writer to start with. His rambling style fused with a dry, almost academic, vernacular makes reading this book of insubstantial observations and half-formed ideas all the more insufferable. All he proves is that drugs make intelligent people sound like morons. He feebly attempts to make the argument that researchers and scientists don’t take “spiritual” experiences seriously because they can’t see it, measure it, rationalise it, in any scientific way. Duh. He bewails methods (eg. taking mescaline) that allegedly “make you more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, and more open to the spirit” which constitute the “non-verbal humanities” aren’t taken more seriously. Well, when you put it like that, Aldous... He attempts to rectify this by constantly referencing William Blake, Homer, and Goethe in an effort to make the essay appear academic and therefore substantial and worthy of consideration. It’s truly pretentious and pathetic in its ineffectiveness. This quote basically sums up the essays: “Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!” p.16 Wooaaaah, Aldous got fucked up on mescaline! ...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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Apr 07, 2013
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Paperback
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1324002646
| 9781324002642
| 1324002646
| 4.09
| 44,949
| Oct 02, 2018
| Oct 02, 2018
|
liked it
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Didja know the US gov’mint is a complicated beast? Trump didn’t! And now we’s all gonna DIIIIEEEE! But not really. Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk is th Didja know the US gov’mint is a complicated beast? Trump didn’t! And now we’s all gonna DIIIIEEEE! But not really. Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk is the latest in a long line of Trumperature hurriedly bundled together and booted out the door to cater to the surprisingly large audience who can’t read enough Trump-bashing. Except Lewis’ effort is a bit more nuanced in its critique of the Trump administration, focusing instead on what its lackadaisical attitude to the country’s major institutions could mean to the average Joe. Unlike previous incoming administrations, Trump and his peeps didn’t bother to learn how the government operates. They took their sweet ass time filling the required posts for heads of massive departments – many which remained empty for months post-inauguration – and, when they did, the appointees were dangerously unqualified, uninformed, corrupt and actively working to undermine the effectiveness of what their departments did to line their own pockets instead! It’s less Trump-focused than that for the most part though. The Fifth Risk is essentially a love letter to government as Lewis highlights exactly what the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture does – and it ain’t what you think! These departments’ remits basically extend far beyond what their misnomers suggest, revelations which are quite remarkable in themselves. But they’re run by equally extraordinary people with sparkling careers, skills and characters, who Lewis diligently profiles. The book is reliably well-written by Lewis and thoroughly informative. I get the impression he’s anti-Trump but he largely keeps his tone neutral and non-partisan, which is laudable. Some of the profiles are fascinating and the entire episode on the current state of the American weather service was stunning – to whit, the American taxpayer bankrolls how the weather data is collected and the guy now in charge owns a private weather company and wants to change it so that weather forecasts no longer remain free and charge the taxpayer for data they’ve already paid for! On the other hand, despite being a relatively short book, it feels overlong. The profiles become repetitive and the subject matter feels increasingly shallow as the book progresses, largely as the premise – that the guys in charge are going to prove so inept (this is the “fifth risk” by the way: project management) that they will irreparably damage the country – probably won’t be proven for some time yet. And it does feel somewhat melodramatic – I mean, could one administration really be so disastrous? It’s not like there haven’t been terrible presidents before and America has prevailed. And there is hope in that the vast majority of the public sector seems to be led by truly good people – skilled, knowledgeable folk who are in it for the mission rather than the money, a veritable phalanx of hyper-competent Leslie Knopes! – and with them around, how bad could a corrupt bossman be (especially as they don’t seem to last with Trump in charge)? The Fifth Risk isn’t saying anything groundbreaking or profoundly insightful (“whuh-oh, rough seas ahead!” seems to be the rather inane and vague message from Michael “Auditioning for the Real-Life Captain Hindsight” Lewis) but it does highlight a few worthwhile things like giving credit to civil servants who do amazing work despite none of it being sexy enough to be reported on in the mainstream media, as well as not taking the general peaceable harmony of society for granted as it could be so much worse without the public sector. Most importantly it teaches anyone who thinks “government sucks” (sadly the majority of people are exactly this uninformed) just why it’s the opposite. And I think that’s how I felt reading The Fifth Risk: it’s competent and well-researched with a fine purpose but ultimately far from compelling and a bit dull to read. It also doesn’t feel very substantial, not least as the impression was like a trio of loosely connected articles got slapped together, but because it made its point almost immediately and spent the rest of the book repeating itself! Not the best work Michael Lewis has done but not bad either, I wouldn’t say it’s a must-read for anyone. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 08, 2018
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Nov 08, 2018
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Hardcover
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0593191382
| 9780593191385
| 0593191382
| 3.37
| 22,558
| Sep 17, 2020
| Sep 29, 2020
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it was ok
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Set in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Lucy, a white 42 year old single mother of two, unexpectedly finds love with Joseph, a
Set in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Lucy, a white 42 year old single mother of two, unexpectedly finds love with Joseph, a black 22 year old man of multiple part-time jobs. Just Like You follows the ups and downs of what an interracial relationship with a large age gap is like in a country getting more divided by the week. I loved Nick Hornby’s early novels - High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to Be Good - but I lost interest starting with A Long Way Down (unfinished) and everything else that followed (Slam, Juliet, Naked) didn’t entice me back. It didn’t help that the screenplays he was writing were for some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen - An Education was an education in patience because it was torture to sit through! But I decided to revisit Hornby to see if the old magic was still there and initially I was delighted to see that it was. Just Like You is a charming romance novel with an unusual setup and it was sweet to see Lucy and Joseph falling for each other. Some light conflict kept things interesting - Lucy’s drug addict/alcoholic ex showing up to cause trouble, Joseph being hassled by police for the “crime” of being black and in an affluent neighbourhood at night - until around the halfway point when things took a nosedive and never recovered. The biggest problem is that Hornby doesn’t really have a story. Once Lucy and Joseph get together nothing much really happens. The ex disappears forever, and all that’s left are people’s reactions to the two appearing as a couple which gets repetitive and tiresome after a while. Joseph half-heartedly sees a couple girls and sorta tries making it as a DJ but neither go anywhere or mean anything. Lucy keeps saying things like “When you’re 50 I’ll be 70”. It’s so boring! And then there’s the Brexit and racial stuff that clogs up most of the second half. I am so done with Brexit - I honestly never want to hear about it ever again, let alone read a novel featuring it prominently, and so having to read page after page of the same tedious arguments for leave/remain was so annoying. The racial angle is part of the reason why Hornby chose to write this book but a lot of the conversations Lucy and Joseph have about race are so contrived - Lucy says something, Joseph misconstrues it in this cliched “what do you mean ‘you people’?” way, and they make up, agreeing once again that Lucy isn’t really racist. No - obviously she’s not, so why does this sort of conversation have to keep happening?? Coupled with the Brexit shite and any enjoyment there was to be had was completely nixed. Sure, race relations is a relevant topic, particularly in 2020, but Hornby doesn’t have to say about racism beyond it exists and it’s bad. Duh. It got so angsty in the second half of the book that I began to wonder why Lucy and Joseph were even a couple. Joseph gets on well with her kids and there’s obviously a physical attraction between him and Lucy, but the way Joseph kept bringing everything down to race/class made me think they shouldn’t have been a couple in the first place! It also made them less likeable as characters and they weren’t that amazing to start with. I feel like Hornby really wanted to write a Brexit novel but was also aware that most people are fed up with hearing about Brexit so he got around it by conceiving Just Like You as a parable-esque novel about Brexit with Lucy representing Remain and Joseph representing Exit and taking the form of an appealing contemporary romance novel. Except Brexit and the near-constant banging on about class and race turns a fine romance story into dreary muck. It’s like he aimed for both and fell short twice so he fails at a romance story and he fails at a Brexit novel (even though the latter I’m pretty sure shouldn’t exist). I’d have liked to have said that Nick Hornby was back to writing great novels like he did when he started out but, like other popular writers hellbent on being taken seriously and “literary”, Hornby sabotages what could have been a decent story firstly by dragging it out for too long without adding anything to justify the length, and then ignoring it altogether and choosing to focus on overbearing politics and ham-fisted social commentary instead. By the time I got to the uninspired and flat ending, I was just relieved it was over and vowed never to bother with Hornby’s fiction again (his nonfiction Stuff I’ve Been Reading columns, collected in several books, remain the best things he’s written in recent years - if he restarted those, I’d read them, but only them). Just Like You is unfortunately just like poo. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 08, 2020
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Jul 08, 2020
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Hardcover
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3.69
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it was ok
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Keiko has worked at the convenience store her entire adult life. But as she nears 40, the pressure to find a “real” job or get married is mounting – w
...more
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Aug 03, 2018
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Aug 03, 2018
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3.53
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did not like it
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Four high school friends now in their thirties reunite after a terrible shared secret threatens to emerge and shatter their peaceful lives. But what t
...more
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Aug 06, 2017
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Aug 06, 2017
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3.86
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it was ok
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Like a lot of novels I started reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs not knowing much about it but hoping it would be a good ‘un. And I was pleasa
...more
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Jun 15, 2020
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Jun 15, 2020
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3.92
|
it was ok
|
SPOILERS My first response to finishing the book was "Thank God that's over", my second was "how could Murakami have screwed it up so badly?". The seco ...more |
Dec 19, 2011
|
Nov 18, 2011
|
||||||
2.66
|
did not like it
|
Five friends rent out a haunted old Japanese house for a spooky wedding - but turns out them advertised ghosts is real and ghosty is getting revengey!
...more
|
Oct 05, 2021
|
Oct 05, 2021
|
||||||
3.55
|
did not like it
|
Teenager Zack Lightman is the 6th best Armada player in the world, a sci-fi shoot ‘em up where you pilot a ship blasting away alien invaders. And then
...more
|
Jul 14, 2015
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
||||||
3.66
|
it was ok
|
Sometime in the future, humanity has discovered they are not alone in the universe: on a distant planet named Oasis dwells a race of supremely ugly al
...more
|
Dec 10, 2014
|
Dec 11, 2014
|
||||||
4.19
|
it was amazing
|
Blimey o’reilly, The Queen’s Gambit was an absolutely stonking good novel – the best I’ve read in ages! Why hasn’t anyone ever told me to read Walter
...more
|
Jun 26, 2019
|
Jun 26, 2019
|
||||||
3.63
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** After the success of The Rosie Project last year, it was inevitable that we’d get a sequel, though so soon was surprising. In The Ro
...more
|
Sep 26, 2014
|
Sep 27, 2014
|
||||||
3.71
|
it was ok
|
I was a big fan of Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” when it came out 6 years ago, it was an interesting and insightful memoir about her growing up in a fun
...more
|
Jun 20, 2012
|
Jun 21, 2012
|
||||||
3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Oooof. Alright - a disclaimer before I start. Normal People by Sally Rooney is superb. I’m gonna gush about this one (warning to those in the splash z
...more
|
Sep 19, 2018
|
Sep 19, 2018
|
||||||
3.39
|
it was ok
|
Yann Martel’s latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, is crap. It’s split into three sections set at different points of the twentieth century: ...more |
Jan 10, 2016
|
Jan 11, 2016
|
||||||
3.69
|
did not like it
|
Who wouldn’t want to time travel? Well, you probably wouldn’t if you had to follow these very precise, arbitrary and convoluted rules - yes, even more
...more
|
Apr 20, 2020
|
Apr 20, 2020
|
||||||
4.02
|
it was ok
|
**spoiler alert** Don Tillman is an Associate Professor of Genetics with (probably) Asperger’s Syndrome who has decided that, as he is nearing 40, he
...more
|
Jan 27, 2013
|
Jan 27, 2013
|
||||||
3.60
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** Sayaka Murata’s back with another story of a social outsider - and it’s even worse than Convenience Store Woman! Natsuki is a little ...more |
Apr 13, 2020
|
Apr 13, 2020
|
||||||
3.73
|
it was ok
|
Laura Blacklock is a travel journalist given a career-boosting opportunity to cover the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise liner headed to see the North
...more
|
Jul 13, 2016
|
Jul 14, 2016
|
||||||
4.27
|
did not like it
|
Brain dead? Want to be? Here’s Red Rising! Pierce Brown: I’m a hack writer. Buy my copy of The Hunger Games on Mars, I mean, Red Roses! Red Riding Hood ...more |
not set
|
Jan 23, 2015
|
||||||
3.92
|
did not like it
|
Have you ever had to be the designated driver while your buddies got wasted? Watching them laugh at nothing and behave like asses while you’re (unfort
...more
|
not set
|
Apr 07, 2013
|
||||||
4.09
|
liked it
|
Didja know the US gov’mint is a complicated beast? Trump didn’t! And now we’s all gonna DIIIIEEEE! But not really. Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk is th ...more |
Nov 08, 2018
|
Nov 08, 2018
|
||||||
3.37
|
it was ok
|
Set in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Lucy, a white 42 year old single mother of two, unexpectedly finds love with Joseph, a
...more
|
Jul 08, 2020
|
Jul 08, 2020
|