Wants to read Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
book
Rated What We Can Know 10/10
This one was excellent. It took me a few chapters to really get into it but then it snowballed from there until I could barely put it down. A lot of it is the characters and the academic setting and the different viewpoints, plus the realistic near-ish future. This book has a lot to say about history and literature and the study of those things, also none of the characters really come off that well.
Rated The Doorman: A Novel 8/10
This is a lot of fun, has interesting details about the fancy building that the 'main' (there is another couple of viewpoints too, but kind of one main one) viewpoint character works at as a doorman. Characters are well developed and the plot is interesting and has a surprising ending. I read another book by this author in July and it was pretty good too.
Rated The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir 10/10
This was interesting to read, lots of parts like her writing about her first experiences with live music were very well written and resonated with me. A lot of sad experiences in her life and I would have liked to see more about her more recent music (and also about her time playing drums for Cub, but that's just because I really like Cub) but I would definitely recommend this if you're a fan.
Rated Or What You Will 10/10
Very well written and a bit of an unusual book. I don't want to spoil it, but it's almost a meta-novel in some ways -- I found the first chapter or two somewhat slow and abstract, but after that it was very compelling, with lots of local Florentine colour.
Wants to read A Lonesome Place for Murder: An Ethan Brand Mystery
Rated Senseless 8/10
Pretty good, different interesting viewpoint characters and I liked the 'resolution' (a couple of threads are left dangling, but it worked for me). Good spooky writing often evoking multiple senses in a scene.
Rated Written on the Dark 10/10
Kay is always excellent, his prose is beautiful and he knows when to focus on the intimate details of a scene between just a few characters and when to pull back and show an overview of a situation, or let the reader know what's happening to someone many years after the main story. This one has the historical connections/influences that he is known for and it's very well done, inspired by several real life events but making its own original story. Lots of family and relationship stuff, some political stuff and a little bit of mortal peril.
Rated Another: A New York Times Bestselling Middle-Grade Horror Novel About an Inhuman Imposter for Kids 10/10
It's good to see that [a:Paul Tremblay|648612|Paul Tremblay|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1741528744p2/648612.jpg] can also do YA (or maybe it's middle grade actually) horror, too. Not much violence in this one but some creepy concepts, I'd like to see a TV/movie version.
Wants to read The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess
Rated Shaman 8/10
I liked this one better than <i>The Wind Up Bird Chronicles</i>, even though both of them take place at least partly in dreams. It seemed a little strange to see this coming from KSR -- I'm used to near-ish future SF from him, and this is set in prehistory. Fun made up words, it reads like there is a lot of research behind it, goes in to some of the detail about daily life and survival.
Rated A Quantum Love Story 8/10
This book was fun, two interesting viewpoint characters and a time loop that worked a little differently than they often do. I kind of feel like so far all the Mike Chen books I have read are like that: cool fun premise handled in an interesting way, characters are not super deeply drawn but also not just cardboard. Also I got it on 7 day skip-the-line library loan and it was a quick read.
Rated The Night House 8/10
Almost feels like an older YA novel and has a few layers of story to it, story within a story. A couple of vivid and weird images, felt like an 80s horror movie in places. Definitely a different tone to the writing than his Harry Hole series.
Rated Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces 10/10
This is excellent. The prose is nearly transparent and it's almost like a selection of short biographical essays about the author's life and moving to Canada as a child, lots of culture clash and immigrant parents not having the same values as their child, but it is full of heart (and grief) and moments of pop-culture (like nu metal, and wrestling fan fiction) drawn very well.
Rated Galileo's Dream 4/10
At last I've finished this book! I don't remember when I may have gotten it, but it's obvious it was once a library book, so I must've bought it from the local library system's clearance fundraising book cellar. Having read and loved thoroughly Robinson's Mars trilogy in high school, I figured it was way past time I read another of his books. The summary of the plot in the flaps sounded so interesting and completely in my wheel house. A founder of science, time travel, and the future in the balance? Yes, please.<br/><br/>And then it took me three months to struggle with finding the desire to struggle through it to the end. It turned out it did have the components covered in the book flaps. Unfortunately, that write-up was much more exciting sounding than the actual novel. The overwhelming majority of the time is spent in the 1600s and most of it Galileo moaning or complaining about something or the other. Or going on about his various relatives who were all hangers on wholly dependent on him.<br/><br/>If you're really into historical fiction of 1500s/1600s Italy, then you'll enjoy this book a lot more than I did. It's not poorly written, it just really wasn't what I was interested in. I would've loved a lot more time spent in the future and with those aliens on Jupiter and Europa etc. Instead I got a lot more about Galileo and descriptions of his hernia and the truss he used to keep his guts in place, constant drinking, and constant need of money not to mention his impoverished starving daughters he stuck in a convent. By the time the future people change the end of his life, I'd long stopped caring and just wanted to get to the end. The last 30 or so pages of the 527 were the most interesting of the lot. A novel from that final character's POV would've been way more interesting to me.
Rated Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 10/10
These are so well done and very powerful, if sometimes kind of distant -- there's history happening just off screen, but we are mostly in the narrator's head. The last hundred pages or so picked up very quickly and it almost ends on a cliffhanger...it takes me a while to read these though so I'll probably give it another few months to marinate in my head before finishing the series.
Rated While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence 8/10
I picked this up as a choice by a local book club. It's great to read a book that I'd otherwise not have gone to and picked on my own. I was about 2/3 of the way through it when I decided to glance at some Goodreads reviews and, as often happens, I somewhat regretted that. Negative comments that came up were criticisms of what the reader viewed as tone. Being someone sensitive to and often a target of "the tone police" that always automatically gets my dander up. The "tone" readers picked up on was what I would describe as thinking the writing lacked emotion and elaboration of the writer's personal feelings.<br/><br/>I disagree to an extent. In fact, in the back quarter? or so of the book she clearly explains that she had trouble with that very thing. A struggle between meanderings about her personal thoughts and memories. Maybe a lot of that was lost in the edit, but I can understand an editor wanting to "trim the fat" and build something coherent out of writing like that. I'd think it was emotion that would lead to that type of writing. The other thing Kissinger mentions is that she's spent a lifetime making sense of the mental illnesses in her family through her career, through journalism, and trying to make a difference with it. Classic journalism was very much "just the facts" and I can see that that's how she ended up shaping this story.<br/><br/>There is so much detail. How else is some sort of cohesion going to happen with so many things happening that were explanations of what went on in her family? I appreciated all of the stories about her parents and her siblings. I don't think she was cold about it, but I would think certainly after some 50? 60? years of it, it can be exhausting and at a certain point it would be repetitive. If you can't imagine and have some empathy for the writer losing 2 siblings and dealing with several other close family members all struggling with their mental health without being told over and over her feelings, I don't know what to say.<br/><br/>I definitely also appreciated that in telling their stories and in pointing out this fact, it was clear how much has changed in her lifetime with regards to mental health. Social attitudes and therefore medical treatment has changed so much in the last 50 years. There's still much that needs to change and improve, but sticking relatives in the attic/basement or some horror-show asylum pretending it's not happening are (hopefully) in the past and talking about struggles without fear or shame are huge strides forward.
Rated Hamnet 6/10
I got on a very long wait list for this book after I kept hearing an Oscar-nominated film was based on it. I'm into some historical fiction and I thought it would be an interesting POV from Shakespeare's wife for a change, even though maybe/probably most of it was fiction hung up on a handful of facts.<br/><br/>A relatively slim novel, it took me a while to get through it still. I have to say that I was disappointed. I kept waiting for maybe a little more colorful writing? Maybe more characterization? I can't quite pinpoint my issue, but I didn't feel I got a whole lot out of it.<br/><br/>I like reading books on which a film is based first, so I'm going to try that at some point, but I'm not racing to find it soon.<br/><br/>YMMV on how wrapped up you get in it as I've read in other reviews.
Edited 32d ago