At this point, I think it's my only option. Clearly, the epidemic of books that sound interesting turning out to be very bI am going to sue the world.
At this point, I think it's my only option. Clearly, the epidemic of books that sound interesting turning out to be very boring is a top-to-bottom issue that cannot be reformed. Outright cancelation of us all is the only way.
Take this, for example. It has the words "affair," "mysterious," and "letter" in the title, all of which I find intriguing. It's a Sherlock Holmes retelling (cool) in a futuristic fantasy universe (attention piqued) with multiple dimensions and underwater cities and time travel and exclusively queer people (curiosity induced x 4).
And yet I did not like it and I had a really hard time paying attention. I kept tricking myself into reading it through strategies like Going To The Beach And Only Bringing This Book and Paltry Threats, and I still barely got through it.
The style didn't work for me, the narrative didn't feel cohesive, the narrator was a snooze and the other characters were too cartoonish to deal with.
There were cool parts with vampires that felt Dracula-y (I love Dracula) and trains (I love trains), but even those were unbearably short lived. Not to mention they were bracketed by encounters with old ladies who were actually witches and sky fights and brushes with death that all managed to put me to sleep like the tea with the sweet bear on it.
But I digress.
Bottom line: Deep sigh of disappointment!
--------------
i cannot remember the last time i wanted to DNF a book so badly.
review to come / 2 or 2.5 stars
--------------
hello gay magic female sherlock holmes
sorry you're an ARC that i'm reading 2 years late.
--------------
reading all books with LGBTQ+ rep for pride this month!
A good mystery, a truly remarkable one, has not only a question at its core that fascinates and eludes thHere’s the thing: This is not a good mystery.
A good mystery, a truly remarkable one, has not only a question at its core that fascinates and eludes the reader. This series certainly has that, but it’s not the only thing that really makes a mystery book worth writing home about.
The really fun thing, the thing that makes the best works of this genre worth reading, is the solution.
The solution should be the peak of the story, not the letdown. It should be an ohmygod moment, a muttered “holy sh*t” as you frantically turn pages.
This was...not that.
Not even close.
The mysteries themselves were more fun, more interesting, and more impressive than the answers. By a mile.
I stayed up until 3 am reading this, and then I was like “...that’s it? No. It can’t be. Maybe there’s a secret riddle in here where I get more pages. Maybe this is a red herring, and I, the reader, am supposed to solve it. Eureka! That’s it! All I have to do is reread all three books, make a cereal-box model of the school like Gansey, never sleep again, start wearing my dirty hair tied in baby socks to get in the heads of the characters…”
And so on.
The real sleepless night this caused was how much time I feel I wasted on this series.
ALL I WANTED WAS ANSWERS. And I got them...but at what cost? Do I have to dedicate my life to writing fanfiction for this series now, and then break down my brain until I forget this book entirely and convince myself that what I wrote is the real thing? Is that the only way I’ll ever find joy??!
Possibly.
On top of all that, I do not care for this “““David””” character whatsoever. You know that part in the last book where he pays someone to beat him up? In my fanfiction version of this series, I’m going to be the one paying those random, like, skateboarders he encounters or whatever to kick him in the shins. And I’m going to be off to the side yelling, “THIS IS FOR ALL THAT EMOTIONAL ABUSE THAT WAS JUST EXCUSED, FOR SOME REASON, YOU NAKED MOLE RAT.”
Apparently I have more pent up anger about this book than I realized.
In fact, outside of this nice little setting made up of learning and riddles and rich people and sweaters and maple-flavored things, I’m having trouble thinking of much I liked about this at all.
Bummer.
Bottom line: I AM DISAPPOINTED.
-------------- reread updates
i know this book was disappointing to me. i know that.
and yet here i am, rereading it enthusiastically and with high expectations.
i love to fail.
update: i am keeping this same review but dropping the rating half a star for the reason that this whole series would have been SO much better without the flashbacks. those were a snooze and a half.
------------- pre-review
if i die tonight, it's for one of the following reasons: 1) one of the murderers in this book got to me. (somehow crossed the bounds of fiction.) 2) i passed away from thirst, because i finished my water while reading this but was too scared to get out of bed and get more. (see: real murderers point, above.)
review to come / 3 stars
-------------- currently-reading updates
IT'S HAPPENING.
I HAVE THIS BOOK IN MY HANDS, I AM ABOUT TO OPEN IT, IT IS HAPPENING.
I can’t remember anything that happened in this book.
Judging by my pre-review (which consists of about one-third expletives and three-thirds surprise), I was shocked by something. I do not remember what that thing was, but considering this is a murder mystery, and also the second book in a series, I’m going to guess it was one part Big Reveal and one part cliffhanger.
How frustrating, presumably, for past me.
The only thing I really remember is finding this book slightly disappointing in comparison to the first one. Not by a lot, just a half-star or so.
I can assume I had some of the same issues with it I had with the first one: weird pacing due to this being a trilogy about one or two mysteries; an overwhelming onslaught of quirkiness. Also, something I loved about the first one was Boarding School, and this one consisted of way more time spent off-campus, leading to kind of a last-book-in-Harry-Potter-can’t-they-just-stay-at-Hogwarts type feel.
I did not understand what was happening, I felt consistently confused, AND I felt overheated and displeased.
The last one miThis book is a fever dream.
I did not understand what was happening, I felt consistently confused, AND I felt overheated and displeased.
The last one might have been at least in part due to the climate change-induced hell in which we all exist, but I can't say for sure.
This had one of my least favorite tropes (annoying perfect younger sibling who an elder sibling has to do everything for) and is in one of my least favorite subgenres (young adult vaguely sci-fi) and provided one of my least favorite vibes (confusion, but not even really that because to be confused implies I care about figuring out what's going on, and I don't care about any part of this).
The writing was fine. The concept was creative. The characters are meh.
This was not fun for me.
Bottom line: No thanks!
--------------- pre-review
this sounds like way too much. can't wait!
update: it was bad.
review to come / 1.5 stars
---------------
challenging myself to read as many review copies as possible this month because i'm addicted to projects!
My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been saMy original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said.
However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree.
In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of...gotten the point of the book, already.
But then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back.
The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are.
He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.
Coming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them.
Including, as they indulge in ever-spiraling hedonism, murder.
And it never works.
When our story ends, our group is decimated, some members dead, some irrevocably changed, all unwilling to return to the story of that fateful year - all except Richard, who is unable to leave it behind.
When I hear this, I don't believe that the point of the story, or what Tartt is trying to tell us, is that a love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. I don't think she condemns an appreciation for the aesthetic, or even a classical scholarship.
I don't think you're supposed to like these characters, or even think they're very realistic - they are, after all, portraits in hindsight written by someone in the throes of unrequited obsession.
I don't think you're supposed to relate to them, or to see their story as something that might happen to you if you read too much Greek myth or like pretty things too much.
To quote the article that inspired the fit of rage that has me typing away, I don't think this is "about all the things [its writer] loved," while "miss[ing] the point of them entirely." At the age of seventeen, they continue, they "wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant."
To that I say: huh?
As I grow older, I care less for lovely or perfect or nice or even good (in the moral definition of the word) characters, and find myself only wanting to read about the unlikable, the complex, the ones who have something to say on what I shouldn't do, rather than teach me about what I should.
It was clear to me that The Secret History is not the latter example, but the former.
Our merry band of classics fetishists may think they are living a life of poetry and meaning, but we, the readers, know they aren't. We know that life's beauty lies not in pleasure without regard for others, in the fulfillment of selfish desires, but in case we get confused, Donna Tartt shows us that a life lived by those guidelines leads to irrevocably damaged relationships, unfading pain, and death.
The Secret History is not a nihilistic book because its characters' behaviors result in no meaning. Quite the opposite - it is a book about what makes life meaningful by showing us what meaning is not.
The Gawker piece quotes a Tartt essay in which she writes, “'Something in the spirit longs for meaning — longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules,'” and in this vein concludes, "To take Tartt the essayist seriously is to wager on that meaning. Even if that means leaving Hampden behind."
And I would agree. To find meaning, one must leave Hampden behind - for it was never intended that what happened there should be lived by as example.
(I also think there's something very interesting in the class dynamics here. But I'll save that for the next time I get mad enough to write almost 1,000 words.)
Bottom line: Book so nice I reviewed it twice.
------------ book club update
this is the july pick for the beautiful world book club!! elle and i will be vibing amidst the dark academia and the gluttony and the classics. please join us!!
------------ original review
Here is the problem with reviewing every book I read: Sometimes I throw around terms before I really need them, and then once I read THE book, The Story that requires and deserves that descriptor, I have nothing to give it.
Right now I have this problem. Because I have used the word “immersive” before, and immediately upon my completion of this book it became clear that I should have saved it for right now.
I felt like I lived inside these pages. I felt like I began to think in the beautiful and sharp prose that fills them. I felt like I knew the characters, ate decadent lunches and walked the snowy campus and whispered with them. I felt an aching emptiness, a genuine longing, when I read the final words.
I miss living here.
This was very, very slow - to the point that about halfway through I said (inexplicably, aloud), “I don’t know what they’ll even do for the rest of the book” - and yet I was gripped by it.
It’s genuinely masterful.
I love Richard and I LOVE Camilla and I love Francis and I, fine, okay, at least like Charles and Henry and even Bunny and Julian.
And I miss them all.
This is an incredible work, but maybe the most incredible thing is how the reader is Richard. I, too, miss my bygone days at my prestigious New England college with my whip-smart group of eccentric friends, and, like him, I am too quickly forced to realize the fallacy of such a feeling.
After all, it was all a fiction.
Bottom line: I’m raising this to a five star rating.
------------ pre-review
you'll have to excuse me, i'd love to actually write something here but my brain is broken and i am incapable of thought.
also seems absurd to try to use words when donna tartt took all the good ones.
For two months, I floundered through this. For two months, I forced myself through in eight page chunks. For tIt took me two months to read this book.
For two months, I floundered through this. For two months, I forced myself through in eight page chunks. For two months, the Kindle for Mac application was open on my laptop, with the ebook version of this existing somewhere among, like, eighteen podcasts and four tabs with Twitter open and a sh*t ton of articles about obscure pop culture tidbits.
In short: It took me two months to get through this and I almost couldn’t do even that.
There are some books that have no excuse to be boring. Some stories have such excellent synopses and concepts that they should be literally incapable of being anything but a nonstop thrill ride. This book, which centers around an island where a monster is killing girls, and so a gang of girls kill the monster and also the girls are in love, should be nothing other than exciting at every moment. There is not so much as a word of that idea that I am not interested in, or, dare I say, ENTHRALLED BY.
And yet, not for a single moment was this book anything but boring to me. Boring boring boring. A punishment to get through. Inexplicably monotonous in a nightmarish way.
For a while, this book was fully inescapable on Goodreads. Everyone was reading it and talking about it and loving (? maybe) it, and because I very much enjoy hopping on bandwagons, I TBRed it. Without actually reading that glorious synopsis. And I started reading it also without doing that.
At a certain point, I was so confused by what this was supposed to be (okay, approximately 3% of the way in) that I read the synopsis. And I got re-excited!
And then I got disappointed again. Because very little of this book is monster-fighting. A lot of it is weird, stylized, strangely descriptive writing that I did not enjoy. And characters I did not care for or understand. And a very slow-moving plot that comes to its climax so late that I did not give half a sh*t by that point.
By that point, I was just thrilled to be mere pages away by being done with it forever.
Bottom line: The best part of this book, for me, was far and away when it was finally, mercifully over.
----------- pre-review
i finished this book yesterday and was so profoundly bored by the whole thing that i legitimately forgot that i finished it. i just promptly deleted it from my brain.
review to come
----------- currently-reading updates
i don't know what's happening but i DO know i don't really care
-----------
reading this book with no real idea of what it's about. what can I say -- I live on the edge
----------- tbr review
I saw enough people I follow reading this book and talking about this book and TBRing this book that I am right now adding it without even reading the synopsis in full.
I know what you're thinking. "If your friends jumped off a cliff would you jump too," blah blah blah, and the answer is yeah, duh....more
This is not a very good book, and yet everything about it operates under the assumption that it is.
For starters, this is not even a full story. It is This is not a very good book, and yet everything about it operates under the assumption that it is.
For starters, this is not even a full story. It is half of one. I picked this up thinking that I was reading a mystery/thriller about a murdered child star. Instead, I was reading the first half of that. Not even the first half, really - everything leading up to the discovery of the body.
So a fraction of a mystery/thriller.
This was constructed to be the first installment of a duology, but here’s the thing: a duology is not two halves of one story. You can’t write half a book, sell it to a publisher, then say you’ll write the second half and publish it.
Mostly because if, say, very few people read the first part, and very few of those people liked it all that much, the publisher isn’t going to want the second book. (And the thing about book deals is that they leave lots of room for the publisher to change their mind.)
Shockingly, though, Macmillan appears to have gone forward with the sequel. But I will definitely not be reading it - not even if I’m sent a review copy. (Sorry. I know that’s in bad taste.)
Because the fact that this feels aggressively unfinished is not the only bad thing about it. Maybe not even the worst thing.
This also has preachy sections about the fallacy of the “real girl” but is legitimately teeming with girl hate and flat female characters. There’s not a single healthy female relationship or positively portrayed girl in the whole thing, and it’s so absurd to forcibly include rants about basic feminist concepts when half your characters are women only described by what they’re wearing and their Valley Girl accents.
This isn’t a mid-2000s TV show about a California high school. We have actually feminist YA now.
So many characters and settings and subplots were introduced for no reason, and ultimately they get no explanation. I read an ARC copy, and I’d like to believe that certain 15-page sections were removed entirely, because they made absolutely no sense.
(I’m talking about visits to psychics during which our protagonist ambles off to another room with who appears to be one of the psychic’s sex slaves. This never makes a lick of sense.)
And also, as I touched on in my pre-review, our main character is inconsistently characterized and completely intolerable. Half of her internal monologue is made up of Taylor Swift-related thoughts, which only gets more insane when you remember that she refuses to call herself a fan at the very beginning. (Her argument is that she wouldn’t wear a Swift T-shirt, even though she adores her music and listens to it constantly and becomes fixated with the idea of meeting her at a pool party and goes on pages-long tangents analyzing her lyrics and persona and public perception and spends an unforgivable four pages relating her feud with Kanye West.)
It’s rare that I’ll definitively NOT recommend something, but I just don’t see anyone liking this book.
Unless you’re into non-endings and semi-hateful Taylor Swift tangents.
Bottom line: This makes me very mad.
------------- pre-review
this book spends more time talking about the feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West (4 pages) than the murder I thought I was reading about (approx. 2 pages).
review to come, but honestly what more do you need to know? / 1 star
-------------
yes, i will read a murder-mystery-of-a-teenage-former-child-star book
(thanks to the publisher for the arc, which i am characteristically reading four months post-pub date)...more
I read this book in the least cool way to read it, and it was still unbelievably cool. I did not deserve coolness, and yet I received it.
To anyone whI read this book in the least cool way to read it, and it was still unbelievably cool. I did not deserve coolness, and yet I received it.
To anyone who lives under a rock that is impenetrable to news of Cool Things: First, may I suggest you move? Sounds like a terrible place to live. Under a rock that is specifically uncool. Anyway, due to the direness of your living situation, you would not have heard of this book, and so it is my solemn duty to tell you that this book is half podcast. The chapters alternate between the story of our main character, Sadie, who is on a mission to avenge her little sister’s death, and a podcast chronicling what happened to Sadie after she left home.
And they actually RECORDED THE PODCAST. As if it were a real true crime thing.
This book can therefore be consumed in three ways: 1) as an audiobook, which includes the podcast 2) by reading the Sadie chapters and listening to the podcast chapters as the podcast 3) by reading the whole thing
I, a fool, just wanted to binge read this book. So I read the ebook in a day.
I regret my choices. And yet this experience was still f*cking rad, because this book is super good.
To be honest, the thing about this that was specifically exciting to me was the true crime bit. I love true crime, but I do not often consume it because I HATE stories without endings. I hate problems without solutions. I do not deal well with the Unsolved, which is about 99% of true crime.
This is why fictional narratives that mimic true crime, like Truly Devious, are perfect for me. Stories I like without the brain-breaking part!
Unfortunately, this usually felt more like Dark Sad Contemporary than True Crime. And while I do love contemporaries, I like Fun Fluffy ones with Friendship and Banter and sometimes a Romance. Usually set in the Summer, on a Cute Local Beach. You know?
This is the opposite of that.
But even with all of that overwhelming disappointment, this book was still good.
I guess the point of this review is there is really no reason I should have liked this book, and yet I truly did. So you should read it.
Bottom line: By my standards, this is a raving recommendation.
----- pre-review
[image]
should i have done it? questionable.
review to come
-----
me: (has class basically from 2 pm to 10 pm)
also me: i want to binge read Sadie today. I'M GOING TO BINGE READ SADIE TODAY...more
So the thing about this book is that it's a novelization of a movie. A British zombie movie. For teens. With singing. And jokes. And one that seems foSo the thing about this book is that it's a novelization of a movie. A British zombie movie. For teens. With singing. And jokes. And one that seems for all intents and purposes to be made up mostly of scenes in which brains get smashed.
Here are some things that don't translate so well into books and/or in general: - stories that fit into a 90 minute timeframe - male best friends who are in love with their female best friends and will not take no for an answer - musicals?? especially when very little singing is ever mentioned??? - plotlines that prioritize the aforementioned brain-smashing over any kind of characterization or relationship-building - really intense, uh, satire (?) that has no grounding in reality so instead you're just dealing with a ridiculous unhinged vice principal for 250 pages and being like "Is this real? Is this in an actual book?" - just getting dropped into a very crazy narrative with no explanation or worldbuilding
I wanted to like this book, because it is a horror comedy about teens fighting zombies at Christmas and that sounds fun. And I believe that the movie version of it probably is fun.
I'm just kind of at a loss for why that movie got published as a book.
Bottom line: This wasn't, like, bad? It's just that its very existence is kind of strange and confusing.
JOHN GREEN, PAY ATTENTION. This is how you write a cool mystery-y book with quirky teens without making me want to die.
Okay, John Green, you can stop JOHN GREEN, PAY ATTENTION. This is how you write a cool mystery-y book with quirky teens without making me want to die.
Okay, John Green, you can stop reading now. I think it would make me uncomfortable if you read the rest of this review, considering the mean things I’ve said and the mean things your fans have said to me in the comments of my mean things. We just have too much backstory.
Now, for the rest of you!
WHAT A FUN RIDE.
As soon as I heard this book was “unsolved murder mystery at boarding school,” I was in. When I heard the elaboration “unsolved rich people murder mystery from History mixed with current boarding school murder mystery plus true crime aficionado,” I was EXCITED.
And whoa mama was that excitement warranted.
This was not a perfect read for me by any means. I think the quirkiness was wayyy extraneous at some points (even if it wasn’t John Green-level - but truly what is), and it took away from the pacing and the believability. It kind of felt surreal at times. (Like, can we stop talking about the girl who somehow has her dirty unshowered hair in a million tiny ponytails tied with baby socks and get to the murdering, please?)
Also, the pacing of this was weird just because it’s a three-book series with one or two main mysteries. So you get answers at some points in this book, but not a lot of them and not really any that matter.
A very unsatisfying experience.
I think if I could have read all three books at once and pretended they were one very long book, I would have liked this more. As is, it’s a solid three point five.
Also, I already forget what happened in the second book. But that’s unrelated.
Bottom line: This was fun and promising! But weird stuff prevented it from being any more than that.
------------- reread review
hell yeah.
rounding up to 4 (instead of down to 3) upon reread
------------- reread updates
THERE'S GOING TO BE A FOURTH BOOK??!
i just picked this up for a reread on basically a whim and now i find out there's another installment out in 2 months. i think i'm god.
------------- pre-review
baby, let me tell you...I GOT WHAT I CAME FOR.
review to come
------------- tbr review
i am ready for INTRIGUE. i am ready for SUSPENSE. i am ready for CRIME and MURDER....more
Here are the things I knew about this book before starting it: 1) Its original title (and current UK title) was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Well, yikes.
Here are the things I knew about this book before starting it: 1) Its original title (and current UK title) was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which, in pure coincidence, is very very similar to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and was therefore changed in the US. (I think this is awesome.) 2) It’s a murder mystery with quite possibly the coolest conceit of any book ever. (I think this is awesome.) 3) It’s teeming with gratuitous fat shaming. (I think this is one of the less awesome things I've ever heard in my life.)
Add to that list that the style is extremely overbearing and unyielding over the course of 480 pages (which feels like many more), and you have my list of major takeaways from this reading experience.
Let’s go in order.
NUMBER 1: TITLE THING Well, we basically already covered this.
But it says a lot that I still think this is the most interesting thing about this book, and it has nothing to do with its contents.
NUMBER 2: PLOT THING The idea for this book is SO COOL. Which is why it’s extra lame that I found the first 300-ish pages to be very, very boring, and also found the Big Reveal to be - while not predictable - also boring, and generally speaking was very bored by this whole thing.
Also, the fact that the conceit of this book is what it is (meaning, a guy wakes up in a different person’s body every day with the task of solving the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle) means there must be Magic involved.
Cool! Who doesn’t love magic?
Um, apparently this author, because this Magical World goes largely unexplained and then is halfheartedly told at one point but is clearly not the Main Issue.
Which is extra, extra lame.
NUMBER 3: FATPHOBIA THING Reading this author say that he did not intend to shame fat people in this book is the stupidest, dumbest, most useless excuse for blatant hatred I’ve ever heard.
It’s actually worse if the fat shaming in this book is not intended, because the idea that someone could go around subliminally thinking things as hateful as this is absurd. The way the fat character in this is written - traitless but for the fact that he is very fat, and therefore lonely and abhorrent and disgusting - is so awful. It’s to the point of being basically unreadable.
This book got better towards the end, but I still wish I had DNFed it at this point.
NUMBER 4: STYLE THING I could tell within a couple dozen pages that this style - extremely overwrought, extremely overbearing, and extremely present for the whole book - was not going to work for me.
It never did.
Bottom line: The only cool thing about this book was the idea behind it, and everything about the execution was a major bummer.
------------- pre-review
well, i didn't hate this as much as i expected.
what a rave review.
rtc / 2 stars
-------------
42 pages into this and already brutally sick of the style. YET ANOTHER PROMISING READING EXPERIENCE...more
not rating this because it was a fine thriller but it was also pro-life as hell!! and that's really going to distract from the rest of the book for menot rating this because it was a fine thriller but it was also pro-life as hell!! and that's really going to distract from the rest of the book for me.
this is a very dark, kind of cool, super noir book that does some cool things with perspective. got a pretty strong female character for the time it wthis is a very dark, kind of cool, super noir book that does some cool things with perspective. got a pretty strong female character for the time it was written.
i'm more excited to watch the french new wave adaptation (also for class) than i was to read this book. i know! it's like, who even am i? revoke my bookworm card already.
bottom line: yeah i have very few feelings about this. sure. it's fine....more
WHY WOULD A CLASS EVER ASSIGN ME TO READ THE THIRD BOOK IN A SERIES WITHOUT HAVING READ THE FIRST TWO. WHY.
Even if they work as standalones. I am stilWHY WOULD A CLASS EVER ASSIGN ME TO READ THE THIRD BOOK IN A SERIES WITHOUT HAVING READ THE FIRST TWO. WHY.
Even if they work as standalones. I am still a bookworm at heart and I have a moral compass for god's sake.
Anyway this was fine. I had to force myself to read it in less than 24 hours (because I did not plan this well) and that was less than ideal and included a binge reading session from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. and the font was smaller than I would have liked but I didn't hate it.
Also I didn't really like it?? Probably closer to dislike if I had to choose my side.
Wow my brain is dead when did I lose my ability to not need sleep I cannot form sentences so now seems like a good time to type up some assigned homework sentences about this book am I right. Oh man my brain feels like a marshmallow.
Bottom line: I have basically zero opinions on this. So. Dope that it's for class and I'll have to spend the next 1.5 weeks making some up....more
If there are any aliens reading this who are looking for a body to take over, hmu. Living is hard and I am ready to hand over that responsibility to sIf there are any aliens reading this who are looking for a body to take over, hmu. Living is hard and I am ready to hand over that responsibility to some other life form. I will not (repeat: NOT) attempt to save the world through any self-destructive means necessary like these buffoons.
Just let me know.
Anyway this book was mildly entertaining but had a really awful boring female character (read: love interest) who almost never did anything except to cling to Our Hero's elbow and, like, make him carry her and cry into his chest and dumb damsel sh*t like that. Hated it.
She came up with a plan once, and it was referred to as "Becky's flimsy notion" and honestly even if that wasn't the way it was handled one plan is not enough for 206 pages of full-on DAMSELING, BECKY.
Whatever.
Bottom line: No thank you, 1950s gender roles!!!!!!! I'm not interested bye!!!! (But to the aliens: I definitely am interested still please message me for my contact info my inbox is open kthanksbye.)...more
in place of a review of this whole book, i'm just going to write about this single line in Inferno that i full on cannot stop twhoa this book is wild.
in place of a review of this whole book, i'm just going to write about this single line in Inferno that i full on cannot stop thinking about. warning: this is completely nasty. blame Dante. also: all credit goes out to my literary foundations professor. i'm essentially regurgitating his argument.
in Canto XXXIII, the pilgrim encounters Count Ugolino. Ugolino, a former governor of Pisa, is feasting on the neck of Archbishop Ruggieri. in life, Ruggieri betrayed him, leading to his imprisonment. Ugolino was trapped in a tower along with his four sons. as days passed and Ugolino and his sons began to hunger, Ugolino bit into his own hands. his children bade him to eat them before he'd eat himself: "Father, it would be far less painful for us if you ate of us; for you clothed us in this sad flesh it is for you to strip it off."
on the fourth day of imprisonment, the first of his sons died. the remaining three died over the next two days. Ugolino concludes: "Then hunger proved more powerful than grief."
CAN. YOU. BELIEVE. THAT. DOUBLE. MEANING.
either this guy should have died of his grief, but rather died of starvation, or - you know what's coming - homeboy ate his sons.
I MEAN.
that's impressive stuff, but it's not even over!!
Dante is often called a "theological poet." however, theology and poetry are opposed when it comes to the trajectory of Inferno. if it's a theological work, then we should feel less compassion for the people we encounter as we progress, because Dante is descending in hell and meeting more and more sinful people. but if it's a tragedy (or poetic), then we should feel more compassion, because the peak of pity has to occur toward the end of the work for the sake of catharsis. so which side of Dante is the dominant side when it comes to Inferno? it's been the subject of scholarly argument for centuries.
the really impressive, unbelievable, can't-stop-thinking-about-it thing: this entire argument comes down to this single line - Canto XXXIII, line 75: "Then hunger proved more powerful than grief."
because either Ugolino is a story of immense tragedy, a story of near-faultless suffering, and we should pity him immesnely - or he's committed the horrifying, grotesque sin of eating the bodies of his children when cannibalism would not aid his long-term survival, and we should be largely unable to pity him! and it's completely ambiguous. we'll never know.
Ohhhh boy I am daunted by the idea of writing this review.
As many people know, I do a VERY adorable thing where I read a book and then don’t feel likeOhhhh boy I am daunted by the idea of writing this review.
As many people know, I do a VERY adorable thing where I read a book and then don’t feel like reviewing it straight away so I put it off for a bit and then suddenly it’s been four months and I don’t remember a godforsaken thing about it and I am a shell of the person I used to be when I read the book and the shell of a person isn’t where the book memories are stored!!
Also part of this adorable review-writing process: starting out infinite reviews in the exact same way, delineating the exact same process. Follow for more of the exact same content!
Anyway this was a particularly bad time for me to put off writing a review, because I barely understood this book while I was reading it and I sure as sh*t don’t have a comprehensive synopsis to give you now.
Basically this book is physics and sci-fi and it’s a little confusing but not in a brain-hurt-y way more like “oh I probably don’t have a full understanding of the causes and/or ramifications of what’s happening here but it doesn’t really matter because I know enough to enjoy this whole plotline situation and I’m not here for a breezy fictionalized physics tutorial anyway.”
So if that is what you’re looking for, I can’t really speak on whether you can find it here.
What you CAN find is a semi-confusing VERY fun lightly thrilling book that will make you feel kind of smart-ish instead of dumb, like most science-y books! It’s like The Martian, but with more suffering! And also I’m not hungover while reading it!
I am also just now recollecting - look guys, progress! - that I had a pretty busy/stressful weekend while I was reading this and I still managed to get it done in the better part of 24 hours. Because this is very gripping on top of everything!!! I should have been very distracted as I had a lot on my mind but guess what, it was all Dark Matter central over here! Kinda. To an extent that is still impressive.
I think I should be done now.
Bottom line: This is not the type of book I normally read AT ALL and heavens to Betsy am I glad I did.
(Note to self: when going outside of comfort zone, preferably do so with reading and not with turns of phrase. That’s how you end up saying sh*t like heavens to Betsy and looking like a goddamn fool.)
--------------------- pre-review
well.
never have i ever read a book like that before.
& it worked out like a dream!!!
review to come
--------------------- currently reading update
I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING BUT I'M INTO IT....more
it follows Detective Investigator (i'm making that up, kinda) Adam Fawley, in the most procedural murder book of all timughhhhhh.
this book was so meh.
it follows Detective Investigator (i'm making that up, kinda) Adam Fawley, in the most procedural murder book of all time. seriously. if you have ever been interested in the mundane inner workings of a suburban british police station, this is the book for you.
i am not. so this wasn't.
this book was more confusing than mysterious or thrilling, and i ended up just really not caring about what happened. which is impressive, considering this book details a sh*t ton of children's suffering. it's kind of crazy to be so bored and ready for a book to be over that you're like "child death? sure. child abuse? uh huh. child negligence? kk."
please if i ever choose to run for president, do NOT take the preceding quote out of context.
also shoutout to the gender roles in this book, which were truly wildin. we've got: objectification of female interviewees; objectification of female police officers; condescension/patronizing of female police officers; judgment of women based on sex life/clothing/maternity; and just really vitriolic ways of talking about women on the internet!!!
which, speaking of: there was also some half-ass attempting at unique formatting (through the inclusion of tweets and BBC articles) that was just the worst. it added nothing to the story that wasn't already covered and completely broke the narrative flow. yippee.
anyway. i didn't hate this book but i did really dislike it! there were twists, kind of, but the twists were more just discoveries of evidence and who cares about that. whatever. boring.
bottom line: non merci. (is it possible that i'm bigoted on the subject of british thrillers exclusively?)
thanks to penguin first to read for the ARC...more
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