i have marked 1,865 books as read on goodreads. i have reviewed 1,813 of them. of those, i would say at least 1,727 had at least one complaint. and STi have marked 1,865 books as read on goodreads. i have reviewed 1,813 of them. of those, i would say at least 1,727 had at least one complaint. and STILL, i just discovered a whole new negative thing to say:
this book is all feelings. the characters don't really have personality traits, they have emotions. they don't have development, they have new feelings. there is no romance, just instalove. there isn't really a plot, just people going through feelings together (for a podcast) and people going through feelings together (that will eventually lead to them being together).
it makes it all feel shallow, like there's no actual connection between these people or their story, and that means there's no connection between the reader and the book.
for this reader, at least.
bottom line: you learn something new every day. i already knew i was a soulless void, but today i learned a new effect of that.
------------------------ tbr review
what's your favorite niche book trope? mine is road trips.
unfortunately this is not really a road trip book. my bad.
i love reading about artists. that way i can pretend i'm creative and interesting.
unfortunately...only the first half of this book was that.
and i lovei love reading about artists. that way i can pretend i'm creative and interesting.
unfortunately...only the first half of this book was that.
and i loved that part! it focused on three friends, all asian-american women, through their 80s childhoods and 90s and Y2K time in new york, on their very different paths—an artist, a coder, a housing activist—and all that they had in common, each in some way on the fringes, in worlds that pointed to what was to come.
i could've read so much of this.
unfortunately, it took a sudden turn into an inconsistent, fake-feeling dystopian future, with everyone forgotten but one, whose character felt different and her motivation unrecognizable.
i've been awaiting this book since the leavers, but this lacks everything that made that book great: memorable characters, a light hand in melodrama, and striking, even emotion.
pssst...emily henry's screenwriter for beach read wrote a romance novel...
and you can probably skip it.
this was a weird book.
it uses the word vague apssst...emily henry's screenwriter for beach read wrote a romance novel...
and you can probably skip it.
this was a weird book.
it uses the word vague a lot, and it loves to murmur. it has a lot of italics, for no real discernible reason. there's a whole scene where it seems like it might be sponsored by scrivener (credit to halle)?
more seriously, it creates a very troubled romance with very troubled characters and puts them in a love story it will take 300 pages to untangle into something resembling a happily ever after, except we never really get to their individual personal issues.
except forget about their respective personal issues because we don't have time to get to those.
helen never makes real friendships, and grant doesn't either. parental relationships are left unresolved. they get back together, but the why feels unsolved at best.
and then there's the worst crime of all...this is so devastatingly unfunny.
a lot of the time in modern life, rom coms are more like rom drams, featuring characters navigating wildly upsetting interpersonal crises with a romance in the background and the occasional line of banter.
i actually don't mind that much, because i'm obsessed with drama and it helps to soothe the part of me that is constantly one bolt of confidence away from asking my acquaintances why they broke up.
but the drama in this was SO crazy, and the jokes SO unforgivably bad (to the point that i wouldn't know they were supposed to be jokes if it didn't literally say "he joked"), that i was more like...why would i root for these people at all.
while questioning if i know what jokes are at all, in the emotional equivalent of when you use the word "joke" so much it doesn't look like a word anymore. which is also happening.
it also relies on chemistry instead of intimacy, with a lot more sex scenes than romantic ones.
i read an interview with the author in which she says that she wrote this early in the morning and late at night while working on an emily henry script, and i hate to say it shows. this reads like the compiled discarded bits of something distractedly written by her.
that would be the meanest thing i've ever said if i didn't love emily henry so much.
this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is very hard to read a whole book without sympathizing with its main character once.
this is actually not because the character in question spends this entire book sleeping with a married man, and a large portion of it sleeping with a man married to a pregnant wife, and a slightly smaller portion of it sleeping with a man married to the mother of a newborn. i have sympathized with characters who have done worse. although not by much.
it's because this character is SO unfeeling, so shallow, and so cruel in the worst way — the way that comes from just not caring about the interior lives of others. i don't know if this character has no interior life or is just uninterested in showing it to us, but it is not on page. not even implied.
i liked the writing of this at first, but eventually the constant slang and pop culture and devil-may-care mentality got old. it reminded me of greta and valdin at first, and then bad greta and valdin, and then no greta and valdin at all.
time passes in this book without reference, feelings grow without reason, and the plot just bumbles on.
boats against the current.
bottom line: a frustrating read, and not in the ways it intends to be.
there should be a legal defense for young women who attempt gruesome crimes upon the gross older men who think they're in a mutually romantic relationthere should be a legal defense for young women who attempt gruesome crimes upon the gross older men who think they're in a mutually romantic relationship with them.
especially if you can tell they're thinking about sex in a really weird way.
i would never convict yamasaki in a court of law.
this book, though, is guilty of the crime that is literary sex scenes...i will never recover from some of these descriptions.
i expected this book to have some serious self-awareness, and while i think it is striving towards that, it doesn't really get there. i did everything i was supposed to: separated the protagonist from the author, accepted the potential of an unreliable narrator, tried to have a good time. but whatever point about gender and power this was trying to make, whether it's my opinion or not, it didn't accomplish it.
and for that reason, i am out.
bottom line: a book i enjoyed so little i am subjecting it to the cruel and unusual punishment that is a shark tank reference.
this is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordthis is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordingly...
and somehow the most unrealistic part was its depiction of human emotion.
the thing they never tell you about sexism is that it's boring. that's the worst part of misogyny: just the most boring female characters you've ever read.
ok, maybe not the worst part. but it's not in my personal favorites.
i am personally of the opinion that if you are going to tell me something relatively insane, such as time travel is real and being hoarded for evil by corporations (with some parts of that being less insane than others), you need to ground me in the narrative. maybe give me some lovable characters. maybe give me some real-feeling feelings. dare i say give me a dose of reality via human relationships, or human life, or human thought patterns.
this book skipped all of that, and the result was dramatic and annoying.
bottom line: logically i know i read this as a book. but in my heart, this is one of those budgetless interchangeable shows you scroll past on a lesser streaming platform and know no human has ever watched or talked about.
except not really. having to interact with strangers every day for no money and subsisting off of amazon gift cards and my wife's generosity sougoals.
except not really. having to interact with strangers every day for no money and subsisting off of amazon gift cards and my wife's generosity sounds like my nightmare.
i thought this would be an interesting exploration of society, and what constitutes a job, and what we value and what we don't. instead, this was a very literal walkthrough of a lot of tweets about doing small errands. it reminded me of the novelty books that came out when twitter was first a thing and people were like "how do we monetize this?"
in other words, for someone who claims he doesn't care about money, this seems like a real fixation for the author— and a money grab.
my thoughts and prayers remain with his wife at this time.
bottom line: this book should be sold for $8 on the novelty table at urban outfitters, and nowhere else....more
i was so excited to read this book, which is so many of my favorite things: women who spy! family drama! historical fiction about an under-discussed gi was so excited to read this book, which is so many of my favorite things: women who spy! family drama! historical fiction about an under-discussed geopolitical moment!
its purpose — to show WWII and the era leading up to it from the british- then japanese-ruled malaysian perspective — is excellent.
unfortunately, the way this book conveyed it undermined the message.
so much tragedy occurs here. violence of every type, deaths of multiple main characters, colonization, war, labor camps, comfort stations, racism, sexism, assaults, murders, torture. it's wrenching and difficult to read.
that isn't a con of this book, obviously. all of those things really happened, and the forgotten stories of the people that experienced it deserved to be told.
it's the fact that these don't feel like real people, or real stories. our characters kill people without regret. they see untold horrors and don't feel them. they keep unforgivable secrets, commit crimes, experience trauma, and give none of it a second thought. characters change from page to page, and motivations, development arcs, and things we hold to be true aren't consistently upheld.
there is nothing that will allow us to ground ourselves in order to really feel these stories as they deserve to be felt. a character who can't pick up a stick in one paragraph is running across a camp and doing his own stunts in the next. 4 people we've been following for hundreds of pages die within one chapter. these people do terrible things without the painful justification that would allow us to feel it alongside them.
bad things happen for no reason, to people who don't feel real—nor does their suffering, keeping us on the outside as one horrible scene after another unfolds.
bottom line: i am glad this story is being told. i wish it was better equipped to be shared.
this just felt too unrealistic. every book ni'm not saying i condone art theft.
but i AM saying...it's pretty cool.
and i wish this book had more of it.
this just felt too unrealistic. every book needs something to ground it, and this was so absurd: indescribable mansions, teenage art thievery prodigies, john green-esque dialogue, friends at school who act more like obsessive fans, rare disorders diagnosed by nearby ballerinas, insta- and life-defining love.
it was too much, and all of it felt dramatic and heavy, and because there was nothing to make any of it feel lifelike it just felt annoying.
i don't even know what this book is about.
but it wasn't art theft.
bottom line: i think many, many people will like this book. i am sad to learn i am not among them.
this one's for all my true crime haters out there.
and also for my general haters out there. because i didn't like this book.
like s'mores, or the kind this one's for all my true crime haters out there.
and also for my general haters out there. because i didn't like this book.
like s'mores, or the kind of chocolate chip cookie that's currently popular where it's essentially grainy dough in the middle, this is a great concept that does not achieve what it sets out to. in the first two cases, it's to be yummy. in this case, it's to remind us that behind every garish crime headline, there are real people trying their best.
we are presented with a potential crime and some of the people that surround it: lucy, a lonely child who may have committed a murder; carmel, her distant onetime teen mom; richie, carmel's alcoholic brother; john, their withholding father; the specters of john's first and second wives; and tom, the journalist who's set out to write about all of them.
the goal of this book is to humanize this cast. and much like the outer bites of the aforementioned chocolate chip cookies, or the part of the s'mores process where you're toasting the marshmallow and you haven't yet undergone the gunky sticky textural nightmare eating of it, there are moments where it's very effective.
this is true of carmel's case. richie has moments of searing sympathy, too. but i felt equally left outside of lucy, john, rose, and tom by the conclusion as i did at the outset. we never get much insight into the first three, and what we do hear from tom happens early and contradicts itself often.
i like the intention here, which it shares with penance, a book i was very impressed by. but like the author's first novel, i think it fell a bit short.
bottom line: the disappointing cookie of books....more
christa comes out of her shell...because christa is shy and also studying snails...i see what you did there.
if only this had more snails.
unfortunatelychrista comes out of her shell...because christa is shy and also studying snails...i see what you did there.
if only this had more snails.
unfortunately this book was over the top ridiculous and utterly forced. it was filled with nonsense jokes, flat characters, an ill-advised romance, a made-up career, inconsistent characterization, villainous recurring extras, a child’s understanding of business, and a corny plot.
i didn’t have fun and in fact grew increasingly annoyed.
in spite of the title, christa is neither shy nor seemingly all that knowledgeable about snails. i would have appreciated either if it meant she either shut up for a minute or talked about shelled creatures instead of indulging in more of her infuriatingly quirky internal monologue.
but no luck.
bottom line: i don't know what just happened, but i didn't like it.
i like an unlikable protagonist, but it turns out i can't stand 3 miserable ones.
for me, the experience of being alive as a woman isn't defined soleli like an unlikable protagonist, but it turns out i can't stand 3 miserable ones.
for me, the experience of being alive as a woman isn't defined solely by hating my body, or by thinking about men, or by hating other women. i have moments of all of those, sure, but they don't make up a significant part of my life. let alone the majority of my experience. let alone all of it!
in the universe of this book, that's all women have.
we have three perspectives and they are all the same: just absolute victims of patriarchy, with the same voice, living the same experience. one looks like emrata, one is thin with "bad boobs," one is fat, but all three are obsessed with their bodies and male validation and nothing else.
there's a lot this book is trying to do, but it overplays its hand a all of it. creating three of the exact same character to do the same thing in an over the top and nonrelatable way and facing down an abrupt and meaningless ending doesn't work for me even from that standpoint.
beyond that, the writing grated on me: all thoughts are merciless or relentless. people are both nervous and worried. skin is knotty and bumpy. this stacked adjectives on top of each other to see what sticks.
the answer to what sticks is my frustration, even reviewing this a month after the fact.
bottom line: i love women! i love being alive! i wish this book did too.
------------------ tbr review
this sounds more interesting to me than the alternative...more
had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without it, it felt kind of adolescent and silly, ungrounded. none of these characters felt real — the only thing that felt real was the city of buenos aires.
if you're reading a book about a 16th century vampire lady falling in instalove with a 21st century single mother ready to leave her son to live in a mausoleum, i at least need to feel like something is believable. even if that's the writing being nice.
instead this just felt overwrought and goofy.
bottom line: brb fleeing to the nearest graveyard home.
the good news is this was part of my favorite niche subgenre: True Crime That Has Since Been Solved.
the bad news is that, though this was very thoughtthe good news is this was part of my favorite niche subgenre: True Crime That Has Since Been Solved.
the bad news is that, though this was very thoughtfully researched, it was also very weird. i enjoyed the first half that carefully constructed the girls' stories, but the author's attempts to switch voices and sometimes write from within the girls' worlds came off very strange...and almost...bigoted?
beyond that the second half got bogged down in theories and had nowhere to conclude, so it felt way longer than it actually was and then kind of just drifted off.
i guess i had more to complain about than i thought.
bottom line: i try to only read true crime that won't make me feel guilty about reading it. here i did not succeed....more
i am so sorry to say this...but this was borderline unreadable for me.
the description of this book — a family saga told with humor and a wry sociopolii am so sorry to say this...but this was borderline unreadable for me.
the description of this book — a family saga told with humor and a wry sociopolitical eye, with the intent of capturing what it was to be a person during a certain era — got me.
but this wasn't funny, to me, or clever; it was self-indulgent and self-serious, pretentious and mocking to its characters. i never managed to like any of them (despite my lifelong tendency to like the unlikable) because the book itself, and its narrator, clearly do not.
and that, as it turns out, is a dealbreaker.
perhaps more importantly, it is rife with the type of selfish, conservative-in-leftist-clothing liberal politics that made its author write a completely stupid essay in the new yorker for exactly no one.
bottom line: this review — not funny but kind of trying to be, extremely self-important, and pointless reading — mirrors its subject!...more
when will i stop accidentally buying graphic novel adaptations!
i intended to buy a copy of Kindred, a great book, and mistakenly bought this, a versiowhen will i stop accidentally buying graphic novel adaptations!
i intended to buy a copy of Kindred, a great book, and mistakenly bought this, a version of it that was not for me. this art style isn't my cup of tea, and this medium isn't really for this story. what was an excellent novel is an emotionally and thematically inconsistent and shallow-feeling graphic novel.
but then again, an accidental review is probably not the best one to trust.
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