Another sadly beautiful book, it is it a beautifully sad book?, by Hanya Yanagihara. Haunting. It’ll start with me a long time, just like A little Life. Grateful to have read it.

hanya you have such a way with too many words 

The writing is beautiful but ultimately I just found this book deeply frustrating. Go into this book knowing you will not get all the answers you might want. I also found the repeated character names across the stories added needless confusion. 
I think most reviews I've seen thought the second story was the worst one but that was probably my favourite. I much preferred the first two to the final story in the volume. Maybe I just wasn't ready to read about pandemics though! The author certainly does a good job describing a dystopian future. 

This books spans three different centuries in America and with this, it covers a multitude of human experiences and themes. Despite its slow pace, it is a deeply moving read from the outset due to Yanagihara‘s use of language and metaphors which come alive on the page. To Paradise is memorable read that will make you reflect on what it is that makes you feel most alive today. And free. 

CW: pandemic, lab testing on animals, armed police, dystopia, military law, radicalisation/terrorism, chronic illness, seizures, environmental destruction, arranged marriage, internment camps etc.

Spanning roughly 200 hundred years this is a book about a world similar to our own but subtly different. It starts in the 1890s in an America which has some areas where it is legal to marry anyone you wish. It discusses 1990s in the same place only with a backdrop of the looming spectre of HIV. The final part is in the 2090s after waves of pandemics have changed the face of the First World into a dystopian vision of strict controls and segregation.

The book discusses health and frailty, chronic illness, being gay, the idea of inheritance and Legacy, life and treatment of migrants of ethnic minority, and love, feud, vulnerability, and .. people being people.

When I got the audiobook I had no idea it was such a long read (over 900 pages or 28+hours in the Audiobook) but the story wasn't really slow.. it just had a LOT in it. It seemed a poetic decision to have a recurring set of names and places. Partly this was to reinforce the continuity of lineage, inheritance and flow of time. Looking at things from different cultural perspectives over time highlights the changes caused by the passage of time, but also the similarities.

This book is artful and tells the stories within it through letters, memories, and stories told to others. It leans hard into the Hawaiian / Pacific Islands' oral tradition, and also highlights the place of those shared stories we tell each other, and how they cement families and communities. It also shows how that knowledge can be so fragile and be lost to time when ideas are not shared or if they cannot be passed on well.

This story starts as a piece of historical speculative fiction, but the latter parts of the book are set in a police state. Published in 2022, this book clearly channels a lot of the common ground we have experienced in the face of global pandemic. Freedom of information, and the radicalisation of rebels and conspiracy theorists against government control, are sympathetically highlighted by the use of main characters on both sides of the fence, one working for the government to limit the casualties of disease, and one fighting against government misinformation and lack of social freedoms.

For all the big ideas, the thing that really sells this whole book to me is the solid characters. The feelings expressed and the stuff they are going through really resonate with me. A number of the characters over the span of the book deal with anxiety, trauma and  chronic physical illness. The relationships formed are often oddly unbalanced, either due to finances, physical/emotional frailty, or even just charisma, and the problems those couples have feel very real to me.

I could go on, but it would be too much. The characters were believable and human, and representation of disability and mental illness was relatable. The discussion of migrants and ethnic minority was an element I valued, and I loved that with the use of Hawaiian language I could still pick up one word in three due to its similarity with te reo Māori (which I  only have a very basic familiarity with).  This was a really good book, and I should have read it last year.

This book. I was mad at it in its third quarter for its intense surprise pandemic-ness, but it really pulled together in the last quarter with more dystopian themes. There are some things that frustrated me about this book - a lot was to do with feeling blindsided about the pandemic content (it doesn't appear until halfway through and is very heavy on the pandemic content in the secone half) and it all felt too close due to covid. I took multiple extended breaks and almost DNFed at 75%. But I'm glad I finished it. 
This book has an epic scope. I want to reread it some day and further map out its intricacies. Its complex and beautiful and philosophical.

Thorny, structurally difficult in its first half. But the second half packs such a punch that is only as satisfying as it is because of the groundwork laid in the first half. A dynamic cautionary tale about the ways that our generational trauma can silently destroy us and others.

Could've used a firmer editor. Lots of unnecessary repetition, and a dickensian tendency to over-describe everything. Would've been more impactful, I think, at about a third shorter.