lory_enterenchanted's reviews
536 reviews

Enjoyable in the main, although I had some issues. The age gap --  it's just a fact that men mature much slower, and the age gap between 22 year old male and 32 year old female is immense. Plus, he's had a crush on her since he was 15? It's just all a bit weird. He's impossibly perfect, too, aside from having a rare medical issue, which seems to be one of Center's hallmarks.

The problem with romance novels seems to be that the couple has to be attracted to each other, but then you have to keep them apart somehow. It's hard to accomplish the latter in today's hook-up culture. So I often find the reason-for-staying-apart, usually based on misunderstandings and miscommunication, absurd and frustrating. That was the case here.

I also found it strange that the MC NEVER thinks about her job as a first grade teacher. I mean, she does mention it a couple of times, and do a couple of teacher-y things, but she never thinks about the children. Perhaps she is desperate to get away from them - but then I think that would come into her mind at some point. And my experience of being a teacher is that it's not a job you leave behind when you're out of the classroom!

A wild Aiken adventure set in Wales, most memorable for the linguistic acrobatics the author performs with various characters talking her own brand of Welsh, Scots, London thieves' cant, and a made-up middle eastern florid style ... I loved the lens-wearing main character Owen and his book about everything, though he did get to be a bit too much of a superhero after a while. Arabis, too, if also too good to be true, with her remedies for everything, was lovely. 

A fine spiritual memoir, with touching stories about the author's healing encounters with nature at a "Farminary" that sounds far better than attending the actual Seminary. Some favorite quotes:

"Rage is misery that does not know where else to go."

"reading books about God and sitting through classes about God did not necessarily engender encounters with God."

 "telling a new story, that our sins do not have lasting power to break fellowship."

"To be made whole isn't just to have one's physical afflictions removed, it is to be restored to community and returned to relationship."

Particularly in light of those last two, it's heartbreaking that Chu's supposedly Christian parents, especially his father, are unable to accept him or his husband (who sounds like an absolute angel) because of their sexual orientation. Meanwhile, there are Chu's friends who try to tell him he's wrong for still wanting to have a relationship with his parents, for not just cutting them off. 

Why not give this book a higher rating? There was something about the writing that disappointed me somehow ...  I can't put my finger on it. But overall a lovely book.

Nostalgic favorite from childhood, though it is VERY dark. A pastiche II think I can credit with sparking my later love of real Victorian literature. I like how Lucas and Anna-Marie's relationship developed, while finding a lost grandmother who provides nurture and shelter in an ice-house is the best kind of Aikenish mixture of cozy and bizarre.  

In the post-election disaster scene of 2024, I also thought about what the book taught me is that evil, dysfuctional systems and institutions are reflections of the unhealed souls of their leaders. I think events are more and more proving this thesis correct.

I skimmed some of this but I'm going to count it as read. The essays about Saccharine and about female pain started to seem overly self-indulgent. Too many words! The latter could have been boiled down to two sentences: "The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true."  

As Jamison is writing about wounded women -- and men -- it's most effective when she concentrates mostly on them. Least when she's concentrating on herself. There are books where I appreciate learning of the author's feelings and perspectives but here it became too much.

A few interesting insights into Sondheim songs, pointing out especially where the music expressed something other than the lyrics, but for full impact this would need to be conveyed through a music lesson. A lot of the rest of the writing felt like filler, banal platitudes. 

A couple of teasing glimpses at the author's life -- if it had been more of a memoir, How Sondheim Changed MY LIfe, it might have been more compelling. But he doesn't seem to want to go there, rather to keep things on an impersonal, general, and therefore boring level.

And, the big "revelation" he has about the Baker's Wife from Into the Woods -- that her story is a tragedy because she turned away from the prince who dallied with her to return to her husband and child -- is just stupid. This is an example of overthinking, of wringing a story out to find some original twist on it that does not exist.

I made a playlist of songs mentioned in the book. I think listening to Sondheim, is preferable to read ing about Sondheim.

In Michael Ende’s modern fable Momo, the title character is a young girl who lives in a ruined amphitheater on the outskirts of an unnamed European city. Momo’s outer appearance is a bit strange, with her wild black hair and man’s jacket that is too big for her, but she has an outstanding ability that soon attracts many visitors: she can listen. Simply by listening, she enables friends-turned-enemies to resolve their conflicts. Storytellers are inspired when she is in the audience. And children know that their play takes flight when Momo is listening. 

But mysterious men dressed in grey begin to convince people to stop wasting their time on friendship or stories or children, and instead to save up precious seconds in their “time bank”. Only Momo can hear their real thoughts, their desperate hunger that drives them to suck time away from human beings … and her wondering response is “Does no one love you?” 

The thieves of time have visited all of us. Never has a society been so obsessed with and so successful at saving time, nor so exhausted and depressed. Meaningful work is steadily being sucked away, and deaths of despair are on the rise. The hunger for love fuels all kinds of addictions. Momo’s gift of listening leads her into the depths of the heart to save her city; we can learn from her journey as we face our own struggles. 

I've read Momo before in English, but it's been a while. As I read through it this time in German -- slowly! -- I thought how timely it remains. And while at one time I thought Momo's gift of listening was a bit dull, I now realize ever more how important it really is. Listening is more than merely hearing, more than letting sensations wash over us. It turns the act of giving attention into a doorway of creation. It's what I started to grasp through the spiritual direction training I recently completed, and what I want to continue to practice in as many ways as possible. 

The situation of the two tin suitors and the “other man” made if their discarded parts was amusing and had potential to be more so, but the rest of the story was just random. 

A pleasant read, but I didn't become as invested in the characters as I expected from other reviews. I wondered sometimes about the translator's choices -- there were some odd words sprinkled in, but perhaps that was a reflection of odd words used in the German. I also found it strange that the vanished, murdered Jews of Vienna were never once mentioned. (In 1938 there were over 200,000, in 1951 9000, today even fewer). One time only there is a flippant comment that half the people in Vienna are Nazis. But otherwise, the war that is sometimes mentioned as being in the recent past is in no way connected with the Holocaust. Maybe this was an intentional comment on people's wish to forget an uncomfortable past? I just found it strange, as characters in the book would surely have known many Jews -- including café owners.

I read the first chapter and the style was too shrill and buffoonish for me.