peripetia's reviews
535 reviews

This is a 4,5 for me but I would round it up because I really enjoyed it.

This was even more fast-paced than the first book, which I loved. The fight scenes are just amazing and I'm always on the edge of my seat.

The worldbuilding was often delivered a little bit more clumsily in this book, but I did appreciate the recap in the beginning and I do love the setting.

What still bothers me a lot, and this seems to bother other people too, is that Tau gets hurt worse and worse and he's still the best fighter ever and is hardly slowed down by almost losing a leg, for example. No one ever sleeps, they just ride around and fight. It's driving me nuts and yes, it's a bit of a silly thing to complain about in a book about dragons but I am a silly goose and that's that. 

"Bizarre" and "what did I just read" are probably the most used phrases for describing this book, so I went in expecting something super strange. However, "what I just read" was child abuse.

The end.

This book is about child abuse and the many forms it takes. This is not bizarre, it's about child abuse.

Everything in this book makes perfect sense. Yes it escalates into very weird situations, but even then, it did still make sense, at least for me.

This book interrogates, first of all, child abuse as well as rules and norms of society and the upset that happens when people don't conform to them. I enjoyed this critical exploration, even when it was quite on the nose.

I think this is a well-written book about child abuse. This was a solid 4 stars for me.

I tried a book by Chambers years ago, I think it was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it did not work for me at all. I dnf'd very early on because I found the exposition clunky. At the time I complained that she was too in love with the world she had created.

But I've been thinking that I never gave her a fair chance, so I decided to try again. Unfortunately, her writing still did not work for me.

This is not because her books are bad or she's a bad writer, this style is very much just not for me.

I can't deal with the gushing and the whimsical and the optimism and the utopia. The audiobook narrator was good - she actually acted - but I cringed listening to her peppy marveling.

A lot of people really love these books and that's wonderful. I totally get why these are so comforting for people. I think this is like a warm hug and this is like a nice cup of tea type of books just aren't for me. 

I feel like I didn't get the point of this book. On one hand, we have very interesting stories of famous (male) scientists. On the other hand, these are fleshed out by fiction invented by the author. Why? 

The author pretty much just tells stories of scientists, their lives, and their discoveries. I found this fascinating as the history of science is one of my special interests. I just don't really understand what the author was trying to say here. Was he just imagining the lives of the scientists outside of their work? Why? What is the point? His own amusement?

I was also quite annoyed at the end - I learned all kinds of interesting facts, except now I don't know what is fact and what is fiction. Those were blended really well, which is both great and also frustrating.

It's not exactly the focus being on male scientists, some of them not well known, that bothered me. It's more that the women of these stories are vague and thinly drawn side characters, often literally nameless. This bothered me the most in the story of Schrödinger and his sexual obsession with a teenage girl, who is present in the story quite a lot, but who is only referred to as "Doctor Helwig's* daughter" and nothing else. Why? 

And this too is apparently fictional, which makes me wonder even more why she couldn't have a name. I mean, I figured that out when listening to Schrödinger's fantasies and him molesting the girl's body, but that's a pretty heavy story to come up with. Why? I have no idea if Schrödinger really was into young girls or not, but if he was, a much better story could have been told about that. Instead we get a tortured genius enamored with a vixen/virgin. 

Also there really are buried, interesting stories about women scientists trying to break into the masculine world of science, but this was not of interest to the writer, I guess.

I just don't know what else to say except that I don't understand the point of this book. Cool stories, but so what? I guess it could be about how science kind of gets away from us sometimes and surpasses us, but again this was in part made up, and what is the lesson here anyway? Stop doing science? Mathc will really fuck you up if you get into it? Maybe I'm just really black and white here.

Finally, I don't understand the point of the final part about his life. Just... meh.

*I think it was Helwig. I listened to the audiobook so I'm not 100% sure.

This book is beautifully written and buried in it is probably a great story. I'm conflicted about dnf'ing this at 46%, but the story is just so slow and in parts utterly uninteresting. Reading this feels like a chore and I'm not sure that this book is worth that effort.

I loved the beginning of the book, but was disappointed and bored when we switched to Digby's, the Scottish doctor's, POV. I also did not care much for Dr Rune, maybe because I don't find that kind of religious fervor very interesting, to be quite honest. I loved getting to know the local environment and culture, even if the depictions sometimes became more like a history book than a novel.

I feel like this book is so long because these kinds of family sagas are supposed to be long. This doesn't have to be. There are so many great elements in this book, but the story just meanders and drags on. It seems like the book can't decide between being plot or character driven - in the best case scenario it would be both, but now it's neither.

What started to annoy me quite a lot is that all of the POV or central characters are perfect people. Even their mistakes and shortcomings are on the level of "oh no I fell in love with the wrong person". Maybe this will change later in the book, but 46% is too much for such one-dimensional characters, interesting as they can be.

I'm not afraid of long books, but I dislike books being long just for the sake of being long. The story is fascinating and beautiful, but it drowns under history lessons.

En nyt tiedä oliko oma kiinnostunut aiheeseen kuitenkin liian alhainen vai oliko kirjalla vaikeuksia löytää tasapaino akateemisen ja populaarin kirjallisuuden välillä, lähdeviitteitä kun käytettiin silloin tällöin, mutta usein kirjoittaja kertoo miten asiat on ihan oman asiantuntemuksensa, kokemuksensa ja mielipiteidensä mukaan. Toisaalta tämä tuo akateemista tutkimusta myös tavallisen ihmisen ulottuville, mikä on aina hyvä.

Tästä ei oikein muodostunut ehjää kokonaisuutta ja analyysi jäi minusta aika yksipuoliseksi, kirjoitukset kun keskittyvät lähes täysin Eurooppaan. Kirjoittajat toivat paljon esille tutkimuksen ja lähdetekstien heteronormatiivisuuden ja keskittymisen nimenomaan naisten käytökseen, mikä oli tärkeä pointti mainita. Näitä puutteita kyllä pyrittiin ihan ansiokkaasti haastamaan, sen verran kuin se oli mahdollista.

Jotkut artikkeleista olivat erikoistuneita enkä ihan tiedä mikä niiden laajempi relevanssi oli kun en asiaa tunne. Itselleni jäi ainakin hämäräksi.

Itselleni tämä oli suoraan sanottuna usein todella tylsä. Teologiasta ja varsinkin kirkkohistoriasta kiinnostuneille toimii varmasti paremmin.

 

I started this book years ago and didn't finish it. I don't know why - I found it fascinating and have often thought about it since. I started from the beginning with the audiobook and found it just as fascinating.

Humans love to believe in their exceptionalism, which is the most important theme of this book. We come up with reasons why we are unique, special, and natural masters of the world. In this book, de Waal busts these myths one after the other.

The book's title asks if we are smart enough to know how smart animals are, but at the same time de Waal questions what intelligence even is and why we measure intelligence based on our skills. Why do we consider dogs smarter than wolves simply because they do what humans tell them to do? What is the correct measurement to use when measuring intelligence, and why is it even necessary to do so?

De Waal also rails against the inhumane (heh) treatment of animals in the name of science, which I appreciated. He also criticizes the way humans have used similar arguments as they do with animals to oppress everyone that is not a white man.

I think this is a great book for people who are interested in animals and/or science.


(P.S. Reading the top reviews in Goodreads made me wonder if we read the same book. I literally scrolled back up to check.) 

I just didn't get much out of this novel. I'm having a streak of bad to mediocre reading experiences, which may have made me more negative when listening to the audiobook, but still, I'm just not satisfied.

The narrator of the book is passive and lacks any kind of personality or opinions. She is quite empty, except for her occasional anxieties. Her contributions to conversations are limited to repeating the last word of a sentence the other interlocutor just said. She drifts from pointless scenes to other pointless scenes.

The start of the book was quite promising. It's the middle that was bad, with nothing happening - and although I'm aware this is not a plot-driven novel, I would expect some character development from a character-driven novel. She takes some actions that seemed pretty random to me. That's it. I sped up the audiobook to get over the slog, and the ending did pick up a bit, if only to explain everything.

The themes of the book, such as expectations for women, were thoroughly explained through long monologues. or I guess dialogue, but the main character provided nothing to them so I don't think it counts as a conversation. Side characters tell you about the issues regarding the conflicting expectations put on women, but otherwise the themes are barely there. The main character goes to look at some books, but even then she has absolutely no opinion or interpretation of what she sees.

And then in the end she shakes of her vacant brain and explains to another character her feelings which we didn't really see during the book. The loose storylines were not resolved, at least in a way that I would have been satisfied with.

Or maybe her thoughts and feelings were presented so subtly that I as an idiot missed them. Sure, I'll accept that, but still I found the book so underwhelming, boring, and a waste of effort.

I am also very much a plot-driven reader and I didn't find enough of a well-rounded and interesting character to enjoy this. So, if you're into "character studies" (again, I don't think this is one but ok), this could be for you. At least the protagonist is different than most. 

I do not care about the story or the characters or anything. This is written in such a dry, almost academic way that it's just off-putting and boring. Probably the audiobook narrator didn't help.

The protagonist just recounts a story that could be very interesting but he's just stating facts or referencing source material. I'm giving up at ~25%. It's a short book but I just hate it.

(I also found myself thinking is it just me or is this racist, which is not a good sign. Maybe it isn't and I just disliked how the protagonist talked about the local people, including his wife.)

I disliked this book very much. The writing was just the worst kind of chick-lit clichés*. First of all I don't like books that are written like movies, and this book was 100% a generic rom-com, but with magic. Our main character is fired from her dream job, she describes her looks for no particular reason, she has a sassy best friend and a caricaturishly evil boyfriend who's name is. you guessed it, Chad. 

I did not care for this at all. I dnf'd before she got to her family hacienda because I found the writing unbearable. I checked out some reviews before I decided to dnf, and since it seems the actual plot is romance, I did not want to continue beyond the 30 minutes that I wasted listening to the book.

Something that is REALLY bugging me are the reviews and the constant "this is Encanto". This is putting me in such a rage that it's better than I don't rant about it. I know I didn't finish the book, but I would just love to know what they have in common except a latinx family with magical abilities and one of the girls in Encanto being able to control flowers. Could it be that you only know two pieces of media from the same general area, except that Mexico and Colombia are not even on the same continent ffs.

*Note: Chick-lit is a baffling concept and I hate it, but I'm using it here so you get what I mean.