peripetia's reviews
535 reviews

Words cannot describe how much I love Terry Pratchett. I started reading his books when I was way too young to understand all of the social and political commentary, but I understood enough for it to have a big impact on my worldview, values, and the way that I wanted to live my life.

This book takes on multiple of these social and political issues - racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, you name it. The most prominent theme is war and the stupid reasons we end up in them, such as the ones named above. 

What Terry Pratchett does so well is showing the absolutely stupidity, hypocricy, and ridiculousness of people, especially those in power. 

It's controversial whether Pratchett actually said this, but it describes his type of satire well. However, this doesn't mean that he ignores the casual and everyday racism of ordinary people. One of the critiques in this book is about how people get swept up in a fervor and are suddenly ready to violently attack other people for... uh... reasons.

A lot of Pratchett's writing is dialogue, and I personally love that. Sometimes the focus of his books are not in the plot but on characters, which can make the pacing a bit slow. That said, the plot was complex and came with unanticipated twists and turns.

I understand why someone might not like Pratchett's books, especially if one does not enjoy absurdist writing. I personally love it. Pratchett also wrote in racist and sexist stereotypes in a way that would probably not fly in these days. These can be offensive, but that's kind of the point.

Anyway, I could talk about this for hours. I will always recommend Pratchett to anyone and everyone.

This book evoked many emotions in me, from rage to sympathy.

The narrator of this book is a wife and a mother. Everything else that makes her a person has been taken away from her, even her name. She now just "mama", even for her husband.

She writes a diary in secret. In the beginning she suggests to her family that she might write a diary also, and they straight up laugh at her. What would you have to write about?. Ha ha haa, they laugh benevolently.

Her children and her husband don't see her as a person, don't recognize that she might have thoughts and feelings. In their minds, she exists only for them. They take her service for granted and can't imagine anything else. Whatever she is irrelevant, not worth thinking about.

This makes you feel a lot of sympathy and frustration for Valeria. This book has a feminist message, but Valeria is not in an outright rebellion. She accepts and embraces the confines in which she lives it, yet struggles in the prison she's in. She's in constant conflict with herself, trying to make her own way in life, yet clinging to the traditional values and norms she has learned to live with. Possibly she feels the need to hold on to them, because if they are not true and right, what does that make of her? Has this life been for nothing?

Valeria is not a perfect person. While her family relies on her, she also relies on them for the sake of her identity and her purpose in life. She refuses to let go of her children, fighting tooth and nail against the modernizing world that her children are eager to accept.

Her relationship with her daughter Mirella is especially strained. Mirella is infuriatingly childish, especially in the beginning, but Valeria treats her like a misbehaving child. She cannot accept Mirella having a career and, as it is revealed, values and thoughts of her own.

Valeria is also hostile against her son Ricardo's girlfriend due to her own insecurities. She wants both girls to enter the same confines that she lives in, at whatever cost. She is controlling, insecure, submissive, angry, tired. This makes her a very well-rounded character.

The reason why this isn't a 5 star for me is because I just didn't find the housewifery very interesting, even though that was kind of the point of the book. Valeria is a very average woman in a very normative position. The book shows the everyday struggles of an unremarkable woman, which is a remarkable feat. Still, I was sometimes kind of bored.

This is not a flaw of the book, but I feel like I didn't know enough about Italian history to fully understand everything. Overall, I'm happy to have read this book. 

I don't know how to review or rate this book since I understood very little of it. Based on other people's reviews, this book needs to be read several times in order for one to understand it. This is probably true. Now that I know what happens (which is not much), a second round would be easier. I'm just not interested in reading it again.

My enjoyment of this book was on and off. When I understood what was going on, I really enjoyed it. Most of the time I did not know who or what or when was being talked about. In this case, Finnish having only gender-neutral pronouns was probably making things worse since I had no clues into which character's POV we were in.

This is one of the first books in the genre of magical realism, inspiring Gabriel García Márquez, probably the most famous author of magical realism. I'm not in general such a big fan of magical realism - it's somehow just too convenient since nothing needs to be explained - but here it was quite interesting. 

Still, I can't in good faith give this more than 3 stars because it was utterly confusing, often on purpose for sure, and I didn't get much out of it. That could be because I am an unsophisticated pleb (but it might also be that everyone claims to love this book because that's what you should do to not look like an unsophisticated pleb).
It's a short book so if you're even a little bit interested, it's worth the try.

I've wanted to read this classic for a long time and just never got around to it. I will admit that I find classics difficult to even pick up - there's the risk of not understanding the language and writing style (especially when read in English), the often astounding page count, and the possibility of not liking it and then feeling like an idiot because it must be that I just didn't get it. Especially if the book's by a well known genius man.

This was an easy read though. I listened to the audiobook and found that also approachable and accessible. The story was engaging and I was fully invested. The main character really makes you feel for her, even when you want to shake her to make her stand up for herself - although her actions and insecurities make perfect sense and this was the best way to write her, it's just that I empathized with her so strongly.

The experience would probably have been different if I'd read it as a book. I felt like the tone of the audiobook narrator didn't always match how I thought a line should be delivered. I also felt that the writing was sometimes repetitive with "that's how it is, isn't it" structure used constantly, same with conversations being just Yes, Yes, Yes one after the other. That might have been a deliberate choice and different in writing.

A great read overall, would recommend to anyone, especially someone looking to read a classic that is not mind-numbingly boring, difficult to read with nothing at all happening after 900 pages. 

I picked up this book because I wanted to read something in Swedish. I had a project coming up where I had to use Swedish, and since my Swedish was a little bit rusty, I figured I could refresh my skills reading a book. It tends to work. My project got postponed but I did get back into reading in Swedish!

This was a surprisingly good read for me. The book is so popular that I was expecting some kind of cheap tear-jerking melodrama. Granted, Backman does get pretty close to it, but I found the story and especially the characters to be deeply moving. I loved specifically the teenagers who were written as actual humans instead of hormone-ravaged dramatic extensions of their parents.

Backman has taken on a difficult subject, but I think he managed very well. This was great, especially coming from a male author and a story about ice hockey and a small community.

This book built tension for a long time, just building and building and building until I was incredibly stressed about a fictional hockey game. Rarely does a book make me this invested. (Being stressed about a real hockey game is another story) When tension is solved, he starts building it again, and again I am stressed. It was pretty amazing.

Backman writes in short sentences, aimed at maximum impact. The language is pretty simple and plain, which was great for me as my Swedish is far from perfect and I'm just getting back into reading in Swedish. It's quite likely that my opinion would be different if I'd read it in another language.

So many things about this book felt so familiar - the anxiety of small towns slowly dying, jobs and services moving further and further away into bigger cities, a cause bringing a whole community together and not necessarily in a good way, xenophobia and racism, misogyny and rape culture.

This book is, in my opinion, about empathy. Its goal is to make you feel empathy for a large cast of characters and their circumstances and (view spoiler). That's a great goal. In fact, isn't empathy one of the wonderful things that literature can teach us? 

I'm afraid this wasn't a good book overall. I'm giving it 2,5 because there wasn't anything wrong with the writing, it's the pacing and narrative choices that were the problem. I believe this could have been much better with stronger editing.

The story is cool - two girls encounter spirits etc. -, but too little time was spent on the story. We have two POV characters: Treasure, whose narration is in the first person, and Ozoemena, whose story is told in the third person. I don't see the reason for this, especially since

Treasure dies at the end and is not the narrator for the whole story.

Ozoemena's story is mostly her daily life and her going to school. This was not interesting. Maybe if this was some kind of a coming-of-age story it would make sense, but the point is the interaction with the spirits. Also I don't really care for coming-of-age stories.

The characters were interesting, but their stories were just boring due to unnecessary and over-long scenes, especially in Ozoemena's parts, and she was in a bigger role than Treasure. I guess the author was trying to set the scene and the characters, but too much time was spent on, well, nothing.

Apart from these issues, the writing was good.

In short: interesting story, interesting concept, uninteresting execution. 

I love family sagas that span decades of even centuries. It's so interesting to follow how small decisions and major world events cumulate and lead the descendants into fates that seem almost inevitable. So I very much liked this book.

I do think that the first half or so of the book was much stronger than the latter half. The characters felt more distant and their lives were kind of run through without as much depth. Still, the story was great, and I loved getting to know more about this particular time period in this particular context. 

This book deserves all the hype it's gotten and more. This needs to become as big as Game of Thrones and Sarah J. Maas and all of the other popular fantasy series. This is without a doubt one of the best fantasy books I have ever read and I can't wait for the rest of the series. (I just realized the second part is already out and I NEED IT)

The author covered the foundations of a good fantasy book so well. The worldbuilding was unique and intricate, yet he resisted the urge to infodump everything about his well-constructed world immediately. There are so many things I still don't know and understand about the world of the book, and I'm so happy about that. I just know he's going to go even deeper into it in the next books and it's going to be fantastic.

The Omehi - the main group in the book - have a caste system that is not there just to prop up the main character, Tau, and emphasize how exceptional he is. I loved that he actually wasn't exceptional at all, and he fought tooth and nail for every step he managed to take in the story, just to be forced one step back.

The powers and magic of the world have their limits, which keeps the story consistent. There are some lines that the main character cannot break no matter how hard he tries. This means that there are no sudden bursts of unexpected power to save him from an impossible situation. He gets himself into these situations and is saved unexpectedly, yes, but these occurences make sense. The story isn't moved forward by happy coincidences - when there are coincidences they, again, make sense. 

This wasn't a perfect book. The pacing got slow during Tau's military training - basically he was just doing the same thing over and over again -, but then again the fight scenes were always great. Even if the author overuses "swords whirling". 

This isn't exactly criticism, but in general Tau is so damn stupid and does the stupidest thing all the time and stresses me out and I love him. It can be frustrating though.

The training also didn't make sense to me. It had this Fourth Wing (?) type of system where the goal seems to be to kill as many initiates as possible. The Omehi's problem is an enemy that has overpowering numbers, and yet they just casually break each other's bones and even kill each other. I guess it makes sense since the Nobles don't give a fuck about the Lessers, but it just didn't fully make sense.

As a gymrat it bothered me how Tau supposedly reached his superior physical condition and fighting skills by training all day without sleeping or doing anything else. That just doesn't work. You will not develop without rest. This is such a small complaint but it did annoy me every time.

Anyway, I could talk about this book for hours, but I will end here and just say that this book is amazing and you should read it.

 I'm finding myself unable to get into this, so I'm dnf'ing it. I'm not sure how far along I am (I've been listening to the audiobook), but I'm at chapter 5 out of 21, so I assume around 25%.

I think first and foremost this memoir is just not my cup of tea and I'm also thinking that in this case the audiobook format was not the best choice. I could try the e-book but I don't really want to.

The concept of this memoir is to somehow weave together Japanese folklore and the author's own life, which I don't think is done successfully. In every other chapter she writes about folklore in a semi-academic way, citing Western scholars, and every other chapter she writes about her own life. Since the folklore was not, in my opinion, tied in successfully with the stories about her life, the memoir is disjointed. She explores Japanese, Okinawan, and Taiwanese stories from an outsider's perspective, which I also did not warm up to.

She mentions Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and probably tried to do something similar, but again in my opinion did not succeed.

Finally, I was expecting a memoir dealing mainly with her bipolar disorder but it just doesn't, unless you want to interpret things heavily yourself without the author offering any analysis. I was not a fan of the writing style either. Could be that it didn't work well in audio, especially the "listen - the penny drops; see - the waves hit the shore; remember - I was happy then" (these are my made up examples but I hope you get what I mean). I suppose the writing was supposed to be lyrical but somehow it just sounded whiny and immature to me. 

I'm dnf'ing this at 68%. The book doesn't really align with my reading goals at the moment, so I'm not sure why I even wanted to read it. Also I just haven't managed to get invested, and this far along I'm doubting it will ever happen.

The premise of the book is very interesting but I don't think the concept is strong enough. The main focus of this book so far has been covid and conspiracy theories, combined with the indifference of states and the predatory nature of corporations, the things that Klein is famous for.

At this point I don't feel like the book has much new to offer. These topics and points of view have been repeated time and time again. Some chapters are stronger than others, but often Klein just veers into directions that go too far from the point and then has trouble finding her way back.

I'm not against any of Klein's points, it's just that these topics aren't interesting to me anymore if you don't have any new information or analysis to give me.