roach's reviews
269 reviews

 

I've seen the 1978 movie years ago and loved the gritty tale of rabbits on the search for a new home. Eventually, I became curious to read the original book as well and it drew me in very quickly.
Knowing that Adams' book won several awards including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, I genuinely had a good chuckle when I opened the book and the first chapter started with a quote about a blood sacrifice and the stench of death. It set up the book perfectly and I was excited to read this juxtaposition of cute rabbits going on gritty adventures.

I adore how close the book is to nature. Adams clearly took his research very seriously and incorporated a lot of genuine facts of a rabbit's life into the storytelling right down to the ugly parts. Watership Down isn't really ever violent for gratuitous reasons but simply because rabbits do live a vulnerable life and have to navigate a lot of danger. After all, it's even incorporated in the mystical belief of the rabbits about El-Ahrairah, the so-called prince with a thousand enemies.
I loved how the journey lead the group of rabbits through several really interesting situations which involved different strange warrens of other rabbits, each presented with their own way of life. Their own mannerisms and beliefs or philosophies. There is lots of variety in this book and all of it is connected very well through this adventurous travel. The rabbits strategize their ways through obstacles and it makes for a lot of very engaging sequences.

The characters really grew on me and I cared for their well-being. And some of them are just straight-up badass like the strong and heavy Bigwig that literally tells an antagonist to "eat shit" in rabbit language. That was probably one of my favorite moments in any book I've read.

Death is always around the corner in Watership Down. But so is hope and this story is all about that.

 

 

I picked this up spontaneously from a display of poetry books at the library. I was intrigued by the colorful presentation and the title roughly translating to Love in Times of Followers. I was hoping for some nice poems with a modern point-of-view on social media and our lives with it.
It was only when I got it home and read the preface that I learned that this book wasn't really a collection of poetry written for printing, but more of a novelty publication collecting a bunch of social media posts by the author. Max Richard Leßmann is a German musician and has a hobby of posting daily short poems on Instagram. This book is a collection of some of those.
And I really feel like your enjoyment of this book heavily relies on how you stumble over it. If you liked the guy and his music first, then stumbled over his Instagram account and become a fan that way, I'm sure it's cool to see him put his daily writing on physical paper for fans to buy. But if you, like me, stumble over this book with no idea of who the author is and just end up with a colorful book of mostly mediocre wordplay in your hands, that leaves a very different impression.

I think Leßmann's personal challenge of daily writing is a fun exercise for him. But seeing them on your social media feed has a different effect than having them printed on paper. I don't think his poetry is great. Lots of them I found repetitive, mundane or with oversimplified wisdom that didn't impress me and sometimes made me roll my eyes. Certain subjects are overrepresented like falling out of contact with people or loving yourself.
There were only a handful of poems I actually found decent to good, one of which was a fairly lengthy one about the effect of digital media on our lives, part of which I used for my opening quote. But for every decent poem with style and point, there are 10 pages of brief casual statements that don't really say anything of note.

This is not to say that enjoying Leßmann's poetry is a bad thing or that he should stop writing. Far from it. But this just didn't do much for me and I feel like these texts really are more at home in Instagram posts.
 

 

There are two sides to No One Is Talking About This.
The first half of the book is an amalgamation of the "Chronically/Extremely Online" experience with impressive precision. While it doesn't name a specific form of social media and instead only mentions a vague representation called "the portal", the vignettes of the protagonist's experience being active on it are very true to real life and present lots of astute observations about how people interact on social media. The memes, the weird humor, the endless cycles of eclectic global arguments developing at light speed, the overbearing rush of information, the obligatory and cathartic buzzwords, the focus on social problems and the shift in priorities... It picks up on tons of elements of life on social media and how it might shape someone's existence offline.
It's funny and often clever, but I was unsure about it after a while because the first half of the book doesn't do much more than that.
It's all written in short, individual paragraphs, almost like scrolling through a timeline of individual posts. So there isn't much of a coherent narration and after a while, I was waiting for it to get to a point or wondering if I was even supposed to expect some sort of plot.

It's the second half of the book that finally brings it all together properly though. While the first half establishes, in a humorous way, what it might mean to be always online and intensely involved in the social media sphere of the modern days, the second half brings real-life tragedy to the mix and rips the protagonist out of the scrolling and meme-posting, putting things in perspective for her. It is still written in detached paragraphs rather than one continuous text, but now there is a thread to follow and room for some reflective character development.

I think the first half of the book can drag a bit, especially if you go into this expecting a more conventionally narrated story. There are many great pokes at current online culture in there without being too cynical about it, but that part of the book went on a bit too long for my taste. The second half however saved it a bunch, actually getting to a point and presenting some sort of genuine struggle, and with that Lockwood definitely wrote a book that captures the detachment of the online sphere and immediate "IRL" experiences very well. 

 

Philip K. Dick was good at marrying lively scifi with thought-provoking philosophical themes, as in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep for example. Dick was also good at frying his brain with drugs and using his experiences in his later writing, like VALIS, the semi-autobiographical novel that processes Dick's very real encounter with what he believed to be a sort-off divine entity. In 1974, he was struck by a wisdom-filled pink beam, began having hallucinations, and started writing an 8000+ page exegesis, a sort of journal about his newfound insights about the world.
It seems that part of him knew that all of that was madness. In VALIS he creates a story that includes himself as a character as well as an alter-ego called Horselover Fat who experiences the exact same things that Dick did in real-life. And that is the setup for what feels like Dick's journey of self-reflection where fiction and the author's real life constantly blur together.

VALIS is a fully harebrained experience. It's light on actual plot but spends lots of time letting the character(s) discuss all their out-of-this-world ideas and wisdoms. It combines so many religious, spiritual, philosophical, and technological ideas into chaotic ramblings, page after page, that it can feel like the book is frying the reader's brain just like the pink beam did to main character Horselover Fat. It might be a complete mess of overwhelming information, but that might just be the point and it does end up being rather captivating. It's challenging but also funny at points, and while it throws so many difficult and crazed concepts at you about God and the world, Dick seems to be aware of how all of it sounds and makes that a point as well.
I don't know if VALIS is very good as a novel in itself, but it is absolutely fascinating as the result of the author processing his own strange experiences that took over his life in a way. 

 

When I started to fill the gap in my education about the Middle East, specifically Afghanistan, I started out with the country's history and political development. But after that first groundwork, what I was really interested in was the cultural aspects of this country that is so often reduced to its history of turmoil. Azoy's book about the traditional sport of buzkashi gave me all of that: A thorough and passionate insight into a uniquely Afghan past-time and its purpose in society.

I went into this book expecting to learn about the origins and rules of this sport that involves a group of horseriders fighting for the possession of a goat or calf carcass, but I got much more out of it. The depth of the organizational process for such a communal event and the political elements that are at play during these festivities are dissected with a lot of ambition and precision.
Although the subject might seem so super specific, this book gives an amazing insight into the life and values of Afghan people and the author adds a certain personal charm as well through his first-hand accounts with these people.

If you're interested in this country, I highly recommend hunting this book down. 

 

(Quote translated from German.)

Going to trade school and learning about all the things that make capitalism tick in business class also includes all the "fun" idealistic theories of the free market and how actual real-life conditions just corrupt that idea in basically every way. Which is why there isn't really any place that has a definitive free market and instead adjusts the concept in different ways to hopefully turn it into something that works in the real world. And so whole institutions were developed to overlook the market, attempting to balance out healthy competitiveness and social stability. It's a whole complex science in itself and I've become interested in how these guardians of the competitive market were founded and how they work.

Kurzlechner's book deals with Germany's Federal Cartel Office and basically chronicles its entire history from its founding until the time of the book's release in the 2000s.
As expected, there were a lot of dry sections in this and lots of pages overflowing with company names and numbers that I couldn't possibly retain. But overall, this book managed to make the subject rather accessible, and a lot of its written in a casual way. While I wasn't very interested in the pre-WWII era of capitalism, before monopolies were even really considered as something dangerous, it did get a lot more interesting in the second half of the 20th century, when the cartel office already existed for a little while and continually tried to find its footing.

From journalistic backlash towards the cartel office as being the first sign of a "government-controlled market" to the cheers of consumers that were taught about exploitative, corrupt companies thanks to the cartel office's transparency. The difficult creation and development of laws against market-dominating practices and the balancing of the cartel office's power under the eye of the government.
There is a lot to be covered here and the author pinpoints a bunch of major incidents to look at more thoroughly. I especially liked the whole chapter about publishers of opinion-forming media and the significance of monitoring that market in particular, as well as the chapter about the complicated history of the energy market.

As a general overview of this agency's history, spanning so many years, it's a rather approachable and interesting book. 

 

I've been watching May Leitz's YouTube content for years now and always liked her coverage of grimy movies and shock media deep dives. So, when she ended up writing her first novel, the cover art sprouting a bunch of content warnings for full transparency, I knew I'd get into something filthy and dark, but for some reason I didn't quite expect what I got. It makes absolute sense that this story came out of this mind though.

Fluids is an ultra-vulgar, filthy tale of desperation, self-destruction, and human abysses. While it starts with introducing a deeply troubled but mostly sympathetic main character meeting a new girl on a dating platform who bond over their respective struggle to exist in this world, it eventually becomes clear that she is nothing but a bad influence on the other person. Blinded by a skewed and egocentric personal definition of the word love, what might have started as some sort of genuine affection and care turns more and more into a destructive spiral.
It's a deliberately over-the-top and chaotic exploration of someone shaped by trauma and gore media on the internet.
As the title suggests, the book is overflowing with bodily fluids of every kind and suffering is abundant. I read a lot of this book during my daily commutes and I'm prone to some travel sickness. I'm telling you, having that slight nausea mixed with the vile contents of the book was quite the experience.

This book is definitely not for everyone. It's genuinely disgusting and depressing. I wouldn't recommend reading this if you're not in a great place yourself.
The writing is a tiny bit stilted every now and then, but the author also has some creative ideas for metaphors and wordplay. For a debut novel, this is very well written overall and I really liked how it switched between the point-of-views of the two main characters. This was genuinely engaging and I really wanted to see where things were going. 

The popularity and objectification of Asian "values" and aesthetics in a lot of Western parts, often tinged with misogynistic elements, is something I've noticed myself over the years. So, it's great to have a book written by someone involved and affected by it, done with a lot of personal passion and thorough academic research into a facet of sociology that doesn't have that much academic analysis done yet.
The widespread reduction of Asian culture by Westerners to "exotic" fetishes, submissive gender stereotypes that support power fantasies, and a problematic perception of sex work/trafficking is examined and connected to historic roots and the branches that reach into the now, including the model minority myth. (I certainly understand better now why alt-right bigots still love hentai...)
Although this is primarily focusing on the USA and the experience of Asian American people, looking at that specific history and dynamic, it's still a valuable read for non-Americans as what it points out reaches beyond that and largely rings true for any white-dominated country. Aside from that, even just from a sociology and history viewpoint, this is a very interesting look at a very complex cultural development.
It even incorporates very recent subjects like the rise of "incel" communities online and the impact of the COVID pandemic on Asian-American tensions.

I personally wasn't big on the formatting/layout with frequent emphasized quotes and paragraphs, which sometimes made it feel a bit too much like an online article trying to grab my attention. But that is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine and I do appreciate the effort to make the book visually interesting as well. The addition of little art pieces from different artists to break up the passages of text was nice.
Most importantly though, the content of the text is undoubtedly the product of a lot of thorough work and I enjoyed that quite a lot.