schinko94's reviews
107 reviews

This book is so incredibly detailed that I haven't gotten all the way through it (it's over 1100 pages long). However, it without a doubt tells you everything you need to know about the Odawa-Nishnaabe language and its closely related sister languages like Potawatomi and Oji-Cree. It's an absolutely indispensable resource for language revitalization.

I think Jack Ketchum's writing is good, and I'm actually a big fan of the way that he describes the 1950's in this novel. He even speaks about the dark side of that time in his author's note.

The problem is, I don't really know if he wrote the main character convincingly. David isn't that interesting, and it's supposed to be that way, because he stands in for the reader as the observer of the crimes being committed in the book. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if the book would have been more interesting if written from the standpoint of Susan, but I don't think the author would have known how to write a narrative voice for that character. It would have been much better if half of the story were about the crime, and half of the story were about adult David and how he grapples with his thoughts after the fact. That's where all the introspection and guilt and juicy emotions occur.

So, this book is good, but not great. A fast and captivating read, for sure. The descriptive language is good, but if I'm being picky, the vocabulary is a bit elementary, and the torture scenes can only go on for so long before you're looking at your watch and waiting for something else (ANYTHING else) to happen. Then again, I don't think I could write a book like this, so I think it's good to be lenient with my rating. Three and a half stars (not three).

This was a great little novella! I'm fascinated by liminal spaces (and so are many other people), and this book captures the essence of those spaces very well. In this novella, the night is a metaphor for liminality, and all of the behaviors that it can catalyze. You can let your guard down; you can become someone else; you can escape your problems; you can become violent; you can become vulnerable; you can have realizations.

I've always preferred the night for that reason myself. My friends tease for waking up in the early afternoon. But I think it's so interesting that the earth becomes a totally different place when it's dark outside, even though geographically we may simply stay in the same spot.

This novella is my first experience reading Murakami, and I have to say, it was rather impressive. It's obvious to me that Hemingway is one of his literary influences, because his ability to economize his descriptive writing is on the same level. I like this style of writing, but in this story, I almost feel like I wanted more. For example, in my opinion, Shirakawa is one of the book's most interesting characters, but we only get a little insight as to why he behaves in the way that he does. I also would have loved to know a little more about Kaoru and Korogi, because their characters were interesting enough to have their own vignettes.

On the other hand, I think that Murakami purposely leaves these characters' stories to our imaginations, because people in liminal spaces have a certain mystique to them. I think the ending of this novella is rather beautiful, though, because it demonstrates that a lack of vulnerability comes at a cost for all parties involved. As they say, the best disinfectant is sunlight. Four stars.

It's shocking to me that there's a growing contingent of Americans that would like the social conditions of the Victorian era to return. Everything about the social expectations of the society surrounding Edna's life drove her to the eventual ending of this book, because there were simply no alternatives other than the path she chose.

The ending scene is particularly beautiful in my opinion, even if it's tragic. The bird with a broken wing flying above the water calls back to the words of Mademoiselle Reisz earlier in the book, who examines Edna's shoulders and says she must be strong to fly away (and that it was a pity to see weak birds fall to the ground in their brokenness).

Part of me wonders if Mademoiselle Reisz experienced something similar to Edna's predicament earlier in her life, which is why she saw through her pretensions so clearly. We never get that clarification in the book, but it seems to me that her situation (as a small old woman scorned by society) is indicative of what was to come for Edna if she continued her affair with Robert. Edna doesn't have the strength of an artist like Mademoiselle Reisz, though, as exemplified by her numerous failed attempts at sketching.

The woman in black at the beginning of the story is also an interesting character, because she's depicted as following the lovers from behind, for the whole summer that Edna is at Grande Isle. It seems to me that she's the personification of death, or perhaps the personification of Victorian religious and social conventions, which might as well be equivalent to death. She's a beautiful foreshadowing of what's to become of Robert and Edna's relationship, which was doomed from the very start due to Edna's marriage.

This novella was fascinating all around. The plot was a little slow at times but the prose is excellent, and the descriptions of New Orleans Creole life transport you to another place and time. Kate Chopin was very clearly influenced by her contemporary Virginia Woolf, who was one of the grandmothers of modern feminism. In summary, this book should be on every feminist's shelf. Four stars.

Oh yes, this is the original sad girl book.

I've struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. The first half of this novel felt so familiar in terms of the symptoms Esther was describing, although I was fortunate that my mental state didn't progress as far down the rabbit hole as hers. Regardless, Esther in college might as well have been me in college--I so vividly remember being full of hope regarding my eventual career, and then having that hope basically disintegrate when things didn't work out the way I wanted. I remember the summertime, and how I was supposed to be happy, but instead felt tired and like the bright light was hurting my eyes. I even had an internship like Esther's at a literal prison (as opposed to the concrete prison of NYC), and I had no idea what I was doing there. I remember doing risky or crazy things just to feel something. I remember feeling profoundly disappointed by just about every man that I feigned a relationship with.

The feeling of loneliness and numbness sort of persisted even after college until I found Tantric Buddhism, and I realized that my compassion was really what was keeping me around. I loved other people too much. Esther, unfortunately, doesn't share that sentiment in this novel, and it leads her to constantly think about suicide. I really feel for people, especially women, in her situation, because it could have easily been me if I had been a couple of screws looser. We're very fortunate to live in a time where we have excellent medical care for people with chronic depression, and access to medications that actually help rather than harm. In the 1950's, and even after that, that wasn't the case, and sadly it led to the author's demise. RIP Sylvia, your novel is a 5-star work of art.

It was an interesting read; I was fascinated that the author decided to include 9/11 in the story line in between various bouts of the protagonist's sleeping pill addiction. With that being said, the protagonist is also very annoying and also a bit lazily written. The concept of this book still makes it worth a read though; at the very least, Moshfegh is very adept at portraying the experience of depression/drug addiction.

DNF, I got to page 393, or about 55% of the way through. You can't say I didn't try.

Look, I get what the author was trying to do in this book. The house is an avant-garde metaphor for our reactions to trauma, how that trauma changes based on experience and subjective perception, and how the echoes of the past can simultaneously be comforting, terrifying, and isolating. He uses textual spacing and footnotes to create both a geographic visual of the house, and also a meta-narrative which spans across both the Navidson Record and the life of Johnny Truant (who, by the way, is maybe the most boring and unlikable character that I've read to date). In many ways, this novel is a perfect time capsule of the 90's--At once stylistically modern but also primitively naïve in its navel-gazing, self-assured tone.

The problem is that, even though some of the author's methods are innovative, they completely fall flat. I don't think that the author's techniques for writing this novel convey any sort of groundbreaking insight. At their best, they are a tepid and dry attempt to convey the depths of madness and the banality of the absurd. At their worst, they are a pretentious way for the author to spout off big words and appear to be a very deep and academic individual. They're also a way for readers to pat themselves on the back for getting through such a "difficult" and "artsy" book (which I think is why so many people like this novel in the first place, if I'm being totally honest).

In other words, this novel basically confirms that I hate most post-modernism and stream-of-consciousness writing. When done well, stream-of-consciousness is an enveloping experience that allows you to get to know a character (Virginia Woolf does this very well, as does Faulkner in some instances). But if it's done in the way that it's done in this book, it's boring gibberish. I can only sit through so many bouts of Johnny Truant's drug-fueled, heterosexual lust excursions and asinine feelings of terror before I'm so bored that I want to gouge my eyes out. Maybe this book would be more interesting if it were written by a gay man. 1 star for trying but failing to be interesting.

I guess my feelings about Hemingway have changed, because I did not like this novel. I remember reading The Sun Also Rises in high school and liking it, but I now have the sensation that it was because it was a little *too* easy to read.

Henry's relationship with Catherine is utterly boring, and the main character (who is supposed to be a semi-autobiographical portrayal of Hemingway himself) spouts off dialogue in grunts. "Oh darling I love you" "I love you too" "I'm worried" "Don't worry" "When will the war be over" "I don't know" "Will you love me forever?" "Sure, forever." That's what the majority of dialogue between the two characters was like, and it doesn't make for interesting reading.

The ending was sad but I disliked the main character so much that I didn't feel bad for him. This novel would have been much more interesting if all of it were like Book 3, which is where the majority of war action happens. Usually, I expect the relationships to be the most exciting part of a novel, but with the way that Henry and Catherine spoke to one another all the way through books 2, 4, and 5, I was begging for anything else but that relationship.

This book was a long yawn. I wanted a deep reflection about war but instead, I got a milquetoast expression of Hemingway's own thoughts towards women and a side dish of food descriptions. Did I mention there are a lot of meals in this book? Meals are beautiful, but if they're included in a story, they have to mean something. And the majority of meals in this book were totally meaningless. He even managed to make the beauty of Italian cooking sound boring. 2.5 stars (because the ending was actually okay and it felt fitting--It was the most impactful part of the novel).

This is hands down the most important book published in the 21st century. When David Graeber passed, we lost an incredibly talented anthropologist and an even better person. RIP.

Graeber is what Yuval Noah Harari tries to be, but isn't. This work is sprawling in terms of the historical ground that it covers, but the fact that it does so in just over 500 pages is nothing short of miraculous. The thesis of this work is that debt, not money, came first, and that therefore every single "rational economist" stakes their life's work on a system that is predicated on a total falsehood. The myth of barter is an outright lie: There is no society anywhere on earth, at any point in history, that started its economy by replacing its primitive barter system with money.

The implications of this thesis are, as you might expect, profound and unsettling. It means that our entire economy has been achieved with a level of violence so terrifying that it can't be computed. It also means that the pendulum of economic history has mostly swung between one of two maxims: credit economies and cash economies. We are currently in a credit economy, and we will undoubtedly swing back to a cash economy in an apocalyptic fashion. Either that, or we will destroy the planet and our species via climate change first.

This book isn't all doom and gloom though--Graeber ends the book with some optimism and a suggestion to broaden our horizons in order to see our potential futures. Contrary to what our creditors might like us to believe, we do have a choice in the matter, and that choice stems from our understanding that debt is a figment of the imagination. Debt is real in its consequences, of course, but the execution of those consequences also involves the sacrifice of one's humanity at the altar of capital. If we want to build a world that is inhabitable for future generations, we have to act in every way possible to resist the callousness with which modern capitalists want us to remain in debt eternally. Through this resistance, there is hope for everybody who clings to their humanity with enough fervor that it can never be taken away.

This is an absolutely fantastic and comprehensive grammar and vocabulary guide for the Portuguese language. I'm the type of person who needs to know exactly how sentences are put together before trying to speak a language, and this book offered an in-depth explanation of anything I ever had questions about. Absolutely amazing, and I still use it for reference to this day.