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| 4.16
| 339,923
| 1869
| Jun 25, 1998
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liked it
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The sheer density of this book meant that a) it took me like five months to finish and b) I would dip in and out of it, alternating a few chapters of
The sheer density of this book meant that a) it took me like five months to finish and b) I would dip in and out of it, alternating a few chapters of this with lighter, fluffier fare to balance it out (there's a cozy mystery series that was a godsend during this time - I absolutely hate it but also I'm on like Book 14?). All this is to say that I read War and Peace in installments, often returning to the story after days away from it, and so I experienced the story in a constant state of mild amnesia. I'm not saying it's the best way to get through an epic with a huge cast of characters, some of whom are related and some of whom are dating and hell if I could remember which was which sometimes (Natasha and Nikolai are siblings because their names both start with N, you're welcome), but it certainly made this book a fun experience. Basically every time I started a new chapter it was like, "Oh, who's this fella? Andrei? Nice to meet you, Andrei! What are we getting up to today?" Repeat for 1,400 pages. I'm not recommending my method, to be clear. And I'm not saying that it was the correct way to enjoy this novel. Yet enjoy it I did! I certainly will not be revisiting it any time soon, but it was a fun ride while it lasted, and now I can be one of those people who can say they've read War and Peace, which seems to be the main reason anyone reads this book. Anyway, please enjoy the one passage I bothered to mark so I could quote it later: "Pierre told her of his adventures as he had never recounted them before, as he had never recalled them even to himself. He saw now, as it were, a new significance in all he had been through. Now that he was telling it all to Natasha he experienced that rare pleasure men know when women are listening to them - not clever women who when they listen either try to remember what they hear for the sake of enriching their minds and, when the opportunity offers, repeat it, or adapt it to some idea of their own, or who promptly contribute their own clever comments elaborated in their own little mental workshops; but the pleasure real women give who are gifted with the faculty of selecting and absorbing all that is best in what a man shows of himself." RIP Leo Tolstoy, Goodreads would have given you a fucking aneurysm. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2023
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Sep 12, 2023
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0374277923
| 9780374277925
| 0374277923
| 3.90
| 1,259
| Feb 21, 2023
| Feb 21, 2023
|
really liked it
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"What is loneliness? Telling one's story, when no one will listen. Not sharing one's truth out of fear. Letting others dictate one's narrative, none o
"What is loneliness? Telling one's story, when no one will listen. Not sharing one's truth out of fear. Letting others dictate one's narrative, none of the versions just right. Attaching oneself to those tales so that one becomes distant even from oneself. Maybe a truly lonely person doesn't even believe they have a story to tell. Loneliness is keenest in the company of others, when comparisons suggest that everyone else is relating to and forming bonds with one another. To lose a friend is to lose an identity - the self defined only by one's relation to that singular person. To make a connection requires risking rejection. To share a story requires an audience trustworthy enough to receive it. The longer a person remains isolated, the more sensitive they become to potential threats. The longer a story goes untold, the harder it is to tell." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2023
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Apr 11, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 4.01
| 164,533
| Aug 30, 2022
| Sep 06, 2022
|
really liked it
|
I wasn't especially blown away by the other Maggie O'Farrell book I attempted earlier (Hamnet), but I had much higher hopes for The Marriage Portrait,
I wasn't especially blown away by the other Maggie O'Farrell book I attempted earlier (Hamnet), but I had much higher hopes for The Marriage Portrait, and it delivered. Much like she did in Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell takes a real-life event of the tragic death of a young person and explores what might have been going on around that event, and what might have led up to it. In this case, the real-life event is the untimely death of Lucrezia de Medici, who was married off at age thirteen to Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. When she was fifteen, she died suddenly of what her husband claimed was illness, but it was rumored that he murdered her. Maggie O'Farrell takes us through Lucrezia's childhood and her marriage, alternating background chapters with happening-right-now chapters of the night Lucrezia realizes that her husband is planning to murder her. The main thing working in this novel's favor is that there's a much more significant historical record about its subject, Lucrezia de Medici, which means that Maggie O'Farrell has plenty of real-life facts and events to work with and cannot simply go HAM making up whatever she wants about a historical figure (so no, nobody's mother is retconned as an actual, can-do-real-magic witch, thank god - sorry, but as soon as you introduce magic into the mix, you can no longer claim that your novel is historic fiction and those are just the rules). Also, Lucrezia is a great protagonist, with an inner strength and proactive personality that keeps this from being a dreary account of an awful historical marriage. I will admit, however, that things kind of fell apart at the end for me. (view spoiler)[The final "twist" was pretty blatantly telegraphed - as soon as the maid is introduced and Lucrezia is like, oh, she kind of looks like me, I immediately guessed that O'Farrell was going to pull some kind of switcheroo and have the maid get murdered while Lucrezia escaped. Because I saw it coming from a mile away, the final pages weren't the gut-punch I imagine they were intended to be, and I ended the book just feeling kind of deflated. Like...it's great that you got to run away to Venice with this painter you just met but your friend got murdered by accident because you left her behind in the room? Does Lucrezia even know that her friend was the sacrificial lamb that gave her her freedom? (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Feb 2023
|
Feb 21, 2023
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1472223799
| 9781472223791
| 1472223799
| 4.20
| 280,666
| Mar 31, 2020
| Mar 31, 2020
|
liked it
|
I picked this up because I was actually more interested in Maggie O'Farrell's most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait. But, thanks to that book havin
I picked this up because I was actually more interested in Maggie O'Farrell's most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait. But, thanks to that book having a sizeable waiting list already, I decided to try Hamnet instead. This novel really crystallized an opinion that I didn't even realize I had: I don't really care about William Shakespeare as a person! I don't care if he was secretly multiple people or Christopher Marlowe or the Duke of Buckingham or whatever. I'm never super interested in those "but what about the author behind the famous book?" explorations, because usually the answer is not very interesting or illuminating! And since we know almost nothing about William Shakespeare the person, authors attempting to create fictionalized accounts of his life basically have carte blanche to make up whatever they want. Case in point: Hamnet takes the fact that William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died (cause unknown) when he was very young, and then several years later, Shakespeare published a play about a man with a very similar name to his dead son. Maggie O'Farrell takes what very well could be just a weird coincidence and spins it into, "what if William Shakespeare's son Hamnet died of the plague and Shakespeare dealt with that grief by writing a play about a man in his early twenties named Hamlet who gets visited by his father's ghost and told to avenge his murder. Also what if Shakespeare's wife had magic powers." I mean, sure! To paraphrase Mac on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that doesn't sound right but I don't know enough about Shakespeare's life to dispute it. I dunno guys, this one just didn't hit me in the right way. On the one hand, this is a very beautiful exploration of grief and how families heal (or don't heal, in some cases) from a shared trauma in a time when the entire country is experiencing similar traumas as a result of a plague (HAHAHA GEE WONDER WHAT THAT FEELS LIKE). But I can't get past the Shakespeare of it all, and how O'Farrell is trying (unconvincingly, as far as I'm concerned) to retcon Hamlet as some sort of outlet for Shakespeare's grief about his dead son. I'm sorry, I'm not buying it! Still going to try to get my hands on a copy of The Marriage Portrait, though. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2022
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0486822184
| 9780486822181
| 0486822184
| 4.21
| 811,986
| 1862
| Apr 18, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
I had kind of a weird journey with this one. I never sat down with a physical paper-and-ink copy of the novel; instead I had it downloaded as a free e
I had kind of a weird journey with this one. I never sat down with a physical paper-and-ink copy of the novel; instead I had it downloaded as a free ebook on my phone. I would read a few pages while I was waiting for the bus, or if there was downtime at work, but otherwise I didn't focus too much of my energy on finishing the book. This is probably why it took me, I estimate, about five years to read Les Miserables. The other main reason, which will not surprise anyone who's attempted to crack open a Hugo epic, is that this fucker is loooooooooong. Like. It's so goddamn long. And more often than not, Hugo's lengthy digressions ("Hey, who wants to hear a chapters-long description of the Battle of Waterloo? Nobody? Too bad!") or insistence on giving a full backstory to just about every character who appears in the book are extremely frustrating more often than they're illuminating. Remember how Jean Valjean's story kicks off when he gets caught breaking into a bishop's house and the bishop gives him the silver candlesticks? In the musical version it's one scene. In the book, you have to get through the bishop's entire life story before he gets to give Valjean the candlesticks and complete his one (1) task in the whole novel. This book, in other words, is not for the faint of heart or short of patience. But here's the thing: Victor Hugo is the master of the long game. There is a reason he makes you learn everything about the bishop, so we can understand exactly why he gives Valjean the candlesticks. He makes us sit through multiple chapters about Waterloo because it's going to come back around to Marius, and we need that entire backstory. He makes us wait while he describes the history of the Parisian sewers, because when he sets a crucial scene there he wants to make sure we can see it, and understand the geography of the setting and its dangers. And yes, he goes on lengthy digressions where he discusses stuff like the fall of empires, but you can't even get that annoyed with him when his random digressions sound like this: "Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved." It's a slog, but Les Miserables rewards the patient reader. Ultimately, this is a heart-wrenching epic that covers hundreds of characters and decades of time, and makes you wade through chapters and chapters of what seems like random information, but Hugo knits it all together and by the end you understand that every single digression and every minor character played a crucial role in the final product. It's beautiful and frustrating and exciting and boring and tragic and funny, and you won't regret giving it the time it deserves. "These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps. To love, or to have loved - this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfillment." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Dec 2021
|
Feb 28, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1594634491
| 9781594634499
| 1594634491
| 3.68
| 60,993
| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
Matrix: Latin, originally meaning "mother" or, in even older cases, "womb." "The queen said that she had news, oh what delightful news, what relief, sh Matrix: Latin, originally meaning "mother" or, in even older cases, "womb." "The queen said that she had news, oh what delightful news, what relief, she had just now received the papal dispensation, the poor horse had exploded its heart it had galloped so fast to bring it here this morning. That, due to her, the queen's, own efforts over these months, this poor illegitimate Marie from nowhere in Le Maine had at last been made prioress of a royal abbey. Wasn't that wonderful. Now at least they knew what to do with this odd half sister to the crown. Now they had a use for Marie at last." Marie is seventeen years old and an outcast at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine - she's not pretty, she's unnaturally tall, and worst of all, she's an unwanted royal bastard. We meet her as she's riding towards a rundown abbey in England, in the spring of 1158, having just been exiled from court on the pretense of making her the prioress of the abbey. When she gets there, Marie finds about a dozen nuns, all starving or dying of disease, and has to make a choice: is she going to wallow in her sadness and anger at being kicked out of court, or is she going to make something of this seemingly-doomed abbey that she's been forced to run? Lauren Groff could have easily made this book about any random young noblewoman who gets banished to an abbey - imprisoning a woman with the nuns was a common practice in the Middle Ages for anyone who was difficult, or just unmarriageable. And the lack of historical records about this time period, particularly records concerning what women were up to at the time, makes it easy for an author to create their own version of events. But Groff does something really interesting where she makes her protagonist the future Marie de France, who really existed and wrote a series of short fairy tales called The Lais of Marie de France (which I actually read for a college English class once, so that was a cool connection for me). Matrix covers the span of her life, and shows us how Marie slowly came into her role as prioress, assuming responsibility for the nuns under her care and turning the abbey first into a thriving, profitable enterprise (one of her first brilliant ideas - the nuns will work in a scriptorium, and because women aren't supposed to copy manuscripts, they can offer the work for less than the monks charge) and eventually a veritable fortress where the nuns are able to completely insulate themselves from the outside world. At the same time, she grapples with her faith and eventually comes around to her own way of worshipping and believing. It's also just really, really good historic fiction. Whenever Groff does the required "here's what's happening in the world of medieval current events" update (and these are rare, which makes sense because the story takes place entirely within an isolated abbey) it feels organic to the story, rather than the author trying to show off how much research they did or trying to fulfill a checklist of "here are the things that readers associate with this time period that I have to mention." And besides that, I can't really explain it any better except to say that all the characters feel medieval. One mark of lazy historic fiction is that it feels like the author just took modern characters and stuck them into a historical setting without making any adjustments, and there's none of that here. The world of Lauren Groff's abbey feels well researched and thoroughly understood in a way that doesn't make itself obvious, and the characters feel like true products of their time. Stunning and compelling, all around. "She brings her attention in close, because the nuns all around her are singing. The abbess's milky eyes are shut in fervor, her voice rises silvery and sure above the rest. And this song Marie can see in waves made visible. The song rises from the mouths of the nuns in puffs of white breath, it expands as it flies, it touches the tall white ceiling and collects there until it grows so heavy that it begins to pour down the walls and the pillars and the windows in a cascade; it trickles back across the stone floor to where the nuns' clogs press, and up through their wooden heels and it reaches tender living skin and passes into the blood and purifies itself as it rolls through their bodies, up through the stinking entrails and the breath exhaled from the lungs. And the song that rises into them and leaves their mouths is prayer intensified, redoubled in its strength every time it pours through them anew. It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird's because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Nov 2021
|
Nov 16, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1419757598
| 9781419757594
| 1419757598
| 3.78
| 32,596
| Aug 21, 2019
| Sep 07, 2021
|
it was ok
|
The best and briefest way I can think of to explain how this novel failed me was by saying that it felt like I just read an extended excerpt from a mu
The best and briefest way I can think of to explain how this novel failed me was by saying that it felt like I just read an extended excerpt from a much longer novel. There's really nothing here - just a quick little 200-page novella that doesn't have the time or space necessary to develop the characters, complicate the plot, or explore any of the multiple interesting potential angles the story could have gone into. The Mad Women's Ball is Victoria Mas's debut novel (and uh, it shows), taking place at an infamous women's asylum in 1800's Paris. Our two main characters are Genevieve, a respected and long-term nurse at the asylum whom the patients call "The Matron"; and Eugenie, a young woman from a bourgeois family who is locked away by her family after she claims she can communicate with spirits. The two women forge an unlikely connection and hatch a plan for Eugenie to escape the asylum on the one night a year when the hospital is open to the public: the famous Lenten ball, when the patients are allowed to dress up and mingle with the Parisian citizens who have come to witness the spectacle. The first and most glaring problem with this novel is that Eugenie's "gift" of speaking to the dead is clearly established as a fact. There is absolutely no doubt or ambiguity surrounding her claim that the dead communicate with her, at any point in the story. The fact that Mas had an opportunity to make Eugenie's spiritualist claims a little more suspicious and give the readers space to wonder if maybe she is struggling with a mental illness that the 19th century doctors don't yet have the vocabulary for, and then decided, no, it's all definitely real, is extremely frustrating. This could have been a cool Alias Grace-style story of a mental health professional trying to figure out if a patient is telling the truth or merely saying what she thinks the doctors want to hear. Add that to the fact that in reality, every single Spiritualist who claimed to speak to the dead was actually a con artist exploiting desperate people...but no, instead Victoria Mas has decided that her story takes place in a universe where characters are given solid evidence of life after death, and then do fuck-all with it. On top of that, the book is just drowning in what I like to call "Disney Feminism" (Eugenie doesn't want to get married? She likes reading and hates wearing corsets? Wow, groundbreaking, what a fresh character, we certainly haven't seen this kind of lazy feminist shorthand characterization before!!!) and tiresome "bUt WhAt If ThE pAtIeNtS aRe ThE rEaL sAnE oNeS?!" themes that show up in every single asylum story you've ever seen before. And Mas makes the classic debut novelist mistake where she overexplains Every. Little. Thing because she's afraid we won't figure it out ourselves. At one point in the story, a patient learns that she's been cleared for release, and promptly slits her wrists. Mas then treats us to an extended paragraph where she explains, see, the patient has no family outside the asylum and she's been here so long and this is the only place she feels safe, so she wasn't actually trying to kill herself, she just wanted to make sure they kept her institutionalized! But we, as the reader, know all of this because it's already been established in the text, and the fact that Mas doesn't trust us to connect the dots is a little insulting. The second major failure of this book is that the story is essentially a prison escape adventure, but Mas doesn't indulge herself in any of the fun tropes of the genre. Look, I hate to reference Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder's weird masturbatory fever dream that I once paid eleven American dollars to see in theaters, but at least he understood that when you have a group of characters planning to escape an evil asylum, you can have some fun with it. Give us a classic "here's how the escape will go down" explanation scene! Give us a last-minute complication! Give us an unexpected betrayal! God, we don't even get a scene where a character studies a set of blueprints or steals a key from a guard and I'm furious about it. Don't give me the plot description "two women plot an escape from an asylum using a formal event as cover" and then do absolutely nothing with it. There's even the potential for a great twist at the end, which of course Mas doesn't take, and I'm gonna hide it as a spoiler even though it obviously doesn't happen in the book, but what if (view spoiler)[the escape gets foiled because we find out that Genevieve isn't a nurse? Like, maybe she used to be a nurse but then she had a breakdown (and maybe tried to free another patient, with disasterous results) so she was committed, but because she was there for so long and was so beloved, the other nurses let her wear her old uniform and humor her by letting her pretend to boss them around, but because Eugenie just arrived at the asylum and has been in solitary confinement the whole time, she doesn't know this. Her only conversations with Genevieve happen when they're alone, and when Genevieve offers to help Eugenie, the younger girl doesn't question it and only finds out when Genevieve's laughably simple escape plan (seriously there was NO WAY it would have worked) fails and the other nurses reveal the truth. Victoria, gimme a call, we can fix this! (hide spoiler)] Let's hope the movie adaptation turned out better. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Oct 2021
|
Oct 21, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250182492
| 9781250182494
| 1250182492
| 4.40
| 41,377
| Mar 05, 2020
| May 04, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
Looking back through my reviews, I learned that I reviewed Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, all the way back in 2012 - w
Looking back through my reviews, I learned that I reviewed Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, all the way back in 2012 - which means that between the beginning of the series and the end is a span of almost ten years. So there's really no way for me to try to summarize this series as a whole, and I'm even at a loss to say anything specific about The Mirror and the Light, because I finished reading it months ago and can't remember most of the little details (pandemic-related mental fatigue means that writing reviews has become kind of a struggle lately, so I have a backlog of reviews that I'm slowly chipping away at). This series has definitely been moved to the top of the to-re-read pile. All I can really say about The Mirror and the Light is: god damn this series is good. God damn, Ms. Mantel. God damn. "Is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves, the dragon’s footprint; the hand breaking the waters of a lake. His forefathers interrupt his sleep to castigate, to warn, to shake their heads in mute disappointment. At a prince’s coronation, God transfigures him, his human faults falling away, his human capacities increased; but that burst of light has to last him. That instant’s transfusion of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Jan 2021
|
May 28, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316393878
| 9780316393874
| 0316393878
| 3.64
| 88,268
| Sep 20, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
|
it was ok
|
To be honest, I only read this book (okay, technically, listened to it) because I needed to find an audiobook to listen to for an upcoming car trip, a
To be honest, I only read this book (okay, technically, listened to it) because I needed to find an audiobook to listen to for an upcoming car trip, and the library didn’t have a ton of better offerings at the time. I liked Room, because everyone liked Room, but Emma Donahue’s other novel, Frog Music, didn’t impress me very much. But I had heard of this book, so I decided to give it a shot. The story, taking place in 1859, starts when British nurse Lib Wright receives a very strange assignment. In a small village in Ireland, a family claims that their young daughter has not eaten any food in four months. Locals are insisting that it’s a miracle, and that the girl is a new saint. Lib, along with a local nun, will spend two weeks watching the girl, to either confirm that Anna O’Donnell is surviving on nothing but water, or to figure out how the deception works. So my main problem with the book was that Donahue presents us with a very simple mystery at the core of her novel - how is Anna surviving on nothing but a few spoonfuls of water a day? What’s the trick? – and then wastes a lot of time not addressing that mystery with any real sense of urgency. The pace of this novel is sloooooow, and mostly follows the same pattern throughout: Lib gets up, goes to Anna’s house, and sits with the girl for like eight hours. Repeat. And repeat. We are expected to become invested in Lib’s relationship with Anna and her increasing inability to stay impartial and unattached, but I was mostly impatient for Donahue to just tell me how the trick was done. Too much buildup, not enough prestige. Lib is also a frustrating protagonist, because her entire job in the novel is to just sit and watch things, which means she is very, very boring. But also, she’s charming in a weird way because she’s a) a stone-cold weirdo who reacts to people and situations as if this is the first time she’s left the house in several years, and b) manages to completely misinterpret every single conversation she has with another character. Yes, Donahue does give us a satisfying solution to the mystery, so at least there’s that. The problem is the solution itself, which involves (view spoiler)[Anna’s mother spitting pre-chewed food into her daughter’s mouth under the pretense of a good-morning kiss. I just…I cannot. Stop and picture, really picture, what that exchange would look like. We are expected to believe that Lib never noticed anything weird for DAYS, even though apparently she was watching a mother and daughter basically Frenching each other every day. What in the actual fuck, Donahue? (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Sep 2019
|
Dec 19, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393307611
| 9780393307610
| 0393307611
| 4.42
| 20,064
| 1973
| May 17, 1991
|
really liked it
|
“Valuable and ingenious [Stephen] might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to h
“Valuable and ingenious [Stephen] might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’ No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came. ‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,’ he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.’ ‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.” Honestly, all you need to know about this book is this: first, we get so much more Stephen Maturin angst/sadness/character-building struggle (honestly, the poor man goes through A LOT in this one, and I just want someone to give him a hug), plus more marriage-plotting shenanigans with both Jack and Stephen. Also Stephen brings a sloth on board, and it’s afraid of Jack at first, but then he gets the sloth drunk and they become friends, prompting Stephen to exclaim that Jack has “debauched my sloth!” Quality stuff, from start to finish. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Jun 2019
|
Sep 16, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1476746583
| 9781476746586
| 1476746583
| 4.31
| 1,771,493
| May 06, 2014
| May 06, 2014
|
really liked it
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I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajam
I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajamascough*) or they’re an excuse to sugar-coat the United States military as a bunch of good-hearted Captain Americas heroically defeating the Nazis and saving the world from evil (whenever you read an overly-sentimental portrayal of the Allies in WWII, just remember that as this was occurring, the United States was imprisoning their own citizens in internment camps and the French government was selling out its Jewish citizens to the Nazis. I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis were not the absolute personification of evil, I’m just pointing out that nobody’s hands are clean. Remember Tim O’Brien’s words: there is no such thing as a moral war story.) But at the same time, I also hate stuff like The Reader, where authors try to be like bUt WhAt iF tHe NaZis WeRe VicTiMs ToO? (if you ever feel like absolutely ruining your afternoon, look up the “concentration camp prisoner falls in love with a guard” romance subgenre) Basically, I think WWII was a real shitty period of history and is too fraught with moral minefields to be the setting for whatever Deeper Point an author is trying to make. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I first started hearing about All the Light We Cannot See and how great it was, I was wary for all of the above reasons, and I put off reading the book for a long time. But then I finally decided to look it up, and see what everyone was talking about. Doerr’s first good move was narrowing the scope of his book, and focusing on a small group of people – All the Light We Cannot See is definitely character-driven, not plot-driven. We have Marie-Laure, who develops blindness at a young age; and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Then we have Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany who’s recruited at a young age by the Nazi party for his mechanical and mathematical talents; and Volkheimer, a Nazi official hunting a rare gemstone held in the museum where Marie-Laure’s father works. The structure of the book is great, starting a few years into the German occupation of France, in the town of St. Malo right after the Allies have bombed it – and Marie-Laure, Werner, and Volkheimer are all in different parts of the city, each on their own separate mission. Then Doerr takes us back, giving us the backstories of each main character and working towards the moment when all of their paths will cross in the bombed-out city. Doerr still falls into a few of the traps that authors writing in the WWII genre tend to fall into – the bad people are very bad, the good people are very good, and sometimes Marie-Laure’s blindness strays a little too close to “It’s a metaphor for society’s blindness territory. But All the Light We Cannot See sneaks up on you. For most of the book, you’re enjoying a detailed, well-written, but ultimately run-of-the-mill WWII historical fiction. But then, around the time the separate characters are drawing closer to each other and the tension is ramping up, it becomes impossible to tear yourself away, and suddenly you’re submerged in the beauty and the tragedy of these characters and their stories. I’m still not a fan of WWII fiction, but this book is a good argument in its favor. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2017
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not set
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Nov 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0316126063
| 9780316126069
| 0316126063
| 4.25
| 20,054
| Oct 03, 2017
| Oct 03, 2017
|
liked it
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I had kind of a weird experience with this one. I went into Before the Devil Breaks You assuming that it was the final installment in the series, and
I had kind of a weird experience with this one. I went into Before the Devil Breaks You assuming that it was the final installment in the series, and so I spent most of the book expecting everything to be wrapped up neatly by the end, or at least for all the stories to be brought to a satisfying conclusion. So imagine my horror when I got to the end of the book and realized, nope, it’s not over, and now I have to wait for the next one to find out what happens to everyone (as of the posting of this review, the release date for so-far-unnamed Book 4 is spring 2020. Which frankly feels like a million years away.) Anyway, this is all a long-winded way to say that Before the Devil Breaks You is primarily concerned with setting up the action for Book 4. Looking back on it, I realize with some disappointment that nothing really happens in this one. Obviously there are lots of ghost battles and confrontations and revelations, but there’s something insubstantial about all of it when you know that everything that happens is just killing time until the next book. Yes, we get more answers about Project Buffalo and the Man in the Stovepipe Hat, but ultimately, Before the Devil Breaks You is just 550 pages of setup for the finale. Not that it isn’t enjoyable – all of the Diviners remain charming and delightful, and I even found myself getting just a tiny bit invested in Jericho’s story. (That interest didn’t last long, and apparently it didn’t for Bray, either – about two-thirds into the book, Jericho virtually disappears from the story, and after a few pages none of the characters seem to notice or care that he’s gone) Another good thing about this book: without giving away spoilers, I will tell you that people BONE in this one, and I mostly mention it because any acknowledgement of sex in a Young Adult series is always a good thing. (JK Rowling employed awkward metaphors about “chest dragons” to indicate that Harry Potter was horny; Libba Bray just writes that someone got a boner. Bless.) And, as always, it remains creepy as hell in all the best ways. We get a new kind of ghost in this one, brought over by the Man in the Stovepipe Hat, and the Diviners figure out how to fight them as a group. And oh man, I know I’ve said it before, but Libba Bray is so good at creepy: “At the end of the hall, the mist thickened into a dense bank of living fog, shadows among shadows. Vague forms emerged, indistinct from one another. The same pallid skin peeling off in ribbons of rotting flesh. Diseased mouths dripping with oily black drool. Rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. Their eyes were the gray-white of pond ice and seemed to see nothing. Instead, the ghosts swept their heads left and right, sniffing in the way an animal hunting prey would.” But even as I admit that this book is kind of a giant stalling tactic, I have to acknowledge that there’s something much bigger brewing under the surface of this series. Libba Bray, in addition to casually throwing all kinds of diversity into her books like it’s not even that hard (I really didn’t intend for this review to turn into a JK Rowling callout post, but there it is), is using a silly ghost hunting story to teach her readers something much more serious and important. I’ve mentioned before that Bray isn’t afraid to talk about the less-fun aspects of the Jazz Age, like the Immigration Act and the eugenics movement, and she goes all in on this one. She is not for one second pulling her punches when it comes to showing the dark underbelly of America, and the rotten foundations the country is built on. “The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with the snap of a rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: a theft of land. A theft of witness.” Oh I’m sorry, did you think you were signing up for Ghost Hunting Flapper antics? Too bad. Sit down and shut up, kids, because class is in session. Just in case we had any misconceptions about the level of fucking around that Bray is doing here (answer: none) she gives us an afterword to assure us that yes, this was all very much intentional: “As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions of who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us Americans, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic ‘’great’ past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of ‘We the People.’ We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and our present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 20, 2018
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Oct 2018
|
Sep 20, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393307069
| 9780393307061
| 0393307069
| 4.26
| 23,601
| Jan 1972
| Aug 17, 1990
|
really liked it
|
I've been reading the Aubrey/Maturin series for a few years now, and even though I'm not as loyal to these books as I am to other series, it's always
I've been reading the Aubrey/Maturin series for a few years now, and even though I'm not as loyal to these books as I am to other series, it's always nice to dip back into Patrick O'Brian's well-researched, well-written, and consistently delightful historical adventures. Post Captain, the second in the series, is almost split evenly between scenes on land and scenes on various ships, and even though a lot of people prefer the ratio to skew more towards sea-based scenes, I liked the frequent changes of scenery. And it's always fun to see how Captain Aubrey functions on land opposed to how he functions at sea. The story here gets off the ground when Aubrey learns to his dismay that he won't be paid for the capture of a foreign ship in the previous book, because it's been officially classified as a privateer and not a military ship. This information is revealed through this delightful exchange between Aubrey and his superior, where we see Patrick O'Brian proving once again that historically accurate dialogue isn't required to be stuffy and dry: "'The Cacafuego was a thirty-two gun xebec-frigate, my Lord.' 'She was a privateer, sir.' 'Only by a damned lawyer's quibble,' said Jack, his voice rising. 'What the fucking hell is this language to me, sir? Do you know who you are talking to, sir? Do you know where you are?'" Having already put himself into debt by spending money he thought would be paid, Aubrey spends a good amount of the book trying to do two things: stay one step ahead of his creditors, and get another assignment on a ship, as soon as possible. He's given the command of a ship that is, to put it mildly, a bit of a fixer-upper, and has to try to earn some money while balancing a difficult ship and a more difficult crew. And on top of that, Aubrey and Maturin get into some very Jane Austen-like shenanigans involving gossip, affairs, and marriage plots. Basically my tagline for this book would be "If you thought Pride and Prejudice just needed more sea battles, Post Captain is for you!" And now, in list form, some other delightful things that happen in this book: -To stay out of debtors' prison, Aubrey has to escape England and go to Spain. Maturin's plan for smuggling Aubrey through the country involves disguising Aubrey as a dancing bear. -Aubrey meets a Jewish man at a ball; a few paragraphs later, he murmurs "bar mitzvah" to himself in what I can only imagine as a tone of childlike wonder. -Maturin has an affair with a sexy widow. Whenever they're alone, he calls her by her last name, and I can't fully explain why, but I was super into that. -Aubrey rescues a sailor who falls overboard into shark-infested waters, and then he tells a story about how when he was younger he once dove off a ship and landed square on a shark's back. -Maturin brings a hive of bees onto the ship and releases them into Aubrey's cabin so he can study their behavior, and then can't figure out how to get them back into their hive. -Aubrey has a romance with a woman named Sophie (who I'm pretty sure he marries later in the series) and when he arranges for her to travel on his ship, goes into a full-out tizzy decorating the cabin in a way he that he thinks she'll like. This also requires Stephen to move his bees out of the cabin, which gives us this great conversation between Aubrey and Maturin while Aubrey is furiously decorating (seriously guys, I cannot say enough good things about O'Brian's dialogue): "'We can shift the bulkhead a good eighteen inches for'ard,' said Jack. 'By the bye, you will not object to the bees going ashore, just for a while?' 'They did not go ashore for Mrs. Miller. There were none of these tyrannical caprices for Mrs. Miller, I believe. They are just growing used to their surroundings - they have started a queen-cell!' 'Brother, I insist. I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour. Now there is a great favour I must ask you. I believe I have told you how I dined with Lord Nelson?' 'Not above two or three hundred times.'" I love that so much. I swear, if I ever get married, the line "I should send my bees ashore for you" is going in my vows. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2018
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not set
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Jan 30, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 031632468X
| 9780316324687
| 031632468X
| 3.20
| 26,366
| Apr 01, 2014
| Apr 01, 2014
|
really liked it
|
In the summer of 1876, Blanche Beunon and Jenny Bonnet are on the run. The two women - Blanche, a French burlesque dancer; and Jenny, a cross-dressing
In the summer of 1876, Blanche Beunon and Jenny Bonnet are on the run. The two women - Blanche, a French burlesque dancer; and Jenny, a cross-dressing frog hunter - are hiding out at a boarding house on the outskirts of smallpox-infested San Francisco, trying to escape Blanche's violent ex-lover. In the middle of the night, someone shoots into the women's room, and Jenny is killed. Now, Blanche is racing to solve two mysteries: who murdered Jenny Bonnet, and the secrets of Jenny's past. It wasn't until I got to the author's afterword that I found out that Emma Donoghue based Frog Music on true events: a woman named Jenny Bonnet, who had previously been arrested for dressing in men's clothing, was shot dead outside San Francisco, with a burlesque dancer named Blanche as the only witness. Using court documents where Blanche and others provided testimony about Jenny and the events surrounding the murders, Donoghue attempts to recreate these historical figures as fictional characters, and present her own solution to the mystery of Jenny Bonnet's death. So yes, you do eventually find out who killed her - sort of. The actual historical case remains unsolved, but I thought Donoghue's solution to the mystery was perfectly acceptable, although I don't know how much artistic license she had to take with her characters to make her ending work. Overall, this is an exciting historical mystery, and Donoghue does a great job of presenting 19th-century San Francisco as a city that feels fully researched and real. The thing that pulled me in and kept me invested in the book was the relationship between Jenny and Blanche, so I was confused and sort of annoyed when early in the story, we're also informed that Blanche has a baby that she gave up for adoption. The Jenny angle is kind of dropped by the narrative for a little while as Blanche decides to track her baby down, and ends up trying to raise it herself. Remember, at this point I still thought the story was completely fictional, so I was sitting there thinking, what's with the baby subplot? Can we get back to the murder mystery? Like, if I were Emma Donoghue's editor and this was a straightforward novel, I probably would have told her to cut the baby entirely, since it distracted from Jenny's story. But Blanche's baby does ultimately come into play in the aftermath of the murder, so at least there's that. Donoghue writes in her author's note that after the breakout success of Room, she was interested in trying to write a "bad mother," someone who doesn't have Ma's fierce maternal instinct and is less likeable. If this was her goal with Blanche, she's...sort of successful. Sure, Blanche doesn't want to be a mother, and she's annoyed with her baby more often than not. But eventually, just like in the wildest fantasies of pro-life fantatics, a magical switch gets flipped in Blanche's brain, and she falls in love with her baby and decides she's going to do her best to be a great mother. So, way to subvert expectations there, Donoghue. Look, the simple truth is that not all women are meant to be mothers. I'm not going to argue that Blanche's baby was better off where she initially left it, but there are other options for her character besides "abandon child at a baby farm" and "form strong emotional bond with baby through the magical power of motherhood." But the most irritating thing about the whole baby subplot, as I've said, was that it distracted from what I'd assumed was the main point of the novel. I wanted a fictionalized retelling of two unconventional women trying to break out of their circumstances in a society intent on keeping them under control, and Frog Music only partially delivered. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 2016
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not set
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Jan 11, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316126047
| 9780316126045
| 0316126047
| 4.11
| 32,996
| Aug 25, 2015
| Aug 25, 2015
|
really liked it
|
Libba Bray is one of my favorite authors, but at the same time, I will not begrudge anyone who says that they don't like her books. Like, if you insul
Libba Bray is one of my favorite authors, but at the same time, I will not begrudge anyone who says that they don't like her books. Like, if you insult Margaret Atwood or Donna Tartt or Virginia Woolf to my face, then buddy you'd better pick a second because it's PISTOLS AT DAWN. But if someone told me that they gave Bray's Diviners series a try and hated it, I'd be like, "...okay, fair." The series, so far, is really really good - I don't want to undersell it. But there are a lot of things in these books that you might not love, and I went into more detail about that in my review for The Diviners by Libba Bray. Those issues ultimately didn't ruin the book for me, but I understand why they'd be dealbreakers to some people. But those people also wouldn't bother continuing with a series after disliking the first book, so I can assume we're all friends here. Let's dive in. Lair of Dreams picks up a few months after the events of the first book - after destroying the malevolent spirit Naughty John, Evie's psychic abilities have been made public, and more Diviners are starting to come out of the woodwork. Evie, in fact, has been given her own radio show (she's the Sweetheart Seer, because of course) where people give her objects to read. Meanwhile, an evil force is once again gathering power on the fringes of the story. The plot here is very Nightmare on Elm Street, 1927 - people have dreams where creepy, ghostly entities promise them everything they want, and chant "dream with me" over and over. (Have I mentioned that Libba Bray is really good at creepy? LIBBA BRAY IS REALLY GOOD AT CREEPY) If a person accepts the terms, they never wake up. The "sleeping sickness" starts in Chinatown, and is creeping throughout the city. The biggest advantage this book has over the previous installment is that it's much more of an ensemble story. Rather than focusing primarily on Evie, our former protagonist is sidelined for a lot of the story so Bray can focus on other Diviners, who are more closely connected to the current Big Bad. Some of them were briefly introduced in the first book (like the green-eyed Chinese girl), and others are surprises - turns out, Henry and Theta are Diviners too. With Sam and Memphis having powers, plus Jericho being half-machine, the only one who's still left out of the fun is poor, boring Mabel (don't worry, guys, I remain convinced that Mabel's got something really big in the chamber). Meanwhile, we also get more information about the mysterious Project Buffalo and how it ties in with Sam's missing mother, and two creepy government agents are hunting down Diviners to use their powers for...nothing good, we're quite sure. Also there's a man in a stovepipe hat, and crows, and that creepy blind homeless guy who hangs around Memphis is still Up To Something, so Bray is clearly already laying the groundwork for Book Three (I just wish that the foundations weren't so obvious). The shifting perspectives are good, because having a wide cast of characters means that we have more points of reference for the current mystery, and things get done quicker. It's also good/bad, because in the midst of all these diverse, interesting characters, Evie O'Neill suddenly becomes the most boring character in the bunch. Evie's pretty useless in this book, honestly, and you almost get the sense that Bray is getting tired of her, too - Evie's main role in this book is be an obnoxious party girl, to the point where Evie is stinking drunk during preparations to face off with the Big Bad, and the other characters are well and truly sick of her shit. Theta even threatens to punch Evie in the face, and I can't say I was mad at this. Why would I be interested in reading about Evie hosting a radio show when Henry is teaming up to go dreamwalking with the Chinese girl? Even poor boring Mabel gets to be a badass - her Communist parents instilled her with a healthy distrust of The Man, so Mabel is the only one who notices that the Feds have been trailing the group. Like I said - I firmly believe that Bray is just biding her time until she can release Mabel's full awesome, and when it happens, it'll blow your socks off. (in fact, I suspect that we have an Orange is the New Black situation here, where Evie is Piper Chapman, the pretty white girl brought in as an apparent protagonist when actually she's just there to draw viewers in, and then get them hooked on the stories of the more diverse and more interesting supporting characters) Evie's parts are also frustrating because, after spending so much time in the first book trying to convince us that Evie and Jericho would make a good couple, Bray appears to have changed her mind, and is now whole-heartedly shipping Evie and Sam. Like, I think this is a good instinct - Sam and Evie's banter has always been more interesting than bland Jericho (hell, even Jericho and Sam have a better dynamic and more chemistry than Jericho and Evie) - but the problem is that Bray overdoes it, and indulges in every overused fanfic trope in the book to convince the readers that Evie/Sam is a Thing now. I mean Jesus, they actually have to fake an engagement for entirely stupid reasons, and not tell their friends that it's fake for even stupider reasons! The only thing that's missing is a scene where Evie and Sam check into a hotel only to find that oh no, there's only one bed! The whole fake engagement plotline drags out way longer than it should, and it made me less interested in seeing Evie and Sam as a couple. But that annoying subplot aside, this book is good, creepy fun. The sleeping sickness is done so well and is so scary, but if I'm being honest, I probably should have guessed who the villain was way earlier than I did. But on the other hand, I wasn't even trying to figure out who was behind the sleeping sickness, because I was having too much fun in Gothic Flapper Ghost-hunting Funtime Land. (On that note, having protagonists other than Evie means that the amount of obnoxiously self-aware flapper slang is way lower that it was in the first book, and all I can say is thank Christ for that.) The greatest strength of this series is Bray's refusal to look at the 1920's with rose-colored glasses. Yeah, the Jazz Age had great music and fun fashion, but it also had the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the eugenics movement, and the Immigration Act. Bray doesn't shy away from any of these topics - in one of the book's more disturbing scenes, a black WWI veteran is hunted down and lynched - and isn't afraid to show her readers the racist, violent foundation that America is built on. Even Evie's flapper antics have progressed from harmless partying to warning signs of dangerous substance abuse, and Bray deserves a ton of credit for not falling into any nostalgia traps while depicting this period of American history. It's rocky, it's uneven, and there are plenty of things I could do without, but dammit, Libba Bray's Diviners series is good, scary, messy fun, and I can't wait to see where she takes the characters in Book Three. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
Jul 28, 2017
|
Aug 2017
|
Jul 28, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1101057025
| 9781101057025
| 1101057025
| 4.02
| 110,348
| Oct 01, 2002
| Oct 01, 2002
|
really liked it
|
“I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.” Sue Trinder is an orphan living a Dickensian- “I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.” Sue Trinder is an orphan living a Dickensian-like life in 19th century London - her mother was hanged as a murderer when Sue was a baby, leaving Sue to be raised by Mrs. Sucksby in a "baby farm" in the slums of London. Sue grows up surrounded by thieves and pickpockets ("fingersmiths"), learning to counterfeit coins and commit petty crimes, and then one day she's offered a chance at a much bigger job. A con man known as Gentleman has a plan to trick an heiress out of her fortune by seducing and marrying her (and then dumping the girl in an insane asylum once he has the money), and he needs Sue to pose as the girl's maid and spy on her. But as in all good crime stories, the job isn't as simple as it sounds, and everyone has their own agenda. And it turns out that Sue's target, the innocent heiress Maud Lilly, has secrets of her own that Sue will discover...(Homer Simpson voice) with sexy results. Here's an indication of how good Fingersmith is, and how well it hooks you - I read this book six months ago, but I can still remember every great plot twist and betrayal that happens. It sticks with you, is what I'm saying. The book is divided into sections based on character perspective. First we're in Sue's head, learning the details of the job and going to the Lilly mansion to pull off the con. Just as soon as we feel comfortable, and are confident that we know what's going on, Waters yanks the rug out from under us. The con, we learn, is not what we thought it was, and then, in the next section, we get to read the same scenes again - but from Maud's perspective this time. And Waters isn't done! After that, we get another section, just to drive home the point that every time we thought we had the whole story, we were wrong. Con men (and women), romance, revenge, skullduggery, betrayals on top of betrayals! What's not to love? AND NOW A NOTE ON THE MOVIE: The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook's adaption of Fingersmith, is fascinating for a lot of reasons. First, changing the setting to 1930's Korea works really, really well, and the movie sets just the right beautiful but vaguely suspicious tone that the novel requires. The changing perspectives are handled well too, and as a bonus, the romance elements are lovely and charming and sexy. (fun fact: I saw this movie in theaters, and let me tell you, it is quite an experience to sit in a room full of people all maintaining mature, thoughtful silence while we watch two women [redacted because of spoilers and children present]) Also, if you saw the movie but didn't read the book, man you are missing out, because The Handmaiden cuts off Waters' story about two thirds of the way in, because they just didn't have enough time to explore all the plot twists from the original. So if you liked the movie, please go read the book, because there are some major, major bombshells that you still need to know about. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 2016
not set
|
Jun 14, 2017
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0618663029
| 9780618663026
| 0618663029
| 3.43
| 11,994
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 02, 2016
|
it was ok
|
Well. That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to. I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to Well. That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to. I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to look up a plot description, it sounded like everything I wanted from a novel. The story begins with Lilliet Berne, star soprano of the Paris Opera, being offered an original role in a new opera. But as she reads the story, she realizes that the opera is based on her own life, and exposes secrets from her past that she wants to stay buried. There are only four people who know Lilliet's secrets, and she decides to find out who's working behind the scenes to expose her. As she does, the reader follows her on her journey and learns how Lilliet went from orphan farm girl, to circus equestrian, to courtesan, to imperial spy, and ended as an opera singer. Based on that description, this book should have been my absolute jam. Opera singers! Belle Epoque Paris! Intrigue! Affairs! Courtesans! These are all things that I love, yet I did not enjoy a single page of The Queen of the Night, and I still can't figure out why. Nothing in this book worked for me. Other reviews praised Lilliet as an awesome heroine; I found her dull. Sure, it was impressive the way she was consistently wiggled her way out of one scrape after another (her best escape is stolen directly from The Count of Monte Cristo, and I'll forgive the absurdity of it because I love a good Dumas homage), but there didn't seem to be any spark to her - it was just five hundred pages of "oh, now I have to deal with this. Well, that was a close one." Maybe the problem was Chee's prose, which struck me as very dry and removed - I wanted narration that threw itself whole-heartedly into the fantastical aspects of this story, and was willing to have a little fun with it. Chee's writing takes itself way too seriously, and as a result, I couldn't commit myself to what should have been a melodramatic adventure story. The other major problem was the antagonist. At the beginning of Lilliet's career as a courtesan, she is purchased (literally purchased) by a man she refers to only as "the tenor." But he might as well be named "the patriarchy" because his job is to remind the reader of how thoroughly it sucked to be a woman in the 19th century. Sure, fine, I can get behind a malevolent john character when Lilliet is starting out. But then the tenor refuses to go away. Every time Lilliet escapes him, he just reappears a few chapters later, and she's back where she started, and by the time this had happened three times, I was beyond bored with the tenor. He has nothing to redeem himself to the reader, but isn't evil enough to be a compelling villain. When Lilliet finally (view spoiler)[kills him, it happens about three hundred pages too late. Chee should have killed the tenor off way earlier in the story, so he could be another skeleton in Lilliet's closet, and made up a better villain to take his place. (Also, the murder itself is so fucking easy there's no reason she couldn't have done it literally years ago. And it's stupidly absurd - she stabs him, which, yay! But then she breathes fire at him and it's pointless and I'm just glad that Chee resisted the urge to write SUITABLE FOR FILM ADAPTATION at the bottom of the page, because that's clearly what he was thinking when he wrote the scene) (hide spoiler)] But the biggest problem is Lilliet herself, and the role she plays in this story. It's disheartening that, in a 500-page novel, our supposed heroine never really gets to be anything other than a victim. She's a victim of the tenor, she's a victim of her employers - Lilliet is early Sansa Stark, and it was frustrating. Like, I get that this is 19th century France and we can't exactly have her charging around with pistols or whatever, but give her some goddamn agency, for Christ's sake! Lilliet is reactive rather than proactive, and it makes her a lame excuse for a heroine. She never really gets to be in control, in a book that is supposed to be her story. Instead, she just bounces from one terrible scenario to another, constantly being manipulated and controlled by others. Oh! And I almost forgot to talk about the romance element, which elicited only eye-rolling from me. So when Lilliet is working as a servant (and spy) in the Emperor's household, she meets "the composer." (He gets a name later on, but not before I got my history mixed up and thought he was supposed to be Mozart, so for most of the book I was sitting there laughing and thinking did Chee really just...?) She sees him playing, they have A Moment, then they fuck in the garden and poof! It's true love. I never, for one second, found this romance interesting or believable, and having to read about Lilliet mooning over the composer every few pages just made me resist it more. I never saw any reason for these two to be so in love, and had no idea why they liked each other so much, which made their affair boring and perplexing. Also a major time waste - why was Lilliet wasting her time sneaking around with the composer, I wondered, when we could be doing something more useful, like, I don't know, trying to escape her horrible circumstances or murdering the tenor? It also REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS, readers, that in a story where our heroine is constantly abused, raped, and victimized by men, the thing that finally motivates her to take control of her own life is the healing power of yet another man's love. Eye rolling for days. (oh, and the opera that was going to reveal all of Lilliet's secrets and ruin her life? Total fucking MacGuffin. Thanks a lot, Chee.) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
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not set
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Jun 09, 2016
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345521307
| 9780345521309
| 0345521307
| 3.82
| 299,745
| Feb 27, 2011
| Feb 27, 2011
|
it was ok
|
"It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was p
"It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was probably vanity, wanting to stand out in a long line of women. In truth, it didn't matter what others saw. We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other." In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (writing as her partner Alice) describes how when artists would visit them, Gertrude would talk with the men while Alice sat with the wives. That was Alice's job: Gertrude would have intellectual discussions with the various men of genius while Alice sat in another room and talked about hats or whatever with Mrs. Picasso, Mrs. Matisse, and, of course, Mrs. Hemingway. This illustrates what I found so frustrating about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and, by extension, The Paris Wife: while it's certainly interesting to read about the people who shaped and affected artists' lives, the fact is that these people who were forgotten or ignored by history can never escape the shadow of their famous loved ones. Sometimes these ignored bystanders are untapped wells of unacknowledged genius and influence. And sometimes they're Hadley Hemingway. Look, I'm sure Hadley was a lovely person. If nothing else, she deserves a medal for putting up with Ernest Hemingway's shit for so many years, and for going on to live a long and happy life after she left him. But the unfortunate truth, a truth that Paula McLain's book cannot escape, is that Hadley Hemingway's life did not need its own novel. The book started out strong, when we're seeing Hadley and Ernest meeting in Chicago when they're in their twenties. It's the best part of the book, because their chemistry is obvious and you can totally understand why these two got married and moved halfway across the world together. But once the Hemingways move to Paris and Ernest's career starts taking off, that chemistry and that connection disappears, and we're left with a book about a woman who stood on the sidewalk and waved as a parade of famous people walked through her life. The biggest problem was Hadley herself. I didn't understand her any better at the end of the book than I did at the beginning, and throughout the story I could never predict how she was going to react to a given situation, because I never got a sense of who she was as a person. Her motivations and reactions were constantly baffling to me - sometimes Ernest would do something boneheaded and Hadley would get angry at him; other times she would just shrug and think, "oh well, that's just how he is." And she's so, so irritatingly passive. Hadley is a talented piano player but has never pursued it professionally, but about halfway through the novel she decides (after much prompting from her friends, because Hadley never really makes any decisions independently) to put on a concert. As I read descriptions of Hadley practicing for the performance, I thought, Yes! Your life has a purpose! You have identified a goal and are working towards it! You are finally behaving like a protagonist! Go, Hadley, go! And then Ernest cheats on her and she cancels the concert. Cue sad trombone. After Ernest comes clean about the affair, Hadley once again decides to start acting like a dynamic character and gives Ernest an ultimatum: Ernest will not contact the other woman for one hundred days, and if, at the end of that period, he still wants to go through with the divorce, Hadley will agree to it. Guess who caves and agrees to the divorce before the hundred days are up? Possibly the biggest misstep in the novel is McLain's decision to insert random chapters, mostly flashbacks, from Ernest's perspective, and it only serves to prove that Hadley cannot sustain an entire novel on her own. And I have to say - for a book that takes place in the roaring twenties in an artists' community in Paris, it's fucking boring. Even the Fitzgeralds were dull, which I didn't think was possible. An ordinary story about an ordinary woman who happened to know some famous people once. It's sort of like listening to your friend tell a boring story about how she was once in an elevator with a celebrity. Not everyone needs a biography. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Jun 2015
|
Jun 13, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1594487014
| 9781594487019
| 1594487014
| 3.87
| 63,315
| 2012
| Jun 05, 2012
|
it was ok
|
It's the summer of 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, and thirty-six year old Cora Carlisle is bored. Her twin sons are preparing to leave for college, and she
It's the summer of 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, and thirty-six year old Cora Carlisle is bored. Her twin sons are preparing to leave for college, and she doesn't have anything to do with her time except various charity functions. Then she learns that her neighbor's fifteen year old daughter has been accepted to a summer dance program in New York, and needs someone to accompany the girl as a chaperone. Cora volunteers for the job, but has motives other than just an excuse to get out of Kansas for the summer: Cora's own history began in New York, and she goes there hoping to answer some questions about her past. In the meantime, though, she will stay busy keeping an eye on her charge: headstrong, independent, fifteen year old Louise Brooks, who is only a few years away from becoming a Hollywood superstar. I picked this up expecting it to be a light, fun romp in the vein of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - just two ladies being modern and fun and generally having a blast in a pre-WWII setting. What I got was something...pretty different. It feels unfair to say that the synopsis felt like a bait-and-switch - it's called The Chaperone, after all, so obviously it's going to focus more on Cora than Louise - but it's so Cora-heavy that Louise barely functions in the story at all. Moriarty is obviously more concerned with Cora's story than Louise's, and this is most apparent in the structure of the book. I expected the story to cover just the period that Cora and Louise spent in New York, but instead the book spans Cora's entire life. When she returns to Kansas from New York, what I expected to be a two-or-three page epilogue instead turns into the last 3/4 of the book, as we have to sit through all of Cora's marital drama (turns out that her husband (view spoiler)[is gay, a plot twist that was blatantly projected from basically the minute the husband was introduced (hide spoiler)]) and a quick tour of post-Jazz Age American history, and by itself it's interesting, but the problem is that the shadow of Louise Brooks looms over the entire story, and this is to the book's detriment. The problem is that, when given a choice between reading about a movie star in her wild teenage years and a middle-aged woman who lived a pretty unremarkable life, I'm going to choose the former every time. There's nothing wrong with wanting to write a book about an ordinary woman living an ordinary life, but don't trick me into reading it by luring me with the origin story of a Hollywood icon. That's the big problem with this book - Cora's story can't compete with the one we could be reading, the one about how Louise Brooks left home at fifteen and, by nineteen, had been kicked out of her prestigious dance company for wild behavior. In fact, I almost suspect that Louise Brooks was not featured in the early drafts of this book. I think this started out as the story of a woman who lived in the 1920's and went to New York, and at the later stages an editor or someone was like, "But what if Cora knew someone who became famous later?" and Louise was introduced. If that was the case, it didn't work - I know I said that it's unfair to call the plot a bait-and-switch, but that's what it felt like. Also Laura Moriarty commits the cardinal sin of historical fiction writing: she lets the research show. Good historic fiction should be well researched, but the reader shouldn't be able to tell - in historic fiction, if the reader can see what research went into the book, it doesn't work. Every five pages the characters in The Chaperone are like, "Let's talk about how scandalously short the skirts have gotten! My, aren't bobbed haircuts interesting? Say, did you hear about this kooky new group called the Ku Klux Klan?" etc. Worst of all, Moriarty will insert narration into the story to underline the significance of whatever historical info dump she just featured. When two characters discuss the Ku Klux Klan in their town, Moriarty suddenly fast-forwards to when Cora is an old woman and her niece is asking how she could have considered joining, and Cora is like, it was a different time, dear, and it's jarring as fuck. And then Moriarty does it again: in New York, Cora and Louise see a show, and Moriarty jumps in to tell us that oh my god, you guys, did you know that Josephine Baker was working backstage at that show?! It's clumsy and obvious, and reading the book felt, at times, like Moriarty had a list tacked next to her computer titled Important 1920's Events to Cover and was trying to check off as many as she could. Ultimately, this was a disappointment. Cora Carlisle's story is a good one, and it didn't deserve to be overshadowed so thoroughly by Louise Brooks. At least I got another book to add to my reading list: Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks' autobiography of her career. At least that one will give me the story I wanted to read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Mar 2015
|
Mar 20, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393308626
| 9780393308624
| 0393308626
| 4.45
| 12,916
| 1984
| Apr 17, 1992
|
really liked it
|
It's always nice to revisit Aubrey and Maturin. I've only read a couple books from this series, and I never feel any serious need to find more install
It's always nice to revisit Aubrey and Maturin. I've only read a couple books from this series, and I never feel any serious need to find more installments, but I always enjoy them when I do. And this is one of the best ones - not only because it's pretty similar to the movie version and picking out what they changed/didn't change for the adaptation is a fun game, but also for other reasons, which I will now list: -Plots! So many plots. Almost too many plots. This book is just over four hundred pages, and there is A LOT happening. The main story concerns the Surprise trying to track an American ship, the Norfolk, around South American (the movie changed the bad guys into Frenchmen, first because it connects better to the threat of Napoleon and also AMERICA FUCK YEAH). But there's more. Maturin has a spying subplot, as he often does, and there's a nice scene where Jack helps him figure out where a secret letter has been hidden. Then the Surprise itself is a little fuller than usual, as the ship is carrying a bunch of twelve-year-olds who are learning about ship life (let's call them interns), which was included in the movie - but there's also a bunch of crewmen who were recruited from an insane asylum, and also two crewmen bring their wives along. So in addition to the multiple plots, we also have a ton of characters to keep track of, but luckily they're all a lot of fun. Also we have the tension created between Maturin and Aubrey when Aubrey cancels the former's day trip to the shore and Maturin gets all huffy about it. And there's a big scandal where one of the crewmen has an affair with one of the women and it does not end well. And towards the end of the book Aubrey and Maturin fall overboard (or, more accurately, Maturin falls overboard and Aubrey jumps in to save him) and are lost at sea, and then rescued by a boat crewed entirely by Polynesian women who plan to castrate them (why the hell was that not in the movie?). And then Aubrey captures a bunch of prisoners and the crew of the captured ship and the Surprise have to stay on an island together while Aubrey tries to keep everyone from killing each other. Quick - without looking, tell me the name of the American ship they're trying to catch. See what I mean about almost too many plots? It can be hard to keep up with, but luckily it's all very exciting and well-written, so even if you're not 100% sure what's going on, you're still having a good time. -Lots of fun details O'Brian's books are always impressively researched, but it seemed like there was an extra amount of good insider information about ships in the 1800s here. There are details about the Sunday services given on English ships (sailors were woken up half an hour earlier, to give them time to clean up for services), the sheer number of different people who traveled on ships (see: crewmen's wives and the interns, and it's very cute because the two women are in charge of the kids' lessons onboard), and the ceremonies involved in taking a ship and its crew prisoner. I also now exactly what grog is - I always knew it was watered-down rum, but apparently they also added lemon juice and sugar to it, and someone should really put that in a Mason jar and sell it to hipsters for $15. Additionally, there are a lot of descriptions about the food served on the ship, like this passage about the meal served at a fancy dinner in Aubrey's cabin: "'Mr. Martin,' said Jack, after the chaplain had said grace, 'It occurred to me that perhaps you might not yet have seen lobscouse. It is one of the oldest of the forecastle dishes, and eats very savory when it is well made: I used to enjoy it prodigiously when I was young. Allow me to help you to a little.' Alas, when Jack was young he was also poor, often penniless; and this was a rich man's lobscouse, a Lord Mayor's lobscouse. Orrage had been wonderfully generous with his slush, and the liquid fat stood half an inch deep over the whole surface, while the potatoes and pounded biscuit that ordinarily made up the bulk of the dish could scarcely be detected at all, being quite overpowered by the fat meat, fried onions, and powerful spices." ...yum? Either way, you gotta admire the detail that went into this book. O'Brian knows his stuff. And now we come to my favorite aspect of this book. -Ladies! (yeah!) Ladies! (yeah!) In addition to the two women on board the Surprise (one of whom gets a really good, albeit tragic, subplot where she has an affair with one of the crewmen), there's the previously-mentioned bit where Aubrey and Maturin get rescued by a ship of Polynesian women. Polynesian women who decorate the masthead of their ship with the severed dicks of their victims. Also one of the women jumps into the ocean and kills a shark with a knife. Okay, on the one hand, I understand why this was left out of the movie version, because it would be a total distraction from the whole let's-get-the-French plot. But on the other hand, where is my movie about a ship full of castrating Polynesian women! Scratch that, I want a miniseries. Anyway, that entire subplot is awesome, and combined with the two women who travel on the Surprise, completely obliterates the argument that female characters don't belong in seafaring stories because "it's not historically accurate!" Check and mate, says O'Brian. Also the Polynesian women are fantastic because they prompt this conversation between Stephen Maturin and another man, which I will reproduce in its entirety because that's how happy it made me: "'No,' said Martin, 'I saw nothing but a swarthy crew of ill-looking female savages, full of maligned fury, a disgrace to their sex.' 'I dare say they had been ill-used, the creatures,' said Stephen. 'Perhaps they had,' said Martin. 'But to carry resentment to the point of the emasculation you described seems to me inhumane, and profoundly wicked.' 'Oh, as far as unsexing is concerned, who are we to throw stones? With us any girl that cannot find a husband is unsexed. If she is very high or very low she may go her own way, with the risks entailed therein, but otherwise she must either have no sex or be disgraced. She burns, and she is ridiculed for burning. To say nothing of male tyranny - a wife or a daughter being a mere chattel in most codes of law or custom - and brute force - to say nothing of that, hundreds of thousands of girls are unsexed every generation: and barren women are as much despised as eunuchs. I do assure you, Martin, that if I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left.'" (at this point, I have to point out that earlier in the book Maturin refuses to perform an abortion on a woman who tells him that her husband will literally kill her if he finds out she's pregnant, so way to put your money where your mouth is, douche. But the speech is still awesome, and Maturin is still great.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Oct 2014
|
Nov 02, 2014
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.16
|
liked it
|
Jul 2023
|
Sep 12, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
Apr 2023
|
Apr 11, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
really liked it
|
Feb 2023
|
Feb 21, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.20
|
liked it
|
Nov 2022
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.21
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 2021
|
Feb 28, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 2021
|
Nov 16, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
it was ok
|
Oct 2021
|
Oct 21, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.40
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 2021
|
May 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.64
|
it was ok
|
Sep 2019
|
Dec 19, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.42
|
really liked it
|
Jun 2019
|
Sep 16, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 27, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
liked it
|
Oct 2018
|
Sep 20, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jan 30, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.20
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jan 11, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
really liked it
|
Aug 2017
|
Jul 28, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
really liked it
|
Aug 2016
not set
|
Jun 14, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.43
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Jun 09, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.82
|
it was ok
|
Jun 2015
|
Jun 13, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
it was ok
|
Mar 2015
|
Mar 20, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.45
|
really liked it
|
Oct 2014
|
Nov 02, 2014
|
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