alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

This book was surprisingly good. It's another one of those "year of doing X" memoir books, and follows the same style -- a chapter for each aspect of the year-long challenge, snappy editing, lightly humorous, would make a good audiobook. In this case, the author, who grew up Canadian Baptist, felt like his spiritual life had grown dull and wanted to focus on learning the secrets of Christian prayer.

A lot of the author's adventures seemed rather last-minute "let's wing it and see what happens" and so multiple times I thought that he missed out on giving important and meaningful context to certain rituals and traditions. But I did like that each chapter had a good takeaway or prayer tradition that you could try out in your own faith practice. In fact, just this morning I tried Pope Francis's five-finger prayer method, which was quite easy to remember and helped me focus while I was commuting and praying at the same time (easier said than done).

In spite of talking with and experimenting so many different flavors of the Christian faith, the author stays quite rigid with his personal theology (which is fine, but he notes when he disagrees with certain aspects of other people's beliefs). Showing his own spiritual progression throughout the year isn't really the focus. At the end, he writes that his prayer life is much more active than before, and that he has built a sort of road-map for where he would like his praying abilities to develop, but as a reader I didn't get a sense of spiritual development along the way.

Anyways, it was a fun, light read, I took a lot of notes to do more research later. And I think it would be a good book to read with someone high school or college age.

This book is exactly the reason why everyone should read books that are from other cultures. I have never read any story that is even remotely similar to this one, with the exception of The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I'm hooked.

Strong images and stronger metaphors, powerful women, and fierce discussion of religion, gender roles, and war. Not easy to digest, but I am in awe of the author's talents and want more.

The story is way more enjoyable now that I am six books invested in the characters. I care about all of them. The emphasis on family is so heartwarming.

Intriguing start but I'm not really sure where the larger tale is going. Demons possess people and the hero discovers that his touch can agitate them and exorcise the demons. He's a loner outcast, and he can cast out demons... Get it? Good art and excellent coloring. Going to give volume 2 a shot.

Loved this. Non-fiction graphic novels are one of my favorite things ever. This isn't really a mystery because the story goes back and forth in time to show the process of interviewing the Green River Killer and the effect the career-long case had on the author's father, a lead detective in the case. But it was interesting nonetheless. I also watched Zodiac this weekend, and it shows a similar situation where the hunter becomes haunted by his search for answers. The most infuriating thing for both of the hunters in these cases is that the killings don't make sense. And that's just it, they will never make sense to anyone who is not a sociopath. I think that's part of why we are so fascinated with murder stories, particularly serial killer stories ('we' ... I am at least...)— we are looking for a way to empathize with people who make zero sense to us.

Zzzzzzz.....

Scott Pilgrim this is not. Besides being totally vapid (which may not be a point against it since I am into that a lot of times on the weekend), a lot of plot points don't make sense at all. Hopefully vol 2 will clear up those doubts, but I don't know if I'll stick around for that. With Scott Pilgrim, each volume was fairly self-contained, and I like that structure a lot better. The art is neat though!

The story bounces back and forth between the MC, an American woman recently arrived in Bulgaria, and memories surrounding the life of a dead man (who experienced trauma during the communist revolution). The modern-day parts were strung out, tedious, and naive, but the memories of Old Bulgaria were magical and beautiful. I thought it so strange how differently written the two story lines were—they could have been written by two different people. I struggled to finish the book, and I would have edited it to be at least 100 pages thinner.

Okay, I don't get why people so vehemently hate this poet, other than they think she doesn't deserve to be so popular and so published as she is? Like, her poetry is what I considered romantic and "maybe someday I will be this passionately in love" when I was like 16. I would have written this stuff when I was 16. She's the Billy Collins of YA poetry. It's shallow, simplistic, fatalistic, if you have experienced sacrificial romance then you will roll your eyes at Leav's thinking that her relationships were true love. But you know what? If it's selling, and people are reading more poetry, and it helps people get more interested in reading poetry in the future, then I don't see what the problem is.

Glad I read this book. So fascinating, and so tragic that Malcolm X was killed right on the cusp of exploring his new beliefs. Who knows what he could have done in the nation?