Un très bon roman d'horreur/de post-apocalyptique/de schience-fiction/de style Black Mirror/de Stephen King. Oui, en effet, un peu dur de le ranger dans une catégorie. Mais nul besoin ! C'est là la beauté de l'artiste qu'est cet auteur; on lit, on kiffe, on pleure, on éprouve de la terreur. Enfin, on finit et, parfois, comme aujourd'hui, on sourit. 
Accessoirement, je serais curieuse de savoir ce que Stephen King pense des téléphones portables, dont il avait si bien cerné le potentiel danger… Ses craintes révélées dans ce livre sont-elles aujourd'hui confirmées, alors que le peuple devient réellement de plus en plus dangereux et zombifié ?

J'ai lu beaucoup de Stephen King dans ma vie, et je décide enfin de me replonger dans ses livres... mais pas avec un bon roman, hélas. Peut-être par sa petite densité de pages, ou par ses chapitres tout aussi courts (particulièrement les premiers), je n'ai jamais réussi à ressentir la peur, l'angoisse qui caractérisent habituellement les romans du King de l'horreur. Je ne me suis pas attachée aux personnages non plus, pour tout vous dire, je n'en avais singulièrement rien à péter de ce qui pouvait bien leur arriver. Je ressors blasée de cette histoire, alors que j'étais d'humeur à chasser le loup-garou; même, je m'en réjouissais. Dommage ! 

FINALLY, I'm free of this book. It has been a LONG read, spread over many months, and for good reasons.

I'd like to start by saying that the author has a truly spectacular vocabulary, and a great way with words. His prose can be as pretty as it can be laugh-inducing. He could be one of the funniest men in the world... if he were not such a bigoted, sexist american. While we may find beautiful sentences such as "It was spring on the streets, but February on people's faces." in this book, we also can read the most obnoxious, perverted horrors I've seen in a long time. Like, when the author owns up wanting to bring a drunk, comatose girl to her hotel, hoping to "lay his tingling mitts on her splendid buttocks" while she's out of it. Is that sexual assault or rape? Because it cannot be anything else.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but humor's a hard thing to master, and racism/sexism is NOT a prerequisite to be funny. On the contrary. Even if that book's old, it does not change anything. People were already fighting to justice and equality at the time, or even basic respect and decency for minorities, and Bill Bryson clearly wanted no part in that. 

All that the author was willing to do, through his travels and writing, was apparently to complain, criticize, and lament some more. Bigotry, misoginy, and racism were walking side-by-side with him. Gypsies, arabs, women, no one's safe from his wrath, in berween two sexually degrading comments, of course.

Another thing is, there's no dialog, at all. As the author's very busy walking around and spewing préjugés at everyone, he has no time to actually exchange with the population... which makes this book surprisingly long, as well as extremely offensive to every person who's not a white, straight, cis, rich man from the United States of America.

While I don't believe we should blame "the old age of that book" for its numerous, problematics remarks, I do think we ought to just categorize that as "another american's self-serving view of the world". I'm starting to think we just shoudn't leave americans write nonfiction, as they are themselves living in some sort of a simulation, therefore rendering them incapable of observing the reality around their blind asses. This way, we'll avoid trash books such as this one being recommended to me (I still do not get why everyone and their mothers were recommending that book to me. What the aactual fuck?).

To end this note on a happier note, somehow, this book made me want to travel even more than I already want on a regular basis (meaning, a lot). Be it to actually meet the people Bill Bryson had no desire to encounter, or to see the place he, honestly, wonderfully described (as I said, the author's vocabulary isn't the issue), I'm out of that book feeling relieved of having to read more of it, appaled at knowing that this is a successfull memoir, and determined to discover the world myself. While once again, being extremely furious at capitalism, which let thoughtless americans travel all they want only for them to spit on the populations they cross, while actual, curious people cannot because they're poor and burdened by unfairness. Life sucks.

Alright so, I had read this book before. For a long while, as I was remembering liking it, I thought about opening it back up again. This year, I finally did so.
Alas, I'm not feeling that enamoured this time. This book/memoir is made of three types of contents, for lack of a better word. There are texts, pictures, and poems. 
Well, the written parts are very repetitive to me, in vocabulary and sentence rythms... it's, often, indeed written like a diary you do not expect anyone else to read, except, this one got published. There's too many telling, not enough showing: "As he does, my mind plays games with me, repeatedly whispering insecure, heartbreak-induced words in my ear, like worthless, pathetic, and pointless." yes, true, but we need to feel it. I have depression, I live through it, still it feels... robotic? It's hard to describe how I felt reading this book, this time. Detached, I believe. Unmoved, as well. 
To be noted, sometimes there will be a sudden breakthroughs through a paragraph or a chapter, about depression or some other dark feeling. Out of nowhere, something WILL be nicely written, showing, moving. It's just that isn't the case for the majority of the "texts" in the book. And I believe I'm, anyway, not a great target for rich, white american men's memoirs, even if they're gay and depressed. I got extremely annoyed at a LOT of the "motivation speeches" I could see through this book. It's easy to speak when you've got a perfect family, money overflowing your bank account, health and a great support system. This is not my case. Still, of course, I hope the author escaped from his depressive demons!

As for the poems, I must have enjoyed half of them. Poetry is something deeply personal, and we cannot really judge it, so, I won't. I'll just say there were some I really truly loved, and others I couldn't give less of a shit about. An example of some poem that I deeply felt:

"the scariest moment comes

when my eyes remain open

through an hour

empty of answers
"

Finally, the pictures... I LOVED THEM. Every single photography, the way it was shot, the colours, the eye that Connor Franta seem to have for that art is very real. Kudos for that!

Hard for me to rate this book. It is so... weird? Anti-conformist, in its themes and the way it treats these? While one of the main subject is conformism itself, making the book... my head hurt. What I mean is, this story is well written. I felt the convenience store, understood the points of the author, and somehow the character grew on me. 
One thing though; that woman exhibits all classical signs of a psychopath. Does she NOT become a serial killer only because she's being conditionned into being a "convience store woman", as she put it? This never get resolved, and I'm left wondering if there's something I missed or did not get.  
Also, the way society works in Japan is very different from the west. Which isn't a surprise, but still, I do find it harder to relate. In Europe, while you can very well get judged for not being married or not having "a career", it'll be more discreet, more in-your-back than what I just discovered. The dialogs felt very much foreign a lot of the time, and they are, but it didn't help the case of a book that's already particular, therefore not everyone's taste. 
Still, a story to be read, to take a long look at capitalism and society's expectations of its people.

Encore une fois, Pierre Bottero frappe avec un livre d'une rare puissance, et un personnage je pense inégalé auparavant. Pas de changement à l'horizon par rapport au tome 1 de cette troisième trilogie de l'auteur, excepté peut-être que l'ombre s'agrandit... comme notre amour pour Ellana, qui perpétuellement s'élargit. Les mouchoirs ont encore dû être sortis par ici... et ce ne sera pas la dernière fois.

Bon. Comme tout les lecteurs des livres de Pierre Bottero, je me suis évidemment particulièrement attachée à Ellana. C'est donc comme toujours un parfait régal que de la retrouver dans une trilogie qui lui est dédiée, d'autant plus que ces nouveaux livres sont, eux aussi, merveilleusement bien écrits. Cette trilogie est beaucoup plus sombre que les deux précédentes, mais dans le même temps, quelque part, encore plus humaine et merveilleusement belle. Qui a dit que de la tristesse ne pouvait naître la beauté ? Absolument pas moi, et visiblement, pas Pierre Bottero. L'auteur a, contrairement à bien d'autres avant lui, fait un choix judicieux en poursuivant son oeuvre de la sorte. Ces nouveaux livres apportent vraiment un plus à l'histoire, et du bonheur à mon coeur.

Une conclusion parfaite à une trilogie parfaite. Les mots me font défaut pour remercier Ellana d'avoir accompagné ma route ces derniers jours; mais quel bonheur que de l'avoir regardée prendre son envol, puis affronter une prophétie, avant enfin de conclure l'ensemble de l'histoire de Pierre Bottero et Gwendalavir en un seul roman. Dans mes larmes, aussi. Qu'elles soient de rire ou d'émotion, elles ont certainement coulé. Je n'ai aucun regret, uniquement hâte de retrouver ces mêmes livres que je viens de dévorer, encore, dans quelques années. Le temps que le vide laissé par cette histoire remarquable laisse place à l'appel des retrouvailles.

La fin parfaite à une saga/double trilogie absolument... fantastique, dans tous les sens du terme. Des adieux émus à ces personnages si chers à mon coeur, des conclusions satisfaisantes à tous les plots, de nouveaux endroits propres aux rêves découverts... On n'aurait pas pu rêver mieux pour clôturer la saga d'Ewilan. Je ne suis que bonheur <3