I’m not one for short story collections but I am a fan of characters drawn with a lot of empathy, which seems to be the mantra of this series, so far. It also did augment my experience reading the first book. Technically, you don’t need to have read it but there are a few stories where it builds nicely on the knowledge you’d have from the first, to an emotional degree. Almost all the stories naturally orbit the Lucy Barton story of characters. Sometimes expanding on them or circling around. It’s good storytelling.

There are a few moments that feel a little bit over-the-top. A bit too sweet. Especially after the first one, which was funny at times but was pretty consistently sobering. Where some of these shine is often in the portrayal of old(er) age characters, who contrast current events with early memory in compelling ways. Whether the recontextualized school yard taunt to an earnest statement or the movements or current events: Bootstrap economics, autonomy of women, mental health, very forms of abuse. There is an underscore of bringing these things into context of contemporary times with characters who don’t feel all that content part, mostly due to their location and circumstance.

It’s more effective than most collections, but how someone might feel skipping the first book, I really don’t know.

Witty, wry, often humorous. The kind of empathy I think most good stories need to have for short stories to hit. There’s just no time to build anything otherwise. From an old bitty bigot ruminating on an actress she once knew who was very nice for someone who isn’t actually French enough, to the a very short story about people literally In Transit at an airport - these stories are usually defined by a really great rendering of interiority.

I wouldn’t say they’re very “active” and they’re not connected, so they are probably out of vogue. They are exceptionally well written and vary in interest but are never in any danger of being put down by me when that happened, which is probably the best endorsement I can think of for a collection. There’s also advice on reading short stories I did not take: Read a story, put the book down. They are self contained and not meant to be parsed together. I have heard this advice elsewhere, and one day I might do it. Probably, it does make you remember and think on each one more. Even still this was very enjoyable in a 3 sitting format.

Gave it 30 pages—I usually give it 50–but couldn’t handle it. First of all, to Sue the first 10 pages as basically a fourth wall is wild. The priest may have well have turned to the camera and been like, I hope we don’t get bombed eh eh eh! But also, it’s boring and the perspective is broken. Probably, it’s trying to straddle the times when Pino has related parts of the story in great detail, and so it’s comfortable contextualizing certain exchanges and scenes, I’m guessing. Then, it pulls back and refuses information sometimes they you ought to be privy to based on what is established already, when Pino does provide that context, basically. Suddenly the other characters feel like nothing more than caricatures in plays, shouting their motivations and regurgitating trite war scene movie dialogue.

Not my jam. Though, to be fair, I hardly like any war books anyway, so it would have had to be pretty stellar to keep my interest anyhow. Being boring and broken and trite in the first pages is not the way to do that.

This was very promising at the start. The source or primary documents created for this is an achievement. However, they’re also lost on me. As the two protagonists are academics in Victorian poets, uncovering a monumental find regarding two fictional relative titans that would make scholars rethink their entire fields regarding them, the reader, along with them, consumes the documents that propels the story forward. At the same time, life imitating art (within art) the two academics also mimic a will-they-won’t-they perhaps blossoming romance.

If I were at all interested in the large amounts of poetry and the victorians, or even has a familiarity with the stocking horse titans they are based on, I’m sure I’d have gotten more out of this. As is, the meta component mostly interested me. It also got more contrived and convoluted as it went on. Culminating into a tropey and wildly inane ending, at least from my point of view. It is poetic (of course), but also, especially when taking into account Val and Euan’s sudden integration of the plot, just made the whole thing seem very broken, even when fun.

Again, It’s a feat constructing such a thing as this. Yet it’s also, I think, less interesting than had the primary documents not been present, and their contents summarized for the reader. Since they have to be later on anyways, and the actual consumption of them somewhat tedious, there’s only the satisfaction of seeing the interplay between the two stories. It isn’t enough.

I knew of the author from the Kevin Smith God Hates Westboro, but thinks Megan is hot, or however that went. Even in Canada and as a teen there’s some vague associations. It is wild that that teenager arrived at the place she is at now, divorced from indoctrination and, apparently, a pretty great memoirist.

Stories about motivated thinking, cultish behaviours always fascinate. I think because it’s horrific, and a good reminder to think critically. A check-in: what positions do you have that are indelible, and how did you come by them? A woman who grew up in a church that subjugated and molded young women like her is now witnessing in our polarized society, eerily similar rhetorics regarding the way we speak to one another. It really is disturbing.

Good story, probably not a surprise to anyone who had read something similar, but told well, earnest, well structured. It’s a bit unmoored in time and place sometimes, making it confusing. But otherwise she goes far more granular than I had expected and think this is a very smart move by her, since her family who ostracize her may actually read it. I didn’t even know about the whole god hates fangs in True Blood referencing this real life church doctrine. Wild.

Absolutely a modern classic, to my mind. I haven’t much of an interest in fashion but this structure was absolute genius. With something close to 600 answers to a survey, some short stories, personal anecdotes, and some interviews between some pretty high profile figures—from lingerie models, actors, writers, artists, people from different continents, from different stratifications of class—this just immaculately cultivates the most interesting interrogation of embodiment I’ve ever consumed.

The audiobook has a lot of actors, all were great. Presumably the royalties would go to many people, so it’s also just a cool project. It’s different. It’s artistic in the best way. Stories of grief, love, time past, futures dreamed, memories emerging, constructions of urban environments from around the world. Really, it feels like absolutely everything, all experience erupts from this formulation. It’s not just eclectic it’s encompassing, and then gives voice to a staggering amount of people. It’s got photos of mothers explored. Favourite pieces of clothing. Style changes from eras. All of which is in the pdf I got for the audible purchase! It convinced me to pick up the book, too, which is really hard to find.

Absolutely one of my all-time pieces of nonfiction. I was never bored and almost all of the time wildly fascinated.

This was a much more nuanced “disaster woman” story than I expected. From the conception of love, or intense infatuation, with an emotionally manipulative, abusive, and older man—to the metamorphoses she undergoes enduring the relationship.

She’s narrating from a place in the future, looking on things, which is a place I typically most enjoy. As is the case here. There is a clear delineation between what she does/did and how she perceives herself in that past and “present”context. Shes smart yet driven by poor pattern and impulses, enshrined from upbringing and normalized past behaviours from boyfriends.

It’s mostly a descent, but also a way through, which I like. She’s also not unhinged, as I expected. She’s actually quite sane when you learn more about her. I mean, she processes things poorly, but her story feels quite realistic and not overly dramatic or surrealistic. Pleased with how it developed and really liked the voice crafted for the character.

This fantastical Hollywood seems a liminal space. On one hand the mythology it produces, the other what it co-opts from stories of old. Where the studio executive is literally a big bad wolf, blood sacrifice is needed to grease the wheels and keep them turning, and the perception of what you are is in danger of transforming you into precisely that. It’s an interesting world.

As is the case with soft worldbuilding, I’m not sure it feels totally square? There’s no predictable nature or rules, so stuff just happens. Including the ending. I think it’s an interesting concept, and love the representation and message. Queer people ascending to a literalization of stardom, if the only could circumnavigate the straight folkloric death guarding the trajectory, it’s good at driving home that particular message. The ways the system and it’s goons try to mold her with racism and sacrifice and other ways of harrowing her into a corner, those made sense. The rest of it feels a bit too on rocky ground for me.

The prose were better than normal and the narrator fantastic. It’s certainly engaging and, to me, novel. I think I’m just a reader that puts a particular importance on the world building making sense. I don’t need to know everything, but conversely, not all of it should feel like some Deus ex machina every time a fantastic element is introduced, in my opinion.

The cultivation of love derived from kinds of people that should be together, is the initial spark and scene. Lata and family are characterized in the arranged marriage of her sister. Quickly it becomes about finding a suitable boy for Lata, and the narrative unfurls from this heart to characterize a number of suitors and seemingly peripheral components, many of them ideologues, found in the core and extended family, which then proceed to converge like petals around a flower.

In that way, the core story reminded me of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The plot does a great job of shifting the suitors about and showing their character. One day approaching the auspicious, the other on a downward spiral. Both in terms of Lata’s perception of them and their fortunes in the world. Conversely, we also get more meatier chunks dedicated to Maan, a member of the extended family whose story seems the superfluous component. He doesn’t appear to be suitable at all. Rather the opposite, and a sharp contrast.

It’s very helpful, I think, to think of this as the dramatic plot components of something romantic coupled to a philosophical interrogation of passion itself. Manifesting the very best and worst of people. And the many plot threads also form an encapsulation of “New India”, as it is often referred to in fiction. Out of adolescence, the country itself is struggling as Lata does. Separation from parental figures. Becoming an adult. Educating oneself. Asserting boundaries and cultivating a sense of self. All this comes into the political sections, which are not long, and probably the hardest to get through, if for no other reason than the rest of it I found to be completely enthralling.

I read this like I was raptured. I always seem to read much more slowly when I like it a lot. Soaking in every detail and luxuriating in the actual experience of consuming prose work that is just exactly to my taste. Granted, this was still the case with the political parts, but not as much. My qualms, of course, were tramped down as, again, the innocuous became extremely pertinent to the themes of the novel, and paralleled the plot nicely. It is intricately plotted, exceptionally well written, wildly, too-easily readable, and exactly subjective and prescriptive as a novel ought to be, in my humble opinion.

With a cheeky epigraph showing two signs of the same coin: The superfluous, that very necessary thing…; The secret to being a bore is to say everything, turns out to be a very true thing. Actually, I again and again I wondered why a Gibran quote wasn’t in the epigraph. One—my favourite—is a perfect match to this fiction, and what I’ll leave you with:

“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

A trio with an usual trade: bank robbers; an inheritance from their parents, execute well planned heists in Boston. Only things go sideways when Doug, the mastermind, went to jail and rather rationally, divorced from drugs and booze, is looking to ply the trade to get out, rather than further in, like everyone else. When they rob a bank and take the manager as collateral, it’s the unexpected catalyst and galvanizing force to find something apart.

Away from the insular town, his friends all going the same way. Death, jail, drugs, heists. Their lives are the definition of insanity, but only Doug can see this. Patterns are hard to break, just like alcoholism. During the course of the crew combining efforts for the next big job, there is far better rendered character work than some literary work. Only, not for everyone. While one could be argued as intentionally opaque, the other is the cop chasing them down, and he feels fairly paper thin. Motivated by thrills and jealously. Doug, his best friend and his sister, though, are embodiments of degrees of a life set to a pattern without the help of interruption or intervention. Some are perceived easily, others slowly unravel throughout the plot masterfully.

The conceit of Doug’s fixation and projection onto the bank manager is unique and not something I’ve encountered in this kind of fiction. It doubles thematically, symbolically, and is the meat of the plot and message. I think it easily plays out like something commercial, superficial, if not for the work it puts in. This actually made me like the movie even more because it explains the intricacies slowly and methodically along with the plot, and the movie simply doesn’t have the time for it.

Speaking of, this has the handicap of my having seen and loved the movie many times. I expected this to be bog standard commercial fiction, but it’s actually more like upmarket - almost literary. But not quite. The prose work is again, much better than commercial, especially the dialogue, which doesn’t, as is almost always the case with these heist stories, devolve into one-liners. It’s got excellent flow, and embeds a musicality that creeps with the tension. Really, I think my only complaint would be that if it were literary fiction, which it isn’t, the character work for those two would be better. Loved everything else about it.