hollowistheworld's Reviews (105)

A fine, informative read about modern art. To my relief - as someone who mostly just find modern art pretentious with a few choice exceptions - the author does not ask the reader to like modern art, only to agree that it is, in fact, art (most of the time, anyway). And as art, it is responding to the time in which it is created. The author spends very little time telling you about the artists as people. He puts them and their art into context and explains how they ended up in the often very bizarre artistic places they did. If modern art baffles you, and you'd like to know just why the cubists decided to go that direction, or how Warhol decided soup cans were the art of the future, I definitely recommend this book. With one caveat - don't listen to the audiobook like I did. The narrator's straightforward read would do excellently in a more lecture-like history book, but the author of What Are You Looking At made an effort to be more personable, more accessible, and most of the jokes flew right by me at first due to the narrator's delivery. 

I've read/listened to some awful books before, but I think this is the fastest and latest nosedive a book has ever taken for me. 

The murder mystery part was good. Very tense. The dumber decisions/lack of suspicion on Isla's part worked with the fact that she was in no way an investigator. The writing style was excellent. The audiobook narration was phenomenal. I was dinging it in a few places- particularly the fact that she'd apparently fallen for Alban with zero story that supported that - but I expected to end this book at about a 4 rating. But that ending. Oh my god.

After wrapping up the identity of Elodie's murderer and Stella's abuser, the remaining THREE HOURS of the audiobook were an infodump I thought would never end. The plot went from murder mystery thriller to soap opera. My suspension of disbelief shattered. At the beginning, we were told Isla got so sick she had only fuzzy memories for a few months. By the end, it's become a solid YEAR she's lost, plus the few months of recovery. And she was a student at that time, but then became an award winning photographer in the following year and a half? She never thinks about not having finished school? Or did she finish school in Australia and somehow transferring credits from Scotland never came up? Or she finished in Scotland and never thought about her diploma? She doesn't even remember applying to school in Scotland? (Surely that could have been used to explain why she wanted this job opportunity in Scotland?) The mystery baby won the genetic lottery to keep the plot going (Isla even comments that the kid looks soooooo much like Jessica!!!!)? When she was hospitalized they didn't realize she'd recently given birth? (Any decent doctor would have checked for signs of SA in a situation like that, and they would have noticed.) It felt like the author just put in stuff to keep in tension and then went 'wait I have to explain all this' and just winged it. What the hell was any of that, and could you POSSIBLY have delivered it in a more boring way. Christ.

At first, I was excited to have found a female thriller writer, as the genre tends to be seeping with sexism, but apparently Anni Taylor doesn't know how to wrap up a plot. 

The concept was good and the writing did a good job of delivering on emotions, but the stories left increasingly bad tastes in my mouth.

If your husband throws away your birthday present because he's mad you know he's getting you one, you're married to an angry toddler. That's not a character quirk, that's a sign you need a divorce attorney. I turned the book off after The Sisters ended with the character being successfully guilted into taking up the family business that she Did Not Want. Living for your relatives is bad. Living for your DEAD relatives is even worse.

May be appealing to the more family-oriented but I am not among them. 

When I was a kid, we owned a lot of poetry books. This was the only one that spoke to me, that made me see poems as an art form. Our copy was lost in a move, and for years I could only remember bits and pieces - the painting of the tree for October Paint Pots, a scrap about train windows at night. I was well into my twenties before I again stumbled across 'The fog comes on little cat feet' and was able to find this book of poems again. It still speaks to me - the silliest of Arithmetic, the soft ache of loss in Buffalo Dusk.

I really liked the first Seanan McGuire book I read, and got several more for Christmas. I really hated the second one I read, and proceeded to ignore its fellows on my shelf for two years. 

This one was just... boring. Have you ever read an urban fantasy before? Congrats, you've read this one! Like Dresden - which I grew tired of years ago - but at least Butcher knows when to use present tense and when to use past.

I was enjoying this book at first - the actual history stuff is in-depth, interesting, and well presented. But toward the end it began to feel less like a history book and more like a massive piece of pro British imperialism propaganda. He says very little about the slave trade when Britain was an active member of it - fair enough, I thought, it's not the focus of this book - but once Britain switched to being anti-slave trade he would not shut up about it. France and Spain are villainous tyrants when they colonize somewhere; when Britain does the same they're heroes following their destiny. And did you know it was actually England that won the American Revolutionary War? Because Herman sure tries to make that argument. I was shocked to look up the author and learn he's not British himself. I think maybe he wants to go back to 1776 and get on a boat.