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lory_enterenchanted's Reviews (582)
It's incredible how little we know about our digestive system. I think Enders is right when she says it's become associated with dirt, refuse, and unpalatable things we prefer to avoid looking at, but it's time for that to change. The young author does a great job of presenting information in a lighthearted way that is nevertheless intellectually respectable (for the nitpicky, footnotes would help). Since the book came out there has been more research and more books on the subject, but this is still a good introduction to the topic. I hope we'll be hearing a lot more about it and that it will become, as it should be, the ground of our healthy, happy existence in an interdependent world.
After reading Falconer by John Cheever, I wanted to read something by an actual prisoner. Shaka Senghor's story lacks the elaborate phraseology and literary nuances of Cheever's tale, but it's clearly and lucidly written and the story itself packs a powerful punch. Senghor describes his journey into the hellish pit of imprisonment, external and internal -- and wrests his freedom from within, before he is released. It's an astonishing achievement of the human spirit. He is far more insightful and self-aware than Cheever's character Farragut, who walks through his imprisonment and escape as if in a dream.
No thanks for Senghor's rehabilitation are due to the prison system itself, which seems determined to grind human beings into the dust and bring out their worst possible sides -- guards as well as prisoners. But something lives in the individual spirit that can counteract these forces. What we need is to design institutions and procedures that support this spirit rather than crushing it. Accounts like Senghor's are of inestimable value as we confront this challenge.
Most striking to me was the moment when Senghor started to write down his feelings and found that this gave him enough distance and perspective to stop reacting immediately in ways that ultimately hurt him (he had just viciously attacked a prison guard who harassed him and been put in solitary confinement for an extended period). He also became a voracious reader, especially of Black history, social justice, and spirituality, and this put him on the road to self-respect and to understanding the wider context of his painful experiences. Reading and writing are not just intellectual exercises, but spiritual disciplines which release us from the prison of disconnected experience and raise us to a higher level upon which we can move and act freely, because we have not just sensations or emotions, but knowledge and insight into the whole.
A relationship begun while Senghor was still in prison played a large part in the latter chapters of the story - sadly, it seems this relationship was not as ideal as he describes it (see description of the book by his partner, Ebony Roberts). Nobody is perfect, and even those who have made huge steps in self-development can still have unhealed wounds which continue to hurt them and others. However, I hope that both Senghor and Roberts can both continue to learn and grow and raise children to a better life, none of which can happen if we keep chaining people up with our prejudices and judgment and misunderstanding.
No thanks for Senghor's rehabilitation are due to the prison system itself, which seems determined to grind human beings into the dust and bring out their worst possible sides -- guards as well as prisoners. But something lives in the individual spirit that can counteract these forces. What we need is to design institutions and procedures that support this spirit rather than crushing it. Accounts like Senghor's are of inestimable value as we confront this challenge.
Most striking to me was the moment when Senghor started to write down his feelings and found that this gave him enough distance and perspective to stop reacting immediately in ways that ultimately hurt him (he had just viciously attacked a prison guard who harassed him and been put in solitary confinement for an extended period). He also became a voracious reader, especially of Black history, social justice, and spirituality, and this put him on the road to self-respect and to understanding the wider context of his painful experiences. Reading and writing are not just intellectual exercises, but spiritual disciplines which release us from the prison of disconnected experience and raise us to a higher level upon which we can move and act freely, because we have not just sensations or emotions, but knowledge and insight into the whole.
A relationship begun while Senghor was still in prison played a large part in the latter chapters of the story - sadly, it seems this relationship was not as ideal as he describes it (see description of the book by his partner, Ebony Roberts). Nobody is perfect, and even those who have made huge steps in self-development can still have unhealed wounds which continue to hurt them and others. However, I hope that both Senghor and Roberts can both continue to learn and grow and raise children to a better life, none of which can happen if we keep chaining people up with our prejudices and judgment and misunderstanding.
Entertaining mystery set in Sicily, with a structure that could have been too confusing and contrived, but somehow worked for me - the "author" is the title character's nephew, a writer working on a family saga that never gets off the ground, who visits Poldi periodically and ends up writing about her amateur sleuthing adventures instead.
Lots of local color and an eccentric MC (based on the real author's real aunt) make this an amusing way to while away a few hours. I might try reading the next adventure in the original German, hoping not to get too derailed by Bavarian dialect.
Also great to have an older woman as the energetic and sensual center of the story, egging her nephew on to live life more fully, but her periodic bouts of depression and recurrent wish to drink herself to death added a jarring note. Also, her wig slipping off kept distracting me. What did she look like without the wig? Did this not interfere with her amorous adventures? The nephew wondered this too, but she did not answer him.
Lots of local color and an eccentric MC (based on the real author's real aunt) make this an amusing way to while away a few hours. I might try reading the next adventure in the original German, hoping not to get too derailed by Bavarian dialect.
Also great to have an older woman as the energetic and sensual center of the story, egging her nephew on to live life more fully, but her periodic bouts of depression and recurrent wish to drink herself to death added a jarring note. Also, her wig slipping off kept distracting me. What did she look like without the wig? Did this not interfere with her amorous adventures? The nephew wondered this too, but she did not answer him.
A second Kate Saunders book for my "I need something diverting and unchallenging but not totally stupid to read" mood. It fit that bill well enough. The 1935 school setting was well done and Flora's gradual adaptation to her new circumstances, and her seeing sides of herself and others she hadn't before, fit believably into the story arc. The one thing that felt very "off" to me was that the point of the time-travel episode was to make Spoiler Flora's grandmother a better person, one who THINKS OF OTHER PEOPLE, but then she still leaves her baby son??? That made no sense.
"Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has got enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the f*** planet to pieces."
Read this with one of my English students who had enjoyed a story by Cheever ("The Swimmer") and wanted to try a novel. I'd never read this author before and did not know what we were in for.
Falconer is a nightmarish, phantasmagorical tale of imprisonment and escape, more of a series of vignettes than a coherent narrative, of which some or even most of the scenes may be dreams or fantasies. The protagonist, a former WASP professor who rejoices in the name of Ezekiel Farragut, has been sent to prison for killing his brother (an act he denies and which is further explained only in the final few pages of the book). Through Cheever's stylized, mannered prose, we move in and out of his current and past experiences, impressions, memories, and visions, which are comic, repulsive, pathetic, and squalid by turns.
I would not go to this book expecting realism of any kind. It's not a realistic prison exposé. It's a sort of Inferno through which Farragut must pass, coming in the end to a kind of apotheosis, but not giving us anything solid for our tidy minds to grasp. We are only left with the certainty of what another prisoner expresses in the quote above, that in the guts of man is all the explosive needed to blow up the world -- but maybe also all that is needed to redeem it.
Read this with one of my English students who had enjoyed a story by Cheever ("The Swimmer") and wanted to try a novel. I'd never read this author before and did not know what we were in for.
Falconer is a nightmarish, phantasmagorical tale of imprisonment and escape, more of a series of vignettes than a coherent narrative, of which some or even most of the scenes may be dreams or fantasies. The protagonist, a former WASP professor who rejoices in the name of Ezekiel Farragut, has been sent to prison for killing his brother (an act he denies and which is further explained only in the final few pages of the book). Through Cheever's stylized, mannered prose, we move in and out of his current and past experiences, impressions, memories, and visions, which are comic, repulsive, pathetic, and squalid by turns.
I would not go to this book expecting realism of any kind. It's not a realistic prison exposé. It's a sort of Inferno through which Farragut must pass, coming in the end to a kind of apotheosis, but not giving us anything solid for our tidy minds to grasp. We are only left with the certainty of what another prisoner expresses in the quote above, that in the guts of man is all the explosive needed to blow up the world -- but maybe also all that is needed to redeem it.
Another enjoyable read from McFarlane, mixing quirky characters, witty banter, and some seriously deep topics in a way I've never quite encountered before. It's as if P.G. Wodehouse decided to throw some PTSD awareness into the mix of his madcap comedies -- and it works somehow.
The one qualm I have is that in both the books I have read so far, all the main characters are heavy drinkers. They drink when they are happy, they drink when they are sad. They drink to calm down and to pep themselves up, and just for the heck of it. If I had to reckon up the amount of time they spend being seriously intoxicated during the main action of the story and important conversations, I would estimate about 80%. Yet absolutely no one has a problem with that, not an inkling of a notion that it might be going too far or a form of self-medication that should be reconsidered.
Even though there are good messages about self-empowerment and authentic relationships, alongside these is the constant assumption: "We can't really have fun and live life to the fullest unless we are sozzled." I find this a little weird. And sad. Alcohol is not to the human body as oil is to a car engine, something it needs in order to run happily and smoothly. It's a harmful toxin, however pleasurable its use may be, and should be treated with some caution. Call me a spoilsport if you like (Bertie Wooster certainly would), but in our day and age, it's just strange to promote drinking culture so one-sidedly without ANY awareness of the drawbacks.
The one qualm I have is that in both the books I have read so far, all the main characters are heavy drinkers. They drink when they are happy, they drink when they are sad. They drink to calm down and to pep themselves up, and just for the heck of it. If I had to reckon up the amount of time they spend being seriously intoxicated during the main action of the story and important conversations, I would estimate about 80%. Yet absolutely no one has a problem with that, not an inkling of a notion that it might be going too far or a form of self-medication that should be reconsidered.
Even though there are good messages about self-empowerment and authentic relationships, alongside these is the constant assumption: "We can't really have fun and live life to the fullest unless we are sozzled." I find this a little weird. And sad. Alcohol is not to the human body as oil is to a car engine, something it needs in order to run happily and smoothly. It's a harmful toxin, however pleasurable its use may be, and should be treated with some caution. Call me a spoilsport if you like (Bertie Wooster certainly would), but in our day and age, it's just strange to promote drinking culture so one-sidedly without ANY awareness of the drawbacks.
This was a sweet romance with a serious message at its core. I found Georgina an endearing character, and rooted for her all the way. The pop-culture-strewn style of humor, which often leaves me cold, was in this case amusing and the verbal banter well-judged. Somehow, even with a number of truly awful characters (boss, ex-boyfriend, housemate, and stepdad from hell) the overall tone was still comic and uplifting, maybe because they were balanced out by supportive friends, relatives, and coworkers. I'll definitely read another McFarlane and hope it makes me smile as much as this one did.
I was unsure during the first segment about a disgruntled farm wife, but once this set of linked stories moved on to the next segment I was hooked. Four Swiss women with four points of view (the outer two third-person, the inner two first-person), each of whom observes and comments on the others ... their stories deftly linked into a little chain that becomes a circle at the end, rounded out by their mutual concern with another character who at first seems to be only a minor distraction. It's a microcosm of a particular place and time in history that opens up a window into many human concerns that vex us to this day.
I don't want to give away more about the plot or characters because much of the pleasure of this slim narrative is observing how O'Dea builds it up, step by step, out of the lived experience of women's lives. On this historically significant day, these women are denied by male Swiss voters their right to participate politically in society, yet they retain the right to choose - to choose life, agency, empathy, and creativity over passivity, stasis and despair. Yes, all people deserve the right to cast a ballot, but it's our will to "vote" with our hearts that will ultimately determine our future.
I don't want to give away more about the plot or characters because much of the pleasure of this slim narrative is observing how O'Dea builds it up, step by step, out of the lived experience of women's lives. On this historically significant day, these women are denied by male Swiss voters their right to participate politically in society, yet they retain the right to choose - to choose life, agency, empathy, and creativity over passivity, stasis and despair. Yes, all people deserve the right to cast a ballot, but it's our will to "vote" with our hearts that will ultimately determine our future.
While I detested this author's Five Children on the Western Front (I couldn't read more than a couple of chapters because she got the Psammead so wrong), I was willing to try her again with this Victorian mystery and was pleasantly diverted. I thought she did a respectable job with the literary voice while still inserting some rather modern social commentary via the perspective of an independent-minded widow. There was rather a pile-up of Victorian lit and/or murder mystery tropes by the end (an Afterword reveals that the book is actually based on a subplot from David Copperfield), and most of the characters were fairly generic and forgettable, but I'd read another book with Mrs. Rodd in it.
An ingenious puzzle mystery written entirely in electronic correspondence (mostly emails and text messages). As one might imagine, this requires some straining of credulity, particularly regarding persons who exist only via said correspondence. It also seems absurd that a pair of legal counsel would never meet in person to discuss the evidence but would laboriously go over it via WhatsApp. However, I found it compulsively readable and couldn't sleep until I'd gotten to the end. The plot was certainly primary, but the characters were acceptably interesting and it was fun to see how the author revealed their characters through their missives. I enjoyed the "Little Theatre" setting too. In some ways, drama is in some ways the opposite of the epistolary form -- as it relies on people interacting in real space and time. But on the other hand, through letter-writing one can conceal one's real identity, as does an actor. So there was a neat tension of literary form along with the criminal intrigue.