Love this book. I had forgotten most of it since reading it in high school, and it was fun to remember elements of it as it went along. Fun to listen to as well!

It’s amazing that the style of writing works. How the narrator will start to tell a story, then be like,  wait, let me give you more context, go back and tell a completely different story, then come back to the one she started off with. It builds beautifully. 

Ishiguro is able to describe very specific scenarios that occur within close friendships, particularly ones from childhood, so that it feels like he’s describing your life. I felt such an affinity to these characters. And the penultimate scene is just heartbreaking. It’s not a twist per se - nothing you learn is much of a shock. The slow build until it’s finally laid out plainly before you makes it much more impactful.

Ruth is kind of irredeemable tbh! She was so shitty all the time! It was vindicating to hear her admit it at the end but her “gift” to Tommy and Kathy just felt too-little-too-late. Kathy asks Tommy if he thinks his tantrums were because deep down he understood more about their situation than everyone else. Could Ruth’s nastiness be explained the same way?

Didn’t fully work for me! Which was too bad because I was looking forward to this one. It was well written, but the concept felt too slippery and it was hard to look past. Also

boring that they started sleeping together tbh? There was no build to their romance and no hint to how either of them felt about him cheating on his wife. Felt lazy.

I did like the story within a story element.

One thing I’ll say is that the narrator is very talented

By the first chapter or so, I wasn’t sure if this book was going to resonate much with me at this point in my life. It felt like it was written in a tone that was stuck in 2016 internet humor, what folks in the 2020s might now call “cringe.” But her chapter on her abortion really brought me back in and reminded me why so much of what was being discussed in 2016 was and still is so important. Then the whole second half of the book was amazing. The last six essays or so tell a somewhat continuous story about her relationship with comedy, trolls on the internet, and the death of her father. And wow. This book is a stark reminder of how difficult it is, how much bravery it takes, simply to be a fat woman who’s not hiding. The amount of abuse she (and many others) has had to endure just for existing is unforgivable. I cried during the This American Life chapter. Humans can be incredibly cruel, and I could spend a lifetime reading hateful comments on the internet and trying to understand where that cruelty comes from. There’s so much abuse that I’ll never understand, but being able to hear one singular person own up to their mistakes and attempt to explain why they did it, makes it a little bit easier to exist in this world.

I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, so this book was not easy to wrap my head around. As can happen with a lot of SFF books, I didn’t always fully grasp the world building or how exactly certain tech or magic worked. I took some long-ish breaks from this book and that might be a part of why I struggled to understand the different political/religious factions and how they worked together or against each other. I know it’s not the elegant way to do it, but sometimes I just want a breakdown at the beginning of what we’re walking into.

I enjoyed the shifts in Misery’s perspective, and how they were never really a reliable narrator.

Her quick jump from lying about being a Messiah to fully believing it was a little too fast for me. But I guess that’s how it goes. It reminded me of Paul’s transformation in at the end of the second Dune film.

Looking at the book as a whole, it definitely seems like a critique of the uber religious. It displays how people can be misguided by their religious zeal so that they are unable to empathize with others or be able to fully observe situations.

This book is truly exemplary in its use of personal pronouns. We are viewing the world through Misery’s perspective, and so the narration uses the neutral xie/hir for any character we meet until hir pronouns are revealed to Misery/us. A great example of how we can avoid gendering folks until they identify themselves to us. The last book of Yang’s I read had very interesting gender lore (people using magic to suspend the development of external sex characteristics until they decide for themself how they would like to identify - but a stigma exists in this world against non-binary people who are seen as not being able to “choose”) and it was nice to read another book of theirs, this one where there seems to be no prejudice against any particular gender (and many more than two exist).

I’m curious to hear the reasoning for ending the book with his journey with cancer when it seemed to be the inspiration for the book, and I think would have introduced the overall theme very well. I suppose it wraps it all together, but I think it would have been a powerful introduction.

He used way too many puns and corny jokes for my liking. Another major qualm is that he mentions Big Night on every other page but only name drops Tony Shalhoub once. What’s with that?

Full honesty, if you quizzed me about the content of the book I would fail. I’m not good at listening to non-fiction

Kind of a surprisingly boring ending? But I don’t think that ruins the whole thing for me. I’ve heard complaints that it’s just Klara observing things a lot but honestly I could have read a whole book of just that. I liked that the dystopian elements were subtle and didn’t drag down the vibe. Really interesting to think about this through a religious lens. I’m rambling a bit but yeah this was cool

Definitely recommend listening to this one! Cute and wholesome. Sometimes the essays felt a tad repetitive.