nadia's Reviews (587)

This is a reread eight years later and wow, what a fantastic book! Now that I'm older, wiser, and have lived through a pandemic, I could appreciate it even more than the first time I read it. The writing is wonderful and the shifting perspectives and timelines work so well together to create an immersive tale. Can't wait to finally read some other St. John Mandel books!

(My review eight years ago was a 4. Upped it to 4.5. Didn't quite get to that rare 5-star "je ne sais quoi"/magic for me.)

I feel bad but I was very bored. A lot of these poems went over my head as well. 🙈

A poetry collection that didn't feel like poetry, maybe because it was very accessible and the narrative strand was so strong. I felt like I was reading vignettes in prose. It's incredible how much can be conveyed by so few words. A great book to read in one-sitting.

Still fun, but this volume felt a little bit silly/too contrived at times. And there didn't always seem to be consistency or clear reasoning in the characters' actions. But I enjoyed the illustrations and thinking about the progress of history through the different lenses.

This is an excellent book — especially on audio as you get to hear the actual interviews (!) — that can inspire climate activism in anybody. The breadth is impressive, spanning everything from politics, Hollywood, the legal system, the ocean, and more. It is rather dense — and most of the facts when in one ear and other the other — but I think it's a book that you should listen on audio and then have a print copy to refer back to. Loved the titular/central question of the book. A very positive, hopeful framing, despite the darkness of the situation!

Not as strong as the first volume, and it felt more like a thesis/opinion/persuasion-piece than a history. I felt the "simplification" of everything more, and this one felt like the authors dwelled on a few points for a bit too long, but it does illustrate certain things – beginnings of slavery and the compounding impact today, the power of fictional ideas in shaping culture — creatively and effectively!

A very creative adaptation of the first part of one of my all-time favourite books. I loved the illustrations, the setting, and the cast of characters. I don't know if I'd rate this so highly if this was my first interaction with the material and if Sapiens wasn't one of my few five-star reads, but this was a fantastic way to revisit some of that material and I've already started Volume 2!

The structure of this book was so fun and clever! I loved it! The wrap-up didn't have as much impact as I would have hoped given the run up to the conclusion but Magpie Murders did keep me guessing until the very end, on all fronts, and the eventually conclusions did make sense in the general context of a contrived murder mystery setup, so a job well done to the author!

(I didn't realise until reading the blurb for this — after I'd finished the book, of course — that Anthony Horowitz created Midsomer Murders! He came into my high school once to do a school assembly — including a reading and takedown of an opening paragraph of one of Dan Brown's novels — and it was one of the most entertaining things!)

Given Wonder is the only book to make me cry as an adult, I was hoping for more from this one (though it has been three years since I read Wonder). It just didn't have the emotional impact I was hoping for — apart from one part — nor did it generate the empathy I was expecting to feel for the titular character. Still, I really appreciated having the chance to revisit this story from Julian's perspective!

This wins points because I did remain intrigued and I was visualising the tennis in my head — big tennis fan — but the narration was rather clunky at times. For example, given Judy Murray's background, I was hoping for rich details that revealed someone who knew the BTS of being a tennis pro and playing at a tournament like Wimbledon, but those parts were so in your face like: "Here is a fact that I'm just going to tell you, rather than subtly weave into the story, because I know a lot about tennis and what goes on behind-the-scenes". And a few of the characters were so cliché and cringe. For someone who has a serious background in tennis, I hoped for something more realistic and nuanced regarding some of the character portrayals.