pineconek's Reviews (816)

Mimi: I'm gonna move near a cemetery, what's the worst that can happen??

Also Mimi: gonna sleep in a car overnight with my friends near a weird beach. What's the worst that can happen???

Also Mimi: I'm gonna go down into this creepy secret room, what's the worst that can happen????? 

Junji Ito remains great. 4.25 stars on SG rounded down to 4 on GR.

(read in french but reviewed in English parce que mon francais ecrit est pouri). 

The ice palace is a story of two girls - one is kind, beloved by her school mates, and a generally well adjusted creature living happily in a Norwegian town. The other is a new student, recently orphaned, who has moved in with an aunt she barely knows. But they're magnetically drawn to one another and spend an evening of tension and things unsaid. That powerful scene arrives early in the book, and cultivates in an eleven year old girl saying that she doesn't think that she'll go to heaven. 

And then the new girl wanders in the woods, to the natural phenomenon of an ice palace set in a waterfall, and disappears. 

The remaining two thirds of the novel are tense, atmospheric, and a lot of "no plot just vibes". And the vibes are largely disconcerting. This is a novel about things unsaid and about the social retreat of the girl who is left behind. There's recurring scenes of villagers asking her, begging her, to tell them what happened the night before the disappearance, just to get a clue as to where the new arrival could possibly be... But she remains resolutely quiet, despite herself. 

I'm not sure I "got" this book, and I don't think that I enjoyed reading it. It filled me with an odd sense of discomfort that I can reach to again now while trying to tell you about it. The writing was exquisite and the atmosphere was nothing short of disconcerting. I was left somewhat unsatisfied but...perhaps that was the point? 

Recommended if you're into books where nothing much happens, where the setting is a character, and that feels like a puzzle that's tough to crack. 2.75 stars on SG rounded up to 3 on GR.

Is AI sentient? Do AIs have emotions, desires, motivations? Are they ones that humans should, ethically, respect? 

Chatgpt said no during a pretty interesting chat we had had together, but my desire to anthropomorphize AIs means that that answer doesn't quite sit well with me. Especially not after reading Annie Bot. 

This book follows an AI in an organic body, grown from real human cells. A "cuddle bunny", Annie is the dream girlfriend for a man who couldn't quite make his last series relationship work. She even looks like his ex, with some features "corrected". And he can set her libido, obedience, and so much more, to any setting he wants. But he can also allow her to be autodidactic, as practice for when he is ready to be with a human (unruly) woman again. 

So yeah, this is basically a horror novel. 

Recommended if you're interested in ideas around self determination, autonomy, feminist criticism of heterosexual relationships and, of course, ethics of AI. This broke my brain. 4.75 stars on SG rounded up to 5 on GR.

This is a review for the first three volumes of this extremely charming manga. 

Firstly: the plot is very, very simple. A little girl from the "light" (human, medieval setting) side is abandoned in the woods and taken in by a creature of the "dark" (humanoid, shadow figure) side. The dark is contagious, and any physical contact with a dark one turns a human into a dark one in a matter of hours. 

But the little girl is innocent, and kind, and loves her dark caregiver. She calls him teacher and they bake apple pies and tell each other stories. The art ads to the incredible charm of this series, and result in a pseudo-dark cozycore vibe. The dark one is a tender hearted scholar who wants to take the best care of the little girl that he possibly can. But knights from the light side don't see it that way.

I'm not sure whether I'll continue with the series - while I love the vibes, I'm barely invested in the plot. The stakes seem like they should be high but they're just...not. I'm wholly confident that everything will be ok, but maybe I'm wrong. 😅

Recommended if you're looking for a found family cozy fairytale rendered in beautiful black-ink art. 4.5 stars on SG rounded down to 4 for GR.

The author and I are approximately the same age and had remarkably (disturbingly) similar internet experiences. While I never really got into early YouTube or Vine celebrities, everyone around me did and I remember some of the critical moments described in the book all too well. 

Extremely Online describes how the internet went from classic Geocities websites to what we see in the early to mid 2020s. There's a lot of focus placed on monetization of content and ways in which everything became an ad. As an aspiring YouTuber (who hasn't posted in months, which the algo will punish me for when I get back to it), a lot of this was frightening and frustrating to read. It definitely provided helpful insight into the attention economy and context for what we see in current content creation trends. 

I went into this book expecting less of a focus on internet celebrity and personality cult and more of a deep dive into how internet trends entered non-internet spaces or, conversely, ways in which people abandoned their physical lives in favor of their digital ones. While it took me to some unexpected places, I found the book well researched and insightful. 

Recommended if you're interested in the bizarre logic of the influencer economy and the rise and fall of social media platforms (Facebook, twitter, instagram, vine, snapchat, and tiktok all feature quite prominently). 3.75 stars on SG rounded up to 4 on GR.

My one liner about this book can be boiled down to: if the Lost Apothecary were actually good. 

While the parallels are obvious, my enjoyment of the two books was drastically different. I DNFd the Lost Apothecary due to the writing style, which grated on and annoyed me. I preferred the style of Weyward much more, and generally found the themes more interesting. The structure is similar: we follow three related women, in three time periods (past and present), who are connected by a deeper thread and who draw on similar strengths to overcome their struggles. 

Weyward is a book that you have to be in the right headspace for. A lot of bad things happen to the women we follow (both when they're grown up and when they're girls) and it can be harrowing to read about. I found the handling of these topics to be sensitive and nuanced, and generally found their stories relatable and compelling. I suspect that, based on your own experience, your mileage may greatly vary. 

Recommended if you're interested in following multiple narratives relating to the concept of "woman as witch", reproductive rights, and connections with nature. 4.25 stars on SG rounded down to 4 on GR. 

Note that reading this did lead me to getting really into the songs "labour" and "burn your village" for a solid three weeks.

Returning to library :(

Had to return it to the library :(

The bf and I go to a lot of used bookstores, and I'll often impulse buy something he recommends to me. This is one of such books, where he simply said "this is literally you".

And yes, this is literally me. With depictions of what makes me happy, explanations about a need for solitude and social recharge time, and wholesome comics galore. I kind of want to give this book to my mom.

Highly recommended to my fellow tea drinking and book-loving INFJs, and my only criticism is that I wanted more. 4.75 stars on SG, rounded up to 5 on GR.

I won't lie: I found the first quarter of this book extremely boring and drawn out. But once the action picked up...Woah boy. I'll be holding this one up as an example of why I don't like to dnf.

This book had everything from body-horror corpses to surreal nightmare masquerades to mythical beasts to ripped out tongues to god complexes. And all the expected elements are also there: (suspicions of and paranoia around) cannibalism, the terror of a vast arctic desert, and more nautical descriptions than I ever thought possible. I had no interest in the Franklin expedition (or any exploratory expeditions tbh) prior to reading this but I had a blast combing through wikipedia to lign up fact (and scientific speculation) with this book's fiction
 
Recommended if you're looking for a slow-paced historical horror novel that explores the terror of vast, empty, hostile spaces and the evil that men do. 4.5 stars on SG rounded down to 4 on GR.