pineconek's Reviews (816)

The best part of this book is the title.

What a banger of a title. Holding out on suicidal ideation because of a small joy in life and holding that dialectic. I wanted to read this based on the title alone.

Maybe I shouldn't do that.

This is less a book and more a transcript of a few therapy sessions that frankly aren't very productive, well structured, or particularly insightful. A lot of the conversation is "I feel this" "have you considered it's ok to feel this?" Or "have you considered feeling this instead?" Or "maybe you don't actually feel that?" and none of these generic prompts really lead us down anything profound. The author and therapist both acknowledge that at the end - there's no conclusion, there's just this. It's unproductive therapy dressed up as performance art.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone and would instead plug Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know as a self-help-memoir written by an East Asian woman that has therapy transcripts and says something new.

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/vni9kSfxaf0

Paper Planes follows two central characters, Leighton and Dylan, as they attend a camp for troubled youth in the summer before their first year of high school. The incident that sent them there is revealed late in the graphic novel, a choice which emphasizes that this book is primarily about our two characters, their growing pains, and their relationship.

This is ultimately a bittersweet read about friendship, navigating romance as a young teen, gender identity, sexuality, class, and race. I looked through some other reviews of this graphic novel and they largely echo one another with praising the ace and non-binary representation in the book. As such, a lot was packed into the 200-odd beautifully illustrated pages of this book and the storyline suffered as a consequence.

Recommended if you're looking for a gentle graphic novel about finding yourself as a young teen, a strong ace or non-binary representation is important to you, and you're ok with a somewhat rushed story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC!

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/iNUD3wZlu7w

The audiobook for this is so striking. This book has left me speechless.

Recommended if you're emotionally prepared to read about a hopeless and realistic situation, want more insight into the realities of sex work in Oakland, and are ready for a punch to the gut.

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/iNUD3wZlu7w

A+ marketing for pitching this as "a sequel to let the right one in and other stories" and putting said sequel at the end of the collection. The journey made me feel like I was indeed living deliciously.

Lindqvist is phenomenal at writing about love and human relationships, and chooses unleash that power in horror which makes me very happy.

A lot of the stories were not really my thing: a shoplifters union, a troll, a Lovecraftian demon, a sea creature seeking revenge... Are all backdrops that I typically sidestep as I prefer having my horror grounded in reality. But gosh did I like these. The prose is so beautiful and paints a vivid picture of Swedish life. My favorite stories were the border (the one with airport security and neighbor's baby), let the old dreams die (Stefan and Karin tho), tindalos (our main characters marriage wrecked me tbh), and the one with the leaning apartments as well as the one with the unborn baby and husband who almost drowns.... oh, and the one with the corpse who covered.himself with a blanket (what the hell!!), oh and..

You see where I'm going with this. The only skips in this collection were stories that were only a few pages long and read like a writing exercise. Everything substantial was damn weird and damn good. 4.5 stars rounded up.

Recommended if you loved let the right one In (and if you haven't read it, go change that) and want more paradoxically gentle Swedish horror in your life.

My annotations for this book included: "bruh same", "lol relatable", and "mood".

Chronic pain is a fascinating social phenomenon. Not only does the sufferer become sick of their own pain, but everyone around them becomes sick of the sufferer. "Get well soon" and "have you tried X" slowly turns into "wow, it's like you want to complain". And that's the state in which we meet our protagonist, Miranda.

Miranda has lost everything to her pain. Her career, her relationship, her sense of self. She tries to control the little she can - a community college Shakespeare production of All's Well That Ends Well. Her cast is rebellious and annoyingly healthy. Good thing three strangers appear to offer her a tempting brew and a magic trick...

What ensues is some fun social commentary with one foot in Macbeth and one foot in AWTEW. "Fun" and "funny" feel like the wrong words to describe this book. Our main character holds a lot of anger and vindictiveness, and this becomes apparent as she (and we) lose our grip on reality.

Recommended if you've walked the path of "sick and tired of being sick and tired', love some good subverted Shakespeare, and are a fan of women's wrongs/descents into madness.

Ok I have a lot of very complicated feelings about this book.

I loved Friday Black, the author's short story collection, so I went into this with very high expectations. And it pains me to say that if this has been a short story in Friday Black, it would have been a skip for me.

There's individual portions of Chain Gang All Stars that work amazingly. I was much more gripped by the side stories and the factual interjections than I was by the main plot. I really appreciated the very harrowing exemplification of how cruel solitary confinement and forced mutism are, and how much they damage a human psyche. The balance between "yes they did bad things (although some of them didn't, but false imprisonment is a separate theme) but nobody deserves this torture" was masterful.

So why the low rating? Frankly, I just couldn't get into it. I devoured Friday Black in what feels like a day or two, but I almost DNFd this one. The writing style largely didn't work for me and neither did the pacing. It became a case of "if every single page is high stakes, then nothing is". I struggled to connect with the characters and I struggled with being curious about what happened next.

I feel like I would have enjoyed this more had there been a deeper exploration into character's inner lives and pasts, more portrayals of how the general public reacted (the protests, complacency, and direct enjoyment were interesting and under explored), and less focus on the actual gladiator battles, nicknames, and weapons.

Recommended if you have a strong interest in the racism of America's prison system and don't mind books with a large cast of characters and POVs. But I would first recommend diving into Friday Black, the author's stunning short story collection.

2.5 stars rounded down to reflect "not for me, but it definitely has merit and I see why other people would like it"

I love when a highly anticipated read delivers.

As cliche as this sentence is, I will say it because it's true: Lily Brooks-Dalton has a way with words. And with writing about loss, longing, grief, stolen opportunities, and love. And for creating incredible backstories for her characters in only a few lines. And for reminding us about the urgency of climate change.

To tell you the story would be to spoil it. But in brief: we follow the life of Wanda, born during a devastating hurricane bearing her name. She is surrounded by people (and ghosts of people) who breathe just as much as she does. I particularly loved Phyllis, a lone survivalist and ecologist living down the road from Wanda who decides to nurture this child's natural curiosity. The community Wanda grows up in is devastated by floods and climate change. Many people evacuate and don't come back. Some stay. And that's all I'll tell you for now.

While I didn't quite enjoy this as much as Good Morning, Midnight, it remained an absolute delight to read. 4.5 stars rounded up.

Recommended if you enjoy coming of age novels, are always looking for character-driven climate fiction, and don't mind a hefty dose of magic realism.

"like touching an icy hand", to summarize one of the reviews on the back of my copy.

I think one of my favorite things about Yoko Ogawa is that I genuinely don't know which directly her writing will go in. This is my fourth book of hers and it's most similar in tone to Revenge, a collection of short stories that slot together like 4 dimensional puzzle pieces as the book continues (and these novellas slot into that collection as well, or at least the third one does - a child dying in an abandoned fridge). But she also writes tenderly and mundane human relationships (see the Housekeeper and the Professor) as well as surreal social commentary (see the Memory Police) so I truly never know what I'm going to get. But I love all of it.

Here's one summary of all 3 novellas: a (you g) woman becomes covertly obsessed with someone else's body or bodily functions. This obsession consumes her thoughts and becomes expressed through detached cruelty towards someone far more vulnerable than her. The effects of the cruelty are not immediately apparent, but tension mounts with each page and leaves the reader out of breath.

I read that story 3 times, in 3 contexts, following 3 (possibly) different women. And I was unsettled every time.

Recommended if you enjoy subtle fiction that leaves your skin crawling for reasons you can't quite identify, are fascinated by the grotesqueness of the body, and especially if you read and enjoyed Ogawa's Revenge.

Sometimes I truly am a magpie - I see a book with a shiny title, so I pick it up.

The shiniest thing about this really is the title. This graphic novel is several shades of fine. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but there's nothing special that's caught my interest. I'm not invested in the characters (yes, not even the Cool Tough Monster Hunter Girl Erica Slaughter), the victims, the useless cops... I read issues 1-6 (one past this volume) and still didn't really exit trope-land, so I don't really see myself engaging further with the series.

All that said, there's nothing overtly wrong with this. It's exactly what it says on the tin and has decent pacing and decent art. The page layout is occasionally confusing, but that might also be because I'm a casual graphic novel fan rather than an aficionado.

Recommended if you like Monsters and Monster Hunters (TM) and are ok with stories that don't really subvert your expectations in that genre. 1.5 stars rounded up for decent pacing/art.

What I've learned about Cixin Liu's books: there comes a point, usually around the 40% mark, where the writing feels so dazzling and so clever that I can't help but be completely lost in it.

In book 1, it was the video game and the timestamps. In book 2, it was the wall facers and wall breakers. And here? It was fairytales and the end of the human race. How I love those fairytales.

The series has some shortcomings, and the greatest one for me is the characterization. As in previous books, characters feel more like one dimensional chess pieces rather than like people. This isn't a book or a series written with the intent to make us remember characters, but instead to look at human dynamics as a whole and how different archetypes respond to these surreal situations.

If you'd told me that my big summer reads this year would be a hard sci fi series about humans interacting with alien races featuring astrophysics, military tactics, social engineering, political mutinies, all written like as a sweeping alt-history saga... I would've assured you that that's not my thing. And yet.

The writing is so delicious and accessible, and is delivered beautifully on audiobook. When acquaintances find out I read and ask for sci fi recommendations, I now send them to this series.

Recommended if you liked the others, especially in their exploration of philosophy, physics, and the future of the human race. Many stars.