pineconek's Reviews (816)

It didn't occur to me to put this book down.

Did I know what was going on? Not really. But did I get one of the most vivid paintings of the life of a young woman in Rio and her biographers pity and off contempt for her? You betcha.

This was my first foray into Clarice Lispector. I was told that I would enjoy her work but, frankly, I knew nothing about her writing going in and instead focused on how her name reminded me of the silence of the lambs (Lispector rhymes with Lector, Clarice). (Forgive me for my ignorance).

I saw a review here that the writing is like that of a raving lunatic with frequent moments of absolute brilliance. And frequent they are. Reading this is like panning for gold and seeing that the water is full not only of gold but other precious stones and I greedily wanted to gobble them up (I've never planned for gold so I'm mixing metaphors here). And that's why I couldn't stop reading. The beauty and the ache of the prose kept reeling me in and I just couldn't get enough. More please.

Recommended if you love a weird little book where the sentences take your breath away, thrive on evocative imagery even if what they evoke is miserable, and have no need for such literary conventions as "plot" or "coherence" to have a good time with a book. (I jest but not really. This was amazing).

(It also made me crave cheese and guava, which I thankfully had in the house)

I love books that change my mind.

I have a confession to make: as a scientist who is also a human, I've struggled a lot with the tension between the scientific method and other ways of knowing. Part of my heart loves the unexplained or unexplainable, but I love it even more when explanations converge. Nothing makes my heart happier than discoveries such as the one of the wood wide web aka scientific proof that trees do in fact speak to each other.

Because trees do speak to each other. And botanical mutualism abounds. And we are interdependent with all the other creatures on this earth (the "more than human" world, as this book has taught me to call it). And reconciling the parts of myself raised in formal education and late stage capitalist society with the part of me that intuitively understands has created a lot of tension.

This book resolved that tension. Robin is a botanist, an ecologist, a scholar, a human, a mother, a woman, and interdependent with the world around her. And she can seamlessly transition from speaking to the scientist in me and to the human in me and then back again. Something clicked for me while listening to this book (read by the author, which I highly recommend) that's been germinating since I started reading nonfiction nature writing and I am nothing short of a convert.

I'm really grateful that this book finally found its way to me. The connection between my heart and brain feels more aligned, like a dislocated joint limbering up after being cracked back into place.

The ending of the book was a fascinating way of discussing climate change and our role in restoration. The comparison between a culture of constant desire (and artificial scarcity brought by capitalism) with the windigo was particularly meaty and something I will be contemplating a lot going forward. And the contrasting mentality of abundance, gift economy, etc... are concepts I look forward to sharing with others.

Highly recommended if you too struggle with reconciling seemingly incongruous ways of viewing the world and our species' place in it, if you feel alienated from a part of yourself by virtue of living in a concrete jungle, and if your heart craves some nourishment. Five stars.

All happy families are alike, and all unhappy families could do with having David Sedaris write about them.

Alternatively: "hey kids, the whiskey I gave uncle David has kicked in! Come gather round!"

David is a sibling of six with a dead mother (cancer), a dead sister (suicide), a loving husband (probably not paraplegic), a snarky father (Republican), and a cast of siblings (who enjoy using his beach house). And this book is simply a stand up comedy show featuring this cast of characters and an attempt to make sense of the world.

I don't typically read comedy, but David's work has crossed my radar in the past and I gave into my curiosity. It's a delight on audiobook and provides some well needed levity during difficult times.

Recommended if you're a "well, I might as well laugh about this tragedy" kind of person, enjoy rambling storytelling, and don't mind descriptions of bodily functions. Recommended on audiobook, which features some recordings of live readings.

3.5 stars rounded up for making me sincerely chuckle.

Ouchie ouchie ouch ouch.

I think a lot about those cozy internet doodles about how grief doesn't get smaller but instead that you grow around it. I found this book an interesting depiction of what those growing pains entail, especially when the grief hits so suddenly and so fiercely.

Joan Didion, acclaimed author at the time of writing this memoir, lost her husband suddenly to a heart attack (caused by the infamous "widow maker") while her daughter was clinging to life in the ICU. Didion oozes financial comfort, higher education, and privilege afforded to the upper classes of New York City - and yet her writing about grief and its trauma carries an interesting relatability. She emphasizes the differences between grief and mourning, talks about the ridiculous forms of magical thinking the ones left behind engage in (hence the title), and comes across as both detached from and overwhelmed by the experience and its aftermath.

This was my first Didion and this book has made me look forward to reading more of her writing. Recommended if you think you would enjoy reading about a socialite losing what money can't buy (with a voice not unlike Schitt's Creek's Moira Rose) and seek out sad autobiographies. The audiobook contains music at the closing of chapters, which is an additional nice touch. 4 stars.

This is a case of "I am not the correct audience for this book".

Which is a shame, since I quite enjoyed the first one. The tea dragons gave me the warm and fuzzies despite my cold, cold heart but this sequel didn't chip away at any of the ice. The combination of new characters that I wasn't invested in and the distinct lack of tea dragons (they were background characters at most) made this a largely forgettable read for me. This is a sequel only in the sense that it's set in the same universe as the first book, but it has very little plot and didn't keep me engaged.

Recommended if you're not looking for a direct sequel and instead just want a cozy "human cares for dragon who slept too long" vibe. The art is, as always, beautiful. 2.5 stars rounded down.

An ode to an ode to women writing stream of consciousness while feeling stuck in a life that they may as well be watching from the outside while actually watching a different life from the outside.

Perhaps something Virginia Woolf would have written if she'd known about social media and homesteading and lived in Vermont. I say that based on what I remember of reading Mrs Dalloway back in highschool. In other words: this is a book where nothing happens and the main character is despondent. We live in her head with her, and it's not always a great place. She wants to bake pies and be the perfect mother to her children and a good wife to her academic husband and all that other new england glory. And she sees others, one woman in particular, being so much better at it than she is.

Recommended if you enjoy reading 100+ pages of angst about routine and motherhood and don't mind if absolutely nothing happens.

*slowly laughing* hahah what the f-

This is the first book of the other Murakami's that I read and it's nice to now know that there are two Murakamis that I intend on reading more of.

Miso Soup takes us, through the eyes of narrator Kenji and his suspicious client Frank, on a tour of Tokyo's red light district. We might girls in various stages of undress and experience culture shock between Frank's Americanness and the Japanese world around us. But Frank's money is quite literally soaked with blood, and strange murders have recently been reported.

This book was "no plot just vibes" until about 3/4 through when the violence suddenly began. And then there were more vibes, this time eerie and breathtaking and terrifying.
.
Recommended if you like slow burn books featuring terrible people doing terrible things for few reasons other than "it's fun" and are looking to expand your repertoire of translated fiction (I read this in french). 4 stars.

Things that are creepy:
- hares walking funny even after you've shot them in the head because they're possessed by mushrooms
- analogous things happening to humans
- the implication that soon it'll happen to you

Since reading Merlin Sheldrake's incredible book about fungi, I've been paying extra attention to mushrooms of all kind. Closer to animals than plants, they truly lend themselves fantastically to horror. With the amount of fungal imagery in the original Fall of the House of Usher, bringing them in was an excellent choice.

But then there were all the things that didn't work, which is bound to happen with certain retellings. I was painfully frustrated with all the characters and especially our narrator, Alex Easton, whose voice felt anachronistic and wrong on so many levels. It was next to impossible to assess the level of actual friendship or past history between the characters, who were somehow meant to be childhood friends and war buddies but were all painfully removed and hollow.

It's disingenuous to write this review to comment on the amount of real estate that was taken for unrelated world building around our narrators fictional country. The pronoun system, military culture, and other social structures were shoehorned in between unrelated narrative moments that I wish had been devoted to developing the horror or the characters of Madeleine and Rodrick. The world building was clearly there to set the stage for a sequel but, in the context of the stand alone novel, was a frustrating distraction.

Between all this, I didn't really care about the plot. And as other low rated reviews have said, that's a good thing since there wasn't much there. The narrative tension was unconvincing, the intended mystery was obvious, and I just wanted to put the book down or finally get it over with.

As such, other than a few well crafted creepy scenes, I i was just left frustrated with this book. 1.5 stars rounded down.

I finished it a few days ago and am finally ready to address my disappointment.

This book had all the right ingredients: eco fiction, wolves in the woods, an unreliable narrator with a troubled past, a little murder mystery, themes of trauma and abuse and sexism, small town vibes... and, to stretch my metaphor further: the ingredients were in the wrong proportions, undercooked, overcooked, and frustrating to eat.

I love ambitious books that try to be many things. It's a brave thing to do specifically because it's so difficult to do masterfully. This book was however trying to be the Light Pirate, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Sinner, and a cozy mystery (Broadchurch?) all at once. Sprinkle in a little Parable of the Sower (hyperempathy, of all things) on the top and serve hot. All brilliant stories, but with so little room to explore the themes separately, Once Their Were Wolves had to resort to tropes and convenient plot holes. Characters were unbelievable and oftentimes explicit mouthpieces for The Message, and the ending was predictable and frustrating.

In short: I wish the recipe had been simpler, or the book longer. I wish the portrayal of mental illness and domestic violence had been less tired 80s tropes and misconceptions. I wish we'd gotten more luscious descriptions of wolves and forests. I enjoyed the beginning and kept wishing this book would become what I wanted it to be. Butt, by the end, I felt I got a resolution as frustrating as the one offered in the Silent Patient.

Recommended only if you like the ingredients listed above and are also fine to not overthink things and suspend disbelief. I'll give this two stars because I'm not mad - just disappointed

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/N13GyePhEvk