whoischels's Reviews (116)

I read this over the course of a year. In hindsight, that wasn't a great way to approach this book. Its strength lies in using essays and primary sources to delineate the differences between Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana buddhism, and extrapolate on how to use key focuses of each in your life, with some helpful introductions and annotations for the primary source texts. I would remember more of the specifics and be able to describe these things had I approached it like a textbook and taken notes. I found some helpful constructions for meditation and different ways to think about what I am trying to achieve when I meditate. 

A brisk work of eco-horror that you can complete in a day or two. Sat down with this while high thinking I'd read a couple chapters and ended up breezing through half of it. This book is rich in themes: the difference or lack thereof between humanity and nature, nature's advancement upon everything we build, what closing yourself off to those who love you closes off in you, what makes us human and whether we (or bad actors) can whittle away at it, whether a human is something more than an animal, the futility of achieving objectivity when you tell a story, etc.

Transitional ecologic niches serve as a metaphor between the transition of human to animal that happens to a person under duress. Though in this case, not just animal, but even plant or fungi or vague nature-based thing. The political workings of the Southern Reach world that have given rise to the circumstances of this story are hazy at best in this book. I suspect they become more clear in the sequels, which I'm eager to read. There are vague thematic hints that perhaps the fabric of the Southern Reach world is undergoing a slow transition from human to animal/natural world that mirrors what the biologist narrator goes through.

 Having read this, I really look forward to watching the movie, which I never saw in 2018. I suspect it may drastically alter a lot of key plot points. While this is a great book, it would not make a great movie. Too much of the plot hinges on inner dialogue and observation. Actions and dialogue would be clustered at the beginning for it to end with a character silently looking at things and thinking things. A well done movie version of this will drastically alter it.

Probably the most chaotic book I've ever read. I can't say I've read a book that ignores sequential time so thoroughly. Heller jumps between events gracefully. You'll often find that the narrator begins to recount something that happened quite far in the future or past of the camp on Pianosa, but you don't quite develop an understanding of how distant future and past are until you've reached the end and various

characters have died off and been replaced by new, untrauma-ed characters.

The manipulation of time is breathtaking and exciting once you look back and think about what you've read. I'm surprised I haven't heard this book being discussed in the context of other time bending books, like To the Lighthouse, perhaps I just haven't been listening closely enough about why people read this book. 

As the classic comedy of war book, it's a very comedic read. The comedic style throughout the whole thing undergoes its own character development in a way that is quite satisfying. It works to keep the horror of the experience of war at arm's length for the majority of the book and then slowly brings it closer for the end. Heller captures the comedic dichotomy between the very visceral body horror that people experience at war and the slow machine of bureaucracy.

My only complaints are that it's a behemoth to read. Heller can be describing an event that is comedic in its conception, but do so in a way that obstructs feeling, particularly in the first 2/3. I understand this to be intentional, but was still a bit frustrated with the masculine boringness of the prose. It's an odd experience to read something that has these features but still manages to be so dynamic and flexible in its plot structure. 

You think this book isn't doing anything for you and then time slows down as you are with John Grady making eye contact with Alejandra for the first time, and your heart is racing when the captain in Encantada questions you and it becomes clear you will go to prison. This is the first McCarthy book I've read and the length of his sentences and the peculiar punctuation he uses made it hard to get into. Once I got used to it though, it felt very natural. The next book I read with standard punctuation will probably feel odd. 

A number of things really blew me away about this book. Chief among them is the fact that part of the thing making the characters feel real was the understanding that each had a vast emotional world under the surface to which no one, not even the reader, was privy. Just like how real people are. John Grady makes a number of non-overt assumptions about the drives of other characters, and most of those assumptions are turned on their heads when the characters reveal the complexity of how they walk in the world.

The setting is just as much a character as any of the people. A lot of love goes into the descriptions of Texas and Mexico, but it's not a gooey love, it's one based in respect and understanding. This is also how McCarthy writes about horses, and writes about people thinking about horses. 

You never really get a lot out of the first read of a primary source text. I imagine I'd have more to say after reading this a second time. This text makes clear to me the historical foundation (as in events) that undergird the ideas of communism, that is, how the philosophers used the revolutionary events in 18th and 19th century Europe to form a lexicon of ways to describe different classes and their struggles. Critiques of specific types of socialism and other left-wing political beliefs were a bit lost on me. I don't have a basic understanding of who the people with these views were or what their application was. That said, this is an important foundational read and I think having read it will better prepare me to read communist texts.

Almost all of these stories have at their core just...really great ideas. Chiang's stories are imaginative and really precisely and cleverly build worlds and ideas. The stories are very well contained and paced, with just enough room to imagine them in a longer form (such as...the movie Arrival). The ideas they explore are thought-provoking and often haunting, and I think I'll remember them for quite a while. 

Tower of Babylon - 5

Understand - 4

Division by Zero - 3

Story of Your Life - 5

Seventy-Two Letters - 4

The Evolution of Human Science - 3

Hell is the Absence of God - 5

Liking What You See: A Documentary - 4

Was excited to read this for the first time, then realized a few stories in that I had already read it about six years ago. Do with that info what you will. Some of these stories are very haunting and explore really brilliant ideas. Some of these stories are not very good. I will rate each story with a number, the way I've seen others do in their reviews.

The Veldt - 5
Kaleidoscope - 3
The Other Foot - 3
The Highway - 2
The Man - 3
The Long Rain - 4
The Rocket Man - 4
The Fire Balloons - 3
The Last Night of the World - 2
The Exiles - 2
No Particular Night or Morning - 4
The Fox and the Forest - 3.5
The Visitor - 4
The Concrete Mixer - 3
Marionettes, Inc. - 4
The City - 3
Zero Hour - 3
The Rocket - 4

Blown away by Didion's prose. I have historically been *into the hype.* However, I'm having a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment after reading these essays. Didion's essays are entirely personal or rhetorical analyses. This has its place when it comes to things like the California governor's mansion, which she describes as a massive version of the type of new tract house that was popular at the time. She describes architecture in terms of its rhetorical purpose, diagnosing the mansion as tacky, individualistic, at its core poorly designed and poorly thought out. Architecture as rhetoric makes sense here because at the end of the Reagan decided to build a house, and when you sign off on designs you are saying something.

When it comes to things like lifeguards and highways, Didion says nothing at all. She talks about the feeling of driving in LA and the feelings and associations do ring true. But then she diagnoses her personal issues with improvements and changes to public infrastructure in ways that lack expertise and any real insight. She dismisses a robust research project that the city was doing to improve roads as bureaucracy, dismissing things like HOV lanes as unnecessary and useless. A lot of research goes into things like public infrastructure policy. These aren't fit for rhetorical analysis alone. 

These essays are fun to read, and they're really beautiful in the precision of her prose and her turns of phrase. But some of her opinions aren't backed by any facts at all, and the beauty of the prose completely hides it. So I've sort of had to come to terms with what impact Didion had on the type of BS, un-researched opinion pieces we see published in major newspapers today. One would think quite a bit given how popular she was.

Horrifying descriptions of child sexual abuse and kidnapping. Incredibly difficult to read because the content is so disgusting and visceral. This book is beautifully written and firmly anti-child sex abuse. A lot of people in the reviews here understand the former, and completely miss the latter.

Honestly, one of the most horrifying things about this book, having read it now, is how much the culture misunderstands it. There are people above and below me in the comments calling this either a "love story" or pro-pedophilia. It's not. Humbert is pedophilically obsessed with an idealized Dolores. He never sees the scared child she is. The only time he catches a glimpse of Dolores for who she really is

at the very end when he recounts the three times that he saw the sadness and fear in her. He swings and a misses. If he had realized that those painful moments where he recognizes the horror of what he's done to her were the closest he ever got to loving her, perhaps he could have stopped himself from continuing to act on his pedophillic urges.

Nabokov is not sympathetic to Humbert. His name is "Humbert Humbert" for christs sake, how much more obvious can you get that this is not a narrator to be trusted? There is a fictional introduction from a psychiatrist condemning Humbert's actions. Humbert says that he'd give himself 35 years to life just for what he did to Dolores.

The man f**gers a child's a**hole while determining whether she's ill enough to need the hospital.

  He's the most despicable character I've ever read. If I were to somehow meet this fictional man in person, knowing what I know about him, I'd straight up try to k*** him with my bare hands. It would bring me joy to strangle this character.

I don't know if people see this as a love story because reading comprehension is way worse than I thought it was or because people's attitudes toward women and children are way worse than I thought they were. This is deeply depressing to think about. Reading this book and learning how people have adapted it will make you want to give up on culture. The fact that Kubrick could adapt a movie of this in the 60s and play it as a comedy is insane. The fact that his 30 something year old producer dated the underage actress portraying Dolores during the press tour for that movie is insane. The fact that popstars like Lana Del Ray and Katy Perry cast the "sexuality" of "Lolita" in a positive light in their music and interviews (while maintaining they had read the book!!) is insane. 

The only conclusion I can come to is that a lot of our culture makers just want to engage with things at face value and many people are too lazy to think about subtext. Then again, it's hardly subtext. For an author who "despises didactic fiction" Nabokov makes it pretty f***ing clear Humbert is a piece of sh*t. 

Why did I rate this book five stars when as a rule I generally never rate anything five stars? Because it has revealed something deeply f***ed up about our culture (see: everything I've written above). I already knew that the sexualization of children, particularly young girls, is and has been entirely too permissible in the United States, but somehow I know it more now. This book turned this intellectualized knowledge into a real feeling for me. I am less happy for having read it, but I understand this better now. Wouldn't ever recommend this book to anybody. You just have decide it's time to read it.

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As an aside, it is a testament to Nabokov's skill that Dolores shines through as a child persevering through unspeakable suffering in heartbreaking little glimpses, despite the fact that she is being portrayed unfairly by an unreliable narrator. Dolores feels like a real, scared little girl trying hard to act and survive, despite the rosy, false treatment that Humbert gives her. Never read an unreliable narrator story that pulled something like this off so well.

Gyasi balances the multiple themes of this emotional story deftly. It's a satisfying read and it's very well written. A great example of modern literature that feels both like literature and modern. Gyasi doesn't prescribe how you should feel about the sometimes conflicting themes and feelings her main character goes through, she simply tells a story about those things. Great book.