George D
A fun easy read with an insight into Australian comedian lyfe. As a Melbourne-based standup comic whose done the Australian festivals this book basically felt like a diary at different points - I've literally been to every single place it mentions.
Couldn't relate to his living conditions though, food is not for the bed!
A fun light easy read about the deaths of species and people.
Didn't go where I expected and kind of felt like the journey of Mammut ended arbitrarily but still a good time, and Chris makes the “Mammoth narrator concept” easy to understand and follow on his journey.
I wanted more - a richer biography of even more events and people and places, maybe have the ‘present day' sections somehow add more complexity and depth to the overall story rather than functioning mainly as an enjoyable narrative device.
But if you read a novel and the complaint is you wanted more then it's done a good job I'd say.
You won't be leaving this book without some pretty major shifts in how you view sexuality.
Now to attempt the impossible task of stopping myself from butchering the statistics and wildly extrapolating the results when speaking to people about it.
Srsly though, who knew BDSM was so mainstream? Turns out it's almost more rebellious to not have done it at some point.
My intro to the French Sherlock Holmes and I will definitely read more. The Paris of the book feels messy and grey and the inspector is refreshingly human.
Instead of being a super-genius, Maigret is just some guy slowly figuring out the case with plenty of reassessment, mistakes, and double checking of details. Plus the constant references to the Parisian streets and the french lifestyle (you better believe he's going home for lunch) builds this visceral feeling you don't get with Sherlock.
Don't know if it's because of the original author or the translator but the writing itself isn't anything special. To be fair as a Le Carré fanboi I might have impossibly high standards.
It's also a short read, which adds to the pulpy feeling of the experience.
Obviously not the definitive guide to 3,000 years of history, but a well written and engaging summary. If something strikes your fancy, you can now dive into it. The author does well to make the lessons of Greece's history feel relevant to today.
Will definitely try out some of those other shortest histories.
Plus I learned the 1946 Greek civil war was the first proxy battle of the Cold War. Who knew it started so early?
Did you know Marx didn't technically come up with a specific way to do “Marxism”? All he did was show the flaws in Capitalism and voice some general thoughts on how a system designed to avoid those flaws might look.
Thats a fun fact, true Comrades?
A thoroughly entertaining pulp novel.
Half farce, half noir, set in a lovingly detailed Kuala Lumpur that perfectly captures its eclectic mix of religions, races, and politics.
None of the social commentary ever feels like social commentary, instead it's all just fuel for a - sometimes silly, sometimes tragic - tale of wrong identities, corrupt cops, sleazy back alleys, and heists gone wrong.
Very fun.
Set on the estate of Blandings and full of inept uncles, aggressive aunts, bungled marriage proposals and impersonations on top of impersonations, this is PG Wodehouse doing what PG Wodehouse does. As always his ability to turn every second sentence into a work of comedic art is unmatched.
Halfway through I realised this was a plot that would last as long as he felt like it lasting, each time a character seems like they've resolved it all he just has a silly new misunderstanding crop up to keep the story going, the plot means nothing but the writing and characters are so fun it's impossible to care.
Didn't feel like it achieved the feeling of being both individually great with each story as well as a unified brilliant sum of the parts like Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (the only other short story collection of his I've read) but still a treat.
Good Old Neon is a masterpiece.
I'll be honest, I thought the book was pretty good - the simplistic prose with occasional glimmers of beauty used to capture the bleak emptiness of the world - but then I saw a negative review and was a little won over by it. Maybe I was just fooled by McCartney. Tricked by sparse prose into thinking the book was better than it really was. Hoodwinked into thinking the repetitive plot was very clever even though I didn't get it.
It's definitely possible and I can't shake that feeling, so I have to call this book average.
I'll tackle Blood Meridian one day, from some glances at it I think that one is much more undeniable in its brilliance.
It's Buddhist fan fiction and like all the best fan fiction it updates, reorientates, and makes the story feel new.
For me the highlight was reading this while watching The Bear and seeing the book get a mention, what are the odds?Enjoyed it enough to read some more about this buddhism thing, turns out buddhism is pretty good.technically the odds are pretty high since I'm always reading something so at some point whatever book I was currently reading would be mentioned by whatever I happened to be watching, but also, maybe karma?
I forgot how phenomenal this book is.
Listened to the audiobook this time and Joanna Froggert absolutely knocks it out of the park, her voicing of the younger Linton managed to perfectly capture how hilariously horrible he was.
Can't believe Emily Bronte - a young woman from the 1800's who lived her whole life at her rural house with her brother and father the only male contact - could better capture the complexity of masculinity than most modern authors.
And gotta give a shout out to Heathcliff, one of the great villains of literature. On the one hand, yes, a monster. On the other, I've never related to a character more.
At least he also channeled his obsession into a very respectable property portfolio in West York.
I dread the day I pay a visit to Jeeves and Wooster and it is anything less than exemplary.
Today was not that day.
Brett Easton Ellis perfectly capturing a moment and place and people - drug addled college students and their empty experience of love and sex.
Great use of subjective narratives, seeing the same event from different viewpoints adds a lot of depth and hilarity to the situation.
The epitome of farce written with the kind of eloquent skill which leaves you slackjawed.
A delight, pure and simple. Something to snuggle into and enjoy every brilliant sentence.
A story about two couples and their friendship over the years. There are trials and tribulations - tragic sickness, dreams dashed, lives unlived - but the real life kind rather than the overly dramatic kind.
Turns out, when captured perfectly, regular friendships with regular difficulties become beautifully poignant and profound.
Full of Bryson fun facts peppered through a little story of two guys who were friends in their youth hiking the AT together.
It'll make you wonder whether you're due a walk in the woods.
Because I listened to this and bits of his other books with the same narrator on audiobook, I couldn't help thinking Bill Bryson sounded like a friendly American voice artist. I looked him up and found out in actual fact he has literally the most intersectional American/British accent I've ever heard in my life.
As a male comedian in his mid 30's whose attended the Edinburgh Fringe for almost a decade, whose career feels stalled, and is struggling with the most difficult breakup of his life, Dolly Alderton bringing out a book about a male comedian in his mid 30's whose attended the Edinburgh Fringe for almost a decade, whose career feels stalled, and is struggling with the most difficult breakup of his life, feels like the universe has given up on sending me subtle hints.
It's impossible to be objective about a book that has you saying things like “That's not what I did!”
But I'll try.
The book is funny with some good characters, you know exactly where the stories going but it's still fun getting there. Between both Andy and Jen's points of view, everyone whose gone through a breakup will be able to relate to something. Like technically, I was Jen (though also technically the exact opposite of Jen - a relationship confirmed all her opinions, a breakup made me sort out what I didn't know).
Dolly tries her best to be empathetic with the male experience, you can tell she's gone out of her way to do her research but, just like the standup comedy elements, it's very much written by someone on the outside looking in. While the comedian elements mostly work, the male emotional elements felt like cliches started creeping in.
The most glaring example of this is the way she describes the male friendship group dynamics after the breakup, which feel like the book was written in 1987. Sure in real life the group will go get drunk, that's a given, but they will definitely also have stories to share about the emotional difficulty of breakups, especially a group of guys in their mid 30's. You're going to have at least one guy wanting to talk about it too much, if anything.
What is lacking in the Andy POV narrative is actually taken too far in the other direction when Dolly writes from Jens perspective. I think Dolly made the mistake of being unable to separate herself from her character, she couldn't handle making Jen “the bad guy” or unaware in any way, and the point she was making suffered for it. From a narrative standpoint the choice Jen made should've been starker, like she was giving up something beautiful or betraying someone who didn't deserve it for the sake of what she really wanted, that way the choice has weight. As it stands its still nice to see this idea of being happy alone talked about, but the choice isn't exactly hard when it's not even a real relationship.
“You should choose to be happy alone rather than stay with a selfish whinger who slags off your entire family and doesn't support you emotionally, financially, or mentally” isn't quite the groundbreaking point it's made out to be.
Having said all that, the book helped me realise I've been floating in a limbo of impossible hopes for way too long, so whatever, 5 stars.
You won me over making Bean the smartest person in the world and Greek but then lost me with Achilles being so much better at manipulating the world than (almost) every Battle School graduate.
The weakest of the original quartet and this series so far, hoping it picks up in the next one.
A great example of how much you can get out of retelling of a story from a different angle.
Lacks the more philosophical stylings of the later Ender books but an entertaining page-turner that sets things up well for the rest of the series.
Tony Judt dictated this book while suffering from ALS, a disease that causes you to slowly lose all motor function until eventually death with no impact on your ability to think and feel. A tragic, unique, and profound perspective to look back on a life.
He knows how to pick and choose snapshots from his past that both capture that era as well as providing context on the state of the world and how it differs to today.
I love a good book on the beautiful moments found in a memory from a writer who knows how to write. There is no way anyone reading the final lines of the book isn't feeling something.
A lot of people loved this book but for me I had too many issues with the plot and characters.
The descriptions of the various circus tents are cool though. Which is good because there are a lot of tents throughout this book and they are very relevant to the story.