John
This was beautifully written but has a few moments / conclusions that just depressed me. It is perhaps not a book to read in quarantine.
this is one of the most incredible books i've ever read and i can't wait to reread it.
goes excellently with Andrea Ripley's high conflict - highly recommend for anyone who feels hopeless reading the news.
i picked this up looking for a relatively light read after Lincoln in the Bardo but this is a brilliant and masterfully story. Stark/Westlake only improved as they aged.
this had some of my favorite elements of IT and The Stand and I tore through it in like two days. a great escape.
once i was a couple chapters in i found this book impossible to put down. i (unfairly) expected a sensational account of the author's unusual childhood, and while there are definitely some gruesome passages, the author's reflections on the fallibility of memory in traumatic situations, the dissociative effect of decades of gaslighting, and her refusal to reduce any members of her family - even in their cruelest moments - to mere caricatures are what made this such a compelling and engaging read.
since goodreads won't allow 6 stars, i may have go back and lower most of the other books i've read this year by 1 star. this is a phenomenal book.
Caveat that I love Robert Webb and have watched hours and hours of him and David Mitchell, so perhaps I had an easier time reading this entire book in his Peep Show monologue tone - but this felt to me like a brilliant, vital, moving memoir.
i liked the story and setting of this book but it needed a tougher editor. even though it switches perspectives, each character kept making the same brand of winking, cynical, occasionally-smug asides to the reader - that plus their tendency to speak in (beautifully-written) expository paragraphs made every character seem like the author in a different outfit.
made me think (among a million other things) about the outsized weight of tiny kindnesses
jennifer egan is an incredibly transportive author - the diving scenes in this book were so vivid and evocative that i found myself rereading them again and again before moving on just because i wanted to relive the experience of diving in wallabout bay.
this is an excellent, comprehensive, gorgeous read that took me about 3 months. i would almost recommend keeping it on the shelf like a textbook (next to Understanding Comics) and reading through a chapter or two during creative dry spells.
very well written & readable history of a period that's often reduced to a much simpler one or two sentences.
this was difficult to read (particularly if you're squeamish) and there is a lot more editorializing and gratuitous (/occasionally speculative) detailing of the radium girls' personal lives, but ultimately this felt like a really important story about our collective short memory and the degree to which we associate “healthy corporation” with “healthy society”.
about five pages into this book i was like “this is not that remarkable, i can basically see where it's going” and then i blinked and it was 1 am and i'd read another 200 pages without getting up. it doesn't go where you think it's going to, and even when it does, it's still pretty moving.
this book includes several 5-star sections but some of the other digressions really slow it down. i appreciate what the author was trying to do, and some of the studies and conclusions will stick with me for ages. i just wish some of the more tangential bits had been trimmed.
these are very good, very unsettling stories. i do not recommend reading this collection while traveling alone.
