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| 0007350783
| 4.05
| 909,204
| Dec 23, 1815
| Apr 2010
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liked it
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A conversation about Jane Austen between myself and a second party would usually go like this: Second party: Have you read any Jane Austen books?A conversation about Jane Austen between myself and a second party would usually go like this: Second party: Have you read any Jane Austen books? I would like to disclose in this review once and for all that I could never consider myself a Jane Austen fan. I know that she's an amazing, influential classical female writer whose works have been adapted on screen and translated worldwide. I also always nod in amicable agreement whenever someone mentions her as their favorite author because I can acknowledge her contributions to literature as well as respect the fact that you enjoy her works. That being said, Austen is simply not the kind of writer whom I can connect with. I tried finding a semblance of kinship in her works several times in the past with Pride and Sense, two novels which I hadn't finished for the first two times I read them, but I only did so by the third and fourth time respectively. Simply put, I don't like Jane Austen's books even if she is an immensely celebrated writer. I find her prose often tedious even if she can compose passages with wit and humor. I think her characters are intolerable and the only redeeming quality I admire about her characterizations is that she obviously isn't afraid to make her protagonists unlikable and absurd which is where the source of her rich social comedy of manners sprout from. For the longest time I told myself I will never read another Austen novel again but because I was so irrevocably smitten with the Pemberly Digital webseries Emma Approved which is the modernized adaptation of this novel, I decided to venture on, reassuring myself that perhaps third's time the charm. In a few inspired ways, it was. But in many other instances that's almost painful, it wasn't. EMMA is supposed to be a story about 'youthful hubris and misconstrued romance' and with Austen's signature dry humor and amusing observations and parody regarding the exhausting social graces during the era she is writing in, Emma more than fulfills that promising premise. The titular heroine Emma Woodhouse is beautiful, clever and rich but she's also conceited and proud; often overestimating her so-called "matchmaking" skills. She's only twenty-one and a privileged one at that who has a very high opinion of herself and how others should view her. In spite of these flaws, Emma can be impressive particularly because of her streak of independence and ideas about a woman's agency which were considered queer and upsetting during her time. Because she has no financial hardships unlike other Austen heroines, Emma does not feel obligated to get married. In fact, as an heiress, she would rather just live by herself in her estate and possibly throw cool parties and hang out with other legible ladies whom she can charm and bewitch. One of them who has fallen prey to Emma's irresistible companionship is the modest Harriet Smith who eagerly tries to please Emma by following every single advice the other woman gives even if ultimately it proves to be to her detriment. Their friendship is not exactly of equals which make their interactions quite infectiously funny and warm at times. I have no doubt Emma adores Harriet but she tends to confuse that with her incessant need to control Harriet's choices for her which had proved to be bothersome. Emma's heart is in the right place but she's also far too headstrong to realize that her actions often cause harm or misunderstanding to the people around her. But Austen has written the approach to this relationship as a little bit of a comedy so at least that breaks the tension a bit. The main conflict that happened in the first volume (this novel is divided into four, or whatever, I'm too lazy to check the book again) is Emma's adamant belief that a certain Mr. Elton fancies her friend Harriet. Emma was so convinced that she is doing something remarkable and worthwhile by matchmaking these two that she was totally blind-sighted by the fact that Mr. Elton actually wants Emma and not Harriet. It was only when Mr. Elton himself confessed that Emma realized that she was wrong to make assumptions from evidence that she willfully and purposefully interpreted for her own convenience and in support of her own twisted logic. Not only did she embarrass and humiliate Harriet and Mr. Elton by placing them in a very awkward position concerning misread signals and feelings, she has also deliberately cast aside Harriet's suitor Robert who seemed to like Harriet enough and sincerely wanted to be a good husband to her, if she will have him. To Emma, however, Harriet should aspire for more. Not a bad sentiment; in fact it's the kind of liberal thinking ahead of her time--but it's not something accepted by society back then so poor Harriet will only suffer humiliation to her character, all because Emma wants to put her in equal footing as herself which is ridiculous! Harriet is nice and sweet but she can't have the same set of choices and freedom as Emma because Emma has the privilege to be fickle, vain and independent--Harriet simply does not. Emma's ignorance over such an obvious difference between their social standing is irritating--yet also very endearing. [image] Emma being Emma Emma does not care that people in her social circle would see Harriet as beneath them; she adores Harriet nevertheless because she finds her interesting and special and whether or not she realizes it can be a tad condescending is unimportant because Emma only has good intentions even if those intentions get her into troubles of her own silly making. I think Emma is very well-written, filled with enough flaws and entitlement that give her much depth as the protagonist. Another aspect of her character that I had fun exploring was when it comes to her opinions and insights regarding the lovely Jane Fairfax. Emma is insecure around Jane, mostly because Jane is reserved and hard to engage in small talk, as well as the very definition of an accomplished woman that Emma aspires to be. While Emma is merely content indulging on her whims for so-called self-improvement and autonomy outside marriage, Jane Fairfax dedicates herself to fulfilling work outside the confines of her social class which makes her more learned, resourceful and educated about the world. The only thing that Emma comforts herself with when it comes to Jane Fairfax is that Jane is actually pretty dull in personality, often the subject of light mockery between Emma and the slightly douche-y Frank Churchill. In one conversation, they talk about how boring Jane is and that people like Emma and Frank are not to blame if they can't find the energy or time to try and coax Jane out of her shell. Both so arrogant, self-assured and individualistic, Emma and Frank for me are the perfect match. However, Emma has claimed since the beginning of this book that she has never fallen in love and could never be capable of it hence her aversion towards marriage. I could easily surmise that she could have been an asexual which would be okay but I don't think Austen ever intended her to be that which would have been more of a rewarding character twist, to be honest. It's worth nothing that even though Emma does not want to involve herself in personal romantic entanglements, she is more than happy to insert herself in other people's love lives. Austen plays this absurd character flaw of hers to a tee and I can admit that they are the instances in this novel that I find very enjoyable to peruse. It's the source of this book's conflicts. That being said, almost a good sixty percent of this four-hundred-seventy-seven-paged book is SO FUCKING SLOW AND REPETITIVE. I even said during one of my status updates for my reading progress that the social interactions among characters that populate this book are the Victorian-equivalent of Facebook-ing. The content of these scenes and dialogue does not at all justify the length and I hated every goddamn minute I have to read through all the non-events that happened by the 180-paged mark. Nothing monumental truly transpires after the amusing Mr. Elton-Harriet-Emma drama save for the scarce intriguing narrations concerning Jane Fairfax being a bore to Emma (and Emma feeling guilty about feeling that way), and Emma's contemplation about her real feelings for Frank; and whether or not she's attracted to him or not. Emma does not end up with Frank Churchill, though. She ends up with Mr. Knightly, an old family friend who is ten or twelve years her senior. And it only took for Harriet to realize that she might fancy Mr. Knightly for herself just so Emma can realize too that she had always loved Mr. Knightly after all. WOW. Who knew that's all it takes? It would have been awesome if we cut out the tons of bullshit parties/get-togethers/whatever where random characters would gossip or charm each other so we could have arrived to this stellar revelation earlier but hey, Austen felt like the other stupid parts of this book that I hated were important so--who I am to argue with a classical writer? I just never remember being this annoyed about minutiae descriptions of ordinary events in classical works unlike when I read an Austen book. Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, and Doyle all have moments where they dwell on piles of descriptive narrative pertaining to scenes that are often not as relevant as others, but at least they kept it down to a minimum and go back to the purpose of their plot in the first place. With Austen's Emma, it was an indulgent feat that littered a great number of chapters for the second and third volume. By the three hundredth or so page, I almost did not want to finish. But I made a promise to myself that I will push through a Jane Austen novel this time. If I was ever going to do it, I want it to be for Emma because I do find the main character so engaging and relatable, and I care about what happens to her a lot. It's really the other inconsequential interactions among other characters that I would rather without which negatively affected by overall enjoyment and appreciation of this novel once I finished. If only this book was at least two volumes shorter, it would have gotten another full star in its rating instead of three and a half. RECOMMENDED: 7/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
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![Fate／Zero（1）第四次聖杯戦争秘話 [Dai Yonji Seihai Sensou Hiwa]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1678694839l/9965332._SX50_.jpg)
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| 4.17
| 534
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| Jan 12, 2011
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really liked it
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REVIEW TO FOLLOW
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Notes are private!
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Nov 30, 2015
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Dec 02, 2015
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Nov 30, 2015
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| 0553212281
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| 4.19
| 241,460
| 1843
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really liked it
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No other writer evokes horror in its rawest, most human form like Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes his stories are a blunt force trauma while others are dri
No other writer evokes horror in its rawest, most human form like Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes his stories are a blunt force trauma while others are drilled into the mind using precision instruments of terror. His themes and depictions of people's greatest fears are very diverse and uniquely constructed, more visceral in some aspects but also cerebral in execution for a select few. This anthology The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings is comprised of his finest works in short story and poetry forms tackling what is readily terrifying, certain terrors that elude the psyche, and the unfortunate ways human beings transform into the very monsters they fear. With seventeen gruesome tales and sixteen morbid poems, this anthology is a must-have for any aficionado of the genre. The prose that Poe crafts in each of his pieces is spellbinding; we get descriptive ramblings of mad men and women, psychologically layered instances and premonitions, and frightening yet subtle symbolisms plus debated interpretations of each work. Reading his short stories transport you right into the disturbed minds of irredeemable individuals who heed the call of misery and darkness, acting both predator and prey of their own machinations and failures. His best pieces are those that make readers experience paranoia and dissociation themselves and such stories have become a classic for that very reason. The titular The Tell-Tale Heart is a brief yet searing account of a man haunted by his macabre misdeed while The Black Cat and The Cask of Armontillado have characters who commit murders for reasons somewhat hollow and petty; the former was discovered in the most absurd way possible while the other was successful in concealing it but is forever tainted after the fact. We also have allegorical pieces such as The Masque of Red Death, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and A Descent in the Maelstorm which evoke a series of unavoidable misfortunes, marking its characters in blood and death. And then we have tales that have more non-conclusive interpretations and resolutions such as The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeria, The Pit and the Pendulumand The Premature Burial. All four of these stories are imaginative and insidious, dealing with fantastical elements and spine-tingling primitive fears that plague as all, only if we allow ourselves to contemplate deeper about them. A few other stories deal with catastrophic, life-altering conflicts which are found in Ms. Found in a Bottle and Silence--A Fable. And then we have the character-centric baffling accounts of William Wilson, Eleanora, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the last of which has the most trying length. Before there was ever a more defined detective genre and its formulaic elements, Poe has created C. Auguste Dupin, the first crime reasoner who used deductive reasoning in solving criminal cases that later on inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his more famous great detective Sherlock Holmes. Dupin only appeared in two stories, The Murders in Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter which deserve multiple readings to be acquire a more nuanced appreciation for the groundwork and thought process that Poe has employed in characterizing his detective and resolving the plots. After readers had their fill of his gripping short stories, they can move on to the assortment of his poems which offer a more economical way of slaking their interest and intrigue for the memorably horrific and sometimes even upsetting concepts regarding ailments and discord that people will always find themselves caught up in and often not overcoming. Poe's poetic style is refined and elegant in a lot of respects but there are moments of sporadic contemplations and truly intense retrospective epiphanies that will keep reeling readers in. I personally enjoyed Israfel, The City in the Sea, The Valley of the Unrest, The Sleeper, The Bells and Alone. With a vigorous and daring marksmanship in which he penned his works with, Poe's prose is very much alive--rustling, palpitating, throbbing, moaning and groaning and every other vivid ways that may drive weaker minds mad upon reading. His tales are cavernous places, buried deep in the recesses of our minds we never fully acknowledge. But every so often we can hear them calling for us--like a bell tolling from a distance--or the low, persistent humming of a heartbeat; whether concealed in a crypt, lodged inside a bottle in the middle of an ocean or has made itself comfortable right under our very beds where we believe we are most safe when we really aren't. RECOMMENDED: 9/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
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Nov 24, 2015
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Dec 11, 2015
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Nov 24, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0618711651
| 9780618711659
| 0618711651
| 3.97
| 425,786
| 2005
| Apr 04, 2006
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really liked it
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We lose more than we gain and these losses always resonate. They have very sharp edges and far-reaching sounds. They are both unique to every person,
We lose more than we gain and these losses always resonate. They have very sharp edges and far-reaching sounds. They are both unique to every person, and universal to all. The impact of never having them again is just something we could never quantify. The world we live in is populated with the ghosts of those we loved--those who were claimed by the dark, and continue to haunt us long after they perished. A loss can hurt a person too deep that there is no way to swim back to the surface, even more so when the option of sinking is so tempting. A loss can ignite us with a purpose too. When love is forfeit and must be restored again, others would seek out answers to questions that could never offer closure. The search for that ultimate puzzle piece, the despair in trying to move forward, the grating incomprehension of sorrow and guilt--the weight of it all is far too great, too intangible, too heavy to ever carry ahead, let alone fully understand. But we have to try anyway. "Our situation is this. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." ~Albert Einstein Tragedies force us to examine the state of our relationships and perspective about the things we can't see or define, and when they occur so suddenly as they often do, it curses us with the opportunity to change, the burden of insight. We learn to die far more often we can count, but we also get to live again--either reborn as stronger people, or become mere empty shells. Author Jonathan Safran Foer attempts to capture the overwhelming mystery of what loss (as well as guilt) can do to us, as well as the shocking simplicity of the things between them. In his 9-11 tragedy-inspired novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer shaped a fascinating story told in the eyes of a nine-year-old Jewish boy named Oskar Schell who is coping with the death of his father, Thomas, after the terrorist attacks. Smart, inquisitive but still very young and so naive of the ways of adults, Oskar embarks on a journey to preserve the memory of his father by reading too much into clues and making up theories along the way concerning the last few things his father had done before he was killed during 9-11. He retraces the steps of his father's habits, and explores the places he had been weeks before until he became obsessed with visiting every person in the six boroughs of his neighborhood with the surname 'Black', believing he or she may be the last person his father talked to before he went to work and died. His most prized object was the key his father left behind, wishing it will lead to some secret or revelation, regardless of whatever it is. Oskar is not the only POV narrator of this novel, however. Between his journal entries faithfully cataloging every minuscule detail of his adventures are the letters shared by his paternal grandparents. The grandmother writes to Oskar, retelling the story of how she met and fell in love with her husband who left before Oskar's father was even born. The grandfather, Thomas Sr., on the other hand, writes to his late son whom he had never met, but now he was willing to connect with his estranged wife in the wake of their son's unexpected demise in 9-11. Their respective entries serve as breaks from Oskar's own, but they have to be the saddest pieces of writing I have ever read from two people who struggle to make a life together but couldn't figure out why it was worth having one together in the first place. The climactic meeting between Thomas Sr. and Oskar at the very last hundred pages or so of the book was a quiet moment filled with both meaningful and pointless conversation. It was also when Oskar finally confesses as to why he couldn't stop missing his father, and why he had been trying to solve a mystery he may have pinned all his hopes to, mostly because it was the only thing left of his father he can hold onto. What he had always wanted in the end was forgiveness. As perceptive and brave as Oskar was during the coping process, he remains a child of nine years; selfish, narrow-minded, innocent and optimistic. He's far too young to face such a harrowing existential crisis, but that inner conflict is what drives the spectacular quality of this novel. I think Foer's narrative style and stylistic language overall have an impressive breadth; the descriptions are so uninhibited and very detailed, yet also quirky and sporadic that the incoherent ramblings of each of its three major narrators can be very poetic and poignant, if not altogether exhausting to peruse. I can liken Oskar to Christopher John Francis Boone from Mark Haddon's A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime because I think Oskar may also have a developmental disorder and may even be in the autism spectrum. He sure is a strange child with a sense of wonderment yet also well-acquainted with cynical and disheartening views about how the world works and the agonizing paradoxes of death and living. His grandparents are probably the saddest people I have ever encountered in fiction. Oskar's detailed accounts remind me of Captain Ahab's in Moby Dick where nothing is held back. This also means that Foer's writing has a tendency to drone, often at the consequence of the story's natural flow itself. Much like Moby Dick, this expansive writing style that is borderline anal retentive is an acquired taste and so I don't recommend this book for easy and casual reading. I admit that even I was getting irritated if not entirely bored in some passages. Despite that, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a fulfilling and daring chronicle about grief and loss, death and metamorphosis, told in the conflicting yet enriched perspectives between a child who lost a parent and an old married couple who lost their son. The 9-11 inspiration was done just right without giving itself to some condescending melodrama, and Foer was actually able to create a vivid landscape of feelings whenever he can say a lot more with the most economical words as long as they can deeply speak to the heart. The trouble with the writing which I remain critical of simply lies in its indulgent tendency to become garrulous, filling the pages with too much information that interrupts the flow of an otherwise consuming and unique narrative. In a nutshell, I really liked this book for its effort to convey how a young mind tries to process having a loved one die in an event of national importance, and how that can potentially mess him up. I really thought Foer had the ability to distill the essence of such pain and wanton longing, particularly when I read the passages shared by the grandparents because those parts of the book really made me feel as if contents of my own soul are laid bare before me, and I fear what is being reflected back in its muddled surface. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an elegant tale that for me struggles and somewhat succeeds in offering half of the answer for The Beatles' song about where all the lonely people come from, and the wondrous, possible places that they travel to once they decided there is no reason to stay stuck in a place that only makes them feel less whole. RECOMMENDED: 8/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 2015
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Nov 14, 2015
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Nov 01, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1476785651
| 9781476785653
| 1476785651
| 4.08
| 49,797
| Aug 11, 2015
| Aug 11, 2015
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it was amazing
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I stumbled upon Felicia Day almost four years ago when she first appeared in the CW's Supernatural during its seventh season. She played the role of t
I stumbled upon Felicia Day almost four years ago when she first appeared in the CW's Supernatural during its seventh season. She played the role of the queer computer expert and all-around geek Charlie Bradbury, and has since continued to reprise that role in the subsequent seasons of the show. I absolutely enjoyed her portrayal because I found that I can relate to her as Charlie, so I researched about the actress online and found out that she has written and produced her own webseries called The Guild, a rather funny slice of life story concerning a bunch of gamers and their eccentricities and struggles both on and off their roleplaying games. I was instantly hooked by the first two seasons and utterly mesmerized of the confidence and talent that Felicia has displayed as herself and as the co-founder of her company Geek and Sundry that has a channel in YouTube featuring the most nerdgasmic content about gaming and other related stuff. As an independent woman who has made a profit out of her geekeries, Felicia Day is someone I found rather inspiring and so I have spent copious amount of time downloading and watching a lot of the G&S shows like Tabletop, Meta Dating, Sword and Laser, Co-Optitude, The Flog, Vaginal Fantasy, Written By a Kid, and many more. I couldn't get enough of this lady and simply had to know more about her. Luckily, she finally published her memoir and I eagerly devoured it the moment I got my hands on a copy. This was everything I expected it would be and so much more! I would recommend this to EVERYONE even if one does not know who she is because her journey to get to where she is now is astounding and enjoyable, written with a style and prose that exude warmth, teeming with humor and insight. Felicia Day certifiably makes her distinct mark recognizable and uniquely hers in every passage found in You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), an autobiography that never ceases to be engaging from beginning to end. Day is sensible and humorous as she recalls her unconventional childhood and family ties, her studies to become a violin virtuoso while also earning a Math degree, and most importantly her introduction to the gaming world and how finding a community of like minds (and having a very supportive mother) has nurtured her individuality and confidence in herself. But Felicia Day is not always as self-assured and secure in her life no matter how much she thrives on her uniqueness. In fact, her amusing streak of neurotic insecurities fill the pages with stories about her daily freak-outs over the most minuscule of things, and her struggle to make it as an actress during her twenties. They are very realistically rendered and often very heartfelt and hilarious at the same time. It was only when she found a support group of other creative women and finally decided that she wanted to write a show about her experiences with game addiction that Day found her true calling in life. That being said, there are more battles to come that she needs to conquer to maintain her success, small and non-mainstream as it may be, but still very much hers to claim and be proud of nevertheless. The memoir also reveals her creative process and the grueling and often disheartening ways she almost didn't want to write or act or do anything because she was overcome with fear, anxiety and the pressure of living up to people's expectations, as well as her built-in personality flaw of chasing after perfection. These are the most gripping portions of her book because it was her tell-all. Her crippling self-doubt is something we all can relate to. By showing her weakest points and allowing the readers to see how she challenged herself to get the upper hand over them, Day has also encouraged them to take control of their lives and pursue what they're most passionate about--regardless of how weird--no matter the pesky negative feedback from an unappreciative audience because sooner or later other people who share that passion will find them and make all the heartache and rejection worth it. Bravely and proudly, she writes to all of us: "Create something they've always dreamt of. Connect with the people they never thought they'd know because there's no better time in history to do it..We need the world to hear more opinions, give glimpses into more diverse cultures... "Everyone has a chance to have his or her voice heard, or to create a community around something they're passionate about and connect with other people who share that passion. Best of all, it rewards people and ideas that never would have made it through the system and allows the unique and weird to flourish." Felicia Day is the living embodiment of this example, and by establishing her Geek and Sundry channel, she has allowed other individuals who have the same vision about themselves and the world at large to come forward and bask in the glory of their geekiness; to never be ashamed of being labeled as weird, idiosyncratic or a little crazy. Day's memoir essentially imparts the message that once you accepted what you are and become fearless enough to show it to the world, the world will open to you and you can carve a place in it where you can belong. You can even help people build their lives around the things they love and want to celebrate with others. This is why she has a spin-off extension channel for aspiring vloggers who talk about whatever they want, however they want. That is what defines a nerd or a geek. It's the often obsessive but devoted ways we show how much we love and enjoy the books, shows, games and fandoms that have dominated our lives. Day simply found a very positive and constructive way of using it to reach to an audience who is interested to hear her story and point of view, and all of us could do the same, thanks to the power of the internet. "I love the idea of breaking the system. The beauty of the internet is that it gives unrepresented voices, the opportunity to do a little breaking." You need to be able to be proud of yourself. You are unique and good enough just as you are." Of course, she also shares her bad experiences during the #GamerGate incident which was something that you could tell was hard for her to talk about, but she soldiered on anyway because she knew her voice as a female gamer has to be represented especially when she is a role model to a lot of young women who want to feel safe in their gaming community that has continued to become even to this day so vile, close-minded and sexist. Day expresses her concerns and wishes that this misogyny and discrimination not just against women to be put an end to because it damages the gaming community to the outside world, and fractures the relationships of these people within their own divided factions. Felicia Day's You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is an unforgettable and inspiring narrative detailing a young woman's quest to find a fulfilling vocation that led to the creation of her own geekdom. It's funny, audacious, reflective and very much riveting. Pick it up, even if you don't know who this woman is because it's nigh time for you to get acquainted with the ferocious Felicia Day. Visit her channel GEEK AND SUNDRY Watch THE GUILD Watch THE FLOG RECOMMENDED: 10/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 08, 2015
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Dec 19, 2015
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Oct 26, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0307948463
| 9780307948465
| 0307948463
| 3.62
| 2,822
| Jul 24, 2012
| May 07, 2013
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really liked it
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I bought this book first, but the very first Charles Yu work I've read was my next purchase which was How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe. I c
I bought this book first, but the very first Charles Yu work I've read was my next purchase which was How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe. I could never begin to tell you just how madly in love I was with it from start to finish. You can read my review about it in case you're curious. Now, if I sit still for a moment and think about it again for a whole minute, I might get lost inside my own head and never recover. The only reason I bought this other book was because of one of the quoted reviews in the back page cited that if I'm a fan of the cult NBC show Community, then this one is definitely my cup of tea. And I can agree with that person...to some extent. The truth is, if it wasn't for that reference to my all-time favorite sitcom, I never would have even bothered looking for Yu's novel in the first place. Also, if I happened to read this first before How To Live, I'm afraid I might just put this author aside which would be a damn shame because How To Live was one of the most amazing literary experiences I have ever had which touched the geekiest parts of my soul. That being said, this collection entitled Sorry Please and Thank You wasn't like How To Live in a Science Fictional Universe. For one thing, it's an anthology of twelve stories, and a few of them are so convoluted and ridiculous but they still manage to be delightfully imaginative. His conceptual work of the plots (or a lack of any plot at all) can be gratingly incomprehensible one moment, and terribly poignant and heartbreaking the next. What was common between the two books had to be the overall style and delivery. There is no doubt that they are definitely penned by the same writer whose sense of humor and wit are mystifyingly outstanding and unique. At their best, these same qualities could make up for the flaws in his storytelling for some of the pieces. Writing-wise, Charles Yu has the kind of voice that speaks a language you and I may not understand at first until we listen to it without distractions as we try to analyze how he communicates or attempts it with us--and why sometimes he often fails. Only then can readers unravel the secret pain and wish fulfillment in his written words that are so wrapped up in his ramblings about how a few people in this world ever really learned to talk and respond to him in the same manner. But those that do speak his language and are willing to form a dialogue with him will find a ready friend and confidant in Yu's comfortable and unassuming lead characters. They are often just him role-playing through a piece, much like a lonely child creates magic and mystery as he plays by himself while adults look on, both amused and worried of the stories he comes up with. Only three stories truly stood out for me as magnificent pieces in this collection; the rest are products of the deranged, quirky and absurd writings of a most puzzling man who indulges in his whimsical passages with disregard for harmony and structure. Yu is far too fanciful with the other stories that it's hard for me to take them seriously, let alone have some sustained interest in them. However, as critical as I am about his overall lack of literary restraint, and slightly appalled by his chaotic compositions for Sorry Please and Thank You, I will attest that he has quite the huge talent and potential to become, well, even crazier and uninhibited in his storytelling. His prose is never stilted, never dishonest or bland. Charles Yu will tell you a story and you will hate him for how he tells it but he will make you feel something as if you have never lived until you heard/read what he has to say. And so, ultimately, what he offers in this anthology may be so disparaging and irregular, so imperfect and so laughably disturbing and fucking preposterous but you are guaranteed to become a duly impressed, captivated audience. I have never read a writer who had laid bare his soul and all its contents--the broken trinkets and the precious suffering--and still remain so genuinely innocent and clueless about the darkness and void he had treaded without heed or caution; and all because his imagination has no strings or a cage big enough to enclose it. This may not have the powerful resonance of How To Live in a Science Fictional Universe but Sorry Please Thank You is just as exceptional; it has never been tedious or dull and there are interesting details to each story that can be quite enjoyable to re-read again. As for the three stories I truly loved in this anthology, they are Standard Loneliness Package, Hero Receives Major Damage and Open . These stories were deconstructions about humanity's awkward relationship with death, destiny and identity respectively, and Yu did not hesitate to tug that seam repeatedly to show us what could be lurking underneath our insecurities about them until the entire thing frayed. I also liked Inventory, Note to Self and Designer Emotion because the style and approach to said pieces managed to be inventive and hilarious all at once. Others like Troubleshooting and The Book of Categories are laborious to write since they parody the content of technical manuals with a humorous twist, and no other writer but Charles Yu could pull it off. I simply believe the man is absolutely bat-shit insane and I think that's why I enjoy reading his stories so much even when they confound me to no end! RECOMMENDED: 8/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 29, 2015
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Oct 10, 2015
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Sep 27, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0007558066
| 9780007558063
| 0007558066
| 4.18
| 4,818
| Jun 1938
| Jul 21, 2014
|
really liked it
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This book is a real treasure since it collects two of Virginia Woolf's most notable essays namely A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. They were bot
This book is a real treasure since it collects two of Virginia Woolf's most notable essays namely A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. They were both such insightful readings filled with memorable and philosophical passages that took me in an adventurous and stimulating journey about important issues that I damn well should care about. In fact, I was so incredibly enthralled by the essays that I ended up placing strips of sticky notes for the pages that have the most discussion-worthy quotes. I suppose this review will be littered by them as I write this because I want to take the time to explain how much Woolf's writing affected me, and the kind of lasting impressions it left. Please take note that I will be devoting more time tackling A Room of One's Own and just briefly touch upon Three Guineas much later on. [image] A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN "Literature is open for everybody. I refuse to allow you to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." This is probably the only written feminist piece that resonated with me for all the right reasons mostly because it was written for and about women who aspire to write in literature themselves. I don't consider myself a feminist; even when I joined Gabriela Youth in the first two years of college, I simply didn't become passionate about the movement itself. It's just not a political identity I can strongly associate myself with, but I would be a negligent asshole if I don't at least acknowledge and be thankful for the benefits I'm reaping now which are mostly due to the long decades of dedication and hard work of earlier generations of women who fought for feminist values. That is why A Room of One's Own was such a meaningful reading experience to me now that I'm at this tricky point of my life where life-altering decisions depend most often on the small and seemingly inconsequential ones. I myself have always dreamed of becoming a fictionist. I want to write something publishable someday too. It's just a matter of fate for me to seek out the words of a respectable writer like Virgina Woolf, and what she could teach me. Divided into six cohesive chapters, A Room of One's Own is where Virginia Woolf imparted a beguiling lesson on the status of women in both the real world and in fiction whilst providing very searing observations regarding their perceived inferiority, and the day-to-day oppression that they had to face throughout the centuries. Woolf also employed the 'stream of consciousness' type of narrative for this titular 1929 extended essay which was originally a series of lectures she delivered in Cambridge University about Women and Fiction. The essay's title is derived from Woolf's assertion that a female writer needs to be financially stable and to have the space and privacy in which to write. It's also essentially a metaphor for the freedom 'needed for creativity and imagination to flourish' (Collins). The quoted passage below was taken directly from Chapter 5 of the essay where Woolf was reading the first novel of the fictitious Mary Carmichael as Woolf made notable criticsms on where she could improve and how to go about it. The commentary she provided for this part of the essay is one of my favorites. Sure, it was bizarre to read about a literary criticism on a novel that doesn't even exist, but Woolf made it work, using Carmichael as a way to further emphasize the points she wants to get across when it came to the formation of female writings. She assessed for any woman who wants to write: "Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days." To determine how and why women write fiction, Woolf traced how women have been represented in fiction so far as written by men. She took on the persona of Mary Beton. The first chapter gave detailed accounts explaining her experience in luncheons and tedious social gatherings she had to attend at a university, and how she seemingly feels at times misplaced in her surroundings. As Beton, Woolf distanced herself from her writing as she tried to establish the definition and constraints about women and/in fiction in general. This led her to some crucial and enlightening research about the several crises, challenges and disadvantages women have been subjected to that in turn stifled whatever creative heights they can accomplish as novice writers. Her research included and highlighted a great many essays written by men who argued that women have less intelligence than men, and therefore cannot sustain the discipline and other qualities needed to pursue a literary endeavor or anything based on an intellectual pursuit. Quotes such as "Female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex" can be both infuriating and amusing to read, and Woolf was very glib albeit sharply critical of such ridiculous sentiments coming from well-educated men who had internalized and perfected their chauvinist points of view into a near art form. To contextualize this, Woolf called out patriarchy to attention as an enabler for such a cyclical narrow-minded view about women and their role in civilization. It's interesting because, in her next essay about the needless contraptions of wars fought in the name of masculine gain and greed, Woolf held patriarchies in contempt, citing them as dangerous social constructs that allowed the fascist movement to take root and infest Europe. But I digress. For now, Woolf shared us these gems to illustrate the oppressive function that women were unwittingly placed upon: "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...Whatever may be their use in societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if [women] are not inferior, [men] will cease to enlarge...and if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished." Woolf as Mary Beton proceeded to quote certain male essayists regarding on how they view women, the paradoxical ways that they women as muses on pedestal to serve for inspiration; but also as sirens or seductresses who lure them to to their destruction and ruin once a woman ceases to agree with him or worship his every word as if it's the only sacred thing. This for me is the singular, most spot-on assertion that anyone has ever said about men's idealization of women in fictional landscapes and sexist disregard of them in real life; something that could still hold true even in modern times: "Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the property of her husband." Midway through the essay, Woolf as Beton then began to weave a fictitious tale about Shakespeare having a sister who is just as talented as he is but unfortunately was never allowed to study so she can learn to read and write. This sister was said to be just as creative but instead was forced into marriage which she promptly denied. Ber family disowned her and she was forced to leave in the streets, her hopes of being just as accomplished as her brother had turned into despair. In this fictitious Shakespeare sibling, Woolf merely wanted to showcase and drive home the point that the education and privilege afforded by men will always give then more opportunities and varied choices for careers, livelihoods and vocations. Meanwhile, women play the parts of a subjugated, separated species altogether in the background, only meant for homemaking and childbearing alone. In fact, Woolf cited poetry from possible women who lived in those times and the content of their poems she shared is depressing; almost all of them protest their stifling homebound lives that they consummately fixate on the unfairness of their chains, rendering them unable to write anything else. Woolf made an educated guess that if a learned woman (born in a high-class family) aspires to write, her stories and poems will always bear the tragic mark of her enslavement and would not create any kind of literary legacy. Such in the case back then for women who have creative inclinations. "…a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she will be inferior as that he shall be superior." In addition, Woolf also talked about how a fully-characterized woman in fiction should be depicted by her fellow woman as genuinely as possible, and that in order to be successfully understood, her value as a person should not be exclusively tied to her relation to a man at all in a story . This is still applicable today especially in male-centered narratives in certain genres like action movies where women are one-dimensionally portrayed as the men's love interests, sex objects or damsels in distress to rescue (hell, even all of the above so the story can focus on the male lead's journey and completion of goals; the worst of which is the "girl" is reduced to becoming a 'prize' he is entitled to claim). Sure, women both in fiction and real-life have a wider range of roles these days but the battle--to define ourselves without having to always contextualize male presence and perspective and how they contribute to our decisions and actions-is ongoing and is still being fought. "All these relationships between women are too simple…almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women in fiction were not only seen by the other sex but seen only in relation to the other sex...indeed, literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them?" Woolf also briefly referred to lesbianism which she surmised is natural; 'sometimes women like other women' and that's that. I'm also queer myself so Woolf writing about lesbian identity was a nice touch because I've always felt more emotionally compatible with the same sex though, ironically, I intellectually identify more with the literature written by men which brings me to this intriguing philosophy Woolf offers about bisexuality in men and women: "…it made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness…in each of us, two powers reside; one male, one female...the normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating…'a great mind is androgynous'. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all of its faculties." As Virginia Woolf nears the end of her essay, she gives us this great advice to women: "By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction." THREE GUINEAS This essay, on the other hand, expounds on the promotion of education for women so they can hold positions in more demanding careers and even in public office. This is contextualized in the eve and aftermath of the world wars. Woolf exposes the stupidity of war according to her opinion, and lays out facts she believes are indisputable when it comes to preventing wars, and that should start with the liberation of women. For example, she talked about finances and that a woman should be allowed independent control of money she earned: (1) The daughters of educated men are paid very little from the public funds for their public services; (2) They are paid nothing at all from the public funds for their private services; (3) Their share of the husband’s income is not a flesh-and-blood share but a spiritual or nominal share, which means that when both are clothed and fed the surplus fund that can be devoted to causes, pleasures or philanthropies gravitates mysteriously but indisputably towards those causes, pleasures and philanthropies which the husband enjoys, and of which the husband approves. It seems that the person to whom the salary is actually paid is the person who has the actual right to decide how that salary shall be spent. Once again, Woolf emphasized the limited roles of a woman during that time, particularly on how her individuality is automatically diminished once she is taught that marriage is her only calling and must therefore subject herself to the whims and ambitions of her husband. "It was with a view to marriage that her mind was taught. It was with a view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra; sketched innocent domestic scenes, but was not allowed to study from the nude; read this book, but was not allowed to read that, charmed, and talked. It was with a view to marriage that her body was educated; a maid was provided for her; that the streets were shut to her; that the fields were shut to her; that solitude was denied her—all this was enforced upon her in order that she might preserve her body intact for her husband. In short, the thought of marriage influenced what she said, wha she thought, what she did. How could it be otherwise? Marriage was the only profession open to her." I was honestly more enticed with A Room of One's Own than Three Guineas which I might have to re-read because I got decidedly uninterested midway through reading. Nevertheless, Woolf manged to write something exceptional and remarkable in these two essays and I warmly congratulate her for the insights she accomplished to deliver in her pieces, most notably in A Room of One's Own. I am so excited to read her fiction before the year ends. I'm undeniably compelled to do so now.. RECOMMENDED: 9/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 09, 2015
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Aug 27, 2015
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Jul 25, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812975634
| 9780812975635
| 0812975634
| 3.63
| 11,154
| Sep 2009
| Sep 07, 2010
|
really liked it
| "What do we really know? If every question is answered so that we know everything there is to know about life and the universe, what then? What wil "What do we really know? If every question is answered so that we know everything there is to know about life and the universe, what then? What will be different? The darkness will be there still. The deepest darkness. The darkness that is deeper than any sea-dingle." This was a book I was pleased to read among my Batman graphic novels for July, weekly marathon and subsequent reviews for Batman: The Animated Series, and an assortment of shoujo/josei manga. It was only two-hundred and a few pages long and had a languorous yet hardly wasteful prose, with a first-person narrative that manages to be contemplative in all the right places, even heartbreaking. A simple yet elegant story about brothers--one a blind and romantic musician as its storyteller; the other a cynical and aspiring philosopher with a penchant for collecting forgotten things--Homer and Langley follows their journey throughout distinct eras of American history, ranging from the two World Wars, the hippie, peace-loving late sixties to seventies, and the polarizing and tumultuous eighties which are the times the brothers still maintain an interactive yet somehow deteriorating contact with the outside world. By the nineties and as they reach old age, both Homer and Langley Collyer began to retreat further into their hermit lifestyle within the frugal comforts of their family house which had withstand and bore remnants of the decades that passed it by as seen from the trinkets and nostalgia-inducing objects left behind its quarters. This was a strangely endearing novel, part-period piece and part-memoirs. It manages to be engaging in spite of the straightforward and linear storytelling. Nothing particularly exciting truly happens apart from the brother's encounters with a crime boss and the latter parts of the book where the Collyers became the talk of town because of their reclusive lifestyle and accumulating debts from public agencies. Homer as the first-person narrator is likeable enough. He is visually-impaired yet musically-inclined, describing the life he lived and experienced with his brother with such vivid richness in spite of his lack of sight. The transient relationships he had with other people always have a sad tinge to them most probably because of how deeply he allows himself to get attached, unguarded and unquestioning. He was such a romantic, highly contrasting his more stern and pragmatic brother. Langley is a philosophizing cynic who believes in the Theory of Replacements and yet he is a walking, talking and breathing contradiction. While Homer is content exploring the world with an open understanding yet limited curiosity, Langley questions and challenges almost everything that comes his way, often becoming miserable and frustrated of the little terrible things humanity gets itself into. His major project is to compile a single global newspaper where he collected all necessary news events that should be preserved. He also had little side projects such as painting, believing he can somewhat restore Homer's sight through tactile recognition. He is a determined intellectual who in spite of his flawed and resistant nature against change is actually a decent and loving brother who remained loyal and devoted to Homer throughout their lives. "I could only think of how easily people die. And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin--an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition. Homer and Langley reads as something you might hear from a pair of grandparents, in this case a couple of old men who are mismatched brothers and who surprisingly got along just fine even if their differences are so readily apparent. As a novel itself, it's not very action-oriented and only told in one perspective, with a few dialogues. But I genuinely found it such a quaint autobiography about a person's life rich with details of even the tiniest insecurities, tragedies and triumphs. Reading it was a breeze and I stayed emotionally invested enough on the brothers to see how their story wrapped up by the end of this book. I could recommend this novel because of how at ease it made me feel perusing it, and made me think about my grandfathers in both sides of the family who passed away before I was even a teenager. This is what it would probably be like to learn about the daily grind of their lives from the past. I think my parents could easily have their own unique tales to impart in the future and I certainly think that theirs would have the same charm and poignancy as Homer and Langley's. Not the most thrilling or life-changing of books but this one is subtly enthralling in its own way. One of the few good examples of how a memoir can be written. EDIT: This is actually based on the real Collyer brothers and their infamous hoarding. The author just took some liberties about their possible inner lives. Read about the factual accounts HERE RECOMMENDED: 8/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 16, 2015
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Jul 20, 2015
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Jul 15, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1407233769
| 9781407233765
| 1407233769
| 4.16
| 10,503
| 1980
| unknown
|
really liked it
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My favorite speculative fiction of all time is Michael Cunningham's
Specimen Days
which I read back in 2012, while the very first science fiction
My favorite speculative fiction of all time is Michael Cunningham's
Specimen Days
which I read back in 2012, while the very first science fiction I read was Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
. I read these books only a few months apart and I was forever changed because of them and this change has definitely got me interested to venture on acquiring and experiencing more of what the science fiction genre has to offer as much as I could. Eleven more sci-fi books later, I remained insatiable, more so after finishing this one. The very first thing that struck me while in the middle of consuming this novel by Walter Tevis is that it was unmistakably a majestic blend of both the dystopic landscapes featured in Huxley's book, and written in the same nostalgic manner of aching, melancholic sensibility and spiritual contemplation very much alive in Cunningham's work. With that, I couldn't help but find myself deeply embedded in the pores of this haunting tale of Mockingbird. Like most sci-fi books, it started with an off-beat promising premise that slowly developed into something personal and tragic for both the characters and a reader like myself. I think books like this one work very well for me because they lavish on the often inarticulately beautiful quality of human life and the art and terrible burden of living itself; how precious and fleeting our lives truly are, and what happens when a certain moral decay or a disintegration of long-held valuable things occur. Truth be told, Mockingbird is a tapestry of themes I mostly associate with some of my favorite sci-fi stories like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, to name a few. There's the usual existential crisis where characters live in an age of detachment from self and/or others but suddenly and quite poignantly awaken from their stupor to contemplate and pursue the meaning of why they exist to begin with and why the world has been reduced to shambles, whether physically or metaphorically. Mockingbird follows the same formula with its own invigorating narrative. The central theme of this book focuses on the grim possibility of humanity losing literacy, particularly their ability to read, and how that seemingly simple negligence would follow a series of other significant losses due to population control via fertility-inhibiting drugs (and other forms of recreational drug use to numb everything away), the disappearance of any creative endeavor like art and literature, and utter extinction of family, community and religious inclinations. All of these set-ups sound awfully familiar already, and rightly so because Tevis does share his dystopic characterizations of his world in the same vein as Huxley's inarguably superior novel Brave New World. However, what does elevate Mockingbird in another new level entirely is the quality it also shares with another novel I love to pieces, Specimen Days, when it comes to its character arcs and relationships. "My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered and drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment." ~ Paul Bentley The summary found at the back of the book was slightly misleading. I originally thought that the android character Spofforth would be the main focus of the entire novel but it turns out that this responsibility belongs to two other characters; a man and a woman named Paul Bentley and Mary Lou respectively who are instantly recognizable as the representational equivalent of their world's very own Adam and Eve, as both stumble their way into consciousness and awareness together. Paul was introduced as the only human being who has the ability to read which he picked up on by accident when he unearthed an instructional videotape on the subject. Spofforth hired him to record the written dialogues in the archives of silent films which was an activity Paul has learned to enjoy and appreciate. By learning to read and watching film from a forgotten era, certain feelings were brought forth from Paul; thoughts and emotions he never recognized which only deepened when he begins a relationship with Mary Lou who dared him to question and outright ignore the rules programmed into them as children. True to being a biblical Eve, Mary Lou dares Paul to challenge the status quo. Paul's journey to "memorize his life" as suggested by Mary Lou was done by the very simple act of scribbling his daily grind into pages upon pages of diary entries. But the more he records his own memories and encounters, the more miserable he becomes when he realizes how dull the world has become with its people caught in a standstill, burying all their self-awareness through drugs and quick sex. His nuanced journey from imprisonment to liberation on two levels--the physical and the emotional--is, for me, the most humane aspect of this book. I eagerly discovered things alongside him as he devoured what scarce books he can find in the places he travels. One notable place is an abandoned mall outlet where small groups of Christian families reside. His collective experience with these people is one of the most ironically comical yet heartwarming moments found in the novel. "Why don't we talk to one another? Why don't we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets in the city? People used to read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquence silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said I am human. I talk and I listen and I read. Why did we stop reading? What happened?" ~ Mary Lou Mary Lou is an engaging, clever and intelligent young woman who was inquisitive enough to figure out by herself that there is something amiss in the world she lives in. All her life she has been on the run, disobeying rules and making a mockery of the robot-police state, all for the sake of not forgetting what makes her human and unique in spite of the initial programming all children are required to undergo which diminishes personality and identity. Paul was understandably drawn to her and as he teaches her to read, she in turn opens him up to a realm of turbulent feelings and creative musings, instilling in him dismissed qualities such as imagination and intellectual curiosity. Her journey in this book is about satisfying that same curiosity as well as understanding why children have become extinct and accepting that there is a faint glimmer of hope that she may have found a way to turn things around if she's brave and resolute enough to do it. "I would like to know, before I die, what it was like to be the human being I have tried to be all my life." ~ Robert Spofforth Spofforth is the first character we get introduced to in this book but the role he plays is much less personal but nonetheless just as moving and sad. A robot created by implanting another living person'a brain, he suffers dreams and thoughts from that late person's life and so develops an acute sense of 'humanness'. This is troubling because what Spofforth really wants to do is to cease to exist but his programming does not allow him to die as long as humans still have a need for his kind, a robot of the Make Nine series, and probably the last one there is. For an android, Spofforth is surprisingly humane and often relatable, especially during such times he is subjected to gloom and suicidal thoughts. Mockingbird is an enduring work of the heart and the imagination, an enchanting tale about human resilience and creativity while also being a painful yet also humorous commentary on the qualities that we as humans value and celebrate and the awful aftermath that follows once we take these same things for granted in the long run. Much like Brave New World, this book's take on a dystopic society of drug-addled and individual-based society is unforgettable, and its prose is sparse yet can powerfully illuminate dark recesses of the soul in the same manner Specimen Days has achieved as well. The world Paul and Mary Lou live in may be underpopulated but their story will certainly proliferate strong emotions from readers who will consume it and hopefully appreciate such simple yet essential things in life we can so easily forget and destroy. A MUST-HAVE AND READ! RECOMMENDED: 9/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2015
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Jun 25, 2015
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Jun 19, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575094141
| 9780575094147
| 0575094141
| 4.14
| 170,392
| Dec 1974
| Mar 29, 2010
|
really liked it
|
I've had the longest fascination about war and the military lifestyle whether in historical books or works of fiction in general. There's just somethi
I've had the longest fascination about war and the military lifestyle whether in historical books or works of fiction in general. There's just something deeply stirring about men and women giving up their lives in service of country or a government system even when that kind of loyalty demands death, destruction and bitter endings. I have great respect and admiration for this kind of people even if those things are mixed with pity and sadness as well. My enjoyment for reading, watching and learning about wars throughout histories is a double-edged one; on one hand, it does break my heart to know about such fragile and empty lives being sacrificed as people in such compromising positions have to face the sharpest consequences. On the other, I often view the bloodshed and deaths during war-times (fictional or not) to be the most thrilling and exciting stories ever told. To have literature grant me access and safe passage inside the heads of the people who were part of it, and travel the dystopic landscapes of such times will always be the most fruitful of my reading experiences. "This is really a novel about coping back to regular life after the thrills and traumas of conflict--and finding that you have become alien. If you want to tell a story about war, you need to find a way of articulating a profundity of alienation, a depth of strangeness and dislocation." Joe Haldeman's science fiction novel The Forever War was not quite what I was expecting and definitely belongs to the scarcity of books that were able to surprise me in both enlightening and despairing of ways right after finishing them. It tackled some themes concerning sexuality in a manner that I still wasn't sure how to feel about even at this moment, and it fulfilled my earnest desire to read warfare in both its cold and exacting nature and its terrible, malicious form. I felt entirely full on these aspects of storytelling because Joe Haldeman's experiences in the Vietnam War (which was partly an inspiration for this story) truly do come alive for this grand novel, and were contextualized with such an aching retrospection and an uncannily sharp-edged clarity infused with a wicked sense of gallows humor. This was a story about war and its aftermath and earth-shattering effects on cultures and societies from someone who genuinely knows what a battlefield looks, feels and smells like firsthand which makes the physical and psychological descriptions of the intergalactic and planetary battle scenes here quite haunting. The horrors depicted are uncomfortably clinical at times too. What was so notably interesting about The Forever War is its science jargon concerning time dilation during space travel which meant that the soldiers, who fight wars against the alien lifeforms they consider enemies named Taurans, are bound to age in a shockingly slow pace. And this is where the central conflict and existential mediation of the book delve deeply about. Told in the first-person perspective of William Mandella, The Forever War is not just a story about war and death or the dystopic concepts of harmony, progress and social change that have always been essential to any grim science fiction novel. The Forever War is foremost about isolation from humanity in the most visceral level of unfamiliarity that one tends to become alien even to himself. In his service as a war veteran and on-and-off-and-on again soldier on duty, Mandella has lived an almost immortal life where he could stay in a certain planet for five months but come back to earth a century later. This, of course, is a disconcerting transition, particularly when the world that you know changes and destroys itself in order to create a new cultural identity and status quo right before your very eyes and you have no other choice but to adjust to these abrupt changes. As exciting and wonderfully compelling the moments of Mandella being a soldier were, it's actually the daily grind of his civilian life post-war that provides this novel with its beating, bleeding heart along with all the messy and intricate parts. One of the shift in societal values in Earth is the normalcy of homosexuality and outright abolishment of heterosexuality (which eventually softened in another decade or so where now heterosexuality can be 'reformed' or 'cured'). Procreation between man and woman is now seen as a wasteful activity and biological harvesting is the more prevalent practice so homosexual couplings are encouraged so the population is kept under control as well as the eugenics that come along with it. It's an idea and plotline that has made me shiver. I identify as a queer woman though I'm not very political about it, or at all, honestly. I wasn't offended or anything like that because I always contextualize the times a book was written in before accusing the material to be hate-mongering or promoting discriminatory propaganda. True, I found the portrayal of homosexuality in this book as slightly offhanded and bizarre because the reversal of what was considered taboo, sexuality-wise, did not sit well with me, though I understand the point Haldeman is trying to get across by switching the roles. Now, I don't think this novel is trying to promote either sexuality but it does make an interesting argument concerning societal attitudes and how much they can be changed decades or centuries from now. Fortunately enough, I believe the generation of today is taking a more positive step forward in accepting homosexuality and other gender-specifics identifications outside what is considered 'traditional'. But The Forever War is a cautionary tale on how a wrong step does lead to a misdirection where an exclusion of one race, sexuality, etc. does in fact only reinforce damaging and harmful (if not utterly barbaric) way of thinking. Much like how the homosexual society of Haldeman's creation is now the oppressor of a minority it perceives to be sinful or unnatural. There may be plenty of discussions to be had on that aspect of the novel (and I'm sure other people online and in GR have talked about it too), and it's certainly the one that has struck a chord in me. In spite of that polarizing theme, this novel has a few other ways to engage anyone who enjoys science fiction in its most eye-opening, radical and unexpectedly humorous and moving of moments. William Mandella's crisis concerning the age-generation gap between him and the platoons he must handle and work alongside with had been an interesting development to watch, as well as his bittersweet relationship with Margay Potter, yet another soldier who is his only connection to a world that was lost to him for good, which provides the book with so much needed warmth and insight. I also loved the fact that, indirectly, this book also cautions us against the concept, if not the pursuit of some us, for 'immortality' and our rather stupid desire to acquire it. Life is only precious because it is supposed to be short. We are supposed to expire. But someone of Mandella's position is not allowed to live a brief yet fulfilled life but rather just exist by default, suspended in a sort of personal limbo of repetitive cycles because he can never be released from active duty as long as humanity keeps fighting its monsters, real or imaginary. This was really well-done in the book; Haldeman has given us a harrowing depiction of Mandella's struggle to fit in in an ever-changing world that always seem to leave him behind as he's stuck in a continuous loop of soul-crushing military service with little to no hope for a normal, well-balanced life. The Forever War is a highly sophisticated science fiction novel that happens to be only the first book of a series. Its writing is purposeful and meditative, filled with infectious moment of grief, action, philosophical dimensions, and, above all else, one man's tireless quest for a loving life against the suffocating immensity of deaths around him. Now I won't have time to read the next installment this year or the next but I am definitely going to follow up on it once I set up a new reading roster. RECOMMENDED: 8/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 12, 2015
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Jun 19, 2015
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Jun 10, 2015
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| 1857983416
| 9781857983418
| 1857983416
| 3.91
| 42,318
| Feb 1974
| Nov 08, 2001
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liked it
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[image] That .GIF image perfectly captures the range of distinct reactions that Philip K. Dick's Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said got out of me in the [image] That .GIF image perfectly captures the range of distinct reactions that Philip K. Dick's Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said got out of me in the expanse of reading it in the last four days. There was bafflement--then disbelief--then mild disgust--and, finally, karmic relief. Don't get me wrong, it's not a badly written book. Of course fucking not, it's PHILIP K. DICK! His outstanding Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep will forever destroy me in this world and in another parallel existence because asdfghjklmalfunctionerror10101... Anyway, that being said, something along the way went wrong as I peruse through the two hundred and four pages of this novel; I can't really pinpoint exactly where, but all I know is that I couldn't help but alternate between confusion and rage as I went on. Originally, around eighty pages or so, I was going to rate it with four stars because, right from the get-go, I was just enjoying the brisk, no-nonesense yet highly engrossing pacing and linguistic style that Dick had incorporated in his storytelling; the breadth of the entire narrative work felt so much lighter than Do Androids Dream, honestly, making it easy for me to keep up with every twist and turn as I follow the protagonist Jason Taverner, a government-experimented Six which basically means a person with enhanced physical/sexual appeal and whatever attractive aptitude there is. He's a former musician-turned celebrity talk show host and in a relationship with another icon named Heather Hart, also a Six. After a confrontation with one of the women he duped and took advantage of, promising her a career in showbiz only to sleep with her a few times, he was left physically compromised and woke up in a dingy motel room with only a wad of cash on hand but with no trace of discernible legal records of proof of identity whatsoever. It's as if he's been literally deduced to non-existence. Set in a fictional futuristic world of 1988 in the United States where everything seems to be under the command of a rampant police state where laws and legislation are just plain FUCKED-UP (sexual legal consent is reduced to thirteen years of age; African-American lineage is sanctioned to die out), the premise and the mystery that this book are hitched on were promising and I really did eat it all up in the first two days of reading. By the fourth day, however, as I stare blankly at the last page (right after containing myself from convulsing in laughter), I realized it had more to do with my unmistakable dislike for every goddamn character featured in the book with the exception of the police general Felix Buckman (whom I was 50/50 with) and the very brief insert of one Mary Anne Dominic (who really should have been a major character as oppose to some flimsy extra in the background). Other than those two, I cringe my nose at the rest, more particularly in vile contempt for the overall way the female characters are portrayed, the greatest offenders of them all have to be the insecure, selfish and self-entitled paranoid bitch Heather Hart, and the clinically insane (sort of a) sexual predator who is skilled in the art of emotional blackmail, Kathy Nelson. The least offenders have to be Ruth Mae (whose speech about love and grief was actually pretty philosophical--too bad it came off completely dissonant to her general characterization), and the bisexual (pansexual?) fetish-driven drug addict Alys who had an incestuous affair with her twin brother and sired a son with him. And YES she is less offensive than Hart and Nelson because at least Alys had a personality I did enjoy reading about while the other two were so emotionally flat and perceived only in how the main male character objectifies them. They're placeholders that reflect his sexual frustration and inadequacy which make them rather one-dimensional miserable fuckers. Normally, I could overlook gender-biased portrayals if they serve the story or a theme in the narrative. However, it didn't feel like these poorly characterized female characters ever served a purpose except to interact with the male protagonist, Jason Taverner. I don't have any kind of concern about his character since he took that mescaline drug. I suppose I eagerly wanted to know what happened to him that he lost his identity and people don't remember him at all in spite of being a popular son of a bitch. My interest in his welfare continued to decline the more he showed what a pompous chauvinist he was (although his very short interaction with Mary Anne Dominic rekindled some sympathy because that was the only sweet and humanizing moment for his character in this book). Then again, everyone in this book is miserable--and not even in a compelling way that makes me sympathetic for them. Whatever end they got (Dick was kind enough to wrap up their fates nicely in his Epilog) is something they more than deserved, in my brutally honest opinion. It's actually great that Dick didn't leave it to chance, or his readers' imaginations, as to how these characters' fates came to an end because I personally didn't form any sort of connection with them to ponder about what happened in their lives after the novel finished. So thank Loki that Dick inquisitively wrapped it all up. Phew. I love character-driven stories; I root for characters with problems and struggles that make me sympathetic to their plights; characters who later on develop self-awareness of their bad choices instead of just going through the motions of being victims forever. None of the characters in this book ever grew or did anything that could have redeemed them, with the exception of Mary Anne (who is so slight of a character that she only appeared in six or eight pages). I did LOVE THE ENDING though. Basically, the beautiful blue vase that was the product of love, commitment and talent that Mary Anne produced was able to be displayed in a museum (while she had a career in ceramics; how ironically bittersweet and awful was it that the shoe-in extra gets a happy ending?) AND MORE OR LESS OUTLIVED EVERY MISERABLE FUCKER IN THIS BOOK. That was poetic justice if nothing else. In any case, I will keep reading more of Philip K. Dick's books because THERE ARE SO MANY OUT THERE and I am looking forward to acquaint myself more with his writing. Overall, Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said just didn't work for me as a sum of its parts, especially when the parts are composed of characters that I perceived to be grimy, irresponsible disablers of human dignity and progress. The mystery plot and the answer concerning Jason Taverner's sudden lack of identity was still a pretty thrilling read, though. RECOMMENDED: 7/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 07, 2015
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Jun 10, 2015
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Jun 07, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0307739457
| 9780307739452
| 0307739457
| 3.44
| 18,973
| Jul 23, 2010
| Jun 28, 2011
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it was amazing
| Enter the following data: Enter the following data: +++ When it happens, this is what happens: By reading Charles Yu's incomparably original work of fiction, I'm realizing, have realized and will have realized that I've lived and I am still living inside a box that travels backwards in time when I'm supposed to propel myself forward into the unknown future of my own makings. We are all time machines, he claims, but most people's machines are broken that they get stuck or get looped or get trapped. Our greatest anxiety is the box we live inside of--everyone's personal TARDIS, if you may--and it's something we use to evade the present, re-create the past, and deal with the future. We are required to move ahead and yet more often than not we stay in a standstill, reliving memories and regret as if their tune is all we are and what we can only afford to look forward to. In this inexhaustibly consistent yet still beguilingly self-referential novel is where we meet Charles Yu--a character you may or may not interchange with the author--who is a thirty-something time machine repairman working in Minor Universe 31 whose inhabitants tend to get a little loose with time traveling and get themselves in a pickle all the time. Yu only has two sustainable personal relationships with: TAMMY (his vehicle to travel in time), and Ed (a fictional space-dog of a sidekick). One day he encounters a future version of himself and shoots it dead. Literally running in a loop where all points in his timeline converse and diverse before his eyes, Charles also has to find his father, a failed time-travel theorist who might as well fell in a black hole after he just disappeared with no rhyme or reason, and only a book which Yu himself has written in the future entitled How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the key to unravel it all. With both unyielding clarity and stupendous lack of linear direction, this book serves more as a commentary of the science fiction genre and its conventions, particularly the literary approach to the time paradox, as well as the rudimentary themes of existential crisis, quest for autonomy, and both the illusion and victory of choice. Most critics have even compared it to Douglas Thomas' Hitchhiker series fused with Philip K. Dick's emphatic literary sensibilities, and yet Charles Yu's scintillating book stands apart and all on its own. "Most people I know live their lives in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward." I will attempt to explain why this book can possibly change your life if you're willing to see past through the heavy-laden self-referential flow of the narrative because underneath that seemingly impenetrable exterior is a story so rife with meaningful insights on human connections and the pursuit of happiness all the while paying respects to what the science fiction genre as a whole contributes to our goals of self-fulfillment and progression. I would caution, though, that this is never going to be for everyone; its writing is eloquently paradoxical, and unmistakably a taste only a few might acquire; and those that would will delight in its essence. I've recommended this book to a close friend of mine who shares my affinity with the NBC-now-Yahoo-sponsored show, Community. Created by Dan Harmon, a showrunner as equally kooky as his own creation, Community is a tremendously meta and experimental basketcase of a situational comedy series that continues to push even its own envelope and has just wrapped up its sixth season earlier this week. Its unique approach to comedy and storytelling is what made it endearing to its fans that the show acquired a cult following whose passion an outsider can never truly understand unless he joins the circle for himself. Much like said show, Charles Yu's novel operates in the same level of manic disregard for what is conventional and safe in telling a story. This two-hundred and thirty-nine paged paperback is INSANE. Even though it's fairly written in an understandable contemporary language and style, the conceptual narrative framework can still be alienating to a certain extent since it's mostly an open discussion on the theorems and mechanics through philosophical ramblings of the character as the author, and the author as the character. This novel essentially reads like the kind of conversation you will have with yourself if you're someone who is too self-aware for your own good. It breaks itself apart. It questions even the act of asking a question. It carves itself a special place in the universe where only it can make sense both its own state of being and non-existence. It's quite difficult to get across just how incredibly complex and frustratingly clever this book is. Whatever I type in the review will forever pale in comparison of what the novel itself actually offers the readers, and that is a chance to interrogate oneself in a manner that I can only akin to not only breaking the fourth wall of the plane of reality but hammering it into a shape both familiar and unrecognizable. "Time isn't a placid lake, recording our ripples...we are too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about..sure, there's a little bit of splashing up the surface but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us." As a self-referential ode to science fiction conventions, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a self-sustaining metaphor of the genre and formula of writing science fiction itself while also making snide or glib commentary upon itself while it's busy outlining the time paradox via a bittersweet personal experience of the lead character he succinctly and quite pitifully termed as the 'father-son-axis'. In a shallow surface, this is an autobiographical search for family and identity; on another level it's a pastiche of humanity's fascination for the concept of time travel; and resting on another layer of that is a symphonic composition that poignantly captures how human beings are their own time machines after all. We are highly intelligent species with an acute sense of time and therefore we are always able to create and define what is past and future while also simultaneously, laughably and heart-breakingly unable to LIVE IN THE PRESENT which is more elastic than we ever realize. We mourn the past; we are eager to discover the future. But we never really enjoy what we are and who we are in the present. As Charles Yu's insightful manual claims: "Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine." What is about time travel that a lot of us are so smitten by and curious of? Isn't it the uncanny ability to be able to pass through our lives as observers, to re-live our moments of defeat and regret, hoping we can somehow change what happened so it can dictate what will happen next? Being able to time-travel means we might be able to rewrite what has already been read and discarded; worn-out stories that we've desperately clung to because we believe they're the only truths we must preserve in order to live another day. Yu's novel forces us to examine these beliefs, to really dissect why we remain stuck in our time machines, going over events as oppose to creating new ones. On the other end of the spectrum, some of us--like me--would rather SKIP AHEAD . Right after finishing the book, I realized that I've been caught in a time loop myself. We all have been everytime we get caught somewhere between mourning of what was behind us and daydreaming about what lies ahead. And I for one have this tendency to wish I can fast-forward to my life--ten or twenty years to the future. That's why I like reading science fiction. It appeals to my wish fulfillment of envisioning a made-up future without having to do the work in the present. Hell, while midway through a good book, I would cheat and LOOK AT THE LAST PAGE. And I did the same thing with Yu's novel and you know what I got in the end? An empty page with this note:
I didn't get its significance until I finished the entire novel itself. That's when it hit me--this self-annihilating habit of mine to try and hurry up the steady pace of my life just so I can get over both the small and the big stuff--it's how I keep getting trapped. Upon having that very epiphany now that I'm staring at that said last page of this book for the second time, I actually teared up a little bit. It seemed inconsequential at the moment but contextualizing it with the overall pattern in how I live my life, I realized what a damaged fool I have been. So this is what Charles Yu, ultimately, wants to say to himself and to us with his book:
RECOMMENDED: 10/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 31, 2015
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Jun 05, 2015
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May 29, 2015
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Paperback
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| 080213422X
| 9780802134226
| 080213422X
| 3.91
| 27,026
| 1965
| Aug 09, 1995
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really liked it
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On deciding for the title of this novel, writer Jerzy Kosinki was inspired by the symbolic use of birds in literature which "allowed certain people to
On deciding for the title of this novel, writer Jerzy Kosinki was inspired by the symbolic use of birds in literature which "allowed certain people to deal with actual events and characters without the restrictions which the writing of history imposes". He states that there was a certain peasant custom he witnessed as a child before in which he describes it as follows: "One of the villagers' favorite entertainment was trapping birds, painting their feathers, and then releasing them in the air to rejoin their flock. As these brightly colored creatures sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them." Due to the controversial nature and content of this book, I was surprised that I even stumbled upon a copy about a year ago while once again casually flipping through the general section of a bookstore. I've only known about the book months prior to acquiring it, and I was so excited to start reading it on a scheduled time. Some months later, I did just that and for two days I was immersed in witnessing the ugliest and most vile horrors I have ever read in fiction that were loosely based from real-life accounts of people who lived through the second World War. There was nothing about this book I enjoyed, to be honest. It was psychologically painful and slightly numbing to peruse through, especially with each chapter dealing with deprived deviant acts of the social and sexual kind. That being said, this is a spectacular novel that examines the darker and sickening aspects of human nature, and it was successful in its depiction because I don't think any decent person would enjoy the varying degrees of cruelty and degradation that Kosinski have shared in The Painted Bird. The Painted Bird follows the travels of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Central Europe, and whose parents have sent him away in beliefs that he would fare better away from the heart of the warfare and Nazism at the time. What happens mainly instead over the course of the book is that the boy was forced to grow up very quickly, robbed of another option, as he stays in one village after another, more often discriminated against, beaten up and rarely cared for. As a book that deals with the Holocaust, Kosinski managed to stay away from events surrounding the actual prison or labor camps where the Jews were gassed or incinerated. We all know that's where the real horror lies but Kosinski challenged this idea and revealed to us that in times of warfare, even the most modest of places such as rural villages can be sources of the most potent evil human beings are capable of. This book delved deeply on the shocking ways that antisemitic sentiment, religious persecution and barbaric superstitions could turn people into hateful creatures; that even the simple folk back then can and will ruefully participate in terrible acts, often justifying their malicious intentions as divine interventions, against the boy himself, and any Jewish or Gypsy person of the same ilk who would pass their way. I don't think it's worth specifying these truly disgusting and abhorrent events here in my review, mostly because I'm still sick to my stomach just thinking about them. Even the subtlest ways of these people when it comes to their maltreatment of the boy just because he has black hair and dark eyes (and therefore an abomination to God) were chilling in retrospect. So, yes, I did not enjoy reading this book but I was fully hypnotized into trudging along each chapter anyway. I could then claim that this was a great exercise on moral conscience and inherent human compassion on the end of the readers such as myself who have developed a certain keen sense of cynicism over the years regarding the world at large. I am not shocked easily by gory details but I have to admit that this book made me feel bad every time I try to insert some humor in my initial thoughts in Goodreads for the reading updates while reading. It doesn't feel like a subject to be made light of, personally, but it was also the only way I can endure reading the chapters--I had to find some sort of morbid amusement and detachment just so I don't get thoroughly disheartened. What was so moving about this novel, however, was the main character of the boy who remains unnamed throughout, but whose iron will and resilient youth had made it possible for him to come out on the other side alive, though fragmented and forever changed. Children are tougher than we give them credit for, and I was comforted with the fact that he was resourceful in adapting to multiple situations where his own life and innocence are fully at stake. This book features tons of examples of mob mentality (the likes of which are awfully symbolized by the painted-birds analogy Kosinski has utilized), as well as separate incidents of incest and bestiality, and a rather disconcerting abundance of gang rapes at the later part of the book where a whole chapter is devoted describing the entire thing in painstakingly gross detail. This is not a book meant for enjoyment so if you happen to decide you want to read it, please remember what I just said in this review. The Painted Bird also operates on the wisdom that there are no happy lives, just happy moments, and about fifty pages near the end, the readers are allowed to view snapshots of the boy's life in the aftermath of the fall of the Third Reich and though there was nothing immediately uplifting about it, it's the best happy ending he could make out of from the traumatic experiences that have shaped him, and malformed him somehow. Personally, I didn't expect that there's going to be a healing message by the end of this tragic tale anyway. I think the ambiguity of the resolution for The Painted Bird accomplishes what it was set out to do in the first place: to remind readers that the darkness hovering in our lives is real and it could seep through the cracks, whether or not we allow it. But the real test of courage and spiritual enlightenment is on how we cope and deal with the poison that corrodes our systems, and I would like to believe against hope that we can rise above our own base impulses towards hatred, ignorance and persecution. There is corruption and sickness in the world, yes, but we all should strive to be the balm on its infected pores. The Painted Bird, after showing me so much inhumane and malicious acts that people do to each other, has also reminded me of my humanity and the blessings and burdens of ensuring I don't give in to the call of moral decay and disintegration of values, no matter how easy (and even remotely tempting) it is to act like lesser beings. RECOMMENDED: 9/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 15, 2015
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Apr 16, 2015
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Apr 12, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1781082227
| 9781781082225
| 1781082227
| 3.89
| 326
| Oct 07, 2014
| Oct 07, 2014
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really liked it
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January is the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes' birthday month. His creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle assigned him the 6th of January 1854 as his birthda
January is the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes' birthday month. His creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle assigned him the 6th of January 1854 as his birthday and, growing up, I have always celebrated this date in my own special way. This year, he just turned a hundred and sixty-one years old, if you can believe it. That's a century and a half of legacy already! Because of such a tantalizing breadth of tales, Holmes and his loyal companion, best friend and bibliographer Dr. John Watson have been adapted to film and television throughout the years and these crime-solving partners were most recognizable in the present for the Guy Ritchie films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, the BBC adaptation Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and, my most favorite of all, Elementary starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as a female version of Watson, Joan. But my Sherlock Holmes will forever be Jeremy Brett of the Granada series in the late nineties because his performance simply captured the eccentric, bipolar and often callous sleuth whose unquenchable thirst for puzzles and off-putting practices and have alienated him from the rest of the polite Victorian society. Brett's interpretation of the character was eclectic; bursting with energy one moment and brewing in melancholy and lethargy the next. His Holmes might be a logical automaton but his personality was richer and diverse--unpredictable and playful; grim and despairing. It was timeless for me; Doyle's very vision fully realized on television screen and every time I re-read the original books themselves (composed of four novels and fifty-six short stories in total), Jeremy Brett is who I picture. So to celebrate my Great Detective's birthday for this year, I decided to spend the next four weeks of January reading four Holmesian anthologies written by other authors. My first pick is Two-Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets. As much as I uphold that Doyle's canon version is the Sherlock Holmes I will forever and dearly hold onto, the editor of this anthology, David Thomas Moore, has a different opinion on the matter. In his introduction, he claimed that the canon itself never appealed to him, most possibly because of the era it was set in and the conventions of the genre that Doyle was writing in. He owed his favorite version of Sherlock Holmes to the "revisionists" of the modern times which is to say he liked his Holmes and Watson in settings and scenarios that hopefully challenge the archetypes they represented for so long, but such stories should still be able to keep their essence and spirit intact in spite of the more liberal interpretations. In Two-Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, the fourteen stories Moore has collected for this volume are guaranteed to be quirky, absurd and imaginative with premises and plots that I myself would never even think of which was why my enjoyment was immense while reading each piece because they are mostly speculative fiction in scope (a very underappreciated genre), even if there are a few of them that just didn't work for me. Looking back, I actually considered ten out of these fourteen to be well-written enough to sustain interest and excitement, if not instantly unforgettable pieces I would like to re-read again. My notable favorites out of these ten are A Woman's Place in which Mrs. Hudson's role as a landlady has more to its appearance and function than what it seems; The Innocent Icarus where Victorian society is majorly composed of people with superpowers while Holmes belongs to the minority of ordinary mortals, and he has to work the old-fashioned way to develop and expand his intellectual acumen; the leisurely creepy The Lantern Men about the metaphorical significance that ghost hauntings become for people who are either hypersensitive or neglectful of their own lives; and, finally, we have Parallels which is a delightfully meta story concerning teenage girl-versions of Holmes and Watson (Charlotte and Jane) where Jane is a fanfiction writer online who weaves slash fics about Sherlock and John (of whom I assume must be the BBC adaptation characters) as a way to cope with her own internal conflict regarding her relationship with Charlotte. As for the six other stories, I really did find them oddly endearing in some form or another, and these are Half There/All There set in bohemian sixties of New York Cities where Holmes and Watson are lovers, partaking in recreational drugs and small-scale mysteries; The Adventure of the Speckled Bandana in which a celebrity fakes his own death; Sherlock Holmes as a demon summoned by a Chinese scholar to solve petty crimes was featured in The Final Conjuration; the carnival-themed A Scandal in Hobohemia has Holmes living as a psychic in drag named Sanford "Crash" Haus who meets an African American doctor named Jim Walker; A Study in Scarborough where Holmes and Watson are real people who became celebrities because they made a career out of their cases by adapting them into episodes for a radio show; and All the Single Ladies where a female Sherlock Holmes helps John Watson, a doctor working in an all-girls school, from being implicated in a serial rape case. The other four are The Rich Man's Hand, The Patchwork Killer, The Small World of 221B and Black Alice. All fourteen stories in general have Sherlock Holmes and John Watson set in alternate universes with plots so convoluted, endlessly confounding and yet surprisingly entertaining that would either intrigue anyone who is open with such self-indulgent fan-fictions or infuriate one who is less inclined to appreciate this thematic anthology as a concept and collection. I fall on the former category. There are just plenty of consecrated awesome moments in a lot of these pieces that I could not get enough of (and even wish there is a sequel for some of them) so I definitely can recommend this. Regardless, this is still a polarizing volume because, as imaginative as the settings and characterizations are, I could discern that they are mostly written for shock value or for a whimsical effect that may be slightly pandering on a surface level. There aren't enough meat to the stories that you could digest and claim that they're bloody brilliant and substantial. If you are looking for a collection that features hard-boiled mysteries and conundrums, then this isn't it, so it's up to you if you still want to try it. Otherwise, this was a fun anthology. RECOMMENDED: 8/10 [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 05, 2015
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Jan 11, 2015
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Jan 02, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0441627404
| 9780441627400
| 0441627404
| 4.07
| 114,088
| 1958
| Jun 15, 1987
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liked it
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I knew enough about the King Arthur mythology through cinematic adaptations I've seen growing up, but this is the first time that I ever read a novel
I knew enough about the King Arthur mythology through cinematic adaptations I've seen growing up, but this is the first time that I ever read a novel about this legendary hero, and I thought T.H White's classic masterpiece The Once and Future King is the best place to start as any, considering the raving reviews I've encountered about this one every time I browse the medieval literature section in book-related websites. I was also drawn to this book because of this quotation taken from it:
'Perhaps we all give our hearts uncritically to those who hardly think about us in return'
I remember buying a copy of this book once a paperback became available back in 2013 or so, and I started reading last year but had to stop because of my self-imposed Batman comics diet. I was glad to pick this up again last week where I was already halfway through the first of the four segments. Now that I have officially finished the entire thing, I suppose what I can say first and foremost was that it wasn't everything that I hoped or wanted it to be--and that was pretty disappointing, honestly. Nevertheless, there are exemplary aspects to it--particularly on the discussions concerning the ideologies of power and leadership; morality and gray areas--that are thoughtful and provocative. This book has very strong arguments which I immensely appreciated. "Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance." The first segment of the book is The Sword in the Stone where a boy deemed Wart, a warden of Sir Ector and a playmate to his son Kay, meets a mysterious and whimsical wizard named Merlyn who offers to tutor him. Their chance encounter was supposedly destined and Merlyn is very fond of pointing out that he has clairvoyance, often humorously overwhelming Wart with prophesies from his distant future. Their relationship is very unusual, an interpretation and approach that I'm not used to, but it remains nonetheless as my fondest and most favorite part of the entire novel. Wart doesn't feel special in any way and it baffles him why Merlyn has taken such an avid interest him especially when the boy has gotten accustomed to being treated of secondary importance to his more privileged friend, Kay. His journey of self-discovery is an entertaining mix of the extraordinary and poignant where Merlyn forces him to question the social constructs of the era he lives in. "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then; TO LEARN." Throughout The Sword in the Stone, Merlyn accomplishes this by turning Wart into various animals through magic, imparting him indirect lessons pertaining to the nature and roles of community and individuality so that the boy who will become king of Camelot will develop an understanding and compassion of how to best govern his subjects. Wart is a receptive student who eventually does accept that nothing his eccentric mentor is teaching him is inconsequential. Over the course of the first two hundred pages, Merlyn shapes Wart into the fine young man worthy of pulling out that famed sword Excalibur at the end of the first segment, and it's pretty much rewarding for our lead character and the readers to see Wart freely choose and embrace his fate even when he's absolutely terrified of the things Merlyn has warned him about for his future. Next we have The Queen of Air and Darkness whose tackled events are twofold in scope; the first few years of Arthur Pendragon's reign and the wars he felt obliged to wage; and the curious adolescent misadventures of Queen Morgause's sons Agravaine, Gareth, Gawain and Gaheris whose unquestioning devotion and slightly (if not gravely) Oedipal-worship for their mother are upsetting and pitiful to read. Queen Morgause is, of course, Arthur's half-sister, who will make him unwittingly commit an incestuous affair that will produce an offspring who is to be Arthur's ultimate downfall--Mordred. In this segment, there are noteworthy discussions about "Right" and "Might" between Arthur and Merlyn and his old friend and mentor continues to challenge him to think about every decision he makes as a king and the purpose and motivation behind every course of action he will take. "You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt. Unless you do something, your reign will be an endless series of petty battles. That is why I have been asking you to THINK" The third segment entitled The Ill-Made Knight is the longest one and definitely the part of the novel that ALMOST ruined it for me. We've been following Wart's growth and evolution to King Arthur and his meditative discussions with his mentor Merlyn, and then all of a sudden we've switched central characters midway and they're the most irreconcilably selfish, distressing and unsympathetic pair I have ever encountered. I'm referring to Lancelot and Queen Guenever. I may have more sympathy for the former whose lamentations and struggles of moral judgment against the weakness of earthly desires can be quite moving in some moments during the book, but I absolutely abhorred this version of Guenever. I assert that the writing for the women in this book is so appalling, even in medieval romance literature's standards. We have Guenever who is just vain, oppressive and pathetic and the commoner Elaine who is passive-aggressive yet also submissive and stupid. Both women are Lancelot's love interest and unrequited admirer, and they are respectively the devil and the deep blue sea for him as well. It's like reading the lives of a celebrity couple and a stalker-fan who wants to pull them apart. And it's not even the trashy-fun, tabloid drivel kind of soap opera which was why I almost, ALMOST wanted to give up reading this book entirely. I did like this quote, however: "They thought they had understood each other once more--but their doubt had been planted. Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were seeds of hatred, and fear and confusion growing at the same time; for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury." Though the third segment is heavily focused on the painfully unrealistic and absurd adulterous love affair between "Lance and Jenny" and the involvement of the unwanted second mistress Elaine (who, by the way, tricks Lancelot twice in her own version of modern 'date rape'), there are still gems to be found in this part of the book. This happens when we revert back to Arthur who begins to question and doubt the choices and rules he had imposed on his kingdom. I just don't understand why I should care about Lancelot and Guenever's depressingly bland "love story" when I'm so invested in finding out more about King Arthur as a leader who is supposed to be a champion of the masses but has found himself becoming their oppressor instead and in ways he had been so committed in preventing in the first place. This was the man who argued with Merlyn that ideas should not be imposed on people but rather made available for them to choose or not to--and yet he finds himself doing the exact opposite because the supposedly noble knights in his service have taken advantage of their positions. "When I started the Table, it was to stop anarchy. It was a channel for brute force, so that the people who had to use force could be made to do it in a useful way. But the whole thing was a mistake. It was a mistake because the Table itself was founded on force. Right must be established by right: it can’t be established by Force. I'm afraid I have sown the whirlwind, and now I shall reap the storm." Furthermore, there are also interesting sidestories concerning the knights themselves, particularly about the theory and application of "chivalry" back in those times. I recall Jaime Lannister from George R.R Martin's A Song of and Fire series once arguing that there are so many vows that knights take that it's often possible to follow one vow and forsake the other especially when they tend to contradict each other. White does tackle this but not nearly as straightforward as Martin's. His knights are still more inclined to hide under the veneer of moral self-righteousness to justify their machismo and misogyny. Even the bravest and most chivalrous of them all, Lancelot, still mistakes his own intentions but I can actually blame Guenever and Elaine for that. As a central character of The Ill-Made Knight, Lancelot is compelling but his inability to reclaim his weaknesses and use them instead to strengthened his convictions is ultimately the reason I stopped rooting for him. The only real lesson I garnered from reading the torturous and unsurprisingly tragic relationship between Lance and Jenny is the fact that passions unchecked and consummated out of blind lust and immaturity are going to destroy you little by little, and Guenever most of all deserved whatever is coming for her. I frankly want to wish away the "Lance and Jenny" disaster from the pages of this novel. "Morals are a form of insanity. Give me a moral man who insists on doing the right thing all the time, and I will show you a tangle which an angel couldn't get out of." The final segment of the book is The Candle in the Wind is probably the most serious part of the entire novel (where as the first one has great humor in it) which is only appropriate since it concludes the story in a way that I actually found shocking yet acceptable. The personal drama between Lancelot and Guenever's revelation about their affair and Arthur's reaction to it is one that really amused me to no end because Arthur has been aware of the affair since it started (thanks to Merlin, the walking spoiler alert) but chooses not to do anything about it as long as it's left unspoken. However, his half-brother/half-son Mordred wants to make sure that Arthur will be forced to punish the adultery of his wife and best friend in accordance to the new laws of his kingdom. What follows over the course of the pages is actually rather suspenseful for me. Everyone's dishonor and sin have caught up with them; Guenever's jealousy, Lancelot's pride and betrayal and Arthur's ineffectual stand against these two people and his unwillingness to accept Mordred as a son (as well as a couple of other things I won't spoil here). In the most twisted and ironic twist of fate, these three characters have no other choice but to stay united against the joint forces of Mordred and Agravaine who are determined to end Arthur's reign in Camelot. Arthur's conflict for me in this last segment is very riveting to watch unfold; all the lessons Merlyn have taught him have lead him to this moment. "Arthur’s laws are the culmination of his conversations with Merlyn about the use of might and right; to abandon his faith in these laws would be to reject everything for which he stands. Mordred and Agravaine are aware of Arthur’s commitment to justice, so they are able to trap him by his own rules and laws. Arthur does not want to unravel the society he has built, but to preserve it, he must sacrifice the two people he loves most." It's Arthur, waiting and dreading for the other shoe to drop. In summary, The Once and Future King was thought-provoking in ways that I enjoyed and consumed wholeheartedly, but it also fails to establish a well-balanced narrative that allows me to attach myself emotionally to its characters which diluted my investment in their eventual fates. I was very fond of Wart and Merlyn's relationship the most, and I would have liked to see Merlyn still play a role in the final years of Arthur's reign. I think the reason I have to rate this book lower than I initially intended was because I believe trimming The Ill-Made Knight is NECESSARY. I also believe White should have lessened his focus on Lancelot and Guenever and showed us more about Lancelot's relationship with Arthur as oppose to telling us in passing. I think Arthur and Lancelot's relationship is more important than his affair with Guenever and if Guenever was written better then perhaps her role in the story wouldn't have been so wasteful and indigestible to read. I maintain that this is a remarkable classic as a whole as long as you can select the parts to remember the most fondly. If I ever re-read this, I definitely plan to skip all the Lance-Jenny-Elaine debacle. I must also caution anyone who plans to read this novel to endure the insufferable length of the third segment because, overall, this is still a worthwhile read. RECOMMENDED: 7/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT: [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 20, 2014
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Feb 20, 2015
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Mar 20, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 4.07
| 101,368
| Jan 10, 2012
| Aug 07, 2012
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it was amazing
| "In Mexico, there are these fish that have colonized the freshwater caves along Sierra del Abra. They were lost. They found themselves living in compl "In Mexico, there are these fish that have colonized the freshwater caves along Sierra del Abra. They were lost. They found themselves living in complete darkness. But they didn’t die. Instead, they thrived. They adapted. They lost their pigmentation, their sight, eventually even their eyes. With survival, they became hideous. I’ve rarely thought about what I once was. But I wonder if a ray of light were to make it into the cave, would I be able to see it? Or feel it? Would I gravitate to its warmth? And if I did, would I become less hideous?" When I was fourteen years old, my father bought me a shabby copy of a paperback from a book sale written by an author named Harlan Coben. It's entitled Just One Look and it was about a housewife who discovers a weird photograph among her family pictures just after she had the film developed. She showed it to her husband who started acting strange until he just disappeared one night. What reeled me in wasn't really the mystery of this plot but the role and participation of its main antagonist, a twenty-six-year old contract killer named Eric Wu who grew up in North Korea and was trained as a master torturer of sorts, using a martial art that targets pressure points across the human body. He utilizes this technique to inflict pain all throughout the novel, and his chapters are just electrifying to see unfold. Wu was calculating, terrifyingly apathetic and often amusing in his contemplations. You get the sense that because of his upbringing and brutal encounters as a child who grew up in such an oppressive state, he has a unique way of examining things. He stands separate from the rest of the world, looking from the outside with a ready shrug of the shoulders while the rest of us form meaningful relationships, and fulfil our dreams and goals. For a man like Eric Wu, life is simply about survival for him; as he puts it: "hurt or be hurt, kill or be killed." It wasn't until I read him in his very first appearance in yet another Coben novel Tell No One that my fascination for this character grew and evolved into something that can only be described as a consuming obsession that lasted for a decade since high school. My connection with this fictional character also fostered my interest in North Korea as a country. In trying to understand the extensive damage of Eric Wu, I also started to take an active stance in comprehending said communist state. Researching North Korea was simply my secret hobby that only a few of my friends can understand. I was insatiably curious of the life and culture of that country, and so this is initially what made me buy this book the moment I laid eyes on it one day about eight months ago. I didn't know anything about it. I simply took it out of the shelf and read the back of the book. Just the fact that it's about North Korea was enough incentive but I put off reading this because my Batman comics diet got in the way. Now here I am at last. I just spent two weeks reading this novel and I felt numb all over right after finishing it. It had been very personal for me; the culmination of ten years worth of slightly abnormal fixation that brought me to the heart of this story. I find that some books can just physically hurt you, and there is no way of knowing which ones will leave the most scars. I am sure even a hundred pages in last week that this book will leave me a gaping wound that will take a while to heal. "People do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they have done." I recently just acquired a taste for dystopian stories which was why most of the science fiction books I've read since Brave New World four years ago focus on that, and it's funny that something a lot of us seek and partake so eagerly in fiction can and actually do exist in the real world. North Korea is the nightmarish dystopia come to life, based from several accounts of citizens who have defected, and the experiences of tourists who were brave enough to navigate it. Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son is something I can consider a fine work of imaginative fiction because it aimed to capture and define the essence of what it must be like to live in a communist state that denies its constituents a sense of identity and individuality; where propaganda is as rampant as it is a basic component of the daily lives of its people. To live in North Korea must be like breathing in a place where a man who fancies himself a god among men rules a starving nation and can determine their fates based on whatever whim pleases him; the people are just dead leaves, crushed by the tyrant’s weight, and then swept away. The Orphan Master's Son is a four-hundred-plus narrative that is divided into two parts. First, we have the protagonist Pak Jun Do and his biography, while the other is the confessions of Commander Ga, the supposedly rival political figure of the then-current Great Leader himself, Kim Jong-Il. The first part is akin to a coming-of-age story for Jun Do who was the son of the caretaker of the orphanage Long Tomorrows. Jun Do named the orphans after martyrs from the Japanese-Korean strife, and he himself picked the name "Pak Jun Do" because of its personal significance to him (which is somewhat of a foreshadowing too). Jun Do believed that his father is unable to show his love because of the loss of his mother whom he insisted was a singer spirited away to Pyongyang because of her beauty and talent. This fantasy served as an ember of hope for him growing up, and he continued to cling to it quite fiercely even as an adult man. Its poignancy affected me greatly, most probably because Coben's Eric Wu also lost his mother (in the most horrendous way possible; she was tortured, executed then hanged in front of him--he was six years old). It's also a notable pattern for Jun Do to seek women as if each one is just another reflection of a mother he never had. This will consistently play out for the rest of the novel. By the second part, a new character becomes the second narrator who relays certain key events in his perspective. He remained unnamed throughout the book and all that we really knew about him was that he was a dedicated worker; an interrogator who wishes to write biographies about the people who were captured and detained once they were considered as traitors or dissidents to the Kim regime. He strongly believed that what matters in the end when all is said and done would be the stories of individuals who will disappear and be long forgotten. In North Korea, people are expenditures whose relevance is always temporary, if not non-existent. This unnamed narrator acknowledges that which was why he develops an attachment to Commander Ga whose biography he desperately wants to write. "Little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that you once used a spoon or a toilet. Before you relinquish yourself, you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary." Adam Johnson creates an ugly and harrowing yet memorable and moving portrait of what it must be like for North Korean families who live their lives in such a harsh landscape where all its hues have gone dark. It's a place where there they have to acquire and use ration cards for food, alcohol and cigarettes. It's where sex is not necessarily something you have to pay for, so long as you have coupon books that can be stamped every time you were with a prostitute. Everything right from the basic needs is organized by your government, including vices and indulgences. In The Orphan Master's Son, we can read about Jun Do's personal encounters with failed defections, as well as participating in outright abductions of Japanese citizens who are unfortunate enough to stand near the ocean where the perpetrators can grab them and take them away forever. This is a place of constant propaganda blaring on loudspeakers; where its movies are singularly centered around the portrayal of North Korea as both the victim of American corruption who rose as a champion against the filth of its capitalism. These films always have the actress Sun Moon as its only lead, and she is considered a national icon handpicked by the Great Leader himself, and she later on becomes the reason why Jun Do started to desire things beyond the confines of his cage. North Korea is where prison and labor camps await families of anyone who tries to leave the country, and where widows must receive replacement husbands as assigned by the government. In North Korea, dogs are not household pets but rather illegal wild animals kept in zoos. These are the situations author Johnson chooses to depict and they become increasingly more significant later on in the story. The protagonist Pak Jun Do, in spite of the consuming darkness that shaped and distorted his life, possesses a light that can never be extinguished even when he was not aware of it himself at first. In spite of being programmed early on to accept the casual cruelty of his surroundings, if not directly implement it on others, Jun Do was still capable of compassion and insight which allowed him to develop a keen sense of curiosity and sense of justice for lives he unintentionally had to destroy to make it out alive. While most people in that environment have become passive of their impoverished state, Jun Do slowly begins to question the status quo as he searches for a freedom he had never known is something we all fundamentally deserve and strive for. With knowledge of the outside world naturally comes the desire to become a part of it after all. "Intimate," he said. "I do not know this word." After being rewarded for stopping a co-worker from defecting, Jun Do was sent to a Language school where he learned English. He began staying in a fishing vessel as a communications expert whose job function is to listen and record radio transmissions. A notable one belonged to a pair of American female athletes who dared themselves to row a boat across the world. He finds himself drawn to the one who rows at night and her audio journals of the trip which filled him with a sense of unnamed longing. In the ship, he develops a camaraderie with the Captain who was almost like a father figure to him, and the Second Mate who later on tries to defect. This fishing expedition part of the first installment has to be my most favorite arc of the book. It left me with a sense of hope and dread all at once because of how intense and gruelling the experiences of Jun Do and the crew are once they encountered a group of American soldiers. I feared for their lives, honestly, and found their resourcefulness during and after that event to be amusing as well as pitiful. It was by this part of the story that we become more intimate with how deep and crippling the fear that North Koreans have towards their own government that they are willing to invent tales to evade the possibility of being arrested and tortured for treason. My second favorite arc has to be when Jun Do was requested to come to the United States, specifically to Texas, as a civilian representative of the DPRK together with two other officials, and they met with a state senator, the federal agent that Jun Do only knew as Wanda, and the senator's Christian wife. This is where Jun Do was able to interact with foreigners (specifically Wanda) and their cultural differences are immediately vast, where both of them are unknowable to each other. Wanda asked him if he ever felt free and Jun Do has a different concept and definition for what 'freedom' is in his country, as well as what love and beauty is for someone who grew up in a place seemingly bereft of such things. Jun Do was also able to make a brief connection with the Senator's wife who was touched by Jun Do's story concerning the actress Sun Moon whom he has learned to pretend to be his wife while he was at sea. Her face had been tattooed to his chest because the Captain insisted on it for the sake of maintaining his cover as part of their crew. Pak Jun Do never ceases to be such an engrossing voice of the narrative. Reading him becoming aware of his own autonomy and personal desires has evoked powerful emotions from me, considering I've always been fairly individualistic myself. To live a life not knowing real independence or not having the ability to make my own choices is something so frightening to me in a visceral level which is probably why this novel has gripped me with possessive claws and refused to let me go every time I turned a page. It's a rather exhilarating experience! "He had been raised in an environment that stressed the power of men and the subordination of women, but Eric Wu had always found it to be more hope than truth. Women were harder. They were more unpredictable. They handled physical pain better--he knew this from personal experience. When it came to protecting their loved ones, they were far more ruthless. Men would sacrifice themselves out of machismo or stupidity or the blind belief that they would be victorious. Women would sacrifice themselves without self-deception." The women in Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son are the central figures and often catalysts that inspired Pak Jun Do to seek liberation, autonomy and intimacy. From the fantasy of his mother whom he never met, Jun Do would find himself feeling for each suffering woman he became acquainted with throughout the book. We have the Second Mate's wife, a great beauty who wanted to travel to Pyongyang to be an actress, hoping she has a shot of a better life by starring in movies. There's the federal agent Wanda who was willing to listen and encourage Jun Do to form his opinions and she unknowingly helps him figure out that there are certain liberties he wants to achieve by living as a person who can make his own choices outside of government control. There's also the Senator's wife who expresses her sadness over the fact that Jun Do has no religion or spirituality to keep him afloat, and tries to give him a gift he can bring home to his wife Sun Moon, his pretend-spouse. To a lesser extent, we also have the American female athlete who rowed at night. She was then detained by North Korean coast guards and was offered as a special prisoner to Kim Jong-Il. Jun Do also becomes friends with a woman named Mongnan in a labor camp at the mines and she was rumoured to be a former university professor who, along some of her students in class, publicly protested the injustices of the Kim government. Of all this women, the one who stands apart is the deceptively delicate Sun Moon who is favored personally by the Great Leader so he made her the sole star of all his propaganda movies. She was the treasure of the big screen, and the roles she played as an actress have endeared her to the nation and its citizens. The rest of the second part of the book is devoted to the dynamics and gradual relationship between Jun Do and Sun Moon, and his plans to help her and her children defect from North Korea. Theirs is not a story of easy romance; one might argue it was born out of coincidence and convenience, and they may not be wrong. But their relationship can't also be simplified that harshly because it was through Jun Do that Sun Moon finally found the courage and means to get out of the unhealthy arrangement she has with the Great Leader, while she in return taught Jun Do the meaning of sacrifice and love, as well the gift of song and completeness. "Oh, I know what you are. You know what that is? You're a survivor with nothing to live for. Wouldn't you rather die for something you cared about?" Overall, reading The Orphan Master's Son has to be the most intimate way I have ever experienced a work of fiction. It was tantalizing and enduring in vision and message. I think my fixation for North Korea found a more grounded purpose because of what this novel personally symbolized for me. Though it's punishingly intricate to read, it was also supremely masterful in every way, reeling me in completely until I felt as though I am also a captive myself. This novel is a daring feat of imagination that examines and challenges our own convictions and beliefs about what it truly means to be free by showing us what oppression, hunger and poverty feels and tastes like. We often neglect and take for granted how blessed we are for the many options and opportunities we have in our lives every day, and The Orphan Master's Son this is the kind of book that reaffirms exactly that, if not shame us with our own ignorance, self-entitlement and privilege. DOCUMENTARIES YOU CAN WATCH ABOUT NK: The Land of Whispers [A North Korea travelogue] Danny from North Korea Shin Dong-Hyuk's Camp 14, Total Control Zone RECOMMENDED: 10/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT: [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2015
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Mar 02, 2015
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Mar 20, 2014
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 971884516X
| 9789718845165
| 971884516X
| 4.05
| 643
| 1973
| Mar 15, 1988
|
liked it
| "I love our country. But what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite." This is "I love our country. But what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite." This is the third installment for F. Sionil Jose's Rosales saga after Po-On and Tree , and being able to finish it last night left me rather cold and unsatisfied. Unlike the first two books, this one has a protagonist I could not form any attachment to, and I truly tried to make some sort of genuine connection with him and it doesn't make sense to me why I couldn't. All things considered, Luis Asperri--the lead POV character for this novel--is probably the closest archetype I should have some affinity for. He's a writer who lives with his ideals through pen and paper. He worked for print media. He was privileged, well-educated and eloquent. In other words, I should have related to him because we have those listed commonalities to contend with. But I simply did not like him at all; and perhaps that reveals something about how I view myself in an objective sense. Perhaps these same qualities are things about me that I'm rather ashamed of even if I feel entitled to have them. Set in the fifties, My Brother, My Executioner is rife with historical allegories that I immediately recognized upon reading. Personally, I find that strong parallels have been made between Luis Asperri, the illegitimate son of the rich feudal lord Don Vicente, and Victor, his half-brother and the leader of the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement, to that of two of the most iconic national heroes: Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio. Much like Rizal, Luis is a writer who desires to help his fellowmen through his writings. Victor, like Bonifacio, admires his brother for his ideals on paper but is more inclined to follow through with actions even if they only lead to violence and chaos. History had told us that Rizal had inspired Bonifacio to lead a revolution for Philippine independence through his writings, and this is probably the fundamental basis of the relationship between the characters of Luis and Vic, However, the comparisons end there and much of the characterizations for Luis and Vic have a life of their own, and neither is always portrayed in a flattering light. In fact, I could argue that from all of F. Sionil Jose's protagonists so far (Istak from Po-On and unnamed first-POV narrator in Tree), Luis Asperri is the least relatable--or the most, depending on how much you can actually sympathize and appreciate such a flawed, sad idealist. There are times I can understand his motivations and sufferings; the way he would rationalize and justify his decisions through dark contemplation; the way he yearns for control and freedom to govern his own life; the way he would desire to contribute more to society and to help the poor but is nevertheless reluctant about sacrificing his own material comforts and heirlooms. Luis Asperri is the most realistic of all the protagonists in the books so far, and for that I think he is compelling and interesting enough--but I have no affection for him whatsoever. I suppose I can't help but feel harsh and critical of him because in spite of his failings and weakness, Luis Asperri is also a reflection of what I generally feel about myself as a Filipino which is to say he mirrors the same kind of helplessness, cynicism and hopeful dreams for the future of this country that I know a lot of us Filipinos still possess and have learned to suppress because we have gotten so used to the functional dysfunction of our economic structure and government system. "We cannot conquer life, no one can conquer what one cannot define, but at least it is there and it is ours to shape and to possess fully, with all the senses working, with all the powers of the heart surging, as we search for the answers to the greatest riddles." My Brother, My Executioner is, as I would have expected, well-versed in the underlying political and ideological discussions (that manifest literally in the texts with the conversations with characters or is latent through the reader's own personal perspective) concerning societal inequity and the cycle of poverty and uneven distribution of wealth in the Philippines--which is very much the oldest story of the world, isn't it? Luis Asperri and his father Don Vicente are inherently different in their views about the elite (their kind) and the poor but at least one of them is a lot more genuine and action-oriented than the other. Sadly enough, it's Don Vicente, and he is more pragmatic albeit oppressive in his actions as a rich man. He believes in self-preservation; that in order to rise from the ranks you need to seize opportunities, and this is only possible when there is are masses of people who are lower than you and often you need to rule them over. Meanwhile, Luis is a dreamer so consistently blinded by his own heartfelt illusions of harmony and peace that they have made him bitter and angry because they remain unfulfilled throughout the story. He claims to embrace change and yet is trapped within his failed progressive ideals, going back and forth between trying to become the man he aspires to be and the man he is meant to be because of predestined options because of his family background and way of life. And that in itself is a worthy discussion. Are we truly in control of our destiny when choices are scarce? Can we truly forge new paths or be content walking across paths which were already there to begin and we simply have to follow their direction? What good are ethics and ideals if we are not strong enough to live by them through actions and not just words? My Brother, My Executioner had introduced such fascinating concepts and dialogue regarding national freedom and that of individual autonomy, the tension between the privileged and the masses, and the often inescapable obligations for family and country. However, most of these ideas remained only half-baked, most probably because the protagonist Luis Asperri as a character is ultimately both too proud and ashamed of his life to actually take its reigns and be the change in the world he is always preaching he wants to see fulfilled. He's too caught up in his crippling inaction. "If they were affected by war at all, they certainly bore no scars" This was why the ending was so unsatisfactory and underwhelming for me. I would have liked to have known his brother Victor some more, and his relationship with him but instead we get so many wasteful pages highlighting Luis' doomed relationship with Ester Dantes who is, by the way, a rather poor representation of women here in this book (which is odd, considering F. Sionil Jose also wrote one of the most empowering women in fiction, Dalin from Po-On, in my opinion). The other female character in this book (the 'all-woman, sensual' Trining), is just as stereotypical and one-dimensional as the evasive Esther. I think that is my major criticism of this novel and it's made even more obvious because Luis is frustratingly chauvinistic without the self-awareness he usually applies when it comes to his moral dilemmas. That said, I think I may have to rate this installment the lowest of the bunch so far and I dearly hope the next one would have more focus and purpose like Po-On had been. RECOMMENDED: 7/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 05, 2015
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May 11, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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Paperback
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| 9718845143
| 9789718845141
| 9718845143
| 4.05
| 585
| 1978
| Aug 15, 1997
|
really liked it
| "You are going to die," I told him. "You are going to die," I told him. Reading the first book, PO-ON , of the Rosales series last year by prolific Filipino writer and living legend F. Sionil Jose was a gruellingly reflective experience that awoken a dormant passion of the nationalistic sense within me that I never thought I ever had to begin with. I would go as far as to say that this should have been a required reading in schools all across my country, and it baffles me now that it's wasn't. Simply put, this series is an extraordinary piece of work that needs to be celebrated and read every day because of its relevant commentary in the Philippine society as a whole, using no other than the means of fiction to deliver across some of the most crucial and moving points regarding the state of our post-colonial country. The Rosales saga is comprised of five books with stories told across history starting with the Spanish era down to the Martial Law years. Each story is interrelated or consequential of the one before it. The stories' shared setting is the Ilocos region, particularly the Rosales area. We follow the lives of a select family for every installment who lives in Rosales. In Po-On, we have the story of the Salvador family as told by the eldest son Istak, narrating the events starting from the moment they were driven from their lands to seek out a new home after one of their own committed a crime, and then as they venture on in a trip so often beautifully and tragically reminiscent of the Biblical text, Exodus. The struggles of this ordinary family could have easily been our own as well, and it's with the characters of Istak and Dalin that Po-On weaves a tale so engrossing that even the most subtle details in their lives such as their vulnerabilities and sentimentalities become nearly sublime. It was just a remarkable story about a Filipino's ruthless quest for freedom and identity which still rings true even to this day. "The balete tree--it was there for always, tall, leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!" Meanwhile, in Tree, the approach is vastly different from its predecessor. Now written in first-person narrative, this story is almost autobiographical if not for the fact that the narrator himself (who remains unnamed) was actually more focused on telling the stories of specific relatives, including their idiosyncrasies, most striking experiences and eventual end. This makes Tree more of an exploration of a social status than a personal one where the focal family are haciendero elites during the American era. They supervise the lands owned by the feudal mogul Don Vincente (who interestingly enough becomes the main character in the next book), as well as the lives of modest farmers who have no choice but to work these lands with barely enough compensation. Chronologically designed to follow the tale of this unnamed narrator from childhood to college years, Tree is semi-autobiographical because of this, but readers never learn about the narrator as much as they learn about his family's way of life, and the servants with their children within his household and out there in the farmlands. What follows then are chapters specifically devoted to certain relatives (mostly his uncles) or childhood friends and their families who have worked tirelessly for him and his father all throughout their lives. In the span of seventy pages or so, the narrator would recall circumstances in his childhood that would allow readers to develop their own insights and interpretations as to the harsh realities the people around him are striving to get through while he himself was living rather comfortably if not ignorantly as a rich haciendero's son. As he grows older, the narrator has learned to understand the subtleties of the socio-political climate during those times, as well as the unending class struggle and corruption happening around him, but he was still ultimately powerless to do anything about them. In this sense, Tree is more intimately close to the way modern Filipinos react to the dire situations of the politics that dominate our lives these days, fully aware of the persistent effects and yet a great number of us would still rather choose to remain individually negligent in finding solutions to the nation's prevalent social diseases. Not because of apathy but more as a product of collective exhaustion because the corruption of the rich and the abuse of the poor has become too much of a convenient commonplace that we are no longer moved to act against this terrible status quo. Tree only has a hundred and thirty-five pages which meant that it can be consumed within two days or so. With this brevity, the story itself is engaging in such a way that each chapter deliberately and seamlessly explores what it means to live in a world where people are suffering on different levels of oppression; that whether rich or poor, a family and the individual can suffer because of the overall inequality in the society they live in. Tree's metaphor of the balete tree found in the story further emphasizes this truth; a seemingly noble tree that is a centuries old can also be viewed as a parasitic entity that thrives in expense of the plants surrounding its breadth, much like those who live in luxury and comfort indirectly harms those who are less fortunate than they are. Perhaps through this novel, F. Sionil Jose is making the argument that such a dog-eat-dog mentality will always be the natural state of things which allow only the strongest (if not ruthless) to survive, and now perhaps it's merely up to us as a nation whether or not to embrace this evolutionary state, or rebel against it and redefine our place. RECOMMENDED: 9/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT: [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 30, 2014
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Mar 29, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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| 9712720837
| 9789712720833
| 9712720837
| 3.86
| 412
| 2007
| 2008
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really liked it
| "The truth was never just one person's story, or one version of what happened, never a shining absolute but an often filthy and ragged compromise t "The truth was never just one person's story, or one version of what happened, never a shining absolute but an often filthy and ragged compromise that took not only godly patience to piece together, but also the devil's sureness of the worst of human nature." This was one of the few books that stayed on my shelves for a very long time and I was only able to pick it up now because I knew I had to include it on my Book Diet schedule for this year at long last. Now I've always considered it a great, humbling experience every time I would come across a novel to which I had no kind of expectations for or familiarity with whatsoever; and yet it'd ultimately fill me with clear-cut emotions that defied almost a logical explanation for their being. Jose Dalisay's 2008 fiction Soledad's Sister was exactly just that. It tackled really hard truths with an almost ethereal glow of optimism in its pages while still being able to leave readers an incompleteness that refuses to become whole. It's a troubling experience that personally made it unforgettable. At its heart, it's an unmistakable tale of two sisters steeped in sweetness and tragedy, both as a hopeless and a fruitful examination of what happens when certain family conflicts never get resolved or find a happier ending. It's also primarily a novel that is so simple and straightforward in concept because it's rather familiar; yet another story that concerns overseas Filipino workers and the loved ones they left behind. Such a story has now become an insistent archetype dealing with themes of loss and opportunity as portrayed through countless middle and low-class Filipinos journeying to foreign lands to become more or less minimum wage workers (more specifically as caretakers) since it seems to be the only decent option to financially provide for their families back home. There is something immediately tragic with this storyline and Dalisay quite deftly approaches the subject with surprising empathy that for me was uniquely devastating. This has a sincere delicacy to it that can be haunting. The premise is this: a casket with the corpse of one Aurora Cabahug arrived to an airport to be picked up by her next of kin. It turns out that the real Aurora Cabahug is alive. She is an ambitious twenty-one year old singer in a karaoke entertainment bar somewhere in the humble district of Paez, who is taking care of a nephew whose mother hasn't stayed in constant contact with for several months now. It was the police officer and Walter Zamora who notices this anomaly. Retired from a life of investigating brutal crimes, Zamora had met Aurora one night in the bar and could not forget her and so he was eager to fix the mistake concerning the wrongfully identified remains of Aurora's older sister Soledad, who used her identity to get another passport. What follows is a deceptively murder mystery scenario where readers might expect Walter Zamora to "solve" the puzzle on how and why Soledad Cabahug died. They would be mistaken to expect something like that to take place so I must caution anyone not to get stuck on this promising style of narrative because Soledad's Sister is foremost an intimate and leisurely tale about forgiveness and second chances; but mostly it's about hope--what it truly means to hope and live in hope against all odds that would state otherwise; and why there's a recurring painful pattern to that practice. That is the real mystery that can never be solved. What I love about Soledad's Sister are the lavish descriptions and introspective passages about the two main characters, Aurora and Walter. I find myself drawn and readily sympathetic for them. Dalisay knows how to make readers care about these people which was why I was invested to know how this story will end. He was able to build up both Aurora and Walter with respective strengths and admirable qualities and then, much like with real people, expose us with their harmless deceptions, deep-rooted fears and insecurities and failures along the way. I feel like I know them very well and not at all as soon as the novel wraps up. And the wrap-up itself is just as frustrating. The ambiguous ending could be the defining quality of Soledad's Sister as a whole and it would depend on the type of reader you are on how you would perceive its rather unfair conclusion. If you're a completeist, then this book could be seen as a waste of time because the characters you've learned to root for didn't get a grand pay-off to their emotional struggles. But if you're like me and you enjoy the constant intrigue of a story that is not supposed to be about endings but of beginnings in the first place then you will appreciate the heartfelt and poignant message of Dalisay's book. His prose is something I really fell in love with; it was magnetic and rife with uncomplicated subtext and imagery that get under your skin quite easily; while also persistently character-driven in its scope, with a sadness in its delivery that's almost akin to tasting one's own sweat and tears. This distinguishing flavor in his prose had rendered me speechless every now and then. "But duty, she thought, was also a kind of love, perhaps a superior one, even; it had always been about duty, about doing the right thing by and for others, even if they didn't know it, and no matter what it cost." My favorite character, ironically enough, is Soledad Cabahug who was already dead when this novel began. She was rather pitiful; a woman trapped within the prison of her own guilt for what happened in the past; and yet there are small moments when she was also brave enough to hope for better horizons even if she prioritizes penance and sacrifice as a person. It has made her so deliberately dull without any dreams of her own unlike her younger sister, but it made me love her more deeply. The quoted statement above was written in her point of view of things which demonstrates what a selfless creature Soledad Cabahug is which can also be seen as her foremost flaw. That quote summarizes her as a person and her inclinations to give more than receive something in return. Her relationship with Aurora was so moving and uncomfortable all at once. I can liken it to the unexplored theme of emotional separation and distance between Frozen characters, Elsa and Anna which were left fully unexplored because that cartoon must have the happier Disney-twist. Removing that and we get what Soledad and Aurora's relationship as sisters who spent their lives not understanding or knowing one another in spite of living under the same roof but barely interacting meaningfully in a regular basis. It's a more realistic portrayal of such a tragic and fragmented sisterhood and I really appreciated the way Dalisay took his time weaving these emotions within the framework of their respective personalities and struggles. Overall, Soledad's Sister has the near-perfect simplicity and elegance that one may never expect from a two-hundred paged novel. It has heart and soul and the author has a great understanding on what makes characters sympathetic and easy to root for. It's definitely worth the purchase years ago. RECOMMENDED: 8/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT: [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2015
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May 20, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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Bookpaper
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| 0375713271
| 3.77
| 54,318
| Feb 25, 2000
| May 13, 2003
|
liked it
|
This had to be the seventh Murakami book I've read since I was seventeen. Back then, there are only two authors whose works I faithfully consumed. One
This had to be the seventh Murakami book I've read since I was seventeen. Back then, there are only two authors whose works I faithfully consumed. One was Murakami-sensei, the other was Chuck Palahnuik. Both have exceptional writing styles that stay with you and often haunt your days and nights if you allow them. I remember reading a Murakami anthology (The Elephant Vanishes) but since it was only a borrowed copy from the library, I never got to finish (I plan on re-reading that next year). This is the second anthology I was graced with and it was composed of six measly short fictions that are, in the truest Murakami sense, irresistibly consuming. The theme for this collection deals with the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake and the lives of his characters who have to cope in its wake. Each of the stories had protagonists who are already so immersed in wanton longing and abandonment, and it was only after a disaster took that place that they became even more uncomfortably acquainted with their mortality, as well as their ultimate irrelevance in the grander scheme of the cosmos. But there's hope of course. Losing themselves to oblivion has to occur only so they regain stability and purpose once more as soon as the dust settled and changed the course of their destinies forever. Passages of existential crisis for me have always been Murakami's strongest quality in writing after all. The following stories that are comprised of After the Quake are UFO in Kushiro, Landscape with flatiron, All God's Children can Dance, Thailand, Super-frog Saves Tokyo, and Honey Pie.. "I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for light so they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone--not anyone--to try and put them into that crazy box--not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar." Three out of the six stories struck me as very memorable and meaningful. First is UFO in Kushiro that told the story of a man named Komura whose wife had ran away because she accused him of being an empty vessel. In her own words: "Living with you was like living with a chunk of air." Trying to adjust to this abrupt abandonment and now feeling even emptier than usual, he goes to deliver a package to his sister, a box whose contents he was curious to find out but never got to. The second story that I thoroughly enjoyed was Thailand. A young doctor named Satsuki travels to a foreign place, accompanied by an insightful cab driver who introduced her to a fortune-teller during her stay. Satsuki's symbolic dreams reveal the suffering she has carried with her, a weight that makes it unable for her to escape her doom, no matter how much she traveled because there is simply no way one can get away from oneself. Murakami's prose for both stories explored a human being's tendency to erase themselves or become less than what they are in fear of never becoming whole again. Both Komura and Satsuki gain a newfound perspective about who they are once they were able to free themselves from the torment and distraught that their respective spouses have inflicted on them. Komura learns he is important regardless what his wife had said, while Satsuki is finally able to put to rest her vengeful thoughts about her husband. The symbolic use of the earthquake as a catastrophe that transforms lives was fully realized in the third story that is the most surreal of the six. Super-Frog Saves Tokyo was about Katagiri, an ordinary man whose assistance was required by a six-foot frog who claimed that they are the only ones who can stop an attack underground permeated by a large worm who apparently has just woken up and was about to throw a tantrum fit which will destroy the city. Katagiri agrees in spite of hesitation and the battle between the two creatures was definitely something worth reading that I won't spoil here in the review. he other three stories of the collection were just as unique and contemplative and I think out of those least three favorites, I can recommend All of God's Children Can Dance most of all. It simply reads like an amusing coming-of-age story due to its awkward and unassuming young protagonist Yoshiya, who is dealing with his strenuous pseudo-Oedipal relationship with his beautiful mother who claims he was the second coming of Christ, but later on he also comes to terms with the real identity of his estranged father, and how to talk to him and make him understand. Before he could make that choice, he witnesses an earthquake happening from a distance where he stood in shock. In a nutshell, After the Quake is a worthwhile read filled with retrospective tales and the lonely characters that inhabit them. I don't consider it as one of Murakami-sensei's strongest works, but the three stories that became my favorites are at least worth checking out for yourself. RECOMMENDED: 7/10 DO READ MY REVIEWS AT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 13, 2015
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Oct 21, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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my rating |
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| 4.05
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liked it
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Jan 18, 2016
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Jan 01, 2016
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| 4.17
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really liked it
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Dec 02, 2015
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Nov 30, 2015
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Dec 11, 2015
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Nov 24, 2015
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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Nov 14, 2015
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Nov 01, 2015
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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Dec 19, 2015
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Oct 26, 2015
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| 3.62
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really liked it
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Oct 10, 2015
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Sep 27, 2015
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| 4.18
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really liked it
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Aug 27, 2015
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Jul 25, 2015
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Jul 20, 2015
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Jul 15, 2015
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| 4.16
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really liked it
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Jun 25, 2015
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Jun 19, 2015
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| 4.14
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really liked it
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Jun 19, 2015
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Jun 10, 2015
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| 3.91
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liked it
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Jun 10, 2015
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Jun 07, 2015
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| 3.44
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it was amazing
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Jun 05, 2015
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May 29, 2015
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Apr 16, 2015
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Apr 12, 2015
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Jan 11, 2015
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Jan 02, 2015
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Feb 20, 2015
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Mar 20, 2014
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Mar 02, 2015
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Mar 20, 2014
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| 4.05
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liked it
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May 11, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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| 4.05
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really liked it
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Mar 29, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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May 20, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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| 3.77
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liked it
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Oct 21, 2015
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Jan 30, 2014
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