versmonesprit's reviews
217 reviews

Another Claire Keegan, another brilliant story. She has an unmatched talent for building up character psychologies through few words, and a wonderful touch of realism all her own. As per what I feel can be called the hallmark of her works, her characters don’t end up having surpassed the bigger conflict, don’t get to be better off. The changes are often small, sometimes detrimental, and in this lies the impact.

Without giving away too much (as it’s only a little story) I especially loved that the third person narrator also touched on the dog’s perspective — those for me were both sad and heartwarming.  

Because its reputation is undeservedly inflated, I got Wuthering Heights over a decade ago, and each of my attempts at reading it (at least 5-6) resulted in me dropping the book before page 30. To my astonishment, this time around I really enjoyed it . . . that was, until Chapter 12. The book steadily devolved so much to the point reading it filled me with fury. Emily Brontë was an unimaginative, dull, and talentless writer. There are 4 narrators within one other’s narration, and none of them have an inkling of a difference in voice. The book drags on with repetitions, and every single thing that happens is laughably overdramatic. It reads like a sloppy first draft than a final manuscript, and like written by an immature child. I’m thinking maybe the reason every single character is an idiot is because Emily has never been or been around someone who isn’t? We need to stop pretending every single old book is a classic, because we all know no objective evaluator today would do anything with this book other than mop spillage from the kitchen floor with its pages if they run out of tissue.

A cosy and sweet little book with equally cosy and sweet little illustrations, The [titular] Writer’s Cats talk about the beauty, support, and inspiration they provide. It’s certainly made me smile, and touched my heart, but I wasn’t a fan of the whole bit of the writer essentially complaining about the hardships of being a writer. 

I have no idea what I was thinking, but almost the entirety of this book was self-important and pretentious while being kind of subpar for a peer reviewed publication. It’s very difficult to find any new information in these articles, and rather shocking that some of them include no images at all while talking about a visual field!

I had such high expectations of a book with such a promising and interesting premise, which turned out to be just a catchy title for a rather mundane scope of approach to Islamic architecture and textiles. Almost every article involved was extremely repetitive and scarce in actual research beyond an insane amount of quotations from other people’s works. Add to that the horror that I read “TARDIS-like sudden appearances” in an allegedly PEER REVIEWED article, and I’m barely surprised the same person used someone’s blogspot as a source. This is unacceptable, and it made me weep for the shameful state of academia today. 

Strange things happen, from the oneiric to the outright sinister, in First Person Singular; but the stories are also humorous, touching, and sweet — in true Murakami fashion. Perhaps what makes this book all the more interesting is that we get to see Murakami dabble a bit in poetry!

Of the 8 stories in this collection, I really liked most, but my favourite by far was Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, which I finished in streams of tears. It might well have been the tenderest story I have ever read, written obviously with so much love!

Murakami’s cozy tone was at its peak in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection, which read like a quasi-essay, and was full of heartwarming humour.

I will never not recommend Murakami’s stories, they’re always a mixed bag in tone and twists, and that’s what makes his story collections a wonderful surprise each time! 

After reading Lonesome Traveler, I felt myself yearning for more of Kerouac’s poetry, so I thought; what better than an actual poem?

To say I’m shocked by how terrible this is would be an understatement. Kerouac, concerned with breath and attaining the rhythms of jazz in writing, somehow manages to destroy both. I’m shocked precisely because he does it occasionally in his prose!

So what went wrong? First of all, it’s the line breaks. They don’t make sense. They interrupt the breath, you pause while reading, and poof, the breath is lost, it’s now many breaths, none of which create a likeness of jazz (or blues) or even have any sort of rhythm!

Does it at least have wordplay that can replace rhythm? No, not at all. Every entrancing turn of phrase present in his prose is for whatever reason absent from Mexico City Blues. The pseudo-wordplay is just a mockery, adding the letter ‘y’ at the end of words does not make them rhyme or create a musical sound.

For comparison, I’ll share two quotes from Mexico Fellaheen, Lonesome Traveler. The first: 

The rhymes here are quite in your face too, but they’re not done in a manner that feels inorganic, forced, childish. This is filled with emotion, fervour, rhythm!

And the second: 

Look at the rhythm of the sentence, the uninterrupted breath, the flow of the words!

How can someone write like this in his prose, and completely miss anything remotely poetic in his actual poems? And to think I had really enjoyed the haikus in Lonesome Traveler! It seems being given too much space for his poetry makes Jack a dull boy. 

Didion must have known she was playing a losing game when she decided to repeat what Camus had done in The Stranger 28 years before.

Maria Wyeth knows there’s no meaning to life as it is, she plays the cards she’s dealt even though they cause her grief, but she also knows ultimately we make our own meaning (e.g. her future plans to get her daughter, and to can fruit). Sound familiar? That’s because this is the philosophy told through Meursault’s story.

Play It as It Lays is almost formulaic, but at least it’s not an exact replica: the heat doesn’t really come into play, the gun shows up but as a taunt to Chekhov it doesn’t go off on anyone, and the main character and (occasional) narrator does not kill someone. And where it’s Meursault’s mother’s death that kicks off speculations about him, Maria is already dissociating before any major impact (here, the abortion) takes place.

Sure, the book is bleak — very bleak. The book description alleges this is ennui. But is it? Maria isn’t quite listless; she’s in fact highly emotional. Her alienation is to interactions; she remains connected to her feelings. She’s more just profoundly sad, than going through existential ennui. Her apathy is a façade, her crisis is not existential but personal.

And then the rest is disappointment. The desert is overshadowed by the majority of the book being set in the city, the dialogues feel like caricatures at times, the snake imagery is abandoned abruptly for no reason, the driving theme and its underlying desperation to just go are ended way before they attain their full potential as a device for the book, the first person narrator states her full name (it feels like a writer’s insecurity that they’ll be incapable of building a real character, so they must resort to fictional facts like the character’s government name) and keeps addressing the reader, multiple PoVs are presented even though the book immediately defects to third person narration which gives it ample opportunity to reiterate the sentiments expressed by Maria’s ex-husband and BZ’s widow in the sort of “prologue”, the first person narration returns just to interrupt the book’s climax, the overall tone feels very anti-abortion which is disturbing, not to mention the f-slur being randomly thrown out for no reason that I can conceive as non-malevolent on the writer’s part, and the chapters are so infuriatingly short (there are 84+3 of them) that they are just snippets that disrupt the narration continuity and hence the reading rhythm. One could argue this fragmentation reflects the way Maria experiences her reality, but then they should’ve been shorter, more ambiguous, more broken, less summary of several days at a time sometimes. No, it’s clear this was only out of convenience for the author.

Speaking of whom… was she sponsored by Coca Cola? Because I cannot think of any other reason Didion would feel the need to precise Maria is drinking Coca Cola so many times!

Oh and, her name is pronounced Mar-eye-ah. She says it herself, directly, to the reader, because that’s important! and quality writing!

Despite what the title might suggest, Miller’s musings don’t revolve around sex, but wander from relationships to modernity. His tone is different from that in his fictionalised works, though calling this non-fiction is also pushing it: this essay is almost as fictionalised as his autobiographical novels. I’d believe you if you told me it was indeed a portion in one of his novels!

The Cat Inside is a tiny, tender book full of emotion, an ode to not just cats, but also the transformative quality of loving animals. In it Burroughs reflects on how cats changed him as a person, and immortalises his beloved cats through both heartwarming and heartbreaking anecdotes. He’s an excellent writer, able to evoke full images in few words.

Unfortunately it turns out he felt a lot of disdain for dogs. He explains it by saying it’s what people have made of dogs (in his eyes, brutish beasts) that he hates. There’s truth in that sentiment: about how humans can turn dogs bad — but as someone who adores dogs, I can’t deny it hurt to read dogs being despised.