zerolss's reviews
102 reviews

I loved the author's philosophical exploration on what memories mean to us, how they make up who we are and how stripping us of those memories erases a part of us, in the case of this book literally and figuratively. The chilling atmosphere created by the author revealed just as much as it needed to, reinforcing the air of mystery that followed our characters. I thought the writing was beautiful and the ending perfect; I think it was the only way the book could have ended.

It's unfortunate that this beautiful haunting story was accompanied by such bland characters. I like character driven stories so maybe that's why this book didn't work for me. I wouldn't need the memory police to erase the main characters' existense from my mind. I can see this as being intentional: the characters being stripped of their memories and stripped of their souls, leaving an empty shell of who they used to be. That doesn't change the fact that it made reading the book from our mc's POV boring. The dialogue was awkward and I sometimes felt like I was reading a set of instructions instead of people talking. There was no way to distinguish the characters voices from each other or even from the rest of the text.

In general, the book seemed to lack substance. A lot of times I found myself reading it for the sake of finishing it. I feel like this could have been an incredible novella but, even being less than 300 pages, the book felt like it was streched out to hold more words than author had to say.

Finally, it's not that I didn't like the mini story within the story, I just felt like the inclusion wasn't necessary. I think taking a note from Elena Ferrante with 'The Blue Fairy,' mentioning the story and creating tension around it but never revealing it, would have been so much more impactful.

Also the cheating plotline??? LMAOO I don't even have a response for that, it felt so random. And her still being in touch with his pregnant wife?? They both are messy af.

I'm so conflicted. On one hand Stoner was extremely well written book. By the end of it, I felt like I had lived an entire lifetime. On the other hand I felt like this book was trying to get me to care about a character who was written as the embodiment of the 'male lonliness epidemic.'

My favorite parts were all the university related stuff and the faculty drama. I would have loved if the entire book was on the inner lives of rivaling petty professors and pretentious students. The theme was solid and well executed and the ending was beautiful—the idea that the real love of Stoner's life, through all his pain and happiness, had been his love for literature. I also loved the incorporation of historical events and the indirect influences they had. The writing was really good, despite my strong opinions about the tone and sexism, I was unable to put this book down because it had a way of making even the most mundane events seem interesting. 

Moving on to my issues with this book: I was okay with the whole regular-man-discovers-the-disappointing-realities-of-life plotline, but then

this guy goes ahead and cheats on his wife and fails his daughter

and is somehow is still portrayed as a hero and victim. He's pretty much a loser and a coward the entire book, which would be fine if it wasn't for the self-pitying narration. He's doing all that and you want me to feel bad for the guy? For what? Having to do housework? Having to take care of his own daughter? Having to buy a house for his family? The book wrote him as a pitiful character imprisoned by his circumstances which just wasn't the case.

On top of that, the way Edith was written was very disturbing. She was so clearly traumatized:

her throwing out her dad's belongings and becoming lively after his death, her response to intimacy, her fluctuating nature

—this women needed help and support. Instead the book told us she's 'annoying' and 'waging a war' against her husband the minute she decided to become social and lively. Her mental health was dismissed as an unsolvable problem, the kind of ideology that led to the popularity of giving women lobotomies. Living under a controlling family,

an implied abusive father

, confined to the house, her husband's dull nature and obsessiveness over his work, being a woman in 1920s america when women barely had rights: I wonder why she was unhappy and mentally unstable? Edith was the real victim in many ways, not Stoner. I also didn't care much for

Stoner's manic pixie dreamgirl, aka one of his former students, who helped him realize what love is, and who literally only existed in the story for this purpose.

I genuinely think this had the potential to be an incredible and thoughtful book if John Williams didn't have such strong tunnel vision. I'm always down for an unlikable and flawed main character but don't try to portray his life as an undeserved tragedy. 

There are so many layers packed between these less-than-200 pages that I won't even try to unpack. I'm obsessed with the way Toni Morrison writes but more importantly, I'm obsessed with the way she thinks. Storywise, Sula is not much different from the usual tale of the unconventional women who exists outside of societal norms and morals, but Toni Morrison has a way of getting inside her characters' heads that make you see the world in a new way. Her great writing is not limited to her characters; the way she writes relationships, families, and communities all carry that same level of depth. 

One aspect that stood out to me was the symbolism and imagery. So many sentences in this book stuck with me. I found myself, at random times, thinking of an odd way something was described, or pondering on the significance of a strange event. Sula can be described as dark and tragic, but not in a way that's overt, instead the darkness is carefully woven into the narrative like an invisible thread. Even the most horrific events aren't written as if they were meant to be horrifying, rather they're just events that happened because they happened. The reader isn't meant to linger on them, even if the reader can't forget them. 

I have a very distinct memory of reading the bluest eye eight years ago and the impact it had on me; it wasn't any different from the impact Sula had on me. I'm tempted to reread both books immediately.

For a concept this interesting, I expected the book to be a bit more... complex? I liked the set-up of the cafe, with all it's unique touches and rules. I liked the idea of the characters and the way their lives connected to one another. Everything else felt flat. 

The writing was really not my cup of tea. The author explained the rules of the cafe at least three times. I get that the cafe's naturally cool and has a wooden ceiling fan, why am I being told this again and again?  There was way too much repetition; for a short book with stories of four seperate lived you'd think the author would wanna use the word count more wisely. I'm not if it was the translation but the writing also just read awkwardly. 

The characters had interesting setups and stories but somehow still managed to feel surface level and tropey. None of the relationships were particularly appealing. On a surface level the women were depicted as strong working women but the relationships themselves seemed to feed into traditional gender roles, with the women having to carry a lot more of the emotional burden and weight of communication. This didn' t seem to be intentional on the author's part and there was no deeper discussion of this. You'd expect, with all that they've been through, for their stories to have more nuance and depth but they were boring and predictable. 

I'm glad I listened the audiobook because I might have DNFed if I actually had to read it.

When it comes to essay collections, there will usually be one or two essays which I will feel a particularly strong connection to. The problem with this collection is that I feel this way about all these essays; Natalia Ginzburg captures the experience of losing a loved one, of being in love, of being a writer, and of being a human being. Reading this felt like having a first meaningful exchange with a new friend. 

It was so interesting to see James Baldwin write a script. I can definitely see his vision I just think a lot of significant details (such as the existence of Ella and her impact on Malcolm X) from the original autobiography were cut.

With the kind of reputation Dostoevsky has I expected Crime and Punishment to be a lot more clean and refined and it wasn't and I honestly loved that it wasn't. It was scattered and chaotic and all over the place and that somehow worked, it represented Raskolnikov's mental state so perfectly. A lot of authors write from an objective-ish standpoint but Dostoevsky's writing in contrast felt painfully honest, there seemed to be a blur between the character and the author himself which I found so fascinating; it played such a role in portraying Russian culture and the way it was evolving at the time. It was poetic in a way that didn't seem pretentious. And it was funny? Some lines of dialogue genuinely me dying. Raskolnikov was such a lovable protagonist I feel like he could've done anything and I still would've supported him and believed in his goodness. In general I just loved how all the threads and tangled storylines came together and how cleanly everything tied up in the end.

Captivating but kind of weird. It felt like a shorter version of her other work, nothing really stood out to me.

The way Virginia Woolf builds up her argument is so good. The book is a collection of six essays but they flow together like a story. They branch out into tangents talking about the history of the relationship between women and writing.

She touches upon the idea of men writing women vs women writing women and I really liked reading her take on gender in general. I can definitely the impact it would have had in the time she wrote it.

It was interesting how she addressed women as the 'impoverished class' making reference to the fact that many women didn't have a means of earning especially considering her position and inheritance.

Overall I'd wanna reread this in the future after having read some of the books/authors she referenced (the brontes, jane austen, shakespeare).