i hate books

Meanwhile I'm just trying to read a book

I stopped after the first, is the rest of the series a worthwhile read?

I been going hard with the books this year

Discovered African & carribean Literature

The lonely londoners is excellent

Loved The Martian, but holy s*** this is the MBDTF to The Martian’s Graduation. I guess the criticism from those that have one is that they have a very similar premise, but this is just amplified to 100 on everything. Such a fun book that’s super hard to put down.

Just Finished Killers of the Flower Moon and they had The Wager first Chapter. Guess I’m in.

what is there to say man. I had read the first ~300 pages about a year ago, so when I picked this up again I just began from there. Despite the reputation this book has, I thought it was really earnest and genuine. It had a lot of care for all of its characters.

I really connected with it as a book about people struggling to be understood and to understand others, I think this is addressed literally in the last few chapters where the main character cannot stop making facial expressions no one else can read.

The family relationship at the center of the book was engaging, the way Hal interacts with both of his brothers is a dynamic I can recognize with my own family. Having run competitively in HS and college and now being a member of AA and in recovery I can confidently say DFW nailed both settings, the tennis academy and halfway house felt real and true to my experiences.

I do think the ending was a bit of a flop, I would have appreciated the story coming to a logical conclusion instead of the metaphorical one we got. Full disclosure, I did not read the footnotes - I felt that most of the book was easy enough to decipher using context clues. DFW's invented slang was fun (I love the term "eliminated his map" instead of "killed").

I will likely never read this again but I'm glad I did once, the reputation the book has is not something that I found I believed even a third of the way into it. It's a 4.25/5

edit: as an addendum, there are a lot of questionable portions of the book (racial, homophobic, transphobic slurs) that were kind of wild to write even 50 years ago and are absolutely insane to write in the 90s. Didn't add any characterization, and it got pretty gratuitous towards the end.

Finished Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins about a week ago.

what a guy. (my distaste for the military aside...) can't rly say s*** about him being too aggressive on social media cuz like, dude can back it up to the bone. unbelievable grit. wanted to run through a concrete wall when I was reading it. the book gave me a similar feeling to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in that I feel like I can't really justify a complaint about my life ever again

This morning I finished A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

The second in a duology, a quick and delightful solarpunk read that just makes you want to sit on the beach or in the forest just because it's there and you can.

This is f***ing fantastic. It tells the story of Suzanne Mallouk, Basquiat's on-again off-again partner, through a series of short vignettes written by Clement who was also part of the NY art scene in the 80s. This is interspersed with Suzanne's own words to add some context and detail.

Main thing that impressed me here was Clement's writing. It's beautiful stuff, really poetic and evocative - each little vignette paints a picture of an entire world in just a few paragraphs. You can see, hear and smell everything. Can practically feel the junk under your fingernails at points. It captures the time and the place perfectly.

It's 100% Suzanne's story but she is constantly sucked into Basquiat's world as if had some kind of gravitational pull about him. Fascinating character but he seemed like a f***ing nightmare to be around lol

4/5

5/5

took a long break from Murakami and came back to read this one. definitely wasn't one of my favorites of his. just felt like a lesser version of his later novels. that being said, it's still engaging and interesting as any other Murakami. 3/5

I f***ing hate how ugly this section looks, why haven’t they changed it back? It turned what was already a pretty dead section into an even quieter area

my first DeLillo so i didn’t quite know what to expect. the somewhat slow opening ~50 pages had me wondering where all the substance was, but the author packs SO MUCH into the next 160 pages that it’s almost overwhelming. i enjoyed this surprise, though, and the book ended up impressing the hell out of me.

i really enjoyed the wacky range of characters, even if we don’t bother to get to know any of them much at all, outside of each of their fleeting interactions with the protagonist. DeLillo’s writing style is super distinctive, like pretty much any other great writer, but it’s hard for me to describe or offer comparison having no other experience with his work.

the novel is wordy, random, ridiculous, pretentious, philosophical, and allegorical. there’s a lot to love, but i can also see the jargon and pretentiousness alienating some readers.

for me, the ending was the best part of the novel and made me even more glad I picked this one up.

4/5

Yo was the main character like a billionaire meeting these people on his to way to get a haircut ? I think Cronenberg made a film bout this

yeah Cronenberg directed the film adaptation, starring Rob Pattinson apparently never seen it

Just finished the last book in Conn Iggulden's Conqueror series about Genghis Khan and the beginnings of the Mongol empire awesome and informative

This one was fine, kind of a confusing trip through Egyptian politics and religious life. I knew almost nothing about the Egyptian military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab Spring and subsequent coups in Egypt, which made understanding the story of this book fairly difficult. Understanding the emotional thrust of this book on the other hand is fairly easy, and the author does a great job making clear the effects of living under a tenuous state on the edge of collapse.

There's an incredible Kafka-esque (not a term I use lightly, this is truly something Kafka would write) twist near the end that throws the story into overdrive and coalesces the themes into something that makes the book more powerful than the entire lead-up. The book almost lost me in the middle, but at the end came to be something slightly more powerful. Wish I understood more of it, although it has made me start reading several wikipedia articles about the Arab Spring and it's impacts on Middle Eastern countries.

Seems like kind of a response to The Stranger, where instead of a disconnected, unaffected protagonist here you have a protagonist that is too raw and compulsive to live in society. I liked this one a lot, and in the same vein as The Stranger I could see a lot of my own personality blown out of proportion in this character. I would recommend this one to any Camus-heads. It helps that it was a quick read, 140 pages made up of short ~4 page chapters.

Grimmest book I've read in a long long time. It's gross, it's grimy, it's sad, it's horrifying. It's like if Jack Kerouac had none of the whimsy of the beat generation. I did like it a lot, it's another one that can be sped through to reach the psyche-baring conclusion. Which I absolutely loved.

finally got my hands on Darnielle’s second novel, the only of his 3 that, prior to starting, I’d yet to read. this one resembles his debut Wolf in White Van in that it’s hard to talk much about, and his latest novel Devil House in that it serves up a final product far removed from what you thought you ordered.

I definitely enjoyed it. I read half of it immediately after finishing Cosmopolis, then split the other half over two days. I couldn’t put it down.

My favorite parts were the brief forays into snuff horror, but I was pleasantly surprised when it ended up as a mystery of lost mothers and found purpose with a shockingly poignant conclusion. The characters were the weakest part of the entire thing. None of them except Lisa Sample ended up feeling dynamic or multifaceted in any way; disappointing from an author who habitually excels at offering in depth character studies within his lyrics and novels.

3/5

Finally been getting into reading again after so long. This my favorite author. Just finished "the lowland" before this. Master work. I'm tryna be a author and this is my main inspo. This book made me feel things i can't describe in words. That post college alienation/isolation/lack of belonging is too relatable even tho the narrator is a middle aged italian woman Would def recommend

4.5/5 ⭐️

yeah not a fan at all

Good looks on The Tunnel, I think I’ll pick this up

havent read a book in full in years man. just did last night. I didnt smoke yesterday and to resist the urge i lost myself in "the barracks thief"

it was p dope wish it was longer. def had a n bomb in there

i found this book randomly one day and just brought it inside for the f*** of it.

next im going to read the revolt of the cockroach people. what would yall recommend me? im into anything tbh doesnt have to be fiction

what should i read if as a kid i really liked s*** like maniac mcgee and holes