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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
5 stars
I went to the bookstore and picked up this book quite impulsively without knowing what it is about. Now it's safe to say that it's one of the best impulsive decisions I have ever made.
To put it simply, The Tenth Muse is about the journey of an Asian-American woman—a gifted and hard-working mathematician to tackle the unsolvable Riemann Hypothesis and discover her identity as a whole.
This book is beautifully written. While reading it, I feel so much for women, for how, throughout history, so many of them have been mistreated. So many of them have been robbed of the products of their hard work in a world full of men in authority. This is shown through the main character Katherine's journey, and also through the history that plays out before her story begins. This book is rich in its historical aspects as it often discusses the conflict of World War II and gives us a glimpse of the conditions during those times. A lot of prominent historical figures, primarily those who are in the fields of mathematics, were also mentioned.
Katherine has such an interesting voice and her story is told in the most compelling way while staying true to her identity. It is interesting to see how the author uses mathematical analogies in describing the things going down in Katherine's life. It's truly well-executed and very much engaging to read about her knowledge in mathematics. Her passion burns deeply and that is one of her prominent traits that makes her a rich well-written character.
The second half of this book took me by surprise as I didn't expect it to turn in such a direction. More mysteries were uncovered—about Katherine, about her father, her mother, her lineage—and I found that I was unable to put the book down. Every single chapter became a brilliant page-turner that captured me with each and every sentence.
This book tackles love, betrayal, and trauma. We are shown how much the past, no matter how distant it may be, can affect who you are in the present day. How even time does not possess the ability to heal certain wounds—ones that have been too deeply engraved on a person's skin. We see that through Katherine's parents and the history behind why she is there at all.
If you are looking for a story about the burning ambition of a young woman with a lot of turns that will bring you lots of emotional turmoil, I would very much recommend this book.
I went to the bookstore and picked up this book quite impulsively without knowing what it is about. Now it's safe to say that it's one of the best impulsive decisions I have ever made.
To put it simply, The Tenth Muse is about the journey of an Asian-American woman—a gifted and hard-working mathematician to tackle the unsolvable Riemann Hypothesis and discover her identity as a whole.
This book is beautifully written. While reading it, I feel so much for women, for how, throughout history, so many of them have been mistreated. So many of them have been robbed of the products of their hard work in a world full of men in authority. This is shown through the main character Katherine's journey, and also through the history that plays out before her story begins. This book is rich in its historical aspects as it often discusses the conflict of World War II and gives us a glimpse of the conditions during those times. A lot of prominent historical figures, primarily those who are in the fields of mathematics, were also mentioned.
"He wanted me to know who had granted me that thing he called freedom. As if liberation or freedom can have meaning when you are taken from a world of men into a world of men, and all your possible futures diverge into unending other worlds of men."
Katherine has such an interesting voice and her story is told in the most compelling way while staying true to her identity. It is interesting to see how the author uses mathematical analogies in describing the things going down in Katherine's life. It's truly well-executed and very much engaging to read about her knowledge in mathematics. Her passion burns deeply and that is one of her prominent traits that makes her a rich well-written character.
The second half of this book took me by surprise as I didn't expect it to turn in such a direction. More mysteries were uncovered—about Katherine, about her father, her mother, her lineage—and I found that I was unable to put the book down. Every single chapter became a brilliant page-turner that captured me with each and every sentence.
This book tackles love, betrayal, and trauma. We are shown how much the past, no matter how distant it may be, can affect who you are in the present day. How even time does not possess the ability to heal certain wounds—ones that have been too deeply engraved on a person's skin. We see that through Katherine's parents and the history behind why she is there at all.
If you are looking for a story about the burning ambition of a young woman with a lot of turns that will bring you lots of emotional turmoil, I would very much recommend this book.
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
This is an engrossing story of a female mathematician searching for her identity and her place in the world. The writing is wonderful, and I loved learning about Emmy Noether and the other mathematicians featured here.
"I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman: looping into myself, interrupting. Things have never seemed straightforward to me, the path has never been clear. When I was a child, first discovering numbers, the secrets they yielded, the power they held, I imagined I would live my life unchecked, knocking down problem after problem that was set before me. And in the beginning, because I outstripped my classmates, my parents, and even my teachers, it seemed possible that it would be so. That was pure hubris. I would have been better off reading Greek tragedies."
In coiled, precise prose, Chung writes a fictional memoir about a female mathematician coming of age and maturing in the late 20th century. The fragmentation of Katherine's personal/familial history and the struggles of being a womanly academic were two topics that Chung excelled at describing and reflecting upon without getting bogged in fixation's mire.
In a strange turn of events, my primary complaint (keeping my rating shy of five stars), is that there wasn't enough math. Perhaps I'm simply used to the type of detailed explanations required to get hard sci-fi or dystopian literature off the ground... but I do wish that the rhythms or characteristics of mathematics as a discipline were more explicit. Here I'm not wishing that Chung had tried to drag my numerically-challenged bones up to the level of understanding particular hypotheses, but rather that the work of becoming and being a mathematician had some specific texture to it. How much of mathematics is research and how much of it is original? Is it a mainly a project of repetition, where repeated attempts at a problem become their own ritual? Are there ways of bringing one's personality to bear on the work? These details could have, in my opinion, only added to Katherine as a character.
"This was what made me angriest—not that he never apologized or admitted or said even once, 'Good job,' but that I expected him to, that I waited and waited, and was wounded by the waiting, like a fool."
"The first word he taught me was freedom: he wanted me to know I was free. The second word he taught me was liberation. He wanted me to know who had granted me that thing he called freedom. As if liberation or freedom can have meaning when you are taken from a world of men, and all your possible futures diverge into unending other worlds of men, where your body will be used and traded, and words of love will be all that are given to you in exchange, as if this currency has so much value and your life so little that you should be grateful for these words."
"Thus began my season of being another kind of person in the world, when I became more body than mind... merging in and out of the constant crowds, partially alone, partially embraced in a throng of strangers. I felt my muscles working as I walked, I felt my body's hunger and its every ache. In those days I felt electric. I looked at everyone, I noticed everyone looking at me."
In coiled, precise prose, Chung writes a fictional memoir about a female mathematician coming of age and maturing in the late 20th century. The fragmentation of Katherine's personal/familial history and the struggles of being a womanly academic were two topics that Chung excelled at describing and reflecting upon without getting bogged in fixation's mire.
In a strange turn of events, my primary complaint (keeping my rating shy of five stars), is that there wasn't enough math. Perhaps I'm simply used to the type of detailed explanations required to get hard sci-fi or dystopian literature off the ground... but I do wish that the rhythms or characteristics of mathematics as a discipline were more explicit. Here I'm not wishing that Chung had tried to drag my numerically-challenged bones up to the level of understanding particular hypotheses, but rather that the work of becoming and being a mathematician had some specific texture to it. How much of mathematics is research and how much of it is original? Is it a mainly a project of repetition, where repeated attempts at a problem become their own ritual? Are there ways of bringing one's personality to bear on the work? These details could have, in my opinion, only added to Katherine as a character.
"This was what made me angriest—not that he never apologized or admitted or said even once, 'Good job,' but that I expected him to, that I waited and waited, and was wounded by the waiting, like a fool."
"The first word he taught me was freedom: he wanted me to know I was free. The second word he taught me was liberation. He wanted me to know who had granted me that thing he called freedom. As if liberation or freedom can have meaning when you are taken from a world of men, and all your possible futures diverge into unending other worlds of men, where your body will be used and traded, and words of love will be all that are given to you in exchange, as if this currency has so much value and your life so little that you should be grateful for these words."
"Thus began my season of being another kind of person in the world, when I became more body than mind... merging in and out of the constant crowds, partially alone, partially embraced in a throng of strangers. I felt my muscles working as I walked, I felt my body's hunger and its every ache. In those days I felt electric. I looked at everyone, I noticed everyone looking at me."
This is so good for so many reasons. A definite read for women and for anyone in the STEM field!
emotional
sad
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Something in my chest that had begun to uncoil days after I read this book seized up again while I wrote this review, as quickly as if someone had held a light to kindling.
There’s a wordless agony to reading stories about women who wanted more freedom than the world wished to give a woman. I often felt myself running with a swift, clear rage—the feeling like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat, leaving my mouth tasting of ash. But a thrum of awe still fills me, along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of hope, in spite of all the coursing anger, knowing that—although cast out, ostracized and dispossessed—the bolt of these women’s triumph always slid home.
Forceful, cerebral and immaculately controlled, “The Tenth Muse” is a dazzling portrait of a young woman who refused to fit the shape of the small space the world left for her.
Katherine had shone brighter, by a great deal, than was normally permitted a woman. The Riemann hypothesis was the mystery that had opened her mind like a door, and she has never doubted that the path to it would one day open, stark and clear before her feet. Katherine’s desire to come out on top was born out of the conviction that she didn’t have to be her opponents’ equal to be considered a worthy contender—she had to be better. But in her obsession with cracking the uncrackable equation, an underlying crisis emerges: young and drifting, Katherine is searching for identity, and answers to the tragedy that had ruptured her family forever.
From its first sentence, “The Tenth Muse” grabs the reader with its directness and earnestness. “I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman,” Katherine begins, “looping into myself, interrupting.” Thus, standing knee-deep in the rubble of her life, Katherine starts delicately piecing it back together, losing her footing and slipping, but rising every time to scrabble forward—one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages—toward the realization that only at the end of one’s life can one look back and see lucidly the prices they paid along the way.
Katherine chronicles her own tale, and the novel spasms with her remembrance like synapses firing in the dark. The novel spans a number of difficult decades and Katherine’s memories are seized up, measured and weighted: her mother’s face, glossy with joy, beaming through her haze, and her subsequent absence, like having a rib wrenched from her side; the lovers she naïvely refused to see anything about except their most engaging qualities which she then cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all their less desirable ones; the male colleagues who had made the mistake of believing her discomfort would be like theirs; her works, validated and stolen in one fell swoop; the loss of her brilliance, the withering of her grace, all the things that had to be worked and learned through errors and trials, and above all, her indigence over inequality, the plight of women in the world, and the madness that rose from a new creeping certainty: that there is only so much forcing of the world a woman can do.
Katherine stains the page with herself, and the tone of her voice, urgent yet measured, gives the impression that she is unburdening herself to a patient and sympathetic interviewer. The result is a profoundly searching book—one that could potentially be frustrating for readers who require propulsive plots and clean resolutions, as it offers neither. Still, Chung makes it work beautifully by impeccably building a sense of inexorable apprehension as we begin to discern elements of self-deception and omission in Katherine’s narration, and secrets swell to bursting with world-shaking promise.
As the novel probes the secrets and lies that thrum beneath the surface of Katherine’s family, The Tenth Muse demonstrates, heartbreakingly, how acts of brutality—even those distant in time and geography—cast a dark shadow over relationships. Through Katherine’s voice, The Tenth Muse also explores the cold outer limits of ambition, and each word falls sharp, like a butcher cutting meat. (“Don’t you know the rule,” they said, “that the price of your dearest wish is always everything you have?”) Katherine’s want, hard and spare, took hold of her, driving out the fears, the ones people tried to give her, tried to put into her heart with dark looks and patronizing smiles. But Katherine not only navigates her gender in a male-dominated field—she navigates her mixed race as well. Ethnicity, gender—these things don’t matter until they do, and it’s as exquisitely articulated as anything this thoughtful author has put to the page.
The central message of Katherine’s character arc is one that I should’ve seen coming, but didn’t and felt fear in me, gleaming like water, when I finally realized the author’s goals for her. That said, The Tenth Muse isn't all grim. The heart is always able to beat with a new rhythm and this sentiment is core to the novel. I won’t dare spoil the context, but the final words spoken still shudder through my mind: “in the end, we can only unlock our own locks, we have only the gift of ourselves.”
Highly recommended!
If you liked this review please consider leaving me a tip on ko-fi!
There’s a wordless agony to reading stories about women who wanted more freedom than the world wished to give a woman. I often felt myself running with a swift, clear rage—the feeling like the blast of fire rising up a dragon’s throat, leaving my mouth tasting of ash. But a thrum of awe still fills me, along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of hope, in spite of all the coursing anger, knowing that—although cast out, ostracized and dispossessed—the bolt of these women’s triumph always slid home.
“All my life I’ve been told to let go as gracefully as possible. What’s worse, after all, than a hungry woman, greedy for all that isn’t meant to be hers? Still, I resist. In the end we relinquish everything: I think I’ll hold on, while I can.”
Forceful, cerebral and immaculately controlled, “The Tenth Muse” is a dazzling portrait of a young woman who refused to fit the shape of the small space the world left for her.
Katherine had shone brighter, by a great deal, than was normally permitted a woman. The Riemann hypothesis was the mystery that had opened her mind like a door, and she has never doubted that the path to it would one day open, stark and clear before her feet. Katherine’s desire to come out on top was born out of the conviction that she didn’t have to be her opponents’ equal to be considered a worthy contender—she had to be better. But in her obsession with cracking the uncrackable equation, an underlying crisis emerges: young and drifting, Katherine is searching for identity, and answers to the tragedy that had ruptured her family forever.
From its first sentence, “The Tenth Muse” grabs the reader with its directness and earnestness. “I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman,” Katherine begins, “looping into myself, interrupting.” Thus, standing knee-deep in the rubble of her life, Katherine starts delicately piecing it back together, losing her footing and slipping, but rising every time to scrabble forward—one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages—toward the realization that only at the end of one’s life can one look back and see lucidly the prices they paid along the way.
Katherine chronicles her own tale, and the novel spasms with her remembrance like synapses firing in the dark. The novel spans a number of difficult decades and Katherine’s memories are seized up, measured and weighted: her mother’s face, glossy with joy, beaming through her haze, and her subsequent absence, like having a rib wrenched from her side; the lovers she naïvely refused to see anything about except their most engaging qualities which she then cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all their less desirable ones; the male colleagues who had made the mistake of believing her discomfort would be like theirs; her works, validated and stolen in one fell swoop; the loss of her brilliance, the withering of her grace, all the things that had to be worked and learned through errors and trials, and above all, her indigence over inequality, the plight of women in the world, and the madness that rose from a new creeping certainty: that there is only so much forcing of the world a woman can do.
Katherine stains the page with herself, and the tone of her voice, urgent yet measured, gives the impression that she is unburdening herself to a patient and sympathetic interviewer. The result is a profoundly searching book—one that could potentially be frustrating for readers who require propulsive plots and clean resolutions, as it offers neither. Still, Chung makes it work beautifully by impeccably building a sense of inexorable apprehension as we begin to discern elements of self-deception and omission in Katherine’s narration, and secrets swell to bursting with world-shaking promise.
As the novel probes the secrets and lies that thrum beneath the surface of Katherine’s family, The Tenth Muse demonstrates, heartbreakingly, how acts of brutality—even those distant in time and geography—cast a dark shadow over relationships. Through Katherine’s voice, The Tenth Muse also explores the cold outer limits of ambition, and each word falls sharp, like a butcher cutting meat. (“Don’t you know the rule,” they said, “that the price of your dearest wish is always everything you have?”) Katherine’s want, hard and spare, took hold of her, driving out the fears, the ones people tried to give her, tried to put into her heart with dark looks and patronizing smiles. But Katherine not only navigates her gender in a male-dominated field—she navigates her mixed race as well. Ethnicity, gender—these things don’t matter until they do, and it’s as exquisitely articulated as anything this thoughtful author has put to the page.
The central message of Katherine’s character arc is one that I should’ve seen coming, but didn’t and felt fear in me, gleaming like water, when I finally realized the author’s goals for her. That said, The Tenth Muse isn't all grim. The heart is always able to beat with a new rhythm and this sentiment is core to the novel. I won’t dare spoil the context, but the final words spoken still shudder through my mind: “in the end, we can only unlock our own locks, we have only the gift of ourselves.”
Highly recommended!
If you liked this review please consider leaving me a tip on ko-fi!
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Expected it to be more mythological and wished it had been more like life after life in following the different iterations of this tenth muse given that was the premise it seemed based on
Nevertheless
the general angle was interesting but i think the main characters extreme tendencies in terms of needing success that her father addresses as her inability to hear people out bothered me
Also I was left with several unanswered questions
Like does she ever figure out the solution
Why didn’t she expose Karl (whose plot line by the way I found predictable but a good way at pulling the theme through the novel)
Nevertheless
the general angle was interesting but i think the main characters extreme tendencies in terms of needing success that her father addresses as her inability to hear people out bothered me
Also I was left with several unanswered questions
Like does she ever figure out the solution
Why didn’t she expose Karl (whose plot line by the way I found predictable but a good way at pulling the theme through the novel)
this was the best book of 2021 so far!! i loved it so much and genuinely could not put it down. each chapter my heart broke a little more and more for katherine, and i wanted her to have someone in her life that gave her faith in love and happiness. i hated that she ended up lonely with nobody to share her successful career with, but it was a realistic ending and she did work things out with her father and continue her parents’ work. i loved how the book related her math interests to her parents being mathematicians in WWII and i am happy that she was able to find out her true identity and background. it shed so much light on the difficulties of being a woman in math that does not get the respect she deserves and feels like an outsider, just like she does in her personal life. such a beautiful story with so much heartbreak. i wish katherine made some different decisions (i.e. gave peter another chance, worked things out with henry and karl, didn’t withdraw her name from publication) and i think her life would have turned out better, but i understand why she made certain choices. i didn’t like the lesson of the ferry problem : that everyone can only use their own skills and resources to succeed in life