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A review by leafblade
These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown by Rebecca Rosenblum
3.0
I recieved a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
I honestly don't know how to rate this, so 3/5 it is. On the one hand, I'm nosy and lonely as hell because the isolation never really ended for me after the pandemic, so reading a day to day recount from some random person's life was something I liked, to an extent. But if I thought about it too much, it ended up spiraling towards "why the fuck am I reading this? why do I care?".
And on the other hand, this book is a piece of history. 50 years from now it'll be a very interesting read. But I lived through the pandemic, am still caught in the aftermath, and none of this is news to me. She seemed to be allowed to go to more places than I was, and she spent the whole thing with someone she loves and is only mildly annoyed at sometimes, which is something I didn't get to do, so sometimes it was like I felt that my experience was more of a history document than this book. Which is really shitty to think, because I don't mean to sound like those "my three year old could've painted this!!", but it's also a result of the times I think, of having gone through the pandemic together.
Although I understand the legal hijinks it could bring, it would've been nice if some comments on the posts were kept. At the beginning we're told some of this posts were conversations with someone in the comments, or continuations of answers she gave to some previous post. And then we just don't get to see that, not one comment, and I think the traces of other posts being a follow-up of some comments were scraped in the edits. If this were blog entries I'd understand, but they were originally social media posts!!! Where's the social??
And the end felt weird. It just stopped.The author gave so many good political opinions/monologues on the rest of the book, that it's just stupid to not explain why you stopped writing in february 2022. Was it because you got bored of facebook? Because you think covid ended there? Because no one was interacting with your posts anymore? It would've been the sensible thing to do to explain why it ended where it did.
I honestly don't know how to rate this, so 3/5 it is. On the one hand, I'm nosy and lonely as hell because the isolation never really ended for me after the pandemic, so reading a day to day recount from some random person's life was something I liked, to an extent. But if I thought about it too much, it ended up spiraling towards "why the fuck am I reading this? why do I care?".
And on the other hand, this book is a piece of history. 50 years from now it'll be a very interesting read. But I lived through the pandemic, am still caught in the aftermath, and none of this is news to me. She seemed to be allowed to go to more places than I was, and she spent the whole thing with someone she loves and is only mildly annoyed at sometimes, which is something I didn't get to do, so sometimes it was like I felt that my experience was more of a history document than this book. Which is really shitty to think, because I don't mean to sound like those "my three year old could've painted this!!", but it's also a result of the times I think, of having gone through the pandemic together.
Although I understand the legal hijinks it could bring, it would've been nice if some comments on the posts were kept. At the beginning we're told some of this posts were conversations with someone in the comments, or continuations of answers she gave to some previous post. And then we just don't get to see that, not one comment, and I think the traces of other posts being a follow-up of some comments were scraped in the edits. If this were blog entries I'd understand, but they were originally social media posts!!! Where's the social??
And the end felt weird. It just stopped.The author gave so many good political opinions/monologues on the rest of the book, that it's just stupid to not explain why you stopped writing in february 2022. Was it because you got bored of facebook? Because you think covid ended there? Because no one was interacting with your posts anymore? It would've been the sensible thing to do to explain why it ended where it did.