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elerireads's reviews
382 reviews
Le mage du Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Not the most novel-like of novels. More that the author was using fiction as a vehicle to explain how Putin came to be where and what he is today (as da Empoli sees it at least!). For those of us who are fairly ignorant about recent Russian political history it was an interesting and engaging read - although it wasn't the most compelling plot it didn't feel clumsy or overly dense. However, I'm fairly sure more knowledgeable readers would find it a bit dull and/or frustratingly oversimplified. The only real gripe I had was with that random ranty chapter about technology stuck in at the end. Added nothing of value whatsoever, didn't fit with the rest of the book, and there was no real attempt even to disguise it as anything but a pretentious essay.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
Nothing special and definitely more vibes than plot, but nonetheless quite sweet. A nice little book for winding down before bed.
How to Share a Cat and Other Life Lessons by Evelyn Fenn
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
A very sweet and gently enjoyable book. I thought Moira in particular was an excellent character - still deeply affected by a complicated past from decades previous, shallowness of friendships harshly exposed by the pandemic, open to learning new things about the world and herself. Of course, it was also great to have her as an older asexual character when a lot of the existing representation is teenagers/young adults. It was also a good demonstration of the importance of access to resources/information/community.
Nessa and Meg felt like quite accurate representation of well-meaning but hasty and occasionally callous teenagers. When Poppy was introduced though, it felt like Nessa was super quick to judge her and for a while I was expecting there to be some kind of lesson there about not being so hasty to write people off? But then it turned into Poppy actually being completely horrible. I thought her suddenly being expelled for drug dealing was kind of bizarre though - it slightly got my back up in a vaguely 'drugs are immoral' kind of way.
The writing was a bit clunky and overly preachy in places. But for the most part it was very readable.
Nessa and Meg felt like quite accurate representation of well-meaning but hasty and occasionally callous teenagers. When Poppy was introduced though, it felt like Nessa was super quick to judge her and for a while I was expecting there to be some kind of lesson there about not being so hasty to write people off? But then it turned into Poppy actually being completely horrible. I thought her suddenly being expelled for drug dealing was kind of bizarre though - it slightly got my back up in a vaguely 'drugs are immoral' kind of way.
The writing was a bit clunky and overly preachy in places. But for the most part it was very readable.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
I really enjoyed this! Got me all enthusiastic about moss and lichen and ferns. Always liked the rain anyway but now I'm super excited about how rainy it is in West Wales. Basically it succeeded in converting me to temperate rainforest nerdiness and I have two new mortal enemies: sheep and rhododendron ponticum. Tbf sheep were already in my bad books.
Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher
emotional
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Ah this really hit the spot. Read it in one day and it just solidly delivered what I was hoping for. Easy to read YA, rom-com still covering serious things but with a light touch, well-written characters that aren't one-dimensional, Camelot vibes plus everyone is gay. Iconic. Honestly I was a bit confused by the world-building but that may be on me for having read it so quickly. Anyway, would solidly recommend, especially for anyone wanting an easy pick-me-up or getting back into reading.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, Homophobia, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, and Violence
Minor: Gore
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Very interesting and thought-provoking! The plot felt quite holey in places but the concept was cool and gave a different lens to to think about female bodily autonomy - regardless of your position on abortion you'd think if ever there was a case for it, alien implantation would be it. I was quite entertained by the way it attempted to duck and weave around the idea that mass rape might be the most likely explanation for all the women suddenly being pregnant after being sedated for a day - "mathematically unfeasible" so of course alien implantation is a much more likely cause... Lots of interesting ethical and legal dilemmas, a nice little twist I didn't see coming, and an ending I definitely did see coming.
The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
informative
medium-paced
4.5
Excellent. Particularly good at eviscerating crappy studies, patiently pulling them apart and explaining why their conclusions are a load of rubbish. The title was quite clever - the core argument of the book being that there's no real evidence for hardwired, innate biological differences between male and female brains, but what IS demonstrated over and over is that brain plasticity means brains are "gendered" by the highly gendered world in which they develop and exist. i.e. whatever differences that can be found between male and female brains are often far better explained by gender-differentiated factors in upbringing etc., e.g. playing tetris or similar spatial problem-solving games. Rippon dug into a lot of the complexity around the way that attitudes and expectations influence abilities. Very young children have well-developed social perception are highly attuned to parental disaproval in particular, e.g. little boys will pick up on their dad's discomfort with them wearing a princess dress even if the dad doesn't say anything negative (and if asked would say he's fine with it). I think Rippon referred to children as "expert gender detectives" or something similar. I found the discussion around women in STEM particularly interesting and useful because it articulated and backed up a lot of the things that I had long thought/suspected but not been able to express as clearly or succinctly; the complex layering of factors from the types of toys young children play with, the association of maths and science with "genius", early beliefs about boys' vs girls' likelihood of being geniuses, and teachers' biases all feeding into maths anxiety in girls, then coupled with visibility of clear existing gender imbalance and blatantly hostile work/study environments... It's a hell of a lot more complicated than just needing to encourage more girls to do science.
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Well that was disturbing, and it just got more and more disturbing as it went on. On the whole I think it was very good. Made lots of clever points about the bizarre way people are able to distance themselves from the suffering of animals they eat, and sort of extrapolates that to say 'what if we were still able to do that even with human beings?'. Anyone with any familiarity with the meat industry will recognise the use of strange clinical language - I can never see the word 'processing' now without linking it to animal slaughter - to avoid describing what they're actually doing. I wasn't entirely convinced by the premise and set-up. As in I'm guessing the author came up with this disturbing premise but then really struggled to come up with an explanation for how it came about - the government made up a virus and everyone just believed it??
I don't want to spoil it but the ending was a kicker and I really felt like we had been lulled into a false sense of security.
I don't want to spoil it but the ending was a kicker and I really felt like we had been lulled into a false sense of security.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Gore, Violence, Blood, Trafficking, Cannibalism, Murder, and Pregnancy
Moderate: Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Torture, Excrement, and Death of parent
A Three Dog Problem by S.J. Bennett
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
Gah I can't put myself through any more of these I'm afraid. Far too many pompous twatty men taking credit for women's work. I know it's taking the piss out of how shit they are but honestly it's too much to bear. Quite a fun mystery though.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.75
Hmm this was vaguely interesting to start with but as it went on it got kind of boring, and the annoying stupid things about the concept became more and more obvious and irritating. So by the end of it, all I could think about was how bad it was.
So first of all I think it's really stupid to suggest you can really experience what another life would be like if you were plonked into it without any of the knowledge that you would actually have in that life.(a) It just makes the experience of trying other lives incredibly stressful. That's where 90% of the tension in this book comes from - trivial stuff like trying to figure out where your house is. It's maybe interesting the first few times but there are so many lives Nora tries out and it felt like Haig was trying to get through every possible variant - "Oh no! I don't know where I work!", "Oh no! I have to give an inspirational speech with no preprepared slides!", "Oh no! I have to sing a song I supposedly wrote, in front of thousands of people!", "Oh no! I'm supposed to be a glaciologist but I know nothing about glaciers!". Seriously we got the point after the first few and it got old really quickly. Just became an annoying gimmick to me. And that stress is not at all representative of what it would be like to live that life with your memories intact! I understand it would be a much duller book without that stuff but honestly I think that just reflects the fact it's a bit of a naff concept. (b) Memories and knowledge make up an enormous part of your lived experience. I would bet that the proportion of our thoughts that are memories is really high. What if something really awful and traumatic had happened to you in the life you picked but you'd never told anyone about it? Or equally maybe you'd had some giant epiphany? The random other version of you would never know. I feel like it kind of does a disservice to the richness of people's inner lives.
Secondly, Nora is a moron. It's only in the final life she tries that it occurs to her that she might not be able to be satisfied with a life she didn't earn. That was the first thing I thought right near the beginning when the concept was explained - you'd always feel like a fraud and wouldn't be able to derive any of the self-esteem boosts that come from your achievements.
Thirdly, the version of Mrs Elm in the midnight library was an incredibly tedious character. She was supposed to be all mysterious and wise (albeit also only some kind of figment of Nora's imagination, so limited as to how wise she could be...), but nothing she ever said was even remotely interesting or valuable. By the second half I was just skipping over all the sections in the library because it was so annoying and not adding anything at all.
Fourthly, none of the characters were well-written. Including Nora. I didn't feel like I actually got to know any of them as people, so I didn't really get that invested in any of them.
Fifthly, a lot of this was just crap self-help psychobabble (badly) disguised as a novel with some plot filled with obvious holes. It was nowhere near as bad, but it did give me flashbacks to 'Ta deuxième vie commence quand tu comprends que tu n'en a qu'une', which I would say is actually the worst book I've ever read.
Random minor gripe: when Nora started to want to live again, it suddenly became a whole issue that if she died in one of the alternative lives she tried then she would actually die. It felt like that was conveniently sort of sidestepped earlier on when she was suicidal. Why didn't she just kill herself in one of the alternative lives? Seemed like a bit of a plothole to me.
Related to that, this book was completely predictable from the outset and (not to be a weird morbid person who's rooting for a main character to kill themselves or anything) I think it would have been a much more interesting book if she'd ended up deciding she still wanted to die. Also probably irresponsible and unpublishable, but still. In quite a few of the earlier lives she was more outwardly 'successful' but still miserable, on antidepressants, etc. And I thought for a second it might be making a point about predisposition towards mental illness mattering more than external circumstances. Not that I would necessarily have agreed, but it would have been a lot bolder and more interesting than the much more pedestrian point it ended up making about conventional ideas of success not being what actually makes people happy.
Finally, despite all the negativity in this review, from the giant essay I've accidentally just written it's clear that this book sparked a lot of thoughts so was interesting from that perspective if nothing else. So I'm still glad I read it. One thing I did like was that each Nora was clearly a different person with different tastes and habits, etc. Regret is, of course, a completely natural human emotion, but I've always felt there was no point dwelling on - and certainly not torturing yourself over - what might have happened if things had turned out differently. Our experiences shape us so much that it's impossible to imagine what your life would have been like because you would have to imagine yourself as a completely different person, which is incredibly difficult to do. You wouldn't necessarily feel the emotions that the true version of yourself would feel if suddenly plonked into that life.
So first of all I think it's really stupid to suggest you can really experience what another life would be like if you were plonked into it without any of the knowledge that you would actually have in that life.(a) It just makes the experience of trying other lives incredibly stressful. That's where 90% of the tension in this book comes from - trivial stuff like trying to figure out where your house is. It's maybe interesting the first few times but there are so many lives Nora tries out and it felt like Haig was trying to get through every possible variant - "Oh no! I don't know where I work!", "Oh no! I have to give an inspirational speech with no preprepared slides!", "Oh no! I have to sing a song I supposedly wrote, in front of thousands of people!", "Oh no! I'm supposed to be a glaciologist but I know nothing about glaciers!". Seriously we got the point after the first few and it got old really quickly. Just became an annoying gimmick to me. And that stress is not at all representative of what it would be like to live that life with your memories intact! I understand it would be a much duller book without that stuff but honestly I think that just reflects the fact it's a bit of a naff concept. (b) Memories and knowledge make up an enormous part of your lived experience. I would bet that the proportion of our thoughts that are memories is really high. What if something really awful and traumatic had happened to you in the life you picked but you'd never told anyone about it? Or equally maybe you'd had some giant epiphany? The random other version of you would never know. I feel like it kind of does a disservice to the richness of people's inner lives.
Secondly, Nora is a moron. It's only in the final life she tries that it occurs to her that she might not be able to be satisfied with a life she didn't earn. That was the first thing I thought right near the beginning when the concept was explained - you'd always feel like a fraud and wouldn't be able to derive any of the self-esteem boosts that come from your achievements.
Thirdly, the version of Mrs Elm in the midnight library was an incredibly tedious character. She was supposed to be all mysterious and wise (albeit also only some kind of figment of Nora's imagination, so limited as to how wise she could be...), but nothing she ever said was even remotely interesting or valuable. By the second half I was just skipping over all the sections in the library because it was so annoying and not adding anything at all.
Fourthly, none of the characters were well-written. Including Nora. I didn't feel like I actually got to know any of them as people, so I didn't really get that invested in any of them.
Fifthly, a lot of this was just crap self-help psychobabble (badly) disguised as a novel with some plot filled with obvious holes. It was nowhere near as bad, but it did give me flashbacks to 'Ta deuxième vie commence quand tu comprends que tu n'en a qu'une', which I would say is actually the worst book I've ever read.
Random minor gripe: when Nora started to want to live again, it suddenly became a whole issue that if she died in one of the alternative lives she tried then she would actually die. It felt like that was conveniently sort of sidestepped earlier on when she was suicidal. Why didn't she just kill herself in one of the alternative lives? Seemed like a bit of a plothole to me.
Related to that, this book was completely predictable from the outset and (not to be a weird morbid person who's rooting for a main character to kill themselves or anything) I think it would have been a much more interesting book if she'd ended up deciding she still wanted to die. Also probably irresponsible and unpublishable, but still. In quite a few of the earlier lives she was more outwardly 'successful' but still miserable, on antidepressants, etc. And I thought for a second it might be making a point about predisposition towards mental illness mattering more than external circumstances. Not that I would necessarily have agreed, but it would have been a lot bolder and more interesting than the much more pedestrian point it ended up making about conventional ideas of success not being what actually makes people happy.
Finally, despite all the negativity in this review, from the giant essay I've accidentally just written it's clear that this book sparked a lot of thoughts so was interesting from that perspective if nothing else. So I'm still glad I read it. One thing I did like was that each Nora was clearly a different person with different tastes and habits, etc. Regret is, of course, a completely natural human emotion, but I've always felt there was no point dwelling on - and certainly not torturing yourself over - what might have happened if things had turned out differently. Our experiences shape us so much that it's impossible to imagine what your life would have been like because you would have to imagine yourself as a completely different person, which is incredibly difficult to do. You wouldn't necessarily feel the emotions that the true version of yourself would feel if suddenly plonked into that life.