enteka's reviews
275 reviews

Rules for Rule Breaking by Talia Tucker

funny

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

made me smile and laugh! on the train! without a mask! bad for me. good book. 

nice character development and the main couple's rlsp progressed really well. this is a new era for me (reading romance!?!?!?!) so idk if my review is well-researched!

My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson

4.0

• The reticent volcano keeps
• I felt a cleavage in my mind
• I took my power in my hand
• I know that he exists
• Today or this noon
• It sounded as if the streets were running
• Where ships of purple gently toss
• I dreaded that first robin so

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

she's just like me frfr and somehow it's such a kind book

I remember feeling sixteen and feeling eleven. I remember thinking, how could i be a teenager I remember finishing high school and thinking, am I grown now? Is this what it feels like? I feel the same as I did before. 

MAN

I am a life force contained in the deformed bodyof a baby. Of course I'm a fraud. The fact that I'm able to carry myself through life without being crushed beneath the psychological weight of being alive proves that I'm a con artist. Aren't we all con artists?

MAN

I liked to daydream about what I might do, where I might go, and what might happen to me. I don't do that anymore. I can't see myself older. 

MAN

The image of Eleanor committing something I said offhand to her memory, spending her money, and gifting me this makes me feel, for some reason, heartbroken. [...] I find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people. I feel like I am falling through space and Eleanor just thew me a rose. It's such a sweet, pointless gesture. It would be less devastating to fall through space alone, without someone else falling next to me. Whenever someone does something nice for me, I feel intensely aware of how strange and sad it is to know someone.

MAN

Everything matters so much and so little; it is disgusting. 

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

5.0

my first winterson book was the passion, because i'd been trying to find historical fiction. so then i fell in love with her prose there and i read written on the body. i live in singapore but for some reason the library had e-copies of the former but not the latter book. i did not like written on the body, or more accurately that was too much winterson. i think i still like her writing, though maybe it has to be taken in small doses; she writes obsessively, and so... i wanted to say, that people with good writing can make the mundane interesting to read. but what's the mundane, anyway? well, even if you're not bothering with all this semantics, winterson's life here is explosive. so, it reads well in that wintersonian way and it's explosive. english literature from A to Z. 

Some quotes I liked: 

• It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea.
• Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writes frame their world.
• There's a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together? 
• I was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option. I had to be able to think about it and on good days I did so because it gave me back a sense of control - for one last time I would be in control.
• I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike - and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it.
• Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.
• Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. / Feeling is frightening. / Well, I find it so.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

2024 is my year indeed. a sally rooney book, wow. it didn't feel like a 5 star read but it's really nice, introspective. connell are you me? is that a bad thing? should i get help? well i won't. rooney writes scenes like how one'd dream them. it's beautiful and yet it's mundane. wonderful.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, Vol. 1 (Light Novel) by Piero Karasu

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

3.0

relationship progression was a bit fast to me, and some parts can get verbose (mfw anis lecture) but overall it's enjoyable.

The Hawthorne Legacy by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes

2.0

i think that's enough hawthorne for a while, maybe forever

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

very okay. i just didn't find myself intrigued by anyone, which is a bit of a problem for a character-driven book. writing was nice, on a whole, but some of the short paragraphs of the end kinda made me cringe. might be a me problem though. 

listened to nude by radiohead, henry by soccer mommy, and adrift by austin wintory while reading.

Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?