hongjoongie's reviews
357 reviews

Panenka by Rónán Hession

hopeful reflective sad

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

3.0

‘Let's not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn't. Not to mention maintenance.
All the relationships with names - parent, sister, husband, lover - come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it's supposed to be. Shouldn't we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I'll try and do the same for you?'

This felt incomplete, like it couldn’t decide if it was a novel or a short story. The writing is decent and I think I like the overall message, but at the basic level it’s about a guy who couldn’t get over a mistake he made during a soccer match 35 years ago… ? I wish this was grounded in a more poignant scenario and other ideas/points were explored and developed more. 

Weather by Jenny Offill

dark funny reflective

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

2.0

Sacrifices lovable characters and a memorable story for an experimental form. Liked a sentence occasionally. 

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense

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

5.0

I hope that when we return them to their homes along the river they will have many far-fetched stories to tell their neighbours. I hope that the history of their captivity enters their legends, passed down from grandfather to grandson. But I hope too that memories of the town, with its easy life and its exotic foods, are not strong enough to lure them back. I do not want a race of beggars on my hands.

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain. It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story … “

Outside of time and space, this story could take place in the past or the present, in apartheid South Africa or Trump-consumed America, as it details the barbaric relationship between colonizer and the colonized. A tense and gritty depiction of empire, paranoia, isolation, xenophobia, and the struggle to resist imperial oppression if it means letting go of the power and privileges it awards you. This novel begs to be analyzed and is full of allegory and symbolism. A must read edition to the post-colonial canon that encourages us to challenge our complacency and question who the real barbarians are. 

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

challenging dark reflective sad tense

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

4.0

She had loved his father. She had known his father when lightning flashed and thunder rolled through Heaven, and his father said: "Listen. God is talking." She had known him in the mornings of that far-off country when his father turned on his bed and opened his eyes, and she had looked into those eyes, seeing what they held, and she had not been afraid. She had seen him baptized, kicking like a mule and howling, and she had seen him weep when his mother died; he was a right young man then, Florence said. Because she had looked into those eyes before they had looked on John, she knew what John would never know—the purity of his father's eyes when John was not reflected in their depths. She could have told him—had he but been able from his hiding-place to ask!—how to make his father love him. But now it was too late. She would not speak hefore the judgement day. And among those many voices, and stammering with his own, John would care no longer for her testimony.

Really nuanced exploration of Black Americans and their relationship with religion, both as a tool to inflict pain and a means to overcome it. Great characters (Florence is the best) and loved how their stories all overlap. Wish the main character’s sexuality was explored more. 

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing

Cute but could also be titled “Wealthy Woman Gets Lucky All the Time!” Glad I listened to it bc Ina narrating was nice. 

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

challenging dark funny informative reflective tense

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

4.0

I would just really like someone to tell me what's going on. What are the rules now? I feel sure there was a time when I could tell you with some confidence whether I had ever done anything very seriously wrong. Something gravely immoral. Now I don't know. I'm just waiting to be accused of something. My only certainty is that I do not currently understand my past the way I will eventually understand it.

Her generation thinks they are not religious. They think there has never been a more secular or rational American generation— except that religion is everywhere once you are looking for it. Even in the semantics, how they talk to each other. People are woke like they are saved. Don't you see, wokeness is a theology? But a theology with no text, no god, no organizing myth or principles, no traditions. There is in this millennial religion only the vaguest sense of good and evil, applied to daily life by an ever-shifting clergy of popular priests and priestesses. On their phones at all hours, they "follow" the priest du jour, absorbing the gospel, then some find a new priest, schism, then schis again. They do have a religion: it is the religion of the mob.

There must be some part of you […] that yearns for the eternal sunshine of the un-woke mind. Just think how beautiful it would be to wake up and be yourselves —smart, educated, lucky, white, straight, American people—without feeling like your very existence is traumatizing untold numbers of people you've never even met.

A timely examination of power, cancel-culture, activism, woke-ism, complicity, and the moral and ethical price of progress. Good writing and interesting characters, but I do wish it was a bit more emotionally resonant, and all the physics talk did make my eyes glaze over a bit. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective sad

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

3.5

Cute and interesting premise. 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

dark mysterious reflective sad tense

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

3.5

Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy

adventurous challenging dark

• 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? It's complicated

Can’t rate this because, like Beautiful Mutants, I have no idea what happened. Glad these first two books are done so I can read good Deborah Levy novels now lol

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense

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

3.0

Definitely an interesting book! I think this presents a unique discussion of normalcy, societal expectations, sexual trauma, neurodivergence, unconventional intimacy, and more. I also wanted to keep reading because it’s just so… weird. But the writing itself isn’t that good (very stilted translation with meh dialogue), and I never felt connected with the characters. It’s also quite on the nose, again maybe because of the translation. Some examples: 

Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory. My husband and I were people they'd failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up an act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.

And when the main character talks with her sister about being sexually abused: 

"Look," she went on, “I hate to be the one to say this, but he didn't even force you to go all the way, did he? So I kind of wonder why you're acting so traumatized. I mean, I've been groped loads and it's horrible, but we just have to put up with it, right? If we let that sort of thing stop us from hooking up with anyone for our whole lives, the human race will die out pretty quick! Some of my friends suffered way worse, and they all have boyfriends now. Everyone else does their best to forget the past and look to the future, Natsuki. You've got as far as college without even so much as speaking to a boy. It's a bit weird."

There’s definitely a more nuanced way to critique patriarchy and other harmful systems. Overall, this was fine.