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leaflinglearns's reviews
395 reviews
Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
medium-paced
5.0
This debut novel was brilliant. It's one of my new favorite books.
Peggy Hillcoat, an 8-year-old girl, is taken away from her home by her father one day. He tells her that the world has ended and that the rest of her family is dead. They are the only two people in the world left. They live together off of very little in a completely rundown cabin in the woods. When she finally comes back to her mother nine years later, they both discover the truth about what happened out there in the wilderness and back home before they left.
The characters and the world that they build for themselves is so vivid. A story about two people alone in the woulds could easily become boring and get bogged down by details about surviving with very little (though I do love those kinds of details). Their situation shone, because we learned so much about them, their relationships with each other, and their previous relationships with people like Peggy's mother as time goes on. Both Peggy and her father are still wrapped up in the past and their own dreams, that they get very involved in certain projects like building Peggy a noiseless piano. It takes them a while to really learn how to take care of themselves and each other. But something is very clearly changing in her father. And once Peggy discovers a pair of boots in the woods, everything starts to unravel and fall apart.
I loved that the book jumped back and forth between Peggy's time as an adult back home with her mother and when she is a child with her father. The tension that's created is superb and everything is revealed with expert timing. I was too absorbed in the story to even think once about what Fuller was slowly doing.
This is a very quick, dark, and heart-wrenching read. Fuller's prose is absolutely exquisite. At so many chapter endings I felt completely blown away and ready to race into the next chapter. Her writing and pacing sucked me in entirely. I couldn't stop reading. And it's not a thriller or a mystery, really. It is well-written, unnerving literary fiction that feels absolutely human and real. And, wow, what an ending.
Peggy Hillcoat, an 8-year-old girl, is taken away from her home by her father one day. He tells her that the world has ended and that the rest of her family is dead. They are the only two people in the world left. They live together off of very little in a completely rundown cabin in the woods. When she finally comes back to her mother nine years later, they both discover the truth about what happened out there in the wilderness and back home before they left.
The characters and the world that they build for themselves is so vivid. A story about two people alone in the woulds could easily become boring and get bogged down by details about surviving with very little (though I do love those kinds of details). Their situation shone, because we learned so much about them, their relationships with each other, and their previous relationships with people like Peggy's mother as time goes on. Both Peggy and her father are still wrapped up in the past and their own dreams, that they get very involved in certain projects like building Peggy a noiseless piano. It takes them a while to really learn how to take care of themselves and each other. But something is very clearly changing in her father. And once Peggy discovers a pair of boots in the woods, everything starts to unravel and fall apart.
I loved that the book jumped back and forth between Peggy's time as an adult back home with her mother and when she is a child with her father. The tension that's created is superb and everything is revealed with expert timing. I was too absorbed in the story to even think once about what Fuller was slowly doing.
This is a very quick, dark, and heart-wrenching read. Fuller's prose is absolutely exquisite. At so many chapter endings I felt completely blown away and ready to race into the next chapter. Her writing and pacing sucked me in entirely. I couldn't stop reading. And it's not a thriller or a mystery, really. It is well-written, unnerving literary fiction that feels absolutely human and real. And, wow, what an ending.
Remembering the Kanji, Volume I: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Heisig
informative
slow-paced
4.0
I finally did it. It only took me four years to really commit to it haha.
There's so much back and forth about whether or not RTK is a valuable method. After many years of dipping in and out of learning Japanese with different techniques, I'm at this point around an N3 level (per my iTalki tutor's assessment), though it's hard to judge because I learn a lot of random stuff out of "order" through immersion. I had almost decided against RTK entirely after hitting roughly 600 kanji a year or two prior to when I started to focus on learning Japanese in a sustainable way this year (consistency over intensity, with a focus on fun immersion learning). But as I was working through native content (books, games, websites), I realized how helpful it was when I ran into a word I didn't know but I already knew what the kanji meant. And I realized how helpless I felt staring at a string of kanji whose lines were completely meaningless to me. Because of this and because rote memorization feels like absolute torture, I decided to finally focus and pursue the completion of this book alongside the kanji.koohii.com story database & flashcards (yeah, yeah, I should use anki, whatever). I'm so so happy I stuck to it.
Only reason it's not five stars is because damn sometimes Heisig is so weird in how he decides how to present things.
There's so much back and forth about whether or not RTK is a valuable method. After many years of dipping in and out of learning Japanese with different techniques, I'm at this point around an N3 level (per my iTalki tutor's assessment), though it's hard to judge because I learn a lot of random stuff out of "order" through immersion. I had almost decided against RTK entirely after hitting roughly 600 kanji a year or two prior to when I started to focus on learning Japanese in a sustainable way this year (consistency over intensity, with a focus on fun immersion learning). But as I was working through native content (books, games, websites), I realized how helpful it was when I ran into a word I didn't know but I already knew what the kanji meant. And I realized how helpless I felt staring at a string of kanji whose lines were completely meaningless to me. Because of this and because rote memorization feels like absolute torture, I decided to finally focus and pursue the completion of this book alongside the kanji.koohii.com story database & flashcards (yeah, yeah, I should use anki, whatever). I'm so so happy I stuck to it.
Only reason it's not five stars is because damn sometimes Heisig is so weird in how he decides how to present things.