Scan barcode
one_womanarmy's reviews
207 reviews
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
challenging
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
James Baldwin's 1956 novel of queer love, shame, the mirage of American exceptionalism and the damning silence of masculinity is hopeful in spite of it's tragic arc and ending.
One of Baldwin’s most famous novels, Giovanni’s Room is an exquisitely written tale that I loved as soon as I started reading it, and that I have thought about ever since finishing it. An achingly beautiful read, we meet David, an American who has escaped to Paris to find himself. Soon after his arrival in Paris he meets Giovanni – and, despite being betrothed to his fiancé, Hella – a relationship begins to form between the two men.
From the start, the reader and narrator share a mutual understanding of the story’s distressing and inalterable conclusion, making it even more difficult for both to trek through the memory of misadventure. Baldwin’s language is lyrical and haunting; his imagery agonizing, and while Giovanni’s Room is by no means an easy book to read, it’s undoubtedly an important one.
I can’t remember the last time I was this blown away by a book. The evocative Parisian setting, the gothic-like nature of the tale, the desire; the shame and the sexuality; the all-consuming love and lust.
The audiobook was fantastically narrated. The reader voices David's first person take with forceful, emotive shame and longing, moving me to tears on more than one occasion.
One of Baldwin’s most famous novels, Giovanni’s Room is an exquisitely written tale that I loved as soon as I started reading it, and that I have thought about ever since finishing it. An achingly beautiful read, we meet David, an American who has escaped to Paris to find himself. Soon after his arrival in Paris he meets Giovanni – and, despite being betrothed to his fiancé, Hella – a relationship begins to form between the two men.
From the start, the reader and narrator share a mutual understanding of the story’s distressing and inalterable conclusion, making it even more difficult for both to trek through the memory of misadventure. Baldwin’s language is lyrical and haunting; his imagery agonizing, and while Giovanni’s Room is by no means an easy book to read, it’s undoubtedly an important one.
I can’t remember the last time I was this blown away by a book. The evocative Parisian setting, the gothic-like nature of the tale, the desire; the shame and the sexuality; the all-consuming love and lust.
The audiobook was fantastically narrated. The reader voices David's first person take with forceful, emotive shame and longing, moving me to tears on more than one occasion.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
The Three Body Problem is one of the most enjoyable and successful hard science fictional books ever written. Cixin Liu - China’s most popular sci-fi author - immerses the reader in a quintessentially Chinese story; not only is Three Body set in a different part of the world from most sci-fi you’ll encounter, but it also feels remarkably different in writing style and plot development.
Hard science fiction paradise ensues alongside a complex timeline, historical fiction, and the development of cults, scientific progress, and intergenerational trauma. Liu injects the plot with heavy doses of realistic quantum entanglement, information theory, nanotechnology, and particle physics. New, fantastical ideas abound, such as a lengthy but plot stabilizing description of Trisolaris - the epiponimous planetary name of our interstellar neighbors - creating a single proton subatomic particle called a “sophon,” which changes dimensionality as a way of storing information.
This is brilliantly combined with questions of human morality the division or uniting of a species, and what should be considered "advancement" by intelligent society (fascinatingly contrasted by one scene towards the end of the book where those stensibly trying to save humanity also reaorrt to cutting hundreds of innocent people into tiny chunks with nanowire). The ramifications of broad changes in sociological conditions as having bearing on these ropics, especially in relation to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is interwoven alongside science to bring history, philosophy, sociology, and its impact on human science and the development of morals and mores.
The story itself is told from multiple points of view across several decades. Such drastic shifts in perspective and time frame could be disorienting in less capable hands, but Cixin Liu adeptly handles these transitions, using them as an effective way to build the greater narrative.
On to limitations. I’m not the first reader to note this, but the lead characters are flat. Very, very flat. Instead of driving the plot, the central character Wang reacts to it. I never felt that the decisions he makes in the novel were guided by his belief system. He’s kind of like the cart on an on-rail amusement park ride. The ride sure is thrilling, but you’re unlikely to remember much about the cart.
Overall, ven a single one of the ideas in here would have sufficed for a book of its own, but to put them all together into a single cohesive epic tale is absolutely jaw-dropping. Liu reaches for the stars - figuratively and stylistically - and finds tremulous, imperfect brilliance among them.
Hard science fiction paradise ensues alongside a complex timeline, historical fiction, and the development of cults, scientific progress, and intergenerational trauma. Liu injects the plot with heavy doses of realistic quantum entanglement, information theory, nanotechnology, and particle physics. New, fantastical ideas abound, such as a lengthy but plot stabilizing description of Trisolaris - the epiponimous planetary name of our interstellar neighbors - creating a single proton subatomic particle called a “sophon,” which changes dimensionality as a way of storing information.
This is brilliantly combined with questions of human morality the division or uniting of a species, and what should be considered "advancement" by intelligent society (fascinatingly contrasted by one scene towards the end of the book where those stensibly trying to save humanity also reaorrt to cutting hundreds of innocent people into tiny chunks with nanowire). The ramifications of broad changes in sociological conditions as having bearing on these ropics, especially in relation to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is interwoven alongside science to bring history, philosophy, sociology, and its impact on human science and the development of morals and mores.
The story itself is told from multiple points of view across several decades. Such drastic shifts in perspective and time frame could be disorienting in less capable hands, but Cixin Liu adeptly handles these transitions, using them as an effective way to build the greater narrative.
On to limitations. I’m not the first reader to note this, but the lead characters are flat. Very, very flat. Instead of driving the plot, the central character Wang reacts to it. I never felt that the decisions he makes in the novel were guided by his belief system. He’s kind of like the cart on an on-rail amusement park ride. The ride sure is thrilling, but you’re unlikely to remember much about the cart.
Overall, ven a single one of the ideas in here would have sufficed for a book of its own, but to put them all together into a single cohesive epic tale is absolutely jaw-dropping. Liu reaches for the stars - figuratively and stylistically - and finds tremulous, imperfect brilliance among them.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
adventurous
emotional
funny
reflective
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? Yes
5.0
Review to come! This was my fourth read - this time on audiobook.
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
After finishing the final pages of Christopher Priest's pandemic-birthed novel, I was left with the same question that puzzled me in the first ten, fifty, and hundred pages of the book - what genre is it? Science fiction? Time travel? Historical fiction? A book about injustice? A clever climate denial scheme?
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.
Gideon Falls, Vol. 2: Original Sins by Jeff Lemire
dark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
Gideon Falls is blowing my mind! Such intense graphic novel deployment, from arrangement to color.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
challenging
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface sinks its teeth into the world of publishing and the discourse on racial or owned-story authenticity through the eyes of June Hayward, a white woman who has taken the draft of a Chinese-American woman’s novel and published it as her own. She will forever be haunted by this choice, a Lady Macbeth whose modern fame and inner isolation fuels her ignorance, justification, and ultimate 'demise.'. It is a perfect follow-up to Babel and the conversations on how language can be a form of colonialism.
I’ll be honest, I read this book in a single sitting. I could not look away. June's unrelenting selfishness - and yet, humanity, as we witness her relive real and painful memories of rape, bullying, and familial indifference - starts as fear but grows darker each page, racing towards its final, white savior navel-gazing end. It was like watching the first episodes of The Office....unbearable, at times. Kuang makes us sit with our discomfort, and forces us to confront our own experience as a meta audience to the public Twitter & social media unravelling - June's lies and appropriation a rainwreck that can't be stopped, just as I could not stop turning the oages.
With a sharp critique on the commodification and consumption of art in publishing and reviewing, a look at online debates, the self-aggrandizing aspects of social media, and the way artists are pitted against each other as if writing was a competitive sport, Kuang balances the real micro and macro aggressions experienced by Asian women with her own masquerade - a white woman's painful story, told by a Chinese American. The onion layers of complex publicity literary dynamics at times veered towards insider gossip, but nonetheless a wretched set of mistakes and racists errors keeps even those of us far from the publishing world's inner workings fixated on June, Athena, and a cast of diverse and flawed women until the end.
The only reason why this isn't a bit higher join terms of stars is because of the last 15% percent of the book started spiraling, specifically into an oddly criminal-thriller bent.
I’ll be honest, I read this book in a single sitting. I could not look away. June's unrelenting selfishness - and yet, humanity, as we witness her relive real and painful memories of rape, bullying, and familial indifference - starts as fear but grows darker each page, racing towards its final, white savior navel-gazing end. It was like watching the first episodes of The Office....unbearable, at times. Kuang makes us sit with our discomfort, and forces us to confront our own experience as a meta audience to the public Twitter & social media unravelling - June's lies and appropriation a rainwreck that can't be stopped, just as I could not stop turning the oages.
With a sharp critique on the commodification and consumption of art in publishing and reviewing, a look at online debates, the self-aggrandizing aspects of social media, and the way artists are pitted against each other as if writing was a competitive sport, Kuang balances the real micro and macro aggressions experienced by Asian women with her own masquerade - a white woman's painful story, told by a Chinese American. The onion layers of complex publicity literary dynamics at times veered towards insider gossip, but nonetheless a wretched set of mistakes and racists errors keeps even those of us far from the publishing world's inner workings fixated on June, Athena, and a cast of diverse and flawed women until the end.
The only reason why this isn't a bit higher join terms of stars is because of the last 15% percent of the book started spiraling, specifically into an oddly criminal-thriller bent.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Racism
Moderate: Vomit, Rape, and Toxic friendship
Minor: Suicidal thoughts