shorshewitch's reviews
326 reviews

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn

3.5

The Employees, originally written in Danish, has a fascinating format. It is made up of a series of barely a page or two each of non-sequential entries from employee interviews conducted by a nameless committee on a spaceship called the Six Thousand Ship. The employees are a mix of humans and humanoids, and the interviews are being conducted to observe and document their responses to alien objects picked from a planet called New Discovery. The entries are super-ominous, vivid, melancholic and in some places very disturbing. The characters remain unnamed, analogous to the namelessness and expendability of human cogs in late capitalistic workplaces of today, one of the many satirical aspects of the book. The end is intriguingly disconcerting. And I learnt about trypophobia. I think I have it but have found coping mechanisms. I wish there was more I could read though. It felt very abrupt but with immense potential to be a saga. I shall go hunt down if Olga has written more on this.

The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza

dark mysterious fast-paced

4.0

Excuse me, wtf! 

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

hopeful lighthearted relaxing fast-paced

3.5

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

5.0

This was such a sad book. A blend of fiction and philosophy told by a narrator we never know much about, not even the name. The broken star's name is Macabea and it's about her and like 4 people she has ever known in her whole life. 

The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila

4.0

tw : motherhood, abortion

My second book from the 3TimesRebel oeuvre. I wasn't as impressed as with the first one "Mothers Don't" but this one also deals with motherhood and as a childfree woman, motherhood fascinates me from afar. That women keep choosing again and again to do this to their bodies is very intriguing to me. In that, this one also deals with an abortion. It's a quick read so I'd recommend if you want a reflective clips of a life of a mother who chose to abort the second time. 

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

5.0

Like I said on the reading group some of the parts of the book are at such a mic-drop level that this can be a brilliantly good ironical (satirist) stand up comedy monologue.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

3.0

This took me so long. It rambles way too much in some places. It is a very confusing book for me. Like there were several passages in it, that as a writer / reader, I wish I had written. But there are so many others that as an editor I think I might have edited out. I will probably write in detail later. But for now, it's a good book, except for maybe the need for tighter edits. But the Pulitzer has decided it's a great book, so who am I to contradict. 🥲

Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language by Roxane Gay

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Ma is Scared and other short stories by Anjali Kajal

5.0

To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova

5.0