Another solid week of reading. Here are my goodreads reviews. If you’re on goodreads, add me as a friend so I can see your books too!
Recursion (4.5stars): It’s always challenging to explain a Blake Crouch novel and this one is no exception. If you’ve read Dark Matter, you have some idea what you’re expecting in this book. His books are fast-paced, “keep you on your toes and wildly confuse yourself as you try to keep track of things that are happening” books.
Recursion is about physics, the science of the human mind, memory generation, politics, and so much more. It’s also about grief, our desire to set things right, connection, greed, and so much more. And most of all, it has character development that’s rich which is rare in books with the kind of plot and pacing his books have.
I’ve read a bunch on quantum physics and I studied a bunch of computer science and have even taken classes on the human brain but I can’t really tell you which of his ideas in the book are possible and which are pushed well outside the realm of possibility and which are just completely made up. Partly because they are a bit mixed up together but mostly because I don’t really care. If you’re a complete stickler for accurate science, this book might frustrate you, but if you take it for what it is, a fast-paced, very entertaining, though-provoking book that uses science as its story source, then you will enjoy it thoroughly and find that not only is your mind blown during reading it but that you think about it well after you’re done. And if that’s not the sign of a good book, I don’t know what is.
thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Elsey Come Home (3.5 stars): This quick little book started out not being able to hold my attention too much but by the time I was more than halfway through I was really invested in Elsey. There is so much suffering and so much realness and so much tenderness in this book. Marriage is hard. Being a human is hard. And while I don’t drink, I could still connect to her feeling of wanting to escape and her feelings around choosing between being a mother and being a thing you want to be (painter in this case) and being a wife. Her internal conflict is so real in this book and so easy to connect to that I couldn’t help but root for her.
I’m glad I persevered with this one.
The Body is not an Apology (4 stars): For the last few years, I’ve been on a journey towards trying to make peace with who I am both inside and out. As part of my word for 2019, I’ve decided to dive deeper into this journey and that means reading books that teach me to unlearn many of the messages I’ve been given (or I chose to distort) throughout my life. This spreads over many areas but none more than my body.
So even though I had not heard of Sonya Renee Taylor before picking up this novel, I knew it would be good for me. It would help change some of the messages in my head.
And it was.
The messages I have in my head will not disappear with one good book. Years and years of conditioning and messaging doesn’t get erased in a few hundred pages. But like most journeys, it all begins with one step forward. And this was a solid step in the right direction.
I don’t think there is anyone who couldn’t benefit in some way or another from this book. It’s not about fixing your body issues, it’s not about fixing anything, in fact. It’s about learning to love yourself (I was going to write radically but that word doesn’t sit well with me and if you’re like me, I don’t want you to not read this book just because of that word.) There is so much goodness in this book. I had heard of the concept of how you’re not your thoughts from many many other books but this one brought it home for me. I get it so much more now.
If there’s an inkling of interest when you read the title of this book, then I’d say grab it, you will not be disappointed.
The Shape of a Life (4.5 stars): I don’t usually read biographies, let alone biographies of mathematicians. But this particular book caught my attention with its description and it’s similar timeline to when my father-in-law got his PhD in Math (his PhD adviser is in fact one of the names mentioned) so, on a whim, I decided I would read it.
I am so glad I spent some time with this book. There were layers and layers of interesting stories and learnings for me. Even though there is a lot of math in the book, much of which I didn’t understand, I still deeply enjoyed reading Yau’s journey. I had never heard of this mathematician before and now I feel like I have had a window into math, or a type of math, at a certain time in history. Of course, this is all written from one person’s perspective, with one person’s biases but it was still interesting.
In my experience, solving hard math problems takes hard work, and there’s no way around it, unless the problem is rather trivial.
I loved this because I think it encourages hard work and discourages the belief that we are born “geniuses” at math.
Yau’s childhood and youth are a heart-wrenching read and very eye opening to me. It was incredible to see his success despite all of the hardships he (and his family) had to endure.
There were so many opportunistic coincidences in Yau’s early life that culminated in his ability to end up in the United States (and his ability to study math vigorously) and it made me realize that we all have a lot of random coincidences in our lives and what might look like a disaster (not getting into the any schools for example) might turn out to be the thing that sets the course of your life positively (as it did for Yang.) and also that a single person can completely change the course of someone’s life. There are many who played a major role in getting Yau to where he could really thrive. Like Salaff who worked extraordinarily hard to get him into Berkeley.
“I have spent a whole day without eating and a whole night without sleeping in order to think, but it was of no use, I got nothing out of it. Thinking cannot compare with studying.”
It was quite depressing to me how incredibly political academia is. I knew this of course but as someone who has spent all her life in corporate America, with a brief stint in non profit land, it was depressing to see how academia can put all of the greed and political shenanigans to shame. All that bickering and blocking each other’s paths. What a waste of incredible mental talent. (I know there’s a lot of cooperation, too, which is also clear in the book.)
This was a really enjoyable read for me, despite (or maybe because of) being very different than my usual fare.
gratitudes to netgalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Golden Child (3 stars): This was a challenging book for me to read. I don’t want to write too much about it because it will be easy to give away the plot. But as a mother, it made me think a lot about sacrifices parents think they should make, how much parents alter the course of their kids lives, how words have power (and of course actions too.) and how some decisions are ones i will never agree with or understand. Maybe if I had read this book at another time, I might have been able to separate myself from the story enough to have some sort of literary criticism on this story. But I am not able to do that at the moment. Some books just come at the wrong time (for a reader) and this was one of those cases for me.
Lie With Me (4 stars): This quiet, small, and beautiful novel takes place over decades of two characters’ lives. The story is told from the perspective of one of them when they were teenagers and then again a few decades later and then again about ten years after that. This not a plot-rich story. It’s not about what happens but it’s about youth, identity, and love.
It’s about connection and how brief but powerful connections can (and do) have lasting impact on our lives. I originally wanted to read this book because I thought it might be like Call Me By Your Name which I loved. And parts of this story might have similarities to that story but to me the two felt very different.
The prose in this novel is very sparse, very clean. It’s so stark that the emotions come to the surface that much more. I have never read Besson before and it sounds like he is a famous writer and this might be his style. At first, I found it jarring but, over time, I really appreciated the space it provided for me.
This is not a happy story. In fact, I would say it’s a really sad story but it’s not presented in a way that makes you feel the sadness on the surface like some melodramatic books do. It’s subtle and quiet and so the sadness I felt was deeper and quieter.
Overall, it was a really beautiful story and I am excited to have discovered a new-to-me author. I am looking forward to reading more of his books.
Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in return for an honest review.
Here and Now and Then (3 stars): This book took me a while to get into. I listened to it on audio and decided that the narration wasn’t good. I also felt like I couldn’t get interested in any of the characters. There wasn’t enough character development or depth to make it so I cared about any of them. I felt like each character had 1-2 token things about them sprinkled in to make them “interesting” but there was no real depth. Which meant I didn’t end up caring about them enough.
The plot is very unusual and maybe for a lot of people that’s enough but that usually isn’t enough for me and this book was no exception. By the end, I was a bit more interested and I am not sorry I read it but I feel there was more opportunity here for the author to develop the characters further and make this story deeper.
And there we go, a really solid week of reading. Here’s to another fantastic week.
Books I Read this Week 2019 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2019 here. I am also tracking my books in real time on Good Reads here. If you’re on Good Reads add me so I can follow you, too!
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