father of two, trying to get back into a regular reading practice!
he/him pronouns, trans rights are human rights.
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A woman lost at sea, floating on her back, tries to keep from falling asleep - and subsequently drowning - by remembering all of the people she knows, painting a fragmentary portrait of a life and community. An unfinished novel, I don't think it necessarily clicked for me - I don't "get it" - but it's beautiful
In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to …
A beautiful, funny, crushing little novel, about grief and suburban life and marriage and also a six-foot-eight fishman who walks into a woman's kitchen and life one evening.
A witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head …
Starting with the subtitle, "The Antidote" positions itself against "positive thinking" - the sort of mind-over-matter faith in the future that pretty much every other self-help book espouses, a doctrine that author Burkeman neatly and thoroughly dismantles with copious endnotes. But there's no lazy cynicism here, in a search for happiness via unconventional and counterintuitive ways, and a surprising amount of, well, positivity. From Seneca and the Stoics to memento mori's and a shrine to Saint Death, Burkeman guides the reader on a whistle-stop tour of philosophies that reorient our ideas about happiness, success or even the self. I absolutely devoured it - it's also, in parts, very funny! - and think it might become an annual read, or at least a great starting point on further reading.
A witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head …
This book is extremely good and also - unexpectedly - quite funny.
This might be an unfair review - at this time last year I was reading Edward Parnell's "Ghostland," a sort of overview of British horror tied in to the author's own life, and so I'm mentally comparing them despite them being about such different things. Green writes very beautifully, about compelling subjects. But I was kind of hoping to get a bit more of his life in there - at the very start of the book he mentions the turbulence of his own life while writing this book, and I was hoping that might be a part of it. Regardless, a neat pop history with some truly beautiful parts
Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned …
A VERY short little volume but one that is intensely fun to read. This is actually my first DeWitt - I haven't read The Last Samurai yet! - and I really loved it. Made up of 32 chapters, the book starts by painting an exquisite picture of a world before - in chapter 3 - very suddenly throwing it into peril. Extremely good.
A beautiful, brutal little novel - it feels like talking about what happens in it should require a spoiler alert, but... nothing MUCH happens! Just very powerfully observed.
Two people move to a house in rural Ireland and live there, in an every-shrinking world, for eight years. That is, essentially, the plot of the book. But what the book is about - at least to me - is the dread and joys of living with someone, experiencing both growth and entropy together. I spent most of the book reading in a state of apprehension, waiting in agony for the moment where the solitude of the couple is interrupted, where their precarious poverty becomes too much to bear, where illness or money or the outside world intrudes upon the life they've made for themselves. It's almost like domestic horror where the danger is entropy. An incredible book.