Joseph Schreiber > Recent Status Updates

I'm halfway through, but this book is an uneven effort and I' not sure if I will finish it—at least not at this time.

Progress is slow because each essay has me looking up books or pulling something off my shelf. Lots of rabbit holes to fall down. Which is okay.

I read half of this book and likely will leave it unfinished. As someone who lives with mental illness and has spent years working in mental health and brain injury, I could not read this with enough distance.

Halfway through and I'm undecided whether this will be an DNF. As someone with extensive personal and professional experience with mental illness, the setting of this novella is difficult to accept. Maybe such "institutions" exist in Denmark, but most people aren't so lucky. Characterizations are fine but don't make for a particularly engaging narrative. I'm a very critical reader of books that are too close to home.

I am slowly reading this wonderful book—it's perfect to move in and out of, and as such makes it the perfect book to pick up and take along when I need a read and nothing else I have on the go will work. Thing is, I don't want to rush it. I loved the Italian miniseries based on this work and the book fills in and fleshes out Levi's sensitive account of his forced exile in southern Italy.

25 pages in and I'm going to put this aside. If it's meant to be I'll come back to it but the casual cruelty and violence thus far is turning me off. I understand it has an element of political/social satire though my knowledge of recent Korean history is not strong, but there has to be more to hang on to.

This book is a world (or worlds) of its own.

This is a good book, I'm enjoying it, but I can put it down. I'm reading it as the bridge between Adventures in Immediate Reality and Blecher's Sanitarium Journal. It's definitely a safe account of life with spinal tuberculosis, if that's possible.

This is a dense, demanding and entirely original trilogy of novels. I now have the final part to go which looks very different again than the first two.

I think I will have to bail on this. It's a book that has received a great deal of praise, so why do I feel like the only person who finds it over the top.? Female text? Yes if female means bearer of children, pumper of milk and folder of laundry. There seems to be a lack of substance here (and as a trans man I do have a long female history including two children), but I'm afraid this book does not work.

Having finished the first part of the book without really connecting with this book even though it improves toward the end. It is not a difficult read, the single sentence monologue style is not a problem but something is missing. I will probably finish it to see if anything "happens" to help me understand the appeal.

I have to admit that I am not loving this, even though I feel that it should be "my kind of book." I have heard so much praise, but I am finding it rather contrived and tedious. I am hoping to be proven wrong so I am sticking with it for now.

This excellent collection of essays is, given the brutality of the Mexican reality Rivera Garza chronicles, best read a few essays at a time every week or so. And that is what I'm doing.

I put this book down some time ago when I was having trouble reading anything. I'm halfway through but for now it will remain on hold. This Italian writer was heavily inspired by German Gothic literature—perhaps too much for my tastes. I'll revisit in time.

Very much enjoying this but other reading commitments forced me to put this on hold until later in the year.

This book started out great, like Zone and I am enjoying much more than Zone (which I respected more than loved) but like that earlier work it could be 100 pages shorter. I know that makes me an outlier. I intend to finish it but I'm taking it slowly.