Jen Maybe > Recent Status Updates

Oh yeah here we go, back in the big leagues, babyy

My Halloween read this year - God I have no tolerance for true crime anymore.

damn this book is good

Something to tide me over until Infinite Jest arrives

I know I read this book before, but I think I was like 12 when I did, so I'm going to apply my big strong adult brain to it this time and see what comes of that.

"There is always one thing to be grateful for – that one is living in any time other than 11th century London." - Me

This book is not grabbing me. Why does the author keep the sentences and paragraphs so short all the time? Why not mix it up a little, give the story some rhythm or tension? Is it for people with short attention spans? The stakes feel so low and the violence so tame for a WWII book, and I don't really feel for any of the characters. I don't really want to finish this one.

Looking ahead...
Book Goals for 2022: (subject to change)
1. 100 Years of Solitude
2. A Confederacy of Dunces
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Middlemarch
5. Brothers Karamazov
6. Ana Karenina
7. War and Peace
8. Infinite Jest
9. The Master & Margarita
10. Ulysses
11. Finnegans Wake
12. Candide
13. Shogun
14. Wolf Hall
15. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
16. Count of Monte Cristo
17. Odyssey
18. Lord of the Rings #1

I was going to bring this book on vacation with me. Thank God I started it early, because this would be a terrible vacation book - I'm so invested I literally don't want to do anything else until it's done. So it's actually a perfect "read at your desk at work" book. I will not be sleeping until this one is done. What a pleasure!

Took me 75 pages to figure out the age, race and name of the protagonist whose head I was inside of, turns out there's a list of characters but this copy puts it in the back of the book. Yikes. Glad no one is testing my reading comprehension on this one

I slowed down in July & August, but now I'm going ham again. Even though I've got 7000 things to do that aren't reading... Oy

This author really prides himself on pith - too clever by half. "The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes". Every paragraph has to end in some bon mot and it's becoming cloying. Call me a revolutionary but off with their heads.

The tone is definitely playful. The writer seems skillful enough to thread the needle through a challenging premise and pacing problem - a smart man trapped in a hotel. But parts of it strike me as smug? I might just be lashing out because the setting is making me claustrophobic. The protagonist seems too smart to be stuck, and I'm nervous about the author pulling this off in a way that doesn't get tedious...

I really appreciate the way Wilkerson reminds the reader of where the last story left off when switching between the multiple main characters of the story. So many books with multiple threads just expect you to learn someone's name and be able to keep everything straight, but this author is very considerate and generous with her recaps in a way that isn't obtrusive.

"Along the riverbanks, rows of soot-stained rectangular houses leaned into the narrow Flemish streets like drunks in blackface." The flourish gets in the way of the facts a bit in this one, and the writer's flair for the dramatic makes an already dramatic story seem embellished. This might not be the plague book I was looking for.

"...if I could have him like this in my dreams every night if my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest."

I love John Green. I see myself in his writing - wistful, borderline maudlin, self-conscious, anxious and frequently, almost compulsively, quoting other authors. I like his self-awareness, his self-doubt, his self-reflection. I like his fiction. I *love* his nonfiction. Reading this at work, which is a terrible idea, because it's so absorbing I keep ignoring my job and it's so affecting I keep tearing up.

It's surprisingly readable considering there are characters like the "synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed collateralized debt obligation" (he literally lost me at "synthetic")

"People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little of us left to care."

God this book is sharp. Writing a book about a double agent can so often get on top of an author if they aren't smart, but Nguyen never misses a chance to layer another meaning, another symbol, another twist to a layered and consistent protagonist who consists of endless masks and contradictions.

..."ordinary psychological processes and normal, common human motivations and certain basic but not inevitable tendencies in human thought and feeling" are the "primary sources" of the human capacity for mass destruction of human life. "Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception."

"I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway... Truthfully I must say at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then... Only later did it first occur to me that it had not been right."

ooooweeee it's a big boy, dense to get through. Loved the Satan parts, would have enjoyed it more if Milton wasn't such a raging misogynist - you can only read about how inferior women's brains are so many times before you're rooting for the snake