Books for Reading

A short read but one I really appreciated. The protagonist is just so unlikeable and immature, but it all leads up to the moment her brain fully develops and she starts acting like an adult and gets her life together. It's a really nice glimpse back into the awkward, bumbling years of very early adulthood where you're really not sure what you're doing, but you don't want anyone else to notice or say anything about it (but they do because it's really obvious). It's also a nice reminder that no one is going to get your shit together for you.

An otherwise cozy and interesting novel is ruined by the author desperately wanting the reader to cry. It's so trite that you can see it coming a mile away, and it's almost offensive that he actually went for it. I'm hoping it gets an anime or manga adaptation, I can't remember the last time we got a good terminal illness waifu of the month.

It's one of the loveliest books I've read in a long time. I teared up a few times reading it, not because it's particularly sad, but it's very artful. I'm not in the position to be thinking about having kids, but I really loved how all of the characters had their own ideas and moral frameworks concerning motherhood and they are all equally right despite coming to wildly different conclusions. And I love books that have happy endings after wringing out your heart.

Full review here.

Really immersive worldbuilding. I went into it completely blind, so it was initially difficult to follow. But both the mystery that the protagonist is pursuing and the workings of this society a revealed at a good pace, and all of the pieces start fitting together near perfectly. You start to feel like you're working at a digstie yourself! It's really exciting. I've never read anything quite like it before, and I haven't since.

Should've kept them as drafts!

A book about being a Woman in Society. Full review here.

To be honest I never finished it. The arguments were weak to me, so I didn't see a point. I do think there is something to be said about teenage girls having the tendency to internalize the emotions and experiences of others as a sort of misplaced empathy (because they're still working on developing that), and how it can cause them to “fake” or otherwise induce a “disorder.” But I think Shrier fails to do much other than look down on teenage girls for being too stupid to to understand that their highest aspiration in life should be getting pregnant. I wish she might spend more time considering that they're new to dealing with feelings and might justifiably try to opt out of the fate that their sex tends to designate, and it's not purely social contagion. There is nothing inherently wrong with superficial nonconformity anyway. But I think this book mostly serves to scare tradition-inclined parents into thinking letting their daughter cut her hair short is a slippery slope to self-harm.

I watched the movie when I was 12~14 and this book at the conclusion of my teenage years. Despite the time gap, I read it imagining the scenes in the movie. I think there are some differences but I'd have to revisit the movie again to point them out. It's a really wonderful story about friendship and being yourself, which would ordinarily feel very cheesy and infantile! But here, experiencing it as an adult, it feels more like an acceptance of your past immaturity and shortcomings. And do what you want because you're not getting any younger! I really love this book.

A book about being a Woman in Society. Full review here.

Full review here.

It's honestly a shame that this book is really good, because it feels really unfair that the lasting impression it made upon society is the idea that it's appropriate and justified to sexualize children. Especially when such efforts are made by the book to very bluntly call abuse what it is. There is some debate as to whether or not Nabokov himself was a victim, but I'm going to agree with the masses and say no. Humbert's actions are definitely admonished but he's also written to be a very sympathetic narrator. He's very pathetic and foppish, but you kind of have to root for him in the beginning. People who don't finish the book, or worse, take everything at face value, are understandably left with the current mainstream concept of “lolita.” Nabokov is very talented but I think if this was his coping mechanism, he'd have written about pedophilia a whole lot more or have expended much less empathy toward Humbert, though I'm unfamiliar with the rest of his works.

The version I read was a more recent publication that provided some context, but I'd like to read an annotated version some day.

I think it's a little weird to classify this as dystopian fiction since usually the protagonist rises up to confront, fight against, or oppose whatever oppressive power governs the world. But the protagonist is a lot more passive here. I guess it makes sense because the oppressive force, The Memory Police, and their motivations really aren't explained, which is kind of disappointing, because the Memory Police as an institution is in charge of disappearing objects. The objects that they choose to disappear are removed from everyone's memories instantaneously, and they no longer have any understanding of the concept of something once it has been disappeared. This has some fun implications that are explored a little. For example, hats are disappeared, and the hatmaker no longer has a job. But it's a little surface level because construction still exists, so what about hardhats? Is this a separate object, or even if it's still a hat, wouldn't the invention of head protection come about afterwards? Also a lot of things are disappeared seemingly even to the Memory Police's detriment. But the story is quite surreal, so none of the characters really spend any time asking “why.”

Anyway, the protagonist is a writer by profession, so of course she's doing some writing as these events play out! I was honestly a little more compelled by the story being written within the story than the actual narrative going on. They both have similar themes about entirely losing your sense of self, and your ability to sense your sense of self, both in abstract and concrete ways. Maybe I like it more because the whys are easier to follow.

Interesting world building! I enjoyed how it was explored, you're never given too much information but there is plenty to help you make sense of the environment. It's quite chaotic and weird, and some ideas are never really fully expanded on, but I never felt overwhelmed. I actually thought some of the characters felt a bit wasted.

I don't really like the pirate thing.

Almost BL but a little too genuinely gay. Some interesting ideas but the time skip made it too disconnected from the previous two books, and I wasn't as invested in the characters and what they were up against. There may have just been too many characters doing something important that for me it didn't really seem to come together in a satisfying way by the end.

This is a rare instance where I think the live-action Chinese adaptation (I haven't see the N*tfl*x one so I can't vouch for it) is much better as a whole than the book. And the book is very good. There's a lot of very dense technical descriptions that are difficult to follow while reading if you don't have working knowledge of the engineering or science being described, but the story as a whole is imaginative enough that it doesn't matter too much. The live-action fills in a lot of these gaps. I also think it adds a lot of richness to the character interactions that feels missing once you realize it's not there, with one exception being how the antagonist is depicted. They're given no description in the book, which would have made it a little scarier I think, but I watched the live-action first so that's what they looked like in my mind.

This book presents another really fun thought experiment, and now with time travel being a factor (though only technically, and only in one direction), the series starts to feel more typical sci-fi. Not in a bad way though. Alien diplomacy is genuinely an interesting concept, and I'd love to read other books that play with that idea. The only time it becomes a slog is after the introduction of the protagonist's perfect waifu. The exploration of his hedonism gets a little weird, and I think the author's weakness in developing characters becomes really apparent. I understood what he was trying to do, but it felt unrefined. I don't really see any reason it needed to go in that direction. But overall I think the book does a good job redeeming itself in the end.

I would not say it's necessarily a weak end to the series, but it is a slow descent into despair despite the underlying message of hope and humanity's resiliency that was better established in the other two books in the series. It is not a fun read at all. But the worst part is that the protagonist of this one, Cheng Xin, is a woman. The reason being that (like most male sci-fi authors) he believes himself progressive in the sense that he's ok with women having jobs outside of homemaking, but that's about it. Cheng Xin is hardly distinguishable from all of the other women in the series: she's beautiful and dutiful but her emotion-driven actions inevitably brings humanity closer to its downfall.

Apparently, the translator, Ken Liu, cleaned up a lot of the blatant sexism. I'm almost always against censorship via translation even if it offends, but I honestly think it's a better book for it, so I'll forgive it this time.

Anyway, in a way, it definitely and completely ends the triology, ties up all loose, and leaves nothing for the reader to say “What about..?” I mean, it literally ends with the heat death of the universe and it's really hard to offer up any conceivable continuation after that. So I suppose it's not a bad way to wrap it up, it's just that getting there feels really awful though.

Hated it. Full review here.

Full review here.

If you're going to write a book with a regular cat as a narrator, you had better not anthropomorphize him to a point that he could feasibly understand taxes. Actually this book is made entirely unenjoyable due to the blatant absence of the author's love of cats. Whether it's a translation error or not, it's ridiculous to assert that male tabbies are rare. This is a stupidly easy thing to research. Anyway slight spoiler but the protagonist is dying of cancer and he takes his cat to visit several friends so they can glaze him up and down about how perfect he is before he kicks the bucket. It's just boring.

This is the book that made me realize I don't really like any of Murata's longer works. This one in particular is repetitive to the point of being annoying. Like most of her books, the ideas presented are genuinely interesting. I think there is also some worthwhile and timely discussion to be had about what it means to expect or demand total control of fictional relationships requiring no sacrifice or compromise. In fact, a lot of these themes are reflected in the superflat art movement, which muses about a world occupied exclusively by otaku. I'd like to think in Vanishing World it's explored less optimistically but the conclusions are similar. I also enjoy navigating our world, or one similar enough to it, as an alien instead of a functional member of society. But there is only so much “Isn't society cRaZy? I'm so much more rational and aware, aren't I?” that I can take. I just personally can't relate to the majority of her protagonists's lines of thinking, or their sexual hangups. It's the sort of party where you show up to be polite but feel compelled to make an excuse to leave early.

Cats are very charming and have unique and wonderful personalities, and I really appreciate the time the book spent on properly depicting that. Though I think it could have given itself more credit instead of losing confidence and going out of the way to explain the “magic”. I really didn't think the twist was clever enough that it benefited from this decision either. But overall I didn't think the whimsy was overdone, and did not demand any tears from the reader. It's just a pleasant light read for cat lovers.

I enjoyed how obsession was depicted here. When I was younger, I think I frequently receded and felt like a person of no presence in the background of someone else's story. The protagonist felt weirdly relatable, and almost made me wish I could have ever taken things that far.