✔ A modern classic about a young woman and her uncertainty ✔ She seems to be successful, yet her mental health falls apart ✔ Though it's more than 60 years old still relevant
★★★★★ A summer job at a magazine in New York, all looks well yet nothing is going well. Modern classic coming of age novel about young women's fear and anger, still very relevant today.
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The famous, the classic.
A young woman from a poor family studies hard and wins all prizes including a summer job at a magazine in New York.
All looks well, except nothing was actually going well and she ends up in an institution.
I am glad I didn't read this in my 20s because I'm not sure if I could take it.
Esther's fears are what any young women fear, and her anger, hopelessness, hatred, they are all familiar.
She's determined but if you let go one small rope, you lose yourself in the ocean.
Seemingly successful doesn't always mean happiness.
The author herself took her own life a few weeks after the publication.
It was written in the 60s so the world around these issues has changed, a bit, it's kinder now.
But 60 years on, it's still not that crazy to feel how she felt.
As long as there are girls in this world, this book will be read.
✔ Life in Kalimpong, India, historical fiction ✔ Class struggle and love story ✔ Gurkha movement and immigration
★★★★★+♥ One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so is there any hope? In spring the Himalaya brings fragile hope, but with the rain it makes everything rotten. We live at the mercy of something we cannot control. Powerful.
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Recommended by a friend so I realised only later that it was in Kalimpong. Through eyes of a well to do orphan girl, it looks at Gurkhaland movement in a non-romantic way; how we live in our own imagination - and how the reality bites back in nonchalant tone.
The orphan girl starts to live with her grandfather, who eats Indian food with a knife and fork, in a big house with his cook/servant. She falls in love with a young man amid the violent Gurkha movement, and at the same time on the other side of the world the cook's son is fed up with his life in NY that's going nowhere. One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so in the end, is there any equality, understanding, or hope?
Everything changes, except for one thing; the Himalayas. In spring it brings fragile hope, but the rain makes everything rotten, and we all live at the mercy of something we cannot control. It's a feeling you get when you are in India, you physically feel some superior power, something much bigger than life.
It is comical at times but tragic in a subtle and unkind way. Powerful.
★★★☆☆ A little book about boyhood, growing up, London and rock'n'roll.
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A little book about boyhood, growing up, London and rock'n'roll.
I wanted the brilliantness of My Beautiful Laundrette, but here there's only the ode to pop culture and music.
It's a fairytale, of a modern and urban, specifically London, family life seen from a boy's perspective whose parents were living rocknroll lives knowing rocknroll people back then. Which, in itself perfectly likeable if you are into it, just that I'm not familiar with that vibe.
✔ Unusual friendship to save their kids ✔ Organised terrorist attacks using kids ✔ Thrilling and gripping
★★★★☆ It demands you to keep reading. Kids "seeing wrong people" and become extremists. A Muslim dad whose life turned upside down but would still run, to save his daughter. Adrenaline full throttle. A page-turner.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Action movie type of book. Parents chasing after their each of their kids before police catch them as they're "misled" to join terrorist actions. Police officer who is also a mother also joins the chase from her own perspective.
Probably the most interesting character is the father, Sajid. A Muslim dad whose life turned upside down but keeps running for his daughter.
But I was right to pick this as a partner of the long flight. A page-turner.
✔ Dystopia, life with an AI friend ✔ Challenges concepts of family and friendship ✔ Sad, heart breaking
★★★★★ As always his stories are sad. Not too dramatic but subtly and surely sad. Artificial Friends; are they friends, or pets or toys? Surely not just things?
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As always his stories are sad. Not too dramatic but a bit sad.
Artificial Friends are there, maybe a bit like pets, puppies, except they are things, regardless of their intelligence.
A lot happens around her but we only see it from her point of view. So we're not able to see the intention behind the actions from human. Are they selfish? Maybe not so much, it's just how things are, and for us how things will be soon.
She has her mission and asks the Sun for guidance and eventually in order to pursue she is willing to be violent simply because that is her mission. So is she a threat? But really, it seems like she's the only one to remain innocent, or "human"
★★★★☆ Small book of 2 short stories. 2 very different stories but I liked the second one with the mum. My first Nick Hornby.
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2 short stories. I think it's the first Nick Hornby book. It's entertaining, the first one is a bit of Sci-fi but I preferred the second one, "Not a star" where a mum finds out her son's secret but the family is eventually alright and she actually appreciates the effects it brought. Nice little stories.
✔ Last but incomplete work from Camus ✔ Strong relationship with female family members and teacher ✔ Based on his own life
★★★★★ Incomplete work published decades after his death in 1960. It's half his biography half a novel and is fully touching.
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Incomplete work published decades after it was found at his death in 1960. It's half his biography half a novel and is truly touching.
It talks about the life in poverty in Algiers but it's full of love for those he was close, his mother, grandmother, uncle, friend and teacher. Without father and without tradition, split between France and Algeria, living in the poverty, there was nobody to rely on, nobody to teach him about life, other than how to survive in the poverty, until, he met his teacher at the elementary school.
How sometimes in life, people connected not by blood but pure love can raise you. This section of the teacher is the most moving. Then as he grows older, it abruptly ends where he is in love. True, this could have been a masterpiece.
✔ Modern classic about happiness ✔ Environment and sentiments around mental handicap ✔ Heart breaking
★★★★★ What is happiness? I am certain he was happy when surrounded by all the wonders of the world and knowledge, but if life is a cycle, nothing is permanent. Forgiveness and salvations.
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This book is too personal and can't help to think in my surrounding situation, but let's try not to be objective.
This book asks the big question, what is happiness? As Charlie gets smarter, a girl at the bakery mentions the garden of Eden, that God doesn't want us to go beyond what's given to us, quite frankly, she's saying it's wrong to be smart.
Was he happy that he got a lot smarter than everyone around him, was it a good thing? I think he was happy, to be surrounded by the wonders of the world, he absorbed all the knowledge that almost all of us cannot reach. Then he struggles as he lose the super power, but like any of us who get old and old enough to go sinile, I don't think it's a bad thing to return to our simple selves, it's a cycle. You gain something, you also eventually lose that something.
Knowledge is power, sometime too powerful and harmful if we only focus on the power, but like the cycle of life, knowledge in a person is temporary, and he understood it, he decided to live every stage fully.
It also made me thing of one's role in a community, and coming from the US where they focus on the individualism, it's even more interesting that he finds peach in the given role.
Then, at the end, was the mother a bad person? Was she bad to wish he was "normal"? It's easy to say she was evil if you have been taught correctly at school, but if you have never experienced the desperation to realise that your child would never have "normal" conversations and "normal" work like other kids, you cannot dismiss her as bad. She forgot to love her son, she was too focused on her unhappy self, the despair made her blind.
In the end, we are all selfish, but this book is a reminder that we always mean well and we don't want to hurt people around us, it's just it's difficult to juggle it all. Glad that this book is full of salvations and forgiveness.
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