Laugh-out-loud good. Not because it is funny, though it often is, but I often just found myself laughing because my body wanted to react, and a laugh Laugh-out-loud good. Not because it is funny, though it often is, but I often just found myself laughing because my body wanted to react, and a laugh felt the most appropriate. I loved this book, and the time I spent listening to it. More than an accumulation of ludicrous and beautiful incident, a reflection on the importance of story just as the world turns away from it.
I'd pair this, maybe oddly, with Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain as two books I love about the making of story, from two writers that I adore....more
What a bafflingly beautiful book, the physicality so gorgeously realized. When the characters eat, you are sated. When they sweat, your skin prickles.What a bafflingly beautiful book, the physicality so gorgeously realized. When the characters eat, you are sated. When they sweat, your skin prickles. Minimal and lyrical at the same time. No interiority, save the vastness of the universe, which feels like interior monologue. McCarthy is out of this world....more
I have thoughts about the ending but those are between me and my cats. Celeste is a great writer, and I'm very glad I read this.I have thoughts about the ending but those are between me and my cats. Celeste is a great writer, and I'm very glad I read this....more
A delight to read, with a lot of personal resonance for an international school kid who grew up in Manila. What I admire most about with the author haA delight to read, with a lot of personal resonance for an international school kid who grew up in Manila. What I admire most about with the author has done here is her ability to create a story that is very clearly interested in the dynamics of power and freedom (or lack thereof) that exist for domestic workers in Singapore (and OFWs more broadly) without ever reducing her characters to puppets. They aren't a means to a rhetorical end, they are real people, as petty and luminous as people can be. They are also just a delight to spend time with. Clean plotting, unexpected surprises, a trio of utterly winning and generously rendered protagonists, some freaking outstanding sentences--a hell of a book. Extra points for sunbirds on the cover....more
Tore through this, and the following two books in the trilogy. My review is for the trilogy as a whole, even though not all books in it are equally suTore through this, and the following two books in the trilogy. My review is for the trilogy as a whole, even though not all books in it are equally successful. But my goodness--old school Asimov vibes, plus the most compelling writing about physics in fiction I've ever encountered. Liu Cixin pulls from Goethe to Chinese Poetry to string theory to put together a science fiction classic that operates on the scale of generations, and millennia. Startlingly new.
Some of the character work is a bit iffy, particularly a groan-worthy thread about a love interest in book 2. But individual psychological realism is not the project here. I can forgive the writer for rendering them a bit 2-dimensionally. (This is is an inside joke re the book content. I'm proud of it).
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