The OTHER Barb

I never don’t love Terry Pratchett

Revisado: 09-02-24

This book was really wonderful . Theres a deep kindness in the act of writing an alternate history that does the work of making better choices. The regrets that i think we all have (if youre the kind of person who cares about it, which i am) for the way things unfolded, especially in the past couple hundreds of years, feel actively relieved by the fact that now there is a world out there where the event of cultural first contact involving western empire was positive, and rather than plunder it was a genuine and respectful meeting of minds. we cant redo it here, but at least it can be done on other earths. I really loved this book. Which i was fully prepared to do because of the name of the author.

I listened to the audio book. The performance was fantastic. I began it and finished it on the same day without break, and it was half because of the writing and half because of the reading. It was a good good night.

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I have rarely finished a book and wished I could thank an author so profusely as I do NK

Revisado: 12-03-23

This book is painful and scary, but if someone is brave enough to stand in the middle of where the world is and truly look around with Naomi Klein, she rewords you with an easy voice/tone, humor, and a reminder that we are standing on the same road we have always stood on, moving in the same direction, and we haven’t stopped. And so we keep on walking.

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Another great Adrien Tchaikovsky world

Revisado: 05-22-23

I think he’s one of the best in the world and this book is yet another reason why

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Absolutely wonderful

Revisado: 03-29-23

So deeply fascinating, hopeful, exciting, urgent, needed. Also, what wonderful pros. It’s truly a beautiful book. I listened to the audible version and it was a total pleasure to listen to. Intermixed with whale song and the splashing sea.
I know that this isn’t a very smart review, or maybe it’s not even a review at all, im at work right now about to clock in when I finished the book. I’m just writing for the hope that anyone reading the reviews and thinking of buying this book on Amazon will go ahead and do it.

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Brilliant

Revisado: 01-21-23

Truly wonderful. It was so terrifying, like hair standing on end terror, but also so deeply wonderful.

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Wonderful.

Revisado: 12-22-22

I am reading the extended list of books related to the Dark Tower series right now. Bag of Bones was number 12 of 33, so i have a long while to go. Its a wonderful adventure through time and dimensions, so many different people’s stories tied up together sometimes centrally, sometimes simply because they hail from the same town, sometimes because they dive through a fuzzy tear in space and wind up on the now abandoned location of someone else’s event, and sometimes…often…because they are confronted by someone or something that knows them all. And because of the way Stephen King writes, there isn’t a person in any town who appears to be unimportant, for better or for worse, in not just their world but every world. Every word spoken by every secondary character holds your attention once you get the hang of the feel of them all being effected by everything that happens. Thats how King works with his broader strokes, turning the whole town into a vibrant character, living through everyone living inside it. With his tighter strokes he plunges into core relationships. A mother and a son with their abusive husband/dad losing his mind, an elderly widower falling in love for a second time with an elderly woman while still loving his wife who is passed, an elderly woman loving a widower and loving his wife who’s passed, a father mourning the sudden death of his tiny son while wanting to protect his now shattered wife, a group of children who reconnect as adults, a man and a young man with a developmental disability, a stranger-rogue gunslinger and a lost boy, etc etc…and in this case a widower and his paternal love for a young girl. When i think of Stephen king I think about the ways we are connected to those around us, all the different ways, and the effects that has on us and our decisions. I think about that before i think of monsters.

Bag of Bones might be my favorite book yet in the extended series. But. Take that with a grain of salt because I just finished it a few minutes ago, and every one that came before it was my favorite one when i had just finished it. Still, its very very good. And so moving. And, like always, King used that emotion to bring the fear into, because he makes it really matter, whatever happens.

Note: Bag of Bones is not technically part of the Dark Tower series. You don’t have to read 12 books before getting to it. The extended DT “Extreme Event” as i started calling it is something King fans started doing when they found ways the books seemed to be related, the world building crossed over. If you want to, and I think you should, look up the list and order of books on YouTube.

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Oooh the closet

Revisado: 04-26-22

I can feel it closing in, just like I remember from my youth. I’m glad there were a few mentions that he was homosexual. Even though to counter balance that claim it was mentioned that someone or other is quoted denying it by stating that he “in no way opposes the traditional family”. Ridiculous. Anyway, it was a good read! A lot of things that were jews to me, and I’ve been an American since I was born in the states in 1979.

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If you’re a serious person trust me skip this book.

Revisado: 02-06-22

This is a rage rant. It’s what happened after I kept sticking with it listening to this book - eventually you snap!
I know it’s her first time being heart broken, and it’s upsetting and i know people can get obsessed with their own Breakup pain becuase it can all feel momentous, a breakthrough for breakups as a whole, poetic. But oh my god! This entire book is her being enamored by this experience of feelings she’s having and letting it seduce her into the feeling of deep deep specialness. But most of us have done this already, multiple times! Imagine thinking we should alert the media because we are grieving?? Cause of a breakup? Who you think you are, Joan Didion? And if you’re not, what can you add to a universal human condition that we need and that Joan Didion hasn’t said already. About finding her dead husband, not being dumped by a boring man.

I have had my heart broken and I don’t know if I’ll ever recover, and I don’t want to listen to you try to rebound with a loser douche bag because I already went through my 18 year old broken heart leading to my finding myself under some obvious creep because they held some delusion of a promise. And yeah the body keeps the score of cptsd. Duh. I’m 43 now. There’s a reason I don’t want to get my mirroring from 18 year olds, or frankly the glaringly unwise. Because they think I want to get my info about grief, trauma, neuroscience, physical health, love, redemption from a book where a peppy self obsessed, self-enamored, chronically “adorable” divorcé talks endlessly about themselves and their divorce! And the audacity too. I mean walking with a group of sex trafficking survivors and relating their momentous recovery to her own journey is unbelievable! After telling these women’s stories the author needs to think real deep cause she’s very moved by these “strong women” and they helped her realized her job now is figuring out what autonomy is for her, reclaiming her body as her own, her SELF as her own, since she’s been married for so long so wasn’t a one but a two, but now she’s a one, and that’s new, who am I? It’s just like these young women who were trafficked, jailed, addicted, abused from day one .
I basically just skip the entire book until she gets to a scientist. I thought I was buying a science book, but man, the science/girl talk personal essay ration is like 20/80, and that’s generous. It’s mostly just her being that one drunk friend who you gave to fully cut ties with because they just go on and on about their relationships and their breakthroughs and new revelations about themselves and their old relationship - yeah no thanks bye

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Welp….

Revisado: 01-25-22

I hope Orson Scott Card paid off the IRS… which is , I’m assuming, the reason this book exists? I’m guessing? A la willie Nelson?
There’s nothing here. The story is meaningless, it brings nothing to the world. Maybe card’s priest told him that his other books were too vague about his religion and he should try to get some conversions out of this platform he built? Which he did with the meanest little efforts, just like everything else.
And the narrators, HOLY Bagoli, Peter Wiggins played by an old man who sounds like he’s just about to whine himself into wracking sobs. And Petra. I can’t take it anymore with her. She’s a sniveling meek amorous-nag!! What a betrayal. And the woman who read for her, it’s like she pumped up this specific kind of fake-deep, thoughtful Uber-femininity, like every sentence trails off as though Petra is watching her thoughts trail off while gazing out the window, yogurt spoon upside down in her mouth pensively …. So, so very thoughtful. And maybe even a little wicked… especially when she’s wanting a baby. Or talking to a Muslim. Between how she was acted and how she was written, i wish she WOULD get kidnapped and carried somewhere far far away. Along w card himself. Chauvin.

I hate this book, and after loyalty investing into the enderverse, reading every book up to this point, in order, thoroughly, believing in the mythology, taking it at the writer’s word, i feel ripped off and I quit.

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If you have ever, in your life,

Revisado: 05-31-21

If you have ever, in your life, picked up a book about the brain, for however long, no matter if you even opened it up for a single second, then you already know too much to squeeze any usefulness out of this book. Every chapter eagerly describes a “puzzling” scenario, the reader’s tone of voice clueing me into the fact that I am meant to be simply riveted. Unfortunately though, or actually fortunately, time has rendered the stories to be mostly scientific inaccuracies, and other times they point to what’s now common knowledge. Still the amazed excitable reader presents us which scenarios, one after the other where the subject is meant to represents a scientific miracle of some kind , “a blind person who developes hallucinations but is not crazy!” , yes of course she does! “Imagine the whole world is nothing more than an hallucination!!!” Ok, I mean it is “YOU COUDNT PROVE IT ISNT!” Right mate sure. “A wild lion is staking you in the woods you’re all alone and it’s getting closer. SUDDENLY the lion leaps at your face and .... it was just a bag of leaves , but you were scared! You thought it was a lion! It was leaves the whole time! Neuroscience!” ummmm wait what? “The Matrix was written by really cool brothers!” Ohhhh ok I see the problem now

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