Sarah B

Aimless and unhelpful

Revisado: 08-24-24

Respect to the author but this is only her personal account of her personal progress with few real tips or guidance. Instead we hear about acupuncture and the author's liver health. okay?

If you're looking for constructive help or stories, you may not find it here. I also feel turned off by the level of privilege on display. Few of us have the resources or time described in the book which just left me feeling disconnected from the story.

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Madeleine's Preachy Era

Revisado: 02-19-24

If you enjoyed her previous books in this series you may notice a stark difference beginning with this one. I found this book incredibly off-putting and almost embarassingly ignorant until I did more work to understand Madeleine herself, not just the way she portrays herself. From that understanding the meaning of these books bloomed for me. This is a woman in pain, with nowhere to send or truly express that pain. Now, in the Irrational Season, we should learn to read between the lines.

Poor Madeleine. While she has rarely shied away from including others very personal details in her books and memoirs, she carefully trims away the "unseemly" reality of her own life in The Irrational Season. Far from her previous books in this series, this journal is focused on the external, the choices of others, and how those choices are far inferior compared to the ones Madeleine has made for herself.

Within her rants about liberal sex and anti-choice rhetoric a perceptive reader may note an undercurrent of resentment and anger looking back on a long marriage and the vows, she clearly took incredibly serious, but obviously had many exceptions when it came to Mr. Franklin's behavior. As she rails against the lack of loyalty liberal women seem to feel for their responsibility to get married and have babies, I can only picture young Madeleine being abandoned by her parents at a boarding school and the horror of having what little family interaction she had being ripped away from her and all the times her Husband stepped out of their holy union.

The anger she feels toward her parents and her trifling husband all have nowhere to go and certainly could not be expressed by Madeleine without her feeling as though she broke some unspoken covenant with the past and would no longer be a good woman, good wife. She could not expect loyalty from either her husband or her parents, so she rages at the rest of the world and produces a finely tuned composition of her own life, the life she wanted to live, her own fiction.

Read this book with a sense of tenderness toward Madeleine's humanity. She was fallible, as are we all.

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It's a bad title for an autobiography, that's all.

Revisado: 09-14-22

I'm still kind of baffled. On one hand it's comforting to have portions I can relate to pop up in a book, on the other, this book is titled "How to be Alone If you want to, and Even If You Don't" when really it's an author's personal journey. If you're expecting true insight you are going to be like me, confused and slightly disappointed.

When I finished the book (I did, I swear) I was left with a feeling of "Okaaay... Now what?"

Lane seems to be trying extra hard to insert additional quirkiness into her story via her performance on this Audiobook and it kind of makes her seem... Spiteful. It sounds like she's perfectly aware of her problems and thinks they're cute, cute enough to present in a quirky comical voice. That's tolerable in small amounts but it's literally the whole book.

If you like Moore's work and would like to get to know her better, this book is for you!

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A decent story plagued by its narrator

Revisado: 11-05-21

This book had its moments where it was exciting and moving, brought low by excessive padding that drags out the middle of the book and didn't really add anything for me. In contrast to the achingly slow sections of the book is an ending I felt was quite abrupt, that quickly tied up loose ends with halfhearted explanations. I don't mind a book that is light on the details of its ending but when the rest of the book is detailed to a fault, an abrupt ending is a bit odd.

While I appreciate the attention to detail in this book, I feel much of it slips into the realm of "padding". For example, Chapter 20, I didn't need to sit through a detailed explanation of how long he had to hold something in place for the epoxy to cure. I get it, it takes a bit, it doesn't need a paragraph explaining why.
Things like this seem nitpicky, but may I remind you that this is almost twelve hours in. Twelve hours of listening to a man speak in the most consistently snotty tone I have ever heard in my life.

This brings me to the narrator, whose performance was the greatest challenge to me finishing this. I appreciate someone adding more character to their delivery but it needs to be dynamic. Ray Porter does not emerge from the sarcastic know-it-all delivery for one moment. Every time something with momentum was happening, Ray would deliver the character's monologue like the most whiney and immature and unlikeable jerk imaginable, causing me to literally wish I could scream "Shut up!" I don't need my characters to be flawless heroes and I believe Andy Weir has written a very very good character (though he's a bit of a convenient genius) in this book but the delivery doesn't do him justice at all and transforms him into a classic bump in the road personality in a strange and unusual situation. That sounds like it could be fun, but not after 16 hours.

Three quarters of the way through this book I wished I had just bought a physical copy so I could experience it without this narrator's influence. I think it would be a much better book read by someone else.

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Morality tangents and metaphors galore

Revisado: 02-26-21

I'm really not interested in listening to someone complain about attractive women who are "dressed suggestively" giving us all a misleading impression of what meditation is like when that same person is going to take at least six chapters to get to the point.

I can sit in silence for hours but listening to this man drone on about benefits makes me feel like I'm sitting in a Timeshare sales pitch. We get it dude, meditation is fantastic, you don't need to spend five chapters talking about how it will help us, that's why we're here, we KNOW it can be beneficial.

In the art of practicing mindfulness I am going to set this aside and move on to something that doesn't make me want to pull my teeth out.

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loved it

Revisado: 11-05-20

By far my favorite book of this year. this was incredibly written, full of vulnerability and frank recollection as well as deep insight into the world of trauma.

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Prepare yourself

Revisado: 08-02-19

Stephen King spins another yarn of the world torn asunder. This time, without a trace of irony, he has created a brave new world of simple men and the women who belong to them. The men are occupied by politics and who to have sex with and the women are chattel, consigned to the Madonna/Whore complex, all under the umbrella of old religious doctrine. While the men posture for each other like cowboys of the ol' West, the women try to hold in their giggles and are kept up at night trying to figure out to which man they should give up their virginity.

Peppered in between the cringe-worthy tropes are incredible moments of storytelling that transport the reader beautifully, making this book a complete whiplash experience of great writing and boring material you'd expect from a Harlequin Romantic Suspense "novel". If you're used to Stephen King's style, then you understand that with the good, comes the really really bad. For every terrifying chapter that sucks you in, there is another with a child-orgy in the sewer.

If you're comfortable with men un-ironically introducing their spouses as "my woman", rape victims being immediately flirtatious after their rescue, and you don't feel as if you really know much about a woman unless you're told what her breasts look like and how many men have had her, then it will be smooth sailing reading this book.

On the other hand if you're more interested in a realistic imagining of how people would behave in a post apocalyptic world where God is making his hand known, you might find yourself rolling your eyes every fifteen minutes.

If George Lucas is the King of trying to "fix" what wasn't broken, then Stephen King is the Grand Master of setting up ambiguity and destroying it with explanations. "Oh my god the world of humans is coming to an end, why is this happening?" It's God. "... Oh." And you're not even halfway through the book, so enjoy the balloon squeal as this story slowly deflates. Don't worry, everything will make sense in the end, King doesn't trust himself enough to leave anything open to interpretation.

Prepare yourself for the thrill of a lifetime as men rig democratic process to put themselves in positions of power (and these are the good guys) and the woman stand around feeling the swell of their own breasts.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas