Sarah E. Daniels

Beauty and the Beast meets Twilight

Revisado: 06-22-24

Feyre is unbearably dumb. It’s so disappointing since the world is imaginative and intriguing with glimpses of Narnia and Ovid. I spent most of the time shouting the obvious, heavily projected, answers at a protagonist who seemed willfully dim-witted. By the time we got to the trial under the mountain, the riddle provided was so transparent, all the drama was sucked out of the story.

These books can’t possibly be for children, but who else would find Feyre believable?

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It's Him-a-Lay-a

Revisado: 05-05-24

I read this book when it was first published. It's one of my favorite works of nonfiction, and I recommend it to everyone who hasn't read it.

That's gotta be said upfront.

Regarding the narrative, there's nothing I can say here that hasn't already been said regarding Krakauer and his heartbreaking epic of hubris and fate.

However, the producers really messed up the narration. The actor mispronounces Himalaya and Himalayan from page one. The narration also repeats the final sentence in various chapters numerous times; I assume when the narrator is doing pick-ups or starting his next session.

I can't hold it against the narrator—someone should have provided him with phonetic spellings, and his producer should have gotten in there and actually edited the recordings.

But the story is so good that you should barrel your way past these annoyances. Nothing is more worth reading if you want to understand why we're all doomed by our own demons and dreams. This is the story of what it is to be human.

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Sorry, Ladies, but you're doing it wrong

Revisado: 05-05-24

First off, Murakami has a fascinating mind. I've got no trifle with a weird, narcissistic, point of view when devoted to fiction.

But there's some real old-school misogyny here that isn't just cringe-inducing, it's distracting. All beautiful women are beautiful in the same way? As a declarative statement, it diverted my attention to the variety of obstacles faced by women who are simply trying to get through our lives with some modicum of personal success and dignity.

First, WTF is beauty? Is that a judgement on whether or not one particualr male finds us worth seducing (or some darker phrase you can insert here)? Does it mean that beauty replaces any notion of drive, talent, and indivduality?

I'll stop with the interrogatories to say, as far as I can deduce from Murakami's writing, yes. Yes to all these questions.

And that's too bad, because the whole rest of the collection is wonderfully weird, unique, captivating, etc. But a short story devolted singularly to female beauty, or the lack thereof, means I had little else in my mind but the old chant "this is why we can't have nice things."

Somewhere in these pages there's a monkey. Read it for the monkey, and, I'm sure, all the other stories I must have enjoyed along the way.

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Just the facts, ma’am

Revisado: 05-04-24

Enjoyed this matter-of-fact, detail-rich, account of the Wager’s tragedy at the end of the Earth.

It moves at a clip with very little conjecture, mostly condensing what appears to be exhaustive research into a tightly spun narrative thread.

The narrator did his best, but I found it took me a bit of effort to catch pauses and adjust to changes of voice and tempo. The book is dense with quotes from source materials, so many sentences bleed one into the next as the narrator tries to capture the various voices.

Overall, entertaining, horrifying and humbling, and no doubt a poignant reminder that anyone, no matter their triumphs or travails, can and will be forgotten with the passage of time.

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Narrator ruins a great book

Revisado: 07-25-21

It’s unfortunate no one directed this performance. The voice for Cromwell turns our protagonist into the villain, but that’s not the first thing you notice.

The first disappointment comes during the first dialog between Thomas and Belle. There are no inflection changes in his female characters. The tone doesn’t match the author’s intent. This means dialogs between characters have no twinkle or spark. Teasing is lost as is love, affection, concern. A narrative which is full of nuance on the page turns flat and nearly incomprehensible in the narration.

It’s unfortunate because Wolf Hall is such a wonderful book, I bought the narration for my second time through.

Best guess, we have a narrator who doesn’t read for pleasure. It’s quickly obvious he has no feel for the story. Buy the book, not the narration.

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The Most Important Writer of our Time

Revisado: 05-11-21

It's rare a premise takes me by surprise. In Science Fiction (though I hesitate to assign genre to Jeminsin's work), there is rarely fresh and uncharted territory despite its reputation. Jemisin has created a whole new world. One only superficially related to our own regarding its physics, geometry and other mathmatic and scientific elements. It's the beings, their humanity, which resonates. She launches us into this foreign landscape with no apology or introduction. Trusting that the power of her prose and her clarity of vision will captivate us enough to transform the readers into anthropologists. We must learn this world, its language, landscape and rituals. But it's so well rendered we enter it like explorers discovering a lost city of ancients. With fascination. We are rapt and enraptured, so much so, you may never want to leave.

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