elfs29's reviews
194 reviews

There was something about many of these characters that did not compel me as their initial introductions led me to feel they might, but they were never the point of this story. They act only as vessels for the wider and more pressing story of trees. The way Powers writes of nature is beautiful and deeply moving, and I have never read fiction that has made me more devastated for our treatment of the planet than this. It felt almost like a shock, to read such whole and devastated prose in awe and defence of the miraculous truth of the forests, and for that I am very grateful.

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to grow crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when it’s great trunk starts to teeter.

This book is just wonderful. Hurston’s writing is beautiful, the way she tells of and describes feelings and people and communities is moving and astute, every word perfectly chosen and placed. Janie is a magnificent character, she felt so completely real and entirely sympathetic. Her journey into self discovery and freedom was heart breaking and powerful and I will not forget it.

The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out in the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods - come and gone with the sun.

This was a very endearing story. It is essentially a story of a married woman’s self discovery, interspersed with astute observations of human feelings and relationships and gorgeous descriptions of the Illyrian landscape. Grace and Nicholas’ relationship was very sweet, and the way they helped each other so sincere, that by the end I felt completely satisfied, and very light hearted.

She had been at Komolac for three days, and she was deeply content to be there. It was with something of the sense of slipping into clear water that she woke, in the mornings in her bare room, seeing from one window the long shadows of the cypresses cutting across the shafts of early light, from the other the olive trees detaching themselves with unwonted precision against a hillside which the morning sun made faintly golden. She lay in bed watching them, her lovely empty day spread ahead of her as wide and still as a lake, which she could explore in any direction; it seemed to her that she had never been happier, never so free.

The narrator, known to us only as Mrs Armitage, recounts to the reader the collapse of her fourth marriage, after thirteen years, to her unfaithful husband. This writing feels exceedingly modern, and Mortimer's honest and heartbreaking dissection of women's loss of identity, or failure to secure one, in the wake of marriage and motherhood is wonderfully raw as it is bleak. She writes of women's role in sex in a reality so often overlooked - the narrator's many children being used as a vice, to give her a purpose she does not know if she wants, and to make sex something that is not painful for her. I just love reading women's writing about women, about their weaknesses that are not their own, their failures that they blame themselves for, their relationships that they destroy themselves in.

Dear Mrs Evans, for God's sake teach me how to live. It's not that I've forgotten. It's that I never knew.[...] When we were young we said to hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so when they take away love. Be a man, Mrs Evans. It's all that's left for you. 'What's this?' Jake said. He glanced at the letter, taking it from me. It drifted into the wastepaper basket.[...]While he held me, I kept an eye on it; it contained the only evidence I had in the world that I was not alone.

An easy to read yet interesting story of two detectives trying to unravel what appeared to be a double suicide. The themes of government corruption and false preconceptions that cloud our clarity made this novel an interesting reflection of post war Japan, and the civilian’s helplessness in the hands of those in power.

We all fall prey to the preconceptions that make us take certain things for granted. This is a dangerous thing. Our slavish reliance on our own common sense creates a blind spot.

It’s interesting to explore philosophical theories through an often unlikeable main character, but as a challenge to the moralising ideas of Christianity, Camus uses Meursault, hated by all, to ask the reader to create their own meaning. Ideas of existentialist philosophy, life is absurd and without meaning so to live we must create our own, was so interestingly crafted, especially in Part Two. Meursault‘s reminiscence for the life he lost, the small and simple joys that made his life worth living, perfectly portrays this philosophy - that if there were an afterlife, he would want a life that reminded me of this one.

I was overwhelmed by memories of a life that I could no longer claim as mine, a life which had offered me the most subtle and persistent joys: the scent of summer, the neighbourhood that I loved, a certain type of sky at night, Marie’s laughter and her dresses. The sense that I was completely pointless here made me feel as if I were suffocating. 

Baldwin's writing in this memoir is entirely truthful, and in its truth is both devastating and hopeful. Despite all that has hurt him, all that he fears, all that is evil and all that festers in its ignorance, he has faith in the black people of America, and he loves them. Such love is what makes all of his writing so intelligent and so powerful, and this is no exception.

Now, as we came out, and I looked up the road, I saw them. They were all along the road, on either side, they were all along the roofs, on either side. Every inch of ground, as far as the eye could see, was black with black people, and they stood in silence. It was the silence that undid me. I started to cry, and I stumbled, and Sammy grabbed my arm. We started to walk.

Everything Toni Morrison writes seems to be the best thing I've ever read. This story, taking place in the unique town of Ruby, dissects the intersections of society. Morrison discusses racism, religion, masculinity, and generational evolution, among much else, and folds them into each other to understand how every strand affects another, and how in almost every instance, women are blamed and punished, by others and themselves, for consequences entirely out of their control. What made this novel so special, though, was the bonds between these women, both those in the Convent and in Ruby. How the Convent women found solace in each other, freedom in the absence of men, love in the empathy for one another. How the women of Ruby could not save them, but felt faith in their ability to survive. Completely moving writing, deft and beautiful and full of love. I will not forget these women.

If a friend came by, her initial alarm at the sight of the young women might be muted by their adult manner; how calmly themselves they seemed. And Connie - how straight backed and handsome she looked. As she slid into the driver's seat, it might annoy her at first being unable to say exactly what was absent. As she drew closer to home, her gaze might fall on Sweetie Fleetwood's house, Pat Best's house, or she might notice one of the Poole boys or Menus on his way to Ace's. Then she might realise what was missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted. Or hunted either, she might have added. But there she would have been wrong.

Maria’s character was tragic and devastating, and I was struck by how misunderstood she was by everyone around her and how isolated she became. A fascinating character dissection and look at the role of women in LA told through snapshots of a painful life lacking context or control, and the gradual unfolding of Maria’s psyche allowed the reader to collapse with her, and sympathise with her in her loss.

She realised that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only punishments, swift and personal. ‘It means she’s having a nightmare,’ she said finally.

At it’s core, this is a story of the human condition and an aging grandfather’s attempt to understand it, within himself and his family. Very slow, winding language and very beautiful descriptions carve out relationships and questions about them, why people treat each other the way they do, and why we feel things we cannot control.

Not in a grave. And not dying. Just resting. If it were possible to rest in the ground - you would wake up after fifty thousand years and find all your own problems settled and the problems of the world, and you would be in paradise.