klor's reviews
89 reviews

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

I haven't really thought about Patti Smith or knew who Robert Mapplethorpe was before reading this book. Same goes with some of the people that have been name dropped in the book (I must admit I had to look-up a bunch of people on wikipedia but I think it led me to fun stuff to check out). Just Kids meanders into Patti and Robert's relationship from beginning to end, alongside their growth and developments as people and artists, the people they meet, and the things they've created. It is a beautifully book that explores complex relationships that you just end up caring so much about these people you've just met through the pages. The prose is enthralling and I adored a lot of the Hotel Chelsea section, it's the meat of this book. I loved how the scene there was written as well as how this book also just feels like a big love letter to loving art. I close this story feeling attached and heartbroken but I'm glad their legacies seem to live on
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Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

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adventurous dark emotional funny reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

This is the first book I've read from Kurt Vonnegut and it's honestly not what I expected. Regardless, I felt a lot of emotions while reading and especially that funny, empty feeling you get once you finish a good book. I can understand how this has been a classic. I absolutely adored the writing style, the non-linear storytelling, the quips, the heartbreaks, tragedies and unfairness of war, and just the sense of being of a person who's been through a lot and has to keep reliving a lot. I'd love to revisit this again a few years from now, I know this will keep living in my head rent free
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A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

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dark funny mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I SUPPORT WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND WOMEN'S WRONGS. Lol.

Food and sex are such a fun thing to explore as well as to take too seriously as this book does. The novel is written as a mock memoir of our human-meat loving critic. While the writing often meanders, and sometimes you can tell that the blocky paragraph of introspection feels like it's written for the purpose of being screenshot and shared, there's almost something that makes it feel fitting as a mock memoir. I have a love and hate relationship with it to the point that I almost DNF-ed this but found it quite amusing as I pushed through. I can't say I didn't enjoy it. There are things I enjoyed a lot here such as Dorothy's friendship with Emma, the various ways of murder that has occured, and how our protagonist is a middle-aged woman (maybe it's just the books that I read but I don't think it's common in this type of media). I love how it reminded me of Hannibal and that we should really have more awful women in fiction to this extreme, why not have our own American Psycho? I almost wished the end was fleshed out a bit more but memoirs are sometimes like that I guess. People seem to hate how self aware and pretentious this book is, but honestly, I think it helped give it character; a murderer is only a badass in her own head. 
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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

The compilation of stories have this brooding and dark tone to it that sets the mood despite the book not being a full novel. I found some of the stories a little lacking but also loved how open ended and mysterious some of them ended. There's almost a folktale quality to these that I also love and it almost makes these folktales feel more geared towards adults. An interesting read and I kind of wish I enjoyed it more
Banana Heart Summer by Merlinda Bobis

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emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

The book heavily focuses on 12 year old Nenita, her small neighborhood, and the various people that live around her over the course of a summer. Portrayed through the nostalgic lens of our narrator, people are the heart of this book as well as Nenita's honestly heartbreaking relationship with her family, especially with her mother. I must say, this is one of those books that are tied together by food as a love language and that's something that's ever present in asian households and communities such as this one. As I finish the book, I keep wanting to find out more about these people and follow more of Nenita's life.
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All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 15%.
Had to return to library. Will pick back up again
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

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adventurous dark informative sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I've been recommended the audio version of this book over the physical copy and the (apparently innacurate) movie version and boy, did I enjoy it. Brooks took a lot from historical instances of how different countries and people will respond to a zombie apocalypse, I also enjoyed a lot of the interviewee voices and the stories that created a much well-rounded story of what happened in the zombie war. I think for topics like this, focusing on people is one of the things that brings a heart to the story. I think it also looked at different solutions like
the ocean (it's terrifying to think of zombies underwater and RIP whales, and in some instances, how the world hasn't recovered fully yet.
This is one piece of media that I'd probably enjoy seeing as a miniseries but the whole situation might also feel a bit too early, given that similar incidents happened during the COVID pandemic.
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On Photography by Susan Sontag

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

Shoutout to Susan Sontag, you would've hated instagram fr fr
We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle

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dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense fast-paced

3.25

The book covers the author's experience in helping find the truth about the Dozier School for Boys and the injustice and abuse that it has influcted on the children that used to reside there. While the book tells the story of this horrible place, it primarily interacts with the school's aftermath. I thought it was interesting how an entire small town rallied behind this school, knowing what they know. The author explained their prejudices agaunst these boys really well and the amount of influence racism and prejudice played in the enabling of this abuse. The book was also super informative when it came to the scientific processes that were involved in the exhumation. Overall, I really feel for the victims, dead and alive, and it's such a shame that places like this still exist and had existed.
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It by Stephen King

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

An absolutely dense story filled with rich character studies, friendships, and the horrors of a small town in New England. There are a lot of things I loved here: the tenderness of the Losers' friendship, the nostalgic callbacks to their summer in their childhood, how IT could also be an allegory for how ambivalent a small town is, the Derry Interludes and Mike's voice and stories that gives the world they live in a very rich context, the genuine scares I got reading some parts of the book
from the built up of Stan's suicide and the very human violence of Tom and Henry to the claustrophobia in the sewers
, I'm glad we also got to explore everyone's backstories and their motivations even if sometimes, as a reader, you know the choices they make aren't the best. There were also a few problems like how the women in this book on how it deals with excess whether it's the racism or misogyny in order to drive the point home. The near end also felt a little unfocused as if King didn't know how to end the novel but the actual endings tied things up well and gave readers a hopeful look on the Losers' futures. I do love the book format a lot and hope the adaptions follow the back and forth more ala Little Women (2019) rather than splitting it up in two parts. The childhood nostalgia and trauma hits more within the context and really tells a story less about freaky clowns and more about children trying to navigate their early years with all this tragedies (big or small or personal) around them and how their experiences manifested even further in their adulthood, and vice versa.
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