Reviews and Comments

sunstone

sunstone@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 11 months ago

weirder.earth/@sunstone | he/him | tech worker | USA | 30s | Reading interests: speculative fic, pop-science & history, tech-related & software, social justice, and Buddhism & Hinduism.

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Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris (French language, Independently Published) 4 stars

Notre-Dame de Paris relève du genre du roman historique, qui est à la mode au …

Fun plot, very specific vibes

4 stars

You kinda have to get into the right mood to enjoy this. Lots of discussions of aesthetics and architecture. Entire chapters dedicated to describing Parisian landscapes and buildings.

The pace picks up at the end, where almost all the plot beats happen back to back. But that's not really the point, is it?

Christopher Alexander: The Timeless Way Of Building (1979, Oxford University Press, USA) 4 stars

Develops a humane and intuitive design and construction technique applicable to a wide range of …

First pass reading was excellent

4 stars

I’m not someone who builds physical spaces in a professional sense but I do put thought into the spaces I do have control over. Reading the italicized sentences and sometimes diving into the corresponding detailed paragraph was the way to go for me.

This book is making me see things in a new way. I’m noticing what feels alive and what doesn’t in the spaces around me. It encourages readers to use their intuition and that’s what I’ll do.

George R.R. Martin: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015, Bantam Books) 4 stars

"Taking place nearly a century before the events of A Game of Thrones, A Knight …

Charming little stories

No rating

Love the two main characters, Dunk and Egg. Their loyalty to one another, expressed frequently, adds richness to Westeros that isn’t often found in the Ice and Fire novels. They get into all kinds of trouble, big and small, that points to larger forces at work that set the scene for A Game of Thrones. Recommended if you’re a fan of the novels or even either of the TV shows. I don’t know if it stands alone if you’re not already familiar with the stakes.

E. L. James: Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian (2015, Vintage) 3 stars

It’s not good

1 star

The plot and characters have major problems and I’m sure others have been saying this for years. I can guess that seeing the male character’s backstory can give more complexity, but it also implies kinky people must have some tragic backstory to make them that way.

It’s so many pages with so little going on. There are so many emails. There’s so much description of the meetings and emails about this one corporate project that doesn’t even pay off.

Also: The smut isn’t kinky and it’s repetitive.

David C. Pollock: Third Culture Kids (2001, Nicholas Brealey Publishing) 5 stars

Life changing

5 stars

I first began to read this book in 2017 and only finished it today.

A lot of it was an awakening: oh, I’m not alone, there’s a name for so much of what my life experience has been, and there are others like me.

It took me 5 years to finish this book because it has been an emotionally complicated journey. This book was teaching me things about myself and I didn’t have the bandwidth to take it all in. I read a chapter here and there, sometimes going an entire year or two in between, while I dealt with more urgent emotional bridges to cross.

If you are an immigrant of any kind, or you ever have the experience of code switching, or having to straddle multiple cultures, I highly recommend this book. Most of it is quite extreme and may not apply to you, but I guarantee you’ll …

Mercifully quick

2 stars

Content warning Ending

Listen, I’m no hater. I know lots of people love these books. I’m taking it at face value.

The reason why the acting in the movies is so stilted is because these characters behave in bizarre ways. It’s kind of fun to read, though. My first time reading this author’s work.

Devine Lu Linvega, Rekka Bellum: Busy Doing Nothing (EBook) 5 stars

We are artist and sailors, and have been living, and working from our sailboat since …

@rek@merveilles.town is a good writer. They make a captain’s log interesting to read without skimping on the details. The doodles are delightful too.

I don’t have enough seafaring vocabulary to understand 100% what’s going on but I’m getting the general feel of things. And maybe picking up a concept or two. Especially because the book stops to explain the more complicated things.

Overall, a breezy fun read so far!

Robert O. Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism (2004, Knopf) 4 stars

Excellent introduction to fascism

4 stars

This book takes an interesting approach to defining fascism by dissecting its historical manifestations and then finding what they all have in common. He makes a distinction between fascism and authoritarianism that I hadn’t thought about before. He argues that fascism isn’t simply a subset of authoritarianism because of some key factors like counterrevolutionary tactics and relationships to other institutions.

I’m not a scholar in this field but my main criticism would be that if we define fascism to be so narrow, then it becomes a little unwieldy to fight against. It’s impractical but maybe for the interests of researchers and historians, this is the right move.