July 2025: Wuthering Heights

written by Emily Brontë

somehow I read this book knowing absolutely nothing about it. like the name sounded familiar but I knew nothing else. I think in general the feeling I got from this book was that I wished I liked it more!

I'm not super fond of the structure of the book of being a story told to the main character who is then telling it to us. it feels like a weird level of abstraction that I was grasping to find a purpose for. it's interesting, I guess? but I'm not sure it adds anything to the story, and there were more than a few times I became confused at who the narrator was.

I also became less interested in the book once we moved into the flashback portion of it. heathcliff in the present had not made enough of an impression on me for me to care about his backstory, and instead I wished the book had pursued the tantalizing thread of catherine's ghost that appears briefly in the beginning and then nothing really happens like that again until the very end. I dunno, I think I just wanted a more literal haunting of the narrative than the sort of metaphorical.

the majority of the character were unpleasant and not even in like, a fun sort of way. it's hard to explain I guess, but the rivalry and bitterness between the two families, and the misbehaving kids just were things I couldn't find any sympathy for at all. so when the characters are experiencing actual grief, I can't find it in myself to feel sorry for them because their struggles didn't feel "serious" to me. does that make sense? shrugging emoji.

I guess a positive I will say is that the characters are fully formed, even as unlikeable as they are. they do feel vibrant, even within the distance of a narrative of a narrative. I do also like how the setting itself seems to be a character at times, with the oppressive feeling of the heights adding to the sense of misery.

I do feel like there's a lot I am missing in the book with the themes but I just dislike the character so much I don't see myself rereading it any time soon haha. planning to watch one of the movie adaptations soon to see if that is enlightening for me.

June 2025: The Book of Disquiet

written by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith

a book in fragments. I thought pessoa's use of "heteronyms" was really interesting. I was reading the road on and off with this, and there was a foreword about stephen king's use of a pseudonym for the book and it was interesting to compare that with what was written about pessoa's heteronyms... not quite the same, but still.

as for the book itself, I really enjoyed it! I think I unfortunately kneecapped myself a little bit because I was slightly rushing to get this book finished by the end of the month and I think that it would have benefited from letting me meditate on each of the passages more... probably going to go back to some of the passages I bookmarked to think longer about them. the book did feel more like reading poetry than reading prose at times, which left it feeling much less like a traditional book and more so a scrapbook of various snippets. it did feel kind of intimate at times, as there were some more diary-like entries. it was easy to believe that bernardo soares was an actual person as opposed to just a fictitious personality.

overall the book had themes of dreams and dreaming, which I thought was interesting to read about. in some respects it felt like soares/pessoa had given up on his life and so committed himself to dreaming... he feels like he has a low self opinion of his works, which I don't really agree with considering how prolific his works are. there is a snippet about dealing with perfectionism in one of the essays, and it makes me wonder if pessoa was poking fun at himself there, since he published very little in his lifetime but wrote a lot. I can relate to that to an extent, as the amount of WIP drawings and other projects I have littering my hard drive is innumerable... not all of them were stopped because of perfectionism, but more than a few are things I am putting off until I have the "skills", whatever that means.

the second part, a disquiet anthology, felt a lot more disjointed. especially the first couple of pieces titled "advice to unhappily married women". it feels a bit weird that one of the few times pessoa writes about women in this book is when he's telling them how to cheat? albiet only mentally, which ties into the overarching theme of dreams and dreaming somewhat... idk it felt kind of tonally weird to start this section talking about love and lust. there were a couple of pieces in this section I could have seen fitting in the main part of the book, but overall it felt like a bunch of cutting room bits that could maybe tie into the book...

I do think in general I prefer books that have more plot than this one, but there were a handful of interesting quotes I saved... soares does have a unique view on the world, if nothing else.

May 2025: The Post Office Girl

written by Stefan Zweig, translated by Joel Rotenberg

it is difficult to give a rating to the post office girl, as I feel the content hits a little too close to home at points. the writing is beautiful, evocative, and vivid. it flows like a waterfall from the page, and in the first part of the book I can't help but be swept up in the glamour of life as a wealthy person. its such a culture shock for christine to be be thrown into luxury like jumping into a cold pool, and I am impressed with how well she adapts to her new lifestyle. her indulgence quickly warps into overindulgence, and her honeymoon in the wealthy world ends abruptly. she gets a taste of what its like to live without worrying about money before any other troubles sink in. the woman who was the catalyst for christine being evicted from luxury feels like one of the cruelest characters I've ever encountered. though I suppose, she has no frame of reference for what it feels like to grovel in poverty, so maybe it didnt seem like that bad a sentence to force christine to leave. despite knowing the book wasn't a happy one, I still wanted to root for christine to succeed and find a piece of happiness even in her shabby origins.

it made my heart hurt to see christine’s fall from grace and her subsequent renvisioning of her old world as incredibly destitute and miserable. I do relate to some level to her desire to have something to control when everything around her is too large for her to grasp; I do it by getting into new media though rather than clamping down on any meager bit of power I wield. the strict leader role has never really appealed to me. I do wonder, if christine’s aunt had made an attempt to reach out to christine back at home if there would have been a way out for her. some of it I think was just christine’s personality, but I’m sure feeling cut off from the people who were treating you so nicely just a short time ago was miserable.

the latter half of the book started to dip into almost black comedy in a way. christine finds someone she thinks can understand her, but is tripped up again and again by the confines of poverty. they don't have enough money to go on a proper date, or to find a nice hotel room. a suicide pact being the saving grace feels equal parts comedic and sad to me. almost a “Christine can’t bear the truth of the world so she turns to ending it” way. it does feel painfully realistic how light she feels after deciding to do it, which considering the author’s circumstances doesn’t surprise me.

the twist after the suicide pact and the sudden abrupt ending threw me off. it is difficult for me to say if the author intended the ending to be hopeful or not, seeing as the book is unfinished, but i’m choosing to believe that Christine was able to find some small sliver of her former happiness in the end.

April 2025: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

written by Yukio Mishima, translated by Ivan Morris

when I think about this book I don't hate it. but I don't love it either. because it does have a lot of things in it that I think do resonate with me, some to a lesser extent than others. I have visited kinkakuji in japan (or at least, the rebuilt version) so I feel like I can understand why someone would become obssessed with it to a dangerous degree. I even think I can relate to the general concept of being so insanely religiously devoted to something that it affects the rest of your life negatively. maybe the protagonist of the story just leans a little too unlikeable for me to really get on board with the book, haha.

this book in parts does feel more like an exploration of the main character's consciousness than a straightforward narrative, and it is interesting how mishima got into the possible headspace of the person who burned down kinkakuji in real life. there is a sort of proto-incel feeling I get, even though the story doesn't center on women that much. the times it does though are very telling of how the protagonist feels about them. the writing does feel a little too navel gaze-y at points though with the main character philosophizing on things like beauty and the nature of evil.

I think it's also interesting how... blase? I suppose? the novel deals with the conflict of good and evil because it's very clearly represented in the two friends that the main character is closest to. and then the character who is most virtuous dies, which very obviously shows what route that the main character is headed down. the narrative doesn't really pass judgement on good vs evil though, even beyond viewing it through a sort of unsavory main character. it just is, and that sort of thing feels very in line with the religious tones of the book.

maybe I ultimately feel sort of middling about the book is because I already knew where it was going to end up, and following the main character through the journey that led up to the main event didn't have anything particularly surprising or enlightening to it. I think also you could make a case about it being a little to a lot unpleasant that the author used physical disabilities of characters to indicate some sort of inward evil manifesting on the outside but I'm not particularly well versed in that sort of discussion. just something I noticed.

March 2025: The Apple In The Dark

written by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser

so like, this book genuinely took the whole month to read. I read a chapter at a time for a while, and then eventually read the last like, 150 pages of it in one chunk. ideally I would have liked to sit with each chapter for more time than I gave it but. so be it. I think at some point I gave up on trying to understand every single sentence and just tried to absorb the general Vibes of the prose. reading some reviews, people do agree that this is a tougher one of Lispector's books to start with, so at least I am comforted that It's Not Just Me that felt like things were kinda going over my head.

owing in part to the difficulty and estotericism of the prose, I didn't super love it? but also I found myself liking it more and more as I went on... the plot is barely there and it's mostly just characters standing around and thinking. or talking to each other and thinking. which sounds extremely dull maybe, but Lispector writes such deeply strange (positive) metaphors and imagery that I felt compelled to keep going, even if it did kind of feel I was only looking at vague shadows of a play on a wall instead of being front and center in the audience.

I did find Ermalinda's monologues on what love was and felt like to be particularly enlightening, as someone who is aroace and has angsted in the past over not really ever knowing what "love" is... which while I don't think I have a stronger grasp on it after this book, at the very least I have more ephemeral imagery to toss around in my head whenever one of my alloromantic pals discusses love...

at times I did get a little annoyed at the character's internal monologues because it reminded me too much of my own navel gazing at times. I got out of the mines of psychologically analyzing myself for hours a day, don't bring me back!!! overall though I thought the book was just OK. will I be reading more of Lispector? probably not. did I still glean some sentences that stuck with me in a way? yes.

February 2025: Despair

written by Vladimir Nabokov

I went back and forth with how I felt about the book as I read it. like, I wasn't in love with the stream-of-conscious style of the book and I kind of felt lke a lot of nothing was happening, but I wasn't turned off enough entirely to stop reading like I almost was with To The Lighthouse. I think all of the rambling being focused on one person and his life and thoughts compelled me to keep reading to see if he would eventually have a point to the nonsense.

the last quarter of the book was where it finally clicked for me that hermann is a wildly unreliable narrator and incredibly self absorbed and seemingly unmoored from humanity at general. like, he's a guy so unlikeable that you can't help but root for his downfall. hermann seems to find nothing enjoyable about his wife but stays by her, perhaps because he wants A Wife but not strickly the one he has now, and it's easier to continue with the status quo than to divorce her. I admittedly did not catch at all the affair between ardalion and hermann's wife; maybe a second read is necessary now that I know that hermann is unreliable and I don't have to waste excessive time trying to untangle his raving.

there is humor in the book, not laugh out loud humor, but witty remarks. with asides to the reader frequent, it feels like a conversation with hermann at times as opposed to a straighforward narrative. the foreword for my copy had vladimir discussing how fun the book was for him to write, and I can feel it in the prose.

it is interesting to note that vladimir translated it himself, which is probably the ideal scenario for an author, to make sure that meaning comes through in the target language. I wish he had more discussion about the difficulties of preserving his message in a different language but I always want to learn more about the translation process, so maybe that's just me.

I am conflicted on how I feel about this book. I don't hate it, but I don't love it. I think knowing what I know now about the book I might reread it shortly to give it a fairer chance, since I spent most of my first time reading it wondering what the point of all of hermann's digressions were, and now I have more of a grasp on it.

January 2025: Invisible Cities

written by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

tragically the version of this book that I read did Not have any sort of foreword or notes from the translator which I am a little sad about! because I like reading about the art of translation and what the thought process was for translating the book...

the plot of this book is very thin which I was worried would be a stopping point for me, but I was quickly enveloped in the short vignettes of the various cities that marco polo describes. to me, it was clear that the various cities were supposed to be taken metaphorically rather than literally, as different facets of humanity. I would love to spend more time in the worlds of a lot of these cities, but the brevity leaves me with just a vivid image in my mind to turn over.

I don't think I quite got the interludes of polo and khan, I felt like it dealt with the commonalities of human emotions even across cultural and language barriers, and the dangers of losing yourself as you consume more, but I need to let it rotate around in my brain a little bit more.

the cities themselves are the biggest characters, serving as depiction of memory and desire and time and so much more. I can't fully explain what about them kept me turning pages after I said I would stop reading but it's a somewhat etereal feeling. the cities feel like dreams rich with metaphor. there is a lot of repetition in the themes but it feels purposeful, not boring. I did think the snippets of cities that seem to be more squarely set in modern times were different enough to stick out to me. I do think this book inspires me to look at the big cities I visit and live near differently.

December 2024: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

written by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

I think about death probably more than most other people. I don't intend that as a flex, more just so I consume a lot of horror media so typically thinking about characters dying in horrible ways isn't too far from my mind. do I think about my own death, like the titual ivan? sometimes. I try not to though. but between a handful of health scares over the years and aforementioned inclination to thinking about death it has come up, now and then. I'd rather not go into detail on it on a book review, but I say all of this to give you an idea of the perspective I approached the book with.

mentally I divided this book into three parts. the first part is a mere chapter; that of pytor, one of ivan's colleagues, hearing of ivan's death and going through the motions of going to the funeral. after finishing the book, I was confused at this chapter's presence when the rest of the book is centered purely on ivan. I thought about it though, and to me this chapter is for putting the rest of the book in perspective. ivan is born, grows up, and dies within the span of the rest of the book, but for pytor who hasn't witnessed ivan's whole life that span of time is compressed to a single day. to me, it is a reminder that no matter how expansive and grand your own troubles and inner world might seem, in the grand scheme of things it is a small dot on the world. life moves on.

the second part concerns ivan from his birth up until he sustains the injury that leads to his death. ivan has a straightforward, if not entirely simple life, I would say. he does well in school, works hard at his job and is rewarded, and marries a beautiful woman. there were hiccups in his life of course, with his wife's pregnancies and children in the house being a little more of a challenge than he anticipated, but for all intents and purposes he's written as having a pretty good life. he doesn't ponder his on mortality at all, which is a sharp contrast to the latter half of the book. I think all of this was to set up tolstoy's critique at people who have such an ordinary, simple life, since I read in the foreword to this that he had just come out of a spiritual crisis a new man.

the third and final part starts with ivan receiving an injury while working on his new house. he thinks nothing of it at first, but it gradually develops into more discomfort and pain that he is unable to ignore. his condition deteriorates, he continues to seek a sliver of hope that he will pull through the illness, and everyone around him pities him but doesn't understand him. ivan worries about his mortality, and spends the majority of his time slowly coming to terms with his death. the fact that everyone around him continues to ignore his decline, treating him as if he were merely sick and not gravely ill, is representative of how society in general shuns death and prefers to keep it under wraps as much as possible. ivan is joyful in his last moments though, after suffering through weeks of agony. I take that as him realizing he's finally freed from the trappings of his easy, simple life that slowly constricted him without him even realizing it.

ivan worrying in the latter half of the book if he's lived his life in a "right" way was something that unfortunately struck a deep chord with me, as a young milennial trying to figure out what I'm doing as the world churns around me. I think that ivan felt some comfort in the inevitability of death at the end, although I feel like he never really concluded on if the way he lived his life was worth living or not. what does this mean for me? I dunno... or maybe I don't want to think about it too hard for fear of spiraling into an existential crisis about how to make all the right choices with an unknown future.

I did enjoy this book, despite what I've stressed about in previous paragraphs. I kind of worried that a russian novella about contemplating one's mortality would be borderline inaccessible for me, but tolstoy's prose is concise while being picturesque - I was able to picture myself in ivan's shoes without much difficulty. I didn't find it preachy either, as I was worried it would be after reading that this was written after tolstoy's spiritual awakening. I think it has a lot to say with what tolstoy consider's the "correct" way to live, but it came about naturally rather than being shoehorned in.

November 2024: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

written by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

this book reminded me of a hundred years of solitude in a way, except centered around the life of one man rather than an entire family's worth of people, and without any of the magical realism that solitude had. the writing was light and playful, and the shortness of the chapters made it easy to keep reading. I did like how a sparse few of the chapters played with the format, either with being only punctuation or with a script format instead of the traditional book format.

I did find it interesting how the book didn't seem to pass judgement on the affair between virgillia and bras that takes up the middle of the book. of course, part of it was because the book was from bras's perspective and I imagine he would have found it hard to condemn his own actions. it's just something the book offers to you objectively.

the version of the book that I read had endnotes to explain many of the historical and literary allusions that machado made in the book, as well as occasionally putting in snippets of previous versions of the book, since machado had revised the book several times. I found the snippets of previous versions the most interesting extras, since I felt that the extra literary explanations didn't add a whole lot to the book.

I do agree with the goodreads reviews I read that said it was a timeless book. aside from like, the lack of technology in the book the dialogue didn't feel antiquated. it's whimsical and light while still giving deep insights on human nature. the whole throughline with humanitas was interesting as like. a whole thought experiment.

overall I did greatly enjoy the book, with my only quibble being I'm not sure how seriously I'm supposed to treat it. like, the writing did feel playful even while discussing more serious topics, but I did feel like on occassion the narrator jumped to more navel gazing stuff. I leave you with some quotes I liked.

Then I pondered that tight boots are one of the greatest blessings on earth, for by causing one’s feet to hurt, they make way for the pleasure of taking them off. Mortify your feet, wretch, then unmortify them, and there you have cheap happiness, befitting both shoemakers and Epicurus.

We kill time; time buries us

Believe in yourself; but do not always doubt others.

October 2024: A Pale View of Hills

written by Kazuo Ishiguro

for like 90% of this book I only understood it at a surface level. the summary for the book makes it sound straightforward, so I took it that. in the final chapter though, I started peeling back the layers of the story, and after reading a few other reviews on the book I think that this really is astoundingly clever.

admittedly like halfway through the book I looked up what eliptical writing was, and "artfully obtuse" is absolutely how I would describe the style. the prose is brief, but hints at ideas much more complex than the simple dialogue conveys at first glance. I would describe the story as being hauntingly beautiful, as there is a sense of unease and tension through most of the scenes in the book. despite that, there is a level of artistry to how the books themes are laid out.

the elephant in the room is of course etsuko's unreliable narration. do I think that etsuko and sachiko are one and the same? not entirely. I don't think that sachiko and mariko existed at all. I believe that etsuko created sachiko and mariko in her memories to distance herself from how she treated keiko when she was a child. some of what sachiko did was actually done by etsuko, but estsuko also embellished further on sachiko's actions to further seperate herself from sachiko. it's part reflection, and part metaphor. etsuko very much blames herself for keiko's suicide, and her reminiscing on her memories of japan are a way for her to compartmentalize the trauma, and reassure herself that she was a good mother who did her best for keiko (even if that's not entirely the case).

I'll touch briefly on the themes of old vs new/japanese vs western that were expressed in the scenes with ogata. these parts of the book weren't as interesting to me, in part because I thought the smaller (relatively) internal conflict that etsuko was facing was more interesting than the broader strokes of conflict and change that were tackled between jiro and ogata. I think I'm not super qualified to discuss the residual conflict in post-war japan, so I'll leave it as I noticed those themes, but I didn't think about them as hard as I did etsuko's personal journey.

I came into the book thinking that for being described as having etsuko dwell on keiko's suicide, the book talked very little about keiko. thinking about it more, I realize the book was about keiko, although viewed through the lense of someone who was struggling to justify her actions that may have contributed to keiko's demise. absolutely something I intend on rereading, now knowing the quote unquote twist.

September 2024: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

written by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

holy shit man. without any sarcasm at all, this was Peak Fiction

I actually only started reading this after seeing a post putting it (moderately jokingly) as a recommended reading for umineko no naku koro ni, which is another piece of Peak Fiction that shares some similarities with solitude. while I don't know if the author of umineko read solitude, the themes of multigenerational family conflict, incest, elitism, and repetition of history are similar to umineko's throughlines. there's also the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in solitude and one in umineko.

the magical realism in the book was carefully balanced with the raw emotion that grounded scenes. like, the world that macondo is in lies just outside the bounds of real life. a sort of "heightened reality" where unnatural things happen without explanation and without much fanfare. a woman ascends into the sky never to be seen again. a man is tied to a tree and taken care of by his family for decades. a woman lives far beyond what is natural. it rains for four years straight. but the unusual is usual here, and I really vibe with stories like that (see: kekkai sensen, which while it ended up being too action-y for what I wanted, I really liked the mesh of fantasy and reality that the setting had). I would say the main focus of the book was the internal and external conflicts surrounding the buendía family, and the entire range of human emotions were explored over the years. I felt this helped me connect with the characters, as even if their lives were drastically different than mine, we have loved, grieved, fought, and laughed in the same ways.

the characters in the book are also flawed people, and I don't think the narrative judges them too harshly for that. it's refreshing I think, to read a book where the characters can move and grow and make mistakes and fumble without necessarily feeling like they're being judged by the narrative for it.

because I hate being misunderstood on the internet I feel the need to state that, despite saying that, the incest and pedophilia as it happens in the book is interesting but I don't condone that shit in real life. feel like that's an obvious statement but my experiences online have led me to believe otherwise. personally, I read it as the "realism" part of magical realism. shit is nasty sometimes and I don't think books should shy away from that. ok. cool. thanks for understanding.

there is a part of me that wonders why I fell so in love with this book when I didn't like to the lighthouse, because superficially they both have a meandering sort of prose about human emotions and familial relations; and I think purely because in solitude the town is as much a character as the family itself that I was able to ground myself in the story and visualize the space and characters much more. it does make me want to reread to the lighthouse to see like, if i quote unquote get it better now that I feel like some new pathways have formed in my brain that make things click a bit better. I don't know! I really just want to be a more well rounded reader at the end of the day

I leave you with some quotes from the book that really stuck out to me.

"Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply:

“It’s like an earthquake.” "

"Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.""

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. "

August 2024: Pnin

written by Vladimir Nabokov

going from reading it to pnin was a drastic, but not unwelcome, change. I think because I read it immediately after a long horror novel it felt more lighthearted than if I had read it far separated from any other book. overall I really enjoyed the book!

the writing style had a charming feel to it. I felt like I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend discussing a third person we were both friends with. which I mean, the last chapter tells you that it's narrated by another professor familiar with the titular pnin, so I don't think that sort of impression is too far off the mark. pnin himself is a tragic character to some extent, as each chapter narrates some kind of predicament that he finds himself in with various degrees of severity. I couldn't help but root for pnin to overcome his struggles; he's a very likable character. I do feel like the book could have benefited from maybe one more chapter describing what pnin plans to do after being fired from his university, but even without it the book is a neatly self contained narrative.

I found this novel more comedic than tragic, although I can see how someone would view it as leaning more tragic, with pnin being subservient to his wife that cheated on him, as well as his constant misfortunes. the story never felt like it lingered long enough for any of these problems to sink in. there were several funny turns of phrase per chapter - the line about women in transparent raincoats looking like potatos in cellophane stuck with me.

overall I thought this was a trim, charming little novel that let me peek at the life of a quirky russian professor. I think I'm definetly on team pnin for this.

July 2024: To The Lighthouse

written by Virginia Woolf

man I thought strangers on a train was in the characters heads a lot of the time, and then I started to the lighthouse and realized that's what 90% of the book was.

I will be upfront and say I didn't like this book very much. this isnt a knock on the book at all, I thought it was well written for what it's purpose was, which is to be an exploration of human relations and families and grief. I just personally did not vibe with the stream of conscious style of writing, and the extended metaphors and descriptions and the nebulous point of view that jumped from character to character to omniscient POV with no warning. I initially started reading this as an ebook, then got 10 pages in and realized I had not absorbed a single word I had read, so I switched to an audiobook and that at least let me gently flow through the words and pick up pieces that resonated with me. it's very much a Vibes based book over Plot, and while usually I do like pieces of media that have a vague, dreamlike feel to them, I think it didnt work this time because I felt so unmoored in the narration for most of it. I was lost in the metaphors and inner thoughts and was grasping for some kind of concrete anchor to latch onto to figure out where I was in a scene.

I also think I didn't like the book because at parts it reminds me too much of my own navel gazing sessions. I read somewhere that this was woolf's most autobiographical book and I could feel the raw emotions underpinning the characters monologues. I did end up liking the book more by the end of it, because I started getting used to the ebb and flow of the prose and starting to understand the feelings underlying the metaphors. still think it wasn't a book for me, but I understand why so many people did like it (at least according to goodreads reviews).

overall even if I personally didn't like to the lighthouse I can agree that it is a powerful piece exploring human roles and relationships.

June 2024: Strangers On A Train

written by Patricia Highsmith

yes I am writing this post in july. don't worry about it

I voted for this book for the june bookbug book because from the summary it seemed most like my usual style of book (that being horror/thriller or adjacent). I have a comfort genre and given the choice I want to stick to it... that aside, I did enjoy this book! it was a lot more in the characters heads than I expected it to be, but I thought the internal conflict was interesting... every time bruno appeared on the page I was wondering what he was going to do next.

the writing felt fairly dense yet not difficult to parse. I do feel like even though guy was one of the main characters of the book, he had drastically less agency than bruno or even anne. everything that happened in the book felt like it was already laid out for him, and all that needed to happen was for the first domino to fall. I can't help but feel I would be able to handle his situation better LOL but at the same time it is fascinating to watch a character fight uselessly against the whims of fate...

the last chunk of the book starting with bruno's death felt sort of disconnected from the rest of the book. I'm not sure where I was expecting the trainwreck (pun intended) of a story to end up, but it wasn't with bruno dying and for guy to confess everything to a character that hadn't been brought up since the start of the book... I dunno, it felt really weird. also there's no closure with what happens to guy after that, but in a way I felt like it was fine there was none

overall I thought it was a fun, quick thriller novel with some nice cerebral bits whenever we get into some internal monologuing

May 2024: The Master and Margarita

written by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky

the master and margarita was a little bit difficult to get into, admittedly. I'm not used to reading classics and so the style of writing threw me off some... I pushed onwards and got hooked by the end of chapter three.

I thought the presentation of satan (Woland) in this novel was very interesting. not to bring dnd terminology to a 1960's novel, but he felt more chaotic than evil, simply doing things for his own amusement rather specifically to cause harm. well. except for berlioz. jury's still out on if that was woland's fault or not.

the latter half of the novel was more interesting than the first half for me. I could relate to margarita's desire for freedom and the feelings of having everything laid out for her but still being unhappy. I'm glad in the end she got to reconnect with the master; I thought their love story was charming.

I don't 100% understand the interweaving of pontius pilate's story into the story. a pushback against the atheism of the soviet union? there were footnotes in the version I read but other than that I didn't have any background of the setting the novel was written in so. grasping at straws

overall I enjoyed the slide from more realistic to total fantasy over the course of the novel. I thought behemoth was funny. I had a fun time reading this. :-)