The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary, 326pp
A woman, Tiffany, sees an ad for 1 bedroom flatshare where the guy, Leon, works the night shift so they can share the flat without sharing at the same time. She is leaving a relationship and it seems a good deal. Tiffy and Leon start leaving notes for each other and get to know each other through notes. They don't even meet in person until much later in the book. It was really a fun, uncomplicated read. There are a bunch of subplots and both characters change and grow but really this is a nice romance book that was just relaxing for my brain and I just wanted to keep reading it. I liked their relationship and their flirting and the general way they were behaving. Highly reccomend.
Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945 by Kurt Vonnegut, ed. by Edith Vonnegut, 215pp
I thought this collection of love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife from when he was in college, then in the army and then after their marriage before he was discharged from the army would be interesting, especially as he was a POW and survived a Dresden bombing but after a while it was pretty much the same thing - just a collection of a young person trying to figure it out. I do see his writing voice in it but there is nothing truly notable in this collection and I might have stopped reading if it wasn't a gift. This collection was edited by their daughter, and I can see her essential idea- for the people who loved each other so much or at least the way Kurt was pursuing Jane, it is hard to see that he would leave her many years later for someone else, but that is what happened. So all those promised of a life together didn't amount to much apparently. Overall this was meh.
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, 184pp
Tanya got it for Christmas (since I put it on my Wish List a while ago). I never read it as a child. I just knew it was about a spider and that she dies at the end. So it was a chance for me to catch up on a classic book. I read it outloud to Tanya for about a month and a half. She enjoyed it most of the time, was bored sometimes but liked it overall. And I did too. I thought all the characters were cute and I liked the pace of the book and all the descriptions of nature and the farm. It really was a cute story.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell, 428pp
I read it as part of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hamsterwoman's sync read and I really had fun with it. I haven't read the original story when it was posted on Ao3 and knew nothing of the plot other than it was arranged marriage trope with two male characters. I really enjoyed the tropiness - it was well done - I also really liked "huddling for warmth" trope. This book is told from the perspective of two main characters, so we can see how they start out fundamentally misunderstanding each other and making assumptions but then they managed to actually bring it up and talk to each other and to resolve some issues that way.
The political plot was a little too much for me at times and harder to follow but I did like how the ending worked and the overall solution was pretty clever on politics level and on the personal level too, with both main characters growing and changing in very believable way. I think my favorite part of the book is that people reacted to things like crime and embezzlement like real people would - they called the authorities to deal with it and were properly horrified. The characters felt like real people. A fun read.
Text by Dmitry Glukhovsky [in Russian], 460pp
My Dad gave it to me as a present last year and I finally read it. It took me some time to realize that this won't be a sci-fi book - I was expecting sci-fi from his other titles. It is not sci-fi. It is really how one person's life is in their phone - you can find out a lot from texts, emails, recordings, photos - and you can even become that person. I can't even set up the plot without spoiling it so I won't and will just talk about general impressions. It is a psychological thriller if a genre must be assigned.
It is a really well written book - I liked the prose. I was really surprised just how much English is now part of the Russian language - mostly technological and social media terms but it was really a lot. I came to US in 1993, and of course culture and language evolved since then especially because of tech, but it still throws me sometimes when I read modern Russian novels.
There is a movie based on this book and I do want to see it at some point.
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, 470pp
This is the book that put Oliver Sacks on the map. It is about the events of summer of 1969 when he gave post-encephalitic Parkinson's patient L-DOPA with wonderful initial results which then led to diminishing returns and weird consequences. He presented various histories of the disease and the drug. The main focus of the book are the case studies of several patients (Sacks later perfected the art of writing up the case studies). He wrote the first version of this book in early seventies and added more things and postcripts. I was reading 1990 version of the book where most of the patients have died by then.
This book has a lot more medical terminology than his later books - I think the later books were written for a more popular audience, due to success of this one. So this book was a little harder to read - not harder in terms of understanding medical jargon but more technical and therefore a bit boring on those parts. But the history of the disease was interesting and so were the case histories. I have seen the movie with Robin Williams and Robert de Niro as a teenager, so I was familiar with the broad outlines somewhat (I liked the section of the book about various stage and film adaptations of the book; I was impressed with the preparation and study Robert de Niro did for the movie and their acting preparation process itself). The disease itself and what these people had to live through was horrifying though - and reading it now, during a different pandemic where long term consequences are not known, was unnerving. I watched the documentary after I was done (it's on YouTube) and it was interesting to put faces on the various people in the book. And horrifying too. But Sacks is great in finding humanity in people and triumphs even in the depth of suffering and disease. He shows how people adopt and how your personality and who you are as a whole person matters in disease.
Sacks also talked about various theories in physics to try to figure out how L-Dopa works in patients and he explored a chaos theory. He mentioned a three-body problem and that's when I realized that that name is a concept in physics, which I then looked up. And now I'm reading "Three-Body Problem" sci-fi book, since it won a Hugo and I meant to read it for a while - I do like how my books flow one into the other.
A woman, Tiffany, sees an ad for 1 bedroom flatshare where the guy, Leon, works the night shift so they can share the flat without sharing at the same time. She is leaving a relationship and it seems a good deal. Tiffy and Leon start leaving notes for each other and get to know each other through notes. They don't even meet in person until much later in the book. It was really a fun, uncomplicated read. There are a bunch of subplots and both characters change and grow but really this is a nice romance book that was just relaxing for my brain and I just wanted to keep reading it. I liked their relationship and their flirting and the general way they were behaving. Highly reccomend.
Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945 by Kurt Vonnegut, ed. by Edith Vonnegut, 215pp
I thought this collection of love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife from when he was in college, then in the army and then after their marriage before he was discharged from the army would be interesting, especially as he was a POW and survived a Dresden bombing but after a while it was pretty much the same thing - just a collection of a young person trying to figure it out. I do see his writing voice in it but there is nothing truly notable in this collection and I might have stopped reading if it wasn't a gift. This collection was edited by their daughter, and I can see her essential idea- for the people who loved each other so much or at least the way Kurt was pursuing Jane, it is hard to see that he would leave her many years later for someone else, but that is what happened. So all those promised of a life together didn't amount to much apparently. Overall this was meh.
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, 184pp
Tanya got it for Christmas (since I put it on my Wish List a while ago). I never read it as a child. I just knew it was about a spider and that she dies at the end. So it was a chance for me to catch up on a classic book. I read it outloud to Tanya for about a month and a half. She enjoyed it most of the time, was bored sometimes but liked it overall. And I did too. I thought all the characters were cute and I liked the pace of the book and all the descriptions of nature and the farm. It really was a cute story.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell, 428pp
I read it as part of
hamsterwoman's sync read and I really had fun with it. I haven't read the original story when it was posted on Ao3 and knew nothing of the plot other than it was arranged marriage trope with two male characters. I really enjoyed the tropiness - it was well done - I also really liked "huddling for warmth" trope. This book is told from the perspective of two main characters, so we can see how they start out fundamentally misunderstanding each other and making assumptions but then they managed to actually bring it up and talk to each other and to resolve some issues that way.The political plot was a little too much for me at times and harder to follow but I did like how the ending worked and the overall solution was pretty clever on politics level and on the personal level too, with both main characters growing and changing in very believable way. I think my favorite part of the book is that people reacted to things like crime and embezzlement like real people would - they called the authorities to deal with it and were properly horrified. The characters felt like real people. A fun read.
Text by Dmitry Glukhovsky [in Russian], 460pp
My Dad gave it to me as a present last year and I finally read it. It took me some time to realize that this won't be a sci-fi book - I was expecting sci-fi from his other titles. It is not sci-fi. It is really how one person's life is in their phone - you can find out a lot from texts, emails, recordings, photos - and you can even become that person. I can't even set up the plot without spoiling it so I won't and will just talk about general impressions. It is a psychological thriller if a genre must be assigned.
It is a really well written book - I liked the prose. I was really surprised just how much English is now part of the Russian language - mostly technological and social media terms but it was really a lot. I came to US in 1993, and of course culture and language evolved since then especially because of tech, but it still throws me sometimes when I read modern Russian novels.
There is a movie based on this book and I do want to see it at some point.
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, 470pp
This is the book that put Oliver Sacks on the map. It is about the events of summer of 1969 when he gave post-encephalitic Parkinson's patient L-DOPA with wonderful initial results which then led to diminishing returns and weird consequences. He presented various histories of the disease and the drug. The main focus of the book are the case studies of several patients (Sacks later perfected the art of writing up the case studies). He wrote the first version of this book in early seventies and added more things and postcripts. I was reading 1990 version of the book where most of the patients have died by then.
This book has a lot more medical terminology than his later books - I think the later books were written for a more popular audience, due to success of this one. So this book was a little harder to read - not harder in terms of understanding medical jargon but more technical and therefore a bit boring on those parts. But the history of the disease was interesting and so were the case histories. I have seen the movie with Robin Williams and Robert de Niro as a teenager, so I was familiar with the broad outlines somewhat (I liked the section of the book about various stage and film adaptations of the book; I was impressed with the preparation and study Robert de Niro did for the movie and their acting preparation process itself). The disease itself and what these people had to live through was horrifying though - and reading it now, during a different pandemic where long term consequences are not known, was unnerving. I watched the documentary after I was done (it's on YouTube) and it was interesting to put faces on the various people in the book. And horrifying too. But Sacks is great in finding humanity in people and triumphs even in the depth of suffering and disease. He shows how people adopt and how your personality and who you are as a whole person matters in disease.
Sacks also talked about various theories in physics to try to figure out how L-Dopa works in patients and he explored a chaos theory. He mentioned a three-body problem and that's when I realized that that name is a concept in physics, which I then looked up. And now I'm reading "Three-Body Problem" sci-fi book, since it won a Hugo and I meant to read it for a while - I do like how my books flow one into the other.