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AliCorbin

AliCorbin@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 3 months ago

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Chris Hadfield: An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (2013, Little, Brown and Company) 4 stars

Hadfield takes readers into his years of training and space exploration to show how to …

Review of "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A cross between a memoir and a self-help book, interspersing details of how exactly you function in a weightless environment with advice on how to achieve your dreams.  Work your butt off, pull your own weight and help others out, don't be an asshole.  

Celeste Ng: Little Fires Everywhere (Hardcover, 2017, Penguin Press) 4 stars

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the …

Review of 'Little Fires Everywhere' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars


Mothers and daughters and their interactions. All sorts of mothers - biological, adoptive, and virtual. There are men and boys in the book as well, but they are mainly placeholders. The novel is really all about the women and girls.

The novel is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio (where Ng grew up, although she was born in Pittsburgh) in the 90's. Ng is of the generation of the teenagers in the book, while I would be the same age as the mothers.

Mrs Richardson seems at first to be Lady Bountiful, distributing largess to the deserving needy, but is gradually revealed to be the Witch Mother from Hell, secure in her own knowledge of what is right and proper and manipulating and controlling everyone around her. Mia on the other hand, is a Wise Woman, a nomadic artist, poor and rootless, but with the gift of seeing the deep inner …

Douglas Adams: The Salmon of Doubt (Paperback, 2005, Del Rey) 4 stars

On Friday, May 11, 2001, the world mourned the untimely passing of Douglas Adams, beloved …

Review of 'The Salmon of Doubt' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A great whopping chunk of the book was taken up with various speeches, interviews, articles and short stories, culminating in about a dozen chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently book. The writing was wonderful, but I really had no idea what was going on, as Adams skipped happily to and fro. I can only trust that he would have pulled all the loose ends together and tied them all up in a big messy knot. Or gone through the chapters and snipped them all away. We'll never know now.

Doyle, Brian: Mink river (2010, Oregon State University Press) 5 stars

Review of 'Mink river' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I truly loved this book. My only regret is that it took me this long to get around to reading it. It's got a plot, more or less, but is more a poem than a novel. Or a fairy tale, about a magical place were crows converse and bears read the New York Times, wrapped around countless other tales. Salish, Irish, human and non-human, all mixed and mingled together.

Spencer Johnson: Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life (2002) 3 stars

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and …

Review of 'Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

A fable for adults.  Purportedly about how to deal with change, and with a gushing introduction that told how it helped people.  "It saved my job!"  "It saved my marriage!"  "It saved my life!"  But I found it boring and simplistic.  The lessons that I heard in the text were:

Change is good.
Learning is fun.  (Well, duh!)
Motivational posters are useful.  (As jokes?)
Keep your head up, and run at the first hint of trouble.  In other words, quit before they get around to firing you.
Don't overthink.  In fact, don't think at all.  The best and quickest success comes from action without thought.

I don't think the author thought this through very well.  In fact, I kept being reminded of Animal Farm, and almost wondered if the whole thing was actually a parody.  

The book kept harping on overcoming your fear of change.  And maybe some people do …

Ruth Ozeki: My Year of Meats (1998, Viking Press) 4 stars

My Year of Meats is the 1998 debut novel by Ruth Ozeki. The book takes …

Review of 'My Year of Meats' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Ozeki's first novel. So she hadn't hit her stride yet.

I got the feeling that she'd wanted to write an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production, but decided to wrap it in a novel, to get more people to read it. And so ended up writing a novel about a woman who creates an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production. She created a plot to showcase all the horrible things that go bad in feedlots and slaughterhouses, and then set up stock characters to populate the story. The male characters in particular came across as stereotypes.