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janson

janson@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 months, 1 week ago

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2024 Reading Goal

janson has read 0 of 30 books.

reviewed The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir (Pantheon modern writers)

Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed (2013, Pantheon Books) 4 stars

Review of 'The Woman Destroyed' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Not perfectly for this reader, given shrugged elusion of the stream style in the second piece. Still, the rest was masterful and I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t contemporary. 

Elif Batuman: Either/or (Hardcover, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

Selin returns to Harvard for her sophomore year, spends lots of time thinking about Ivan, …

Review of 'Either/or' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Loved, in a heady sort of way, although it was more Helen DeWitt this time around than Rachel Cusk.

Tillie Olsen: Tell Me a Riddle (1971, Delta) 3 stars

Review of 'Tell Me a Riddle' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

Fragments. Of senses, sentences, vibes. I think I see intent but didn't deliver beyond scratching itch and the pathos stuck up sat on a tree branch.

Yiyun Li: Book of Goose (Hardcover, 2022, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 4 stars

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from …

Review of 'Book of Goose' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

“How Ferrante like.” As if the construct of Shelly’s monster split into two has not been tried before. Still, and yet, Li’s take is soft and weighted and just enough fantastical and horrendous. 

Emily St. John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility (Hardcover, 2022, Knopf) 4 stars

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …

Review of 'Sea of Tranquility' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

More pat, if not more enjoyable, as Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” meets “Glass Hotel”. I find myself more and more comparing rather than absorbing. “How Ferrante like, how so Cuskan, how pale Le Guinian.”

Gabrielle Zevin: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Hardcover, 2022, Knopf) 4 stars

In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners …

Review of 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

This fucking book. I felt all the feels. And not just all the good ones but the bad feels as well, the icks as the youths would say. Technically, I shouldn't like it, and in many didn't think it'd work, which I suppose is also a meta feel also likely intentional and also annoying in it's frustrating accuracy. I feel a bit like Emily I suppose. Which is all the point, no?

Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You (Hardcover, 2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 3 stars

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d …

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Perhaps it isn’t fair, so close to Cusk, to think Rachel wrestles with her writerly-ness with more detached but interesting nuance. That said, Rooney posed the questions with empathy and familiarity.

Review of 'The stories of John Cheever.' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

There are many stories, too many perhaps, all of the same ilk. I was in a bookstore the other week, shelves by owner’s whim, with five labeled just “mid American mad men.” If latter seasons Mad Men was suburban NE corridor, but also ignored the women characters, it’d be Cheever-esque.