emmaliborski's reviews
47 reviews

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

adventurous mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

"For I suppose there's there's some would hear my words and think our love flawed and broken. But God will know the slow tread of an old couple's love for reach other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole." 

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

dark informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

"I have faith, because nature is the very best example of integration. things grow differently when they're damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before." 

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

“They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.”

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling

challenging informative reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book perfectly captures what it's like to be a white woman living and working in a capitalistic America and how the white feminist girlboss morality develops over time. Bunny isn't unintelligent, but she's insecure and constantly bargaining with her own conscience. She spends her life feeling uninformed, unprincipled, and un-extraordinary compared to the men she knows, but as she grows older, she's only downplaying how she uses her own economic and political power. Her "ignorance" is her crutch, and as her values develop, you see how the political bleeds into the personal (and vice versa).

Bunny's character study was my favorite part of the book, but I could see other readers finding her irritating. I also enjoyed reading more about energy industry and the geopolitics of a region I know very little about. The book felt educational without being bogged down by background information, but I'm not sure someone uninterested in those topics would enjoy this book. 
 
"She began now to think about how she could explain what she had done to herself or anyone else, as if it were only a problem of storytelling."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

dark emotional reflective slow-paced

5.0

I'm not sure how Maya Angelou accesses the essence of her childhood so effectively, but this book is a masterclass in memoir, in sifting through countless stories and images and realities of a long period of life and piecing them together to create a true narrative. Her style of writing is so artful, full of reverence for the places and people around her. You really felt like you were witnessing her world through a child's eyes. Her life experience is certainly difficult to read about- you get so invested in the young Maya that you feel the true injustice of the things that have happened to her. But knowing that such an intelligent child would grow up to be widely honored for her work makes it easier to process. I can't wait to continue reading her memoirs and immersing myself in her life.
 
“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.”

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

challenging dark informative tense medium-paced

4.5

This is such a special, immersive, informative book. I'm a sucker for history books that are, in some way, about the idea of history as a concept, and the final chapters of this book dive into these questions in such a pertinent and satisfying way. How can a society move on when people feel that they've been robbed of the justification of their actions? How can something be "in the past" when people are afraid to add their experience to historical record? What role should the state play in processing national trauma? How should it be held accountable?
 
“Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and then get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The strength of its book is its nuanced exploration of human relationships (parent-child, sibling-sibling, husband-wife). I found myself relating to a lot of the dynamics she explored; Moriarty has a command over these complicated relationships and communicates them with remarkable nuance. I actually enjoyed the true-crime tone of the book

until it was spoiled by a completely lackluster and borderline nonsensical ending that sucked all of the tension out of the plot

. Moriarty chose to go into great expository detail about minor characters, which was a disorienting choice and I also found some of the most critical character motivations completely unbelievable. Anyway, the tennis stuff was fun and I'm looking forward to the miniseries because Alison Brie is my girl!
 
"People made accusations of lying with such triumph: as if pointing out a lie won the game, as if you'd just shatter with the shame of it, as if they'd never lied themselves, as if people didn't lie all the time, to themselves, to everyone."

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

challenging informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

This is completely unlike anything I've ever read. It's a series of poetic vignettes that weaves together the lives and works of real queer female artists and revolutionaries in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. If you try to grasp too firmly onto the historical reality of this novel and focus on keeping all of the characters, relationships, and timelines straight in your head, this will be a headache of a read. I found that surrendering to the language and the intended flow of the book made the reading experience almost magical and reverent. 

This is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book- a lot of people won't like the quasi-academic form it takes. My only disappointment was how it ended with a whimper, not a bang. I didn't get a sense of why the book ended when it did in the timeline. Regardless, this novel is the result of what I'm sure was a Herculean research effort and a remarkable amount of creativity and I'm deeply impressed by it. 

"An invert is not exactly someone thought backwards. An invert is someone thought in a different order. A part that others might display on the outside, like a bronze breastplate, is instead kept chambered in the heart. Or inverts may have their warmest parts turned outwards, like orchids or octopuses. 

In Fragment 51 Sappho writes of two states of mind in the same body. When two things are coupled together in one throat, in one belly, in one blush of feeling that runs up the spine, they orient the body in different directions at the same time. We were well acquainted with that warm disarray spreading through our nerves. Sometimes we wanted to be everything at once. An invert is someone who believes this is possible."

Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia

challenging informative inspiring slow-paced

3.5

This is a well-researched book with a unifying approach: developing tools that lengthen both our lifespan and our healthspan. Attia's arguments about the shortcomings of Medicine 2.0 (the system that focuses on prescribing medication over holistic health and prevention) are compelling. Anyone can benefit from looking at health in a different way, by prioritizing exercise, diet, and sleep over everything else and knowing that the benefits will multiply in time.

Even though the entire last chapter is about Attia's emotional and mental health journey, he doesn't integrate that lens into the rest of his recommendations. For example, he matter-of-factly dives into research supporting the idea that eating less than your body signals you to eat at all times will add years to your healthspan. That may be true, but for many people, focusing on eating less constantly is more a detriment to their overall health than anything. I got the impression throughout the book that Attia is an obsessive perfectionist. He explicitly reflects on this in the final chapter, but that neuroticism permeates the whole book. It's an attitude that might resonate with others, but I personally find it off-putting and counterproductive. 

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book, reflecting on my choices, and making connections between elements of human health that I didn't think were related (for example- metabolic health seems to linked to every major life-threatening disease and is deeply affected by our everyday choices). The chapters on cancer, dementia, heart disease, and diabetes toward the beginning of the book were incredibly informative. I closed this book feeling more in control of my own health and curious about the topics Attia discussed.