Write a Review on the Last Book You Read

Night Owl

Night Owl

This Bird Has Flown
MBTI
INFJ
Enneagram
Never
If you've just finished reading a book, this is the place to write your thoughts on it. Yet feel free to comment on any book you might have read, even if it was ages ago. Begin by mentioning the title of the book and the author, and if possible the date it was published. Here are some questions that might help in your response.

What is the book about?
How did you feel before approaching the text?
What struck you?
What did you learn?
Is there elements you found challenging or difficult?
Is there a memorable line you can share?

Perhaps this thread can be a place where we can exchange ideas, grow through learning, and stumble across books we might not have thought to have read.
 
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What is the book about?
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Four Ways to Forgiveness is composed of 4 interlocking short stories 1) Betrayals, 2) Forgiveness Day, 3) A Man of the People, and 4) A Woman's Liberation set on the planets Werel, Yeowe, and briefly Hain. It explores the relationships between clashing cultures and genders and how all of the heroic (and very ordinary) people caught in this violent conflict survive and rebuild what is lost in slavery, war, and rebellion.
How did you feel before approaching the text?
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I found a used copy at a local book store and hurried through The Eye of the Heron to start it.
What struck you?
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A overarching theme in all four stories was forgiveness and how the protagonists reconciled long-held traditions, brutal discrimination, and xenophobia with brief, gradual, and almost accidental understanding. I was impressed that I was able to relate to both the male and female protagonists.
What did you learn?
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Similar to The Eye of the Crane and Dispossessed, K le Guin explores how gender and class struggles define unhealthy societies, in the case of Werel/Yeowe, who are the Owners and who are the Assets.
Is there elements you found challenging or difficult?
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Descriptions of slave compounds, rapes, and (child) prostitution were difficult to read.
Is there a memorable line you can share?
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“There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.”
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"Oh yes," he said. "But not in a rebellious spirit. That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance. To keep an acceptant spirit. That's what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world."
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"All those rules!" Yeron said. "So complicated and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran away."

"All I did was learn in Kathad what I wouldn't learn in Stse," he said, smiling. "What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology. What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules - a pattern that makes sense?" He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, "I'm drunk. Come for a walk with me."
 
Jet said:
The last book I read was a children's book about venomous reptiles. It was far more disturbing to me than I was expecting. #momlife
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Damn kids books. I was terrified of ticks for years because of a "so called" kids book. You ever see one of those up close? Well 9 year old me did and didn't sleep for weeks after.
 
Jacobi said:
Damn kids books. I was terrified of ticks for years because of a "so called" kids book. You ever see one of those up close? Well 9 year old me did and didn't sleep for weeks after.
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I'm far more disturbed by the book "Where's the Poop?" Why the fuck are you teaching my kids that poop is something to be hidden and then found?!?!?! Just wrong.
 
Jet said:
I'm far more disturbed by the book "Where's the Poop?" Why the fuck are you teaching my kids that poop is something to be hidden and then found?!?!?! Just wrong.
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So it's like a Where's Waldo book with poop. I'll have to check that out.
 
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In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"--in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron--as part of their prenatal treatmen....

In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery radioactive metal circulating in their veins. Spanning the 1930s to the 1990s, filled with hundreds of newly declassified documents and firsthand interviews, The Plutonium Files traces the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary fifty-year cover-up. It illuminates a shadowy chapter in this country's history and gives eloquent voice to the men and women who paid for our atomic energy discoveries with their health--and sometimes their lives.

From Amazon's website.
 
@Wonky Oracle

This looks like it would be a disturbing and painful read while still being very enlightening and opening one's eyes to things some of us had no idea about until now.
Consider me intrigued now.

But I wonder if reading it will just make me more pissed off about what's being hidden from us.

:mpff:
 
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>> What is the book about?

A mystery fiction anthology.

>> How did you feel before approaching the text?

That I don't usually read mystery, but I should.

>> What struck you?

That title is bullshit. It wasn't mystery at all. It was crime fiction. That boiled my potato a bit as I read through the anthology, knowing full well it doesn't really matter.

>> What did you learn?

James Ellroy is an oldtime guy who likes boxing, baseball, and classic noir where men are men and dames are dangerous. (There were others stories, but it was overwhelmingly that stuff.)

>> Is there elements you found challenging or difficult?

The usual when it comes to violence - we're capable of some fucked up shit.

>> Is there a memorable line you can share?

"Life was stuck in the night; daytime was just the intermission, the waiting between the acts of the real show."
 
What is the book about?
How did you feel before approaching the text?
What struck you?
What did you learn?
Is there elements you found challenging or difficult?
Is there a memorable line you can share?

I just read Lady Thief, the sequel to Scarlet. This is my third time reading it, actually, and I can easily say it is probably my all time favorite. I'll give a review on the first book, anyway.

Robin Hood and his gang go head-to-head against the sheriff of Nottingham. The sheriff is a wicked man. He overtaxes his people and imprisons them if they cannot pay up come tax day. Robin Hood--a charming, chivalrious man who lost his title due to purely unfair circumstances, now steals from the rich and gives to the poor--John Little--an eighteen year old who lost his family in a tragic accident--Much--a sixteen year old, the baby of the group, who was caught stealing and had his hand cut off as a result--and Will Scarlet--a thief, in the purest way--all live in Sherwood forest. Only, unbeknownst to everyone but the band, Will Scarlet is a woman, and the main protagonist of the story. We know very little about her background, but we figure it out along with the group.
An infamous thieftaker, Guy of Gisbourne is rumored to have been hired by the sheriff to track the Hood down, and Scarlet knows exactly who he is and how bad his presence is for everyone--particularly herself. Between trying to keep the people safe, figure out Scarlet's feelings for her band members and attempting to keep her away from Gisbourne, the group faces a challenge that ultimately pulls the rug out from under their feet.

Honestly, because the grammar of the entire series was purposefully manipulated to match Scarlet's speech, I did not want to read the book. You do get used to it.

What struck me most was the author's insane ability to twist my emotions the way she wanted them. Never before have I felt such an insane sense of dread about meeting a character I know nothing about, or have I felt so safe and secure with one fictional person.

I think what I learned was that I am not unlovable, or undeserving of the people that like me. Rather, I hold them up, and in return they hold me up.

One thing about the series is that, with the almost charming discomfort you often feel comes moments where, for some people, boundaries can be crossed.

And, probably the question I was most excited for,
"There is so much more in your heart than your ghosts."

*Exaggerated sigh* It's a good book...
 
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