I feel like I must be very clear here. I never minded the writing. The writing was clear, evocative, and seemed to always have a lot of emotional turmI feel like I must be very clear here. I never minded the writing. The writing was clear, evocative, and seemed to always have a lot of emotional turmoil and ongoing conflict -- enough to scream soap opera drama from the skies.
I read it because of all the award nominations and my feed blowing up about how brilliant it is, too. I always try to spread my wings a little bit and go for pieces that are not my usual fare.
So why DID I get halfway through this enormously long book and then decide I'd had enough?
I just didn't care.
Yes, it's nice and all to see such a loving gay couple going through the sexual ringer, having apparently awesome gay friends, learning about their lives and troubles and careers, and watching them be supportive (or not) to each other, jumping up and down the timeline of a whole life so that we KNOW what is to come but have all the in-between bits get more and more reveals, etc., but after a certain point I am OVER the DRAMA. A shorter, MUCH shorter book would have been fine.
But let's put it this way: after 45 references to cutting oneself, 32 references to being long-term sexual abuse in a conversion facility, what seems to be DECADES of self-loathing, regret, and mourning, and then what seems to be the END then just makes me realize that there is YET MORE TO COME.
I'm sitting here, never a big fan of Drama to begin with, being tortured with characters that only slightly tug on my heartstrings, and realizing that this slow-moving, endless slice-of-life drama is never going to end. Or at least it feels like it's never going to end. And this is where I have to ask myself, "Why am I putting myself through this?"
So, I'm sorry, Hanya Yanagihara, it's me. Not you. I already suffer from enough social anxiety and depression in my own life. I'm done.
I guess it's just a matter of timing and perfectly misaligned expectations, but I couldn't bring myself to want to get into this novel no mattI tried.
I guess it's just a matter of timing and perfectly misaligned expectations, but I couldn't bring myself to want to get into this novel no matter how much I tried. It was super-lite. The SF portions were too little, too contrived, and kinda worthless as a plot-device, while the character-heavy literary fiction feels never gripped me and from everything I've read in other reviews, it wasn't ever going to.
I might have made a good go at this and suffered through to the end if there was any kind of indication of a huge twist, some valuable insight, or a simple "I love this character"... but it looks like this book isn't even going to have something like that in it for me. So I'm calling it off. It's me, not you, The Space Between the Stars. I don't want to be bored to death.
I don't often abandon books, but the ones I do abandon are usually under a few specific categories.
A: Too Specialized, and I don't have the level of I don't often abandon books, but the ones I do abandon are usually under a few specific categories.
A: Too Specialized, and I don't have the level of interest to maintain a read. B: The information is repetitious and/or something I've already come to understand sufficiently and even agree with, thanks to other authors. or C: It's absolutely horrible.
Fortunately, this book only falls under the first two categories. It's a perfectly decent read if what you want is a little more than a handful of scientific journal articles telling you that system's ecologies can slide along different levels of resilience and too much specialization of species or groups of species, while rather impressive in certain circumstances, often leads to catastrophic diebacks if the situation tips.
The first hundred pages that I read was all about this and dropped a lot of bibliographies on me. There are some nods to humanity trying to fix ecological problems with disastrous results as well as political implications on multiple sides of the fence, but for the most part, these are serious scientific papers dealing with long studies of real science dealing with real math.
It's great if you are invested in such. I can follow it fine. It's just a bit dry and I don't recognize any of the names in the field and there's definitely nothing in the way of language designed to captivate a lay-reader like me.
I'm not quitting this because it's the book's fault. I'm quitting because I'm just a tad outside of my interest level. A lay approach would have been perfectly wonderful for me. Even a rather heavy science lay approach, rather than an assumption that I've read all these myriad other science papers on the subject and therefore I should immediately grok the extremely subtle differences that are made in the current paper.
Put simply, however, ecologies on a high-level, meaning globally, tend to have a much greater ability to bounce back, assuming that there are plenty of mitigating factors such as a wide variety of species able to fill the open niches. If a rigid stratification occurs, the system is much less likely bounce back after a dieback.
These are the papers that broke that ground. Bravo....more
I want to thank Netgalley for the opportunity, but after a fairly thorough lookthrough, I've discovered that the only way I'm going to get anything ouI want to thank Netgalley for the opportunity, but after a fairly thorough lookthrough, I've discovered that the only way I'm going to get anything out of this book is by becoming a heavy scholar of Domesday and read at least a dozen other scholarly works to even recognize the other scholars who are dropping vague hints about the per capita income of such and such serf under such and such minor noble before or after the Norman invasion.
Just because I could do such a thorough invasion, assuming I also had access to such specialized libraries, doesn't mean I have the patience to wind my way through what is apparently, to my very casual eye, an incestuous survey and/or repudiation of other's painstaking research.
I was looking for good non-fiction, not something completely unreadable.
I'd recommend staying away unless you're already very familiar with the Domesday field....more
I rarely, if ever, DNF a book, but I had to with this one because I was bored spitless. I got through 80 pages and realized I had only read 40 becauseI rarely, if ever, DNF a book, but I had to with this one because I was bored spitless. I got through 80 pages and realized I had only read 40 because the other 40 were just white space. It also didn't help that I've studied this stuff for years and it's not even a refresher.
The penultimate Self-Help book. The medical man's history primer of Galen and Astrology. The completionist's guide to a completely exhaustive and exhaThe penultimate Self-Help book. The medical man's history primer of Galen and Astrology. The completionist's guide to a completely exhaustive and exhausting compendium of (now) obscure references, to Latin, and frankly inexplicable inclusions.
If he went out of his way to design for us a perfect way to exhaust us with his knowledge of poverty, nobility, love, the Humors, the Galenic qualities of all kinds of foodstuffs, and do it with more in-text annotations than actual text, doing it all in that peculiar idiom common to any English text coming out before the advent of the DICTIONARY, then I think he succeeded. Admirably.
And let me tell you... Robert Burton defeated me.
He set out to give us the full wide range of depression in this academic treatise that fills to the height of 1620's modern medicine, stoops to the depths of hundreds of poetical sources, revolts us in explaining just HOW one might get depressed... and teaches us how to fight our own depression by making us come up with a thousand and one reasons why we ought to stop this FREAKING ENORMOUS BOOK and JUST STOP... thereby relieving our -- by now -- enormous melancholy.
I made it half-way through. I found myself negatively enjoying practically every new step in this amazingly long-winded treatise. I could not find a single aspect about it that made me want to continue.
Not the science, not the beginnings of psychology, not the weird historical curiosity.
I was defeated. I am sad to say, after 29 hours of Librivox and epub slogging, that I will now DNF.
Goodnight.
I may laugh myself to sleep. The relief is palpable....more
This has got to be the best, most fantastic, wonderful book ever written to have absolutely freaking defeated me. Not only is the wordplay and freakisThis has got to be the best, most fantastic, wonderful book ever written to have absolutely freaking defeated me. Not only is the wordplay and freakishly brilliant alliteration such that I want to roll around in it like a dog in autumn leaves, but the language is also so dense and impenetrable I can BARELY get a sense of what the F*** is going on.
Is it brilliant? Yeah, I can see that much. I can also so see that it was specifically written to break modern literature scholars from their dependence on LSD and Heroin. Both used at the same time. And this is the "lite" version of the drug which is much more insidious because it is even MORE addictive and it happens to kill you in about thirty days after reading. It's a socially-transmitted Irish cancer. It's also a mudkiss written by a psychotic who throws readers into the abyss without a parachute. It was written by the Joker. You know, the one that just wanted to watch the world burn.
It's murdercock English. It's being peed on by pearlypets. It's joking around like a hearse on fire. It's a nappywink.
Honestly, I would NOT have DNF'd this at the midpoint if it wasn't so freaking dense. Or if I were completely drunk in a room full of other Irish foks shouting out random lines from this monstrosity. Or if I joined a cult, bringing this book with me to counteract the crazy by a more potent kind of crazy.
But I did none of these things. I was DEFEATED.
But I do it gracefully. I admit I was beaten by this madman....more
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