Nataweeee Posted January 5 Posted January 5 (edited) This will (hopefully) be my first full year of dedicated reading and I have so much stuff I'm excited to check out! Hope its a good year for everyone ❤️ 01. Hungerstone (Kat Dunn, 2024) (audio) ★★★ 02. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) ★★★½ Edited 6 hours ago by Nataweeee Quote
Nataweeee Posted January 5 Author Posted January 5 #1. Hungerstone (Kat Dunn, 2024) Wanted to like this a lot more than I did. On paper there's a ton of appealing stuff about it, being a queer feminist reimagining of a classic vampire story with an anti-capitalist slant but unfortunately the anti-capitalism isn't much more than window dressing and the queerness is just used as a literary device. That's not really the problem though, the problem is that any time the book wants you to draw parallels or make connections or anything like that the character will just tell you and once I noticed this was becoming a trend I got pretty annoyed with it. It just gives you nothing to consider at any point aside from "what happen next?". Admittedly, this is ideal for an audiobook as I did have my focus split between this and work though and I definitely didn't feel like I missed anything lol. Another thing is that it overuses the word "hunger/hungry" to the point that it feels ridiculous. Like the conceit is comparing the vampiric hunger to a woman's need for freedom from the constraints of a shitty marriage/the patriarchal social structure which is clear and easy to follow and good but it touches on it a lot and then they also tie the character's eating disorder into this and maybe its just because I listened to the whole thing over two long nights but god you just end up hearing that word over and over and over again. That's a small gripe but it wouldn't have felt so ever-present if there were moments of profundity or emotional resonance and even though it does try these moments just don't hit. The closest we get to that is a good crowd-pleaser ending that even though it kind of feels like the only possible ending they do a good job of making you think they might go a different direction and there's some good catharsis in it. This probably sounds like an exceedingly negative review but I don't think this a bad book I think it just has different goals from what I want from it. Its focus is very much on being a functional, well-structured story where all the dots are connected and it succeeds in this for sure but its just not the type of writing that moves the needle for me. 6/10 Quote
Nataweeee Posted 6 hours ago Author Posted 6 hours ago (edited) #2. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) Well, after about 9 months of picking away at it I finally got through this and I probably understood like 7% of it. It references a ton of things, none of which I know anything about, not even The Odyssey or Shakespeare and I don't know anything about Ireland or the 1900s or Ireland in the 1900s. Every chapter is also written in a different writing style and some of them might as well have been gibberish to me. That being said, the 7 or so % I did get was usually pretty funny and often enough even the bits I don't get at all have some fun lines. The edition I have has a ton of notes and stuff in the back and I might have referenced those had I known they were there before I got to the last chapter lol. Speaking of the last chapter, gosh I wish the whole book was about Molly Bloom singing songs and whoring around solid ending there and now that I'm on the other side of it I do think of the whole of it a bit more fondly than when I was trudging through it though you can't convince me some of this isn't unnecessarily padded, especially the penultimate chapter written in a Q&A format (I liked the point A and point B but everything in between was mind-numbing). Even though I was grasping at straws a lot the craft of it was never in doubt even if it feels for the sake of itself at times. Hard to rate a book that went this far over my head but I'm gonna say... 7/10 Edited 4 hours ago by Nataweeee 1 Quote
lunababymoonchild Posted 1 hour ago Posted 1 hour ago This is on my TBR and I’ve been advised elsewhere that in order to better understand Ulysses it’s a good idea to first read The Dubliners. I have not yet done that either 😁 There is also much in the way of online guidance to help as you go along. Well done getting through it, though Quote
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