misireads

[misireads]

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a modern re-telling of the story of odysseus from the point of view of his wife penelope. now long deceased, she recounts and assesses her past life from the realm of the dead, telling the truth about it from her perspective.

🌼👰‍♀️💧

➕ the main reason i even read this: it's very short. i needed a small book to take with me to a 5-day trip and i finished this during it just like planned so i was very pleased

➕ i'm not all that savvy about the stories of greek mythology, nor am i particularly interested in them tbh, but this is narrated in a way that brings you along and explains the stories while not being too heavy-handed about it. so i didn't feel dumb for not being familiar with the original tales. the modern snark and feminist PoV was also very fun to me, i feel like i could read all of the myths in this form instead. (also the OG palamedes appears in like three sentences, exciting)

➖ though i do think i would have enjoyed more if i actually did know anything about odysseus and penelope lol.

⭐ score: 3½ -- i don't have much to say, i don't feel like analysing this book, it was just quick light fun to me so i enjoyed it, and i think that's all that matters.

[misireads]

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

during the era of napoleonic wars, a captain with a promising career in the british navy abruptly finds himself in charge of a baby dragon that hatches from an egg they've just looted from the french. this means his career in the navy is over and he needs to instead become part of the aerial corps as the master of this dragon now. he's initially devastated and feels doomed by the narrative, but it soon becomes evident that his partnership with the dragon is, in fact, the best thing that's ever happened to him. in addition to the development of their wholesome friendship, he makes a wonderful dragon pilot and as temeraire the dragon grows, the evidence is mounting that there's something special about its species and original, intended purpose.

🐉🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿💣

➕ i loved this a lot! the way it's written is very soothing, the language is fairly simple but without making this feel soulless. the characters are extremely wholesome and i adore the way laurence's character is built, the narration never makes it feel like he's a bad person but he does tons of introspection all the time and as the story progresses, it's clear that he's quite conservative and sometimes Problematic(TM) but recognises these flaws in himself and wants to be better. he sees women as captains in the aerial corps and goes "Ok that's weird. but then again, why not. i just need to get used to this" and never disrespects them on purpose. and what more could a girl want than a story about a young guy who turns soft from a friendship with a pet dragon like seriously (i also watched the new how to train your dragon movie last week so i've been on a dragon boy kick) frankly i sometimes forgot this was a book about war while reading

➕ there's a sweet balance of politics and the military stuff, some conflict between the dragon masters, and nice wholesome good times petting and befriending dragons. all the pay-offs were perfect to me, nothing about the story left me unsatisfied. i don't even care that this is somewhat a case of the main character being special without doing anything and coincidentally also getting the coolest and strongest and smartest dragon. because they are both too cute for me to hate in any way

➖ truthfully i often skimmed the war-strategy related stuff. nor am i a history buff so i don't how this all compares to real history. while i really like the concept of aerial warfare on dragons instead of planes, i could as well just read about the dragons without any war stuff tbh

⭐ score: 4 -- i liked this! in a rather neutral way, but that's fine. i am a casual dragon enjoyer. temeraire is a series of 9+ books and actually the later parts have even better reviews than early ones, i may be low-key interested in continuing this?

[misireads]

Muistilabyrintti ("Memory labyrinth") by Arttu Tuominen

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

another opening part for a police series, this time about the police force of the finnish city of pori. the PoV jumps between several different narratives, but the title (and the prologue part of the book also) implies that the most central character is a senior police constable that leads the department of violent crime, a crude, scar-covered man who lost one of his arms in a car accident and simultaneously has a prodigious memory (he literally visits a labyrinth-like space with corridors and rooms and stuff when he's recalling things, hence the title) and some serious gaps in his memory due to the accident. the story kicks off when he gets a new partner, a female officer who moves to his unit from patrolling and is a local celebrity due to her successful past career as an athlete. there are a few other colourful characters working in their unit as they start investigating the brutal murder of a female reporter whose body is found from a manhole.

at the same time with the murder investigation, there's some unrest in the city due to a group of activists protesting a newly erected statue of a local millionaire, claiming that the marketplace it's placed in belongs to the working class. also at the same time, in the neighbouring city of ulvila, an environmental auditor (and a depressed alcoholic) is being pressured to do his job and investigate what's polluting local beaches or else he'll be fired.

the three different stories seem scattered at first but are actually connected.

🏅🚓🗽

➕ i have read one novel by arttu tuominen before (that would be mies joka kuoli) and was already familiar with his style of building absolutely batshit insane scenarios. the pacing here is pretty slow, but it makes the crazy moments stand out all the more. i was on the fence about this book until a scene where jarkko the environmental auditor goes investigate the beach and a flood of dead fish shoots down the river, at that point i was like alright this is the signature stuff of tuominen so this has to be a wild ride, and that it was. the best scene in the entire book is a city council meeting. no really, not a joke. it was a banger

➕ related to the aforementioned, by far the best character here is jarkko. i could have read a whole novel just about him without any of this police stuff tbh i think it would have been a better book

➕ not even sure if this is coincidence or not but all the major characters have nature-related (sur)names, the violence unit at the police in particular have names related to trees, and i just really enjoyed that detail

➖ i'm not a big fan of police novels and this book reminded me again why: because they are so insufferably formulaic, and this is a prime example of it. there's always a main character officer that's somehow weird and off-putting (but still a genius and loved by their co-workers), and they always have a softer partner of the other gender. almost every single time there seems to be a young woman that's been murdered (and the writers of this genre are really desperate to come up with more and more violent ways to kill the women because everything's already been done a hundred times anyway). and then there's some sidekick character who turns out to be different from the first impression or whatever. this is only saved by tuominen's totally outlandish scenarios, like, the conclusion of the final climax of the case here is that [spoiler] the characters get out of a burning house by wearing the real actual space suits of the apollo 11 crew, it's totally bonkers

➖ this book treats its few female characters like absolute shit and leans heavily into gendered violence towards them. in addition to all the other shit they've put through, there's a scene of the female officer watching the rioters by the statue and for whatever reason tuominen felt it necessary to include that her nipples get hard under her police outfit while watching them like. What

➖ the bad guy is comical beyond any credibility, he's like a james bond villain or something and of course at the climax part of the novel there's a convenient scene of him deciding to explain his entire Evil Plan to the main hero police officer, this is so incredibly goofy writing. like, as much as i like tuominen's extravagant style, this just felt stupid. also unfitting for finland (not to mention [spoiler] the villain is a rich fennoswede who loves sailing, which feels like such a silly fucking stereotype to use, in a bad way. i liked the drama of him smashing the activist boy's skull with the statue head tho)

➖ there's a reveal about the main guy at the end that's probably supposed to be mind-blowing but instead felt kinda out of place, there was so much other stuff going on throughout that the buildup to it was just… it's just kind of "oh alright. anyway," (and the whole memory labyrinth thing, which the book is named after, was very secondary, maybe even tertiary or something, so overall it feels like the main guy was not very successfully established here)

⭐ score: 3+ -- entertaining and had some individual A+ scenes but also like… not that great of a book? it feels very much like a "written by a man, for other men" kind of thing. an äijäily kind of book. the only reason i even picked this up was that one of my rec TBR lists had the third part of this series in it, and it would have felt strange to start from there, so i went to the start. i'm not sure if i'll revisit for the second and third books. i might try something else from tuominen instead because i like his way of combining deadpan humour with vivid, melodramatic scenarios without it turning out totally camp in the end. in a way i'd kind of want to see if the female officer gets any better treatment in later books

[misireads]

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

[ physical book, read in english ]

an abused and traumatised young woman living in an insanely misogynistic world clings to stories of magic and fairy tales to survive. she's particularly fixated on her country's recently deceased national author and his magnum opus, a fantasy novel about a resourceful young woman titled angharad. her dream is to study literature but she's only allowed into the college of architecture, and even there she's the only female student and belittled and abused by everyone. she hates her studies until she comes across an invitation for students of architecture to design a new house for the surviving members of the late national author's family. she's so hyperfixated on him that she ends up winning the competition and gets to travel to the current family estate, the hiraeth manor, to work on the blueprints of the new house that she designed. a dream come true!

except it isn't. the manor turns out to be a nightmarish, half-rotten shithole on some miserable coastal cliff, inhabited by the late author's weird-ass son. she also meets another college student, a boy studying literature who's at hiraeth to research the late author for his thesis -- a thesis that aims to prove that the author never wrote his own magnum opus, a theory that threatens to tear apart her entire world as she knows it. he's very academic and no-nonsense and doesn't believe in magic. she, on the other hand, sees ghosts and monsters and magic everywhere. but as they investigate the secrets of the manor, the evidence supporting his theory gradually accumulates and she's forced to question her beliefs. besides, he offers her the opportunity to become a co-author of his thesis, which would open the door into the literature college for her.

🌊🏚️📚

➕ the vibes here are absolutely impeccable, it's positively haunting and a combination of a couple of my favourite things -- dark academia with a sense of nautical horror, not to mention the whole wales-inspired gothic fairy tale fantasy thing going on here. water is constantly present in some form and i happen to have some kind of weird aesthetical fetish for sea-related stuff in particular, i absolutely love the eerie coastal scenery and the way sea and water are used both figuratively and literally to describe things. the title itself has multiple meanings as the world these characters live in has gone through a "drowning", some sort of mass flood event where the sea rose enough to swallow all of land (which feels like a reference to global warming but isn't in the logical sense because the worldbuilding here corresponds to early 1900s or so), and the hiraeth manor is constantly subject to drowning because the house is in such shambles that water keeps seeping in (how have the myrddins not died of pneumonia yet??), and effy's anxiety is described with vocabulary related to water and drowning throughout the book. and there are several instances of literal drowning being a very possible outcome for the characters. great atmosphere, great pacing, great use of language, aesthetics-wise one of the most "me" books i've ever read

➕ the main reason i picked this up: preston! as i fondly call him now, a palamedes variant lol. a very good bespectacled scholar boy, blunt and just a bit condescending at first sight, actually very gentle and soft, values objective truth over everything, possibly logical to a fault because it makes him very unreceptive to effy's version of the world where not everything always makes sense. i wish he was my boyfriend too

➕ i don't read a lot of romance -- in fact, this was baby's first romantasy, i think?? -- and i rather enjoyed this honestly! it's a bit corny, a bit cheesy, but i mostly enjoyed it a lot. it's like having a soft, warm blanket wrapped around you to have a straightforward love story where a damaged girl is accepted by a gentle boy and feels safe for the first time in her life. i wish i had that, where is my preston i'm serious

➕ the worldbuilding uses welsh and breton in fictional context and i loved that thoroughly. llyr is clearly a fictional version of wales but argantia is perhaps a combination of england and france, i'm not sure -- and it doesn't really matter, it's not supposed to be based on reality but just uses the real languages and some vague geographical semblance.

➖ it's hard to put into words what didn't quite click for me here -- i had fun with effy and preston's romance but, at the same time, there's a reason why i don't really read romance and that's that it's kind of. well. cringe. maybe it's that i'm so hecking picky with how i'd like the romance to be played out, i'm bound to be put off by something and then the immersion is broken, in a way. like my soul has to slip out for a second when it hits a cringey part so i can keep going. that's why i prefer reading fics of pairings that don't happen in canon, i think

➖ the whole fairy king thing was mostly confusing to me and i'm still not sure if it's meant to be more metaphorical or literal

➖ i was reading this at the same time with a flicker in the dark which ALSO features a main female character with trauma and paranoia who eats pills to deal with her mental health. ASID dealt with the theme far better (and effy is young, unlike chloe who was just stupid) but regardless i was kinda "really? again? can we stop writing women as these fragile creatures defined by their relationships with men?". so maybe i would have felt differently if i didn't read these two books back-to-back. i do think effy is a well-written and likable character though, very sympathetic and she had proper development, without sacrificing her core as the girl who believes in magic. so it's not that i dislike her as a character, just i read this at an unfortunate moment that affected my impression maybe

⭐ score: 4+ -- we are hitting a high score for once, lads! (almost 4½ but you know, nona the ninth is there... maybe i dug a bit of a hole for myself with these scores...) there is a lot of good in this book and i overall enjoyed it very much, it's beautifully written too.

[misireads]

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

[ physical book, read in english ]

a woman with a seemingly perfect life -- successful career as a psychologist, a house in a nice town, and a perfect fiancé with a summer wedding coming up -- is haunted by her past as the daughter of a serial killer. when she was twelve, her father kidnapped and killed several girls in their small hometown, and was eventually caught because she found a box of memorabilia from the murdered girls in his closet and brought it to the police. but as the 20th anniversary of the old murders approaches, history starts repeating itself. teenage girls start disappearing and turning up dead in her new hometown, and eventually she begins to suspect there's a copycat murderer on the loose, imitating his father. in her escalating paranoia, she's coming up with her own ideas of who the culprit is.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦💊💍

➕ this is an extremely formulaic suspense-thriller, and i don't think that entirely bad a thing. in fact, i found it rather comfy -- in my case, this was the right book to come along at the right time because it's exactly what i was looking for. not too complicated a story but with an interesting hook anyway about the serial killer dad. easy to follow, simple enough that you don't need to be thinking about anything whatsoever while reading. the book uses the tropes successfully to build a story that works. i overall had a good time reading it.

➖ but, i mean. i knew who the culprit was from the first scene said character was in at the beginning of the book, lmao. the whole thing is handed to you on a plate, including the girls about to get killed. this is the most predictable "mystery" i have perhaps ever read, the story really was just about waiting for how the truth is eventually revealed -- which isn't a bad catch for a book, honestly, but it does make it very boring plot-wise. there is no excitement in this story. the too-perfect a husband being framed for everything could be seen from miles away before he ever was framed for the first time. but even the story itself seems to know that the reader will know everything from the start because there's no climax, no moment of grand reveal and subsequent action at the end, we just kind of sail smoothly into the truth and even the narrator herself is like "well i kinda knew it all along but didn't want to admit it" and that's the end of it. i guess the impact of the narrative is supposed to be elsewhere, in some kind of female empowerment that i'm not sure i really grasped at all. or maybe in invoking feelings of nostalgia, i don't know. like, ultimately, i'm not really sure why the author told this story at all? because it clearly wasn't to build up tension towards an exciting payoff at the end. perhaps it's a "baby's first suspense novel" of sorts. if you're not aware of the tropes and the usual formula of these stories, maybe it is exciting in some way.

➖ i don't like the main character, she's bland and annoying, her only personality trait is her suspicion of men (while also being so amazingly heterosexual that she apparently can't stop herself from sleeping with random men) -- to be honest, and i know this isn't very feminist of me, i'd describe her as a hysterical bitch lol. she's supposed to be a psychologist yet she's fucking ass at reading any of the other characters, and she doesn't seem to have the self-awareness of considering that perhaps the things she's constantly imagining are not real (despite her chucking pills in her mouth every two chapters). that perhaps she jumps into conclusions all the time. lmao. i mean, i know it's for the purpose of the "suspense" narrative, and this is a very typical female main character trope in these stories, but that's not gonna make me dislike it any less. the fact that she's supposed to be a psychologist makes it even less credible than usual.

➖ the writing isn't very good. not only does the narrative repeat the same things way too much, smearing things on your face (yes i don't need to be told for the umpteenth time how she was touching the TV screen while watching her dad being arrested, like why is this a thing we need to hear about over and over??), the author really ought to check how many times she's repeating the same words because the amount of "direction"s and "exhale"s in the writing is fucking mind-boggling. either word is on like, every two pages proably. seriously, i'm not exaggerating.

⭐ score: 3- -- i can't call this a good book, but… reading it was entertaining. it's cosy in the way familiar things are. no surprises and no confusing elements, just something you've seen many many times, in a slightly new package. but it's also a fucking dumbass book.

[misireads]

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

an autistic girl is sent on a space adventure by three magical women, to go save her scientist father who's been missing for years. she's accompanied by her genius 5-year-old brother and some random boy from her school. turns out the father is being held hostage on a communist planet ruled by an evil brain. also there's some kind of evil darkness taking over the world idk

🤓👽♾️

➕ well, this is a children's book from the 60s and it has an autistic(not said outright but seems obvious enough) girl as the main character, with a message about her being just as important as everyone else despite her imperfections, so i think that's a very good message to have.

➕ there are other good messages in here too, about how important love is, and how forcing everyone into the same mould is oppressive and not equality. i imagine that was progressive for the time

➕ short

➖ what the fuck? what the fucking fuck did i just read?? there's being too much of an adult to appreciate books for children, and then there's children's books that i look with adult eyes and go "yeah no, this just isn't good." throughout this book, i was trying to parse together if this is all some big metaphor for something or if it's simply a fucking nonsense ass book with the most incoherent plot to ever be plotting. is this like, philosophy and emotional intelligence for children packaged into a Hehe Exciting Fantasy Adventure? or? i don't know, i genuinely can't tell. it's difficult to even put into words how strange a book this is. nothing is taken with any particular gravity, there's no logic to anything and nothing is explained -- and i mean nothing when i say nothing. who are the three women and what's the deal with literally anything about them, i don't know. how is "tesseracting" done, i don't know. why is charles wallace the way he is, i don't know. why did the literal tiny children have to be the ones sent after the dad, i don't know. what's the point of calvin's existence in the entire fuckign story, i don't know (literally it's just "he was standing there so now he's coming with us", and i guess it's for maybe two lines that imply he's from an abusive home, which ultimately means nothing though because he's barely even a character, he just exists). what is this super fucking evil darkness that's apparently around some planets including earth, i don't know and nothing is done about it. what's "it" and why does it give a single fuck about these random humans (esp children of 5-14 years) from outer space and what was the goal there, i don't know. there's a lot more emphasis on how meg is feeling at any given time than making sense of the plot, rather the plot just feels like random devices to make some kind of vague scenarios happen where meg can again feel cold and miserable and get angry and understand her own anger and impatience and then they all word their feelings to each other and everything is fuzzy and lovable again or something. much of the dialogue is just the characters arguing back and forth about something. also there's literal aliens talking about christianity

➖ it also doesn't help that i'm pretty sure the finnish translation is ass

⭐ score: 1½ -- this felt like a fever dream and i don't know where i am and who i am now

[misireads]

Jonakin onnellisena päivänä ("On some happy day") by Leena Lehtolainen

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a woman's account of her life story, evidently addressed to the love of her life. she grew up in a tumultuous family in the small city of outokumpu in north karelia; her father left early on, her depressed mother became an alcoholic after meeting a new man and gave birth to a set of twins with FAS. then the mother turned into a devout christian and, after the death of the new man, she found yet another new man, another christian who beat children. to escape this hellish home, the main character got married young to her middle-aged boss whose appliance shop she's working at. she's relatively happy with the new circumstances, until one day a handsome red-haired man of her own age drops by the shop to sell some computers, and the two immediately proceed to have an affair. trying to keep the relationship a secret from her husband has disastrous consequences for the remainder of her adult life.

at the end of the book, it's made clear that the reason she's telling this story is to explain why she cannot be with the man she's writing it for.

📝❤️👫

➕ this is just a comfy first-person story that's all about learning everything about this one fictional person's life. no gimmicks of any sort, just life and one horrific event in the middle of it all. my favourite part was her childhood, before she became a horny teenager and her mother turned into a religious nutcase, it was very relatable to me. especially because she escaped reality into books and got very invested in the characters. truthfully i picked this because lehtolainen was on my list of "thriller authors" but i didn't want to pick a book from her best-known series because it's another long-standing police novel series and i'm just not interested in that, and i was already pretty far by the time i realised this book is not a thriller, and then i just went ah well, i'm kind of invested in marjukka already so could as well.

➕ the best characters are either the twins who end up becoming porn stars, or the best friend who's a no-nonsense writer who dreams of dating a poet from turku

➖ i was significantly less invested after the childhood part ended, i couldn't fathom at all her decision to marry the old dude, then i momentarily understood her falling for the suave salesman, then lost her again after the cheating fest started and she got pregnant at 20 and wanted to keep it despite not knowing which man's baby she had. but the overwhelmingly most boring part was the latter half where she met this man she's telling the story to. there just wasn't anything there for me anymore. their relationship isn't very interesting in any way. it wasn't very clear to me what she even liked about the guy so much, this read to me like she was mostly interested in the sex.

➖ good lord, the victim mindset and the way she talks about that former boss of hers that she married is insufferable, easily my most hated thing about this book. not only is there no indication at any point whatsoever that she found it gross that a 50yo man wanted to marry his 20yo employee, [spoiler] she also repeatedly calls him "a good man" FOR KILLING TWO PEOPLE, ONE OF WHICH WAS A BABY??? what????????? what. the . fuck? why does she keep talking positively about himgdfmgjk fjgnfjdfngjfn gjf the guy was a fucking psychopath??? she calls him a good man to her son whose brother the man killed??? i don't get it. this is insane. i'm not at all in the "don't talk ill of the dead" boat when said dead was a psycho pedo and a murderer

⭐ score: 3+ -- it was alright… i don't know if i'll ever think back fondly to this specifically, but i do like reading this kind of story every now and then. where it's just some person's life story with some heavier topics sprinkled in. nothing more, nothing less.

[misireads]

Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär (The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear) by Walter Moers

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

as the title says, a first-person narration of thirteen and a half lives of a bear that's blue. the story is set in an alternative past version of the earth that has several, magical extra continents, the most essential one being a place called zamonia, inhabited by all sorts of fantasy creatures, most of which are unpleasant. starting from bluebear's earliest memories of floating in the sea as an infant, the thirteen-and-half lives span his adventures through sea, a man-eating island, assisting a rescuer pterodactyl, studying under the smartest man on earth, travelling through alternate dimensions, wandering a desert made of sugar, living inside a tornado, living in a metropolis and becoming a liar gladiator, and saving the rest of his kin i.e. a bunch of colourful bears.

🐻💙🌊

➕ this is a book i read as a child, over 20 years ago, and remember liking immensely back then. so this isn't a wholly unbiased read. this is an ode to imagination, and i'm pretty sure it influenced small me quite a lot with the amount of wild details in this vivid fantasy world. the worldbuilding is comprehensive and consistent, and it's very pleasing how the story wraps around itself (literally, in the part where bluebear becomes a gladiator, he recites all his previous lives in order as if they were just a story for him as well). it's really quite clever for a children's book in the way all the building blocks fit together, the length of the story is utilised nicely in characters being introduced and then getting cameos later on, nothing is left unanswered or untapped. there are some nice easter eggs for an adult reader to discover also, like the rescuer pterodactyl's name being deus ex machina because his job is to appear for the rescue on the very last second. no way in hell younger me understood that one.

➕ i liked that some of the minor characters who were frankly introduced as utterly unlikable turned out to be somewhat nice later (and vice versa, someone who was supposed to be all great turned out to be an offensive ass), actually. very morally grey and it gives "you can be one dumbass motherfucker and still do good things"

➖ now, stating the obvious… it is a children's book. therefore me in the present is not exactly the target audience, and i have to admit that i'm a boring adult in the sense that reading things for children is pretty jarring for me. firstly, i didn't like the way bluebear was so overpowered and perfect at everything he did, his every adventure was meeting something super rare, surviving super rare events, him being smarter than everyone else etc. secondly, i got tired VERY fast of the juvenile narrative style of endless lists of things that probably entertain a child but i was like "good lord just end me" every time. and the repetition in general. there's a loooot of repetition as a stylistic element in this book. including that bluebear just repeatedly comes across things and creatures that are really big. way too many way too enormous fucking things in this world, it got old. this also repeated twice the thing where a bad creature lured him in with an illusion and then attacked him. and the fucking troll, whatever it is in english, it kept coming back too many fucking times i wanted to shoot that little asshole's head off

➖ related to that previous thing, the humour was a complete miss to me 90% of the time. i did chuckle out loud a couple of times, but mostly nah. it's also a bit hard to tell what's supposed to be a joke and what isn't, in a book like this where basically everything is ridiculous?? everything is fucking stupid but at the same time you're supposed to take it seriously, this is the thing my adult brain can't get itself around, almost every single creature introduced in this book is described as ugly and annoying (only bluebear is perfectly fine and cute, apart from some puppies, apparently)

➖ this is a german book presumably for german children so i understand to an extent, but the worldbuilding is ridiculously europe-centric despite some (somewhat lazy tbh, occasionally low-key racist) attempts at having the rest of the world included at times. i was annoyed at the inconsistent use of languages, the fuck do you mean a martial arts combining flamenco and matadors is brazilian?? lmao. this is maybe the finnish translation's fault but there was a species named "rye moomins" and i was like nice, finland mentioned? no they were "celtic druids". WHAT

➖ for a book this creative, apparently the author couldn't imagine a female creature that doesn't exist just for a man to be with. seriously not a single female character in here just being a character. every single time bluebear is in a new place and meets new people who do stuff, they're all men.

➖ he's "captain bluebear" in the title but is never a captain in the book

⭐ score: 3 -- overall i had fun reading this, coming up with all sorts of ridiculous voices for the characters. but, on top of all those minuses, some of the lives felt too long for my liking (namely the sweet desert & atlantis parts, i think they together made up almost half of the 700 pages, or at least one third) so at times i was regretting my life choices. i'm too happy to be done with this to give it anything more than three

[misireads]

⭐ My scoring system explained

this is reference for myself. first and foremost

1 finished out of spite and/or because the book was super short. there won't be many of these because i don't hate myself this much

2- considered dropping but didn't; not dropping didn't feel worth it, a negative impression remained 2 considered dropping but didn't; meh, a whatever, mostly feel neutral 2+ considered dropping but didn't; some pros in there but not enough to actually like it 2½ considered dropping but didn't; likely had entertainment value but was ultimately just whatever

3- didn't consider dropping but it wasn't good either 3 basically a default score when i don't feel much anything either way or don't know whether i liked something or not 3+ alright, not bad 3½ alright, not bad; either there was something that clicked personally or entertainment value was fairly high

4- good; some things were meh, but overall captivating 4 good; in the neutral way. just good 4+ very good; i liked it 4½ very good; i REALLY liked it, but some con kept it from entering the fives

5- favourite; honestly the only books in here (on this blog) are the locked tomb so idk what to say, other than that there needs to be a ship for me to give something a five 5 favourite; screaming, yelling, squirming out of my chair etc

[misireads]

I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

the first-person monologue of a young woman who's thinking of breaking up with her boyfriend of a few months. she hems and haws, going back and forth about his pros and cons inside her head. to delay the decision-making further, she agrees to go visit his parents in the countryside. maybe it'll be pleasant! and all that. it's not pleasant; it's dreadful, his parents are strange and borderline scary, they live in a dark, old farmhouse. they start the drive home in a snowstorm at night. for some reason, the boyfriend insists on stopping to get dairy queen, then to go dispose of the empty cups at an old school in the woods. literally everything about the day is seriously off and keeps getting worse, and soon she's wishing she really had ended things already.

in the middle of this first-person narration, there are bits of dialogue between people talking about An Incident. it's violent, from the sound of it.

💭🚗🥤

➕ whaaaat. what a strange ass book (i seem to come across those lately). it's rather short, and there's something captivating about it from the start. originally i was hooked by the personal outrage of the boyfriend sounding alarmingly much like a palamedes (like, literally a line the girl says is "his sharp mind made his lankiness attractive" [or appealing, not sure which it was]) yet she's talking about wanting to break up with him because she's not really a match for his intelligence. but then it starts getting weird. just small things first, there's an impending sense of a slowly (surprisingly slowly, for such a short book) advancing trainwreck of some sort, but you can't tell what's really going to happen. she's receiving strange calls that are coming from her own number, and it's the same message every time, but she's not doing anything about it and the identity of the caller is just sort of ignored as the story progresses. jake the boyfriend keeps bringing up the strangest of philosophical topics to discuss with her. and then they get to the horror farm. everything is very unsettling without an explanation. i really enjoy this kind of vibe, it's one of my favourite types of horror!

➕ it's kinda amazing, it took me getting to the very end of the book to realise we are never given the name of the (supposed) main character. i never realised i even wanted one (i guess i didn't want one? i mean it's fitting since [spoiler] she never was a real person to begin with, and never really felt like one either)

➕ it was really cool how [spoiler] at the end it's revealed this book, written in first person, was actually a book within a book, essentially, or that there was a frame story of people reading this book that they found next to a body

➖ what i'm not so much about is that this got very inexplicably intense at the end, in a way i didn't really understand or like very much, basically the whole school sequence was kinda meh and didn't match my expectations that had mounted by then. the very end was clever and all but i had to go read a plot summary to understand what the ending really was about lol (typical me). this should probably be read twice, maybe even more times to really get the gist of it, and i don't have the patience for that.

⭐ score: 4- -- this was a bit tough to score, but in the end i went with the same that i gave empuzjon. a captivating book in a very weird way, i couldn't stop reading because i wanted to know where the weirdness was taking me.

[misireads]

Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews

[ physical book, read in english ]

set in near-ish future where literal waves of magic compete with "tech" and render anything modern and human-constructed useless, the story follows a young, snarky mercenary woman who wields a sword named slayer and takes no shit from anyone. she lives in atlanta and does all sorts of violent gigs killing supernatural monsters and something such. one day she discovers that her father figure, a cleric-kind of member of a local order for protecting people from all the bad shit running around, has been brutally murdered. she starts investigating this on her own, collecting clues around the city, going around talking to people and not-so-people. she becomes acquainted with a clan of local furries and fights vampires and other monsters with them. there's also a guy she sort-of dates. or more like he tries to date her.

🗡️🌃🦁

➕ i haven't read any urban fantasy for all i remember, and i rather liked this worldbuilding FWIW. the thought of there being random, chaotic waves of magic that make any technology malfunction and wrecks buildings and whatever is actually rather horrific. it's implied here that tech was still dominant a couple hundred years ago, so i assume that means our real modern times. i do wonder a little why people haven't in those 200 years come up with tech that works with magic (there seems to be some, like "feylantern" lamps of magic, but that's about it?) but whatever.

➕ the Order and the People mildly intrigued me

➕ now in all fairness, at first i was a bit excited about, uh, the first few pages, because i had just finished reading a buffy the vampire slayer AU fic and here comes a female protag who slays vampires with a sword named slayer

➖ i was about to walk in guns blazing complaining about all the things i disliked about this book, then learned that even the authors themselves dislike it and think it's a shit starter for a series, so now i feel kinda bad. but this is my blog so i'll do it regardless! here's a complete list of things i didn't like:

➖ kate is not a likeable protag to me, she's the definition of Ow The Edge and feels cold and distant while also simultaneously feeling too perfect of a character within her own universe. basically everyone likes her despite her not being nice to anyone, multiple men (if not almost all of them in the whole book, now that i think of it) want her romantically and sexually, she's already perfect at what she does at the beginning of the story, there's no story or character arch of any kind here. she's also the only female character in the book with any kind of significant role to speak of

➖ didn't like any of the other characters either. i'm extremely bored of this idea of a pack of furries i'm really really not into that kind of thing, curran is first described as a totally super fucking mysterious character who nobody ever meets and he immediately becomes some kind of boyfriend sidekick to kate who walks around the city like a normal dude. i thought derek would become her legit sidekick and the book got momentarily better at that point but then he left. i was mostly just intrigued by the necromancers (TLT brain strikes again)

➖ not the main villain though, that was uninteresting and lacked flavour on so many levels, or rather the main flavour was something foul because the setting of this book is that the bad guy is a predator who rapes and kills women. the fact that a story with a young attractive(apparently) female protag has a main villain who wants to fuck her is not only uncomfortable and tacky but also a fucking snore. i can read any crime novel if i want this plotline

➖ the pacing is insane, like this jumps into becoming a glossary of worldbuilding terminology on pages 1 and 2, and the majority of the book progresses like a point-and-click adventure game. kate gets a clue, kate walks to a place to talk to character x. this interaction gives kate a new clue. kate walks to a new place. kate talks to a new character. kate gets a new clue. kate walks to a new place. kate talks to a new character. kate gets a new clue. dry dry dry dry dry i wasn't aware i swallowed sandpaper this week

➖ these basic bitch ass names??? hate them. if i wanted to read about kates and nicks and dereks who live in america i wouldn't be reading fantasy

⭐ score: 2½ -- oi, i scored metsässä juoksee nainen as a three minus yesterday and that was a genius book compared to this, so this one cannot possibly start with a three. now, everyone and their grandmothers is praising how this is one of The Series Of All Time and gets like soooo superduperrrrr goooddd later on!!!! i'm so not interested in forcing myself to read something i don't like just because a danielle on goodreads gave it five stars. maybe one day in the future if i'm really so bored of finding new things to read, i'll get back to these fantasy series with part ones (and sassy female protags) i didn't like, such as this and throne of glass.

[misireads]

Metsässä juoksee nainen ("There's a woman running in the forest") by Elina Airio

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a dystopian take on the finnish society where social services have been turned into a business. a woman starts working with a new client of her company, a young mother struggling with two children who has some notable mental health problems and an apartment full of plants. there's evidence of the mother abusing her kindergarden-aged daughter and it's blatantly obvious that the structured 60-minute "care visits" are nowhere near the level of help the mother actually needs, yet the awkward social worker keeps pushing the pointless program on her that she knows won't do jack shit. and hates every second of it. except the plants. she likes the plants.

🪴🌳🍃

➕ what a weird-ass book /positive. it doesn't really have a plot and approx 50% of the entire narrative is vividly describing and listing all the plants in the apartment. this is a positive because it's refreshingly strange in the way that makes this an interesting, unique read. the use of language is utterly fascinating and the main reason i kept listening. the big thing here is that the young mother seems to have like schizophrenia-fuelled OCD or something?, she's obsessively thinking there's forest muck in her house and compulsively cleans (and then wrecks) the place and hits her children when she thinks they're covered in literal dirt and whatever. also thinks there's plants growing out of her own vagina and whatever. you can't always tell what's real and what's in her head because the plant hallucinations start affecting the social worker as well. it's not a horror book but there are elements of creeping horror in here for sure.

➕ short. very fast listen

➖ what a weird-ass book /negative. the embellished language mostly feels form-over-substance kind of poetic nonsense, like this author is more in love with her words than any story she's trying to convey with them. she's also clearly in love with naming as many house plants as she's able to remember. there's a point where you just don't need any more of those listed tbh and then the book somewhat starts repeating itself. some scenes are really fucking weird and simply unnecessary, like the social worker seems to be aroused during these visits to the mentally ill woman???? or the plants are sexualised?? i didn't really. understand what that was about.

➖ like the previous short audiobook i listened to, this also managed to drag like crazy and just sort of wallow in the same things over and over, and then abruptly ends with no real conclusion in sight. i'd have liked the mother's mental illness fleshed out a liiiittle more. this was left extremely vague about what is actually happening while detailing on the plant details like crazy. in a way i liked it... in a way i didn't. a fever dream of a book with a grim baseline for a story.

⭐ score: 3- -- yeaaahhh… a weird one. i'm a bit confused what i really thought about this tbh because on one hand it's a unique little gem. on the other, it's nonsense that i only finished because it's short

[misireads]

The Obsession by Jesse Q. Sutanto

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

a high school boy is grieving the death of the girl he loved when he has a chance meeting with another girl who looks exactly like his crush. he immediately decides to make this girl his own. the girl, in the meanwhile, is struggling in a domestic abuse situation perpetrated by her mother's new boyfriend and has very little trust in men. things start getting spicy when she accidentally kills the man one day. the boy finds out about it because he's set secret cameras in her house.

🖤🛑💣

➕ these bitches crazy. here we have a book that's not particularly clever or anything but man if it's not entertaining. at first i thought it would be your run-of-the-mill oo he's obsessive, he's going to stalk her, she's spooked out, whatever. then when the evil stepdad was introduced i wasn't so sure where this was going anymore. there were quite many twists and turns that i didn't see coming. i also liked that the girl, too, is fucking cooked. both go on and on with these raving inner monologues where they overthink and strategise every single thing in what seems like nanoseconds (and neither seems to realise their own respective mental problems) and it's gloriously entertaining. the narrators of the audiobook also sounded fittingly insane, the woman is like gasping for breath all the time

➕ i actually liked that this stayed very PG. it adds a layer of this particular gentlemanly chivalrous horridness to logan when he's like i'm SUCH a good guy, i'm NOT even trying to have sex with her because i am AN EXCELLENT MAN WHO WON'T TOUCH HER

➕ i liked the twist about an evil librarian

➖ the plot moves a bit slow. there's a lot of dillydallying around the same things, i feel. some repetition also. and then it just. ends, with not a very satisfactory conclusion

➖ the female characters are dumb ass bitches. the main girl's mother and best girlfriend in particular, they're comically unaware of her distress and don't address it, i mean the best friend turned out alright later but basically what happens is that her bestie goes on a first date with a guy neither knows, comes back royally fucked up and is avoiding talking about it, and what the bestie does is get angry with her because WHY ARE YOU NOT TELLING ME!!!!! I ANGY BECAUSE YOU IGNORE ME!!!! that was nonsense. clearly the best and most reasonable woman here is mendez (which is why delilah hates her)

➖ very minor thing but i thought it a huge missed opportunity to not have sophie the previous girl completely unaware of logan. like it would have enhanced his weirdness considerably if their entire relationship was also his delusion

⭐ score: 3½ -- i enjoyed this! listened to it very fast because i wanted to know what happens. not the case with all books as you can see from this blog

[misireads]

Koskinen ja siimamies ("Koskinen and the fishline man") by Seppo Jokinen

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

the first novel in a long-standing series about the local police force of the city of tampere, particularly detective sakari koskinen and his co-workers. they begin to investigate the murder case of a teenage girl who's found strangled with a fishing line under a bridge in hervanta. soon they discover that they're dealing with a serial killer who targets young women with short hair. in the meanwhile, the grieving father of the killed teenager has decided that her boyfriend is the killer and decides to bring her justice on his own by kidnapping the boy.

🎣🚓🔍

➕ i was pleasantly surprised by this, but it's also one of those cases of this just having been the right moment for me to be reading (listening to) this book. i had just finished two books i disliked, both kind of a bother to read, so this one in its simplicity and back-to-the-basics vibe was extremely welcome. very easy and pleasant to follow, doesn't require much thinking (but not the way hildur didn't require thinking. the intrigue is still there) the story isn't anything special but it's not boring either. the characters are sympathetic and funny and just very finnish, it's not all hardboiled and tells about the characters' mundane everyday life stuff as well (but not on the plot's expense, again which hildur did). all in all this book was like a warm hug in the form of a normal finnish detective investigation story. the audiobook's reader also has a very pleasant voice so that kept me captivated early on.

➖ i felt like there was no real closure for the already loose story. it ends very suddenly. the culprit's motive basically [spoiler] comes down to mental illness which is. yeah. the book is from the 90s though and gives some grace to the murderer so it's not all horrible.

➖ tampere 🤮 (jk)

⭐ score: 3+ -- hmm, it was a decent little police story. i'm probably not going to start reading the koskinen series now, but who knows.

[misireads]

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

[ physical book, read in english ]

on an alternative historical timeline where the axis powers won the second world war, america has been divided between nazi germans and the imperial japanese who are the higher class and pretty much run the society. the narrative revolves around a few central characters, such as an american man running a shop for american goods with historical value that are highly sought after by the japanese, and another man who quits his factory job to start making hand-made jewellery to sell to said merchant. a swedish man who's actually a spy is letting some japanese officials in on a german plot to blow up japan. and the jewellery-making man's ex-wife goes on a roadtrip with a random italian man, to go meet the author of a novel that's all the rage at the moment, about an alternative history where the allies instead win the world war.

📖💍🇺🇸

➕ it's a rather short book, about 250 pages, yet packs a vivid world full of details that go beyond what's actually on the pages. that's impressive in such a limited space imo.

➕ and indeed it being short is the biggest plus, otherwise i wouldn't have bothered

➕ technically, i found intriguing the concept of an alt history novel where, within this story, there's an alt history novel that tells the real history (it's not the real-real one tho), but….

➖ when you read a book, you usually want to have some reason to be reading it. and while reading this, 99% of the scenes had me wondering "why am i reading this and why should i care about any of these words that i'm reading." this book is mostly just pseudo-intellectual nonsense where things happen without consequence and i hated every single thing about how it's written. where do i even start with everything i hated about this. it's two and a half hundred pages of words that say pretty much nothing. there's a story somewhere in there but it's extremely thin and hardly goes anywhere because the main point of the book is some philosophical yadda yadda that you're supposed to go OOOH and AAAH at and i was like, the fuck is this? this means nothing. you've just put a few thousand words of nonsense next to each other and pretend it means something because it's Oh So Deep, Look At All These Words, Deep Message Wow. and i'm like, please just say a single sensical sentence please. this doesn't mean anything. every single little action and movement and just thought is expressed in an extremely convoluted way of using a maximum amount of empty words to say one thing. there's an entire chapter where essentially all that happens is a japanese man is persuaded by the american merchant to buy a piece of hand-made jewellery. he sits on a bench waiting for it to tell him the meaning of life. and that's pretty much it. and this is a chapter of probably 10+ pages because there are just so many nonsense words telling nothing at all, not advancing anything in a story, well to begin with there hardly is a story here to tell

➖ i don't know if this is just the author's way of writing (since he has an enormous catalogue) but what the fuck is even this grammar. i was wondering throughout the book if it's trying to imitate japanese grammar, maybe implying that the characters speak japanese, but even the germans speak like this to each other so probably not. i absolutely hated this clipped nonsense lingo that often makes the sentences just lists of things. it's jarring af to read.

➖ why do you write a book about people from all these different nations, japan, germany, sweden, italy, and give them english names. like very pointedly america is the inferior nation here, and you give them all english names. there's a swedish man named "baynes"(?!) and a japanese couple named betty and paul, why??? uuhh how about giving the guy posing as a swede a, i don't know, swedish name????????????????? the actual japanese names that are in here are also nonsense and not something you'd see as real japanese people's names. i have no idea if this is intentional or this author is a fucking racist buffoon who had no idea what he was even writing about

➖ nobody acts or speaks like normal people in this book?? seriously i don't understand anything. what's going on. why does everyone believe in chinese astrology where you toss sticks around and take it so fucking seriously like it's the law of the universe. why is a fictional novel such an issue in this world. this is only an alt history where the result of WWII was different AND it's only been less than two decades since the war, yes? not like, art and culture and literature of all kinds has been wiped out in the entire world??? surely they know what fiction is??? that people uhhh have imagination, creativity??? that the entire history of mankind is already full of novels where people come up with alternative versions for what has happened??? seriously please explain to me what the fuck any of this was, i understood that nazis have banned fiction in the parts they occupy but clearly it's still a thing in the rest of the world so what the fuck. it's like everyone has a five-year-old's child's brain in this story and doesn't comprehend anything that's not put directly in front of them

➖ and just the worldbuilding of this is crazy (and lazy!) and i don't understand the world the author has constructed here. you have nazis and japan somehow ruling the world, and by the entire world it mostly just means the places the author felt like mentioning and everything else is just kind of shrugged off, africa has been blown up in its entirety somehow so there's no need to deal with any non-whites or non-asians in the book. it's all so implausible and crazy and i didn't like any of it because it's such a stretch. this also wiped both of my ethnicities entirely, reducing slavs to russia and coming up with a narrative of slavs being (part of) the bottom of the barrel of the human race, uhh thanks?? like there's no nuance to this whatsoever. all the nuance is poured into philosophical gibberish and directed away from any believable worldbuilding

➖ why is this called sci-fi? there's no science here whatsoever. we get mentions of space travel somehow being way more advanced than in reality (how, without the soviets and NASA, well who knows because this book is not interested in telling us!) but there's nothing whatsoever about what the science behind anything is because it's more important to let us know someone again takes out the i ching for the umpteenth time. i refuse to tag this as sci-fi.

⭐ score: 2- -- congrats for joining the rare one star club in my goodreads. the reason i even read this in the first place was that this was on a fantasy recommendation list as an example of "alternative history fantasy". this is perhaps the most boorish possible example you could give me of alt history fantasy. i'm more interested in reading stories than reading poetic philosophy when i pick up a "fantasy novel". all these five stars reviews that claim this book changed their lives or whatever, good for them! but also you're all pretentious cucks, come on. i sure hope the rest of my fantasy recommendation list is actual fantasy

[misireads]

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

set in the tumultuous early years of nigeria's independence, the story spans a decade with three rotating narrators. the first narrator is a young igbo boy from the countryside who moves in to become the servant of a wealthy university teacher and political activist, and the boy quickly adapts to the new lifestyle and starts absorbing knowledge of various subjects and reading his master's books. the second narrator is the university teacher's igbo girlfriend (and later wife) and a member of an influencial upper-class family who moves in with the two. the third narrator is the wife's sister's british boyfriend who's interested in local culture and history and aspires to write a book about them.

the first half of the decade mostly consists of the characters' personal relationship drama and some clash between traditional customs and superstition vs modern city life and academics. the second half dives deep into the violence that the igbos faced from other nigerian tribes, and the creation of the independent nation of biafra and the horrors of the civil war that followed, as well as all three characters' unwavering faith in biafra's eventual triumph and freedom.

🌅🪖🇳🇬

➕ so i was entirely clueless about biafra before i read this. the beauty of going in without any foreknowledge of a book is that you have no idea what you're about to learn. this was above else an informative experience about a time and a place i knew nothing about. i learned a lot about not only nigerian history and the complexities of the society but also geography and the igbo language!

➕ i liked the rotating narrators and how this also jumped back and forth between the early and later 60's in turns. it really created a sense of time passing and you grow sympathetic with all the characters that come and go with time.

➖ it's not really a pleasant book. there's a lot of violence and the sort of raw realness that makes you wonder how humans are able to do these things to each other. i've read several novels like this in addition to listening to history podcasts about dictators and shit (and, you know, i'm half ukrainian so.) but it never really gets any more understandable. this was a pretty pointed example also of the effect that propaganda (sometimes baseless such) can have on people.

➖ the drama outside the war stuff is your run-of-the-mill kind of hets cheating on each other and such, it was totally secondary imo. and ugwu the servant boy has some normalised misogyny and questionable behaviour that leaves you feeling a bit icky, but he does recognise his own wrongdoings afterwards. to an extent at least. the best character was kainene and [spoiler] she's the only one of the main cast who gets a bad end so i didn't like that very much

⭐ score: 3½ -- with a baseline of 3 for these sort of books, this was a quick and captivating read that rarely bored me. another "white girl learns about other cultures" kind of vibe here lmao bear with me. did you know biafra's national anthem used the finlandia hymn as its melody?! what

[misireads]

Empuzjon (The Empusium) by Olga Tokarczuk

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a polish engineering student travels west to receive treatment for tuberculosis in a health resort in early 1900s. he lives in a men-only guesthouse and listens to the other guests' longwinded conversations and debates all day long, the topics mostly circling around politics, philosophy, and supremely misogynistic takes on women. he befriends one of the less argumentative (and more sick) guests who also happens to be gay. the main character is rather dainty himself, as well as socially anxious from having lived all his life controlled by his cruel father.

from the other men, the main character hears superstitious tales about women who were banished into the mountainous woods years ago and still haunt the place, as well as stories about one person dying in the woods every year around november, his body found torn violently to pieces. all the while he keeps hearing strange noises coming from the attic above his room, and the guests keep jugging down a strange liquour made of shrooms.

🦠⛰️🍷

➕ what a book! that was a wild experience. i knew not to expect very conventional horror (because this was recommended by a friend who said so), but i'd call this a horror novel all the same. the horror comes from the atmosphere, the constant ominous mood and the feeling of something being a bit amiss, something lurking in the shadows in the wilderness, and all the other guests and their conversations being rather strange. the true horror of course is the misogynistic horseshit that the men keep confidently spouting because it's all based on reality

➕ i knew i'd love the way this is written the moment i read the first sentence on the first page: it starts with (my freeform translation from finnish) "Now the scenery is obstructed by the clouds of steam from the train." i know i'm gonna love a book when the very first sentence starts with the word "now". also the way the main guys as a group are described for the first time by introducing what their feet and shoes look under a table. it's brilliant.

➕ the occasional use of "we" in the narration is unique, and at first i thought it was just a gimmick to break the fourth wall and make the story seem like we, the readers, are watching it through a lense, for a cool little added effect… well, (spoiler) turns out there's an actual reason for this PoV, and also for why it comes and goes instead of being a consistent thing. because women just come and go in this narrative

➕ mieczysław! (spoiler) at first i was like, is he gay? is he gay? then i was like, oh we got an ace king here yessss! AND then turns out not just that, but an intersex king?! who, at the end of the novel, puts on the dress of a dead woman and fucks off from the health resort. wow! my mind was blown a little

➕ this made me so cultured about europe, the historical borders of countries from this era are kinda fuzzy to me. the main character is said to be from "lemberg", and for a good long while i was like, that's a town in poland? that's a very german name for a polish town but well, maybe it's next to germany somewhere. well, turns out that's the german name of lviv actually! in ukraine in other words! that's crazy

➖ now, i didn't rate this more than three stars on goodreads and i'm having a bit of a hard time articulating why to myself, but it's like, a vibes thing. this was interesting, it's well written, it's thought-provoking… but it's not really the kind of book that particularly excites me. it was more interesting than likable per se for me. nothing wrong with that, but my personal scoring system is just such. the pace of the story is really really slow, and the conversations between the male characters drag and go on tangents i could have lived without. i felt no sense of culmination or reward from reading it all, but apparently it's a reference to thomas mann's der zauberberg, actually this whole novel is a reference to it but i'd never heard of it before so that was obviously lost on me, so. i can appreciate that retrospectively but while reading it gave me nothing

➖ i'll be the simpleton that i am and admit i didn't fully understand what happened at the end. and there were some things that i just felt didn't get any closure and it bothered me. not sure what the significance of them jugging down schwärmerei was either

➖ kinda just wanted all the cishet men to die tbh. no matter how excellently it works within the narrative, i hated reading about these arrogant assholes

⭐ score: 4- -- a bit on the fence about whether this is a 3½ or a 4-, but i decided on the latter when i looked at other books i've scored so on this blog, the vibe is pretty much the same. i'll end this with a totally fucking raw quote from the doctor character (my translation again): "Once a person considers themselves excellent and thinks they've found their fulfillment, they should kill themselves"