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Abandoned books roundup
A few more abandoned books.
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
Unusual setting for a fantasy novel (I don't think I'd read any set in an actual arab country before, though I've read several since trying this) but I realized I was reading entirely for the setting and wincing my way through putting up with the characters. So much teenaged shouting and pouting, it might as well have been anime. Meh.
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
So this is actually really compelling. It's a bunch of oral histories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are stark contrasts here – there are the people who loved the union and whose lives and identities were shattered by its collapse. The profundity of the wound they suffered is extraordinary to read about; they didn't lose a nation, they lost an entire way of being. And then there are the others whose experience of the union was one of violence and terrible deprivation. Their memories are even more complicated. So basically, no one has a happy story to tell here. Content notes for antisemitism, death, torture, mass killing, etc. So yeah, this is a truly compelling book, but I lost my place somewhere in the middle – smack dab in a recollection of a mass execution – and I think I'm good.
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
Unusual setting for a fantasy novel (I don't think I'd read any set in an actual arab country before, though I've read several since trying this) but I realized I was reading entirely for the setting and wincing my way through putting up with the characters. So much teenaged shouting and pouting, it might as well have been anime. Meh.
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
So this is actually really compelling. It's a bunch of oral histories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are stark contrasts here – there are the people who loved the union and whose lives and identities were shattered by its collapse. The profundity of the wound they suffered is extraordinary to read about; they didn't lose a nation, they lost an entire way of being. And then there are the others whose experience of the union was one of violence and terrible deprivation. Their memories are even more complicated. So basically, no one has a happy story to tell here. Content notes for antisemitism, death, torture, mass killing, etc. So yeah, this is a truly compelling book, but I lost my place somewhere in the middle – smack dab in a recollection of a mass execution – and I think I'm good.