iseefeelings's reviews
201 reviews

"I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong.
The rules, they were already inside us." [120]
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"They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves." [125]
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"I'm broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.
[...]
Into - yes, that's more like it. As in, Now I'm broken into." [167]
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"Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away - even if what I want most is to tell you everything.
It's in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do - how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you." [171]

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"All this time I told myself we were born from war - but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
  Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it." [231]
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What should you do with somebody's field of memory that slowly clings to your heart and shakes yours? 

The narrator - Little Dog - roams in the past and present in which stories of three generations intertwine. Reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous invokes my turbulence in the past, how an act of endurance is (on some level) so familiar to children growing up in complex family backgrounds. The author’s marginalised identity resonates with my frustration – often rooted in the multicultural childhood I grew up with and in passive discrimination of race and social class since I moved to a new country. 

 Even when reading in a foreign language other than my mother tongue doesn't make the violence motif in the Vietnam War easier to indulge. Vuong scattered a few scenes of brutality which are essential to bringing out the narrator's family history yet they were all so powerful. Indeed, I had a hard time flipping through the scene of a group of men slicing the brain of a live macaque monkey.

Trauma. Sex. Death. Violence. Love. Ocean Vuong describes them masterly and his words enhanced one’s personal experiences and filled all the gaps in between — perpetually adding to one’s mind a whole picture like no other. I haven’t read much fiction in the last few years and this book pulls me back to the fascination of reading fiction: how it extends beyond your account and you live more than one life for a moment through imagination and the craft of writing. Line by line, the words appear lyrically and elliptically in Ocean Vuong's prose poem. The originality in Vuong's work is astonishing, or as a writer on Los Angeles Times put it, "an outpouring of emotion". It has the momentum of a good epistolary novel and the intimacy of a true letter which the readers only have the privilege to know in hindsight.

Towards the end of the book, there is a moment when a white man (the narrator's grandfather) uttering broken words to say goodbye to his first love - the narrator’s grandmother - my heart sank and I held my tears. I don’t know why I had to hold it in, though. It’s too real.

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through The World’s Strangest Brains reveals insight into neurological aspects of some extraordinary cases: people living in the realms of consciousness and unconsciousness due to the unique way their brain functions. Each story is adeptly set out by Helen Thomson with both empathy and knowledge. She knows how to engage in conversation and put them on paper as if I was there with the people she spoke with.

By examining these extraordinary cases, the book is a reminder that our abilities to feel things and remember and understand the world should never be taken for granted. We are, after all, living in a ‘reality that is “merely a controlled hallucination, reined in by our senses”.  

Reading this book after Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia is a good thing: I found Thomson’s tribute to the work of Sacks in many chapters (whose writing has inspired her). This book is cross-referenced to a few renowned cases in Sacks's books which help to expand what I learnt in neurology.

Of the many debut books I read so far, I think this work by Thomson is the most intriguing and one of the best ones I have read this year. 

*

This book is rather an excessive amount of storytelling than extensive research. It requires a good foundation in both music and psychology to be well understood and I, therefore, feel like I need to re-read it later on to have a better insight. One thing that is worths noting is that most of the music genres mentioned in the book are instrumental and classical music.

*

I only read this book as a part of my reading challenge (books about music) but I was quite pleased with this choice I made out of the music section in my local library. 

My favourite chapter must be In the Moment: Music and Amnesia which is the story about Clive Wearing with his half-a-minute memory span and the unconditional love of Deborah Wearing to him. 

*

A few things I jotted down in my reading journal:

*

Slow-paced yet a fine read. The plot development is quite predictable but I believe that only L.M.Montgomery has the skill to transform a plain story into a beautifully written one. For example, how Maud wrote about a clock in Valancy's 'blue castle':

 With a character rebelling against her family and daring to embark on a striking chapter of her life, this book seems to be the most feminist work of Maud to me. 

There is a page (159, to be specific) which the author devotes to her love of nature. She describes its remarkable beauty from October to November, each painted a perfect picture in words. The dreamy October scenery penned by Maud is my favourite. This book was set entirely in Muskoka and even though living in the region, I still feel awe-struck to read the lines in which all the simple things are turned into a marvellous scene. There are little moments easy to ignore but she views them in their full glory:

Despite my praise for the book, the Bantam Books edition has many typing errors that ruin the experience. I may trade it for another edition one day. 

If you're too familiar with Virginia Woolf's life and work, this book might not shed any new light except giving you a lavish amount of illustrations and photographs. In my view, this book is interesting if you want to know about Virginia Woolf's milieu or first encounter a biography of this influential writer. I favour Mary Ann Caws's insightful commentary rather than other short biographies with dull text. This thin book also evoked my interest in other members of Bloomsbury Circle, along with Angelica Bell, whose affair with David (Bunny) Garnett is weirdly fascinating. Mary Ann Caws also carefully selected some good excerpts from Woolf's diary. What this book lacks is an extensive insight into Woolf's writing and her journey as a writer, which I do think that you can find in many other publications as further reading.

 

 "Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void.
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel." / p.65
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"She tried to gasp, but a paper doll can't gasp. She thought she was trying to think, but her flattened-out mind was as unable to function as her lungs; her thoughts were squashed along with the rest of her. Her heart tried to beat; it gave a knifelike, sidewise movement, but it could not expand." / p.90
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"We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal." / p.205
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As much as I enjoyed the science fiction materials in A Wrinkle in Time, the agnostic part in me cannot relate on the spiritual level with some dialogues in the book. The paperback edition has a stunning illustration and a lovely design, which is all enough for me!

All the main characters - Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin O'Keefe are full of flaws and weaknesses and yet so human, so real. As opposed to many reviewers, I do like Madeleine L'Engle's writing: she knows how to elaborate on things we might never see and simplify things that are too complicated for us - as beings - to understand. Although the book is quick-paced with many characters being introduced, it didn't overwhelm the readers (still, there were a few times I have to jump back a few pages to surely know that I didn't miss a detail but I'd blame it for my habit of reading slow-paced books).

I'd continue with the second book in the series to see if I would drop it or finish the trilogy.