kingofspain93's reviews
238 reviews

a very sweet little rabbit gets ready for bed! my Gàidhlig is too poor to really grasp the finer points, but there is some good vocab in here (like aodach-oidhche for pajamas!) and the overall style is charming. 

a cute little shapes book with great colors and very funny fish drawings. triangle shark is a particular favorite. best of all there is a built-in opportunity to pepper your baby with kisses and go “pòg pòg pòg!”

this is an amazing introduction to managing finances. Sethi’s style is really brusque and openly confrontational, which I think actually lends itself incredibly well to a taboo topic like money. he is acutely aware that talking about savings, investing, etc. is hard and (above all) emotional. despite his vast knowledge and his offhand tone he is never cruel and always supportive of people who are actually working hard to learn and grow. and he still finds it in his heart to hate stupid people, which is refreshing.

while the tone is a striking feature of this book which will make it way more accessible if you’re willing to be a little humbled, the content is also phenomenal. it makes retiring feel feasible! it makes saving money gradually over time sexy! it is all about playing it smart and safe, and most importantly setting up your finances to the point where you hardly need to touch them! I recommend this to anyone who is scared of talking/thinking about money (like I used to be). it is so so doable and helpful.

literally every page makes me want to squeal, the dìneasair beag is always making SUCH a cute (sometimes mischievous) face. she’s a little sweetie! a very good bathtime book with some good onomatopoeia (“splois, splais, splios!”) 

Beautiful illustrations of a sleepy little bear and her parent. When she is yawning it is so cute! The Gàidhlig translation is well-done. Perfect bedtime vibes.

it turns out that Clarke’s excellent film is true to the play. though I suspect that Gelber was as committed to pure shock value as Clarke, both pieces of media deal well with the sorrow of failing to make art about real experience, an experience that is both more banal and more nuanced than the artistic product. I don’t find addiction particularly interesting (Clarke explicitly did not, too) but it does give these provocateurs material to work with and they both retained a surprising and welcome amount of social consciousness. Clarke wisely ditches the play conceit and cuts the number of interlopers to two, but Gelber’s play necessarily bothers the audience by including plants and making the whole auditorium the stage. at times it is too lofty but mostly it is interesting and a little tender. this is like the L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat of plays for how much it scared audiences into thinking it was real lol. 

I realized I only knew the disney version of this story and nothing about the original source material. I assumed it was an old anonymous folk tale and was pleasantly surprised to learn that it belongs to the feminist literary tradition of the French fairy tale. 

(I did not know this but the term “fairy tale” was coined in French (“conte de fée”) by Madame D’aulnoy in the 1690s! that’s not from this book, it’s just an interesting peripheral fact I learned while reading about the genre online.)

The fact of Beauty and the Beast being a novel means that, in addition to the fairy tale logic common to folklore, there are slightly more in-depth explanations behind characters, their motivations, and the larger world of the story. In this way the author is much more present on the page than in, say, orally collected folklore where there is an air (however unrealistic) of authorial non-intervention. Because of this it is possible to draw conclusions about de Villeneuve’s values and interests in addition to the general ethics of her class and times which is a compelling feminist exercise.

Frankly the story is captivating and beautifully told. the Beast suffers from both imposed hideousness AND imposed stupidity which makes for a more interesting narrative. The fact that he is truly cursed and not just a Nice Guy that Beauty has to clean up raises the stakes. There are also many many exciting flourishes and details, both in characterization and in world-building, that add unexpected depth. This is an enduring work and not just a curiosity.

Wolfgang has an obvious level of dedication to the source material and the history of this novel and not the least of her contributions to literature is to clearly trace the lineage of this story from its original publication and through all its bastardized translations and editions to the modern day. It turns out that until Wolfgang’s translation was published it was almost impossible to read an unabridged version of Beauty and the Beast in English! she clearly loves what she does and it shines through; she’s produced the definitive English-language edition.

this belongs in the same sinister literary corner as The Sundial or Picnic at Hanging Rock. while it tends to stray closer to Jackson’s sense of the macabre it has none of her insufferable whiny bitterness, and though it treats its central phenomena coolly it doesn’t have the universal mystery of Davis’ book. they’re kin, each showing sorrow, cruelty, and human relationships in slightly different qualities of light. Comyns is smart and interesting. she reads like a feminist. the girlies are always telling stories about mass hysteria; what’s up with that?

I read this alongside Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich and it was interesting to have the contrast as they have different investing styles. While Kaur’s book does a much better job of defining the dense terminology surrounding investing, Sethi's is less ideologically muddled. Kaur attempts to caution against active fund management, day trading, risky investments like crypto, etc. but her approach is too even-handed. I could see that she might be trying to provide a resource for people who are going to make risky decisions no matter what as well as the more cautious investor. My concern is that the total novice (the target audience of this book) is not going to catch that nuance and will walk away thinking that day trading is a good idea.

Still, as someone who is already prone to be risk-averse in investing, I appreciated Kaur's ability to demystify the market. I'm curious about all of it, even knowing that I will not engage with most of it. I think pairing this with a more direct/opinionated book like Sethi's (he really hates active management and probably will not be teaching me about the ins and outs of day trading lol) makes for a well-rounded experience. 

unfortunately this translation is terrible, carried out as it is by a petit-bourgeois american pig with no class consciousness. Segall, in attempting to downplay the lower class provenance of these stories and simultaneously sanding down their rough edges, completely misses the folklorical imperative that I suspect Ispirescu had in mind. the resulting fairy tales are not unreadable; Youth Without Age and Life Without Death even brought me close to tears. their strengths shine through, but only in spite of the insipid language used. I expected this from an American translating Eastern European writing. Ispirescu has enough cultural capital that I hope I can find a translation of his work into English by a Romanian. we owe a massive debt to archivists like Ispirescu, John Campbell, and countless others who recognized what was being lost when the stories of the people were no longer valued.

here is the overview that Segall gives of the publication history of the included stories:

As early as 1862, Ispirescu published a few popular tales in the Țăranul Român (the Roumanian Peasant). These he collected in the same year in a small brochure under the title Basme și Poveștĭ Populare (Popular Tales and Stories). In 1872, 1874, and 1876 there appeared, in three instalments, his well-known collection Legende saŭ Basmele Românilor, which in 1882 and then again in 1892 were issued by him in one volume. These last two, however, do not contain all the tales of the earlier editions. It is from the 1892 edition of the Legende saŭ Basmele Românilor that the tales here rendered into English have been taken.

and here are the seven stories collected in this volume:

All Romanian spelling (including accents) are recreated directly from Segall’s collection and may contain errors that originate with him.