nere's reviews
82 reviews

i am admittedly not one for memoirs. especially celebrity memoirs where people take delight in talking about their lives and expecting others to find it fascinating by virtue of their fame and ego. this, however, is not like that. it’s honest and an incredibly heart-wrenching account of her life. jennette is an enticingly meticulous writer and has such an incredible ability to engross you in anything she writes. many content warnings for this one, make sure to brief yourself before diving into this if necessary. looking forward to other things she may write in the future, fact or fiction. 

i hate this book cover. detest it utterly. my first order of business if i were to obtain a physical copy would be to rip it off and give it that “so used the cover fell off” look. i hate the trend of colorful silhouetted romance covers. it tells me approximately 0 about what the book is actually about. 

in all honesty, i loved this book to pieces. i was ready to give up on the romance genre since so many people preached about this one and that and i would consistently pick them up only to put them back down again. i accepted the fact that the contemporary romance genre just wasn’t for me and i could find joy scratching that itch through other genre books and fanfiction—but as is often the case, i just hadn’t found the right book yet. 

Book Lovers opens with a rather tongue-in-cheek, meta, and very-aware-of-it’s-genre passage—owed to our main protagonist, Nora, who is working as a literary agent in the publishing industry. it’s a gimmick you’d think would get tired quickly, but it works like boiling a frog slowly since at first you are with Nora eye-to-eye and sure-footed, and in the next moment the fourth wall gets rebuilt and you’re nothing but a powerless observer on the other side. it, like many other books of its genre, falls into many traps of cheesiness and clichés, but it remains just charming enough throughout that you forgive it. It's laugh-out-loud and funny, the tension is immaculate and despite the gripes of genre expectation, it’s HONEST. 

moral of the story. truly. for the love of god and i mean this you have never heard this before in your life: NEVER judge a book by its cover. 

Thursday, September 8, 2022 (Reread)

hamlet is my best friend actually

Saturday, August 13, 2022 (Reread)

Ari and Dante are two Mexican-American boys navigating teenage-hood. It’s a quiet simmering novel. To pick this up means you’re peering into the mind of a boy in the suburbs, a stream of consciousness of sorts. And it is equal parts introspective, light-hearted, elusive, and devastating. Mind you, not devastating in all the ways queer people are all too familiar with. It’s devastating because it sees you, it understands you, and it aches because it’s nothing you’ve ever felt before. At least, that’s the only way I can rationalize why I end up in snot-filled disgusting tears every time I finally finish this book. Its chapters are short and its prose is quip to match. 

Ari is as insular and alone and freedom-seeking as one constantly is in the gripes of young adulthood. It’s one of the few novels I feel capture this feeling so perfectly. The anguished and flighty hormonal mood swings, mixed in with the specific flavor of repression you experience as a gay teenager. I’m admittedly wary of the sequel since nothing I feel can rival this. Nonetheless, its existence doesn’t change the fact that I’ll always have this warm little moment with Ari and Dante to go back to whenever I so choose. I love it I love it I love it I cherish it. To read this is to peer into my soul just a little bit—it's a looking glass. It reminds me to be kind to what I see. 

Monday, August 1, 2022 (reread)

Summary & a note on translation

Solaris is as much psychological horror as it is science fiction and an introspective look at human space colonization. It’s claustrophobic, engrossing, and poetic. I can see why many might trifle or even outright dislike this book if it’s picked up with the wrong expectations. Full disclosure, despite this being science fiction this is not an explosive, action-packed, robot-fighting novel brought to an earth-shattering climax. This is a simmering slow-burn of a thing, that starts slow and only gets slower. (Despite this, I still cling to every word.)

Kris Kelvin is a psychologist who lands on the fictional planet of Solaris from Earth. He arrives to a sparse crew and an eerie situation—the mystery of which the reader, as well as Kelvin, are left to uncover in tandem. I won’t say much else since I feel it is better to discover it on your own.

Translations, I think, are only as good as their translators and unfortunately, the only English translation that is widely available for Solaris at the moment was translated from Polish to French and then English. As you can imagine, it results in a very stunted work losing much of the poeticism and linguistic intent of the original. If you can manage to get your hands on it, I highly suggest the only other English translation in existence currently: Solaris by Stanisław Lem, translated by Bill Johnston (2011). It’s a direct-to-English translation and though I don’t know a lick of Polish, in the brief comparison I did between the French translation and the Johnston one, the difference is stark. And for the better.

“Much is lost when a book is re-translated from an intermediary translation into English, but I’m shocked at the number of places where text was omitted, added, or changed in the 1970 version,” said Johnston. “Lem’s characteristic semi-philosophical, semi-technical language is also capable of flights of poetic fancy and brilliant linguistic creativity, for example in the names of the structures that arise on the surface of Solaris. I believe this new translation restores Lem’s original meaning to his seminal work.” (source: The Guardian)
 

Friday, July 15, 2022 (reread)

Lolita or Lola or Dolores Haze, she (this novel), is a stream of consciousness, a confessional, and a deluge of thought and metaphor from our protagonist H.H., Humbert Humbert. Though the subject matter Nobakov is writing about is horrendous, every line of it is poetry. And it’s perhaps because of that dissonance that the experience of the book is heightened.
 
I had read (and promptly didn’t finish) this book for school. And although I had heard some of these passages several times before, there’s something about the lyricism of the writing that makes it very hard to get tired of. Nobakov’s sparse use of paragraph breaks makes this a strain on the eyes, but the experience of it in any other format affects the rhythm of the thing I think.
 
I don’t think I need to say it. Every content warning under the sun. This isn’t exactly a light beach read. But it’s undoubtedly a masterpiece that I feel the need to pick apart with my teeth and scope the spaces between the words on the page. It was part of the reason why I was perfectly fine reading some passages thrice over for assignments. Each reading is as unique as if it were the first. And this certainly won’t be my last.

Reading a book that got a Pulitzer and rating it anything other than 5 stars feels illegal somehow. Sorry, Columbia University.