August 2020 Wrap Up

this entire thing was really difficult to read but the whole time i was really glad that she was telling her story i'm glad that she has an outlet to tell her story and i think it's really important to put out there because these types of love stories aren't love stories they are stories of abuse but at the same time i really didn't like the execution of her storytelling in this book

why even have a pact like that be a part of the storyline if the main character isn't even going to make an attempt to stick to it she throws it out immediately she doesn't even try so that plus the insta love that was going on had me pretty mentally checked out from this book from very early on

i thought this was fantastic i thought the way the character of cersei developed throughout the book was so interesting i thought it was paced beautifully and i thought all of the characters not just cersei were extremely nuanced and complex

this is a book that's ostensibly all about whales but in execution it goes far beyond that since it looks at so many sides of the connection between the human world and the animal world

that section is downright terrifying i had no idea that horror and memoir could intersect but they do in this case and yet at the same time this book is so beautiful i don't know how she did this is her first book i found it to be so impressive it's definitely memorable i think it's still giving me nightmares but i highly recommend it

this whole book is nothing but an exercise in emotional manipulation and this world that the author created is nothing but a very boring vehicle to tell the story of a character who's tortured and just wants to be free the ending is a load of crap as well and this book is just hot or should i say globally warmed garbage

a much better memoir that i read during the month of august was actually a new august release it was called inferno by catherine cho

i thought the penelope ad by margaret atwood was a complete dud this book is extremely short and i still couldn't finish it i had to dnf it this book feels like it was written for high schoolers that is not me being facetious it is so simplistic in its language and it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer

i tend to be a pretty laid-back person but once or twice a year there is a book that just makes my blood boil last year it was the secrets we kept by laura prescott

i do think she could have drawn the lines between those two things a little bit thicker made them a little bit more explicit for the audience the way it is right now it's very subtle i think those connections are very good very important very interesting but i think they could have been drawn out a little bit more so that more people will notice what she's trying to do there but beyond that small gripe i thought this was great it's definitely a very moving memoir

it was just a mess by that point the fish no longer had the starring role and she had turned this story into an international adventure story but a boring one it was just a really underwhelming read

this was really more of a long essay than it was a formal book but i still found it really interesting it definitely made things clearer for me no less terrifying but definitely more understandable i thought the parts about social media and how misinformation spreads were particularly important

it is part taxonomy part biography and part memoir it sounds so odd but i found it to be incredible and i highly suspect it's going to be my favorite nonfiction book of the year

i also read wonder girl by don van nada jr which is a sports biography all about mildred babe dedrickson zaharias who is definitely not the most famous babe to ever grace sports but who can probably be considered one of the greatest female athletes of all time