monkey-network

[thedustyshehnai]

I wish I could describe how this book made me feel. It’s almost astronomical, the array of emotions and feelings that emerged straight from the soul as I flipped each page. The detail, the love, the uncertainty - to describe it with the fewest words, it’s magnificently unpredictable.

The characters, each one of them, inscribed something deep within my spirit. The love and bonding between Marie-Laure and her father, Etienne and his demons, and Werner and his sister, Frederick and his birds, and his powerful resentment towards something wrong - his power. Madam Manec with her peach jams and the big pot where she carried all the love. The big museum with its exhibits, all those herbarium sheets and fossils, and the curse of a diamond that was equivalent to eight Eiffel Towers that should've been thrown out into the deep trenches of the oceans long ago, but only an insane would throw eight Eiffel Towers into the unknown. Papa, with his crafty hands, built the whole of Paris with his bare hands. Marie-Laure is so unaware of what everything around her looks like, yet she hears the very minor details. Jutta, the little girl who had a mind of her own, who had words of her own, and her elder brother, who was nothing by himself, who really lived under the shadows of others, had a heart so weak to resent, too weak to fight, that the heart decided to do what everyone else was doing - a heart scared of rebellion. Frau Elena served the abandoned children till her very last breath, showering those nameless breathing corpses with so much love. Von Rumpel and his war - his war with the world, his quest to find the cursed diamond, his greed, his unfathomable hatred, his desire and passion for war and victory, his dying body, his hunt for immortality that the diamond is rumored to confer upon anyone who possesses it, his selfish greed, his undying fear of the unknown,and his trembling fear of death.

The depth that this particular book touched is unmatchable. It feels like loose sand slipping through your fingers, and the helplessness that comes with it - the haunting beauty and magnificent pain of separation, of lost identities, of lost people. It’s astonishingly remarkable, to say the very least.

[classicbooks101]

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[thetypedwriter]

The Women Book Review

The Women by Kristin Hannah Book Review

I have been tasked with yet another book club book. 

I am in the era of book clubs apparently (and I’m not complaining). 

The Women by Kristin Hannah is another example of a book I would never normally read. It’s not YA and it’s about war. In general, I’m not the biggest fan of fighting or bloodshot which usually discounts any war books.

However, since I had to read this for my school book club and it's from the perspective of a female nurse during the Vietnam War instead of a soldier, I was cautiously optimistic. 

Turns out, I really enjoyed it. 

For people like me, people who don’t like war or fighting or bloodshed, this book is not for you. That being said, I thought The Women offered a fascinating take on a historic event but told from the view of a group largely marginalized and forgotten: women. 

Namely, the novel follows Frances “Frankie” McGrath and her story of becoming a hero by serving as a nurse in the Vietnam War following the death of her older brother, Finley.

Wanting to make her parents’ proud and get her photo tacked onto her fathers’ hero wall, Frankie enlists as a nurse without any training or experience. 

Naive and doe-eyed from her coddled life on Coronado Island, California, Frankie finds out very quickly that life in a war is worlds away from the country clubs and sparkling oceans from home. 

With soldiers and civilians alike coming in with chest wounds, missing limbs, and burned bodies, Frankie quickly casts away the shell of her former self and adapts to life in ‘Nam. She grows and learns and leans into her one passion: nursing. 

The first half of the book is about Frankie’s years in Vietnam and the horrendous things that she witnesses and deals with on a daily basis. The details are…atrocious.

As a book about war, this was expected, but still harrowing. To read about the appalling wounds and injuries that American soldiers and Vietnam villagers suffered and endured are heart-wrenching beyond belief. 

It was almost as much of a relief to me as a reader as it was to Frankie when she finishes her second tour in Vietnam and goes home, a concept that seemed as far away and as foreign as Vietnam once seemed to a sheltered girl in the 1960’s. 

The whole second half of the book is almost as terrible as the first, but in a less gruesome sense. Frankie’s life since coming back is less than ideal…

Being assaulted at home with anti-war sentiments, people calling her a baby killer, her parents telling their Coronado community that she’s been away in Florence, people unwilling or hesitant to talk about the war, and on and on it goes. 

Frankie, who expected people to be proud of her, drowns instead in her own shame and suffering, sending her down a dark spiral accompanied by addiction, drunk driving, and the betrayal of her own morals, values, and beliefs. 

All in all, The Women is exactly what you would expect of a war novel. It includes grisly injuries beyond most people’s imaginations, the struggle to reintegrate into one’s life back home, the pull of addiction in order to numb the pain and nightmares, and the eventual finding of one’s self in the aftermath of so much pain and suffering. 

The one special caveat of this book, is, as its namesake suggests, about the women. Over and over again in the novel a variety of people say, “There were no women in Vietnam.”

Lies. There were women. Important, significant, brave women who made a difference. 

This book is their legacy, one that will never be forgotten. 

Recommendation: War books are not my cup of tea. The fighting, the sadness, the agony—it’s usually too gut-wrenching for me to consume. However, The Women is such an important tale detailing the heroic women of the Vietnam War, their contributions, and their lives.

This book taught me so much, as well as deeply saddened me to know that such a horrific event took place in human history that cost countless precious lives. 

This is not a book I picked up willingly and I probably won’t read another war book for some time (or ever), but I appreciated all that I learned. It showed me how fleeting life is and made me grateful for the life I have now. 

Any book that can remind me of my own mortality (and make me cry) is pretty powerful in my opinion. 

Score: 7/10

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells

Thank you @brewed_books for the reread! ❤️

[yourcoffeeguru]

Vintage Winston Churchill by J.W. Fletcher 1941 First Edition Australian Print Collectible || AUtradingpost - Ebay

[thebanishedreader]

Friday Favorites: All Quiet on the Western Front

Today's highlight for @thebanishedreader's Friday Favorite is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

Published in 1928, All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that draws heavily from the experiences of its author in World War One. A German war veteran, Remarque projects his horrific memories of the war onto protagonist Paul Bäumer, a 17-year-old infantryman who, motivated by nationalism and naiveté, enlists into the German army with his schoolmates.

Paul is battle-worn and disillusioned from the moment readers meet him, but his trauma ebbs and flows, is emphasized and overshadowed, and carries on as a common thread throughout the novel with each new tragedy. Though young and harrowed, Paul's wisdom by experience haunts his narration, illustrating the horrors of war in a way no prior novel had ever captured; not all horror is found to be graphic, though, as the rotting ache of hope robbed from a young man culminates in this gut-wrenching masterwork.

My Goodreads Review:

"One of my favorite books of all time. I fear if I start writing this review in further depth, I will never stop. A horror story, a haunting tale. A poetic display of love, loss, and the meaning of life. An understanding of the despicable nature of war in a way I have never experienced in another novel since. I return to this book time and time again."

"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men."

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Blackwell's (UK)

[4nn13773]

All Quiet on the Western Front: Appreciation Notes I

Hey!! I want to try out something new, and share a piece of my thoughts that i really trasure, abouuut......(drumrolls).. All Quiet on The Western Front! I saw he movie, and I loved it, despite all the hate its getting, but I must admit, the book got me CAPTURED in it, so Ill post some Tumblrs with my aprecciation notes for the book, cause it had been laying in my head for AGES! There will be spoilers so beware when reading new posts! (worry not, there will also be warnings :) )

[lightthewaybackhome]

Lazy Monday mornings in December.

[peipurr]

I'm laughing too hard hahaha this is so funny

[satturn-x]

BROOOOOUGGGHHHH. Im reading ground zero by Alan Gratz and- [spoilers ahead]

-I JUST FOUND OUT WHO TAZ WAS. THERES NO WAY TAZ AND BRANDON ARE THE SAME PERSON NOOOO 😭😭😭 MANNNN!!!! UGH this is why i love Alan Gratz his books make me go "AUGH WHY 😔😔"

[thedustyshehnai]

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr.

[classicbooks101]

A true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[leyendolibros]

How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd.

Sloan Wilson 

[rachel-sylvan-author]

Happy Labor Day!

Reveal: the book that destroyed my mental health for three weeks and made me so depressed, I couldn't read for three weeks: "The Memory Keeper of Kyiv" by Erin Litteken

QOTD: Do anything fun for Labor Day? ✨ My family got together and ate BBQ! I baked peanut butter cookies and they turned out perfect!

[johnpodlaski]

SOUTH VIETNAM’S THERMOPYLAE

The Spartan-like defense and tragedy of Xuan Loc, April 1975. After fighting for twelve straight days, the valiant stand at Xuan Loc by heavily outnumbered ARVN soldiers echoes the famed sacrifice of King Leonidas’ 300 Spartans facing Xerxes’ Persian masses at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Greece. The Persians then marched south and captured Athens. Read about the last major battle of…

[spongey445]

Join me for the Goosebumps book that’s about warfare and rebel uprisings.

Yes.