Tag: Fiction Book Review

Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and the brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire view mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

I gotta admit that this book didn’t work for me, even thou I read a lot of good things about this book on Goodreads. But after reading this book I need to say that this book is slightly overhyped for me personally. 

This book has a intriguing premise for the plot. Since we follow the main characters’s fantastical in a way voyages to really weird and strange places and we get to see his encounters with some very strange societies which would make the FreeMasons blush if they read this book. 

But after having read this book, I need to be honest here and say that the plot felt very tedious and overly lengthy. Because it would drag a lot at times because of the very long elaborate descriptions and intricate political commentary. Which really made take a few breaks from this book while reading it. 

At times the plot comes off as convoluted and detracting because of the narrative’s overdone enjoyment of the plot in this book.

There are times when this book feels very heavy-handed and preachy because of all the critiques about human nature and society the plot chimes with every so often. And because of this, the book feels like it is trying to give moral lessons to the readers.

As I’ve said above, this book has a tendency to drag a lot at times, which really makes the book feel boring and uninteresting. Thats what happened to me while reading this book.

The characters in this book aren’t as good as I expected them to be. The reason why I’m saying this is because I felt like all of the characters in this book were simply tools for the authors ideas for how the book should be like rather than the characters having their own personalities and having things which would make them relatable to the readers. 

I Give This Book 1 / 5

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett’s drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical structure of the original story.

I gotta say that I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this book, and after reading this book I am glad that I didn’t have expectations for this book because if I had I think I would have enjoyed this book much less than I actually did.

To be very honest reading this book didn’t take me too much time, if I remember correctly I have read this book in 6 or 7 days which isn’t that long if you look at the fact that this book has over 700 pages (at least my copy of this book was over 700 pages long).

The plot here is okay. It talks about corruption and a guy who had fallen in love with two women who are up to no good. My problem with the plot in this book is that it drags for too long fir the majority of this book which really made me so demotivated to continue reading this book.

The characters here were okay. I don’t have any strong or any thoughts or feelings towards the characters in this book because I simple didn’t care about them enough to have any opinions about them. They weren’t bad because if they were bad characters I would have gotten negative opinion about them.

The writing style as you can expected from Dostoevsky is very chunky and heavy. Which shouldn’t surprise you if you read any of his books in the past. 

Yes Dostoevsky’s books are hard to read because of the chunky and heavy writing style combined with the big plots. 

Even thou this book isn’t my favorite book from Dostoevsky, its pretty far from it. I’m in a way happy that I read this book even thou I wouldn’t be recommending this book to anyone looking to get started reading books from Dostoevsky.

I Give This Book 3 / 5

‘I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn’t soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.’ In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide.

I gotta say that this book is easily my favorite book written by Fyodor Dostoevsky I’ve read so far at least. The biggest aspected which made me like this book is that this book makes you really think about the topics this book talks about.

The characters in this book are few yes. But the once we get in this book are positively complicated which for me only added to the aspect of me liking them more. Because they felt like real human beings rather than fictional characters.

The plot in this book gives you a lot of questions but it doesn’t give you conclusive answers for those questions. For me personally made this book so much better and so much more fun in a way.

This book is very short so it doesn’t give me a lot to talk about, since its only 57 pages long or at least my copy of this book is that long.

The writing style in this book is meh to be honest. Ive read some of Fyodor Dostoevsky books in the past so I k ow that he can normally have much better writing style than he had in this book.

I Give This Book 4 / 5

The crew of the whaling ship the Pequod is bound by its Captain Ahab to a single, bloody goal: the killing of the whale Moby-Dick, the giant albino that has taken his leg and on which he has sworn vengeance. Driven, perhaps doomed, by his dangerous monomania, they sail in pursuit of the monster.

I gotta say that I was afraid of reading this book, because I have heard a lot of good about this book but I know that the more good I read about a book on the interest than the chances that the book is overhyped are very high. But after reading this book I gotta say that this book is okay. 

I need to admit that this book is much longer than I expected it to be. And after reading the entire book, I need to get a little bit honest here and say that at times this book drags for far too long. A lot of parts could have easily been removed and it would make this book so much better and shorter.

This book gives a lot of fun and in depth depiction of sea navigation and how it was like being a sailor back in 1820s and 1830s. But the aspect of whale hunting in this book made me really take away some points of this book. 

This book took awhile to read, because I needed to take some days long breaks from this book. Because a lot of parts of this book drags for too long and it kept making me uninterested but I wanted to finish this book. So when I was getting very close to DNF-ing this book I took some days long breaks before returning back to it. 

The writing style in this book was okay. I wasn’t taken back by it or anything like that. To be honest I am very neutral about the writing style in this book. I don’t have any strong feelings or thoughts about the writing style in this book. 

The characters in this book were okay to be honest. Im writing this review 2 days after I finished this book and I don’t remember any of the characters in this book. That’s because they weren’t memorable or very likable which would make me remember them. The characters in this book felt like different versions of the the same character which really didn’t help me with liking the characters in this book. 

I Give This Book 3 / 5

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

I gotta say that I’ve heard a lot of good about this book before getting into. But at the same time I didn’t have any expectations for it personally. And that might be the reason why I liked it so much. 

This book is long let me tell you that. The copy I have of this book has over 1200 pages, and after reading the entire thing I feel like this book should be at least 400 pages shorter and it would have made this book so much better.

The plot is is actually very interesting. But there are a lot of moments in this book where the plot drags for way too long. There were a lot of moments in this book where one situation could go for like 50 or more pages. And when it happened I began so overwhelmed by it since the author would give us way too long descriptions and the characters would randomly go onto 5 pages long monologues. 

The characters here were okay for the most part. The main character is the best character in the entire book. Since we get to know him the best in this entire book. But the side characters here were way too noble for me. Because of their need to be the most noble in the room they had zero personality and it felt like every single character tried to be more noble than the rest of the room. 

I gotta say that reading this book have taken me 5 months to read it front to back. Because during reading this book I needed to take long breaks because this book would drag for too long and I just couldn’t handle to read this book in a short time. And I didn’t want to end with the biggest reading demotivation over this book. 

The writing style in this book was actually very charming and good. Which is the reason why I gave this book a higher rating than I wanted to at the beginning. 

I Give This Book 3 / 5

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

I didn’t know much about this book other than it being sort of under the LGBT category which I avoid because the book I read in this category I ended up hating in a way. And this book isn’t anything different from the other books in the category which I hated.

The only good thing about this book is the writing style which was pretty gorgeous and I loved it a lot. It really made me think that the author of this book is a really good author solely based on the writing style.

To be very honest in this review, this book was very melodramatic, stereotypical, repetitive, dull, self-indulgent and very unbelievable. And because of this I DNF-ed this book after having read 310 pages of this book.

The beginning of this book was actually interesting because it states with 4 classmates form a small Massachusetts town moving to the big apple (New York City) but then within 2-3 chapters it fast forwards a few decades to when one of those classmates are is well in his 40s I believe and we follow him. Which I found very boring, uninteresting and annoying. Because it went very quickly from being an actually interesting book to being a very boring book.

The characters in the beginning was actually okay characters but when the fast forwards thing happened, the characters become like the watered down versions of themselves which really didn’t have anything in common with their younger selves.

I personally liked the characters at the beginning but after the fast forward I began to hate all those characters I liked at the beginning because they we’re vert melodramatic, stereotypical gay but most importantly very very annoying.

As I’ve said before I read some books in the LGBT category but this one is the most full of the work bull shit I’ve come across so far. Which really helped me to DNF this book so fast. 

And this book had everything which you put under it being Brutal, and of course I am talking about sexual abuse, child abuse, physical abuse, drug addiction, rape, self mutilation, suicide, horrific violence, abduction and amputation. So be warned about those things if you want to read this book.

I Give This Book 1 / 5

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, the besieged city of Ilium, the feud between the gods, and the fate of mortals.

To be very honest here I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this book even thou a lot of people on the internet claims that this book is very good, I learned my lesson to not trust people on the internet with books.

Again to be honest here I don’t have any strong feelings about this book, I didn’t dislike it and I didn’t like it either. 

I personally struggled a lot to finish this book because I found it uninteresting and I just didn’t have enough will power to finish it but in the end I did finish it. 

I’m glad that I read this book but after reading this book I became very neutral to this book. I didn’t like it nor dislike it. And to be honest here, if I didn’t listen to the audiobook of this book I wouldn’t be able to finish it because its very heavy and I just count focus on it for longer portions of time.

For me personally this book was a very slow read, because all the things happening in this book were not so interesting to me but also the way this book was written in had made all the action slow so that it could describe it better in a way. 

One of the things about this book is that it keeps building up to the point where the Trojan horse will show up at one point in this book, but it never does show up and it really annoyed me here because whats the point building the plot to a moment and then the moment never comes ?

This book had a lot of heavy and hard moments to get through in this book, and some moments in this book were actually okay and I liked them. But the most of this book is hard and heavy to get through.

The writing style here was very heavy and I just count bring myself to like it. And I’m not sorry about it. I didn’t like the writing style because it felt very heavy and hard.

I Give This Book 2 / 5

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.

Ive heard a lot of good about Thomas Hardy, and thats why I picked up this book to just my journey with this author.

There are very few characters in this book, and we’ll those characters we get in this book are bad and I just couldn’t care less about them than I did. This is because I found every character in this book to be very annoying and I just wanted to slap the shit out of every single character in this book.

The main character in this book which is Tess was a very silly character, and because of that fact I found it hard to like her or even relate to her in any way. So its safe to say that I dint like her. But also she was the victim in every possible situation she was in, which really annoyed me because I don’t like those kind of characters which always portray themselves as victims every single time something happens to them.

However gave this book for challenging in a way and talking about double standards between men and females which I personally am not a huge fan off. 

The plot itself in this book was very depressing and well there isn’t a lot of good things happening in this book. However the plot had shown really good the religious and social undertones of the time this book is sett in which made me like this book a little bit more.

While reading this book I got a huge feeling that the author didn’t knew a lot abut women because of he made the female characters as. Which really disappointed me because all of the female characters in this book we’re very bad and had the same problems as Tess have. 

The writing style here was meh, to be honest. I cant compare the writing style to any other books written by the author because this book was the first book I’ve read by the author so I don’t have knowledge about other books about this author. 

But the writing style in this book was not okay at the very least. It was like the author just throw at us words without thinking a lot about them. Which really didn’t sit well with me personally.

I Give This Book 1 / 5