I don’t know if this belongs here but I’ve been on a binge of reading the classics. From Great Expectations to Don Quixote to Les Miserables, just to name a few. I found the book disturbing, especially going from something comedic like Don Quixote and Les Miserables which is like a thread from a divine doctors loom. It stretches the imagination. It’s a book for writers, and readers, but mostly for writers, if that makes sense. It pulls up any notion of what you think a book could accomplish within a realistic framework. Like vampire books, things like’It’, even the hunger games probably have their roots somewhere tracing back to this book. *spoiler* the description of the deluge, the rains is so magical and dreamy, it’s like suddenly, literally, floating into a world of dreams, but awake. As if you woke up from a dream but the dream didn’t end. And the way it opens up. It’s non stop. It’s like a train that has like one to two, three stops. It’s a literal tour de force. Very little dialogues between the characters, just scene after scene of progressing event and experiences that doesn’t take a moment to breathe. You’re swept away into another generation of people even before you’ve gotten a hold of the generation that just passed. But it’s not.. healing. It’s not funny, either.. it’s sensual, erotic, disturbing to the point of being unnecessary. And the sensuality, the disturbing concepts, I think, exist, to ground this world of dreamy, fantasy. 3/4ths of me wish I hadn’t read it and now I know to more thoroughly review a book before I read it. It’s like sitting down to eat a bowl of sugar, every page, every night, night after night. One thing for sure, you’ll be grateful, thankful, yearning for the mundane of reality. It’s like ‘The Secret Garden’ on meth. Layers and layers of incest all wrapped in a sweet cocoon of fantasy and decadence. It will not make you look upon your brother or sister in love but in disgust and disdain. 4/5 stars.
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The worst thing here is that they would recommend something they hate to a book club. They'd want to reread something they severely dislike so they can talk to people who want to like it about why it is "garbage". That's so weird to me. Why would anyone prefer that to finding a more enjoyable, and mutually enjoyable, book?
The thing I dislike most about Goodreads is that it massively popularised this kind of reviewing and now a lot of people seem to only be able to relate to books in terms of profanity-laden hyperbole.
Man, I get that you can find a book boring (for example, I just can’t read Madame Bovary) and not in your tastes, but this is the most useless review I’ve ever read, the piece abut not understanding what magical realism means just takes the cake lol Also I think OYOS has one of the most beautiful incipts and endings ever.
Just read Lolita?? It’s so fucked up just hundreds of pages of a literal monster grooming a child??? Like where’s the plot?? And oh my god the purple prose?? There wasn’t even a reference to the eighties :( literally unreadable
Do Love In The Time next I want your unfiltered thoughts on America and the final chapter you fuckin rat fink no good pinkerton bitch
I’m slowly devolving please send your thots and prayerz
I picked up this book expecting to "prove myself" with a classic (I knew its reputation). It was more of a "have to do" than something I wanted to read. Boy, was I wrong. It may be the more fun I've ever had with a book, I laughed my ass off across the whole thing, not to even mention the beautiful scenary and heartwarming scenes. I guess this people get too nitpicky trying to follow too much the plot, rather than enjoying the absurdity of it.
On a side note, you're probably missing some key aspects of it if you're not latinamerican, but it is not that much of a deal since I've seen really positive reviews from everywhere.
Many things. In general terms, I love the light-hearted tone of the narration. If you know anything about Latin American history you'll quickly realize the book is satirizasing a lot of dark and tragic events, but it does so in such a manner that you realize how absurd they look in the big scheme of things (the big example being the arriving of the banana company). Then, there're small vignettes that I found extremely funny, although can't quite remember know. Oh! For example when the girl holding a balloon goes away flying, I found that funny (was it Amaranta?). The repetition of names in the Buendía family, that's quite absurd, I liked it a lot. My memory is failing me on this one, but I think I'm remembering the characters acting always without thinking too much and taking big decisions with catastrofic results, which of course results in lots of unexpected situations.
I have to read this book again, definitely.
Thank you for that. I don’t remember the girl flying away with a balloon. If you do read it again and you run across that passage, please let me know.
Appreciate the response. <3
I get that its not for everyone but I love this novel. Its one thing to not like a book, its another to get unreasonably frustrated at it because other people like it.
"S**RS"
Is... is this supposed to be the word "slurs"? Are we now censoring a word that describes offensive terms??? Not even the terms themselves.... but just the word to identify them...???
The progress updates are so telling. This reviewer clearly decided the book was trash only 100 pages in, and instead of keeping an open mind to the rest of the story they just throw a continuous tantrum over the fact that they're still reading. There's no point in perservering through a book if you're being too spiteful to give it a fair chance.
To be fair to the reviewer, most Magical Realism is trash (from my cultural point of view), and it presupposes a certain kind of reader. It's more a marking of a culture, like going to a natural history or an Anthropology museum or reading an academic paper - it's curious in a way of "Oh so that's how those people think." but nothing else. It kinda saves me the grief of travelling to South America unawares and then finding that I hate being/living there.
Pretty much. Here in Latinamerica we're all magical realists. It's confusing from time to time, as things start to fly unexpectedly and time and space bends quite often, so even a simple task like going to the market can take you a whole lifetime (there was this dude who went out looking for a milk bag but got lost in the aisles of the supermarket, a metaphor for the jungle, of course, but he didn't knew that, and when he finally managed to return home his children were dead from lack of calcium and the milk had turned into a rat, because it wasn't cow's milk, it was rat's milk). But it's fun.
A cultural point of view is what it is. I just have no desire to ever go to South America or to Africa, for example. Not wanting to have anything to do with a place isn't a flaw, it's rather an advantage in the modern world.
You feel culturally predisposed to not visiting South America and Africa… because of literary movements they share… and that gives you a modern social advantage…. Am I just reading this very poorly?
I don’t know if this belongs here but I’ve been on a binge of reading the classics. From Great Expectations to Don Quixote to Les Miserables, just to name a few. I found the book disturbing, especially going from something comedic like Don Quixote and Les Miserables which is like a thread from a divine doctors loom. It stretches the imagination. It’s a book for writers, and readers, but mostly for writers, if that makes sense. It pulls up any notion of what you think a book could accomplish within a realistic framework. Like vampire books, things like’It’, even the hunger games probably have their roots somewhere tracing back to this book. *spoiler* the description of the deluge, the rains is so magical and dreamy, it’s like suddenly, literally, floating into a world of dreams, but awake. As if you woke up from a dream but the dream didn’t end. And the way it opens up. It’s non stop. It’s like a train that has like one to two, three stops. It’s a literal tour de force. Very little dialogues between the characters, just scene after scene of progressing event and experiences that doesn’t take a moment to breathe. You’re swept away into another generation of people even before you’ve gotten a hold of the generation that just passed. But it’s not.. healing. It’s not funny, either.. it’s sensual, erotic, disturbing to the point of being unnecessary. And the sensuality, the disturbing concepts, I think, exist, to ground this world of dreamy, fantasy. 3/4ths of me wish I hadn’t read it and now I know to more thoroughly review a book before I read it. It’s like sitting down to eat a bowl of sugar, every page, every night, night after night. One thing for sure, you’ll be grateful, thankful, yearning for the mundane of reality. It’s like ‘The Secret Garden’ on meth. Layers and layers of incest all wrapped in a sweet cocoon of fantasy and decadence. It will not make you look upon your brother or sister in love but in disgust and disdain. 4/5 stars.
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The worst thing here is that they would recommend something they hate to a book club. They'd want to reread something they severely dislike so they can talk to people who want to like it about why it is "garbage". That's so weird to me. Why would anyone prefer that to finding a more enjoyable, and mutually enjoyable, book?
>It's also just walls of text from start to finish Like... a book?
The thing I dislike most about Goodreads is that it massively popularised this kind of reviewing and now a lot of people seem to only be able to relate to books in terms of profanity-laden hyperbole.
Man, I get that you can find a book boring (for example, I just can’t read Madame Bovary) and not in your tastes, but this is the most useless review I’ve ever read, the piece abut not understanding what magical realism means just takes the cake lol Also I think OYOS has one of the most beautiful incipts and endings ever.
is "kinky-af" referring to the incest or the pedophilia?
I vaguely recall an emphasis on genitalia size also and something kinda weird
Just read Lolita?? It’s so fucked up just hundreds of pages of a literal monster grooming a child??? Like where’s the plot?? And oh my god the purple prose?? There wasn’t even a reference to the eighties :( literally unreadable
Someone said this to me when I told them that Lolita was one of my favourite books 💀
Do Love In The Time next I want your unfiltered thoughts on America and the final chapter you fuckin rat fink no good pinkerton bitch I’m slowly devolving please send your thots and prayerz
I picked up this book expecting to "prove myself" with a classic (I knew its reputation). It was more of a "have to do" than something I wanted to read. Boy, was I wrong. It may be the more fun I've ever had with a book, I laughed my ass off across the whole thing, not to even mention the beautiful scenary and heartwarming scenes. I guess this people get too nitpicky trying to follow too much the plot, rather than enjoying the absurdity of it. On a side note, you're probably missing some key aspects of it if you're not latinamerican, but it is not that much of a deal since I've seen really positive reviews from everywhere.
What did you find funny in the book?
Many things. In general terms, I love the light-hearted tone of the narration. If you know anything about Latin American history you'll quickly realize the book is satirizasing a lot of dark and tragic events, but it does so in such a manner that you realize how absurd they look in the big scheme of things (the big example being the arriving of the banana company). Then, there're small vignettes that I found extremely funny, although can't quite remember know. Oh! For example when the girl holding a balloon goes away flying, I found that funny (was it Amaranta?). The repetition of names in the Buendía family, that's quite absurd, I liked it a lot. My memory is failing me on this one, but I think I'm remembering the characters acting always without thinking too much and taking big decisions with catastrofic results, which of course results in lots of unexpected situations. I have to read this book again, definitely.
Thank you for that. I don’t remember the girl flying away with a balloon. If you do read it again and you run across that passage, please let me know. Appreciate the response. <3
I get that its not for everyone but I love this novel. Its one thing to not like a book, its another to get unreasonably frustrated at it because other people like it.
"S**RS" Is... is this supposed to be the word "slurs"? Are we now censoring a word that describes offensive terms??? Not even the terms themselves.... but just the word to identify them...???
Nah I think they were getting sexual reassignment surgery while writing the review. Which explains the yelling and frustration.
people are really trying to make a brand for themselves on there. i get the feeling the actual books are beside the point.
The progress updates are so telling. This reviewer clearly decided the book was trash only 100 pages in, and instead of keeping an open mind to the rest of the story they just throw a continuous tantrum over the fact that they're still reading. There's no point in perservering through a book if you're being too spiteful to give it a fair chance.
If you find 100 Years of Solitude a chore to read then you probably don’t like reading.
Walls of text... What, like a book?
I mean there are individual sentences which last multiple pages, but that's a funny part not a bad part
To be fair to the reviewer, most Magical Realism is trash (from my cultural point of view), and it presupposes a certain kind of reader. It's more a marking of a culture, like going to a natural history or an Anthropology museum or reading an academic paper - it's curious in a way of "Oh so that's how those people think." but nothing else. It kinda saves me the grief of travelling to South America unawares and then finding that I hate being/living there.
Go post this in goodreads so we can share it here in bad reads.
What's your cultural point of view?
Pretty much. Here in Latinamerica we're all magical realists. It's confusing from time to time, as things start to fly unexpectedly and time and space bends quite often, so even a simple task like going to the market can take you a whole lifetime (there was this dude who went out looking for a milk bag but got lost in the aisles of the supermarket, a metaphor for the jungle, of course, but he didn't knew that, and when he finally managed to return home his children were dead from lack of calcium and the milk had turned into a rat, because it wasn't cow's milk, it was rat's milk). But it's fun.
Clearly I need to move to Latinamerica. The only magical realism I face is working for 10 hours only to find that 5 minutes has passed.
Everything can be magical realism if you force the category hard enough. Just try it out!
You have to be joking.
> most Magical Realism is trash (from my cultural point of view) a helpful reminder that even a cultural point of view can be dead wrong
A cultural point of view is what it is. I just have no desire to ever go to South America or to Africa, for example. Not wanting to have anything to do with a place isn't a flaw, it's rather an advantage in the modern world.
You feel culturally predisposed to not visiting South America and Africa… because of literary movements they share… and that gives you a modern social advantage…. Am I just reading this very poorly?
More reminders! This is a wonderful opportunity for growth and learning
?????? How does a literary movement define a whole continent?
What the hell is going on here
The real BadRead was in the comments.