Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (4 stars)

A tough story to read. Tara's success through so much adversity is remarkable. There are so many times where she could, or should, have died even just from physical injuries, let alone mental injuries. Her level of academic success, and the amazing quality of her writing and speaking (I watched an interview) is really astonishing given her background and what it took for her to get there. 

I'm not sure it's inspiring, more horrifying, knowing that there are many more like her that don't make it out of poverty and abuse to a comfortable life, let alone international success.

Another thing that suck with me is just how destructive conspiracy theories can be when combined with mental illness. Her Dad's paranoia and radicalization were stoked by the events with the Weavers on Ruby Ridge, and very nearly destroyed the entire family.

4 stars.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (5 stars)

Saw this one on a goodreads list of best novels, I'd never heard of it before, but it is well known as a Gothic suspense and even won an award as best novel of the century. It's very impressive, I can see why.

It's just so impressively dark, in a loveless, jealous second marriage way. On the surface our nameless narrator has landed an amazing catch: husband and incredible estate. But it's wrong, very wrong, we just don't know why exactly for a long time. The suspense is incredible.

He likes me in the way I like Jasper [the dog]

Manderlay, modeled on the real-world Menabilly in Cornwall is as big a character in the novel as any other. The descriptions of the estate, the beach, and the gardens are amazing, building an incredible atmosphere of suspense from this foggy, wet, and treacherous environment by the sea. And suffusing every part of Manderlay is Rebecca, the first wife who died in a tragic accident:

Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent lingered on the stairs. The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she liked. Her favorite flowers filled the rooms. Her clothes were in the wardrobes in her room, her brushes were on the table, her shoes beneath the chair, her nightdress on her bed. Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley.

When the reveal comes it's amazing. And the change it wreaks in our narrator is spectacularly written. Apparently it was too much for Hitchcock, he watered it down for the movie version!

In the version I read there's an excellent analysis in an afterword that I'm tempted to quote from, but too many spoilers. Interestingly though, du Maurier applied parts of her life and character to multiple women represented in the novel.

Loved it.

5 stars.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (2 stars)

A classic, but I'm not sure why. I haven't seen any of the movies. The premise is amazing, original, loved it: a huge planet-scale intelligence that's doing it's own thing and doesn't seem to know or care about humans. 

Spoilers ahead.

When humans build a habitat on the ocean the planet creates a replica of the human they have most injured in their lifetime. This part was amazing, the suspense was great, the tension of what the other men were dealing with was incredible, the killing and rebirth sequences were amazing. The narrator is terrified, not knowing the consequences for not playing along. Here we have outstanding structure for a rollicking horror story, amazing stuff.

But he blows it, completely.

We get these extensive detailed descriptions about the structures made and destroyed by the planet:

the hardened planes on which the layers of ductile matter rising from below have accumulated, while at the same time the deep-ocean geysers mentioned above condense and transform into mobile tentacle-like columns; clusters of them reach toward loci of construction that are strictly determined by the dynamics of the whole, recalling some sort of immense gills of an embryo growing a thousand times faster than normal, and streaming with pinkish blood and a green water so dark it’s almost black.

 delivered in the most boring way possible: the narrator reading scientific summaries in the habitat library. Why not first-person? I don't want to read a book about someone reading scientific papers. This is boring AF:

Its extensors and mimoids were seen as tumorous growths; the processes that moved its huge fluid body were examined for indications of chaos and anarchy, to the point that this orientation became an obsession, and the entire scientific literature of the following seven or eight years, though of course free of expressions explicitly indicating the feelings of its authors, nevertheless was like one long barrage of insults—revenge taken by the gray leaderless masses of solaricists upon the unchangingly indifferent object of their intensified research, which continued to pay no attention to them whatsoever.

yawn. OK but eventually he has to get back to the creepy mimics, right? And reveal what the mimics were for the other men?....OK more boring papers, nothing happening. OK the mimics are gone. The end. Flips table.

2 stars. 

Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky translation by Olena Bormashenko (1 star)

Very meh. It's interesting because I see some people saying this is legendary among Russian speakers, and some quotes apparently made it into common language and usage, which is the hallmark of a true classic. A fair bit of it is like watching two drunk people have what they think is a really deep and meaningful conversation but to anyone sober it's just boring. 

Perhaps too much is lost in translation...but I loved roadside picnic by the same translator? I suspect the part that doesn't do well in the translation is the humour. It swings between fairly heavy handed, hey don't kill all the scientists and intellectuals or you will destroy society philosophy:

No country can develop without science—it will be destroyed by its neighbors. Without arts and general culture, the country loses its capacity for self-criticism, begins to encourage faulty tendencies, starts to constantly spawn hypocrites and scum, develops consumerism and conceit in its citizens, and eventually again becomes a victim of its more sensible neighbors.

and Monty Python moments:

Is it true that you have hemorrhoids?

I get that this was an incredibly important subversive text of its time, wrapping up a political message in sci-fi. but it doesn't hold up well through time or translation. It's only very notionally sci-fi too, the main character is an alien, but you wouldn't know it without him telling you and the occasional demonstrations of advanced technology that don't fit the otherwise medieval world.

It certainly isn't without quotable moments:

And if the fates decreed for one of them to be born or become a master, he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave—a slave of wealth, a slave of outlandish excesses, a slave of his slaves. The vast majority of them weren’t guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery.

Everyone is free to understand this in his own way. For us scholars, evil is in ignorance, but the church teaches that ignorance is a blessing and that all evil comes from knowledge.

there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are, Don Rumata, and that’s how our world is.”

“Cruelty is power. Having lost their cruelty, the princes would lose their power, and other cruel men would replace them.”  

1 star.