This was an interesting book, I would say the selection of short stories, for the most part were great! I never took English classes as a means of being a better writer, only as a means of critical analysis. I would have appreciated these stories more as a discussion or maybe even a guided video essay compared to the book.

I enjoyed the cart and the subtle nuanced break down of how monotonous Marya's life was, how used to the bleak grey and the insults of fate that gets thrown at her. The page by page breakdown was tedious so I'm glad that the rest of the book opted for essays at the end. The Singers was wonderful in setting up the descriptions to create the parallel in the climax. I didn't understand the ending, but I'm glad there was some analysis accompanying it. I liked the evocative feeling of Gooseberries, it felt like the most complete/what I would want in a short story where we get a slight status quo shift. I can see why the book is named after what happens in Gooseberries. The feeling of Aloysha the Pot was rather sad but it didn't feel strong, same with Master and Man, but that was one of the criticisms brought up by Saunders anyways.

The only one that I disliked was the Nose. I think the leap of logic and the analysis accompanying it around creating statements to solidify the world were lacking. I disagree with the fact that people didn't want to question the issue about the nose, it just is improbable since nothing else about the world makes the nose becoming sentient easily acceptable enough to publish an advert about it.

If I read this to improve my writing, I think the exercises were thoughtful. The translation exercise is rather important with how Saunders doesn't know a lick of Russian. I think that would immediately remove important context from the story.

I was told that this was a good recommendation for people who liked She Who Became the Sun and I cannot see why beyond the Chinese Mythology portion. The writing style felt juvenile and the pacing seemed really slow. I skipped forward a bit and everything still felt the same.

I am not wholly convinced that Kylie Chan didn't make this a self insert novel where she is a white Australian (with possible Chinese ancestry???) that lived in Hong Kong for a decade and her ex-husband was a Chinese nurse working in the area. This novel would have been the best case scenario if she had support from the people around her, other immigrants to Hong Kong and a doting husband. Apparently vendors wouldn't let her buy groceries because they thought she was a tourist? Hmmm. If you lived there for ten years I'm sure you would have been a regular and made some friends.

Though I'm sure there are children of immigrants that are still treated as foreigners in HK that probably felt this more acutely.

She borrowed the Chinese name (since some reviewers thought English was her second language??) and the setting but called it a day. The way everything was introduced was very clunky. I think the went to a park and pointed that the statues belonged to different gods like the Goddess of Mercy at the train station. You would think there was a more holistic way to introduce everything.

Skip this one and try a different Asian author.

When I finish books that are for class, I find my self enjoying them much more after the fact. Its an absolutely dreadful read, but reflecting on the plot and the progression of time, it is one of my favourite books for my American lit class.

There was something so poetic in how Carrie rose to fame and how soulless the ending was.

I love Leigh Bardugo's books so much! I read the book and immediately sink into the world.

...I had to turn the library book back in and haven't picked it up again in favour of my months old holds being available!

I read the whole book but I really didn't like El Higgins as the main narrator/the writing style of this book. El is just up in teen angst for no reason after going through 6?? years of this sort of schooling.

There is a lot of interesting world building but it also comes in very large trains of thoughts by El. There must have been a more natural way to show what happened in the past/build it up better. Like when El says she reinforced her table - maybe show her trading with others and build it during shop class? Instead she makes a mirror that can tell the future but she never uses it in the novel. I understand it was to build friendship with the other characters but eh. I read this book because I liked some of Naomi's other works and also because Orion Lake was suggested as a Golden Boy character like Gansey from the Raven Boys and Jason or Percy from Percy Jackson. Yes that holds up! El is just a dialed up to 10 Blue from Raven Boys which was a bit much.

I think one scene that did this well was when she was trading spells since she had something valuable and we know they were valuable since it caught the interest of people that wouldn't even know the language of how to perform the spell.

Naomi Novik is a hit or a miss for me. Spinning Silver was my favourite of hers, I enjoyed Her Majesty's Dragon but this and especially Uprooted were my behated. I think I like her writing better when it's focused on older characters where they have developed habits and interests.

I thought this book was interesting!

I really liked the second half after the twist and how she ended up really fixing everything

The pacing got a bit lopsided here with the new characters but it was still a fun novel to read!

I thought that there were many delightful origin stories for the words and the author really tried his best to make them connect from one topic to the other. I thought the story about the Guillotine was nice especially how it was related to executioners. I thought the jump from pooling money from poule was interesting since it was based on gambling on who could throw a rock at a poor bird.

The humor of the book is REALLY English where other countries are clearly inferior to them. There are certainly a lot of jokes that don't age well about Indigenous people, slaves and colonialism. By the third quarter, the charm of the short chapters wore off.

I think it's hilarious that he prefaced the book the way he did. Books have the kindness of interrupting the narrative and taking a break while being suckered into a conversation with him does not. I think this book reflected this idea really well ahaha

Hmmm I would say this was worst than the first - the book sure does move along quickly but there are two time skips in this book that makes sense, but also the plots that weren't time skips weren't all the strong to display character developments.

I rather liked the Sower arc but the Huan Hua Palace and fall out after the arc fell flat. The world has changed considerably and Shen Qingqiu is just scrambling to make sense of it as a stallion harem reader.

I think the opium poppy chapter contained too much of an info dump, I found it the driest of the three sections. Maybe it's because he improved as a writer over time, but the caffeine and mescaline chapters were just far more interesting to me.

The caffeine one being the legal psychostimulant that suits capitalism in all it's forms, both to sell and to corral employees to keep working following the 9-5 cycle because caffeine happened to get metabolized at that rate.

The mescaline chapter was rather choppy, but I really liked the experiential contrast between taking pure mescaline and the tea extract. I plan on reading Huxley's Doors of Perception sometime soon to see what his experiences were!