a book about loving books with an ending that made me say "holy fuck" out loud. and it's a quick read!
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I know I am technically late to this book but I just finished it and it has fundamentally changed me forever. Maybe its because I am an academic, or because I often introduce myself as the speaker of 2 and a half languages but it hit hard. It is vivid and spectacular and grief inducing and devastating. It has so much heart, so much love, yet so much despair. The attention to detail regarding history and conflicting philosophies, politics, religious beliefs and belief systems is so carefully and precisely constructed, it is in and of itself poetry. It's so vivid that I can taste it, I can feel the texture of the pages, different passages are rattling around my brain and I can remember where I read them, I am a different person from before I read this book. After the reading slump I was in, it feels like all along I was waiting to find this book, I didn't know I was missing it, or waiting for it and yet when I read it it is like all at once I suddenly knew that I had needed this book all along. Read it, if you are one of those people that gets skeptical of things that reach a certain level of popularity, just know that all the hype in the world has undersold this book. It is that good. And yes, I attached a low light photo of my copy because I have reread chapters of this so often that the pages are curling, fished it out of my backpack when I found random spots to sit or stand idly, accidentally smudged it when I immediately reached for it after writing sprawling pages in my notebooks. You see how my earphones aren't connected to anything because all I am thinking about is this book? Yeah exactly! This is a good fucking book I am so serious you guys if you have held off on reading it, bump it up your list.
Jan 9, 2025
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I feel like this book found me during the most adequate moment in my life.
Sep 29, 2024
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god this book is beautiful. somehow both a slow burn and constantly moving. i read love in the time of cholera more recently, which was very good, but there’s something so magical about 100 years and i just can’t recommend it enough
May 14, 2024
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Spring always brings it out of me. The buds on the trees! The breezy warmth! The tulips appearing where there was once only a small patch of dirt for dogs to piss on! Everything is incredible and awesome and absurd and I’m always so grateful for the moments I can get past my own relatively small problems to stand in awe of the world :,)
Apr 12, 2024
you choose a decade and a country and it gives you obscure music from that time and place. built from the private collections of djs and crate diggers all over the world, there are so many gems on here. bonus roadtrip game–play a song and make your car mate guess the country/decade
Feb 20, 2024
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I have lots and generally stopped overthinking them after my first one. In theory, permanently marking your body is seen as an eternal commitment that carries a ton of weight, but I’ve really benefitted from flipping that on its head and using tattoos as a practice to remind myself of the impermanence of life and of my body (we’re all going to die :)). Now I give them to myself with needles from amazon, I let friends tattoo me, I get them on a whim when I’m traveling. I think a lot of people are scared of carrying physical markers of all the different people they’ve been (myself included), but I think doing so is actually a great practice in self acceptance—carrying all those versions of you, on you, all the time, baring them for others to see. The ones I got 4 years ago that I wouldnt get today don’t bother me even though I no longer resonate with them; they’re a personal history of sorts. And because of the whole death thing, all tattoos are temporary :)
Mar 25, 2024