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Rachel Unkefer

runkefer@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

Reader, writer, mostly literary fiction with brief forays into nonfiction and poetry

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Rachel Unkefer's books

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Chéri and the End of Chéri (2022, New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The) 4 stars

Millennial Angst from the Previous Millennium

4 stars

The best part of this book is the second half, which was a sequel to the first. The first half depicts a middle-aged Parisian woman's affair with a late-teenaged boy, and the second half focuses on that boy/man after coming back from serving in WWI to a world that no longer makes sense to him. The writing is evocative but not flowery, unsentimental and sometimes scathing.

Klara and the Sun (AudiobookFormat, Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group) 3 stars

"Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the …

A lot of setup for not much payoff

3 stars

What even was this? A parable? A fairy tale? An allegory? Was it about religion? About artificial intelligence and how it can spawn its own superstition? This seemed to me a huge amount of world-building and excruciating detail just to say‚ what?

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (AudiobookFormat, 2021, Macmillan Audio) 5 stars

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; …

Review of 'A Psalm for the Wild-Built' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I wanted to read this because I had heard about this genre of “hope punk” or “cozy punk,” and I was curious. As I expected, there was no real conflict, or any jeopardy or much in the way of stakes. But this is what the genre is about, giving a break from the catastrophe that is our current world, so on that count, I would give it a high score, but I prefer novels with more at stake and more conflict. But I can see how many who are very stressed in everyday life and stressed about the planet and technology might take comfort in this sort of a book (not that I’m not stressed about these things, but I guess I’m used to higher level of stress). I don’t expect to continue with the series, but who knows?