Critiques et Commentaires

On one hand, I feel like it took me a small eternity and a lot of focus to finish this book, compared to How to do nothing that I had devoured. I was already familiar with a lot of the arguments being presented re: the critique of individual productivity, or indigenous worldviews on time, space and language (among others, Odell cites Oliver Burkeman, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Tyson Yunkaporta, whose books I read), but it's not easy to conceptualize time in terms of overlapping cycles and not just a straight line made of fungible hours.

On the other hand, I highlighted a lot of passages, especially in the last chapters. As I'm starting a new job after a burnout, reading this book made me envision time differently, and it also made me even more curious about things and people.

Didn't work for me. I felt that the dream-like sequences were confusing, and I sometimes had a hard time distinguishing certain secondary characters from each other.

Evoque divers moments de la vie de Jacques Fleurentin, en effleurant beaucoup d'aspects de son étude des plantes médicinales mais sans les approfondir. La narration n'est pas un modèle de clarté non plus.

It's not the best manga ever: the pacing could be better for instance, and the way some chapters end feels wonky. I like it a lot anyway, because the art looks great, the titular ramen wolf is really cute and I love how INTENSE he is about the things he love (i.e. ramen). And I appreciate how earnest the story is, which makes me forget that the storytelling could be better.

I thought I would like it more, given its reputation? (I'd give it a: ★★★☆☆)

To be fair, it's not every day that you read a story about a murderbot with a dry sense of humor and whose aim is to half-ass its job as much as possible to watch serials in peace (but who gets attached to its human clients more than it thought it would). Maybe it just hit different after having being exposed to the concept of "quiet quitting" many many many times on social media.

At the end of the free sample I thought that the setting was great but I sometimes had a hard time finding the behavior of the characters credible.

I finally read the whole thing for the aforementioned setting and my opinion stayed the same: I would read more stories about enchanted forests and faes, but it would be nice if I wasn't often wondering "why on Earth does he behave like that? that makes no sense??"

I had a hard time really getting into the story: during the first half I was mostly pushing through, telling myself that it was only ~100 pages long and that, at least, it would be over soon.

BUT there's a very subtle story that unfolds slowly, and that gets very satisfying at the end. I was glad I didn't drop the book and will read the next one in the series!

This story was by far my favorite from the Dagger Dagger vol. 1 anthology, I love what Sloane Leong did with the knight and I'm happy that the story is easily available now.

Seen mentions of it several times, the last one was on Sluggish.

Still deep into my Qigong / Taiji hyperfixation.

This one was easy to read, with some dated/questionable advice, but we're talking about a book published in the 90's, about a guy who was the author's taiji teacher in the 60-70's.

There were also some metaphors that I really liked, e.g. the passages about the cat-like alertness: being relaxed, but not slumped, and alert at the same time.