closer to 3.8🌟?

i came out of this book fairly despondent. not because i felt like the book disappointed me, but because of how hopeless it is.

this is a story of 40 women, who found themselves free after being kept in captivity for god knows how many years. from inside their prison to the outside world, we follow them on a journey of reflective/projected motherhood and sisterhood, with questions of how are these women who were practically strangers going to face ideas of intimacy and family.

what kept me going page for page, was the anticipation, the wait, for something good to happen to these women, but i guess the best thing in life is release (spoilers). absolutely heartbreaking at the end (spoilers #2).

this was a powerful narrative revolving the feminist perspective, because even while you are with these brave women in their journey to reclaim the lost years, men are still very much in power. you see it in the chaos they’ve left behind. deep-seeded patriarchy, perhaps?

what makes you an introvert or extrovert has been something on my mind for a while now. a lot of us tend to associate introversion and extroversion as “quiet vs loud”, “antisocial vs social”, “nerd vs jock”— and that’s just the public’s perspective.

what i appreciated here in susan cain’s work is that she does a lot of debunking around the myths of introversion in a world that values extroversion. from the Extrovert Ideal, the Culture/s of Character and Personality, to the New Groupthink and Deliberate Practice, there were a lot of new things i discovered about myself as an introverted individual.

perhaps my only critique about cain’s work is that, as most discourses in the world, there is a lack of literature done on how introversion is seen in the third-world countries, or regions dominated by pre-existing geo/sociopolitical factors and barriers.

pretty interesting read, and i’m glad i’ve finished this! i had so many notes to take!

in an era dominated by AI, this book serves as a beacon emphasising its importance of books and literature.

i’m sure a lot of us have seen the atrocities of anthropic’s doings, with the burning of century-old texts and works for the trainings of their AI—this book reflects a similar scenario.

we are brought into a world, whereby censorship has taken over democracy, freedom is allowed as long as its in service to the government, literature is stripped bare to only its words and never its meaning.

we also follow a book censor’s journey from being skeptical of a book’s power to being the guardian of books, but it all changes when his daughter becomes infected with the ‘disease’ called imagination. his world is challenged and very much uprooted in front of him.

this book is a cry for liberation and literacy, that books remain a powerful object in shaping the worldview, and those dialogues about the advancement of AI in literature? please use the “delete” function, because not one of us as readers are even going to bother discussing.