neele_hihi

My name is Neele~ I actually read a lot of literature in Korean so my favorite books aren't available here yet. Right now I'm also reading more in English :)

637 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)

neele_hihi commented on a post

kayseemaccy

100%

Guys, I may have missed something, but idk why this book is called heaven?

neele_hihi is interested in reading...

The Memory Police

Yōko Ogawa

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

neele_hihi is interested in reading...

Severance

Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

neele_hihi is interested in reading...

We Had to Remove This Post

Hanna Bervoets

For readers of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny or Ling Ma's Severance: a tight, propulsive, chilling novel by a rising international star about a group of young colleagues working as social media content monitors—reviewers of violent or illegal videos for an unnamed megacorporation—who convince themselves they’re in control . . . until the violence strikes closer to home. Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments. Yet Kayleigh finds a group of friends, even a new love—and, somehow, the job starts to feel okay. But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they’re meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She’s still totally fine, though—or is she?

neele_hihi is interested in reading...

The Guest

Emma Cline

A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake. Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.

neele_hihi finished reading and wrote a review...

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

neele_hihi

Nov 22, 2025

3.0

Enjoyment: 3.5Quality: 3.0Characters: 3.0Plot: 3.5

Feels weird to rate this book now that the author has passed but I was reminded of this book through it. I read it a while ago. It was a quick and easy read. Relatable at times but from what I recall sometimes it felt like the book told me that my problems aren't actually that deep and I'm not actually that mentally ill. I don't know how to explain it but it felt like medical gaslighting at times. I'm not sure if this was just because of the state I was in when I read it but that was what I thought then. I might reread it at some point to see if my opinion has changed.

neele_hihi commented on a post

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 24%

Yeah no, I'm putting this book as "DNF" for now. Maybe I'll revisit it another time but Connell just annoys the shit out of me. I'm not doing this to myself, at least not for the time being

neele_hihi commented on a post

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 3%

Honest first impression: I don't like the writing style. The missing quotation marks irritate me (there have been other books where it barely bothered me but here it is hard for me to fully the dialogues). I have trouble picturing the characters and their surroundings so far. Let's see where this goes. This is the first time I'm reading a book I know from social media so I'm really interested to see whether it will live up to the hype

neele_hihi finished reading and wrote a review...

DNF

neele_hihi

Nov 21, 2025

DNF

2.0

Enjoyment: 2.5Quality: 4.0Characters: 2.0Plot: 3.0

So normally I do not add books as DNF but as paused because I assume that coming back to the book later will somehow make me want to read it more. But for this book... no. I love stories about messy characters who make stupid choices. But Connell just is such an insufferable character. He suffers from pretty much nothing, struggles with nothing that even remotely explains his behavior. He just genuinely feels like a character who sucks because he is a man and he feels like he can. I actually like the plot and I like other characters or at least feel like they are redeemable but I just can not deal with the typical white man who faces miiiinor problems and therefore thinks he can just get away with it

neele_hihi DNF'd a book

Normal People

Sally Rooney

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

Post from the Normal People forum

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 24%

Yeah no, I'm putting this book as "DNF" for now. Maybe I'll revisit it another time but Connell just annoys the shit out of me. I'm not doing this to myself, at least not for the time being

neele_hihi commented on a post

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 12% (page 33)

"He often makes blithe remarks about things he 'wishes'. I wish you didn't have to go, he says when she's leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished for any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy."

This. Exactly this. I'm sorry but he sucks. I'm so tired of having to empathize with male characters because they struggle (meanwhile their struggle is not even half as conflicting as what most girls in this world go through and still the girls are expected to handle their stuff more gracefully.

Post from the Normal People forum

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 21%

spoilers

View spoiler

neele_hihi made progress on...

Normal People

Sally Rooney

24%

Post from the Normal People forum

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 12% (page 33)

neele_hihi commented on a post

blurrypages

Thoughts from 10% (page 26)

Whooo boy, I forget how emotionally draining it is to be a teenager… and Marianne bb girl, why Connell? (I know why but like come on 😭)

It’s giving girl falls for guy that does the bare minimum (even less so rn) and idk if I can stomach this if that’s what this book entails…

We shall see

neele_hihi commented on a post

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 10%

So far I'm sorry to say but I don't like Connell at all. I get that he has to pretend to fit in but honestly no. Maybe it's because i just finished reading "Sunburn" by Chloe Michelle Howarth which also features this kind of conflict between the life others expect you to live and the life you want to live. In "Sunburn" the at times shitty actions of the main character feel somewhat redeemable because she is closeted in a homophobic town. In this book, Connell just seems like an ass who doesn't know his priorities. Maybe I just expect too much maturity from a teenage boy character but still. I don't like him

Post from the Normal People forum

neele_hihi

Thoughts from 10%

neele_hihi made progress on...

Normal People

Sally Rooney

16%

neele_hihi earned a badge

Level 4

500 points

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