sentientmatter

1475 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

Autistic Burnout Recovery: Your Guide to Your Personal Recovery Plan

Post from the The Glass Castle forum

sentientmatter

Edited

Thoughts from 88%

spoilers

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Post from the My Year of Rest and Relaxation forum

sentientmatter

Thoughts from 61%

spoilers

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Post from the My Year of Rest and Relaxation forum

sentientmatter

Thoughts from 18% (page 51)

Using this book as an anti-guide of who not to become, because I fear she is me if I were rich and left the most rotten parts of myself unchecked. Instead, I must persist and go to therapy 😌

Post from the The Glass Castle forum

sentientmatter

Thoughts from 14% (page 47)

The cat mistreatment in this book is so heartbreaking. I wish there was a warning on that. Poor babies.

sentientmatter started reading...

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered. The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.

sentientmatter started reading...

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.

sentientmatter commented on a post

yara.pdf

Thoughts from 6% (page 42)

"There are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days."

Do you agree with this stance? Why or why not? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.

sentientmatter started reading...

Inkheart

Cornelia Funke

Alternate cover edition: 9780439709101 From internationally acclaimed storyteller Cornelia Funke, this bestselling, magical epic is now out in paperback! One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called INKHEART-- and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever. This is INKHEART--a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. Dare to read it aloud.

sentientmatter started reading...

Tintenherz / Inkheart

Cornelia Funke

Ayah Meggie—namanya Mo—memiliki kemampuan ajaib: ia bisa mengeluarkan tokoh-tokoh dari buku yang dibacanya. Sayangnya, kehadiran mereka ternyata harus ditukar dengan manusia-manusia di dunia nyata. Sembilan tahun yang lalu, Mo membaca Tintenherz. Tanpa sengaja ia memunculkan berbagai tokoh jahat buku itu, dan membuat ibu Meggie lenyap karena masuk ke buku. Capricorn dan Basta, dua tokoh jahat dari buku tersebut, lantas menculik Mo karena ingin Mo memunculkan lebih banyak lagi tokoh jahat dari Tintenherz. Termasuk sang Bayangan, monster menakutkan yang akan bisa membunuh semua musuh Capricorn. Capricorn juga menyuruh Mo mengeluarkan harta dari berbagai buku untuk membiayai kejahatannya di dunia ini. Maka bermunculanlah tokoh dari berbagai buku, termasuk Tinker Bell dari buku Peter Pan, Farid dari Kisah Seribu Satu Malam, troll, goblin, bahkan si prajurit timah. Situasi makin rumit karena Meggie ternyata memiliki kemampuan yang sama dengan ayahnya!

sentientmatter wrote a review...

12w

sentientmatter

Jun 03, 2026

Sunrise on the Reaping

3.5

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 3.5Characters: 4.0Plot: 3.0

🌳

🎶

😥

I absolutely did not expect to like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes more than Sunrise on the Reaping. While this story provides some valuable context, and I loved the characters, it ultimately doesn’t add much. We already had an idea of what Haymitch went through from the main series. This book almost feels exploitative of his trauma and others in it. It’s nostalgia wrapped in devastation. It’s by far the saddest book in the series, and what makes it so devastating is the complete lack of hope. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this sad for a fictional character before. It‘s also far too similar to the first book in the main series, just more hopeless.

I wish we had gotten more insight into the districts, Panem, the Capitol, and its people. This could have been a great opportunity for a deeper world-building for a series that is so loved by many, including myself. While the book did have some great moments, it ultimately felt like wasted potential to me.

sentientmatter finished a book

14w

Sunrise on the Reaping

Suzanne Collins

When you've been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for? As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch's name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He's torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who's nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he's been set up to fail. But there's something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

sentientmatter started reading...

14w

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "

sentientmatter commented on a post

14w

The_book_bee

Thoughts from 45% (page 110)

spoilers

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Post from the Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5) forum

14w

sentientmatter

Thoughts from 100%

I wish this book would have let us spent some time in 12; jumping into the games, its horrors and the cruelty of the Capitol feels voyeuristic and exploitative. This is absolutely the saddest book in the series by far. I‘m looking forward to the movie but I tear up anytime I see snippets of the trailer.

I used to want a separate story on Finnick, and I can‘t say I wish for that anymore. I would much rather learn more about the districts, their traditions and how those compare to ours, or how Katniss‘ generation onwards continued to live and rebuild after defeating the Capitol. I guess I wish for some hope, like there was in the main series, as our own world seems very bleak right now.

Post from the Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5) forum

14w

sentientmatter

Thoughts from 93%

“And maybe it won’t be realized today, maybe not in our lifetime. Maybe it will take generations. We’re all part of a continuum. Does that make it pointless?”

It’s a tough pill to swallow - realising that we’re all just a part of human existence that spans tens of thousands of years. It’s so unfortunate that some people have to endure more than others before the change for the better.

Reminds of the state of the world today and how the future seems bleaker now than it did a decade ago.

sentientmatter commented on a post

15w

LotusBlossom

I feel empty now that it's over

I want to read it again. I suspect I am not the only one that feels this way after finishing this greek tragedy.

sentientmatter TBR'd a book

16w