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withrosie

professional reader, novice scholar | postgraduate student of anglophone literatures reading postcoloniality and migration šŸ“š

1122 points

0% overlap
Winter 2026 Readalong
Japanese Literary Fiction
Level 4
My Taste
Human Acts
The Grapes of Wrath
The Fire Next Time
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
Reading...
Notes of a Native Son
0%
Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border
0%
The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago
0%
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
0%

withrosie wrote a review...

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  • Travelers
    withrosie
    Jul 20, 2026
    Travelers
    4.0
    Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 4.5Characters: 3.5Plot: 4.0

    With all its shortcomings, and there surely were some, this novel is incredibly perceptive. It's uniquely structured, a novel mimicking a collection of short stories, glued together by a Nigerian man (doing his PhD in History in the States) who moves to Berlin to accompany his American wife who receives a prestigious grant as a painter in the city. Made up of six books in total, taking us from Berlin to Basel to London, this book is a brilliant exploration of displacement in its purest form, with refugees in their rightful spotlight. "Often I'd look around me and ask myself, Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?"

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  • My Sister, the Serial Killer
    withrosie
    Edited
    Thoughts from 100%

    Reading this in one go is like overdosing on rage bait

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  • My Sister, the Serial Killer
    withrosie
    Jul 13, 2026
    My Sister, the Serial Killer
    3.0
    Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 2.5Characters: 3.0Plot: 3.5Audiobook: 5.0

    I don’t think I read a book as annoying as this one before

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  • My Sister, the Serial Killer
    withrosie
    Edited
    Thoughts from 100%

    Reading this in one go is like overdosing on rage bait

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    comments 3
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  • The Remains of the Day
    withrosie
    Jul 12, 2026
    The Remains of the Day
    5.0
    Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 4.0Audiobook: 5.0

    Ah to be a prisoner of your own mind

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  • The Remains of the Day
    withrosie
    Edited
    Thoughts from 60%

    Of course, each book offers more than what is written on its pages but The Remains of the Day does this more so than I have read elsewhere. Stevens is a very entertaining unreliable narrator to read; the reader has to decode the story hidden behind his words, alongside the actual journey, and this keeps the mind busy even as Stevens rambles on and on about very particular details of his work.

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  • The Remains of the Day
    withrosie
    Edited
    Thoughts from 45%
    spoilers

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  • The Remains of the Day
    withrosie
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  • withrosie made progress on...

    2w
    The Remains of the Day

    The Remains of the Day

    Kazuo Ishiguro

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    withrosie wrote a review...

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  • The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
    withrosie
    Jul 03, 2026
    The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
    5.0
    Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

    A torturous masterpiece

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  • Small Boat
    sweetie
    Edited
    Thoughts from 41% (page 43)

    Longest 40 pages I've ever read. It's just SO repetitive. The narrator is also... almost comically evil and lacking empathy to an extreme degree. If you're going to try to hold up a mirror to the west's dehumanization of migrants, why would you make the symbol of this dehumanization someone the average person can so easily disassociate from? It just makes it so the western audience can say "thank god I'm not like this" and feel good about themselves for being someone with basic empathy, instead of doing any sort of reflection on the harmful western attitudes that literally cost lives. That's not holding up a mirror to anything, it's just more liberal circle-jerking.

    It's very possible this gets turned on its head later in the book, but honestly, I don't care to find out. The repetitiveness is just too much for me.

    5
    comments 7
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