Jenkins - Daisy Jones and The Six by Reid

By: Taylor Jenkins

Review:

When I started googling why I haven't heard of these band members, this band, that's when I realized that I wasn't reading nonfiction. I was reading a novel, and the whole thing is made up. I spend 10 minutes questioning myself, why doesn't apple music or Spotify has it. If these people were so large, so well described, so recorded, then why couldn't I find them? The reasons were visible, the writing, the speeches, the dialogue, the emotion, the audiobook, were real. They existed in a part of my head. They orated like it was a spectacular set of interviews, from the author to them. And, the author wrote their stories.

The author wrote each and every interview as, as a documentary that was supposed to teach the aura of the 1970s. They took us out of time and lived it through their eyes, every little cup of vodka being drunk, every shard of glasses being broken, every heart being broken, and sown. They're real, they felt authentic. We knew what was going to happen, the burnout, the death, the puking, the heartbreaks.

We all knew. And there are so many themes being taught, especially gender and sexuality. Especially feminism. Especially the addictions.

Especially them all, with many parts from the book are lessons from the ages of rock and roll.

Stats:

• Reading Time: 12/12/19 - 12/13

• Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• December 13, 2019 –
  90.0% "“I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life.
  “I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong”"
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  84.0% "D:When T died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "“It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  72.0% "“Karen and Graham must be sleeping together. And I say to them, I said, “Are you two an item?” And Graham says yes and Karen says no.
  G: I didn’t understand. I just didn’t understand Karen.
  K: Graham and I could never last, it was never…I just needed it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  51.0% "“BILLY: I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using.
  I thought, She knows how to have fun.”"
  December 12, 2019 –
  50.0%
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  36.0% "“BILLY: When she took her key out of her pocket, she also took out a bag of coke. She was going into her room, and she was gonna, at the very least, have a bump. I…I didn’t want to be around it.
  I couldn’t go into that room.
  DAISY: I had thought for a moment that he and I could be friends, that Billy could see me as an equal. Instead, I was a woman he shouldn’t be alone with.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  23.0% "“Teddy said, “How do you feel?”
  And I told him I felt like I’d made something that wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, but it was maybe good in its own right. I said it felt like me but it didn’t feel like me and I had no idea whether it was brilliant or awful or somewhere in between. And Teddy laughed and said I sounded like an artist. I liked that.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.”
  I shut the door in his face.
  And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like.
  I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "“ I went to rehab so I don’t have to meet my own new daughter.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  5.0% "The audiobook is really fun! Each section is read by a different orator!"

Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Review:

This book is gorgeous, it's a story of Barcelona during the early days of the 1900s. With such wonderous translations from the original Spanish, the translated copy provided me with a dreamy atmosphere as I journey through this book. The start, a retelling of the youth of the main character, recounted the lack of memory of his mother. The father then took the child to the cemetery of forgotten books, the start of this creative fiction. Reading this book was similar to me walking down Valencia a few years back. It was 11pm at night, where the roads of Valencia were twisting and turns in the classical parts of the city. Everything was real, the beauty of the Spanish night in the local streets, with the sounds, the commotion, and yet, the mysteries.

To produce magic without incantation, to conjure worlds without sigils, to mystify without gesture.

This book reads like a thriller novel, but dreamy, the hangover fog, and hazy. It's gorgeous for sure, but much like this review, a bit convoluted. It's broken into the perspective of a few characters and meant for those who love prose. This novel reminded me of my journey and has given me many new proses to study. Read this if you like the way Proust wrote, dreamy, dreamy, dreamy.

Reading Stats:

• 1/3/20 - 1/6/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Quotes and Notes:

• “HEARD A REGULAR CUSTOMER SAY that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

• * “A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.”

• * “Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”

• * “Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,” said my father. “Besides, it can’t be returned. Open it.”

• * The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,” he would remark. “And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”

• * Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”

• * “Let me see. This afternoon, about an hour or an hour and a half ago, a gorgeous young lady came by and asked for you. Your father and yours truly were on the premises, and I can assure you without a shadow of doubt that the girl was no apparition. I could even describe her smell. Lavender, only sweeter. Like a little sugar bun just out of the oven.”

• * The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.” I clapped solemnly at his discourse. “You’re a poet, Fermín.” “No, I’m with Ortega and I’m a pragmatist. Poetry lies, in its adorable wicked way, and what I say is truer than a slice of bread and tomato.

• * The man came up to the counter, his eyes darting around the shop, settling occasionally on mine. His appearance and manner seemed vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t say why. Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of an incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in Sunday best.

• * The caretaker gave me a guarded look. When he smiled, I noticed he was missing at least four upper teeth.

• * "I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.”

• * “Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced that he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or, as in the case of Don Federico, his leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”

• * "if you see my father, tell him I'm well. Lie to him."

• * Few years separated her from the hospice’s guests. “Listen, isn’t the apprentice a bit young for this sort of work?” she asked. “The truths of life know no age, Sister,” remarked Fermín. The nun nodded and smiled at me sweetly. There was no suspicion in that look, only sadness.“

Reference Links:

• Forgotten books: 17 years since ‘The Shadow of the Wind’

• Readers Guide by Penguin Random House Books