The Lady Matador's Hotel

 
 
The Lady Matador's Hotel

by Cristina Garcia

Scribner

2010

 

 

I first noticed The Lady Matador's Hotel in grad school at the college bookstore because of its eye-catching cover, and I've kind of been meaning to read it ever since. One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to finally get around to reading things that've been on my list for forever. I'd long since forgotten whatever it was that drew me to the book, just a vague sense there was something there that intrigued me. I feel fortunate, because it's a much better than I had any reason to expect.
 

The Lady Matador's Hotel is quite structured, which immediately endears it to me. The book follows six main characters over the course of six days, from Sunday to Friday, plus an epilogue. The action is mostly contained in the Hotel Miraflor. Each chapter gives us one scene with each character over the course of one day, and each scene is labeled by the location it takes place, like the elevator, the patio restaurant, the lobby, the roof, specific rooms. The characters do have names, but Garcia usually refers to them by their occupation - the lawyer, the colonel, the waitress, the poet, the factory owner, and of course, the lady matador. The last section of each chapter is excerpts from the day's tv and radio news.
 
The characters pass each other by and occasionally intersect; the plot is like one of those movies with an ensemble cast where everyone's following their own storyline, the sort that were popular around the time Garcia wrote this. Because it takes place in a Spanish-speaking country (in this case, an unnamed Central American nation) and involves bullfighting, it reminds me of one of the first movies like that I ever saw, Carnages. I learned that in the intervening years, the book has been made into a play. On the one hand this makes sense, as Garcia has an eye for pairing dramatic moments and scenic locales; but on the other hand, an awful lot of what happens takes place inside the characters' heads, and the what action there is gains its meaning from those interior thoughts.
 
The book's cover depicts the very first scene, the lady matador admiring herself in the mirror before dressing in her costume. She's in town for a competition between matadoras, and to fight a few exhibition matches before the big event. She provides a throughline to the book. She's in the first scene and the last, in the news each day, and each of the other characters notices her and thinks about her, the celebrity in their midst. The lady matador thinks about her dead mother, contemplates her eventual retirement, psyches herself up with casual sex, preens around the hotel, and performs for an adoring press. We get to see a couple of her bullfights close-up.
 
The colonel is at Hotel Miraflor for a pan-Latin American military conference. He's a brutal man, a killer, a war criminal. The waitress is an ex-guerilla, a former leftist militant who thought she'd retired from conflict, until the man who killed her whole family, who drove her to revolution in the first place, shows up as a guest. The waitress spends the week trying to decide whether or not to assassinate the colonel, and being visited by the ghost of her brother. On the news, we see bombings nearby as other rebels attack the conference-goers at neighboring hotels.
 
The lawyer sells the infant children of local mothers to adoptive American parents. She calls the mothers she employs her 'breeders.' The national legislature is on the brink of passing a law banning international adoptions, but she's sure her political connections and her bribe money can keep her in business. The poet and his wife are here to adopt a baby. The poet is a Cuban exile, his wife an American, and being here is dredging up old feelings and new uncertainties.
 
The factory owner is a sadsack from Korean. He's depressed and suicidal. He feels endlessly sorry for himself. He's been losing money, his workers are striking, the press accuses him of underpaying and abusing his workers. His 16 year-old indigenous girlfriend is about to give birth, and she persuaded him to book them the honeymoon suite, which he can't afford, but he plans to be dead by the end of the week anyway. He doesn't seem to know or care what will happen to her if she's alone.
 
Several of these characters are unpleasant people, who have done and are still doing immoral things. The country is troubled, an ex-dictator is favored to win an upcoming presidential election, and America is implicated in many of the troubles - it's Americans who come to the hotel to buy babies, CIA agents attend the military conference. Garcia sets the characters in motion and closely observes their inner lives. Her writing is psychologically realistic, without overt moral judgment. Even as the world just off-camera is filled with big dramatic events - an election, a hurricane, a fatal nightclub fire, terrorist bombings - the characters themselves remain grounded in both their immediate concerns and their introspection about past regrets and future decisions. 

Die 2

 
 
Die 2
Split the Party

by Kieron Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020

 

  

In the first volume of Die, we learned that on Dominic's 16th birthday, he and five of his friends gathered to play a bespoke roleplaying game. They vanished from the Earth for months, and when they came back, they were unable to speak about anything that happened there, and game master Solomon remained behind. Then, a couple decades later, as they were all staring down the disappointments of their mid-30s, they got pulled back to the game world, back to the 20-sided planet Die. 
 
When they returned to Die, each got back the supernatural powers they had the first time. Also, Dominic, who seemed happy enough to be a man on Earth, became a woman named Ash. Going back again opened up a lot of old wounds and traumas, and the group couldn't leave until everyone agreed. Ultimately, they killed Sol, but then the group fractured, with three wanting to leave, and two wanting to stay behind.
 
In volume 2, Split the Party, we return after more weeks or months have passed, and both sides are basically hopeless. Ash the Dictator, who can compel people to do things; her sister Angela, the fairy-powered cyberpunk Neo; and Matt the Grief Knight, whose powers are fueled by his own and others' sadness, are trapped in the besieged remains of Glass Town. Izzy the Godbinder, who can compel spirits to do do favors for her on the promise she'll do them a favor in return in the future, and Chuck the Fool, who can be supernaturally lucky, so long as he remains over-confident and non-self-reflective, have been transported to the far side of the planet. Everyone is starving and desperate at the start of the volume.
 
Die seems to be made up of the remains of the games others have played there before. Glass Town, and the countries Angria and Gondal, were all invented collectively by the Brontes; the conquering army from Eternal Prussia seems like it came from the war games HG Wells used to play on the living room floor with Robert Louis Stevenson. My recognizing this isn't a spoiler, but neither is it something Gillon necessarily expects his audience to already know. The characters certainly don't. An explanation of the allusions is part of the plot. Zamorna, who is as fiendish as he is handsome, is another Bronte creation; he eventually describes himself as a ravisher of 17 year-old girls, dreamed up by a 17 year-old girl who wanted to be ravished. Gillon makes him literally a vampire.
 
The last time the group was on Die, they initially treated is as just a game, the place itself and its inhabitants as unreal. They acted as though their actions had no consequences, as though they were the only people present who could be hurt or who had lives that mattered. They were also, after an unspecified period of just having fun, desperate to figure out how to escape and return home. Eventually they came to accept that Die was real, magical but real, that the people who lived there were real. We don't really know what they did before reaching that point, but we know they regret a lot of it, now.
 
And they regret all the chaos Sol caused, and that their only plan to defeat Sol involved allowing Prussia to wreck Glass Town. Sol, though dead, persists as one of the Fallen, the zombie-orcs that the group used to just think of as generic monsters to kill.
 
Ash, Angela, Matt, and their prisoner Sol go to Angria, where they are greeted by Ash's son, Augustus, who is a member of the Ruling Party here. It seems that as teenagers, Izzy dated Zamorna, then Ash dated Zamorna and got pregnant, and Izzy got a goddess to agree to take over the pregnancy when they all returned to Earth. Izzy and Zamorna arrive not long after Ash, (Chuck is off sleeping with elf queens instead, apparently,) and Izzy confesses to the group's role in the conquest of Glass Town, which gets them all locked in bell jars in prison.
 
While they're locked up, their jailer is the ghost or remnant of Charlotte Bronte, who briefly tells the story of how she and her siblings made up their parts of Die. Allegiances shift, and Ash agrees to help Izzy save the world before they leave again, which involves a complicated plan to temporarily amplify her Dictator's powers to make herself the queen of Angria and place Zamorna under her thrall. We'll have to wait to see what she'll do!
 
Meanwhile Chuck shows up, luckily at just the right time to rescue Matt and Angela, leaving the zombie of Sol in prison. They have a different plan to save the world, so they're off to the races too.
 
Gillon's use of so many literary characters and setting components here reminds me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Fables, though I suspect the gaming history he's drawing on is much less familiar to most people than the literary heroes and fairy tale figures from those series. 
 
Portal fantasies where you change when you pass through the portal (and I guess magical girl series where you transform to activate your powers) have the potential to include magical gender changes, but I think Gillon has done more with that idea than I've seen before. My one complaint is that Ash is so reserved and taciturn that we hardly know how she feels, or how Dominic felt about briefly becoming a girl and then turning back into a boy all those years ago. Dominic was bi, and maybe the experience helped him accept his attraction to men? But in neither body does Dominic or Ash appear to experience any kind of gender dysphoria. 

 

We get one page of backstory about her relationship with Zamorna, how it intersected with her fraught friendship with Izzy, and what happened to her pregnancy. The emotion is implied amidst a spare recitation of facts, without the benefit an actual voice to lend inflection to the words. You know she's not happy, that her lack of affect is covering up some kind of pain, but all we see is the surface of the black box. We can only guess what's inside it. Maybe there's more coming, but I can't help but wish that Ash was either more expressive or that she had a foil, another character who experienced the same things but reacted differently, so we could discern more about how she felt by contrast.

Otto

 
 
Otto

A Palindrama

by Jon Agee

Rocky Pond Books

2021 

 

 

Jon Agee calls Otto a 'palindrama,' a portmanteau of his own devising that describes the fact that every bit of text in the body of the book takes the form of a palindrome, a word or phrase that reads to same forward and back, like racecar or noon. This is a children's comic rather than a picture book. Each page has multiple panels of sequential art, and the story is mostly told with pictures. 
 
The text, when it appears, is largely dialogue, but also sometimes signs and labels. An awful lot of these are longer than any of the palindromes I'm used to (which top out at like, 'Madam I am Adam,') and many of them are formed by a statement and reply, two characters working together to make one palindrome.
 
The story follows young Otto on an adventure that seemingly takes place in his own imagination, but that also involves a wider and stranger world than you'd think he could dream up alone. I've come to appreciate this as a pretty classic structure for kid's stories. In Otto's case, he's playing with his dog Pip when his mom and dad call him into the dining room to eat his wonton soup. Staring into the soup bowl, he's imaginatively transported to a beach where his parents are asleep on blankets in the sun, leaving him unsupervised. He wanders off and has his adventures before returning to the beach just as his parents are waking up, and then returning to reality as his daydream while staring into his soup comes to an end. The structure is fairly symmetrical, which suits the theme well.
 
On the beach, Otto sees a rat carrying a surf board; Pip gives chase and Otto follows. Soon he's in a desert. He briefly meets and passes by a few eccentric characters and odd food stands. He finds a doctor asleep on the railroad tracks, who's saved at the last moment by the 'Mr. Alarm' mascot from Otto's bedroom clock. He reaches a road where someone gives him a ride into the city. He sees lots of signs and advertisements, and once in town the driver points out various notable cityfolk. Otto wanders a bit, goes to the 'mueseum,' and meets more strange people, including a woman in a pink cat costume who wants his help stacking cats on a ladder. He continues wandering, through a park, a cemetery, to the lake shore and into the lake. Eventually he takes a boat ride, braves a storm, and ends up back where he started. It's fair to say Otto's dream is action packed!
 
At the end, Agee credits people who suggested a few of the palindromes to him, and of course some were simply well-known. But it seems he made up most of them himself, especially the longer and more complex ones. Whether that's something his brain was uniquely suited to, or a skill he practiced, I'm really impressed! 

Chrono Trigger

 
 
Chrono Trigger

by Michael Williams

Boss Fight Books

2014

 

 

Michael Williams' Chrono Trigger is the Boss Fight Books book about the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. I previously read BFB's Spelunky and Earthbound books. Spelunky was pretty great, but it was also written by the game's designer, and so had insight into the creative process that will simply never be available in a book written by anyone else. Earthbound disappointed me because the author paired a walkthrough of the game with a roughly equal amount of narrative about his own life, which was not what I'd hoped for.
 
Chrono Trigger has a much better balance, I think. Williams describes the basic plot, the characters, and a few key moments, in the early chapters, then spends the rest of the book on actual criticism. He looks at the portrayal of gender, race, and sexuality in the game. He talks about the portrayal of social institutions like government, law, and the economy. He actually gets brief interviews with both the original translator who wrote the first English localization, and the one who retranslated the game for a rerelease. He even explores a bit the role of time travel in the game's narrative.
 
Williams does discuss his life a little bit, what it was like to first play Chrono Trigger in the 90s, and he mentions his time as an English teacher in Japan, but like, his reasons for doing so are obvious and help to advance his discussion of the topic at hand. He talks about himself about as much as I do in these reviews; he definitely does not put a whole memoir's worth of life stories into his video game review.
 

Chrono Trigger the game is one of the most highly regarded Japanese rpgs of the 16-bit era, with colorful pixel art, and a plot and cast that ranges across time to include a cave woman, a cursed medieval knight who looks like a frog, a robot from the future, all trying to save their world from the apocalyptic Lavos, who crashed into the planet in the distant past, and who will erupt to fly off to another world in their year 1999, wiping out almost all life in the process. Players travel back and forth in time to assemble their party, face off against Lavos, definitely lose their first battle against the living embodiment of mass extinction, then continue exploring the world at different times until they're finally ready to fight Lavos again.
 
I think Williams's work here probably represents a pretty good baseline of what one should reasonably be able to expect from the whole 33⅓, Pop Classics, Boss Fight Books format. There are a few more of these books that I kind of feel interested in, but I've also realized I'm more interested in histories of how things were made more than I am in commentaries about them. Williams provides a blend of both. But I may have been spoiled by the wealth of insider knowledge in Spelunky.

The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

The Eyre Affair

 
The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fford

Penguin

2001, reprinted 2003

 

 

The Eyre Affair is the first in a series of mysteries involving living people who cross into, and fictional characters who cross out of, the world of books. Like the idea that our toys have secret lives that they act out when we're not looking at them, the thought that the characters in books are aware of their stories, are conscious of acting them out, even when we're not reading them, has a deep, almost primal appeal, a resonance with some of our earliest childhood imaginings. It reminds me of old Looney Tunes like "Have You Got Any Castles?" or "Book Revue" that depict everyone stepping out of their books at night to mingle and party. 

It's a scenario that makes intuitive sense, but that also doesn't fit neatly into the distinctions we usually draw between science fiction and fantasy, although in this case, Fforde fills up his world with alt history, time travel, mad science ... plus supervillains, werewolves, and vampires. His protagonist, Thursday Next, is a secret agent working for the busiest, least glamorous branch of British Intelligence, the ones who investigate book-related crimes. 
 
In Fforde's world, the Crimean War that started in the 1850s is still dragging on in the early 2000s, Britain and France use time traveling spies to sabotage each other's histories, cloned dodos are a common pet, and the general public is fanatical about classical literature and live theatrical adaptations thereof, seemingly to the exclusion of almost any other form of entertainment. Instead of football hooligans, you get crowds dressed up like Shakespeare or Milton rioting because they encountered a banned art style like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, or they witnessed a play that illegally departs from approved interpretations. Those sorts of crimes, plus lots and lots of attempted forgeries, are the things Thursday ordinarily investigates.
 
At the start of The Eyre Affair though, Thursday gets a temporary promotion to a division that's trying to arrest super-criminal Archeron Hades, who's bulletproof, invisible on film and security footage, who can dominate men's minds, and who's just stolen the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The attempted arrest goes badly; Hades overpowers and kills the entire team of investigators, except Thursday, whom he merely injures. 
 
The structure of the plot reminds me of a Bond film - short job, reassignment, meeting with the tech guy, long job. After the massacre, Thursday transfers from London back to her old home town to recuperate. She visits her family, and her genius uncle shows her his latest inventions, including the Prose Portal, his brand new device that will let a person travel inside a book. Later, while Thursday's at work, Hades steals the device, kidnaps her uncle, and announces his plan to extract the character of Martin Chuzzlewit from the manuscript and kill him, unless his ransom demands are met. If you use the portal to enter an ordinary book, you'll only change that one copy, but if you enter an original manuscript, any changes will affect all the other copies that are based on it.
 
Thursday's uncle manages to sabotage Hades's first plan, but that only prompts him to go after an even bigger prize, the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Thursday is too late to prevent the theft, or the initial kidnapping, which results in half the book getting erased. But Thursday is able to go into the book to rescue Jane and thwart Hades, which accidentally results in the book getting a new ending, the one it has in reality.
 
I'm assuming that future Thursday Next mysteries will also involve the Prose Portal and travel into other books. I don't think I'll be continuing though. Fforde's worldbuilding feels like an unsuccessful collage, the smorgasbord of different genre elements never really blending into a coherent whole. I liked Shades of Grey, a later work of Fforde's which is equally wacky, a novel of manners set in a dystopian future where social status is based on the ability to see color. But Fforde's humor in this one didn't really work for me, and the plot felt too unwieldy. 
 
Thursday has a few episodic book-police adventures felt extraneous, although Fforde did give them some connection to the main plot in the end. Her dad is a rogue time traveler who repeatedly stops time to pop in and have a non sequitur chat with her before disappearing. Thursday has a lot of bad memories of her time in the army in Crimea, which relate to a present-day plot about whether Britain will escalate or finally seek peace. And she has a romance plot with her old boyfriend that I think is supposed to parallel Jane and Rochester, but that mostly ends up feeling incredibly rushed and emotionally unrealistic. It's a lot! And to me, it just doesn't work together well enough to make me want to continue.

Funny Ha Ha (2002)

 
 

Funny Ha Ha

directed by Andrew Bujalksi

written by Andrew Bujalski

Goodbye Cruel Releasing 

2002 

 

 
Funny Ha Ha is probably the first mumblecore movie (especially if you think of it as a movement rather than a genre). My introduction to mumblecore came via a New York Times article. Ever since, I've had a soft spot in my heart for these rough-around-the-edges movies about young people trying to figure out who they want to be.

 

We follow Marnie across a single summer sometime after college. As the film opens, her life is destabilized in a couple ways - she just lost her job, and Alex (who she has a crush on) has been dumped by his girlfriend. She also seems very open to influence - early on, a couple friends spot her out walking while they're driving by; they invite her to join them for dinner, and she does. Many of her other interactions have a similar chance quality.

 

Marnie's friends all push her to try to date Alex, who beats her to the punch by calling her to preemptively tell her he's not interested. But then later he also asks her out for coffee. Alex clearly has feelings for Marnie, but wants to keep stringing her along instead of dating her. Every time Marnie starts to get over him, he contacts her to build her up and then reject her again. The one part of Marnie's life she figures out by the end is realizing what he's doing and deciding to stop going along with it.

 

Outside of Alex, Marnie tries to kiss a cute guy who she's chatting with at a party, and he rejects her. Her friend Dave (who's dating her friend Rachel) kisses her, but she's really not interested. And Marnie wants to be friends with former coworker Mitchell (played by director Andrew Bujalski), but he keeps asking her out, even after she's said no, until she gets mad and throws him out of her apartment. Every crush in this movie is unrequited.

 

After losing her first off-screen job, Marnie tries temping at the same company as Mitchell, then gets a job as a research assistant for Alex's professor uncle. She tries to quit drinking, tries basketball and chess, and maybe makes a couple new women friends by the end.

 

I like Marnie as a character, but overall I think I want to like this movie more than I actually like it. The sound is rough, much too loud in parts and quiet in others, depending on where the mic was. Some of the actors are not so great at improvising dialogue. And all the guys seem kind of sexist and unlikable, none more so than Alex. It feels authentic, but also painful.

 

I was in college when Funny Ha Ha came out, and the friend-group Marnie is sort-of a part of looks and sounds like friend-groups I saw back then because I knew one member and attended the occasional group event. I think the film captures that time and social position very well.

 

One kind of fun thing about re-watching it now is the technology. Marnie has an answering machine, and at one point uses a pay phone. Only one character in the whole thing has a cell.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022. 

Playing with Books

 
Playing with Books
The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book

by Jason Thompson

Quarry Books

2010

 
 
Playing with Books is a craft book about art projects created using printed books as a raw material. Thompson showcases about 30 projects, mostly of his own design, that the reader could attempt. He also showcases about 30 professional artists who create using books.
 
Reading through Thompson's suggested projects, I was struck by the fact that book crafts are mostly just paper crafts, using a specific source of paper. Thompson suggests making envelopes and origami, beads made of rolled-up pages, and various items of jewelry or decor from shapes cut out of the paper, usually circles or butterflies. For a few projects, Thompson leaves the spine on the book and fans it out - by combining 2 or 3 like this you can make a cylinder, which can then by modified by folding or cutting the pages to make shapes. In a couple cases, he suggests laminating paper and plastic together and using the composite to make purses or bags.
 
The projects are mostly easy enough for an adult to do together with a kid, though for any of the projects more difficult than that, I don't really think he provides enough instructions. Each project gets 2-6 pages, usually 4. The first page is always just a large photo of the finished project, the second only has the name and a list of materials. This section takes up the vast majority of the book, in a way that feels unbalanced.
 
The artist showcases mostly get only one page, very occasionally two. Each of these pages then includes several smaller photos of the artist's works, along with a very brief bio, probably written by the artists themselves. Compared to the very (overly?) spacious layouts of the crafting section, this part seems quite cramped, and for many of the artworks, I wished for a larger photo so I could see the details better. 
 
The artists often modify whole books, creating sculptural objects that are both built up and cut away. Many of the books were soaked in water so they could be reshaped, warped, wrinkled, splayed, twisted, the pages cut into strips like tentacles. I found the collages and assemblies the most interesting. I think that, ultimately, I may be more interested in seeing really skilled book artworks made by others than I am in attempting to make my own little craft projects. In retrospect, I am struck by just how exceptional Good Mail Day is among craft books - the projects are achievable, the instructions are genuinely helpful, and the authors write in a way that's conversational and that genuinely encourages you to try.