nathalie

I don't know how to review a book like this. I've been torn apart by images of naked, bleeding grief bookended by descriptions of kimchi and the best noodle broths. Impossible how Zauner sways so easily between joyous memories and the still fresh pain of losing her mother. Hoping someday I have half the strength to love like she does.

This remains the defining coming of age story. Still the blueprint for movies like Lady Bird of Eight Grade, just a foundational text for people interested in grounded stories of adolescent ennui. Was shocked to see this came out in 1970, feels very daring for a children's book back then which tracks given people are still trying to get it banned today.

I am a sucker for religious uncertainty, struggling with femininity, and school drama so this ticks all the boxes. Margaret has a great voice that balances overly thoughtful narration with heaps of tween angst. Her titular reframe is initially a bit silly, but once the book begins to explore her anxieties around religion (stemming from pushy adults on all sides), it takes on a greater significance as it's clear her relationship with god means a lot to her despite having no name to put to it.

I do wish the emotional beats weren't reserved for the last 30 or so pages. Much of the book is straightforward scenes of children existing in fairly unremarkable ways (which is itself interesting), but a lot of the major threads go unresolved as there simply aren't enough pages to handle them once the ball starts moving. It has also aged quite severely in many places, which would be alienating enough if everyone wasn't also extremely rich.

Glad to have this as a reference text for similar media, and excited to check out the recent movie which seems to complete the circle of grounded coming of age stories that are maybe more popular than ever.

What an exasperating novel! Literally half of it is made up of the most inane, indulgent emails where characters ponder about consumerism and cosmetics and the philosophy of relationships, with zero theoretical background. Literally hundreds of pages of people just saying shower thought nonsense about labor and the exploitation of the global south and being like “idk if that makes sense, I've just been thinking about it.” These are the sorts of conversations I have with friends over coffee and they tell me to read a fucking book.

The parts that aren't Wikipedia rehashes are also bizarrely inert. Huge chunks of the book read like alt text (constant plain descriptions of characters opening messaging apps), with almost no character voice because it's written in this detached third person style where everyone is a soup of the author just trying to have a single coherent idea. The back third of the book is the best by a wide margin because the emails go away and characters actually interact, but even that is too little too late because it's coming in with dynamics that are explicitly pulling from decades of friendship we barely see. We're meant to assume these characters are best friends despite only having uncomfortable interactions and bizarre emails. Then - psych - it's COVID time and we're talking about how actually nothing changed and isn't it sad we can't go to the cinema. Just exhausting stuff.

Finally, there are ongoing gestures at queerness which are so fucking obnoxious. Two of the characters are supposedly bisexual but everyone craves the traditional stability of heteronormativity. The book literally ends with a character getting pregnant and talking about marrying her childhood best friend and moving to the country.

This will certainly appeal to a certain type of middle class liberal that fancies themselves progressive but refuses to engage with actual materialist reality. Why consider decades of theory when you can act like you're the first person who has ever thought maybe it's wrong to subjugate much of the world to preserve an expendable lifestyle. Rooney is so transparently trying to come to terms with her own wealth and celebrity and it's just embarrassing.

What a fucking let down after Normal People.

In insolation each story is lightweight if unremarkable, but collected together, the repetition and simplicity becomes an annoyance. “A misunderstood, not-like-other-girls girl feels seen by the sensitive stud she mistook as a douche.” A bit too uncharitable to call it Wattpad-core, but certainly working from a similar base.

My favorite book of all time. Bleakly funny, beautifully penned, a wonderful and horrible companion through so many years.

Just wrapped it up. It's a very good detective novel though I think it's political allegory sort of falls apart by the end (or at least to the wayside). Lands in a disappointing ambiguity about the role of police and borders, seeing them as both fully artificial and hostile but also necessary because the alternative is total anarchy. I maybe expected something a bit more given Mielville's clear interest in leftist politics, but it was really closer to a Dan Brown novel but where the conspiracy is actually just a sad man with something to prove.

Decent body horror novella with a lot of queer subtext. I think it tries to be about too many things and doesn't end up having coherent thoughts about any of them (transhumanism, being trans and beholden to the pharmaceutical industry, trauma from complicity with a dehumanizing corporation), but it's pretty sick when a lesbian turns into the monster from Carrion and eats Newark.

Happy to have finally read something by Le Guin. I enjoyed the pseudo-epistolary structure and concept of a fully gender fluid civilization, but the book's age really shows through in the limits of how far this queerness can go (all relationships “become” heterosexual, for instance, because reproduction I guess).

I think I'm missing some important context for when this was written, as it has both a lot of vaguely anti-communist sentiment and also seems to be pulling from Catholic mission trips to East Asian countries, but I can't quite pinpoint a through line. A bubbling pot of challenging political ideas that are not so much unexplored as they are too large for a 300-page scifi novel. Very curious to check out some of Le Guin's later work, but this seems as good a place as any of, like me, you've been meaning to check her out.

I can't stop thinking about what a nightmare this book must have been to design and print. I'm not sure any book will ever give me the sort of awe and revulsion I felt seeing a sentence span across the spine over two pages. It's obscene.

I didn't know much about House of Leaves beyond it's infamous typography, so it was surprising to learn it's functionally a book equivalent to found footage horror. It trades documentary “authenticity” for dense citations and pervert French, but conceptually I find a lot of similarities (both are primarily interested in the mechanics of their medium and how our trust in those forms can be exploited). How successful HoL is depends mostly on your willingness to indulge its most excessive elements, following footnotes to smaller footnotes and spinning the book around like it's the world thickest centerfold.

HoL slots into a weird segment of media that I conceptually appreciate but dread existing because it inevitably gets attached to the worst sort of gross art bro. It is a playful, surprisingly warm, darkly funny book, but also one that revels in masculine violence and the deification of male ambition. It is proud of its swamp, fascinated by the algae and mutated fish, but if you want to study the tadpoles you're forced to wade past crocodiles and a CW list longer than the terms you didn't read.

My metaphors are mixing and my mind is wandering, but this is all to say HoL is a challenging recommendation in 2022. A rewarding one if you can stomach the grime, but I wouldn't shame anyone for keeping it on the shelf a while longer.

Grotesque queer horror of the most beautiful and trashy variety. It is so rare to find something that so bluntly captures the trans experience, trans survival, love and gore wrapped in a scrapnel coated blanket. It is uncompromising, at times bordering on cruel, the accumulation of a thousand daily tragedies spilling out over a ceaseless apocalypse.

Within that pain are the pockets of hope that sustain us. The relationships and messy connections and bitter loyalty of communities continually rebuilding themselves because nobody else is going to save them. It is an uncertain future, but a future all the same.

Had high hopes this would finally make a Sonic Youth fan out of me but I'm honestly shocked how boring I found it. Kim Gordon has a pretty abstract, detached way of writing that makes all the events described feel very distant and almost like they were happening to someone else. Maybe it's just that I'm not very interested in middle class art gallery culture, or that I also read Michelle Zauner and Carrie Brownstein's memoirs recently and both were much more engaging.

I will continue to not have any real feelings about Sonic Youth I guess. Truly zero opinions on this band I spent 300 pages learning about.

A sympathetic, unwaring untangling of leftist guilt during parallel revolutions. Jumping between contemporary Shanghai, pre-to-post communist China, and 1980s Cape Town, How to Be a Revolutionary is less concerned with historical specificity than the mutual grief and shame felt by those unable to save the people around them from state violence. It is both a condemnation of inaction and a challenging attempt to interrogate our complicity in ongoing atrocities.

Structurally, it's an ambitious bit of time traveling (if occasionally difficult to keep mentally organized). The second act's pacing slows considerably but in service of expanding on characters whose motivations near the end would otherwise read as reckless (if not outright cruel). There is still a pronounced amount of shock value in the final revelations which I am torn on, though the historical context makes it feel a bit more justified.

Recommend for fellow comrads struggling with apathy and guilt at how little any one person can do.

The more I think about this book the more frustrated I am. It's my first Terry Pratchett so I wasn't sure what to expect, but the blend of British “incompetent masses” humor with the oppressively cynical, Liberal politics was agonizing. The book's arc is about how the world is fucked but it's at least better than the alternative because the people in power are composed tyrants rather than openly killing people; learning that it's actually super fulfilling and good to be a cop if you take it seriously, giving up training dragons to be a proper aristocrat, etc.

Just aggressively bleak “return to normal” resolution that combined with the “people are naturally ignorant sheep who will adjust to anything people in power demand” feels super cynical about the possibility or need for political change. Everyone is the same selfish, ignorant drunk who immediately rationalize horrible actions when they realize it's in their financial favor. I get it's supposed to be a satire or whatever but it just feels unsophisticated and antisocial.

Probably not gonna read more Pratchett unless I get a compelling sell in the future. Can definitely see a through line from this to Wheaten to Marvel writing, which is unfortunate but I guess helpful for tracking this style of wink at the camera, a better world is not possible fantasy.