LaShel

Literally my favorite novel I've read in at least two years. This book does a really good job of addressing privilege (along several axes) in the context of an engaging story about a young woman just trying to adult.

The first half of this book is amazing - slow and beautifully written, with a delicious sense of foreboding doom. Then everything starts to happen at once, magical elements are popping up all over the place with no consistency or reason, there's graphic violence and stomach wrenching child abuse for what often feels like no purpose at all, and the book takes a moralistic anti-technology tone that I hated. So overall three stars, I guess?

Fluffy and predictable. I didn't love the “moral” (everyone's lives look perfect on Instagram but are actually a mess - that maybe would have felt fresh in 2013 but not in 2017 when it was published and definitely not in 2020 when I read it) especially paired with a main character who felt like a bit of a Mary Sue (she's just brilliant at her career and effortlessly beautiful and all the emotionally unavailable guys can't help being in love with her, you know?) but it was an easy, fun read.

I was expecting a lot more science but this is just your standard new age pop-psych self-help book.

Things I loved: The cover. The nuanced take on racial identity and racial passing, especially as the main characters' back stories spin out. Katherine. The weapons and clothes. The moral complexity and ambiguity in interactions with the no-longer-alive and the oppressors. The lack of a romantic subplot.

Things I liked: Jane (her internal dialogue was off to me, though). The treatment of sexuality. The setting (but did we really need two of them?). Many of the minor characters. The dialogue, especially between Jane and Katherine. The battle scenes (action scenes in books usually bore me into flipping pages but not these).

Things I disliked: The inclusion of some paper thin characters (especially the sex workers and the Native American character). The meandering to a cliff-hanger end (I didn't realize this was part of a series - if I had I probably would not have bought it).

Hoping this becomes a movie. And maybe a video game.

Time travelling queer romance? Sounds amazing! But the main characters fall so hopelessly, breathlessly, dramatically, obsessively in love without even knowing each other and then spend the rest of the book proclaiming that love in the most effusive, flowery language you can imagine. retching sounds I still liked the premise and the plot (secondary though it was to the characters' emotions) but I am not enough of a romantic to fully enjoy this kind of thing.

First, the good. I loved the cover, I picked up some useful bits of inspiration for my practice, I was inspired by some of the witchcraft-as-a-movement bits, and as someone who has rejected Wiccanism because of the heternormative, reductive male-female duality I liked that this book is non denominational.

But then there's the womb talk. If you don't have one, have one that doesn't work, don't want to use yours to make a baby, have one that causes problems for you, have one that has to be medicated, or are past the age where you can use yours for baby-making, this book is at best dismissive and at worst actively exclusionary.

Creepy and unsettling (in the best possible way). I could not put this book down.

The ending left far more questions than answers but I'm assuming that it's being set up as a trilogy.

I loved that it's a tiny bit queer, but also that there's no romance (I hate the predictable love triangles in YA sci-fi). A lot of the dread in the book is tied to the disorienting experience of being a young woman in a body that's changing in ways you can't control and don't fully understand, which was very effective. And I looooove the cover.

Obnoxious characters. Beautiful writing.

There's a lot of research in this book, and the author generally gives you enough information about the studies for you to evaluate their process, which is nice. In addition to being backed up by one or more studies, the nuggets of advice are concrete and not always intuitive (for instance, people are much more likely to lie “to your face” than in an email because of the psychological weight of putting something in writing, and even judges and police officers are very bad at telling if someone is lying by their body language and physical appearance whereas vocabulary queues can be quite reliable [people who are not telling the truth tend to use far fewer first person pronouns but a lot more third person pronouns than normal], so email might actually be the best way to go next time you are looking to get to the bottom of something).

Some of the studies were new to me, others I've heard of at least a hundred times (like the infamous “marshmallow test”). Because a lot of the studies were conducted decades ago some of the advice feels old fashioned (the dating chapter in particular incorporates a lot of assumptions about heteronormative gender roles), but again at least the author provides enough information about the studies to let the reader see where that might be happening.

This was an impulse read for me (on the “new arrivals” shelf at my library). It is just a series of spotlights on different start up businesses. A fun reminder to think creatively but I don't think this would be very useful for someone actually trying to start a successful side hustle.

This should have been a really interesting exploration of racism (given that the protagonist is a vampire who has been genetically modified to have dark skin and some other vampires hate her for it) but it read like really fluffy YA fiction following the adventures of an amnesiac Mary Sue whom everyone who isn't racist falls in love with. And the prejudice is confined to a small subset of traditionalist sticks-in-the-mud while everyone else is “good” which, yeah, that's exactly how racism works.

This could have included an interesting exploration of bisexuality (given that the vampires build “harems” that include both male and female humans) but the focus remains firmly on the male-female pairings (the main character has to find a vampire husband, her male human “first” is mostly okay with sharing her but only with women, humans bound to vampires of the same sex explain their fate is okay because they still get to have sexy times with opposite sex humans).

I expected an interesting exploration of gender (given what I had heard about the author going into the book) but it turns out vampires are matriarchal because female vampires are more biologically powerful (because they are “sexier”). That's it. It veers awfully close to gender essentialism.

On top of all this, let's throw in a bunch of sex scenes between a prepubescent vampire girl who looks about ten (but it's okay because ten in vampire years is 50 in human years) and a twenty five year old hairy man who literally can't stop himself because she's sooooo seductive (because she has the strongest vampire sexy powers ever and even her dad and brothers have a hard time controlling themselves around her).

I picked up this book because of the comparisons with Addie LaRue, which I absolutely adored. Like that book, The God of Endings is told from the perspective of a "young" woman who has been cursed with immortality and has to cope with loss and the world shifting around her. The God of Endings also raises some interesting questions about hypocrisy, saviorism, and agency/biological compulsion. I could not put this one down, although I do wish it were a bit less vividly gruesome.

This book was really, really hard to read. Not because it discusses what might happen to our planet and our species in the face of unchecked climate change, which it does and which I think is a worthwhile endeavor, but because of the time it does spend discussing solutions (which seemed beyond its scope).

The book ascribes plenty of blame to our individual actions (the last plane ticket you purchased put meters of arctic ice into the ocean, did you know) but insists that anything any one of us does (including not having kids, opting for a hermetic existence, and even self-immolating) is ineffectual and even silly in the face of inevitable catastrophe. It's not wholly fatalistic (the author seems to think that at least his hypothetical grandchildren will be okay if we “just” demolish capitalism and nation-states in the next few years) but still somehow entirely unhopeful and castigating. This may well be intentional (the author rails a lot against complacency) but I'm less useful, not more, when my anxiety is inflamed.

Overall I learned a lot about climate change, but it was not an exercise that was good for my mental health and it planted a lot of “weeds” in my headspace that, even if true, I don't appreciate (there's no point in saving for retirement, voting for greener political candidates is pointless, it's futile to try and make the world better). I am relieved to finally be finished with it.

Some of the short stories were much better than others but the best of them were brilliant.

There's an interesting story at the heart of this book, but it gets weighed down by the details (there are so many characters who are difficult to keep straight but ultimately are only peripheral to the plot). Had a hard time pushing through to the end, and did not get the resolution I was expecting.

This book managed to change my entire perspective on decades of American history. And it was weirdly comforting to see how many overtly-racist, anti-democratic politicians our country has survived so far? This is on my shortlist of books I would make everyone read if I could.

Controversial opinion: I did not like The Broken Earth. At all. I was barely able to finish the trilogy. So it took me a while to give this collection of short stories a chance. Which was a shame because these are great! I disliked the one story that takes place in The Broken Earth universe but the rest of them were very good. The scary ones kept me awake at night, the funny ones made me laugh, and a few of them prompted more self-reflection than I'm used to when reading fiction.

I hate monkeys. Rats and mice? Adorable! Snakes? Hello there, beautiful. But monkeys? They make my skin crawl. There is nothing creepier to me than a monkey dressed up like a person. Which is a long winded way of saying I should have known better than to pick up this book. Some of the scenes in this book are so, so disturbing that I'm worried they will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Beyond that, this book does have some interesting things to say about race, sexuality, and personhood, but even setting the monkey aside, it all felt a bit disjointed? I kept expecting something to happen that would tie the threads together but it never came. There's a really beautiful scene involving a teacher in a classroom getting through to his students that I loved, but overall this book was not. for. me.

While I did appreciate the author's emphasis that the gender differences she describes are the result of socialization, not biology, overall this book didn't move or inspire me. That's odd because I usually really like books in this genre. I suppose I prefer bring told how I can better leverage my strengths (The Myth of the Nice Girl) than read about how damning my weaknesses are. And while the book also talked about how little girls are encouraged to “play it safe”, I don't think it adequately addressed how society so often punishes adult women for taking risks (like negotiating for a higher salary or even running for public office [Katie Hill comes to mind]).

I hated this book. So much so that I wasn't able to bring myself to read anything else for a month after I finally powered through this (in retrospect, I shouldn't have been so stubborn about finishing it). Absolutely nothing about this book was funny to me - it made me sick to my stomach. I only realized while reading other reviews after I finished that all the horrible, mean, and offensive bits were supposed to be “satire” (maybe I missed this in part because of all of the pop culture references that I didn't get? Or maybe I just don't find horrific child abuse, mental illness, and sexism funny?). Clearly there's something here that's resonating with others but the humor just didn't connect for me.

Delightfully creepy

The plot: boring rich people live in big houses in New York City and think about how much they dislike other boring rich people while dealing with the minor frustrations of everyday life.

The moral of this story - that people and their choices are complex and someone's circumstances have an outsized role in shaping both her actions and their consequences - is worthwhile, although I hope not novel to any readers. But this book was too long and the characters were almost universally flat and unlikeable.

I found this while (virtually) stack browsing and went in not knowing anything about the subject matter. Wow. I've had my share of terrifying experiences as a pedestrian but never realized how intentionally our western cities and towns prioritize the comfort and convenience of drivers over the lives of those who are on foot.