Julia

I can relate to another goodreads reviewer who said they felt like they set feminism back 100 years by reading and liking this - but I'm not sorry about it? So be forewarned that my reflections might really just be post hoc self-justification. First, the plot includes a female journalist getting a temporary assignment following the Seattle hockey team. I think the locker room talk is likely a highly accurate depiction, but that also means...you end up reading a fair bit of locker room talk! Second, the love interest has a reputation as a womanizer, so there's a lot of “he's just in it for the sex” stuff, which is a boring plotline. The thing that redeems this aspect, but not fully, is that we get enough character development of him to see that a lot of that perception of his current actions (not his past, which sounds very par for the “professional athlete” course sorrrrrry that sports pun just came out of left field oh god I can't stop) is actually misperception on the journalist's part. He is legitimately into her pretty quickly, and she is too caught up in her own crap to realize it. Third, journalist actually pays her bills by writing erotica, and I really like that premise, but Gibson didn't use it as effectively/interestingly as she could have. The journalist ends up having an internal virgin/whore battle going on that just...ugh. She shouldn't be apologetic about that!! Even if she's not advertising it to her colleagues!! Anyway, totally unrelated to sexism, Gibson is funnily obsessed with the glamour of the Space Needle, which is easily not one of the best parts of Seattle. All in all, smart woman gets super hot partner who is really into her, sex scenes are steamy, and this was definitely written in 2003.

I picked this book up randomly off the shelf of the woman a babysit for–who has a huge thing for historical fiction. Apparently this is THE lesbian fiction novel to read, and I have to say, it's a good novel to boot. The setting (fin de siecle London) is delightful, the plot intruiguing, and yes, the sex was hot. It was definitely one of those books that I put off doing important stuff to read.

This would be the BEST BEACH READ EVER, since it's a 900+ page potboiler, but I have to admit, after having invested 900+ pages worth of reading time, I was disappointed not to get a happy ending. Amber is a heinous bitch, so I guess she gets what she deserves, but for chrissakes, where's the love for the Cruella DeVilles of the world? An entertaining read, nonetheless, and apparently a very historically accurate lampoon of Restoration England.

Sometimes I forget that I like a thriller, if it's more psychological than gory, and I don't think it's a stretch to say this is a ballet thriller. It's other things as well (a study of the complexity of long-term female friendships is certainly one of them), and I also love an author who will write a not-particularly-likeable protagonist. It reminded me a bit of Detransition, Baby in the sense that there were times I was cringing at various characters' choices, but because they were believably terrible, not unbelievable. Kapelke-Dale also writes with great precision about the underestimated depth of female ambition and desire in a patriarchy, especially in the particularly strange patriarchal microcosm of professional ballet. This does feel like a first novel in ways that are hard for me to specify, but if you're looking for a quick, evocative read with some interesting themes, it's good.

Ehhhh...spunky heroine, but sometimes to the point of deliberate obtuseness regarding her willingness to investigate her own motives, despite lots of narrated rumination? Hero hellbent on revenge in a fairly simplistic manner, then a 180 near the end? A little too much reliance on the idea of “animal instincts” to characterize their attraction to each other? Plus an annoying pattern in which they each basically orgasmed very quickly and at the same time. There were three good supporting characters here, and the dialogue often zipped along, but I didn't find it particularly compelling overall.

Dirty girl that I am, I almost wish this book had been condensed into the chapters on the sex organs (preciously named “Madonna del Latte” and “Privy Members”). Which were excellent. There were certainly gems in other sections of the book–informative tidbits on why we have back pain, attitudes towards hair, the bogusness of palmistry–and I LOVED how snarky he was about Freud, with other good jabs at the occasionally absurd attitude of patriarchy towards various elements of the female body, but once in a while his quirky sense of humor got a little too quirky. While in general it's fascinating to hear the skips and stops a quick mind makes (he's a positive genius with selecting funny quotes), once in a while it was a little disjointed. Don't spend too much time on it, and you'll remember some good cocktail factoids and let the rest slide.

Belc's memoir of nonbinary parenthood is a pleasure to read from start to finish. He grapples with what gender means in the context of personal development, relationships, pregnancy, being an embodied human generally, and parenting. Actually, grappling is the wrong word. More like, thoughtfully contends with all those areas of intersection and more, while creating a memoir that also reads like a love letter to his wife and their children. The inclusion of family photos and archival bureaucratic paperwork highlighting the discrepancy between parenting as it really occurs and societal ideas about “natural mothers” feels effortless, not forced. I'm just grateful he shared this story with the world.

I'm not sure I adore this quite as much as Beloved or Sula, but am so glad to have read it. Coming back to [b:Toni Morrison 6149 Beloved Toni Morrison http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165555299s/6149.jpg 736076] after a couple years since my last read of hers, I was just blown away by a lot of this book. Reading this really made me wish I'd taken a course in college on black masculinity (did UVa offer such a thing?)...I think all feminists interested in the intersectionality of race, class, and gender (which has been coming up again and again on feministing, lately, as it should) would benefit from reading this. At times Morrison's portraits of decay in rural America throughout the novel reminded me of the best parts of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom: slow, slightly mystical, and walking the fine line between chilling and uplifting.

Yalom wrote what is still a definitive tome on group therapy, in addition to many other things, but I wanted to read his writing on individual psychotherapy and more of his personal reflections about the practice. I think a star rating is sort of beside the point on this one. I found it useful to read and use as a self-reflective tool for my own practice.

There are parts of this that have aged TERRIBLY, as they should. For example, Yalom is highly fat-phobic, and his story of a woman working toward weight loss is frankly painful to read. He's also very focused on people's physical appearances generally, has a tendency to sexualize women that he recognizes but doesn't always manage successfully, and although he is good at spotting how anxiety about mortality shows up for his therapy clients, I would argue significantly less good at recognizing how what I'd bet is his own death anxiety shows up around some of his own ageism about his older clients.

I've seen lots of reviews commenting on his judgment of his therapy clients, and I can imagine reading this as someone who is or has been in therapy and feeling shocked and quite unsettled, wondering if all therapists feel this way all the time. I actually think some of this might be an artifact of what this book is: Yalom selected episodes of therapy that he found especially challenging, and times when we struggle to be effective are often times we struggle with countertransference toward the people we are finding “difficult to help” in a way that reflects our performance anxiety as opposed to the people themselves being “difficult.” My guess would be that he often treated people in therapy toward whom he did not have these strong reactions (likely even the majority of the time), but also those times would be less interesting to a reader for other reasons, too.

For therapists reading Yalom, I would urge myself and others not to turn away from his petty judgments and biases. Are we not all capable of the same???? I think if we see Yalom as qualitatively different from us, as opposed to just writing about the relatively extreme reactions that all therapists can have at times to people they serve, that weakens our own ability to identify the times that we are similarly problematic. Yalom is effective at destroying the idea of therapist neutrality for himself, and our field is still heavily colonized! What could be more reflective of the hegemony of White supremacy than to treat the therapist's perspective as “neutral”?? If psychotherapy is going to have a future outside of that origin story, we have to grapple meaningfully with deeply embedded but seriously flawed ideas such as there being an “objective reality” that is somehow unimpacted by one's worldview. I would argue that there is more harm to be done to people entering therapy by the therapist who has not closely examined the specific ways they personally are most likely to cause harm to others than the therapist who is uncomfortable with the idea that they might cause harm at all. To me, this is how the idea of intention /= impact plays out in mental health. Of course my intentions are good. My intentions are irrelevant to the impact I have on others, so I need to pay much more attention to the actual results of my work than my good intentions for my work.

For people who have been in therapy reading Yalom, I do find myself wishing that he had given more context to some of his strong reactions, if such context existed. Like more discussion of how he wrestled with his biases in his own therapy (which he superficially references), and the process of getting consent from the therapy clients he depicts - I imagine that some relational repair work would have been needed for them to reconcile their experience of the therapy as it was versus how it became after reading his version of it, as well. A good therapist might indeed sometimes have the challenges Yalom lays bare, and it is also the good therapist's responsibility to attend to those challenges fearlessly and persistently.

All in all, I find this book functional, I suppose. One of Yalom's strengths is his willingness to admit that there were times when he had no idea what the next right thing to do was, which is a truth that therapists continue to find uncomfortable, and I appreciated what he offered as food for thought for the ways my own frailties (different than his, but still very present!) show up in the work I try to do with others.

Like the title, this book was really beautiful. I'm working with a lot of people with extensive trauma histories at work right now, so I was bracing for the tragedies I was pretty sure were going to unfold, not feeling totally sure about my capacity for non-escapist fiction right now. The central one was indeed wrenching, but I'm glad I stuck it out for what Harris captured about what can come after that.

Read this last month, so my review will suffer from my currently hamster-like memory for books. But I liked it! Enough that I brought it along to a reunion with grad school friends to pass it along to one of them. This is a family drama, but I mean that in an expansive way. Coster's characters are fully imagined: they have strengths to admire and weaknesses that made me cringe in sympathy and recognition. The ties that bind and support are also the ones that constrain, portrayed against the complicated backdrop of racism in the American South.

A great beach read. Here Reichl tackles not her unruly adult love life, but her equally unruly childhood. Her insight is crisp, as is her ability to tell a good story. I didn't love it quite as much as I loved “Comfort Me with Apples,” but I'm beginning to suspect that I seldom love the second book I read from an author after having completely adored the first.

This was good! A total palette cleanser from my other recent romance novel. Rochon is clearly a feminist romance novel writer without being didactic about it, and this novel has all the elements I want in the genre - zippy plot, believably flawed characters you root for, genuine heat that doesn't fall into tired sexual tropes. I think I get a little distracted by plots that are so “of the moment,” like how the protagonist works at a tech start-up. My eyes glazed over a bit when she described the details of the app she was creating, but not in a way that diminished overall enjoyment. I'm not sure I'll seek another of Rochon's out soon, but next time I'm in the mood for a romance novel, this would definitely be where I head.

I think Elizabeth Gilbert's main strength lies in reflecting upon things without making the reader feel like she's trying to impart knowledge. She's very aware of her own shortcomings, but, at certain points, her self-awareness becomes plodding and whiny. Nonetheless, she's had an interesting life. I would give this book more stars except [SEMI-SPOILER ALERT HERE, FOR GODSSAKE LOOK AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT YOU SICK END-OF-BOOK-READING FUCK!:] I realized rather late in the book that I strongly suspected she had cheated on her husband with the codependent boyfriend, and that sort of tarnished my sense of camaraderie with her.

Nesta, Nesta, Nesta! I was pleased when my bestie alerted me that she is the star of this one.

****SPOILERS AHEAD****

I was also pleased to find that Maas' ability to write sex scenes, which I already found competent, has increased across this series. What this obviously means is that she should next turn her growing abilities to a book with Mor and whomever her lady love turns out to be, for one of the upcoming ones!

But back to this book - I read someone else's comment that another of Maas' skills is presenting a couple you root for, then demolishing your love for them with an even better one, and so on. I really do like Nesta and Cassian together, because Cassian has many of Rhys' good qualities, minus some of his bad (like his terrible habit of attempting to protect loved ones by withholding information from them - dude, get over yourself!!).

I will say that a corner Maas has backed herself into is one I heard someone talking about re: the Marvel franchise: if every character has world-ending powers, then all the conflicts are bombastic in a way that can eventually get boring! Maas has a related but different plot issue: if Rhys is really the most powerful High Lord who has ever lived, and Feyre is his equal, could they really not just have tweaked her pelvis for childbirth on their own? I say that because I love Nesta best as her Death God self, so I was a little sad to see her powers diminished (and think it would have been potentially more interesting to see her continue to wrestle with walking away from the option of total world domination). That loops us back to the Marvel issue, though, which is if Nesta stayed a Death God, what would the conflict in the next book look like? So I'm not smart enough to have a solution, just smart enough to see the issue, lol. Carry on, Maas, I guess!

I liked Ancillary Justice, so to feel the second novel in the series upping the ante was pretty fun as a reader. I think one of the most interesting plot points of this part of the trilogy is how Breq's identity as an ancillary (i.e., non-human-but-made-from-a-murdered-human AI; this isn't a spoiler alert as that's clear from from the first novel) gives them passing privilege among humans, with the downside passing always also includes: hearing in an even more unfiltered manner how clearly and easily humans distinguish between themselves and other (read: lesser) life forms. Breq also struggles with themes about what privacy and consent mean in a hyper-connected world, and those around her and under her command wrestle with whether individuals have the power for change in vast, slow moving, inequitable systems. There's a quote from a review of the front of the book that refers to the trilogy as a “space opera,” and opera doesn't speak to me personally, usually, but I get what they mean: thematically, the scope of this trilogy really feels like what it means to be a person (human or otherwise) in the world.

Jacob and I started reading this book out loud on a road trip to CA last summer...and just finished it on a road trip to CA this summer. What can I say? Who reads out loud, anyway? What I can say is that I unreservedly think Antonia Fraser is a treasure. Which is not the typical reaction I have to someone who uses at least one word per page that I don't know. She is delightfully British, delightfully clever, and sneakily snarky in a way I absolutely adore. Plus, this is one. juicy. story. Even if you're already sort of familiar with it. Perfect for when you feel the need to be reminded that truth is stranger than fiction.

Lord, can that man footnote. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it was one of those books that didn't blow my mind–the idea of creating more local and more sustainable communities and economies (food and otherwise) is something I've been a fan of for a while. I get the sense that the type of people who might buy this book are the choir McKibben is preaching to. Which is a shame, since I think he's pretty even-handed in his presentation of facts, even for a crazy commie liberal. But if you're a commie liberal too, of whatever level of sanity, I'd recommend it for a fun read that is well-researched, to boot.

Great; necessary. Half of my book club read this while the other half reading Indigenous Continent, and I think based on David Treuer's review in The New Yorker, I'm happy about my pick. Dunbar-Ortiz has a sweeping comprehensive view of the historical details plus a searing vision of the completely cohesive through line between our founding (and ongoing) genocide against Indigenous peoples and current imperialist foreign policy (and the delusional moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy at the center of it). I also especially appreciated the last chapter on what the future may hold. I occasionally had trouble tracking the geography of what she recounts because she tended to organize by theme/time period, but I think this also reflects that the Indigenous experience included both forced relocation and resistance through geographical flexibility.

Do you ever read a book and spend the whole time wishing you had written it? Yeah, hot damn do I wish I was Ariel Levy. This book is a funny, smart, nuanced, and culturally aware look at how “girl power” has gone very, very wrong. This book is everything a sex-positive feminist (which is certainly how I identify) could want for help responding to people who want to know why the Pussycat Dolls aren't a good example of female empowerment. As Levy so eloquently says, “Raunch culture isn't about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. It's about endlessly reiterating one particular–and particularly commercial–shorthand for sexiness.” The only point where I felt she needed to tread more carefully was her discussion of porn stars. I don't think trotting out the old speculation that many of them may have suffered from sexual abuse is doing anyone any good. On that, she should have stuck with confirmable facts, like the disturbing one that although Jenna Jameson considers herself powerful, she still can't watch any of her own scenes. I finished this in two days, and would recommend it to anyone interested in a more in-depth analysis of the pop culture we ingest daily.

I found this in a lending library replete with romance novels in the tiny town of Pacific Beach, WA (as all lending libraries in tiny beach towns should be). It is very representative of the genre (which I like!), but not exceptional, and grating in one significant way. The author is totally up on her medieval history, so I did actually enjoy and learn from the political intrigue aspects of the plot, but the central romance is just way too consistently about rape fantasy for me. I don't want that to sound judgmental, because there is a wide swath of things that people find sexy and enjoy in consensual ways, but if a relationship is all “hate sex,” that's just not my particular cup of tea. No matter how satisfying the characters are written as finding it afterwards. But my feelings aren't hurt, and it was exactly the sort of thing you zip through at the beach and then never think of again (or at least, once you write your goodreads review).

This was just so satisfying. Hot faerie sex, good friendships, exposition of one character I was intrigued by last book and now looooooooove (and which made me appreciate Maas' long game in #1, which I went back and re-read some of to really appreciate the subtle setup she did in that one for #2), danger, magic, complexity of sibling relationships, etc. Also, today I discovered that not only do my best friend and I alternate “Serious Novels” with “trash” (ratio varying by how terrible the outside world is at a given moment), but we both started this series within days of each other and now I am just waitttttting for her to finish this one to discuss! This one ends with a cliffhanger, but not the kind I'm mad about. I will say that if you like your escapism to just be sexy escapism, skip this series, which is violent, but as long as my literary violence is encased in a fantasy world, I'm fine with it.

I picked this up from one of the lending libraries in my neighborhood. When I lived in Albuquerque, my internship training director had recommended Hillerman's work as an interesting window into Southwestern culture. It certainly made me nostalgic for the Land of Enchantment! This is a pretty standard mystery in terms of plot and pacing, but the characters are interesting and funnily flawed, and Hillerman weaves a great deal of local tribal and political history into the finely-observed details. I'd definitely reach for another Hillerman next time I'm in the mood for a mystery.

Wow. This book is a ton plot-wise - just reading the goodreads recap before writing this review reminded me that the whole thing started with Feyre back in the Summer Court! Hah! Feels like forever ago in the timeline of this series. Is there such a thing as too plotty? If so, perhaps this verged on that. But I liked it. It's fine! The novelty of #1 is gone, clearly, the sexy suspense of #2 is past, and this is just a good ole-fashioned battle between good and evil. I will say that the major perk of this part of this series is that roughly 1/4 in, I was talking all things Pride with a friend and sharing my two cents that the ACOTAR series would be better if it was more gay...and then Maas made things more gay! I hope the trend continues in the remainder of the series. The cast of characters is now also more diverse. I do think a weird thing that happens in fantasy is that although it's pretty clear the primary protagonists don't think this way, others in the world distinguish between High Fae and Lesser Fae. Which perhaps is an intentional choice on Maas' part to reflect hierarchical structure in that society, but like, why? Why not, if one is world-building, build a world in which that society, whatever its flaws, doesn't have that particular one, and instead sees the Fae that populate the story as neither higher nor lower than anything else? There is enough animism in Maas' world already that it would be completely consistent (maybe more so) to extend that to flattening philosophical distinctions among Fae and between Fae and other creatures. ANYWAY. I'll keep reading, but this was enough of a temporary conclusion to a bunch of plotlines that I'll be reading some other stuff before #4.

There's something to be said for a book that'll take a day or two to read. A lot of the essays were poignant, but overall, this anthology made me feel like I should be having a quarterlife crisis like every single neurotic contributor to the collection. Which maybe I should be, but I think crises are best when they arise organically, as opposed to literary-induced.