My Beloved World

I thought the parts about her childhood in the Bronx were very compelling and novel-like, but the unending cliches, gratuitous nostalgia and self-back-patting made it hard for me to finish. “How Great I Am” might be a more appropriate title.

Very enjoyable.
Great foundation, early on she directly states that it's a memoir, how that differs from a biography, and that she's not going to discuss her time on the Supreme Court. The furthest point in time that she talks about is her acceptance of her current position. That really helped adjust my expectations and put me in the right mindset for her story.

I liked the perspective she loaned me as a technical outsider to her culture/background, and enjoyed her description of her childhood and college experiences. I also liked her commentary on womanly style mostly on the topic of fashion sense, who had a sense of style and how she late in developing one; I wasn't expecting it, but also realized the RBG referenced this in the biopic I saw earlier this month, and the connection as well as the actual content made me smile.

I appreciated her writing style in that it did not rely on exaggeration or hyperbole, because it made her more reliable. I felt that I could trust her. Even when she was talking about her mother's withdrawal from the family, I felt that she in no way exaggerated what happened, that she was telling it how it was.

Very much enjoyed that Sonia did the intro herself and Rita Moreno as a narrator was a treat. I'm a little surprised that nowhere in her narrative, even when she was jumping out of time to analyze past events from her current perspective, did she talk about her father's & cousin's addictions as addictions, rather than as personal moral failings. Would certainly think, as smart as she is, that her perspective on that would change with age.