Sounds Fake But Okay

I received this book as an ARC through Netgalley and after glancing at a few reviews, I read most of this book using a screen reader so as to avoid being unfair to it because of formatting. I'm not a listener of the podcast hosted by the authors and had no awareness of them until reading this book.

The authors utterly failed to convince me that the lense they purported to bring forth was anything more than a diluted version of a queer lense and it seemed like a lot of the interviewees they quoted had more interesting ideas than them. The don't should thing they kept bringing back seemed clunky and unnecessary, maybe it's a thing that work for the audience of the podcast but for me it was just another “why?”.

It's 101 to a level where it was frustrating to read, I genuinely feel that most everything that was informative could have been gleaned from a 20 minute stay on ace TikTok. Where the book almost made points it tended to carefully tiptoed around things (most of the time capitalism) seemingly in a bid to not alienate anyone which made the whole book feel like it wasn't really saying anything and almost being sorry for existing.

The structure was underwhelming and a little messy.

Ending the book with a talk about Harry Potter left a bitter taste in my mouth.

A very easy read–conversational, even. Might be a good primer to asexuality for those less steeped in the literature. It made me want to reread [b:Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex 52128695 Ace What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex Angela Chen https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580804471l/52128695.SX50_SY75.jpg 73599792] to compare the two.(Yes, there's the JKR half-paragraph thing at the end, which is unfortunate. Between this and the many HP references throughout the one podcast episode I tried to listen to (I actually didn't know about the podcast until reading this book)... it is quite cringe and I'd say it would be better for the authors to dial it down.)