Reviews and Comments

This book taught me to read slowly. Loved it.

Fantastic! I loved this so much. The joy, the love, the queerness. Wow! I look forward to reading more of her work.

This book was the biography of a Chinese poet unknown to me, Li Bai. He’s so well known that if I had asked my Chinese students about him, they would know who he is. It was a fun read, although his parenting and husband skills were awful which was rather frustrating.

I recently learned he's one of China's most famous poets, so clearly I need to go take a look at his work!

This is a book of poetry for the heathen liturgical year. If you are a heathen who likes poetry, you might enjoy this! There's lots of poems here you could use in ritual.

I like his poems well enough, but… there’s a lot of “I” statements in these poems. It threw me off sometimes, because I guess I expected the poetry to be more deity-centric? There's a strong thread between the devotee and the divine, certainly. That might work for some folks! I think the issue is that forcing myself to read the same poet every day is a bit intense--picking it up randomly for light reading might work better for me.

On the whole though, it’s nice to read heathen poetry and think about the deities I worship, rather than read Christian poetry and try to distantly sorta-kinda relate it to the deities I worship.

If you enjoy this author, you’ll enjoy this small, short biography she wrote.

Ebook. A short story set in the world of Earthsea, although you don’t need to know the world to follow the story. I have to be careful reading LeGuin’s work now, as she has passed on and there is a limit to how much work of hers there is left for me to read. Here, LeGuin returns to writing about women in Earthsea.

Some of you may know that this was a struggle for her: to move away from male characters and figure out women’s roles in her own work. In this story, there is a stone that has a spirit in it. A woman visits it every day to feed it. She speaks of vengeance.

Why?
You read on to find out.

A play about the life of Joan of Arc. I liked this quite a bit. It was funny. There was a good balance of Joan’s fervent belief and varying degrees of belief from other characters, offering skepticism, faith, and desperation. The ending was too religious for me, but then again, she is a saint. If you like Joan of Arc and want to know what famous authors have said about her, this is worth a read. I’d like to read Mark Twain’s book about her eventually.

Well-written, but tough to read if you suffer from any of the issues he writes about!

Hilarious, heart-warming, gay read.

So intriguing. Hard to put down. Had the pleasure of 'meeting' the author in a trans/non-binary book club. What a delight.

Such a hilarious, clever, thoughtful read. I'll be rereading this for years to come.

Hilarious & fun.