Reviews and Comments

Gersande La Flèche

gersande@millefeuilles.cloud

Joined 6 months, 1 week ago

💬 they/them ; iel/lo

🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc. English, French, and many translations.

📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction, de fiction littéraire, de poésie, de classiques, de spéculatif, de réalisme magique, etc. Lecture en anglais et en français, et beaucoup de traductions.

💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande

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Disney War (2005, Simon & Schuster) No rating

The dramatic inside story of the downfall of Michael Eisner—Disney Chairman and CEO—and the scandals …

Material in this book was a major part of the research and context of a Lindsay Ellis video from way back, and I've been meaning to read it but had to wait until I could find a cheap paperback copy, because getting this to work on my Kobo was a fun adventure in futility.

commented on Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco

Foucault's pendulum (1989, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) No rating

A rollercoaster ride through a world of ideas and aberrations, an adventure into the modern …

The first chapter really does hit different if you've been to Saint-Martin-des-Champs and the musée des Arts et métiers.

A word I had never encountered before: sublunar (adjective, more commonly found as sublunarly): of, relating to, or characteristic of the terrestrial world.

Neat.

Swan Dive (Hardcover, 2021, Henry Holt and Co.) No rating

Pazcoguin's memoir covers the two+ decades of her career (which started when she was a child) at the New York City Ballet. The gothic humour was welcome and familiar around the tougher memories of relentless emotional, sexist, and racist abuse. During the more triumphant parts of the book (and there are some really great ones), your heart soars at Pazcoguin's words. Righteous!

Organized in a series of non-chronological vignettes (some very out of order), there is definitely a method to it, though it requires a bit of work to keep names and places and years straight. It pays off at the end: maybe you're even a little emotionally winded, but in the best of ways.

While the book offers a tantalizing and brutal window into the amazingly dysfunctional, abusive, and hurt/ing art form that is ballet, the book is careful (and wise) to anchor it to Pazcoguin's perspectives and memories. …

In Cold Blood (Hardcover, 2013, Modern Library) No rating

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the …

I've had to return my copy to the library (been a while now actually) and my little "true crime" wonderings has seriously abated (see earlier notes on this book, I think I talked about it). I have some thoughts about the first couple chapters that I don't think I talked about here, but I'll probably eventually get back to Capote. Fluid writing style.