mouse started reading Immodest Acts by Judith C. Brown
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of …
This is really fun so far!
Reviews and Comments
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mouse started reading The lonely city by Olivia Laing
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately …
I wish I had a specific label for the type of nonfiction this is, where it's a mix of memoire, thinking about ideas, and evocative factual passages? At any rate, enjoying this so far and I have learned something about some artists already so that's cool
mouse reviewed Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
Not for me
3 stars
This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.
The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the …
This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.
The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the characters.
While the author has put a lot of thought into gender and sexuality, even if I found it ultimately shallow, I found the near total absence of a critique of power and class to be pretty uncomfortable.
That said, it wasn't hard to read, and if you wanted a comforting romance about healing from assault (which, fair warning, is very graphic, though not imo gratuitous), it might be for you. And I really liked that the protagonists spend the whole book trying to solve a mystery and do an absolutely abysmal job at it.
mouse reviewed Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
Dark but not heavy
5 stars
This book really stuck with me after reading it. I had to stop reading it before bed because I would stay up too late reading it, which is a trait I cherish in a book and is also hard to pull off in a book with such heavy themes -- brainwashing, abuse, reproductive coercion, war,.... And the characters were so well articulated. I really live for books where characters seem like actual humans who are capable of being really truly horrible to each other and also capable of kindness and growth.
mouse finished reading The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher
I enjoyed this! I wouldn't recommend it if someone was just looking for something to read because wow the language around race does not age well and the plot wasn't super tight, but it's an interesting piece of the history of detective fiction
mouse commented on Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
This was extremely good, I don't have cogent enough thoughts to write a review yet, but I liked this a whole lot and it was also very intense
mouse started reading Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
interesting to start a book with the protagonist being the absolute worst!
mouse finished reading Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
I'm a little grumpy that I predicted the twist at the end early on. This wasn't really my thing, but it wasn't bad?
mouse started reading Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
I'm not super feeling this but I'm still reading it
mouse started reading Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell
Rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster Tennalhin Halkana can read minds. Tennal, like all …
Been a while since I got lost in an escapists sf/f genre read, what a cool drink for me right now
mouse finished reading The Philosophy of Art by Curt John Ducasse
I keep finding that with philosophy or theory books, I find the intro super interesting and then the rest of the book a combination of absolutely impenetrable jargon and excruciatingly detailed debunkings of prior work that I haven't read and means nothing to me. I guess this is why I didn't go to grad school.
mouse started reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the …
delightful so far
mouse finished reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
"For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, Treasure Island has never been surpassed. From the …
this really brought me fully back to being a kid who wanted to be a sailor
mouse started reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems …
My mom lent me this, it's interesting so far!
mouse finished reading The Goddess and the Bull by Michael Balter
Discovered in 1958 by James Mellaart, Catalhoyuek, located on the Konya Plain in Turkey, is …
I really enjoyed this!