Wants to read Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy
book
Wants to read Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
Wants to read Wizard of the Crow
Rated Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection 10/10
wonderful. heavy subject but a light read - it's brief, but dense with both emotionally rich storytelling and fascinating detail.
Rated Women & Power: A Manifesto 8/10
Two good, brief essays on the titular subject by a terrific historian who uses her knowledge of Ancient Rome to inform her perspective.
Rated Jade Legacy 10/10
very long and rich and sweeping but also very exciting moment-by-moment. the first two books are so tight in scope by comparison that it's impressive that this one *moves* as much as they do.
Rated Fang Fiction 8/10
Charming, cleverly executed, very satisfying.
Wants to read The War of the End of the World
Rated Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval 8/10
A remarkable and unusual social history, composed of novelistic vignettes drawn out from scanty archival material about the lives of Black women in the early 20th century. The project here is to center as history the lives of people who are on the margins and whose stories don’t get told in the traditional forms of history - Black, poor, queer, and otherwise in violation of the norms of a heavily policed and stratified era.
Inspirational reading..?
Edited 30d ago
Rated Persuasion 10/10
the ability to accurately narrate a character’s interior justification at face value and yet still convey the gap between it and the real world is a kind of magic trick, and to also make it funny, a little miracle
Rated The Spiritual Poems of Rumi 4/10
This was a gift and it’s more decorative than anything else; the layout is beautiful but the “nonliteral” translations are so hippy-dippy and loose that they could be hanging on the wall of an AirBnB.
Rated Player's Handbook 8/10
I think they did a really good job with this edition - putting the detailed instructions on how the game is actually played up front, for instance. The art is nice and I mostly like the minor changes they’ve made to the game mechanics and how those mechanics are explained.
Rated Crying in H Mart 8/10
A really lovely memoir of the author’s fraught relationship with her Korean-immigrant mother and the Korean food that bonded them. I went in expecting this to be very sad and it is - the subject is very much loss and grief, and the ravages of both cancer and cancer treatment come up in detail. But it’s also very warm and thoughtful, with much of the book focused on how Zauner uses cooking, music, writing, and travel to keep her mother with her. Brief and really well written.
Rated Sleepless Nights 6/10
Not really my thing, I guess - a sort of flown lyrical amalgamation of remembrances that don’t really hang together.
Rated Velvet Was the Night 8/10
A clever and compelling thriller set against the backdrop of political repression in 1970s Mexico.
Rated Epidemia ultra 10/10
Edited 31d ago