Rated The Devils 10/10
Amazing and intoxicating big fat weird brutal imaginative gory fantasy novel. Huge (I had to read it sitting at a table). Joe Abercrombie is back!
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Wants to read The Left Hand of Darkness
Wants to read Manhunt
Rated Writing and Being 6/10
A series of essays on the writer's responsibility to depict their time and place, through critical review of the authors Naghib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz, ending in Gordimer's description of her own involvement with the anti-apartheid movement. A little academic - the final essay is the most compelling.
Rated I, Claudia 8/10
A clever and fast-reading YA, adapting "I, Claudius" to a California high school. Generally pulls off what it's attempting; as with all adaptations of this type, there are ways it illuminates the original material, ways it stretches the premise delightfully, and ways it stretches the premise clunkily. Recommended if you like Veronica Mars, Megan Abbott's books, or any of those movies/books where it's, like, "here's Shakespeare but with surfers" or whatever. Objectively it has some eye-rolly aspects but I definitely found myself staying up too late or carrying my kindle around the house in order to keep reading, which is a good sign!
Rated Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America 8/10
Not 100% sure how I feel about this book and my opinion wavered as I read it. In some ways the book itself is also the kind of thing the book is intended to critique: a well-intentioned poverty safari, a member of the elite trying to explain to other elites what the non-elite life is like, without really offering the reader anything to *do* about it. But it’s humble and kind enough that it doesn’t come off nearly as badly as it could, and Arnade doesn’t paper over or exclude the reality of racism and the deleterious effects of market capitalism. I don’t know who the ideal reader of this book is; I guess I’m included in that category, though I think I know a lot of the broader points he’s trying to make and certainly buy his worldview a lot more than other people in the technocratic-elite set he’s addressing. A quick but tough read, mostly in the ways it intends, and I’m glad it exists and I read it, but I do have some mild reservations about it.
Rated Passing 8/10
A soapy, fast-reading novel about two childhood friends, one living as a Black woman in a Black community, the other living as white. It's about people and not ideas, but never loses sight of the essential absurdity of a system that assigns status and merit based on ancestry. Predates - both in writing and in setting - [b:The Vanishing Half|51791252|The Vanishing Half|Brit Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1577090827l/51791252._SX50_SY75_.jpg|73423787], but shares its themes and concerns.
Rated Transcription 8/10
Engaging most of the way through, but kind of takes a weird turn toward the end. It's a good story, and I read it really quickly, but doesn't pull off what it's doing as well as Atkinson's other books, which are *so* careful and clever and well-built that a pretty-good iteration suffers a little by comparison.
Wants to read The Black Girl Survives in This One
Rated McGlue 6/10
A deeply bleak monologue from a broken, alcoholic 19th-century sailor accused of a murder he doesn’t remember. Skillfully done and blessedly brief. Moshfegh really knows how to put you directly face down in whatever she’s writing about; your opinion of whether that’s a good thing may vary.
Wants to read She Who Became the Sun
Rated Beyond the Fringe: An Arcana Imperii Collection 10/10
Rated The Mothers 8/10
A terrific, sad book, told simply and well. The Mothers of the title are the older women of a Black church in Southern California, who appear only occasionally in person and narrate the book with a collective, weirdly omniscient voice. The title also, though, refers to the absent mothers who haunt the book’s main characters - Nadia, who lost her mother to a suicide, and Aubrey, who fled her home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. It’s a very compassionate story to its characters and a quick, propulsive read.
Wants to read Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices
Wants to read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Rated Jane, Unlimited 6/10
Fun and a little slapdash - a young woman’s visit to a weird house is the setup to five increasingly outlandish potential stories, each of which builds on the previous ones. All together it’s clever but doesn’t quite amount to a novel.
Wants to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Rated We're Going to Need More Wine 8/10
A really interesting personal story. It hits all of the beats of the celebrity show biz autobio - here’s my childhood, here’s how I got into the business, here’s my romantic misfires and my current family life, here’s the namedrops and anecdotes of the challenges of fame, here’s me and my personality and idiosyncrasies, all in a chummy breezy tone. But through all of this Union is unusually frank about it all and very intentionally delivering a sharp analysis of race and of being a Black woman in an industry - and a world, really - that often devalues Black women. She’s much more interested here in using her platform to talk about serious stuff than ingratiating herself.