Wants to read Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
book
Rated Silver Nitrate 8/10
<div>This was really good. Spooky old cinema magic? Yes, please.</div>
Rated The Twenty Days of Turin 6/10
I think I would have liked this more if I were more familiar with the time period/location (1970s Italy) to which this story alludes, and also if I'd read more of it while not drowsy. However! It's a good book with pleasantly unsettling elements, and plenty of other people should get more out of it than I did.
Rated Katabasis 5/10
<div>If this book is meant to replicate the futility of certain sections of hell by being a little bit of a slog to read, then mission accomplished.<br><br>Alice is just SO special, dontcha know, SO SPECIAL. She doesn't need pesky things like FEMINISM or FOOD or NORMAL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. She has THE WORK! And her coworker/fellow grad student is just TOO GOOD to be CHRONICALLY ILL! He must HIDE it! <br><br>I don't need my main characters to be likable, but I gotta have some reason to care how it all shakes out for them.<br><br>Look, I really loved Yellowface and Babel, so I was quite surprised that I didn't really like this much. I get that it's supposed to be a tale of not killing yourself for academia and/or terrible "mentors," but it doesn't seem like Alice learns a whole lot. I guess it was innovative in that it was a dude, for once, who got <spoiler>fridged, temporarily, in order to advance her plot, but I didn't care that much.</spoiler><br><br>The magic system and the intellectual rigor were not turn-offs. I get it; it's Cambridge. And the writing itself was 99% perfectly fine. (Writers, please never make me read "quirked a smile" again, though.) It's just that, if we're writing a story about fucked up priorities, I guess I just expected a little more revelation other than <spoiler>"Now I will have an undead boyfriend who is ashamed of his health."</spoiler><br><br>YMMV!</div>
Wants to read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Wants to read Interrobang
Edited 86d ago
Rated Autobiography 6/10
My feelings about Morrissey are conflicted, for a lot of reasons, and I wasn't surprised to find this book kind of insufferable. Very little about the process of making music, tons and tons of petty passive-aggressive score-settling that I think is supposed to be "delicious" but is actually kind of sad. Also, there are no chapter breaks; it's like a seven-hour monologue. Still, somehow glad I read it.
Wants to read Rough Music
Edited 86d ago
Rated Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 8/10
Tolentino is a great writer - her project is taking the tools of literary criticism and applying it, deftly and clearly, to non-literary texts: broad cultural trends, institutions, her own life. These essays vary from bright and fun to heavy, but they all come from the same sharp critical eye.
Rated A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 4) by George R. R. Martin (2-May-2006) Paperback 8/10
GRR Martin blazes new trails in introducing you to characters, getting you to identify with and root for them, getting you invested in their plans, and then messily thwarting those plans. He also enjoys tormenting you with having characters act upon information you know to be untrue, or fail to discover information that you know would help them. <br/><br/>Great fun, really.
Rated How Did You Get This Number: Essays 6/10
Very nicely written, and Crosley is charming and a great observer, though these essays don't quite close the deal for themselves - you might be left asking "so what?" A quick and pleasant read.
Rated Throne of Glass 8/10
Fun and engaging, if a little too romance-tropey for me to be totally on board. More or less tells a story with a beginning/middle/end but has some of that "we expect you to read this whole series" structural frustration.
Rated Flood 6/10
Enjoyable, but a little bit like an overly-enthusiastic college paper. Left me with TMBG songs in my head for days after.
Wants to read The Goblin Emperor
Rated Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity 8/10
Very striking - journalism that reads like a novel. A few years in the lives of families living at the edge of subsistence in a slum in Mumbai, right behind the airport and luxury hotels that symbolize a rising global upper class. Boo, the author, mostly removes herself from the story and narrates from the perspectives of her protagonists as they deal with poverty, corruption, religious conflict and their efforts to carve out a space for themselves. Beautifully done.