Black lives matter Be gay do crimes ACAB
Pronouns: she/they
Living in occupied ancestral lands of the Osage nation (St. Louis, Missouri)
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Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
Gay rom-com. It's hilarious, it's queer, it's fat-positive, it's uplifting.
It's a long novel but it didn't feel like it was wasting words. It's a few stories told at once about different people living in different places at different times. One thing that links the stories is none of the main characters are satisfied with the hand they were dealt in life, and the stories explore how they deal with that. Some threads (Constantinople) engaged me sooner than others (Argos), but by the end I was interested in everything, and it all came together in a satisfying way.
There also was some queer representation in the novel, and I like that sort of thing.
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. …
I decided it was finally time to read Catch-22 so I could get the cultural references that come up from time to time. I couldn't finish it.
In each chapter, we meet some odd characters with odd names that are probably supposed to make the reader laugh. We encounter some kind of circular logic. We have an absurd situation. And nothing really changes, and then we move onto the next chapter with new odd-named characters, new circular logic, new absurdities. 8 chapters into the book I skimmed through the chapter titles, which are nearly all odd character names, and realized it was likely going to be the same pattern again and again. The problem is that I wasn't entertained, and so in the middle of my 8th mission I decided that it just wasn't worth it and deserted. I won't make it to 42 missions.
Repetition to drive home a …
I decided it was finally time to read Catch-22 so I could get the cultural references that come up from time to time. I couldn't finish it.
In each chapter, we meet some odd characters with odd names that are probably supposed to make the reader laugh. We encounter some kind of circular logic. We have an absurd situation. And nothing really changes, and then we move onto the next chapter with new odd-named characters, new circular logic, new absurdities. 8 chapters into the book I skimmed through the chapter titles, which are nearly all odd character names, and realized it was likely going to be the same pattern again and again. The problem is that I wasn't entertained, and so in the middle of my 8th mission I decided that it just wasn't worth it and deserted. I won't make it to 42 missions.
Repetition to drive home a point can be very effective. It seems that a lot of people have been entertained by Heller's writing. I wasn't, so I couldn't deal with the monotony. Heller, I think, wanted to show us the absurdity of the military in a time when we were still feeling good about the military after WWII. It was a bold thing to do, and the success of the novel shows it was effective for a lot of people. I appreciate the idea behind the novel, the execution just didn't work for me at all.
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. …
Somewhere in chapter 8 I decided I could not justify the effort to finish this book. I was very bored.
The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters …
Things that author Morgan Thomas does well: their prose is wonderful, they challenge us with flawed characters, and they color their stories with the history and character of the US South.
It's difficult for me to review an entire story collection so I'll focus on one of my favorites, "Bump". Louie, a trans woman, is so delighted to be asked if she's expecting a child by a coworker that she plays along, with the aid of the titular mail-order pregnancy bump. Louie, like all Morgan's flawed characters, makes choices I can't agree with but I still find her so relatable and love her so much. The author's painting of the intense yearning for something the body isn't capable of is so moving, and it's such a trans experience.
Songs in the key of brown with a queer/trans tempo and slappin' disabled beats. Music to my ears.
Gender Queer: A Memoir is a 2019 graphic memoir written and illustrated by Maia Kobabe. …
Excellent, gave me lots of feels.
A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter’s fresh, pointed debut is …
The Seep is a story about grief, more than anything else. The description of how Trina deals with her grief is well written. But I give the book only 3 stars because it feels shallow. How do we have multiple characters who turn out to be so important to Trina and her journey, without us learning much about them? I finished the book in an evening, and felt that perhaps something important had gone over my head because the story just seemed to be missing something. Trina is native, and Jewish, and trans. Does any of her identity and cultural background influence how she deals with the world created by the arrival of the Seep? It feels like it should be relevant, and I can speculate, but if there were hints from the author I missed them.
Despite the shallowness, the parts that are there are very good. Porter creates …
The Seep is a story about grief, more than anything else. The description of how Trina deals with her grief is well written. But I give the book only 3 stars because it feels shallow. How do we have multiple characters who turn out to be so important to Trina and her journey, without us learning much about them? I finished the book in an evening, and felt that perhaps something important had gone over my head because the story just seemed to be missing something. Trina is native, and Jewish, and trans. Does any of her identity and cultural background influence how she deals with the world created by the arrival of the Seep? It feels like it should be relevant, and I can speculate, but if there were hints from the author I missed them.
Despite the shallowness, the parts that are there are very good. Porter creates a really interesting world, a utopia where our material needs are met and the horrors of capitalism are in the past. Utopias seem like they should be dull to write about but Porter proves this wrong.
After finishing the book, I learned that a friend has a different edition that also includes a short story that goes into more detail about the boy and Horizon. Perhaps that edition would have felt more complete to me.