Reviews and Comments

This book is fun! It's all cabaret and musical and drag and drinking whiskey in the morning with a spy thriller in the background.

Read this because a friend said it best represented their attitude to (their) gender. It's an autobiographical account of somebody taking testosterone, interspersed with a (very paranoid) reading of the pharmaco-pornographical complex. The narrative account is a beautiful insight into gender roles, and if you're strapped for time, I'd skip the historical account. At times the writing feels deliberately poorly edited, as if writing on speed (or testo) and just throwing every thought there was onto the page. Reading (and re-reading sections) became easier once I allowed myself to not expect every single sentence to make sense. It's a dope book and I think everyone should read it, or at least parts of it.

Somewhat autobiographical account dealing mostly with pregnancy and queerness, heavily relying on other texts in a way that is now my ideal for how I wish or hope to one day be able to read texts myself. Like, it's like you can be inside the brain of the author and for a little bit experience how incredibly rich the world can be until your ejected again when the sentence ends.

I love this. If you haven't read it, read this first. It's perfect. The synesthesia, the acuity, how heartwrenching it is, the creativity — I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of how fucking fantastic this text is. Each time I put it down I felt a little sadder for not being able to see my own world as richly.

Interesting but long read. Enjoyably snarky, but at times a little too academic to make for riveting reading (take my advice: it's totally fine to skip the biographies if you want, you won't miss much). Focused on the Greeks, Romans, Europeans, Brits, Americans

A very charming and interesting and educational overview of the French existentialist; good easy reading. (The authors depicted are mostly male, so that may not quite fit with the vibe though)

Presents 5 concepts that have been so ingrained and taken over by the contemporary (viz. capitalist, bourgeois) discourse that they seem like obvious truths rather than ideological positions. I think the chapters on time and labour are worth reading, the rest not so much.

Space Opera in 3 parts — long, grand, sci-fi, easy & fun to read. Incidentally the main civilisation of the book does not distinguish gender, which is represented in the book by giving everybody female pronouns, which is kind of a cool reading experience. I like the depiction of fragile consciousness of the protagonist.

It's hard sci-fi, with the basic conceit that fundamentally, physics literally is math, that everything mathematical literally exists. But what's most gripping is the description of consciousness and simulated or repeated consciousness, and slicing it, and duplicating it, and messing with it. Made me feel weird while reading it, and still does, and informs the way I think about the mind.

Heartbreaking, cute, heartwarming, description of a weird boarding school in a weird world and very normal children. Very short, you could easily read this in one evening. I don't really know what i like about it, it's just ... very good? Gripping?

Just one long book that describes every person and thing and story in one Parisian apartment building, and is very weird. There's a bit of a background story of a rich person and puzzles, but mostly just only tangentially connected bits and pieces from all over the place. Really a thorough attempt at grasping all the world at once. It's gripping and compelling and has changed the way I read the world, look at rooms, interact with things. I found the original French too difficult, but sometimes when a little chapter was particularly compelling I'd go back and read it in French, too, which was always a joyous experience.

Short story collection, best described as "weird fiction". Some faves of mine with super brief content descriptions to help the serendipity: "Saecken" is the best horror I've ever read. Also like "Three Moments of an Explosion" (drugs and time), "The Condition of New Death" (sudden rupture in how the world is), "The Dowager of Bees" (weird structures in the back of the world), "The Crawl" and "Escapee" (both very short film trailer storyboards), "The Bastard Prompt" (so weird, but I love the description of the relationship of the protagonists), "Four Final Orpheuses" (only a page long and so good), "Dreaded Outcome" (therapy)