Reviews and Comments

This was good! I’m into the setting of weavers and jacquard looms and a musician and piano building. But!! It’s really a heist story that has two main characters who pretty easily fall in love and into sex, not so much a romance. Still fun! Just not quite what I was looking for.

I don’t know why I didn’t read this when it came out, smack in the middle of my grad student career and learning to teach. But now, almost three decades later, it’s both familiar and utterly destabilizing. hooks's ideas are so intertwined with how progressive teaching is today that a lot of this doesn’t feel groundbreaking the way it was. But she is so smart and eye-opening on how she talks about the intersections between gender, race, class, and the classroom and teachers and students—it’s inspiring.

I didn't want to read about Online because I am already too Online, so I almost quit it, but then wept through the second half of the book instead.

I'm not sure the puff "Get Out meets Devil Wears Prada" quite does it justice, but it's not wrong. The book didn't go where I thought it would, and was probably better for that.

I had a lot of fun reading this (disclosure: I was a teen girl in the 1980s so that's part of it). It's easy to read with a ridiculous plot that is also about feminist and anti-racist issues.

I loved this. All the questions about what’s a barbarian and what makes empires and invasions, not to mention a world built around poetry and allusions, not to mention the intrigues and friendships and romances—just a big yes to it all. (As a side note, ugh titling reviews is hard)

I loved this book. The important caveat is that I know nothing about Japanese history or textual cultures. But I know more now and even without any familiarity with the subject, this book was fun to read. If you are looking for either a way of understanding how Japan shifted towards nationhood in the Edo period or how texts can shape a culture’s sense of itself, I highly recommend this.

I wanted to love this, I really did. Words! Etymology! Dictionaries!!! Split timelines across centuries, mysterious phone calls, lovers, queer women! LONDON!!! And yet. And yet it was a bit too infatuated with the mysteries of words and dictionaries and slipperiness, nearly all of the characters in the 19c plot are annoying af, and many of the 21c ones are too. It did make me want to reread that Simon Winchester book about the OED, though, so I guess that's a point in its favor?

Meh. Assistant ends up dating boss, both of them very worried about the perception of sexual harassment, but both of them apparently the only queer women in all of LA.

To my jaw-dropped delight, analytical bibliography (in this case, using clues in printing to determine who printed a text) plays a key role in this romance and I was not expecting that! Fun, tries to squish progressive values into 18c period romance and I'm here for it. Especially because of the printing. Always because of the printing.

The premise was interesting and I went along with it for a long time, but then it shifted to a love story and I just didn’t care. Don’t sell your soul. And don’t be tempted to fall in love with the being you sold your soul to. And for the love of everything, don’t assume he doesn’t always know everything. And above all, ffs, don’t ask to live forever.

A light read featuring a romance between two women and the exciting realizing that working for yourself is better than being beholden

I don’t read these Nevada Barr mysteries to be steeped in the aura of NYC and I definitely don’t need the annoying asides about women’s weight and femininity. I normally like this series but this was a crappy one. I’d rather get claustrophobia from the caves again.

Deaths from a long ago storm come back under consideration when a survivor returns to their small Tasmanian town and someone is murdered. It’s more of a portrait of a town and the weights of history and guilty feelings than a murder mystery, really, and it’s absorbing for that.